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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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It's Sunday again, so we go back in time to a random entry from the past. This one's from March of 2021: "Untruth and Consequences"  This was very close to the 1-year anniversary of the pandemic being officially declared, with all the disruption that it led to. The entry itself, though, is a riff off a Cracked article about disinformation. The link is, unsurprisingly, still there; disinformation is still rampant. Much of the entry, and the article, is as relevant as ever, if you discount the references to pandemic restrictions. So I just want to point out a few things that slipped through the cracks (pun intended) last time. Online Groups Are Getting Really Weird What I might not have been clear about is that in the 30 or so years that I've been online in one form or another, there has never been a time when online groups weren't sometimes weird. Though things may have been easier to deal with in the days before everything was commodified, advertised, bowdlerized, centralized, and sanitized. Yoga And New Agey Types Are Getting Into It Humans usually find it easier to forgive or excuse the misdeeds of their in-group while magnifying those of their out-group. It's the difference between, say, "Boys will be boys" and "Lock up that miscreant for life." Or, "A [person in minority] stole my car stereo once, so I hate all [people in minority]" and "Almost all mass murderers and serial killers are white guys, but that doesn't mean white guys are mass murderers and serial killers." It's important to guard against this tendency, I think. It's not a matter of "both sides are bad," but of recognizing that every demographic group has both good people and assholes in it. Except Nazis, of course. They are, by definition, bad. The point is, if you're on the political left, for example, you might be tempted to think that accepting misinformation is tied to consuming right-wing media all the time, when the left (and make no mistake, New Age is definitely "left") is just as susceptible to faulty group-think. The reverse is also the case. I noted this in the original entry, but the above expands on the idea: You won't hear me say "both sides are bad," but what I am saying is that bullshit doesn't take political sides; it's an equal-opportunity brain rotter. I'll end this Revisited entry with what I still feel is the most important point, from my own perspective: Once you start believing one unsupportable thing, you can be open to believing more. That's one reason I hammer on about science. But hey, at least, this week, I didn't land on one of my infamous early short-ass blog entries. (In my defense, I think those happened before the Newsfeed existed.) |
| One thing that often bugs me about science fiction movies and shows is when they get the "science" part wrong. How long could you survive in space without a spacesuit? The vacuum of space is unforgiving, and time is not on your side. It usually doesn't stop me from enjoying the story, unless it's egregious, but how long would it take to make sure you get something right? Today's topic, though, is one that we don't have much empirical data on. It's not like we can shove people out of airlocks and time how long it takes until they die. Well... not ethically. And yet, some recent shows don't seem too far off the science on this one. Many of us have dreamed of going into space. Preferably inside of something. But traveling in space brings a whole set of challenges and hostile environments, so it's vital to recreate the conditions on Earth that have allowed life to evolve and flourish. As I've mentioned before, we can only live in a zone of atmosphere proportionally thinner than an eggshell. Everywhere else in the universe, as far as we know, will kill us in varying amounts of time, from instantly to slightly longer than instantly. Hell, even our evolved environment kills us, but usually over a matter of years, not seconds. Spacesuits allow astronauts to venture outside their spacecraft for short periods, by providing the air, water, pressure and physical protection needed for a human to survive. Sucks if you're one of the people who also need companionship to survive. I guess there's the two-way radio for that. Sci-fi movies and shows, including "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "The Expanse," have portrayed astronauts suffering — and surviving — short exposures to outer space without a spacesuit, while others have depicted a range of grisly deaths. I thought The Expanse was great, but it didn't always get the science right, either. "Within a very short time, a matter of 10 to 15 seconds, you will become unconscious because of a lack of oxygen," according to Stefaan de Mey, a senior strategy officer at the European Space Agency (ESA) charged with coordinating the strategy area for human and robotic exploration. I still don't think that's the worst part. Bodily fluids, such as saliva and tears, would begin to boil. A human body would also expand, but the skin would be elastic enough to cope with the pressure change, de Mey said, adding that horrific movie portrayals of exploding humans are not accurate. And it's even worse than that. Fluids don't start to boil because they get hot. They boil because the pressure drops. You know how water boils at a lower temperature in Denver than it does in New York? Well, space is even more empty than Denver air, and the boiling point drops even further. Depending on where you are, you can boil and freeze at the same time. Because you'd be unable to alter your dire situation, brain death would follow within minutes, unless you were rescued and brought back to the safety of the pressurized, oxygen-rich environment of a spacecraft and resuscitated. "Within minutes?" Weasel! Of course, as I said, we have no empirical evidence of this, so uncertainty is understandable. So I'm going to go with the time it took to rescue Star-Lord in Guardians 3. Spacesuits also protect from various types of radiation. In LEO, there is protection from some forms of radiation. Prolonged or long-term exposure to electromagnetic radiation from the sun would cause health issues, including radiation sickness and an increased risk of cancer. UV light would also burn the skin. Sure. I just got yeeted out an airlock, and my first (and last) thought is, "Boy, it sucks to be exposed to this much radiation." Being in space without an EVA suit becomes very deadly — very, very quickly. While someone could survive this grim scenario, they would want to have very little air in their lungs and get back to the safety of a pressurized spacecraft within seconds — or hope to be rescued and resuscitated within minutes. I think the important takeaway here is that death by airlock isn't instantaneous, not like if you're standing next to the fusion reactor when it explodes. No, you'd have time to think about it, much like those seconds between when you jump off the building and hit the pavement. In the latter case, though, the last thing that goes through your mind would be concrete. |
| What's worse than a scary story? A scary story that happens to be factual. Urban legends—those unsubstantiated stories of terror that allow us to use our imaginations to fill in increasingly horrifying details with each retelling—have been with us forever. Longer than the adjective "urban," even. Or the cities it references. While the internet has made the dissemination of them easier, humans have been goading one another with spooky anecdotes for centuries. Yeah, and some of them become actual myths, legends, or religions. Urban legends often come with a dose of skepticism. (No, a killer with a hook hand has never terrorized necking couples.) But sometimes, these stories turn out to be true. That's what the hook-hand no-neck conspiracy wants you to think. As the title suggests, these are supposedly verifiable. No Jersey Devil, no Mothman, no Nessie. I, however, couldn't be arsed to research them, so take it however you want. 1. Rats in the toilet bowl Never saw a rat there, but I did get attacked by a frightened, wet mouse once. Not where I live now. And I have seen articles about toilet snakes. And I don't mean the plumbing kind, but the no-legs forked-tongue scaly kind. 2. Cropsey For years, kids living in and around Staten Island raised goosebumps by relating the tale of “Cropsey,” a boogeyman who lived in the woods and made a nocturnal habit of disemboweling children. It's important to have a bogeyman to scare your kids into behaving. Well, as much as a kid can behave, anyway. It's generally best if said bogeyman is fictional, though. Parents no doubt eased their kids’ fears by telling them no such monster existed. Ha! You overestimate Staten Island parents in the 1970s. "Oh, he totally exists, but he only eats kids that don't do their homework." Incidentally: "bogeyman" is probably a more proper spelling, but boogeyman, boogieman, bogyman... whatever. The article spells it with two Os. I stick to the official spelling, to help distinguish the kid-scaring villains from the disco-dancing kind. In a nod to equality, the bogeyman can be female, nonbinary, or genderfluid, too. But he did. In 1987, Andre Rand was put on trial and convicted for a child abduction. He was probably mad he was named after the worst libertarian ever. To be sure, this one might be a case of "he killed a couple of kids and the legend grew." Still, the only acceptable number of kids' deaths at the hands of a serial killer is zero—unless, of course, the kids in question don't finish their vegetables. 3. The leaping lawyer Sooner or later, Toronto residents hear the tale of a lawyer who had a peculiar fondness for running full-bore into his office windows to demonstrate how strong they were. I'd heard about this one. Maybe from the Darwin Awards? I don't remember. In a eulogy, managing partner Peter Lauwers called Hoy “one of the best and brightest” at the firm. Not exactly a persuasive ad for your firm's services. Still, it's at least mildly amusing that there's a lawyer named Lauwers. 4. The body under the bed Vacationing couples. Newlyweds. Disneyland guests. All have been the subject of an urban legend involving hotel occupants who fall blissfully to sleep, only to wake up to an awful stench coming from either under the bed or inside the mattress. Gleefully reported by the competing hotels. While finding a dead person in your room would be legitimately horrifying, disgusting, and weird, things could be worse. 5. The Maine Hermit For decades, people who vacationed in central Maine’s North Pond area were puzzled by items that would go missing. The only really horrifying thing about this (dude was certainly strange, and he'd steal shit, but to the best of my knowledge, he never physically harmed anyone) is that Stephen King didn't think of it first. Skipping a few for brevity's sake. 8. The legend of the bunny man If you lived in or around Virginia in the 1970s, you were probably exposed to the story of the Bunny Man. In the tale, an escaped mental patient takes to gutting bunnies and hanging them from a bridge underpass. I'm actually kind of salty that I never heard of this, despite spending my hearing-about-bogeymen years two counties over at about the right time. Or maybe I did, and I just blocked it out of my head. 9. The legend of Polybius Vintage video gamers have long traded stories about a coin-operated arcade game circa early 1980s Portland that had strange effects on its players. The game, titled Polybius, was alleged to have prompted feelings of disorientation, amnesia, game addiction, and even suicide. Here, the article departs from "verified." This isn't even a case of "well, maybe it's true." There's no evidence that this is anything but an actual legend, myth, falsehood, whatever. Of course, that's what they want you to think. That one seems to be an outlier here, though. There are a few more at the link. While it's not always true that truth is stranger than fiction, it certainly can hit harder when you realize that the bogeyman is real. Now go clean your room! |
