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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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| https://aeon.co/essays/mindfulness-is-loaded-with-troubling-metaphysical-assumpt... The problem of mindfulness Mindfulness promotes itself as value-neutral but it is loaded with (troubling) assumptions about the self and the cosmos Hey, look, an article that critiques this mindless "mindfulness" bullshit. Three years ago, when I was studying for a Masters in Philosophy... Normally, that's my cue to Stop Reading There, but hey - can't pass up a chance for Confirmation Bias. We gathered in strangers’ houses to meditate at odd hours, and avidly discussed our meditative experiences. It was a strange time. Okay, I'll say it: meditation annoys me. Not other peoples' meditation - if it works for you, great - but my own attempts at it. There is no difference, to me, between meditation and going to sleep. A popular activity (though I’ve never tried it myself) even involves eating a raisin mindfully, where you carefully observe the sensory experience from start to finish, including changes in texture and the different tastes and smells. Yeah, whatever. Something about the mindfulness practice I’d cultivated, and the way it encouraged me to engage with my emotions, made me feel increasingly estranged from myself and my life. You mean... it's just more snake oil? Tell me more. Instead of engaging in deliberation about oneself, what the arts of mindfulness have in common is a certain mode of attending to present events – often described as a ‘nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment’. There is no such thing as the present moment. There is only the immediate past. By the time you become aware of something, even within your own body, that something is in the past. In his book Wherever You Go (1994), Jon Kabat-Zinn, a founding father of the contemporary mindfulness movement, claims that mindfulness ‘will not conflict with any beliefs … – religious or for that matter scientific – nor is it trying to sell you anything, especially not a belief system or ideology’. "I'm not trying to sell you anything. Buy this book!" As well as relieving stress, Kabat-Zinn and his followers claim that mindfulness practices can help with alleviating physical pain, treat mental illness, boost productivity and creativity, and help us understand our ‘true’ selves. And make your dick bigger, and help your hair grow back, and... Buddhist scholars have accused the contemporary mindfulness movement of everything from misrepresenting Buddhism to cultural appropriation. Don't fucking get me started on "cultural appropriation." But if someone from a certain culture accuses you of appropriating something from their culture, maybe listen? We're not talking about sushi or kimonos here; we're talking about something that messes with your mind. Kabat-Zinn has muddied the waters further by claiming that mindfulness demonstrates the truth of key Buddhist doctrines. There have been books purporting that certain aspects of quantum mechanics also demonstrate the truth of key Buddhist doctrines. Those books are, without exception, bovine excrement. So I'm not going to believe that there is a "truth" in the scientific sense to any religious teaching. Not without hard evidence, at least. Critics such as the author David Forbes and the management professor Ronald Purser argue that, as mindfulness has moved from therapy to the mainstream, commodification and marketing have produced watered-down, corrupted versions – available via apps such as Headspace and Calm, and taught as courses in schools, universities and offices. Meanwhile, Drunk Yoga is still a thing. (Yes, I know that's from a different culture and religion. My point stands.) Contrary to Kabat-Zinn’s loftier claims to universalism, mindfulness is in fact ‘metaphysically loaded’: it relies on its practitioners signing up to positions they might not readily accept. Yeah, like proclamations from philosophers of old. One technique in Buddhism, for example, involves examining thoughts, feelings and physical sensations, and noting that they are impermanent, both individually and collectively. I take the exact opposite stance to Buddhist thought in this: I note that everything in the Universe is impermanent, and thus, the only "reality" is one of impermanence. Anything you think is eternal? That's the illusion. This worldview is controversial, I know, but without it, you start thinking that reality is fantasy and fantasy is reality, and that way lies madness. The problem is the current tendency to present mindfulness as a wholesale remedy, a panacea for all manner of modern ills. Like I said: snake oil. The questions of consciousness, of self, are tricky ones. It's possible that none of us can comprehend our own consciousness because we're living it. And the desire for easy answers is a very human one; we want to answer these questions definitively and finally - without complication. We can't get what we want, and that's annoying. I do know one thing, though: if the matter of consciousness is ever resolved, it will be by science, not religion. Religion and spirituality provide guesswork, no matter how intricate their frames or how firm their foundations seem. Science doesn't provide final answers, either, but we can get asymptotically close. |
