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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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| Today is the day when I dig into the archives for a past post and talk about what's changed—in me or in the world. Unfortunately, what's changed in this case is that both of the links I shared are now broken: "Took the train down to Athens"  , from 14 years ago.On one talon, it should be no surprise that 14-year-old links are broken. On the other talon, they were from The Daily Mash (kind of the British version of The Onion, still in existence) and Cracked (which, though it's gone through its own changes, I continue to read and, on occasion, share). Everyone knows that Greece's economy has taken a turn for the worse, right? I reiterate: this was 2010. Lots of economies had already tanked. Some had even begun to recover. (There followed a movie reference that was probably a lame attempt at a joke even way back then.) But it's the next-to-last paragraph that had me rolling on the floor laughing my acronyms off. And sadly, whatever that funny bit was is probably lost in the mists of time. Someone might be able to find it by searching the internet archives. But that someone will not be me. The world has moved on since then, and there are more relevant jokes around. Besides, I just can't be arsed. Bonus link is from Cracked: Back then, that site ran Photoshop contests that schlubs like us (not me, though, because I suck at photo editing). This was apparently one of them. Incidentally, The Daily Mash was paywalled last time I tried to look at it (it's been a while). They're funny, but not funny enough for me to subscribe. The title of the post was, as with some of my other entry titles, a reference to a song. If you feel cheated by all the broken links, at least I can post the relevant music video, Euro-Trash Girl from Cracker, who I once had the pleasure of seeing in concert: Took the train down to Athens And I slept in a fountain Some Swiss junkie in Turin Ripped me off for my cash Yeah, I'll search the world over For my angel in black Yeah, I'll search the world over For a Euro-trash girl |
| Got a long one for you today. It's from Truly*Adventure, a source I've never used before, and it's a few years old. As the title is kinda vague, and the subtitle is kinda long, I'll sum it up as quick as I can: A volcano erupted, people fled, and other people saved the animals left behind. What makes this interesting to me is that I've visited the volcano. While it was active. The Soufriere Hills Volcano had been threatening the small Caribbean island of Montserrat for two years. I mean, technically, the island of Montserrat is the Soufriere Hills volcano. It was dormant for so long they thought it was extinct. Turns out it wasn't. The article is, as I said, long. So this is more to share it, and recount my own experience, than to make comments on it. There exists a photo of me—rare, I know— standing next to the volcano exclusion zone sign on Montserrat. Really, I should have put at least one foot over the line to demonstrate just how rebellious I am. But it's probably wrong for me to joke (though that's never stopped me before). What happened to Montserrat is a real tragedy. Thousands displaced. City destroyed. Fortunately, they're a Commonwealth country, so England took a bunch of them. But how do you go from living on a tropical island paradise to cold and windy Old Blighty? Not that Montserrat isn't windy. There's a distinct difference between the windward and leeward sides of the island. One's mostly barren, with sporadic trees that grow diagonally because of the winds off the Atlantic. The other's a tropical rainforest. Or, well, was, before it turned to ash. And a few holdouts remained on the island. To avoid the exclusion zone, they migrated to the inhospitable (barren and windy) northern lobe. I haven't been there for 20 years, but I recall makeshift dwellings and such. Hopefully, things have improved by now. At the time, I considered myself lucky to get a tour of the island, at least those parts open to travel. Unless you live in a volcano zone, it's not every day you get to observe an active one, and even rarer that you can do so in relative safety. Standing on a windy hillside, I watched the mountain blow plumes of smoke while the ground vibrated beneath my feet. Clouds hovered around the summit, and, despite the wind, never cleared. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but it's too early in the morning for me to tease it out. |
| Good writers shun clichés, and avoid them like the plague. Then there's Cracked: Every cliché starts from somewhere. As I've said so many times it's become cliché: Every cliché was once profound wisdom. Often, these tropes don’t simply stay exactly the same until we’re all sick of them. Hunt down their debut, and you’ll see something different from what you’re now picturing. There is an important distinction between a cliché and a trope, but I can't be arsed to get into that right now. But it's like... in action movies, explosions are tropes. Hard to have an action movie without at least one explosion. It's part of their charm, along with car chases and fight scenes. But the action hero calmly walking toward the camera while shit explodes in the background? That's cliché. But the first time we saw it (I don't remember what movie), it was fresh, cool, and different. 5. The First Damsel Tied to Railroad Tracks Was a Man If you’re a mustachioed villain, and you have a helpless maiden in your clutches, you know what you have to do. The villainous mustache has transcended trope and cliché and achieved icon status. The article delves into the history, here, and it's worth looking at if only for the photo of greatest villainous mustache of all time. But, as the header suggests, the first fictional track-victim was male. I'm sure someone could get their college thesis done on just this topic alone. In any case, this seems to be an instance of the original idea being twisted, and that twist becoming the cliché. 4. The Emperor’s New Clothes Was About Fear of Being Disinherited That story isn't so much trope or cliché as it is an important literary reference that everyone should know. In the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, the emperor walks around naked, and no one’s willing to point this out, having been told that only smart people can see the clothes. This offers lessons for everyday life. Sometimes, people are just pretending to know what they’re talking about. Sometimes, the stuff that wins awards is garbage. Also: A whole lot of people are afraid of looking stupid. One might even suggest it's a ready-made metaphor. 3. The First Man Who Asked for Three Wishes Was a Dick Joke A man finds a lamp, and when he rubs it, out comes a genie. “I will grant you three wishes,” says the genie. “Great,” says the man. “I will wish for two normal things, and for my third wish, I will trigger the punchline.” The "rule of three" doesn't only apply to comedy. That's only where it's most apparent. The header here is perhaps misleading, as the original format (from the One Thousand and One Nights) was less joke than fable. 2. The First Bad Boy Was Pretty Lame We use the phrase “bad boy” to describe not just actual children but excitingly rebellious men. We consider that normal, but it’s a little odd. There are only a handful of arenas in which it’s considered okay to call a man a boy. And there's at least one situation where one should never, ever do that. But apart from that, clearly, the author of this piece isn't Southern. We call rebels “bad boys” because of an 1870 novel called The Story of a Bad Boy. The main character, Tom Bailey, is a rebel but is also very much a boy. His antics include scaring people by setting off a cannon and pushing a car into a fire. As the "car" as we know it wasn't invented for almost another 20 years, this must be one of the other definitions of "car." 1. “The Butler Did It” Wasn’t a Cliché But a Cheat Another one that makes great joke fodder, but is cheating in detective stories. Apparently, it's always been a cheat. You might think that The Butler Did It became an unforgivable trope after tons of murder mysteries pulled that trick, until it got old. That’s not really what happened. Instead, in 1928, an author of detective novels published a set of rules that he claimed mysteries should follow, and among them was a rule saying the culprit must not be a servant. I'm just going to pause here and bask in the elitism of it all. Moving on... That set of rules was written by S.S. Van Dine, who went by “Willard Huntington Wright” when he wasn’t writing detective fiction. The rules start out reasonable enough, talking about how the author must play fair and provide all necessary clues. Then it makes some questionable blanket statements about what all mysteries must do — there must be just one detective, the crime must always be murder and “there must be no love interest.” By Rule 16, Dine is insisting that mysteries must have “no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations.” I don't usually subscribe to the notion that rules were made to be broken. In this case, though, I'll make an exception. Breaking my own rule, as it were. Rule number 11 says, “A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.” Elitism intensifies... Dine’s rules laid out a few other solutions that he says stories should never use. The death should never be revealed to be an accident, he said, or a suicide. The detective must never be the culprit. There must never be multiple culprits. The solution must not involve the killer committing the murder after the police have broken into the crime scene. Yeah, those aren't rules. Those are story ideas. In other news, I'm going to attempt to make this my last hyphen-pun-titled entry for a while. It's becoming cliché. |
