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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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| It's a five-year-old article, but what the hell; it's new to me. From GQ: Why Your Brain is Wired for Pessimism—and What You Can Do to Fix It  We’ve evolved to expect the worst. Dr. Martin Seligman, a psychologist, explains why—and what you can do to get some optimism back. Why in the ever-loving shit would I want to fix what ain't broken? How can I get back what I never had? And most of all, am I going to have to once again rage against the misuse of evolutionary psychology in articles? And why do I bother with GQ if I know I'm going to rant about it? Okay, that one I can answer: because it's fun. Ever had someone tell you to just cheer up? Did it drive you crazy? Well, turns out that someone telling you to “be happy” isn’t just annoying—it’s also wildly unhelpful. It's especially unhelpful for people with clinical depression. Seligman compares being happy to falling asleep: it’s not something you can actively do—in the way you can get stronger by lifting more weights. It just kind of has to happen. Okay, sure, but unless you're tired past the point of exhaustion, the way to fall asleep is to get into a comfortable position and pretend to sleep until, at some point, you either fall asleep or say "screw this" and go play a video game. My point is that in order to sleep, we usually first have to act like we're asleep. In that analogy, we'd have to pretend to be happy in order to be happy. So, do you still want to compare being happy to falling asleep? Now, yes, I've said in here at least a dozen times that happiness isn't a goal, but a byproduct. So, sure, I don't completely disagree with that premise; I just had to nitpick the analogy. And as the father of positive psychology—the study what makes a good or meaningful life—much of Seligman’s work has dealt with trying to help people figure how to make it happen. Hurk. “Half the world is on the low positive affective spectrum,” he says referring to positive affectivity, a trait that usually correlates with sunnier dispositions. “I'm part of it, and a lot of the justification for what I work on, and what I write, is to try to help half the world, who is not naturally positive affective, to be more positive and optimistic.” WHY?! OH GODS WHY?!!! What if... what if the only people who benefit from someone being mindlessly optimistic are 1) those around them who don't have to deal with someone's annoying pessimism and 2) our overlords, who will more easily control a populace who believes the best will happen? What he has learned is that well-being can be broken into five elements: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (PERMA). Boy, shrinks love their mnemonic acronyms. Why does it seem like we are wired for pessimism? The species that [was] going through the Ice Ages had been bred, and selected, through pessimism. Not only is that abysmally terrible evo-psych, but it's easily falsifiable terrible evo-psych. Not that I've disproven it, mind you; but consider: not all of humanity was directly affected by an ice age. Many populations were equatorial or near-equatorial. Are their descendants happier today, controlling for all other variables? But the main reason why it's horrible evo-psych is that, as usual, it assumes that the only evolution that mattered to us started with humans, instead of us having ancestors dating back to the dawn of life, each of which contributed factors to evolution. So is this at odds with something like mindfulness, which argues you should be present in the moment? If you're focusing on optimism, you're also sort of missing the present moment, right? Well, I think, if you look at what people are doing, and what you're doing right now when we're talking, you're prospecting into the future. But if positive psychology is at odds with mindfulness, and I also despise mindfulness, oh no! Cognitive dissonance! Wait, no, I've got it—I can hate both. I've read a few people have said that you might be better off cultivating a sort of non-attachment to well-being: be mindful that a lot of life is going to be suffering, and if you can find contentment in that, you might be better off than seeking out happiness. I think the good thing about meditation—mindfulness, concentrating on the present, detaching—is as good anti-anxiety, anti-anger tools. "A few people have said," interviewer? A few people? You do know that that's Buddhism, one of the most widespread spiritual practices in the world, don't you? Of all the things you've studied, or learned, is there one idea you constantly find yourself encountering most frequently? I think it's hope. Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cageI do believe in hope. I'll leave off quoting the article and explain that now. So, let me simplify things, but with a simplification that can easily be extended to our more complex lives: You have two possible outcomes, A and B. Maybe they have predefined probabilities, like drawing a certain card from a shoe in blackjack, or maybe not, but it doesn't matter. Let's say you label A bad and B good, or at least less bad. From what I understand of positive psychology, it tells us that you should believe that B will happen. You should manifest that B will happen. But then if A happens, which it still might because no amount of manifesting will change the fact that it can happen, you're crushed, devastated, forlorn, lost. Whereas if A happens, you might feel a fleeting jolt of accomplishment, serotonin momentarily coursing through your neural network, and then it's gone. On the other hand... if you convince yourself that A will happen, if you predict A, if you act as if A were the only way that the universe could possibly work... when A happens, you're not nearly as devastated, because you expected it. Whereas if B happens, you're not just experiencing fleeting pleasure, but absolute joy. In other words, being pessimistic, seemingly paradoxically, must lead to greater overall happiness. But that's probably only true if you still hold out some hope that B might occur; and that's what I mean by "I do believe in hope." This philosophy is most usually expressed by "expect the worst, but hope for the best." No, I'm not deliriously happy all the time. But I have something I consider far more valuable: contentment. I may not be where I envisioned myself when I was younger, but I'm doing okay. And that's the real trap of optimism: you think you can always do better, so you strive, you make changes, you expect things to improve, and then you're discontented when they don't. You're disappointed that you don't have what you want, instead of being satisfied with wanting what you have. Or hell, I don't know. Maybe optimism works for you. I'm not judging. I only take issue with the idea that everyone should strive for some nebulous, glorious state of "happiness" at all times. Incidentally, this is not the last GQ article in my queue. And the other? Well, it's even worse... |
Of all the weird, strange, or just plain incomprehensible names for colors, "navy" stands out as one that almost makes actual sense... from a certain point of view. Under certain ideal conditions, the ocean appears that deep, dark blue color, for reasons I can't be arsed to go into right now but you're right; it does involve physics. But our word, navy, comes from a Latin word that referred more to ships than the ocean. Still, you know, you can't have a ship without something to float it in. Which reminds me that another word from the Latin navis is navigate, whose meaning should be limited to finding one's way around on a body of water. But, naturally, it's not, because we're pretty good at making new meanings for old words, and new words for old meanings. Take, for example, space. Thanks to years and years of science fiction, we know what a vessel that carries things around in space is: a spaceship. And again, that makes sense from a certain point of view. But the harsh reality is that if we do get to the point where we have spacecraft transporting people or things around out there, the vessels will have far more in common with a submarine than they do with a ship. And, by naval convention, submarines are always boats, not ships. "Spaceboat" just doesn't have the same ring to it, though, does it? Don't ask me to define the difference between boats and ships further. My dad was a sailor, and I never fully understood the distinction he made, when he bothered to make one. Near as I can tell, a boat goes out from port or ship and returns to the same port or ship, while a ship carries cargo and/or passengers from one port to another (hence the verb "to ship," which also refers to sending parcels by road or rail). But by that definition, a ferryboat should be a ship, but it's not (I sidestep this by calling it a "ferry"). A ship can carry a boat, but a boat can't carry a ship, though a tugboat can push a ship, despite "tug" having the connotation of "pull." Anyway. The other thing we get from science fiction is the use, in spaceships, of a "navigator," like on the original Enterprise. Properly, this should be "astrogator," but that would just lead to alligator puns (though some SF does use this term), so probably best to repurpose the word. And don't get me started on the etymology of "bridge," as in a spaceship's control room, which takes its origin from Mississippi River steamboats... dammit, I said don't get me started. Still, sometimes it bugs me that landlubber GPS uses "navigation." I mean, we want fewer people not paying attention and driving their cars into lakes, right? But again, there's not much to choose from in terms of better words. "Orienteering" is the process of finding one's way around on land, but that doesn't really work in cars or trucks, does it? So we're stuck with navigation. But even that makes more sense than calling a web browser a "navigator." Which you don't see much these days in English, but one early web browser was Netscape Navigator. And the French word for browser is "navigateur." This wouldn't bother me so much if the defining metaphor of the Internet weren't a spiderweb, rather than an ocean. You could say all the contradictions give me the blues. |