| Of all the idiosyncrasies of human nature, one that remains elusive to me is the concept of "fashion." https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613034/the-hipster-effect-why-anti-conformist... The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same Complexity science explains why efforts to reject the mainstream merely result in a new conformity. I used to joke that the "Fashion" merit badge here on WDC would be the last one I'd get, so of course, once, someone awarded me with one as a joke. What the hell; I'll take it. Somehow, I managed to get a "Family" one, too, for similar reasons - which is amusing if you read yesterday's entry. So I'm going to take the time to say I'll probably never get a "Consistent" Merit Badge. You’ve probably seen this effect—perhaps you are a victim of it. You feel alienated from mainstream culture and want to make a statement that you are not part of it. You think about wearing different clothes, experimenting with a new hairstyle, or even trying unconventional makeup and grooming products. "Victim?" Hardly. I wear what's comfortable, with some thought to appropriateness. When I go out, I wear one of my most elegant t-shirts, along with a Hawaiian shirt and black jeans. When I don't, I wear a less ritzy t-shirt and sweats. As for makeup and grooming products, well, I haven't worn makeup outside a stage production (though I don't object to it for men on cultural grounds, it's simply too much trouble), and my grooming products consist of an electric razor and a comb. The razor is mostly to keep my cheeks relatively smooth and my goatee relatively symmetrical and non-frizzy. Due to some genetic fuckery, I can't grow a full beard; hence the goatee. Why a beard at all? I don't know; I just think I look better with a goatee. And yet when you finally reveal your new look to the world, it turns out you are not alone—millions of others have made exactly the same choices. Indeed, you all look more or less identical, the exact opposite of the countercultural statement you wanted to achieve. Apart from people deliberately emulating The Dude, I rarely encounter people who made the same choices. Not "never," of course; there are about three billion men out there, and certainly some of them have longish hair and goatees. This is the hipster effect—the counterintuitive phenomenon in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same. Similar effects occur among investors and in other areas of the social sciences. This actually came to my attention when I was a kid and hippies were still a thing. My dad pointed it out. "Let's display our individuality by all looking the same!" And his conclusion is that in a vast range of scenarios, the hipster population always undergoes a kind of phase transition in which members become synchronized with each other in opposing the mainstream. In other words, the hipster effect is the inevitable outcome of the behavior of large numbers of people. Or it could be an inevitable outcome of having large numbers of people and finite fashion choices, combined with the Blue Car Effect, also known as confirmation bias. The idea is before you own a blue car, you rarely notice them, but when you do own one, you see them everywhere. But what do I know? I'm not a college professor and I know dicksquat about fashion. I do own a blue car, however. I have noticed an odd thing about fellow beer geeks, though. The male ones, anyway. The vast majority seem to have beards. This is, to me, counterintuitive; if one of your primary recreational activities involves pouring delicious, foamy malt beverage into your maw, it seems like having a beard (or at least the mustache part) would be contraindicated; it's a lot easier to wipe beer head off your upper lip if it's bare. But since I have upper lip whiskers, and it doesn't bother me, I don't really care. This simple model generates some fantastically complex behaviors. In general, Touboul says, the population of hipsters initially act randomly but then undergo a phase transition into a synchronized state. He finds that this happens for a wide range of parameters but that the behavior can become extremely complex, depending on the way hipsters interact with conformists. I guess it becomes a form of social signaling, like putting bumper stickers on your car, or even your choice of car. "I am in this tribe, and not the others." Whenever I see a dude with a full beard, it's a good bet he's a beer guy and we can have a conversation. Still not sure how to identify female beer geeks in the wild; if I knew that, I might not be single. Hipsters are an easy target for a bit of fun, but the results have much wider applicability. For example, they could be useful for understanding financial systems in which speculators attempt to make money by taking decisions that oppose the majority in a stock exchange. Those are called "contrarians," and, pretty much by definition, they're not generally speculators. Warren Buffett, arguably the greatest investor alive and once the richest man in the world (still in the top five) as a result, once said something like (can't be arsed to look it up) "be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy." Short-term market thinking results in getting in and out of positions, usually at the exact wrong time. For example, if you sold stocks last Monday, you were doing so when the market was crashing - which it was doing because the majority of people in the market were also selling. However, if you used it as an opportunity to buy, you'd be richer today than you were Monday (what it'll do tomorrow is anyone's guess). Point is, there's a difference between "speculators" and "investors," and the former tend to follow the herd, to their eventual detriment. So anyway, just linking this because it's an interesting article and made me think about fashion. Who knew it was subject to mathematical modeling? I would have never thought about it like that. But then, I'm proudly contrarian. |
