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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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Final entry for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]. I started June's blogging adventure with an entry, and I'm ending it with one. Also because 30DBC starts tomorrow, I'm going to wrap this one up.Magic works. I know, I know, "Waltz, you're full of shit talking about science and stuff and then proclaiming that magic works?" Well, I'm also an atheist, but I assert that prayer works, too. It just doesn't matter who you pray to. Obviously, I'm going to explain these assertions. Might want your beverage of choice for this one. And, at the end, you may still decide I'm full of shit. Or, you know, you can just skip to the starry bit below if you're only here to discover who won yesterday's Merit Badge mini-contest. Most people, I think, associate the word "magic" with one of two things: stage illusions, or bending the universe to one's will. The former is, as the name implies, illusory -- though I do enjoy a good magic performance -- and the latter is simply wrong. I'm not talking about stage magic here, though; just distinguishing it from the other kind. In fantasy writing (oh hell, this would have made for a decent editorial, but I've already turned in this week's Fantasy newsletter), magic works something like this: someone casts a spell, the soundtrack blares out triumphant (if the character is a protagonist) or discordant (if they're an antagonist) music, the SFX team makes glowy, swirly lights, and (usually) whatever they're trying to do manifests itself in reality. This is enjoyable for me, too, by the way. I do like a good fantasy story, especially if the writer keeps the magic system self-consistent. It's only later that I think, "But where did they get the energy to shoot that fireball / summon a demon from Hell / fly / talk to their dead ancestor / force someone to fall in love with them / whatever?" But there are ancient (and modern) magical traditions here in the real world, though they're nowhere near as flashy. After all, we haven't yet figured out how to hack into the source code of the simulation we're living in, have we? That's a joke. We're not living in a simulation, and even if we were, so what? Thing is, no, you'll never be able to shoot fireballs, or do any of that other stuff. Not without technological assistance, and even then the demon-summoning thing is still questionable. There's nothing "magical" you can do to change the world around you, or the laws of physics. But that doesn't mean you're powerless. We affect the world in other ways, mundane ways. We can affect how others see us by, for example, choosing to bathe instead of, you know... not bathe. Or put on make-up, or get a haircut, or dress a certain way. We can change our surroundings by rearranging furniture, cleaning our rooms (I really need to remember that bit someday), washing the dog. Hell, some people have changed the world by merely writing. So, no, there are no magical shortcuts to these things. We can't change things just by thinking about them; action is necessary. In that sense, magic is purely fantasy. Magic doesn't clean us; soap and water does. Magic doesn't transport us to faraway locales; feet, wheels, and wings do. No, you can't change the world by just a thought, prayer, or ritual... but you can change yourself. Yoga, meditation, prayer, a ritual circle, whatever... these things can focus the mind, or reduce stress, or just give you a different perspective on things. The break from everyday routine alone could be enough to inspire you to finally write that novel, or psych you up to ask your boss for a raise, or whatever. And to relate this back to the prompt, even if you could "make" someone else fall in love with you, well, that would be kinda evil, wouldn't it? Messing with someone's so-called free will is generally considered a Bad Guy thing (unless you're a Jedi, apparently). The stories about such things always end badly too: love potions, charm spells, whatever. There's never a Happily Ever After in such stories, and probably shouldn't be. But just as you're more likely to find a date if you take a shower and comb your hair and maybe lose some weight and stop wearing socks with sandals, so too could modifying your own personality make it easier for someone to be attracted to you. And just as there is nothing wrong with grooming oneself, there is also nothing wrong with identifying the problem areas of your personality and working to change them. You're not messing with someone else's free will; you're only making yourself more attractive. If doing so means drawing a hexagram and some runes on the floor, lighting some candles, and intoning some words, and that works for you, great. Or if it means talking to your invisible friend who happens to have created the universe, well, nothing wrong with it. Whatever works. At least, in theory. None of it has worked for me yet. Maybe if I shaved occasionally?  Mini-Contest results! Yesterday, I asked for words. Specifically, your favorite rare or obsolete words or expressions. As always, y'all didn't make it easy for me. But where would be the fun in that? I loved all the answers, and you'll all get another shot at this soon. Elle - on hiatus  was the clear overachiever here, with five odd words in one comment (and a bonus sixth in another), so one Overachiever Merit Badge heading her way!And yes, I'll find a way to do this even during 30DBC month. I've been trying to make Mondays Mini-Contest days, but we'll see where the prompts take us. |
| June's almost over -- it seems so short and yet interminable at the same time -- and next month I'll be in "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" [13+] again. So, today, I'll talk about one of the reasons most of us are here: words. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/51150/12-old-words-survived-getting-fossiliz... 12 Old Words That Survived by Getting Fossilized in Idioms Not going to repeat all 12 words here, just some highlights. And then it'll be your turn, for a chance to win a Merit Badge. English has changed a lot in the last several hundred years, and there are many words once used that we would no longer recognize today. For whatever reason, we started pronouncing them differently, or stopped using them entirely, and they became obsolete. I'm pretty sure I've talked about things like that before. I know I have a couple more in the queue, though it'll probably be at least August before I get to them. There are some old words, however, that are nearly obsolete, but we still recognize them because they were lucky enough to get stuck in set phrases that have lasted across the centuries. We writers like to deride clichés, and usually for good reason. But we tend to forget that almost every trite phrase was once poetic and meaningful. 1. Wend This, to me, is one of the more interesting ones because of the history: The past tense of wend was went and the past tense of go was gaed. People used both until the 15th century, when go became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where went hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb. In case you were ever wondering why English has such different words for present and past tense of "go." 7. Fro The fro in "to and fro" is a fossilized remnant of a Northern English or Scottish way of pronouncing from. This one is probably obvious, or at least it was to me when I first encountered it. But it never made sense. I mean, if the o sounds at least rhymed, I could see it, but no, we get an oo sound and then an oh sound. They're only related because they happen to be represented by the same letter. "to and fro" makes precisely as much sense as "to and from." But at least there's historical reason for it, as this list demonstrates. 12. Shrift We might not know what a shrift is anymore, but we know we don't want to get a short one. Shrift was a word for a confession, something it seems we might want to keep short, or a penance imposed by a priest, something we would definitely want to keep short. But the phrase "short shrift" came from the practice of allowing a little time for the condemned to make a confession before being executed. Unlike #7 there, this one made some sense to keep around. No, it doesn't rhyme, but it has that nice double alliteration: short shrift. So, mini-contest time! Take a look at the full article at the link (it's short). Do you have a favorite word or expression (other than the ones at the link) that involves a rare or otherwise obsolete word? I'm sure there have to be others besides the twelve listed. And if coming up with one stresses your brain too much -- it does mine; I'm not coming up with any, myself -- then I'll accept any word (or phrase) with an interesting history. Just keep it real; I'll (hopefully) be able to sniff out faux or folk etymologies. The one I like best will earn the commenter a Merit Badge. This could be because it's funny, or interesting, or both. As usual, deadline's midnight WDC time, and please leave the comment here and not in the Newsfeed. |
| Since Avatar: The Last Airbender showed up on Netflix recently, I finally got a chance to watch the series. I don't have the attention span to really binge it, so it's taken me this long to finish it. In honor of reaching the final episode last night, I also finished a bottle of gin, with the (in hindsight) obvious effect of making it so I have no idea what happened in the final episode. The... good guys... won? I think? Oh, sorry if that spoils it for someone. Also, Darth Vader was his sled and Rosebud was Luke's father. So now I have to watch that episode again, sober. All of this is really just my explanation for why I'm posting this at 7 in the morning, after sleeping it off, rather than at midnight, when I was barely able to see the screen, let alone type coherently. https://www.space.com/possible-extraterrestrial-protein-meteorite.html First known extraterrestrial protein possibly spotted in meteorite But the find is preliminary. Yeah, hedging like that really isn't going to stop people from going "Hey look they found life in outer space!" A research team claimed to have found the first known extraterrestrial protein, spotting it in a space rock that fell to Earth 30 years ago. So I can't stress this enough: while proteins are essential for life as we know it, the presence of a protein doesn't imply even the most basic life, let alone Vulcans or Gallifreyans. No, the article doesn't mention anything like that, but every time I see something about "astronomers find earth-like exoplanet" there's always that leap to "Klingons!" It's as predictable as the snickers whenever someone names the seventh planet of our solar system. The protein, which the researchers proposed calling "hemolithin," consists of chains of the amino acids glycine and hydroxyglycine, as well as iron, oxygen and lithium atoms, the researchers reported. And the hemolithin is significantly enriched in deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen that features a neutron in its atomic nucleus along with a proton. I can't be arsed to look for this now, being too hung over and all, but I vaguely remember something about astronomers finding evidence of hydrocarbons in outer space. Like, via spectroscopy. I'm certain that, at the very least, they found a cloud that's mostly ethanol -- because, obviously, that's something I'd remember. At the moment, the distinction between a hydrocarbon and a carbohydrate escapes me, mostly because of the effects of one or the other going on in my body right now (by which I mean, a hangover). But the point is, carbon is really very abundant in space dust, and it forms molecules very easily (hence why there's a whole branch of chemistry devoted entirely to carbon molecules). I guess what I'm trying to say is: it should surprise exactly nobody that there are long-chain carbon molecules in outer space. Being science, though, it's important to actually find them and not just assume that they exist. It's also important to actually find them and not just, for example, end up with Earthly organic contamination on a 30 year old meteorite. I mean, the deuterium seems promising in that regard, but I don't know enough to know if there might be other explanations for it. Such deuterium enrichment does not appear in amino acids that form here on Earth, and so it "indicates protosolar disc or molecular cloud origin," McGeoch and his colleagues wrote in the paper... And that seems like a leap to me. To be clear, the researchers aren't claiming that the hemolithin is evidence of alien life. But the discovery, if it holds up, would still be of great interest to astrobiologists. That's because it would show that very complex chemistry of the sort employed by life as we know it on Earth occurs of its own accord in deep space. Considering that Earth is part of "space," again, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest; if it happened here, it could happen other places. I think the important question is whether long-chain carbon molecules can form and survive things like the solar wind and cosmic rays, which our atmosphere and magnetosphere generally protect us from. The implication would be that it doesn't take a miracle for bona fide biochemical systems to get up and running — and that, therefore, life might be widespread throughout the cosmos. This idea might annoy people of a certain religious bent, but it tracks with what I've been suggesting for years: that life, simple life anyway, is probably common in the cosmos. What I question is the existence of sentient life in our vicinity. Evolution in no way requires the development of anything like what we consider "intelligence." There are other ways for organisms to survive and thrive, as is evidenced by the millions of species of plants, insects, bacteria, fungi, etc. here on Earth, all of which have been evolving for exactly as long as we humans have and yet have, thus far, shown little indication of building spaceships or broadcasting radio. