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Previous: 2005

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Reading Log For 2006

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THE BATMAN HANDBOOK

The Ultimate Training Manual (2005)

Scott Beatty

Illustrations by David Hahn

Foreword by Chuck Dixon

Paperback

Quirk Books, Philadelphia

2006-03

• 14: For Further Bat Reading: Ten books every crime fighter should have in his or her library
1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. Anabasis by Xenophon
3. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
4. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche
5. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
6. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
7. The Enchiridion by Epictetus
8. Handgun Stopping Power by Evan Marshall and Edwin J. Sanow
9. Homicide by David Simon
10. Where Death Delights by Milton Helpern
• 42: The Cons of Having a Sidekick
• Emotional Attachment
• Double the Dangers
• Contributing to the Delinquency of Minors
• 170: 13 Phobias Batman's Rogues Gallery Depends On

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• 17: Abagnale makes more money trying to prevent fraud than he ever did by committing fraud.
• 26 - 27: When a man from Argentina received a $20 parking ticket, he stuffed $22 in the envelope and mailed it to the Miami city clerk. The city mailed him a check for $2.00. He scanned the check into his computer, made it out for $1.45 million and deposited it in a bank in Argentina. He got away with it.
• 28 - 29: The notion of people ordering checks directly from vendors started with Miriam Loon, in the greeting-card business who made novelty checks with dogs printed on them. Soon, all the check manufacturers started selling directly to individuals.
• 31 - 32: Abagnale was flabbergasted by the TeleCheck system, where a check is scanned and then returned. They never ask for I.D. and there will be no evidence left if the check is forged.
• 34: Recommends that all institutions date code checks and that employees be taught to read date codes. The older the date code, the more established the person who wrote the check.
• 39 - 40: Check forgery that once took weeks can now been done quickly with a piece of scotch tape.
• 42 - 43: Changing the Federal Reserve Bank numbers on a check so it gets routed across the country, giving the forger two weeks to write bad checks.
• 59: When asked “When are we going to see the paperless society?” He tells them, “When you see the paperless toilet. No time soon.”
• 108 - 109: The short-change artist
• 156: A German hacker wrote his own Microsoft ActiveX control for Quicken employing a “salami attack.”
• 177 - 178: Counterfeit Underwriter Labs (UL) seal on untested medicine.
• 181: According to the FAA, between 1973 and 1993, bogus aircraft parts accounted for at least 166 U.S.-based aircraft accidents or less serious accidents.
• 183: Joe Barbara, creator of “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” used a pen with his own DNA to authenticate his drawings.
• 193: Numerous scams are based on the fictitious country of Melchizedek.

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1988: Cheryl

• She takes a home pregnancy test. Married to Jason (as far as they knew, were the only married couple who attended Delbrook high school).
• 12: Attended Youth Alive! meetings three times a week.
• 14: The (Columbine-like) attack.

1999: Jason

• 73:

“There's this rumor going around the school right now.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Word has it that God smokes cigarettes.”

“Jason, please don't . . .”

“Also, and this is weird, God drinks and he uses drugs. I mean, he invented the things. But the funny thing is, he's exactly the same drunk as sober.”

Mom recognized the pattern. “Jason, let it rest.” Kent sat there waiting for the crunch.

Taunting my father was possibly the one time where I became vocal. here's another example: “It turns out that God hates every piece of music written after the year 1901.” The thing that really got to Dad was when I dragged God into the modern world.

“I hear God approved of various brands of cola competing in the marketplace for sales dominance.”

Silence.

• 91: References to title.
• 92: Instructions to his clone.
• 111:

It doesn't feel miraculous to me. But the kids down at the Trust office talk about miracles all the time, and this, too, baffles me. They're always asking for miracles, and finding them everywhere. Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God – I think He created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.

2002: Heather

• 157: She bursts into tears over the most unromantic beginning of a date a romantic guy (Jason).
• When Jason disappears, a psychic offers to help.

2003: Reg

• Looking for his son.

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• 25: Table 1: The Historical and Universal Expression of the Golden Rule.
• 41: Typical communities tend to bifurcate when higher than 150. 150 is roughly the number of living descendants a Paleolithic culture would produce in four generations at the birthrate of hunter-gatherer peoples.
• 123: Daniel Dennett argues in his book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, that if there is too much free will, there could be no room for modifying immoral behaviors.
• 131 - 132: Matt Ridley explains the futility of personality eugenics:

Do you see now how unthreatening it is to talk of genetic influences over behaviour? How ridiculous to get carried away by one “personality gene” among 500? How absurd to think that, even in a future brave new world, somebody might abort a foetus because one of its personality genes is not up to scratch—and take the risk that on the next conception she would produce a foetus in which two or three other genes were a kind she does not desire? Do you see now how futile it would be to practise eugenic selection for certain genetic personalities, even if somebody had the power to do so? You would have to check each of 500 genes one by one, deciding in each case to reject those with the “wrong” gene. At the end you would be left with nobody, not even if you started with a million candidates. We are all of us mutants. The best defence against designer babies is to find more genes and swamp people in too much knowledge.