| https://www.outsideonline.com/2258581/mountaineers-choice-be-sterilized-climbing... *sigh* I guess I'll link to this site again, even though it has the damned word "outside" in the title. A Mountaineer’s Choice to Never Have Kids The accomplished alpinist Lydia Bradey looks back at her life, 31 years after making the decision to get sterilized I decided long ago that I never wanted kids. After having been active in several childfree forums on the internet, I've come to the conclusion that the decision is different for men and women, but social expectations are similar. Lydia Bradey always knew she didn’t want kids of her own. She knew that when she was 18, and had already summited both of New Zealand’s most famous peaks, Mount Aspiring and Mount Cook. She didn't change her mind at 19, when she attempted the south face of Alaska’s Denali, nor at 26, when she became the first woman to climb an 8,000-metre Himalayan peak, Gasherbrum II in the Karakorum range, alpine-style without oxygen. I also made the decision to never climb mountains, and yet, for some reason, that doesn't come with the same cultural baggage. The topic of motherhood in mountaineering wouldn’t ignite the public's attention until 1995, when British climber Alison Hargreaves died on K2 in a violent storm. Hargreaves was one of the best mountaineers of her generation, also summiting Everest without supplemental oxygen and soloing all six of the classic north faces of the Alps in a single season. But rather than being remembered for her skill, she was attacked after her death as irresponsible and selfish for being a mother of two who indulged in such a risky career. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't. Can't please anyone if you're a chick, I suppose. Still, I'd like to point out that anyone can die of anything at any time, so if you have kids, you're always risking orphaning them. It's a huge responsibility, mountaineer or not. It's not that Bradey made the decision lightly, and she admits that over the years, her thoughts about having children began to evolve. “You begin to meet young people and you start to think about how having children would be rewarding,” she says. “As you get older, you see that parenthood is a compromise.” There are occasions when speaking in second-person works. This is not one of them. I have never, not once, considered that having children might be rewarding. Or rather, perhaps I have, but the potential rewards were always outweighed by the potential downsides. Other people, I know, felt the converse. Most people seem to breed without much thought, though. To be fair, "thought" isn't something required for that; even gerbils do it. In her early 40s, Bradey began the process to adopt a child. “When I was very young, the concept of adoption came up a lot,” she explains. “I’d decided when I was little that if I were to have children, I wanted to adopt.” Well, I certainly can't say she hadn't given it thought. For the most part, I respect the people who want to adopt - there are way more people who have kids and can't take care of them than there are people who want kids and can take care of them. As an adoptee myself, I only wish more people would do that rather than demand their own genetics be passed on. Spoiler alert if you don't read the article: She didn't adopt. “I reckon if I could afford to have a permanent nanny and I could do full-time adventures, I would definitely have had children, and I’d have had no problem being a Himalayan guide.” I don't detect much regret in this statement, just a plain stating of fact that if things had been different, things would be different. A tautology, really. I mention this because "regret" is one of the things the childfree - especially women - get asked about most often. When it comes up, I usually point out that if you're going to have regrets, it's better to regret not having 'em than it is to regret having 'em. The former affects no one but yourself. The latter? Kids can pick up on that shit. I could write an entire treatise on this, but no one would read it so... meh. All I'll say is that it's an individual choice. A lot of ethical questions can be resolved by asking "would it still be the right thing to do if everyone did it?" Well, if "everyone" decided to have kids, we'd be overpopulated that much more quickly. If "everyone" decided not to, we'd die out pretty fast (whether that's a good or bad thing is outside the scope of the question, but inside of 100 years there'd be no one left to debate it). So my conclusion is that it has to be an individual choice, made for whatever reasons you find compelling. Examples of non-compelling reasons: "My parents demand grandchildren," "All my friends are doing it." So I'm not writing this to rag on the people who choose one way or the other, just to throw out the idea that maybe it would be good if we could stop the social pressure - and maybe accept that, sometimes, fulfillment and accomplishment comes from other sources. Biology, after all, isn't the same thing as destiny. |