| Here's one from The New Yorker that, when I first read it, I thought: This has comedic potential. When Philosophers Become Therapists The philosophical-counselling movement aims to apply heady, logical insights to daily life. I mean, think about it. "Doc, I'm distressed because I can't find meaning in life." "That's because life has no meaning, so stop looking for it." "Wow! That's deep! Thank you." "Sure. That'll be $180." "Here's $200." "Thanks!" "Can I have change?" "You already did." Around five years ago, David—a pseudonym—realized that he was fighting with his girlfriend all the time. On their first date, he had told her that he hoped to have sex with a thousand women before he died. All the TNY pieces I've seen start out with anecdotes and then, maybe, bit by halting bit, go around and around in circles until they get to something more general. Sometimes they never even get there, which I call "The New Yorker School of Not Getting to the Fucking Point." This one contains a whole lot of anecdotes. My point, which you'll note I'm getting to very quickly, is that I'm going to skip a lot of it here. In brief, he worked with a philosophical therapist named Lydia Amir. I might have missed it, but I don't think the article notes whether he had sex with her or not. Between meetings, Amir sometimes gave him reading assignments: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hume. Oh yes, definitely, if I'm having an existential crisis, those are absolutely the philosophers I want to read. Amir is one of a small but growing number of philosophers who provide some form of individual counselling. In the United States, two professional associations for philosophical counsellors, the National Philosophical Counseling Association (N.P.C.A.) and the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (A.P.P.A.), list dozens of philosophers who can help you with your problems. Well. Philosophy tends to pay jack shit. Therapy, however, can bring in the bucks. Philosophy is both a natural and a strange resource for helping people resolve the problems of life. Ancient philosophical traditions such as Stoicism and Buddhism focussed on practical ethics and techniques for alleviating suffering, but much modern philosophy seems to aim to express suffering, rather than reduce it. I wouldn't call the aim of those philosophies to be "alleviating suffering," but there's always the possibility that I don't really understand Stoicism or Buddhism. Some think that the practice of philosophical counselling should be more standardized. Others worry that philosopher-counsellors will miss serious mental-health issues. The two major American professional organizations stress that philosophical counselling can’t address certain severe psychiatric disorders, and urge counsellors to refer clients to mental-health providers when their issues do not fit a philosophical scope of practice. Well, that's somewhat relieving. It's one thing to seek someone else's point of view, or be able to talk things through with a neutral party. It's another to have legitimate mental health issues that need more medical treatment. So, anecdotes (and jokes) aside, this kind of thing obviously exists (in the same sense that anything can be said to truly exist), and it mildly amuses me. Does it work? All the TNY anecdotes in the world won't convince me one way or the other; I want to see a study. I'm sure a philosophical therapist would have something to say about my need for evidence-based science. But, you know. Whatever. |
| Well, "Spring is Sprung" , as they say, so for no reason other than random chance, here's a Wired article in praise of Wikipedia. Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it's a beacon of so much that's right. Of course, Writing.com is really the Last Best Place on the Internet, but I'll accept Wikipedia as a close second. Remember when Wikipedia was a joke? In its first decade of life, the website appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. I've noted before that WDC came into being prior to Wikipedia. Not by much, mind you. September 2000 and January 2001. I remember when those years seemed so futuristic. We expected interplanetary travel, jetpacks, flying cars, suborbital transport, and asteroid mining. What we got was the internet. The article is long, but here's a few select comments. To confess that you've just repeated a fact you learned on Wikipedia is still to admit something mildly shameful. It's as though all those questions that used to pepper think pieces in the mid-2000s—Will it work? Can it be trusted? Is it better than Encyclopedia Britannica?—are still rhetorical, when they have already been answered, time and again, in the affirmative. I remember back then, someone took a random sampling of articles from both Wiki and EB and fact-checked the hell out of them. They came in about equal. Of course, that was 20 years ago, and a few things have changed. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. It does do a fundraising event every year, kind of like public radio. I'm not the least bit embarrassed to say that I contribute. Money, that is. I don't have the will to contribute content there. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked? I have, at times, noted that it's the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. Like that ancient institution, I fully expect it to be overrun and destroyed by the know-nothings, at some point. Until that happens, I continue to use it. Wikipedia and Britannica do, at least, share a certain lineage. The idea of building a complete compendium of human knowledge has existed for centuries, and there was always talk of finding some better substrate than paper: H. G. Wells thought microfilm might be the key to building what he called the “World Brain”; Thomas Edison bet on wafer-thin slices of nickel. Wells was a science fiction writer, and Edison was a hack. They were both products of their time and prognosticated the best they could with the technology available to them. Wells couldn't foresee some storage medium denser than microfilm, and there was no way Edison or anyone else (not even Tesla) could have predicted semiconductor technology (or, if they did, it was by mere chance). There is, as I said, lots more interesting information in the article. One reason I'm sharing this is that I have a tendency to hyperlink Wikipedia entries here, and I wanted to justify that. Two things can happen with crowdsourcing. Well, more than two, as usual, but at the extremes, you can get the worst of humanity, or the best. As the article notes, Wikipedia isn't perfect. Nothing is. But it represents the best of humanity, while social media usually represents the worst. |
| The equinox will occur later today (or early tomorrow if you live in certain time zones), so it's appropriate that this cosmological link resulted from my random die roll today. Warning: It's from Salon, a source I don't normally use and that might be problematic. Sure, we're all made of stardust. But what does that really mean? We often hear that our bodies contain elements from the stars. But how do we know this for sure? Personally, I think it's the most meaningful, profound insight in all of science. As far as I know, most cultures have an origin story: we were shaped from trees; we appeared out of literal nothing; we were formed from clay; whatever. I use passive voice there because, usually, gods were involved, powerful entities that predated humanity. Some origin stories also attempt to explain where those creator gods came from, but you quickly run into the turtle problem: if Earth is a flat disc resting on the back of a giant turtle, what's holding up the turtle? Another turtle? Well, what's holding up that one? It's turtles all the way down. Now, you could say, "But science runs into the same problem. If all that exists was created in a Big Bang, how and where did the Big Bang... well... bang?" This is a fair question, however it's stated. And science doesn't have a definitive answer. The difference between that and creation myths is that science doesn't pretend to have a definitive answer. In any case, one reason I find it meaningful is that it doesn't just focus on one human tribe, or even on humanity in general, but the entire universe; that is to say, everything. How humans came to be from non-humans is the focus of evolutionary biology, not cosmology. And how different tribes formed is in the purview of, among other disciplines, anthropology. I'll grant that the creation stories our ancestors came up with have a certain poetry to them (and say an awful lot about the cultures involved), but to me, they all read like "Just-So" stories. Or, well, vice-versa. But my point stands. With that, I won't be quoting too much from the article. That was really the thing I most wanted to say. As the poets at NASA put it, “from the carbon in our DNA to the calcium in our bones, nearly all of the elements in our bodies were forged in the fiery hearts and death throes of stars.” Poetry again. It depends what you mean by "nearly all." By mass, it's mostly oxygen (the "ox" in "Hydrox" from yesterday's entry). By number of atoms, we're mostly hydrogen (the "hydr" in "Hydrox" from yesterday's entry). You might also recognize these elements as the atoms of water, and I'm sure you've heard that we're well over 50% water, so that all tracks, though both hydrogen and oxygen are part of other molecules in our bodies, notably carbon-based ones.Point being that hydrogen is mostly primordial, not forged in stars. Though an argument could be made that, at the very least, protons are mostly primordial, no matter how many of them are in a given nucleus. And they’ve been around far longer than we have. Light elements started forming an estimated 14 billion years ago, actually, in the first few minutes after the Big Bang, though others didn’t come around till a few hundred thousand years later when the universe cooled down enough for electrons to stay in orbit around atomic nuclei. That... doesn't quite mesh with my understanding, though I admit my understanding may be off. An element is defined by the number of protons in its nucleus, irrespective of the number of electrons associated with it. A proton is a hydrogen atom (technically, it's a hydrogen ion, but whatever). So once you have free-roaming protons, you have hydrogen. Therefore, it doesn't matter if a proton (or a bound pair or triad of protons, together with the appropriate number of neutrons) has electrons or not; it's still hydrogen, helium, or lithium, respectively. In fairness, the article calls out these elements in the next paragraph; I just have quibbles with how the information is phrased. But you don’t just kill a star and get an entire cupboard of elements suitable for whipping up whatever material good — whether Uranus or, with apologies, your anus — you’re after. Apology absolutely not accepted. Seventh-planet puns are never funny. Well, almost never. Apart from that, well, the article delves into the science of it all, and I won't rehash it further. Suffice it to say, for my purposes, that we know, insofar as we can ever truly know anything, that we are indeed stardust. So is your dog. And poison ivy. And plastic and concrete. The good, the bad, and the ugly. |
