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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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| Well, it missed the full moon by a couple of days, but this one finally came up from my queue for me: Why the Moon’s two faces are so different  The far side of the Moon is incredibly different from the Earth-facing side. 63 years later, we know why the Moon's faces are not alike. Article has a helpful picture of both hemispheres of the moon up at the top, and lots of other pretty pictures scattered throughout. The Moon, by far, is the brightest object and largest object that’s visible to human eyes in Earth’s night sky. I was about to object to this until I realized that it means that it appears the largest, not that it's the largest object, in absolute terms, that we can see. That would probably be a star somewhere, depending on your definition of "object." So to satisfy my urge to be pedantic, I'll point out that one can often see the moon in the daytime sky, as well, during certain phases when it doesn't appear too close to the sun. With even an off-the-shelf pair of binoculars or the cheapest telescope you can find, there are two main features about the Moon that you can’t miss: That it's made of cheese and it's round? In addition, because the Moon’s orbit is elliptical, moving faster when it’s closest to Earth and slower when it’s farthest away, the face of the Moon that’s visible changes ever-so-slightly, a phenomenon known as lunar libration. Even though this means, over the course of many months, we could see up to a total of 59% of the Moon, it wasn’t until 63 years ago, when the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 swung around to the far side of the Moon, that we got our first pictures of the far side of the Moon. Because of this, most of the features of the far side are named in Russian. Although it wasn’t very impressive in terms of image quality, it was remarkable for an unexpected reason: the near side of the Moon appears vastly different, in terms of both cratered features and maria features, from the far side that always faces away from us. This discovery came as quite a shock, and for decades, even as our imaging and understanding of this elusive side of our nearest planetary neighbor improved in quality, we lacked an explanation as to why this difference existed at all. The rest of the article explains just that, and it's pretty cool, not only for the explanation, but for the observations, deductions, and science that got us there. Which is fascinating, but there's not a lot of point in rehashing it here. Then: No matter how wild or unusual your idea may be, if it has sufficiently strong explanatory power to account for what we observe, it just might be the necessary idea to solve whatever puzzle it is that you’re considering. Until some better observations come along, of course, and change everything we think we know. But that, too, is part of the awesomeness of science. |
| Whenever Cracked claims to be "scientific," I always take it with a huge chunk of pink Himalayan sea salt. Still funny, though. Of all the things you want control over in your life, who you have sex with probably ranks pretty high. Right, because not controlling it means someone's committed a felony. Fortunately, considering that we have not, in fact, descended into a Handmaid’s Tale dystopian nightmare (yet), it probably feels like you do. We're getting there. Well, we’re sorry to tell you that free will is an illusion and you’re as beholden to the tyranny of biology as the grubbiest little worm when it comes to who you rub your genitals on. Well, duh. Some of these are not so "secretly." I'm not going to go through all 15 here, just some highlights (lowlights?) 14. Whether You’re Ovulating Ovulation (that is, the phase of a woman’s menstrual cycle when she’s fertile) lowers women’s standards... Anything that lowers women's standards can only work in my favor. 12. How Much They Smile This one depends largely on who you are and who you’re trying to get with: Men prefer women who smile more, while women like men who smile less (or even look vaguely ashamed). This one didn't sit right with me—it is physically impossible for me to smile in the standard bare-your-teeth fashion, and yet I'm somehow not swimming in sex—so I went to the link they helpfully provided, and oh boy. A note to single dudes: If you're looking to pick up a woman at a bar, whatever you do -- don't smile at her.I have a hard and fast firm (dammit, there's not an adjective here that can't be misconstrued, is there) rule about not picking up women at bars. "But Waltz, didn't you just say that you want women with lower standards? What lowers a person's standards more than alcohol? Don't say 'ovulation.'" Yeah, that was what's known in the rarefied circles of advanced comedy as a "joke." The obvious difficulty here is that if I'm out in public, I'm probably at a bar. Full disclosure: I did it a couple of times when I was younger; why else do you think I developed that rule? Researchers asked more than 1,000 volunteers to rate the sexual attractiveness of hundreds of images of the opposite sex.Images don't cut it. Smiles, and other expressions of emotion, are generally fleeting, unless you work for a retailer and thus have to have one plastered on your face at all times. No, maybe an image can give someone a good or bad first impression, but I suspect I'm not alone in wanting to see more body language—even if I'm terrible at reading it. (All were heterosexual, ages 17 to 49 years, with a median age of 21. Fifty-two percent of participants were Asian, and 48 percent were Caucasian.)I think a few demographic groups are missing here. While it's irrelevant to me what gays, for example, prefer to see in such a study, I'm sure a lot of people do want to know that. What is relevant to me is if that still holds true at age fifty-something. I suspect that, like most studies of this nature, the majority of the guinea pigs were university students (or possibly teachers/researchers in the case of the older ones) who got enough bread for a couple of pints out of the deal. They found that women ranked the smiling guys as less attractive -- but they were into the prideful and ashamed men. But the male participants were most attracted to the smiling women, and least attracted to the ones who seemed proud.Missing some instances of "most" here. I seriously doubt everyone had the exact same reaction. It's like asking people what their favorite candy is. Most people say "Reese's cups." I despise Reese's cups. Anyway, enough of that. Suffice it to say this is one instance of me needing that huge chunk of pink Himalayan sea salt. (How sea salt got up into the Himalayas, I leave as an exercise for the reader.) 