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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
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Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. ![Merit Badge in Quill Award
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| This Guardian article should be uncontroversial. ‘Outdated and misleading’: is it time to reassess the very concept of money?  It’s regularly being created and destroyed – and economic models that don’t reflect that fact are not even slightly useful ...not. The article itself, which begins with the simplistic concept of banking enunciated in the well-known movie It's a Wonderful Life, isn't as amenable to out-of-context quotations as some of the stuff I post here. I haven't seen that movie in decades, by the way, but I do remember the scene in question: George Bailey (James Stewart) dealing with a potential run on the bank. When you borrow money and your bank credits your loan account, the account balance is created anew, “from thin air”, not from or in relation to existing deposits or other existing money. And as you repay the loan principal, the money created at the time of the loan gradually disappears, reverting to its previous form of airy nothingness. I'm no economist money talker person, but to me, that just sounds like someone figured out that negative numbers exist and can be operated upon just like positive numbers. Your deposit account is a liability for your bank and, as a depositor, you are no more than one among many of the bank’s unsecured creditors. Leaving aside for the moment the mistaken assumption that everyone has enough unspent money to even have a deposit account, this has been the way it works for at least as long as I've been alive. Which, of course, doesn't mean it's the only way to do things. In normal times a promise from a private bank is nearly as good as a promise from a government or a central bank. But in a crisis the promise is worth much less, and can be worth as little as nothing at all. That may be true in the UK, where this source is based (I don't know), but here, we have federal deposit insurance for that sort of thing, as a result of the Great Depression. If money is as unreal and ephemeral as they claim, though, a run on the bank shouldn't make a difference. The bank, or its insurance agency, could just conjure more out of the same "thin air" that they do when you get a loan. That it does make a difference tells me there's something incomplete about this article's assertions. Details aside, the US and UK banking and government systems aren't all that different from each other where finance is concerned, so I'm not saying this article is completely useless on my side of the pond. There's a bit more I can't really quote out of context, then: Crucially, society as a whole needs to think differently about the nature of money –possibly by first discarding the term itself. “Money” encompasses a range of phenomena that have intrinsically different purposes and risks. Well, yeah. I've known that for a while. Look up money supply. Oh, wait, no, I just did that so you don't have to.The article's conclusion: A new financial conversation would make the causes of inter-generational inequities more explicit, and it would allow the community to rethink allowing “too big to fail” banks to earn, year in year out, enormous risk-free profits. There may be ways to accomplish these seemingly-worthy goals without drastically switching to what appears to be a Star Trek economy, which, in truth, would never work without access to near-unlimited free and clean energy. Not that it's ever properly explained in the Star Trek universe, except for maybe holding up the capitalistic Ferengi as counterexamples to it. The truth that no one seems to acknowledge is that our current system requires an underclass. Okay, that might not be a "truth," but only my opinion, and, like I said, I'm not an expert. The underclass doesn't have to be a particular demographic, though, sadly, it has been. Gotta have people desperate enough to eat and otherwise stay alive, so they'll take the crappy but necessary jobs that almost no one would freely choose. That's not freedom. That's economic coercion. But any suggestions to improve it are above my pay grade. Pun intended. |
| Something interesting from the BBC last year: I thought all Australians lived underground. Otherwise, they'd fall up into space. I mostly saved this article so I could use the entry title I did. I'm inordinately proud of that pun. But it's also a fascinating concept, at least to me. These are the first signs of Coober Pedy, an opal mining town with a population of around 2,500 people. Many of its little peaks are the waste soil from decades of mining, but they are also evidence of another local specialty – underground living. That name sounds as Australian as kangaroos and Crocodile Dundee. I wonder if the article will state its origin. In the winter, this troglodyte lifestyle may seem merely eccentric. But on a summer's day, Coober Pedy – loosely translated from an indigenous Australian term that means "white man in a hole"... Of course it did, and it's hilarious. ...needs no explanation: it regularly hits 52C (126F), so hot that birds have been known to fall from the sky and electronics must be stored in fridges. Yeah, I prefer heat to cold, but that's just going too far. I thought Phoenix was bad in the summer. As the blistering three-month heatwave continues in the US – with temperatures even cacti can't handle – and wildfires incinerate swathes of southern Europe, what could we learn from Coober Pedy's residents? Again, this article is from last year. August, specifically. At least it was winter then in Australia. People have been retreating underground to cope with challenging climates for thousands of years, from the human ancestors who dropped their tools in a South African cave two million years ago, to the Neanderthals who created inexplicable piles of stalagmites in a French grotto during an ice age 176,000 years ago. Well, duh. It's not exactly news that humans and related apes lived in caves. Caves served another very important purpose, as well. As the article notes, most underground locations that are deep enough—provided one isn't near a volcano or whatever—stay around 13C, or 55F. Before refrigeration, this was an common way to keep beer and wine relatively chilly, and thus preserve it longer. Even now, a lot of fermented beverages are best served at "cellar temperature." Apart from comfort, one major advantage of underground living is money. That, and your HOA can't give you shit if you happen to paint your house the wrong shade of pink. On the other hand, many underground homes in Coober Pedy are relatively affordable. During a recent auction, the average three-bedroom house sold for around AU$40,000 (£21,000 or US$26,000). I'd imagine that at least part of that is its remote location. The question is, could underground homes help people to cope with the effects of climate change elsewhere? And why aren't they more common? Guessing that at least part of the answer to that last question is "rock" and "water tables." And also "building codes" and "zoning laws." It's my understanding that, to be considered a bedroom in the US, a room must have a window. Windows aren't exactly a common feature of underground living. Besides, if your neighbor lives in a cave, how are you supposed to judge their lifestyle by how they keep their yard? There are several reasons why making dugouts in Coober Pedy is uniquely practical. The first is the rock – "It's very soft, you can scratch it with a pocket knife or your fingernail," says Barry Lewis, who works at the tourist information centre. Okay, so I might have cheated a bit with my "rock" answer, because further up in the article, they mentioned it was sandstone and whatnot. However, the feats at Cooper Pedy would not be possible everywhere. One major challenge with any underground structure is damp. I did say "water tables." Civil engineering education is good for something. But in Coober Pedy, which sits on 50m (164ft) of porous sandstone, conditions are arid even underground. "It's very, very dry here," says Wright. Ventilation shafts are added to ensure an adequate supply of oxygen and to allow moisture from indoor activities to escape, though these are often just simple pipes sticking up through the ceiling. The downside of building, even underground, in a desert is the other side of that equation: where do you get your water? I missed it if the article addresses this. I imagine there's an aquifer further down, but I don't know. The article also doesn't note another important thing about learning how to live underground. If we end up with people living on the Moon and/or Mars, they're pretty much going to have to do so in underground habitats. Not only does the rock above you provide a barrier to space radiation, but it all but eliminates potential problems with small meteorites punching a hole in your bio-dome or whatever. Also, nearly unlimited beer storage. |
