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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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| As I'm someone who gets information more from reading than from listening, sometimes I'm prone to pronunciation errors. I'm okay with this; I consider them more literate than spelling errors. So, from Lifehacker, some actual decent information: My worst was "quinoa." How the ever-living fuck was I supposed to know it didn't rhyme with Genoa? So much for "never eat anything with ingredients you can't pronounce." (Which is a dumb rule anyway that only encourages ignorance.) I’m no prescriptivist—words are yours to do with as you will, so pronounce ‘em however you like. The obvious problem with this philosophy, when taken to its logical endpoint, is everything ends up being pronounced "Bob." Bob, bob bob bob Bob bob bob; bob bob bob bob. Gyro I saved this article because of this word alone. “Gyro” is either a shortened form of “gyroscope” or the name of a Greek lamb sandwich. It's not a sandwich. It's a taco. In the unlikely event that you’re talking about gyroscopes enough to need to shorten the word, it’s pronounced “jeye-roh.” The greek sandwich, according to Websters, is called a “yee-roh” or a “zhir-roh.” It’s rhymes with “hero.” I'm going to mock that site for misusing "It's" in a completely new improper way. Which, by Waltz's Second Law of the Internet, means I've probably got an error in my own writing here somewhere. As an aside, those things that are maybe-sandwiches that most of the US calls a "sub" or maybe a "grinder?" In New York, the traditional name for them was "hero." For years, I assumed (shut up) that this was an Anglicization of "gyro" (the food that is not actually a sandwich). Because, you know, both involve filling bread with stuff. That turns out to probably not  be the case. The etymology of "hero" for the food isn't really clear, though.Interestingly, the Greek word for “to turn” is the root of the word for both the sandwich and the machine, but the terms came into the language at different times, so we don’t say them the say way. I can't confirm or deny that, but I was able to determine that it doesn't have to be made with lamb meat. Açaí The berries from the Açaí palm tree that grows in South America have become popular enough that you may be called upon to say their name at brunch. If so, it’s pronounced aa-saa-ee. Fair enough. Another one I'd only seen printed, never pronounced. Nguyen “Nguyen” is a common last name in Vietnam, and Vietnamese is a little tricky for English speakers. To call it a common last name in Vietnam is to master the art of the understatement. About a third of the population has that name.I met a blackjack dealer in Vegas once whose name was Tu Nguyen. I was just drunk enough to assert that, well, that's what I'm here for: to win. She was too sober to appreciate it. No, actually, probably every drunk cracker who's ever visited Vegas made the same "joke." Sorry, Tu. I promise I'm never a mean drunk, but I am a stupid one sometimes. Oh, and it's important to remember that "Nguyen" is a transliteration from a pictographic language. Why they couldn't create a more approachable spelling is beyond me. Gif I don't care what the article or the format's inventor says. It's a hard g. I have spoken. Hell, I wouldn't change my mind if the clouds parted and Jod themself pronounced [pun intended] that it was "jif." (It's graphic interchange format, not giraffe interchange format.) Worcestershire Worcestershire is a county in England where they invented a delicious condiment in the 1830s. And that word was Kid Me's introduction to how England can't pronounce English. Phở This Vietnamese noodle soup is pronounced “fuuh,” according to Websters, but “foe” seems to be catching on fast, at least if you’re an English speaker. Thus leading to my second favorite restaurant name of all time: Phở King. It's phở king glorious. If you get sick there, well, phở cough. Want it to go? Phở cup. My favorite restaurant name of all time? Same cuisine: Viet Noms. There are probably dozens of them by now, but the first one I saw was in central California. (Great food, incidentally.) There are more in the article, all English... but many derived from French, so it's no wonder we phở kit up. |
| This article, from The Guardian, is a couple of years old, though I doubt that matters. It's a New Year's article, so if you've failed at your resolutions (statistically, you have by now), maybe this can replace them. Be bad, better – from anger to laziness, how to put your worst habits to good use Forget new year resolutions and stop striving to be someone you’re not. It’s time to embrace your messy, imperfect, soft-bellied self While much of it aligns with my personal philosophy, I have some objection to the wording in the headline—the point shouldn't be that you're being "bad" or "good," just you. I think. We have the Babylonians to blame for making the new year a festival of self-flagellation – although their resolutions were more about appeasing gods than weight loss or cutting back on booze. I'm finding it difficult to tell the difference there. Either way, it's a sacrificial rite. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, rekindled the idea in 1740, with an annual new year’s service of resolution – his included a promise never to laugh, which might explain why we also choose punishment over joy. And yet people look at me funny when I say something bad about Protestant "morals." What if, instead of being motivated by guilt and shame, we leverage our worst habits to serve us better? By being intelligently, purposely lazier; less mindful, disorganised, slower (and with a bit of self-compassion), we might actually be more successful, productive and happier – but on our own terms. Yeah, that might or might not fly in England, but almost certainly won't in the US. We're all about guilt and shame here. You are bad and you need to do penance. I'll be skipping a lot of this, because it's long and I'm lazy, but a couple of highlights for me: Be brilliantly lazy Kendra Adachi, podcast host and author of The Lazy Genius Way, is a productivity expert who isn’t necessarily into making people more productive. And that's a lazy way to promote your books. Learn to love negative emotions When your cat dies and someone breezily says, “Never mind, you can get a new cat,” that’s toxic positivity. “Two things go wrong with toxic positivity,” says Robert Biswas-Diener, positive psychologist and author of The Upside of Your Dark Side. “One is relational – when your friend comes to you wanting support, what they want and what you offer has to match, but often it doesn’t.” When we try to cheer someone up who actually just wants to be heard, “toxic positivity feels invalidating”. We’ve all felt this – when a parent or partner wants to solve our problem instead of letting us talk about it. Someone says "Never mind, you can get a new cat," or something similar, to me, then after they complain about where my fist went, I can say, "Never mind, you can get dentures." And oh, look, more book promotions. Here's the thing: I admit I'm one of those whose first response is to try to solve the problem. It's either why, or because, I'm an engineer. Maybe both. I try to resist this, but in the moment, I don't always. Someone comes to me with a problem, my brain just goes "must... solve... problem." But one thing I don't do, because I'm terrible at it, is cheer someone up. I do try to make them laugh, though. Which isn't the same thing. Be moderately disorganised According to the book A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, “neatness and organisation can exact a high price”. ALL the book promotions! Problem here is finding a balance. I'm too much on the "disorganized" (I'm spelling it American) end of the scale, but I'm entirely too lazy to do anything about it. Freedman and Abrahamson point out that Albert Einstein’s desk – among many others – was always in “stupendous disarray”, so next time someone officious tells you to tidy up your desk (or your sock drawer), remind them that if one of the greatest thinkers of all time thrived in a semi-shambles, then so can you. Um, yeah, no, Einstein trap there. What worked for him won't work for us regular schlubs. Be less mindful “Traditionally, meditation was never thought of as something to create a moment of calm in the middle of crisis,” says Dr Julieta Galante, a neuroscience researcher at Cambridge University, who studies the upsides and downsides of mindfulness and meditation. “That is a western repurposing of it.” To be blunt, it's nearly pure copium. Work less “We now have a century of research that shows overwork is counterproductive,” says Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a four-day week campaigner and author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. Surprise! Another book. Anyway, that's easy to say, and will often fall on angry ears, for good reason. This isn't on us. It's the system that needs to change, the one that requires people to work a lot just to maintain food