| I've been saying that every cliché started out as profound insight. Before They Were Cliches: On the Origins of 8 Worn Out Idioms Erin McCarthy and the Team at Mental Floss Examine Some Famous Phrases While they call out Mental Floss, the above link is from LitHub. Worn-out phrases can make a reader roll their eyes, or worse—give up on a book altogether. "Roll their eyes" is itself a cliché. Clichés are viewed as a sign of lazy writing, but they didn’t get to be that way overnight; many modern clichés read as fresh and evocative when they first appeared in print... Which is what I've been trying to say. But of course, many clichés are tired and worn-out, but they have to be used sometimes, or else how will people know when you subvert them or make a joke out of them? Add Insult to Injury The concept of adding insult to injury is at the heart of the fable “The Bald Man and the Fly.” In this story—which is alternately credited to the Greek fabulist Aesop or the Roman fabulist Phaedrus... Look, if anything's that old and passed into cultural mythology, it's not a cliché; it's an allusion. Or just part of the language, like a word, only it's a phrase. Like "part and parcel" or "cease and desist." Though no one knew the origin of this phrase. Except us, now. Albatross Around Your Neck If you studied the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in English class... We skipped that one, and I still haven't read it, but I haven't seen this phrase used enough to consider it cliché. Also, it's an allusion, too. Forever and a Day This exaggerated way of saying “a really long time” would have been considered poetic in the sixteenth century. My nitpicky mind always thinks "but when time runs out, we have no way of knowing the length of a day." Happily Ever After This cliché ending line to countless fairy tales originated with The Decameron, penned by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century. Okay, look, no. Used at the end of a fairy tale, it's not a cliché; it's a formula, the flip side of opening it with "Once upon a time." Other languages use different formulae. You might as well claim that "amen" at the end of a prayer is a cliché. It Was a Dark and Stormy Night Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford opens with “It was a dark and stormy night.” Oh, come ON. I thought this list was about overused phrases that were fresh and wondrous in the beginning, but this infamous story-opener was widely hailed as "bad" from the get-go. That's why it makes great comedy material. There are a few more, but I'll be honest, here: Yesterday, I finally broke down and purchased Baldur's Gate 3. And I'm in a hurry to get back to gaming. So feel free to see for yourself; I don't have the same sort of commentary on the others, anyway. |
| Mostly, I just think this is cool, so I'm sharing it. (From BBC) What did Stonehenge sound like? New research into the prehistoric site's acoustical properties is revealing that the stone circle may have been used for exclusive ceremonies. While fascinating, I'll note that there's still a lot of educated speculation in here. Through the doors of a university building, down a concrete hallway and inside a foam-covered room stands a shin-high replica of one of the most mysterious monuments ever built: Stonehenge. Shin-high replica of Stonehenge? Did they borrow it from This Is Spinal Tap? "We know that the acoustics of places influence how you use them, so understanding the sound of a prehistoric site is an important part of the archaeology," said Trevor Cox, professor and acoustics researcher at the University of Salford in Manchester. As long as the theory is sound. (You're goddamn right pun intended, and I'm WAY more proud of that one than I have any right to be.) Despite being the world's best-known and most architecturally sophisticated ancient stone circle, archaeologists still don't know who built Stonehenge or what it was used for. We know who built it: People. That's right; not aliens. Probably. Thanks to Cox's recent studies, however, we now know a fascinating detail about one of the world's most enigmatic sites: it once acted as a giant echo chamber, amplifying sounds made inside the circle to those standing within, but shielding noise from those standing outside the circle. Which is cool and all, but did the ancient builders do that on purpose? If so, how, without a scientific theory of sound, did they know? Well, it's very likely that Stonehenge didn't spring suddenly out of nowhere; I'd bet money that earlier henges were made out of material slightly easier to obtain, transport, and build with, such as wood. So, I'd guess (but it's only a guess) trial and error. Unless, of course, it was aliens. Once the stones were painted grey and arranged in the correct distribution according to the computer model, the challenges of the testing process began. Another thing I wonder is: why gray? (Look, they use British spelling and I use US spelling.) Does color somehow influence the acoustic properties? I'd have guessed it would be more about material and texture than color, which just goes to show that my guesses are just guesses. Through mathematical processing, Cox was able to create a computer model that simulates the acoustic properties of Stonehenge and can distort voices or music to give a sense of what they would sound like within the circle. The results surprised him: although Stonehenge has no roof or floor, sound bounces between the gaps in the stones and lingers within the space. In acoustics, lingering sound is known as reverberation. Which musicians use to great effect, mostly electronically these days. These results showed that Stonehenge would have allowed people inside the circle to hear each other quite well, while those outside would have been excluded from any ceremonies taking place. Cox's research adds to a growing body of evidence that Stonehenge may have been used for rituals reserved for a select few, with one study even pointing to the possibility of a hedge grown to shield the view from those not participating. While this is sensible knowing what humans can be like (sometimes elitist), I wonder if the people excluded, if this speculation is true, were also the people who did the hard manual labor of cutting, moving, and erecting the stones. That, too, would be typical human behavior. Thus, probably not aliens. Cox acknowledges that unanswered questions about the real Stonehenge make it difficult for him to draw definitive conclusions from his work with the scale model. Like I said above: educated speculation. But, in short, apparently people living in England have been rocking out for a lot longer than we thought. |
Unlike with most words, I have a vague memory of my first known encounter with this one. I know it was in a comic book, but (this is where the vague comes in) I can't remember if it referred to the color of Superman's cape, or they called The Flash by one of his nicknames, the Scarlet Speedster. It would be many years before I was forced to read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as part of an AP English curriculum in high school, so never let it be said that we can't learn things from comic books. The upshot of this is that, for me, the word and color "scarlet" would always be associated with heroism, and not, as turns out to be the case in our complicated psychological color map, sin. The shade of red associated with romantic love, e.g. on V-Day, is much darker (as is appropriate), and actual primary-color red mostly just has "stop!" and "expense!" connotations. Which also reminds me of romance. The red used in comics, though, is red, not scarlet. There's a historical reason for this: the most common (probably cheapest) technology for printing in something other than monochrome was the four-color technique. There's a lot of technical stuff at that link that's irrelevant right now, but you might recognize that the system is still in use. You might even have one in your home and/or office, comprised of a cheap-ass loss-leader printer, using four cartridges of ink that, ounce for ounce, is probably more expensive than gold.Hence, Superman (or The Flash) was rendered, in comics and in the Sunday newspaper, mostly in bright primary and complementary colors: red, green, blue, magenta, cyan... even yellow, which doesn't always show up well against a white background. Actual scarlet, which is on the red side of reddish-orange, was probably too subtle for the four-color process. But there, I'm just guessing. "Scarlet speedster" was likely used more for its alliteration than chromatic accuracy. As I can't seem to do one of these entries without researching etymology, though, I did so, and discovered that, apparently, scarlet was a relatively early word adopted into English: it appears in Old English texts as far back as 1250 C.E. , while the color itself stretches back into the first millennium B.C.E.And, like I said above, it's often associated with sin, because of English translations of the Bible. But I reject that association and substitute my own. |