| So far, in my random meanderings around the solar system, I've hit Mercury, Earth, Pluto, and the mysterious, undiscovered-as-yet Planet Ix. This... this is the one I've been dreading. I should point out that this article is from the BBC. The thing about the BBC is that they have this reputation, at least on my side of the pond, for being stodgy, straightforward, mostly reliable, and largely disinclined to the tabloid excesses of certain other UK outlets. This reputation is only slightly deserved. They have a remarkable sense of humo(u)r sometimes, but often, you have to look for it. For example, their native video player? Some years ago, I noticed that the volume control slider goes to 11. That cannot be an accident. So with that out of the way, it's time to dive in... The butt (snigger) of countless jokes, Uranus is almost certainly the most unloved planet in our solar system. It always seems to get overlooked when the mission invitations go out. Okay, good, acknowledge the issue in the lede. People are going to make the jokes anyway; you might as well get ahead of them. (To head off more of the tiresomely inevitable, yes, I've seen the Urectum clip from Futurama.) Spacecraft have been sent to Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter. There is even one on its way to non-planet Pluto. Dwarf planet. Also, this article is from 2014, before New Horizons zipped past Pluto. It's not like Uranus has changed much in 9 years, apart from progressing further in its orbit. But Uranus (pronounced “yur-an-us” in polite astronomical circles) does not deserve its dull, or comic, reputation. Pronouncing it Urine-us doesn't help matters. One could go back to its Greek origins and pronounce it "oor-an-ohs," but that's just weird. I usually call it "the seventh planet" to avoid the inevitable bad jokes, but that doesn't work either, and besides, I end up watching people mumbling "Mercury, Venus, Earth..." while counting on their fingers. “Uranus really stands out,” says University of Oxford planetary scientist, Leigh Fletcher. I'm just going to pause here while you get this out of your system. With a volume 60 times that of Earth, Uranus is a compressed mass of toxic gases, including methane... NOT HELPING. “We don’t have a solid surface on any of these giant planets,” says Fletcher. “There’re no sharp boundaries, nothing to stand or sail on, but there’s a continuous progression from gas to liquid to some sort of solid.” Okay, jokes aside, this is hard to wrap one's head around. We're used to pretty low pressures, and clear dividing lines between the three classical states of matter. Sure, you can always think of exceptions, like silly putty, but for the most part, gas, liquid, and solid (dammit, more pun fodder there) are well-defined. Even the extreme pressure at the bottom of the ocean isn't enough to push water into some sort of boundary state. In a giant (Uranus is classed as an ice giant), the pressures get way higher than that. It's difficult to visualize, but it gets weird. Circled by 26 small moons, a few faint rings and a weak magnetic field Uranus appears to be tipped over on its side. Every planet has a slight tilt when it spins – it gives us our seasons – but unlike every other planet in the solar system, Uranus rotates on an axis pointing almost directly at the Sun. Something that Fletcher describes as “really weird”. This is a bit misleading, but only a bit. It's close enough in essence. For one thing, the axis doesn't point at the Sun (except for twice in an orbit); it would be more appropriate to say that the axis is roughly parallel to the plane of the solar system. “Imagine a world where winter lasts 42 Earth years and you don’t see the Sun once during that time,” he says. That's probably easier to imagine than the whole states-of-matter weirdness in the depths. Fletcher is part of an international team that believes Uranus has been neglected for too long. See? Subtle. This group of space scientists and engineers from Europe, the United States and several other nations, including Japan, is working on a $600m mission proposal for the European Space Agency (ESA) with the aim of sending out a space probe, within the next 10 years, to discover why Uranus is so odd. Go ahead, call it the Uranus probe. You know you want to. From what I can tell, this mission never materialized. Bummer. However, there is a good reason why, in the entire history of space exploration, only one mission has visited Uranus: it is extremely difficult. And as the article notes, that one mission was a flyby. There's also some issues with launch windows. Any mission out that far requires gravity assist from other planets, and they have to be in a good configuration to do that. So it's doubtful that we'll send a robot out there in my lifetime. That's okay. Once I'm dead, I won't be able to get mad at all the stupid ass-puns. |
| Science fiction is blurry. By which I mean, the edges of the genre kind of blur into other genres: horror, fantasy, adventure, mystery, snob-lit, whatever. This makes the genre remarkably difficult to define, other than "I know it when I see it." So keep that in mind when looking at this collection of early 20th century SF. How Scientific and Technological Breakthroughs Created a New Kind of Fiction Joshua Glenn Chronicles the Development of Sci-Fi in the Early 20th Century If you insist, as I do, that the fundamental thing that makes it science fiction is exploring the ramifications of new or potential discoveries or inventions on people, society, and culture, then SF actually got its start in the early 19th century. But there's no question that it took a while to blast off. But I'm not here to argue about genre, which is essentially a marketing tool. The article itself is a marketing tool, promoting the guy's book. That's fine; lots of us are here to promote our books or find stuff to read. During the early twentieth century, the world’s scientists were wonderstruck by the revelation that the spontaneous disintegration of atoms (previously assumed to be indivisible and unchangeable) produces powerfully energetic “radio-active” emissions. Wait'll they find out about quantum physics. Throughout the nineteen-aughts and -tens, scientists and snake-oil salesmen alike would ascribe to radium—and radiation in general—vitalizing, even life-giving powers. I've noted things like this in here before. Now, look, I'm not going to quote from the rest of the article, here. It's not really necessary, and it provides quick descriptions of several early 20th century SF books. If you're interested, the link is right there; if you're not, see you tomorrow. But I find it interesting to delve into the history of the future; that is, what people thought the future might be like in the past. If that makes sense. It's not about seeing what "came true" (I've noted before that science fiction doesn't predict; sometimes it warns, but most often, it inspires); it's about seeing what attitudes people had then and how they might have shifted. And some themes continue to the present day: what would alien life be like? What if we could create life? How do we deal with the ethical issues of technology? So, yeah. Maybe I'll expand on this in a future Fantasy newsletter (there's no official SF newsletter, but close enough). Until then, step into the time machine, if you dare. |
| Some science explaining from The Guardian (hence the British spelling): The big idea: why colour is in the eye of the beholder We might think the sky is blue and trees are green, but the truth is rather stranger I'll be using US spelling for my bits. In February 2015, a Scottish woman uploaded a photograph of a dress to the internet. Within 48 hours the blurry snapshot had gone viral, provoking spirited debate around the world. The disagreement centred on the dress’s colour: some people were convinced it was blue and black while others were adamant it was white and gold. Has it been eight and a half years already? I guess so. As with so many things on the internet, the followup took a dark turn later.Everyone, it seemed, was incredulous. People couldn’t understand how, faced with exactly the same photograph of exactly the same dress, they could reach such different and firmly held conclusions about its appearance. It shouldn't be that surprising. We're still arguing over how to pronounce .gif (it's a hard g, by the way), and that format is like 30 years old at this point. The confusion was grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding about colour – one that, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, shows little sign of disappearing. That's at least partly because anchoring bias, where you stick with the first thing you learn about something, is rampant. For a long time, people believed that colours were objective, physical properties of objects or of the light that bounced off them. Even today, science teachers regale their students with stories about Isaac Newton and his prism experiment, telling them how different wavelengths of light produce the rainbow of hues around us. That's not really a bad thing, or even basically wrong. It may be simplistic, but that's nothing surprising when it comes to explaining science concepts to grade-school students. What's arbitrary is that Newton, who bridged the worlds of mysticism and science, assigned seven color names to what's really a continuum—seven being a magical number associated with astrology and the days of the week, among other things. But this theory isn’t really true. Different wavelengths of light do exist independently of us but they only become colours inside our bodies. Colour is ultimately a neurological process whereby photons are detected by light-sensitive cells in our eyes, transformed into electrical signals and sent to our brain, where, in a series of complex calculations, our visual cortex converts them into “colour”. The point of using a prism, or observing a rainbow in the sky, is that the refraction angle of light through a medium (glass or mist) depends on wavelength, which is how you get rainbows and Pink Floyd album covers. One cause of the problem – or perhaps its symptom – is language. In English we divide colour space into 11 basic terms – black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, grey, orange