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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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Congratulations on winning an honorable mention for Best Blog at the 2018 Quill Awards for [Link To Item #1196512] . *^*Smile*^* This award was sponsored by the blogging consortium including [Link To Item #30dbc] , [Link To Item #blogcity] , [Link To Item #bcof] and [Link To Item #1953629] . For more details, see [Link To Item #quills] .](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/type-Blogging-2180.gif) ![Merit Badge in Highly Recommended
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| Well, tomorrow I plan on going back to the 30DBC for September. We'll see how that goes. So today's article is short on philosophy and long on speculation, but I thought it was interesting enough to share since this affects many people. Also, since it's the end of the month, I'll do a Merit Badge Mini-Contest! Details below. Why the world is becoming more allergic to food The rise in allergies in recent decades has been particularly noticeable in the West. Food allergy now affects about 7% of children in the UK and 9% of those in Australia, for example. Across Europe, 2% of adults have food allergies. Obviously the BBC is a Brit-focused site, so they didn't give stats for the US. I suspect it's about the same... at least in reality. When you lump in all the children whose parents just want them to be special, it's probably closer to 40%. Naw, I just pulled that number out of thin air. I can't be arsed to look it up. But seriously, all the ones who are faking it (as with gluten intolerance, or getting some doctor to sign something that your vicious little yip-yip mutt is actually an emotional support animal) just make things worse for those with serious issues. I suppose as far as Munchausen's-By-Proxy goes, though, things could be worse. While we can't say for sure why allergy rates are increasing, researchers around the world are working hard to find ways to combat this phenomenon. Article is from last year, obviously. I'm betting the pace of the work has slowed somewhat. The increase in allergies is not simply the effect of society becoming more aware of them and better at diagnosing them. It is thought that allergies and increased sensitivity to foods are probably environmental, and related to Western lifestyles. Well, then, we're boned. There is no single explanation for why the world is becoming more allergic to food, but science has some theories. Insufficient data to know if she's using "theories" in the scientific or colloquial sense. Given her credentials, I certainly hope it's the former. One is that improved hygiene is to blame, as children are not getting as many infections. Sounds like a bit of a trade-off to me, but what do I know? Another idea is that vitamin D can help our immune system develop a healthy response, making us less susceptible to allergies. Most populations around the world do not get enough vitamin D for several reasons, including spending less time in the sun. Not much you can do about that in the UK. But really, you tell people to slather on SPF60 sunscreen and then wonder why they have VitD deficiencies? A newer, "dual allergen exposure" theory, suggests food allergy development is down to the balance between the timing, dose and form of exposure. Well, that tracks with it being an immune response thing, but the article doesn't do enough, in my opinion, to explain why rates are increasing if that's the case. I went over half a century without allergies. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one. When I spent some time in the hospital, I got asked about it all the time. The orderly: "Are you allergic to any medications?" Me: "No." Nurse: "Any allergies?" Me: "No." Doctor comes in. "Do you have any allergies?" "I'm allergic to repeating myself." They wheel me down the hall in a gurney. Janitor stops what he's doing: "Are you allergic to anything?" Me: *sigh* I mean, this is a hospital that, one time, switched a couple of people's babies, and apparently people thought that was a Big Deal (having been adopted, I fail to see the problem), so I can understand them being thoroughly cautious, but fucking stamp it on my forehead or something, will ya? I'm having a heart attack over here; I got worse things to worry about than allergies. So anyway, some years later, I tried a new brand of protein bar with something called "moringa" in it, and goddamn if I didn't break out in hives. I could feel my blood pressure plummet to something like 40/20. Okay, I don't know what my actual BP was, but the point is, it felt awful. I can no longer say that I'm not allergic to anything, but unless they put moringa in my flu vaccine, I'm probably safe.  Merit Badge Mini-Contest! Normally I relate these things to the topic, but I'm allergic to allergy talk. So, since it's the end of the month, I'll just ask: This year has been utter shit. What are you hoping and/or fearing for September? As usual, you have until midnight, when the calendar flips over to the new month. Just comment below. There's a Merit Badge going to whoever posts the comment I like best. Could be funny, serious, something in-between; I won't know what I like best until I see it. Here's some inspiration. Or not. Up to you: |
| Because nothing matters anymore, I thought I'd just take today's blog entry to give you the recipe for a drink I invented. 3 oz. Russian vodka 1.5 oz. Kahlua 1.5 oz. Rumchata 1.5 oz. milk or cream Fill a cocktail glass with ice. Mix vodka and Kahlua in glass. Splash in Rumchata and milk. This is my take on a White Russian. I invented it sometime in 2017 at a bar but never really made it for myself because I don't like to buy milk. This is because every time I actually buy milk, it seems like it goes bad the next day, and yes, I do put it in the fridge. But nothing matters anymore, so I have milk now. Oh, so Rumchata? If you're unfamiliar with it, it's delicious.  This is an American drink with a Russian influence. Consequently, my name for it is... The American Election. So August is almost over. Therefore, this needs to be shared. You look into her eyes And it's more than your heart will allow In August and everything after You get a little less than you expected, somehow. |
| Okay, whoever keeps asking the question, "How could this year get any worse?" -- I want you to stop that shit right now. Never ask that again. I learned of Chadwick Boseman's death a bit over an hour ago, so I'm getting drunk and watching Black Panther. But that doesn't mean I can't do a quick blog entry at my usual time. Today's ties in with the entry from a couple of days ago, and it's written by a guy I know. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/do-aliens-exist-probably-are-they-intelligent-prob... Do aliens exist? Probably. Are they intelligent? Probably not. Just to be clear, my own speculation on the subject, as seen in "No, It's Not 36." , was based on stuff I'd figured out before I saw Plait's article. As you'll see, we are in fairly close agreement on these things.I've been asked if I think life exists elsewhere, and my answer is always that I do. This is based upon a single fact: Life got a toehold on Earth very rapidly after the planet formed, just a few hundred million years. Only in cosmology is "a few hundred million years" considered "very rapidly." Maybe life usually takes billions of years, and we were lucky. We only have our one example of life arising and so it doesn't really tell us anything about how easy it is. All it tells us is that the chances of it happening are not 0. The chances could be one in billions, trillions, or even more. Or it could be close to 1 in 1. We simply don't know, and we won't until we find other examples of life and study them closely. If it seems unreasonable for the chance to be 1 in a trillion, just remember: your odds of winning the lottery may be 1 in a billion when you buy the ticket, but once you've won, prior odds are irrelevant. Maybe we won the lottery. We'll find out eventually if this year would stop fucking with us. A new study using a sophisticated form of statistical analysis shows that life is actually quite likely to arise if conditions allow it. Hurray! However, it also shows intelligent life is far less likely. Boo. Which is fine and all, but any statistical analysis, sophisticated or not, boils down to guesswork in this sort of thing. And yet, I'm inclined to believe it. Perhaps because of confirmation bias. But just because I'm inclined to believe it doesn't make it true. But they found that when they ran their calculations, changing the prior assumptions strongly influenced their result, giving wildly different answers. That's frustrating. That also supports my "don't put too much weight on this analysis" suggestion. Phil goes on to explain some of the math involved, but I've already had too much wine to know what to paste and what not to paste here, so you'll have to read the article. What about intelligence? Assuming life arose quickly, the odds of intelligent life evolving are actually slim. Looking at whether the probability is very close to 0 (meaning extremely rare intelligent life) or 1 (very common), Kipping's work favors the low probability at odds of just 3:2. In other words, it's more likely intelligent life is extremely rare. Phil uses approximately the same definition of "intelligence" as I do; to wit: the ability to use technology to go into space. Those are the species we'd be most likely to encounter, if they exist. In my own opinion, sure, we could find there's a highly advanced squid-like civilization under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa, but our own squids are pretty damn clever and they're not building rockets. More, we can't seem to communicate with them. But if you like to gamble, it implies that the best bet is that life is common, but intelligence is rare. This study, this article, and my own thoughts on the subject are not new. There's a thing called the Rare Earth Hypothesis, which, in a nutshell, asserts that the particular combination of conditions the Earth has experienced and allowed creatures to evolve who could build rockets is probably rare in the universe. He hasn't proven anything, because that's not how this kind of probability works. He's just shown that, given these assumptions, life is likely to be common and intelligence rare. Leaving this here because it's important. As I noted before, I could be wrong and I kinda hope I am. Also, again, it's a really big universe, and lots of things are possible... somewhere. Anyway, if you have the time and desire, read the article and watch the video embedded in it. There's also apparently a Tweetstorm at the link, but I've arranged my browser to pretend that the blight on the Universe known as Twitter doesn't exist, so I can't see it. And now, back to getting drunk and watching Black Panther. |
| Hey look, something relevant to fiction writers today. https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and... The good guy/bad guy myth Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed? Good guys don’t just fight for personal gain: they fight for what’s right – their values. Personal gain is a value. Kind of a shitty one, but it's a value. This moral physics underlies not just Star Wars, but also film series such as The Lord of the Rings (2001-3) and X-Men (2000-), as well as most Disney cartoons. Couple of points: First, the X-Men comics may have been, at one point, good vs. evil, but the movies (absent the new one which hasn't come out yet) are pretty damn clear about the moral ambiguity on both sides. Professor X is the protagonist, Magneto is the antagonist (usually), but we see Xavier do some reprehensible things, and Magneto is shown to have solid motivation other than personal gain. Second, the Jedi are no angels; bending someone's will with the Jedi Mind Trick is the very definition of evil. And third, this article is from 2018; this year's X-Men title, New Mutants, is supposed to be the last film in that series -- which, of course, doesn't mean that Disney won't reboot it now that they have full rights. That last one is beside the point; I just like superhero movies. This is the important part: Virtually all our mass-culture narratives based on folklore have the same structure: good guys battle bad guys for the moral future of society. These tropes are all over our movies and comic books, in Narnia and at Hogwarts, and yet they don’t exist in any folktales, myths or ancient epics. The rest of the (somewhat long) article basically expands on this. In old folktales, no one fights for values. Individual stories might show the virtues of honesty or hospitality, but there’s no agreement among folktales about which actions are good or bad. When characters get their comeuppance for disobeying advice, for example, there is likely another similar story in which the protagonist survives only because he disobeys advice. No wonder people are so confused all the time. In the Three Little Pigs, neither pigs nor wolf deploy tactics that the other side wouldn’t stoop to. It’s just a question of who gets dinner first, not good versus evil. I usually root for the wolf because bacon is delicious. On a side note, I ventured into a movie theater the other day. With a severe lack of choice, I went to see Unhinged, the Russell Crowe thriller about road rage. I was the only one in the entire theater, incidentally (and yes, I followed all the guidelines for safety except for the one about "don't go to the movie theater.") I won't spoil it, but I made the mistake of reading the reviews first, so I went in expecting to be disappointed -- but it's actually not bad. Terrific acting, really impressive stunt work and car chases, and the plot hangs together pretty well. The reason I'm bringing this up is that it's relevant to this article: there's a good guy (er, girl) and a bad guy (Crowe, and please spare me the corvid-19 jokes), and on the surface at least, it's black and white. Thing is, and I think this might be why a lot of people don't like the movie, I thought his motivation was kinda flimsy, and her character was uninteresting to me. Perhaps they tried too hard to make it black and white, or, perhaps, they tried too hard with the motivation. After all, Jason doesn't need motivation to run around slashing teenagers, does he? Anyway. No need to quote more from the article; if you're interested in this sort of thing, check it out. Like I said, it's kinda long, but I think it's a good essay on how storytelling has changed. And the conclusion -- the discussion of why it has changed -- is kinda chilling. Though not so much as the idea of a road rager who believes in disproportionate retribution. |