• 137 - 138: William Ernest Henley wrote Invictus, about nineteenth century scientific self-determinism, while terminally ill.
• 148 - 149: Fydor Dostoyevsky was arrested in 1848 as part of the Petrashevsky circle (followers of Fourier). He was found guilty of conspiracy against the Orthodox Church and Russian government and suffered a six-year term in a lonesome, cold penal colony. This is where he became extremely religious.
• 160: There are 33,820 different Christian denominations.
• 161: descriptive ethical relativism passes no judgment on whether ethical theories are valid or not; while normative ethical relativism claims that ethical theories are relative compared to others, but valid for the culture in which it is practiced.
• 165:

Thanks to extensive interdisciplinary research by psychologists, sociologists, and economists over the past several decades, however, we now know that humans are emotional and intuitive decision makers subject to the considerable whims of subjective feelings, social trends, mass movements, and base urges. We are rational at times, but we are also irrational, the latter probably a lot more than we care to consider. As we shall see at the end of this chapter, moral reason must be balanced with moral intuition.

• 168:

Fuzzy logic also helps us see our way through a number of moral conundrums. When does life begin? Binary logic insists on a black-and-white Aristotelian A or not-A answer. Most pro-lifers, for example, believe that life begins at conception—before conception not-life, after conception, life. A or not-A. With fuzzy morality we can assign a probability to life—before conception 0, the moment of conception .1, one month after conception .2, and so on until birth, when the fetus becomes a 1.0 life-form. A and not-A. You don't have to choose between pro-life and pro-choice, themselves bivalent categories still stuck in an Aristotelian world (more on this in the next chapter).

Death may also be assigned in degrees. “If life has a fuzzy boundary, so does death,” fuzzy logician Bart Kosko explains. “The medical definition of death changes a little each year. More information, more precision, more fuzz.” But isn't someone either dead or alive? A or not-A? No. “Fuzzy logic may help us in our fight against death. If you can kill a brain cell at a time, you can bring it back to life a cell at a time just as you can fix a smashed car a part at a time.” A and not-A. Birth is fuzzy and provisional and so is death. So is murder. The law is already fuzzy in this regard. There are first-degree murder, second-degree murder, justifiable homicide, self-defense homicide, genocide, infanticide, suicide, crimes of passion, crimes against humanity. A and not-A. Complexities and subtleties abound. Nuances rule. Our legal systems have adjusted to this reality; so, too, must our ethical systems. Fuzzy birth. Fuzzy death. Fuzzy murder. Fuzzy ethics.

• I have tried to bring this Fuzzy logic way of thinking to true believers, with little success.
• 169 - 170: The three door “Monty Hall Problem.”
• 174: The Captain Kirk Principle (from “The Enemy Within” where Kirk is split into two beings): intellect is driven by intuition, intuition is directed by intellect.
• 178: In a survey of who is most likely to go to heaven, 87 said themselves.
• 181: “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, which is the good he seeks” —Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
• 186: We need to take the Golden Rule one step further with the ask first principle, to test whether an action is right or wrong.
•  188: The liberty principle states that it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to some else's loss of liberty.
• 190:

On July 16, 1964, in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater gave voice to one of the most memorable one-liners in the history of politicking: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” For most human endeavors, however, Goldwater is wrong. Extremism is almost always a vice that generates countless unintended consequences. Extremism too often leads to violence, terrorism, and even war. From 9/11 to the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, and from the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City to the blowing up of abortion clinics, the principles of happiness and liberty are violated in the most ultimate fashion.

The opposite of extremism is moderation. The moderation principle states that when innocent people die, extremism in the defense of anything is no virtue, and moderation in the protection of everything is no vice. The moral principles behind the moderation principle are happiness and liberty. If you are killing people in the name of anything, you are seeking happiness and liberty at the ultimate expense of someone else's happiness and liberty.

