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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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| 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.) |
| A double dip into the pit of the past today. The entry is from all the way back in 2007: "1984" Nothing to do with George Orwell, and not a lot of text there, mostly just a picture of me and my friend Pat from, well, 1984. Not a lot of photos exist of me from that era. Or any era, really. I hate having my picture taken, even more now than I did back then. That's one reason I became a photographer; better to be on the other side of the lens. Unlike most things from the past, I'm not too embarrassed by this pic. I mean, sure, the hair, but who wouldn't be embarrassed by what they did with their hair in the 80s? Mine's longer now, and Pat's is... well, he still has some, so that's something. |
| Yeah, sorry, but I'm going to be phoning it in today. No article, no Revisited (that's tomorrow), and not enough stuff has been going on in my life to talk about it. That last bit is a good thing, though: it means my life's goal of avoiding drama is still successful. So, taking advantage of it being the final day of September, well... WAKE UP! (Yes, that's a Green Day reference.) I did want to plug a couple of things for October, which is usually a busy time around here. First, there's:
Even if you're not planning on doing NaNo, it's a good way to get your stuff organized for a longer story. Hell, you can use it if you're running a role-playing game and want to do your own adventure. It runs through October, and there's still time to sign up. And then there's:
As that is a blogging activity, I'll be participating. The prompts are even more open-ended than usual for that contest, and it should be interesting to see what people come up with. If you're intimidated by having such intimidating competition as myself, well, don't be; I never win. I'm just in it for the prompts. You only need to do 8 entries during the month. So that's about it for now, though I know there are numerous other activities here this coming month. I'll be back tomorrow with more usual content. |
| It's been a few weeks, I think, since the last time one of the solar system articles came up from my queue. This one's about Saturn. Saturn Could Lose Its Rings in Less Than 100 Million Years Recent discoveries suggest that the planet’s distinctive feature may be gone in the cosmic blink of an eye I guess this is considered noteworthy because, with a few notable exceptions such as comets or sunspots, we tend to think of astronomical objects as relatively unchanging. And, from a human perspective, 100 million years is a very long time indeed. 100 million years ago, our ancestors were mouse-sized quadrupeds, hiding from dinosaurs. I did an entry a while back on Jupiter, that other gas giant in the solar system, and we've witnessed the shrinkage of its iconic Great Red Spot over the past couple hundred years—in comparison, lightning-fast. Now it might be more properly called the Okay Red Spot. Anyway, back to Saturn... If someone asked you to draw a planet other than ours, you would likely draw Saturn, and that is because of its rings. Rings are very common in SF art, to indicate "hey, a different world." And yet, of all the planets we're most familiar with, only the one has easily identifiable rings. It was Galileo Galilei who first spotted something there. His primitive telescope gave him only a slightly better view of the heavens than did the naked eye, and in 1610 he thought he saw two undiscovered bodies flanking Saturn, one on each side. I think he called them "ears." Some of his, and others', early drawings are reproduced in the article. As the article notes, when they're edge-on, they basically disappear from Earth-based views. The particles in the inner rings move faster than those in the outer rings, because they are fighting against a stronger gravitational pull. That's... well, that's mostly correct. Except they're not "fighting against" anything. The average thickness of the main rings is believed to be no more than 30 feet. A recent study showed that parts of the B-ring—the brightest ring of all—are only three to ten feet thick. I've known this for a while, but it still amazes me. Considering the overall breadth of the rings, this makes them far thinner, proportionately, than a sheet of paper. Most of Saturn’s rings lie within what’s known as the Roche limit—the distance a satellite can orbit a large object without the planet’s tidal force overpowering the object’s own gravity and tearing it apart. Which might well be how they formed in the first place. The article goes on to describe how one researcher figured out (probably) how the rings were disappearing. In 2012. Just goes to show that there's no apparent end to discovery. There's also lots of cool pictures of the rings, of course. From close-up. Because we've sent robots there. We're also treated to what I consider an excessively long biography of the researcher in question, which, admittedly, I skimmed. “Take a Good Look at Saturn Before It’s Too Late,” Time magazine cheekily warned, “Because It’s Losing Its Rings.” And this is why I have issues with most science reporting. There's another article in my queue, which I'll get to eventually, about the recent discovery of potential life-indicating chemicals on an exoplanet. Popular media immediately jumped to techno-aliens in flying saucers. But. This article shies away from such sensationalism. Because the reality of it is sensational enough. I mean... just look at those fucking rings! |
