This is exactly why I ride a bicycle. Nuclear zombies.
Dude, apparently we won't even be able to read one another's handwriting.
If it's zombies, you just need a rickshaw and some brains on a long stick.
Over at the Zombie Squad forum, there's a long thread about "tactical wheelbarrows". Not completely in jest, either.
Current car engines are twitchy racehorses due to fuel emission standards (and consumer preference for simultaneous fuel economy and high performance). Older engines and diesel engines will be able to run on easy-to-make biodiesel in Madmax zones.
People who know how to culture Penicillium chrysogenum and isolate the antibiotic will be powerful shamans. Energy-effecient welding will be useful as well. 1995 Russia, or for the more pessimistic, N Korea or Zimbabwe are probably more useful guides to what will be practical than movies.
I've been meaning for a while to read Left Behind The spiritual consequences of disaster will make Falun Gong look like Methodists, that's my real worry.
I know a bunch of Methodists, so I should be fine on that count.
5: Energy-effecient welding will be useful as well
Did you see that melting-rocks-with-focused-sunlight video on bOing bOing a couple months ago? The parabolic mirror was only a couple of feet square. Intense.
I'm thinking windmills might be better than solar panels. Nuclear winter might block the sun plus the windmill is old technology of the kind that runs after farmers smack it with hammers.
Assuming the farmer is sober/calm enough to know not to hit the bearings.
I've been meaning for a while to read Left Behind.
Zombies are the post-Rapture Tribulations of secular humanists, and I don't mean that as a compliment to anybody.
Solar powered gasification of biomass to fuel your diesel generator!
Lots of lemons and electrodes and salt bridges: your proud will smell very refreshing
James Howard Kunstler covered this in his second novel, I think.
Wait, why wouldn't Wal-Mart still be open in this scenario? They sell gas, right? Problem solved.
post-Rapture Tribulations of secular humanists
I don't know. Vampires with individual personalities interested in individual victims were popular for quite a while. Aliens who hid and then seduced and consumed the weak were popular in the 50s.
Romero's zombies, which themselves changed a lot over the three movies, and the cartoons that fight flowers don't have that much in common.
Pretend That We're Dead goes into this in some detail
I'm going to tune out the zombies and protestors and pimps and CHUDs now though and go to sleep.
The real scary thing is never the apocalypse, but that nagging sense at the back of your head that it will never come and you actually have to start working on solving your problems.
I almost missed 3.last in skimming this thread. How is the first comment not: Becks!
18: They were, those zombies, a kind of solution.
I think the way it's supposed to work is that a re-animated Walt Disney pops out of a mausoleum somewhere in Southern California and gives us some wise insights.
Re-animating Walt Disney probably infringes on a bunch of copyrights.
24: Or generates fees. Halford wins the apocalypse.
18: Apocalypse to-morrow and apocalypse yesterday - but never apocalypse to-day.
What you want is a pre-war Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost - big, robust, easy to maintain, and will run on petrol, diesel, meths, paraffin or alcohol. Or wood gas, with a slight modification.
I'm thinking windmills might be better than solar panels
(I wish they'd let you link straight to the film instead of forcing a redirect to an information page first.)
9: if there's a real deep nuclear winter then everyone is generally screwed anyway. If it's anything less than block-out-the-sun then solar panels will still work, just with less output.
Also, solar panels are failsoft. If one of them breaks, all the others still work. If a bit of your windmill breaks, then your entire windmill will stop working. And there are more bits to break on a windmill - all those bearings and blades and moving parts.
Becks!
I watched The Book of Eli at the weekend. It annoyed me all the way through it, starting with, how the fuck does he keep his clothes so perfectly clean?
On the other hand, I reckon I could probably keep a simple windmill* running with a pretty basic metalwork shop, but I could never repair a solar panel.
I build a waterwheel once. It didn't work. But it wasn't supposed to, so that was all right. (The smaller versions worked fine.)
(It also depends what you need power for. A spinning axle is actually pretty useful provided you can set things up properly for it.)
Yeah, a few reasonably handy people working together could build a decent-sized watermill or a windmill, but building solar panels requires the whole industrial supply chain to be working.
Fact of the matter is, when the zombie apocalypse most of us, by definition, are going to be zombies. You're much better off thinking about how you're going to out-compete your fellow zombies to eat the last few remaining survivors.
35:You're much better off thinking about how you're going to out-compete your fellow zombies
Magnet-shrooms! Potatoes! Cactus!