| Not every question has an answer, as illustrated by this Cracked piece about riddles. By "fictional," they mean "appearing in works of fiction." Lots of riddles are fictional in that someone made them up. The literary, cinematic and funny-paper canon is full of riddles because they’re as fun for the audience as they are dire for whichever hero must solve them to obtain the One Ring, whatever the hell a sorcerer’s stone is, etc. The Sorcerer's Stone was meant to be the Philosopher's Stone, and it is called that in the book's original language. Of all the ways they dumbed down that series for an American audience, that was probably the worst. The Philosopher's Stone was, historically, the hypothesized material that alchemists thought they could use to turn lead into gold, or confer eternal youth, or had whatever transformative properties were faddish back before science. Kind of the Unobtainium of its time, and its own unsolvable riddle. The more philosophical alchemists treated it not as an actual material, but a transformative idea for achieving enlightenment or whatever. 5. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Just a few pages after the Mad Hatter asks Alice, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” in the rant against modern math most beloved by hippies, the answer becomes clear: He doesn’t know. Likely my first encounter with the subject at hand. Pretty sure it annoyed me back then, but it taught me an important life lesson: Not every question has an answer. As the article notes, people have stumbled around trying to find an answer, but, like the search for a material Philosopher's Stone, answering it misses the entire point. 4. Life Is Beautiful Toward the end of the movie, Lessing begs Guido for help with a riddle, translated to English, “Fat, fat, ugly, ugly / All yellow / If you ask me where I am, I say ‘quack, quack, quack’ / Walking along, I say ‘poo poo.’” Sound like nonsense? It is. In contrast to the Mad Hatter thing, I've never encountered this, which apparently comes from an Oscar-winning movie. But even had I seen the movie, I think I might have accepted that for the near-Brechtian absurdity that it obviously is. 3. Twelfth Night This takes some explanation; fortunately, the article does just that. But you'll have to see it there, because I can't do it any justice with small excerpts. Our theory is that Shakespeare wrote fart jokes and never intended anyone to think this hard. On that point, I have to agree with Cracked. 2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Every nerd’s favorite number is 42, supposedly “the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” calculated by the supercomputer Deep Thought in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is now absolutely impossible to have a philosophical discussion about the meaning of life without someone shouting that number out. In fairness, that someone is often me. 1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail Ah, yes, that other work of art that nerds can't help but quote. You know both this and #2 were created in the 1970s, right? Holy Grail in particular came out in 1974. For the math-challenged, that's 50 years ago. Wait... Shakespeare's and Carroll's works are much older than that. Some of us nerds like to quote them, too. This has given comedy nerds a handy call and response by which to identify each other but also an actual riddle: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? It's true. I have been known to select people to hang out with based on whether they can do Holy Grail references. I knew one person who could quote the entire movie, verbatim. That's dedication. The real joke: It’s a trick. There’s no such thing as “airspeed velocity.” Sure, you could calculate the airspeed or the velocity of a swallow of any nationality. "You're using coconuts." Perhaps comedy is the actual Philosopher's Stone... |
| Not to brag, but I've known this for a long time. Still, there's always new stuff to learn. This is a fairly old article from Vox: Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single magical plant species And collard greens. Also kohlrabi, but every time I mention kohlrabi people be like wut? In some circles, kale has become really, really popular. Too popular. I think people may have finally calmed down on it a bit since this article came out in 2015. I don't know what the latest fad food is, but I can almost guarantee that behind the fad is someone with money trying to make more of it. Once a little-known speciality crop, its meteoric rise is now the subject of national news segments. Some experts are predicting that kale salads will soon be on the menus at TGI Friday's and McDonald's. I don't know about Friday's, but apparently McD's did come out with a kale salad that had more calories than a Big Mac. Calories (if you haven't been following along, I talked about calories a few days ago) aren't the only indicator of healthiness in a food, but I do find that hilarious.This makes it pretty interesting that kale and cabbage — along with broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collard greens, and kohlrabi, and several other vegetables — all come from the exact same plant species: Brassica oleracea. Linguistic detour, as I often do: you might notice that most of those have some variant of "cole" in them. It's in the middle of broccoli, the beginning of cauliflower and collard and kohlrabi, and it's a slight vowel shift for kale. Not so much cabbage itself, but the syllable survives in that version's most perfect presentation, coleslaw. The odd one out is Brussels sprouts. One might be forgiven for thinking that this is where the species name brassica came from, but apparently not; brassica seems to have been Pliny the Elder's name for the cabbage group. No, Brussels sprouts were named for, believe it or not, Brussels, the one in Belgium, near which the plant was heavily cultivated. Nor was Brussels apparently named after brassica. The similarity of the first syllables there seems to be another linguistic near-coincidence.How is this possible? About 2500 years ago, B. oleracea was solely a wild plant that grew along the coast of Britain, France, and countries in the Mediterranean. Because France doesn't count as "Mediterranean?" I guess they meant the north and/or west coasts of the country. As for "how is this possible," obviously, the article goes into detail. But it's the same sort of thing as saying "How is it possible that a chihuahua and a Great Dane can be the same species?" Short version: artificial selection; that is, trait selection by humans. As we, too, are part of nature, the distinction between artificial and natural selection is, well, an artificial one. For the long version, there's the article. All this speaks to one thing: the remarkable power of human breeding and artificial selection. Wow, that could have been worded better, couldn't it? Oh, well; I'm sure I've done worse. |
| Today's historical excavation takes us back to 2019, at a time when I was apparently participating in the 30-Day Blogging Challenge... though I neglected to note that in the entry: "Getting the Lead Out" For context, my current >4 year daily blogging streak wouldn't start for about another month, and, obviously, this was in the Before Time. The prompt I was writing to started with "What characteristics do you admire in a leader?" and continued to build on that. I'm not sure I really addressed all the nuances of the prompt, but I'm okay with that, especially now that it's >4 years later. I am a Bad Example. I even printed up "business" cards with my name followed by "Bad Example." My friend's ex-wife never liked me. She called me his "bad influence." I should have run with that, instead. But I'm not always. Case in point: it might have been the month after this entry appeared, maybe not, but let me set the scene: California, the home of two of my friends, married to each other, and their kids. Breakfast time. Someone made pancakes. I poured a small amount of syrup onto said pancakes. The mom, talking to the youngest kid, maybe 12 or so: "See how he doesn't drown the pancakes in syrup?" The dad, to me: "Bet that's the first time you've been held up as an example of self-restraint." Everyone involved, especially me, had a good laugh at that one. Basically, I don't want to be a leader. I don't like it. The benefits don't outweigh the constrictions, for me. I admire those people who can do it... I worded this poorly, I think. There are lots of people who are "leaders" that don't deserve, or get, my admiration, or even respect. Evangelical TV preachers, for example. Most politicians, from any political party. Certain billionaires. Thing is, those types get all the press. I'd be hard-pressed to cite an example of a leader I actually admire, at least in terms of naming someone well-known. Being well-known probably works against you, there; not one of us is without our follies and drawbacks, and being in the public eye tends to put a magnifying glass on them. What I should have said was probably that I have some respect for those who can balance things well enough to be both a good leader and, mostly, still be what I'd consider a good person. But there's one thing I hate more than being a leader, and that's being a follower. Still true. Fortunately, life isn't binary, and I choose Option C: going my own way. It's enough to be responsible for my own situation, and I'm not always so good at even that. Not everyone has that option, I know. Another thing I'm terrible at is motivating people. I like it when people motivate themselves. Any attempts I make in that direction always seem hollow to me. But I think good leaders find ways to motivate their team, though how they do it might as well be sorcery for all I understand it. A few weeks after this entry, I did one on Emotional Intelligence, or EQ. I only remember this because I was skimming nearby entries while trying to remember the context of this one. I probably could have related the two concepts at that time, but I didn't. In summary, I question the whole concept of EQ because it seems self-referential: they define EQ as the quality needed to achieve success (based on a narrow definition of success), and to achieve that kind of success, you need a higher EQ. My point being that I imagine it takes those same qualities to be an effective leader. Anyway, yeah, this is kind of rambling, but the bottom line is: don't look to me to set examples, unless you enjoy drinking at bars. Again, this was the Before Time, so the difference now is I'd end that sentence with "home." |
| Posting early today because it'll be a busy and exhausting day of visiting local wineries with friends. For the sake of context, this 2013 article from Collectors Weekly came out during the time when same-sex marriage was still being debated in the US; it wouldn't be until 2015 that Obergefell v. Hodges settled the matter once and for all. Hey... stop laughing; I said once and for all. I mention this only because, at the time, "traditional marriage" was a buzzword, and a dog whistle for "white Christian man marries white Christian woman; together they go on to produce 2.1 children, and the man makes all the decisions in the family." And even that is not what was, historically, "traditional marriage." In reality, it’s the idea of marrying for love that’s untraditional. This is not even getting into different cultures' traditions. For most of recorded human history, marriage was an arrangement designed to maximize financial stability. Much as I'd like to agree with that, it still seems Eurocentric. But, honestly, I don't know enough about other cultures to know all the nuances involved. By the Middle Ages, gender inequality was not only enshrined in social customs, but also common law. In most European countries, married women were forced to give up control over any personal wealth and property rights to their husbands. Eventually, the system became known as “coverture” (taken from “couverture,” which literally means “coverage” in French), whereby married couples became a single legal entity in which the husband had all power. One of the more common arguments against same-sex marriage back then