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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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| Rant time. I had a doctor appointment scheduled for this morning. No big deal; regular check-up kind of thing. As you might be aware if you're reading this the day I post it, practically the entire country got sn*w dumped on it last night. My part of the country got off easy: maybe 2 inches, barely any on the roads. Not much, sure, but more than we've had for two years. So naturally, things like schools, businesses, and non-critical clinics shut down or opened late. Okay, no big deal, right? Well, maybe. See, the clinic is part of a massive, bureaucratic, and very busy hospital system. They run pretty efficiently, but they have instituted some strict policies. Like, no-show for an appointment without something like 48 hours notice means getting charged in full; naturally, insurance doesn't cover that. It also means they drop you as a patient, because, like I said, they're very busy and don't have the patience for no-show patients. You might think they'd be more lenient about such policies when we get sn*w, because everyone around here acts like they've never seen sn*w every time it sn*ws, but, like I said, bureaucracy, so no, I don't trust them to be lenient. So, I woke up at the gods-forsaken cow-milking hour I'd have to wake up in order to account for sn*w-clearing and slower driving (the clinic is only 2 miles away, and I'm usually happy to walk it, but not on fresh sn*w in sub-freezing temperatures), and I checked their website, figuring, okay, if the clinic is closed, I'm off the hook. It's not closed. It has a delayed opening at 10. My appointment was for 9:30. So there I am, bleary, blinking, no caffeine yet. What do I do? Show up at 10, figuring they're just going to try to cram everyone in? Show up at 9:30 anyway, because maybe the website was wrong? Go back to sleep, so they can potentially bone me hard? Call them? But they're closed. Okay, I thought, maybe they have a phone system that auto-forwards in these rare instances. So, after double-checking all the websites I could think of, I got ready to try a phone call. Which is when they called me. That's good, right? Well, it would be, except that for some reason (possibly, but probably not, related to the sn*w), the voice on the other end was almost hopelessly garbled. She's probably trying to call a few dozen people this morning (like I said, huge hospital system), so she's understandably in a hurry. Somehow, I manage to get the gist of what she's saying: reschedule for Friday morning at 10. Fine. I change my calendar accordingly. It was only after the call ended that I thought to check the weather forecast for Thursday night and Friday morning. Guess what. Go ahead. Guess. |
| When I was a kid, and I learned about radioactivity and the economy, I remember thinking, "Wouldn't it be cool to come up with a science fiction story set where money is radioactive, and its value depends on the level of the original isotope in the coin?" Automatic inflation. No one could save money; you'd have to spend it like it's hot (which it is). Not so much a serious SF idea, but I was envisioning a comedy like Hitchhiker's or something. Never did devise an actual plot, or characters, or other reason to write it; that idea is just one part of a larger setting. Naturally, any idea I come up with has already been thought of: What If Money Expired?  A long-forgotten German economist argued that society and the economy would be better off if money was a perishable good. Was he an anarchist crank or the prophet of a better world? I'd like this article better if it didn't start out with an ever-so-precious anecdote about little kids engaging in capitalism. Then, as with every single piece about money ever written, it goes into the history of money: The history of money is replete with equally imaginative mandates and whimsical logic, as Jacob Goldstein writes in his engaging book, “Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.” Oh, surprise, it's a promotion for a book. Before money, people relied on bartering — an inconvenient system because it requires a “double coincidence of wants.” If I have wheat and you have meat, for us to make a deal I have to want your meat at the same time you want my wheat. Hell, I've talked about the history of money myself in articles about money, so I shouldn't bitch too much. I'm just in a bad mood because it sn*wed overnight. And it's still sn*wing. Not much, but any sn*w at all puts me in a bad mood. What that bit of monetary history leaves out is that usually, within a tribe, it's not like you had to get the meat for the wheat right away. When everyone knows everyone else, social pressure ensures trade balance. Anyway. Whatever. That's not really relevant. Aristotle, for one, wasn’t convinced. He worried that Greeks were losing something important in their pursuit of coins. Suddenly, a person’s wealth wasn’t determined by their labor and ideas but also by their cunning. Bit rich, coming from someone as cunning as he was. After the inevitable Brief History of Money is over, they get to the point: “Here’s a thing that always happens with money,” Goldstein wrote. “Whatever money is at a given moment comes to seem like the natural form money should take, and everything else seems like irresponsible craziness.” I'm not sure I agree with that. I mean, sure, cryptocurrency is irresponsible craziness, but that's a bit of an exception. Pun intended. More than a century ago, a wild-eyed, vegetarian, free love-promoting German entrepreneur and self-taught economist named Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. You know who else was a wild-eyed vegetarian German who dabbled in economics? Okay, I don't think he promoted free love. And he was actually Austrian. “Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.” I really hope he explained all that. I mean, sure, like I said, I had the idea too, but mine was meant to be funny. After he explains all that, you get this bit: To achieve this, he invented a form of expiring money called Freigeld, or Free Money. (Free because it would be freed from hoarding and interest.) The theory worked like this: A $100 bill of Freigeld would have 52 dated boxes on the back, where the holder must affix a 10-cent stamp every week for the bill to still be worth $100. If you kept the bill for an entire year, you would have to affix 52 stamps to the back of it — at a cost of $5.20 — for the bill to still be worth $100. Thus, the bill would depreciate 5.2% annually at the expense of its holder(s). Too much work. And math. Just make it radioactive. In this economy, money would circulate with all the velocity of a game of hot potato. There would be no more “unearned income” of money lenders getting rich on interest. Instead, an individual’s economic success would be tied directly to the quality of their work and the strength of their ideas. The big problem with this system, of course, is that I make my money from interest, dividends, and capital gains, so it would be Bad. Not all of us can produce quality work or strong ideas, and we have to be creative with economics. Okay, no, it's not just me: it would tie people even tighter to work, leading to exploitation. Well, more exploitation. The article continues, and it's a fascinating read, but I won't bore you further here. I'll just say this: I'm not educated enough to discern much difference between self-depreciating money, and government policies that mandate certain levels of inflation in the economy. For example, the Federal Reserve tries to maintain a 2% inflation rate. At this, they've been largely successful for decades, until the past couple of years (this is not an invitation to blame your least favorite politician). So, $100, a year later, buys what would have been $98 of goods. Or something like that. Point is, inflationary money policy is baked in to the system, if not the money itself. Banks tend to keep their interest payments on savings below the inflation rate, so saving money in a traditional sense only partially offsets the ravages of inflation. To actually make money without working or coming up with new and exciting ideas, we have the option of investing, which comes with its own risks, but the reward potential is greater. But it's that last bit that some people have a problem with. Do I have an answer? Of course not. But I've figured out how to use the system to my advantage. Change the system, and people (who are not me, because I'm clearly out of ideas) will certainly figure out how to use the system to their advantage. Also, changing the system would suck for me, which is the most important argument against doing so. Money isn't radioactive. It's okay to save it. |