| Here's an article about an important component of life. The curious case of the disappearing Hydrox cookies Oreo, the Hydrox knockoff, has been accused of burying its competitor by scoring sweetheart deals with grocers. Does it wield too much power over smaller rivals? Yes, Oreo was a Hydrox knockoff, not the other way around. But that crap happened around 1910. Maybe stop worrying about who was first? Audrey Peard is searching for an elusive, chocolatey piece of Americana: a package of Hydrox cookies. Come to think of it, I haven't seen them in a while, either. Can't go to the grocery store without hearing the siren call of Oreos (which I usually ignore because they produced, then yanked, my favorite ones), but haven't seen Hydrox since before I can remember. She’s visited multiple grocery stores near her home in the Bronx, followed a Facebook group, and even talked to a manager at a production facility in El Segundo, California, about supply shortages. El Segundo may sound like an obscure California town, but in reality, it's right next to LAX. Hardly obscure. Hydrox was the original chocolate sandwich cookie, predating Oreo. With a mildly sweet creme and a crunchier cookie that has a darker chocolate taste than its rival, Hydrox developed a reputation as the dessert of the discerning eater. It was, according to legendary food writer Calvin Trillin, the “far superior” cookie. Sure, but this is the US. We ignore the superior in favor of the cheap and/or flood-marketed. That's kind of our thing; we even apply it to countries. Hydrox, meanwhile, was discontinued in 2003. It came back in 2015 thanks to Leaf Brands, a San Diego-based company that specializes in reheated nostalgia. Well, that might explain why I haven't seen any for a while. Like almost anything else, you can buy Hydrox on Amazon (in bulk). Don't fucking tell me that. Dammit! In March 1912, the first batch of Oreos produced for sale was shipped from Nabisco’s six-story Romanesque-style headquarters in Manhattan to a grocer in Hoboken, New Jersey. It would’ve been a historic moment of American innovation if not for an inconvenient fact: Nabisco totally copied the cookie. Another US thing. See also: Thomas Edison. A smaller rival, Sunshine Biscuits (then known as The Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company), was started by Jacob and Joseph Loose in 1902. Now, this is where my inner linguist starts asking questions. Nabisco was originally National Biscuit Company. Obviously, they both mostly made cookies, not biscuits. Except that in British English (and also in French), what we call cookies, they call biscuits. And what we call biscuits aren't technically biscuits at all ("biscuit" comes from Latin words for something like "twice baked"), though obviously they're delicious in their own way. But these were clearly American companies, as evidenced by their locations in New York and Kansas City. So why "biscuits?" Did we only split off from British usage after the watershed moment when someone invented the first delicious creme-filled sandwich biscuit/cookie? Apparently not. And it looks like we can blame the Dutch for, among other things, "cookie."To complicate matters further, some cookies are called crackers. All of which is to gloss over the fact that it's too bad they didn't stick with Loose-Wiles. Anyway, the article goes off on a tangent about corporations and unions in the US, before going on with: In 1908, Sunshine created one of its most popular products, Hydrox. If you're thinking that's a portmanteau of hydrogen and oxygen, well... According to company lore, the name stemmed from the elements of water — hydrogen and oxygen — chosen to symbolize the cookie’s cleanliness at a time when materials like chalk and plaster of Paris routinely appeared in baked goods. I mean, technically they should have called them Carbohydrox, but whatever. Remember, this was before some other marketing convinced people that chemicals are bad, despite everything being made of chemicals. Sunshine bragged that chemists tested Hydrox for purity and that workers made them at “thousand window” factories with natural light. Yeah, right. Hydrox also stood out against Oreo by promoting its more adult taste and kosher ingredients — in advertisements that bordered on erotic. The "kosher" thing wasn't just to grab the Jewish market, either. It had the cachet of being more "pure" back then, kind of like "all-natural" is today. Whether it was/is or not is up for debate. The article goes on with history for a while, and I think lays out a compelling case for why Oreos ended up reigning supreme. There's also quite a bit about the anti-competitive world of grocery stores, which I find fascinating. Usually, doing articles like these makes me hungry. Not this time. All I can think of is the abomination known as Swedish Fish Oreos, so... no, thanks. |
| When I do these Sunday retrospectives, I can usually find a lot of things in common with the guy who wrote the earlier blog entry. The further back in time I go, the less I find in common, but such is life. This personal update, though, from February of 2008, is tough for me to relate to, and difficult to re-read: "Power" The wind has been crazy here, today. It started sometime during the night, whistling between the houses and threatening to spin my attic vents right off. While I still live in the same house, I've replaced the roof since then, and goodbye old-fashioned spinning attic vents. When I woke up, at around the crack of noon, it was still going on. I'm always a late to bed, late to rise person, but, with age, my ability to sleep until noon has vanished. I figured I'd grab some breakfastlunch and go write this week's Comedy newsletter. Well, I'm still writing Comedy newsletter editorials, at least. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. That, of course, is when the power went out. I've since purchased and had installed a whole-house generator, an automatic start one hooked up to the city gas line. While I justified it to myself and others with my medical devices and a basement sump pump that tends to be most necessary at the times when the weather's lousy enough to cut the power, the real reason is so I never lack internet access. I'm sure the neighbors appreciate the blast of a nat-gas engine cranking up and running like a combination leaf blower / lawnmower every time we lose electricity, but if anyone ever said anything to me, I'd absolutely claim medical necessity. Now, I don't have my truck this weekend. A friend of mine is using it to move. I don't drive pickups anymore, either. And that's one of the reasons why: someone inevitably asks to borrow it or, worse, me. My wife was out in her car, so I was stuck. No longer married, either. I worked some crosswords for a while, but then started feeling antsy about getting the newsletter in. I miss old-style paper crossword puzzles. Probably they still make them, but there's plenty to do on the internet. So I called my wife to drive me to my office. Nor do I have an office. Or a business. Or a job. (My choice.) I booted up my computer, checked some email, started looking for items to include in the newsletter (funny things about romance, mostly - it's the Singles Awareness Day issue of the Comedy newsletter), and the power went out. Well, I continue to rag on Valentine's Day most years in the Comedy NLs. Again, good or bad thing? I don't know. With my memory the way it is, I'm sure it gets repetitive. Before we went home, though, we visited the hospital, where my dad's still being treated for his UTI. Dad would go on to pass on the following month. Not of the UTI. When the doctor called back, she said, "I don't know too much about that patient. UTI. Tested positive for influenza. Going to have to keep him at least a couple more days. Did they make you wear a mask in the room?" As a reminder, this was 2008, long before masks became a political statement and were merely an effective means of helping to prevent disease transmission. "Oh, and there's some question about whether we can send him back to assisited living or if he'll have to be moved to a nursing facility." Wow, a rare misspelling. Eh, it happens. And I'm certainly not going to edit out that wart at this late date. Anyway, as I recall, they eventually moved him back to the assisted living facility (which specialized in Alzheimer's care). He didn't die of the flu, either. Which would have been an irony I would not have appreciated. See, he had been born in New Orleans in 1917. A year later, his mother, quite a young woman at the time, dropped dead. The family never told me more details than that; when I was a kid, I just accepted that dying is what grandparents do. It wasn't until much later in life that it dawned on me: New Orleans. 1918. Death of a young person. Oh... right. Spanish Flu. Not going to leave you in suspense. Official cause of his death was "complications from Alzheimer's." But I got home and did the Comedy newsletter anyway. Sometimes you just have to be funny, even if there's nothing left to laugh at. And that philosophy, folks, seems to be the one thing about me that does not change. There's a kind of power in that. |