was "What's next, you can marry your dog?" To me, that argument told me everything I needed to know about how the person making it would treat women. It's like the idea of "two willing adults wanting to enter into a mutually beneficial agreement" completely escaped them. Once you get to the "two willing adults" hurdle, it's not even a little bit of a stretch to consider that those adults can be any sex and/or gender. I'd personally be perfectly content to extend that to more than two (for other people, not for me), but that's a fight for another time. Under such laws, children were generally viewed as assets, in part because they were expected to work for the family business. Another change: nowadays, they're liabilities. Or, at the very least, it's an emotional bond more than a business arrangement. Despite the church’s staunch position on monogamy, in the late Middle Ages, a legal marriage was quite easy to obtain. However, as more couples attempted to elope or marry without consent, the old guard upped its game. To combat the spread of “clandestine” marriages, or those unapproved by parents, state officials began wresting the legal process of marriage from the church. In my view, that sowed the seed that became part of the same-sex marriage debate, at least in the US. Religious people get married twice in the same ceremony: one sealing their bond in the eyes of their religious group, and one making it official to various government agencies, not least of which is the IRS. Much breath was wasted with people talking past each other, not understanding that one person meant religious union, while the other meant civil union. As this philosophical support for individual choice spread, more young people wanted some say regarding their future spouses. “Demands for consent from the people actually getting married were thought to be quite radical,” says Abbott. Even more radical was the idea that marriage might be entered into for emotional, rather than financial, reasons. It's also apparently radical that a marriage be considered a partnership between equals. In fact, for thousands of years, love was mostly seen as a hindrance to marriage, something that would inevitably cause problems. “Most societies have had romantic love, this combination of sexual passion, infatuation, and the romanticization of the partner,” says Coontz. “But very often, those things were seen as inappropriate when attached to marriage. The southern French aristocracy believed that true romantic love was only possible in an adulterous relationship, because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event. True love could only exist without it.” In other words, they knew that love dies, but money is forever. Anyway, the article goes on for a while, but, as it covers centuries of history, it seems to be a decent summary. It also emphasizes how laws are often slow to catch up to social realities. And yes, there's a nod to the then-current marriage debate. The laws, if not the attitudes of certain kinds of people, have moved on since then, and we've shifted our focus as a society to trans issues, when we're not contemplating our looming climate apocalypse. And no, the two have nothing to do with each other. But the shift in attitudes about marriage and the climate problem both seem to have their roots deep in the Industrial Revolution. |
| Gonna have to contradict folk wisdom again: there really is such a thing as coincidence. Cracked has a few examples here: ...except "same exact" is, for most of these, a stretch. In March 1951, a new comic called Dennis the Menace debuted in the U.S. That very week, a different comic about a different mischievous boy debuted in Britain, and it was also called Dennis the Menace. Both became hugely popular, and neither adapted the other, and neither ripped off the other. It would be weirder if coincidences never happened. Other things invented in disparate places simultaneously include calculus and the theory of evolution. Those are less coincidence, though, and more about the background having been laid out, setting the stage for ideas that were ready to be invoked. 6. The Tale of Hershey’s and Hershey’s These two brands didn’t, say, form on different continents with the same name, like how there was one restaurant in Australia called Burger King and was unrelated to the famous burger chain. The two Hershey companies both formed in Pennsylvania, in the same county, within a decade of each other, by unconnected men named Hershey. Trademark law is complicated and way outside my expertise, but from what I understand, it gets even more complicated when actual peoples' names are involved. Milton Hershey created the Hershey Chocolate Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1884. Jacob Hershey and his four brothers created the Hershey Creamery Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1894. The Hershey brothers were not related to Milton Hershey, and they didn’t form a creamery to piggyback off Hershey chocolate. They formed a creamery because they were a family of farmers. Still, ten years apart, same county? You'd think even back then some lawyer would have advised one of them to change their name. 5. The True Name of Dogs We’re playing around with exactly how the conversation went down, but the basics are true: The host kept saying “dog,” and Dixon assumed he’d misunderstood the question. Against all likelihood, “dog” really was the Mbabaram word for dogs, though the language shares no other roots with English or with any of the many languages related to English. There exist other linguistic coincidences, though they escape me at the moment and I can't be arsed to look for them. But given the number of extinct and extant languages in the world, combined with the relatively limited number of sounds a human can make, it would surprise me more if there were no such coincidences. 4. We’re Stuck With Two Different Calories We measure food using what’s called the large calorie, the dietary calorie or (most confusing of all) Calorie with a capital C. The other type of calorie is the small calorie, or calorie with a lowercase c. And yet, people act like calories are an ingredient in food, not a measure of energy. Obviously, we should not use the same word to describe these two different measures, and for a while, people tried calling Calories “kilocalories.” That made far too much sense, so it never caught on. Pretty sure I've seen kCal in European food labeling, but I could be wrong. In any case, again, this is less coincidence and more sharing a common origin, unlike the dog example above. Also, it's not that hard to determine which one is meant from context. If it's about stuff you're going to put into your gaping maw, it's Calories. If it's not, it's calories. 3. Nacho, and His Nacho Formula Nachos were invented by Ignacio Anaya. “Nacho” was his nickname and has traditionally been the nickname of various people named Ignacio. You know that already if you have any friends named Ignacio, if you saw that Jack Black luchador movie or if you watched Better Call Saul. Okay, gotta admit I didn't know that. I like Jack Black, but haven't seen that movie. Nor have I seen the referenced TV show. In this example, the coincidence isn't, as one might expect, two dudes named Ignacio coincidentally inventing nachos at the same time. No, it's way cooler than that, at least if you know the slightest bit about chemistry: The emulsification agent used in nacho cheese today is sodium citrate. Its chemical formula is Na3C6H5O7. NaCHO. It was destiny. No, it's coincidence. Stay focused, okay? 2. We Keep Lolling Over Lol Lol is Dutch for “laugh,” or “fun” or “joke.” This probably derives from an earlier word lallen, which referred to drunken slurring. While it shouldn't be surprising that there are similar words in English and Dutch, which are, unlike with the dog thing above, related languages, the similarity here does seem to be coincidence in that LOL is an English acronym that happens to mean something similar to what this article claims is a Dutch word for laugh. But, again, it's not that farfetched. 1. Everything Ends Up Crabs No, everything really doesn't. Crabs are no more an inevitable end product of evolution than humans or bees. Some scientists a while back pointed out that different evolutionary lineages produced crablike forms, and the popular media ran with that and exaggerated it to "everything ends up crabs." I can deal with some hyperbole on a comedy site, though. You see, we have a lot of different types of crab, and they didn’t all form from one crab diverging into different species as evolution progressed. They formed because a bunch of different species all independently evolved into the same basic animal: the crab. Biologists call this process crabification. Coincidentally (heh), "crabification" is what I call what people do at certain all-you-can-eat seafood buffets. Often, when different species evolve in some convergent way, we can point to what’s desirable about that trait, which makes everyone naturally acquire it. When a bat and a dolphin each evolve methods to navigate through chirping, that’s weird, but we can easily say why multiple species would evolve echolocation: because it helps them get around. With crabs, we can only speculate on why creatures keep evolving these flat bodies and tiny tails instead of, say, all turning into lobsters. Fair enough, but it doesn't rise to the level of coincidence if there's something in the marine environment that makes it useful to have a hard shell and pincers with a flattish body plan, even if we can't quite point to what that something is. This would be like saying "what a coincidence that fish and marine mammals both have fins." Except we know that fins are useful appendages for underwater locomotion, and that underwater locomotion is helpful for underwater survival. So, honestly, I mostly kept this article in the queue because of the sodium citrate nacho thing. But it's all interesting, as far as I'm concerned. Because sometimes, there really is such a thing as coincidence. |
