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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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| While one should never get their legal advice from an online comedy site, you might like this Cracked article about laws. Yeah, I don't know if these are unique. And it's not like other countries don't have stupid laws, too. Hell, some of them still punish you for blasphemy. The United States is a pretty weird country. Which one isn't? Oh, yeah, Canada. Never mind. Even though what’s supposed to be the famous, usually screamed tenet of America is freedom, the actual freedoms we do and don’t have are cherry-picked and puzzling. Yeah, right. "Freedom." So it’s unsurprising that there’s a whole lot of regulations and laws in the U.S. that haven’t fallen far from the apple tree — at best confusing, at worst fully oxymoronic. Or just moronic. Here are five American laws that are likely, in the eyes of other modern governments, incredibly dumb. I always liked those lists of weird laws still on the books, like needing a license to wear penny loafers, or whatever. These aren't those, though. 5. Female Lawmakers’ Backwards Dress Codes Another point on the high school side of the scale is the fact that, despite being our chief legislative body, Congress still enforces a fucking dress code. And like most dress codes, it’s a whole lot more draconian when it comes to the female members. That's idiotic, sure, but then there are still countries where "female lawmaker" is semantically and legally impossible. Sure, Britain isn’t much looser, but they also think “fanny” is a cuss, so is that such a win? That's what I've been saying. 4. Kinder Surprise Eggs Banned Another common feel in American law is the conflict between a country that’s supposed to be advocating for freedom above all, while seemingly convinced that every American has the death drive of a baby lustily staring at the forbidden liquids beneath the sink. One place this pops out is in the absence of the Kinder Surprise Egg in American stores. Meanwhile, far more hazardous products remain legal. You know what I mean. 3. Weird Real Egg Laws Right, because no one else has weird laws about food. 2. Pharmaceutical Advertising Everywhere else foolishly believes that if you need medication, your doctor probably isn’t relying on you to provide suggestions. It doesn’t help that the advertising is just as predatory as usual, mostly suggesting that if you don’t fix your allergies, your child will spit on you and leave you to cry in a musty robe while they go to the park to play with their other parent, who they now like more. I despise almost all advertising, and it is kinda strange to push prescription medicine on the TV, but there are worse things to advertise. Homeopathy, e.g. 1. Sex With A Porcupine And I'm done with the internet for today. |
| It's been a while since I've ragged on the "time is an illusion" nonsense, so here we go again. Despite my issues with the wording, it's an interesting article with some things I hadn't read before. Obviously, I can't do the whole thing justice here; that's what the link is for. America's official time is kept at a government laboratory in Boulder, Colo., and according to the clock at the entrance, I was seven minutes behind schedule. Not if time is an illusion, you weren't. NIST broadcasts the time to points across the country. It's fed through computer networks and cellphone towers to our personal gadgets, which tick in perfect synchrony. For various definitions of "perfect." "A lot of us grow up being fed this idea of time as absolute," says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire. But Prescod-Weinstein says the time we're experiencing is a social construct. That's misleading at best. Sure, the way we slice time up into hours, minutes, and seconds is purely arbitrary (though it does have some basis in observation), but time's going to do its thing regardless of whether there's a clock to measure it. The orbits of the planets, for instance; they make an effective clock if you know how to read it. How can I claim to know better than a theoretical physicist? It's the "theoretical" part. The smallest "things" we know of, quarks and electrons, don't experience... well, anything. But where time is concerned, subatomic particles follow laws that don't take much notice of time, if any. From that perspective, okay, time isn't fundamental, and that's the framework a theoretical physicist works in. But for everyday stuff? Time is real. The sun rises in the east (though the directions are also a social construct) and sets in the west. There is darkness, and then there is light. The consensus I've seen is that it's a bulk property of matter, related to entropy. You know what else is a bulk property? Temperature. But there aren't pseudo-mystics floating around airily proclaiming that temperature is an illusion. Any that do need to be shipped to Antarctica in a pair of shorts to see if they can wish temperature away. Real time is actually something quite different. In some of the odder corners of the Universe, space and time can stretch and slow — and sometimes even break down completely. You're going to claim time is a human construct, and then, in the exact same paragraph, use the phrase "real time?" Yes, that last quoted bit is correct, to the best of my knowledge. The thing is, though, we know exactly how time stretches, slows, and breaks down under acceleration (including acceleration due to gravity). There are equations for it. To me, an "illusion" wouldn't have that quality. Space is also different from one point to another, but only the most bearded philosophers claim space is an illusion. For many people, this unruly version of time is "radical," she says. It is, by definition and equations, ruly. Not unruly. Yes, it seems odd to us because it's outside our normal experience. But there's plenty of observational confirmation of the way time changes at different locations. By averaging a subset of the 21 clocks together, NIST has created a system that can count the time to within one quadrillionth of a second. That means the government's clock can keep time to within a second over the course of about 30 million years. At which point it'll be moot, because the Earth's rotation will have changed, and the second is based on the minute, which is based on the hour, which is based on the time it takes for the Earth to make a complete rotation during the current epoch. I expect the second will remain the same, provided we last long enough to keep measuring time. But the length of the day will gradually increase, unless something catastrophic happens. The time from this lab is used to run our lives. It says when planes take off and land, when markets open and close, when schoolchildren arrive at class. It controls computer networks, navigation tools and much, much more. And? I'm as lazy as anyone, but I still want to keep track of time if I'm doing something or meeting with someone. Governments around the world aren't just providing the time as an altruistic service to citizens, Prescod-Weinstein argues. It's about keeping society organized and efficient. It's about increasing economic productivity. Bit of a stretch, in my opinion. "Capitalism sucks, and I think a lot of people's relationship to why time is not cool, is structured by the resource pressures that we feel," she says. So she has an agenda. I'm not going to get into the "capitalism sucks" debate, except to say that, well, we've tried some other systems, and as Churchill said, it's the worst economic system, except for all the others. I do hold out some hope that we'll find a replacement, à la Star Trek, or improve it so it's not so dehumanizing as we pursue peak efficiency in the name of Holy Productivity, and pretend that infinite growth is possible. So I can relate to that agenda. But really, none of that says anything about the concept or reality of time itself. Wibbly wobbly timey wimey I can't hate an article that has a Blink reference. True time is actually much more flexible than most people realize, Prescod-Weinstein says. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, space and time are tied together, and space-time can bend and curve. Sure, but that has no practical value for us as we slog through our daily lives. In places where gravity is very strong, time as we understand it can break down completely. At the edge of black holes, for example, the powerful gravitational pull slows time dramatically, says Prescod-Weinstein. And upon crossing the black hole's point of no return, known as its event-horizon, she says space and time flip. I've seen that finding before, and it's got lots of theory supporting it. Obviously, there's no way to experimentally verify it. Again, no practical use for us. Not yet, anyway. The Universe is expanding, and because of entropy, energy and matter are becoming more and more evenly spread out across the ever-growing void. In its final state, the Universe may end up as an inert cloud of energy and matter, where everything is evenly distributed. Yeah, I've referred to that before. They call it the heat death of the Universe, because there will be no more heat transfer, because everything is already at maximum entropy. As I noted, time is probably the result of the one-way direction of entropy. No entropy change means no time. That's if our current cosmological models are correct, which is always an active question. What this article fails to mention is that this is not an imminent existential threat. We're talking about something like 10100 years from now, which is a number so large that you don't understand it. Hell, I barely understand it, myself. As a comparison, there are fewer than 10100 atoms in the entire observable universe. That exact number is called a googol, incidentally. Not to be confused with Google, who either deliberately or accidentally misspelled it. Anyway. So time, as we understand it, has some really big problems, but it also has some really tiny ones, too. In fact, some scientists who study the microscopic interactions of fundamental particles are questioning the idea of time itself. Yes, we know, fundamental particle interactions are time-reversible. As I said up there, time is a bulk property, to the best of our knowledge. Well, I've banged on long enough. There is, as I noted, a lot more stuff in the actual article. If you have time to read it. |