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the idea that we're actually puppets of the bacteria, which is probably a stretch. Mostly I'm putting this out here because there still seems to be an unwarranted cognitive leap in popular thinking from "life" to "space aliens that we could potentially communicate with." But such talk of implications is preliminary; the new paper is still under peer review, after all. And not everyone is onboard with the results. This is a good thing. It's important to be skeptical about things like this. However... "The main problem is the occurrence of hydroxyglycine, which, to my knowledge, has never before been reported in meteorites or in prebiotic experiments. Nor is it found in any proteins," Bada, whose research interests include the geochemistry of amino acids, organic cosmogeochemistry and the search for alien life, told Space.com via email. "Thus, this amino acid is a strange one to find in a meteorite, and I am highly suspicious of the results." ...just because something's never been found before doesn't mean it's impossible. After all, isn't that was "discovery" means? Also, I have to say that "cosmogeochemistry" sounds to me like an abomination of a word. |
| Sometimes in here I talk about science. Sometimes I talk about philosophy. Other times I talk about booze. Of the three, booze is the most important to me. But here's an article about science and philosophy anyway. Well, "article" is being generous. It's more like a book promotion. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/making-sense-of-quantum-mechani... Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics Philosopher David Albert thinks there might be a “clear and straightforward” way of thinking about quantum phenomena Clickbait for nerds! And I bit hard on that hook. I’ll always be grateful to David Albert. In the early 1990s, when I was struggling to write an article called “Quantum Philosophy,” Albert, a philosopher of physics who specializes in quantum mechanics, took pity on me. He served as my guide through the netherworld of quantum interpretations, elucidating the relative merits of the Copenhagen, Bohmian pilot-wave and many-worlds interpretations. The problem with popularizations of quantum mechanics is that they too often stray into the territory of New Age nonsense -- something that this article addresses later. So here's somebody who, maybe, has a pretty good grasp on both QT and philosophy. Horgan: ... What is philosophy’s chief contribution to humanity? Albert: Clarity. Wonder. A certain kind of anxiety. The obvious and enormous and innumerable consequences for the history of the world that I mentioned above. I don't know. See? Only an actual scientist is comfortable saying "I don't know." He could have led with that, of course, but "I don't know" doesn't sell books or generate ad revenue. But I take issue with the "clarity" answer. Philosophy always muddies the water, and discussions thereof always descend into epistemology, and you start to question whether anything -- including yourself -- is real. I say any philosophy that doesn't start with "I am real" is merely mental gymnastics. Nothing wrong with that, per se; a lot of great discoveries have come out of mental gymnastics. But no amount of wishing away the world around us will make the chair under your ass disappear. Or your ass. That takes diet and exercise. Here’s my question: Will science ever tell us why there is something rather than nothing? It already has, in the most basic sense. That is, if there were nothing, then we wouldn't be around to ask the question. Of course, "There is something, rather than nothing, so that we could ask the question," is admittedly unsatisfying and an affront to both philosophy and science. Horgan: I’ll take that as a no. You’ve spent a lot of time pondering quantum mechanics. Have you figured it out yet? Albert: Yup. Sort of. I think I understand it much better than I used to, and better than I used to imagine I ever would. 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. And the interpretations of quantum mechanics that I like (although “interpretation” is really the wrong word here - since the various so-called “interpretations” on offer are really different physical theories, which often make different empirical predictions) are the ones that show, by explicit example, that an account like that can still be had - interpretations (that is) like Bohmian Mechanics, and theories of spontaneous localization. And among those I have no favorite. I think all of them are interesting, and promising, and since they make different predictions about the outcomes of certain performable experiments, it will be up to those experiments, and not to philosophers like myself, to decide which of them, if any, are actually true. So... no. You haven't figured it out. If you had, there'd be only one theory, and you'd have a Nobel Prize. That, or superpowers from having hacked the source code of the universe. Well... I suppose if you have the latter you can always get the former. It turns out that if you imagine that the fundamental physical space of the world is something other, and larger, and different than the three-dimensional space of our everyday experience, then everything that has always seemed uncanny about quantum mechanics suddenly becomes clear and straightforward and understandable and in some sense to have been expected. Even I, an utter amateur at this sort of thing, can see how postulating more dimensions can explain a lot of things (the spin of an electron, e.g., or certain features of gravity) But like I said, I know next to nothing, so I leave it to the scientists to figure out exactly how many dimensions and how they relate to each other. "But if there are other dimensions, why can't we perceive them?" Same reason we can't perceive the earth as round without experiments or a change in perspective -- neither of which change the fact that the earth is, indeed, round. Horgan: Why does quantum mechanics inspire so much New Age nonsense? Albert: Precisely (I guess) because quantum mechanics had for so long been understood - incorrectly - to have overthrown every hope of understanding the world in an objective and literal and realistic and mechanical way. Uncertainty is not ineffability. Horgan: Fair point. What’s your utopia? Albert: I see that some of your other respondents talked about someplace where they could sit around in bathing suits and have nice conversations with interesting people. I like that too. While drinking booze. There is no utopia without booze. HA! I got a reference to booze in here. Anyway, the link is there if you want to read it. I found it interesting but certainly not clear, straightforward, or possessing the ability to help one "make sense" out of anything. Just remember it's basically one person's opinion -- albeit the opinion of someone more knowledgeable about this sort of thing than I am. |
| Nothing, save perhaps the Eiffel Tower and escargot, could be more quintessentially French than champagne, right? Or, as the French call it, "champagne." Well, since you ask... https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-champagne How an English Energy Crisis Helped Create Champagne Desperate bottle-makers turning to a new fuel resulted in a sparkling innovation. Turns out that, like gravity, crumpets, Doctor Who, and Russian Imperial Stout (no, really), champagne was a British innovation -- and the reason why will shock you! (Hey, look, I can write clickbait! Pay me!) In the early 17th century, the kingdom of England was in the grip of the world’s first energy crisis. Decades of population growth, rapid urbanization, countless foreign wars, and myriad voyages of discovery to the New World under the capricious Tudors decimated the country’s forests and its timber supply. They only lost 10% of their forests and timber supply? That doesn't sound so bad. Oh. No, the author is just misusing "decimate." King James I was terrified. Wasn't King James I Scottish? I can imagine a Scot being a lot of things, but "terrified" isn't one of them. No trees for timber meant no ships for the navy, and no navy meant leaving the country wide open and undefended against England’s enemies—which, at this time, was pretty much all of the rest of Europe. But, mostly, as per usual, France. In particular, the proclamation explicitly forbade that anyone should be so wasteful as to “melt, make or causeth to be melted or made, any kind, form or fashion of Glass or Glasses whatsoever, with Timber, or wood, or any Fewell made of Timber of wood.” It took me a bit to figure out what "Fewell" was. Fuel. Google was, for once, no help. But it's not like I spent a lot of time on it. Come on, I only give myself a half an hour to write these things. Maybe an hour, but that stretches my attention span to it- SQUIRREL! But I think I get the idea. "Don't burn wood to make glass, or we'll send you to France." The country’s glass-makers were outraged. They had been burning timber for centuries to make their product: an almost alchemical process of using fearsome heat to melt a mixture of potash and sand. What on earth were they to do now? Harness the hot air coming from Parliament? English wine has long been maligned. And for good reason. But since French beer leaves quite a bit to be desired, I'd say they're even. Especially since they're both very skilled at making cheese. And, in the 1600s, a new type of wine was being produced on the shores of England: refined and unique in character, to cater to the tastes of the affluent and upwardly mobile individuals who had flocked to the capital. The article goes on to describe the basics of the process by which sparkling wine is crafted. It is a method made famous, as the name suggests, by the French in the Champagne region. But here is the first known description of making “sparkling” wine—and Merrett writing that British vintners had been doing this for years. The British are nothing if not creative. I mean, yeah, the French are, too, but again: gravity. And Russian Imperial Stout. The problem with this new liquid, “brisk with spirits,” was that it generated an incredible amount of pressure. In a standard bottle of sparkling wine today, the internal pressure is at around six times that of atmospheric pressure—three times that of a car tire. Which is the only fun part of drinking champagne: popping the cork and sending it flying across the room for the cats to chase. Only an especially strong bottle could withstand this sort of pressure. Thankfully, England’s glass-makers were prepared. And it's not just about the glass. The way the bottle is shaped is essential. Ever notice that sparkling wine bottles have a dimple in the bottom? That's like a three-dimensional version of an arch. Without it, the bottom would just pop right off. After the royal proclamation a few years before, English glass-makers had reluctantly turned to coal. While wood was thought of as a noble fuel, across Europe coal was historically considered undesirable and dirty, and the act itself of mining it had been likened to vandalism or burglary from the earth ever since Roman times. And it's beginning to be considered so again. Fortunately for everyone involved, we can generate massive heat without coal, these days. Sure, coal gave off fumes and toxins, but it also reached a much higher temperature than timber, creating stronger, more durable, and thicker glass. Over time, artisans honed new industrial methods to take advantage of this discovery. While European counterparts were still using wood, the Champagne bottle as we know it was born in the furnaces of England. And once again, we see that while necessity is the mother of invention (and laziness is the milkman), it's booze that drives the greatest innovations. The founding myth of Dom Pérignon has played a vital part in transforming Champagne into one of the richest and most fiercely protected global food and drink regions. It is a convenient, if apocryphal, first-to-market story that has successfully given authority to the Champagne region over every other wine producing area. It was actually the infamous English sweet-tooth and the Londoner’s predilection for bubbles that first gave the wine-makers of Champagne inspiration; they just needed to work out how to create the right sort of bottle, like that of their cross-Channel cousins, in order to capitalize on the new potential market. And we wonder why England and France were at war for nearly a thousand years, with stuff like this going on. This, however, took some time. Replacing wood with coal in the bottle-making process was not adopted in France until after 1700, to imitate and reproduce bottles à la façon d’Angleterre (“in the English fashion”). But change was so gradual that, as late as 1784, French entrepreneurs were after the industrial “secret” of English bottle-making. Basically, the article lays out a timeline and shows that the English invented the stronger bottle first. It was not until the Industrial Revolution reached France that bottles could be produced with enough precision and standardization to withstand the pressure. To be as fair as possible to France, their own contribution to the Industrial Revolution can't be ignored. Some of the earliest and most important work on steam engines was French. Still, as with many origin stories, the French invention of champagne is une histoire fausse. And I'll tell the story of Russian Imperial Stout one day. It's just too awesome not to share. But today is not that day. |