| By coincidence, this article from BBC, which I've had saved for a while, is almost exactly three years old. Well, it can't be entirely lost, as we know about it. Pity the event planners tasked with managing Cahokia's wildest parties. A thousand years ago, the Mississippian settlement – on a site near the modern US city of St Louis, Missouri – was renowned for bashes that went on for days. Well, at least they didn't have the internet and its trolling, grifting denizens to deal with. Throngs jostled for space on massive plazas. Buzzy, caffeinated drinks passed from hand to hand. Crowds shouted bets as athletes hurled spears and stones. And Cahokians feasted with abandon: burrowing into their ancient waste pits, archaeologists have counted 2,000 deer carcasses from a single, blowout event. Pretty sure most of that still happens when the Cardinals win the World Series. A cosmopolitan whir of language, art and spiritual ferment, Cahokia's population may have swelled to 30,000 people at its 1050 BCE peak, making it larger, at the time, than Paris. Math aficionados might note that this would have been about 3,000 years ago, not "a thousand" like in the sentence I quoted up there. This is because, apparently, the BBC made a (gasp!) mistake here, at least according to this Wikipedia entry, which appears to be thoroughly sourced. The Beeb should have written 1050 CE, not BCE.I point this out only to show that everyone makes mistakes. I don't think that means we can't trust the rest of the article. It's what Cahokia didn't have that's startling, writes Annalee Newitz in their recent book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. The massive city lacked a permanent marketplace, confounding old assumptions that trade is the organising principle behind all urbanisation. Oh, look, a book promotion. Startling. "Cahokia was really a cultural centre rather than a trade centre. It still boggles my mind. I keep wondering 'Where were they trading? Who was making money?'," Newitz said. "The answer is they weren't. That wasn't why they built the space." Archaeology, or really any scientific discipline, is subject to human cultural biases. One reason for science's existence is to minimize, at least over time, the effects of bias. It helps to have people from diverse cultures studying things. We in the English-speaking world tend to assume everything's always been about money and trade, but this is not necessarily the case. (In fairness, it appears that math and written language in Eurasia both began as means to record business transactions, but even that appearance may be the result of some bias.) When excavating cities in Mesopotamia, researchers found evidence that trade was the organising principle behind their development, then turned the same lens on ancient cities across the globe. "People thought that this must be the basis for all early cities. It's led to generations of looking for that kind of thing everywhere," Pauketat said. Like I said. They didn't find it in Cahokia, which Pauketat believes may instead have been conceived as a place to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead. Yeah, let's not immediately leap to that conclusion, either. "May... have" doesn't fill me with great confidence. Nevertheless, it indeed seems to fit as a hypothesis. Eventually, Cahokians simply chose to leave their city behind, seemingly impelled by a mix of environmental and human factors such a changing climate that crippled agriculture, roiling violence or disastrous flooding. By 1400, the plazas and mounds lay quiet. Great, more ammunition for the anti-climate-change crowd to seize on. "See? Climate always changes." I mean, sure, it does, but usually on a much longer timescale than what we're experiencing now. Plus, recall that this was in the Mississippi flood plain, and that river has been known to shift, even during a single human lifespan. But it's more than that. Cahokians loved to kick back over good barbecue and sporting events, a combination that, Newitz noted, is conspicuously familiar to nearly all modern-day Americans. "We party that way all across the United States," they said. "They fit right into American history." The only thing missing is beer. And I'm not going to wade into the cultural quagmire on that subject. |
| I'm sure everyone here already knows what the headline here is saying; at the very least, I've talked about folklore and fairy tales in here before. But the article, from Vox, goes into more detail. She's a princess. She wears a beautiful dress with a shiny headband, glass shoes, and long white gloves. She overcomes the adversity of her wicked stepmother and stepsisters, who treat her as their maid, so she can meet and dance with a very handsome prince, then hurry home before the clock strikes midnight and her carriage becomes a pumpkin again. But that's not the real Cinderella. That's the Disney Cinderella, the one from the 1950 animated film and the new remake in theaters right now. Yeah, that bit's way out of date; the article is from 2015. This makes no difference to the history. At the center of most Cinderella stories (whether they use that name for their protagonist or not) is one thing: a persecuted heroine who rises above her social station through marriage. It is impossible for me to hear "Cinderella story" without picturing Bill Murray's glorious, and reportedly ad-libbed, performance in Caddyshack. Which, now I think of it, does have a thematic element of rising above one's social station (but for a dude, not a chick). But it's been a while since I've seen that movie, so my memory there might be a bit fuzzy. And, really, a silly comedy, no matter how funny, has no right to contain such metaphorical depth. It's a movie featuring a dancing gopher, for shit's sake. The first recorded story featuring a Cinderella-like figure dates to Greece in the sixth century BCE. In that ancient story, a Greek courtesan named Rhodopis has one of her shoes stolen by an eagle, who flies it all the way across the Mediterranean and drops it in the lap of an Egyptian king. A shoe, not a coconut; an eagle, not a swallow. The pop culture movie references just keep coming. Another one of the earliest known Cinderella stories is the ninth-century Chinese fairy tale Ye Xian, in which a young girl named Ye Xian is granted one wish from some magical fishbones, which she uses to create a gown in the hopes of finding a husband. Because even in China, the most important thing for a young woman to do was find a husband. In total, more than 500 versions of the Cinderella story have been found just in Europe, and the Cinderella we know best comes from there (France, specifically). This should not be surprising, but it was to me; I always had this vague idea that it was German in origin, probably because it was featured in Grimm's. The Brothers Grimm also collected the tale in their famous fairy tale compendium. That story, called Aschenputtel (Cinderella in the English translations), appeared more than 100 years after Perrault's version in the 19th century. Hence why I associated it with Germany, I suppose. In the Grimm version, the heroine's slippers are made of gold (not glass), and when the Prince comes to test the stepsisters' feet for size, one of them cuts off her own toes to try and make the shoe fit. In the end, Cinderella marries the prince, her stepsisters serve as her bridesmaids, and doves peck their eyes out during the ceremony. It is, needless to say, a beautiful tale for children. This is the sort of thing I absolutely adore about the non-Disneyfied versions of these stories. Did Cinderella invent the Wicked Stepmother trope? In a word, no. I didn't think it did. It's almost as common in fairy tales as "Once upon a time..." But plots don't just emerge out of nowhere. Most are pulled from real-life scenarios or at least real-life feelings. As Dr. Wednesday Martin, author of the book StepMonster, wrote for Psychology Today, "Stepmothers are frequently singled out for very bad treatment indeed by stepchildren who pick up on their mother's anger and resentment and become her proxy in their father's household." It is entirely possible that the whole reason I saved this article into my queue was because that author's name is Wednesday, and that's too funny not to share. At its core, Cinderella is about how dependent women once were on men to determine their place in the world. Yeah, I'm not saying that's wrong or anything, but it strikes me as a postmodernist deconstructive interpretation. Thus, Cinderella as Disney retold it in 1950, is the true embodiment of what that time period thought of as women achieving the American Dream — not through work, but through marriage. So, your homework (it would be my homework, but I'm entirely too busylazy) is to reinterpret the story through this post-feminist lens. Or maybe Caddyshack already did that. |
| Made it back home. Amusingly, the weather did clouds and rain the entire 8-hour drive back—which, fortunately, didn't happen yesterday. If you're hoping for a description of the eclipse, look elsewhere; it's been covered by better writers, and better photographers, than me, so I won't even bother. Just know that, whatever you've read, it's insufficient to describe the experience; and whatever pictures you've seen cannot do it justice. I've seen some scoffs on the internet to the effect of "why bother with the hassle of traveling when you can watch it on video online?" Leaving aside how sad their lives must be, or how it might feel to have one's sense of wonder surgically excised, I have to wonder if they ask that about everyone's experiences: "Why go see a band in concert when you already have all their albums and can listen to them anytime?" "Why bother going to a football game when you can watch it on TV?" "What are you doing going to Disney World when you can watch internet videos of the lines and rides?" "Why go camping when you can just look at pictures of trees and rocks?" Now, granted, you won't catch me doing the last three, and my days of doing the first one are probably behind me, but I try not to yuck other peoples' yum. Maybe some of them are just trolling. Maybe some honestly don't see the point in viewing celestial phenomena, and would rather go to concerts, sports games, amusement parks, or the (shudder) outdoors. Maybe an eclipse is "nerd stuff," but the fact is, everyone's a nerd about something. If it's not astronomy, maybe it's music, sports, theme parks, or hiking. Or beer or wine. If you really like something and seek its experiences and knowledge, you're a nerd about it. As for me, I ended up seeing it from the grounds of a winery in Indiana, which may sound odd, but I'd been to that particular one before, and I knew they had good product. My friend and I got lucky that, when we got there, they still had viewing spots available, and we even got bling bags out of the deal. And they played Pink Floyd as the eclipse progressed, so everything came up Waltz. No, I didn't have detailed plans beforehand; I didn't see the point when, had it been cloudy, all that planning would have been mostly wasted. Sick of hearing about the eclipse? Don't worry; that was very likely my last one, so no more from me on the subject... probably. Tomorrow, back to my regularly (and randomly) scheduled nerdery. |