| This is pretty cool, recent, and informative, though of course I have some quibbles. The true story of how humans are searching for intelligent alien life Real scientists are searching for alien life. Don’t let the kooks distract you. Quibble 1: "Intelligent." I've railed on this before, but, to summarize: What they really mean is "technology-using." The signals postulated in the article would be the signs of tech-using beings. It is possible to be intelligent and never invent radio, spaceships, lasers, or Tamagotchi. In fact, we did not, up until a few decades ago, which is an insignificant sliver of time compared to the age of the universe. And, finally, using "intelligence" just invites tired, outworn clichés like "we can't even find intelligent life on Earth," which is one of those rare statements that automatically disproves itself because one must have a minimum level of intelligence to utter it and have it be understood. So. When the article says "intelligent," substitute "technological," and you'll be closer to what I believe the intent to be. This summer, a stony-faced David Grusch, a former US Air Force intelligence officer, sat before a House Oversight subcommittee and made some extraordinary claims. Chief among them is that the American government has a clandestine program that locates then reverse engineers unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) — an ostensibly less-silly way of saying unidentified flying objects, or UFOs — and that US operatives were in possession of nonhuman biological matter. Quibble 2: UAP may be more or less silly than UFO, but I believe it to be a better fit. Many phenomena formerly attributed to UFOs weren't "flying objects" at all, but mirages or electrical activity. At which point they weren't "unidentified" either, but I'm willing to bend on that one, as everything is unidentified until it's identified. It has the added advantage of not yet having accumulated years of fringe. Quibble 3: I am in possession of nonhuman biological matter, too. They're called cats. Grusch didn’t provide an ounce of verifiable evidence, citing only anonymous sources telling him vague things. When pressed for confirmation, he said because this was all so exceedingly classified, he was unable to provide specific details while under oath. Not-a-quibble: uh huh. Let’s get something straight: Congressional hearings are not the way we are going to discover the existence of intelligent alien life. They are a distraction from the bona fide alien-hunting work — the sort that doesn’t involve grandstanding individuals and showy stunts, but scientists searching a sea of stars for the sounds or sights of extraterrestrial intelligence. Quibble 4: We're also looking for signs of general life: byproducts of biological processes. There's difficulty there, because we only have one data point (Earf) for what to look for, but you gotta start somewhere. Because space is inconveniently enormous and traversing it so intensely time-consuming (without bending the fabric of space-time to your will, anyway), it’s exceedingly more likely that humanity’s first brush with extraterrestrials (ETs) will come in the form of eavesdropping on radio transmissions they’ve sent, or seeing a sign of technological civilization with a telescope, than recovering a pancaked little green wayfarer from a crashed capsule. Quibble 5: What's the first thing we did when we started exploring space? Sent robots, not people. No reason to assume hypothetical aliens wouldn't do the same. (No reason to assume they would, either; just gotta keep the possibility open.) “If we detect a civilization, that means civilizations can exist for a reasonable amount of time and overcome their issues and problems,” says Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, a planetary habitability researcher at NASA. “That means there’s great hope for us.” (Or, if the grim history of colonization has anything to say about it, great peril.) Quibble 6: This does not follow, logically, and rests on a biased premise. Aliens would be, by definition, alien, and their "issues and problems," if they have any, may not bear much resemblance to ours. If they were to discover that there is life out there — intelligent life that has forged a civilization — it would first mean that biology is not a fluke. Instead, it is something that can take root on many worlds; something that does not merely arise but repeatedly produces thinking, technological, curious creatures, those that may wish to share their knowledge of the universe, and their way of traversing or surviving it, with others. And if this civilization existed on a world very different from Earth, it would demonstrate that the largely unlivable cosmos is populated by myriad different isles of habitability. Quibble 7: There's a lot of assumption to unpack here. For starters, it is possible (I would even say likely) that we'd see signs of life first, not technology. As I noted above, on our world, the kind of technology that produces signs that we could, in theory, detect has only been going on for less than an eyeblink compared to how long life has existed. There is nothing about evolution that requires the eventual appearance of a curious species with the right combination of intelligence (using that word now in its general sense), manual dexterity, language, socialization and other factors to begin to develop complex tools. But as the article notes toward the end, we might not find anything, but if we don't make the attempt, we will definitely not find anything (unless of course it comes to us first). Okay, that's all I'm going to quibble about. The rest of the article goes into great detail about the actual search, and it's probably worth at least skimming if you're interested in this sort of thing. Just keep in mind that, given the above quibbles, I'm not 100% on board with the speculative aspects. |
| Reaching back to August of 2019, I landed on this entry: "Headline Questions Are Usually Answered "No."" It contains a raw link (not an xlink) to a Nautilus article. The link no longer works, but I guess they simply switched around the way they handled URLs in the intervening years, because a quick search found the original article. Here it is in my more current format: Does Depression Have an Evolutionary Purpose? Some psychologists believe suicide and depression can be strategic. Now, the article itself is from even further back in the past: February of 2017. So the field might have experienced some changes since then, especially what with a few years where a lot of people, if they could get psych help at all, did it remotely. Which seems to me like a recipe for disaster, especially for extroverts, but what do I know? So, I'm still not going to cherry-pick quotes from the article; as I said last time: 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. This, then, will focus on some of the things I wrote back then in the Before Time. I have problems with how evolutionary "explanations" for this and that and the other thing are generally portrayed. Speculation from evolutionary psychology has become so pervasive in human biology reporting that, unless the article in question is especially compelling, I just quit reading when I get to lines similar to: "This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. In the distant past, our ancestors would have..." Because it's almost always speculation, and it almost never takes into account that our evolved traits, whatever they may be, include holdovers from even more distant ancestors than our lonely great^great-grandparents on the African savannah. They're origin myths, "Just So" stories, only written to appeal to a slightly more scientifically literate audience. The only difference between them and "God made us that way" is a lack of supernatural references, an acknowledgement that we are, in fact, products of evolution. Which is better, but still not great. 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. In that case, by "distant ancestor," I meant pre-hominid. As for the appendix thing, since then, I've heard that the appendix does indeed have a function: as a store of beneficial gut microbes. When the intestines are subject to disease or poison, disrupting the flora there, it's supposedly meant to pump the good bugs back into the tube. Now, it's not like whoever told me that was a doctor or even a biologist, so I wouldn't take that as Absolute Truth or anything. From a purely anecdotal perspective, I never had big problems with weight control before the appendectomy I endured back in the early noughties, but that could easily be correlation without causation. I mention this because there also seems to be a correlation between gut microbe health (or, more properly, lack thereof) and mental health, so it might actually be relevant to the article. Or it might not. I don't know. 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. Still does. I'm still subject to the occasional round of depression, and the closest I've ever come to contemplating suicide has been from a place of writer's curiosity: if I were to write a character deliberately ending their life, how could I do it in a way that seems realistic to readers? From that perspective, and no others, I've also contemplated such things as rape, theft, murder, war, and what it would be like to be Southern Baptist. Stuff I'd also never attempt. So I don't think it counts Still, the article makes some interesting points and I'm curious to see if this line of speculation goes anywhere. Despite my gut feeling (pun intended, of course), there could be something to the "evolutionary psychology" explanation. But there needs to be more than just guesses, though I have no idea how one could go about doing the requisite science to support or falsify such a hypothesis. One final thing: the end of the original article provides a link and a phone number for suicide prevention. I'm not 100% sure, but I think they've changed the phone number so you can get there by calling 988. Which makes me glad we don't use rotary phones anymore. I can just imagine someone getting to the second digit, waiting for that goddamned dial to spin back around, knowing there's still another one to endure, then going "fuck it" and blowing their brains out. |