| I never sausage a thing. Which Hot Dog Brand Is Best? A Blind Taste Test of Oscar Mayer, Hebrew National, and More  Because your summer BBQs deserve the best. (Or at the very least, not the worst.) Dammit! It was sitting right there. They could have said "not the wurst," but no, they had to play it straight. Do you know the difference between sausages, wieners, frankfurters, and hot dogs? If, like me, you hadn’t ever really thought about it and assumed they were all pretty much the same, I’m thrilled to tell you that you’re wrong. Because of course we are. It's been many years since I've actually eaten a hot dog, frankfurter, or weiner; anything requiring a hot dog bun. At home, I got really tired of the mismatch between number of franks and number of buns in their respective packages, and while out, there are other foods that appeal to me more. Not to mention I know what they're made of, but that doesn't stop me from eating breakfast sausages. So, unlike those two other staples of American haute cuisine, hamburgers and pizza, I don't have a dog in this fight. Pun intended, as usual. I just relished the article and found it amusing. Regardless of which type of sausage is your favorite, there’s one that screams summer louder than the others: hot dogs. Our staff tasters were sure childhood standbys like Oscar Mayer and Hebrew National would sweep the competition but, as always, the results of our taste tests are full of surprises. Naturally, I enjoyed hot dogs when I was a kid. Our cylindrical delicacy of choice was, unsurprisingly, the Hebrew National brand. When those were unavailable for whatever reason, the replacement still had to be made of cow, because my mom tried to keep a kosher house as best she could out in the boonies. To cut down on variables, we boiled and tasted only all-beef hot dogs. So this is why I picked this article to go into my queue. And though we offered up buns, ketchup, and mustard, most testers boldly chose to taste their dogs plain. This makes sense from a pure taste-testing perspective, but out in the wild, you're looking for a whole experience, including bun and condiments. I believe that the right choice of bun influences that experience. Would you taste-test pizza without the crust? As for condiments, in a taste-test, you at least want them to be consistent across all the samples. And finally, I know they didn't do this in Chicago, because in Chicago, they track down anyone putting ketchup on a hot dog and run them out of town on a rail. In the end we blind tasted seven of the most popular brands and judged them on flavor, casing snap, and the satisfying firmness of the meat each bite. Phrasing! Of course, for full effect, you'll need to go to the article for details. I'm just highlighting things here. The Biggest Loser: Oscar Mayer Quelle surprise. Their dogs are terrible. Unflinchingly Flaccid: Ball Park I'm starting to think this author has issues. Not because they don't like Ball Park. That's normal. It's just, again, phrasing. Happily Herby: Hebrew National Here's the thing: it's hard to be objective about food (or drinks) during a taste test. Taste is, well, a matter of taste. Beer, for example, is highly personal; some love *shudder* IPAs, while I prefer darker, less hoppy brews. For colas, Coke will, for me, always be far superior to Pepsi. And Hebrew National is always going to be my Platonic ideal of hot dogs, even if I don't eat them anymore, because it was our go-to brand when I was a kid. The two that beat it on the list, Sabrett and Nathan's, were only available to Kid Me on trips to New York City. Either they hadn't yet expanded distribution to the rest of the country, or we just didn't get them in our off-the-beaten-path area. In both cases, I always wished it was HN. So, in the end, you'll have to make your own taste test if you care to determine which is best. Or be like most people and just eat whatever's cheapest; this is why many Americans have no sense of taste. But you like what you like and it's not my decision. One final note: there is perennial debate over whether a hot dog, nestled as nature intended in its bun, is a sandwich. I've heard even a Supreme Court justice once weighed in on the matter (RBG, if it matters), though in an unofficial capacity. This is, ultimately, a categorization problem, like whether the Blue Ridge are actually mountains, or Pluto's planetary status. So there's no official answer. Categories are, in the end, a social construct. However, when you consider that the hot dog is generally served with the split side of the bun facing upwards so that the toppings don't fall out—something you never do, and can never do, with a sandwich—and that the bun itself is always solid at the bottom, barring accidents, and also given its origins as handheld street food, there is only one True Conclusion to which someone can arrive: A hot dog isn't a sandwich. It's a taco. |
| Nothing is forever. I didn't fact-check these, so beware. If true, there are some on this list I'd never heard of. As per normal, I'm not copying all of them here. 1. Ansault pear Unlike other items on this list, the Ansault pear appeared relatively recently. First cultivated in Angers, France, in 1863, the fruit was prized for its delectable flesh. Angers, France? That's not Nice. Irregular trees and the rise of commercial farming contributed to the fruit's demise. Seems to me that, if we really wanted to, we could recreate this one. Fruit varieties are generally made by some sort of cloning or hybridization. 3. Auroch You may have heard aurochs mentioned in Game of Thrones, but this creature doesn’t belong in the same category as dragons. The real cattle species was domesticated 10,000 years ago in the early days of agriculture. They were big (“little below the elephant in size,” according to Julius Casear) and leaner than modern cows. Apparently these lasted longer than I thought, all the way to the 17th century. Here, the article leaves out an interesting bit about the aurochs: it was so important, so integral to developing civilizations, that the pictogram for it became a letter. Phoenicians called it aleph. The Hebrew script still does. In Greek, alpha. We know it as the letter A. 5. Dodo Dutch sailors first visited the island chain of Mauritius in 1598, and less than two centuries later the archipelago's native dodo went extinct. Sailors relied on the birds as sustenance during long voyages at sea, but that isn't the primary reason they died out; habitat and the introduction of invasive species like rats and pigs ultimately wiped out the animal. Pretty sure they mean "habitat loss," not "habitat." It's my understanding that it was fairly common, at the time, for people of the European variety to believe that God put all the other animals (and plants, etc.) on Earth for our benefit, and would never allow one to become extinct. That turns out not to be the case. 6. Steller’s sea cow German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller identified the Steller's sea cow around the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea in 1741. Growing up to 30 feet long, it was significantly larger than the sea cows alive today. Cue Hindenburg disaster narrator: "Oh, the huge manatee!" 7. Mammoth Wooly mammoth meat was an important component of the diets of our earliest human ancestors. We ate so much of them that hunting may have contributed to their extinction around 2000 BCE (though climate change was likely a bigger factor). So, apparently, there were mammoths wandering around at the same time as there were pyramids in Egypt. Not in the same place, though. 8. Taliaferro apple Thomas Jefferson cultivated Taliaferro apples at Monticello. In an 1814 letter to his granddaughter, Jefferson said the small fruit produced "unquestionably the finest cyder we have ever known, and more like wine than any liquor I have ever tasted which was not wine." Including this one in my commentary for literal local flavor. But also because many people might not be aware that the Virginia pronunciation of Taliaferro is, inexplicably, Tolliver. 9. Great auk Modern humans primarily killed great auks for their down, leading to the species’s extinction in the mid-19th century, but prior to that they were hunted for dinner. I knew about this one because I had an English teacher in high school who loved to point out awkward sentences in his students' compositions by writing a big red AWK and circling the offending phrase. He called it the "Great Awk." It should surprise no one that I had a truly stupendous Great Awk collection. Anyway, there's obviously more at the link, and they're all interesting, even if, as is the case with the passenger pigeon entry, some of them are already well known. |
| Today, we're going all the way back to June of 2020 for an article about quantum mechanics: "Something about Nothing" . Now, don't freak out; it's not a technical treatise in any way. The article referenced there (really a book promotion masquerading as an interview masquerading as an article) is a year older than that, but it's still up and can be found here, with the misleading title of "Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics."As I've noted, the main reasons I do these retrospectives are to see if there have been any updates to the material covered, and to elucidate how my own views on the subject may have evolved. I don't follow science news all that rigorously; that is, I'll read an article or a book, or watch a video, here and there, but it's not like I delve into much depth. But the one thing that comes to mind is that, recently, there was a lot of buzz about a Nobel Prize given to some scientists for their work on quantum entanglement. Same as with everything else related to quantum theory, people got that stuff wrong, too. I don't mean the prize-winning scientists, who presumably had really tight results, but the way it was reported on made it look like the old "Einstein was Wrong" crowing, with an emphasis on how quantum entanglement means something travels faster than light. It does not. The light speed barrier should more properly be termed the information speed barrier, and quantum entanglement does not, at least with our current understanding, imply the transmission of information faster than light. We can't use it to send instantaneous messages to Pluto, for instance. Mostly, from what I can tell, the usefulness is limited to the arcane workings of quantum computers. Perhaps there are other uses, or will be in the future, but mostly the prize was about experimental confirmation of a theory. None of which really negates anything in the article I featured, as far as I can tell. In that entry, I said: I've always been of the opinion that anyone who claims to have figured out quantum mechanics is lying, at the very least to themself. Nothing about that has changed. But I do want to go back to that original article to note something I apparently missed the first time around: Horgan: Good choice. What is the point, in our scientific age, of philosophy? Albert: I'm not sure I see the connection. It's like asking, “What is the point, in our scientific age, of ice cream?" People like it. People - or some people - want to understand how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together. And it happens (moreover) that the business of trying to figure that out has had obvious and enormous and innumerable consequences for the history of the world. And if the thought is that what goes on in university science departments has lately somehow taken that function over, then that's just clearly and wildly wrong - and the fact that it's wrong, as I explained in my answer to your previous