11. Whether They Touch Your Arm Lightly touching a woman on the arm makes her more likely to agree to dance or give out her phone number because touchers are considered more attractive and (sigh) more dominant. Touching a woman on the arm (or anywhere else) if you don't know her that well is a good way to get mace in the face. Or so I'm told. Maybe that's just me. 7. Genetics You have a secret superpower, and it’s sensing immune profiles. (We never said it was cool.) Women prefer the smells of men whose genetic immune profiles are the most different from their own, which is helpful for your future offspring but also to everyone hoping to avoid a distant cousin. Or, sometimes, people just stink. You can't avoid a distant cousin, by the way. Close relatives, maybe, but everyone who isn't a close relative is your distant cousin. And I've seen other "studies" that imply that people too distantly related won't be attractive to a given individual. Case in point: 4. What Your Parents Look Like The Freudians weren’t right about much, but we do gravitate toward people who look like our preferred-gender parent. This would seem to counteract the whole “genetic diversity” thing... I have no idea what my genetic parents looked like (other than that they probably resemble me, if they're still around). Who I find attractive has historically been all over the place, though, and I can't think of anyone I looked at and said, "oh, wow, she's short with black hair just like my mom!" I mean, ew. 3. Your Parents’ Ages Similarly, people raised by older parents tend to have older partners... No idea if this is genetic or environmental. My adoptive parents were a lot older than me, too old at the time I was adopted to have given birth to anyone. And while my first wife was two years my senior, my second was nine years younger (fun fact: they were both 27 when I married them). 1. Who You’ve Had Sex With Before Think you don’t have a type? Wrong. You might not have started out with one, but one of the biggest factors of our perception of beauty is familiarity. We prefer faces similar to those of our friends, loved ones, and yes, exes, because we associate those people with good times. Yeah, no, not in my case. Women I've dated tend to be all over the spectrum in terms of height, hair color, body type, etc. The one thing they all have in common, the one characteristic that could be considered "my type" is that they were all batshit crazy. Which I'm aware says more about me than about them (me being the other thing they all have in common). Which in turn is one reason I'm single. That and my refusal to pick someone up at a bar. |
| Full moon tonight. Also a lunar eclipse, but one that's too late to stay up for and definitely too early to wake up for. So instead, we get to read about the Incredible Shrinking Brain. Given the state of the world right now, I would think "thirty years ago" rather than "three thousand years ago." Did the 12th century B.C.E.—a time when humans were forging great empires and developing new forms of written text—coincide with an evolutionary reduction in brain size? Well, it's not in the headline; it's the lede. The answer is still "no." Think again, says a UNLV-led team of researchers who refute a hypothesis that's growing increasingly popular among the science community. One thing I should note: brain size isn't strongly correlated with intelligence. If it were, elephants would be ruling the planet. While I'm convinced they're intelligent, it's not like they've invented the internet, sliced bread, or beer. Last year, a group of scientists made headlines when they concluded that the human brain shrank during the transition to modern urban societies about 3,000 years ago because, they said, our ancestors' ability to store information externally in social groups decreased our need to maintain large brains. That's... not really how evolution works, anyway. Their hypothesis, which explored decades-old ideas on the evolutionary reduction of modern human brain size, was based on a comparison to evolutionary patterns seen in ant colonies. "What is this, a study for ants?" That by itself would raise a bunch of red flags for me. "We re-examined the dataset from DeSilva et al. and found that human brain size has not changed in 30,000 years, and probably not in 300,000 years," Villmoare said. "In fact, based on this dataset, we can identify no reduction in brain size in modern humans over any time-period since the origins of our species." The date for the appearance of what's called "anatomically modern" humans, from what I've read, is about 100,000 years ago. The UNLV team says the rise of agriculture and complex societies occurred at different times around the globe—meaning there should be variation in timing of skull changes seen in different populations. However, DeSilva's dataset sampled only 23 crania from the timeframe critical to the brain shrinkage hypothesis and lumped together specimens from locations including England, China, Mali, and Algeria. The only information we have on human brains from that long ago is cranial capacity, which puts an upper limit on brain size. But, again, the relationship between brain size and intelligence isn't absolute. I'm