and pink – but other languages do things differently. Know how I know the author is male? Because he left out fuchsia, chartreuse, turquoise, etc. Also, his name is James. But mostly it's the color names. You'll note I said seven above while this list is longer. Newton reported red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Black and white aren't spectrum colors. Brown is basically dark orange. Pink is light red. Purple is weird and I don't have time to get into why right now (or why it's not really the same thing as violet). Indigo was totally made up by Newton so he'd have seven colors. Many don’t have words for pink, brown and yellow, and some use one word for both green and blue. The Tiv people in west Africa use only three basic colour terms (black, white, red), and at least one Indigenous community has no specific words for any colours, only “light” and “dark”. This could easily send me off on one of my "language shapes and reveals how we perceive the world" rants, but, to borrow a term from optics, I'm focusing on different stuff here. The Aztecs, who were enthusiastic farmers, used more than a dozen words for green; the Mursi cattleherders of Ethiopia have 11 colour terms for cows, and none for anything else. We have special color names for horses. The meanings of colour are no less socially constructed, which is why a single colour can mean completely different things in different places and at different times. In the west white is the colour of light, life and purity, but in parts of Asia it is the colour of death. In America red is conservative and blue progressive, while in Europe it’s the other way around. This last bit has long amused me, because red represents both the Republican party in the US and the Communist party in China (and in the former USSR). There's a bit more at the link; I'm afraid I copied way more than I usually do, here. It ends, in proper British fashion, on a pun, which I always appreciate. The point, though, is something I've been saying for some time: that color isn't an intrinsic property of things. Wavelength, however, is measurable and objective (it is, in part, how we know the chemical composition of distant stars). That dress, incidentally? It's always blue and gold to me. No amount of staring or mental gymnastics can change my perception of it. Other optical illusions, usually, become clear to me upon reflection (pun intended). This one's persistent. And after almost 10 years, it still reminds me that we all have different perceptions. And I do need reminding of that, from time to time. |
| Today's article, presented after languishing in my queue for several months, is from The New Yorker, so it's long and rambling and to be honest, I didn't read the whole thing. I'm linking it anyway. Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It The scientists who study solar geoengineering don’t want anyone to try it. But climate inaction is making it more likely. For starters, the headline is a bit misleading. It makes it sound like people are actually going to turn down the dimmer switch on the accursed daystar itself. We don't have that technology yet. If we decide to “solar geoengineer” the Earth—to spray highly reflective particles of a material, such as sulfur, into the stratosphere in order to deflect sunlight and so cool the planet—it will be the second most expansive project that humans have ever undertaken. (The first, obviously, is the ongoing emission of carbon and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.) We do have that technology, or are very close to it, so it's a matter of "should we" not "could we." I would also like to point out the logical fallacy right there in the first paragraph: the idea that our "most expansive project" is "the ongoing emission of... heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere." Normally, I'd quit reading right there, from a combination of mistaking a result for an intention, and, well, it being in The New Yorker. Belching out greenhouse gases wasn't what we set out to do. It would be like saying you set out to purposely damage your liver by drinking booze and popping Tylenol. The idea behind solar geoengineering is essentially to mimic what happens when volcanoes push particles into the atmosphere; a large eruption, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, in 1992, can measurably cool the world for a year or two. You know what else would work? Nuclear winter. That doesn't mean it's a good idea, either, but it would work, at least temporarily. It is being taken seriously because of something else that’s speeding up: the horrors that come with an overheating world and now regularly threaten its most densely populated places. Nothing wrong with thinking about it. That's just science. Implementing it would be a different story. Even before 2030, we may, at least temporarily, pass the 1.5-degree mark. Ah, the naîvité of last November. We've already crossed that line, snowflake.It’s likely, in other words, that conditions may force a reckoning with the idea of solar geoengineering—of blocking from the Earth some of the sunlight that has always nurtured it. Like I said, thinking about it is fine. When it comes to actually doing it, though, you have to deal with the possibility of overcorrection, which could make things worse in the other direction. Everyone studying solar geoengineering seems to agree that it’s a terrible thing. “The idea is outlandish,” Parker told me. Mohammed Mofizur Rahman, a Bangladeshi scientist who is one of Degrees Initiatives’ grantees, noted, “It’s crazy stuff.” So did the veteran Hungarian diplomat Janos Pasztor, who runs the Carnegie initiative on geoengineering governance, and said, “People should be suspicious.” Pascal Lamy, a former head of the World Trade Organization (W.T.O.), who is the president of the Paris Peace Forum, agreed, saying, “It would represent a failure.” I'd take the experts' opinions over that of ordinary people (including me) any day. I can't help but feel that these quotes were cherry-picked, however. (Sulfur dioxide is the most commonly discussed candidate, but aluminum, calcium carbonate, and, most poetically, diamond dust, have also been proposed.) The poetry about using diamond dust isn't that it's diamond dust. Diamond isn't nearly as rare or precious as people are led to believe. We can make it easily in laboratories. No, the irony is that diamond is carbon, and carbon (in other molecular forms) is part of the problem. The question is more: what else would it do? On a global scale it could, at least temporarily, turn the sky hazy or milky (hence the title of Kolbert’s book); it could alter “the quality of the light plants use for photosynthesis” (no small thing on a planet basically built on chlorophyll—studies have shown that U.S. corn production increased as polluting aerosols went down in the wake of amendments to the Clean Air Act); and it might damage the ozone layer, which is only now repairing itself from our recent assault with fluorocarbons. And those are just the known unknowns. Worse, if they did this (and I'm not saying they will, or should), then any random weather disaster will be turned into the dust cloud's fault by ignorant hicks. "A tornado hit my house. Goddamn weather machines!" "My garage fell into the river! That geoengineering caused a flood!" Don't believe me? Look at any random weather disaster now and see how fast someone screams "climate change" before the scientists even have a chance to weigh in on it. Or, in another field, the people who are absolutely certain that a certain vaccine is worse than the disease. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. The article touches on that, a bit, and I won't quote from it further; as I said, it's long, though not nearly as convoluted as a lot of the stuff that rag puts out. I will, however, point out that there are other possible mitigation efforts under thought. One of the most interesting, to me, is enormous carbon capture plants, designed to essentially filter the atmosphere to directly reduce the proportion of greenhouse gases. (Sure, vegetation does this too, but this could potentially be faster than trying to plant billions of trees.) It reminds me of the massive atmosphere plants in Burroughs' Mars books, a last-ditch effort of his fictional Barsoomians to prevent the ultimate climate disaster. In other words, think big. Just remember that not every idea is going to be a good one. |
| A couple of weeks ago, I revisited an entry that I noted was probably my shortest one ever, but wasn't about to check. So, behold, today the RNG gives me, from December 24, 2010, is longer by a word or two: "Enjoy this Christmas" ...that is, of course, if you don't count the ~4 min linked video which, much to my surprise, is still available as of this writing. I'm not going to embed it again, because I don't find it as amusing as I did 13 years ago. Nothing wrong with it, of course; it's John Cleese narrating a parody of Night Before Christmas. I don't find it offensive or outdated, just a bit hacky, like most parodies that I didn't write. And the video graphics seem dated. I'm clearly a different person now, with a slightly different sense of humor, than I was in those halcyon days of yore. Also, apparently, video embedding here is older than I thought. My sense of time is whacked, sometimes. And no, not because I'm linking a Christmas video in August; that's just the inevitable result of using a random number generator to pick these older entries. I'm not encouraging Christmas creep here; let us at least get through Halloween, and preferably also Thanksgiving here in the US, before we start up with the Santa shit again. Which means, sadly, Cleese lied. |