| England invented English. Here in the US, we perfected it. Mostly, I'm just sharing this because I find it intriguing. Though, as usual, I didn't do extensive fact-checking. English settlers faced with unfamiliar landscapes and previously unknown plants and animals in the Americas had to find terms to name and describe them. Gosh... if only there had been people here who had already named such things. They sometimes borrowed words from Native American languages. "Sometimes." By the time of the American Revolution, English had been evolving separately in England and America for nearly two hundred years, and the trickle of new words had become a flood. Given all that, it's truly a wonder that we're mutually intelligible. Most of the time. Corn offers an example of how English words evolved in America. Before 1492, the plant that Americans call corn (Zea mays) was unknown in England. The word corn was a general term for grain, usually referring to whichever cereal crop was most abundant in the region. For instance, corn meant wheat in England, but usually referred to oats in Ireland. When American corn came to Britain, it was named maize, the English version of mahiz, an Indigenous Arawakan word adopted by the Spanish. When the first colonists encountered it in North America, however, they almost always referred to it as corn or Indian corn, probably because it was the main cereal crop of the area. Interestingly, the Arawak weren't North American, and apparently their staple food crop was cassava root, not maize. Yeah, it gets complicated. Also, the French word for it is maïs, pronounced similarly to maize. As with aubergine and courgette, this is one of those food words that sometimes trip up US/UK relations because the British names are closer to the French than they usually like to admit. Much of the landscape of North America was new to the English, so many early word inventions applied to the natural world. Often these simply combined a noun with an adjective: backcountry, backwoods (and backwoodsman), back settlement, pine barrens, canebrake, salt lick, foothill, underbrush, bottomland, cold snap. Plants and animals were similarly named, for instance, fox grape, live oak, bluegrass, timothy grass, bullfrog, catfish, copperhead, lightning bug, garter snake, and katydid (a grasshopper named for the sound it makes). Now, see, that last one is another example of me having been wrong about something, and I can admit it. We have katydids here; I see them every summer. The cats like to try to catch them, which I discourage, because katydids are cool. But I'd never really heard whatever sound they make, so I assumed (yes, I know the line about assuming, but shut up) that it was a corruption of "caryatid." Americans repurposed other English words as well. For example, bug, which meant a bedbug in England, broadened to cover any insect... Here's where I get pedantic: in science, "bug" refers to a subset of insects, ones with specific mouth morphology. Here in the American South, "bug" can refer to pretty much anything with an exoskeleton that lives on land, including spiders, which of course aren't insects. Other usages restrict "bug" to pests, such as midges, mosquitoes, or cockroaches (or, yes, bedbugs). Which is correct? Well, all or none, depending on your point of view. Interestingly, though, no one ever seems to refer to butterflies as bugs, though they're insects, and I don't know of anyone who considers lightning bugs to be pests. Several words for bodies of water changed meanings between the old country and the new. In England a pond is artificial, but in America it is natural. Creek in British English refers to an inlet from the sea, while in American English it describes a tributary of a river. Eh... sometimes. Sort of. In common usage, a "creek" is like a stream or brook: a (mostly) permanent, small flow of water in a channel. Here in the South, people sometimes call it a "crick," which is usually down in the "holler." But if you look at a map of the Chesapeake Bay, especially on the Virginia side but also sometimes in Maryland, you'll see a lot of tidal estuaries called creeks. These were (I suspect, though again, not a lot of fact-checking on my end) likely named by John Smith, who was, of course, English, so I suspect he was using the "inlet from the sea" meaning. Many of them have local names followed by "creek." One example is Potomac Creek, in Virginia, which wasn't named for the river it connects to; rather, both were named for the native group, part of the Powhatan Confederacy, whose main village was located on its banks. This usage can confuse people who aren't from the area. "That's a 'creek?' It looks like a bay!" Well, it is. Both. You get into categorization problems, like with mountains vs. hills, seas vs. lakes, or what makes a world a planet. Especially with the Chesapeake Bay, which is really the flooded lowlands of the Susquehanna River, which became tidal the last time a bunch of glaciers melted to raise sea level. Whatever. I spent my childhood in the area, so I probably think about it more than most. Back to the article. An English watershed is a line or ridge separating the waters that flow into different drainage areas, but in America it’s a slope down which the water flows, or the catchment area of a river. And that was part of my career, so I always used it in the "catchment area" sense; the ridge that separates watersheds, we simply called the watershed boundary. English speakers also adopted words from other colonial countries. The language that influenced early American English the most is Dutch. You see that mostly in the New York and New Jersey area. My favorite, though, is the Murderkill River, in Delaware, which has nothing to do with murders; it's from Dutch words meaning "mother" and "river," so its name, translated, means something like "mother river river." It's actually a creek. Bushwhacker, from a Dutch term meaning forest keeper, made its first appearance in print in 1809, in Washington Irving’s comic novel A History of New York, written under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker. He describes a gathering of prominent Dutch settlers as “gallant bushwhackers and hunters of raccoons by moonlight.” I will take this opportunity to point out that "raccoon" wasn't Dutch, but came from the Powhatans' Algonquian language. They also gave us "opossum." Yankee is also almost certainly a Dutch contribution. And we have yet another thing for which we can blame the Dutch. |