and shelter. The next one I'll highlight (still more book promotions) is the one I liked best, though: Abandon meaningfulness “The pursuit of meaning is not fundamentally a bad thing,” says Wendy Syfret, author of The Sunny Nihilist: How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy. “If you want to spend your whole life in a monastery, or pursuing enlightenment, good for you. But meaning has become so intensely commodified that now everything around us has to have meaning: your job has to be meaningful, your relationship has to be groundbreaking and every single consumer product is presented as life-changing – I saw a pack of tampons the other day that said, ‘This box is a revolution.’” When looked at this way, it’s obvious that meaning is a construct – and if absolutely everything is meaningful, then, arguably, nothing is. There's a kind of poetry in finding meaninglessness in meaning, and meaning in meaninglessness. I'm impressed. As usual, many more suggestions appear at the link, each with its own lovely book someone's trying to sell. I've said it a hundred times, but for any newcomers or forgetful folk: I'm not going to shun an article just because it promotes books, not here on a site promoting reading and writing. The article, as I said, came out as a New Year's thing, but to me it works better as a "You failed your resolutions; now what?" kind of thing. Which just so happened to come up for me at random in January. |
| A little perspective, from Cracked... I'll just jump into the list, which, naturally, counts down. 5. Catching A Foul Ball Sure, it’s no home run ball, but catching a foul ball while watching a live baseball game is still a nice consolation prize. Judging from some of the videos I've seen, there's more competition, with fewer rules, between the spectators near the end of the ball's trajectory than there is on the field. The fact is, though, that if you’re a frequent attendee, especially if you’re picking seats based on likely trajectories, the odds really aren’t that astronomical. They basically sit right around 1 in 580. Hell of an "if" there. I haven't been to a baseball game as a spectator since Nixon was president. Hell, I've played it more than I've watched it. I guarantee you me catching a foul ball would not only be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but a probability-breaking macroquantum event. 4. Total Solar Eclipse Would it surprise you I knew about this one? No? Okay. It’s true. The belief that it’s so incredibly rare is probably based on the fact that it takes 375 years to happen again in the same location. If you’ve got a deep love for orbs and an even deeper bank account, though, you could see dozens in your lifetime with the right travel plans. Yeah, but let's not confuse "happens somewhere on Earth" with "happens where you live." Tell you what, though, if you live around Paducah, Kentucky, you experienced totality in 2017, and will do so again this April. So you're, you know. Doomed. 3. Animals Going Extinct The fact is, animals are going extinct constantly, in huge numbers. The reason we don’t see more coverage of each particular critter configuration we’re losing isn’t because it’s not happening, it’s because there are literally too many to report on without their own 24-hour news cycle. 2. Blue Moons I'll give them points for not explicitly stating the false definition here. But they did include a link to a site that still promulgates that mistake, so negative points for that. By the false definition, a few years ago, we had one in January and one in March. That can never happen with the true definition. The actual last Blue Moon was on August 22, 2021. The next one is this year, on August 19. After that, May 20, 2027. One can only occur in August, November, February, or May. But yeah, they happen every 2-3 years. Which is rare enough to warrant the "once in a blue moon" expression, but the false Blue Moon can never, ever coincide with the true Blue Moon. To mash up two entries into one fun fact to throw into bar conversation, “once every total solar eclipse” would actually be more frequent than “once in a blue moon.” Again, sure, if you're privileged enough to be able to travel to the eclipse. 1. Investment Opportunities And this one should go without saying. If someone wants you to buy what they're selling, it's because they think your money is worth more than what they're selling. You should probably think so, too. Which should be obvious, but greed can blind you. |
| As has been my custom on Sundays, I randomly picked an older blog entry to take another look at. This time, we're going back all the way to May of 2008, with a really very short one: "O Bai teh Wai..." You may have noticed a lot of the early ones were short. I'm pretty sure that's partly because this was before Newsfeed was introduced here. In a way, it's good, because there's a record of what I was thinking in 2008. But it's also bad, because there's a record of what I was thinking in 2008. The entry contains a naked link (x-link hadn't been invented yet, either). I suggest you don't click on it. It's nothing like whatever I'd found 16 years ago. I have a vague memory of "lolcatbible" being a translation of, you know, that book into lolcat pidgin. But I could be wrong, confusing it with the Pirate Bible and the Brick Testament. Doesn't matter. It's not there anymore. As I noted in that long-ago entry: I mean, really. Lolcats should have been done by now. Srsly. Lolcats certainly aren't done, though they've evolved (that evolution sometimes even involves better spelling and grammar). That site, though... that's done. But, as with my embarrassing blog entries from the noughties, most things on the internet never truly die. With a cat's curiosity, I searched for "lolcat bible," and found this WIkipedia entry. Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.... |
| I have been seeing pieces about a "new continent" that scientists have "found." As the landmass is almost entirely under ocean, and shows no sign of rising out of the ocean anytime soon, in order to do this, they had to redefine what "continent" means. It's basically New Zealand, dwarfed by a hell of a lot of what they're defining as continental shelf. One wonders at their motivation for this. Oh well, call it a classification problem, like calling the Blue Ridge "mountains" and Pluto a "dwarf planet." In any case, that's only the latest in imaginary places in the ocean. Most famous is probably Atlantis, but I do hope you've heard of Lemuria, as well. The Frenzy About the Weirdest Continent That Never Existed Forget Atlantis, the lost land of lemurs had people in a tizzy. The article, appropriately from Atlas Obscura, is fairly long, but it has maps, so you'll want to look at those. It begins with an early attempt to reconcile finding similar fossils in Madagascar and India... a discovery perfectly well explained by continental drift, but that wasn't a thing back then. The fossils were of lemurs; hence, Lemuria. So he did what other scientists of the day did when faced with similar disconnects: He proposed a vast land bridge that had once linked Madagascar to India. Lots of former "land bridges" are well-attested: Bering, e.g., and Doggerland. Incidentally, if we're going to start defining continents by their tectonic plates, then North America would get a big chunk of eastern Siberia. Bet that would go over well.That was in 1864, and ever since, Sclater’s serious scientific work has been overshadowed by his creation—because Lemuria turned out to be one of the weirdest continents that never existed. Hey, science has to start somewhere. The problem comes in when a hypothesis is disproven and yet still remains in public imagination. In 1870, German biologist Ernst Haeckel suggested that Lemuria could be the ancestral home of humanity, as a way of explaining “missing links” in the fossil record of early humans. (Rejecting Darwin’s hypothesis of humanity’s African origin, Haeckel had initially favored India as the birthplace of humankind.) Gosh. I wonder what might motivate a German in 1870 to disbelieve that humanity emerged in Africa. Hmm. Can't quite put my finger on it. In the 1880s, Lemuria graduated from scientific hypothesis to pseudoscientific fact when Helena Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, integrated it into her esoteric, proto-New Age belief system. You mean "pseudoscientific fiction." But whatever. There is, as I noted, a lot more there at the link above. But here's the part I found most fascinating (though I'd heard some of it before): In the American imagination, Lemuria became most closely associated with Mount Shasta in northern California, which according to Frederick Spence Oliver (in his 1894 book A Dweller on Two Planets) and other occultist writers was the last refuge of the survivors of sunken Lemuria, who lived there in a jewel-encrusted underground city called Telos. The Mount Shasta connection might seem tenuous at first glance, but I'm assured that his book did all the proper fantasy world-buildingresearch. Hell, there are people even today who swear weird stuff happens