| Back in May, I linked an article showing that Yosemite Sam (pronounced Yo-sem-it-ee) is probably Jewish: "Sam: I Am" Now, Cracked takes a different crack at the character. "Nonsense?! Why, you dadburn rassa-frassin varmint..." If Yosemite Sam is remembered for one thing, it would be his massive, marvelous mustache. But if the Bugs Bunny villain is to be honored for a second accolade, it would be his colorful, almost-but-not-quite-off-color vocabulary, which has the whiff of obscenity but is cloaked in euphemisms and old-timey lingo. Which is somehow even funnier than actual swear words. Now, these aren't necessarily original to Warner Bros. cartoons. Lots of minced oaths have been around for a long time, possibly in some form since at least ancient Sumeria. They say a lot about cultural taboos. For example, in keeping with my 18+ rating, I can only say "fuck" once in this entry. But I can say "frak" as many times as I want, and everyone knows what the frak I really mean. You might note there's an issue with the numbering in the article. Doesn't matter; I'm only going to highlight a few. 10. Landlubber Landlubber has been around since the 1700s, and I love it even though I’m a landlubber myself: i.e., a non-sailor, as I might be disgustingly labeled by a seafarer. Though no sailor, when Sam occasionally found himself in sea mode, he’d modify his folksy lingo accordingly, adopting this term. Mel Blanc's voice was, as we know, extraordinarily versatile. But Sam's voice and a classic pirate accent always seemed similar to me. As the article points out, this isn't exactly a minced oath, or even fightin' words. 9. Dad-Burn As in, “Dad-burn it!” Sam’s lingo is one of the few remnants of this sense of dad as a euphemism for God. This one, however, is a classic minced oath. You can't say goddamn in a kids' cartoon. 6. Varmint I reckon this is the most characteristic Yosemite Sam word: He is the patron saint of calling critters varmints. The term has referred to vermin since the 1500s. By the late 1600s, a broader meaning emerged relevant to Sam and Bugs: “An animal of a noxious or objectionable kind,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. It should be obvious, but it may not be, that "varmint" is a linguistic morph of "vermin," while "critter" comes from "creature." All varmints are critters, but not all critters are varmints. The distinction might be better explained here: "So basically, a varmint is a sub-set of a critter that's not tasty enough to eat or hunt into oblivion. Sort of like the difference between a plant and a weed"4. Lily-Livered There’s an implication of femininity here, which is a heckuva accusation for a man to throw at a rabbit. Have you met Bugs? That bunny was genderfluid before the term "genderfluid" ever existed. Anyway, as the article points out, "lily-livered" has nothing to do with perceived gender role. 2. Eejit This variant spelling of idiot signals that the speaker may not have any right to ride a high horse of non-idiocy. A predecessor is found in 1853: eediot. In addition to being unable to imagine Sam sounding out the word "idiot," it may be that "idiot" was at a point in its linguistic evolution that "retarded" is right now. Both words were originally value-neutral ways of saying that someone has diminished mental capacity. Humans being humans, such words inevitably become slurs, and we have to find new value-neutral terms, which are destined to inevitably become slurs. Don't believe me? Try calling someone "special" these days. 1. Rackin’-Frackin’, Rassa’-Frassin’ Ah, yes, the absolute Platonic ideal of a minced oath. Words like this are the lexical equivalent of grawlix, a comic strip gimmick consisting of symbols that indicate swearing, like %*!#$. And despite over half a century of enjoying comic strips, this is the first time I've encountered the word "grawlix." I love learning new stuff. Incidentally, I got in huge trouble for using grawlix (though obviously I didn't know that term then) back in middle school. I was trying to avoid getting into trouble, you see. Turning over a new leaf, as it were. I don't remember the context after all this time, but I'd written a note containing the "words" @$$ and $#!+. I thought I was being clever, you know, replacing "ass" and "shit" with what would now be perfectly legitimate substrings of internet passwords. The teacher, though, wasn't stupid, and translated them immediately, sending me across the hall to the principal's office, all while probably thinking what a doggone varmint I was. Well, #@%* me. |
| Getting back to my list of solar system articles, this one's about a planet most of you know. When will the Earth try to kill us again? Most mass extinctions began with vast convulsions of Earth’s interior—can we detect that? Why would you want to detect that? Are you going to try to warn the rest of us, who won't listen, and end up sending your kid away in a rocket to a distant planet where they'll have superpowers? But seriously, though, unless we can do something about an impending disaster (or would that be displanet), just don't tell us. We're still doomed, only without the riots and panic. Our planet Earth has extinguished large portions of its inhabitants several times since the dawn of animals. Think of it like shaking an Etch-a-Sketch. And if science tells us anything, it will surely try to kill us all again. Except now, it's got competition. Well, it always did; the asteroid impact wasn't the planet's fault, except maybe for having the audacity to orbit into the path of the asteroid. But now we're the competition, too. Though, philosophically, we're part of the planet, so maybe it spawned us for the purpose of wiping out the latest Etch-a-Sketch. But it seems like, in terms of mass extinction events, scary meteorites are in the minority. In the words of researchers David Bond and Stephen Grasby, who reviewed the evidence in 2016: “Despite much searching, there remains only one confirmed example of a bolide impact coinciding with an extinction event.” Real quick: Asteroid: rock in space (though as I've said before, this should be the name for hemorrhoids) Meteor: the same rock, in the atmosphere, leaving an ionization trail Meteorite: the same rock, having hit the ground. Bolide: the rock explodes before it hits the ground. There's more to it than all that, but I find it unlikely that the Chicxulub rock was technically a bolide. But whatever. Volcanism, on the other hand, has coincided with most, if not all, mass extinctions—it looks suspiciously like a serial killer, if you like. I don't like. No. It's not like we can arrest Hephaestus. This isn’t your regular Vesuvius/St. Helens/Hawaii style volcanism. It’s not even super-volcanoes like Yellowstone or Tambora. I’m talking about something far, far bigger: a rare, epic volcanic phenomenon called a Large Igneous Province or “LIP.” LIP? What the fuck, geologists? Anyway, the article goes on to describe these doomsday events, in excruciating detail, with color graphics even. So if our serial killer is the volcanism associated with an LIP eruption, when will it strike again? And can we beat it to the punch? Their images reveal fat mantle plumes, regions of hot rock as wide as France, rising like chimneys through the mantle. C'est très chaud. LIPs may be on a cycle. On average, there’s one every 15 million years, with the last occurring 16 million years ago (the Columbia River LIP in northwestern USA). By that rough reckoning, we are overdue for another. That's not how averages work, and a science author oughta know that. Still, it could happen at any time. Sooner or later, as Susan Ivanova said on Babylon 5, boom. It's inevitable. And if Olson is right, the field reversal will give us more than 30 million years’ advance warning of the next LIP (for perspective, human ancestors separated from chimp ancestors about 7 million years ago). So, no need to worry about the sun turning into a red giant in 5 billion years or so. We're doomed long before that. Get your kid into a rocket now! The climate effects of volcanic gases are deadlier still. Stratospheric sulfur from Laki cooled the planet by 1.3 degrees Celsius for three years, triggering one of the most severe winters on record in Europe, North America, Russia, and Japan. That seems perfect right about now. Unfortunately, as the article notes, it's short-lived and followed by a much longer warming period. At the end of the Permian, the Siberian Traps LIP erupted staggering quantities of lava for 300,000 years with relatively little environmental effect, just like the Paraná–Etendeka and Columbia River LIPs. Precise rock dating shows that Earth’s most severe mass extinction only began when sheets of magma, called “sills,” began to inject underground through sediments rich in fossil fuels, igniting them and baking off gases, as Seth Burgess describes: Whew, good thing we've gotten rid of most of those fossil fuels, then. Human mining and burning of fossil fuels mimics the most deadly LIPs. Even if LIP greenhouse gas emissions were larger and lasted far longer, our emission rates are far faster, so they are just as capable of overwhelming Earth’s neutralizing mechanisms. This is compounded by a cacophony of other man-made environmental disturbances (pollution, acid rain, deforestation, and so on). Or not. One of the talking points I hear from climate change deniers is that the climate has changed before. While technically true, in those cases, no one was around who could have caused it, or could have done anything about it. We did, and we can. But we won't. |
| Today's list, from Cracked, is way too short. It fails, for example, to tell the story of "Mad" Mike Hughes, the flat-earth rocket scientist who, in an effort to see for himself the flatness of the planet, built a steam-powered rocket in the wilderness of Southern California, and promptly died in a lithobraking maneuver. I wrote about him, last year, here: "Bad Advice" So here's more of that sort of thing, albeit not nearly as steam-powered: Stubbornness isn’t a particularly delightful trait to interact with. It is also not a virtue, no matter how stubbornly people insist it is. Dealing with a bullheaded friend or acquaintance is likely to end with a prominent forehead vein and a conversation that concludes in “okay, whatever, I don’t even care anymore.” When a Gen-X meets a Taurus... Combine that same stubbornness with an incorrect belief that’s considerably higher stakes, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Like crashing your homemade rocket in the California desert. With you inside. Or like these items: 4. Franz Reichelt For whatever reason, I've seen this guy from multiple sources recently. Franz Reichelt was highly interested in the human power of flight, a hobby that, throughout history, has a pretty abysmal survival rate. Reichelt, however, lived at a time where airplanes already did exist and functioned — mostly. His interest took a slightly different slant, which was the development of a parachute suit that would allow pilots, or thrill-seekers, to jump from a great height and float down safely to the ground. To give you some idea of how this went, I can assure you that Reichelt is absolutely not the inventor of the parachute. Or, for that matter, the wingsuit. After what had to be an incredibly irritating back and forth with French police, Reichelt got permission to toss one of his dummies off the top of the Eiffel Tower. When he arrived at the top, though, he committed one of history’s most ill-advised and disastrous switcheroos, deciding he would wear the suit and jump himself. And that, mes amis, is why today we call it the I-Fell Tower. 3. Herman Cain As far as jokes about stubbornness go, politics is rather low-hanging fruit. But this guy was an entire branch of low-hanging fruits. No person became more of a grim figurehead of the health risks of being a huge asshole than ex-presidential candidate Herman Cain. I guess he wasn't Abel to let go of his stubbornness. 2. William J. Bailey Throughout history, humans have come up with no shortage of wackadoo medical treatments and various snake oils. Snake oil, it turns out, has legitimate uses. Most of the things we label "snake oil" are just useless. Some might actually do something, but no one's done studies. They don't make up for the ones that, you know, kill people. In the 1920s, for example, radium was all the rage. Yes, the radioactive kind. Looking back, you can find it casually included in all sorts of consumer products like makeup or the glowing numerals on a watch face. Maybe the most straightforward, and incredibly stupid application was invented by a man named William J. Bailey, who created and sold Radithor, an “energy tonic” that was created from the simple recipe of water plus radium. I'm not an expert on radioactivity (there are different kinds of radioactivity, and some of them are relatively harmless if their sources stay outside your body), but my understanding is that ingesting radium is particularly harmful because the body's chemical processes think it's calcium. So you end up with radioactive bones. Suddenly, those glow-in-the-dark skeletons you see around Halloween aren't so cute, are they? 1. The Titanic This one's so famous that I don't know why they even bothered including it on this list. It might not be a single person, but I don’t think we could really end this article without acknowledging one of the greatest acts of human overconfidence in history. This is true, but few of the people involved were directly, corporeally affected. The submersible that went to look at the wreckage earlier this year, though... |