I've been meaning for a while to read Left Behind
Reading Left Behind is a very energy efficient way of turning yourself into a zombie. Any Vodoun priest will tell you this. Better to read Fred Clark's weekly takedown of it on Slacktivist.
Also, Becks!
And once more: Becks!
Let me plug steam engines for post-apocalyptic travel. If you can build a windmill, you can build a reciprocating steam engine. It'll burn anything. Just add water.
On the other hand, I reckon I could probably keep a simple windmill running with a pretty basic metalwork shop, but I could never repair a solar panel.
True. But you probably couldn't repair an electric car either. Certainly you couldn't make a new lithium-ion cell once the old one started to lose charge capacity.
Plus I think you're being a bit optimistic about keeping a windmill running yourself, if we're talking about a windmill that is being used for generating power rather than just grinding corn. You'd need ball-bearings, wouldn't you? And precision gears?
If you can build a windmill, you can build a reciprocating steam engine.
And indeed a steam engine can drive a mill. Mills of some sort will be needed though for all kinds of jobs, unless we're really thinking of going back to the Neolithic, and I bet there are more people who know how to make a steam engine than know how to, e.g. balance a grinding mill. The few who do will no doubt evolve into an oppressive elite, and then there'll be trouble at t'mill.
If we go back to the Neolithic of course, the oppressive elite will come from the handful of academic archaeologists who have taught themselves flint knapping.
I like 18. Mind you, I think I'm the only other person on Unfogged with practical windmill-jack experience. I'd vote for the Southern Cross windpump option if all you want to do is charge some 12 volt batteries. Those things are Clyde built - even the one I dismantled that had been destroyed by a cyclone was worth stripping for parts.
In Bosnia during the civil war, people built improvised run-of-river hydro generators using bits scavenged from washing machines and dead cars and whatnot. So I don't think bearings would be quite that much of a limiting factor, given how much stuff incorporates them.
re: 40
I think a lot of those things are straightforwardly salvageable in a way that solar panels may not be. I'm pretty sure I could 'Scrapheap Challenge' up a simple working windmill or watermill [on a small scale].
That said, the tech needed for a mill is Roman, or medieval, rather than 20th or 21st century. So even if you had to build one from scratch, including making the bearings and gears, it's less of a challenge. Not to diminish how much of a challenge it is, but it's cottage workshop/guild/small-factory levels of tech rather than a vast supply chain.
In this case I'm not really thinking of mills specifically to charge batteries, mind. As your point re: electric cars is well-taken. I meant just more as an entry point to some sort of power generation, whether that's mechanical power or electrical.
I've been meaning for a while to read Left Behind
I got about 1.5 books in. Turns out they're mostly bad-bad instead of hilarious-bad. The only truly funny thing that happens in book 1 is that the femme fatale, such as she is, is named Hattie because the authors are 400 years old and so you end up picturing her looking like the mom on The Waltons or something.
Zombies are the post-Rapture Tribulations of secular humanists, and I don't mean that as a compliment to anybody.
No see a compliment is like "I like your sweater!"
I like your sweater, Mister Smearcase.
Are we sure this is really Becks? I'm keeping my hand on my wallet brains until I'm confident she hasn't been turned.
47: A compliment is like that, but is not that.
I like Mister Smearcase's sweater anyway.
11
Zombies are the post-Rapture Tribulations of secular humanists, and I don't mean that as a compliment to anybody.
Wait, I thought a gray goo of nanomachines was the Tribulation for secular humanists? Or is that just the Tribulation for nerds, specifically?
52: a gray goo of nanomachines was the Tribulation for secular transhumanists.
Sorry, 53 was me; don't know how that happened.
OT:
Lisa Simeone was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and earned a B.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland (the 'Great Books School') in 1980.
Someone must know her.
25: I believe that would be what they vomit up.
OT:
Lisa Simeone was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and earned a B.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland (the 'Great Books School') in 1980.
Someone must know her.
(Me).
I think all the Johnnies around here are about ten years younger.
So having a troll cross the line brings all the departed unfoggers back? Useful to know.
Having to share a planet with the Left Behind folks is tribulation enough for secular humanists, no?
59: I think it's one of those "we shall return at your moment of greatest peril" things. Becks is in her hammock and a thousand miles away, (Ogged, art tha sleepin' down below?) etc.