in and around Mount Shasta. Lemuria also lives on in Ramona, a small town in Southern California and headquarters of the Lemurian Fellowship. I bet they got to move it move it. ...look, I tried. I tried really, really hard to get through this entry without making a King Julien reference. I could not. Just like how it's impossible to say "mah na mah na" without someone singing "do doo do doodoo," or playing Don't Fear the Reaper without someone calling out desperately for more cowbell, I can't get through a lemur-related article without a Madagascar movie reference joke. The Lemurian Philosophy says that if we live by universal laws (including the belief in reincarnation, karma, and the teachings of Christ), we will achieve an advanced stage of civilization. Pretty sure reincarnation/karma is diametrically opposed to the words attributed to Jesus, but the wonderful thing about religion is that people can say it means whatever they really want it to mean. The article ends with some fun facts about lemurs, the primates who inspired all this: Lemurs were named in the 1850s by Carl Linnaeus himself, the founder of the current system of biological nomenclature. Linnaeus got the name from ancient Rome, where the lemures were the restless spirits of the unburied dead. On May 9, 11, and 13, during the festival of Lemuria, the father of the household would rise at midnight to placate the lemures by casting black beans behind him. So, would that be the midnights that start May 9, 11, and 13, or the midnights that end May 9, 11, and 13? It's important to get it right so the ghosts don't eat you. And what if you miss actual midnight when casting the black beans? That would be bad, right? And this was before clocks. Hell, even with clocks, 0:00 or 12:00 am isn't actual local midnight, except very rarely and only by coincidence. I guess we'd have to ask the Lemurians. Anyone up for a trip to Mount Shasta? |
| It's snowing again here. Not too heavily, and it's not really sticking on the roads, but every time people in Virginia see so much as one flake of snow, it's like some alien invasion, as if they've never seen it before. And it snows here. Every. Winter. Well, not so much last winter, but every other winter. And I had to leave the house, so I got to experience the chaos firsthand. Anyway, no need to leave the house again until tomorrow evening, so I get to share with you this article from Eater about... When Cheese Can Tell the Future The Kitchen Witch brings the ancient art of tyromancy — divination through cheese — to the modern day Headline notwithstanding, no, cheese cannot tell the future. Unless it's moldy when it's not supposed to be, in which case it predicts its own journey to the trash can or compost pile. Still, people think it can, and that's fascinating to me. Throughout history, people have sought answers about the unknown. Yes. That's why there is science. Do you know how milk becomes cheese? Well, neither do I, beyond the absolute basics, but science does. But predicting fates and futures hasn’t always been synonymous with tarot cards and oracles; sometimes, it comes down to what you eat or drink. With me, it's like, "I see a night on the toilet in your future." Though each society has its own versions of food divination, shape interpretation is the common ingredient in countless fortunes told. In the 1700s, “pulling the kale” was a popular way to predict the qualities of one’s future mate based upon the traits of the pulled-up plant. And people think kale sprung suddenly onto the scene in the noughties. And then there’s tyromancy, or cheese divination. Oddly enough, the word "tyro" means novice or amateur, but that's from a different root word. And now, Jennifer Billock, the Chicago-based creator of the Kitchen Witch newsletter, is taking this ancient yet new-to-most form of fortune telling into the 21st century with group readings. “It seemed like a fun way to tell fortunes that also ended up being delicious,” she says. As long as I get to eat the cheese afterward, I'll pretend to believe in divination. After the introduction is an interview between the publication and Billock. I'm not going to quote from that, but it goes into the mechanics of how it's done (short version: she reads the "variations," like mold stripes or ridges at the break of a hard cheese). As with astrology, I'm amazed at the amount of work and thought people put into things like this. Sure, I don't accept that dairy products (or stars) can actually tell one's future, but I've come to the understanding that life is a little more fun with these absurdities than it would be without them. Still, the only future I can predict when I have a hunk of cheese is that it will soon be in my belly. |
| I've done entries about older slang in here before. Here are some examples from nearly a century ago. It's important to remember that, a century from now, if anyone's still around, they'll be doing websites or braincasts or clay tablets or interactive holograms or whatever is the tech at the time to resurrect and/or ridicule the fashion and slang of the 2020s. Yes, even "rizz." Especially "rizz." I won't be highlighting all of them here. You can go to that link from Mental Floss. But of course, I have something to say about a few of them, starting at the very beginning. 1. Nogoodnik Given that the suffix -nik denotes a person associated with something, nogoodnik is, expectedly, a word for someone who’s nothing but trouble. The links provided on the page are to the OED, which is fine, but I don't think they go far enough for this complex word. See, it's essentially Yiddish. "But it's clearly from 'no good,' which is English." Sure. But Yiddish, like English, likes to borrow words from neighbors and never pay them back. Or, in this case, suffixes. "-nik" is a Slavic/Russian suffix. "Beatnik" is another English use of it, from a few decades later. One particularly Yiddish example is "nudnik," which is loosely "annoying person." And apparently, there's a Russian word, romanized as "negodnik," which means reprobate... or no-good person. So "nogoodnik" is English-Yiddish-Russian, and we should really be using it more, but there are too many syllables in the word for it to ever make a resurgence in today's short-attention-span slang. 3. Blow One’s Wig There's a repeated theme in jazz lyrics about "blowing one's top." Anywhere but jazz, that meant being angry, like in the cartoons when someone's face turns red and steam comes out their ears. In jazz, it seems to be about being completely surprised, but in a pleasant way. Personally, I'm pretty sure it's a euphemism for orgasm. 6. Dog’s Soup Asking a server to bring you some dog’s soup while you browse the menu might result in a worried glance today, but back in the ’30s, a thirsty patron ordering some dog’s soup would be granted a fresh glass of water. This one would never fly today. The sibilants would merge, leading to inevitable misunderstandings. You can order a hot dog, but not dog soup. Well, not in the US, anyway. 7. Boondoggle The next time you’re tasked with tedious or impractical busywork, it may break a bit of tension to call it a “boondoggle.” This word is still around, of course, but I've only ever heard it used to describe government spending of limited public value. 11. Gobsmacked I still see this occasionally, but I think it's still mostly British. 13. Nitwittery Nitwittery is a particularly posh-sounding word for stupidity. I do like that word. Might have to work on bringing it back. Made me wonder about "nitwit," though, so I checked. Is it a modification of something like "nought-wit?" As in "witless?" Well, maybe something like that. Another source thinks "nit" comes from the word for louse eggs. Which could also work, in the sense of "lousy."19. On Sus Another slang term 1930s people have in common with Gen-Z, sus, according to the OED, is an abbreviation of suspicion or suspect, and indicates a feeling that questionable activities are afoot. Obviously, this one reappeared in a different form. As "sus" is only one syllable, it fits in well with emojiworld. 20. Floss In 1938, floss or flossing was synonymous with flirting or showing off, especially about one’s possessions. Possibly a variant of "flaunt?" Or maybe an association with more expensive stuff, as "floss" in the other sense comes from something meaning silk, which was at historically pretty high-end stuff. Hence the British use of "candy floss" for what we call "cotton candy." Doubt this one will come back, because the meaning would be too ambiguous. "She's over there flossing." Yeah, wrong head-picture. Several more at the link. I tend to doubt some of the etymologies, but many of the words are fun. |