| I just mentioned Big Think yesterday, and then today, when picking an old blog entry at random to revisit, behold, this one from October of 2022 featured an article from Big Think: "Working Easy" There's no such thing as coincidence! This must Mean Something! Yes, there is, and no, it mustn't. The article is still there, not too surprising for something relatively recent. But I noticed that there's now a note saying it was updated in November 2023. I don't remember enough of the original article to know what changed.Because the entry isn't that old, I wouldn't make many changes to my commentary. Probably, I'd use a different intro than "What the hell is hard work, anyway?"—the article isn't about that kind of work, and I think I was just spitting out something vaguely related to some word-association from the headline, or maybe I'd already picked the entry title and desperately tried to say something that fit. One thing that does occur to me on rereading the article and the entry: You know how you can't think of someone's name, or a word? It's on the tip of your tongue, as the metaphor goes, but no matter how hard you push yourself, it doesn't come to you. You just end up getting frustrated and maybe a headache. Then you give up and go do something else, at which point the word pops right into your frontal lobes. Or maybe that's just me. Anyway, what the article is talking about is something like that. |
| This Atlas Obscura article (apparently from a writer at Big Think, which I've also sourced here) has been taunting me for a long time, waiting for its number to come up. Today, it finally did. There Are at Least 10 Cities With Their Own Psychological Disorders Stockholm Syndrome is the most famous, and most relate to tourism or hostage-taking. I'd expect there to be a lot more than 10, but maybe there are. "At least" covers a lot of numerical territory. Everybody knows Stockholm Syndrome, when hostages develop an attachment to their captors. Like most things "everybody knows," there's doubt that this even exists in the way they think it does.But who knows its two opposites? Lima Syndrome is when the hostage takers start sympathizing with the hostages. I mean, that makes sense. It's the inverse of Stockholm Syndrome, and it's kind of on the other side of the planet, hence the inversion. And London Syndrome is when hostages become argumentative toward their captors—often with deadly results. What are they going to do, kill us? Then they won't have hostages as leverage. In all, ten cities around the world carry a unique burden: they have a psychological disorder named after them. I don't need to rehash all of them here. Really, I just have one quibble (apart from questioning whether Stockholm Syndrome is really a thing): Brooklyn Syndrome ...cities where, due to specific cultural circumstances, the male persona naturally gravitates toward being overly argumentative or personally combative. It is simultaneously hilarious that they picked Brooklyn as the archetype for this kind of thing, and sad because Brooklyn isn't a city, but part of New York. Hey! I'm walkin' heah! Instead, I wanted to propose other disorders named after cities. In no particular order. Albuquerque Ailment: That nagging feeling that you shouldn't have taken that last turn. Chicago Croup: A perverse desire to be someplace cold and windy. Seattle Syndrome: The feeling that it really ought to be raining. Montréal Malaise: Not knowing enough of the local language to carry on a conversation, but just enough to know when they're calling you names. San Francisco Flu: Being too hot when the temperature climbs above 60F. Washington Woozies: When someone drags you into an unwelcome political conversation. ...yeah, I know those are all in North America. It's not like I spend weeks refining my jokes. If you have suggestions for other cities, please feel free to add below. |
| It may surprise some of you to know that women can be clever. Examples, from Mental Floss: Necessity isn’t the only mother of invention. I'll say it again for y'all in the back: Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is the milkman. Though it wasn’t always easy to get patents or the credit they deserved, women are responsible for many items we use today. In some cases, blame. Like when Lise Meitner invented the atomic bomb. Okay, men helped there. As usual for these longer lists, I'm skipping a few; the link is there if you want to see more. 1. Paper Bags A man named Charles Annan saw her design and tried to patent the idea first. [Margaret] Knight filed a lawsuit and won the patent fair and square in 1871. The truly amazing thing here isn't that a woman came up with something, but that a 19th century court acknowledged it. But the paper bag was only the first step. What I want to know is: Who was the absolute hero god(dess) who figured out how to give them handles relatively cheaply? That person deserves a statue, a commemorative coin, and a star named after them. 3. Foot-Pedal Trash Cans For me, the best inventions are those that save time, giving me more opportunity to play video games. But this one's awesome for another reason: you can throw shit away while you're cooking, without washing your hands every time you lift a trash can lid. Or you can have a lidless trash can like I do, but if you live with someone, they inevitably complain about the odor. In fairness, mine used to be one of those battery-operated sensor lid things, which is even lazier than a foot-pedal. But the problem with moving parts is that they tend to break, and then they need to be fixed or replaced. Or done without, in my case. 4. Monopoly Pretty sure I've covered this one before in here. Elizabeth Magie created The Landlord’s Game to spread the economic theory of Georgism—teaching players about the unfairness of land-grabbing, the disadvantages of renting, and the need for a single land value tax on owners. From what I heard, she had two sets of rules: one for that particular flavor of socialism, and one for capitalism. For some reason, the company that eventually published the game only concentrated on the latter. The reason why escapes me. 6. Disposable Diapers I'm sorry, but of all the things on this list, this one gets my vote for "most likely to have been invented by a woman." 7. Dishwashers I know I covered this one before in here: "Pretty Petty" One might argue that this would be a contender for "most likely to have been invented by a woman," but this was a case of "my servants are Doing It Wrong and I don't want to do it myself, so I'll invent a machine." 12. Circular Saws And being a power tool, this would be my "least likely to have been invented by a woman" thing. But I guess that would make me sexist, so it isn't. A weaver named Tabitha Babbitt is believed to be the first person to suggest that lumber workers use a circular saw instead of the two-man whipsaw that only allowed cutting when pulled forward. That's "two-person whipsaw," you sexist. 15. Folding Cabinet Beds Sarah E. Goode’s folding cabinet bed didn’t just maximize space in small homes. In 1885, it made her one of the first Black women with a U.S. patent, after Martha Jones, who received one in 1868 for her cornhusker design. Yeah, but Jones cheated; she was a time traveler. (I really hope that's not too obscure a reference.) 19. Computers Women in computer science have a role model in Grace Hopper. She and Howard Aiken programmed and designed Harvard’s Mark I computer, a five-ton, room-sized machine in 1944. Women have been involved in computer science since before there were computers. Not to minimize Hopper's contribution at all. Like I said, there's more I didn't cover. It's not always necessary to know who invented the stuff we use (nor would it be practical, as most things were group efforts), but sometimes it's nice to acknowledge where they came from. |
| The Random Number Gods have chosen to bless us with another Cracked article this day. And no, one of them isn't "time." Well, the last one is. Sort of. Not really. Don’t believe your eyes. They lie to you every day. I might have mentioned this before, but I used to work with a guy who was constantly showing me optical illusions. As he was an engineer with more experience than I had, I thought he was trying to train me to believe the measurements and numbers more than my visual perception. But no; he was also a devout Christian and was trying to show me that only God is real or whatever. Thing about those optical illusions you can find all over the internet is that most of them have documented, logical, proven explanations. So all that did was reinforce my admiration for science. 4. Your Nose Is Smaller Than Selfies Tell You It Is Long ago, I was a semi-professional photographer (in that I got paid for it, but it wasn't my main source of income). This section reiterates what I've known for a long time about the difference between focal lengths. For authentic pics, never hold your phone up close. Instead, set up a tripod several feet away, inconveniencing everyone in the name of better art. Like anyone's gonna do that. Just hand your phone to some random stranger and ask them to take the pic. There's a very good chance you'll even get your phone back, afterwards. 