| Oh, Guardian. And you were doing so well. Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36 New calculations come up with estimate for worlds capable of communicating with others In case you're not aware, The Guardian is a British rag; hence the British spelling. Now, on with the show: They may not be little green men. They may not arrive in a vast spaceship. But according to new calculations there could be more than 30 intelligent civilisations in our galaxy today capable of communicating with others. And there "could be" a magical griffon roosting in a tree in my backyard. I can't prove there isn't. After all, it's magical and might be invisible. Experts say the work not only offers insights into the chances of life beyond Earth but could shed light on our own future and place in the cosmos. I'm all for shedding light on our own future and so on, but the fact remains that the only spacefaring, communicating civilization [just because they spell it with an s doesn't mean I'm going to] that we know of is us. Usual disclaimer to ward off the inevitable jokes and human-haters: if I use the word "intelligent" in this post, read it to mean "technologically equipped with the ability to send signals across, and visit, space." Also, "they haven't shown their little green faces because we're terrible," or words to that effect, is utter tripe, and I don't have the time or patience to go into why right now. Perhaps a future entry. “I think it is extremely important and exciting because for the first time we really have an estimate for this number of active intelligent, communicating civilisations that we potentially could contact and find out there is other life in the universe – something that has been a question for thousands of years and is still not answered,” said Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and a co-author of the research. 1. Not the first time. 2. It's a guess, not an estimate. 3. The timescale of any communication with someone else in this galaxy is potentially, on average, on the order of 50,000 years, round trip. 4. "Other life in the universe" doesn't necessarily mean intelligent life. I've covered this before. In 1961 the astronomer Frank Drake proposed what became known as the Drake equation ...Which is not an equation as such, but more like a way to think about these things. Nothing wrong with thinking about them. To be fair, the article points this out: But few of the factors are measurable. “Drake equation estimates have ranged from zero to a few billion [civilisations] – it is more like a tool for thinking about questions rather than something that has actually been solved,” said Conselice. And yet, guesswork remains guesswork. “Basically, we made the assumption that intelligent life would form on other [Earth-like] planets like it has on Earth, so within a few billion years life would automatically form as a natural part of evolution,” said Conselice. And the basis for that assumption is...? Just because intelligent life can appear doesn't mean that it must appear. Again, I know I've said this before, but evolution does not require that an intelligent species develop. Nor does it proceed toward any sort of ultimate goal. Life on Earth existed for something like four billion years, most of that time underwater, before we showed up. Those qualities that led us to eventually travel into space are not necessary for species survival. Just ask the millions of other species that infest this orb. Oh, wait, you can't because we can't communicate concepts with them, and yet most of them thrive just fine, and even more would, too, if we weren't actively, if inadvertently, trying to eliminate them. Yes, some are quite clever, but they aren't using radios or building spaceships, which is what we're talking about here. The assumption, known as the Astrobiological Copernican Principle, is fair as everything from chemical reactions to star formation is known to occur if the conditions are right, he said. I think it probably is fair to assume that, given the right conditions (whatever they may be), life will arise in semi-stable environments. Whether that life develops radio and whatnot is another question, entirely unrelated. He added that, while it is a speculative theory, he believes alien life would have similarities in appearance to life on Earth. “We wouldn’t be super shocked by seeing them,” he said. It's not even a theory. And I think "similarities" is entirely too broad a term. If we found life and there were no similarities, how would we know it was life? The team add that our civilisation would need to survive at least another 6,120 years for two-way communication. “They would be quite far away … 17,000 light years is our calculation for the closest one,” said Conselice. This differs from my number above because he's using "probable closest one" and I was using an average. Either way, it's a long damn time. Now, sure, maybe we get lucky and we find that birdlike creatures on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri are starting to send out bird porn broadcasts that we pick up, but even there, we're talking a 9-year round trip communication. Dr Oliver Shorttle, an expert in extrasolar planets at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the research, said several as yet poorly understood factors needed to be unpicked to make such estimates, including how life on Earth began and how many Earth-like planets considered habitable could truly support life. I'm not going to argue with experts, but "how life on Earth began" is irrelevant to this discussion as, obviously, it did. Oh, sure, you can have your pet hypothesis that it originated elsewhere (say, Mars) and migrated here as microbes on asteroids, but all that does is kick the can down the road on the question of "how life began." And I will grant that since it started here, it probably started elsewhere, though not necessarily through the same processes. What I will not grant is that it necessarily evolves what we're calling intelligence. Dr Patricia Sanchez-Baracaldo, an expert on how Earth became habitable, from the University of Bristol, was more upbeat, despite emphasising that many developments were needed on Earth for conditions for complex life to exist, including photosynthesis. “But, yes if we evolved in this planet, it is possible that intelligent life evolved in another part of the universe,” she said. Oh, now we've gone from galaxy to universe. I would not be in the least surprised to find that around one of the 200 billion stars in each of the 200 billion galaxies in our observable universe (wild-ass guess here, but that order of magnitude), someone else didn't trek into space. Whether it happened more than once in this galaxy, which is the only one where we can reasonably expect some sort of communication, well... sure, maybe. But maybe not. We simply do not have enough information to state with any kind of certainty that "intelligence" happened elsewhere than on Earth. “[The new estimate] is an interesting result, but one which it will be impossible to test using current techniques,” he said. “In the meantime, research on whether we are alone in the universe will include visiting likely objects within our own solar system, for example with our Rosalind Franklin Exomars 2022 rover to Mars, and future missions to Europa, Enceladus and Titan [moons of Jupiter and Saturn]. It’s a fascinating time in the search for life elsewhere.” And I'll say this once more for emphasis: the search for extraterrestrial life in our own solar system is looking for microbes (or whatever equivalent). It would be a big fucking deal if they found some and were able to demonstrate to a high level of certainty that it wasn't seeded from Earth. I'd say there's a fair chance, and I hope they succeed. But sorry, guys... no Martians, no Vulcans, and, sadly, no Orion slave girls. Or, hell, maybe I'm completely wrong. I kind of hope I am. But the evidence doesn't make it seem likely. |
| You might have thought yesterday's article about quantum physics put you to sleep. Well, wait'll you see today's... https://www.domino.com/content/benefits-of-napping/ What Happens to Your Body When You Take Naps Every Single Day? It sleeps. Duhhh. As often as we talk about the benefits of sleep, more than a third of Americans are not getting the proper amount of shut-eye. That's because they're working three jobs just to live. If the thought of adding one more thing to your already busy schedule is making you stress out, you can consider naps as a natural way to recharge for the day. Maybe during your commute? "Like meditation, it can be [used] as a quiet time in the middle of a chaotic day." What a coincidence! Every time I've tried to meditate I've fallen asleep. However, taking a midday nap doesn’t mean you can sleep the day away. Do people actually do this? I'm retired and don't have a set schedule most days, and I still can't sleep more than 9 hours, max. Usually 7-8. In two shifts. While you may want to sneak a small nap into your day, you might have a hard time getting a little shut-eye if it’s not something your body is used to doing. My body was used to me fighting to stay awake through a slump every day between 4-5 pm or so, and then being forced to wake up before 8 am. It never worked well for me, as much as I tried to conform. Basically, adding a nap into your daily routine will give your body a major health boost. After six months, the long-term benefits of napping kick in. Breese notes one study on Greek adults that found a short nap during the day reduces the risks of dying from heart disease and regularly getting more rest may increase your sex drive. Well, that's useless to me. Incidentally, can anyone tell me why they people call it "beauty sleep?" This has never made sense to me. I get the feeling it's used sarcastically, or perhaps apologetically. "Oh, just like every other human being on the planet, I need to sleep, but admitting that might make me seem weak, so I have to pretend there's a purpose to it." Or something like that. Like I said, I never understood it, and it's a phrase that's been around since at least my childhood. Well, I'll sleep later. First, drinking. Which doesn't actually help one sleep, but it's worth it for its own sake. |
