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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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| This article, from Slate, has been, like a customer at the DMV, patiently waiting over four months to be called up. And it's 9 years older than that. But, despite the headline and date, it's not time-sensitive; grammar and spelling rules are timeless. Sort of. Nothing quells my Christmas cheer as quickly as a stray apostrophe. Every year they assault me. Oh, you only notice them in December? Then you haven't been looking. Usually it’s in the middle of an otherwise quaint moment: I am padding around my parents’ house, wearing pink slippers, sipping on some hot chocolate. Snow is falling outside the window, and Josh Groban’s Christmas CD is filling the downstairs with peace on earth and mercy mild. My mother is baking a pie. She’s about to ask if I want to lick the spatula (which, duh, I will). Remarkable; 12-year-olds are writing articles these days, while other writers struggle to make money. First, though, I find a stack of Christmas cards and begin to flip through them—pausing to marvel at how big so-and-so’s kids have gotten. And then I spot it: an apostrophe in a last name that isn’t supposed to be possessive. This part, I absolutely relate to. Gone is my Christmas cheer! All my glad tidings, replaced with fury. Look. I get it. It pisses me off, too. But if that's all it takes to turn you into the Hulk, seek help. Maybe I overestimated her age, above. Okay, okay, kidding. I recognize hyperbole when I see it. Usually. This year I’d like to preempt the pluralization problems. It’s mid-November now, time to order Christmas cards again. The holiday season starts earlier every year. It could be that, by waiting this long but not long enough to write about this article, I'm contributing to Christmas creep. But, given the prevalence of year-round Christmas stores in the US, I don't think my small contribution makes any difference. I have created a brief guide to help you pluralize your last name. It is my humble attempt to preserve not only apostrophe protocol but also the dignity of the letter S. You should visit the link just to see this chart. It's both informative and funny. In summary, if you're writing in English, every surname adds either -s or -es to become plural, and an apostrophe doesn't belong anywhere near it, unless the name already has one like O'Brien. I have no idea how they do it in other languages. Q: Why do people add apostrophes? A: I have no idea. Neither do they. I have an alternative suggestion, though, since so many people misuse apostrophes, putting them in where they don't belong, or omitting them where they do belong: Instead of "Happy Holidays from the Smiths," consider: "Happy Holidays from John Smith, Jane Jones, Braden Smith-Jones, Kaylee Jones-Smith, Fluffy, and Stinky. (Don't look at us like that. Braden was four when he named the dog.)" It's not like you have to get the damn things engraved at a printer, these days, and get charged by the letter. Besides, calling the whole household by one last name perpetuates the myth of the nuclear family, and enforces the hegemony of the patriarchy. We can't have that, now, can we? I bypass the whole thing by remaining singular. And not sending holiday cards. |
| One of the more philosophically interesting implications of physics as we know it is that there is no such thing as "nothing." We are not empty  The concept of the atomic void is one of the most repeated mistakes in popular science. Molecules are packed with stuff Well, except maybe for the contents of your savings account. The empty atom picture is likely the most repeated mistake in popular science. It is unclear who created this myth, but it is sure that Carl Sagan, in his classic TV series Cosmos (1980), was crucial in popularising it. Part of the problem is that everyday language fails in its ability to describe sometimes esoteric scientific concepts. Take the word "nothing." It's obviously an ancient portmanteau of "no" and "thing," implying that when you describe a space as "nothing," there's "no thing" there. But the word "thing" isn't exactly precisely defined, especially when you get down to subatomic scales and discover that all particles are actually energy, and "thing" can be used to describe, well, anything, from stars to light to dark matter... maybe you see the semantic problem. In other words, maybe the problem isn't the science, but the language used to communicate it. Sagan was brilliant, and a strong communicator with excellent fashion sense, but, being human, he'd have made mistakes, and he was working with a 1980s knowledge of science, which has advanced a bit since then. All it takes to question the idea of the empty-space idea is to attempt to bring two fully solid objects together. Swords, say. If swords were mostly empty space, they wouldn't be very effective at parrying other swords. Or cutting, when you're not quick enough to parry. Swords swing just fine through the air, though, with only minimal resistance (unless you swing them broad-side-on), but air isn't "nothing," either. Most problems surrounding the description of the submolecular world come from frustrated attempts to reconcile conflicting pictures of waves and particles, leaving us with inconsistent chimeras such as particle-like nuclei surrounded by wave-like electrons. This image doesn’t capture quantum theory’s predictions. Saying that light, for example, behaves "sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle," betrays our macroscopic bias. If we'd learned the quantum stuff first, we might be confused by the "things" that only behave like waves (sound, e.g.) or only like particles (ping-pong balls, e.g.). To compensate, our conceptual reconstruction of matter at the submolecular level should consistently describe how nuclei and electrons behave when not observed – like the proverbial sound of a tree falling in the forest without anyone around. Two problems there: 1) How do we experimentally verify how these "things" behave when not observed? By definition, we'd have to observe them to find out. 2) A tree falling in the forest absolutely makes a sound. Sound is waves in air, caused by a transfer of kinetic energy; it exists whether an ear is there to pick up on it or not. The only way a tree falling in the forest would not make a sound would be if the forest were in a vacuum, in which case we have way more immediate problems than philosophical koans. Here’s a primer on how to think of the fundamental components of matter: a molecule is a stable collection of nuclei and electrons. If the collection contains a single nucleus, it is called an atom. Electrons are elementary particles with no internal structure and a negative electric charge. On the other hand, each nucleus is a combined system composed of several protons and a roughly equal number of neutrons. Each proton and neutron is 1,836 times more massive than an electron. The proton has a positive charge of the same magnitude as an electron’s negative charge, while neutrons, as their name hints, have no electric charge. Usually, but not necessarily, the total number of protons in a molecule equals the number of electrons, making molecules electrically neutral. I could quibble about some of the details there—for example, a neutron is slightly more massive than a proton—but that's a remarkably good summary, so long as it's understood that some details need further embellishment. The interior of the protons and neutrons is likely the most complex place in the Universe. Yes, even more complex than crowds at a Taylor Swift concert. Particles with the same electric charge sign repel each other. So additional interactions are required to hold protons close-packed in the nucleus. These interactions arise from quark and antiquark pairs called pions that constantly spill out of each proton and neutron to be absorbed by another such particle nearby. It occurred to me later in life that the grade-school simplicity of the seemingly contradictory statements "like charges repel; opposite charges attract" and "atomic nuclei are positively charged while the electrons are negatively charged" should be way, way more confusing to middle-school students than it is. Positively-charged protons in a nucleus stick together, and electrons don't just fall in and join with a proton to neutralize the charges. This article does a pretty good job explaining the basic physics behind why that's not a contradiction. I won't quote it. Not gonna lie; it gets a bit technical. It needs to, though, to avoid the inevitable wobbliness of everyday word definitions, like "thing." The association between this mass concentration and the idea that atoms are empty stems from a flawed view that mass is the property of matter that fills a space. However, this concept does not hold up to close inspection, not even in our human-scale world. When we pile objects on top of each other, what keeps them separated is not their masses but the electric repulsion between the outmost electrons at their touching molecules. This bit kind of answers the implied question in the headline, so I'm including it. My criticism of the empty atom picture isn’t meant to shame people’s previous attempts to describe atoms and molecules to the public. On the contrary, I applaud their effort in this challenging enterprise. Our common language, intuitions and even basic reasoning processes are not adapted to face quantum theory, this alien world of strangeness surrounded by quirky landscapes we mostly cannot make sense of. Which is what I've been trying to say. Also, the Ant-Man movies didn't get it right, either. Fun movies, but don't use them as quantum physics lectures. In the end, though, the idea of "something" and "nothing" will stick with us in our everyday language, and they are, I think, generally adequate to describe, say, the difference between a planet and the mostly-vacuum of space. But even vacuum has something in it. Not so sure about some humans' brains, though. |