question, was part of the reason why I moved from a science department to a philosophy department. Here, I think both people missed the mark. Ice cream has nothing to do with science (except in the sense that everything does and that, reportedly, Einstein was a big fan). But—and I might have mentioned this before, but I don't remember—philosophy guides science, and science informs philosophy. "Science" isn't a body of knowledge; it's a method. The scientific method is, at base, philosophy. It's philosophy that works, in that it's been shown to get useful results, unlike a lot of the mental self-pleasuring some philosophers do. But philosophy also has at least one other function in science, and that's to limit the lengths to which we'll go to investigate some hypothesis. To note a basic example, in biology, animal testing is a thing. What limits animal testing isn't science itself, but ethics, which is a branch of philosophy. You can argue that the restrictions go too far, or, conversely, that they don't go far enough and maybe we shouldn't be doing animal testing at all. But by doing so, you're not doing science, you're doing philosophy. As for "science informs philosophy," well, the thing about philosophy is that you can build entire logical edifices on the foundation of a false premise. One need look no further than the convolutions of a flat-earther to see what I'm talking about here, but, in general, if you're going to draw conclusions, it's best to start with a solid and well-tested premise, such as "the earth is basically round" or "gravity is an attractive force between masses." Sometimes, when you do that, you might find a contradiction, or a paradox. That might lead to a revised premise, and that's okay. My point is that the universe doesn't support our penchant for putting everything into neat little boxes. There's no sharp dividing line between, say, biology and chemistry. The boundary between our selves and our environment can get murky, too, and does so every time we take a breath, or eat, or shit. So it is with science and philosophy. Though we were doing philosophy way before the beginnings of science as a discipline (physics was originally termed "natural philosophy"), it often led to some really wrong conclusions. Still does, of course. Okay, enough of that. I guess I just had to defend why I bang on about both those things in here, when I'm not making dick jokes. And sometimes when I am. |
| From the "don't believe everything you hear" department (courtesy of The Guardian): Chocolate doesn’t cause acne – but carrots do help you see in the dark: the best and worst health myths and wisdom True or false: cheese gives you bad dreams and oysters are aphrodisiacs? We investigate good, bad and mad health advice Folk "wisdom" usually isn't wisdom, but mythology. People have always had a problem confusing correlation with causation. Sometimes, though, like a sightless person throwing darts randomly and hitting a bullseye, it turns out to be right—at least provisionally. How do you tell the difference? Science, of course. I won't copy all of them here; there are quite a few. Just hitting some highlights that I wanted to comment on. Chicken soup helps cure colds and flu Works best if prepared by a Jewish mother. Okay, no, that's a joke. But I'm pretty sure the canned kind is going to be inferior to the homemade variety. I'm wary of the word "cure" in the title; however, this falls into the "can't hurt and might help" category. Unless you're vegan, in which case, good luck. Anyway, I've banged on about chicken soup in here before. The short version is, if it makes you feel better, and you like it, great. Chocolate causes acne This one's labeled "false." As with much of "nutrition science," the jury's still out. An apple a day keeps the doctor away Also labeled "false," but only on a technicality: you're going to get sick eventually, no matter what you do or don't do. But, as the article notes, it's not going to hurt you to eat a damn apple. And it's admittedly a catchy rhyme. Going out with wet hair gives you a cold "False." Duh. Colds are caused by viruses. Viruses that you pick up from *shudder* people. Carrots help you to see in the dark The article points to "true," but I have to say, not to the extent that mythology would indicate. This nonsense started, if I remember correctly, in England during WWII, when, not wanting "zee Germans" to know about the Allies' sophisticated (for the time) radar, they attributed early warning of aerial attacks to people eating carrots and therefore seeing the impending threat better in the dark. But again, as with apples, it's not like eating a few carrots is going to hurt. Cracking your knuckles will give you arthritis This one's false, and I've known that for some time, but goddamn, it's annoying. So if you use it to scare kids into not cracking their knuckles, I can understand that. I crack my knuckles all the time. It takes up to seven years to digest swallowed chewing gum Another false one intended to scare children straight. Garlic under your pillow aids sleep Labeled "false," but I'd call it true, if you're frightened of vampires; clearly, you're going to sleep easier if you know you're protected. It also keeps other people away because of the smell, so you get a better night's sleep. Still, when it comes to garlic, I'm too busy eating it to put it under my pillow. Urine relieves jellyfish stings I'm including this one in my commentary because I'm still hearing this nonsense sometimes. I suspect it got started by someone with a pee fetish, which is way more common than I ever realized. Oh, yeah, and it's false. Cheese gives you bad dreams I remember the first time I heard of this one. It was in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, as Scrooge attributed his nocturnal visitations to possibly having eaten cheese. As the article notes, dairy products might actually help with sleep. Again, good luck, vegans. Probiotics support your gut health This is the last one on the list, and it doesn't surprise me in the yeast—er, I mean, least—that it's not entirely true. The magical benefits of probiotics are mostly marketing gimmicks. Big surprise. |
| A little more depth than usual, today, but I'll try to make it worth your time. Descartes and the Discovery of the Mind-Body Problem The French philosopher René Descartes is often credited with discovering the mind-body problem, a mystery that haunts philosophers to this day. The reality is more complicated than that. Descartes was, of course, more than a philosopher. Probably most famous for "I think, therefore, I am," he was also a scientist and mathematician (he's the guy who decided it would be cool to represent points on a two-dimensional grid with x and y axes, ever after known as the Cartesian coordinate system from his name). And he had the best hair of any philosopher. Newton's was arguably better, but his focus was mostly science, math, and alchemy; plus, I suspect his was a wig. Consider the human body, with everything in it, including internal and external organs and parts — the stomach, nerves and brain, arms, legs, eyes, and all the rest. Yeah, I know what you were thinking about with "all the rest." Even with all this equipment, especially the sensory organs, it is surprising that we can consciously perceive things in the world that are far away from us. Eh, not really. Most animals can do that. Kind of necessary for avoiding predators and finding prey. For example, I can open my eyes in the morning and see a cup of coffee waiting for me on the bedside table. There it is, a foot away, and I am not touching it, yet somehow it is making itself manifest to me. How does it happen that I see it? How does the visual system convey to my awareness or mind the image of the cup of coffee? "Even more importantly, I live alone!" I am conscious of the cup, we might even say, though it is not clear what this means and how it differs from saying that I see the cup. Everyone treats consciousness like it's gotta be this massive, complex thing, but if it turns out to be really simple, I'll laugh my ass off (from beyond the grave, if the dualists turn out to be right). How did my neurons contact me or my mind or consciousness, and stamp there the image of the cup of coffee for me? It’s a mystery. That mystery is the mind-body problem. By this point in the article, the author could have, you know, drank the coffee instead. Such are the perils of philosophy: your coffee gets cold while you wax philosophical about it. Our mind-body problem is not just a difficulty about how the mind and body are related and how they affect one another. It is also a difficulty about how they can be related and how they can affect one another. Plot twist: they're the same thing. According to Descartes, matter is essentially spatial, and it has the characteristic properties of linear dimensionality. Things in space have a position, at least, and a height, a depth, and a length, or one or more of these. Hence, Cartesian coordinates (extended into a third dimension). Mental entities, on the other hand, do not have these characteristics. We cannot say that a mind is a two-by-two-by-two-inch cube or a sphere with a two-inch radius, for example, located in a position in space inside the skull. This is not because it has some other shape in space, but because it is not characterized by space at all. *bong hit* duuuuuude. Okay, but in seriousness, I believe this next bit is the actual crux of the matter under discussion: What is characteristic of a mind, Descartes claims, is that it is conscious, not that it has shape or consists of physical matter. Unlike the brain, which has physical characteristics and occupies space, it does not seem to make sense to attach spatial descriptions to it. In short, our bodies are certainly in space, and our minds are not, in the very straightforward sense that the assignation of linear dimensions and locations to them or to their contents and activities is unintelligible. That this straightforward test of physicality has survived all the philosophical changes of opinion since Descartes, almost unscathed, is remarkable. I don't know about that last sentence. There are philosophers that will tell you, with straight faces (if you can see said faces behind their beards) that what we know as matter is an illusion, and mind is the only thing that's real. Oh, wait, that's from Descartes, too. Descartes is untroubled by the fact that, as he has described them, mind and matter are very different: One is spatial and the other not, and therefore one cannot act upon the other. And yet, one does act upon the other, as we prove every moment of every day, so if it didn't trouble him, it's not going to trouble me, either. This is analogous to Zeno's paradoxes. The way they're formulated, nothing can move, and two people can never get close enough to kiss, and no one would ever be able to enter a room. All of Zeno's paradoxes were later resolved by calculus and limit theory (which came along a generation after Descartes and built on his