| The article today, from The Conversation, is about a year old, but that shouldn't matter. But debates about quantum mechanics – be they on chat forums, in the media or in science fiction – can often get muddled thanks to a number of persistent myths and misconceptions. Oh, it's way worse than that. I think there are still authors out there promoting books about harnessing the power of the quantum realm with your mind, or some such gobbledygook. Remember: the bolded and italicized bits below, taken straight from the article, are the misconceptions. So if you skim this entry, please don't walk away thinking I'm endorsing misinformation. 1. A cat can be dead and alive Erwin Schrödinger could probably never have predicted that his thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat, would attain internet meme status in the 21st century. I've met people who knew about Schrödinger's Cat, but weren't aware that it was a thought experiment. They believed Schrödinger had actually stuffed a cat in a box with a quantum choice contraption. I'm not ragging on them, but I think it's important to note that, to the best of my knowledge, no cats were harmed (or not harmed, or a superposition of the two) in the pursuit of knowledge about quantum physics. Which is way more than other branches of science can say. It suggests that an unlucky feline stuck in a box with a kill switch triggered by a random quantum event – radioactive decay, for example – could be alive and dead at the same time, as long as we don’t open the box to check. The obvious issue with this thought experiment is that, if it requires consciousness to collapse a quantum state, a human doesn't need to open the box; a cat possesses consciousness and knows it's alive (or doesn't know anything, if it's dead). Is it really both alive and dead as long as we don’t open the box? Obviously, a cat is nothing like an individual photon in a controlled lab environment, it is much bigger and more complex. And that's the non-obvious issue. In any event, Schrödinger came up with his Rube Goldberg cat-quantumizing machine idea to refute certain ideas about quantum physics, not to demonstrate its truth. 2. Simple analogies can explain entanglement This one was way more immediately relevant last year, when the article came out, because 2022's Nobel Prize in Physics was all about quantum entanglement (this year's was about attosecond pulses of light, which, well, look it up; it's cool as hell). There's a lot to absorb here, and I can't really do this section justice with cherry-picked quotes, but the upshot of it is this: There's no suitable macro-world analogy for quantum entanglement. I'd also add that QE doesn't imply superluminal information transfer, as some people insist it means. It's plenty weird, but it doesn't defy the cosmic speed limit. 3. Nature is unreal and ‘non-local’ Another reminder that the above heading is false. But in this case, I'd add "probably." Despite Bell’s theorem, nature may well be real and local, if you allowed for breaking some other things we consider common sense, such as time moving forward. I've banged on in here about time on numerous occasions. Suffice it to say that, in the quantum realm, common sense needs to go right out the window. I hate the concept, anyway. Put another way, quantum equations, insofar as I understand them, don't have a time arrow. Time, then, is best viewed as an emergent property of macroscopic matter. Which is fine; lots of perfectly real things, such as temperature or life itself, are emergent phenomena. However, most options on the table — for example, time flowing backwards, or the absence of free will — are at least as absurd as giving up on the concept of local reality. This sentence, of course, is one of the main reasons I saved this article. The absence of free will isn't absurd at all; it is, as far as I'm concerned anyway, settled science. 4. Nobody understands quantum mechanics But I'm not always right. For instance, I've crafted similar sentences to this #4 heading. This is my chance to qualify it; I do believe it's correct in at least one sense. A classic quote (attributed to physicist Richard Feynman, but in this form also paraphrasing Niels Bohr) surmises: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand it.” I believe that quote is correct for people like you, me, and the author of Using Quantum Jedi Mind Tricks to Win the Lottery and Get Laid (or other books to that effect). Quantum physics is supposedly impossible to understand, including by physicists. But from a 21st-century perspective, quantum physics is neither mathematically nor conceptually particularly difficult for scientists. We understand it extremely well, to a point where we can predict quantum phenomena with high precision, simulate highly complex quantum systems and even start to build quantum computers. And while this is true—the calculations are, from what I've heard, far more accurate than in any other branch of science—that doesn't mean there aren't still arguments over what it all means. That is, questions of interpretation, like "many-worlds," are still open. Where the true difficulty lies, perhaps, is in how to reconcile quantum physics with our intuitive reality. Fair, because they are very different. I certainly don't claim to have it all figured out (unlike some writers), but as with anything else, that's not going to stop me from blogging about it. |
Way back in the murky mists of deep time, during a period when I was on the fence about being childfree or not, I knew what I wanted to name a daughter: Amethyst. That would even be my red flag, I decided. When I'm dating someone, I find out if she likes the idea of naming a girl Amethyst and, if not, we weren't going to go any further. This lasted, oh, about a month or so, when I dated a woman who hated the idea, but was really smoking hot, so all of those plans went right out the window. It wasn't long after that, probably, that I decided my actual red flag was "I want kids." But I digress; the point is, I liked the sound of that word for as long as I can remember. Which is actually a fairly long time, as I was told early on that it's my "birth stone," just because I arrived in February. "Birth stone" is, of course, a transparent marketing gimmick, like those silly lists of anniversary gifts. Regardless, I liked the sound of the word amethyst, and I liked the deep purple tint of the stone. It's just quartz, you know. Silicon dioxide, the second most common mineral of the Earth's crust. (The first is feldspar, which really shouldn't count, as it isn't always composed of the same elements the way SiO2 is.) Of course, amethyst isn't really "just" quartz. That color comes from the occasional iron atom in the crystal lattice. Don't ask me why that makes it purple, though; it probably involves quantum effects. So yeah, common or not, I have a thing for amethyst. Or, at least, I did, until I found out the etymology of the word. It's probably common knowledge by now, but I'll reiterate it here anyway: the word comes to us from ancient Greece, though they certainly weren't the first people to know about the mineral. They assigned it the mystic property of protecting a person against drunkenness, so they named it not-intoxicated, or, in their words, a-methyst. From what I understand, they even made goblets of carved amethyst on the theory that you could drink all you wanted to out of them and not get drunk. If they'd been half the scientists people think they were, though (and I have an article in the queue that touches on the ancient Greek penchant for natural philosophy), they might have done controlled, double-blind tests and realized that no, it possesses no such property, and any perceived resistance to the blessings of Dionysus was essentially a placebo effect. I don't know how this belief didn't piss off Dionysus. And you don't want to piss off Dionysus; he's a mean drunk. I, however, am not a mean drunk; I'm a lot meaner when I'm sober. So even though didn't possess this magical quality, the mythology made it lose some of its sparkliness for me. Therefore, it's just as well I never had kids to saddle one with a name I'd grow to distrust. |