linking this article because, while I didn't see reports on the original study (the one that claimed brain size reduction 3,000 years ago), apparently, lots of people did. And when a study like that comes out, it's natural for people to want to share it, especially if it fits in with their worldview. In this case, it would be the (demonstrably false) worldview that we're stupid and never should have invented agriculture or civilization. Or possibly that we shouldn't be relying on what I like to call "auxiliary memory" (my smartphone) or we'll become even stupider. (Incidentally, there's a picture making the rounds purporting to show a misshapen human with a cell-phone-holding claw and a crooked neck and calling it "the future evolution of humankind;" that's also utter bullshit.) It's like when a nutrition scientist says "dark chocolate is good for you," and people crow about it while stuffing their faces with Godiva, and then never hear that the study was suspect because it was funded by Willy Wonka. So I'm here setting the record straight to the best of my ability. Now you can be That Person at the party who, upon hearing someone confidently proclaim that our ancestors' brains shrank 3,000 years ago, can go, "Well, ackshually..." |
| When faced with the unexplained, obviously, the explanation is aliens. How did life on Earth start? No one knows. But we have some pretty compelling hypotheses. We know all about evolution and DNA replication... No, we do not. ...much more than our ancestors did, but we still have nothing but theories when it comes to explaining how nonliving matter ever started living. Cracked here is using "theories" in its layperson sense, not scientifically. One theory says this process, abiogenesis, never happened on Earth at all. Life came to Earth fully formed as simple microbes from some other planet, then it spread and evolved. Earth has never had the conditions for abiogenesis as far as we can tell (whatever those conditions might be), but an alien planet could have those conditions. Except that we're pretty sure Earth did have such conditions at one point. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but going to "aliens did it" just kicks the can down the road. What we know beyond any reasonable amount of doubt is that life, somehow, started; as evidence for that, well, look in a mirror: life on Earth exists. I'm not saying it definitely, absolutely, got its start from non-life here on Earth, but I think we'd need to rule that out before jumping to any extraterrestrial origin hypotheses. Which doesn't mean that I think life doesn't exist elsewhere also. I'm just saying it's within the realm of possibility that nonliving matter began to do its organizational thing right here in our own oceans, leading eventually to the development of DNA, cells, mitochondria, and, eventually, Instagram influenzas, without aliens being involved in the process. Though I'm still not sure about the influenzas not being aliens. Francis Crick—Nobel prize winner and part of the team who first observed the structure of DNA—weighed in on the subject in 1973. Crick, of course, didn't work alone (James Watson got co-credited for the discovery, which happened almost exactly 70 years ago), and there's good reason to believe that it was Rosalind Franklin who actually discovered DNA as such, though for some reason—I can't quite put my finger on it—he got a Nobel Prize but she did not. None of this, however, diminishes Crick's contribution to the field. Going on about aliens might, though. The idea that spores from a different planet just happened to make their way to Earth ("panspermia") is too unlikely, said Crick. But you know what he said is a lot more likely, and which we have to consider? A theory dubbed "directed panspermia": Aliens seeded life on Earth on purpose. Again, sure, maybe. We don't know. But we shouldn't jump to that conclusion. (Also, it's entirely within the realm of possibility that spores can survive interstellar travel.) And it still doesn't answer the actual question, which is: how does nonlife become life? That is, whether it happened here or elsewhere. Crick also had some more specific arguments beyond this speculation (at one point in his paper, he says, "the psychology of extraterrestrial societies is no better understood than terrestrial society," realizing his reasoning is getting kinda "out there"). Life evolved to require such rare elements as molybdenum, which would make more sense if it started somewhere in which that element was more common. Also, Crick discovered that all life shares a universal genetic code, which is odd but would make sense if we all evolved from one kind of germ that infected our planet. That germ's home planet, however, probably had numerous separate very different genetic codes. That's a whole wheelbarrow of speculation right there. I'm certainly not an expert in biology, but there are multiple ways that rarer elements can get concentrated here on Earth through natural, pre-biotic processes. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't find deposits of said elements. All it would take would be one well-placed deposit. One straightforward way is a meteor hitting Earth, which I suppose actually qualifies as an extraterrestrial origin, though not "directed panspermia." Around the time that life started here on Earth, there were a lot more meteors flying around. As for the "life shares a universal genetic code" thing, that can be explained by DNA out-competing any other potential blueprint for life, analogous to how sapiens eventually out-competed neanderthals. We're all comforted to learn that aliens might have sent life to Earth, like in Prometheus. No, I'm not comforted by that at all; I'd still want to know how life began in the first place, here or elsewhere. Not that comfort has anything to do with science. Besides, I didn't like that movie. At least this article correctly labels this as "speculation." Speculation is an important part of science. But just because someone's a Nobel Prize winner doesn't mean they're always going to be right. Occam's Razor indicates that we shouldn't needlessly multiply entities, and throwing sentient aliens into the mix absolutely multiplies entities unnecessarily. It's equivalent to saying "we don't know, so God did it." Sure, it could turn out that he was right all along. I'll be sure to ask the aliens when they finally show up here. |