| Been a while since I landed on a Cracked article. No, Greek Fire isn't one of these. But rest assured, there are far more than 6. We have some Russian doodles dating back to the year 1260, showing a six-year-old imagining himself as a knight fighting monsters, but we have other whole years where our records are blank. D&D is apparently older than we thought. For example, let’s be honest, can you remember a single thing that happened in 2019? Only when I look at that year in my blog. As usual, it's a countdown... 6. What Volcano Blackened the World, Half a Millennium Ago? It seems like we should know. An eruption that big should have created immediate columns of ash 15 miles tall and would have been audible a thousand miles away. However, we don’t have records from anyone who saw or heard it. Clearly, it was the one that wiped out Atlantis. 5. What Does pH Mean? I gotta be honest; this one surprised me. My father, who had an actual degree in chemistry, told me it was "percent hydrogen," and, being younger than 13 at the time, I took that to be the Final Truth on the subject. Once I entered my rebellious years (which never ended), I was too arrogant to ever question that. You know all about the pH scale if you use quack remedies that promise benefits from balancing the pH in your body. No, you don't (yes, I know this is what we in comedy circles sometimes refer to as a "joke.") The H stands for hydrogen — that much, we know. But the p? It doesn’t stand for “percent,” though pH does measure the proportion of hydrogen. Nor, for that matter, does it stand for “proportion.” Many people think it stands for “power,” because pH takes into account exponents, which we sometimes describe using the word power. Various urban legends say it stands for various foreign words, like puissance, Potenz, pouvoir, potential and pondus. French, German, back to French, English (which isn't foreign to Cracked readers), and... Latin? The guy who came up with it was Danish; why not look in that language, which I know pretty much nothing about (though it is somewhat related to English and German)? 4. Who Was the Guy on This Coin? Obviously, "this coin" is pictured in the article. Silbannacus must have been emperor for a couple months in the year 253. There was enough of a gap in the timeline for him to reign for a little bit. For a short spell in September and October, exactly 1,770 years ago this week, he was the most powerful person in the world. Then he was gone, leaving behind only two coins. For once, the RNG gave me a recent article, so I need not explain the historical context of the writing I link. I just want to know if he lasted longer than Liz Truss. 3. What Is This Battery Made Of? I'd guess... battery stuff? In 1840, the science of electricity was taking its first faltering steps. Oxford professor Robert Walker bought a curiosity called the Clarendon Dry Pile, which he set up in his lab. It used some kind of chemical reaction to generate electricity, which sent a clapper back and forth between two bells. Fun fact: we still use "pile" for "battery" sometimes, but from what I understand, the French word is "pile" (pronounced more like "peel.") You can say "battery" in France, but they'll think you're saying "drum" (batterie) which, when you think about it, makes a hell of a lot more sense than English. It’s been running almost 200 years now, without pause. And yet, my smartphone battery starts to fail after a month. The only way to find what’s in the battery is to cut it open. This would end the ringing and may also end the world. Unless that long-ago inventor managed to stumble upon a way to circumvent the Laws of Thermodynamics, it's not a perpetual motion machine. At some point, perhaps in the distant future when humanity is either dead or living amongst the stars (or both), it'll stop. Then we'll know. 2. What Do Levi’s 501s Mean? Jeans trivia is its own special branch of knowledge. Did you know that the rivets in denim are essential for holding the fabric together, and aren’t there simply to look cool? That was true when they were invented. Now, it would be possible to use advanced materials technology to do that with thread alone. But then it wouldn't look nearly as cool. Did you know that the leather patch that bears the brand logo is called a Jacron? Okay, I learned something. And that the tiny upper jeans pocket (the one that fits a single key or an emergency ecstasy pill) was designed to hold your pocket watch? You do if you read this blog. And did you know what the “501” in Levi’s 501s stands for? Nope, you didn’t, and as you might now guess, having read this far in the article, no one else today knows that answer either. You'd think maybe it was just a cool-sounding number, which companies like car makers pull out of thin air all the time, these days. But according to the article (which, in case it's not obvious, shouldn't be taken as the final word on anything, and neither should this blog), there was a whole history behind it. Said history was lost in a fire, much like the contents of the Library of Alexandria. 