| Ironically, the tagline for The Takeout, which provides today's link, is: "Food is delicious." You know what else is inflating? My rage at portmanteaux. Every time I see a cutesy one, it's like I have an anger bar (like a health bar in a video game) and it just keeps getting fuller and fuller. I call it... rageflation. It's okay when I do the portmanteau. If you swear your go-to snacks and candies all seem to taste different—and worse—these days and you can’t quite put your finger on why, you’re not alone. I mean... it is supposedly true that one's sense of taste dulls with age. Business Insider has taken a deep dive into food manufacturers’ increasing adoption of what BI calls skimpflation or flavorflation, aka modifying recipes in order to (you guessed it!) maintain or increase profit margins. Oh, good, now I know what entity to blame for the maddening portmanteau. Call it what it actually is: enshittification. Ingredient costs, obviously, are a huge factor in the pricing of any consumer product. So are employee wages, which is why we replace them with robots. Business Insider cites an instance of Conagra reducing the fat content in its Wish-Bone House Italian Dressing by 10%, replacing it with additional salt and... water. On the bright side, we're running out of fresh water, so the price of that is going to go up, too. In 2013, Breyers, the ice cream of my childhood, had to legally change the labeling of its products from ice cream to “frozen dairy dessert.” Why? Because the company had reduced the amount of dairy fat in its product to the point that it didn’t legally qualify as ice cream anymore. Good to know there are standards. I eat "frozen dairy dessert" so infrequently that I'd probably never notice. Part of the reason is that I have cold-sensitive teeth. But once a "quart" of ice cream became 3.75 cups or whatever, I quit buying it. Apologies for the shitty measurement system to anyone using a logical one; what you need to know is that one quart, which is a bit less than a liter, is equivalent to four standard cups. Speaking of logical measurement systems, I remember when soda was sold in half-gallon bottles (and they were made of glass, prone to shattering, and heavy). At some point, they switched to 2-liter plastic bottles. As I noted, a liter is slightly more than a quart, and 2 liters is thus more than a half-gallon. Again, apologies to metric users: it's called a quart because it's a quarter of a gallon, okay? I'm not really sure why. Perhaps they were thus able to increase the price beyond what it cost them to include those few extra drops in the bottle. If so, that would be one way to sneak a price increase past us: give us a bit more of the product, while charging disproportionately more. I digress. This is about (ugh) skimpflation and not (blech) shrinkflation. The most egregious example of so-called skimpflation we’ve seen recently was October 2022, when Conagra dropped the amount of fat in its dairy-free Smart Balance spread from 64% to 39%, which meant water became the most plentiful ingredient in the product. I guess someone there found a smarter balance on their accounting spreadsheet. My solution? Use butter. As an aside, I'm going to complain about English muffins (or, as I believe the English call them, muffins), which are one of my favorite foods. I even use them for hamburger buns. For a while, though, the only kind sold by my go-to grocery store was Thomas', so I didn't buy them (or I made a special trip to Whole Paycheck to get the good kind). Thomas' is to English muffins as Lender's is to bagels; that is, a piss-poor replica. Unsurprisingly, those are now both products of the same soulless corporation (aptly named Bimbo). Bread is food; everything else is a condiment. Anyway, more recently, the nearby grocery store started selling its store-brand English muffins. One time, they were out, and the shopper (yes, I get groceries delivered, because I am remarkably lazy) subbed Thomas'. Not only are they inferior in taste, but I noticed that they seemed to be quite a lot thinner than they used to be, so thin it took hours of careful work with specialized tools to split them without destroying them. Now, that could have been my own perception, colored by comparison with the much heftier thickness of the store-brand muffins (which, I should note, are also cheaper), but it could also have been (gag) shrinkflation. Either way, now I have to include a note with my delivery order: "DO NOT substitute Thomas'." I'd rather go without than deal with that bullshit. In conclusion, however, the headline is wrong: Not everything tastes worse than it used to. Beer, for instance, has vastly improved in quality with the advent of craft breweries. More expensive? Sure. But worth every penny. Well. This discussion didn't lower my rage bar. I'm going to go eat an English muffin with butter. |
| Yes, I used to get paid to do photography. No, that doesn't make me an expert. Not being an expert has never stopped me from posting stuff here. This one's from, surprisingly enough, Business Insider. I take such good travel photos of myself that people swear I have a secret photographer. Here's how I do it. Like this author, I tend to travel alone and take photographs. There's one important difference, though: never, in the history of the world, has even one photograph been improved by my presence in it, and, more often, it ruins the whole shot. At least once, it literally cracked the camera lens. So, sure, if you just gotta be the focus (pun intended) of every picture, and you're attractive enough to justify it, great. Otherwise, there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking general landscape shots to prove you've been somewhere. Now, honestly, the article's three-bullet summary should be enough, though even then, the first one is superfluous:  As a solo-travel content creator, I've learned lots of tips for taking great photos while alone. I always travel with a smartphone tripod and use my smartwatch as a remote shutter. If I have to ask someone to snap a photo of me, I always take a photo of them first.So that's all, folks. ...okay, no, I have a few more things to say about the article. First, the example photos really are good, so she's not just blowing wind, here. The last one, especially, with the cacti? It's the first time I've looked at a nature shot and said, "Wow, this picture really is improved by having a human in it." Mostly because the human is wearing something deep red, which nicely complements and contrasts the other colors in the picture. Second, she uses her smartphone for the pictures. These days, there is nothing wrong with this. Phone cameras can be remarkably good, now. Fifteen years ago, I might have scoffed at the idea, but not now. There are things you can do with a standalone camera that you just can't with a phone, but they don't involve composition. On to details: A smartphone tripod is the No. 1 thing I pack on any trip or hike. I would think that the phone would be "No. 1," but whatever. Really, that's it. That's the secret. That, and... I use the Bluetooth connection between my smartphone and smartwatch to create a remote shutter and snap a picture. No matter the camera, selfies, being by definition shot at arm's length, distort features. Most people aren't going to be that close to you, excepting crowded subways, concert pits, and intimate situations, so you're going to look different. Also, it's rather difficult to get a whole body pic (assuming you have a body worth photographing, and/or an outfit you want to emphasize) that way, even with a selfie stick. So the remote thing is a good idea, I think. I used to use a manual cable. I never could get Bluetooth to ever work reliably on anything, so best of luck with that if you try it. A few other tips, and then: There are times when it's not possible to set up a tripod, but I still want to get some photos in a beautiful location. In those instances, I may ask someone to snap a photo or two of me — and, of course, I return the favor. One, that's always been kind of a gray area in my knowledge. If someone else uses my phone to take a photo following my basic requested directions, should they get the photo credit? Like I said, I'm not an expert. And two, I hope you have a backup camera/phone, because not everyone you meet is trustworthy. Most are. But sometimes, you get unlucky. Now, in a way, this article is an ad, not only for the author's material, but also for the products she mentions. That doesn't mean there isn't something useful in there. |
| Remember Rebecca Black's squirmy earworm song, "Friday?" No, I will not link it. Well, this morning, I was tempted to do a parody in honor of today called "Pi Day," but my cats talked me out of it, so we all get to keep our sanity. Unlike this guy, apparently. From Big Think: Tesla’s pigeon: How the great inventor fell for a bird "She understood me and I understood her. I loved that pigeon.” The main trouble with Nikola Tesla's legacy is that his name was appropriated by a mediocre band, and then run into the ground by one of the most successful con artists in history. The only way to reclaim what shouldn't be a laughingstock, I think, is to remember the inventor's life, accomplishments, and, yes, even his apparent madness. On a February morning in 1935, a disoriented homing pigeon flew into the open window of an unoccupied room at the Hotel New Yorker. That hotel, though it's been through a few changes over the decades, still exists. I've stayed there. I don't think the windows open anymore; with air conditioning, it's not necessary, and maybe it prevents some jumpers. While management debated what to do, a maid rushed to the 33rd floor and knocked at the door of the hotel’s most infamous denizen: Nikola Tesla. When I was there, I even made a pilgrimage to the 33rd floor. “Dr. Tesla … dropped work on a new electrical project, lest his charge require some little attention,” reported The New York Times. "Charge?" They just couldn't resist, could they? Revolting how some people just plug in the most obvious puns. Nikola Tesla—the Serbian-American scientist famous for designing the alternating current motor and the Tesla coil—had, for years, regularly been spotted skulking through the nighttime streets of midtown Manhattan, feeding the birds at all hours. He invented way more than that. Some say, rather poetically, that he invented the 20th century. While a bit hyperbolic, it's not that far off the mark. In the dark, he’d sound a low whistle, and from the gloom, hordes of pigeons would flock to the old man, perching on his outstretched arms. Look, all I'm saying is, that's a remarkable image and if someone hasn't painted that, someone definitely should. Tesla said that he and his bird could speak to one another mind to mind, and that sometimes, as they silently conversed, beams of light would shoot from her eyes. This is the sort of thing I meant by "madness" above. But is it really? Or was he operating on a different level of reality? With genius like Tesla's, there's always that seed of doubt: maybe he was right, and it's the rest of us who are blind. Tesla’s love of pigeons was an obsession with a capital O. Likely followed by a capital C and a capital D. He seems to have suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder, and his case was severe. Anyone with only a passing knowledge of Tesla's life, and of pop psychology, would immediately jump to the same conclusion. While it can be dangerous and rude to diagnose someone from some distance in space and time, all the signs were absolutely there. I'd even throw in the possibility of autism. I won't quote more from the article, which is fairly long, but, and I can't emphasize this enough, beautifully written. It weaves quite the tapestry of history and science, and, of course, there's a bit of Mark Twain in there. This is where I'd usually relate the subject of the article to Pi Day, but all I could think of was the relationship between pi and the sine waves of electrical current, but maybe that's a bit too obvious while at the same time too esoteric. So I'll just leave it at that and go find me some pie. |