| Not a lot of commentary today. I started late and I want to hurry up and get to the drinking part of my evening. But Contest results below! http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/how-to-make-sense-of-quantum-physics How to Make Sense of Quantum Physics Superdeterminism, a long-abandoned idea, may help us overcome the current crisis in physics. Mostly I'm just leaving this here because it touches on a lot of subjects I tend to post on, and it starts out as a pretty good explanation of quantum physics. It goes on to branch out into philosophy and even questions of free will. Recommended reading -- just remember the entire second part is speculation. So on with the marketing question from yesterday. Mini-Contest Results! Great entries, and tough to pick just one -- but I managed. As usual, everyone will get another chance in a few days. Aennaytte: Free & Wild in GoT  , the phrases "tone-deaf," "bad optics," and "read the damn room" come to mind there.Sumojo  , this is exactly why I try to stay away from hot-button issues. I don't always succeed.⭐Princette♥PengthuluWrites  , how that got past the number of people who would have had to have been involved is a mystery. Perhaps they were all drunk.prettypoetry, yeah, I remember that. You do one thing and you've been doing it for decades, and all of a sudden you want to change the formula that works (that is, without seismic macroeconomic shifts as with JC Penny and Sears, see below)? See also: New Coke. Wordsmitty ✍️  , what in the hell were they thinking?Lostwordsmith  , true, not really what I was looking for, but darkly hilarious.Charity Marie - <3 , I could say the same thing about Sears. Sears built its entire brand by people in remote areas being able to order stuff from them through the mail, from a catalog. They were huge; at one point, they had their name on the tallest building in the world, and they were a household name. The Internet comes along, and Sears sticks to its b&m model; Amazon adopts an updated Sears strategy and becomes a juggernaut. Sears gets gutted by private equity and turns to vapor. As for Sherwin Williams, true story (at least as far as my memory might be reliable): the first time I saw an SW logo as a kid -- it hasn't changed in at least 50 years afaik -- I remember thinking, "but where is the gravity coming from that's letting the paint drip off the planet? Point being, I was a huge nerd even as a child.Everyone who commented without an example, I appreciated your responses too -- thanks! In awarding the winner, I wanted to consider something as close as possible to the Tropicana and Coke fails, and the idea of a marketing strategy being so outrageously bad that it led to the company becoming not-a-company, so: Wordsmitty ✍️ gets the Merit Badge for: Just For Feet, a giant shoe retailer, decided to take the plunge with a Super Bowl ad to an estimated 120 Million plus viewers on January 31, 1999. Unfortunately, ...The commercial began with four caucasian-looking men in a Humvee with the license plate "Just For Feet." They track footprints in Kenya until they overtake a black man and offer him water. He collapses (drugged?) and they put a pair of Nikes on him. When he wakes and sees the shoes, he screams "Nooooooo!" and runs off trying to shake the shoes from his feet. Quoting the book, "The backlash from the ad was immediate and fierce." The company didn't survive to see the new century. Thanks again and we'll do this again soon! |
| Something a little different today. Also, Merit Badge Mini-Contest below! https://medium.com/better-marketing/the-worst-rebrand-in-the-history-of-orange-j... The Worst Rebrand in the History of Orange Juice They paid $35 million to then lose $20m in sales So why am I linking something about orange juice? Because it's a product, and some marketing techniques apply to a broad range of products... like, for instance, your writing. Not that I know jack squat about any of this. Which is why I read them -- to confirm that not only do I not understand, but I will quite probably never understand. But maybe this will help someone else. Or, hey, maybe you just like orange juice. In hindsight, it’s easy to see why Tropicana’s 2009 rebrand failed. No. No, it really isn't. Not to me. And even the author explains, later, that it shouldn't have taken hindsight. Less than 30 days after launch, they pulled the new design off the shelves and went back to the old one. Which probably explains why this is the first I'm hearing about this. Coke's "New Coke" fiasco personally affected me. I don't drink orange juice, so I never noticed a rebrand. The article helpfully includes "before" and "after" pics. Without even getting into the subjective topics of visual appeal and recognizability, some design flaws practically stare you in the face. But do they, really? After the rebrand, the font was thinner, the same color as the remaining text, pushed to the side, and, worst of all, vertical. No matter how great your juice is, if it can’t heal neck pain, don’t force me to tilt my head sideways to read your name. I have the ability to read text upside down, sideways, backwards, mirror image, upside down mirror image... the latter takes me a bit longer, to be sure. I can also write in all those directions. The sideways text wouldn't even impinge itself upon my consciousness. But hey, not everyone can be a super-genius, I suppose, and you have to market to morons. What’s more, white font on a yellow background is a weaker contrast than dark green on a white background — especially considering they stuffed it inside the juice glass. Okay, on that part, I can see their point. Beautiful design is important, but if it’s not functional, it won’t matter. Function is more important than form. Well... for me. Engineer, remember? But I can admit that when it comes to trying to sell shit, part of the function is to catch a viewer's eye (or ear in the case of radio). That requires form. “Historically, we always show the outside of the orange. What was fascinating was that we had never shown the product called the juice.” Really? I mean, it’s juice. Give me a clear symbol of it, and I’m good to go. And what could be clearer than the actual fruit the juice is from? Somewhere in there, I think, is probably a metaphor for promoting one's writing. I'm not quite sure what it is, but I'm pretty sure it's in there. The one thing I’ll give them credit for is the cap of the new carton. It had the haptic structure of an actual orange. “We engineered this little squeeze cap so that the notion of squeezing the orange was implied ergonomically.” Look, I know what "haptic" means, but a few paragraphs ago this author was complaining about jargon (I didn't copy that part, but it's there). Also, making your orange juice cap look like an orange is a surefire way to get me to purchase a competitor's brand. If, that is, I were inclined to buy orange juice. But then, I freely admit I'm not a typical consumer. So, anyway, like I said, maybe someone else can make more sense out of this. And hell, why don't we make it a mini-contest? Merit Badge Mini-Contest! Know any good (by which I mean bad) marketing failures? Comment below. The one I like best will earn its author a Merit Badge. Two restrictions today: 1) Don't talk about New Coke. I know about New Coke. I suffered through the Great Coke Crisis of 1985, and I have no wish to relive those horrid months. 2) Don't use this blog as an example of a marketing failure (I'm including this because I'm the sort of asshole who would do something like that, and besides, I'm not trying to sell anything here. Quite the opposite.) If you can't think of one, it's not cheating to use Google. Mostly I just want to understand this marketing thing better, and, just like they kept showing us the newsreel footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse as a warning in engineering school, I think we can learn from failures as much as from successes. It's best if it's not our own failure. |
| I haven't been to a barber in months, so this article caught my attention. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-did-humans-evolve-lose-fur-180... Why Did Humans Lose Their Fur? We are the naked apes of the world, having shed most of our body hair long ago As usual, I have issues with parts of the article, but pointing them all out would be tiresome. All I'll say right now is that almost all of the evolutionary discussion here is pure speculation and hypothesis... and that the question of "why" in the headline might be misleading. Millions of modern humans ask themselves the same question every morning while looking in the mirror: Why am I so hairy? Well, for me, as I said, the answer is "I haven't been to a barber in months." I suspect a lot of men my age are more asking themselves, "Where did all my hair go?" Evolutionary theorists have put forth numerous hypotheses for why humans became the naked mole rats of the primate world. And few of them are testable. Scientists aren't exactly sure, but biologists are beginning to understand the physical mechanism that makes humans the naked apes. In particular, a recent study in the journal Cell Reports has begun to depilate the mystery at the molecular and genetic level. Even the Smithsonian mag can't resist a bad pun. The article proceeds to explain some of the genetic findings, which I can't really comment on but I'm assuming are current science. But that answers "how," not "why." I'll come up with an analogy here. Could be relevant, could be not; I don't know. Cats can't taste sweetness. . This is, apparently, due to a genetic mutation way back in their lineage. And it's not just your house panther; it seems that all felids have this mutation. ("But my cat loves ice cream and cake!" "The article I just linked addresses that. Also, don't feed your cat ice cream and cake.")But does that mean that there was a reason for it -- a "why?" No. And whether it's the mutation that makes a cat a cat, or being a cat is what resulted in the mutation, well, that's above my pay grade. But it appears to connected to why cats, unlike most mammals, are obligate carnivores. ("But my cat eats grass!" "Yes, and then she throws up on your bed.") So it seems to me with the hairless thing in humans. A mutation turned out to be beneficial for our early human ancestors' survival. With a greater understanding of how skin is rendered hairless, the big question remaining is why humans became almost entirely hairless apes. Millar says there are some obvious reasons—for instance, having hair on our palms and wrists would make knapping stone tools or operating machinery rather difficult, and so human ancestors who lost this hair may have had an advantage. Okay, this is one place where I am going to quibble here. Operating machinery wasn't, I believe, much of an issue a million years ago. Evolution didn't plan for the industrial revolution; evolution doesn't "plan." This is symptomatic of my issues with the evolutionary guesswork these people do. Of course, it's important to make such guesses, but there's nothing substantial to back it up. And again, they might have cause and effect switched. There's more of this guesswork in there; I won't belabor it fur-ther. Now, I wonder if I can borrow some of my housemate's ponytail bands? |
| I can only think of one subject more contentious than politics or religion. And this is it. https://www.nylon.com/life/how-much-should-i-tip How To Tip For Americans, this whole thing can be a minefield. For people from other countries, it's bizarre and more than a little irritating. The worst person in New York City is a 29-year-old woman, ostensibly named Sam. No. No, it is not. How do I know to single out Sam, alone amidst a population of eight million people, many of them not so great themselves? Simple. It's because Sam is someone who tips "around $5, whether the bill is $50 or $100." Oh, someone who tips $5 is worse than those Sunday brunch holy assholes who leave religious tracts that look like $20 bills? No. While writer Monica Burton concedes that many people who don't tip just might not know what's appropriate to do, and cites Michael Lynn, "a tipping expert at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration," who explains that "40 percent of people aren’t aware that they should be tipping between 15 and 20 percent," I think that's far too generous of a concession to make. The fact that there is someone who calls himself a "tipping expert" makes me irrationally angry. And don't they know that a lot of Americans are innumerate, and a lot more are numerophobes? Throwing around percentages like that will just make their brains snap shut like my last date's legs. I also think that if people don't know to tip properly, then they probably shouldn't be eating out at all. Which of course would be SO wonderful for wage slaves in the service industry, if fewer people went out to eat. As we've seen over the past 6 months. Beyond that, as is clear from reading the article, lots of people who don't tip are fully aware of how much to tip, they just don't want to do it. Total sociopath "James" says: "I will add a few dollars and round it to an even number, say a $36.87 meal being tipped $3.13 to make $40.00... This isn’t because I want to tip, it just gives me a little mental math game and I like even numbers." $40.00 says "James" refuses to wear a mask during a pandemic too. Also, that's not "a little mental math game" unless you're a complete and utter imbecile. A better one would be to shift the decimal point one digit to the left, double the result, and leave that much. No, it's not harder; it's actually easier and then you're tipping 20 goddamn percent. But what's fair? It's pretty simple. There is, of course, the 20 percent rule of thumb, and that's not a bad one to live by. Always leave at least this much at a restaurant. Oh, if only it were that easy. So you go into your favorite brewpub. While eating, you notice