1. Why Was Ivar the Boneless Boneless? I'm guessing because his dick didn't work. Was he missing an arm maybe, or a leg? That sounds reasonable, but it would still leave him with plenty of other bones and may not justify the “boneless” sobriquet. One theory is that he really did have no bones, as we normally know them, but had cartilaginous bones, a condition known as osteogenesis imperfecta. If he did, you’d think every account of his life would have mentioned this fact, long before detailing which parts of Northumbria he raided. I suppose it's also possible that he was extraordinarily flexible. Physically, anyway. However, one other theory remains. The name could have been a way of noting that Ivar couldn’t get a boner. We have no record of Ivar having children, and his name may have mocked his impotence. Or his dick didn't work. |
| I can't resist a piece on Poe any more than my housemate's kitten, Edgar Allan Purr, can resist a dangling string. The cat's name was my idea, incidentally. I don't know much about this source, Crimereads, by the way. I just found this article while searching for something else, and, well, like I said, dangling string. Even though literature had, for centuries, brimmed with clever problem-solvers, from tricksters to reformed thieves to wise men to police prefects, Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” still awed the literary world when it appeared in 1841. Detective stories were, for Kid Me, kind of like crossword puzzles: fun to complete, but the secrets of their creation might as well have been quantum physics for all I understood them. I would read a science fiction or fantasy book and go, "Hey, I bet I could write like that." Not so with the detective genre. The police are stumped. But C. Auguste Dupin, a chevalier and rare book aficionado, solves the mystery at home after reading the details in the paper, becoming literature’s first bona fide detective character and starting a genre revolution. Astute readers will note that thus, science fiction predated detective fiction as a genre. As literary critic A. E. Murch writes, the detective story is one in which the “primary interest lies in the methodical discovery, by rational means, of the exact circumstances of a mysterious event or series of events.” Critic Peter Thoms elaborates on this, defining the detective story as “chronicling a search for explanation and solution,” adding, “such fiction typically unfolds as a kind of puzzle or game, a place of play and pleasure for both detective and reader.” Like I said. Crossword puzzle. The well-heeled Dupin is an armchair detective who solves puzzles because he can, using a process called “ratiocination,” in which he basically ‘thinks outside of the box.’ I've known several people who prided themselves on "thinking outside of the box." Without exception, all of these people were lousy at thinking in the first place, and just did free-association. This is quite a different procedure than "ratiocination." (And it’s a good thing he does, or no one will solve these crimes; the murderer of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” turns out to be an escaped orangutan. It might be safe to say no one else would conclude that.) Goddammit! SPOILERS! If Poe had not solidified the conventions that we recognize as marking the modern detective story, others likely would have done the same not long after. Okay, but this is true about pretty much any invention or discovery. If Einstein hadn't worked out relativity, someone else would have. If Nikola Tesla hadn't invented the alternating current method of electricity transmission, others would have. That in no way diminishes Poe's legacy. And no nineteenth-century detective lineage would be complete without Eugène-François Vidocq, a criminal-turned-criminologist who lived from 1775-1857 and who founded and ran France’s first national police, the Sûreté nationale, as well as France’s first private detection agency. His life inspired countless (swashbuckling) adaptations, including an American adaptation published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1828, entitled “Unpublished passages in the Life of Vidocq, the French Minister of Police,” which Poe very well might have read. Interestingly there’s a character in that story named “Dupin.” Ahem. "Good writers borrow. Great writers steal." -T.S. Eliot, and everyone who ever quoted him. Dupin’s ability to read extraordinary meaning into clues makes him rather the first semiotician, elucidating the relationship between signs, signifiers, and ‘signifieds’ more than a century before Ferdinand de Saussure published his work on the subject in 1966—particularly because Dupin finds his clues through linguistics rather than physical objects. Thus, Poe also invented postmodernism. Before modernism was even a thing. Years later, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “Each [of Poe’s detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed… Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” He stole. Indeed, Doyle construed his detective Sherlock Holmes as an intellectual descendant of Holmes, having Watson (who also participates in a lineage offered by the Dupin stories, but of Dupin’s supportive narrator/chronicler and friend) cite Dupin upon first witnessing Holmes’s deductive genius. Clearly, that second Holmes should have been "Dupin." Everyone makes mistakes. Even fictional detectives, from time to time, when the plot requires it. As the article notes at the end, Holmes wouldn't have existed, at least not as we know the character, without Dupin. Neither would Batman. |