| Thank Atlas Obscura for this one, which, again, I'm sharing mostly for the hell of it. Because it talks about two of my favorite things. No, not science and math; beer and food. Ordering Off a 5,000-Year-Old Mesopotamian Menu A community effort brings ancient flavors to modern Texas. Texas has forfeited any claim to being "modern," but whatever. Among the campus buildings at Rice University in Houston, Texas, one curious structure stands out... It’s called a mudhif, and for Iraq’s Marsh Arab ethnic minority, it’s a traditional village meetinghouse where disputes are settled and important gatherings are held. What Marsh Arabs are doing in Houston is explained in the article. Alrawi describes the dinner as a way “to complete the setting” of the mudhif by paying homage to the structure’s ancient origins. Rather than modern Iraqi food, the dinner menu is based on recent archaeological discoveries from Lagash. Located in modern-day southern Iraq, Lagash was a major Sumerian city home to some 100,000 people in the third millennium BC. While that might not seem like a huge city by today's standards, I think it was quite a lot of people for 5,000 years ago. The far better known Babylon, in the same general area, might have reached 200,000, but that was several centuries later. ...the central grain was barley, used to make both bread and another Mesopotamian staple that the team in Houston set their sights on recreating: beer. And now they're speaking my language. Though the beer of ancient Mesopotamia bore little resemblance to the delicious magical concoctions of today, it was fermentation of malted barley. The article goes into some of the process. “Whenever you put an archaeologist together with a chef or a brewer,” says Lao, “they feed on each other.” Recreating the Mesopotamian meal has been a team effort. Now, that's an image I might have done without. Also, as the article points out, it's probably impossible to faithfully recreate all of the recipes. Moreover, we're talking about working-class food, the ancient equivalent to street tacos, hot dogs, and the like. Food availability and price keeps changing; a commonly-touted example is that lobster used to be considered trash that only poor people ate, while now it's treated as a luxury item (I don't know how true that is). So do you recreate the food, or the experience? Lots of cultures have come up with their own working-class food, but the commonality there (pun intended, as always) is that it's all based on what's abundant and cheaply available. At least until it becomes widely known as delicious, at which point it ceases to be working-class food. Like how you might pay $10 for a stadium hot dog, or how I pay $30 for a pizza. But I feel like it brings history to life if they try to recreate the recipes with the foods then involved. Few people love memorizing the facts, dates, and minutiae of history, but get people together for a meal, and stuff will stick in their memories. That said, I have little interest in trying original Sumerian beer. It's enough for me to know how the beverage got its start. |
| Lots going on today, so I'll try to keep this short. It's from SciAm, and I'd find it amusing if it weren't, well, not amusing. Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand Organized crime is mining sand from rivers and coasts to feed demand worldwide, ruining ecosystems and communities. Can it be stopped? Good thing this didn't come up yesterday. People might think it was a prank. He had been in Mali doing fieldwork on the drug trade when a source noted that most cannabis in Mali came from Morocco and that sand trafficking was also a major market in that country, with drug traffickers involved. “I think that when you talk about sand trafficking, most people would not believe it,” Abderrahmane says. “Me included. Now I do.” I'm still not entirely sure I believe it. Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. For comparison, a metric ton is slightly more than an Imperial ton, less than a shit-ton, and a lot less than a metric shit-ton. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. Of all the things I'd expect us to run out of, sand is way down there on the list, right above human stupidity. Sand is any hard, granular material—stones, shells, whatever—between 0.0625 and two millimeters in diameter. Fine-quality sand is used in glass, and still-finer grades appear in solar panels and silicon chips for electronics. Desert sand typically consists of grains rounded like tiny marbles from constant weathering. The best sand for construction, however, has angular grains, which helps concrete mixtures bind. I've gone on about categorization problems in here before. This is one that has apparently been well-defined. In case you're wondering, since "angular grains" and "diameter" appear to be mutually exclusive, sand is, in my experience, graded by successive sieves. Any grains that fit through a 2mm sieve but not a 0.0625mm sieve can qualify as "sand." Those limits are arbitrary, but useful in concrete design, with which I've had some familiarity. There's a lot more to the article, but, as I said, I'm trying to be brief, finishing before too much sand passes through the hourglass. I don't have an answer for the problem, but it's one I'd never considered before, so I thought it was worth sharing. |
| Welcome to Trust No One Day. It's kind of appropriate that this article (from Mental Floss) came up at random today, because, while it's probably not intended as a prank, I don't really trust it. For various definitions of "facts." The solar system: It’s big, it’s heliocentric, and it’s got space junk to spare. "Big" is relative. From our human perspective? Sure. Compared to the rest of space? Not even a pixel. Here are 24 out-of-this-world facts about the corner of space that’s home to Earth, enough asteroids to keep Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis working for decades, and a football-shaped dwarf planet called Haumea, adapted from an episode of The List Show on YouTube. Ah, YouTube, that bastion of fact-checking. Sure, I watch science videos there, but that doesn't mean I accept them all unconditionally. I won't highlight all 24. 1. Our solar system is a group of celestial bodies in the Milky Way galaxy. Thanks. That's so helpful. I've mentioned before why "the Milky Way galaxy" is redundant: "Upward Spiral" One can think of "the solar system" as being everything affected by the gravitational pull of the Sun. Gravity drops off with distance, but never goes to zero, though at some point, the combined gravity of, well, everything else balances or outweighs the Sun's pull. 2. The sun is huge. If you combined the mass of everything in the solar system, the sun would account for more than 99 percent of that mass. Okay, fair enough, though it's much closer to 100% than 99 percent. And again, "huge" is relative. As stars go, the sun's somewhere in the middle.4. A block of lead on Venus would melt like a block of ice on earth. True enough, but misleading. There are plenty of places on Earth where a block of ice wouldn't melt, though I tend to avoid such places. Also, lead doesn't melt like water. Ice is less dense than water, which is why it floats to the top of your glass and forms skating surfaces. But okay, maybe that's too pedantic. The point is, Venus is bloody HOT (from our perspective, not the Sun's), and you wouldn't want to go there. Hotter than Mercury. The planet, not the metal that's liquid at normal temperatures here on Earth. 5. Rocks from space have been found all over planet Earth. Okay, but also pretty trivial, and that's leaving aside that every rock on Earth is "from space;" it's just a matter of how long ago it arrived. I have a meteorite fragment; they're not that uncommon. They are, however, cool. 6. Jupiter is massive. Well, duh. Compared to Earth, anyway. Compared to the sun, it's significantly less than 1% of the sun's mass. If the sun is 99.86% of the solar system's mass, though, Jupiter is most of the rest. Earth is a rounding error. 10. Space junk is a big problem. No, they're not talking about space aliens' genitals. 13. One object in our solar system orbits the Sun backwards. In 2008, astronomers discovered an object that orbits the sun at about a 104-degree tilt. Technically, this means that the 30-mile-wide object is orbiting backwards. The team that found it gave it the name Drac, based on the myth that Dracula could walk up walls. Having a retrograde orbit, or one that's nearly at right angles to the plane of planets (the ecliptic), or, in this case, both, isn't that farfetched. If I had to guess, I'd guess "captured extrasolar object," but that's just a guess. No, what I like about this one is the name. Sadly, the prank here is that "Drac" is just a nickname, not its official designation. Much easier to say than "(528219) 2008 KV42" though.14. Drac was found in the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is an area of our solar system past Neptune containing a lot of icy objects; it's also where Pluto is located. Also misleading. Pluto spends a significant fraction of its time closer to the sun than Neptune. Still, it is considered a Kuiper Belt object, but that's a categorization thing, like its non-status as a planet. Plus, given Drac's orbital inclination from the ecliptic, maybe it should be the Kuiper Shell instead. 15. Neptune has a moon that’s a lot like Pluto. Triton is probably one of those icy Kuiper Belt objects that at some point got trapped by Neptune’s gravity and has been orbiting it ever since. Triton has a couple other distinctive features: It orbits Neptune in the opposite direction than the planet is rotating, and it has geysers that erupt. Hence my "captured object" guess for Drac. 18. One dwarf planet in our solar system has also been a planet and an asteroid. Pluto’s fellow dwarf planet Ceres takes up about 25 percent of the mass of the main asteroid belt, which is located between Mars and Jupiter. In the 19th century, Ceres was considered a planet. Then it was demoted to asteroid. Finally, in 2006, it was upgraded to dwarf planet. And yet, people aren't still salty about that one. Well, maybe astrologers are; I don't know. 19. There are millions of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They can range from less than 33 feet (10 meters) to 329 miles (530 kilometers) long. See, it's because of statements like this (which is, to the best of my knowledge, accurate enough) that movies commit what I consider to be one of the most egregious errors: depicting the asteroid belt as some densely-packed rocky hazard that Our Hero has to demonstrate superhuman piloting skills to navigate. First of all, space is three-dimensional (at least); just go around. Second, if you were standing like Le Petit Prince on one of the asteroids and looking at the sky, you'd be hard-pressed to notice even one space rock. The only show that did it right was The Expanse. But I give props to Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 for inventing the quantum asteroid field, which was funny enough to overcome my pedantry. 20. Two of Saturn's moon have water. Yawn. Freakin' Mercury probably has water (ice) at the poles. So does the Moon. Not to mention the probable ocean covering Europa (one of Jupiter's moons). Water isn't rare. Water is probably second only to rock on my list of "things we find on moons." Liquid water with life swimming in it? Wake me up when we find that on a planet other than ours. 22. The tallest volcano we know of is on Mars. Olympus Mons is estimated to be 16 miles tall, meaning it’s basically three Mount Everests. That's cheating, on two levels. One, it's been extinct for an unimaginably long time, so calling it a "volcano" is nothing more than acknowledging its areological origin. Two, Mars has about 2/5 of our gravity, so of course mountains can be higher. The slope of its sides is comparatively gentle, though, and I question what datum they're measuring from. Everest is generally measured in height above sea level, but from its base on the Himalayan Plateau, it's much less tall. Measured from base, there's a volcano (an active one) in Hawai'i that's taller than Everest (the "base" there is underwater). Measured from the center of the planet, there's a peak in Ecuador that can be considered higher than either (Earth bulges at the equator), but I guarantee you Olympus Mons isn't higher by that standard, as Mars is smaller than Earth. Not to mention there's no sea level on Mars, even if there is water there. Somewhere. Probably frozen. 24. Many of these facts would still be unknown if not for space exploration. Finally, something I can't quibble about. No fooling. |