| Entry 7 of 8 for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+], as usual selected at random 7. The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could fit back into my Wonder Woman costume. Ever notice that no one gives a shit if a chick wears a Batman costume, but a dude who wears a Wonder Woman outfit would be subject to all kinds of ridicule? This isn't just because there is, canonically, a Batgirl and a Batwoman, both of whom wear some version of the Batsuit. No, it reflects a deeper problem with gender roles in society. I'm sure all y'all with liberal arts degrees have already figured this out, but it took me a while. The problem is this, and I'm using superheroes because I'm familiar with them and because they're inherent to the prompt: female versions of male superheroes are acceptable, while male versions of female superheroes are not. Or, well, I could extend that to "costumed adventurers," because not all comic book heroes are "super." But let's just assume that I'm talking about the unpowered as well as the superpowered here, because superpowers are really irrelevant to the discussion. So you had, say, Superman, right? And later on, his cousin Kara shows up and she's in the same brightly colored suit but with a skirt (the current incarnation on TV wears pants, but that's not really my point). I've already mentioned the Batchicks. Hulk, and She-Hulk (to be fair, they're very different except for their bright green color). Iron Man, Iron Heart (I'm just glad they didn't call her Fe-Male). Don't get me wrong; there's nothing inherently bad about any of this (though She-Hulk's creation was, shall we say, a bit problematic), but I can't think of even one single instance where it went in the other direction. That is, take the original canonical female superhero, Wonder Woman, because she's in the prompt. You can't just dress up a guy in the same kind of outfit and call him Wonder Man (yes, I know there is a Wonder Man, but he's an entirely different character and, besides, not even in the same universe). Wonder Woman's origin and entire reason for being is tied up (that's a pun for her magic lasso) in her gender. Black Widow? I mean, you can't even imagine a Black Widower, can you? It doesn't even make sense. Squirrel Girl? I mean, how would you even? Point is, it seems to be perfectly okay, culturally, for women to take on originally male roles, but it's never been the same for men taking on traditionally female roles. When it does happen, outside of the superhero world, it's seen as some sort of appropriation, or the men involved are seen as somehow less than fully masculine. I assert that we won't achieve gender parity until this can go in both directions; that is, until it's not seen as "demeaning" for a male character to take on the mantle of one created as a female. Just think about how things would be different if it had been Supergirl first, and then Superman. Or Batwoman first, and then Batman. There's no logical reason for this; it just reflects the old, entrenched cultural way of thinking, that traditionally male roles are seen as superior to the traditionally female roles. I think that's probably changing, but slowly. "It's okay for a girl to be a tomboy, but never okay for a boy to be a girly-boy." And no, I'm not going to wade into the quagmire where all of this intersects with issues of sexuality or gender identity. Comic books are, as I've noted before, a blend of fantasy and science fiction, along with a few other genres thrown in for spice. Fantasy is a really good way to hold up a mirror to our own society, and sometimes, we're not going to like what we see. So if you ever see a guy jogging down the street in a Wonder Woman costume, try not to leap (over tall buildings in a single bound) to conclusions. Me? I don't think I could pull it off. I don't have the tits for it. |
| Yeah, this article is a few years old now but I only found it recently. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/leonard-cohen-remembering-the-... Leonard Cohen: Remembering the Life and Legacy of the Poet of Brokenness For nearly half a century, the novelist, ladies’ man and Buddhist monk built a tower of song – even though darkness was never far off When I first started writing, lo these many years ago, it was because someone introduced me to Leonard Cohen. Before he was a singer/songwriter, he was a poet, and that poetry translated perfectly to his music. This article can be seen as his obituary. It came out not long after his death, which, coming as it did in early November of 2016, capped that shit sundae of a year with a rotten cherry. Leonard Cohen was the poet of brokenness. I've written before of the link I feel exists between depression and creativity. Nowhere was that link more apparent than with Cohen. There's nothing I can do to improve on either Cohen or this article, so I'm not even going to try. I'll have more to say about him later. But I will post an example of what I'm talking about. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. |
| Never had any interest in this activity. But it seems popular. https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/12/real-estate-house-flipping-renovation.h... Dismantling My Dreams, One Brick at a Time We lived out our fantasy to flip a house. We will never do it again. The sheer amount of work involved is mind-blowing. I mean, for that kind of time commitment and level of physical activity, you could mine for gold, or, you know, do pretty much anything else. Like write for Slate. In the spring of 2016, my husband and I plunged headlong into one of the most tantalizing fantasies a couple can share: We bought a house to flip. That is one of your "most tantalizing fantasies" with your husband? Flipping a house? Boy, I'm glad I'm not married to this chick. "Honey, should we do missionary position tonight, or just skip the whole ordeal?" Okay, yes, I can accept the possibility that she was just going for humor. Still couldn't resist the sex joke. Why did I want to flip a house? Well, who doesn’t? *raises hand* Me! Me! I don't! ...the glut of home-transformation shows on TV prey on our fantasies that renovating a house can be an adventure, one that lets you escape the office, create a beautiful home for a deserving family, and earn a tidy pile of cash. Okay, here's the thing. I'm not entirely ignorant of the existence of these shows. I've seen them, occasionally, on screens at the gym in the Before Times, complete with closed captions so I had some idea of what the people were saying. But did it ever occur to you, Ms. Brown, that there's a very, very good reason why these shows always focus on the joy that people take in tearing out walls, selecting fixtures, and (most importantly) collecting the money when someone else inevitably buys their fixed-upped house? Could it be... oh, I don't know... the fact that 9 out of every 10 commercials on those shows are for home improvement stores, power tools, landscapers, real estate agents, brick suppliers, and the like? Yes, I know the shows always also feature some sort of setback. "Oh no, this trim I bought is 1/4" too long! Whatever shall I do?" (Cue discordant music.) I mean, that's just Story Writing 101, right? Conflict generates interest. Said conflict is always resolved right after the next Lowe's commercial. Lady, you've been bought and sold, and you didn't even know it. To be fair, she does mention something like this setback moment, in different words, later in the article. As lawyers working 100-hour weeks, we imagined buying some rough diamond, fixing it up ourselves, then displaying glorious before-and-after photos. You're... both professionals... in high-paying jobs. Since you're lawyers, I'm going to go ahead and assume you're only actually working 50 hours a week and billing 100. Lawyers bill hundreds of dollars an hour. I could do the math, but you'd tune out. Suffice it to say that even low-end lawyers outside of the public defender's office make over $100K a year. Sometimes a LOT over. I can maybe see someone who's making min at McDonald's fantasizing about a fatter paycheck and not having to work for a clown, but come ON. How wrong I was. Turns out the rest of the show, where things go well, is the fake part. Really, flipping a property is a montage of crisis moments. That's in reference to the "setback" moment on those commercials. Yes, I consider the whole show to be a commercial. The moment we drove up to our house—after the closing—we realized we had not paid enough attention to the house next door. Tiny brown bats circled its crumbling chimney. The place looked so haunted, I half expected hunched vultures to glare back at me. Lady, you're doing vultures a disservice. So we sold it. We made our target price, down to the dime. Doing so much of the labor ourselves, we made a reasonable, but hardly inspiring, return on our investment. Yet given the months of work and the financial risk we took, it was not worth it. I've heard worse stories. Like people who thought they could get rich quick flipping houses before the housing crash in the late noughties, and got stuck with the resulting houses because they refused to budge on the selling price. Thing is? Such a crash could easily happen again. Sure, there's risk in everything, but it's one thing to take a risk on an $800 Beanie Baby and another thing entirely to take one on an $800,000 house. It’s been two years, and we have no desire to flip another place. And we don’t watch those shows anymore. I am glad you learned your lesson, young lady. There's way more money in class-action lawsuits. For the lawyers, that is. I might get 30 cents from the weaselly phone company for their deceptive billing practices, but you'll get $300,000. Okay, so, great responses to yesterday's Urban Legend contest. Loved every answer, and I even learned about creepy things that I'd never heard of, and I live for this sort of thing. And the made-up one made me laugh because it demonstrates that someone's been following along. Thanks! For whatever reason, the one about the haunted middle school worked best for me, perhaps because I could most easily see that one becoming the plot of a really bad exploitative horror flick. So this weeks' Merit Badge will go to... Annette ! I'll send it out shortly. But again, I appreciated all of the comments, and you'll all have another chance soon! |