| Another scholarly linguistics article today... wait, did I say scholarly? I meant amusing, because it's from Cracked. When picking a new insult to throw at someone, current comedic convention suggests you string together a series of random incongruous words. You type, “Yeah, like I’m going to take advice from a lopsided milk-stained piss plank.” This works great when you're typing, because you have time to think and/or randomly choose the next word. Not so easy in person, but for that, there's always "Your mama." 5. A Geek Was a Carnival Worker Who Bit Heads Off Chickens I'm old enough to, if not remember this definition, at least remember older people remembering this definition. A geek worked at a carnival, in an act called a geek show. Some carnival performers exhibited impressive talents, and the freaks showed off strange physical features, but here’s what the geeks did: They bit the heads off of life animals. Another expression that's lost its meaning is "copy editor." “Geek” started to attain its current meaning in the 1980s. Wrong. 1970s. A wrestler called Fred Blassie (among other monikers, but that one was actually based on his real name) had used the catchphrase "Pencil-necked geek," and he wrote a song called that in, like, '75. I'm pretty sure he was the main reason the meaning changed. 4. An Idiot Was Anyone But a Politician I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this sort of thing before. An idiot was someone with an I.Q. less than 25, while other words described people that fell in other ranges — an imbecile scored between 25 and 50, while a moron managed between 50 and 75. No matter what words we come up with to describe those of lower than standard intelligence, they will always, always morph into a general insult, requiring us to come up with new connotation-neutral words to describe them, which will inevitably morph into a general insult, ad infinitum. But this is the interesting part (and it does seem to be at least partially true): “Idiot” has deeper roots, however. It comes from the Greek idiotes, which described a private person... A private person wasn’t someone with a private personality but the opposite of a public figure. It meant a non-politician. So, one of those cases where the word came to mean its opposite. 3. Dicks Were Older Than Penises No real surprise here. Linguistically, anyway. Naturally, Dick has been a name for many centuries, while “dick” has only meant penis since the 19th century. Less obviously, a dick meant a man since before it meant a penis. In the 16th century, the word just meant “guy,” and you’d call someone an odd dick just as you’d call them an odd fellow. Really, just about any word can mean penis if you want it to, depending on context. Like geek, for example. "That woman only dates geeks," someone might say, to which a guy might respond, "She can try my geek." Okay, maybe that doesn't always work. 2. A Barbarian Spoke Gibberish Today, a barbarian is a specific type of warrior, capable of relentless rage and proficient with medium armor. Depends on your preferred game system. I think it was D&D version 3.5 where a barbarian could actually add their wisdom modifier to Armor Class, thus negating the need for armor if you happened to have a decent Wis score. This, I think, was meant to explain how famous literary barbarians such as Conan and Red Sonja could wear a loincloth and a chain bikini (respectively) and still be decent in combat. But yes, in D&D 5 and Pathfinder (a fork of D&D 3), barbarians can rock medium armor, such as hide or chain mail. Before that, it was a word to levy at any of various peoples to dismiss them as savages. But let’s go even further back, to the Greeks, who originated the term. They used the word to describe anyone who didn’t speak Greek. Many of the peoples called barbarians by the Greeks and, later, Romans, had a well-developed culture. The Norse, e.g. The reason they came up with the word barbarian (or the root, barbaroi) was that people speaking anything but Greek sounded to them like they were just saying “ba-ba.” Barbarians were “blah blah” speakers. And in earlier versions of D&D, they were generally illiterate. Which is also unrepresentative of actual barbarians. 1. ‘Weird’ Meant You Have the Power to Magically Control Fate Being literate, I knew this. But it's still an interesting case study of how words change in meaning. Originally, the word said nothing about the wrong kind of nonconformity but instead referred to the magical power to control fate. The article provides examples. Wyrd was an old Norse word meaning “fate,” and in its earliest English form, it was associated with the Fates from Greek mythology. See? Barbarians can and do contribute to culture. |
| Seems to me the world's oldest language wouldn't have needed a name, because there was only one of them. What’s the World’s Oldest Language? Debate rages over which languages can claim to have the earliest origin I suppose it's possible that, as with genetics, all languages might trace their origins back to one first language, but I don't know enough about the field to even speculate that. The globe hums with thousands of languages. But when did humans first lay out a structured system to communicate, one that was distinct to a particular area? Well, so much for the "only one of them" comment above. My next doubt is that the "structured system" was in any way planned. How do you plan without language to describe things? Scientists are aware of more than 7,100 languages in use today. And no, they didn't originate at the Tower of Babel. That's an origin myth. Alternatively, if we assume that most languages can be traced back to an original, universal human language, all languages are equally old. “You know that your parents spoke a language, and their parents spoke a language, and so forth. So intuitively, you’d imagine that all languages were born from a single origin,” Hieber says. Okay, so even linguists don't know that for sure. But it’s impossible to prove the existence of a proto-human language—the hypothetical direct ancestor of every language in the world. Accordingly, some linguists argue that the designation of the “oldest language” should belong to one with a well-established written record. I'd be careful calling something impossible. That tends to bite people on the ass. Still, some things are impossible. More speculation from me: language was probably a thing for a very long time before any system of writing was developed. Among these languages are Sumerian and Akkadian, both dating back at least 4,600 years. And humans have been around for, depending on who you talk to, maybe 300,000 years ago. That's a lot of time for languages to evolve into Sumerian and thus be written down. Part of the problem of pinning down exact origin points is that with evolution, whether biological or linguistic (there are parallels, though they're not the same process), there usually isn't just one thing you can hold up and say "this is the moment when x ended and y started." It's a gradual process. As for the oldest language that is still spoken, several contenders emerge. Hebrew and Arabic stand out among such languages for having timelines that linguists can reasonably trace, according to Hieber. According to Kabbalistic mystics, it was definitely Hebrew. This, too, is an origin myth. Bowern adds Chinese to the list of candidates. The language likely emerged from Proto-Sino-Tibetan, which is also an ancestor to Burmese and the Tibetan languages, around 4,500 years ago, although the exact date is disputed. I knew it was going to have to be in there somewhere. Deven Patel, a professor of South Asia studies at the University of Pennsylvania, says the earliest written records of Sanskrit are ancient Hindu texts that were composed between 1500 and 1200 B.C.E. and are part of the Vedas, a collection of religious works from ancient India. “In my view, Sanskrit is the oldest continuous language tradition, meaning it’s still producing literature and people speak it, although it’s not a first language in the modern era,” Patel says. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess, based on the name, that Deven Patel's ancestry is South Asian. As with the Kabbalists I mentioned above, of course one would be inclined to make the case for one's own language. That, of course, doesn't mean he's wrong. Disagreements about the age of Sanskrit and Tamil illustrate the broader issues in pinpointing the world’s oldest language. “To answer this question, we’ve seen people create new histories, which are as much political as they are scientific,” Patel says. “There are bragging rights associated with being the oldest and still evolving language.” In theory, science, including linguistics, should be non-tribal; you work from evidence, not cultural assumptions. In practice, naturally, it's done by humans, with all of their attendant biases (one of which is always going to be linguistic). This, incidentally, is why it's essential to seek diversity in the pursuit of science. Biases should, in theory, cancel each other out. Anyway. So they're not after the "oldest language" at all, and that's probably beyond our capabilities unless we invent a time machine. "Oldest still evolving language" makes more sense to pursue, though the nature of linguistic evolution makes it difficult—consider how unintelligible the English of Beowulf is to modern English speakers, and yet it's still called English. In any case, I really, really hope there's more to the pursuit than mere "bragging rights." |
Chartreuse is called chartreuse not because it's named after Chartreuse, but because it's named after Chartreuse. I'll take it chronologically. It starts with a mountain village now called Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse. I'm sure you know who Saint-Pierre was, though an alternate translation is something like Holy Rock, which makes a lot more sense, considering. "De" of course just means "of" As for Chartreuse itself, well, those origins are far more speculative; we know it was older than the Roman occupation of Gaul, and it may be named after a local pre-Roman tribe who, I'd venture to speculate, had no idea of the size of the world or that a variant of their name would one day be uttered all over it. If I were writing fiction, I'd posit that the Gauls living around there had a particularly precious monolith that they'd make offerings near, hence "holy rock." But I'm not writing fiction at the moment; I'm doing a blog entry. Anyway, at some point the village ended up giving the name to the entire mountain range, now known as the Chartreuse Mountains (massif de la Chartreuse). Then, in the late 11th Century C.E., some monks took over a château somewhere in those mountains; as monasteries sometimes are, it was fairly remote. The mountains named the monastery and the order of monks, which Latinized the name: Carthusian. The Carthusian order did whatever it was monks did for a few centuries, and then, a miracle: somehow they obtained a recipe for a particular medicinal spiced liqueur. While I'd be tempted to say it came from On High, as it were, the story goes that some guy gave it to them, and they supposedly spent the next hundred years making it better. What they finally released to the world is, of course, today known as Chartreuse, a liqueur with a distinctive green color somewhat different from that of the related liqueur, absinthe. There are variants with different colors now, and that leads to some confusion: chartreuse can refer to a greenish-yellow, like the original Chartreuse, or a yellow, like one of its variants. Though apparently the latter is normally called "chartreuse yellow," so maybe it's not all confusing. So, to reiterate: chartreuse (the color) is named after Chartreuse (the liquor), which is named after Chartreuse (the monastery), which is named after Chartreuse (the mountains), which were named after the (I'm guessing) holy rock of Chartreuse. And with that, I could use a drink. |