| You know what today is, right? Oh, sure, it's April Fools' Eve, of course, but being Sunday, it's time to revisit an older entry. This one was from five years ago, and follows my usual comment-on-an-article format: "Heartbreak" The BBC article is still up, as of today. Remarkable, considering how many episodes of early Doctor Who the BBC destroyed to make room for newer things. Maybe they learned their lesson.To summarize, there was some evidence that a particular heart condition is at least partially caused by stress or strong emotion. Me: The more I learn, the more I think that the commonly stated dichotomy between mind and body is bogus. I would probably phrase this differently, now. Also, throughout my entry, I seem to have used "mind" and "brain" interchangeably, which I think I'd be more careful to avoid, these days. My understanding of the internal workings of a person or other animal is rudimentary, but from what I've heard, the brain is a physical, identifiable organ located mostly in one's head. It does lots of stuff, including stuff we don't understand, but it seems to be responsible for, among other things, telling your feet to walk and your chest to occasionally fill with air. The "mind," however, is a far more nebulous concept. I seem to recall doing another entry about that at some point in the not-so-distant past; it involved René Descartes, who asserted that because you can't put a set of spatial coordinates (Descartes invented coordinates) on the mind, but you can on the brain, that there's no way that one can act upon the other. Might as well link it, too, for reference: "Mind, the Gap" In addition to walking and breathing, the brain is sometimes fairly good at thinking. More in some people than in others, but "thinking" is a legitimate activity, even if it doesn't look like much of an activity to other people. But many people think (pun intended) that it's the mind doing the thinking. Once you're done thinking, often, you do some physical activity. For example, writing what you just thought. We draw that separation between "thinking" and "doing" because we love categorizing things, like cats and dogs being different species, or Pluto not being a full-fledged planet after all. Point being, a lot of the seeming contradictions of mind/body dualism, such as in the last entry I linked, go right out the window when you consider that the mind is a product of the body. It's probably more complicated than just being conjured up by your brain, but the brain is a body part too. Descartes' assertion that the mind cannot influence the body is, therefore, wrong. Brilliant guy, but in this case, he was working from a shaky premise. Anyway. The original entry, from up top, ends with the literal video version of Total Eclipse of the Heart, and I'm pleased (state of mind and body) to see that the video is still in existence. I have a whole entry on that song (the actual song, not the parody) coming up at some point; it's in my queue and will pop up at random. |
| What I'm sharing today, from Men's Health, is two and a half years old, so its main target is what was plaguing everyone's lives in October of 2021. Nevertheless, it's still relevant. The Golden Age of Junk Science Is Killing Us Misinformation is being spewed, weaponized, and consumed at a deadly rate. Fortunately, there's a way out. Here's how to make sense of what you're seeing. Considering that not much has changed on the misinformation front, we didn't take the "way out." In a recent Economist/YouGov poll, 20 percent of U. S. citizens surveyed said they believe that Covid vaccines contain a microchip. Again, "recent" here is 2021. Obviously, 20 percent is about 20 percent too high, even if you account for poll trolls. But it's a lower number than I, a pessimist, expected. This survey also found that only 46 percent of Americans were willing to say that the microchip thing is definitely false. Okay, that's more in line with what I expected. It is becoming harder and harder to tease out the real from the unreal. Sense from nonsense. Magical thinking from microchips. Yep. Just look at the nutters trying to attribute the Baltimore bridge disaster to, well, pretty much everything except mechanical failure. Part of the problem is that we have normalized nonsense in some very subtle and some very obvious ways. Heck, there are a host of (very) successful wellness gurus who have embraced pseudoscience as a core brand strategy. "A host of?" No, it's all of them. Unless your wellness "guru" says something like "follow evidence-based medicine," which none of them do. We really should come up with a better term. Using guru like that has got to be insulting to Hindus and Buddhists. And thanks to people like Andrew Wakefield—the disgraced former physician who started the vile “vaccines cause autism” fallacy in a paper published in and later retracted by The Lancet—misinformation about vaccine safety has continued to spread and find new audiences. As I've noted before, the fallacy got lots of attention. The retraction did not. People still believe that bullshit. Besides, even if it were true, which it's not, a person's fear in that area reveals a great deal about how they really feel about the neurodivergent. But there is a way forward! By using a few critical-thinking tools and being aware of the tactics used to push misinformation, we can cut through the noise. Yeah, but we didn't. We know that misinformation can spread fast and far. In August, Facebook released a report on its most widely viewed content from January through March 2021. The winner? The post seen more times than any other was a misleading article implying the Covid vaccine had killed someone. This nugget of misinformation was viewed nearly 54 million times by Facebook users in the U. S. in that three-month period and has been leveraged by countless anti-vaccine advocates, compounding its impact. Even if the vaccine (or any course of treatment) did cause a death, what we have to do is weigh that against the expected number of deaths from doing nothing. It's pretty well-known, for example, that, on occasion, people die during surgery. Maybe from an unexpected reaction to anesthesia, or whatever. Would that mean we should stop dong medically necessary surgery, which many more people would die from the lack of? People make fun of the philosophical Trolley Problem, but there's a practical example of it right there. And that's not even getting into the fact that people die every day (in general, I mean; obviously, no one person dies every day), so it's inevitable, statistically, that some of them will die of unrelated causes after medical treatment. It's like "Frank ate a turkey dinner, then dropped dead! No way am I ever again eating turkey! Or dinner!" Another problem: Lies, fake news, and pseudoscience can be made more compelling (microchips in the vaccines!) than the boring old truth (safe, clinical-trial-tested, actual vaccine ingredients). Indeed, research has found that, yep, as the saying goes, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Fact-checking a statement takes many orders of magnitude longer than making the statement. And, because of primacy bias, often, fact-checking does absolutely no good whatsoever. The Wakefield disaster is a perfect example of primacy bias. "Vaccines cause autism!" has way more staying power than "No, they dont," even though the first statement is provably false. The article also has something to say about my favorite bias, confirmation bias. So, I do what I can. It's not enough. |
| After yesterday's rant (which indeed contained an egregious error made by me; I didn't notice it until today and by my own rules it's now set in stone forevermore), how about something fun from Cracked? This could just as well have been "5 Facts About U.S. Landmarks," but that doesn't get as many challenge-accepted-clicks. What color is the White House? The Kennedy Space Center is named after which U.S. president? These are questions that you, the well-informed reader, are proud to answer with ease. They left out the old classic: Who's buried in Grant's Tomb? That's a trick question, though; U.S. Grant and Julia Grant are interred in sarcophagi therein, not buried. 