Kizor's New Writeups

January 1, 2010 (place)

2010-01-01T01:25:12Z

As this should have worked

For those of you who are joining us, the end of the year has passed Europe and Africa. It is now moving onto the eastern Atlantic at a rate of some 15 degrees per hour, which it has maintained ever since the first sightings in the Pacific. At this speed, no trace of 2009 will remain on this Earth in twelve hours' time. Please remain calm. Stay in our homes. Despite any rumors you may have heard, there's yet no evidence that this event is destructive. Panic is the worst thing you can do to prepare yourself and your loved ones for whatever may come. This station will continue to bring you the latest news for as long as we can.

In a press conference earlier today, a DOD spokesman stated that the United States would take, quote, "any steps necessary" to "defend the sanctity of its soil and people." Details are scarce, but reliable sources tell us that the aircraft carriers …

Sword of Truth (thing)

2009-08-10T14:43:44Z

The Sword of Truth is a series of 12 fantasy books, characterized by the gruesome details of fantasy warfare that most writers gloss over, and by a message that bursts out of the plot's chest and devours it.

For all the rape and maiming, the first 1-3 books are innocent enough. Richard the Chosen One faces his Mysterious Past on a Quest to save the lands from evil. They've pleased some friends of the genre and noders of recognized taste.¹

At roughly this point the author, Terry Goodkind, rejects the term "fantasy" and takes up "stories that have important human themes"^{(quote) 2} by bringing Objectivism from a background…

Life-saving (thing)

2009-07-01T13:41:15Z

June is when Finns crowd their lakesides for midsummer and corpses wash ashore for days. It's a good time to review amateur life-saving, as taught by professionals to my local Red Cross team. Posmella explains above how the pro version melds dozens of factors into fascinating coreography, but anyone without that skill should focus on a simple idea:

Doing this unthinkingly will get you killed.

An online stranger's recollections will hardly cause thinking, but may show you what you're in for.

Anyone breathing water will be in a state of panic. Panicked people have been lost in burning airplanes because they didn't think of unbuckling their seatbelts to escape. In the water, they'll latch onto anything and will not let go. Look into it: you may find that drownings in your area tend to occur in pairs.

The smart rescuer still has options. The most common order of action…

The line between your testicles (thing)

2009-05-08T20:55:32Z

A ridge of tissue, known as the scrotal raphe or infrequently as the Vesling line, which is a universal feature of male genitalia. It runs the length of the scrotum and joins its counterparts, the penile raphe and the perineal raphe, to connect orifice to orifice. Its prominence varies from a cordlike stripe to undetectability between segments and people.

The peculiar part is that the line is a mystery of the male body. Even in our enlightened age, plenty of people aren't aware of having it or think they aren't supposed to. Sex ed focuses on the more functional bits, and info on the skin behind those is almost exclusively for women (with good reason. Things tend to tear in childbirth.) This node is dedicated to all the thirteen-year-old boys who find the thing and jump to Conclusions.

The scrotal raphe originates from…

CPR (event)

2008-11-04T15:37:55Z

Everyone knows about CPR. It's all over the media. Unfortunately most people know about it in the sense they know that smoking is bad for you or that we should do something about those wars in Africa. We seem prone to think that we can pick it up once we start needing it, that we can control our lives enough for that. I did, until a passer-by keeled over into my yard and died of a heart attack. Male. Early fifties. Short hair.

May all of you lose this impression during your lives, preferably with less spectacle.

The basic steps are simple and Lockheart describes them excellently above, but resusciation is pestered by small details that make its effective use unintuitive. For instance:

CPR is exhausting. Compressions don't wear the helper out as fast when the helper's body weight is used to help push. It's best to lean over the patient, arms going straight down, the upper

…

Sector General (thing)

2008-10-02T22:36:35Z

Science fiction author James White (1928-1999) was born in Northern Ireland and into geekdom at just the right time to discover stories about swashbuckling galactic heroes, vile green things from beyond the void, space awash with green and crimson as good and evil vie for supremacy, ray guns, ray beams, beam rays, antimatter planet missiles and weaponized suns. By the time White picked up the pen he'd had enough of that. He created Galactic Sector Twelve General Hospital. Over the following four decades it would become the centerpiece of a prolific writing career, the fuel for twelve books' worth of novels and short stories.

The Setting

Sector General is a megalomaniac's vision for a space station, the best thing in multi-species medicine and xenobiological research in the known galaxy. It has employees from most of the sixty-odd sentient species of the Federation and the means to serve them all, from ordinary oxygen-breathers, through water- and…