| I pronounce it "collection of endorrheic basins," but apparently, that's wrong. Why Do Nevadans Pronounce Their State’s Name So Strangely? How you say it certainly says something about who you are. Look, it's an occupational hazard when you make a career out of hydrology to see the world in terms of drainage areas. Seriously, though, I, too, pronounced Nevada in the non-Nevadan way until I spent some time as a guest of someone who lives there. Then, I learned the One True Pronunciation, ensuring that never again would I be caught by that particular shibboleth. How exactly is the name of this state pronounced? Nevadans say “neh-VAD-uh.” Non-Nevadans typically say “neh-VAH-duh.” To get it out of the way, there isn’t really a “correct” or “incorrect” way to pronounce Nevada in any objective sense; both “neh-VAD-uh” and “neh-VAH-duh” are perfectly understandable to all English speakers, which is really the only thing that matters. Yeah, not really. Watch what happens if you mispronounce quinoa, for example. It is not unusual for the residents of a state to have their own pronunciation of their state’s name; regional accents and dialects can affect all kinds of words. Which, I suppose, is how we get Mississippi when the people who live in that state call it Misipi. And don't get me started on Ar-Kansas. Even worse, few countries pronounce their names the same way that foreigners do. I'm sure that the way we say "France" here in the US grates on the very last nerve of the French. Proponents of “neh-VAH-duh” will often say, look, nevada is a Spanish word (meaning “snowy” or “snow-capped,” and the state’s name is probably derived from the Sierra Nevada mountain range, part of which lies within its borders. And the area, like most of California, was once claimed by Spain and Mexico, which ex-Spains all the Spanish names in the area. Want to piss off some Southern Californians? Pronounce La Jolla like you're English, not Spanish. The problem is that Spanish, being a much more sensible language than English, has five vowels, and five vowels only. (Well, if we’re not counting dipthongs. Or tripthongs. All languages are complicated but stay with me here.) I think there are more problems here than that. There are a couple of possible explanations for this phenomenon. One is that Nevada, being a fairly new and historically largely unpopulated state, traditionally did not have much to differentiate it. If you’re proud to be a Nevadan, what could you do to present that to the rest of the world? Until the creation of the Vegas Golden Knights NHL hockey team in 2017, the state had no major professional sports team, which is often a way to signify geographical pride. You know who else doesn't have a major professional sports team? Virginia. And I don't hear too much crap about pronouncing my state wrong, except for the hillbillies out west who insist on Virginny. In any case, the article (from AO) is like candy to me because it involves history, linguistics, sociology, and philosophy. So there's no hard science; nothing's perfect. In other words, everyone can learn something there, if only the "correct" pronunciation of Nevada. |
| This one's from Quanta, and was probably written by a human. New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text Far from being “stochastic parrots,” the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to understand the words they’re processing. Difficulty: how do you know anyone understands the words they're processing? I'm sure you think you do, and therefore by extension, other humans do, but can you really know for sure that anyone else is anything more than a biological robot? Artificial intelligence seems more powerful than ever, with chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT capable of producing uncannily humanlike text. Article is less than two months old and already outdated; Google changed the name of its AI bot from Bard sometime since then. I don't remember what they changed it to. I liked "Bard," so I simply quit messing around with it. Was I programmed to do that? Absolutely. Do such models actually understand what they are saying? “Clearly, some people believe they do,” said the AI pioneer Geoff Hinton in a recent conversation with Andrew Ng, “and some people believe they are just stochastic parrots.” Stochastic Parrots is absolutely going to be the name of my virtual EDM Jimmy Buffet band. This evocative phrase comes from a 2021 paper co-authored by Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington. I shouldn't do it. I really shouldn't. But I'm going to anyway, because my algorithm requires it: It suggests that large language models (LLMs) — which form the basis of modern chatbots — generate text only by combining information they have already seen “without any reference to meaning,” the authors wrote, which makes an LLM “a stochastic parrot.” Seriously, though, I see one important difference: an actual parrot is, like humans, the product of billions of years of evolution. She may not understand the words when you teach her to repeat something like "I'm the product of billions of years of evolution" (nor do many humans), but she, like other living creatures, seems to have her own internal life, a sensory array, and desires (apart from crackers). She seeks out food and water, and possibly companionship. She observes. She may not know that her ancestors were dinosaurs, but she inherited some of their characteristics. In other words, calling LLMs "stochastic parrots" may be an insult to parrots. Also, the actual definition of stochastic, via Oxford, is "randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely." Which would seem to apply to most living things. These models power many of today’s biggest and best chatbots, so Hinton argued that it’s time to determine the extent of what they understand. The question, to him, is more than academic. “So long as we have those differences” of opinion, he said to Ng, “we are not going to be able to come to a consensus about dangers.” I've been wondering why so many people talk about the "dangers" of AI, but never about the very real and somewhat predictable danger of bringing another human life into the world. Said human could very well become a mass murderer, a rapist, a despotic tyrant, a telemarketer, or any number of despicable things. The only time I hear about the dangers posed by new humans is when someone's ranting about immigration, and that doesn't count. New research may have intimations of an answer. A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. This theoretical approach, which provides a mathematically provable argument for how and why an LLM can develop so many abilities, has convinced experts like Hinton, and others. And when Arora and his team tested some of its predictions, they found that these models behaved almost exactly as expected. Maybe it's just the way this was worded, but that seems paradoxical. If an LLM were truly autonomous, independent, understanding.. sentient... then you'd expect the unexpected, no? “[They] cannot be just mimicking what has been seen in the training data,” said Sébastien Bubeck, a mathematician and computer scientist at Microsoft Research who was not part of the work. “That’s the basic insight.” Except... we humans also mimic what was in our training data. Sure, some of us can take it apart and put it back together in new ways, build on what's been done before, but for the most part, even our innovations are really just variations on a theme. These abilities are not an obvious consequence of the way the systems are built and trained. An LLM is a massive artificial neural network, which connects individual artificial neurons. "Not obvious," you know, unless you've read, like, even a small sampling of science fiction. Big enough LLMs demonstrate abilities — from solving elementary math problems to answering questions about the goings-on in others’ minds — that smaller models don’t have, even though they are all trained in similar ways. And that sounds quite a bit similar to what shrinks call the Theory of Mind. “Where did that [ability] emerge from?” Arora wondered. “And can that emerge from just next-word prediction?” This is what is meant when people claim that consciousness is an emergent property. Anyway. The article goes on to describe some of the tests they put the models through, and I can't really comment on the methodology because my training data set doesn't really cover those protocols. Is it conscious? I don't know. I don't know for sure that you are, and vice-versa. |