| Before I get back to posting commentary on articles—I still have a large selection to choose from—I thought I'd try something different today. This blog is now nearly 16 years old and contains 2142 entries (this one will be #2143). Sure, most of them are from the past few years, and I took a long hiatus in the middle there. But recently I've had occasion to go back to revisit old entries. Some of them made me laugh, because I didn't remember typing them. Others made me cringe because, newsflash, I change over time. I wanted to revisit some old entries to see how my views might have shifted. True to form, I picked one at random for this purpose. If I do this again, I'll pick a different one at random. I'm excluding anything from the past 12 months. So here's one from March 19, 2019: "Good and Gooder" It's based on this article, which, fortunately, is still available. I'll link it here again in my currently favored format: While I don't have anything to change about that entry, I wanted to do what I didn't back then, and actually list the "seven moral rules" as presented in the article: 1. Help your family 2. Help your group 3. Return favors 4. Be brave 5. Defer to superiors 6. Divide resources fairly 7. Respect others’ property What strikes me now (and might have struck me at the time, but I didn't mention it) is what's excluded from this list, moral/ethical rules that, if they're not universal, I think should be. First and probably most obvious, "Don't murder people." Most societies that I'm aware of draw a distinction between the illegal killing of people, and the legal killing thereof. There are also gray areas in between, as with self-defense. Some examples of legal killing would be warfare or capital punishment. I'm not saying these things are right, mind you; just that they're legal. But walking up to someone on the street and putting a bullet in their head is generally frowned upon in most societies I'm aware of, though it happens more often than we'd like. I guess I assumed it was the same everywhere, though with its exclusion from this list, I have to wonder if "don't murder people" just isn't a major no-no in other societies. Sometimes, it's okay to kill someone from the out-group (North Sentinel Island comes to mind) but not the in-group; more on this later. There might be different lines drawn elsewhere, but I've heard of very few cultures that say it's okay to murder someone—though the definition of "murder" can vary. Second glaring omission: refraining from child abuse. Again, what's considered abuse can vary. For example, there was a big deal made a few years of the practice of female circumcision in some societies, though I haven't seen anyone railing against it recently. This is usually done to children, so from our Western perspective it's child abuse. And then some people noted "what's the difference between that and male child circumcision," a practice strongly rooted in the West, so I think that's one reason the moral panic died out. It's a false equivalence, and most people recognize that. That's just one example, though. When I was a kid, it was expected that corporeal punishment (not to be confused with corporal punishment) was acceptable to keep kids in line. My elementary school principal even had a paddle with "School Board" on one side (the other side was engraved with my name). In a nod to changing morality, though, the school needed parental permission to use it. My dad gave them blanket permission, because he knew me. My mom, on the other hand, was more on the side of alternative punishments. Nowadays, even thinking about spanking your kid gets you labeled as a child abuser. Point being that what we define as child abuse changes over time, just as it changes between cultures. Yet I feel like some version of it should be on that list (as a negative), and it is not. Third omission: don't rape. I don't have much more to say about that except that, again, it should be right there. I suppose it is possible that the list was constructed to include "positive" morality; that is, "do these things" rather than the "negative" morality of "don't do these things." But in that case, one could turn all three of these things around to "respect the autonomy of others," and the fact that this is not on the list is still worrisome, in that it implies that there are cultures where that's not a moral rule. The list, however, purports to be about what is, and not what one random blogger thinks should be. If I were writing codes of morality, I'd make some changes. For example: 1 and 2 would be combined into "help humanity." If you just help your family and your group (which I read as tribe, or political affiliation, or extended family, or religion, or whatever sets you apart from the rest of the population), you're part of the problem. Thinking in such small terms appears to be baked into the tribal psychology of humanity, and it's not easy to change. But hell, some people take it even one step further to "help the biosphere." I don't have a problem with 3, "return favors." This seems like basic reciprocity, which helps smooth social interactions and ties into 1 and 2. 4, "be brave," can be problematic. There's a blurry line between bravery and stupidity. It's fine to respect someone for being brave, but being brave by itself doesn't cut it, in my view. As an example, it would be brave of me to take off all my clothes and walk up the street. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. 