3. The Moon Keeps Changing Its Size on You Yes, this one was the real reason I saved this article to share. If you’re lucky enough to see the Moon rise or set over the horizon, you’ll notice it looks different from how it looks when it’s high in the sky. It looks a bit more yellow, due to the greater amount of atmosphere that moonlight must travel through to reach your eyes from this angle. It may also look slightly squashed, which is another effect of looking at it through so much atmosphere. I should note that there are times when the Moon really is bigger or smaller because its orbit, like pretty much every orbit, is elliptical. This horizon illusion dwarfs that effect, though, at least in my experience. More than anything else, however, the low Moon simply looks much bigger than the Moon as you normally know it. Everyone sees this difference, and no one knows why. Perhaps, but I'm convinced it's a combination of things. Including a version of the Ponzo Illusion (not to be confused with the Ponzi Scheme). Flat Earth (not really, but we perceive it as such), mostly flat sky converging on it. Also the convergence of the two horizon lines. I'm sticking with that hypothesis until smarter people than me figure something else out. That might take a while.2. They’re Using Color to Lie About Produce Ever since that photo known as The Dress exploded into public consciousness, I've seen more and more articles explaining color perception. I got really tired of seeing it when it first happened, but apparently, some good has come from it in terms of public perception of color perception. 1. Clocks Look Like They Stop Because They Break Your Brain Despite what I said above, no, time is not an illusion (probably). As with color, though, our perception of time can change with circumstances. The article goes into the science here, and since it tracks with stuff I already knew, it's absolutely worth reading. Spolier: it's not a glitch in the Matrix. There is no Matrix, except in the movies. In conclusion, my mom always told me "seeing is believing." Sorry, Mom. You were wrong. |
| More from that internationally renowned science reporting site, Cracked: Naturally, I need to nitpick the headline. Planet formation is an active area of research, so they might not have the precise sequence or timeline nailed down. But whatever the actual mechanism, it's pretty clear that everything on Earth, and even the Earth itself, came from outer space. We still get literal tons of material from outer space every day. Everything, including your body and the air you breathe, has an alien origin: it was not of Earth until it was, at which point some of it started getting recycled, mixed, and recombined.Astronauts and space pirates are exploring the cosmos, in search of unobtanium, transformium and precious red matter. That multi-source science fiction reference is doubly amusing to me, as I just downloaded the game Starfield yesterday (featuring astronauts and space pirates and valuable materials) and started playing it. Their quest may be fruitless, since none of those materials really exist. Well, philosophically, anything we can think of "really exists" in some manner. But no, like the Easter Bunny, unicorns, honest politicians, and (probably) Bigfoot, they're not part of consensus reality. 5. Flammable Ice Yes, water is a mineral (just one that happens to be liquid at room temperature), and when methane is trapped in water crystals, that’s called flammable ice. It has a second, equally extreme name as well: “fire ice.” While I generally don't bother fact-checking stuff from a comedy site, this sounded familiar, so I looked it up. Yep, they're talking about {xlink:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathratemethane clathrates. They even lifted the image in the article (and put "methane clathrate" in its caption) from that Wikipedia page. In their defense, the photo is credited to USGS, which I'm pretty sure means it's in public domain, or at least freely licensed. What exactly a clathrate is, I leave to any curious readers to follow appropriate links. It's a more generalized thing, and fascinating, but irrelevant to the article or my commentary. So, is this some promising new energy source, ready to power our kitchens and our factories? Maybe! Or, maybe the warming oceans will melt the ice and release gigatons of methane, setting off a chain reaction of further global warming to push us ever closer to catastrophe. Burning methane produces carbon dioxide, so why not both? 4. Snail Teeth What is the hardest substance in the world? A congresscritter's head. Many of you will answer “diamond.” And many don't understand the difference between material hardness, toughness, and strength. And pure stubbornness, as with my answer above. We’ve also found a natural composite material harder than diamond, in a most unlikely place: inside the mouths of snails. Doubt they'll try to make jewelry out of that. If you think you should now fear these snails, who will cut and smash through your body without mercy, put those worries aside. In reality, your body is so fragile that any animal’s teeth could make short work of it... As some cats I've known were prone to proving. 3. Glass Bombs We’re not totally sure where australites came from. Once we dispensed with the volcano theory, we dubbed them extraterrestrial, having come from meteorites, but we don’t think that’s true anymore. Instead, we think an asteroid struck the ground in the distant past, somewhere around 800,000 years ago. It hit so hard that it threw terrestrial material into space. This material then came back, now transformed by its journey and smoothed through reentry. As I noted above (of course I had a point to my nitpicking), that terrestrial material was actually extraterrestrial material that had been here longer. 2. Spontaneously Combustible Coconuts ...is the name of my heavy metal Jimmy Buffett cover band. You’ve run into coconuts many times when you’ve been stranded on desert islands or when you bought one from a roadside vendor. And yet the dried flesh of the coconut holds strange properties and is a class 4.2 hazardous substance. No idea where the joke ends and facts begin here, and can't be arsed to look it up. 1. Fire-Forged Feces Bird shit has always held fascinating properties, sending us rushing to mine the stuff to exploit it and sometimes sparking actual wars. When we weren’t using it as fertilizer, we were digging out compounds from it to use in creating gunpowder. Pretty sure those are the same material: phosphorus. Like everyone, the kestrel poops. Sometimes, it poops above a Russian coal mine, where the blasts of hot gasses transform the guano into something new. It becomes a mineral, which can be colorless, reddish or lilac. But, sadly, doesn't spontaneously combust. |
| From that ivory tower of knowledge known as Cracked, an article about words: As December draws to a close, it’s time for the world’s dictionaries to name their Words of the Year. Yes, this article was from last month. Most words feel like they must have been around forever. But all words are made-up, and some of them were made-up pretty recently. My goal in life is to make up a word and have it be widely used. I mean, sure, that's already happened: I came up with "rad" (the slang word, not the radiation level, which admittedly inspired me) back in the 70s. But no one knows it was me, and so no one believes me. In fairness, someone else might have invented it independently. But I'm going with "they stole it from me." Anyway. The article: 5. Boy And yet, the word we have now for a male child, “boy,” isn’t that old. It only came about in the 16th century. I've looked into this before. Maybe even here; I don't remember. Seems to me there's some debate about the actual origin. In this case, though, I didn't make it up. Before that, for a few centuries, you know what we called male children? We called them girls. We also called female children girls. “Girl” was a unisex word. I'm also unclear on the meaning of "we" here. 16th century would have been just after the end of Middle English. Not to mention there were hundreds or thousands of words added to English since "boy." 4. Guy For starters, the word was a name for around a thousand years longer than it was a common noun. Then came the big guy, Guy Fawkes. Ah, yes, one of the prototypical religious terrorists. To complicate things, I've heard this word pronounced both like it rhymes with "die" or rhymes with "key." It now refers to people of all genders, though that final shift wasn’t so much a gradual expansion of its meaning as an assumption that any word for men can also represent all humankind. No, that's not the assumption at all. We're moving away from that as a culture. The problem is that English now lacks a second person plural, and y'all won't adopt y'all, instead opting for "you guys." 3. Smoking We say a fire is smoking up the place when it creates smoke, so it’s pretty weird that we say the same thing when we (or ham) take in smoke. Not that weird at all. The smoke is happening whether you're inhaling or not, so sure, smoking is still being used in its older meaning, and this section is interesting but nonsensical. 2. Genocide Gotta admit, the origin of this word surprised me. Specifically, that it's less than a hundred years old. The word “genocide” was invented by one man: Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin... The book was published in 1944. By 1948, the U.N. wrote up a treaty criminalizing genocide by name. 1. Forecast Well, it's not like we needed a word like "aftcast." That would, however, be a fun synonym for "recent history." By coining the term “forecast,” FitzRoy made the idea sound magical, which wasn’t particularly conducive to convincing skeptical scientists. Sure, but I bet it got eaten up by the superstitious public. So, yeah, just some fun with words. Nothing too rad, but I didn't want to just yeet the article into the dustbin. |