| I'm still working on this week's Comedy newsletter. Sometimes they come to me easily, like last month's, which I'm particularly proud of. But I think I shot my wad on that one, because this week I'm pretty much stumped. And it's not like I can go to other comedy writers for inspiration. I'd just end up stealing their bits, without even knowing I've done it, because my memory is crap. Hell, I've stolen from my own older newsletters before, without realizing it. That's an occupational hazard, though, when you've been at it for... (math) Thirteen years?!  It doesn't help that I try to inject humor into almost every blog entry, and that I've been doing one of those pretty much every day. The joke tank goes empty after a while. I've cheated in the past and adapted one to the other, but I just wasn't feeling it this time. So today I'm going to link a comedy article that also touches on some of my favorite other subjects: movies, folklore, and the sometimes invisible line between reality and fiction. And also ragging on Indiana. I was born there, but my parents had the good sense to flee the state before I was even two days old. And hell, I'll even make this one another Merit Badge winning mini-contest opportunity. https://www.cracked.com/article_27320_when-i-was-growing-up-in-indiana-candyman-... When I Was Growing Up In Indiana, Candyman Was Very Real You might be aware that soon there's going to be a new Candyman movie coming out, co-written by Get Out's Jordan Peele, and honestly, I'm not even that mad that one of Hollywood's most exciting new voices is rehashing old properties. Because Candyman is something that, as far as I can tell, is unique in all of cinema: a fictional film whose central thesis can be demonstrably proven, and if that's too Film School for you, let me put it this way -- Candyman came true. Oh, great. I barely know who Jordan Peele is, and I've never even heard of Candyman (probably because, again, my parents swept me out of Indiana before I could even gurgle). My relationship to the horror genre is similar to my relationship with jazz: I find the vast majority of it boring, but the stuff that I do like I really like. Ah. Yes. I can relate. See, I witnessed a double homicide with a shotgun before I was old enough to drink, so horror gore's as unshocking to me as finding a raw hogsnout in my Moons Over My Hammy. Okay, no, I can't. Which brings me to one of my favorite horror films: Candyman. First of all, Candyman is based on a (very different) short story by Clive Barker, an author I admire so much I have a signed photograph of him sitting on the desk I'm writing this article on. When I was going through a horror phase, I read a bunch of Clive Barker. I don't remember if I read that one or not. I'm certain I've never seen the movie this writer is talking about. But if nothing else, click on the article above, scroll down to the bit I just quoted, and then take a good look at the photo just below that text. Visual comedy can be hilarious, and it's one thing I can't do as much of here as I'd like. Maybe if I were actually funny, I could write for Cracked. One of the central themes about Candyman is that whether or not a story is "true" is irrelevant -- if enough people believe in something, the end result is more or less the same whether the thing is real or not. It's why we still have the TSA even though in a test conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA failed to confiscate weapons snuck on board 67 out of 70 times, a failure rate of 95% -- the TSA is roughly as effective as fishnet condoms. I've been saying something like this for years. You get something that enough people believe in, and the result is the same. George Washington chopping down the cherry tree? Probably never happened; doesn't matter. Ben Franklin with the whole lightning kite thing? May or may not have happened; doesn't matter. Paul Bunyan? Certainly didn't exist as advertised; doesn't matter. I'm going somewhere with this, I swear. So Candyman is about a semiotics student researching urban legends for her thesis. Any movie that features a semiotics student is definitely one I should see. According to my goddaughter in Indiana, kids are still scaring each other with stories about Candyman just as much as they are with stories of Slenderman. Candyman has woven himself into the mythology of the Region, and I can personally assure you the fear he engenders is very, very real. The way these things usually work, we don't know how myths like these get started. Lately, though, new ones have cropped up, like the above, and we do have some idea of their origins. And like this author notes, in the end, it's hard to tell myth from reality sometimes, because the myth has real effects. Like how you're so sure there's a monster under the bed that you spend the rest of your life making sure your toes are always covered by the blankets because blankets are an anti-monster-teeth force field (one that, somehow, doesn't work on cats). So here's today's Mini-Contest: In the comments below (not in the newsfeed, please), tell me about an urban legend you know. Or one you just came up with; who knows, maybe we can start our own mythology here. It doesn't have to be long or involved, just the name and the scary part. Mothman, Jersey Devil, Justin Bieber, whatever. But you can explain as much as you like. I'll pick the one I like best and the author gets a Merit Badge tomorrow (probably a Horror/Scary one, but whatever I think is appropriate). As always, you have until the Witching Hour... |
| Entry #6 for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] 3. That's always an interesting concept when you try to mind your own fucking business then you end up on face book or twitter. plainsue  So, again, no idea what the original quote was, and it probably doesn't matter. If you've been following along, you already know I'm no fan of social media. This site here is about the closest thing I ever use to social media, because it's relevant to my interests and most of us at least try to be kind to each other, or, at least, not hateful. There are exceptions, of course, and being a mod probably skews my viewpoint, but by and large I've had much better interactions here than on Facebook. I haven't used my Facebook account in years. Every time I think, "I should close that account," I realize I have no idea what the password is. And then to recover the password, it makes me identify friends from their pictures. Difficulty #1: Most of my Facebook friends are from this site, and I haven't met most of them in person. Difficulty #2: I have mild face-blindness, so I can't identify faces even of people I know most of the time. So, yeah, if you've tried to get in touch with me on Facebook, or friend me there, I'm not ignoring you. I just can't log in or close my account. Apparently, Facebook is forever. Twutter's another story. I first heard of it, I don't know, sometime back in the noughties before it became the Official Platform of the Pronouncements of the Most Powerful Person in the World. The way I first heard of it, a friend of my then-wife was talking about it. She's an engineer with a rather earthy sense of humor, and she described with some glee how a fellow engineer had rigged his office chair to Twit every time he farted. As far as I've been able to determine, that site hasn't improved any since then, and may have even gone downhill. Considering that I think fart jokes are the lowest form of humor, that's really quite a feat. So, no, I don't have a Twatter account and never have. The occasional really interesting thing from it always gets posted elsewhere, so I really don't feel like I'm missing anything. And don't even get me started on the cesspool that is Instagram. Fortunately, that's not part of the quote above, though as it's owned by Facebook, it's relevant to mention it. Oddly enough, I've made a shit-ton of money from Facebook. But that's another story entirely. I've heard people say that the internet is not reality. I don't think that's the case. I was an early adopter, back in the nineties before everything turned commercial, and even then it was an extension of reality. I've met people from all over the world, first online and then in person. Some of my closest friends became so on this site, before I ever met them in person. To say that it's not "real" is to dismiss the people on the other end of the network as non-people, and I think it's dangerous to label anyone as a non-person. That never ends well. So I understand the draw of social media. I just don't participate. I'd rather mind my own business, and if some picture of me ends up on social media, well, I just shrug and go on with life. But then, I haven't done anything egregious enough to get doxxed or called out. If I did, though, it's probably a sign that I'm not actually minding my own business. |
| Well, today is the Summer Solstice. Technically the moment is around 5:45pm Eastern Time (aka the Only Time That Matters). I have mixed emotions about it, of course, because that means that it's all downhill from here, at least for the next six months... and that in turn means that it's possible to go downhill from here, which is depressing. It is also only a few hours away from a New Moon, which is a rare coincidence and very cool astronomically, but not, as some would have it, an omen. Which kind of leads me to today's bullshit headline? https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/06/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-showed... Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real Which means science is broken. 1. No, he didn't. 2. No, it doesn't. I'll save you the read if you can't be arsed: A statistically improbable but not impossible result highlighted problems with accepted error bars and methodologies in scientific studies, which allowed Slate to publish an article with a sensationalist headline. Now, look, I'm not really one of those "reject it if it doesn't fall into established logical parameters" people. By all means, study ESP, cryptozoology, astrology, ghosts, whatever. Just understand that being too credulous about such things is as bad as being stubbornly incredulous about them. Too often, if you want a certain result, you can influence the results of studies to obtain that result, at least within accepted error parameters. I've harped on this sort of thing before in connection with, specifically, nutrition science. But usually, you find something unexpected and just as useful. My pet hypothesis about dragons, for example, and why they seem to feature in the mythologies of widely varying cultures, is that people of old stumbled across enormous bones, and they leapt to the "dragon" conclusion. When science came along, these bones turned out to be from something even stranger, if more mundane: dinosaurs. This led to a whole new branch of science, paleontology, and lots of new mythologies such as Jurassic Park. So, no, a new moon on (or very close to) a solstice isn't a sign or portent, but it is pretty cool, and if it gets people to learn more about astronomy? Great. |
| I know I've ranted about this shit in here before, but it's a constant annoyance for me, so you get to read it again. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/may/31/extreme-night-owls-i-cant-t... Extreme night owls: ‘I can’t tell anyone what time I go to bed’ What happens when your natural sleeping pattern is at odds with the rest of the world? As I've mentioned, I pick these things at random from a list I maintain. Apparently, The Guardian is good for something besides architectrual demolition and wrapping fish and chips. Anyway, I found it amusing that this particular article came up today, because of how my mind works. See, HBO is offering the entire extant season of their show Watchmen for free this weekend. I won't subscribe to them and I've never had cable, but I've wanted to see that series since it was announced, so now's my chance. The reason I'm amused is that a character in the original Watchmen graphic novel (and the excellent (fight me) Zack Snyder movie adaptation thereof) was called Night Owl. And this story is about night owls. Like I said, it's how my mind works. But I'm taking time from my binge to share this with you. You're welcome. For as long as she can remember, Jenny Carter has gone to bed late and not woken up until late the following morning, sometimes even the early afternoon. Growing up, she didn’t have a bedtime, and at university she preferred to write her essays between 6pm and 10pm. She loves evenings. They’re when she feels the most creative and can concentrate the best. But that’s not when her employer or society expects her to be productive. Now if only her name were Jenny Slater, the Watchmen connection would be complete. Anyway, my own story is different. I definitely had a bedtime as a child, but my mind stayed awake long past it, even in the quiet darkness. I've adapted -- a couple of summer jobs I had required that I wake up before dawn, and there was also the rigorous scheduling requirements of school and career -- but I've never enjoyed it. The older I get, the less I'm inclined to wake up before, at, or, really, anywhere close to dawn. If I feel like watching a sunrise, the best way is for me to stay up for it. Carter, 27, an NHS co-ordinator, is an “extreme night owl”, one of an estimated 8.2% of the population whose natural inclination is to fall asleep well after midnight. Left to her own devices, she’d prefer to go to bed around 3am and wake up about noon. Again, I'm different to this (to use the native British construction of the Guardian). I sleep for a couple of hours in the late afternoon, then get the rest of my eight hours in during the single-digit hours of the morning. Sometimes, something will wake me up earlier (one of the few downsides of living with cats), but I've just always found my late-afternoon energy to be really low and, lately, I've had the power to do something about it. Which is why I generally write these things around midnight. But this isn’t what frustrates her most about being a night owl. “I think one of the worst things is people equating night owls and late risers with laziness,” she says. “I am just as productive, enthusiastic and organised as others, but at a different time. Feeling completely out of sync with the rest of society is the hardest thing, like you must be the one that’s wrong.” I know I've said this before, but this is utter tosh. Not what she said, but that she had to say it. You get about 16 hours of waking time a day; why does it matter when those hours are? Unless, of course, you're stuck on someone else's schedule, and that someone else is either a lark or forces themselves to be one. There’s a growing body of evidence that suggests it’s society, not night owls like Carter, that is wrong. Yeah, duh. I think this came out of a time when most people were agriculturalists, and had to use natural light to do their agriculture stuff. It got co-opted by the Industrial Revolution, which bled right into the Digital Revolution, even