| Here's a pretty recent one from Cracked. Mostly just because I felt like sharing it. The title is maybe a bit misleading, but close enough. Making decisions has to be one of my absolute least favorite things to do. That’s why I try to avoid it at all costs. Would it help to know that your decision is already made, but you just haven't caught up to that moment in time yet? And the more decisions matter, the more they suck. Picking a cereal to start your day with is a decision, but given the general futility of life, who really cares? Realizing halfway through a bowl of Cap’n Crunch that you really would have preferred Froot Loops is just another thin cut delivered by the blade of life. I avoid this by not having cereal in the house. It’s when you’re faced with decisions that really influence the future of your life or business that you get to experience the full cocktail of stress and anxiety. Hence the relevance to the article's content. Though sometimes the wrong decision turns out to be not deciding at all. 4. Sony Backing Betamax Given that plenty of people under 30 probably don’t even remember VHS tapes, I’m going to wager that Betamax rings even less bells. It’s an old, cursed technology, that barely made the cut for my 33-year-old brain, much less Zoomers’. We really need to teach history better. Anyway, yeah, so Sony backed the losing technology. They're still around, though, unlike the next fool: 3. Borders Gives Amazon Its Business The biggest mistakes they made? First was not investing in or offering e-books, and the second was outsourcing all their online book sales to a little company called Amazon. Yeah, I'm gonna call that one of the worst mistakes of all time. 2. Kodak Doesn’t Go Digital This one's pretty well-known. In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson invented an early digital camera that could record images electronically onto tape and display them on a TV screen. He showed it to executives, who gave it a resounding thumbs down, because it would ruin their ability to sell film, a big part of their business. So someone else went to market with it, and the tech steadily improved, ruining their ability to sell film. If only they could have seen the writing on the wall. (Okay, that might be an obscure reference.) 1. JCPenney Respects Its Customers’ Intelligence I'd have titled this "JCPenney Overestimates Its Customers' Intelligence." I mentioned the 1/3-pound burger fiasco a few days ago in here, and that people were so abysmally ignorant that they thought it was a worse deal than a quarter-pounder because, clearly, 3 is less than 4. Well, this is similar. It turns out that they do not want a $40 waffle maker, they want a $40 waffle maker they can tell people was worth $80, and if they don’t get it, they will figuratively burn your store to the ground. Sales dropped 20 percent, and one ex-customer with a real peach of a brain explained, “If I don’t get a special discount, it’s not worth the trip.” No, I'm not calling YOU stupid. Anyone who reads this blog is automatically smart, attractive, and talented, if only by association. But goddamn, the vast amorphous bulk of consumers are idiots to the core. Anyway, I'd add one more to this list: Sears. They built a sales empire on mail-order, sending catalogs to the farthest reaches of the US and Canada, and probably beyond, I don't know. At one point, they were mail-ordering houses. I'm not kidding. They got so huge that they built and occupied what was then the tallest building in the world. And then the internet came along, and they didn't keep up. There are probably lots more, of course. Most decisions are going to turn out to be bad ones, or at least neutral, which is why people like me and this article's author avoid making them whenever possible. Which is also going to be a bad decision, but whatever, at least then it's not my fault. |
| Rant time. I had a doctor appointment scheduled for this morning. No big deal; regular check-up kind of thing. As you might be aware if you're reading this the day I post it, practically the entire country got sn*w dumped on it last night. My part of the country got off easy: maybe 2 inches, barely any on the roads. Not much, sure, but more than we've had for two years. So naturally, things like schools, businesses, and non-critical clinics shut down or opened late. Okay, no big deal, right? Well, maybe. See, the clinic is part of a massive, bureaucratic, and very busy hospital system. They run pretty efficiently, but they have instituted some strict policies. Like, no-show for an appointment without something like 48 hours notice means getting charged in full; naturally, insurance doesn't cover that. It also means they drop you as a patient, because, like I said, they're very busy and don't have the patience for no-show patients. You might think they'd be more lenient about such policies when we get sn*w, because everyone around here acts like they've never seen sn*w every time it sn*ws, but, like I said, bureaucracy, so no, I don't trust them to be lenient. So, I woke up at the gods-forsaken cow-milking hour I'd have to wake up in order to account for sn*w-clearing and slower driving (the clinic is only 2 miles away, and I'm usually happy to walk it, but not on fresh sn*w in sub-freezing temperatures), and I checked their website, figuring, okay, if the clinic is closed, I'm off the hook. It's not closed. It has a delayed opening at 10. My appointment was for 9:30. So there I am, bleary, blinking, no caffeine yet. What do I do? Show up at 10, figuring they're just going to try to cram everyone in? Show up at 9:30 anyway, because maybe the website was wrong? Go back to sleep, so they can potentially bone me hard? Call them? But they're closed. Okay, I thought, maybe they have a phone system that auto-forwards in these rare instances. So, after double-checking all the websites I could think of, I got ready to try a phone call. Which is when they called me. That's good, right? Well, it would be, except that for some reason (possibly, but probably not, related to the sn*w), the voice on the other end was almost hopelessly garbled. She's probably trying to call a few dozen people this morning (like I said, huge hospital system), so she's understandably in a hurry. Somehow, I manage to get the gist of what she's saying: reschedule for Friday morning at 10. Fine. I change my calendar accordingly. It was only after the call ended that I thought to check the weather forecast for Thursday night and Friday morning. Guess what. Go ahead. Guess. |
| When I was a kid, and I learned about radioactivity and the economy, I remember thinking, "Wouldn't it be cool to come up with a science fiction story set where money is radioactive, and its value depends on the level of the original isotope in the coin?" Automatic inflation. No one could save money; you'd have to spend it like it's hot (which it is). Not so much a serious SF idea, but I was envisioning a comedy like Hitchhiker's or something. Never did devise an actual plot, or characters, or other reason to write it; that idea is just one part of a larger setting. Naturally, any idea I come up with has already been thought of: What If Money Expired? A long-forgotten German economist argued that society and the economy would be better off if money was a perishable good. Was he an anarchist crank or the prophet of a better world? I'd like this article better if it didn't start out with an ever-so-precious anecdote about little kids engaging in capitalism. Then, as with every single piece about money ever written, it goes into the history of money: The history of money is replete with equally imaginative mandates and whimsical logic, as Jacob Goldstein writes in his engaging book, “Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.” Oh, surprise, it's a promotion for a book. Before money, people relied on bartering — an inconvenient system because it requires a “double coincidence of wants.” If I have wheat and you have meat, for us to make a deal I have to want your meat at the same time you want my wheat. Hell, I've talked about the history of money myself in articles about money, so I shouldn't bitch too much. I'm just in a bad mood because it sn*wed overnight. And it's still sn*wing. Not much, but any sn*w at all puts me in a bad mood. What that bit of monetary history leaves out is that usually, within a tribe, it's not like you had to get the meat for the wheat right away. When everyone knows everyone else, social pressure ensures trade balance. Anyway. Whatever. That's not really relevant. Aristotle, for one, wasn’t convinced. He worried that Greeks were losing something important in their pursuit of coins. Suddenly, a person’s wealth wasn’t determined by their labor and ideas but also by their cunning. Bit rich, coming from someone as cunning as he was. After the inevitable Brief History of Money is over, they get to the point: “Here’s a thing that always happens with money,” Goldstein wrote. “Whatever money is at a given moment comes to seem like the natural form money should take, and everything else seems like irresponsible craziness.” I'm not sure I agree with that. I mean, sure, cryptocurrency is irresponsible craziness, but that's a bit of an exception. Pun intended. More than a century ago, a wild-eyed, vegetarian, free love-promoting German entrepreneur and self-taught economist named Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. You know who else was a wild-eyed vegetarian German who dabbled in economics? Okay, I don't think he promoted free