| The random number gods bring us back to the solar system today, but this time we're talking about a planet that only exists in educated speculation. Before Pluto achieved dwarf planet status, that would have been Planet Ten. I will admit, Planet X sounds better than Planet IX. But maybe I'll start calling it Planet Ix. At 9,200 feet, there is 20 percent less oxygen than at sea level, enough to take all the air from my lungs after just three steps. Is it bad that I understood immediately why one would open an astronomy article with this sentence? I had to walk very slowly when I was at the peak of Haleakala, where a bunch of telescopes lurk. This wasn't Maui, though, but that other island. And the actual telescope is a couple thousand feet higher. We were at base camp on the dormant volcano Mauna Kea, on the big Island of Hawaii. The pair were here to use one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, called Subaru. Which has nothing to do with the car company; both take their names from what we call the Pleiades. Tomorrow night, December 3, marked the start of their sixth observing run and their next attempt to find the biggest missing object in our solar system, called — for the moment — Planet Nine. Yeah, I'm gonna call it Ix. The article is from Longreads, so... well, it's right there in the name. I won't be quoting a lot more of it, but I wanted to highlight a few relevant sections. As a theorist Batygin feels that he’s already mathematically proven its existence. But it’s generally accepted that for a planet to be considered discovered in the field of astronomy, the theory must also be accompanied by a photograph. I know I've pointed this out somewhere before, but a while back, a planet inside Mercury's orbit was "mathematically proven." They figured one had to be there based on perturbations in Mercury's orbits. Some people even claimed to have images of it, taken during eclipses or whatever. So they called it Vulcan, after the forge god (not to be confused with, well, you know). You think it was bad when Pluto was designated a dwarf planet? Imagine renumbering all the planets. Earth becomes Planet 4, for example. Anyway, short version, there was no Vulcan; the images were false and Mercury's orbit was fully explained by Einstein. I'm not saying the data pointing to Planet Ix is nothing but gravitational anomalies, but there's still a lot we don't understand. Which is why we do science. Part of their job was first to try to find a solution less extreme— like a passing star or a galactic anomaly — than a giant undiscovered planet far off in the depths of the solar system, because, a hidden planet? That was absurd. See, now, to me, a passing star or a galactic anomaly would be more weird than a hitherto unobserved planet. But that's why they get paid the big bucks. (I'm joking; astronomers don't get paid the big bucks.) After the observing run was complete, I asked the pair if they ever felt that trying to find Planet Nine was ridiculous, that the whole notion of a giant missing planet and the efforts they have gone to to find it ever make them feel defeated. They both gave me roughly the same response: no. Their answer brought to mind the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus. He thought a lot about the myth of Sisyphus and plucked his unfortunate mythical backstory away from the root of his actions, the eternal task of pushing a boulder up a mountain only to watch it fall back down again. Right? Because the telescope is located at the summit of a mountain, and the astronomers are like Sisyphus, climbing and descending the mountain over and over again. Like I said, a long read, and a lot of it is, pun intended, atmosphere. But I found it fascinating. Life is barely possible at the summit of that volcano; it has, as the article notes, barely enough oxygen to survive, let alone move around and do stuff. When I went up Haleakala—from which you can see Mauna Kea off in the distance—I'd brought a bottle of Coke with me. When I finished it, up at the summit, I twisted the top back on and left it in the car, because I didn't want to add to any trash at the peak. After enjoying the cold, thin air for a couple of hours, we headed back down the mountain. Back near sea level, in Kehei, I went to toss the bottle into a bin, and saw that, despite the cap being tightly screwed on, it had crumpled, as if squeezed by a fist; this was physical proof of the vast difference in air pressure. And Haleakala is "only" at about 10,000 feet. My point here is that outside of a thin membrane of habitability, proportionally thinner than an eggshell, the Universe is actively trying to kill us. And yet we continue to push that boundary to learn everything we can about this vast, uncaring expanse. Whether we find proof of Planet Ix or not, there's something to be said for the lengths we'll go to in order to try. |
| Yes, it's time once again to have a look at word origins. I don't necessarily take all these as absolute truth. Etymology, as the article itself notes, is littered with guesswork and outright falsehoods. Consider it a starting point. Also, no, I'm not listing all 71 words here. That would be cumbersome Which, it should be noted, is a word based on the archaic word "cumber," which itself seems to be from "encumber," which, though older, is still in use today. English is weird. An even older origin places "encumber" as a derivative of yet another French loan word that changed its original meaning. So that's bonus etymology #72. 1. Vaccine Yeah, this one's seen a lot of use lately. The word vaccine derives indirectly from the Latin for cow, vacca. The story goes that, just before the turn of the 19th century, a British doctor named Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, or variolae vaccinae, were much less likely to contract smallpox, which could otherwise devastate entire communities. The article lists a bunch of Romance languages whose word for cow is obviously related to vacca. But it fails to mention the French version, which is vache. 4. Shampoo "Why do people need shampoo when there's so much of the real stuff around?" Okay, that's a pun, not an etymology. See also: sham-pain 6. Chortle Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” has a character chortle in joy. It seems Carroll combined the words chuckling and snorting to build a new, intuitively understood verb. Carroll was remarkably good at making up words that sounded right. 16., 17., and 18. Sinister, Dexterity, and Ambidextrous These are, I think, pretty obvious. Or at least, I've known about their origins for a long time, though perhaps only because at one point, I studied Latin. I'm only including them because there's a parallel in French. Even though it's a Latin-derived language, their words for left and right aren't related to sinister and dexter, respectively. But it's almost as bad: left is "gauche," which has a negative meaning in English; right is "droite," which is very similar to that other right, meaning correct, which is "droit." (We have words based on that, too: adroit and maladroit.) Southpaws just can't catch a break in any language, it seems. 24. Pundit In contrast, this is one I'd always wondered about, though never enough to be arsed to look it up. Pundit comes to us from a Sanskrit word that has been transliterated as pundit, pandit, or pandita (पण्डित). It originally referred to someone who had committed to memory a significant amount of the Hindu religious texts known as the Vedas. It came to refer more generally to something like “a learned man” or “philosopher” by the 19th century, and today that meaning has expanded to include people who like to yell at one another on cable news. They call it the Indo-European language group for good reason. 27. Tycoon And yes, English has more than its share of non-Indo-European origin words, like "taboo" or this one. Tycoon comes to the United States via the Japanese taikun, a word whose Chinese roots mean “great ruler.” And it's definitely got its origins in US English. I don't know if they use it in other Anglophone countries or not. 29. Nimrod This is an example of a word whose modern usage origin is subject to some misinformation. Whatever the origin, it’s often stated that Bugs Bunny helped popularize the derogatory meaning of the word when he lobbed it at everyone’s favorite hapless hunter, Elmer Fudd. But no one ever actually mentions which ‘toon that was in; we found that Daffy actually calls Elmer “nimrod” in 1948’s What Makes Daffy Duck. Bugs used it in reference to Yosemite Sam three years later in Rabbit Every Monday. Never underestimate the cultural power of old Warner Brothers cartoons. 33. Orange And orange comes from, well … oranges. Its predecessors include the Middle French orange and the Sanskrit naranga-s, but what’s really interesting to note is that English didn’t really have a word for this color for centuries. I've heard it said that "orange" came from "an orange," which in turn was slurred from "a naranj." I don't know how true any of this is, but it seems to me that the fruit named the color, rather than vice-versa. 38. Gerrymandering Come on; I learned the origin of this one in, like, eighth-grade social studies, complete with a memorable image of an early American political cartoon.  42. Silhouette I did, like, a whole entry on this one a while back. 58. Window Another one I've wondered about. "Windshield" is obviously a descriptive name for a window-like pane in the front of a car, one which bears similarity to a window, so did "window" have its origins in "wind?" Window comes from the Old Norse vindauga, or “wind eye.” It originally referred to a hole in the roof, but over the years made the jump down to glazed glass usually found on a wall. Probably, yes. 63. and 64. Flower and Flour Not just a rich source of puns, these words actually have the same origin, it seems: Flower comes from the French fleur, and so does flour. The part of a plant used to make flour—the kind that you mill—was considered the “flower of the grain,” the best part. Interestingly, the French word for "flower" is still "fleur," but their word for "flour" is "farina." 67. Walrus Despite its Latin second-declension noun ending, "walrus" probably didn't come from Latin. Goo goo g'joob. 69. Nice I've written about this one here before, too. I'm just including it because I'll bet $69 that they purposely made it #69 just so they could write "69. Nice." And finally, one of my favorite topics: 71. Science Last, but definitely not least. The Latin word nescius comes from the prefix ne-, for not, and a form of the Latin verb scire, “to know.” That verb also eventually gave us science, which even today isn’t far from its mid-14th century meaning, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary: “What is known, knowledge (of something) acquired by study; information.” While science is more of a process than a strict body of knowledge, the word origin here is less disputable than most. |