though by its very nature the latter has no grounding in diurnal cycles. People tend to change over their lifetime. They are larks in childhood, night owls as teens, and more lark-like again as they get older. I've never willingly been a lark. Well, okay, that's not 100% true. When I'm on a road trip, I tend to wake up earlier just so I can see more of the countryside. Also hotels tend to kick you out before a proper waking time. So why do night owls exist? There is no single universally accepted theory, but evolutionary biologists think that communities with more variation in chronotypes may have been more likely to survive. If not everyone needs to sleep at the same time, then some members of the tribe can stand guard and protect those who are resting. Gah! Save me from bullshit "evolutionary psychology" assertions without evidence. A recent study of a modern-day hunter-gatherer tribe found that during a three-week period, there were only 18 minutes during which all of the 33 tribe members were asleep simultaneously. Well, okay, maybe there's some evidence. Still not strong enough for me to get past my distaste for the whole "this is because evolution" crap. Note: I don't deny evolution; quite the contrary. But there's a whole lot of "we're guessing that we do so-and-so because our ancestors on the savanna needed to do it for survival," and it may or may not be true, but it's largely assertions without evidence. It might as well be Kipling. “We’re brainwashed to believe that early birds are happier, more successful, more disciplined and all-round better human beings than night owls. The hours when I feel most alive are considered ‘ungodly’ and likened to a vampire’s schedule. Owls like myself internalise this message, and we believe we must be lazy, depressed and irresponsible.” That's raw sewage, too. I'd be lazy, depressed and irresponsible regardless of my sleep schedule. This mentality is rooted in our agrarian past, when farm work had to begin at dawn, she says, since people who slept in were unable to provide for their families. These ingrained belief systems are evidenced through aphorisms that span cultures, such as “the early bird catches the worm”. To which my common response is (a very unoriginal), "Maybe, but the second mouse gets the cheese." The article goes on to mirror my own thoughts on agrarian / industrial reasons for these outmoded attitudes. “The biological clock evolved to get a lot of light during the day and get none after night, because we didn’t have electrical light,” Roenneberg says. “In the past, the distribution of larks and owls was much narrower. If you couldn’t fall asleep in those days until 2am and would routinely sleep until 10am you were probably an outlier, or you were sick.” Thus contradicting the "evolutionary" bullshit hypothesis. Roenneberg’s vision of an ideal society would see nobody use an alarm clock: “[People] would fall asleep when they’re tired and wake up when they have slept to the biological end.” I can think of a few more things required for an ideal society, but yeah, that's a big one. And I'd suggest reading the article to get more nuance and less snark. I'm going back to watching Watchmen. I'll probably be at that until 3 or 4 am, after which I'll get some sleep and resume around noon. |
| I've heard Scots, the language, described as "what English might have been if it weren't for those bloody French." So here's an article about Scots. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/scots-language How the English Failed to Stamp Out the Scots Language Against all odds, 28 percent of Scottish people still use it. Despite the headline, there's a lot more to the article than just an examination of linguistic imperialism. But there is another minority language in Scotland, one that is commonly dismissed. It’s called Scots, and it’s sometimes referred to as a joke, a weirdly spelled and -accented local variety of English. Is it a language or a dialect? “The BBC has a lot of lazy people who don’t read the books or keep up with Scottish culture and keep asking me that stupid question,” says Billy Kay, a language activist and author of Scots: The Mither Tongue. Kay says these days he simply refuses to even answer whether Scots is a language or a dialect. Fortunately, the article does answer that question. Though I've heard it described as both, I'm fairly certain that this source is correct: it's a language in its own right. What Scots really is is a fascinating centuries-old Germanic language that happens to be one of the most widely spoken minority native languages, by national percentage of speakers, in the world. That's a fairly specific, and yet non-specific, statement, all at the same time. Scots arrived in what is now Scotland sometime around the sixth century. Before then, Scotland wasn’t called Scotland, and wasn’t unified in any real way, least of all linguistically. Most importantly to me, that was also before Scotch whisky, also known as the sweet nectar of the gods, was perfected. Whether it's spelled "whisky" or "whiskey" is a regional thing, and I can never keep it straight, especially after drinking some. The Anglian people, who were Germanic, started moving northward through England from the end of the Roman Empire’s influence in England in the fourth century. By the sixth, they started moving up through the northern reaches of England and into the southern parts of Scotland. There are a few languages in the world that use the guttural "ch" sound, including Scots and German. I'd always wondered about Scots in this regard, but if its origins are Germanic (as are those of English), this starts to make sense. But the first major break between what is now Scots and what is now English came with the Norman Conquest in the mid-11th century, when the Norman French invaded England. If you talk to anyone about the history of the English language, they’ll point to the Norman Conquest as a huge turning point; people from England have sometimes described this to me, in true English fashion, as the time when the French screwed everything up. "The" time? Also, I'd always heard that the history of England, as England, began in 1066 with the Norman invasion. Which is a bit like saying that American history started in 1776: it glosses over everything that came before and all the people who were calmly living there before some invasion or other. But the Normans never bothered to cross the border and formally invade Scotland, so Scots never incorporated all that Norman stuff. It would have been a pretty tough trip over land, and the Normans may not have viewed Scotland as a valuable enough prize. I prefer to imagine that a vast army of Normans marched north, and, upon hearing the ear-blasting noise of bagpipes, did a quick about-face, uttered the word "NOPE" in unison for the first time in human history, and double-timed it back south to Cornwall in an effort to get as far away as possible and still be on the same island. I realize that there are some people who find those squeaky violations of the Geneva Convention attractive. But I'm pretty sure there's an entire circle of Hell reserved for pipers. By about 1500, Scots was the lingua franca of Scotland. The king spoke Scots. Records were kept in Scots. Some other languages remained, but Scots was by far the most important. "The problem with Scotland is that it's full of Scots." The article then goes on to describe the aforementioned attempts to stamp out the Scots language. Scots is a Germanic language, closely related to English but not really mutually comprehensible. There are several mutually comprehensible dialects of Scots, the same way there are mutually comprehensible dialects of English. Sometimes people will identify as speaking one of those Scots dialects—Doric, Ulster, Shetlandic. Listening to Scots spoken, as a native English speaker, you almost feel like you can get it for a sentence or two, and then you’ll have no idea what’s being said for another few sentences, and then you’ll sort of understand part of it again. Written, it’s a bit easier, as the sentence structure is broadly similar and much of the vocabulary is shared, if usually altered in spelling. The two languages are about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, or Norwegian and Danish*. Unfortunately, I have little experience with other languages, so I have to take their word for it. But, again, it's pretty clear that Scots is its own language. And even now, it's the butt of jokes. Like Yiddish, it's a language that's well-suited to comedy, even if the language itself is serious. Ever seen Scottish Twitter? I don't even go on Twatter and I've seen examples of it. I'm pretty sure there's a good sprinkling of Scots in there. Scots faces a unique and truly overwhelming set of obstacles. It’s very similar to English, which allows the ruling power to convince people that it’s simply another (worse) version of English. The concept of bilingualism in Scotland is very, very new. And English, the ruling language is the most powerful language in the world, the language of commerce and culture. I have a modicum of facility with the English language, and yet I wouldn't want it to displace other languages, however similar or different. Each language reflects its peoples' history and brings a unique perspective. Some people even assert that a different language causes one to think differently, to focus on different aspects of being (or, for some languages, becoming). It's nice to be able to converse with people from all around the world, but that sometimes makes English speakers lazy. There aren't a lot of truly bilingual Americans; we generally aren't under any pressure to learn, say, Spanish or Mandarin, and those are two of the most widely-spoken languages. And yet speakers of those languages often have a reason to learn English, which objectively is a really tough language to pick up. This leads to assholes in my country going, "This is America! Speak English!" which I would find funny if it weren't so damn moronic. And I don't know which would be worse: learning a language that's fairly close to one's own, or learning one that's radically different. I'd imagine that with the latter, you're challenged because every single word, and most grammatical constructions, are completely new to you. It would require a whole new way of expressing thoughts, especially if, as with Mandarin, the written symbols are also completely different. But with a similar language, I could see someone constantly tripping up and not knowing whether the word they want to use is the same in the other language or not. Maybe when, or if, I feel comfortable enough with French, I could give yet another language a try. But not if it involves me having to listen to bagpipes. |
| I ventured Out Into The World for the first time in three months yesterday. Well, unless you count walks to medical offices; I don't because those aren't fun. No, this time, I walked over to the shopping center because I had to pick up a prescription (as a result of one of the trips to the doctor -- not a big deal, just routine), and then I noticed that the nearby taphouse was open for outdoor seating. It was around 3pm, and the temperature was only around 70F (quite low for a Virginia afternoon in mid-June), so there was no wait. Thus, I was able to have my first (and second, and third) draft beer since mid-March. It felt almost... normal. Then I walked home and passed out. And that was definitely normal. Downside to losing weight? Lower tolerance. Upside to losing weight? Cheaper to get drunk. Anyway, today is entry #5 for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] 8. Try not to become a man of Call of Duty prowess, but rather try to become a man of legitimate Zombie Apocalypse fighting skills. Brandiwyn🎶  I'm not familiar with whatever the original of this twisted quote is. Probably doesn't matter. Confession time: I've never played Call of Duty. I don't actually know much about it. I'm more of a Bethesda fan: Elder Scrolls, Fallout, that sort of thing. I've heard good things about CoD and its sequels, but just never got the urge to play it. But I don't think that's the point. All the joking around we all used to do about the inevitable zombie apocalypse seems rather naive what with everything going on right now. An actual pandemic? Cops out of control in the streets? Yeah, no thanks. The attraction of fantasizing about a zombie apocalypse was that the line between the good guys and the bad guys was really clear. Good guys: not zombies. Bad guys: brain-munching shamblers. You could project all of your hate, fear (they are not the same thing), and prejudice onto the hordes of moldy undead. Liberal or conservative, warmonger or peacenik, we could all agree that zombies are bad and need to be eliminated. They are, however fictional, the Common Enemy, and (with a few exceptions in movies and whatnot) there's no nuance there. The survivors have to band together, cooperating against an all-encompassing threat. Even when you have the whole space-alien-invasion trope, there's always, somewhere in the background, the idea that some people will side with the aliens. Not so with zombies. We're all in this together. Well, recent events have thrown into sharp focus the realization that we're not all in this together, and probably never will be. So, give me a video game. Preferably one where I can play as a good guy, or as a bad guy, or (my favorite) a bad guy who convinces everyone he's a good guy. Escape from reality? Sure. Have you seen reality? Three very interesting and well-written answers to yesterday's mini-contest about Why We Are Huge. Though I do have to say I'm just a little bit disappointed that no one proposed "space aliens are fattening us up for the harvest." So it's close, but this time the MB goes to SB Musing  . Check yesterday's comments for the post; it's too long to comfortably copy/paste here. Thanks for reading and commenting!I'll try this again sometime soon, though probably with some subject matter that's a little less... weighty. |