| Today, we're going to discuss something that isn't. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/what-color-tennis-ball-green... What Color Is a Tennis Ball? An investigation into a surprisingly divisive question We think of color as an intrinsic quality of a thing. It is not. I was stunned. I’d gone from being so sure of myself to second-guessing my sanity in a matter of seconds. More than that, I could never have imagined the question of the color of a tennis ball—surely something we could all agree on, even in these times—would be so divisive. Well, someone hasn't been paying attention to politics. Probably best for them. An investigation was in order. It began with the most obvious first stop, Wikipedia. “Tennis balls are fluorescent yellow at major sporting events, but in recreational play can be virtually any color,” the page for tennis balls said. And it’s true. A quick spin through Amazon shows that tennis balls, at least according to the labels, come in yellow and green and purple and even pink with Hello Kitty’s face on them. TOO FAR. “I make this decision as much on the basis of what I think I know about tennis balls—that they are yellow—as I do on what color I recall that they looked when I last saw one,” he said. “In other words, like the color of a lot of objects, how we label [a tennis ball] is determined both by perceptual and cognitive factors: the actual physical light entering your eye and ... knowledge about what people have typically labeled the objects.” When I was a kid, I remember having a deep, philosophical discussion with a friend of mine (we did that sort of thing), and I pointed out that I had no way of knowing whether the color I saw and labeled as "red" (or any other color) was the same as what he saw and labeled as "red." Like, if I could see through his eyes with his brain, maybe I'd see blue instead, or chartreuse, or black. This blew his mind. Much later, this argument was presented on the internet as something earth-shattering. I really should patent these ideas. Conway pointed to bananas as an example of this phenomenon. Bananas can be a number of colors—green when they’re not yet ripe, brown when we’ve let them sit out for too long. But we label bananas yellow, and we do it because “this is their state when we care about them,” Conway said. “It is canonical among most people to call bananas yellow.” Yeah, okay, but when you look at an individual banana, you can assign it a color. Green, yellow, or (in the case of the ones attracting fruit flies on my counter right now), brown. In other words, humans are good at pointing at a yellow paint chip in a line of colorful chips and saying, that’s yellow. But if we’re shown a yellow paint chip alone and asked what color it is, we become less certain about calling it yellow. Like many cities, we have a "Yellow Cab" taxi service here. Some of the cabs are yellow. Most are orange. At least one of them has a silver paint job. This is annoying, so I use Uber. Conway took it a step further, suggesting that the way people see tennis balls could reveal something about their lifestyles. Night owls, for example, spend most of their time under artificial, warm light, which means they’d discount warm colors and see a tennis ball as green. Well, that explains why my initial reaction to the headline was, "Green. Duh." So now I'll go back to my original assertion: Color is not an intrinsic quality of a thing. No, this doesn't mean it's an "illusion." I'm sick of people labeling things that are perceived differently by different people as an "illusion." Like, "Time is an illusion." No it fucking isn't. Yes, we each perceive it differently - mostly this is psychological and/or age-related; relativistic effects are really minor for us earth-bound clowns. But they're real. So is time. So, no, color isn't an illusion, but it does depend on certain quantum effects as well as one's perception. I mean, we can talk about "the green grass," and I think most people associate green with grass. The only exceptions I know of are RG colorblind (duochromatic, technically), but even they have been inundated with social expectations like "the grass is green." So imagine my horror, as a kid, when I heard about Kentucky bluegrass. No, not the music; the actual grass you can put on your lawn. I finally tracked some down at one point and scratched my head. Looked green to me. I can't be arsed to get into the technicalities of it, but grass is green because that's the only color reflected from it when enough light of the right spectrum (e.g. the harsh glare of the accursed daystar) shines upon it. This has to do with electron orbits and quantized energy; like I said, not getting into it. Point is, shine light of a different spectrum on grass, and it could appear to be another color. Or even if it's moonlight, which is highly attenuated sunlight reflecting off dark gray rock, and grass becomes gray or something darker. And yes, the moon is mostly colored dark gray. That brings me to the other point about color, which is that it looks different depending on what other colors are around it. This is even less an intrinsic property of the thing, and more a matter of human nerve cells. Take a look at these, for example: http://mentalfloss.com/article/54448/5-color-illusions-and-why-they-work There are many other examples; a quick Google search will root them out. So, yes, color is somewhat subjective. And arguments about it are idiotic. Unless something is colored Hello Kitty pink, in which case, AAAAAAH MY EYESSSSSS. |