| I didn't fact-check any of these. It's just something fun from Cracked. One person does something bad, and so we pass a new law, to forbid anyone else from trying that same thing. That may not be the most thoughtful path toward creating a legal code, but it’s a routine way of doing things. Which is how you end up with laws like "No baton twirling within 20 feet of park benches." Introduced at the last city council meeting by an elected official with a bandaged head. Sometimes, though, when we pass a reactive law, we’re not worried about that crime becoming a trend. We just want to keep our thumb on that one guy. As far as claims to fame go, you could do worse than "inspiration for a law." 5. Ohio’s Urine Collection Law Part of their pee-nal code. In 2008, a 56-year-old man named Alan David Patton was caught collecting urine from a bathroom in a park in Dublin, Ohio. Okay, ew. Authorities charged him with criminal mischief. This broad and ill-defined law landed him a maximum of 60 days in jail, which really didn’t seem enough for this weird freak. So, they came up with a new law. Ohio now made it illegal for anyone for to collect “bodily substances without consent and for non-medical purposes.” The new penalty for this new crime? Six months in prison. Urine trouble now. 4. The Right to Detain Greg Australian man Greg Kable stabbed his wife to death in 1989. Not cool, Greg. In case it's not clear, wife-stabbing was already illegal in Oz. The sitting Parliament passed a new order called the Community Protection Act. If a prisoner due for release was deemed a danger to the public, said the order, they would keep him in prison until they were satisfied he wasn’t... Fortunately for all future prisoners, New South Wales amended the act to limit its scope. Now, it would only apply to Greg Kable, specifically. "Whataya in for, mate?" "Being Greg Kable." 3. Banning One Kid from Talking About Grass This one's way more interesting than just that bit. Sometimes, this made sense. For example, a 26-year-old was brought up for repeatedly playing “Do They Know It’s Christmas” to annoy his neighbors, an offense that ought lead to life in prison. Nah. 20 years, max. Life sentences should be reserved for "Simply Having A Wonderful Christmastime." An ASBO from 2003 forbade an 87-year-old man from being sarcastic to his neighbors. I'd be boned. 2. An Anti-Armstrong Law The burgh of Langholm in Scotland has a law on the books that says any Armstrong who enters the town must be hanged. Maybe we should arrange a bicycle race through there. The Armstrong was Johnnie Armstrong, who lived in the 16th century. The English remember him as a criminal due to his habit of raiding England, while the Scottish remember him as a folk hero, due to his habit of raiding England. That quote by itself was why I had to blog about this article. Bonus, though: We’d probably never know about this old law. Except, in 1972, Langholm received a famous visitor: astronaut Neil Armstrong. "We must obey the law. Quickly, now, hang... a portrait of Neil Armstrong in the museum!" 1. The Man Who Worked His Butt Off This one's a stretch (pun absolutely intended). It's not really a "law." As of 2016, Britain’s National Health Service had a certification for something called a “rectal teaching assistant.” This was someone employed by the government to visit medical schools, so doctors in training could learn how to conduct prostate exams by practicing on his well-documented body. And I have no doubt he was the butt of many jokes. Rectum? Damn near killed 'im. And with that, I'm done. If I were more ambitious, I'd double-check all these, but more importantly, I'd try to find examples from outside the English-speaking hegemony. I'd bet Germany has some fun ones, for example. |
| Today's random rerun comes from just over a year ago, which pushes very close to my self-imposed one-year exclusion: "Another Avocado Article" Because it's a year old, and based on an article a year older than that (the link is still valid), there's not much to comment on. But I did find a few things, all quotes from me. Does the pumpkin seed paste come with pumpkin spice? I'm asking because, though the article is from last November, it's almost the autumn equinox here and now—peak pumpkin spice season. And I'm not immune: I just picked up a six-pack of Atomic Pumpkin Voodoo Ranger, a seasonal beer offering from New Belgium out of Colorado. You know, I completely forgot to pick up APVR this year. It simply didn't occur to me. I did buy a couple of packs of Pumking, the Imperial pumpkin ale produced by Southern Tier out of New York. Excellent beer. They also make Warlock, which is a pumpkin stout; and a caramel Pumking, which is not nearly as good as it sounds. Anyway, maybe the Atomic Pumpkin Voodoo Ranger is still available. I'll have to check. Eh, whatever. I rarely eat guac anyway. I didn't get into the reasons for this, but it's not that I dislike the stuff. Depending on how it's made, it can range from okay to delicious. It's just that I'm too lazy to make it myself, and restaurants tend to price it like an appetizer. That's how you get people to stop consuming something: price it out of their range. Now, just to be clear, I'm not arguing for or against avocados. Personally, I can take them or leave them; the avocado industry could dry up (pun intended) tomorrow and I doubt I'd miss it much. I don't think this came off as I intended. I like avocados (but only the Hass variety), and I use them occasionally; I just don't make guacamole. I'm pretty sure I would miss them if they disappeared, if only because the surest way to ensure I want something is to make it so I can't have it. Still, they're not exactly what I'd call "essential," not like beer, pizza, or ground beef. (Avocados can be really good as a hamburger topping, but they suck on pizza.) |
| It doesn't matter how safe they are; there are those who are scared shitless of them, and no amount of logic or number-talk will change their minds. Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers? I learned a lot by reading dozens of Waymo and Cruise crash reports. Because I don't have a vested interest in anything, I'll say up front that the answer to the headline question turns out to be "maybe." There's not a lot I need to quote from the article; it's there if you want to read it. I doubt it'll convince anyone of anything, though. Neither will I, but I'm going to talk about the subject anyway. I've done it before, in "Putting the Auto in Automobile" , and others, and I'll try not to repeat myself too much.Here's the important quote: Of course self-driving cars are flawed—all technologies are. The important question is whether self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars. And that's where data analysis comes in. The issue, and this is touched on in the article, is that AV incidents are scrutinized to a much finer level of detail than all but the worst HV (human-driven vehicle) incidents, and every little bump and ding is subject to this scrutiny. Imagine if you had to fill out incident reports and have questioned every decision you made leading up to the event every time you hit a squirrel in the road, or dinged someone's bumper in a parking lot. Point is, accurate comparisons are hard. And while traffic fatalities are, in one sense, common (usually on the order of 40,000 deaths per year in the US), in another sense, they're pretty rare: according to the linked article, an average of one per 100 million miles driven. And this is just me, but I'm not sure if we can take fender-benders as a proxy. That is, you expect x number of serious injuries for y number of minor incidents with human drivers, and the ratio of x over y is probably fairly constant year to year. Human drivers make mistakes. Robots make different mistakes. On the other hand, we can't just set the robots loose, see how many people they kill, and then make a decision. That would be slightly unethical. No, we have to start somewhere. "Waltz, we don't 'have to' start anywhere." Yes, we do. I want my self-driving car so I can go bar-hopping. And I want it NOW. I'll even accept it before my promised flying car, thanks. Anyway, getting back to serious. Data. Unlike some people, I can be persuaded by logic. If it turns out that reliable data show that AVs are safer, I'll be convinced. But there will always be technophobes who will insist that it's better to risk being killed by a human driver than take a lower risk of being killed by a robot driver. Because robots are scary. This is akin to being scared shitless of flying, despite all the statistics. (I despise flying, myself, but that's because they've managed to turn it into the world's most uncomfortable travel experience; I feel fairly safe flying, just grumpy.) And those are the people we need to convince. Not me. Problem is, I don't know how to appeal to emotion. So meanwhile, I'll just continue to drink at home, and in places where Uber can happen. |