| As I warned yesterday, short update today, and be aware I'm going to spend most of it bitching. My plan to catch the total eclipse was: Drive to Louisville (about 7-8 hours), which is outside but close to the path of totality; then, today, drive into Indiana, most of which will experience the full monty. Well, the plan's holding up so far, and the hotel I picked wasn't price-gouging, and they managed to not "lose" my reservation. So there's that. The hotel kinda blows, though. My first clue was when my room key didn't open the door. I went to get it fixed. Still didn't open the door. There's tea in the lobby, which, if you've been following along, maybe you remember is one thing I don't mind paying extra for. However, the provided hot water wasn't hot. If I wanted ice tea, I'd have traveled south instead of west. The toilet doesn't like to flush, either. I hope those problems aren't related. They also put us in a room right across from a massive, military-grade floodlight. I was hoping for an eclipse of that, but no. On top of which, it was one of those nights: As long as I was up and doing stuff, all I wanted to do was sleep. When I'd try to sleep, my brain insisted on staying awake. I'm not usually one to have trouble sleeping in hotel rooms. I generally like hotel rooms, and I've certainly slept in enough of them. At this point, I'm going to be so tired that I'll probably succumb to the darkness the moment the full eclipse begins. Honestly, I expected better from a Hilton. Perhaps my mistake was expecting better from Louisville. |
| I'm getting this done early (really early) because I don't know when or if I'll have a chance to get online later today. And the next couple of days' entries might be short and also at weird times, because I'll be traveling. Today, we're going back in time again, but not very far—February of last year. I have a self-imposed one-year blackout on Revisited entries, and this one makes the cut by less than two months: "Social Greases" In it, I discussed an article from New York (not The New Yorker). Unsurprisingly, the link is still valid as of today. I'm not sure I can say the same for a lot of the "rules" they discuss for "living in a polite society" (I'm increasingly unconvinced that we do).From the article: We sparked office arguments and made messes and ended up with a guide that we hope will stand the test of at least a bit of time — until the next great exciting social upheaval. So, a year later, what's held up and what hasn't? You might need to read the article and decide for yourself. Me, I'm just going to rehash some of my own comments. 4. When shopping with a friend, don’t cut them in the rack. Someone needs to explain this to me. On second thought, no, don't. I never shop with friends. I still haven't figured out what in the hell this is supposed to mean. I could have looked it up, but it's so far removed from my lifestyle that I simply haven't bothered. Not to mention I promptly forgot it until re-reading it just now. 6. Never wake up your significant other on purpose, ever. Never wake them up accidentally, either. You know what's worse than either of those things? Passive-aggressive waking. You're mad that they're still snoozing, so you do the dishes as loudly as you can without breaking them, or run the vacuum, or something equally obnoxious, productive, and designed to make them feel bad that their lazy ass is still in bed. Their lazy ass is still in bed because they need the sleep. Never mess with that. Yes, I've been on the receiving end of that. Another thing sure to make me grumpy? Sleep-shaming. "Oh, look who decided to join the living." Not everyone's a morning person, dammit. 28. Don’t ask people how they got COVID. 29. Or why they’re wearing a mask. No, please ask me why I'm wearing a mask. Depending on my mood, I might answer with "to mess with facial recognition," "because I get compliments on my cat mask but never on my face," or "to keep you from running away screaming." This one probably aged less well than most of the others. 30. When casually asked how you are, say “Good!” Valid only in English-speaking countries. And not even then; if someone asks me that, I assume they really want to know. Corollary: Don't ask if you don't want to know the truth. 34. Actually, it’s great to talk about the weather. No. Talking about the weather is just going to start an argument about climate change. It's now a topic more fraught than sex, politics, or religion. I've had people try to strike up conversations with me by bringing up sports. I'm happy to talk to people, despite what I said in that entry (or others), but the only thing I need to know about sports is that they involve way too many commercials for me to even think about watching them. 38. Always wink. What the bullshit is this? Another one I had no idea about then, forgot about until now, and still have no idea. 84-91. There are new rules of tipping. This might irritate or confuse you, but the reality is there are new social expectations around what deserves a tip. These have, on the other hand, been on my mind. I've started to follow a simple rule: the more work I have to do, the less I tip. Full-service restaurant? Full tip. Delivery? Same. Pick up at restaurant? If I have to do the driving, I tip less. Uber? Always. (That's kind of a pun.) And if I have to order at a counter, wait, pick up my order, and bus my own table, they get nothing. I despise self-checkout, so I never use it, but I've heard some of them have now added tip begging to the checkout screens. Never. Not in a billion years. If I'm doing all the work, shouldn't I be getting the tip? I'm considering implementing another one: if the screen suggests something like a 50% tip, they get nothing and I never go back. Already did that for cabs in Vegas. That's when I signed up for Uber. Some people suggest memorizing who gets lower wages and tip all of them. I guess you can do what you want, but I still think it should be based on actual service, not intricate economic knowledge. I'd prefer a system where people get paid by their actual companies, and not the customers. Raising prices to compensate would make little difference in total amount spent. Obviously, these tipping tips are only valid in the US. Enough of that. The "rules" that really raise my hackles? There are some pearls of advice that suggest that one should do the opposite of what you're asked. Like, "Even when a kids’ party says 'no gifts,' you’re supposed to bring a gift." I've lived my entire life in the South, with frequent trips to New York (whose population this article was obviously aimed at). Doing the opposite of what someone says has always been a Southern thing, and I don't like it here, either. In New York, this "I know I asked you to not to being a gift, but what I meant was bring a gift" or similar would be like traveling to Italy and seeing everyone speaking in perfect, unaccented English without moving their hands. It's not right. It breaks my entire conception of how the world works. Doing as asked is a mark of respect and courtesy. Anything else requires one to memorize a maze of rules, and I don't have the bandwidth for it. On the flip side of that, it's courteous to state your desires plainly. Don't be coy. "Don't bring a bottle of wine" means "don't bring a bottle of wine," not "bring a bottle of wine." It's not that I try to be discourteous. I'm simply not a mind-reader, and some of society's expectations are opaque to me. |
| I need to believe that this article, from CBR and brought to my attention by a friend, is satire... but I'm still not really sure. 10 Ways Calvin and Hobbes Has Aged Poorly While Calvin and Hobbes is generally regarded as an iconic, timeless comic strip, there are some ways in which it hasn't aged especially well. Imagine if I wrote something like "Why Shakespeare's plays have aged poorly," and cited things like archaic language, outdated customs, and now-obscure references? Am I really comparing C&H to Shakespeare? Why yes. Yes, I am. Any reader can still enjoy the strip the way Bill Watterson initially intended. The characters, setting, and circumstances always feel like something that could easily be replicated today. Except that, admittedly, the characters don't have smartphones to stare at. Like Cracked, CBR seems to be fond of countdown lists. As there are ten items, I'm not going to bore you with every single one of them. 10 No One Supports Calvin Calvin's parents are often busy taking care of the house or working, leaving Calvin with few opportunities for emotional support... It is a lot of pressure for a little boy and would not be considered socially acceptable parenting today. Leaving aside for now the open question of whether this is satire, that is kind of the whole point of the strip: that while all of C's physical needs are taken care of, he has Hobbes for everything else. Since Hobbes is only animated in his imagination, he's really supporting himself. 9. Calvin Gets Dinosaurs Completely Wrong Dinosaurs actually had feathers, which contradicts Calvin's imagination Now... everyone should know by now that I'm usually the first person to get all technical about stuff like this. I've done it here in this blog. I've done it in newsletters. Hell, I've done it in fiction writing. But dinging the strip for this is like ragging on Jules Verne for getting a trip to the moon all wrong, or on Ray Bradbury for imagining a Mars that's inhabited and inhabitable. Or, to keep it in the comics world, it's like ragging on Pogo because opossums don't hang out with cigar-chomping, bipedal, talking alligators. On top of which, it feels like the same thing as saying "an actual tiger would have eaten Calvin," neglecting the whole bit about it all being one little kid's imagination, and this is what first led me to believe that we're dealing with satire here. Besides, I'm pretty sure not all of them had feathers. What we call dinosaurs were around for longer than they haven't been around, and they were quite diverse. Don't quote me on this, but I think they started scaly and at least some lineages, over the couple hundred million years or so that they dominated the planet, later evolved feathers, which are modified scales (so is hair on mammals). The few that survived the mass extinction event did have feathers, and their descendants are what we call birds. None of which matters if you're a six-year-old kid with an overactive imagination. 