work), but I mean that in a philosophical sense, when your philosophy doesn't mesh with reality, it's not reality that's wrong; it's your philosophy.Descartes is surely right about this. The “nature” of a baked Alaska pudding, for instance, is very different from that of a human being, since one is a pudding and the other is a human being — but the two can “act on each other” without difficulty, for example when the human being consumes the baked Alaska pudding and the baked Alaska in return gives the human being a stomachache. Okay, that was legitimately funny. The difficulty, however, is not merely that mind and body are different. It is that they are different in such a way that their interaction is impossible because it involves a contradiction. I would say: an apparent contradiction. Again, it just means that our understanding of one or the other is faulty. My money's on "mind." Mind is consciousness, which has no extension or spatial dimension, and matter is not conscious, since it is completely defined by its spatial dimensions and location. Unless you subscribe to the panpsychism philosophy, which is that all matter has some rudimentary consciousness. (I do not, and have banged on about it at length in previous entries.) Was there really no mind-body problem before Descartes and his debate with his critics in 1641? Of course, long before Descartes, philosophers and religious thinkers had spoken about the body and the mind or soul, and their relationship. Plato, for example, wrote a fascinating dialogue, the Phaedo, which contains arguments for the survival of the soul after death, and for its immortality. I begin to see the problem. It starts with a false premise: that the mind, or soul, exists independently of the body and can survive the body's demise. This is like believing that a candle's light can survive the snuffing of the candle. No. Except in the metaphorical sense, as those who saw the candle's flame can remember it. What happens, if anything, for example, when we decide to do even such a simple thing as to lift up a cup and take a sip of coffee? Well, after spending all your time philosophizing about it, that's when you discover it's cold. And I'm still not clear on how it appeared on your bedside table to begin with. Anyway, I get around all this by understanding that the mind is a construct of the physical body. But what do I know? I'm not a philosopher. |
| I've been told that the source for today's amusing link (The Daily Mash, basically The Onion but British) is blocked in non-UK areas. Obviously, it's not blocked for me; there are ways around location-blocking. But if that's too much work, I'll understand. Obviously, the link contains swear words, and would probably be 18+ on WDC. BRITAIN leads the world in swearing, until British people attempt to say things that Americans would call ‘cuss words’. I was under the impression that "cuss word" is pretty much a Southern thing ("cuss" being a mangling of "curse" as "y'all" is a mangling of "you all"), but I wouldn't expect Brits to understand that nuance any more than I'd expect a Yank to know the difference between a Yorkie and Mancunian accent. Asshole Given that we in the UK already have the vastly superior phrase ‘arsehole’, there’s really no need to be pronouncing the word ‘ass’ at all. On this point, I can agree. "Arse" is indeed vastly superior in most instances. Motherf**ker Just call him a wanker, it’ll sound better. Here, I have to disagree. Not that it wouldn't sound better; it definitely would, no matter what your accent. But "m-f'er" and "wanker" are two different insults with two entirely different purposes, coming from two completely different takes on sexual practices. Also, the former is far more versatile, being applicable to a much wider variety of situations than merely accusing someone of incest. Douchebag ...It never sounds right coming out of a British mouth... Phrasing! Also, I suspect it doesn't work in England because it's too obviously French. And "douche" is a perfectly legitimate French word that translates to "shower," as in the kind you take in the morning to get yourself clean for the day. Darn Even our most pathetic swearwords are infinitely superior to theirs. Except, and I must emphasiz(s)e this to keep my US passport, for m-f'er. Pussy Whether used to convey the fact that you think someone is weak or a pathetic way to refer to a woman’s genitalia, British people really can’t pull this off. Right, like "fanny" is any better. And the article specifically claims British ownership of "twat," which is obviously wrong. There's more explanation at the link, if you can view it. If not, just remember it's because of those darn arsehole douche wankers on the other side of the pond wanting to keep their comedy to themselves. |
| When I was a kid, whenever my mom would get exasperated with me (often), she cursed me with "Just wait until you have kids!" That was very effective in ensuring that I wouldn't have kids. I wouldn't want to deal with anyone remotely like I was. As the owner of Childfree Millennial TikTok, Instagram and YouTube accounts, Munoz is one of a growing number of influencers producing content designed to validate why they never want to have kids. Much as I despise TicTac, it's about time someone provided a counterbalance to the insipid mommy bloggers. “The number-one thing that I always say when people ask me why I'm child-free – it's because I don't have a desire to have children,” says Munoz, a small-business owner from Kansas, US. I mean, as reasons go, that's a compelling one. I never do (or don't do) anything for just one reason, so that bit at the top was just the beginning for me. There was also the 1980 Presidential election, which I think is when I realized my country was doomed. In one of her other recent posts, she jokes, “if you have baby fever take a nap, if you enjoyed that nap don’t have kids”. Credit where credit is due, that's a great one. I always called it "baby rabies" though. Rhymes are more memorable. While deciding against having children is nothing new, a trend for owning the ‘child-free’ label and discussing that choice more openly is picking up pace. Oh, come on now, we were discussing this sort of thing in online forums even before social media was a thing. The term ‘child-free’ has existed since the early 1900s, although it wasn’t until the 1970s that feminists began using it more widely, as a way of denoting women who were voluntarily childless as a distinct group. Oh, bite my ass. It's not just women. Sure, the social consequences are different for men, but some of us don't want to be saddled with all it entails to be a dad. To be clear: I'm not talking about the assholes who have kids and then abandon them. That's not being childfree; that's being irresponsible. However, most academic research has typically “lumped all people who don’t have children into the same group,” explains Elizabeth Hintz, an assistant professor in communication at the University of Connecticut, US, who’s studied perceptions of child-free identities. This doesn’t reflect the very different experiences and feelings of child-free and childless people, she says, and means there’s a lack of long-term comparative data looking specifically at either group. Which is another important point: people who do want kids, and can't have them, have my sympathy. Hell, my parents were in that group (be careful what you wish for). People who want kids and have them, well, that's great; they've achieved their desire. Then there's the people who don't want kids and have them anyway, through "accident" or social pressure, and that can be a problem. In any case, there's a world of difference between childfree (I drop the hyphen on purpose, but I suppose the BBC has a style guide to adhere to) and childless. In the US, a 2021 Pew Research Center study showed some 44% of non-parents aged 18 to 49 don’t think they will have children, up from 37% in 2018. More than half listed their main reason as “don’t want to have children” rather than more circumstantial factors such as medical issues or not wanting to raise a child without having a partner. In England and Wales, a 2020 YouGov study suggested that more than half of British 35-to-44-year-olds who haven’t had kids never plan on doing so. Those are pretty high numbers, but I suppose they seem inflated because the base group is people who already weren't parents. However, in my opinion, "don't want to have children" just kicks the question can down the road. Not that anyone is obligated to give a reason. If someone asks me "why don't you eat eggplant?" I just say "Because I don't like it," and the conversation usually ends there. But the way society is, one is tempted to ask "why don't you want to have children?" And the answers can be all over the place. Personally, I often cite the rise of fascism, environmental degradation (a lower population would ameliorate some of that), a moral obligation to not bring new life into a decaying world, being unable to afford it, and my love of being able to sleep whenever I want. Some call it "selfish," but I can't think of anything more selfish than wanting your precious genes to somehow continue, or expecting someone to automatically care for you in your old age. A lot of those reasons are echoed there in the article, but, again, all women. Another burgeoning online community is We Are Childfree, run by British-born Zoë Noble and her partner James Glazebrook, who are both in their early 40s, and live in Berlin. Finally, a dude. At least I'm assuming based on the traditionally masculine name. All I mean by that is, well, representation is a good thing. Munoz’s content has frequently attracted harsh online comments from those who’ve disparaged her choices as being “anti-child” or “selfish”, or from followers who simply don’t believe she could find her lifestyle fulfilling. “A lot of parents just don't understand that it was a choice. And so, they see it as an attack on their choice of having children,” she says. “They immediately go on the defence mode and tell you, ‘oh, but you're going to regret it’ and ‘you're going to die alone’, and ‘who's going to take care of you when you're older?’ and ‘you'll never know true love’.” I have, of course, heard all those things, myself. I can only imagine it must be worse for women, who, historically, have faced even more pressure to reproduce. All I can say is, different people have different priorities. Just like in my last entry, on the topic of sleep schedules, I'm not criticizing others' decisions. I'm not one of those voluntary human extinction people, just, to borrow a phrase, pro-choice. Hintz points out that much of the criticism hurled at child-free advocates tends to be steeply gendered. “Reproductive decision making has always been a burden placed on women more so than their partners,” she says. “And motherhood and femininity are so closely intertwined as well, so that is also, I think, a part of it.” As a result, this means there’s still often more pressure on women than men to follow a traditional “life script” and start a family, says Hintz, even in Western countries that have made great strides towards equality. So the article acknowledges what I've been saying. Still, it generally takes two to make a child (even if one of them is just a donor), so stop with the double standards, already. Practical and financial issues are also covered, including how to plan for retirement as a non-parent. “There's a lot of fear of getting older and ‘who's going to take care of me’ and ‘what is my future going to look like’? Those are legitimate concerns, but I offer this: last I checked, which was a while ago, it costs something like half a million dollars to raise one kid to adulthood, and that's not including any costs of higher education. It may be lower for subsequent offspring, but my point is that if you're earning income and have some discipline, you can invest that money, instead, and use it for long-term care. O’Connor says it’s important to point out that most child-free advocates “are very pro-choice for everyone”, and don’t have the goal of “convincing people to be child-free” or “trying to recruit for the community”. Just re-emphasizing this so people don't get defensive. O’Connor strongly agrees that the media has an important role to play moving forward. “There's a lack of positive representation of what being child-free or childless looks like in society,” she says. “We don’t have in the wider media, in TV shows and in film, older people living just happy content, child-free lives.” There's a reason for that beyond enforcing social norms: in entertainment, drama and conflict are key (as we all know as writers). Hell, one of the best superhero shows of the past few years is Superman and Lois, and how do the writers create drama and conflict? Clark and Lois have teenage sons. There are also potentially world-shattering villains, as befits a show about Superman, but those aren't nearly as relatable. Anyone can relate to dealing with kids, even if they don't have any, because they were, once, kids. Happiness and contentment are great, but they can make for shitty plots. “More and more articles are coming out about people not having kids … and seeing more accounts pop up, more channels being created on YouTube, it’s so refreshing,” she says. “I’m not discriminatory to people who have kids. I have a lot of friends in my life who are parents. But I just love that people are now thinking a little bit deeper about parenthood, rather than just assuming it's the thing to do.” I don't usually quote the last paragraphs in the articles I feature, but this one sums everything up perfectly (thanks, BBC). That's all I want: not for everyone to make the same life choices I did (good gods no), but to acknowledge that there are other choices in life besides following the script. I should probably end on a personal note: as I mentioned, my parents were unable to have genetic offspring, so they adopted. That was their choice, and it worked out great for me. My mom's sister, on the other hand, was a feminist before it was cool to be a feminist, so she never married, focusing instead on her career and taking care of their mentally ill brother. Sometimes, she traveled the world. One of the most impressive people I've ever known. So this kind of choice is nothing new. It just might seem that way. |
| Sometimes, the random number generator points me to the same topic as the day before. Such is the clumpy nature of randomness. Pretty sure this is the last article along these lines in my queue, so after today, we're probably done for a while. "Could" is absolutely the key word in the headline. I will note that this article is from Fortune magazine, so I'm pretty sure what they really mean is "Waking up at 5 a.m. every day would improve your boss's bottom line." Seize the day, we’re told. We're told a lot of things, many of them contradictory. "Seize the day," or carpe diem in its maybe-original formulation, is meant to be an exhortation to live in the present moment with little to no thought of consequences or the future. Basically the opposite of "force yourself to get up at 5 am so you can worship at the altar of Holy Productivity." The early morning wakeup has even become a TikTok trend... I really should have stopped reading there. Once they mention that short-attention-span data-mining cancer of an app, I can be sure that nothing else in the article applies to me. Not that I didn't already know that from the "wake up at 5" bullshit. ...coined the “five-to-nine before the nine-to-five,” where video montages illustrate a slow morning aesthetic of self-affirmations, workouts, and maybe even a head start into planning for the work day. This is like the training montages in movies, which make it look like you can go from wimp to wolf with five minutes' worth of sweat. “The pressure to be a morning person is pretty intense,” says Samantha Snowden, a mindfulness teacher at Headspace, the popular meditation app. Everything about that sentence is pressure. Blood pressure. Mine. Higher. For starters, getting up earlier can improve confidence, Snowden says, because it can feel like an accomplishment. You know what else can feel like an accomplishment? Actually accomplishing something. And if you can use those extra morning hours to make time for yourself in a way that calms you down, it can bolster productivity and make you feel less depleted by the end of the day. Ahhh... I knew they'd get to the P word eventually. You know what calms me down? Sleep. Choosing to move up that alarm should not come at the expense of sleep. I know I've said this before, but you're going to have the same number of waking hours every day, on average, no matter what time you get up. Unless you sacrifice sleep, as I did for many years, and I'm paying for it now—way more than I'm paying for smoking or drinking. Prioritizing sleep means having good sleep hygiene, including waking up around the same time each day, limiting screens before bed, not consuming alcohol or caffeine in the evenings, and having a wind-down routine. This is the first thing in that article that doesn't make me want to yeet something at the wall. Not that I wake up at the same time each day, or get away from screens before bed, or refrain from alcohol or caffeine. I'm just saying it's decent advice, not that I follow it. Snowden says you can spend 10 extra minutes slowing down (even walking a bit slower to the shower in the morning), not checking emails right away, and practicing a kindness message. And there goes my blood pressure back up. Seriously. They say you can't feel it, but I definitely do. Especially for the night owls, choosing to get up earlier won’t feel comfortable immediately. It'll never feel entirely comfortable if you're a true night owl. Never. You can get used to it; we're pretty adaptable. But being an owl and being forced to be a lark is very similar to jet lag, only it never really goes away. Source: me. Now, look. I want to emphasize that I'm not knocking people who get up early, for whatever reason. You do you, as the kids say. Sometimes, we have to; I did for a long time. Some people are just naturally early risers, and that's okay, too. What I object to is the incessant pounding in various media sources (usually ones with a pro-business agenda) that this is the One True Answer. People are different, and have different innate schedules; I'm not "lazy" because I prefer to sleep from 2am to 10am (or whatever my schedule is on any given day) instead of 9pm to 5am. I'm lazy for a lot of other reasons, but not that one. Still, I can acknowledge that more people prefer the latter, though I'd wager not so many among writers or other creative types. I just want to stop the sleep-shaming. |
| Last week, I did a bit on an article concerning early-birding: "For a Lark" And then I found this one, from Popular Science (for whatever that's worth these days) on turning owls into larks: My philosophical stance hasn't changed in five days: that we shouldn't be forcing or shaming chronotypes. But we live in the real world (well, most of us do), and sometimes you just have to fit your square peg into a round hole, or vice versa. So this isn't about the desirability of waking up early, but rather how to go about it if you find yourself in a situation where you have to, as I did for most of my life. It should go without saying, but it won't, that one shouldn't make drastic changes to one's lifestyle based on internet advice, so don't blame me if you try any of this stuff and it goes badly. Ah, Fall: slanting golden light, crisp mornings, and hitting the snooze button 15 times. Yeah, the article is from September of 2021 and biased toward northern hemispherians. Some research suggests that even the most stubborn night owl can indeed shift their natural sleep patterns. Oddly, there's nothing here about larks switching to owl schedules. That's just not as important because it doesn't fit in with the Protestant work ethic. But some people have to do that, too: late-shift workers, for example. Also, we're not "stubborn" any more than we're "stubborn" when we insist that, sometimes, we have to take a shit. The first thing we need to realize is that in each of us, a clock ticks away. There’s a bundle of neurons buried deep inside the brain which regulates our day’s biological rhythms, including our metabolism, when we’re sleepy, and when it’s time to eat, says Gideon Dunster, sleep researcher at the National Institutes of Mental Health. “We call it the master clock,” Dunster says. But the master clock doesn’t always match perfectly with a typical 24 hour day. In fact, on average, it takes about 24.2 hours for people to complete this cycle, says Cathy Goldstein, a sleep neurologist at the University of Michigan Health. I've heard different numbers for that average, but it's always more than 24 hours. I find this fascinating, as I would think that, if anything, we'd have internal clocks left over from the distant evolutionary past, when the length of the day was shorter, not longer. Other factors, including environmental ones, seem to play a role. Light is the most important, and well-understood, of these cues, effectively delaying or advancing people’s master-clocks. Fun fact: I sleep better when it's light out, but I don't sleep well at all with any artificial light around. It wasn’t always so hard to wake up early. “Until 200 years ago, the Industrial Revolution, our biological clocks and environmental clocks were much more in sync,” Dunster says. Now the electricity that lights up our homes at night and powers our bright screens confuses our master clock, which mistakes it for daylight. Right, blame progress, as usual. Sorry, but the advances in laziness technology far outweigh the costs of any sleep disruptions. Is there any hope for night owls to change their ways, especially as those early morning meetings and school bells begin to take over daily life? Maybe. The article goes on to expand upon the "maybe." Scientists in England conducted a trial on 22 “extreme” night owls in their late teens and