| Nooooooo! Someone needs to Do Something, Right Now! Beware: A cheese crisis looms Gird your curds! Say a prayer for Camembert! A collapse in microbe diversity puts these French cheeses at risk. Just to get ahead of this: no, if this Vox article is correct, it's not because of climate change; yes, it's peoples' fault. This looming cheese crisis, this Camembert calamity, stems from a much bigger problem: a collapse in microbial diversity. On the plus side, Camembert Calamity would make a great name for a heavy metal Depeche Mode / Tears For Fears cover band. Each hunk of Camembert or smear of brie is an ecosystem, an assortment of fungi and bacteria that turn milk fats and proteins into hundreds of different compounds. Those compounds produce the flavors, smells, and textures we love. Hopefully, you already knew that the deliciousness of cheese is due to the action and presence of beneficial microorganisms. While we usually associate these things with spoiled food, they're all around us, and inside us, all the time; and as with multicellular plants or animals, the helpful ones outnumber the harmful ones. Some are also responsible for beer and wine. In recent decades, however, the genetic diversity of some of those microbes has caved. The article will, of course, expand on this statement, but of course they gotta hook readers with the bad news. To make cheese, producers typically take fresh milk and mix in bacteria and often fungi, including both yeasts and molds (fungi that tend to be fuzzy). Different microbe melanges produce different varieties of cheese. It's obviously way more complicated than this, but the full process isn't really relevant to the story. That's also a very simplistic description of mold... but an accurate enough one. Historically, Camemberts and bries likely relied on mold strains from a species of fungi called Penicillium biforme, according to Jeanne Ropars, an evolutionary biologist who works at a lab affiliated with CNRS. Each strain was slightly different genetically, and so the resulting cheeses had slightly different colors, flavors, and smells. I'm sure we all recognize at least part of that binomial. Roughly a century ago, however, cheesemakers identified a particular strain of P. biforme that was fast-growing and albino; it produced a fluffy white mold that was, apparently, quite appetizing. This strain, known as Penicillium camemberti, was henceforth considered the gold standard for brie and Camembert (which differ from one another mainly in size). It quickly dominated the cheese industry, and the diverse group of other mold strains used to make Camembert and brie, and the colors they produced, vanished from disuse. And, basically, that strain needs to be cloned, not bred, and cloning eventually results in DNA transcription errors. The whole thing reminds me of the banana problem, which I've written about before, here: "Going Bananas" Ironically, the problem there is one of the bad fungi (the kind that wear leather jackets, smoke cigarettes, and hang out in front of liquor stores). So it's analogous but not exactly the same thing. To its credit, the article mentions that.This rapid caving of genetic diversity threatens other food industries, too, as the author Dan Saladino writes in his book Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them. Hey, this was actually a book advertisement all along! That cheeses me off. At least be up front about it. Ultimately, this doesn’t mean that we must bid farewell to brie, or that Camembert on toast is, let’s say, toast. There is a way to save these cheeses, though it requires some changes in our own taste and tolerance. As for me, I look forward to greater cheese diversity. You want uniformity? Use that "pasteurized process cheese food" that America substitutes for culture (pun absolutely intended). As with beer and wine, I'd be happy to taste different cheeses produced with different friendly microorganisms. As the Mandalorian might say, "This is the Whey." |
| This week's retrospective takes me back to 2009, when I was still scrambling around for a blog theme that worked for me. While I wouldn't settle on "mostly links and commentary" for a while (and then, only after a long hiatus), I did sometimes feature links to things I found amusing or interesting (or both). The particular entry I landed on today is one of those, and it's from August 7 of that year: "Links are Back!" The first link, from Cracked (yes, it's been one of my go-to sites for well over 15 years), was apparently about Clinton rescuing American hostages in North Korea? While Cracked is obviously still around (as of two days ago, anyway), that link is broken. And somehow, we've collectively memory-holed that event. For context, at the time, Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, but Bill didn't have a government position, having stepped down as President in January of 2001. While I often rely on a comedy site for my information, I know it's even less reliable than Wikipedia, which has this entry on the event. If you're curious.Speaking of Wikipedia, the second link in that 2009 entry of mine was to an entry about the really remarkably small "town" of Tenney, Minnesota. While the amusing line I quoted back then has since been edited out, the entry remains, and is a gloriously long and thorough one for a roughly 140-year-old rural community with a population of 5. These days, if I put more than one link in a blog entry, I find a way to relate one to the other. Back then, it was just whatever I happened to find at the time. So now, 15 years later, I'm not even going to try. I mean, the obvious common ground is "the US," but that's entirely too broad a category. If you can think of one, great. Me, I'm going back to video gaming. |
| Like to daydream? Well, consider this article from The Conversation. Author is British, so there are some weird-to-Americans spellings: If daydreaming has a dark side, wouldn't that be a daymare? Despite what we’re often taught to believe, daydreaming can be immensely useful. Especially when you're approaching a deadline. Daydreaming, when defined as thoughts that aren’t tied to what you’re currently doing, occupies a good chunk of our waking lives – an average of around 30% of the time if you randomly probe people. Hopefully not while you're at work. Because that would be time theft. You'd be stealing from the Company. You're not stealing from the Company, are you, Janice? But it’s estimated 2.5% of adults experience a type of excessive daydreaming which is defined as the disorder “maladaptive daydreaming”. So-called maladaptive daydreamers compulsively engage in vivid fantasies and daydreaming plots so excessively that it interferes with their ability to function in daily life. I suppose there is no activity (or, in this case, usually inactivity) that someone, somewhere, can't find a downside to. Unlike typical daydreams which can be fleeting (lasting seconds), maladaptive daydreamers can spend several hours at a time in a single daydream. Okay, fine. That does seem a bit excessive. These invented worlds are often rich and fantastical, with complex plots and intricate storylines that evolve over many years. You've just defined fiction writers. Except for the, you know... writing it all down part. With maladaptive daydreaming, there’s a strong urge to daydream and annoyance when this is not possible or interrupted. Most also find it difficult to stop or even reduce the amount of time they spend daydreaming. I'm no expert, but isn't that pretty much the classic definition of addiction? It’s important to note that immersive daydreaming and vivid fantasy activity isn’t by default maladaptive. I'm just leaving that quote here in case you can't be arsed to read the article (perhaps because you're too busy daydreaming), and are wondering if you should be concerned about yourself. Chances are, no. I think the article is about making the rest of us aware that people like this exist, not, for once, trying to tell us that we're doing something wrong. There seems to be a strong relationship between OCD and maladaptive daydreaming. One study found that over half of participants with maladaptive daydreaming also exhibited signs of OCD. This may suggest possible shared mechanisms between the two disorders, including intrusive thoughts, dissociation and a lack of cognitive control. Again, far from expert here, but I'm pretty sure that by OCD, they mean diagnosed by a professional, not just someone being coy about their cleaning and/or organizational habits. The fact that maladaptive daydreaming is not recognised as a psychiatric condition also means we know little about treatment options. There is one documented case study published in a peer-reviewed journal showing a 25-year-old man was able to cut the time he spent daydreaming in half – from nearly three hours daily to under an hour and a half. This was done over the course of six months using a combination of psychological treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness. At last, a practical use for cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness. Maybe. As always, one data point does not a scientific study make. Somehow, "directing the patient to become a writer" doesn't seem to appear in the list of treatments. Finally, I can't do a title like that without posting the song I cribbed it from, which was written by John Stewart, but not that John Stewart: |