7. Calvin's Babysitter Threatens Him After all, Rosalyn regularly threatens Calvin for even the slightest offense. Staying up late or playing too loudly often led to threats of violence or a punishment of solitary confinement. That's just the way we did things back then. Also, I can attest from personal experience that for a kid like Calvin, solitary confinement is hardly a punishment. 5. No One Tries To Stop Moe In the modern world, students would receive instant support in the face of bullying, especially if the bully is physically hurting them or stealing from them. From what I understand, lots of bullying still goes unremarked these days, too. True, it was probably worse in the past. "Instant support," my ass. 4. Calvin Spends Too Much Time By Himself This one, I took personally, having been an only child with no other kids usually around outside of school. That made me more self-sufficient and less needy, qualities that I consider part of my core personality. Would I be better at social skills otherwise? Possibly. But then I wouldn't be Me. I've said in the past that Calvin was that kid I wish I had been, and hope I never have. The strip was a big influence on my decision to remain child-free, lest I end up with a Calvin to deal with. 3. Calvin Wanders A Forest Alone Hey, so did I. 1. Calvin's Behavior With Susie Wouldn't Be Acceptable Today I have only vague and sporadic memories of being six, but at that age, girls were alien creatures. Pretty sure they saw us the same way at the time. Cooties were scary. In any case, most of these boil down to needing historical context. Lots of older works of art need this. I mentioned a few of them above. (And make no mistake; C&H was absolutely a work of art.) This doesn't negate the art; rather, it's an opportunity to learn more about changing cultural norms and even scientific findings. And if this article really is satire, it's not very good satire. |
| This article, from Slate, has been, like a customer at the DMV, patiently waiting over four months to be called up. And it's 9 years older than that. But, despite the headline and date, it's not time-sensitive; grammar and spelling rules are timeless. Sort of. Nothing quells my Christmas cheer as quickly as a stray apostrophe. Every year they assault me. Oh, you only notice them in December? Then you haven't been looking. Usually it’s in the middle of an otherwise quaint moment: I am padding around my parents’ house, wearing pink slippers, sipping on some hot chocolate. Snow is falling outside the window, and Josh Groban’s Christmas CD is filling the downstairs with peace on earth and mercy mild. My mother is baking a pie. She’s about to ask if I want to lick the spatula (which, duh, I will). Remarkable; 12-year-olds are writing articles these days, while other writers struggle to make money. First, though, I find a stack of Christmas cards and begin to flip through them—pausing to marvel at how big so-and-so’s kids have gotten. And then I spot it: an apostrophe in a last name that isn’t supposed to be possessive. This part, I absolutely relate to. Gone is my Christmas cheer! All my glad tidings, replaced with fury. Look. I get it. It pisses me off, too. But if that's all it takes to turn you into the Hulk, seek help. Maybe I overestimated her age, above. Okay, okay, kidding. I recognize hyperbole when I see it. Usually. This year I’d like to preempt the pluralization problems. It’s mid-November now, time to order Christmas cards again. The holiday season starts earlier every year. It could be that, by waiting this long but not long enough to write about this article, I'm contributing to Christmas creep. But, given the prevalence of year-round Christmas stores in the US, I don't think my small contribution makes any difference. I have created a brief guide to help you pluralize your last name. It is my humble attempt to preserve not only apostrophe protocol but also the dignity of the letter S. You should visit the link just to see this chart. It's both informative and funny. In summary, if you're writing in English, every surname adds either -s or -es to become plural, and an apostrophe doesn't belong anywhere near it, unless the name already has one like O'Brien. I have no idea how they do it in other languages. Q: Why do people add apostrophes? A: I have no idea. Neither do they. I have an alternative suggestion, though, since so many people misuse apostrophes, putting them in where they don't belong, or omitting them where they do belong: Instead of "Happy Holidays from the Smiths," consider: "Happy Holidays from John Smith, Jane Jones, Braden Smith-Jones, Kaylee Jones-Smith, Fluffy, and Stinky. (Don't look at us like that. Braden was four when he named the dog.)" It's not like you have to get the damn things engraved at a printer, these days, and get charged by the letter. Besides, calling the whole household by one last name perpetuates the myth of the nuclear family, and enforces the hegemony of the patriarchy. We can't have that, now, can we? I bypass the whole thing by remaining singular. And not sending holiday cards. |
| One of the more philosophically interesting implications of physics as we know it is that there is no such thing as "nothing." We are not empty The concept of the atomic void is one of the most repeated mistakes in popular science. Molecules are packed with stuff Well, except maybe for the contents of your savings account. The empty atom picture is likely the most repeated mistake in popular science. It is unclear who created this myth, but it is sure that Carl Sagan, in his classic TV series Cosmos (1980), was crucial in popularising it. Part of the problem is that everyday language fails in its ability to describe sometimes esoteric scientific concepts. Take the word "nothing." It's obviously an ancient portmanteau of "no" and "thing," implying that when you describe a space as "nothing," there's "no thing" there. But the word "thing" isn't exactly precisely defined, especially when you get down to subatomic scales and discover that all particles are actually energy, and "thing" can be used to describe, well, anything, from stars to light to dark matter... maybe you see the semantic problem. In other words, maybe the problem isn't the science, but the language used to communicate it. Sagan was brilliant, and a strong communicator with excellent fashion sense, but, being human, he'd have made mistakes, and he was working with a 1980s knowledge of science, which has advanced a bit since then. All it takes to question the idea of the empty-space idea is to attempt to bring two fully solid objects together. Swords, say. If swords were mostly empty space, they wouldn't be very effective at parrying other swords. Or cutting, when you're not quick enough to parry. Swords swing just fine through the air, though, with only minimal resistance (unless you swing them broad-side-on), but air isn't "nothing," either. Most problems surrounding the description of the submolecular world come from frustrated attempts to reconcile conflicting pictures of waves and particles, leaving us with inconsistent chimeras such as particle-like nuclei surrounded by wave-like electrons. This image doesn’t capture quantum theory’s predictions. Saying that light, for example, behaves "sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle," betrays our macroscopic bias. If we'd learned the quantum stuff first, we might be confused by the "things" that only behave like waves (sound, e.g.) or only like particles (ping-pong balls, e.g.). To compensate, our conceptual reconstruction of matter at the submolecular level should consistently describe how nuclei and electrons behave when not observed – like the proverbial sound of a tree falling in the forest without anyone around. Two problems there: 1) How do we experimentally verify how these "things" behave when not observed? By definition, we'd have to observe them to find out. 2) A tree falling in the forest absolutely makes a sound. Sound is waves in air, caused by a transfer of kinetic energy; it exists whether an ear is there to pick up on it or not. The only way a tree falling in the forest would not make a sound would be if the forest were in a vacuum, in which case we have way more immediate problems than philosophical koans. Here’s a primer on how to think of the fundamental components of matter: a molecule is a stable collection of nuclei and electrons. If the collection contains a single nucleus, it is called an atom. Electrons are elementary particles with no internal structure and a negative electric charge. On the other hand, each nucleus is a combined system composed of several protons and a roughly equal number of neutrons. Each proton and neutron is 1,836 times more massive than an electron. The proton has a positive charge of the same magnitude as an electron’s negative charge, while neutrons, as their name hints, have no electric charge. Usually, but not necessarily, the total number of protons in a molecule equals the number of electrons, making molecules electrically neutral. I could quibble about some of the details there—for example, a neutron is slightly more massive than a proton—but that's a remarkably good summary, so long as it's understood that some details need further embellishment. The interior of the protons and neutrons is likely the most complex place in the Universe. Yes, even more complex than crowds at a Taylor Swift concert. Particles with the same electric charge sign repel each other. So additional interactions are required to hold protons close-packed in the nucleus. These interactions arise from quark and antiquark pairs called pions that constantly spill out of each proton and neutron to be absorbed by another such particle nearby. It occurred to me later in life that the grade-school simplicity of the seemingly contradictory statements "like charges repel; opposite charges attract" and "atomic nuclei are positively charged while the electrons are negatively charged" should be way, way more confusing to middle-school students than it is. Positively-charged protons in a nucleus stick together, and electrons don't just fall in and join with a proton to neutralize the charges. This article does a pretty good job explaining the basic physics behind why that's not a contradiction. I won't quote it. Not gonna lie; it gets a bit technical. It needs to, though, to avoid the inevitable wobbliness of everyday word definitions, like "thing." The association between this mass concentration and the idea that atoms are empty stems from a flawed view that mass is the property of matter that fills a space. However, this concept does not hold up to close inspection, not even in our human-scale world. When we pile objects on top of each other, what keeps them separated is not their masses but the electric repulsion between the outmost electrons at their touching molecules. This bit kind of answers the implied question in the headline, so I'm including it. My criticism of the empty atom picture isn’t meant to shame people’s previous attempts to describe atoms and molecules to the public. On the contrary, I applaud their effort in this challenging enterprise. Our common language, intuitions and even basic reasoning processes are not adapted to face quantum theory, this alien world of strangeness surrounded by quirky landscapes we mostly cannot make sense of. Which is what I've been trying to say. Also, the Ant-Man movies didn't get it right, either. Fun movies, but don't use them as quantum physics lectures. In the end, though, the idea of "something" and "nothing" will stick with us in our everyday language, and they are, I think, generally adequate to describe, say, the difference between a planet and the mostly-vacuum of space. But even vacuum has something in it. Not so sure about some humans' brains, though. |