5. Why Does the Pentagon Take Up So Many Acres? And why are we still using acres? For years, the Pentagon was the world’s largest office building, boasting more than six million square feet of floor space. Let's see... commercial rents in that area go for around $30/sf (okay, yes, I'm using square feet after complaining about acres). That would be $180,000,000 in rent if it were rentable. That's per month. The Pentagon is so large because it’s the headquarters of the Department of Defense, the single largest employer in the world. The DoD employs almost three million people, and 27,000 of them work in the Pentagon. The building is especially large because we built it during World War II, which was the most complicated challenge ever faced by the Department, or by anyone. Um... well... I can think of a more complicated challenge during WWII. They released a movie about it last year. None of that answers the exact question we asked. Even if the Pentagon has to contain six million square feet, why is it so spread out, across 30 acres? Because the banks of the tidal Potomac aren't known for being able to support skyscrapers? Washington, D.C. doesn’t have the skyscrapers many other cities do (no building in that town should be higher than the Washington Monument), but plenty of its buildings have 10 floors or more. (1) The Pentagon lurks in Arlington County, VA, not Washington, DC. (2) My understanding of the DC building law is that no building can be taller than the Capitol. But that's irrelevant, because (1). (3) After checking around a bit, my understanding of (2) was wrong; it's more complicated than that. But that's irrelevant, because (1). (4) Even ignoring all that, the National Cathedral in DC is built on high ground, and its spire exceeds the elevation of the tip of the WM.Normally, a taller and narrower building would be the wiser choice. Land is scarce in most locations where a building this large is desirable. Except that building taller and narrower buildings requires better subsurface features, either bedrock (like in NYC) or massive underground structures to distribute the load. If space were truly an issue back then, there wouldn't be all surface parking around it. Plus, elevators move up and down, not side-to-side. Easy enough to fix. Wonka might have some design ideas there. But for a building to stand many floors tall, you need lots of steel, and during construction, they wanted to use as little steel as possible, to save the stuff for the war effort. Okay, there's that, too. The real question here is: why a pentagon? Even in the early 1940s, they must have expected conspiracy theories. The actual answer is more mundane: the original design was meant to be bordered by five roads. I should note that, while civil engineering technology plods along, it does eventually advance, and I'm pretty sure that right now there are no engineering barriers to building skyscrapers on the banks of the Potomac. Probably not going to happen, though, because engineers don't run governments. 4. Where Is the Center of Gravity of the Space Needle? Sure, let's hop to the entire other coast. I did that once. Took off from Washington (actually Arlington) and landed in Washington (actually Tacoma). Skipping to the spoiler: The building may look like a needle pointing from the ground to the sky, but a large bulk of the structure’s mass sits underground. The foundations run 30 feet below the surface, and these foundations weigh 5,840 tons. I told you tall buildings required big foundations. Now, I know way more about foundation requirements in Virginia than in Washington state, but I'm pretty sure the Needle was built on bedrock. Problem is, it's in an earthquake zone. Oh, and here's more fuel for the conspiracy fire: The Needle was privately financed and built by the Pentagram Corporation... 3. What Faces Did South Dakota Want to Carve into Mount Rushmore? If it were up to me, it'd be Curly, Larry, Moe, and Shemp. It started out with a more narrow focus. First of all, the idea for the monument came from South Dakota specifically, rather than from the federal government that provided funding. That's because there is literally nothing else interesting in the entirety of South Dakota. As it was conceived as a South Dakota attraction, it was originally supposed to be themed more to the region. Rather than depicting four presidents, it was supposed to depict figures from the Old West. These included Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea. Lewis and Clark were from around my hometown. We had a big statue of them, along with Sacagawea, at a prominent intersection. Remember that this is Charlottesville, and take a guess if the statue's still there. In fairness, while the statue was meant to depict the white guys staring boldly off into the distant wilderness while their Native guide did some tracking or whatever, it ended up looking like the poor girl was cowering at the heroic-looking pair's feet. I do wish they'd do something with the plinth, though. Right now, it's a big hunk of concrete. Maybe a giant inoffensive abstract hypercube. Except that abstract art also offends some people. 2. Who Was the St. Louis Arch Accused of Plagiarizing? Hint: It's not McDonald's. 1. How Long Does the Grand Canyon’s River Take to Reach the Ocean? If I'm being honest, this is the only one of these that I got right without looking at the text. The Grand Canyon's river is the Colorado, which also supplies some well-known desert reservoirs and a bunch of farms. The answer, if you just consider surface runoff and not the evaporation-clouds-rain water cycle, is infinity. Because by the time you trace the old channel of the Colorado down to the Gulf of California (an arm of the Pacific, so "ocean" isn't the trick part), all the water is gone, diverted to thirsty people or agriculture, or evaporated naturally. This is, of course, a marvel of civil engineering, and I should be quite proud of my field's accomplishments. I'm not. |
| I'm aware that language changes over time. But some things are just always wrong. For example, "alot" is not, never has been, and never will be a word, as in "I have alot of problems with spelling." One does not "loose" one's keys if they're misplaced; one can only "lose" them. "It's" is never possessive, and is always a contraction of "it is." But, being Southern, this one especially annoys me: The South is known for its laundry list of unique, quirky, cultural sayings, like "Bless your heart," "Too big for his britches," and "Well, I s'wanee," to name a few. Okay, I've never heard that last one until now. I don't know everything, but damn if I'm not working on it. But the best-known word in the Southern vernacular is probably our most-loved pronoun: y'all. And make no mistake, it is absolutely a word. Modern English lacks a universally-agreed-upon second person plural, and the other candidates, with the possible exception of the very British "you lot," just don't work outside their regions. The only proper way to spell the contraction of "you" and "all" is "y'all." And that should be the final word on the subject, but I guarantee you, sometime soon, I'll see someone's typed it as "ya'll" and rage will boil up once again. The article goes into why. Basically, an apostrophe serves two major purposes in English: possessives (for words that are NOT pronouns such as "it"), and to replace missing letters. There are a few edge cases, but they mostly involve borrowed words from other languages. "Y'all" is obviously not possessive, so the apostrophe replaces missing letters. The missing letters are "ou." As in "you all" contracts to "y'all." I did say the apostrophe is not used for pronoun possessives, but here, "y'all" is an exception. If you're writing about something that belongs to y'all, it's "y'all's," as in "Where's [where is] y'all's [belonging or relating to all of you] tater tots?" (Never mind that it should be "Where are your tater tots?"; you gotta cut people a bit of slack.) For context, one might ask a helpful grocery store employee this question, usually while standing right next to the freezer containing the tater tots. Though, to be fair, Wikipedia asserts: "The possessive form of y'all has not been standardized; numerous forms can be found, including y'alls, y'all's, y'alls's, you all's, your all's, and all of y'all's."Unlike French, German, and Spanish languages, the English language does not have a designed second-person plural pronoun. I think they mean "designated," because English was far from "designed." But yes, it does. It's "y'all." Anyway, the French second-person plural doubles as the formal second-person singular, and you have to figure out the difference from context. What we desperately need is another second-person plural. Right now, if I said, "We are going to a party tonight," it's ambiguous whether "we" refers to "I and you" or "I and my closest friends, of which you are not one." Call it first-person plural inclusive and first-person plural exclusive. I suggest "ze" for the latter, but no one cares. While we're on the subject of poor spelling, what the hell is up with "Opps!"? Look. I've never, ever heard someone exclaim "opps," which, by that spelling, would be like in "drops." No, I've only ever heard "Oops," though the oo there can be pronounced either like book or like boob. Speaking of boobs, I've been seeing more and more people writing something like "a women" as in "There was a women waiting for the store to open." No. There is no such thing as "a women." There's a woman, or there's several women. Look, I'm not saying I never make mistakes. That would be a mistake. And by Waltz's Second Law of the Internet, because this post discusses spelling mistakes, it probably contains an inadvertent spelling mistake. But come on... at least try. |
| Unless you've been hiding under a rock or on a remote arctic island, you know there will be a total solar eclipse visible from parts of North America in a couple of weeks. I've known about it since 2010 or so, when I decided I wanted to see an eclipse, even if it meant traveling, and I saw that there would be not one, but two solar eclipses within the following 15 years visible from places that didn't even require me to put up with the discomfort, indignity, and humiliation of air travel. Of course, this foreknowledge (eclipses can be predicted to a very high degree of space-time accuracy even several centuries out) didn't stop me from procrastinating the procurement of travel arrangements until very nearly the last minute, but the fault there lies not in the heavans, but in myself. Point is, stuff about the upcoming eclipse is all over the news. Where to see it. How to get the proper viewing glasses. Hell, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if someone didn't have a "what shoes should we wear for the eclipse" (sponsored, of course, by a shoe manufacturer). I hate to add to that cacophony; perhaps you're sick of eclipse pieces by now, and I wouldn't blame you. But I couldn't let this egregious pandering from a formerly distinguished and reputable source (BBC) go unremarked. "Move over?" Look. There is, objectively, no sight more spectacular than that of a total solar eclipse. None. Oh, you may think "except for the birth of my child," but no, babies get born thousands of times a day and they all come from the same place and look exactly the same. A partial eclipse doesn't come close. A lunar eclipse is cool, but ooh, the moon turned red; now what? I thought Avengers:Endgame was a fun movie with great CGI, but it still can't touch an eclipse on the grandeur scale. Photos, no matter how good, cannot capture the experience. No writer has ever been able to pen words that convey even ten percent of the awesomeness. The only thing I can even conceive of that might