that they have six-packs of a favorite beer in the cooler. You want to take some home with you. So you have the waiter add them to the bill. Say the bill is $20 without the six-packs, and you get $60 worth of canned delicious beer. $4 is what you'd normally tip for the meal. But the check reads $80 because of the sixes, so by this you're supposed to leave $16. While that's nice and all, that's a goddamned 80% tip on the part of the check that the waiter actually worked on. At absolute worst, the waiter brought the sixes over to you and punched the total into the order screen thing. Is that worth the price of another six-pack? I have the same problem with ordering wine at a fancy restaurant. You get a $40 meal and a $60 bottle of wine. Okay, I can see tipping $20 at a fancy restaurant, but is opening a goddamned bottle of wine worth the same as bringing you menus, putting up with your inane, arbitrary and bullshit dietary requirements, communicating same to kitchen, bringing you food, keeping your water filled, asking you what you'd like for dessert, bringing you said dessert, and then cleaning up your mess afterward? I say no. No, it's not. But dammit if I don't tip 20% anyway, because social pressure requires that I do so. How about at a bar? One dollar per drink, right? Wrong. One dollar is fine on a $5 beer. Anything other than that deserves at least $2. The 20 percent rule applies at bars, too. I always give bartenders more than 20%. They're bartenders, my equivalent of a priest or psychologist. It's cheaper than tithing or paying for therapy. And finally: Tip the people making your coffee. If you can afford to buy a $6 latte, you can afford to put a dollar or two in the tip jar. No. Under no circumstances. This is where I draw the fucking line. I have no issues with tipping for table service or if I'm sitting at a bar, but if I have to stand in line, order from a cashier, pick up my tea (I don't drink coffee), carry it back to my table, and then bus my own table? That's no different from going to McDonald's, and you don't tip at McDonald's, do you? Or do you? I haven't been in one for a while; for all I know, they've played into that bullshit. There are other times when the 20% rule goes right out the window. The last time I took a cab in Vegas, for instance. Okay, so picture this: the airport is approximately three blocks from the Luxor. I mean, it's right there. So one time, instead of renting a car, I hired a cab to take me on this really remarkably short trip (I know because I've driven it). This cabbie must have thought I was a wide-eyed newbie who couldn't read a map, so he ended up giving me the tour of North Vegas, the Strip, and Nellis Air Force Base before turning around and taking me back to the Luxor. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but only a little bit. Point is, a $20 trip ended up costing closer to $40. Not that $20 is fair, but it's cheaper than renting a car and the distance is just a little too far to walk in 110 degree heat, no sidewalks, while shlepping luggage. Anyway. When I went to swipe my card, they had certain tip amounts preset: 25%, 40%, 50%. Hell to the power of no squared. I declined to tip by card, instead digging into my Emergency Stripper Fund (a wad of $1 bills) and handed the driver five of them. More than 20% of what the trip should have cost, less than 15% of what that con artist ended up charging me. And then he had the audacity to call me a cheapskate for that. Like I said, that was the last time I took a taxi in Vegas. Now, if I fly in, I use Uber. The only difficulty there is that, while the taxi stand is clearly and plainly marked at the baggage claim, and is located right outside its doors, the signage for Uber was about a 6"x8" placard with "rideshare" and an arrow on it. I followed these placards up an escalator, out into the oppressive heat, across an overpass to a parking garage, through the parking garage, down a flight of stairs (no escalator), across to another parking garage, through a door with a smudged sign reading "Beware the leopard," up an elevator, across a tightrope strung over a shark tank, through a bunch of dark, twisty passages, all alike (being careful not to be eaten by a grue), finally leading to an ill-lit and badly organized rideshare pickup area. The Uber driver drove me straight to the Luxor, though, and got a nice tip. What I'm saying is, 20% doesn't always work. I don't mind tipping, especially for superior service. What I mind is living in a society that requires people to tip. If restaurant tips, for example, were done away with entirely, with wait staff paid a decent wage, the cost of dining out wouldn't change much if at all - it would simply be all up front instead of hidden on the back end, and requiring people who failed high school algebra because it was "too hard" to do math. I mean, sure, I'd like to see more math literacy and less fear about it, but we're not accomplishing that by requiring tips -- especially because more and more places have started explaining exactly how much 15%, 18%, 20%, and maybe even 25% of your bill comes to, or just providing buttons on a screen that do the same thing. That's like saying spell checkers have made people better spellers. I understand that, in France, no tipping is expected, though people often do it if they think the server went above and beyond. And I've heard that in Japan, tipping is an insult. I don't know; I haven't been to France since I was a kid, and never to Japan, and I get the impression I'd have even worse culture shock from other things. Oh, and that article? It never does fulfill the promise in the headline: "How to Tip." Oh, sure, it says "20%," but as I've indicated, that's bullshit outside of restaurants. What do you give the concierge who called you a cab? The bellhop at a fancy hotel? What do you slip to the person who did your laundry? Why do you tip your massage therapist and not your head therapist? Should you really give the McDonald's cashier a couple of bills? How often do you tuck a $1 bill into a strippers' g-string? And shouldn't inflation have upped that to $2 bills by now? Make it all go away, and while you're at it, include tax in the advertised price. No, I'm not advocating for paying less for services; I'm saying it shouldn't require an advanced degree in Gratuity Studies to figure all of this out. |
| I looked over some earlier entries and discovered a trend to rag on Scientific American articles. Today's, though, I have fewer problems with. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-does-quantum-theory-actua... What Does Quantum Theory Actually Tell Us about Reality? Nearly a century after its founding, physicists and philosophers still don’t know—but they’re working on it In essence, this seems to be a good introduction to quantum theory, at least at its very basic. For a demonstration that overturned the great Isaac Newton’s ideas about the nature of light, it was staggeringly simple. It “may be repeated with great ease, wherever the sun shines,” the English physicist Thomas Young told the members of the Royal Society in London in November 1803, describing what is now known as a double-slit experiment, and Young wasn’t being overly melodramatic. He had come up with an elegant and decidedly homespun experiment to show light’s wavelike nature, and in doing so refuted Newton’s theory that light is made of corpuscles, or particles. It does, however, toss words around without much precision. For starters, Newton developed several "theories," but the particle nature of light was more of an assumption. And I'd argue that it's more of a refinement than a refutation. Photons act like both, depending on context. Lots of other stuff that Newton came up with turned out to need refinement, but the basic math is still sound, especially for everyday experience. But the birth of quantum physics in the early 1900s made it clear that light is made of tiny, indivisible units, or quanta, of energy, which we call photons. Young’s experiment, when done with single photons or even single particles of matter, such as electrons and neutrons, is a conundrum to behold, raising fundamental questions about the very nature of reality. The old argument "is light a particle or a wave?" is usually phrased thus. Personally, I think they're using the wrong terms, as usual. As with Newton, "particles" and "waves" are functions of our everyday experience. The question isn't why light has properties of both; the question is why macroscopic effects are one or the other. Some have even used it to argue that the quantum world is influenced by human consciousness, giving our minds an agency and a place in the ontology of the universe. All these years and we're still stuck on that nonsense. The article goes on to describe the double-slit experiment. I remember doing a basic one of those in physics class when I was in college. It's one thing to hear it described; it's another to actually see it (and do the damned math). The photon is not real in the sense that a plane flying from San Francisco to New York is real. That's... misleading. Both are "real." One behaves differently than the other, is all. Werner Heisenberg, among others, interpreted the mathematics to mean that reality doesn’t exist until observed. Also misleading, and probably not the case. No, reality doesn't require us hairless apes to observe it, or believe in it. Well, to be fair, there is a nonzero chance that the universe sprang into existence, fully formed, complete with a coherent history. If this event also happened to create humans, then there might be something to this. But while that chance is nonzero, it's represented by an unimaginably small number. Otherwise, the evidence suggests that reality existed before we did, and will continue to exist under most foreseeable conditions after we're all gone. But quantum theory is entirely unclear about what constitutes a “measurement.” It simply postulates that the measuring device must be classical, without defining where such a boundary between the classical and quantum lies, thus leaving the door open for those who think that human consciousness needs to be invoked for collapse. Last May, Henry Stapp and colleagues argued, in this forum, that the double-slit experiment and its modern variants provide evidence that “a conscious observer may be indispensable” to make sense of the quantum realm and that a transpersonal mind underlies the material world. Sigh. Yeah, I know. I wasn't going to talk about panpsychism again. But if everything is conscious, than anything can be the "observer," not just humans. On a related note, you've probably heard of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment. Look it up if you haven't; I can't be arsed to explain the whole thing. The upshot of it is that Schrodinger postulated that without an observer, a cat in a box subject to the randomness of quantum phenomena is neither alive nor dead, but in a state of superposition, until an ape opens the box and collapses the cat's wave function. What's always bothered me about this (and as far as I know, no one has actually performed the experiment, much to the relief of half the world's cat population) is that in his scenario, there is one conscious entity who "knows" whether the cat is alive or dead; to wit, the feline in the box. Also, there are other ways of interpreting the double-slit experiment. Take the de Broglie-Bohm theory, which says that reality is both wave and particle. There you go throwing words around again. There's an upper limit to where wave/particle duality holds sway. As this article notes, that limit is as yet undetermined. But it's definitely smaller than a golf ball. A golf ball is unquestionably (except to the most drug-addled philosophers, which would seem to be a lot of them) a reality-based object, and it doesn't act like a photon in the double-slit experiment. Crucially, the theory does not need observers or measurements or a non-material consciousness. So when drug-addled philosophers start talking about how nothing exists unless we observe it, give them different drugs. Well, who knows. Maybe they're right. But I doubt it. If nothing else, these experiments are showing that we cannot yet make any claims about the nature of reality, even if the claims are well-motivated mathematically or philosophically. Decent conclusion, anyway. "We don't know yet" is a great answer in science. And given that neuroscientists and philosophers of mind don’t agree on the nature of consciousness, claims that it collapses wave functions are premature at best and misleading and wrong at worst. I'd be a lot more concerned if neuroscientists and philosophers agreed on anything. |