love. And he was actually Austrian. “Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.” I really hope he explained all that. I mean, sure, like I said, I had the idea too, but mine was meant to be funny. After he explains all that, you get this bit: To achieve this, he invented a form of expiring money called Freigeld, or Free Money. (Free because it would be freed from hoarding and interest.) The theory worked like this: A $100 bill of Freigeld would have 52 dated boxes on the back, where the holder must affix a 10-cent stamp every week for the bill to still be worth $100. If you kept the bill for an entire year, you would have to affix 52 stamps to the back of it — at a cost of $5.20 — for the bill to still be worth $100. Thus, the bill would depreciate 5.2% annually at the expense of its holder(s). Too much work. And math. Just make it radioactive. In this economy, money would circulate with all the velocity of a game of hot potato. There would be no more “unearned income” of money lenders getting rich on interest. Instead, an individual’s economic success would be tied directly to the quality of their work and the strength of their ideas. The big problem with this system, of course, is that I make my money from interest, dividends, and capital gains, so it would be Bad. Not all of us can produce quality work or strong ideas, and we have to be creative with economics. Okay, no, it's not just me: it would tie people even tighter to work, leading to exploitation. Well, more exploitation. The article continues, and it's a fascinating read, but I won't bore you further here. I'll just say this: I'm not educated enough to discern much difference between self-depreciating money, and government policies that mandate certain levels of inflation in the economy. For example, the Federal Reserve tries to maintain a 2% inflation rate. At this, they've been largely successful for decades, until the past couple of years (this is not an invitation to blame your least favorite politician). So, $100, a year later, buys what would have been $98 of goods. Or something like that. Point is, inflationary money policy is baked in to the system, if not the money itself. Banks tend to keep their interest payments on savings below the inflation rate, so saving money in a traditional sense only partially offsets the ravages of inflation. To actually make money without working or coming up with new and exciting ideas, we have the option of investing, which comes with its own risks, but the reward potential is greater. But it's that last bit that some people have a problem with. Do I have an answer? Of course not. But I've figured out how to use the system to my advantage. Change the system, and people (who are not me, because I'm clearly out of ideas) will certainly figure out how to use the system to their advantage. Also, changing the system would suck for me, which is the most important argument against doing so. Money isn't radioactive. It's okay to save it. |
| I just mentioned Big Think yesterday, and then today, when picking an old blog entry at random to revisit, behold, this one from October of 2022 featured an article from Big Think: "Working Easy" There's no such thing as coincidence! This must Mean Something! Yes, there is, and no, it mustn't. The article is still there, not too surprising for something relatively recent. But I noticed that there's now a note saying it was updated in November 2023. I don't remember enough of the original article to know what changed.Because the entry isn't that old, I wouldn't make many changes to my commentary. Probably, I'd use a different intro than "What the hell is hard work, anyway?"—the article isn't about that kind of work, and I think I was just spitting out something vaguely related to some word-association from the headline, or maybe I'd already picked the entry title and desperately tried to say something that fit. One thing that does occur to me on rereading the article and the entry: You know how you can't think of someone's name, or a word? It's on the tip of your tongue, as the metaphor goes, but no matter how hard you push yourself, it doesn't come to you. You just end up getting frustrated and maybe a headache. Then you give up and go do something else, at which point the word pops right into your frontal lobes. Or maybe that's just me. Anyway, what the article is talking about is something like that. |
| This Atlas Obscura article (apparently from a writer at Big Think, which I've also sourced here) has been taunting me for a long time, waiting for its number to come up. Today, it finally did. There Are at Least 10 Cities With Their Own Psychological Disorders Stockholm Syndrome is the most famous, and most relate to tourism or hostage-taking. I'd expect there to be a lot more than 10, but maybe there are. "At least" covers a lot of numerical territory. Everybody knows Stockholm Syndrome, when hostages develop an attachment to their captors. Like most things "everybody knows," there's doubt that this even exists in the way they think it does.But who knows its two opposites? Lima Syndrome is when the hostage takers start sympathizing with the hostages. I mean, that makes sense. It's the inverse of Stockholm Syndrome, and it's kind of on the other side of the planet, hence the inversion. And London Syndrome is when hostages become argumentative toward their captors—often with deadly results. What are they going to do, kill us? Then they won't have hostages as leverage. In all, ten cities around the world carry a unique burden: they have a psychological disorder named after them. I don't need to rehash all of them here. Really, I just have one quibble (apart from questioning whether Stockholm Syndrome is really a thing): Brooklyn Syndrome ...cities where, due to specific cultural circumstances, the male persona naturally gravitates toward being overly argumentative or personally combative. It is simultaneously hilarious that they picked Brooklyn as the archetype for this kind of thing, and sad because Brooklyn isn't a city, but part of New York. Hey! I'm walkin' heah! Instead, I wanted to propose other disorders named after cities. In no particular order. Albuquerque Ailment: That nagging feeling that you shouldn't have taken that last turn. Chicago Croup: A perverse desire to be someplace cold and windy. Seattle Syndrome: The feeling that it really ought to be raining. Montréal Malaise: Not knowing enough of the local language to carry on a conversation, but just enough to know when they're calling you names. San Francisco Flu: Being too hot when the temperature climbs above 60F. Washington Woozies: When someone drags you into an unwelcome political conversation. ...yeah, I know those are all in North America. It's not like I spend weeks refining my jokes. If you have suggestions for other cities, please feel free to add below. |
| It may surprise some of you to know that women can be clever. Examples, from Mental Floss: Necessity isn’t the only mother of invention. I'll say it again for y'all in the back: Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is the milkman. Though it wasn’t always easy to get patents or the credit they deserved, women are responsible for many items we use today. In some cases, blame. Like when Lise Meitner invented the atomic bomb. Okay, men helped there. As usual for these longer lists, I'm skipping a few; the link is there if you want to see more. 1. Paper Bags A man named Charles Annan saw her design and tried to patent the idea first. [Margaret] Knight filed a lawsuit and won the patent fair and square in 1871. The truly amazing thing here isn't that a woman came up with something, but that a 19th century court acknowledged it. But the paper bag was only the first step. What I want to know is: Who was the absolute hero god(dess) who figured out how to give them handles relatively cheaply? That person deserves a statue, a commemorative coin, and a star named after them. 3. Foot-Pedal Trash Cans For me, the best inventions are those that save time, giving me more opportunity to play video games. But this one's awesome for another reason: you can throw shit away while you're cooking, without washing your hands every time you lift a trash can lid. Or you can have a lidless trash can like I do, but if you live with someone, they inevitably complain about the odor. In fairness, mine used to be one of those battery-operated sensor lid things, which is even lazier than a foot-pedal. But the problem with moving parts is that they tend to break, and then they need to be fixed or replaced. Or done without, in my case. 4. Monopoly Pretty sure I've covered this one before in here. Elizabeth Magie created The Landlord’s Game to spread the economic theory of Georgism—teaching players about the unfairness of land-grabbing, the disadvantages of renting, and the need for a single land value tax on owners. From what I heard, she had two sets of rules: one for that particular flavor of socialism, and one for capitalism. For some reason, the company that eventually published the game only concentrated on the latter. The reason why escapes me. 6. Disposable Diapers I'm sorry, but of all the things on this list, this one gets my vote for "most likely to have been invented by a woman." 