early twenties. Ah, yes, another study exclusively focused on college students, all in one industrialized country, who are probably not representative of the population as a whole, and with a minuscule sample size. What I mean is, I wouldn't take the results of this study as settled science. (For the exact methodology, in plain English, the link is up there.) At least they add this bit: It’s our schedules that need to change to suit our chronotypes, not the reverse, Dunster argues. Alongside colleagues, he advocates for later school start times for kids. Other studies suggest that similar changes—work schedules catered to a person’s natural sleep and wake rhythms—could benefit adults, too. When shift workers were scheduled according to chronotype, they slept better and enjoyed their free time more, according to a 2015 study published in Current Biology. While this lights up my confirmation bias more strongly, I still wouldn't take it as settled science. One trick I've heard of before, but never really tried, is to adjust forward. That is, if you have the opportunity to do so, instead of forcing yourself to sleep earlier and wake up earlier, do the opposite: every day, go to sleep an hour or two later, and wake up an hour or two later. After a couple of weeks of this, you should find yourself aligned with your desired chronotype. That's the hypothesis, anyway. I suspect that, like almost everything else, it would work for some but not others. And it does require a significant period of time where your schedule isn't being interrupted by external needs, like work or family. Or, I suppose, you could try moving to a different time zone and let jet lag work in your favor. But I still think the best way to handle this sort of thing is to make the world align with you, not the other way around. Good luck with that. |
| As it is Sunday, I'm once again delving into the past to see if anything's changed and, if so, how. Another relatively recent one popped up (though I'm still limiting my retrospectives to exclude the past year), this one from my trip to SoCal early in 2022, when I visited Annette  and her family: "No Fault of Mine" It's a short entry and, since it's not very old, I only have a bit to expand upon. We took a drive around a place that's known for its landslides, marveling at all the doomed houses all built to appreciate a view of the ocean. I'm thinking a lot of them will get a much closer view of the ocean at some point. Oh, and did I mention there's also a fault line involved? Fun! I'm thinking this may have come across as joy in the misfortune of others. That wasn't my intention. While I'm not above a bit of schadenfreude from time to time, I normally reserve it for people I think deserve it for some reason. Just living in a place that you know is subject to seismic events doesn't qualify; there is no place that's not subject to the looming threat of disaster. If not earthquakes, then wildfires, tornadoes, fire tornadoes, sinkholes, meteor strikes, enemy missiles, avalanches, hails of gunfire (mostly limited to war zones and the US), floods, droughts (sometimes both at the same time), and that perennial favorite of the Atlantic coast, hurricanes. And lots of people don't have the luxury of being able to move, even if there is a safer spot to move to. My point is, life is uncertain and I can't fault (pun intended) someone for trading a nice view and generally wonderful weather for the possibility of sliding into the Pacific at some point. In that entry, I spoke of my plans to visit Catalina, a lovely island off the coast near L.A. I did, indeed, manage to get there, and wrote a bit about it in the following entry. Lastly, the link to the Wiki page for Santa Catalina Island is badly formatted; I have no idea if it broke in the past year or if I just didn't bother to double-check it because I was in a hurry. It's easy enough to get there with a couple of extra steps after clicking on the link, but here's an xlink anyway. |
| I haven't been feeling like going to the movie theater for a while (which is why I haven't done any reviews recently). So I missed the D&D movie. This article is from around the time that film came out, and I read it anyway because I'm a gamer. 14 Fun Facts About Dungeons & Dragons Before watching the new movie adaptation, here’s what you need to know about the history of the fantasy role-playing game Of all the publications I'd have guessed would write a retrospective of a role-playing game, with or without a movie tie-in, Smithsonian would be near the bottom of the list, right around the same spot as Proceedings of the International Society of Metallurgists. (I just made up that last one) But this is the timeline we deserve, so here it is. In the early 1970s, Gary Gygax lost his job at an insurance company in Chicago. Never says why. I'm going to go with "fired for being a dick." Living with his family in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, he started working as a cobbler as a replacement gig. But money was tight, and his children had to put cardboard in the bottoms of their shoes instead of buying new pairs. You had SHOES? Luxury! Little did Gygax know that his luck would soon change. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the fantasy role-playing game he co-created with Dave Arneson, became a national phenomenon. That may be overstating the case. National, sure. Widespread? Took a while. Since its debut in 1974, D&D has only grown in popularity. No longer a niche game, it’s been played by more than 50 million people to date, according to Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro division that owns D&D. I played it before it was cool. Incidentally, Hasbro also owns Ponies. I want to see a D&D ruleset that's set in the My LIttle Pony universe. What? No, I'm not a brony. I just think it'd be hilarious. Starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Regé-Jean Page of “Bridgerton” fame, Honor Among Thieves is set in a fantasy D&D world. It follows a band of thieves who attempt to recover their loot from an ex-member of their crew, who betrayed them and used magic to seize control of the kingdom. So, basically, The Italian Job (2003), but with fantasy. No, no, it's fine. That's one of my all-time favorite movies. In honor of the game’s turn on the silver screen, as well as its upcoming 50th anniversary in 2024, here are 14 fun facts about the history of D&D and the people who made it. It's not the first time they've tried to adapt D&D to movies. The last attempt was... how do I put this charitably?... a giant steaming pile of owlbear shit. Anyway, obviously, I'm not going to go over every one of the "fun facts" (some of them aren't much fun at all). The link's up there if you're interested. Mostly, I just want to highlight the stupidest one. 8. In its heyday, D&D sparked a moral panic. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, D&D entered the national spotlight under unexpected circumstances. Critics—many of them religious fundamentalists—argued the game was corrupting America’s youth by promoting devil worship, witchcraft and violence. First, it was hardly unexpected. One early book had a naked boob on its cover (I think it was called "Eldritch Wizardry.") That's a sure way to get fundies to shriek at obnoxious volume. Second, the real reason a lot of these assholes protested was because the game favors cooperation and imagination, not competition and some kind of ball. Third, and this should go without saying but apparently it can't, none of the allegations were true. It's a game. Yeah, there was a lot of emphasis on a few people who played it who committed suicide or whatever, but conveniently left out were all the people who played, say, football and committed suicide. Or were bullied and committed suicide. Or were gay in the 1980s and committed suicide. Take any group of people who share any interest whatsoever, and you'll find both suicides and antisocial/illegal behavior. That doesn't mean there's a correlation. And finally, TSR (the publisher at the time) couldn't possibly have done a better job advertising the product: Repeatedly debunked by researchers, the supposed link between D&D and violence earned the game a bad reputation in the eyes of some—but as Clyde Haberman noted for the New York Times in 2016, it also boosted D&D’s popularity, “with the numbers of players leaping from the thousands into the millions.” 12. The most recent version of the game is the fifth edition, published in 2014. A new edition is on the way. I've played 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th editions (I looked at 4th and went NOPE). I have no idea what 6th is going to look like, and the way WotC has been acting recently, I'm not sure I want to. There is an alternative. Whoever was running things when 3rd Edition came out (I think this was right after WotC, better known for Magic: The Gathering, acquired the rights) based the rules on an open-source system. So another company, Paizo, took that ball and ran with it (to mix game metaphors), creating Pathfinder, which had a ruleset very similar to 3rd Ed. D&D. More recently, they overhauled the rules again to create Pathfinder 2nd Edition. I'm currently playing in a sort-of weekly game (through the magic of teleconferencing) of Pathfinder 2nd Edition, which I find to be a great deal of fun. And isn't that what we play for? |
| This one's from a very, very long time ago. Way back in 2011. Among the surest ways to get me to memorize something is to put it in the form of a song (think Schoolhouse Rock) or a joke. Most certain of all is if it's a joke song. Then, that shit never leaves my head. I don't think I'm alone in this. It is utterly impossible to say the place name "Istanbul" without someone chiming in with "NOT CONSTANTINOPLE." Today's link, a very short one, contains no songs. Just some bad "walks into a bar" jokes that, if you're anything like me, will fix some grammar rules in your head forever, like a pawprint in fresh concrete. 1. A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves. Yeah, this is kind of like the old standby "Eats shoots and leaves." 4. Two quotation marks “walk into” a bar. I used to get unreasonably angry when I saw quotes where they didn't belong. Like one outside a restaurant in my town a few years ago: Genuine Turkish Street "Food." (I wonder if the owner is from not-Constantinople.) Maybe it's just me, but I'd much rather eat food than "food." 6. The bar was walked into by the passive voice. This one cracked me up more than it probably should have. Obviously, there are four more at the link. The only one that I found actually funny was #6 above, but the others at least elicited (NOT ILLICITED) a sensible chuckle. If I had more time today, I could probably make up a few more. Know any others? Feel free to leave a comment below. |