| Thank Atlas Obscura for this one, which, again, I'm sharing mostly for the hell of it. Because it talks about two of my favorite things. No, not science and math; beer and food. Ordering Off a 5,000-Year-Old Mesopotamian Menu A community effort brings ancient flavors to modern Texas. Texas has forfeited any claim to being "modern," but whatever. Among the campus buildings at Rice University in Houston, Texas, one curious structure stands out... It’s called a mudhif, and for Iraq’s Marsh Arab ethnic minority, it’s a traditional village meetinghouse where disputes are settled and important gatherings are held. What Marsh Arabs are doing in Houston is explained in the article. Alrawi describes the dinner as a way “to complete the setting” of the mudhif by paying homage to the structure’s ancient origins. Rather than modern Iraqi food, the dinner menu is based on recent archaeological discoveries from Lagash. Located in modern-day southern Iraq, Lagash was a major Sumerian city home to some 100,000 people in the third millennium BC. While that might not seem like a huge city by today's standards, I think it was quite a lot of people for 5,000 years ago. The far better known Babylon, in the same general area, might have reached 200,000, but that was several centuries later. ...the central grain was barley, used to make both bread and another Mesopotamian staple that the team in Houston set their sights on recreating: beer. And now they're speaking my language. Though the beer of ancient Mesopotamia bore little resemblance to the delicious magical concoctions of today, it was fermentation of malted barley. The article goes into some of the process. “Whenever you put an archaeologist together with a chef or a brewer,” says Lao, “they feed on each other.” Recreating the Mesopotamian meal has been a team effort. Now, that's an image I might have done without. Also, as the article points out, it's probably impossible to faithfully recreate all of the recipes. Moreover, we're talking about working-class food, the ancient equivalent to street tacos, hot dogs, and the like. Food availability and price keeps changing; a commonly-touted example is that lobster used to be considered trash that only poor people ate, while now it's treated as a luxury item (I don't know how true that is). So do you recreate the food, or the experience? Lots of cultures have come up with their own working-class food, but the commonality there (pun intended, as always) is that it's all based on what's abundant and cheaply available. At least until it becomes widely known as delicious, at which point it ceases to be working-class food. Like how you might pay $10 for a stadium hot dog, or how I pay $30 for a pizza. But I feel like it brings history to life if they try to recreate the recipes with the foods then involved. Few people love memorizing the facts, dates, and minutiae of history, but get people together for a meal, and stuff will stick in their memories. That said, I have little interest in trying original Sumerian beer. It's enough for me to know how the beverage got its start. |
| Lots going on today, so I'll try to keep this short. It's from SciAm, and I'd find it amusing if it weren't, well, not amusing. Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand Organized crime is mining sand from rivers and coasts to feed demand worldwide, ruining ecosystems and communities. Can it be stopped? Good thing this didn't come up yesterday. People might think it was a prank. He had been in Mali doing fieldwork on the drug trade when a source noted that most cannabis in Mali came from Morocco and that sand trafficking was also a major market in that country, with drug traffickers involved. “I think that when you talk about sand trafficking, most people would not believe it,” Abderrahmane says. “Me included. Now I do.” I'm still not entirely sure I believe it. Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. For comparison, a metric ton is slightly more than an Imperial ton, less than a shit-ton, and a lot less than a metric shit-ton. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. Of all the things I'd expect us to run out of, sand is way down there on the list, right above human stupidity. Sand is any hard, granular material—stones, shells, whatever—between 0.0625 and two millimeters in diameter. Fine-quality sand is used in glass, and still-finer grades appear in solar panels and silicon chips for electronics. Desert sand typically consists of grains rounded like tiny marbles from constant weathering. The best sand for construction, however, has angular grains, which helps concrete mixtures bind. I've gone on about categorization problems in here before. This is one that has apparently been well-defined. In case you're wondering, since "angular grains" and "diameter" appear to be mutually exclusive, sand is, in my experience, graded by successive sieves. Any grains that fit through a 2mm sieve but not a 0.0625mm sieve can qualify as "sand." Those limits are arbitrary, but useful in concrete design, with which I've had some familiarity. There's a lot more to the article, but, as I said, I'm trying to be brief, finishing before too much sand passes through the hourglass. I don't have an answer for the problem, but it's one I'd never considered before, so I thought it was worth sharing. |
| Welcome to Trust No One Day. It's kind of appropriate that this article (from Mental Floss) came up at random today, because, while it's probably not intended as a prank, I don't really trust it. For various definitions of "facts." The solar system: It’s big, it’s heliocentric, and it’s got space junk to spare. "Big" is relative. From our human perspective? Sure. Compared to the rest of space? Not even a pixel. Here are 24 out-of-this-world facts about the corner of space that’s home to Earth, enough asteroids to keep Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis working for decades, and a football-shaped dwarf planet called Haumea, adapted from an episode of The List Show on YouTube. Ah, YouTube, that bastion of fact-checking. Sure, I watch science videos there, but that doesn't mean I accept them all unconditionally. I won't highlight all 24. 1. Our solar system is a group of celestial bodies in the Milky Way galaxy. Thanks. That's so helpful. I've mentioned before why "the Milky Way galaxy" is redundant: "Upward Spiral" One can think of "the solar system" as being everything affected by the gravitational pull of the Sun. Gravity drops off with distance, but never goes to zero, though at some point, the combined gravity of, well, everything else balances or outweighs the Sun's pull. 2. The sun is huge. If you combined the mass of everything in the solar system, the sun would account for more than 99 percent of that mass. Okay, fair enough, though it's much closer to 100% than 99 percent. And again, "huge" is relative. As stars go, the sun's somewhere in the middle.4. A block of lead on Venus would melt like a block of ice on earth. True enough, but misleading. There are plenty of places on Earth where a block of ice wouldn't melt, though I tend to avoid such places. Also, lead doesn't melt like water. Ice is less dense than water, which is why it floats to the top of your glass and forms skating surfaces. But okay, maybe that's too pedantic. The point is, Venus is bloody HOT (from our perspective, not the Sun's), and you wouldn't want to go there. Hotter than Mercury. The planet, not the metal that's liquid at normal temperatures here on Earth. 5. Rocks from space have been found all over planet Earth. Okay, but also pretty trivial, and that's leaving aside that every rock on Earth is "from space;" it's just a matter of how long ago it arrived. I have a meteorite fragment; they're not that uncommon. They are, however, cool. 6. Jupiter is massive. Well, duh. Compared to Earth, anyway. Compared to the sun, it's significantly less than 1% of the sun's mass. If the sun is 99.86% of the solar system's mass, though, Jupiter is most of the rest. Earth is a rounding error. 10. Space junk is a big problem. No, they're not talking about space aliens' genitals. 13. One object in our solar system orbits the Sun backwards. In 2008, astronomers discovered an object that orbits the sun at about a 104-degree tilt. Technically, this means that the 30-mile-wide object is orbiting backwards. The team that found it gave it the name Drac, based on the myth that Dracula could walk up walls. Having a retrograde orbit, or one that's nearly at right angles to the plane of planets (the ecliptic), or, in this case, both, isn't that farfetched. If I had to guess, I'd guess "captured extrasolar object," but that's just a guess. No, what I like about this one is the name. Sadly, the prank here is that "Drac" is just a nickname, not its official designation. Much easier to say than "(528219) 2008 KV42" though.14. Drac was found in the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is an area of our solar system past Neptune containing a lot of icy objects; it's also where Pluto is located. Also misleading. Pluto spends a significant fraction of its time closer to the sun than Neptune. Still, it is considered a Kuiper Belt object, but that's a categorization thing, like its non-status as a planet. Plus, given Drac's orbital inclination from the ecliptic, maybe it should be the Kuiper Shell instead. 