| I just thought this one would be appropriate for this blog. How to beat maths anxiety Getting stressed about maths is so common, yet there’s no need. With the right approach, you can even start enjoying it According to the author's bio, she lives in New York (or at least did in October of last year), but the article uses Brit spellings such as "maths." Just roll with it. It's a fairly long article, but there's very little actual math in it. The first section's purpose is to explain what this anxiety is: Do this maths problem: 34 minus 19. Do it in your head without paper, and then imagine another person watching you. How does that make you feel? Mark Ashcraft, a US psychologist who studied maths anxiety, described how people in his studies responded to solving similar problems. Many showed ‘unease or apprehension’. They had ‘trembling hands, nervous laughter, and so forth,’ he wrote. I am in no way frightened of math. More advanced topics are beyond me, sure, but if I encounter "what's 34 minus 19" or "what's 20% of 130," or whatever, I just do it. Unless, of course, someone is watching me, waiting to see if I'm slow or will get it wrong, so they can feel superior. So yeah, I kinda get that. You may not have realised that maths anxiety had a name at all, but if you’ve tended to go out of your way to avoid maths, it’s likely affected your life. As it's a part of nearly everything, it surely has. A while back, so the story goes, to compete with the quarter-pounder burger at you know where, a smaller fast food chain started selling a 1/3-pound burger (both measures were weight before cooking, but that's not relevant to the story; presumably, each would lose the same percentage of mass on the grill). They set it for the same price, figuring people would switch over to pay the same amount for more meat. But the promotion flopped, and it flopped because a lot of people saw 1/4, and they saw 1/3, and they concluded that since 4 is greater than 3, why should they pay the same thing for less burger? For a long time, I didn't believe this story. Obviously, some people are that ignorant, but surely not a majority. Most people know that 1/3 is greater than 1/4, right? It's right there on your measuring cups, for one thing. The failure must have had another reason: maybe the 1/3 pound burger tasted like shit. Maybe it didn't, but people wanted to stick with the familiar. Maybe they were fine with a 1/4-pound patty, but didn't want the extra calories. Maybe they didn't trust the rival (it was A&W, incidentally) to have the staying power of McDonald's. But no. People really are that ignorant. Maybe that's because of math anxiety; I don't know. I do know that when I had this confirmed, I still didn't want to believe it. It's not that I think people are unbearably stupid, or that I'm somehow superior because I can subtract 19 from 34 really quickly. Ignorance isn't the same thing as stupidity. But stubborn refusal to fix ignorance? There, I start having issues.Today, about 93 per cent of US adults say they have some amount of maths anxiety, and 17 per cent report high levels. That seemed high even to me, so I checked the source. Indeed, the study it came from said 93%. What's worse, though, is that the same report goes on to say, "In a sample of adolescent apprentices in the United Kingdom, approximately 30% of the study participants reported high math anxiety, and a further 18% were at least somewhat affected by it." While the sample is probably different, if you do the math (yes, really), that implies 48% in the UK. Way lower. So, anyway, after the explanation, almost as long as the thesis you have to write on a recipe page, there's the "what to do" section. I won't quote extensively from that, either, but I do have some comments: Learning a foreign language or reading Beowulf can be just as cognitively demanding or complex as manipulating numbers, yet people tend not to be as intimidated by these sorts of linguistic activities. I was way more intimidated at the thought of learning a foreign language, in school, than I was about math. Mostly, this was because of the group nature of the activity, I think. Long enmeshed in the myth is the notion that it’s not just that some people are better at maths, but that those people fall into certain groups. Most common is the cultural belief that men thrive more in maths (along with other STEM fields) than women. The math champion of my high school was a girl. She was cute, too. Sometimes I wonder what became of her. I know this is anecdata, but sometimes all you need is one example to break a stereotype. In this case, the stereotype is "girls are worse at math." Point is, I knew from personal experience that this wasn't true. Expressive writing is when you write for a specific period of time about your emotions and thoughts that come up in response to a stressful maths situation, such as sadness that you’re not good or smart enough, stress that you’re going to fail, or anxiety or anger that it’s too hard. See, even in an article about math, we can slip a little writing in. Teach maths to someone else I find this to be good general advice: if you want what you're learning to really sink in, explain it to someone else. So, like I said, lots more at the link. Even if you have math anxiety and aren't ready or willing to tackle it, there's good information. No pressure. There won't be a test later. Not here, anyway. Just be wary of fast food joints trying to trick you. |
| Today's spin of the roulette wheel (which is actually redundant, as roulette is probably translated as little wheel, so that would make it a little wheel wheel) brought me all the way back to January of 2007, not long after I started this blog. And it demonstrates why I've never really gotten anywhere with my writing: "Procrastination" I've been kicking myself for procrastination for far longer than that, though, but have never managed to stop actually procrastinating. As I've finally recognized it as a core feature of my personality, I've now given up trying to change. Or, I don't know. I keep meaning to. Maybe next week. As for the entry itself, it begins with what's now an Invalid Item link. What used to be there was a Daily Writing Challenge, which was an activity I found useful in prodding me to complete daily writing exercises. As I recall, it started out with just a few words, and gradually worked up to 2000. Kind of like that guy who lifted a calf every day. The calf kept growing, but he didn't notice because he got stronger. Until, one day, he's walking around with a full-grown ox on his shoulders. Left out of that story was how the ox might have felt about being used that way, but I imagine it's better than being yoked to a plow. Oh, yeah, Milo of Croton was the dude's name. I think he was a real person, but the ox thing was almost certainly mythological.From the entry: I'm sitting here procrastinating. I know once I get into the writing, it'll go fairly smoothly. Still, I'm putting it off like I always do with stuff. I had hoped I would learn better by now. Nope, Younger Me: you never do learn better. You just learn to live with it. Oh, and then there's the Fiction Writing class I signed up for. It begins Monday, and runs for like 9 weeks, once a week. I vaguely remember that class. It was a continuing education thing at the university. I remember they sneered at me for writing science fiction. Snooty lit-snob poseurs. Okay. Enough with the procrastination. Time to write. Well, maybe some dinner first... Anyone else writes that, I assume they're joking. I was not. That is truly how my mind works. Or, well... doesn't. |
| Last year, I featured several articles about planets. Over time, I hit every one... except this one, which has been languishing in obscurity due to the inherent randomness of life. Well, not life, but my system. Anyway, here it is, published way back in September of 2019: Oh, it deserves more attention, does it? Well, I can't disagree, but it's not like we can just stroll over there. You see, I fell in love with Neptune as a kid, back when I was in the second grade. Dude, I like astronomy too, but he's too old for you. We all had to read about a planet and tell a few sentences about why we liked it. I got assigned Neptune. What if you turned out not to like it? Huh? Did the teacher ever think of that? "Jupiter's pretty, but its radiation would kill anyone within a million miles." "Everyone's fascinated by Mars, but there's nothing there." Or, you know, phrased the way a second-grader would. And what if the teacher made them draw the planet? I mean, most planets are pretty easy. Circle. Appropriate color. Lots of black background. But whoever got Saturn would be in trouble. Anyway. In August of 1989, when Voyager 2 started sending back the first clear pictures of Neptune and its moons, the mysteries began giving way to marvels. Neptune is a world of giant methane storms and strange rings. Coincidentally, I read an article recently which noted that the Voyager 2 pictures were false-color, giving Neptune a much deeper blue than it would