| Booze laws can be convoluted. You think they exist to promote public health and safety, and maybe some of them do, but mostly, the laws are about who does and does not get to profit from alcohol. (In order, that would be "governments and rich people," and "you.") Leave it to Cracked to find some of the weirdest ones. 5. In New York, Bartenders Are Forbidden from Not Giving Alcohol to Pregnant Customers Of all these examples, this one's actually the least weird. In general, bartenders are allowed to refuse service to customers. In the case of an intoxicated customer, they’re legally bound to refuse service. But they are legally banned from refusing service to a customer because they're pregnant, as this may be “pretext for discrimination or as a way to reinforce traditional gender norms or stereotypes.” For starters, the header is misleading. Bartenders aren't known for "giving" alcohol. They're known for selling it, and for patiently listening to sob stories in hopes of getting a tip. Further, while late-stage pregnancy is usually quite visible, from my understanding, some of the worst and most (eventually) visible effects of drinking while pregnant occur during the first trimester, when it's not usually obvious. And finally, we either need to assert that all adult humans are responsible for their own decisions, or go the way of places like Texas who exert government control over the pregnant ones. 4. The Very First Campaign Finance Law Was About Banning Alcohol Sales *in the US In 1811, Maryland banned liquor sales on Election Day, but the goal wasn’t just keeping the electorate sober in general. The goal was to keep politicians from buying voters alcohol — as bribes. As a result, this is remembered as the first campaign finance law. Well, this one's not that strange, either. If I'm having a hard time choosing between two evil politicians, I would definitely vote for the one who bought me a beer. 3. Happy Hour Bars That Legally Must Give Discounts on Soda During happy hour, bars slash prices on drinks, maybe selling you two for the price of one. The laws I'm most familiar with are, obviously, those of my own state. I still don't fully understand them, but to the best of my knowledge, in Virginia, you can't do two-for-one promotions or ever give out free booze. We do get to enjoy discounts, sometimes, and a half-price beer is functionally the same thing without forcing you to buy two drinks. This drives up business during times that are otherwise dead, and if they’re able to make a profit after halving their prices, that lets you know just how high the markup is on drinks the rest of the time. Markups can be high, but this is not necessarily the case. Sometimes it's about ensuring the bartender has the opportunity to get tips so they're less likely to run off and work somewhere else. France has it’s own anti-happiness law. They do have happy hour there (in France, they call it apéro hour), but since 2019, if a bar offers discounts on alcoholic drinks, they also have to offer discounts on soft drinks. Sadly, the law we need is to fine people for misusing apostrophes. 2. A Special Car for Drunk Drivers Also in France, if you get caught driving under the influence, they might suspend your license, leaving you unable to operate your car. I mean, technically, no, not unless they also impound the vehicle and put you on the "no-buy-vehicles" list. But legally, sure. If a vehicle moves at a top speed of 28 miles per hour or less, and has an engine with an output of no more than 5.4 horsepower, it’s a quadricycle, and in France, it’s known as a voiture sans permis, a VSP. That means you can drive it even if you have no valid license, so long as you’re 14 or older and have a few hours of recorded driving experience. On the one hand, a top speed of 28 mph (or, as I'm sure they express it over there, 45 kmh) is going to reduce, though not eliminate, the hazards of drunk driving. On the other, you're pretty much limited to city driving, and cities there tend to have bars within walking distance, so what's the point? 1. The U.S. Has No Minimum Drinking Age, Actually Yeah, technically correct. But effectively not. Today, all 50 states set a 21 minimum. Even so, nearly every state offers some exceptions. In states like Wisconsin, for example, people of any age can drink so long as they’re with a parent or spouse who’s over 21. Wisconsin's drinking culture is a truly awesome thing to behold. In Puerto Rico (which is part of America, despite what that one song from West Side Story left entire confused generations thinking), the minimum drinking age is simply 18. Puerto Rico has highways, but they gladly reject 10 percent of the funds they could get. Some things are more important. Me? I say lower the drinking age and increase the driving age. That way you get most of the stupid out of your system before you even get behind the wheel of a car. Better yet, hurry up with the self-driving car thing. As you know, I'm alcohol-positive. But drunk driving? Let's just say I agree more with the French on that one. |
| It's about that time of year for most of us, so here's a timely article from Atlas Obscura (copied from The Conversation) to consider: Why Daylight Saving Time Messes With Your Brain To “spring forward” is more damaging to our health than to “fall back,” according to some surprising science. While health shouldn't be the only measure of a thing's worth, if something's unhealthy, then it at least ought to be fun or provide some other benefit. And I'm not convinced switching clocks around twice a year is of any real benefit. This bit is US-centric, but other countries use some variant of DST, so it may be relevant. As people in the U.S. prepare to set their clocks ahead one hour on Sunday, March 10, 2024, I find myself bracing for the annual ritual of media stories about the disruptions to daily routines caused by switching from standard time to daylight saving time. And now you've added to them. Oops... so have I. Damn. But the effects go beyond simple inconvenience. "Inconvenience" is a valid reason to do, or stop doing, something; let's not dismiss it. Researchers are discovering that “springing ahead” each March is connected with serious negative health effects, including an uptick in heart attacks and teen sleep deprivation. On the other hand, an unreplicated study or two is not a valid reason to do, or stop doing, something. Mind you, I'm not saying the findings are bullshit, or that I don't like them (I happen to be on the "no time switching" team, personally), just the same sort of thing I've been harping on all week. I’ve studied the pros and cons of these twice-annual rituals for more than five years as a professor of neurology and pediatrics and the director of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s sleep division. Admittedly, those are some impressive credentials. I do have one quibble, and it's not about neurology, medicine, or somnology: However, the two time shifts—jolting as they may be—are not equal. Standard time most closely approximates natural light, with the sun directly overhead at or near noon. This is misleading. Or, well, misleading in most locations. And I'll mansplain why. First: On a world with 24 equal time zones whose boundaries exactly follow lines of longitude, set up so that the middle longitude of each time zone most closely matches the average zenith of the sun at noon, you still have edge cases: on each edge of the time zone, noon will be off from average solar zenith by 30 minutes. Imagine two people standing on either side of this boundary line of longitude, close enough to touch each other. For one of them, it'll be 11:30 am; for the other, 12:30 pm. And yet both would see the sun at its daily high point in the sky. Well, there would still be a day-to-day wobble, because of the complicated interplay of the Earth's elliptical orbit and its rotation, but hopefully, you get the idea. This offset changes as you cross the time zone going east or west, but only at the middle longitude is it near zero. Second: For sociopolitical reasons, few areas follow the designated time zones. Some countries (even large ones like China) do away with time zones entirely. This leads to even greater divergence between noon and solar noon at many locations. Hell, some places split the difference (notably areas within Australia and India), and the time there is always something:30 when most of the world sees something:00. Third: as I noted in "First," solar noon occurs at a different time (based on a standard 24-hour clock) every day, no matter where you're standing. The sun's location in the sky, throughout the year, at any given clock time, moves around not only north to south with the seasons, but also a bit east to west. This results in a very pleasing pattern known as an analemma (that link, which will take you to Wikipedia, explains the whole thing better than I can in a relatively short blog entry).I'm focusing on solar noon here because that is traditionally what was meant by "noon:" when a sundial's shadow is shortest during the day. I recently found an interesting map  that displays the difference between solar time and clock time, by country and time zone. If you go to that link, you'll see a preponderance of red. This does not mean that the country or area in question voted Republican in the last elections; it means that politicians of all colors seem to favor solar time being behind standard time, rather than vice-versa. Note especially Argentina, which should be mostly in the same time zone as the far east of Canada but is not; and China, which, as I said above, only acknowledges one official time.Other things I found interesting from that map: 1) if you look closely, you can see the 1/2 hour time zone areas; 2) England and France are in different time zones despite being mostly the same longitude (which is terribly on point for both countries); and 3) even London, which through accidents of history defines the basis of all time zones, isn't set for solar noon = clock noon. Whew. That was a lengthy diversion, especially considering the huge number of people who insist that DST gives them an extra hour of daylight. It does not. It only moves the clock around. Hell, even the end of the article is worded like that. So I won't quote further from the article; suffice it to say that the author lays out her case along with some fascinating history and statistics. She seems to be on the side of "just adopt standard time year-round," though to that I'd add "bring the time zone boundaries closer to where they ought to be based on UTC." In closing, then, I'll just add this: it doesn't much matter to me one way or the other, as I'm retired and a night owl. So I don't care on a personal level; I just like things to be logical and consistent, which I know is asking too much of humanity. The most common objection I've heard to year-round DST is: "I don't want to wake up and go to work in the dark." That argument is a condemnation of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic, not a reason to keep switching clocks around. |