| Another link from Cracked, this time about drinking. Except that "modern drinkers" quaff kombucha, which is objectively disgusting. Also, veggie smoothies. Nowadays, even the humblest watering holes are going to have a wealth of beverages available for those looking to tip back a glass of their preferred shape and size. And yet, it's almost never enough variety for me. Here are four ancient drinks that show how good modern drinkers have it. To be sure, the original beer doesn't seem very appetizing to me. And you had to drink it through a straw, because Sumer, for all of its innovations, hadn't figured out filtering. 4. Airag/Kumis If you were part of the Mongol army and were seeking a pick-me-up after a long day of pillaging, the drink of choice would have been airag, now known by its Turkish name, kumis, which, given its appearance, doesn’t seem like much of an improvement. Now, for such a nomadic people, it wasn’t as if they were able to tote wheat fields or barrels of grapes along, so they had to make do with what they had. And what they had, in great numbers, were horses. Horses that could, to their delight and our disgust, be milked. That might disgust some people, but really, is it that different from cow's milk? Also, sheep's milk is still a thing. They're all herbivores. No, the origin isn't the disgusting part. The disgusting part is that, since almost any sugar can be fermented into alcohol, and milk contains a kind of sugar, well... The fermentation wasn’t purely for producing alcohol content, but because straight mare’s milk is apparently nature’s Ex-Lax, and fermenting it kept a little bit more of your insides, well, inside. Making the horse milk a little boozy was just a happy side effect, and the concoction wasn’t only tolerated, but celebrated as one of the sources of the Mongols’ strength. For some of us, any mammal milk is basically nature's Ex-Lax. 3. Kykeon Kykeon, a drink that pops up throughout Greek mythology and history, did indeed have the rep of fucking you up, but not by benefit of its ABV. It was instead supposed to have hallucinogenic properties. One thing that most hallucinogens seem to have in common, not that I have any experience with them, is that they can cause great gastric distress. That keeps me away from them more than the whole "illegal" thing does. Well, the O.G. recipe isn’t exactly mega appealing, being made from water (okay), barley (sure), herbs (fair enough) and ground goat cheese (hmm). Goat cheese? Oh no, that's disgusting! Wait, no it's not. Goats are another mammal it's okay to milk (see above). I'm going to provisionally put this one in the "not that objectively gross" category. 2 Posca Posca was the fuel of choice for the Roman troops — at least, the ones poor enough that they couldn’t afford to drink anything better. If they were rich, they wouldn't have been troops. The sales pitch was that it was great for revitalizing tired troops and fighting infection, which is what you might have to tell someone to get this shit down their gullet. Posca was made from red wine vinegar, water, herbs, spices and honey. Okay, not something I'd drink, but all of those things are stuff most of us have swallowed. 1. Three Penis Wine Yeah... no. Let me disappoint you immediately by clarifying that this is not a euphemism. This is, fairly straightforwardly, wine infused with the tangy taste and power of three different animal penises. Maybe that's why they invented the word "cocktail." Then there's that drink with the human toe in it. No, I'm not going to look it up to link it. You can Google same as I can. Not to fact-check a sitcom’s fake infomercial, but their precise penis combo is a little off, as true three penis wine contains seal, deer and dog penises. As this is supposedly a magical potion for improving one's sexual prowess, and potions are based on sympathetic magic, you'd think they'd have taken a cue from the Mongols and used horse dong. I guess maybe that was a steppe too far. |
| Today, we're going all the way back to 2008 for a prototype comment-on-an-external-link format blog entry: "Finally!" It's short, but as the story is fifteen years old, it's no surprise that the link there is dead. No big deal; I could tell what it was about by the lede I'd copied: SILVERTON, Ore. -- Management for a popular Silverton restaurant announced Thursday that young children would no longer be allowed into the establishment. The manager at the Red Thai restaurant on Oak Street said children younger than 6 aren't welcome in the eatery. Naturally, the questions, here in the future, are obvious: Is there still a Red Thai restaurant on Oak Street in Silverton, Oregon? And if so, is it under the same management? After all, even restaurants without controversial (but excellent) policies close down on a regular basis. Controversy might give them a temporary boost, but they'd have to keep generating more to get such free advertising. A quick search revealed that, indeed, the Red Thai Room on Oak Street was, sadly, no longer in business. I can't be absolutely certain that "Red Thai Room" and the "Red Thai Restaurant" as mentioned in the news link are the same, but I'd bet money on it. My source? Yelp, which for some reason keeps records like that. There were only two reviews, both from 2008, on the "recommended" page, both positive, but containing no mention of their wonderful policy.What I found completely amusing was the dueling reviews on the "not recommended" page: one one-star bitching about the no-brats rule, and another with five stars singing the praises of the no-brats rule.Well. The former restaurant, now singing with the choir eternal, was, according to that Yelp page, located at 211 Oak Street. If the review dates are anything to go by, the restaurant, to my great sadness, didn't last long with its glorious policy. But, if you're ever out that way, apparently there's another restaurant at that same address: Sandee Thai Restaurant. What an amazing coincidence that the cuisine hasn't changed, but the name has.Their food looks delicious, by the way, but I'm certainly biased as I love Thai food, or at least what passes for it in the US. The hotter the better. It generally requires some convincing them that, yes, even though I have pale skin, light hair and blue eyes, I love me some Thai spice; but usually, they acquiesce to my request. Though sometimes, they'll stand there with a carton of milk and watch me take the first few bites. Just in case. I'm not ragging on people who don't tolerate spice well, incidentally. People like what they like. Only on the inherent racism of assuming that I'd be one of them, based on my looks. And yes, I'm aware of the seeming contradiction between this and my desire not to eat around toddlers. Do not expect me to be consistent, but in this case, it's the difference between someone enjoying their meal in peace, or acting like zoo primates. Back to my original entry, my words: But it's nice to think about other restaurants, preferably ones in my area, following suit and denying entry to screaming kids. To me, there's little worse than being at a restaurant and having them seat a kid near me. Even when they're quiet, I end up losing my appetite when I see them eat. I'd rather be near smokers, or even loud drunks. Sadly, the policy never caught on. Fortunately, my tolerance for the antics of young children in restaurants has increased since then, though if they try to seat me near one, I usually try to obtain a different table. Also fortunately, I'm far more likely, when I'm at home, to order takeout or delivery, thus avoiding both screaming kids and disbelief that a white guy likes his food Thai hot. |
| You're going to die. That (along with taxes) is one of the great certainties of life. Cracked is here to make jokes about it. If you think too much about your own mortality, you will wind up on the floor, spinning on your back and screaming at the sky. Floor, yeah. Spinning? It's the room doing that. You should live forever; anything else is unfair. Until you realize that "forever" is a null concept, and you'll still expire from energy depletion at some point before the heat death of the universe but long after you began suffering billions of years of pure boredom. Side note: Nothing we’re going to talk about today is a true paradox. I'm really glad they pointed this out, so that I don't have to. In fact, there are no true paradoxes, anywhere. Paradoxes cannot exist. Anytime someone comes up with a paradox, it’s either a trick of language or they invented imaginary, contradictory premises and are now acting surprised that they contradict each other. Which is what I've been saying, but no one listens to me. 5. If You’re Drunk, You’re Safer Driving Home Than Walking Drunk driving laws aren't about keeping you safe. The article does a fine job explaining the basis of this conclusion, which, again, involves no paradox; it's merely counter to common sense. Because common sense is generally bullshit, which is why we have science. In any case, a few moments' thought should be enough to realize that, whether you're drunk or not, driving should be safer than walking (assuming walking along streets and roads); when driving, we're at least protected in a metal cage. Especially when the person in that cage is drunk. In reality, you don’t have to choose between driving drunk and walking drunk. The easiest and safest option is to just get a ride, with someone else driving. Even easier: drink at home. 4. Those Who Drive Slightly Above the Average Speed Get in Fewer Accidents This earned another "duh" from me, but just because I expected it doesn't mean there was data to support it. Here’s a helpful chart that notes you’ll be perfectly safe if everyone's stationary, but things get a little riskier from that point on. There is no such thing as "perfectly safe." (You'll have to go to the article to see the chart.) One landmark study from 1964 tried to find the relationship between a car’s speed relative to others and the chance of getting into a collision. This look at 10,000 crashes determined that, yes, if you drive faster than the median speed, that raises your chance of a collision. Oh. That explains minimum speed limits that exist on some roads. Two semesters of traffic engineering classes, and I never did get a good justification for that, or how many tickets cops gleefully write when there's a jam and everyone's below the minimum speed limit. For decades, attempts to replicate the study produced similar results. More recent studies haven’t, so the latest advice is to err on the side of going too slow if you can’t keep pace with everyone else. You know what really burns my butt from both a driving and traffic engineering perspective? It's when they give trucks a lower speed limit on the same stretch of road. That never made sense to me. In any case, automobile (and to a lesser extent, road) technology has advanced in the last 60 years since that study, so it's not too surprising that it hasn't been replicated recently. 