approach the spectacle of a total eclipse is if there were a nearby (but not too nearby) supernova; those things can outshine entire galaxies and can be visible during the daytime. But even that, while astronomers and cosmologists would absolutely have orgasms over it, couldn't possibly match the unique experience of a total solar eclipse. So this nova had better come with multicolored flashing lights engineered by sentient aliens saying "We did this!" for it to even be in the same galactic quadrant of gloriousness as a total solar eclipse. The nova T Coronae Borealis explodes about once every 80 years. In other words, it's somewhat predictable, but not nearly to the accuracy of eclipses. While the world's attention has been focused on the total solar eclipse that will occur later this spring, the distant Corona Borealis binary system – which contains one dead white dwarf star and one ageing red giant star – has been busy gearing up for its own moment of glory: a spectacular nova explosion. I'll say this for the article: it does a pretty good job explaining, based on the best science we have, how and why this happens. So, how will this event overtake the eclipse in the race of awesome? The T CrB star system normally has a visibility magnitude +10 in terms of brightness, according to Nasa. But when the upcoming T CrB nova eruption takes place, the visibility will jump significantly, up to what's known as a magnitude +2, which is far brighter than a +10. To put that into some context, a +2 is a similar level of brightness as the North Star, Polaris. By the time that happens, T CrB will be visible to the naked eye. Magnitude 2? Magnitude 2? And you have the audacity to compare the experience of seeing this to witnessing the moon eat the sun, belch corona, and shit the sun out again? Despite what a certain pop song asserts ("You are as constant as the Northern Star, the brightest light that shines") Polaris is neither all that bright, nor constant. Not only is it a Cepheid variable, which means its absolute brightness fluctuates over time, but apart from its useful position near the north celestial pole, there's nothing distinguishing it from surrounding stars. Hell, the only way I can ever find it in the sky is to locate the Big Dipper (hard to miss) and follow the two "bowl" stars across the blackness to Polaris, which is the tail star of the Little Dipper. Further, due to precession, it wasn't the North Star in the past and won't be in the future. So much for "constant." Don't get your scientific facts from popular music. Well, except maybe They Might Be Giants. And Schoolhouse Rock. The dimmest stars you can see on a clear, cold night in the desert, if you have decent eyesight, are magnitude 6. From a city, you can usually see magnitude 2 stars, but they lack context. It's a logarithmic scale, like with earthquake magnitudes or decibels. I'm a big fan of astronomy and love looking at the night sky, but if a new mag-2 point of light shows up in a small, obscure northern constellation, and I didn't know there was a nova, I'd never even notice it. Those hoping to see the nova display should look in the sky for the constellation Corona Borealis, or the Northern Crown – a small, semicircular arc near Bootes and Hercules, says Nasa. Right, because everyone can recognize Boötes and Hercules at a glance. (The article does helpfully provide constellation illustrations.) Now, look. I'm not downplaying how awesome the nova is from a scientific viewpoint. We certainly have better instruments to observe it with than we did last time it flared, and I bet they'll do some great research on the thing. And I'll do what I can to take a look at it, myself. But from our everyday perspective? It's not going to outdo a total solar eclipse. I think the BBC is just salty that we Yanks get two solar eclipses seven years apart, while they haven't had any in a while. So, speaking of celestial sights, I recently found out that there's a comet visiting us here in the inner solar system, and that it might—just might—become visible during totality.My first thought upon reading that was "That would be so fucking awesome." And then, like a few hours later, it hit me: People are, in general, prone to superstition; and both eclipses and comets have been considered portents of DOOM through most of human history. Having both in the sky at once? Damn, that would be spectacular. Except... idiots. Think I'm being too harsh on the people of the land? Well, consider this article from Atlas Obscura: Why Doomsayers Think the Eclipse Will Bring Disaster to Illinois “If you lived forever, and you never moved from where you are today, on average, you would have to wait 400 years for a total eclipse to come across where you are,” says Frank Close, Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College. The likelihood that you could experience two total solar eclipses in one place in the space of seven years is miniscule. The chances are so low, that some believe something special is going on in Carbondale. In particular, conspiracy theorists believe that a seismic event will be triggered when the eclipse arrives in this part of the state, known as Little Egypt, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Back when I was preparing for the 2017 eclipse, I noticed that the track took it right over Yellowstone. Pretty much everyone knows about the Yellowstone Supervolcano (though the actual danger there may be, pun intended, overblown), so I tried to start a rumor that the combined gravitational forces of the sun and moon would aggravate the magma underneath Yellowstone, causing the doomsday eruption. It's a stupid enough idea that I was genuinely surprised when it didn't gain traction. Now, let's be clear. Something bad is going to happen. Something bad often happens, like just the other day when that container ship destroyed the bridge near Baltimore. There's usually a reason for it, but that reason is never a) we're sinners or b) celestial events (unless the celestial event is, you know, a nearby supernova or a giant meteor hitting the planet, in which case it's still not because we're sinners). But I'm glad my idea didn't take off, even though it logically made more sense than the Carbondale "theory" (and by "more sense," I really mean "slightly less nonsense"). Because shit like that often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like when it's about to snow, and you think the grocery store is about to run out of milk and bread, so you rush there along with everyone else in town to buy out the entire stock of milk and bread. If you want to contemplate cosmic coincidences, the one to ponder is this: the sun and moon appear to be about the same size in the sky. Because of elliptical orbits, sometimes they seem slightly bigger or smaller, which is why you sometimes get annular (ring of fire) eclipses instead of totality. But there's no known scientific reason for this coincidence. In the distant past, the moon was closer and appeared larger. In the future, it will be more distant and all eclipses will be annular. There will, consequently, at some point, be a last total solar eclipse. And that makes me ineffably sad. Me? I plan on going to central Indiana. It's fairly close to here, with some good hang time for totality. Because I'm me, though, I fully expect thick obscuring cloud cover. That would suck. But at least I saw the one in 2017. |
| No article to share today, just a personal update: I wanted to say thanks, everyone, for acknowledging that I have the best opinion. I've always known that, of course, but it's good to have others acknowledge it. ...wait, what? Oh, my mistake. This blog is the 2023 Quill winner for the Opinion genre. Apparently, that's not the same thing as saying I have the best opinions. Who knew? Long-time readers (or anyone who bothered to see all the stuff at the bottom of the intro) will note that it did not win Best Blog this year, after taking the title for several years running. Some might wonder how I feel about that, so let me set the record straight: I'm thrilled. Other people are doing wonderful blogs, and I was starting to get a little embarrassed hogging the limelight for four years in a row. Not that I mind winning too much, you understand; I wasn't embarrassed enough to have voluntarily withdrawn the blog from consideration altogether. So congrats to all the other Quill winners, runners-up, finalists, and nominees. And, of course, huge thanks to the organizers; that project is massive, and I certainly wouldn't be able to do it and still keep whatever remains of my mind intact. I'd link everyone here, but I'd probably mess up and leave someone out, so I'll just post the actual winners / finalists list:
Besides, I'm entirely too lazy to copy/paste all those usernames. And I still say I have the best opinion. Back to articles tomorrow, but not a random one; I have a time-sensitive link to post. |
| Today, I'm sharing a link that shows, once again, that it's fun to set things on fire. Back? As fire as I'm concerned, it never went away. Here at Gastro Obscura, we really like playing with fire. When I was a kid, the thing I got in trouble for the most (and this is saying something) was playing with fire. There was the time that editor Sam O’Brien made feuerzangenbowle, a flaming German rum punch with roots in the rowdy student culture of the 1700s. Then there was the night I risked my fingers and eyebrows with the Victorian party game known as Snapdragon, where players compete to pull raisins and almonds out of a puddle of burning brandy. "Snapdragon." Get it? Huh? There's one problem with flaming food and drink: I have facial hair I'd like to keep. Okay, two problems: it's harder to exercise reasonable precautions when you're drinking flaming booze while already drunk. Both of those were Christmastime traditions, though. I’d argue that adding flaming alcohol to food and drink should be a year-round thing. Absolutely! And April Fools' Day is coming up fast... Setting food on fire with warm booze was considered the height of luxury for a good chunk of the 20th century. Now, I don't know about that. The iconic "height of luxury" was usually champagne and caviar. Champagne can be delicious, but caviar? Meh. Besides looking pretty, what does flambéing do to a dish? There’s the taste of the liquor—which could be rum, bourbon, Calvados, or brandy—with some of the potency burned away, resulting in a smoother taste. I've heard some people assert that it burns away all the alcohol. It does not. I suspect that at least part of the reason it fell out of favor was anti-alcohol attitudes. I’ve flambéed a few things in my time, so I decided to set myself a challenge: to flambé my breakfast, lunch, and dinner over the course of one day. My biggest problem with the technique is that it burns away at least some of the alcohol. This is alcohol abuse. The only time I tolerate it is if it makes something else better, which, generally, flambé does. Doing it for every meal, though? That's a stunt. I guess it worked, because I read the article and shared it. Though we have no way of knowing if the author is completely honest about the "every meal for a day" thing, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, mainly because it doesn't much matter. There follows the actual dishes prepared, with hunger-inducing photographs. I just have one thing to add: absinthe. The first time I tried absinthe was at a Moroccan-themed bar here in my town. I forget the exact ritual they went through, but fire was involved. And I liked it enough to go buy absinthe and try it myself. But the serving of absinthe, with or without fire, is kind of finicky. Sure, you can drink it straight, like other liqueurs, but, like some other liqueurs, it's not really meant to be straight. At the very least, the serving of absinthe involves ice water and sugar. Generally, you pour the absinthe into a specialty glass and then use some contraption to let the ice water drip slowly into it over a sugar cube. As I am, above all, a science nerd, I decided to compare flaming absinthe to not-flaming absinthe. Of course, I used the same absinthe, same water source (my kitchen sink) and the same kind of sugar (Domino's brown sugar cubes), because science is all about controlling variables. The result? In my not-humble opinion, the one without fire had the superior flavor. It was also, I can only assume, more potent because the alcohol hadn't burned off. However... the flaming absinthe was just more fun. |
| Today is the day when I dig into the archives for a past post and talk about what's changed—in me or in the world. Unfortunately, what's changed in this case is that both of the links I shared are now broken: "Took the train down to Athens" , from 14 years ago.On one talon, it should be no surprise that 14-year-old links are broken. On the other talon, they were from The Daily Mash (kind of the British version of The Onion, still in existence) and Cracked (which, though it's gone through its own changes, I continue to read and, on occasion, share). Everyone knows that Greece's economy has taken a turn for the worse, right? I reiterate: this was 2010. Lots of economies had already tanked. Some had even begun to recover. (There followed a movie reference that was probably a lame attempt at a joke even way back then.) But it's the next-to-last paragraph that had me rolling on the floor laughing my acronyms off. And sadly, whatever that funny bit was is probably lost in the mists of time. Someone might be able to find it by searching the internet archives. But that someone will not be me. The world has moved on since then, and there are more relevant jokes around. Besides, I just can't be arsed. Bonus link is from Cracked: Back then, that site ran Photoshop contests that schlubs like us (not me, though, because I suck at photo editing). This was apparently one of them. Incidentally, The Daily Mash was paywalled last time I tried to look at it (it's been a while). They're funny, but not funny enough for me to subscribe. The title of the post was, as with some of my other entry titles, a reference to a song. If you feel cheated by all the broken links, at least I can post the relevant music video, Euro-Trash Girl from Cracker, who I once had the pleasure of seeing in concert: Took the train down to Athens And I slept in a fountain Some Swiss junkie in Turin Ripped me off for my cash Yeah, I'll search the world over For my angel in black Yeah, I'll search the world over For a Euro-trash girl |
| Got a long one for you today. It's from Truly*Adventure, a source I've never used before, and it's a few years old. As the title is kinda vague, and the subtitle is kinda long, I'll sum it up as quick as I can: A volcano erupted, people fled, and other people saved the animals left behind. What makes this interesting to me is that I've visited the volcano. While it was active. The Soufriere Hills Volcano had been threatening the small Caribbean island of Montserrat for two years. I mean, technically, the island of Montserrat is the Soufriere Hills volcano. It was dormant for so long they thought it was extinct. Turns out it wasn't. The article is, as I said, long. So this is more to share it, and recount my own experience, than to make comments on it. There exists a photo of me—rare, I know— standing next to the volcano exclusion zone sign on Montserrat. Really, I should have put at least one foot over the line to demonstrate just how rebellious I am. But it's probably wrong for me to joke (though that's never stopped me before). What happened to Montserrat is a real tragedy. Thousands displaced. City destroyed. Fortunately, they're a Commonwealth country, so England took a bunch of them. But how do you go from living on a tropical island paradise to cold and windy Old Blighty? Not that Montserrat isn't windy. There's a distinct difference between the windward and leeward sides of the island. One's mostly barren, with sporadic trees that grow diagonally because of the winds off the Atlantic. The other's a tropical rainforest. Or, well, was, before it turned to ash. And a few holdouts remained on the island. To avoid the exclusion zone, they migrated to the inhospitable (barren and windy) northern lobe. I haven't been there for 20 years, but I recall makeshift dwellings and such. Hopefully, things have improved by now. At the time, I considered myself lucky to get a tour of the island, at least those parts open to travel. Unless you live in a volcano zone, it's not every day you get to observe an active one, and even rarer that you can do so in relative safety. Standing on a windy hillside, I watched the mountain blow plumes of smoke while the ground vibrated beneath my feet. Clouds hovered around the summit, and, despite the wind, never cleared. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but it's too early in the morning for me to tease it out. |
| Good writers shun clichés, and avoid them like the plague. Then there's Cracked: Every cliché starts from somewhere. As I've said so many times it's become cliché: Every cliché was once profound wisdom. Often, these tropes don’t simply stay exactly the same until we’re all sick of them. Hunt down their debut, and you’ll see something different from what you’re now picturing. There is an important distinction between a cliché and a trope, but I can't be arsed to get into that right now. But it's like... in action movies, explosions are tropes. Hard to have an action movie without at least one explosion. It's part of their charm, along with car chases and fight scenes. But the action hero calmly walking toward the camera while shit explodes in the background? That's cliché. But the first time we saw it (I don't remember what movie), it was fresh, cool, and different. 5. The First Damsel Tied to Railroad Tracks Was a Man If you’re a mustachioed villain, and you have a helpless maiden in your clutches, you know what you have to do. The villainous mustache has transcended trope and cliché and achieved icon status. The article delves into the history, here, and it's worth looking at if only for the photo of greatest villainous mustache of all time. But, as the header suggests, the first fictional track-victim was male. I'm sure someone could get their college thesis done on just this topic alone. In any case, this seems to be an instance of the original idea being twisted, and that twist becoming the cliché. 4. The Emperor’s New Clothes Was About Fear of Being Disinherited That story isn't so much trope or cliché as it is an important literary reference that everyone should know. In the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, the emperor walks around naked, and no one’s willing to point this out, having been told that only smart people can see the clothes. This offers lessons for everyday life. Sometimes, people are just pretending to know what they’re talking about. Sometimes, the stuff that wins awards is garbage. Also: A whole lot of people are afraid of looking stupid. One might even suggest it's a ready-made metaphor. 3. The First Man Who Asked for Three Wishes Was a Dick Joke A man finds a lamp, and when he rubs it, out comes a genie. “I will grant you three wishes,” says the genie. “Great,” says the man. “I will wish for two normal things, and for my third wish, I will trigger the punchline.” The "rule of three" doesn't only apply to comedy. That's only where it's most apparent. The header here is perhaps misleading, as the original format (from the One Thousand and One Nights) was less joke than fable. 2. The First Bad Boy Was Pretty Lame We use the phrase “bad boy” to describe not just actual children but excitingly rebellious men. We consider that normal, but it’s a little odd. There are only a handful of arenas in which it’s considered okay to call a man a boy. And there's at least one situation where one should never, ever do that. But apart from that, clearly, the author of this piece isn't Southern. We call rebels “bad boys” because of an 1870 novel called The Story of a Bad Boy. The main character, Tom Bailey, is a rebel but is also very much a boy. His antics include scaring people by setting off a cannon and pushing a car into a fire. As the "car" as we know it wasn't invented for almost another 20 years, this must be one of the other definitions of "car." 1. “The Butler Did It” Wasn’t a Cliché But a Cheat Another one that makes great joke fodder, but is cheating in detective stories. Apparently, it's always been a cheat. You might think that The Butler Did It became an unforgivable trope after tons of murder mysteries pulled that trick, until it got old. That’s not really what happened. Instead, in 1928, an author of detective novels published a set of rules that he claimed mysteries should follow, and among them was a rule saying the culprit must not be a servant. I'm just going to pause here and bask in the elitism of it all. Moving on... That set of rules was written by S.S. Van Dine, who went by “Willard Huntington Wright” when he wasn’t writing detective fiction. The rules start out reasonable enough, talking about how the author must play fair and provide all necessary clues. Then it makes some questionable blanket statements about what all mysteries must do — there must be just one detective, the crime must always be murder and “there must be no love interest.” By Rule 16, Dine is insisting that mysteries must have “no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations.” I don't usually subscribe to the notion that rules were made to be broken. In this case, though, I'll make an exception. Breaking my own rule, as it were. Rule number 11 says, “A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.” Elitism intensifies... Dine’s rules laid out a few other solutions that he says stories should never use. The death should never be revealed to be an accident, he said, or a suicide. The detective must never be the culprit. There must never be multiple culprits. The solution must not involve the killer committing the murder after the police have broken into the crime scene. Yeah, those aren't rules. Those are story ideas. In other news, I'm going to attempt to make this my last hyphen-pun-titled entry for a while. It's becoming cliché. |