7. Dishwashers I know I covered this one before in here: "Pretty Petty" One might argue that this would be a contender for "most likely to have been invented by a woman," but this was a case of "my servants are Doing It Wrong and I don't want to do it myself, so I'll invent a machine." 12. Circular Saws And being a power tool, this would be my "least likely to have been invented by a woman" thing. But I guess that would make me sexist, so it isn't. A weaver named Tabitha Babbitt is believed to be the first person to suggest that lumber workers use a circular saw instead of the two-man whipsaw that only allowed cutting when pulled forward. That's "two-person whipsaw," you sexist. 15. Folding Cabinet Beds Sarah E. Goode’s folding cabinet bed didn’t just maximize space in small homes. In 1885, it made her one of the first Black women with a U.S. patent, after Martha Jones, who received one in 1868 for her cornhusker design. Yeah, but Jones cheated; she was a time traveler. (I really hope that's not too obscure a reference.) 19. Computers Women in computer science have a role model in Grace Hopper. She and Howard Aiken programmed and designed Harvard’s Mark I computer, a five-ton, room-sized machine in 1944. Women have been involved in computer science since before there were computers. Not to minimize Hopper's contribution at all. Like I said, there's more I didn't cover. It's not always necessary to know who invented the stuff we use (nor would it be practical, as most things were group efforts), but sometimes it's nice to acknowledge where they came from. |
| The Random Number Gods have chosen to bless us with another Cracked article this day. And no, one of them isn't "time." Well, the last one is. Sort of. Not really. Don’t believe your eyes. They lie to you every day. I might have mentioned this before, but I used to work with a guy who was constantly showing me optical illusions. As he was an engineer with more experience than I had, I thought he was trying to train me to believe the measurements and numbers more than my visual perception. But no; he was also a devout Christian and was trying to show me that only God is real or whatever. Thing about those optical illusions you can find all over the internet is that most of them have documented, logical, proven explanations. So all that did was reinforce my admiration for science. 4. Your Nose Is Smaller Than Selfies Tell You It Is Long ago, I was a semi-professional photographer (in that I got paid for it, but it wasn't my main source of income). This section reiterates what I've known for a long time about the difference between focal lengths. For authentic pics, never hold your phone up close. Instead, set up a tripod several feet away, inconveniencing everyone in the name of better art. Like anyone's gonna do that. Just hand your phone to some random stranger and ask them to take the pic. There's a very good chance you'll even get your phone back, afterwards. 3. The Moon Keeps Changing Its Size on You Yes, this one was the real reason I saved this article to share. If you’re lucky enough to see the Moon rise or set over the horizon, you’ll notice it looks different from how it looks when it’s high in the sky. It looks a bit more yellow, due to the greater amount of atmosphere that moonlight must travel through to reach your eyes from this angle. It may also look slightly squashed, which is another effect of looking at it through so much atmosphere. I should note that there are times when the Moon really is bigger or smaller because its orbit, like pretty much every orbit, is elliptical. This horizon illusion dwarfs that effect, though, at least in my experience. More than anything else, however, the low Moon simply looks much bigger than the Moon as you normally know it. Everyone sees this difference, and no one knows why. Perhaps, but I'm convinced it's a combination of things. Including a version of the Ponzo Illusion (not to be confused with the Ponzi Scheme). Flat Earth (not really, but we perceive it as such), mostly flat sky converging on it. Also the convergence of the two horizon lines. I'm sticking with that hypothesis until smarter people than me figure something else out. That might take a while.2. They’re Using Color to Lie About Produce Ever since that photo known as The Dress exploded into public consciousness, I've seen more and more articles explaining color perception. I got really tired of seeing it when it first happened, but apparently, some good has come from it in terms of public perception of color perception. 1. Clocks Look Like They Stop Because They Break Your Brain Despite what I said above, no, time is not an illusion (probably). As with color, though, our perception of time can change with circumstances. The article goes into the science here, and since it tracks with stuff I already knew, it's absolutely worth reading. Spolier: it's not a glitch in the Matrix. There is no Matrix, except in the movies. In conclusion, my mom always told me "seeing is believing." Sorry, Mom. You were wrong. |
| More from that internationally renowned science reporting site, Cracked: Naturally, I need to nitpick the headline. Planet formation is an active area of research, so they might not have the precise sequence or timeline nailed down. But whatever the actual mechanism, it's pretty clear that everything on Earth, and even the Earth itself, came from outer space. We still get literal tons of material from outer space every day. Everything, including your body and the air you breathe, has an alien origin: it was not of Earth until it was, at which point some of it started getting recycled, mixed, and recombined.Astronauts and space pirates are exploring the cosmos, in search of unobtanium, transformium and precious red matter. That multi-source science fiction reference is doubly amusing to me, as I just downloaded the game Starfield yesterday (featuring astronauts and space pirates and valuable materials) and started playing it. Their quest may be fruitless, since none of those materials really exist. Well, philosophically, anything we can think of "really exists" in some manner. But no, like the Easter Bunny, unicorns, honest politicians, and (probably) Bigfoot, they're not part of consensus reality. 5. Flammable Ice Yes, water is a mineral (just one that happens to be liquid at room temperature), and when methane is trapped in water crystals, that’s called flammable ice. It has a second, equally extreme name as well: “fire ice.” While I generally don't bother fact-checking stuff from a comedy site, this sounded familiar, so I looked it up. Yep, they're talking about {xlink:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathratemethane clathrates. They even lifted the image in the article (and put "methane clathrate" in its caption) from that Wikipedia page. In their defense, the photo is credited to USGS, which I'm pretty sure means it's in public domain, or at least freely licensed. What exactly a clathrate is, I leave to any curious readers to follow appropriate links. It's a more generalized thing, and fascinating, but irrelevant to the article or my commentary. So, is this some promising new energy source, ready to power our kitchens and our factories? Maybe! Or, maybe the warming oceans will melt the ice and release gigatons of methane, setting off a chain reaction of further global warming to push us ever closer to catastrophe. Burning methane produces carbon dioxide, so why not both? 4. Snail Teeth What is the hardest substance in the world? A congresscritter's head. Many of you will answer “diamond.” And many don't understand the difference between material hardness, toughness, and strength. And pure stubbornness, as with my answer above. We’ve also found a natural composite material harder than diamond, in a most unlikely place: inside the mouths of snails. Doubt they'll try to make jewelry out of that. If you think you should now fear these snails, who will cut and smash through your body without mercy, put those worries aside. In reality, your body is so fragile that any animal’s teeth could make short work of it... As some cats I've known were prone to proving. 3. Glass Bombs We’re not totally sure where australites came from. Once we dispensed with the volcano theory, we dubbed them extraterrestrial, having come from meteorites, but we don’t think that’s true anymore. Instead, we think an asteroid struck the ground in the distant past, somewhere around 800,000 years ago. It hit so hard that it threw terrestrial material into space. This material then came back, now transformed by its journey and smoothed through reentry. As I noted above (of course I had a point to my nitpicking), that terrestrial material was actually extraterrestrial material that had been here longer. 2. Spontaneously Combustible Coconuts ...is the name of my heavy metal Jimmy Buffett cover band. You’ve run into coconuts many times when you’ve been stranded on desert islands or when you bought one from a roadside vendor. And yet the dried flesh of the coconut holds strange properties and is a class 4.2 hazardous substance. No idea where the joke ends and facts begin here, and can't be arsed to look it up. 1. Fire-Forged Feces Bird shit has always held fascinating properties, sending us rushing to mine the stuff to exploit it and sometimes sparking actual wars. When we weren’t using it as fertilizer, we were digging out compounds from it to use in creating gunpowder. Pretty sure those are the same material: phosphorus. Like everyone, the kestrel poops. Sometimes, it poops above a Russian coal mine, where the blasts of hot gasses transform the guano into something new. It becomes a mineral, which can be colorless, reddish or lilac. But, sadly, doesn't spontaneously combust. |