| Some people peak in childhood. Some of us never peak at all. Here's a peek. What Happens to Spelling Bee Champions When They Grow Old? Spelling contests have remained a feature in American life since the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock — but is peaking at 12 years old all it’s cracked up to be? Yeah, just to be clear, I'm all for stretching facts to comedic ends, but that bit about Plymouth Rock is plain bullshit with no humor in sight. Spelling was pretty fluid until the early 19th century, and the earliest mention of a spelling contest in the US comes from the first decade of that century. Anyway. Thinly veiled colonialism aside, the article: Sixty-two-year-old Brad Williams remembers what he ate for breakfast and lunch — Corn Flakes and hamburgers, respectively — on May 3, 1969, the day he won the Wisconsin state spelling bee after spelling grisaille and lamprey correctly. He also, miraculously, remembers exactly what he was doing on my birthday, September 2, 1978. See, now, that's the opposite of me, almost. I couldn't tell you what I had for lunch last Thursday, let alone on September 2, 1978. I'm told I was alive then; that's about all I know. And yet, I'm pretty good with spelling. Not perfect, and I'd be stumped by grisaille because I don't even know what that is but I'm pretty sure it's French. Williams credits his spelling prowess in large part to the hyperthymesia, since if the word in question happened to be on a study list, he could instantly visualize it on the page. I'd credit a spelling bee loss to hyperthymesia. If that was one of the words. As an aside, one snippet of memory I do have from the late 70s involves a spelling competition. Just a minor one, classroom only, and I don't even remember which grade I was in, but it was at least 4th. One girl was asked to spell "dough" and she said d-o-h. That probably stuck in my mind because it was the moment I realized I was better than everyone else. Then, probably a few days later, some bullies beat the shit out of me and I realized maybe I wasn't, after all. The 4-foot-5 kid had a trophy nearly half his size in his bedroom and considers winning the state bee as one of his life’s major accomplishments. That's fair. One of my life's major accomplishments was managing to wake up early enough for a job interview, once. It was invariably a part of Colonial education throughout the 1700s and 1800s, he writes, and the term “bee” referred to many different social events — e.g., “quilting bee,” “barn-raising bee” and “corn-husking bee” — in which an entire community came together, like bees in a hive, for a common goal. Again, I have some doubts about the practice before 1800. But I'm including this bit to illustrate what "bee" means in this context. This, though, is why I'm featuring the article in the first place: I'm a sucker for Mark Twain quotes, and apparently, he opened a local spelling bee in Connecticut in 1875: “Some people have an idea that correct spelling can be taught, and taught to anybody,” Twain remarked. “That is a mistake. The spelling faculty is born in man, like poetry, music and art. It is a gift; it is a talent. People who have this talent in high degree need only see a word once in print and it is forever photographed upon their memory. They cannot forget it. People who haven’t it must be content to spell more or less like thunder, and expect to splinter the dictionary wherever the orthographic lightning happens to strike.” Another of my misunderstandings, early in life, was that because I was pretty good (not perfect) at spelling and punctuation, I had everything I needed to be a writer. Boy, was I wrong. The first national spelling bee was held 25 years later in Cleveland on June 29, 1908. I was also pretty good at math. For instance, 1908 is 33 years later than 1875. A 500-boy choir sang, three bands performed and one newspaper enthused that “thousands of electric lights will furnish illumination.” Marie Bolden, a 14-year-old African-American daughter of a Cleveland mail carrier, won the competition with a perfect score. Perhaps due to the shock of a black contestant besting all of her white competitors, Maguire suggests the next national spelling bee wasn’t organized until 1925. This would be funny if it weren't for the goddamned racism. With probably a dose of sexism thrown in for good measure. As for whether spelling is still an important skill (the answer is yes), the article goes into that, then notes: Also, cautions Tracey Sturgal, a linguist professor and director of business communication at Marquette University, spell-check isn’t perfect. “People still have to have a certain level of spelling competence,” she explains. “The number one spelling error I get in college papers is when students flip definitely with defiantly, which is surely a spell-check error.” Spell-checkers also can't tell its from it's, one of my markers when privately assessing someone else's intelligence. Others include your vs. you're, and there, they're, their. I have to cut this short because my cat has a vet (that's veterinarian, not veteran) appointment, but in brief: unlike child actors in movies and television, who often seem to burn out and/or start using drugs (with notable exceptions like the kid who played Charlie Bucket in Wonka, who pursued a career as a vet (the first kind)), it seems aging former spelling bee champions mostly have their shit together. |
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