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nori Whether you like sushi or not (I do), this is a fascinating read. Though she lived halfway across the world, Kathleen Drew-Baker played a monumental role in saving Japan’s multi-billion dollar nori industry. The article goes on to describe nori and its history in Japan, which is pretty cool by itself. But the main part of the story is what caught my attention. In 1948, shortly after the end of World War II, the nori disappeared. A series of fierce typhoons—coupled with the effects of pollution and industrialization—had ravaged the coast. Unlike past, unlucky years, this time the nori didn’t bounce back the next year. So first they lose a war, then famine strikes. Any other horsemen want to weigh in? But then it gets interesting. But the research needed to revive Japan’s nori had begun 20 years earlier, across the globe in Manchester, England, when Kathleen Drew-Baker was fired. She had been a lecturer in cryptogamic botany at the University of Manchester, but the college did not employ married women. So, enter our protagonist, a victim of institutionalized sexism... and a subject of the Crown with which Japan had been enemies up until a short time before. At the time, botany was one of the only sciences considered appropriate for women to enter. “Botany was a safe science for women,” Kassinger says. “It was the one that didn’t involve mathematics or cutting things up.” As a cryptogamic botanist, Drew-Baker studied plants that reproduced by spores, such as ferns. “Ferns were a good idea for women to study because they didn’t have flowers and therefore they didn’t seem to involve sex,” Kassinger says. What the eukaryotic fuck, sexism? She goes on to make an important discovery about the life cycle of algae. This discovery turns out to be crucial to Japan re-establishing its seaweed trade. Despite the financial setback she faced as a married female scientist, she managed to raise two children while conducting her own research and training younger botanists. In 1952, she was elected the first president of the British Phycological Society. In short, this chick was a badass. So if you’re in Wales, try some laverbread, the pulpy seaweed paste kneaded from wild laver. And if you’re ever in Uto, stop by Drew-Baker’s memorial, smell the salty, weedy scent of the Ariake, and pay your respects to Japan’s Mother of the Sea. So the Japanese kelp farmers put up a statue of this badass scientist from a formerly enemy country, and they pay their respects to her every year. There's still institutional sexism out there, in the US as well as in the UK... and in Japan. It's not as bad as it used to be, though there's a ways to go still. But science doesn't care about your plumbing or where you stick it; nor does it matter to the people whose lives and livelihood you save. And it's not just all about research. Science is still the best means we have of figuring out how the universe operates, and as Randall Munroe, the artist behind the webcomic xkcd, said, "it works, bitches." |
| I should probably type the words "trigger warning" here, because I know some of my readers have mental health issues. But I also know some of you are more triggered by trigger warnings. Oops, too late. Sorry. http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/does-depression-have-an-evolutionary-purpose I want to call bullshit on this. I really do. But it's not my field - far from it. My only experience with psychology was a) one class in biological psychology in college and b) depression diagnosis and unsuccessful treatment thereof. So I'm throwing this out there. Now, usually, I mine quotes from the articles I link, but few of them in this one are really worth isolating; I think one needs to read the article to get the idea. I have problems with how evolutionary "explanations" for this and that and the other thing are generally portrayed. I know I've said this before. My biggest problem with it is somewhat addressed toward the end of the article, but only after the author throws out a lot of speculation about how depression might be advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint. One problem is this: When it comes to things like, I don't know, skull shape, we have an intermittent fossil record thereof. We can see, based on bones dug up here and there, what human, protohuman, prehuman, and other ape skulls look like and how their general forms changed over time. It's easy, then, to see a general trend toward a larger