actually appear to have in the unlikely event that there was a human hanging out nearby. Ah, here it is. Looks way more like that other planet, the one I won't name.So, then the article goes into some of the things we know about Neptune, and they are indeed Amazing Science Facts (well, to the extent that anything we know can be). Something else even more wondrous happens in those deep layers of superionic ice. Carbon atoms get squeezed out of the methane molecules mixed in with the water, creating clumps of crystallized carbon. You probably know crystallized carbon by its more common name, diamond. According to laboratory simulations, the diamonds inside Neptune could have grown to be a meter wide. They are denser than the surrounding ices, so they sink downward toward the planet’s core. That’s right: Inside Neptune, it is raining meter-wide diamonds. Somewhere out there, according to some astronomers, is at least one entire planet made of diamond. I don't know, maybe it was like Neptune, but got too close to a star and its lighter materials blew away. Point being, diamonds aren't as rare on Earth as they try to convince us they are; and Out There, they're probably even less rare. A diamond deserves a ring, and Neptune has several of them — five of them, in fact. Unlike Saturn’s rings, these are thin, dark structures around the planet, too dim to be observed clearly from Earth. I also recently saw a JWST image of... you know, that other ice giant, which also has rings. Spectacular image. That telescope was meant to peer into the farthest reaches of the universe, and yet they pointed it at what's, comparatively speaking, right next door.Look, I'm purposely avoiding the puns, here. Just pretend I've already made the one you're thinking of. So yeah, my adult self agrees with my 8-year-old self that Neptune is a fascinating place. Voyager 2 gave us only a taste of what it’s really all about. And Neptune is just the prototype of a whole class of Neptune-size planets that appear to be common around other stars. When Voyager 2 did its thing, we had no evidence for planets around other stars. I mean, sure, we figured they had to be there, but no direct evidence. Now, we've found thousands. In general, the more we know, the more we understand. Sure, there are probably higher priorities than a mission to Neptune. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. |
| I do like a good literary takedown... though only when I agree with the person doing the takedowning. This one's from LitHub. The article is from last October 10, which is important to note because it starts out: Today is the sixty-sixth publication anniversary of Ayn Rand’s 1100-page magnum opus of unreadable doggerel libertarian science fiction, Atlas Shrugged. Using strikethrough style is, of course, a cheap trick, one where the writer is coyly covering their mouths, giggling, and going "Oops, did I say that out loud?" And it makes me laugh almost every time. Yes, even when I do it. Especially when I do it. In this case, though, the article author did it; I just reproduced it here. Still, calling AS "unreadable," even in strikethrough, is a bit unfair. It is, by some definition of the phrase, readable, in that it contains words, and those words are (as I recall) spelled correctly and ordered according to English grammatical practice into sentences and paragraphs. Set in a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations (isn’t it always the way), it’s the story of railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, and their struggle against the “looters” who want to exploit their productivity. Hence the "fiction" part. Here in reality, it is the "captains of industry" who loot the labor of the workers and exploit their productivity. Despite receiving largely negative reviews upon its release, the novel sold briskly and became a formative text for numerous conservative/libertarian ghouls politicians and thinkers... That's the trouble with science fiction, good or bad: there's always someone out there trying to make it happen. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, it's not. One prominent conservative critic of Rand and her philosophy was William F. Buckley Jr., whose National Review published this scathing review of the novel by (Communist spy turned HUAC whistleblower turned book critic) Whittaker Chambers in December of ’57. So, the rest of the article is Chambers' original review, from which I'll quote only sparingly. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. People being unable to handle nuance is hardly a new thing. So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. Here in reality, those who we today lump into "billionaires" wouldn't last a week in the Gulch, not without the near-slave labor that cooks for and cleans up after them. It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character... Look, I don't care how terrible the book is, or how spot-on the review otherwise is; spoiling the last line is cheating. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. And here the review falls apart, for here we are, two-thirds of a century later, and some people still treat that book like it was handed down from Mt. Sinai. |
| This one's gonna get controversial. Maybe even offensive. You can’t even pay people to have more kids These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work. Continuous human population growth is unsustainable. At what point the crisis will occur is debatable, but if the increase in global population doesn't turn into a decrease, or at least a flat line, we'll find out. And if you go by country, rather than globally, well, now we're getting into xenophobia territory. If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids. Good. In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. We have to be very, very careful parsing the math in an article like this. There's the population, then the birth rate, then changes in the birth rate. If more people took calculus, the differences would be easy to explain. Instead, we get "When are we ever going to use this?" Well, now. Now is when we use this. Not necessarily the nitty-gritty math parts, but the knowing whether you're talking about position, velocity, or acceleration. That said, I didn't spend a lot of time working through the math. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950... Before birth control and while women were still treated as accessories. ...and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. The difference could be made up for with immigration from countries not listed, ones with greater-than-replacement-rate. Oh, but, xenophobia. Right. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. Interesting phrasing. Every other listed country's birth rate is given as a decimal number. This one seems tailor-made for emotional reactions, containing as it does the word "die" right up front. The drop has frightened lawmakers and commentators alike, with headlines warning of a coming “demographic crisis” or “Great People Shortage” as economies find themselves without enough young workers to fill jobs and pay taxes. Fewer people means fewer consumers, which in turn means fewer necessary jobs but also lower corporate profits. I don't have a lot of evidence for this, but it's my impression that this is what drives a lot of the low-birth-rate panic: stock prices might fall. As for taxes, countries somehow find ways to cope. To stem the tide, the world’s leaders have tried everything from generous social welfare programs to pink-and-blue awareness campaigns to five-figure checks to veiled threats, all to relatively little avail. It takes way more than five figures (I'm assuming this is being translated to USD) to raise a kid from childhood to college-age, and way more than that if they actually do go to college. This is a false benefit, like when a new car purchase comes with a small rebate instead of, you know, just lowering the price of the car. I also wonder if there's a difference between "awareness campaigns" and "propaganda," and whether people are "aware" they're the same thing. In many ways, the falling birth rate is a success story — the result of young people, especially women, having more options and freedoms than ever before. And, as a result of that, there could be fewer people burdening the environment. If global birth rates were really dropping. Which they are not. It's kind of like... you're working for a company, mainly doing your job at home. Then, one day, you get notice: "At ZZZ Corp, we care deeply about the environment, so, henceforth, we are no longer providing plastic coffee swizzle sticks or cups in the break room. In other news, all work-from-home is cancelled and now you have to commute in to the office." Fewer births do have real consequences for how families and societies operate. In 2010, for example, there were more than seven family members available to care for each person over the age of 80; by 2030, there will be only four. Providing free labor. An aging society also means fewer workers in key industries and fewer people paying into programs like social security. The "fewer workers" thing is bogus, because it also means, as noted above, fewer consumers. Also, the more companies have to compete for labor, the better wages are likely to be. That's just the free market at work. We're starting to see some of that already. As for "programs like social security," here in the US at least, it was set up assuming an ever-growing population. Bullshit assumption. But again, we could be making up the difference via immigration. A kid is a non-contributing person for at least 15 years, probably more (except in some states that have embraced the idea of putting the little bastards to work in the factories). An immigrant, assuming they're an adult, could start contributing right away. These prospects tend to elicit panic among conservatives, who take a moralistic — and sometimes xenophobic — tone in addressing the issue. Like I said. Bonus points to the author for using "elicit" properly, instead of "illicit," which means something else entirely and isn't even the same part of speech. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has warned of the dangers of the “childless left” and its “rejection of the American family.” Look, I'm not calling out the conservatives, here; the article is. But if he's correct, then wouldn't that mean fewer libby-libs and more conservatives? Assuming the kids pick up on their parents' politics, which isn't always the case. In China, male Community Party officials at a recent meeting on women’s issues bypassed any talk of gender equality and instead urged women to “establish a correct outlook on marriage and love, childbirth, and family.” Well, look at that. The CCP aligned with US conservatives. Who could have predicted that? Except everybody. But concerns about birth rates go beyond the rhetoric of right-wing politicians. Just leaving this here to show that it's not necessarily a left vs. right issue. So far, most countries have tried either asking people nicely to reproduce or sweetening the deal with money. If that doesn’t work, however, restricting people’s reproductive choices may be on the table, especially in more autocratic regimes. Already happened in the theoretically-not-autocratic US. Fears for the future may also play a role in declining birth rates around the world. “Young adults are living in a world which is characterized by many crises,” from war to climate change to the erosion of democratic norms in the US and elsewhere, said Jessica Nisén, a family demographer at the University of Turku in Finland. In other words, as I've said before, choosing whether or not to have kids can be an ethical decision. That leaves policymakers with the question of what they can do. For a lot of experts, the answer is nothing. “I’m basically against having birth rates be a policy target,” Cohen said. “Anything you do to influence this is going to have very probable bad side effects, and any benefits you get are likely to be very small and very long term.” I believe that was meant to be "very short term." They might also recognize that shrinking family size isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Lower birth rates around the world could lessen environmental degradation, competition for resources, and even global conflict, Wang Feng, a sociology professor at UC Irvine, writes in the New York Times. I'm going to give the author credit for including this, even though it's way down in the article. Lawmakers might just have to accept that they can’t control how many children people have. Which won't happen so long as their corporate overlords are screaming for cheaper labor. |
| I saved the link to today's article because it's about a place I've been to fairly recently; and, of course, because it's about astronomy. Gotta say, actually seeing that telescope was inspiring, even if I did have to climb up flights of stairs in the rarefied mountain air to do it. Los Angeles was once the best place in the world to see the universe. Now, a lesser person might retort that Los Angeles is still the best place in the world to see stars, but I'd never stoop so low. Never, ever. The most important things we know about the cosmos were discovered in the early 20th century at Mt. Wilson Observatory. Mostly, that not only is space mind-bogglingly big, but it's getting bigger. It was here, 100 years ago, that Edwin Hubble noted a light in the distance that would lead to one of science’s greatest discoveries. Other sources say 1924 was the year, but this led me to check the publication date: "Oct. 3, 2023 3 AM PT." Someone was keeping astronomer's hours. And Mt. Wilson Observatory discovered what so many aging luminaries in L.A. have: Once your starlight fades, no one is quite sure what to do with you. See, it's not just me who won't admit to thinking of these things. With an annual budget smaller than that of some fancy L.A. parties, a nonprofit organization and volunteers have done a heroic job of keeping the grounds and telescopes open for visitors and the few scientists still working there. And I'm glad they do. Even if you're not a huge astronomy nerd like I am, the place is worth a visit for the scenery and views. The observatory sits at the summit of 5,715-foot Mt. Wilson, accessible only by a serpentine stretch of Angeles Crest Highway. It's not that serpentine, compared to some other roads I've been on in California. In 1908 the animals delivered a 60-inch wide, 1,900-pound mirror to collect light from the stars — the keystone of the largest and most powerful instrument of its kind in the world. And that wasn't even the final telescope mirror. The one Hubble used was 100 inches across. Based on the photo in the article, that one was delivered not by mule, but by some newfangled internal-combustion vehicle. So, just for comparison: 100 inches is a bit over 2.5m. The famous space telescope which is the only reason non-nerds have even heard of Edwin Hubble "only" has a 2.4 meter mirror, but it definitely wasn't delivered by mules... being, you know, in space and all. (The "being in space" thing was the real advancement; even discounting L.A.'s various forms of pollution, it helps to not have atmosphere in the way.) The human eye only collects up to 0.2 seconds of visual data before uploading it to the brain. A camera can collect light over a much longer period, which is why long-exposure photographs of the night sky contain far more stars than are visible with the naked eye. An astronomer once pointed out to me that the popular conception of telescopes as magnifying devices isn't really correct. They're actually light-gathering devices. Quite a bit of the article goes into the bio of Hubble and the history of his universe-altering (well, actually, his "our conception of the universe"-altering) discovery. Despite its august place in scientific history, Mt. Wilson was no longer the best place on Earth to do astronomy. Carnegie pulled its funding from the observatory and closed the big telescope in June 1985. Honestly, I'm surprised it lasted that long. There are actually several observatories (or former observatories) in the L.A. area. The most famous, and picturesque, isn't Mt. Wilson, but Griffith. It's located close enough to Hollywood that it features in many establishing shots of that area. It's a museum (and park) now, but it's an awesome museum. The article mentions it, along with efforts to keep Mt. Wilson open. As noted, science is mostly done elsewhere, now. Maintaining Mt. Wilson isn't about that; it's about recognizing its place in history. Everything's subject to entropy. The famed Hubble Space Telescope will eventually (like within a decade) de-orbit, and all we'll have left of it is a few stunning photographs, maybe some debris, and, of course, its additions to the ever-changing course of science. But this one, we could keep... if we have the will. |
| Especially for everyone who has "eat less food" on their resolutions scroll, here's a food article. Oddly, the URL for the site shows "Foods we don't use as intended," while the headline is basically the reverse. I wonder why that is. On the surface, the two phrases are semantically equivalent, but I wonder if there's some dark psychology at work there, because I'm paranoid. Like, maybe one of those phrases produces an emotional reaction more desirable to the website's advertisers (who I can't see because I'm running an ad-blocker—unless the listed products are actually paid ads, which I wouldn't put past them). Perhaps the URL version seems too judgemental compared to the headline. Or maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I think it's important to notice word and phrasing choices. Anyway, thus ends the "writing" and "media analysis" portion of today's blog entry; let's move on to the article. As soon as a thing is born into the world, it begins to mutate, changing at a sometimes exponential pace, to the point where it might turn into something else entirely. This is especially apparent with human larvae. Take the supposedly innocent graham cracker, for instance. I think it's pretty widely known, now, that the graham cracker vomited forth from stultifying American Puritanism, intended to help people minimize pleasure and stimulation. Fortunately, now, it's just another cookie. They reiterate this in the list itself; I'm only highlighting select items here. 1. Corn Flakes Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who invented Corn Flakes with his brother William, did not care for sin, excess, or meat. So, the same perverted mindset that produced the graham cracker. 