| Speaking of backing things up with science... from Big Think: Everyone is wrong about “Love Languages.” Here’s why. Big Think spoke to the author of "The 5 Love Languages" about the popular relationship theory — and its lack of scientific support. I'm not immune to knee-jerk reactions. Sure, I try to reason through them later, but, as I suspect most people are, sometimes I just hear about something and react with instant rage or disgust. I'd speculate that this was an evolutionary adaptation on the part of our ancestors, who had to make survival decisions in a dangerous environment, but one of the things that sets me right off is speculation based on evolutionary psychology. So I won't. One of the things I immediately scoffed at when first hearing about was "love languages." Then, after taking some time to find out what was meant by that, my reaction softened somewhat. After all, the concept boils down to "we all appreciate different things," which I wouldn't deny. If you're reading this, and somehow still wondering what the hell I'm talking about, well, the précis is right there in the bullet summary at the top of the linked article: The idea, created by evangelical pastor Gary Chapman, is that to make your partner feel truly loved, you must show them affection in their preferred "language." Birthed in a perennially best-selling book over three decades ago, the idea remains ever-present in popular media, dating apps, and social media. The book’s resonant success might make you assume that the theory was born in the lab of a superstar relationship psychologist, but the notion has humbler origins. Actually, I immediately suspect any book, especially purported nonfiction, that achieves huge success, because I distrust the zeitgeist. And it's exceedingly rare that a book written by an actual scientist climbs to that level. The only one I can think of offhand is Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and that one had pretty pictures. (It was also worthy of the success.) The architect of the theory is evangelical pastor Gary Chapman. Okay, here's where I feel compelled to make an embarrassing confession: In my view, evangelicals are all guilty until proven innocent. Some of them are responsible for those grifting megachurches. Others are doing their best to turn our secular country into a theocracy. Many outright reject science in favor of superstition. The ones you hear about are always trying to make life difficult for gays, trans people, and anyone else who doesn't conform to their narrow view of what people should be like. When your ranks include the likes of the thankfully-late Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (and those are just the famous ones from my home state), you have a hell of a lot to answer for. This may seem to contradict my radical acceptance of diversity. And maybe it does. But to me, there's a big difference between being born into a demographic, and choosing to align oneself with a certain philosophy. Even that difference, though, contradicts my assertion that we never really "choose" anything. So I don't know. I guess that, in this way, I've been prejudiced (even though I already had a counterexample in my cousin's evangelical wife, who's one of the kindest people I know). I should work on that. Everyone's a hypocrite in some way. I figure at least I recognize some of my hypocrisies. Point being, when I heard the author was an evangelical pastor, I instantly dismissed anything it might have to say. And I was (probably) accidentally right to do so... but not because of the author's affiliation. The popularity of his book, quiz (taken more than 133 million times), and theory confirm to Chapman that love languages work. No. No, it doesn't confirm any such thing, any more than the popularity of books on astrology confirm that astrology works. Still, popularity and anecdotes do not prove that love languages actually work, or even exist at all. For that, science must weigh in. You knew that was coming, because I'm writing these comments. In a paper recently published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, a trio of social psychologists specializing in relationships reviewed the science conducted on love languages and found it wanting. And yet, one paper does not a definitive takedown make. First off, research contradicts the notion that people have a primary love language, they write. Chapman’s quiz is fundamentally flawed, they argue, because it forces takers into binary this-or-that choices. I'm on board with that finding, myself. As I keep saying, life is rarely binary. Not everything has to be "cool" or "sucks." Maybe it's just me being Gen-X (another labeling system I question), but to me, there's always "meh, whatever," too. In various shades. Second, the five love languages overly simplify forms of love in relationships and are based on a homogenous sample. For example, the love languages “do not include mention of support for a partner’s autonomy or personal goals outside of the relationship, factors that have been associated with relationship satisfaction,” the authors noted. They added that Chapman formulated his ideas after counseling couples “who are all married, religious, and mixed gender and likely share traditional values.” That is, to me, a serious problem. Like with the study I mentioned yesterday, which was all Brits. Or a lot of postdoc papers, which draw from a sample core of "American college students who want a few extra bucks." Third, and most glaringly, the limited research that has been conducted does not support the idea that speaking someone’s preferred love language yields greater relationship satisfaction or success. As the article admits, though, the research is scant. So though I want to agree with the conclusion, I can't quite rise to the level of "science says it's bullshit." Chapman had a chance to respond to these issues, and this is the part where my mind gets blown because it doesn't fit in with the prejudice I stated above: Chapman, who throughout the interview expressed intellectual humility that any scientist would admire, wanted to make clear that he appreciated researchers’ work to study love languages. “I’m not against research,” he said. “Scientific research is wonderful.” So there you have it. I'm not changing my opinion that "love languages" are airy nonsense, but maybe I came away from this with a little less animosity to evangelicals in general. And the world just got a little, tiny bit more tolerant. |
| Here's an example of finding an article that aligns with my existing worldview but having my doubts. That doesn't mean it's right, of course. But it also doesn't mean it's wrong. Optimistic thinking, often celebrated in self-help literature as a pathway to happiness, health, and longer life, can also lead to poor decision-making. This has been clear to me for a while. Research from the University of Bath shows that excessive optimism is actually associated with lower cognitive skills such as verbal fluency, fluid reasoning, numerical reasoning, and memory. Whereas those high in cognitive ability tend to be both more realistic and pessimistic in their expectations about the future. Basically: ignorance is bliss. Well, no, not really, because ignorance is simply not knowing something, which has nothing to do with how smart you are. Everybody's ignorant about lots of things. But stubborn, willful ignorance is another matter entirely... also not necessarily correlated with intelligence. In any case, I'll note that the passage I just quoted seems to be very careful not to imply causation. Does excessive optimism make a person less clever, or does being an idiot lead to optimism? Or, alternatively, is there something else causing both effects? Much as I want to believe the article, that seems like an important thing to find out. “This points to the idea that whilst humans may be primed by evolution to expect the best, those high in cognitive ability are more able to override this automatic response when it comes to important decisions. Plans based on overly optimistic beliefs make for poor decisions and are bound to deliver worse outcomes than would realistic beliefs,” Dr Dawson added. Okay, I'm going to need a reference on that "primed by evolution" thing, hopefully not from bogus evolutionary psychology. Also, why isn't this "override" attributed to evolution? “Unrealistically optimistic financial expectations can lead to excessive levels of consumption and debt, as well as insufficient savings. It can also lead to excessive business entries and subsequent failures. The chances of starting a successful business are tiny, but optimists always think they have a shot and will start businesses destined to fail,” Dr Dawson said. But, clearly, they're not all destined to fail (unless you take the really long view that every business will fail eventually, even if it takes a few centuries). If we didn't have people taking a shot at these things, we wouldn't have businesses at all. It's like the baby turtles' march to the sea. The study took data from a UK survey of over 36,000 households and looked at people’s expectations of their financial well-being and compared them with their actual financial outcomes. The research found that those highest on cognitive ability experienced a 22% increase in the probability of “realism” and a 35 percent decrease in the probability of “extreme optimism”. For once, I can't complain about the sample size. But there are other obvious yellow flags here. UK only, for starters. How cognitive ability was determined from a mere survey: did they basically ask trivia questions? Even if not, there are major issues concerning the standard IQ tests. And how do we know that they're studying truly independent variables? “Unrealistic optimism is one of the most pervasive human traits and research has shown people consistently underestimate the negative and accentuate the positive. The concept of ‘positive thinking’ is almost unquestioningly embedded in our culture – and it would be healthy to revisit that belief,” Dr Dawson added Sounds to me like someone hated the idea of positive thinking and set out to debunk it. I can understand that impulse, as I share it. But, first, if science goes into an investigation wanting a certain outcome, that outcome is more likely (even excluding fraud or other shenanigans). And second, I have serious questions about the methodology. So I put this in the category of "stuff I want to believe, and which tracks with stuff I've been saying, but can't trust the science." |
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