cranium, and how that could accommodate our relatively large brains. We can also see changes in hand / finger bones, and can make a good inference as to why our hands were evolutionarily advantageous. When it comes to behavior, though, the fossil record is necessarily mute. With evolution, not every trait is a survival trait. Some are vestigial or effectively so. Others are incidental. One way evolution works is that incidental traits sometimes end up aiding survival and/or reproduction, so those traits can get passed on. Vestigial traits like - I want to say the appendix, but I've heard that might actually be part of the immune system - whether or not you can wiggle your ears are generally neutral to survival, but might have had some benefit in a distant ancestor. So, in my uneducated view, depression could just as easily be a byproduct of cognition, a neutral one. How can it be neutral when you take suicide into account? Well, as the article pointed out, most suicide attempts fail. Hence, it doesn't necessarily take a person out of the gene pool. Also I should add that while I've been depressed, I've never been suicidal; I don't know what the stats on that are, but I think the article conflates "depression" and "suicidal ideation," and that pisses me right off. Not caring if you live or die isn't the same thing as actively seeking to end one's life. So anyway, smells like bullshit to me. To be fair, whenever someone combines "psychology" with "evolution," my BS detector swings into the red, but I'm sure some studies in that area are legit. I'm more concerned with this holding out false hope to people, or, conversely, possibly making someone think "Oh, well, it's okay if I off myself, then, because evolution wired me to do that." As the article itself points out, "Even if depression evolved as a useful tool over the eons, that doesn’t make it useful today." You know, like the appendix or ear-wiggling ability. See, we also evolved to have conscious thoughts, to use science, and to otherwise work to overcome atavistic impulses. I, for one, have had my appendix removed; whatever benefit it might have been providing was suddenly outweighed by its cost to my health. We can make these choices. Still, the article makes some interesting points and I'm curious to see if this line of speculation goes anywhere. |
| Today, I'm going to wade into a minefield. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/imagining-a-better-boyhood/56... In hindsight, our son was gearing up to wear a dress to school for quite some time. For months, he wore dresses—or his purple-and-green mermaid costume—on weekends and after school. Then he began wearing them to sleep in lieu of pajamas, changing out of them after breakfast. Finally, one morning, I brought him his clean pants and shirt, and he looked at me and said, “I’m already dressed.” Don't care. He walked the half block to school with a bounce in his step, chest proud. “My friends are going to say dresses aren’t for boys,” he told me casually over his shoulder. “They might,” I agreed. “You can just tell them you are comfortable with yourself and that’s all that matters.” Beginning to detect the faint, familiar odor of bovine excrement. When he walked into his classroom, sure enough, one child immediately remarked, “Why are you wearing a dress? Dresses are for girls.” A teacher swiftly and gently shut down the child’s commentary and hugged my son tightly. Ah, yes... homegrown fertilizer. Teachers don't hug, nowadays. They get investigated and fired for that shit. One day when my husband dropped him off, he heard a little girl stand up to a naysayer and shout, “Boys can like beautiful things, too!” Sure he did. Thing is, though, possibly bullshit anecdotes aside, the author makes, in my opinion, excellent points. Maybe you weren't expecting me, a middle-aged man, to say that. I'm supposed to be the Enemy here, trying to hold on to antiquated ideas of gender norms in the face of a rethinking of everything that "gender" means. Fuck that. Like I said, I don't care - one way or the other. Thing is, though - I don't always understand. I feel like there's a subtext to every conversation about sex and gender that I'm not a party to; I'm not even invited to the party. Maybe that's because, like I said, I'm a middle-aged man and thus subject to the social expectations thereof - in short, I'm put in a box as much as anyone else is. Maybe it's because, when I was a kid, my parents were progressive enough not to put all those "this is what boys do" crap in my head. Probably it's something else entirely; I don't know, because whatever it is, I'm missing it. But it doesn't matter. I don't have to understand why some penis-owners insist that they're women, or the other way around; I just have to accept it - or not. I do accept it, because, clearly, it happens. I don't have to understand why anyone does anything, for that matter, and as long as they're not hurting anyone else in the process, I find it difficult to give a shit. Way I see it, everyone - everyone - has stereotypical "masculine" and stereotypical "feminine" traits, likes, and dislikes, in varying degrees. As with most social things, it's not binary, but on a continuum. For instance, I know a guy whose hobby is collecting vintage Barbie dolls