5- I don't have superiors. Nor do I have inferiors. In certain circumstances, a person does have these things; a job, for example, or military service, in which case, well, okay. But the idea that one person is inherently superior to another (rather than being in a manager / employee situation) is, again, part of the problem. 6- "Divide resources fairly." By that measure, the US is a highly immoral society. I'm not going to argue against that. But "divide resources fairly" is not what we practice. Why, that would be soshulism!!! Also, who gets to define what's "fair?" 7 seems to contradict 6, anyway. We tend to idolize the Robin Hood types, but they don't respect others' property. One can make the argument that Robin Hood was just correcting economic injustice, and I won't argue there, but stealing is wrong, whether a rich person or a poor person is doing it (I can make moral, if not legal, exceptions for those who steal to alleviate hunger, but our legal system isn't set up for such nuance). And I'd add the bits about respecting others' autonomy that I discussed above, with "slavery is wrong" added to that mix just to be clear about it. That's enough for today. Back to regularly scheduled random programming tomorrow, unless something major happens. |
| Ever notice that there are very few, if any, tolls to go into New Jersey, but a lot of tolls to get out of New Jersey? My cousin, who has a beach house in NJ, says it's that way because if you charged people to go into the state, no one would visit. Funny, but a little unfair. A lot of New Jersey is actually quite nice, including his beach house, which is just south of Asbury Park. No, he's never met Springsteen. Most of the drive was rather pleasant, absent the perpetual traffic jam in the DC area. My one gripe apart from that is that I was forced to listen to commercial radio. By which I mean, I have to listen to something, and commercial radio was really the only option. See, on long-distance trips, I was used to plugging in my iPod Touch, setting my vast music collection on shuffle, and just letting it play. I had enough songs to drive all the way across the country and back without ever hearing a repeat. And now they've discontinued the iPod, or so I've heard, so if mine breaks, I'm fucked. Besides, I don't see a plug for it. Maybe there is one and it's just hard to find. So I did this trip without the iPod to see what options I had, and I am not pleased. But maybe there's an option I'm missing, so here's what I understand about the current sad state of listening to music while driving. 1. Commercial radio. Emphasis on "commercial." Ads piss me off at the best of times, but the week before an American election? Oh boy. Road rage. According to every single ad, the ad purchaser's opponent punches pregnant women, kicks puppies, eats babies, was once caught jaywalking, is unbearably stupid, and will destroy America. The only thing I can glean from this is that no matter who we vote for, they will destroy America. The only choice, therefore, is to pick the one you think will give us the best bread and circuses during our slide into oblivion. (At least I haven't heard any holiday ads yet; those will definitely take over the airwaves after Tuesday). 1a. Apart from goddamned ads, which I can always switch stations for, again, I like to travel cross-country. There are entire swaths of America where the only options are Christian music stations, Christian talk radio stations, broadcast church services, evangelical emissions, country music, or static. I don't mind country music so much, but too much at one time gets real old real fast, so static it would have to be. Which would put me to sleep, not a good idea while driving. 2. Satellite radio. Advantage: lots of formats to choose from, only drops out in tunnels and maybe some mountainous areas (in which driving is perilous enough that I wouldn't get lulled to sleep). Disadvantage: another monthly subscription to pay for, one that I'd only use like 2-3 times a year, max. Bigger disadvantage: also ads (unless they've changed that, which I doubt), and if there's one thing I hate more than ads, it's paying and still having to put up with ads (this is why I never got cable TV). 3. One of those online music services, like Amazon Music or Pandora or whatever the hell is out there right now (I won't get Spotify under any circumstances) on my mobile, which I think (but I'm not sure) I can use while also using the phone's GPS. Advantage: no ads. Disadvantage: there are entire swaths of America without mobile coverage, during which the streaming stops working. Result: asleep at the wheel again. 4. Downloading some tunes on my smartphone (I will take this opportunity to note that my new car has a feature where if you plug in your phone, it'll transfer the GPS (I use Google Maps) to the car's screen for a totally hands-free experience, which is nice). Advantage: doesn't cut out, ever. Disadvantage: I have limited space on the Android, and that space is even more limited if I download offline Google Maps because, again, entire swaths of the country have no cell coverage; consequently, I could fit maybe two albums' worth of music on there. Repetitive. 5. Bring a big stack of CDs and use the car's CD player. Advantages: no ads, never cuts out. Disadvantage: can't shuffle between CDs. Bigger disadvantage: Come on, it's nearly 2023. Now, I managed to make it to NJ and back without becoming too enraged by the lack of options. This is because that involves driving through areas with good stations: DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia. Basically anywhere in the Northeast Corridor is fine for radio if I can put up with the occasional ads and lame DJ chatter. But eventually, I'm going to want to drive through the Midwest again, perhaps even next month (we'll see). So, what do people do for driving music these days? And don't suggest listening to recorded books. I don't have anything inherently against them, but they also take up limited smartphone space. Same goes for podcasts, except I don't like them in general anyway. I want to hear music; I want to hear it in random order (radio station programming counts as random as far as I'm concerned); I want no-to-very few ads; and I want the music to not repeat every few hours. My iPod met all those criteria and also had the advantage that I didn't have to fiddle with it while driving. Without a good setup, I don't know if I can handle a cross-country trip. So... help? |