| In an effort to tie today's random article into today's sacred observance of Star Wars Day, I'll just quote our first introduction to the Force: "The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together." -Obi-Wan Kenobi Yeah, I know, it's kind of a stretch. But it relates to the unity of life, at least on our planet. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” the great naturalist John Muir wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century. Like I said. The Force. Because of this delicate interconnectedness of life across time, space, and being, any littlest fragment of the universe can become a lens on the miraculous whole. Sometimes, it is the humblest life-forms that best intimate the majesty of life itself. Take, for instance, lichens. Not midichlorians. Lichens — which are not to be confused with mosses — are some of Earth’s oldest life-forms: emissaries of the ocean gone terrestrial. For epochs, their exact nature was a mystery — until an improbable revolutionary illuminated that they are, in fact, part algae. Also not to be confused with liches, the powerful undead that make for difficult final bosses in a D&D campaign. Or lycanthropes, also common in role-playing games. In the final stretch of the nineteenth century, Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter punctuated her writing and her painting with a series of experiments with spores, demonstrating that lichens — which Linnaeus considered the “poor peasants of the plant world” — are in fact not plants but a hybrid of fungi and algae: living reminders that the supreme vital force of life is not competition but interdependence, that we survive and thrive not through combat but through collaboration. I will take this opportunity to emphasize that the person discovering this wasn't known as a biologist, but as a writer. Okay, I'll stop with the pop culture references for now, and take this opportunity to talk about cooperation. There's a popular interpretation of the theory of evolution that is often described as "survival of the fittest." This was not, as I think most people believe, a term coined by Charles Darwin, or even by a different biologist, but by an economist, Herbert Spencer. The problem with this phrase is mostly that it's a vast oversimplification (though reportedly, Darwin didn't object to it) of an extraordinarily complicated topic. Now, I don't claim to be an expert on evolution or economics (and anyone claiming to be an expert on economics is automatically suspect to me), but stopping there, at that phrase, seems to lead to the conclusion that only the strong survive, and that evolution is all about competing for resources. Certainly, there are elements of competition. But the primary driving force of evolution is, in my admittedly limited view, cooperation. As an analogy, consider an American football game. Or, really, any team sport. You have two teams. They play a game and, usually, there's a winner and a loser. Sure, the teams are competing against each other—but within each team, it's only by cooperation that victory is even possible. Moreover, even the battling teams cooperate to an extent: they agree on a set of rules, and when a rule is broken, they agree on the penalties for doing so. Without that cooperation, both within and between the teams, you don't have a football game. It is cooperation, not competition, that allows organisms to survive long enough to compete, and it obviously takes some cooperation for most organisms to reproduce. Okay, enough of that. Back to lichens. From the article, quoting biologist Lynn Margulis: Like a farmer tending her apple trees and her field of corn, a lichen is a melding of lives. Once individuality dissolves, the scorecard of victors and victims makes little sense. Is corn oppressed? Does the farmer’s dependence on corn make her a victim? These questions are premised on a separation that does not exist. The heartbeat of humans and the flowering of domesticated plants are one life. “Alone” is not an option… Lichens add physical intimacy to this interdependence, fusing their bodies and intertwining the membranes of their cells, like cornstalks fused with the farmer, bound by evolution’s hand. There is, of course, a lot more at the link. And it's not very technical; there's not even any math involved. I'll just add one more thing, though: we all probably learned long ago that lichens are symbiotic organisms, usually consisting of an alga and a fungus. I remember that from high school biology. Most of this article takes this point of view, because that was the accepted science for most of the history of that field. I did see an article recently, though I'm having trouble finding it again, which stated that many lichens contain a third organism, a yeast. There's some discussion of the concept here. So the yeast binds the other organisms together.You know. Like the Force. |
| Because, obviously, the only true measure of self-worth isn't money or power or friends or a Pokemon collection, but productivity... What Happened When I Forced Myself To Wake Up At 5 A.M. Every Day For A Month Some early risers might get more done, but it turns out there are times when getting up earlier can make you less productive. I have another article in my queue about the joyous benefits of waking up at 5 am. I'll get to it eventually. But okay, let's see how this author fared with rising at about the time I prefer to be going to bed: Early risers get a lot of good press: They are supposedly more productive and possibly better problem solvers. I'm not going to reproduce the hyperlinks from the article here. Suffice it to say that people still seem to have an issue confusing correlation with causation, and also with trying to generalize conclusions from a single data point. But after a month of forcing myself out of bed at 5 a.m., I learned that getting up early isn’t always the best thing for you. Or, and bear with me here, because this is a complicated assertion: people aren't all the same, and what works for one person won't work for another. I’m a morning person... Hey, I'm a morning person, too! Midnight to six a.m. is "morning." ...and most days I’m out of bed by 5:45 a.m. Seriously? I had to wake up at that time (or even earlier) in the summer when I had an outdoor job that required sunlight. I managed. I never enjoyed it. I usually have 15 minutes before the rest of my household starts to wake, and I use this time to enjoy a cup of tea as well as the stillness of the morning. I look forward to this time so much that I wondered, What would happen if I expanded the 15 minutes to an hour? Society reinforces the "early to rise" thing as something to admire, something aspirational. What do you think would happen if I wrote an article about the productivity gains you'd experience if you lived alone, unbothered by unnecessary distractions, not for an hour, but for 24 of them? The second day I decided to meditate, a practice I’ve wanted to do but never seemed to have the time for. Unfortunately, I fell asleep in my chair. Duh. As the month went on, I used the time to get a head start on work, but by 9 p.m., I was exhausted and would head to bed. Again: duh. You're cutting off a strip of blanket and sewing it back on the other end. Consider: we're supposed to aspire to 8 hours of sleep a night. Again, people are different, and some need 9 while others need only 7. If you consider this variation, and the fact that "head to bed" implies you're brushing teeth, changing clothes, and whatever other nightly rituals you have, the author was still getting less than 8 hours of sleep (9 to 5 is 8 hours whichever is am and pm). And that's not even getting into the time it takes to perform her marital duties. (That's supposed to be a joke.) The article goes on to quote a purported sleep expert, someone who literally wrote the book on the subject. I won't copy most of it here. And not having a strong plan doesn’t help, says Stevenson. “If you don’t have a reason to get up, and your body wants to rest, forget about it,” he says. “You need something that will fill that space that is compelling.” I can wake up early if I have to. I do it on road trips because my schedule doesn't mesh with hotel schedules. I used to do it to adhere to a work schedule. But I have to have to. Getting up just to meditate or exercise won't cut it for me. It may work for other people, and that's fine; I'm not knocking it. I'm just saying that this whole Puritan ideal of waking up early isn't the only way to get through life. At the risk of overwhelming my readers with links, here's one from a different productivity-porn publication that is closer to my own views on the subject. I should note that I have issues with that article, too, but I'm not going to discuss them here. I'll just point out that it's entirely possible that Ben Franklin was trolling everyone with that "early to bed, early to rise" crap. He was an epic troll, and still my favorite Founding Father. Back to the title article: Being the proverbial “early bird” has its advantages, says Shanon Makekau, medical director of the Kaiser Permanente Sleep Lab in Hawaii. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that, based on the surname, that person is at least part native Hawaiian—a culture not really known for strict adherence to Puritanical ideals of sleep/wake schedules. Or worshiping productivity. But I don't want to fall into a trap of stereotyping; I'm sure Hawaiians, like all other groups of humans, have different chronotypes. “Morning people have been shown to be more proactive, which is linked to better job performance, career success, and higher wages, as well as more goal-oriented,” she says. “These people tend to be more in sync with the typical workday schedule, versus night owls who may be still be waking up at around lunchtime.” The problem, here, is, again, correlation vs. causation. Owls trying to become larks are often doomed, as are larks attempting to stick to owl schedules. Early-morning hours also tend to be more productive because there are fewer distractions. This is, once more, a lifestyle choice. I always found I'm more productive and creative at the end of a day than at the beginning. This might be changing, though; as you may have noticed, I don't usually do midnight blog entries anymore. Age affects preferred sleep schedules, too. I will emphasize, however, that I don't consider one schedule inherently superior to another. I'm also still biphasic, but the timing of my first sleep seems to be changing as well. One of the many advantages of being retired: I go to sleep and wake up whenever I feel like it, for the most part. And yet, according to my CPAP, I usually get the standard 8 hours of sleep per 24-hour day, in total. The point is, even if you have family or whatever, you can still get the benefits of "fewer distractions" after everyone has gone to bed as opposed to before everyone wakes up. As for the author's self-described experiment: Unfortunately, my experiment didn’t produce long-lasting results. When my month was over, I immediately returned to my normal 5:45 a.m., which felt like sleeping in. I even slept until 10 a.m. on weekend mornings–a very rare occurrence for me. I feel more productive now that I’m back to my normal routine. And in the end, at least one of the experts quoted seems to agree with my take on it: “The jury is still out regarding whether or not simply shifting one’s wake time earlier is enough to garner all of the positive benefits of the early bird,” says Makekau. “It may be that one’s internal tendency toward productivity is inherent or, more importantly, is tied to the congruency between the internal sleep/wake clock and one’s external schedule. Night owls could be just as productive as long as they are allowed to work on a delayed schedule.” Shaka, brah. |