| I couldn't resist posting today's article. http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/against-willpower Against Willpower Willpower is a dangerous, old idea that needs to be scrapped. They both succumbed to short-term temptations, and both didn’t keep their long-term goals. I went to a dentist today. See, approximately 20 seconds after my state declared a lockdown, back in March, I got a toothache. It's been bearable up until about last week, whereupon the pain in my mouth exceeded my desire to avoid covfefe-19. Few people enjoy going to the dentist, but most realize that the short-term discomfort involved is worth it to prevent problems in the long run. Not me, though. I've never been one to let long-term goals get in the way of immediate gratification. Fortunately, the dentist told me what the problem (probably) is. Unfortunately, it involves redoing a root canal on a tooth that got a root canal many years ago. And root canals are the Platonic ideal of "things I don't want to deal with." That's something I have to schedule tomorrow, which means at some point soon, I'm going to have to visit a specialist's office, again, and keep my mouth wide open for two hours in the middle of a fucking pandemic. So, naturally, afterwards, I walked over to a nearby brewery and drank. I Ubered home. See, I figured something like that would happen, so I had the foresight to not drive to the dentist in the first place. I can plan ahead, when it involves drinking. Back to the article. Ignoring the idea of willpower will sound absurd to most patients and therapists, but, as a practicing addiction psychiatrist and an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry, I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the very concept of willpower, and concerned by the self-help obsession that surrounds it. I'm concerned by the self-help obsession, period. More fundamentally, the common, monolithic definition of willpower distracts us from finer-grained dimensions of self-control and runs the danger of magnifying harmful myths—like the idea that willpower is finite and exhaustible. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Ned Block, willpower is a mongrel concept, one that connotes a wide and often inconsistent range of cognitive functions. The closer we look, the more it appears to unravel. It’s time to get rid of it altogether. Good idea. Do we have the will to do that? The specific conception of “willpower,” however, didn’t emerge until the Victorian Era... If ever there were a time for that concept, it would be then. Self-control became a Victorian obsession, promoted by publications like the immensely popular 1859 book Self-Help, which preached the values of “self-denial” and untiring perseverance. Sometimes I think I was unlucky to have lived during the declining period of American civilization (we peaked on July 20, 1969, and it's been downhill ever since). But then I read stuff like that and realize it's not so bad after all, pandemic be damned. The earliest use of the word, in 1874 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in reference to moralistic worries about substance use: “The drunkard ... whose will-power and whose moral force have been conquered by degraded appetite.” Always with the drunk-shaming. Stop it. In the early 20th century, when psychiatry was striving to establish itself as a legitimate, scientifically based field, Freud developed the idea of a “superego.” The superego is the closest psychoanalytic cousin to willpower, representing the critical and moralizing part of the mind internalized from parents and society. Since Freud proposed it, 96.5% chance it's wrong. By mid-century, B.F. Skinner was proposing that there is no internally based freedom to control behavior. Academic psychology turned more toward behaviorism, and willpower was largely discarded by the profession. Make that 98%. That might have been it for willpower, were it not for an unexpected set of findings in recent decades which led to a resurgence of interest in the study of self-control. Dammit. These studies also set the stage for the modern definition of willpower, which is described in both the academic and popular press as the capacity for immediate self-control—the top-down squelching of momentary impulses and urges. Or, as the American Psychological Association defined it in a recent report, “the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals.” This ability is usually portrayed as a discrete, limited resource, one that can be used up like a literal store of energy. If I had a battery icon on my forehead for that, it would be nearly empty and have a slash through it. No, I'm not tempted to get that as a tattoo. But the thought did cross my mind. Studies supporting the ego depletion effect were supposedly replicated dozens of times, spawning best-selling books (including Baumeister’s own, Willpower) and countless research programs. But a 2015 meta-analysis examining those findings more closely, along with previously unpublished research, found a good deal of publication bias and very little evidence that ego depletion is a real phenomenon. And here we have another example of science correcting itself. Related studies have shown that beliefs about willpower strongly influence self-control: Research subjects who believe in ego depletion (that willpower is a limited resource) show diminishing self-control over the course of an experiment, while people who don’t believe in ego depletion are steady throughout. Funny how that works. A paradigmatic example of reframing is the phenomenon of “temporal discounting,” in which people tend to discount future rewards in favor of smaller immediate payoffs. When offered $5 today versus $10 in a month, many people illogically choose immediate gratification. "Illogically?" I don't think so. You tell me you'll give me $5 today or $10 in a month. I'll take the $5. Why? First, I might be dead in a month. Second, you might be dead in a month and your executor won't know you owe me $10. Third, $10 is couch change for me. And finally, if I'm in Vegas, I could put the $5 on 27 and maybe turn it into $150 -- or probably not, but the $5 was free to begin with and I won't miss it. I'm obviously skipping a bit here but... A conscientious reframing of a problem in this manner would certainly be an example of willpower, but it would not fall into the conventional understanding of the term. Rather than relying on an effortful fight against impulses, this kind of willpower has the individual completely reimagine the problem and avoid the need to fight in the first place. Which, actually, is what I usually do when faced with temptation. Often I indulge anyway. But not always. Like today, when I woke up from my drunken stupor and there was pizza. I think I might have mumbled something about pizza before I passed out, and my housemate, either thoughtful or easily persuaded, had ordered some for delivery. I declined. Alcohol was enough extra calories for me today, and while my weight loss has plateaued, I don't want to backslide. But now comes the important part of the article: Notions of willpower are easily stigmatizing: It becomes OK to dismantle social safety nets if poverty is a problem of financial discipline, or if health is one of personal discipline. An extreme example is the punitive approach of our endless drug war, which dismisses substance use problems as primarily the result of individual choices. Unhealthy moralizing creeps into the most quotidian corners of society, too. When the United States started to get concerned about litter in the 1950s, the American Can Company and other corporations financed a “Keep America Beautiful” campaign to divert attention from the fact that they were manufacturing enormous quantities of cheap, disposable, and profitable packaging, putting the blame instead on individuals for being litterbugs. Willpower-based moral accusations are among the easiest to sling. Which is kind of what I've been saying all along. |
| Today's link is a bit esoteric, and I wouldn't blame anyone for giving it a miss. But I find this stuff fascinating, so I waded through it, and of course I have comments -- else I wouldn't bother posting it. Skip to the bottom for Mini-Contest results! http://nautil.us/blog/new-evidence-for-the-geometry-of-thought New Evidence for the Strange Geometry of Thought In 2014, the Swedish philosopher and cognitive scientist Peter Gärdenfors went to Krakow, Poland, for a conference on the mind. Philosopher and cognitive scientist? That's a dangerous combination. In his talk, “The Geometry of Thinking,” he suggested that humans are able to do things that today’s powerful computers can’t do—like learn language quickly and generalize from particulars with ease (to see, in other words, without much training, that lions and tigers are four-legged felines)—because we, unlike our computers, represent information in geometrical space. So, if I'm reading this right, the evidence suggests that we store concepts the same way we store, for example, the layout of our homes. He argued that the brain represents concepts in the same way that it represents space and your location, by using the same neural circuitry for the brain’s “inner GPS.” You know, we were talking about inventions yesterday, and as I re-read this article to talk about it, I came to the conclusion that there are, in general, two broad categories of inventions: those that can be compared to other things, and those to which we compare other things. To use yesterday's example, a wheel would be one of the latter. So, apparently, is GPS -- a truly world-changing invention, though one that's built on a multitude of earlier inventions. The hippocampus’ place and grid cells, in other words, map not only physical space but conceptual space. It appears that our representation of objects and concepts is very tightly linked with our representation of space. This makes all kinds of sense when you think about it (not that "making sense" means it's necessarily right). At the risk of delving into the kind of evolutionary just-so stories that I despise, our remote pre-hominid ancestors, lacking the concept of "concept," would have known nothing but their environments. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that our brains use the same sorts of brain configurations, adapting them for other purposes. But again, I don't know; that's pure speculation on my part. The article goes into some of the studies backing up the mapping idea. Yet the mind is not just capable of conceptual abstraction but also flexibility—it can represent a wide range of concepts. To be able to do this, the regions of the brain involved need to be able to switch between concepts without any informational cross-contamination: It wouldn’t be ideal if our concept for bird, for example, were affected by our concept for car. It will be when I finally get the flying car I've been promised. Scientists still need to experimentally verify the link between the hippocampus and higher-order cognitive functions in humans. fMRI studies like the ones from the group in Oxford are, as yet, only suggestive. I'm just including this here for anyone who's still with me. This isn't settled science; just an interesting idea with some evidence for it. One reason the concept is intriguing is the potential impact on AI development: Gärdenfors’ theory highlights a fruitful path, not only for cognitive scientists, but for neurologists and machine-learning researchers. It is a kind of incomplete, generic sketch on a canvas that invites refinement and elaboration. Cognitive spaces are, as Gärdenfors and Bellmund put it, a “domain-general format for human thinking,” an “overarching framework” that can help unravel the causes of neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s, and “to inform novel architectures in artificial intelligence.” Oh, yeah, and also to help us deal with brain dysfunction. Maybe we could even figure out how to get more people to appreciate science. Mini-Contest results! All great responses yesterday! Though I have to admit I'm just a little disappointed that no one said "sliced bread." Let's see, we have:  The Human Genome Project -- while I wouldn't consider that an invention, it's certainly an innovation, and a major one at that. As Sumojo noted, it has improved human life to a vast extent. Sterilization -- Lazy Writer est 4/24/2008 pointed out that the idea that implements and people should be, you know, clean, that's a big deal. Saved a lot of lives. I don't know why they didn't think of it sooner, to be honest; it shouldn't require knowledge of microorganisms to know that dirty things make people sick. Writing, as per Zhen  -- I think I did a blog entry a while back on that subject. Or maybe a newsletter? If not, I'll have to do one. This one's foundational, the almost-hidden basis for a multitude of other inventions. Printing Press -- Paul  noted that this extended the above to a wider audience. Vaccinations (and beer!) -- Aennaytte: Free & Wild in GoT , I'm a big fan of both (though if I had to choose, it would be beer). Both have saved lives. No, I'm not joking -- as with the sterilization one above, the process of making beer required that water be boiled, which had the unintended (pre-germ theory) effect of destroying harmful germs. Beer, for much of human history, was often safer than water to drink. And Spring in my Sox  mostly reiterated other comments, but added "autocorrect," which I'd argue is a mixed blessing, but it's certainly made it easier for people. And yes, beer.Now, given that it's me here, I'm really tempted to go with beer (and I will, in fact, go have a beer when I'm done posting this). There are suggestions out there that civilization is the result of people doing what needed to be done to make beer. Of course, whether "civilization" is, on balance, better or worse is arguable. (I'm arguing "better" because I like not having to hunt my dinner.) But in terms of Most Important Invention or Innovation, I'mma have to agree with writing. After all, without it, what would I do when I'm not drinking beer? Oh, right, binge-watching Star Trek. But wait -- that show had scripts. No writing, no scripts, no Star Trek, and no blog entry on this or any other day -- a bleak alternate universe indeed. Maybe even just as bleak as one without beer. So this time the Merit Badge goes to Zhen . I'll send you the MB before I start drinking, promise!Everyone else, thanks! Great comments, and there will be another opportunity in a few days. |