and making little dresses for them. I know another one who likes to enjoy a "Princess Cake" for his birthday every year, complete with pink flower frosting. Not that it matters, but both these people identify and present as men, and they've each been married (to women) way longer than I ever was; I only say this to point out that their other traits are in no way stereotypically effeminate. So, I don't know what I'm missing about this conversation. People like what they like. To shame them into not liking something is basically making it clear that you don't accept them as a person, to attempt to suppress their expression of creativity or joy or whatever. And that sucks, no matter who you are. Therefore, I keep reading about it, and I attempt to have conversations about it, but I feel like every time I bring it up, someone decides I'm not, I dunno, ideologically pure enough to even have the discussion with, and I'm left even more bewildered than before. Just let people be who they are, is my view - again, excluding those who want to do harm; I'm not advocating, say, letting pedophiles have their way. Or, maybe they don't know who they are; in which case, let them explore. Anyway, yeah, I know I'm rambling. That happens when I can't quite wrap my head around something. Maybe someone else can shed some light on the subject for me. |
| Grab a drink. Sit back. Relax. It's time for Adventures in Prohibition. https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/the-secret-lines-of-speakeasies/521865/ The Secret Lives of Speakeasies Decades before Prohibition, the unlicensed saloons of Pittsburgh flouted state liquor laws, fomented social movements, and started a national trend. Dark days in our country's history, to be sure. I mean, it's not exactly on the abyssal level of slavery or Native genocide, but still... dark. The story goes like this: Hester owned a saloon in McKeesport, just southeast of the city, that sold booze in defiance of a state law that upped the costs of licenses for alcohol so much that it was nearly prohibited. When customers got too rowdy, Hester would hush customers with “speak-easy, boys!” to avoid attracting the attention of authorities; the expression soon spread to the city, and the nation. Which would have attracted the attention of authorities, so I'm calling bullshit. Sounds like every other fauxtymology. I just made that word up, so if it takes off, just remember it was me and not some Instawhore. Still, I don't doubt the saloon existed. And I'm pretty sure McKeesport exists, because I've been there. While the Volstead Act, which prohibited the production, sale, and transport of liquors, would not be enacted until 1920 in anticipation of the Eighteenth Amendment’s passage, the temperance movement in the U.S. began to get dry laws on the books in the late 19th century. It's a cliché in time travel stories: "Let's go back and kill Hitler!" Doctor Who even had an episode titled similarly. The idea is, think about the worst person in history and stop that person from doing what they did before they did it. Leaving aside the potential paradoxes and/or impossibility of time travel, I, of course, have thought of whose career I'd nip right in the bud, and that's Carrie Nation  . (My assumption is that someone else can do Hitler.)I'm not sure offing that smug bitch would keep Prohibition from happening, but it's worth a try. The saturation of the booze-slinging market suggests the importance of these public spaces in 19th-century cities. Christine Sismondo, author of America Walks into a Bar, says that saloons and speakeasies provided hubs for networking and space to build social and political movements, especially among immigrant newcomers. It goes deeper into the past than that. The American Revolution was planned, largely, in taverns, alehouses, and inns: in short, it was booze-fueled. Our country was literally founded on booze; turning our backs on that was like abandoning our parents at a shitty nursing home and then "forgetting" to pay the bill. From those connections, political organizing can trace a long tradition back to the American tavern. This was especially true during the Progressive Era from the 1890s to the 1920s, Sismondo says, when bars served as “centers of resistance.” That’s why so many Gilded Age industrialists wanted to shut them down: Margaret “Mother” Finch, the proprietor of the Rolling Mill House saloon on Fourth Avenue in Pittsburgh, was one of the key organizers of the 1892 Homestead Strike, battling Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick’s union busting. In our current condition of late-stage capitalism, we find ourselves with an abundance of choices once again: bars, breweries, wineries... places for people to gather and, one hopes, foment the next revolution. So of course I expect some Puritanical monster to try to shut them down any day now. I must remain vigilant. While the drinks seemingly never stopped, Prohibition did bring about one big change: It brought men and women together in drinking establishments for the first time. I choose to trace the modern search for gender equality to that. I suppose even in the darkest of nights, some light must glimmer. I ask Schalcosky what he thinks is behind the renewed allure of speakeasies today, given the absence of legal prohibitions on alcohol. “I think it has to do with trying to connect with our communal past,” he says. “People appreciate a good tale and location to go along with it. That, and our timeless love for alcohol.” It's important to remember the past. Especially if we can learn from the mistakes it made. And Prohibition was a huge one. |