59, 61: Like Mr. Dawes Sr in Mary Poppins ( thank you, Wiki): "While stand the banks of England, England stands -- whoa, whoa...! [Mr. Dawes Sr. stumbles over his own cane] When fall the banks of England... England falls!" Or something like that. Shoot, I've fallen afoul of teh analogy ban. Or something like that.
I was coming back before the Read episode and got drawn into Alameida's story, and who wouldn't be. I found the Read episode very sad and unpleasant.
Incidentally, is it ogg'd or ogg-ed? I've always wondered.
I've always pronounced it the first way in my head, but however you need it to scan to make the limerick work is fine.
I never understood why Dsquared's project of calling him "Oggers" never caught on. Similarly, I like calling Togolosh "Toggles." Nicknames are great. Maybe I'm turning into George W. Bush.
Maybe I'm turning into George W. Bush.
How does Halfwit strike you?
In violation of the rules of rugby.
I was thinking more like "Mr. President" for me. Or maybe (taking my two favorite in real life actually used by people known to me nicknames) "Gusto" or "The Black Sparrow."
The only nicknames I've ever had IRL are Lizard and Lopez for one summer in college. (Long story, I was complaining about inauthentic Mexican food without being ethnically entitled to.)
In high school and college, people called me Hammer. This was entirely based on my first name and stuck with me mostly because of irony. I was the small, bookish one in the social group.
My Dad was known as 'City', short for 'City Morgue', as a teenager, purely because he has the syllable 'morg' in his name. It's a great nickname, and hilariously inappropriate to any actual degree of menace he was ever able to project.
Lopez & The Hammer was an excellent late 70s cop show.
I'm putting both of those into regular use.
People who like calling people by nicknames tend to call my by some variant of my pseud(s).
I've got a good friend who goes by "Shooter". I'm unclear exactly how that originated, but it works for him.
In high school and college, people called me Hammer. This was entirely based on my first name
Armand? Justin? Trip? John Henry?
||
Ok, I've got Hokey Pokey at work, and the baby-sitter (a student) would NOT accept payment for 3 hours of sitting. He's watching Pokey later on this afternoon, so eventually we just punted on the debate.
Last time you all advised that I respect the car mechanic, when he declined payment*. But this seems different, since it's a student. But I still don't know how far to push the argument - should I just assertively tuck money into his backpack at some point?
*Car still had problems, I took it back, he fixed it and only charged $60 total, and I don't even know exactly what he did but it involved new parts. So I have no idea how this guy supports himself, but it seems to work out. He does have low overhead, working out of a warehouse in his backyard, but still.
|>
And the mechanic didn't do anything for you (not that he wasn't very nice not to charge you for the diagnosis, but he said your car didn't need fixing.) The student did babysit.
Tell him it's the rules: as a faculty member, you're not allowed to have students do unpaid labor for you, it looks corrupt. If he won't take money, you can't have him babysit, so you'd have to stay home from work. So he should please take the money, because you need the babysitting, and you're ethically unable to let him do it for free. If taking the money is a favor to you, he'll take it.
||
Also, the car mechanic seems to operate under a code of ethics that involves protecting my wallet above all else, which is extremely sweet and generous of him. But the logistics of dropping the car off and picking it up are an utter pain, because inevitably we're hauling the kids in their pajamas out into the car, so that Jammies can give me a lift. So sometimes I just want to say "Just start replacing parts! Who cares! Charge me money! We don't need to know exactly what the problem is."
|>
83.2 is right. If he won't take it, tell him to donate it to something charitable. (And then cut him off when he tries to get you to donate it to something.)
I actually answered to "Candygram" for a longish time. I'd have sworn this nickname came from Rob but he says another friend of ours was responsible. When I was a tiny baby the rest of my family called me "cece bean" because I was spherical.
My childhood nickname was Heebie-geebie.
Come on, Lopez, sometimes people just want to be generous and are looking for repeat business.
89: No, no, I think the mechanic is great. But the reason it's okay not to pay him is that he explicitly said he didn't do anything.
Moby's first name is Lump. This has been a burden to him since childhood.
my family called me "cece bean" because I was spherical.
From which I deduce that your parents were physicists.
I answered to, signed documents, and introduced myself as Rusty until I went to college. In high school marching band, the four troublemaking trombonists had nicknames for one another (Nasty, Chuckles, D'Oompah, and Slicky Gee - one guess which one was mine), but didn't actually use them except as punchlines.
A lot of people at my high school called me by the name I chose in French class. I guess it was kind of a distinctive name, not stereotypically French but not found in English either. But it was on the list of names they told us to choose from!
You some kind of commie or what?