| I ever tell you why I don't like gambling in Atlantic City? Yeah, yeah, I know, I do it anyway. But I get to bitch about it if I want. When I play blackjack, I generally prefer the second chair. Picture a casino table, right? Dealer on one side, six player positions on the other. Chairs are numbered from the dealer's left, not the players' left. Sometimes it's called second base, which is weird when you think about it because there's almost always six chairs at a table. Anyway, I'm not that picky about it, but if I have a choice I'll take second so I don't have to deal with the idiot decisions of too many people to my right. More about that later. The dealer proceeds from their right to left, so if all the seats are filled, the deal goes: one card to 1, 2,... 6, dealer up card, second card to 1, 2,... 6, dealer down card. Then the players make their hit/stand/double/whatever decisions also in order 1, 2,... 6. Like any pastime, blackjack has its own insider lingo. Probably everyone knows the basics: hit, stand, double down, split. One particularly annoying piece of lingo that I think is of more recent origin is "monkey" for any card worth 10 points (ten, J, Q, K). This apparently originated in Asia, where presumably the word was in a different language and maybe it has an association with the number 10 in one of those languages. Or maybe a monkey symbolizes luck. I don't know. But Americans picked that shit up and overused it. So you're sitting there at a table, getting into the groove, when some lily-white trust fund brat chips up. He gets dealt an ace. Slap the table, "MONKEY!" Then, next hand, he gets a four-seven. Double down and slap the table. "MONKEY!" Next hand, dealer's showing a six, flips another six. Slap the table. "MONKEY!" On that last one, it's almost worth watching the dealer draw a nine for a total of 21 just to listen to the kid moan about it. Point is, for fuck's sake, mix it up a little, okay? To be fair, this isn't an AC problem; it happens everywhere I've played blackjack. Then you get the ten-splitters. Which I do see more of in AC than in Vegas. There's nothing inherently wrong with splitting tens, but the odds aren't in your favor if you do that. Let me see if I can explain without too much math. So you get dealt two monkeys (ugh). That's a 20. In something like 9 out of 10 hands, that's at the very least a push, if not a win. There are no sure hands in blackjack (even the namesake hand could be a push), but a 20 is pretty good odds, no matter what the dealer's showing (if they have 21, they show before you get a chance to split, and you lose anyway unless you have 21 also). And yet you get greedy people who split tens. They're then basically playing two hands. You can split again. In AC, you can have as many as 4 hands from splits. it's rare. Now, on each 10, you've got a 4/13 chance (roughly) of getting another 10, and a 1/13 chance of each other card. It could even be an ace. But that ace doesn't give you blackjack; that's only a thing on your first two cards. It's still 21, guaranteed to at least push (tie with the dealer). But again... low odds of pulling an ace. Some players think it messes up the odds for the other players for someone to split tens. I disagree. Decks are thoroughly shuffled, and that next card could be anything (I'm talking about multiple-deck blackjack here). But it's maddening as hell if you've got, say, an 11, and you want to double down, and you watch the ten-splitter to your right keep getting monkey after monkey when the card you want is a monkey, and when they're finally done you end up with a five (that gives you 16, which sucks ass, especially after doubling). I mean, sure, it can also go the other way, but it's still annoying, and that's why I like to sit at 2; it minimizes the risk of people to your right making questionable choices. Also, some people like to play two spots. That's fine; it's allowed, with dealer permission, when things aren't too busy. I've done it myself on occasion. So yesterday, I'm sitting there at second, and there's a couple at 4 and 5, leaving open only 1, 3, and 6. Some dude comes up and sits next to me at 1. "Hey man, can you scoot over? I wanna play two hands." Now, look, changing seats at a blackjack table is a Big Damn Deal (no pun intended for once). The dealer probably doesn't care; they just slap cards down at whatever spots have chips in 'em, but the pit bosses are all keeping track of your betting patterns and whatnot. This isn't as intrusive as it sounds; come on, you're in a casino and there are cameras everywhere already. They do this to keep track of your points for comps and tier credits or whatever the casino uses to determine if you're spending enough money to earn Free Parking (that is a pun; Monopoly was based on Atlantic City). Being a relatively nice guy, I'm fine with switching seats so the one dude can play two spots. So I go through the hassle of moving my beer, my chips, my cigar, and my secret card counter (just kidding about the last bit) one seat to my left. Game pauses while the pit bosses mess around with the touchscreen to sort everything out. Guy finally settles in and throws a chip at 1 and 2, and also plays the sucker bet on both. He loses. He gets up and walks off. Look, blackjack is a grind, not an instant jackpot. More often than not, you're going to lose the first hand. Sometimes, over time, you can amass some winnings, but your chip stack is going to go up and down like the Apple stock ticker in the meantime. That is, if you're not me and you're not playing in Atlantic City. I have better luck playing the game in Vegas, for whatever reason (the rules aren't significantly different, so that's probably just chance, or possibly confirmation bias). On the other hand, for some reason, I do better at slots in AC. Go figure. Slot machines are heavily house-weighted (blackjack is only slightly house-weighted), so I don't play them often, but for some reason, yesterday, I won back most of my blackjack losses by hitting a (very minor) jackpot on a slot. That's when I quit gambling for the week. I'm leaving today anyway, so no big deal. With all that, why do I keep going back here? Well, I had a vague memory of talking about AC in an earlier blog entry, so, being done with gambling for this trip, I had time to look it up, from way back in 2018: "Atlantic City" Excerpt: "But they still have bars, and blackjack, and usually you can avoid the scam artists wandering in off the streets for long enough to let casino security kick them out. And, unlike Vegas or Reno, if you look out the window you can sometimes see the ocean, and forget for a moment that those waves will one day drown the city in a flood of sharks and used needles. Sometimes the only purpose of a place is to remind you of how good you actually have it." |
| Still a couple more days out in the wild here. My system for visiting breweries to sample their nectar of the gods is to use rideshare. Yesterday, I visited four different breweries in this general area, paying a whole hell of a lot to Uber for the privilege. I need self-driving cars to happen, like, right now. This is because two of the trips, between breweries, were done by the same driver. A driver who, it was clear from several clues, is an adherent of a religion that forbids drinking. Which doesn't mean they forbid it for others, I know, but I could just feel the disapproval oozing from the driver's seat, and it's not like I could talk about my experiences in a way that he could relate. At the same time, though, if you're an Uber driver; you have to know that your primary purpose in life is to get drunk people from one place to another. With autonomous vehicles, sure, these drivers would be out of a job, and that's unfortunate, but let's stick to what's really important here: my ability to be shuttled semi-anonymously from one brewery to another. I say semi-anonymously because, obviously, I'd still be tracked. But at least I wouldn't have to deal with awkward conversation. Fortunately, the weather is unseasonably warm here, which meant I could at least comment on that. At least for a little while, until I felt the conversation start to drift to climate change, which becomes a political issue, and you don't want to discuss politics or religion with an Uber driver, lest they give you something less than five stars. As for the beer, it was mostly very good. There are always outliers, but they serve as a point of contrast; it helps to drink stuff I don't like now and then to help me appreciate the stuff I do like even more. I've rarely had a bad brewery experience in New Jersey. Rideshare, sure. Not beer. |
| I was halfway to Atlantic City yesterday when I got a phone call from my insurance company. I called them back (after pulling into a gas station of course), using my neat new phone-car link feature for the first time. "So we couldn't add your new car to the policy last week because we got the VIN wrong." Why are you telling me this now, when I'm 150 miles away from home? We got that straightened out, but if I'd known the car wasn't insured, I'd have driven a lot more carefully up to that point. On the way, I stopped by Balić Winery which, as I noted earlier, was the primary reason for my trip. It's one of the places with non-grape wines, featured on Gastro Obscura, that I wanted to try. The owner himself was running the tasting counter, and I was the only one there, so we got to talking."How did you hear about us?" he asked. Oh, I saw an article on Gastro Obscura. "Who?" Part of Atlas Obscura? "Never heard of it." Well, whatever. They had some standard grape wines too, and everything I tried was exceptionally good. So I bought a case of mixed bottles. Don't look at me like that. Their pricing is very reasonable for such excellent product. Having fulfilled the entire purpose of my journey, I had absolutely nothing else to do. Just kidding. I found something to do in Atlantic City. And today I'll be visiting local breweries. |
| I don't know why I keep finding Outside articles. But this one, at least, isn't directly about the (shudder) outside. Speaking of which, I'll be venturing (ugh) outside (sort of) for the next few days. It's been a while since I did a road trip, and now that I have a car I can do one. Remember a couple of months ago, when I linked an Gastro Obscura article about non-grape wines? No? Well, here it is: "Keep Wining" . There, I noted that one of the featured wineries is in New Jersey, which isn't that far away from me, considering that I have, several times, driven all the way across the country and back.I described it as "might be a good overnight trip," but then I found out that it's actually half an hour away from Atlantic City (hookers and blackjack), and that there are other wineries in the area, as well as breweries. So I'm going until Friday. Blog posts may happen at hours unusual for me, but they will happen (barring catastrophe, of course). That's got nothing to do with today's article. I Got a Vasectomy Because of Climate Change Getting one was, by far, the most powerful personal action I could take for our planet I'd like to say that my decision to remain childfree was primarily motivated by concern for the ecosystem. I'd like to, but I can't. Oh, sure, it factored into it—I almost never make decisions based on just one thing, and absolutely never with something of that magnitude. But mostly, it was the other way around: I couldn't ethically justify bringing a child into a declining civilization. The article itself is from the Before Time, almost three years ago. I’ve always struggled to combine the idea of personal responsibility