| Maybe you have an image in your head, as I did, of a primitive caveman using stone tools to create a stone wheel. Turns (pun intended) out that the wheel was invented much, much later. And it's about time for another Merit Badge Mini-Contest! See below. https://www.wired.com/story/who-invented-wheel-how-did-they-do-it/ Who Invented the Wheel? And How Did They Do It? The wagon—and the wagon wheel—could not have been put together in stages. Either it works, or it doesn’t. And it enabled humans to spread rapidly into huge parts of the world. It's not like massive leaps of invention aren't known in modern times, so it shouldn't be surprising that someone made the leap from not-wheel to wheel. What is surprising, at least to me, is how recently (relatively speaking) it happened. In July 1880, the archaeologist Désiré Charnay discovered the first pre‑Columbian wheel set in the Americas. It was on a small coyote figure mounted on four wheels, and Charnay found it in the tomb of an Aztec child buried south of Mexico City. It's been widely noted that the Maya, a civilization in Central America, didn't have the wheel. Their other advancements were quite sophisticated -- the calendar, notably. And yet, the civilizations they would have had contact with, such as the Aztecs, did have that invention. I had the opportunity to speak with an actual Mayan once, and his assertion was that the wheel would have made things too easy. My personal theory is that the wheel might have been too sacred to use for mundane purposes; their fabled calendar was represented as a wheel of sorts. Whatever the actual reason, it's lost to time, and I'm not even 100% sure that they never used wheels. I mention this because, as the article notes, it seems to have been invented on both major continents, independently - not the only time such a thing has happened. The rest of the article focuses on the Indo-European version, which ties in to the entry I made a while back on the origins of most of the languages in Asia and Europe. The full‑size wagon first appeared approximately 5,400 years ago, and it may be one of the the first inventions in history to go viral. Archaeologists have discovered full‑size carts from southern Iraq to Germany within a few hundred years of each other at a time when cultural barriers were particularly impermeable. The wagon, it seems, was irresistibly useful. "If you build it, they will come." This is more of a case of "if you build it, you can go to them." The article is fairly long, so I won't go into it much further. It's there if you want to read it. But I found it interesting because, as I said, thanks to cartoons and whatnot I always thought the wheel was a much older invention. It's one of those things we take for granted now, but as noted at the link, there's really not anything in nature that could have inspired it, not like, say, you can watch birds and go "Wow, I wish I could do that," and then eventually invent flying machines. Since this article presents the wheel, as used in wagons, as one of the most important inventions of human civilization, I thought I'd make today's mini-contest about inventions. So... Merit Badge Mini-Contest! Other than the wheel, what's the most important invention, or innovation, that we've made, and why? The response I like best gets its author a Merit Badge that I think is appropriate. As usual, you have until midnight WDC time (Today is August 18.) Just comment here below. I have a few in mind, but I'd rather hear from others. You can be serious or funny; I can certainly go either way. And there's no limit on how far back you want to go; prehistoric or modern will do. |
| And who, exactly, do you think you are? https://www.cracked.com/article_27124_totally-random-things-that-make-you-well-y... Totally Random Things That Make You, Well, You Let me get this out of the way: These are not "totally random." Yes, yes, I know, I'm quibbling about the definition of "random" when talking about a dick joke site. 6. Your Eye Color Can Determine Your Alcohol Tolerance ... And Propensity For Alcohol Addiction When the time comes for drinking, some of us can down eight shots and still beat anyone in the bar at blindfolded darts, while others have to be carted home after sniffing a single beer-soaked napkin. And some of us don't play drinking games. But I guess I'm a bit older than Cracked's intended demographic. Blue-eyed people consistently hold their liquor better than those of us with brown-eyes. Well, that explains everything (I have blue eyes). Blue-eyed folk's high tolerance seems to put them on track for drinking more and for ultimately being more likely to become alcoholics. If I'm not one by now, I never will be. If by "alcoholic" you mean "anyone who drinks," then sure. Whatever the explanation, people now know simply by looking at you how easily they can get you drunk, which is why, personally, we recommend wearing sunglasses at all times. That also helps to hide the dilated pupils and the red sclera. And mutes the hue of the pink elephants. 5. Having A "Normal" And Easy-To-Pronounce Name Can Make You More Likable And Successful Students with common names tended to succeed more than their weird-named counterparts, while the ones with the uncommon names were the ones most likely to have psychological problems. Okay, here's the thing: I'm painfully aware that this sort of thing has racist (or at least cultural) ramifications. It's been shown that identical resumes, where one applicant was named, like, "Steve" and another named, like, "Hamal," led to the former being accepted and the latter rejected, more times than not. At least in the US. So I don't really like the way this section is presented. But that's no excuse for anyone to name their kid Kaiyleeighh. There is, in fact, no excuse for that at all. 4. Have A Bunch (Or Very Few) Friends And A Huge (Or Tiny) Social Network? It's Probably Your Gut Bacteria You're on the internet and reading a humor article, so there's a fair chance you call yourself an introvert. How... how did you know? What made you that way? Was it your upbringing -- your parents took you to one party when you were three, and it was so loud and sticky that you swore off people forever? Is it in your genes -- your parents were both introverts, and it's frankly amazing that they even socialized enough to ever meet each other? Maybe it's both those, but there could be other factors too. Ten trillion of them in fact, and they're living in your intestines. I'm starting to get the impression that this is the bacteria's body, and I'm just living in it. 3. The Air Quality In Your Home And School Probably Determined How Intelligent You Are In 2015, Southern California experienced a gas leak that was absolutely huge -- you can't really compare gas leaks to oil spills, but if you could, this leak would be bigger than 2010's Deepwater Horizon disaster. People around Los Angeles got pretty worked up about the thousands of tons of methane and other gases suddenly hissing around them, and they responded by installing air purifiers in schools, places where sudden emissions of methane are otherwise normally just a source of comedy. A year later, test scores in schools with the new air filters (and only those schools) went up, measurably. One data point does not a conclusion make, but the article goes on to point out that, yes, it's happened in other places too. Every study on a more specific group comes up with the same thing. Baseball umpires? Chess players? Pear pickers? Everyone gets dumber as the air gets dirtier. Which explains so much. 2. Your Birth Weight Partially Determines Your Respiratory And Cardiovascular Fitness As An Adult Speaking of respiration, your respiratory prowess might have been set from the moment you were born. And sure, a lot of things are set at that point, that's kind of how genes work, but in this case, your parents were able to view your hidden settings using something clearly observable from the start. We're talking about birth weight, which is approximately the first thing the nurses check when you're born, right after what kind of genitals you're packing and whether you have a tail. Pretty sure the first thing they check is if you're squirming or not, but whatever. Obviously, you're still able to change your heart and lung health by exercising, and you should really get on that. Just know that the game is slightly rigged from the start. And when you have a baby of your own, make sure to weigh them immediately and take a commemorative photo with them hanging from a scale at the dock. Trophies are trophies, after all. 1. Your Facial Features And Tone Of Voice Can Determine How Much You Care About The Environment One fun thing psychologists like to do is think of some idea that kind of feels like it could be true, put together a study to see if it's true, and then cackle in delight when they find that, whoa, it's true. And then get mad when another team of psychologists can't replicate the experiment and accuse the first team of p-hacking. Like what happened last year when a Canadian team wondered, hey, you know how research says that the more masculine a man looks, the more selfish and violent he in fact turns out to be? The obvious problem with this is that "masculinity" is subjective. The subjects then answered an environmental survey, and the more noticeably masculine guys gave answers indicating that they didn't care much about the environment at all. The researchers had a pretty clear explanation handy. This all came down to testosterone. Ummm... what? No, it's more likely due to socialization of gender roles. So what does that mean? Was this whole study a bunch of bullshit? Maybe, or there could be another factor here: the socialization of gender roles. Aha! Confirmation! Anyway, as always, don't take anything from Cracked as Truth. I just think the whole thing's interesting. Or, rather, my gut bacteria think it's interesting and made me type this. Help I'm a prisoner in someone's colon! |