| Here's one from The New Yorker that, when I first read it, I thought: This has comedic potential. When Philosophers Become Therapists The philosophical-counselling movement aims to apply heady, logical insights to daily life. I mean, think about it. "Doc, I'm distressed because I can't find meaning in life." "That's because life has no meaning, so stop looking for it." "Wow! That's deep! Thank you." "Sure. That'll be $180." "Here's $200." "Thanks!" "Can I have change?" "You already did." Around five years ago, David—a pseudonym—realized that he was fighting with his girlfriend all the time. On their first date, he had told her that he hoped to have sex with a thousand women before he died. All the TNY pieces I've seen start out with anecdotes and then, maybe, bit by halting bit, go around and around in circles until they get to something more general. Sometimes they never even get there, which I call "The New Yorker School of Not Getting to the Fucking Point." This one contains a whole lot of anecdotes. My point, which you'll note I'm getting to very quickly, is that I'm going to skip a lot of it here. In brief, he worked with a philosophical therapist named Lydia Amir. I might have missed it, but I don't think the article notes whether he had sex with her or not. Between meetings, Amir sometimes gave him reading assignments: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hume. Oh yes, definitely, if I'm having an existential crisis, those are absolutely the philosophers I want to read. Amir is one of a small but growing number of philosophers who provide some form of individual counselling. In the United States, two professional associations for philosophical counsellors, the National Philosophical Counseling Association (N.P.C.A.) and the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (A.P.P.A.), list dozens of philosophers who can help you with your problems. Well. Philosophy tends to pay jack shit. Therapy, however, can bring in the bucks. Philosophy is both a natural and a strange resource for helping people resolve the problems of life. Ancient philosophical traditions such as Stoicism and Buddhism focussed on practical ethics and techniques for alleviating suffering, but much modern philosophy seems to aim to express suffering, rather than reduce it. I wouldn't call the aim of those philosophies to be "alleviating suffering," but there's always the possibility that I don't really understand Stoicism or Buddhism. Some think that the practice of philosophical counselling should be more standardized. Others worry that philosopher-counsellors will miss serious mental-health issues. The two major American professional organizations stress that philosophical counselling can’t address certain severe psychiatric disorders, and urge counsellors to refer clients to mental-health providers when their issues do not fit a philosophical scope of practice. Well, that's somewhat relieving. It's one thing to seek someone else's point of view, or be able to talk things through with a neutral party. It's another to have legitimate mental health issues that need more medical treatment. So, anecdotes (and jokes) aside, this kind of thing obviously exists (in the same sense that anything can be said to truly exist), and it mildly amuses me. Does it work? All the TNY anecdotes in the world won't convince me one way or the other; I want to see a study. I'm sure a philosophical therapist would have something to say about my need for evidence-based science. But, you know. Whatever. |
| Well, "Spring is Sprung" , as they say, so for no reason other than random chance, here's a Wired article in praise of Wikipedia. Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it's a beacon of so much that's right. Of course, Writing.com is really the Last Best Place on the Internet, but I'll accept Wikipedia as a close second. Remember when Wikipedia was a joke? In its first decade of life, the website appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. I've noted before that WDC came into being prior to Wikipedia. Not by much, mind you. September 2000 and January 2001. I remember when those years seemed so futuristic. We expected interplanetary travel, jetpacks, flying cars, suborbital transport, and asteroid mining. What we got was the internet. The article is long, but here's a few select comments. To confess that you've just repeated a fact you learned on Wikipedia is still to admit something mildly shameful. It's as though all those questions that used to pepper think pieces in the mid-2000s—Will it work? Can it be trusted? Is it better than Encyclopedia Britannica?—are still rhetorical, when they have already been answered, time and again, in the affirmative. I remember back then, someone took a random sampling of articles from both Wiki and EB and fact-checked the hell out of them. They came in about equal. Of course, that was 20 years ago, and a few things have changed. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. It does do a fundraising event every year, kind of like public radio. I'm not the least bit embarrassed to say that I contribute. Money, that is. I don't have the will to contribute content there. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked? I have, at times, noted that it's the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. Like that ancient institution, I fully expect it to be overrun and destroyed by the know-nothings, at some point. Until that happens, I continue to use it. Wikipedia and Britannica do, at least, share a certain lineage. The idea of building a complete compendium of human knowledge has existed for centuries, and there was always talk of finding some better substrate than paper: H. G. Wells thought microfilm might be the key to building what he called the “World Brain”; Thomas Edison bet on wafer-thin slices of nickel. Wells was a science fiction writer, and Edison was a hack. They were both products of their time and prognosticated the best they could with the technology available to them. Wells couldn't foresee some storage medium denser than microfilm, and there was no way Edison or anyone else (not even Tesla) could have predicted semiconductor technology (or, if they did, it was by mere chance). There is, as I said, lots more interesting information in the article. One reason I'm sharing this is that I have a tendency to hyperlink Wikipedia entries here, and I wanted to justify that. Two things can happen with crowdsourcing. Well, more than two, as usual, but at the extremes, you can get the worst of humanity, or the best. As the article notes, Wikipedia isn't perfect. Nothing is. But it represents the best of humanity, while social media usually represents the worst. |
| The equinox will occur later today (or early tomorrow if you live in certain time zones), so it's appropriate that this cosmological link resulted from my random die roll today. Warning: It's from Salon, a source I don't normally use and that might be problematic. Sure, we're all made of stardust. But what does that really mean? We often hear that our bodies contain elements from the stars. But how do we know this for sure? Personally, I think it's the most meaningful, profound insight in all of science. As far as I know, most cultures have an origin story: we were shaped from trees; we appeared out of literal nothing; we were formed from clay; whatever. I use passive voice there because, usually, gods were involved, powerful entities that predated humanity. Some origin stories also attempt to explain where those creator gods came from, but you quickly run into the turtle problem: if Earth is a flat disc resting on the back of a giant turtle, what's holding up the turtle? Another turtle? Well, what's holding up that one? It's turtles all the way down. Now, you could say, "But science runs into the same problem. If all that exists was created in a Big Bang, how and where did the Big Bang... well... bang?" This is a fair question, however it's stated. And science doesn't have a definitive answer. The difference between that and creation myths is that science doesn't pretend to have a definitive answer. In any case, one reason I find it meaningful is that it doesn't just focus on one human tribe, or even on humanity in general, but the entire universe; that is to say, everything. How humans came to be from non-humans is the focus of evolutionary biology, not cosmology. And how different tribes formed is in the purview of, among other disciplines, anthropology. I'll grant that the creation stories our ancestors came up with have a certain poetry to them (and say an awful lot about the cultures involved), but to me, they all read like "Just-So" stories. Or, well, vice-versa. But my point stands. With that, I won't be quoting too much from the article. That was really the thing I most wanted to say. As the poets at NASA put it, “from the carbon in our DNA to the calcium in our bones, nearly all of the elements in our bodies were forged in the fiery hearts and death throes of stars.” Poetry again. It depends what you mean by "nearly all." By mass, it's mostly oxygen (the "ox" in "Hydrox" from yesterday's entry). By number of atoms, we're mostly hydrogen (the "hydr" in "Hydrox" from yesterday's entry). You might also recognize these elements as the atoms of water, and I'm sure you've heard that we're well over 50% water, so that all tracks, though both hydrogen and oxygen are part of other molecules in our bodies, notably carbon-based ones.Point being that hydrogen is mostly primordial, not forged in stars. Though an argument could be made that, at the very least, protons are mostly primordial, no matter how many of them are in a given nucleus. And they’ve been around far longer than we have. Light elements started forming an estimated 14 billion years ago, actually, in the first few minutes after the Big Bang, though others didn’t come around till a few hundred thousand years later when the universe cooled down enough for electrons to stay in orbit around atomic nuclei. That... doesn't quite mesh with my understanding, though I admit my understanding may be off. An element is defined by the number of protons in its nucleus, irrespective of the number of electrons associated with it. A proton is a hydrogen atom (technically, it's a hydrogen ion, but whatever). So once you have free-roaming protons, you have hydrogen. Therefore, it doesn't matter if a proton (or a bound pair or triad of protons, together with the appropriate number of neutrons) has electrons or not; it's still hydrogen, helium, or lithium, respectively. In fairness, the article calls out these elements in the next paragraph; I just have quibbles with how the information is phrased. But you don’t just kill a star and get an entire cupboard of elements suitable for whipping up whatever material good — whether Uranus or, with apologies, your anus — you’re after. Apology absolutely not accepted. Seventh-planet puns are never funny. Well, almost never. Apart from that, well, the article delves into the science of it all, and I won't rehash it further. Suffice it to say, for my purposes, that we know, insofar as we can ever truly know anything, that we are indeed stardust. So is your dog. And poison ivy. And plastic and concrete. The good, the bad, and the ugly. |
