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Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| The answer to the headline question from today's The Conversation article is, obviously: Right here where I'm sitting. I’ve spent decades trying to understand general relativity, including in my current job as a physics professor teaching courses on the subject. I know wrapping your head around the idea of an ever-expanding universe can feel daunting – and part of the challenge is overriding your natural intuition about how things work. Part of the point of science is to tell us when intuition and the misnamed "common sense" fail us. Unfortunately, not everyone accepts these overrides, maybe because they're convinced they're the center of the universe. Or maybe they think the thoughts they come up with are just as valid as those who are educated and trained for this sort of thing. For instance, it’s hard to imagine something as big as the universe not having a center at all, but physics says that’s the reality. As with many things in general relativity, that really depends on your point of view. And so we see the apparent contradiction there, right? On the one hand, perception of reality changes with point of view. On the other, my ignorant musings aren't as valid as a trained scientist's careful research and experimentation. If someone says "the Earth is flat," isn't that just as valid as centuries of observations supporting its roundness? In short: no. On Earth, “expanding” means something is getting bigger. Like our waistlines. This idea is subtle but critical. It’s easy to think about the creation of the universe like exploding fireworks: Start with a big bang, and then all the galaxies in the universe fly out in all directions from some central point. Which is why calling it the "Big Bang" is compelling, but confusing. Even my preferred nomenclature, the Horrendous Space Kablooie (thanks, Calvin), is misleading. It’s not so much the galaxies that are moving away from each other – it’s the space between galaxies, the fabric of the universe itself, that’s ever-expanding as time goes on. When your mind gets blown, though, it is a conventional explosion. Metaphorically speaking. A common analogy is to imagine sticking some dots on the surface of a balloon. As you blow air into the balloon, it expands. Because the dots are stuck on the surface of the balloon, they get farther apart. Though they may appear to move, the dots actually stay exactly where you put them, and the distance between them gets bigger simply by virtue of the balloon’s expansion. As the article goes on to point out, that analogy is inadequate in a few ways. Another one I've heard is you put a raw loaf of raisin bread in the oven, and as it rises, the raisins get pushed further apart. That's incomplete, too. The thing we think of as the “center” of the balloon is a point somewhere in its interior, in the air-filled space beneath the surface. But in this analogy, the universe is more like the latex surface of the balloon. The balloon’s air-filled interior has no counterpart in our universe, so we can’t use that part of the analogy – only the surface matters. It's like asking "where's the center of the Earth's surface?" If you restrict your search to the surface itself, you'll never find a center, only important points like the poles, or New York City. But none of these are an actual "center," no matter how many jokes you make about it. One of the most mind-blowing things, though, isn't addressed by the article: that the universe is, to our limited perception, inside-out. The further away you go, the more back in time you see, until it's surrounded by the detectable remnants of the oldest matter/energy in the Universe. A consequence of this is that we do appear to be in the center of the universe. But then, so does every hypothetical being standing on every other planet out there. And this is why appearances can't be taken at face value. |
| Continuing with yesterday's theme, because the random number generator has gained sentience and likes to have a laugh at my expense, a three-year-old article from The Guardian: ‘What are our lives for?’: a philosopher answers kids’ existential questions  What happens when Plato mixes with playtime? Philosopher Scott Hershovitz answers the questions that confound children and adults alike "Kids, you're here because either your parents felt the existential dread of certain mortality, or they were just trying to steal five minutes of fun from their dreary, meaningless lives when the condom broke, thus condemning them to 18+ years of misery." I’ve got two boys, Rex and Hank. They have been asking philosophical questions since they were little, and they try to answer them too. I honestly don't remember if I was that way when I was a kid. I know I was curious about science, which my parents absolutely encouraged. I feel like if I'd asked my dad what the meaning of life was, his answer would be either something completely absurd like "ducks," or he'd be like "I don't know. Go ask your mom." But I don't think the question ever occurred to me, or, if it did, I shrugged it off much like I do all these years later. If God created everything, who created God? Leyha, 7 Does God