| Ever changed your mind? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180622-the-surprising-reason-people-change-... The surprising reason people change their minds We usually believe that our opinions are stubborn and fixed. But new research shows that our views, even on politics, are changing all the time – just not for the reasons you’d expect. You'd never know it from perusing social media. Wherever you look at the moment, we seem divided – Brexiteer or Remainer, pro-President Trump or against. And no matter how much we argue, none of us appear to change our minds. Article is from 2018, so some of the examples may seem dated, since we seem to be down to two issues: Whether to wear a mask or be an idiot, and whether people should have equal treatment under the law or not. No one's changing their minds about those issues, either. But new research suggests that, in fact, we can let go of our opinions – and that opposition can even turn into acceptance. However, I know that my views on some things have changed over the years, so from that single data point, I can extrapolate that this is probably true. It's not like I have special mind-changing powers that no one else does. For decades, research on confirmation bias has shown that we are more likely to look out for, notice and remember anything that confirms opinions we already hold. Like, for example, me and this article. If you like drinking wine, you’re more likely to remember the occasional studies which find a benefit from alcohol than the research on its risks. While I can accept that this is generally true, it's not that I'm not aware of the risks of drinking alcohol; it's just that, for me, the benefits outweigh the risks. Besides, I have yet to see a "risk" study that takes into account how delicious it is. Our brains are also faster at processing opinions we agree with. This is one of those things that probably didn't need a formal study, but I suppose it's good that they've delved into it. All of this would suggest that we hold our opinions dear. This is true, but it doesn’t mean those opinions are fixed forever. We are more fickle than we think. I know I have to catch myself when I start thinking, "I've always held this opinion," when it's clear that I haven't; I just don't want to admit that I was wrong, so I try to convince myself that I was always right. But for me, the only thing worse than being wrong is being pigheadedly stubborn like that. In other words, we rationalise the things we feel stuck with. It’s as though we free up brain space to get on with our lives by deciding it’s not so bad, after all. Yeah, I'm still not there with this whole pandemic thing. Next, Laurin looked at views on Ontario’s 2015 ban on smoking in parks and restaurant patios. She found that people didn’t only change their opinions after the ban had been brought in – they changed what they remembered about their own behaviour. This is like what I said above, and in previous entries here: we can't really trust our own memories sometimes. So it’s not that people simply become accustomed to a new situation. Instead, they actually change their thinking. It is as though they can’t bear to continue feeling angry, so they subconsciously look for ways to convince themselves that it will all be okay. This, too, makes sense. We're nothing if not adaptable. For myself, if something changes that I didn't want changed, I try to find a way to live with it. Some would call that looking on the positive side of things, I suppose. I call it being too lazy to keep getting fired up about it. A Harvard University team has done dozens of experiments demonstrating that when we imagine events in the future, we expect the worst of bad events and the best of good events. In reality, bad events don’t make us feel quite so awful and good events don’t make us feel quite so great. Nah, I also expect the worst of good events. It's a defense mechanism. Then, when things turn out better than I expected, I feel that much happier (or at least less sad) about it. And while we imagine that if something grave happens to us we won’t be able to cope, or that if something positive happens our lives will be transformed, in both cases we will be the same people we are now. After the initial impact, our emotions will subside and we will feel only a little better or worse than now. The same happens when we’re affected by a policy or situation we don’t like. If it’s possible, we make peace with what we once saw as negative changes. I'll try to remember that when this November's election doesn't go the way I'd like. In one sense this is rather hopeful: we try to find the good in every situation. But does this mean that policymakers can do whatever they like and we’ll all decide that’s okay? Not exactly. If that were the case, governments would never get voted out or overthrown in revolutions. Or maybe I'll remember the "overthrown in revolutions" bit. I don't know. But when we can’t change everything, making peace with the world might be an important part of our well-being. Sometimes, though, I think a situation warrants not making peace with the way things are. As I've said before, one way or another: we can't change other people. We can only change ourselves. The "surprising" bit in the article's headline turns out not to be the case. Dammit, BBC, clickbait? Really? I expected better from you. But I guess I can learn to live with it. |
| Bit of a sensationalist headline here, but I found the article interesting. http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/fruits-and-vegetables-are-trying-to-kill-yo... Fruits and Vegetables Are Trying to Kill You Antioxidant vitamins don’t stress us like plants do—and don’t have their beneficial effect. I should point out that this article is from 2014. Since then, I'm sure nutrition science has refuted, confirmed, refuted, confirmed, and refuted again the content by now. You probably try to exercise regularly and eat right. I did. For a while. In the Before Time. Perhaps you steer toward “superfoods,” fruits, nuts, and vegetables advertised as “antioxidant,” which combat the nasty effects of oxidation in our bodies. Nope. Maybe you take vitamins to protect against “free radicals,” destructive molecules that arise normally as our cells burn fuel for energy, but which may damage DNA and contribute to cancer, dementia, and the gradual meltdown we call aging. Here's where the refutations come in. Over-the-counter vitamins seem to be, at best, harmless and ineffective; at worst, harmful. But that's today. Wait a few hours. But that's really the point of the article here. Warding off the diseases of aging is certainly a worthwhile pursuit. But evidence has mounted to suggest that antioxidant vitamin supplements, long assumed to improve health, are ineffectual. "Assumed?" No one did any actual, you know... studies? Fruits and vegetables are indeed healthful but not necessarily because they shield you from oxidative stress. In fact, they may improve health for quite the opposite reason: They stress you. Then there's the whole "fiber" thing, which I'm pretty sure they have done studies on. That stress comes courtesy of trace amounts of naturally occurring pesticides and anti-grazing compounds. You already know these substances as the hot flavors in spices, the mouth-puckering tannins in wines, or the stink of Brussels sprouts. They are the antibacterials, antifungals, and grazing deterrents of the plant world. In the right amount, these slightly noxious substances, which help plants survive, may leave you stronger. I do love me some hot pepper. Brussels sprouts, though? Thanks to science, they don't stink as much as they used to. And do I need to sing the praises of wine here? Parallel studies, meanwhile, have undercut decades-old assumptions about the dangers of free radicals. Rather than killing us, these volatile molecules, in the right amount, may improve our health. Our quest to neutralize them with antioxidant supplements may be doing more harm than good. This actually tracks with some other stuff I've read. But that doesn't mean much. As you know by now, when it comes to nutritional science, I don't believe a damn thing. Oddly, our mitochondria, the energy factories of our cells, emitted ROS naturally. So degenerative disease seemed to stem in part from our own metabolic function: Your mitochondria “burned” fuel, emitted this toxic exhaust, and inadvertently set the limits on your existence. That was the working hypothesis, at any rate. This is what happens when you take a working hypothesis and try to defend it rather than disprove it. Observational studies, meanwhile, suggested that people who regularly ate vitamin-laden fruits and vegetables were healthier. So were people with higher levels of vitamins E and C in their blood. All together now: Correlation is not causation. Vitamins were strongly antioxidant in test tubes. And bleach kills cancer cells in test tubes. It also kills other cells. But if those ROS were so harmful, some scientists asked—and the basic design of our (eukaryote) cells was over 1 billion years old—why hadn’t evolution solved the ROS problem? Do I need to go into this again? Evolution simply doesn't care. If you live long enough to reproduce, what happens to you after that is entirely immaterial. A worthy object for study, sure -- but we're talking about effects that usually happen in a human's fifties and beyond, well after peak reproductive years. According to the ROS model of aging, animals that exercised and fasted should have died younger. But they lived longer. And then there's my philosophy: what's the point of living longer if you have to spend all that extra time exercising, and avoiding one of the few pleasures (eating) that makes life worth living? (Yes, I've reduced my caloric intake and, at least when I could still go to the gym, exercised every day. But not to live longer; just to feel better. Now that exercise isn't as easy for me, I'm not doing it as much, and I find myself sinking once more into depression.) He had 39 male volunteers exercise regularly over several weeks; half took vitamin supplements before working out. The results, published in 2009, continue to reverberate throughout the field of exercise physiology, and beyond. Volunteers who took large doses of vitamins C and E before training failed to benefit from the workout. Their muscles didn’t become stronger; insulin sensitivity, a measure of metabolic health, didn’t improve; and increases in native antioxidants, such as glutathione, didn’t occur. Small, non-diverse sample. But the primary role of vitamins in our body, according to Ristow and others, may not be antioxidant. And the antioxidant content of fruits and veggies does not, he thinks, explain their benefits to our health. So what does? I think we're about to find out. Mark Mattson, Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, has studied how plant chemicals, or phytochemicals, affect our cells (in test tubes) for years. The assumption in the field has long been that, like vitamins, phytochemicals are directly antioxidant. But Mattson and others think they work indirectly. Much like exercise, he’s found, phytochemicals stress our bodies in a way that leaves us stronger. Again: test tube science, while the body is incredibly complex. Also, again: "assumption." Plants, Mattson explains, live a stationary life. They cannot respond to pathogens, parasites, and grazers as we might—by moving. To manage the many threats posed by mobile life, as well as heat, drought, and other environmental stresses, they’ve evolved a remarkable number of defensive chemicals. As I noted recently, every living thing on Earth has been evolving exactly as long as we have. It's silly to assume that, because plants don't have opposable thumbs, mobility, and a central nervous system, that they're not fit for their niche. Mattson and his colleagues say these plant “biopesticides” work on us like hormetic stressors. Our bodies recognize them as slightly toxic, and we respond with an ancient detoxification process aimed at breaking them down and flushing them out. Sounds good, but as I said, we're going to need more than test tube science here. In a study on Type 2 diabetics, broccoli-sprout powder lowered triglyceride levels. High triglycerides, a lipid, are associated with an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. Lowering abnormally elevated triglycerides may lessen the risk of these disorders. "Powder?" Why not just... you know... eat a fucking vegetable? I don't fully buy in to the whole "eat non-processed foods" fad, nor am I vegetarian, but even I have to admit that an actual goddamned vegetable is probably better for you than powder. Implicit in the research is a new indictment of the Western diet. Of course it is. Can't leave well enough alone. Gotta convince people they're Doing It Wrong, so you can sell them the "solution." Sinclair studies another class of native proteins, called sirtuins, associated with health. They’re triggered by exercise and also, Sinclair contends, a molecule called resveratrol, found in grape skins and other plants. “It’s too coincidental that time and time again these molecules come out of nature that have the surprising multifactorial benefit of tweaking the body just the right way,” Sinclair says. Coincidental? Pfeh. Again: we evolved together. But to be fair, the article goes on to explain that, albeit in a way unconvincing to me. In the dance between animals and plants, says Hooper, “I think there’s true mutualism. We’re in this together, the plants and us.” This, however, rings true. While xenohormesis is a compelling idea, it remains unproven. As I noted above, this is from 2014. I suppose more studies have been done since then. I'd be curious to see the results, but I can't be arsed to look for scientific papers that I'm certain will contradict each other. That critique speaks to a larger problem: It’s often unclear how lab research on simple organisms or cell cultures will translate, if at all, into recommendations or therapies for genetically complex, free-living humans. One thing I'll say in favor of this article: it's pretty clear what's hypothesis and what's established. The whole reason I linked this is to point out that just because articles like this exist, doesn't mean we should take them at face value. Still, it's an interesting article... so here it is. |