| This article is seven years old now, so some of the background science might have changed. Still, I think it's worth a read. Especially since I'm going to use it for the basis of another Win A Merit Badge Mini-Contest! https://aeon.co/essays/blaming-individuals-for-obesity-may-be-altogether-wrong The obesity era As the American people got fatter, so did marmosets, vervet monkeys and mice. The problem may be bigger than any of us At first glance, this kind of reminds me of the "Mars is getting hotter too hurr durr" climate change denial bullshit. So you'll believe some scientists unquestioningly, but deny others equally unquestioningly? Hm. But no, this is different from that. And so the authorities tell us, ever more loudly, that we are fat — disgustingly, world-threateningly fat. We must take ourselves in hand and address our weakness. After all, it’s obvious who is to blame for this frightening global blanket of lipids: it’s us, choosing over and over again, billions of times a day, to eat too much and exercise too little. What else could it be? If you’re overweight, it must be because you are not saying no to sweets and fast food and fried potatoes. It’s because you take elevators and cars and golf carts where your forebears nobly strained their thighs and calves. How could you do this to yourself, and to society? Sure. And that cancer is because you smoked a cigarette 50 years ago, not because you live next to a covered-up toxic waste dump. And you have a brain tumor because you looked with lust upon a woman, not random genetic or environmental factors. Moral panic about the depravity of the heavy has seeped into many aspects of life, confusing even the erudite. Fancy words have seeped into popular articles, confusing even the simpletons. A report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co predicted in May 2012 that ‘health and wellness’ would soon become a trillion-dollar global industry. ‘Obesity is expensive in terms of health-care costs,’ it said before adding, with a consultantly chuckle, ‘dealing with it is also a big, fat market.’ So, there's a market incentive to keep people thinking it's All Their Fault and We Have The Answer! And so we appear to have a public consensus that excess body weight (defined as a Body Mass Index of 25 or above) and obesity (BMI of 30 or above) are consequences of individual choice. It is undoubtedly true that societies are spending vast amounts of time and money on this idea. It is also true that the masters of the universe in business and government seem attracted to it, perhaps because stern self-discipline is how many of them attained their status. What we don’t know is whether the theory is actually correct. And that's what science is for, if it's not hijacked for government and business purposes like nutrition science has been-- oh, wait. Now look, I'm saying all this as someone who lost 100 pounds and has kept it off (yes, I'd like to lose 40 more, but other things have taken priority in recent months like attempting to stay relatively sane). "There's something you can do about it" is distinct from "it's all your fault in the first place." As the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, recently put it, defending his proposed ban on large cups for sugary drinks: ‘If you want to lose weight, don’t eat. This is not medicine, it’s thermodynamics. If you take in more than you use, you store it.’ (Got that? It’s not complicated medicine, it’s simple physics, the most sciencey science of all.) Like I said, old article is old. Hopefully by now we've learned our lesson when it comes to elected officials proclaiming science-y things. Hold on a minute while I laugh at my own joke. In fact, many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain. Which means, of course, that they think at least some of the official focus on personal conduct is a waste of time and money. As Richard L Atkinson, Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Wisconsin and editor of the International Journal of Obesity, put it in 2005: ‘The previous belief of many lay people and health professionals that obesity is simply the result of a lack of willpower and an inability to discipline eating habits is no longer defensible.’ Again, just because some people can do something about it, if only temporarily, doesn't necessarily mean it was all their fault in the first place. I'm eating 1300-1400 calories a day and walking a mile and a half just to stay where I am. Does that sound normal to you? It doesn't to me. To me it sounds like the Red Queen's Race. But that's an anecdote, not a study. Treat it as such. Yeah, okay, I've also been drinking more, so that's probably sabotaging things. Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. Here's another anecdote: I have two cats. One is fat. The other is skinny. They have access to the precise same food and exercise opportunities. Cats are not known for their self-control, nor do they spend endless hours obsessing over their looks. Obviously, if animals are getting heavier along with us, it can’t just be that they’re eating more Snickers bars and driving to work most days. On the contrary, the trend suggests some widely shared cause, beyond the control of individuals, which is contributing to obesity across many species. It's clear to me now. The Universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate (this is a confirmed observation of cosmologists). Therefore, we're increasing our own mass so that our personal gravity can hold us together. One recent model estimated that eating a mere 30 calories a day more than you use is enough to lead to serious weight gain. Given what each person consumes in a day (1,500 to 2,000 calories in poorer nations; 2,500 to 4,000 in wealthy ones), 30 calories is a trivial amount: by my calculations, that’s just two or three peanut M&Ms. If eliminating that little from the daily diet were enough to prevent weight gain, then people should have no trouble losing a few pounds. Instead, as we know, they find it extremely hard. I can't help but be reminded of the Dickens quote from the personal finance entry a few days ago. I see a lot of parallels between weight loss and budgeting. To make sense of all this, the purely thermodynamic model must appeal to complicated indirect effects. The story might go like this: being poor is stressful, and stress makes you eat, and the cheapest food available is the stuff with a lot of ‘empty calories’, therefore poorer people are fatter than the better-off. These wheels-within-wheels are required because the mantra of the thermodynamic model is that ‘a calorie is a calorie is a calorie’: who you are and what you eat are irrelevant to whether you will add fat to your frame. The badness of a ‘bad’ food such as a Cheeto is that it makes calorie intake easier than it would be with broccoli or an apple. This is, obviously, an attractive model to those who like to make moral judgements when they see a fat person. We are, of course, surrounded by industrial chemicals. I am very glad that the author here specified "industrial" chemicals. Everything is a chemical. In any developed or developing nation there are many compounds in the food chain that seem, at the very least, to be worth studying as possible ‘obesogens’ helping to tip the body’s metabolism towards obesity. Oh, but we can't focus on that, can we? After all, that would shift blame away from the individual, and that's just not the American Way! Beatrice Golomb, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, has proposed a long list of candidates — all chemicals that, she has written, disrupt the normal process of energy storage and use in cells. Her suspects include heavy metals in the food supply, chemicals in sunscreens, cleaning products, detergents, cosmetics and the fire retardants that infuse bedclothes and pyjamas. I bet she has all kinds of fun trying to get grants. The article goes on to suggest that temperature control and artificial light may also play a role. And now that I think of it, didn't the rise in obesity take off about when central air conditioning became more commonplace? Then there are the viral and bacteriological hypotheses, which the article also goes into. These theories are important for a different reason. Their very existence — the fact that they are plausible, with some supporting evidence and suggestions for further research — gives the lie to the notion that obesity is a closed question, on which science has pronounced its final word. It might be that every one of the ‘roads less travelled’ contributes to global obesity; it might be that some do in some places and not in others. The openness of the issue makes it clear that obesity isn’t a simple school physics experiment. And this is important to note, because none of these proposals are conclusive, from a scientific perspective. But then, neither is the Puritanical hypothesis of "you're a sinner!" In short, Wells told me via email, ‘We need to understand that we have not yet grasped how to address this situation, but we are increasingly understanding that attributing obesity to personal responsibility is very simplistic.’ Rather than harping on personal responsibility so much, Wells believes, we should be looking at the global economic system, seeking to reform it so that it promotes access to nutritious food for everyone. That is, admittedly, a tall order. But the argument is worth considering, if only as a bracing critique of our individual-responsibility ideology of fatness. Or we could just blame capitalism. What are we onlookers — non-activists, non-scientists — to make of these scientific debates? One possible response, of course, is to decide that no obesity policy is possible, because ‘science is undecided’. But this is a moron’s answer: science is never completely decided; it is always in a state of change and self-questioning, and it offers no final answers. There is never a moment in science when all doubts are gone and all questions settled, which is why ‘wait for settled science’ is an argument advanced by industries that want no interference with their status quo. Also important to understand. So, now How To Win A Merit Badge. Above, I suggested, obviously as a joke, that obesity is our way of compensating for the Universe's ever-increasing expansion. So, having at least skimmed this article, and knowing all of these contenders for Why We Are Huge, tell me in the comments: Why are we huge? You can be serious, or funny, or both; yes, I tend to appreciate humor, but if there's a gem of dark truth hidden in the humor, even better. As always, you have until midnight WDC time. If I get enough comments, I'll do this again in a few days. |