with the overwhelming need for human society to address the threat posed by climate change. That's because it's our problem, but it's not our individual responsibility. Since at least the 1970s, the massive energy corporations responsible for the vast majority of our carbon emissions have known about, and done nothing to mitigate, the harm they cause. Because they own politicians worldwide, there doesn’t appear to be any will to take government-level action. But I’m supposed to turn off a light? What possible impact could that ever have? And why is all this on my shoulders and not theirs? Which is what I've been saying. Bad example, though. Turning off a light has a direct impact on you: you pay a lower power bill. A better example might be, oh, I don't know, not taking road trips that waste gas just so you can try exotic New Jersey wines. Incidentally, several years ago, I replaced all the lightbulbs in my house (except for oven and refrigerator) with low-consumption LEDs. Again, I'd like to say this is because I'm concerned with the environment, and that was certainly a part of it. Another part was spending less on electricity. But mostly it's because I'm too lazy to replace lightbulbs, and these LEDs are supposed to last 20 years. When I got engaged, my fiancée, Virginia, and I started planning for the future. It wasn’t just my dog Wiley and me against the world anymore. All of a sudden, I started thinking ten to 20 or more years ahead. Huh. I didn't need to get engaged to plan for the future. Children are an obvious thing to plan. With a sudden focus on responsible decision-making, it no longer made sense to leave hypothetical future offspring up to chance. When should we have them? What did our careers look like on that timeline? Who’d be responsible for staying home and raising them? Couldn’t we just have one of the dogs do that? To be fair, they'd do a better job than a lot of humans. Is this a world we want to bring kids into? Is this a world it’s responsible to bring kids into? No. Of course, that's my opinion. Others have different opinions. That's okay. I would no more want everyone to decide to have all the offspring they can than I would want everyone to suddenly decide to stop breeding. It looks like the pace of climate change is speeding ahead of science’s ability to understand or forecast it. Lately I've been seeing more hopeful articles about climate change forecasts. By "more hopeful," I mean "we're still boned, but not as much as our worst fears." I suppose that's something, but it's still going to suck. I can't help but think that the impetus behind such articles is to keep people from spiraling into despair. Despair isn't good for the economy. Gotta keep the economy going. The future might be worse than any of us currently fear. Again, older article. But even the "optimistic" predictions are pretty bad. Then Virginia and I started talking about something we could do—for ourselves and to make a meaningful impact on the bigger problem. We could just forego the whole kid thing altogether. Such a decision would certainly do more than, say, using only reusable bags, or foregoing plastic straws. The image of personal climate change action doesn’t really match the reality. If I gave up my 15 mpg pickup truck—basically the mascot for climate inaction—and rode my bicycle everywhere, I’d save the planet 2.4 tons of carbon emissions a year. That’d be a massive sacrifice, but it’s nowhere near the carbon emissions I’ll save by skipping becoming a daddy, which comes in at around 58 tons annually, per kid. Any other action we could take, even all the actions we could ever possibly add up together, pale in comparison. One can quibble about the math, but a) do you really need that pickup truck and b) the basic idea is sound: if your carbon footprint ends with you, you've done a lot. That’s because there are simply too many humans on this planet. Arguable. I mean, I happen to agree, but every time I say so, someone chimes in with "so why don't you kill yourself?" as if that's equivalent to not reproducing. There's some basic disconnect there in peoples' brains that I just don't understand and it may be that I never will. Urging someone to kill themselves is otherwise frowned upon, unless it's in that context. Makes no sense to me. So, we’re not having kids. I found a colleague’s brother here in Bozeman who performs vasectomies and made an appointment. I was afraid of getting my scrotum operated on, but the procedure ended up being quicker and less invasive than most dental appointments. It is true that, like most men, I can count the number of people I want holding a scalpel near... there... on the fingers of one foot. But, as with my eye surgery last year, sometimes you just gotta overcome your fears. Once the anesthetic wore off, it felt like someone had kicked me in the balls pretty good, a feeling that dissipated over the next seven days. I took a Valium before the surgery and a few handfuls of ibuprofen afterward but otherwise didn’t need painkillers or even an ice pack. Dude. Frozen peas. Come on. Also, it's not nearly as bad as getting kicked in the nuggets, unless you get it done by your sister's friend's cousin's coworker's uncle in some back alley. The worst part was taking a week off from the gym; I’d been making good progress. Where's my tiny violin? I left it around here somewhere. Anyway, it's certain that a lot of people had, or will have, a visceral hatred of this article. The suicide comment above makes me sure of it. I want to emphasize again that I'm not judging people who do have kids. It's a choice that should be neither mandatory nor forbidden. Nor should we cave to social pressure either way. There are, as I said, other reasons to get the procedure done. It could be argued that, well, why would someone without kids even care about the environment at all? Oh, I don't know, maybe we have a broader view of humanity than just our own immediate family? |
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