Sickle??? You poor man.
94: Raul? A friend was Raul for a while because of this. It's fun to say!
93: Actually, I'm stuck between Nasty, Chuckles, and Slicky Gee.
94 reminds me of the friend who ended up teaching English in China, and when his students asked him to recommend Western names for them he let his sense of humour get the better of him and instead of suggesting bland unobjectionable names like "John Chan" and "Mary Lu" and "Robert Pang" he went for the names of the Seven Dwarfs, and when he ran out of dwarfs he started using the callsigns from Top Gun.
So if anyone ever meets a forty-something Chinese guy with a business card that says "Maverick Wang" or "Iceman Chin" then I can have a pretty good guess which town he's from.
Armand? Justin? Trip? John Henry?
Maxwellsilver? Steam? Ballpeen?
MC?
97: I'm picking the other one because of the punctuation.
At least one co-worker calls me "cy-cy". This annoys me. Partly because it's what my mom called me as a kid, partly just because I think it sounds stupid. "Cy" would be fine. Another co-worker sometimes calls me "Cyropedia", because she dug out (or I gave her it, I don't remember) some historical reference to a book by or about Cyrus the Great. As long as we're going with nicknames with historical references, I'd be happy with "Cyrus the Great", really.
100: And now I do too.
I had to consult google to find out what "pear presser" was.
The downside of having an extremely unusual name is that no one ever wants to give me a nickname. I guess that's just as well, as it could be something embarrassing, but it does tend to make me feel a little left out.
105: I'll call you "Tex" or "Dakota Jim" if you'd like. I'm willing to be reasonably flexible about replacing the "Jim" with any monosyllable name.
Oh right, there was a fifth guy, too: Sponge. Huh, I'd forgotten all about him.
I've told this before but it's a great/terrible story:
Native American math prof of mine goes to hospital. A doctor he knows stops by to chat, and afterwards says "See you later, Professor!"
The nurse says "Professor? How did you get that nickname?"
(He gave some icy stare and withering response.)
One can only imagine that "Colt McCoy"'s parents planned from the beginning to grow themselves a UT QB. Or a cartoon sheriff.
I've never had a nickname either. My dad calls me by the Irish version of my name sometimes, but that's about it. There's a standard nickname version for my name, but I think it's always been universally obvious that it's just wrong for me.
107: Nicknames that have been proposed: Buck, Nosferatu, Noodles -- of these, Noodles has sort of stuck, but only with the two people who created it. I'm not sure I want to be Dakota anything. I think my grandfather in Maine referred to me as "Minnesota Fats" for awhile, but my mother made him stop. He meant it affectionately, I'm sure.
I've never had a nickname either.
Says Thorn.
110: The classy response would be, "Oh, I picked it up in school..."
80:
Put together the amount you want to pay him, in dollar bills. Put it down on a table in front of him.
"This is the money I want to pay you. Since I can't accept services from a student for free, I can't keep it. But you won't take it. So there's only one more option."
Then slowly and methodically shred, by hand, the first dollar bill. Then the second...
until he claims the remainder.
Some people call me by the diminutive or the extra-plus-diminutive of the Russian version of my name. I approve of this practice though I've never actively encouraged it. I guess I associate it with the summer program I used to do during college that was immersion-lite, and I really loved that program, so the name makes me happy.
I have a few other person-specific nicknames, I think.
Oh, person-specific nicknames. My sister still calls me Rodent.
Sometimes people call me by my first name.
No nicknames, though. (Except for some very simple anagrams of my last name.)
The appropriate response wold be, "I've heard people call you Nurse, what's that about?"
121: Ha. My doggie was Vanka, or Vanyitchka, or ochen malenkii Vanyitchka. (He was not any sort of malenkii.)
A friend of mine calls me "bean", and I call her "jam". Isn't that the cutest thing?
124: Helping the other person discover their mistake in a subtle way is one sort of game. Probably the nicer one.
Dropping hints that they have insufficient information to interpret correctly is a very different one.
I don't know that it's a situation where I'd feel obliged to be nice; a certain amount of acerbity seems appropriate.
I called my oldest and youngest kids either Hamhock or Porkchop when they were babies/toddlers. Noah, who was born underweight and has never really managed to carry any discernible amount of body fat got Stringbean instead.
But don't you call all young kids Porkchop?
125: I was always "HUKUMA" in Russian class, and I've always thought it would be funny if people called me "Nikititchka", but no one ever does.