exist? I don’t know, but I’m sceptical. And your question points to one of the reasons why. Imagining that there’s a God doesn’t help us explain anything. It just raises new questions, which are at least as mysterious as the old ones. I figure the Western conception of God is usually depicted with a long, flowing beard because He didn't have access to Occam's Razor. I sometimes feel like I’m the only real person and everyone else is a robot. How can I know if that’s true? Ursula, 8 Well, Ursula, you're only asking that because you were programmed to. If they were really good robots, you wouldn’t be able to tell, at least not without cutting them open. And let’s not do that, since they would get hurt if your hypothesis was wrong. They'd also get hurt if your hypothesis was right. A philosopher named Descartes once tried to imagine that everything he believed was wrong. He didn’t suppose the people around him were robots, since they hadn’t been invented. Instead, he imagined that an evil demon was filling his head with falsehoods – that none of the people or things he thought he knew actually existed. Except, presumably, the demon. Ask yourself the same question, Ursula. Is there any reason to think that you, and you alone, are real? Probably not. Unless you’re the main character in a movie and I’m just another robot trying to trick you … This made me chuckle, because it sounds like something I would say to some snot-nose proto-solipsistic kid. Why are there numbers? Sahil, 5 Specifically to annoy you, Sahil. Where was I before I was here? Josh, 3 Nowhere! The universe has been around for billions of years, but you weren’t part of it until very recently. And, one day, you'll be nowhere again! (The next few questions tackle that angle on the question. I don't feel the need to snark on them further.) What are our lives for? Caspar, 5 Well, Caspar, they are like cogs in a giant machine. As long as the cog works, everything works. As soon as it stops working, you're replaced by a different cog. Seriously, though, this leads in to the part I really wanted to quote: Lots of people want to know what the meaning of life is. They’re searching for something that will help it make sense that we’re here, and maybe tell us how to live. But I think they’re making a mistake. The universe doesn’t care about us... But we are here, and we should care about each other, even if the universe doesn’t care about us. There may be no meaning to our lives. But we can find meaning in our lives by filling them with family and friends and fun – and projects that make the world a better place. You get to decide what your life is for, Caspar, so try to make it something cool. Because that's pretty close to my own thoughts on the subject—at least on those rare occasions when I stop making jokes get serious about it. Why is it bad to have everything I want? Abraham, 4 ...Last, there’s a song by the Rolling Stones called You Can’t Always Get What You Want. That’s true. And you have to learn how to be disappointed without making yourself – and everyone else – miserable. And I'm just quoting this to emphasize the combined absurdity and absolute greatness of a philosopher quoting the Rolling Stones. Why do people end up doing things that they don’t want to do? Sarang, 4 Money. Do the needs of the many outweigh those of the few, or do the needs of the few outweigh those of the many? Arthur, 7 Seven is probably a bit young to be watching Wrath of Khan. Arthur, did you get help with your homework? Or did some grownup put you up to asking this question? I’m a little suspicious, but I’ll answer anyway. I'm a lot suspicious. Still, it's a valid question. As for the answer, well, the author took a lot of words to say "it depends," as philosophers are wont to do. Is your imagination made of atoms? Josie, 7 Now that kid's almost certainly going to become a scientist or philosopher. Or, better yet, both. Unless, of course, the world beats them down just like it does everyone else. Lots more at the article. As usual, the philosopher never seems to mention comedy as critical to the meaning and/or purpose of life. I guess that's a "me" thing. Philosophers don't generally have senses of humor (or humour, considering the source). We have a different name for philosophers who are funny; we call them "comedians." |
| Another article on meeeeeaaaaaniiiiing, this one from Quartz: The secret to a meaningful life is simpler than you think Some people seem to spend their whole lives dissatisfied, in search of a purpose. But philosopher Iddo Landau suggests that all of us have everything we need for a meaningful existence. Let's see... money, check; humor, check; beer, check... yep, he's right. Even if he does sound like he got his name from a Star Wars background character. According to Landau, a philosophy professor at Haifa University in Israel and author of the 2017 book Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World... I'm pretty sure ads don't do anything to make our lives meaningful, unless we're the ones profiting from them. ...people are mistaken when they feel their lives are meaningless. The error is based on their failure to recognize what does matter, instead becoming overly focused on what they believe is missing from