| From that ivory tower of knowledge known as Cracked, an article about words: As December draws to a close, it’s time for the world’s dictionaries to name their Words of the Year. Yes, this article was from last month. Most words feel like they must have been around forever. But all words are made-up, and some of them were made-up pretty recently. My goal in life is to make up a word and have it be widely used. I mean, sure, that's already happened: I came up with "rad" (the slang word, not the radiation level, which admittedly inspired me) back in the 70s. But no one knows it was me, and so no one believes me. In fairness, someone else might have invented it independently. But I'm going with "they stole it from me." Anyway. The article: 5. Boy And yet, the word we have now for a male child, “boy,” isn’t that old. It only came about in the 16th century. I've looked into this before. Maybe even here; I don't remember. Seems to me there's some debate about the actual origin. In this case, though, I didn't make it up. Before that, for a few centuries, you know what we called male children? We called them girls. We also called female children girls. “Girl” was a unisex word. I'm also unclear on the meaning of "we" here. 16th century would have been just after the end of Middle English. Not to mention there were hundreds or thousands of words added to English since "boy." 4. Guy For starters, the word was a name for around a thousand years longer than it was a common noun. Then came the big guy, Guy Fawkes. Ah, yes, one of the prototypical religious terrorists. To complicate things, I've heard this word pronounced both like it rhymes with "die" or rhymes with "key." It now refers to people of all genders, though that final shift wasn’t so much a gradual expansion of its meaning as an assumption that any word for men can also represent all humankind. No, that's not the assumption at all. We're moving away from that as a culture. The problem is that English now lacks a second person plural, and y'all won't adopt y'all, instead opting for "you guys." 3. Smoking We say a fire is smoking up the place when it creates smoke, so it’s pretty weird that we say the same thing when we (or ham) take in smoke. Not that weird at all. The smoke is happening whether you're inhaling or not, so sure, smoking is still being used in its older meaning, and this section is interesting but nonsensical. 2. Genocide Gotta admit, the origin of this word surprised me. Specifically, that it's less than a hundred years old. The word “genocide” was invented by one man: Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin... The book was published in 1944. By 1948, the U.N. wrote up a treaty criminalizing genocide by name. 1. Forecast Well, it's not like we needed a word like "aftcast." That would, however, be a fun synonym for "recent history." By coining the term “forecast,” FitzRoy made the idea sound magical, which wasn’t particularly conducive to convincing skeptical scientists. Sure, but I bet it got eaten up by the superstitious public. So, yeah, just some fun with words. Nothing too rad, but I didn't want to just yeet the article into the dustbin. |
| I just thought this one would be appropriate for this blog. How to beat maths anxiety Getting stressed about maths is so common, yet there’s no need. With the right approach, you can even start enjoying it According to the author's bio, she lives in New York (or at least did in October of last year), but the article uses Brit spellings such as "maths." Just roll with it. It's a fairly long article, but there's very little actual math in it. The first section's purpose is to explain what this anxiety is: Do this maths problem: 34 minus 19. Do it in your head without paper, and then imagine another person watching you. How does that make you feel? Mark Ashcraft, a US psychologist who studied maths anxiety, described how people in his studies responded to solving similar problems. Many showed ‘unease or apprehension’. They had ‘trembling hands, nervous laughter, and so forth,’ he wrote. I am in no way frightened of math. More advanced topics are beyond me, sure, but if I encounter "what's 34 minus 19" or "what's 20% of 130," or whatever, I just do it. Unless, of course, someone is watching me, waiting to see if I'm slow or will get it wrong, so they can feel superior. So yeah, I kinda get that. You may not have realised that maths anxiety had a name at all, but if you’ve tended to go out of your way to avoid maths, it’s likely affected your life. As it's a part of nearly everything, it surely has. A while back, so the story goes, to compete with the quarter-pounder burger at you know where, a smaller fast food chain started selling a 1/3-pound burger (both measures were weight before cooking, but that's not relevant to the story; presumably, each would lose the same percentage of mass on the grill). They set it for the same price, figuring people would switch over to pay the same amount for more meat. But the promotion flopped, and it flopped because a lot of people saw 1/4, and they saw 1/3, and they concluded that since 4 is greater than 3, why should they pay the same thing for less burger? For a long time, I didn't believe this story. Obviously, some people are that ignorant, but surely not a majority. Most people know that 1/3 is greater than 1/4, right? It's right there on your measuring cups, for one thing. The failure must have had another reason: maybe the 1/3 pound burger tasted like shit. Maybe it didn't, but people wanted to stick with the familiar. Maybe they were fine with a 1/4-pound patty, but didn't want the extra calories. Maybe they didn't trust the rival (it was A&W, incidentally) to have the staying power of McDonald's. But no. People really are that ignorant. Maybe that's because of math anxiety; I don't know. I do know that when I had this confirmed, I still didn't want to believe it. It's not that I think people are unbearably stupid, or that I'm somehow superior because I can subtract 19 from 34 really quickly. Ignorance isn't the same thing as stupidity. But stubborn refusal to fix ignorance? There, I start having issues.Today, about 93 per cent of US adults say they have some amount of maths anxiety, and 17 per cent report high levels. That seemed high even to me, so I checked the source. Indeed, the study it came from said 93%. What's worse, though, is that the same report goes on to say, "In a sample of adolescent apprentices in the United Kingdom, approximately 30% of the study participants reported high math anxiety, and a further 18% were at least somewhat affected by it." While the sample is probably different, if you do the math (yes, really), that implies 48% in the UK. Way lower. So, anyway, after the explanation, almost as long as the thesis you have to write on a recipe page, there's the "what to do" section. I won't quote extensively from that, either, but I do have some comments: Learning a foreign language or reading Beowulf can be just as cognitively demanding or complex as manipulating numbers, yet people tend not to be as intimidated by these sorts of linguistic activities. I was way more intimidated at the thought of learning a foreign language, in school, than I was about math. Mostly, this was because of the group nature of the activity, I think. Long enmeshed in the myth is the notion that it’s not just that some people are better at maths, but that those people fall into certain groups. Most common is the cultural belief that men thrive more in maths (along with other STEM fields) than women. The math champion of my high school was a girl. She was cute, too. Sometimes I wonder what became of her. I know this is anecdata, but sometimes all you need is one example to break a stereotype. In this case, the stereotype is "girls are worse at math." Point is, I knew from personal experience that this wasn't true. Expressive writing is when you write for a specific period of time about your emotions and thoughts that come up in response to a stressful maths situation, such as sadness that you’re not good or smart enough, stress that you’re going to fail, or anxiety or anger that it’s too hard. See, even in an article about math, we can slip a little writing in. Teach maths to someone else I find this to be good general advice: if you want what you're learning to really sink in, explain it to someone else. So, like I said, lots more at the link. Even if you have math anxiety and aren't ready or willing to tackle it, there's good information. No pressure. There won't be a test later. Not here, anyway. Just be wary of fast food joints trying to trick you. |