15. Neptune has a moon that’s a lot like Pluto. Triton is probably one of those icy Kuiper Belt objects that at some point got trapped by Neptune’s gravity and has been orbiting it ever since. Triton has a couple other distinctive features: It orbits Neptune in the opposite direction than the planet is rotating, and it has geysers that erupt. Hence my "captured object" guess for Drac. 18. One dwarf planet in our solar system has also been a planet and an asteroid. Pluto’s fellow dwarf planet Ceres takes up about 25 percent of the mass of the main asteroid belt, which is located between Mars and Jupiter. In the 19th century, Ceres was considered a planet. Then it was demoted to asteroid. Finally, in 2006, it was upgraded to dwarf planet. And yet, people aren't still salty about that one. Well, maybe astrologers are; I don't know. 19. There are millions of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They can range from less than 33 feet (10 meters) to 329 miles (530 kilometers) long. See, it's because of statements like this (which is, to the best of my knowledge, accurate enough) that movies commit what I consider to be one of the most egregious errors: depicting the asteroid belt as some densely-packed rocky hazard that Our Hero has to demonstrate superhuman piloting skills to navigate. First of all, space is three-dimensional (at least); just go around. Second, if you were standing like Le Petit Prince on one of the asteroids and looking at the sky, you'd be hard-pressed to notice even one space rock. The only show that did it right was The Expanse. But I give props to Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 for inventing the quantum asteroid field, which was funny enough to overcome my pedantry. 20. Two of Saturn's moon have water. Yawn. Freakin' Mercury probably has water (ice) at the poles. So does the Moon. Not to mention the probable ocean covering Europa (one of Jupiter's moons). Water isn't rare. Water is probably second only to rock on my list of "things we find on moons." Liquid water with life swimming in it? Wake me up when we find that on a planet other than ours. 22. The tallest volcano we know of is on Mars. Olympus Mons is estimated to be 16 miles tall, meaning it’s basically three Mount Everests. That's cheating, on two levels. One, it's been extinct for an unimaginably long time, so calling it a "volcano" is nothing more than acknowledging its areological origin. Two, Mars has about 2/5 of our gravity, so of course mountains can be higher. The slope of its sides is comparatively gentle, though, and I question what datum they're measuring from. Everest is generally measured in height above sea level, but from its base on the Himalayan Plateau, it's much less tall. Measured from base, there's a volcano (an active one) in Hawai'i that's taller than Everest (the "base" there is underwater). Measured from the center of the planet, there's a peak in Ecuador that can be considered higher than either (Earth bulges at the equator), but I guarantee you Olympus Mons isn't higher by that standard, as Mars is smaller than Earth. Not to mention there's no sea level on Mars, even if there is water there. Somewhere. Probably frozen. 24. Many of these facts would still be unknown if not for space exploration. Finally, something I can't quibble about. No fooling. |
| You know what today is, right? Oh, sure, it's April Fools' Eve, of course, but being Sunday, it's time to revisit an older entry. This one was from five years ago, and follows my usual comment-on-an-article format: "Heartbreak" The BBC article is still up, as of today. Remarkable, considering how many episodes of early Doctor Who the BBC destroyed to make room for newer things. Maybe they learned their lesson.To summarize, there was some evidence that a particular heart condition is at least partially caused by stress or strong emotion. Me: The more I learn, the more I think that the commonly stated dichotomy between mind and body is bogus. I would probably phrase this differently, now. Also, throughout my entry, I seem to have used "mind" and "brain" interchangeably, which I think I'd be more careful to avoid, these days. My understanding of the internal workings of a person or other animal is rudimentary, but from what I've heard, the brain is a physical, identifiable organ located mostly in one's head. It does lots of stuff, including stuff we don't understand, but it seems to be responsible for, among other things, telling your feet to walk and your chest to occasionally fill with air. The "mind," however, is a far more nebulous concept. I seem to recall doing another entry about that at some point in the not-so-distant past; it involved René Descartes, who asserted that because you can't put a set of spatial coordinates (Descartes invented coordinates) on the mind, but you can on the brain, that there's no way that one can act upon the other. Might as well link it, too, for reference: "Mind, the Gap" In addition to walking and breathing, the brain is sometimes fairly good at thinking. More in some people than in others, but "thinking" is a legitimate activity, even if it doesn't look like much of an activity to other people. But many people think (pun intended) that it's the mind doing the thinking. Once you're done thinking, often, you do some physical activity. For example, writing what you just thought. We draw that separation between "thinking" and "doing" because we love categorizing things, like cats and dogs being different species, or Pluto not being a full-fledged planet after all. Point being, a lot of the seeming contradictions of mind/body dualism, such as in the last entry I linked, go right out the window when you consider that the mind is a product of the body. It's probably more complicated than just being conjured up by your brain, but the brain is a body part too. Descartes' assertion that the mind cannot influence the body is, therefore, wrong. Brilliant guy, but in this case, he was working from a shaky premise. Anyway. The original entry, from up top, ends with the literal video version of Total Eclipse of the Heart, and I'm pleased (state of mind and body) to see that the video is still in existence. I have a whole entry on that song (the actual song, not the parody) coming up at some point; it's in my queue and will pop up at random. |
| What I'm sharing today, from Men's Health, is two and a half years old, so its main target is what was plaguing everyone's lives in October of 2021. Nevertheless, it's still relevant. The Golden Age of Junk Science Is Killing Us Misinformation is being spewed, weaponized, and consumed at a deadly rate. Fortunately, there's a way out. Here's how to make sense of what you're seeing. Considering that not much has changed on the misinformation front, we didn't take the "way out." In a recent Economist/YouGov poll, 20 percent of U. S. citizens surveyed said they believe that Covid vaccines contain a microchip. Again, "recent" here is 2021. Obviously, 20 percent is about 20 percent too high, even if you account for poll trolls. But it's a lower number than I, a pessimist, expected. This survey also found that only 46 percent of Americans were willing to say that the microchip thing is definitely false. Okay, that's more in line with what I expected. It is becoming harder and harder to tease out the real from the unreal. Sense from nonsense. Magical thinking from microchips. Yep. Just look at the nutters trying to attribute the Baltimore bridge disaster to, well, pretty much everything except mechanical failure. Part of the problem is that we have normalized nonsense in some very subtle and some very obvious ways. Heck, there are a host of (very) successful wellness gurus who have embraced pseudoscience as a core brand strategy. "A host of?" No, it's all of them. Unless your wellness "guru" says something like "follow evidence-based medicine," which none of them do. We really should come up with a better term. Using guru like that has got to be insulting to Hindus and Buddhists. And thanks to people like Andrew Wakefield—the disgraced former physician who started the vile “vaccines cause autism” fallacy in a paper published in and later retracted by The Lancet—misinformation about vaccine safety has continued to spread and find new audiences. As I've noted before, the fallacy got lots of attention. The retraction did not. People still believe that bullshit. Besides, even if it were true, which it's not, a person's fear in that area reveals a great deal about how they really feel about the neurodivergent. But there is a way forward! By using a few critical-thinking tools and being aware of the tactics used to push misinformation, we can cut through the noise. Yeah, but we didn't. We know that misinformation can spread fast and far. In August, Facebook released a report on its most widely viewed content from January through March 2021. The winner? The post seen more times than any other was a misleading article implying the Covid vaccine had killed someone. This nugget of misinformation was viewed nearly 54 million times by Facebook users in the U. S. in that three-month period and has been leveraged by countless anti-vaccine advocates, compounding its impact. Even if the vaccine (or any course of treatment) did cause a death, what we have to do is weigh that against the expected number of deaths from doing nothing. It's pretty well-known, for example, that, on occasion, people die during surgery. Maybe from an unexpected reaction to anesthesia, or whatever. Would that mean we should stop dong medically necessary surgery, which many more people would die from the lack of? People make fun of the philosophical Trolley Problem, but there's a practical example of it right there. And that's not even getting into the fact that people die every day (in general, I mean; obviously, no one person dies every day), so it's inevitable, statistically, that some of them will die of unrelated causes after medical treatment. It's like "Frank ate a turkey dinner, then dropped dead! No way am I ever again eating turkey! Or dinner!" Another problem: Lies, fake news, and pseudoscience can be made more compelling (microchips in the vaccines!) than the boring old truth (safe, clinical-trial-tested, actual vaccine ingredients). Indeed, research has found that, yep, as the saying goes, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Fact-checking a statement takes many orders of magnitude longer than making the statement. And, because of primacy bias, often, fact-checking does absolutely no good whatsoever. The Wakefield disaster is a perfect example of primacy bias. "Vaccines cause autism!" has way more staying power than "No, they dont," even though the first statement is provably false. The article also has something to say about my favorite bias, confirmation bias. So, I do what I can. It's not enough. |
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