3. People Who Take Multivitamins Die Sooner You know who else supposedly dies sooner? People who eat only raw fruits and vegetables. Well... allegedly. I was trying to find a link to the story about the influenza who promoted such a diet and croaked at the age of 30, but all I found were tabloids. Not linking those here. Oh, well; I knew it was too good to be true. Unless you’re vitamin-deficient, popping vitamin supplements will offer you no benefit whatsoever. No, but it does benefit the chemical engineers who make the vitamin supplements. Won't anyone think of their well-being? Nutrition scientists found themselves with a lot of vitamin data to examine thanks to the Iowa Women's Health Study, which surveyed some 40,000 women as they aged through 20 years. Comparing people who took vitamin and mineral supplements to those who didn’t, the researchers found that the supplemented humans were 6 percent more likely to die each year than their unenhanced counterparts. Ugh. "Nutrition scientists:" I don't trust that lot. "Women:" While it's good that there's more focus on women's health, it's not exactly an exhaustive cross-section of society. About the only positive thing about that study is the sample size. This is why it's important to not succumb to confirmation bias. Also, consider this possibility (in addition to the caveats in the linked article): When you do one thing that's "good," it's possible that you slack off on other things that are "good." Like maybe you think it's enough to eat a balanced, low-calorie diet, and don't bother with exercise, or vice-versa. Or, like me, you figure that since you didn't reproduce, you're free to emit as much carbon into the burning atmosphere as you like. So "I'm taking vitamins, so I can slack off on other health habits" might very well be a thing. I don't know. 2. A Century Ago, Rich Women Died Giving Birth More Often Than Poor Women This one's interesting enough, but I don't have much to say about it. This final one, though, that's what really lit up all the LEDs on my confirmation bias: 1. The Stockdale Paradox: Optimism Kills Vice Admiral James Stockdale spent over seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. You already know that situation is what's commonly known as "fucked." For his own amusement, he left fake notes for his captors to find, and to further pass the time, he did logarithmic math by writing in the dust. Conclusion: math can keep you alive and relatively sane. Years later, he was asked about the hundred or so American POWs in the Hỏa Lò Prison who died before the prisoners were released in 1973. Stockdale said the ones who didn’t make it were “the optimists.” As I've been saying: expect the worst, and you can only be pleasantly surprised. This is the least scientific of the phenomena we’ve talked about today. But we wanted to leave you with it because we began this post by saying that reflecting on your mortality will leave you delirious and feeble. That’s not really true. It's also, again, not a paradox. It's a perfectly reasonable conclusion. No, it's not scientific. Designing a study to back this up would itself be a war crime. Even interviewing other former POWs is ethically questionable, as it brings up trauma. Still, I'll continue my pessimist ways, to wit: we're all going to die. |
| I distinctly remember, when computers started taking over in the 1970s, predictions of how much less work we'd have to do, how much leisure time we would be granted because of these great labor-saving devices. How we'd be able to devote the extra time to creating poetry, art, philosophy... Around the world, the four-day week is inching towards grasping distance. For many, I am living the work-life balance dream. Living in some imminent utopian future in which, in return for decades of increasing productivity for relatively little increase in pay and in light of a global epidemic of stress, the four-day work week becomes the next great shift in the way we structure work and leisure. Except that, from what I've heard, it's a shift from five 8-hour days to four 10-hour days. This is OK, say economists and employers, because actually productivity does not decline when workplaces shift. Whew. I'm so glad Holy Productivity is safe. You know what would be utopian? John Maynard Keynes predicted a two-day work week. Work two days, fish five. For the same standard of living. Like most economists, he was wrong, but it sure did sound good—to everyone, apparently, except the ones getting rich off other peoples' labor, and they're the only ones whose opinion counts.Because as that fifth day opens up, one starts to feel the weight of its infinite potential and the questions start to pile up. What will you achieve on that fifth day? Can you justify non-work on a weekday? Can you stop work seeping to that day? Maybe the only thing you need to achieve is non-achievement. Maybe you don't have to justify anything. Not so long ago, being able to pursue or enjoy leisure for its own sake was a marker of your elevated place in the social hierarchy. Now our busyness, the demands on our time, writes sociologist Jonathan Gershuny, has become a key signifier of social status. Oh, good, more proof that I'm on the very bottom of the social hierarchy. Eighty years ago philosopher Bertrand Russell, in calling for a four-hour working day, suggested “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work”. Work is its own punishment. I would steadfastly not work-work – take no calls, check no emails – but I could not escape the feeling that I must be accountable for that time. The idea of rest came with a spectre of guilt. I know this is just one person writing, but to me this sounds like a massive social problem. A 2019 study, The Rest Test, led by psychologist and BBC radio presenter Claudia Hammond, found that for many people the prospect of resting was associated with anxiety and guilt. Look, I come from a culture structured around guilt. My mom was a travel agent for guilt trips. No matter what I did as a kid, I was always "supposed" to be doing something else. I grew to hate the concept of guilt. And so, I planned my day with precision. In other words, you worked. For no purpose other than my enjoyment of it. I leave the house and, from exactly 12:15pm to 1:15pm, I go to an exercise class I love. Why would anyone need another purpose? Well, okay, I almost never do anything for just one reason. Exercise can be enjoyable and good for you. So can rest. Yet here we are, in the age of the most magnificent machines. Burnt out. It could have been different. But social attitudes tend to change slowly, if at all, and there's that continued emphasis on the need to justify your existence by producing something for others. I'm glad I got off that treadmill. To me, work was always about obtaining sufficient resources for myself that I would never have to work again. Which doesn't mean I never do things considered "work," but I do them on my own terms. And yes, I know some people find work satisfying and meaningful. I'm not ragging on that at all. People are different. But what this author talks about sounds more like neuroticism than meaning. |
| Y'all should know by now that I'm a Star Trek fan. Not enough to dress funny and go to conventions, but I appreciate the various shows and movies (mostly). But despite comments like the one I made the other day about Zefram Cochrane inventing the warp drive, I know it's fiction, mythology, and metaphor, not future reality. For one thing, I doubt very much that there are other tech-capable species in our vicinity (and there are almost certainly none that look like us but with forehead bumps), and for another... Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible? The concept of the warp drive is currently at odds with everything we know to be true about physics. And yes, I know that our understanding of physics is evolving and that lots of things that used to be considered impossible, aren't. So while some things are definitely impossible (counting to infinity, e.g.), I hesitate to give technological advancements that label. Central to science fiction, and Star Trek in particular, is the ability to travel the galaxy at speeds far faster than light via a fictional technology called a “warp drive.” What is that, and will we ever have one? Trek didn't come up with the concept; it's been around in various forms in SF for probably half as long as there's been SF (which roughly corresponds to the time frame in which we've known that matter cannot be accelerated to or past the speed of light). A provisional answer is “no.” According to the accepted laws of science, nothing can travel faster than light. That is, based on my admittedly limited knowledge, an oversimplification at best. But close enough for our purposes. The distances are so vast that interstellar travel would take lifetimes. Not if we extend our lifetimes by uploading our consciousnesses into machines... another thing that may not turn out to be possible. That makes for a boring sci-fi plot, so the creators of Star Trek invented a convenient, but imaginary, technology. Again, they didn't invent it, even conceptually. Early shows weren't even consistent in how it was supposed to work. They did, arguably, popularize it, though. According to Star Trek canon, the warp drive works by creating a “warp bubble” around the spaceship, inside of which space is literally warped. In front of the spaceship, space is compressed, while behind the vessel, it is expanded. In this way, a spaceship never travels faster than light; it merely passes through a shorter distance. The difference between "traveling faster than light" and "passing through a shorter distance" really needs more explanation here, but the article couldn't be arsed, and neither can I. Plenty of information out there, though, if you look for it. Is this realistic? Maybe. "Maybe" does a lot of heavy lifting here. In 1994, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre found a solution that distorted space in a way very similar to that originally envisioned by the creators of Star Trek. Under exactly the right conditions, it is possible to expand space behind an object and compress it in front. The Alcubierre Drive is something I've seen stuff about before. There's still a difference between something being theoretically possible, and actually attaining it. For example, from what we know about quantum mechanics, it's theoretically possible for an object of arbitrary size to suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere. The chance of this happening, though, would be akin to that of an individual winning a fair lottery... every day for a billion years. If the universe really is infinite, though, this has happened. Hell, it might