2. Dr Pepper Interestingly, Dr Pepper was not initially envisioned as a carbonated beverage but rather as a syrup to be mixed with carbonated water at the soda fountain. That's not really an "unintended use." The company itself switched to bottling. 6. Saccharin Saccharin, an artificial sweetener discovered in 1879 by Constantine Fahlberg, a chemist working at Johns Hopkins University, evolved from a laboratory discovery to a widely used sugar substitute. Okay, fine, sure, discovered by accident, like many things. But once discovered, it became a sweetening agent, and a sweetening agent it doth remain. Again, not an unintended use. I'm starting to think I'm not seeing any ads because this whole page is an ad. 8. Popsicles As the story goes, on a very cold day in 1905, little Frank Epperson was mixing soda powder with water out on his porch when he was suddenly called to dinner by his mother. Or perhaps it was bed. The point is, he forgot his concoction outside overnight only to find it frozen solid the next morning. Luckily, the stick he'd been using to stir it was still stuck in the ice, and when he pulled it out, the popsicle came with it, revealing a glorious new invention. That origin story is faker and less believable than Spider-Man's. 9. Worcestershire sauce This tasty condiment with a complex flavor profile owes its origin to a fortuitous experiment carried out in the early 19th century by chemists John Lea and William Perrins of Worcester, England. Leading to generations of Americans being utterly unable to pronounce the stuff. 12. Baking soda Before there was baking soda, or baking powder for that matter, bread and cake makers had to resort to the use of yeast to make their creations rise. Ooookaaaay, now I'm sure this is one big ad. Church and Dwight (the makers of Arm&Hammer) have been pushing alternative uses for baking soda on us for decades. Some of them even work. But baking soda soon went above and beyond its application as a leavening agent. It found use as a household cleaner owing to its abrasive nature and deodorizing properties. The fridge-deodorant thing, however, probably does not. 15. Aspartame This artificial sweetener emerged from the laboratory of one James M. Schlatter in 1965. Schlatter accidentally discovered its sweet taste while working on an anti-ulcer drug. A compound he was synthesizing got on his fingers and he tasted it, as you do in a lab full of potentially toxic and definitely mysterious substances. So... same origin story as saccharin. Aspartame has now found its way into a myriad of products, including diet sodas, sugar-free desserts, and chewing gum, offering consumers a guilt-free way to enjoy sweetness — aside from that possible cancer risk. At this point, if they can't replicate studies showing it can cause cancer, despite really desperately trying (studies often conducted and/or paid for by those with a vested interest in the matter, like, say, sugar companies), the only reasonable conclusion is that its cancer risk is no higher than baseline. And even if there were a small risk, you'd have to weigh that (pun intended) against the health problems associated with too much sugar/HFCS/whatever. Or you could just eat nothing but unsweetened graham crackers, I suppose. Can't call that living, though. |
| Same shit, different year. Let's see what the random numbers have in store for this first day of '24 (hey, that rhymed)... Uh oh, I gotta handle a New Yorker article while hungover? Curse you, random numbers! Has Gratuity Culture Reached a Tipping Point? Paying extra for service has inspired rebellions, swivelling iPads, and irritation from Trotsky. Post-pandemic, the practice has entered a new stage. I've chiseled tipping articles in here before... including one almost a year ago which used the pun in their headline before TNY even thought of it: "Tipping Point" Consequently, I'll try to limit my ranting to stuff I haven't covered before. I doubt I'll be entirely successful. Before screens, tipping, like a marriage proposal, was a private affair. No. People proposed in public prior to posting on Pinterest (or whatever). Tips can reveal hidden values or the rumblings of the subconscious. Mostly, though, they reveal who's an asshole and who's not, and a range in between. A waitress’s breast size, for instance, correlates positively with tip size. Correlation isn't causation. Maybe waitresses with ample bazooms provide better service. I should do a scientific study. Etiquette experts studied the so-called guilt-tip boom. And reached, mostly, the wrong conclusions. Apparently, we now tip assistant sports coaches (up three hundred and sixty-seven per cent) and theatre-box-office staff (up a hundred and sixty-one per cent). Okay, look. Those numbers are absolutely meaningless out of context. Used to tip a dime, now tip a quarter? That's a hundred and fifty percent increase. Also, the sentence itself reveals that "we" (not me) have always tipped assistant sports coaches (WHY) and theater staff, because if those started from a baseline of 0, there's no way to express an increase from that baseline as a percentage. I've long ragged about lots of things TNY does. Publishing long-winded, pretentious articles. Promoting a dense, meandering writing style (I've called it The New Yorker School of Not Gettiing to the Fucking Point). Even adhering to anachronistic style standards, such as hyphenating teen-age or using diareses. But one thing I've always appreciated (besides the comics, which I've always found rather amusing) is their facts. Until this article. It's not just the math thing, either. The gratuity, classically, functions as a “thank-you,” but it can also serve as a “sorry.” People most often tip in settings where the workers are less happy than the customers. The Freudian Ernest Dichter once described the compulsion as “the need to pay, psychologically, for the guilt involved in the unequal relationship.” Pretty much everything Freud proposed has been shown to be wrong. Consequently, I'm not going to take his followers' statements at face value, either, not without evidence. Also, I've never felt guilt (except on those rare occasions when I realize later that I should have tipped, but didn't). No, when I leave a tip, it's out of perceived obligation and/or generosity. Michael Lynn, a marketing professor at Cornell, has studied tips for forty years, beginning when he was a bartender in graduate school. “When you think about it, you go, ‘Why would people give up money they don’t have to?’ ” In restaurants, he has found, the answer has to do with social approval. Why would you give a gift to another person or to a charity? You don't have to. You'd have more money if you didn't. English coffeehouses were said to set out urns inscribed with “To Insure Promptitude.” Customers tossed in coins. Eventually, the inscription was shortened to “TIP.” This is the bit that pissed me off the most, though. And yes, I've ranted about this before, but no one listened. The word "tip" did not start out as an acronym. It's much older than the wordification of acronyms. The idea that it did is a false etymology, what I call a fauxtymology because while I hate other peoples' portmanteaux, I'm overly fond of my own. It's been thoroughly, completely, and definitively debunked, and anyone who still believes it has absolutely no business claiming to be an expert on tipping, or writing a book about it.And The New Yorker should be ashamed of itself for letting that get published. Shame. Shame. If I had a rolled-up newspaper, I'd bop them on the nose for it. Incidentally, "for unlawful carnal knowledge" and "ship high in transit" are also fauxtymologies. After that wholehearted nonsense, I couldn't trust any other assertions in the article. Might still be worth reading, but I doubt it's going to change any minds. Personally, I'd like to see tipping go away entirely, replaced by decent wages and bonuses like other workers get. But unless that happens (which it won't in my lifetime), we're stuck with it. Which doesn't mean we have to give in to tip-beggars in traditionally non-tipped positions. |
| Sundays are for reflection in here, and this year, New Year's Eve, which seems to be a popular day for reflection, happens to fall on a Sunday. The random numbers pointed me to an entry almost precisely two and a half years ago, during a somewhat memorable trip: "Elsewhere in Minnesota" As it was a travel update, no external links to deal with. I've decided to stay in the Minneapolis area until July 5. That decision (or rather, the illusion of decision) would end up altering the course of my life. Though, to be fair, any other decision, if one were possible, could have ended up way worse. In the entry, I proceeded to briefly describe a brewery visit. And this place brewed the most delicious mead I've ever enjoyed. This is still the case, though I don't know if their quality has changed by now, or if they're even still doing mead. I don't think I meant to be cagey about the name of the brewery; it's this one. I'd call it a happy mead-ium, but I'd never stoop so low. I can't recall a single other brewery that I've been to brewing mead... And I still can't, though I know they exist. This statement may have been misleading, because what I meant to convey that it's rare for a beer brewery to also make mead. Obviously, places dedicated to mead but not beer exist, and obviously, I've visited them. Four days after this entry, my car would get totaled and that would be it for traveling for well over a year, except for some excursions in others' vehicles. So I haven't been back to Minneapolis since. |