| Science. Drinking. A drinking metaphor for science. https://theconversation.com/evolution-that-famous-march-of-progress-image-is-jus... Evolution: that famous ‘march of progress’ image is just wrong Tough to reproduce images here; you'll just have to click on the link to see the one -- but it's enshrined in world consciousness, so you probably already know it: the illustration of how an ancient ape gradually acquired more humanlike characteristics until humanity is attained. Evolution explains how all living beings, including us, came to be. This should be uncontroversial. Yet, somehow, it is not. What is controversial is how evolution works at the subcellular level. It would be easy to assume evolution works by continuously adding features to organisms, constantly increasing their complexity. That's the popular misconception, sure. What's missing in this picture is that there are living things with a more complex genome than our own, and that every organism on the planet has been subject to evolutionary pressures for exactly as long as we humans have. Yet this is one of the most predominant and frustrating misconceptions about evolution. The article links to another article with a list of five common misconceptions, including the idea that we're descended from monkeys. It's worth at least a glance. Our results show that the origins of major groups of animals, such as the one comprising humans, are linked not to the addition of new genes but to massive gene losses. The obvious thing one might ask is: why, then, do we exhibit more complex behavior than, say, a caterpillar? Now, I'm no expert, and the article doesn't cover this, but I think of it like this: more genes doesn't automatically translate to greater cranial capacity. Another fairly obvious question would be: If we evolved through loss of genes, was the first organism incredibly complex? This article does handle this, sort of. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was one of the strongest opponents of “the march of progress”, the idea that evolution always results in increased complexity. That's the controversy I spoke of before: whether complexity necessarily increases. As an aside, one ignorant (either willfully or naïvely) objection to the idea of evolution that I've heard is: "it would violate the second law of thermodynamics." This demonstrates a misunderstanding of both thermodynamics and evolution. It is true that, in a closed system, everything proceeds in the direction of disorder (entropy). But it is also true that the Earth isn't a closed system; there's a giant fusion reactor close enough to provide it with a great deal of energy. The second law is not violated. The system, Earth and accursed daystar, produces more entropy than it would if it weren't for life. In my darker moments, I sometimes think that this is the primary purpose of life: to increase universal entropy so the Universe experiences its heat death that much sooner. But then I sober up and remember that there is no purpose of life; it just is. And so we come to the drinking part: In his book Full House (1996), Gould uses the model of the drunkard walk. A drunkard leaves a bar in a train station and clumsily walks back and forth over the platform, swinging between the bar and the train tracks. Given enough time, the drunkard will fall in the tracks and will get stuck there. What's the point of the analogy? Read on. The platform represents a scale of complexity, the pub being the lowest complexity and the tracks the maximum. Life emerged by coming out of the pub, with the minimum complexity possible. Sometimes it randomly stumbles towards the tracks (evolving in a way that increases complexity) and other times towards the pub (reducing complexity). Been there. No option is better than the other. Staying simple or reducing complexity may be better for survival than evolving with increased complexity, depending on the environment. And that's what evolution is: survival. Not necessarily "of the fittest," but finding an environmental niche to exploit. Drunkenly, without purpose. But in some cases, groups of animals evolve complex features that are intrinsic to the way their bodies work, and can no longer lose those genes to become simpler - they become stuck in the train tracks. (There are no trains to worry about in this metaphor.) The lack of trains is a big relief for us drunks, but I'm not sure it's entirely true. Metaphorically speaking. Just ask the woolly mammoth -- oh wait, you can't because it got hit by a train. Together with Peter Holland from the University of Oxford, we looked into how genetic complexity has evolved in animals. The article goes on to explain the science involved, and how some extant species evolved through losing or gaining genetic complexity. No need to reproduce it here; besides, there's another graphic. Our results confirm the picture given by Stephen Jay Gould by showing that, at the gene level, animal life emerged by leaving the pub and making a large leap in complexity. But after the initial enthusiasm, some lineages stumbled closer to the pub by losing genes, while other lineages drifted towards the track by gaining genes. We consider this the perfect summary of evolution, a booze-induced random choice between the bar and the train track. Or, as the internet meme says, “go home evolution, you are drunk”. So that's worth including a bonus link , because WTF, Evolution? is never not funny to me.Anyway, it's not often I get to combine two of my favorite subjects, so I just wanted to share this one. |
| Meritocracy. Sounds good, right? Maybe think again. https://aeon.co/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be distributed according to skill and effort. Which, on the surface, certainly sounds ideal. Right? To each according to one's contribution. Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 per cent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. "Should be" is one thing. "Is" is quite another. Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. Hey, I'm living proof of that. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing. Okay, but "everyone has different genetics and background" is so obvious as to be not worth pointing out in most cases. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. I've been saying this for years: if hard work was all it took to become wealthy, there would be no poor sharecroppers. But here's the important part: In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. You may think you have that high-paying position on Wall Street because you deserve it based on all the work you put in and sacrifices you made. You might even be right. You're still (probably) a douche. The article goes on to summarize some of the science behind this idea. The ‘even playing field’ is intended to avoid unfair inequalities based on gender, race and the like. Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this ‘paradox of meritocracy’ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behaviour for signs of prejudice. I've noticed similar things (unscientifically, of course). People I've known who are convinced they are "good" act like bigger assholes than those who recognize that they're flawed. As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just. "That person is poor. It must be because they deserve to be poor. No need to do anything, then." Anyway, obviously, the essay here is one person's opinion. I'm not so sure about the ultimate conclusion ("it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal") As with most things, I think there's probably a middle ground. I'd say, at the very least, we should try to recognize when we're just lucky, and, obviously (at least to me), stop thinking that the world as it is is just and fair. That doesn't mean we can't try to make it more just and fair, though. |
| When the answer to the question, "Have you been living under a rock?" is "Yes." https://www.cracked.com/article_28076_a-brief-history-giant-rock-americas-most-b... A Brief History of Giant Rock, America's Most Bonkers Landmark Americans are not known for their creativity in naming landmarks. It's called Giant Rock, because desert living requires many things, but wild flights of poetic fancy aren't one of them. Nor are umbrellas. There's certainly nothing remarkable nearby, except for the time machine. Way to bury the lede. Over the years, it's also been a family home, a center of pilgrimage, the scene of a bloody standoff, a potential rival to Las Vegas, and the galactic antenna for the wisdom of interdimensional aliens. Pretty sure I saw this episode of Star Trek. The giant rock's modern history starts in the 1930s, when a German guy named Frank Critzer stumbled on it, conveniently located in a part of the Mojave Desert so remote the scorpions had to get two buses and a cab just to murder you. Now, now, surely that is hyperbole. Scorpions have their own custom means of transportation. Pretty sure it involves teleportation gates in shoes. Besides, Critzer was reportedly quite fond of waving a shotgun at any distant neighbors who came snooping around. Since ornery old shotgun weirdos are a crucial part of the desert ecosystem, nobody asked too many questions. This part rings true. Using only dynamite, pickaxes, and insanity, he managed to excavate a large cave underneath the rock... You can accomplish quite a bit with those tools alone. Before long, he was welcoming over a plane a day, and fantasizing about converting the whole area into a Vegas-style winter resort. Oh, the missed opportunities. These plans were destroyed by the arrival of WWII, when the other scattered inhabitants of the desert reported seeing mysterious flares in the mountains, as well as missing dynamite. I have to think that at least one person made the obvious connection, but this is the Mojave. Public opinion turned against the mysterious German with the massive radio antenna on top of his rock, particularly after the FBI swept up the Silver Shirts, a group of Nazi sympathizers attempting to convert a Hollywood mansion into a self-sustaining headquarters for American fascism. Eighty years too early and on the wrong coast. The group went down into the house under the rock, where Critzer exploded. Which probably answered their questions about the dynamite. "Oh, there it was." In any case, Critzer was instantly converted into "wallpaper," while all three deputies were badly wounded. One just about managed to drive 40 miles to the nearest telephone to get help. This should be a movie. This needs to be a movie. The house under the rock was left abandoned until the arrival of George van Tassel, who worked as an aircraft engineer for Howard Hughes and claimed to have met Critzer back when he first moved to California, although his story of the meeting might be the most implausible thing in this whole article. That's... that's a high bar to clear. In 1947, he decided to move his family out there, which involved scrubbing Critzer's dried blood off the walls. Just remember, if your husband ever comes home and says "Honey, we're moving to the desert and make sure to bring your blood sponge!" there's no need to even divorce him, the law says you can just empty the bank accounts and go. I know better than to take legal advice from Cracked, but this sounds about right. In 1952, van Tassel announced that his time at Giant Rock had led to him being visited by a race of aliens, who looked like tan white people and spoke in posh English accents. No mention of a blue police box in the area at the time? The story goes on to relate how van Tassel next began construction of a time machine called the Integratron, which explains the bit in the first paragraph above. In 1957, Van Tassel used the rock as a platform to announce his run for president in the 1960 elections. Thus locking up that all-important scorpion demographic. But somehow the machine was never finished (in fairness, time machines are complicated, and it would be cynical to bring up the ongoing donation money) and he died in 1978, without ever publishing a complete plan for the machine. Too bad the original British time travelers took their TARDIS with them. The internal machinery of the Integratron mysteriously vanished shortly afterward... Only to reappear suddenly at some point in the future, obviously. So, yeah, four out of five on TripAdviser, good job George van T! In some ways, I hope we never cure this kind of insanity. I mean, the human cost aside, stories like this are just too much fun. Well, except for the whole "dynamite wallpaper" bit. That's sad. Mini-Contest results! Great answers to my question from yesterday, some serious, one amusing. I thought about giving it to the funny one, in honor of today's amusing article, but the late entry by Words Whirling 'Round is well-written and generally aligns with my own thoughts on the matter. (It's dated August 11, yesterday, so that's not a link to some older item; therefore, I decided it counts.) So the Merit Badge today goes to Words Whirling 'Round. I highly recommend reading the essay; here's another link to it: "Consciousness" [E].But as always, I appreciated all the comments and seeing how other people think about the subject of consciousness, and I hope to do this again soon so everyone will have another chance. Probably with something less... mentally weighty. |
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