"Aardvark" and "Cowboy" both in junior high
Don't ask me, I don't remember.
128: To be clear, I am suggesting that everyone else's suggestions are nicer than mine, since they allow the other party to discover their error quickly.
We had an exchange student who told us to call him "Paul" because his Czech name was going to be too difficult for us.
His names was Pavel.
I like to call Tweety by the Yiddish version of his name, but he doesn't like it.
To untrained ears,* all Yiddish words sound like slang expressions for 'penis'.
*or ears trained only by Mel Brooks movies
One can only imagine that "Colt McCoy"'s parents planned from the beginning to grow themselves a UT QB. Or a cartoon sheriff.
This semester I have a student named Colton, who writes his name such that it looks like Cotton. The grader thinks his name is Cotton, so it keeps showing up on spreadsheets as Cotton, and I have to work really hard not to call him that in class.
But don't you call all young kids Porkchop?
Only the ones I want to bite.
138: A fellow in my high school named "Christian" had a surname just long enough that his first name was cut off as "Christ".
96: It seems to not really be a French name, upon further inspection. The first British Christian martyr ... the saint from Mainz ... the Austrian composer...
You thought "Alban" was a French name, and picked it absent a list for personal use? Wonder of wonders.
Once you're a saint I think your name is fair game to be adopted by all and any nations. The guys in Mainz and the eponymous city in England were presumably culturally ethnic Romans, wherever they came from.
It looks like "Albanus" is the Latin, and "Aubain" the French.
The nurse says "Professor? How did you get that nickname?"
"The guys in my poker club started calling me that when I got tenure."
We had an exchange student who told us to call him "Paul" because his Czech name was going to be too difficult for us. His names was Pavel.
We had this too! Only "Gerald", German, and Gerhardt.
129 - ha, friends of mine have a Stringbean (SB on their blog) and then their second baby was really chubby, and became Butterbean. BB is skinny as well now though.
When I was a waitress the guys in the kitchen called me Martita, I think because I was about a foot taller than any of them
I don't know that it's a situation where I'd feel obliged to be nice; a certain amount of acerbity seems appropriate.
"I got it at the ASPCA."
I don't know that it's a situation where I'd feel obliged to be nice; a certain amount of acerbity seems appropriate.
Exactly. "It isn't a nickname, it's my job title you ignorant racist," would be the unfriendly version, but perfectly justified too IMO.
It wasn't an exchange student situation exactly, but my family was one of several in my area who hosted teen refugees during the Bosnian war. One of the boys was told when he got off the plane that he'd be known as Ed, since Enis, if pronounced correctly, was way too close to "anus" for Americans to handle. But then the Bosnian for "of course" sounds just like "fuck it" to Americans, which caused trouble of its own.
But then the Bosnian for "of course" sounds just like "fuck it" to Americans, which caused trouble of its own.
Not everybody can work for Comcast.
re: 152
But then the Bosnian for "of course" sounds just like "fuck it" to Americans
It's the same in Czech.
"Fakt jo?"
or just
"Fakt?!"
I'm secretly delighted at discovering how friends have one another stored in their phones. Tonight I learned that a bandmate has me stored as something like "Stanley Blahdowski", which is fantastic. Blahdow!
But don't you call all young kids Porkchop?
Only Gentile ones, surely.
Unfoggedians, be careful what you say about Ezra, because he's reading. (Actually, that post carries Brad Plumer's by-line, but still.)
Not just him. Apparently my bitching about the really crappy bridge I have to cross has been noticed. I'm not sure that you can implode a bridge, but it's nice to know somebody is thinking about a fix.
That is, I know you can use explosives to demolish a bridge but I don't see how something without an interior space can be "imploded."
159: Isn't the critical difference between it collapsing outward vs. inward? So the difference between bridge and building is that with a bridge, it falls onto the surface below, but it's still minimizing inconvenience.
160: In this case "minimizing inconvenience" means imploding it all onto the primary east-west freeway though the city. (But yeah, as much as possible all the debris onto one tidy pile on dirt covering the roadway to enable efficient removal.) To offset costs they should run a lottery where the winner gets to stagger around doing doing their best Alec Guinness "What have I done?" impression before collapsing on the plunger.
The roadway being the interstate highway. I hope the bridge on Murray is far enough so be a safe viewing point.
Actually, the road curves and that may not work.
162, 163: Du-uh, enter the Alec Guinness lottery.
I guess, but I'm kind of more concerned about the part where they shut down the parkway for four or five days.