• 201: Denmark and Japan have lifted bans on pornography and experienced drops in sex crimes.
• 214: Animals are used so extensively, that a sudden ban on animal products (e.g. the blood and fat from cows) would cause the economy to grind to a halt.
• 216: Steven M. Wise analysis of animal rights: Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights.
• 221: In regards to animal rights, consistent with the liberty principle and happiness principle, Shermer recommends: we should never seek happiness and liberty when it leads to a great ape's or a great marine mammal's unhappiness and loss of liberty. This may seem timid to many, and generous to others.
• 225: Dmitri Belyaev started selective breeding silver foxes (Vulpes vulpes) for domestication in 1959. Within 35 generations, the researchers produced tail-wagging, hand-licking, peaceful foxes with significantly smaller skulls, jaws, and teeth than their ancestors.
• 231 - 232: While Shermer's conversion to Christianity was sudden and dramatic, his de-conversion was gradual and evolutionary.
• 240 - 242: On Ayn Rand's Objectivism:

The problem with Objectivism is its contention that absolute knowledge and final truths are attainable. For Objectivists, once a principle has been discovered through reason to be True, there is no further cause for disputation. If you disagree with the principle, then too bad for you—the principle is True anyway. This is more like theology than it is philosophy. Whatever it is, it is not science. In Rand's circle, such absolutism led to the same end that all absolute moral systems experience if they are carried out to their logical extreme: a bipolarization of people into true believers and heretics, with acceptance of the former and excommunication of the latter.

• 244: methodological individualism: assumes only individual phenomena have a basis in reality (there are no pure Platonic essences).
• 245: A student scrawled on the title page of Harvard's only copy of Al Kinsey's 1936 wasp monograph: “Why don't you write about something more interesting, Al?” Funny, I just saw the movie Kinsey.
• 250: In response to, “Do you believe anything?”
1. Metaphysics: Provisional Reality.
2. Epistemology: Provisional Naturalism.
3. Ethics: Provisional Morality.
4. Politics: Provisional Libertarianism.
• 271: Thomas Henry Huxley one-liner coming down hard on reality: “Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical process of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”
• 273: Despite its controversy, E.O. Wilson's SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW SYNTHESIS only had one chapter on humans, and barely two pages on the possible evolutionary origins of ethics.
• 281 - 282: As described in Stephen Jay Gould's magnum opus (and unfortunately, his last book), The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Darwin's Duomo (Cathedral) rests upon three theoretical pillars: agency, efficacy, and scope.
  

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• I took a physics class taught by Prof. Kakalios at the University of Minnesota. Unfortunately, it was not his famous “Everything I Needed to Know About Physics I Learned from Reading Comic Books” class.
• 13: The plot of “The Adventure of the Canceled Birthday” in The Atom #21 dealt with the 11 days omitted during the transition from the Gregorian to Julian calendar when September 2, 1752 was followed by September 14.
• 14: Famous science fiction writer Alfred Bester penned the original Green Lantern oath.
• 14:

Q: How many pulp-fiction writers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: The history of the lightbulb is a long and interesting tale, beginning in 1879 in the quiet town of Menlo Park, New Jersey, and continuing on to the present day. . . .

• 16: The most important question regarding the trajectory of a hit baseball is Does the ball have any choice?
• 21: The original source of Superman's powers was that Krypton had far stronger gravity than Earth.
• 32: The gravity on Krypton must have been 15 times greater.
• 46 - 47: The death of Gwen Stacey from a fall (even though Spider-Man catches her) in Amazing Spider-Man # 121.
• 79: About 300,000 atoms lie end to end across the width of a human hair.
• 155 - 156: Lord Kelvin's estimate of the age of the Earth. He re-did the calculation in 1905, incorporating the energy of radioactive decay, and arrived at a minimum estimate of several hundred million years. “Darwin went to his grave not knowing that Kelvin was mistaken, yet nevertheless maintained his belief in the correctness of his theory of evolution.”
• 156 - 157:

There are critics of evolutionary theory today who point out particular biological phenomena that the theory cannot currently explain, but this does not necessarily invalidate a scientific theory. For example, the motion of three masses interacting through their mutual gravitational attraction turns out to be so complicated as to defy analytical calculation, but this does not indicate that the theory of gravity is wrong. There are always gaps in our knowledge and many things we do not presently understand, but the only way we will change this situation is by critical thinking and experimental testing of evidence. If you find the scientific method lacking in one aspect of science, then honesty would indicate that you should refrain from using its results in all other parts of your life. Which will certainly save you some money on doctor and electricity bills.