be the actual origin of the universe. Doesn't mean we can make it happen. There is a problem, though. To accomplish this distortion, researchers would have to use negative energy—that is, reduce the energy of empty space to below zero. According to Einstein, a warp drive requires an impossible premise. That, the negative energy bit, is definitely a serious problem. That doesn't excuse the article's appeal to authority. Einstein was right about a great many things, but we don't just take his word for it; we do experiments to back up the theory. He was human; he was wrong about a great many things. Just ask his wife. Therefore, while scientists try to find loopholes in the conditions required for Alcubierre’s solution, most think that a warp drive will not be created this way; negative energy is a mathematical artifact and not a physical phenomenon. On the flip side of that, for a long time, people considered negative numbers to be mathematical artifacts and not representative of physical phenomena. It took a paradigm shift to start thinking of them as "real" numbers. And don't even get me started on that extension of negative numbers, complex numbers. Altogether, our current understanding of the laws of nature neither allows for faster-than-light travel nor an Alcubierre-like solution to warping space. However, those who dream of traveling the stars should not give up. Scientists do not have a full understanding of the laws of nature. So yeah, I'd hesitate to call it impossible. Within the timeframe of the Star Trek series? Unlikely. Though probably not as unlikely as that other Trek mainstay, the transporter. But that's a story for another time. I have a new episode of Strange New Worlds to watch. |
| My father always told me puns are the lowest form of humor. Then he'd proceed to make jokes like "Why did Adam laugh? Because God gave him two test tickles." No, that kind of joke takes intelligence, cleverness and agility of thought, even if it is painful to hear (or read). The lowest form of humor is the fart joke. Dad jokes rule. In almost every other context, “dad” as a prefix pretty much means “shitty,” but dad jokes are a whole different thing. Whew. Another reason to be glad I'm not a dad. For those unfamiliar with the expression, “dad jokes” generally refer to what used to just be known as jokes, puns or wordplay — generally a gag based around two similar-sounding but different terms. And I'd prefer that these witticisms not be referred to as "dad jokes," but language, like a cat, tends to do what it wants to do regardless of my wishes. Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first English dictionary and one of Britain’s most celebrated intellectuals of all time, viewed puns as the lowest form of wit. And yet, they persevere. It wasn’t always like this. “Every culture, as far as we know, has some form of wordplay,” says Attardo, who has written extensively on the subject. “Every language has syllables, and as soon as you have syllables strung in a row, you can switch them around. That’s universal.” However, he explains, this doesn’t mean all languages use it for humor. In some cultures, for instance, wordplay is used for magical, symbolic or religious purposes. Humor is magical, symbolic, and religious. But yeah, this sort of thing is true. In Japan, they have national days of observance that are entirely based on wordplay. “In the gospel, when Jesus calls Peter his rock, there is a pun in there — not in the English translation, but originally, with the Latin word petrus, meaning rock. But when Jesus does that, he’s not doing it to be hilarious and deliver a dad joke, it’s more about it all having meaning attached to it, and Peter’s role being preordained.” That stuff isn't limited to the New Testament, where the pun was originally in Greek. There's numerous wordplay in the Hebrew original texts, too. Puns, of course, rarely translate outside of their original language, so this makes parts of the Bible real head-scratchers if you only read it in English. Like, I mentioned my dad's Adam joke above. In Hebrew, adam is a word for adult male human, while adamah can be translated as soil. So the writers put a pun right there in the beginning. That, along with many other Biblical names, get lost in translation. Look for the formula "I shall call him x because y," and you're looking at a badly translated play on words. There are puns in the Latin poetry of Horace and Cicero, and Shakespeare is littered with them. At least the Shakespeare ones are moderately intelligible. “By our modern perception, that’s completely inappropriate,” says Attardo. “My guess is that a pun like that would be seen as clever and layered by audiences at the time rather than something to be laughed at.” Puns are not there to be laughed at. Almost all modern humor involves anguish, pain, suffering, or sorrow, because it's a defense against these things. But a pun only causes laughter in the narrator thereof; the listener experiences the suffering. The only form of wit generally seen as an even lower art form than dad jokes is prop comedy, which is the same thing to an even more extreme degree — you haven’t just sat down and written that material, you’ve spent time rendering it into three dimensions, you worthless clown. I'm not generally a fan of prop comedy, but no, fart jokes are still the lowest because they're too easy. But... The net result is the same — making people laugh. If you’re laughing at how crappy a joke is, you’re laughing at the joke. It worked. You might not have wanted it to, and you might consider yourself above it all, but the joke made you laugh, goddamn it. You look that beholder right in the eye. The other reason there isn’t a lot of academic literature on dad jokes is, of course, obvious. Any time anyone tries to interview a dad-joke enthusiast about the subject and says, “Hi, I’m studying how people use jokes,” they’re met with, “Hi, Studying How People Use Jokes, I’m Dad.” It is, of course, impossible to have a serious conversation about humor. But this whole thing reminds me of a pun I'm building towards in my current fantasy RPG game. In it, I'm playing a bard, someone who uses comedy, storytelling, and music more than the traditional swords or sorcery. If you've played such a game, or seen the latest D&D movie or The Witcher, you know what kind of character I'm talking about. Well, I'm going to hook him up with a lyre, which, as you know, is an ancient stringed instrument and therefore perfectly acceptable in a medieval fantasy setting. And then, when we finally face the Big Bad Boss of the plotline, I plan to hold it up as if it were a shield and taunt her by singing, "Come on, baby, fight my lyre!" After all, eventually all villains have to face the music. |
| A couple of weeks ago, I posted a Cracked piece about ideas that started as jokes: "The Step-Parent of Invention" Today's is similar, only instead of jokes, they started as a giant middle finger. Unless you’re an actual deity (in which case, greetings, Ms. Knowles), you’ve almost certainly pulled some petty shit in your day. Actual deities invented petty. Or, well, as they don't exist, we made up stories about them that projected our own penchant for pettiness upon them. Slowed to a crawl in front of a tailgater, helpfully transferred your neighbor’s dog’s poop from your yard to theirs, squeezed all your roommate’s fruit after the third day of seeing their dishes in the sink — nothing life-ruining, just a risk-free outlet for your anger. I'd like to say I've never done anything like that. But I can't. But have you ever been so annoyed, you changed the world? One person cannot change the world. Not even Beyoncé. 4. The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator I've ragged on this before: astrology for psychology nerds. It was also a fairly useless exercise, as the MBTI has been largely dismissed as pseudoscience, probably because it was invented by a stay-at-home mom with zero psychological qualifications to throw shade on her son-in-law. Hence the "petty" part. She took over entire sections of the library as she embarked on a lifelong study of exactly what factors made her son-in-law suck so much, which her daughter finished after her death, which might have stung for poor Mr. Myers if he had any capacity for emotion. Both of my former mothers-in-law had their issues with me, but not enough to ruin the lives of everyone who ever applied for a job. 3. The Automated Telephone Exchange Let's be real: this was going to get invented eventually anyway. Back in the early days of the telephone, you had to call the operator, who would then put your call through to your mom or your side piece or whoever. And then, if they were bored, they'd listen in. You think internet surveillance is invasive? Ha. They knew who was calling who at all times, and they might even decide for you who you were calling, which must have been frustrating for people who asked for their side piece and got their mom. That was a problem Almon Brown Strowger kept running into in 1878. He was an undertaker living in Kansas City, and he just couldn’t figure out why his business was, uh, not as lively as it could be. You want to piss off the undertaker, it's your funeral. It turned out one of the local telephone operators was the wife of another undertaker, and every time someone called for Strowger, she patched them through to her husband instead. As evil plans go, that one's rather amusing. Of course, when the operators were replaced by machines, few of them likely found that amusing. There's also a nice plot twist, but I gotta save something for the article. 2. The Lamborghini This one, I knew about. What can I say? I don't talk about cars much, but I retain some of Teen Me's fascination with them. Not going to quote this one; the article is funnier than I can be. 1. The Dishwasher I've said before (including in that entry I linked above) that while necessity may be the mother of invention, laziness is the milkman. A lot of labor-saving devices came into being not out of pure necessity, but a burning desire to do less work, which of course is a worthy goal that unfortunately only means you end up filling all the time you saved with other busy work, instead of writing poetry or doing philosophy or whatever the labor-saving advocates imagined our current utopia to consist of. Today, it’s a mark of being Kardashian-level spoiled to not even know how to use a dishwasher, but it was invented by a socialite essentially as an insult to the help. But this one, if a joke site can be believed, wasn't even to save the inventor time, but to diss the servants. The socialite in question was Josephine Cochrane, the wife of a wealthy businessman living in Illinois in the mid-1800s. Must run in the family; their distant descendant, Zephram Cochrane, will invent the warp drive, the ultimate time-saving device. In summary, the dishwasher was invented because servants tended to chip the china. Which is ironic, because rare is the dishwasher machine today that doesn't chip whatever is banging around in there. I don't know about you, but if I were a servant, I'd chip the china sometimes just to be petty. |
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