| Welcome to August. This month, I'm not following prompts. This month, I might not blog every day; I'll be spending most of a week in Vegas, which is three time zones away, and between that, windowless casinos, and the inevitable drinking, I won't even know what day or time of day it is. I'm looking forward to that. But until then, how about some music - and philosophy? You look into her eyes, it's more than your heart will allow In August and everything after You get a little less than you expected, somehow http://nautil.us/blog/the-case-for-professors-of-stupidity The Case for Professors of Stupidity On this past International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I reread a bit of Bertrand Russell. In 1933, dismayed at the Nazification of Germany, the philosopher wrote “The Triumph of Stupidity,” attributing the rise of Adolf Hitler to the organized fervor of stupid and brutal people—two qualities, he noted, that “usually go together.” He went on to make one of his most famous observations, that the “fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Yeah... that idea reverberates back even further. Consider Yeats: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. The linked article goes on to relate Russell's quote to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which has become fairly well-known - but read the article if you're unfamiliar with the idea. On a related note, I started calling Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies "Dunning-Krugerrands." This amuses me far more than it probably should. Anyway... But what exactly is stupidity? David Krakauer, the President of the Santa Fe Institute, told interviewer Steve Paulson, for Nautilus, stupidity is not simply the opposite of intelligence. “Stupidity is using a rule where adding more data doesn’t improve your chances of getting [a problem] right,” Krakauer said. “In fact, it makes it more likely you’ll get it wrong.” Intelligence, on the other hand, is using a rule that allows you to solve complex problems with simple, elegant solutions. “Stupidity is a very interesting class of phenomena in human history, and it has to do with rule systems that have made it harder for us to arrive at the truth,” he said. That... well, as usual, I'm no expert, but it sounds contradictory to say that stupidity is more than just the opposite of intelligence, and then define it as (what seems to me to be) the opposite of intelligence. But hey, I can be pretty stupid. I'd like to take a moment to talk about what else stupidity isn't. It isn't the same thing as ignorance, though the two can be related. Ignorance is not having all the relevant facts. But - who among us can say we have all the relevant facts in a particular situation? No one, that's who. It always pissed me off when someone used the old saw: "Never assume anything, because it makes an ASS out of U and ME." I mean, what the fuck? You have to make certain assumptions. Always, in every case, without exception, or you're paralyzed with indecision. Granted, though, there's no excuse for not finding out all the facts that you can within any time constraints - ignorance can be fixed, but not willful ignorance. It's no surprise to me that when I see that bullshit quote, it's almost always associated with sports, a profession known for many things - intelligence not among them. Which is not to say there aren't really smart athletes; it's just the old mind / body dichotomy going on. Intelligence, then, as I see it, is the ability to make beneficial decisions based on this incomplete information; while stupid decisions are the result of failing to make appropriate assumptions. But, the article makes a good point at the end (and in the headline): we need to study this more. But given the prevalence of what they're calling "stupidity," I doubt that people will accept the results. After all, even those of us who are aware of Dunning-Kruger often have a higher than warranted opinion of our own competence. The worst thing about the DKE is the conclusion that we don't even know what we're ignorant about, much of the time. I know there have been several instances in my life that I can look back on and go, "Wow, I was being stupid there." Even though it seemed smart at the time. No, I'm not sharing; besides, my mind tends to block these things from my direct consciousness, unless I'm, I dunno, trying to fall asleep and something from 20 years ago pokes me awake. I'll end with one last chord: it's easy to assume stupidity for other people, while not attributing one's own failings to it. This happens a lot in politics; Democrats assume Republicans are stupid, and vice-versa. Granted, there are a lot of stupid politicians, but we should at least consider the idea that maybe the other side has good reasons - even if based on different assumptions - for what it says and does. Except maybe on Twitter. |
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