• 162: Engineer Percy L. Spencer was studying the range of a microwave emitter from a magnetron (used for radar applications in WWII) when the candy bar in his pants pocket melted. A follow-up experiment was conducted with popcorn.
• 174: Geckos have millions of microscopic hairs on their toes, called “setae,” which allow them to walk on walls and ceilings through van der Waals forces.
• 222: There is a wave associated with the motion of any matter, and the greater the momentum of the object, the shorter the wavelength of this wave.
• 230: The Flash #123 had parallel worlds where Jay Garrick and Bary Allen were each a Flash in their own world.
• 235 - 236: Similarities between The Doom Patrol of DC Comics and The X-Men of Marvel comics, as well as Swamp Thing at DC and Man-Thing at Marvel.
• 236: The Schrödinger equation made possible the transistor, laser, nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion.
• 245 - 248: Superman's time travel creates multiple Earths.
• 261 - 265: Iron Man with transistors, and repulsor rays.
• 292: Birds have efficient respiratory systems where every single oxygen molecule in their lungs is replaced within two breaths. Humans only exchange 10 of the air molecules in our lungs.
• 304: When Superman believed he was dying in Superman #156, his parting words were, “Do good to others and every man can be a Superman.”

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• Based on the 16 issue quarterly magazine of the same name.

The Faithful Monetto & The Inimitable Dick

• Munito was a poodle who would pick up pasteboard cards with his teeth to solve mathematical problems.
• A woodcut shows another dog, Monetto, presumably doing a similar trick.

Edward Bright: The Gazing Stock and Admiration of all People

• Edward Bright was said to weigh between 616 and 622 pounds at his death in 1750, was the largest man on record.

The Bonassus: Verbal Deception Deciphered

• Supposedly captured as a 6 week old cub in the interior of American, put on display in London in 1821: “A Newly Discovered Animal Comprising the head and eye of the elephant; the horns of the antelope; a long black beard; the hind parts of the lion; the fore-parts of the bison; is cloven footed; has a flowing mane from the shoulder to the fetlock joint; and chews the cud.”
• Actually a common water buffalo of the Philippines.

Fact & Crucifixion

• Tommy Minnock would sing “after the ball is over” while being nailed to a cross.
• There were many copycat crucifixions.

The Smallest Show on Earth: or, Parasites for Sore Eyes

• The Flea Circus

Grinners, Gurners & Grimaciers

• Exhibitioners who make faces

Isaac Fawkes: Surprizing Dexterity of Hand

• Slight of hand in conjunction with escapades of contortionism.

Dancing on the Ceiling

• Examples and methods of performers who walk on the ceiling.

Magical Mayhem: or, The Celebrated Nose Amputation

• Usually the illusion of a knife cutting downward through a nose.

The Wizard of the North and the Aztec Lilliputians

• John Henry Anderson was received at Buckingham Palace on July 4, 1853 to present a pair of diminutive children.
• 86: The children were studied by the scientific community in New York, who held they were not from a race of dwarfs.
• 86: The church was pleased that the children were baptized as Catholics.

The Gnome Fly

• Signor Hervio Nano was neither a dwarf nor midget, was billed as the shortest man in the world, but was an athletic showman.

Subterfuge at Skittles: or, Bowling for Blacklegs

• Matthew Buchinger was born armless and legless in 1674. He demonstrated his skills on the bowling lawn.

THE ULTIMATE DIET: The Art and Arifice of Fasting

• Men and women who supposedly don't eat for very long periods.

Dental Deception

• Questionable cures for toothaches.
• 127: Origin of the word “quack” from sixteenth-century mountebank, or quacksalver, from the Dutch “kwaksalver,” or talkative salesman.
• 128: When dentist Horace Wells demonstrated the use of nitrous oxide at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1844, he apparently did not use enough, the patient screamed, and he was hooted off the stage. Yet “laughing gas” was used successfully in performances.

Suspension of Disbelief

• Levitation of a human in midair, such as with a single pole.

The Automaton Chess Player, The Invisible Girl & The Telephone

• The Mechanical Turk and talking machines
• 147:

Dai Vernon, the great slight-of-hand performer whose life spanned the twentieth century, inspired the encomium: “In the performance of good magic the mind is led on, step by step, to ingeniously defeat its own logic.” This is a story of logic and ingenuity, science and deception – and magic. It is the tale of an eighteenth-century thinking machine that couldn't think and yet influenced the industrial revolution and led to the invention of the telephone.

• 149: Impostors created a talking head of Orpheus on the island of Lesbos.

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• I can see why this won Hugo and Nebula awards. This is one of the most amazing pieces of science fiction I have ever read.
• Private William Mandella: One of many recruits for a new type of war: these people were all skilled scientists and engineers before they were drafted to fight an interstellar war.
• 8: The Collapstar Jump: method of instant (from the perspective of the traveler) interstellar travel. Yet years will pass by in the rest of the world
• 72 - 73: Post hypnotic suggestion to encourage bloodlust.

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