| One reason for learning a different language is to learn wonderful new curse words. Or, as this bit from Cracked points out, just words we don't have in English. ...except it's the end of December, so all I'm feeling right now is cold, and there are perfectly good English words for that. Are you going through something right now that you’re having trouble putting into words? Feeling a little je ne sais quoi, a little pomme de terre? Okay, that made me chuckle. If you’re unable to articulate what you’re experiencing, that doesn’t make your emotions invalid. It does make you want to reevaluate your writing career. As words are kinda important to writing, here they are now: 6. Saudade: Empty Sadness for What Is Lost I never encountered this word (from Portuguese) until just over a year ago. How do I know this? Because I blogged about it: "No Geese Involved" Unlike nostalgia, saudade speaks to a longing for something you’re sure to never experience again, which is a component of your sadness you need to acknowledge. That's not exactly what that previous article stated, once again demonstrating that one should never get one's wisdom from one source. 5. Ilunga: Eventually Unforgiving In 2004, linguists convened to vote on which word, in any language, is the hardest to translate. This was before "covfefe." The hardest word comes from the Tshiluba language from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The word is ilunga. An ilunga is a person who “is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.” That's... really quite specific. 4. Perendination: One Step Beyond Procrastination Oooh, I knew there'd be something in here that could describe me. In Latin, we have a word for putting something off for the day after tomorrow. When you do that, you perendinate, which is one step beyond procrastination. Procrastination is for amateurs. I must insist that this word be added to English immediately. Well, tomorrow. Well... one of these days. 3. Kummerspeck: Emotional Overeating When you’re sad — not just from saudade, but for various other reasons, perhaps resulting from your perendination or being an ilunga — the clichéd move is to grab a pint of ice cream and eat it, right out of the container. Can't. I don't buy ice cream anymore, precisely because it's not a pint anymore. There's a word for that process, too, but I hate it. In German, they have a word for this type of binge: kummerspeck. The -speck refers to pork fat, so the cleanest translation into English is “grief bacon.” Praise the lard! 2. Mudita: Pleasure in Others’ Joy If you take pleasure in someone else’s suffering, we have an English word for that: schadenfreude. Well, it’s not an English word exactly. It is now. If English speakers use a word enough, it becomes English. How much is enough? Depends on who you ask. But saying schadenfreude isn't English is like saying kindergarten isn't English. In Vietnamese, they call it hỷ. In Chinese, they call it xǐ. In Japanese, they call it ki. Several other languages call it mudita, which was originally a Sanskrit word and is a whole concept in Buddhism. Ironically, Buddhism (at least from this outsider's perspective) is more focused on suffering. 1. Swaffelen: Penis Smacking And this one, you're just going to have to go to the link to see for yourselves. Bonus: it's Dutch. Sort of. |
| Ever read something just to remind yourself how good you've got it? For me, that's pretty much everything from Outside, especially this article: The Joys of Cabin Living in Alaska Want to know what domestic bliss looks like? A rundown cabin with no electricity on the edge of rain-soaked Alaskan wilderness. Huh... I didn't know that "domestic bliss" was a synonym for "literal Hell," but in retrospect, it makes sense. Article is from 2013... not enough time for climate change to significantly affect the subject matter or my feelings about it. Yet. My two brothers and I, along with a buddy of ours... own a shack at a place called Saltery Cove on Southeast Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island. Morbidly curious, I looked it up. It's almost as south as you can get and still be in Alaska. The northern boundary of British Columbia is quite a ways north. The place is still way too north. The shack is about 36 feet long and 12 feet wide, with the warped shape and discoloration of a cardboard shoe box that’s been soaked in the rain. Luxury! The appeal of our shack isn’t so much the structure itself, but rather the bare-bones nature of its locality. Surrounded largely by the Tongass National Forest, it’s a place where black bears gnaw mussels from the rocks in what might be described as our yard and killer whales pass by so close that you can hear them even with the door closed. Okay, fine, that would be kinda cool to experience. For, like, a day or two. But in truth that’s only half the answer. The other half is more difficult to explain and also a bit masochistic: Saltery Cove is a place where everything—the weather, the ocean, the mountains, the people, the trees, the animals, even the buildings—seems capable of kicking your ass in a very physical way. And in today’s increasingly tame and virtual world, where our primary sensations tend to be delivered by our Wi-Fi connections, a good old-fashioned ass kicking is something worth paying for. Bullshit. I mean, okay, you feel that way, fine. We gotta have differences of opinion, or else one spot would get too crowded. But to me, this is like saying, "I built myself a beautiful mansion, but I prefer the feeling of living in a drainage ditch." I prefer the simple life. By which I mean, if I'm cold, I press a couple of buttons, and then I'm not cold. If I'm too hot, I press the same buttons in a different order. Hungry? Buttons. Thirsty? Okay, no button for that, but there's a lever. Dirty? Knobs for that. Entertainment? Back to the buttons. Couldn't possibly be simpler, at least not until we further refine AI. No, I don't yearn for the complicated lives of my ancestors; they worked their asses off so I could sit on mine all day, and I'm ever so grateful and appreciative of them for that. Another way in which the cabin kicks my ass is through my wife, Katie. She often regards my purchase of the shack with that eye-rolling sense of dismissal that people will use when confronted with the subject of their spouse’s past girlfriends or boyfriends. And yet she puts up with you. I've never really understood people, and articles like this only add to my confusion. I went there with my brother Danny to fish salmon and halibut with one of Saltery Cove’s eight full-time residents, Ron Leighton, a man of mixed Native Alaskan and Irish descent who’ll tear your head off for tangling an anchor line and then send your kid a birthday present even though the nearest mailbox is an hour’s boat ride from his house. Ron’s résumé includes a tour of duty as a door gunner in Vietnam, a career as a detective with the police force in Ketchikan, Alaska, and a parallel career as a halibut long-liner. Gotta admit, though, that's the kind of person whose life seems tailor-made for writers. The article goes on to describe why it's such a wonderful idea to buy a cabin on the coast of nowhere, sight-unseen: in summary, the place was utterly trashed and they spent months cleaning up. Oh, well. It works for them. More space in semi-civilized areas for me, then. |
| Another reason to use good grammar and spelling: you'd be contributing to public health. Unless, of course, you're an evil villain whose sole purpose is to create as much chaos, illness, and discord as you can without getting caught. Summary: A novel study uncovers our physiological response to misused grammar. Researchers identified a direct link between grammatical errors and a change in Heart Rate Variability (HRV). This appears to be legitimate science, by the way. I don't know if it's been replicated or even peer-reviewed. It gives the answer I want, though, so I'm highlighting it. When confronted with bad grammar, subjects’ HRVs indicated increased stress levels. Hm. Someone should do a similar study for puns. A new study by professors at the University of Birmingham has revealed for the first time how our bodies go into stress-mode when hearing misused grammar. So, see? It's not just me or your English teacher. HRV captures the time between successive heart beats. The length of the intervals between a person’s successive heart beats tends to be variable when they are relaxed but becomes more regular when they are stressed. Now, that seems counterintuitive, but that's why we do science. I don't really need to comment further; the article is there at the link. If I weren't lazy, I'd turn this into a villain's superpower and write stories about it. But I am lazy. |
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