Ever prune a plum tree? One of the many linguistic confusions that plagued me as a kid—alongside such old standbys as flammable/inflammable and the various pronunciations of -ough—was a result of us possessing a plum tree. We had lots of fruit and nut trees. A miniature almond orchard adorned our front lawn; the garden was peppered with walnuts. Off to the side stood several fruit trees, including apple, peach, cherry, and plum. All of those fruits are somehow used to connote something good or desirable. For instance, my father claimed I was the apple of his eye, at least until I did something bad (which was, of course, a regular occurrence, at which point he would pare me, and not spare the rod). When things are going well, people say they're "peachy" (but they also say that when everything's going to the pits, because people love sarcasm). A really nice thing can be "cherry," and, of course, a particularly great job is a plum assignment. You know what's not a plum assignment? Picking fruit and nuts off of trees. My dad was too old to be climbing trees, and there were a couple of years in there between "too young to climb trees" and "too teen to care about anything." But all of these trees, and others, needed to be pruned on a regular basis, and that's what caused me the greatest confusion. Because a dried plum is called a prune. Now, I heard it through the grapevine (we had one of those, too) that those words, plum and prune, are linguistically equivalent, unlike, say, grape and raisin. And there's no special word for dried cherries; they're just dried cherries. The botanical binomial for the various species of plum trees starts with prunus, which is obviously where we get prune (dried plum), but not prune (the verb), which, through a tidal wave of linguistic gymnastics, also traces its origin back to Latin... but this time, from the word "rotundus," which, if you've been paying attention, obviously means "round." I guess it came from the practice of making trees look round, like a kid would draw? I don't know. Contrary to popular belief (which I foster), I don't know everything. None of which explains how we got "prune" from "rotundus." The more recent etymological ancestor, according to the online dictionary I just looked at, is an Old French word: prooiginier, which I guess I can see. All of which is to say it has nothing to do with plumb, plumber, or plumbed, which comes from the Latin word for lead. The metal. If this is confusing, well, good. Welcome to my world. |
| Another one from LitHub today. Another book ad, that is, but what the hell; it's free, relevant, and fairly short. There seems to be a need, for some people, to "prove" that we humans aren't really so special. We use tools! Oh, but so do crows. We have language! So do whales. We can solve complex problems! So can octopodes. We're the only technological species! But the Universe is enormous, so there's probably others. Still, it's good to investigate these things, if only to attempt to push back against tribal superiority complexes. And we know that articles like “the” should precede nouns, as should prepositions like “of.” These and other patterns, sometimes referred to as “rules” as though they represented inviolable edicts voted on by a committee, help to give English sentences a predictable ordering of words. It is this predictable ordering that is usually referred to when linguists talk about a language’s syntax. As I understand it, some languages do have inviolable edicts voted on by a committee. L'Académie française, par exemple. They have a Sisyphean task, but they persevere. Without syntax, it would seem, statements could not be understood, because they would be transferred from speaker to hearer in a jumbled mess of words. This is, it turns out, a bit of an oversimplification since a number of the world’s languages do not have rule-governed word order to the extent that English does. I don't remember all that much about Latin, because it's been a very long time since I actively studied it. But one thing I do remember is that word order wasn't nearly as important there. The language is, I guess the adjectival phrase is "highly inflected," where the purpose of a word - whether it's a subject, an object, the target of a preposition, or whatever - is determined more by its suffix than its position in the sentence. But even Latin evolved over time, and eventually became Italian, French, Spanish, etc., in which word order became important. Like how, in French, some adjectives have to come before the nouns they modify, while others have to come after. My point being that anyone who thought syntax was universal in human languages probably needed to defend that hypothesis vigorously. Syntactic conventions can be exceedingly complex, and any given language contains so many of them that linguists have long wondered how individuals can learn them. Some people never do. An increasing number of linguists now think this “dictionary and grammar” model of language was misguided. According to them there is no real distinction between words and sentences, as odd as that claim may seem, and no material distinction between a dictionary and grammar. For full context there, it would be necessary to read the article. Basically, if I'm understanding this correctly, at first, linguists (such as Chomsky) considered words and sentences independently: dictionary and grammar, respectively. This new viewpoint doesn't make that separation. I can't say I fully understand it, but it tracks with the more holistic view other fields of study have pursued more recently. Chomsky and others suggested that the ability to recursively combine clauses like these is at the core of human speech, implying that it was a key characteristic shared by all human languages. Countless studies have been published on recursive phenomena like embedded clauses, as boring as that might sound. Boring? Maybe. But so are most fields of study when you drill down into them. Those that pursue the study find it exciting, I'd imagine. In 2009, linguists Stephen Levinson and Nick Evans pointed out that, judging from the data, syntactic recursion is not actually found in all languages. Part of the evidence they relied on comes from the famous case of the Pirahã, an Amazonian language I have already discussed. My father published a series of papers around fifteen years ago that described the absence of evidence for recursion in Pirahã (among other things), contradicting the claims of Chomsky and others regarding the proposed universality of recursion in the world’s languages. The problem with any claim of universality is that all it takes is one counterexample to refute. From this perspective, maybe we just have not come across recursion in the language yet despite the hundreds of hours of recordings. To date, anyhow, no clear evidence for recursion in Pirahã has been offered. On the other side, it's exceedingly hard to prove the absence of something. We know that cats exist because we've seen them, but we don't know with any real certainty that Bigfoot doesn't exist, because we haven't looked everywhere. As linguist and syntactician Geoffrey Pullum has noted, part of what was lost in the discussion of Pirahã was the fact that it is not the only language that undermines the notion that recursion is a fundamental feature of syntax. And that's another point: finding one exception could make that exception an outlier. The original claim may have lost its "universality," but one could still make a good claim for recursion being an essential feature of most languages. Finding other counterexamples, especially unrelated ones, blows that hypothesis out of the water. Like many claims about universals in human psychology that may be called into question by examining very distinct populations worldwide, claims about universals in syntax tend to face challenges once a truly representative sample of the world’s languages is considered. As with anything else, it's prudent to examine one's own biases. And that, not the intricacies and minutiae of high-level linguistics, is my real takeaway here. It may not be possible to completely eliminate them; one could consider that a human universal, if one wishes. But we can work towards that ideal. |