| Today's spin of the roulette wheel (which is actually redundant, as roulette is probably translated as little wheel, so that would make it a little wheel wheel) brought me all the way back to January of 2007, not long after I started this blog. And it demonstrates why I've never really gotten anywhere with my writing: "Procrastination" I've been kicking myself for procrastination for far longer than that, though, but have never managed to stop actually procrastinating. As I've finally recognized it as a core feature of my personality, I've now given up trying to change. Or, I don't know. I keep meaning to. Maybe next week. As for the entry itself, it begins with what's now an Invalid Item link. What used to be there was a Daily Writing Challenge, which was an activity I found useful in prodding me to complete daily writing exercises. As I recall, it started out with just a few words, and gradually worked up to 2000. Kind of like that guy who lifted a calf every day. The calf kept growing, but he didn't notice because he got stronger. Until, one day, he's walking around with a full-grown ox on his shoulders. Left out of that story was how the ox might have felt about being used that way, but I imagine it's better than being yoked to a plow. Oh, yeah, Milo of Croton was the dude's name. I think he was a real person, but the ox thing was almost certainly mythological.From the entry: I'm sitting here procrastinating. I know once I get into the writing, it'll go fairly smoothly. Still, I'm putting it off like I always do with stuff. I had hoped I would learn better by now. Nope, Younger Me: you never do learn better. You just learn to live with it. Oh, and then there's the Fiction Writing class I signed up for. It begins Monday, and runs for like 9 weeks, once a week. I vaguely remember that class. It was a continuing education thing at the university. I remember they sneered at me for writing science fiction. Snooty lit-snob poseurs. Okay. Enough with the procrastination. Time to write. Well, maybe some dinner first... Anyone else writes that, I assume they're joking. I was not. That is truly how my mind works. Or, well... doesn't. |
| Last year, I featured several articles about planets. Over time, I hit every one... except this one, which has been languishing in obscurity due to the inherent randomness of life. Well, not life, but my system. Anyway, here it is, published way back in September of 2019: Oh, it deserves more attention, does it? Well, I can't disagree, but it's not like we can just stroll over there. You see, I fell in love with Neptune as a kid, back when I was in the second grade. Dude, I like astronomy too, but he's too old for you. We all had to read about a planet and tell a few sentences about why we liked it. I got assigned Neptune. What if you turned out not to like it? Huh? Did the teacher ever think of that? "Jupiter's pretty, but its radiation would kill anyone within a million miles." "Everyone's fascinated by Mars, but there's nothing there." Or, you know, phrased the way a second-grader would. And what if the teacher made them draw the planet? I mean, most planets are pretty easy. Circle. Appropriate color. Lots of black background. But whoever got Saturn would be in trouble. Anyway. In August of 1989, when Voyager 2 started sending back the first clear pictures of Neptune and its moons, the mysteries began giving way to marvels. Neptune is a world of giant methane storms and strange rings. Coincidentally, I read an article recently which noted that the Voyager 2 pictures were false-color, giving Neptune a much deeper blue than it would actually appear to have in the unlikely event that there was a human hanging out nearby. Ah, here it is. Looks way more like that other planet, the one I won't name.So, then the article goes into some of the things we know about Neptune, and they are indeed Amazing Science Facts (well, to the extent that anything we know can be). Something else even more wondrous happens in those deep layers of superionic ice. Carbon atoms get squeezed out of the methane molecules mixed in with the water, creating clumps of crystallized carbon. You probably know crystallized carbon by its more common name, diamond. According to laboratory simulations, the diamonds inside Neptune could have grown to be a meter wide. They are denser than the surrounding ices, so they sink downward toward the planet’s core. That’s right: Inside Neptune, it is raining meter-wide diamonds. Somewhere out there, according to some astronomers, is at least one entire planet made of diamond. I don't know, maybe it was like Neptune, but got too close to a star and its lighter materials blew away. Point being, diamonds aren't as rare on Earth as they try to convince us they are; and Out There, they're probably even less rare. A diamond deserves a ring, and Neptune has several of them — five of them, in fact. Unlike Saturn’s rings, these are thin, dark structures around the planet, too dim to be observed clearly from Earth. I also recently saw a JWST image of... you know, that other ice giant, which also has rings. Spectacular image. That telescope was meant to peer into the farthest reaches of the universe, and yet they pointed it at what's, comparatively speaking, right next door.Look, I'm purposely avoiding the puns, here. Just pretend I've already made the one you're thinking of. So yeah, my adult self agrees with my 8-year-old self that Neptune is a fascinating place. Voyager 2 gave us only a taste of what it’s really all about. And Neptune is just the prototype of a whole class of Neptune-size planets that appear to be common around other stars. When Voyager 2 did its thing, we had no evidence for planets around other stars. I mean, sure, we figured they had to be there, but no direct evidence. Now, we've found thousands. In general, the more we know, the more we understand. Sure, there are probably higher priorities than a mission to Neptune. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. |
| I do like a good literary takedown... though only when I agree with the person doing the takedowning. This one's from LitHub. The article is from last October 10, which is important to note because it starts out: Today is the sixty-sixth publication anniversary of Ayn Rand’s 1100-page magnum opus of unreadable doggerel libertarian science fiction, Atlas Shrugged. Using strikethrough style is, of course, a cheap trick, one where the writer is coyly covering their mouths, giggling, and going "Oops, did I say that out loud?" And it makes me laugh almost every time. Yes, even when I do it. Especially when I do it. In this case, though, the article author did it; I just reproduced it here. Still, calling AS "unreadable," even in strikethrough, is a bit unfair. It is, by some definition of the phrase, readable, in that it contains words, and those words are (as I recall) spelled correctly and ordered according to English grammatical practice into sentences and paragraphs. Set in a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations (isn’t it always the way), it’s the story of railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, and their struggle against the “looters” who want to exploit their productivity. Hence the "fiction" part. Here in reality, it is the "captains of industry" who loot the labor of the workers and exploit their productivity. Despite receiving largely negative reviews upon its release, the novel sold briskly and became a formative text for numerous conservative/libertarian ghouls politicians and thinkers... That's the trouble with science fiction, good or bad: there's always someone out there trying to make it happen. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, it's not. One prominent conservative critic of Rand and her philosophy was William F. Buckley Jr., whose National Review published this scathing review of the novel by (Communist spy turned HUAC whistleblower turned book critic) Whittaker Chambers in December of ’57. So, the rest of the article is Chambers' original review, from which I'll quote only sparingly. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. People being unable to handle nuance is hardly a new thing. So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. Here in reality, those who we today lump into "billionaires" wouldn't last a week in the Gulch, not without the near-slave labor that cooks for and cleans up after them. It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character... Look, I don't care how terrible the book is, or how spot-on the review otherwise is; spoiling the last line is cheating. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. And here the review falls apart, for here we are, two-thirds of a century later, and some people still treat that book like it was handed down from Mt. Sinai. |
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