| Here's an article about an important component of life. The curious case of the disappearing Hydrox cookies Oreo, the Hydrox knockoff, has been accused of burying its competitor by scoring sweetheart deals with grocers. Does it wield too much power over smaller rivals? Yes, Oreo was a Hydrox knockoff, not the other way around. But that crap happened around 1910. Maybe stop worrying about who was first? Audrey Peard is searching for an elusive, chocolatey piece of Americana: a package of Hydrox cookies. Come to think of it, I haven't seen them in a while, either. Can't go to the grocery store without hearing the siren call of Oreos (which I usually ignore because they produced, then yanked, my favorite ones), but haven't seen Hydrox since before I can remember. She’s visited multiple grocery stores near her home in the Bronx, followed a Facebook group, and even talked to a manager at a production facility in El Segundo, California, about supply shortages. El Segundo may sound like an obscure California town, but in reality, it's right next to LAX. Hardly obscure. Hydrox was the original chocolate sandwich cookie, predating Oreo. With a mildly sweet creme and a crunchier cookie that has a darker chocolate taste than its rival, Hydrox developed a reputation as the dessert of the discerning eater. It was, according to legendary food writer Calvin Trillin, the “far superior” cookie. Sure, but this is the US. We ignore the superior in favor of the cheap and/or flood-marketed. That's kind of our thing; we even apply it to countries. Hydrox, meanwhile, was discontinued in 2003. It came back in 2015 thanks to Leaf Brands, a San Diego-based company that specializes in reheated nostalgia. Well, that might explain why I haven't seen any for a while. Like almost anything else, you can buy Hydrox on Amazon (in bulk). Don't fucking tell me that. Dammit! In March 1912, the first batch of Oreos produced for sale was shipped from Nabisco’s six-story Romanesque-style headquarters in Manhattan to a grocer in Hoboken, New Jersey. It would’ve been a historic moment of American innovation if not for an inconvenient fact: Nabisco totally copied the cookie. Another US thing. See also: Thomas Edison. A smaller rival, Sunshine Biscuits (then known as The Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company), was started by Jacob and Joseph Loose in 1902. Now, this is where my inner linguist starts asking questions. Nabisco was originally National Biscuit Company. Obviously, they both mostly made cookies, not biscuits. Except that in British English (and also in French), what we call cookies, they call biscuits. And what we call biscuits aren't technically biscuits at all ("biscuit" comes from Latin words for something like "twice baked"), though obviously they're delicious in their own way. But these were clearly American companies, as evidenced by their locations in New York and Kansas City. So why "biscuits?" Did we only split off from British usage after the watershed moment when someone invented the first delicious creme-filled sandwich biscuit/cookie? Apparently not. And it looks like we can blame the Dutch for, among other things, "cookie."To complicate matters further, some cookies are called crackers. All of which is to gloss over the fact that it's too bad they didn't stick with Loose-Wiles. Anyway, the article goes off on a tangent about corporations and unions in the US, before going on with: In 1908, Sunshine created one of its most popular products, Hydrox. If you're thinking that's a portmanteau of hydrogen and oxygen, well... According to company lore, the name stemmed from the elements of water — hydrogen and oxygen — chosen to symbolize the cookie’s cleanliness at a time when materials like chalk and plaster of Paris routinely appeared in baked goods. I mean, technically they should have called them Carbohydrox, but whatever. Remember, this was before some other marketing convinced people that chemicals are bad, despite everything being made of chemicals. Sunshine bragged that chemists tested Hydrox for purity and that workers made them at “thousand window” factories with natural light. Yeah, right. Hydrox also stood out against Oreo by promoting its more adult taste and kosher ingredients — in advertisements that bordered on erotic. The "kosher" thing wasn't just to grab the Jewish market, either. It had the cachet of being more "pure" back then, kind of like "all-natural" is today. Whether it was/is or not is up for debate. The article goes on with history for a while, and I think lays out a compelling case for why Oreos ended up reigning supreme. There's also quite a bit about the anti-competitive world of grocery stores, which I find fascinating. Usually, doing articles like these makes me hungry. Not this time. All I can think of is the abomination known as Swedish Fish Oreos, so... no, thanks. |
| When I do these Sunday retrospectives, I can usually find a lot of things in common with the guy who wrote the earlier blog entry. The further back in time I go, the less I find in common, but such is life. This personal update, though, from February of 2008, is tough for me to relate to, and difficult to re-read: "Power" The wind has been crazy here, today. It started sometime during the night, whistling between the houses and threatening to spin my attic vents right off. While I still live in the same house, I've replaced the roof since then, and goodbye old-fashioned spinning attic vents. When I woke up, at around the crack of noon, it was still going on. I'm always a late to bed, late to rise person, but, with age, my ability to sleep until noon has vanished. I figured I'd grab some breakfastlunch and go write this week's Comedy newsletter. Well, I'm still writing Comedy newsletter editorials, at least. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. That, of course, is when the power went out. I've since purchased and had installed a whole-house generator, an automatic start one hooked up to the city gas line. While I justified it to myself and others with my medical devices and a basement sump pump that tends to be most necessary at the times when the weather's lousy enough to cut the power, the real reason is so I never lack internet access. I'm sure the neighbors appreciate the blast of a nat-gas engine cranking up and running like a combination leaf blower / lawnmower every time we lose electricity, but if anyone ever said anything to me, I'd absolutely claim medical necessity. Now, I don't have my truck this weekend. A friend of mine is using it to move. I don't drive pickups anymore, either. And that's one of the reasons why: someone inevitably asks to borrow it or, worse, me. My wife was out in her car, so I was stuck. No longer married, either. I worked some crosswords for a while, but then started feeling antsy about getting the newsletter in. I miss old-style paper crossword puzzles. Probably they still make them, but there's plenty to do on the internet. So I called my wife to drive me to my office. Nor do I have an office. Or a business. Or a job. (My choice.) I booted up my computer, checked some email, started looking for items to include in the newsletter (funny things about romance, mostly - it's the Singles Awareness Day issue of the Comedy newsletter), and the power went out. Well, I continue to rag on Valentine's Day most years in the Comedy NLs. Again, good or bad thing? I don't know. With my memory the way it is, I'm sure it gets repetitive. Before we went home, though, we visited the hospital, where my dad's still being treated for his UTI. Dad would go on to pass on the following month. Not of the UTI. When the doctor called back, she said, "I don't know too much about that patient. UTI. Tested positive for influenza. Going to have to keep him at least a couple more days. Did they make you wear a mask in the room?" As a reminder, this was 2008, long before masks became a political statement and were merely an effective means of helping to prevent disease transmission. "Oh, and there's some question about whether we can send him back to assisited living or if he'll have to be moved to a nursing facility." Wow, a rare misspelling. Eh, it happens. And I'm certainly not going to edit out that wart at this late date. Anyway, as I recall, they eventually moved him back to the assisted living facility (which specialized in Alzheimer's care). He didn't die of the flu, either. Which would have been an irony I would not have appreciated. See, he had been born in New Orleans in 1917. A year later, his mother, quite a young woman at the time, dropped dead. The family never told me more details than that; when I was a kid, I just accepted that dying is what grandparents do. It wasn't until much later in life that it dawned on me: New Orleans. 1918. Death of a young person. Oh... right. Spanish Flu. Not going to leave you in suspense. Official cause of his death was "complications from Alzheimer's." But I got home and did the Comedy newsletter anyway. Sometimes you just have to be funny, even if there's nothing left to laugh at. And that philosophy, folks, seems to be the one thing about me that does not change. There's a kind of power in that. |
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