| I know I've talked about this sort of thing before, but this is a new-to-me article. At last, validation! I'd celebrate, but then I wouldn't be grumpy anymore. This is known as “positive psychology” and has recently expanded to accommodate not only psychologists, but also social workers, life coaches and new age therapists. One of these things is not like the others... But there is evidence to suggest the approach has a negative side. Every silver lining has a cloud. Perhaps the most common advice made by positive psychologists is that we should seize the day and live in the moment. RAAAAAGE. Doing so helps us be more positive and avoid three of the most infamous emotional states, which I call the RAW emotions: regret, anger and worry. Or, and I'm no psych-talker here, but maybe we have those emotions for good reason? Sometimes I think the "professionals" try to get people to be happy all the time, not for their benefit, but to keep from having to be around negative people. No one (not even me) wants to deal with someone who's negative all the damn time. It's inconvenient for us; why can't they just be happy? But human psychology is evolutionarily hardwired to live in the past and the future. I've grown to dislike the "hardwired" metaphor. But remembering the past and being able to plan for the future, well, that's part of what makes us human. If you "live in the moment" (which you can't because there's no such thing as "the present moment"), you're missing a big part of what it means to be human. Regret, for example, which can make us suffer by reflecting on the past, is an indispensable mental mechanism for learning from one’s own mistakes to avoid repeating them. I think the problem is when you experience regret and don't use it to improve. Worries about the future are likewise essential to motivate us to do something that is somewhat unpleasant today but can create gain or spare us a greater loss in the future. If we didn’t worry about the future at all, we may not even bother with acquiring an education, take responsibility for our health or store food. Likewise, worry is counterproductive when you don't do anything about it. Knowing when there's something you can do, and doing it, is essential. Knowing when to let go because there's nothing you can do, well, that's also essential. Like regret and worries, anger is an instrumental emotion, which my co-authors and I have shown in several research papers. No, I didn't follow the link to those papers. But as above, I think there's a difference between useless anger and useful anger. What’s more, research has shown negative moods in general can be quite useful – making us less gullible and more sceptical. Studies have estimated that a whopping 80% of people in the west in fact have an optimism bias, which means we learn more from positive experiences than from negative ones. If true, that also enrages me. I didn't check their work, though. For example, optimism bias is linked to overconfidence – believing we are generally better than others at most things, from driving to grammar. I'm an inveterate pessimist, but I am better than others at driving and grammar. Worse at a lot of other things, though. Defensive pessimism, on the other hand, can help anxious individuals, in particular, prepare by setting a reasonably low bar instead of panicking, making it easier to overcome obstacles calmly. This time, I did follow the link, which, quelle surprise, turned out to be an older Conversation article about the benefits of keeping expectations low. Which is already part of my psychology.The next section in the article, Capitalist Interests, well, I can't do it justice by cherry-picking quotes. Suffice it to say that I was already thinking along these lines. Here's one excerpt: After all, if we have full control of our happiness, how can we blame unemployment, inequality or poverty for our misery? But the truth is that we don’t have full control over our happiness, and societal structures can often create adversity, poverty, stress and unfairness – things that shape how we feel. To believe that you can just think yourself better by focusing on positive emotions when you’re in financial danger or have gone through major trauma is at the very least naive. I wouldn't be so generous as to call it naive. More like manipulated. But here's the "I've been saying this all along" moment: And then comes the question of whether happiness is really the most important value in life. I've been saying this all along. In short, striving for happiness is like fucking for virginity. There's a lot of shit wrong with the world, and in our own lives, and the idea that we should smile our way through it enrages me. |
On May 16, 1960, in Malibu, California, the red dot appeared for the first time. Most of the light that we see has a spectral signature, bright at some wavelengths and dim or even nonexistent at others. The sun emits light from all over the spectrum, all of which adds up to white, though the accursed daystar usually appears yellow because most of the blue has been refracted and scattered by the atmosphere. (There, now you can answer two of your kid's questions: why is the sun yellow, and why is the sky blue. Because it's the same answer.) The sun's spectrum is, confusingly, called "black-body radiation" by physicists. There's actually a good reason for that, but it's irrelevant to this discussion. It's also (combined with airborne water droplets) why we get rainbows, and why we can use a prism to create an artificial rainbow. A tree's leaves absorb light that isn't green, bouncing the green back to the eyes of whoever is looking at the tree. But even that reflected light isn't "pure" green; it's just mostly green, and still covers a range of wavelengths, all of which usually average to some shade of green. Except, of course, at this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, when leaves start to reflect different parts of the spectrum due to chlorophyll reduction... but that, too, is irrelevant to this discussion. To get light in a narrow band of wavelengths, you need a laser. The word "laser" started out as an acronym (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), but, as with "radar," now it's a word. They even back-formed the verb "to lase," which is pretty much the opposite of its homonym "to laze," because lasing requires excitement, while lazing requires none. "Laser" was also a direct derivative of "maser" (the M stood for microwave), which did the narrow band of wavelengths thing, but in a part of the spectrum that we can't see. Thus, masers weren't very good for accompanying Pink Floyd music, or for impressing high school students into wanting to become physics majors. So, in the late 1950s, after the invention of the maser, scientists pursued the idea of an "optical maser," which would later be termed a laser. The theory was sound; what was lacking was the technology to make it happen, and a material for creating the light. That material turned out to be ruby. Not the flawed stones dug up out of mines, but near-perfect lab-created corundum crystal rods. Blind it with high-energy light from a xenon tube (which is like a neon tube, but heavier), do some other technical tricks with internal reflections and whatnot, and zap! Laser. Now, anyone who's seen Star Wars knows that only the bad guys use red lasers; the good guys use green or blue ones. It would be a few years before those higher-energy photons could get excited enough to become coherent, but it all started with a ruby rod. And yet, the ruby laser still has important applications—notably, the important job of keeping cats distracted. And, you know, helping you check out of the grocery store faster. But mostly, the cat thing. |
| I've been banned as a bad influence, so I can identify with this Cracked article. I, too, was innocent. What do you do when your citizens come upon something new? You must ban it, obviously. New things lead to new thoughts, which lead to new actions, which lead to your downfall. Probably why it took fire so long to really catch on. 5. Syria Banned Yo-Yos, Thinking They Caused Drought Every once in a while you hear about some country getting all panicked over a superstitious belief. Then you remember that, here, people still think floods are caused by God being angry that we let gays exist. Looking for something to blame, the country’s holy men turned to a new toy people were playing with: yo-yos. Everyone was praying to the heavens above for rain, they reasoned, and meanwhile here were yo-yos springing to the ground below, and that surely disturbed everything. Ha ha those idiots. Don't they know yo-yos could have been used to dowse for water? At the time of this ban, international reports had to explain to people just what the toy was. It was an invention commonly known as the bandalore, according to dictionaries at the time, and had been called a “quiz” in England. Which would make yo-yo tricksters bandalorians. You may be tempted to laugh at the confused holy men. But shortly after the ban went into effect, the rains returned, so the holy men got the last laugh. And this, folks, is exactly why we need to avoid confusing correlation with causation, or to think that because you took skunk oil and your cold symptoms lessened, it was the skunk oil that lessened your cold symptoms. 4. Germany Banned the Game ‘Risk,’ Saying It Would Induce Feelings of Militarism That would be like the US banning Monopoly because it would induce feelings of capitalism. 3. The BBC Banned Desk Lamps Writers with lamps would pen “smut” and “innuendo,” warned the book, inspired by the light into producing “furtive” and “degenerative” programs. Hm... *searches Amazon for desk lamps* 2. China Banned Videos of Eating Bananas Speaking of smut and innuendo. In time, we came upon further banana videos that — while not porn, by any conventional definition — were so erotic that we refuse to embed them here. I'm sure we can find them ourselves. 1. A Town Banned All Concerts When a Neighboring Lot ‘Accidentally’ Booked Rage Against the Machine If the band performed as planned, people might be able to hear the lyrics all the way in town, residents complained, which would inspire in them all kinds of corrupt thoughts. Or maybe the thousands of concertgoers would descend upon the town and riot. Worse, someone might... dance. Quelle horreur! After all, you know why Baptist teens aren't allowed to have sex? Because it might lead to dancing. (Yes, I know the incident in question took place in Utah, better known for LDS than Baptists, but it's a joke.) |
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Finally. Fascinating stuff. All of them. There is something rather philosophical about comedy. You are certainly right there. 