| This article is a couple of years old, now, and there may have been some changes in the landscape of its subject matter since then. But what the hell, right? https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/should-lab-grown-meat-be-called-meat.html Is Lab-Grown Meat Really Meat? A labeling war is brewing. This sounds like more of a philosophical question than a scientific one. What we call something is largely a matter of perception. For instance, someone who eats dead people to survive is a "cannibal," but someone who takes organs from a dead person to replace their own in order to survive is called an "organ recipient." There's no philosophical difference (though there would be if it weren't a matter of survival), but in our culture, one is taboo and the other is a triumph of medical science. After centuries of a veritable monopoly, meat might have finally met its match. The challenger arises not from veggie burgers or tofu or seitan, but instead from labs where animal cells are being cultured and grown up into slabs that mimic (or, depending on whom you ask, mirror) meat... But there’s another, more immediate battle heating up between the cattle industry and these new entrants into the meaty ring. So buckle up and put on your wonkiest hat, because the labeling war is about to begin. So, it's worse than a philosophical question. It's a marketing one. In February, the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association wrote a petition to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, asking the government to ban cultured-meat companies from using the terms meat and beef at all. In response, a rival cattlemen’s association, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, wrote a letter opposing the petition. Splitters! This is not be the first time that food products meant to imitate or replace more traditional fare have faced questions about their labeling. In 1869, margarine was invented by a French chemist. As the butter replacement spread to the United States, dairy farmers raised the alarm. This is not the same thing at all. Health comparisons aside, margarine is made from completely different ingredients. In contrast, cultured meat is chemically precisely the same as dead cow, pig, chicken, whatever. David Henderson, a representative from Iowa, compared margarine to the witches’ brew in Macbeth. You're not supposed to say the name! No wonder margarine still exists. The rise in vegetarian and vegan food options in supermarkets has given us a few more examples of mimics and their labels. Soymilk and almond milk have been a thorn in the side of the dairy lobby for more than 15 years. The Soyfoods Association of America petitioned the FDA back in 1997, asking for permission to call their products “soymilk,” starting a long battle between soy manufacturers and dairy farmers. Dairy farmers object to these beverages being called milk, but thus far the FDA hasn’t done anything to stop brands from using the word. This, too, is a marketing thing and maybe one of classification. Standing in a garage doesn't make you a car, but if it quacks like a milk, maybe it's a milk? I don't know. So the question of who is going to dictate the labeling of cultured meat is something of a riddle, because it really depends on whether you see cultured meat as meat. From a production standpoint, cultured meat is more in line with the way that drugs and supplements and additives are made in a lab, and that would make the FDA more qualified to oversee things. But from a final product standpoint, if the lab-grown meat is going to wind up on the shelf next to the traditionally slaughtered stuff, it seems like the USDA should take charge. With bureaucracy involved, we should get a final decision on this sometime in the 2070s. Or, I don't know; maybe they've already made the decision since this article was published. Depends on who gives the government the biggest bribe. But what do they want, exactly? It turns out that different cattle lobbying groups want different things. This brings us to our second question, which is less bureaucratic, and more philosophical: What is meat anyway? Is this cultured meat truly meat? Should it be called meat in the first place? The lab-grown meat companies I spoke with are clear on their answer to this question: yes. “Our products meet the statutory definition of meat,” Eric Schulze, the vice president of product and regulation at Memphis Meats, told me by email. “Does it comes from an animal? Does it have the same biochemical makeup as meat? If yes, then it’s meat,” says Josh Tetrick, the CEO of Just. And what is the sound of one hand clapping? Don't answer that. It's 99% likely that I've already come up with the same answer. So, okay, questions of definition, philosophy, classification, legality and marketing aside, let's consider empathy. I'm a carnivore, but I'm well aware of the issues surrounding traditional meat production in a developed world. Factory farming, inhumane conditions, and so on. Now, for me, the taste of delicious meat outweighs those considerations. This makes me an asshole and probably a target for certain groups. I'm okay with that. But when I can be arsed to do so, I try to eat ethically-sourced meat. To me, lab-grown meat is the answer to this ethical quandary: I can have delicious meat, and cows can be cows instead of hamburgers. I would be remiss if I didn't also note that, in the unlikely event that everyone became vegan at once, say, tomorrow, there would still be a lot of dead cows, pigs, chickens, etc. We just wouldn't be eating them. It would be like when horses became mostly obsolete as a means of transportation, only on a much bigger scale because there are a lot more humans now than there were 100 years ago. So all of those meat animals would still be killed, only instead of serving the useful function of being delicious, they'd just become carrion. Huge benefit for vultures; not so much for humans, and definitely not for the poor piggies. Anyway. Lab meat is a way around all of these ethical problems. It would be slow to catch on, so meat animals could decline in numbers slowly. People who enjoy meat but don't like the farming issues could eat meat again. Except, of course, for the people who will have a visceral distaste for the whole idea. And if you don't think those people exist, look up the GMO controversy. I swear there's no pleasing some people. With this many people in the world, GMOs are really the only way to avoid a Malthusian collapse, and yes, I mean even after the paltry 2% drop in population due to COVID-19. And yet people freak out, calling them "frankenfoods," and forcing producers to label their products as to their GMO content or lack thereof. And then there are religious prohbitions. Observant Jews still won't eat pork, lab-grown or otherwise; I'm fairly confident of that. And I talked to a practicing Hindu about this once, and he said they probably still wouldn't eat lab-grown beef. The difference between the Jewish prohibition against pork and the Hindu one about beef is that pigs are considered unclean by the former, whereas cows are considered sacred by the latter. Couldn't be more different. And yet, the result is the same: nope. I find the whole thing fascinating, though frustrating. And now if you'll excuse me, I have some dead cow to put in my belly. |
| "The problem with internet quotes is that you can't always depend on their accuracy" ~Abraham Lincoln https://qz.com/1513176/john-stuart-mills-philosophy-shows-arguing-online-is-futi... 150 years ago, a philosopher showed why it’s pointless to start arguments on the internet Wildly inaccurate facts and spurious arguments are unavoidable features of social media. Yet no matter how infuriatingly wrong someone is, or just how much counter-evidence you have at your disposal, starting arguments on the internet rarely gets anyone to change their mind. Nearly a century-and-a-half ago, British philosopher John Stuart Mill explained, in a few clear sentences, why certain arguments simply won’t go anywhere. So despite the sensationalist headline, a philosopher made a point about arguments in general, and, quelle surprise, the point applies to arguments on a specific medium. Philosophers, of course, are often wrong, but it's hard to argue with John Stuart Mill. Because he's dead. Mill highlights the often overlooked reality that many opinions aren’t based on facts at all, but feelings. And so, contradictory points of information don’t shift emotionally rooted arguments, but only cause people to dig deeper into their emotions to hold onto those views. Of course, MY opinions are entirely based on rationality and facts, while THEIRS are all emotionally based and WRONG. And chartered psychologist Rob Yeung, whose book How to Stand Out emphasizes the effectiveness of emotions, rather than logic, in convincing others to agree with you, points to research showing that use of metaphors motivate people to make decisions. 1. What the neurological fuck is a "chartered psychologist?" 2. I've been saying that metaphors are powerful, but does anyone listen? No. They're brick walls. 3. "motivate" points to "use" and thus should be "motivates." Does no one edit anymore? Pay no attention to these editor-less blog entries. There are often multiple ways of interpreting a single point of information and so, much though some people might like to think they’re right about everything, there are surprisingly few issues to which there’s an unequivocally correct opinion. Except mine, of course. Instead of seeking to convince others, we can be open to changing our own minds, and seek out information that contradicts our own steadfast point of view. Now why would I go and do that? It might turn out that I'm wrong, which of course is impossible, and even if it were possible I could never admit it. So it must be that I've been brainwashed. Maybe it’ll turn out that those who disagree with you actually have a solid grasp of the facts. Unpossible. There’s a slight possibility that, after all, you’re the one who’s wrong. No, YOU are wrong, and probably a sheep-shagger too. Okay, seriously, though, like most philosophy, this is not helping. Joking aside, yes, I could be wrong. But am I supposed to think that I might be wrong about issues like:  Science is the best tool we have for figuring things out, even if it's not perfect; Racism is bad; Vaccination saves lives; Apollo 11 put two dudes on the actual Moon; The Earth is roughly sphericaletc.? I've run into arguments against all of these positions. Some of them, of course, come from trolls who are just trying to get a reaction, which I try not to provide. But some people actually believe the opposite of the above statments, and they're painfully, objectively, dangerously, wrong. I also have opinions that, yes, could be wrong. Not only that, but I might have facts wrong. If so, I try to be open-minded when I get new facts. My problem in that regard is that I have a lousy memory and I tend to forget the stupid shit I used to believe. It's one reason I blog. But then I'd have to go back through old entries and cringe at old beliefs, and that's painful so I don't do it. Still, I understand and respect that some people believe differently than me on, for example, the existence (or lack thereof) of a deity, or whether or not we're living in an advanced simulation (or that, effectively, these are the same belief). I admit that if a flying saucer landed near me and a little bald guy came out and asked me to take him to my leader, well, first of all, I'd ask if he could wait until we have a sane leader, but mostly, assuming I'm sober, I'd abandon my disbelief in sentient extraterrestrial life in a snap. Unlike some people on the internet, I do seek out contradicting views, or, at the very least, I don't automatically dismiss them -- unless they're patently absurd, like the contradicting views to my bullet points above. Still, nothing's worth the drama or hassle of arguing about it on the internet, or even, usually, in person. Just have a beer and relax already. |
| Entry #4 for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] 14. Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you'll get a lot of practical experience with Newtonian orbital mechanics. Robert Waltz  I've been choosing these at random, and just happened to pick the one prompt that I twisted. And that's fine; it means I get to talk about two of my favorite things: motivational quotes and orbital mechanics! I might even get a few words in about beer. You certainly know the original quote: "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars." For once, I could be arsed to look it up, and it's attributed to someone named Les Brown, who I've never heard of unless it was this kid I went to school with who, obviously, wouldn't be a kid anymore. Huffington Post, however, attributes it to Norman Vincent Peale, who I have heard of but couldn't name anything he wrote off the top of my head. Yet another source says it was Neil Armstrong who said it, and if you haven't heard of him, boy howdy are you reading the wrong blog. Another claims someone named W. Clement Stone wrote a similar saying. I think it's pretty safe to say that the actual author of the original quote is unknown, which is fine, because whoever said it ought to be fucking ashamed of themselves (I highly doubt it was Neil Armstrong). It's glurge of the lowest order, even worse than the vast majority of motivational quotes, and it contributes to the general misunderstanding of science that keeps people in willful, comfortable ignorance. Why do I doubt it was Armstrong? Because he's one of the dozen or so people who have been to the goddamned moon, in the course of training for which he would have known exactly and in excruciating detail what would have happened if he'd missed: that they'd be in orbit indefinitely, around Earth, moon, or sun, and whether he and Aldrin and Collins would have died of asphyxiation, dehydration, hunger, or the collective miasma of each other's farts before their desiccated corpses might be found by some other team of astronauts from some other country in the distant future, because if that had happened, we'd have scrapped the space program forever and the only other country who might have sent people to recover them wouldn't have gotten there quickly enough to save them. Hence my twisting of the quote. Orbital dynamics is weird and counter-intuitive. To slow down, you have to speed up. To speed up, you have to slow down. There is no left, right, up, or down. There's no such thing as moving in a straight line as we understand it from our Earthly perspective. Worst of all for the purposes of this idiotic quote, and I'm going to use miles here but as you'll see it doesn't matter, the moon is about 240,000 miles away off the top of my head. The Earth is about 21,000 miles in circumference, also off my noggin, so you'd have to circle the Equator (or any line of longitude, etc.) more than 13 times to travel an equivalent distance. That's a long way, but it's a rounding error compared to the distance to even the nearest star. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about four and a quarter light-years away. Now I've reached the limits of being able to pull numbers out of my ass, so I'm going to look up the conversion. That's (grâce à Google) 2.5e+13 miles. 240,000 is 2.4e+5 in the same notation. The reason we use scientific notation is that such distances are absolutely unimaginable to most of us. And that's only the nearest star. If you take "among" literally in "among the stars," maybe you can accept 1/3 to 1/2 of the distance from our sun to Proxima Centauri, but even that is a mind-bogglingly huge distance. With current technology, you'd literally never get there; we just don't know how to go fast enough to go that far in one human lifetime, even ignoring such trivia as bringing along enough food, water, and beer to keep you alive on the journey. The original quote is meant to convey the idea that one should dare to dream big, and even if one fails at one's goal, something even better might happen. But in reality, you just die, quickly or slowly. And that's reality, folks. But that doesn't mean there's not hope. There are two reasons why we, as a species, were able to put people on the moon to begin with: science and technology. True, we've dreamed about it for a very long time, from our limited perspective of time. This relates some of the historical tales about the journey.One such story tells of the journey Lucian and 50 companions take on a boat carried to the Moon by a giant waterspout. When they arrive on the lunar surface, they’re greeted by a race of three-headed vultures and soon find themselves in the middle of a war with another species. Eventually they make their way back to Earth and experience more fantastic adventures. Lucian’s lunar tale is the earliest known piece of fiction that depicts space travel, a Moon landing, aliens, and interplanetary war. Hell, that sounds like an awesome story. But a story is only the first step. A giant waterspout isn't going to carry you to the moon; it's more likely to rip you to shreds. Similarly, radiation isn't going to turn you into the Hulk, toxic waste isn't going to give you heightened senses, and getting bitten by a radioactive spider is a major nope. Stories are great; they make us human, connect us to each other and the world, and I daresay they're what most of us are here for. But it was Newton who ultimately showed us how to get to the moon, not with stories, not with motivational quotes, but with goddamned mathematics. But hey, I hated the quote enough to give this much thought to it, so I guess it's useful after all. |
| Another personal finance article to take a shot at. And I used to respect this source. Not so much anymore. https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/retirement/T047-S014-7-ways-to-sabotage-your... 7 Ways to Sabotage Your Financial Future I know the url says "slideshow" but it's just one page, at least with my noscript-running browser. Why would anyone sabotage their own future? What future? Here are seven ways you can sabotage your own financial future and work against yourself. 1. Taking advice from someone just because they have a bunch of letters after their name. Oh, wait, that's not actually on there. Let's see what is. Missing Out on Opportunities (to Save) By following your FOMO on impulse purchases, you may keep missing out on savings opportunities and significantly decreasing the odds of achieving financial independence. That's... well, that actually tracks with what I've been saying. Still, it may be worse to completely deny yourself anything "extra" just to sock the money away. Some people can do it. It's possible to do both saving for the future and making the occasional impulse purchase if you plan carefully and already have the basics (food, beer, etc.) taken care of. Making Big Purchases with Irrevocable Consequences With a helpful picture of a money pit (boat). Resale value should always be considered when making big purchases. I didn't buy my home for resale value. I'm not one of those suburbanite "but so-and-so will make my property value decrease." I *want* my property value to stay relatively low, because I'm paying taxes on the thing, and the more valuable the city thinks it is, the more taxes I pay. I'm not worried about resale value because I don't intend to move. People be all like, "your house is an investment." No. Your second house is an investment, should you be so fortunate. The house you live in is a home. And having spent my childhood around boats and boaters, well, no thanks. Falling Prey to Lifestyle Creep I live the lifestyle of a creep. Oh, wait, this means something else. As income goes up, there is a natural desire for some people to increase spending and upgrade their lifestyle. I don't know about "natural." A lot of that is seeing how other people live and getting into a "keeping up with the Joneses" competition. Some of it is comfort-seeking, though. By constantly upgrading your lifestyle to keep up with or even outpace income growth, you may find that no matter how much income you earn you always feel squeezed. One of the sentences in this section made me twitch; I'll let you figure out which one. Anyway, this isn't bad advice as far as it goes. Whenever I'd get a raise, I usually decided beforehand how much of it I'd budget for spending and how much for saving. I've heard "well, you were living on X dollars a year before the raise, and you can keep doing so when you make X+y," but in reality, inflation happens and you have to start spending more just to maintain your standard of living. Setting the Wrong Priorities Make sure you’re on track for retirement and financial independence before diverting too much money toward a child’s education or a second home. I've talked to people who are resigned to working until the day they die. That's anathema to me, so I did something about it. At some point, you're going to become irrelevant and no one will hire you, or you'll be too sick to work, or both. Don't make other people, including your children if you have any, feel obligated to care for you when this happens. That's actually the point this author makes, so no argument on this one. Neglecting the Defense A well-rounded financial plan blends offensive strategies, like investing in stocks, with defensive strategies, such as building an emergency fund and buying adequate insurance coverage. Yeah, okay, but what to do first? The stock market has become the only way to build wealth long-term, what with interest rates at extreme lows. People see the paltry interest rates on savings and bonds and go, "What's the point?" But at the same time they tend to view the market with distrust, and yet investing in a diverse set of publicly traded corporations over the long term has always worked out in the long run (10-20 years). And if it ever doesn't work out, then we have bigger problems than money. It used to be there was a middle ground, that, for instance, CDs would pay significantly higher interest than savings accounts, with only the opportunity cost of having your money tied up for a fixed amount of time -- not usually a problem for an emergency fund. But not these days. Which leads us to Making Temporary Losses Permanent Someone told me recently they watched their account daily during the Great Recession in 2008. When their balance plummeted by 50%, they sold all of their investments in stocks and only held cash to avoid losing any more. Worse yet, when the market turned around, they stayed in cash, afraid to invest again for fear of losing more. Instead of avoiding more losses, he simply galvanized that one as a permanent loss of capital. The biggest mistake people make is buying stocks on margin. Fortunately, that's usually impossible in a retirement account. The second biggest mistake is panic-selling. The thing to do, generally, when the market crashes, is to buy, not sell. This goes against every instinct most people have, so they're frightened of the whole idea. Market drops, even big drops like the one yesterday, are not only inevitable, but a necessary part of the process. Most people know "buy low, sell high," but what's difficult about that is: how do you know when these points are reached? The answer is, you don't. It has been shown time and time again that there is no way to time the market. Even Warren Buffett, who is probably the greatest investor of all time, can't time the market. Sure, people get lucky sometimes, and you hear about them. And people get drastically unlucky at at other times, and you hear about them too. But you know what is guaranteed to lose money? Sticking wads of cash under your mattress. If you did that with $1000 in 2010, what would it be worth now? About $825 in terms of real purchasing power. If, instead, you put that money into an exchange-traded fund? Well, depending on the fund, and the actual dates, but something like $3000, or $2500 in terms of 2010 purchasing power. Not to mention that under the mattress is the first place a burglar will look, followed by your sock drawer. All in all, this turns out not to be terrible advice; I just don't think it goes far enough. |
| Science is cool. Science reporting needs some work. https://www.cracked.com/article_27801_sorry-but-discovery-parallel-universe-bs-t... Sorry, But 'WE DISCOVERED A PARALLEL UNIVERSE' Is A BS Tabloid Headline This crap was making the rounds before the riots, and then, understandably, got buried. Though, I suppose, it could be argued that we all woke up on January 1 in a parallel universe, where nothing makes sense anymore. But I still have my goatee, and everyone else doesn't, so there's that argument against it. Breaking: Scientists have 100% proven that parallel universes exist and that there's one out there where time runs backward, whatever that means. So instead of COVID, they've got a Benjamin Button pandemic ... Except scientists didn't actually prove that at all. Yeah, that's the story that was circulating, or close enough. The study revolved around the movement of high-energy particles called neutrinos. They pass through solid objects all the time and even pass through us trillions of times a second (At least buy us dinner first.) Neutrinos are weird, and they're interesting enough without having to make stuff up about them. For instance, in addition to not interacting very much with the matter we're made of, they're shapeshifters, able to change mass as they travel. I, too, change mass as I travel, but not as quickly, and unlike me, neutrinos don't pick up the extra weight from McDonald's but (probably) from the Higgs Field. There's this part of a lot of scientific studies where the researchers propose explanations for the unexplainable phenomenon they've observed. Other researchers around the world understand that it's just spit-balling to get everyone's minds churning with possibilities. Yeah, this is where we get the disconnect between reality and speculation. It's like when you see weird lights in the sky and say "maybe it's aliens" and you tell your friends and they scoff at you for believing in aliens. I didn't say it was aliens; I said that's a possibility, the same way the poop in your yard is maybe from unicorns but it's way more likely it's from the neighbor's dog. Does it look like a rainbow and smell like roses? No? Okay, discard the unicorn hypothesis and put up a fence already. Tabloid newspapers don't understand that, so they publish the purely theoretical musings as established fact. It's not just tabloids. Even some respectable publications like Cracked make this mistake sometimes. Don't get me wrong; parallel universes are not outside the realm of possibility, if you pay attention to certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, or start wondering why it is we're here and not somewhere else or nonexistent. Hell, it might even explain why neutrinos shift they way they do (but then again it might not). I was reminded of this recently when, plastered all over some site that Google keeps sending me to because it thinks I'm interested in science for some odd reason, was another "Astronomers Discover An Earth-Like Exoplanet!!!" headline. No. No, they did not. First of all, to an astronomer, Venus is Earth-like. But reporting on it like that makes the reader think they've found Gallifrey or Risa or some shit, and we finally have a goal for when this planet becomes unbearable to live on, sometime later this month. But a little digging told me that, while the planet in question does indeed seem to orbit within its star's habitable zone and might be relatively Earth- or Venus-sized, it might not exist at all, and there's nothing in there about showing any signs of actually harboring life. Right now it's just a blip in the data, and that's all. I've little doubt that, somewhere in the galaxy, there's at least one other planet with conditions we'd think of as Earth-like. But no, we still haven't found one. This sort of thing only increases the general public's distrust of science, and that shit needs to stop. I get that you want readers so that you'll get ad revenue, but in the long run it's going to bite you in the ass. But hey, then you can always blame aliens. |
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