| One more travel update before I get back to what passes for normal. Yesterday's random destination was out in the Atlantic. That's okay; I knew it was a possibility and planned what I would do: Find the point on the shore along the line pointing to the destination and go there. This, fortuitously, ended up depositing me on the Outer Banks, in the town of Corolla, one of my favorite places to visit. I haven't been here far too long, several years at least. After a few days of seeing new things, it's nice to see an old haunt, to feel the coastal winds, smell the seaweed, and hear the ocean waves crashing against the ever-shifting sands. Oh, and dine on some excellent seafood. There are no breweries in this vicinity, not yet; I saw one in the process of being constructed, like witnessing Creation itself. It's not like I haven't been near the ocean recently—the Pacific last February/March, and the Jersey shore a couple of times since then—but I don't get tired of it. I would get tired of it if I lived around here, I know. Too ephemeral, too storm-prone. I'm just happy to visit. It's nearly 1 am now, and I think I'm going to venture out into the darkness to see if I can look at the stars. |
| A Monday update about my Sunday travels: The weather didn't hold out for me as I drove south into North Carolina yesterday morning, and I discovered, or rather, confirmed what I already knew about certain modern car features: rain can confuse the hell out of them. When I was looking for a new-to-me car last fall, I had a few requirements: I knew I wanted a Subaru Crosstrek with a decent sound system and a sunroof. Most everything else was negotiable. Well, it turned out that the one they had on the lot fit the bill; though the system wasn't as high-end as the one in my previous Subaru, it's good enough. I wasn't looking for smart features specifically, but they came with the car. For instance, Android Auto for connecting my phone's Maps to the car's screen. But also things like lane sensing and adaptive cruise control. Well, that's what I call it; I don't know what the official name is. It's like, if you set the cruise control but the car in front of you insists on plodding along at 2 mph below your cruise speed, it senses this and slows down. A lot of people don't like new things, so I've heard all the hand-wringing about it, but it works. The car doesn't force you to use it. What I wasn't sure of was how it would handle real rain. Yesterday, I found out. No, not the hard way; turns out that when the sensors are blocked, it warns you. Okay, cool. Fair enough. Something to consider if we manage to get real autonomous vehicles before civilization collapses: how it'll handle reduced visibility. Probably by using something other than visual sensors. Or maybe by giving up and waiting for the rain to slow down. I don't know; I'm not that kind of engineer. The sunroof is mostly useless in the rain, too, but that's as expected. Hence the name. It's not a rainroof. I've heard it called a moonroof, too, and I always thought that the difference was one can be opened and the other is fixed like a windshield, but apparently not. Whatever. Or maybe one of them is for baring your butt at other drivers? That seems dangerous. The weather cleared up around midday, and I ended up in a small town I'd never even heard of, let alone been to (Kinston, NC) which turns out to have a couple of good breweries, so I stayed. One of the breweries is affiliated with the motel downtown, which, really, I don't know why more people don't pursue that business model. "Can't drive? Stay safe in one of our rooms!" Maybe they're afraid of the cleaning that might be necessary. Today (Monday) is my last full day on the road; I expect to return home on Tuesday, after which I'll return to my usual kinds of blog entries. But so far, I'm calling the trip a success: I had some new experiences, mostly positive, though even the negatives, such as the annoying push-button hotel from a few days ago and the occasional lower-quality beer, were worth the inconvenience, as they gave me stories to tell. That could, of course, turn around ("go south," as it were), and if I were a writer, I'd be able to come up with sixty different plot twists to ruin the trip. Oh, wait. I am a writer. Well, bad things can happen at any time, road trip or not, so I'll just keep enjoying the journey for as long as it lasts. |
| Wrapping up another month in the relentless march to our individual and collective doom. As it is Sunday, I wanted to pull out a past entry and take another look at it. As I've noted before, I don't take anything from the past year for revisiting. Today, though, cuts it pretty close; it's an entry from April 11 of last year: "Asking Persimmon" Since it's so recent, not much has changed. The link, to an Atlas Obscura article, still works. I made my perennial complaint about the inconsistency of labeling delicious fermented beverages: In general, beer is fermented grain, while wine is fermented fruit. However, exceptions abound. Cider, usually from apples or pears, is its own category. Japanese sake is most often known as "rice wine" in English, probably because its alcohol content is higher than most beer and it's generally not bubbly. For example. So if someone wants to call this "persimmon beer," well, they don't need my permission. Well, it's not a complaint, exactly. Just an observation. In the end, though, it doesn't matter all that much, as long as you pretty much know what you're drinking. That is, don't make a sparkling plum wine and call it peach beer. Or whatever. I had a mead yesterday that was also somehow categorized as beer because, it seems, there were grains somewhere in the brewing process. My understanding is that, to be called mead, most of its fermentation product has to come from honey—kind of like something has to be 51% de agave (and from a particular region) to be called tequila. What I'm getting at is, as with many things such as mountains/hills and planets/dwarf planets, sometimes you run into a categorization issue. I'm mostly mentioning this stuff again because, from the article and my quote thereof, there's something that I apparently didn't bother talking about: ...fermenting Diospyros virginiana, the diminutive North American persimmon, with sugar, honey, and yeast... So what I'm not real clear on is how much of the fermentation product is from persimmon, sugar, or honey. Persimmon seems to have enough sugars in it by itself for fermentation; I'd imagine the sugar and honey were about flavor. I highly doubt the ratio of those ingredients was consistent, though. Probably doesn't matter. The story remains the same, and it's still just as interesting as it was last year when I linked it, or the year before when the article came out. |
| I found more new-to-me breweries today. But let me start by recapping yesterday. The town I was in was, if you care to look at it on a map, Wytheville, VA. I'd never spent any time in it before, but it's exactly what I expected from a small town in the mountains: two stoplights, 500 people, 600 churches, and a rustic nonfunctional clock on the courthouse. And, as I noted, two breweries. Here's the funny part, though: as far as I know, the breweries aren't related. But one is called 7 Dogs, named after seven dogs the owner had rescued (with, fortunately, a nod to the rescued cat who kept the dogs in line). The other is named Seven Sisters. Yes, this is important because they both had the number seven in the name. But as I approached this second brewery, I pondered: would it be a reference to actual sisters, or to the star cluster variously known as the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, and Subaru? Because as you know, I'm a sucker for anything astronomy. And I drive a Subaru. So I was pleased to see a nice big print of the Pleiades as I entered. And yet, the beers were named traditionally women's names. Like Rosie, Julia, Edith, etc. Which is fine; it's good to have a theme. But one thing disappointed me: there was no beer named Kate. You see, I like to order tasting flights, which usually consist of 4-6 sampler-sized beers. The missed opportunity was that I could have had my Kate, and Edith too. I will just pause while you absorb the greatness of that joke. Ready? Okay. So, after passing out and sobering up, I spent the better part of the day driving across Virginia, to the east, all the way to the Richmond area, as prompted by my random number generator. Nice drive, great weather. I don't get to the southern part of my state very often, and never before along an east-west route. It could just as easily have landed me back in West Virginia, or Ohio, Kentucky, or Tennessee. Or maybe even a Carolina. But instead, it kept me in Virginia. Fine. Such is the nature of randomness. Here, I found a couple of breweries in Chester, which is a city south of Richmond but north of Petersburg. No, it confuses me, too; as far as I'm concerned, all those cities and everything else in the vicinity is Richmond. There really ought to be a rule: unless there's a significant river (the James doesn't count) or a lot of trees and/or farmland in between, just fucking merge the cities. If you still don't know what the hell I'm talking about, try Google Maps again. I've been drinking. Just one thing of note on the drive: I saw a wake of buzzards. By "buzzards," I mean turkey vultures, cathartes aura, my namesake and the closest thing I have to a spirit animal. It's not unusual to see turkey vultures around here, but usually, they're loners. This is one reason why they're my spirit animal. Sometimes, you'll see a bunch ("wake" is apparently the official collective noun for turkey vultures) of them hanging around, but that's rare. So it surprised me when I saw not two, not three, but five of them just chilling together. I had the windows down, but I didn't see or smell any carrion in the vicinity, so maybe they were just having a chat. Nonsocial birds being social. Now I see that they're only called a "wake" when they're munching on a carcass. As these weren't, there are various possible collective nouns. "Committee" seems to be the leading candidate. A committee of turkey vultures.But I digress. Did the Universe send me a committee of vultures as a Sign? A Message? Well, no, of course not. But that doesn't mean I can't remark on how cool and unusual it was to see a committee meeting. Ugly-ass birds, but they're magnificent anyway. |
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