their existence. That's a lot of words to say what I've known for a very long time, which is that contentment stems not from having what you want, but from wanting what you have. In other words, Landau thinks that people who feel purposeless actually misunderstand what meaning is. "But I know! And I can tell you, for just $29.95 for the hardcover or $29.45 for the Kindle edition!" Look, I'm not really ragging on someone trying to make money. Just the practice of disguising ads as articles. I know I link a lot of them in here, but that's because a) this is a writing website, and it's a book promotion and b) some of the very few articles that don't require a subscription or are otherwise behind a paywall are that way because they are ads. Those who do think meaning can be discerned, however, fall into four groups, according to Thaddeus Metz, writing in the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy. Some are god-centered and believe only a deity can provide purpose. Others ascribe to a soul-centered view, thinking something of us must continue beyond our lives, an essence after physical existence, which gives life meaning. Then there are two camps of “naturalists” seeking meaning in a purely physical world as known by science, who fall into “subjectivist” and “objectivist” categories. Now, that, I find interesting, though it does strike me as just another example of humans' obsession with putting everything into nice little boxes with neat little labels. The first two categories there are pretty self-explanatory, I think, and the article explains the difference between subjectivist and objectivist naturalism. For those who feel purposeless, Landau suggests a reframing is in order. He writes, “A meaningful life is one in which there is a sufficient number of aspects of sufficient value, and a meaningless life is one in which there is not a sufficient number of aspects of sufficient value.” Yeah, well, personally, I'd add: "And no one else gets to say whether someone's life has a sufficient number of aspects of sufficient value." Landau argues that anyone who believes life can be meaningless also assumes the importance of value. In other words, if you think life can be meaningless, then you believe that there is such a thing as value. You’re not neutral on the topic. While I feel that this is probably true, I also think it's trivial. It's almost exactly like saying "If you think something is worthless, then you believe in the existence of worth." It relates to my musings on how a hole is always defined by what it's a hole in, rather than some arbitrary volume that we call a "hole." Some might protest that Landau’s being simplistic. Some might make things more complicated than they need to be. In fact, there are even less complex approaches to meaningfulness. In Philosophy Now, Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London in the UK, provides an extremely simple answer: “The meaning of life is not being dead.” Oooh, another Monty Python fan. Casey Woodling, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, proposes in Philosophy Now that the question of meaningfulness itself offers an answer. “What makes a human life have meaning or significance is not the mere living of a life, but reflecting on the living of a life,” he writes. Yeah, well, I have a different take on that: a human life is not much different from a cat life or a beetle life. Birth, life, maybe reproduction, death. Do beetles care about meaning? I doubt it. Cats? Almost certainly not, judging by the ones who live with me. So why are we so profoundly concerned with it? Just because only we (as far as we know) have the capacity to communicate it to others? The next section kind of agrees with me there: In the Eastern philosophical tradition, there’s yet another simple answer to the difficult question of life’s meaning... [Lao Tzu] suggests meaning comes from being a product of the world itself. No effort is necessary. Well, I'm certainly not here to resolve all the philosophical differences between East and West. Or to sell you anything. I just find this stuff interesting. Does it have value? That's up to you. |
| After yesterday's screed, I find it necessary to emphasize that "deterministic" doesn't imply "predictable." Fortunately, today's random number pulled up this article, from MIT Press Reader, about someone who tried to predict everything. The Blunders of a 16th-Century Physician-Astrologer Horoscopic prediction is an inherently uncertain field, as Italian polymath Gerolamo Cardano had occasion to confirm more than once. "Inherently uncertain?" I'd have gone with some variation of "complete garbage" or "utter twaddle," depending on how many British articles I'd been perusing recently. Some of us will remember that Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy consulted astrologer Joan Quigley before any major presidential decision. In fairness, this probably resulted in some better outcomes than Reagan just going with his gut. That the celestial bodies are not always reliable became evident when no astrologer was able to predict that on March 30, 1981, at 2:27 p.m., EST, President Reagan would be shot in the chest during an assassination attempt. But let's stop and consider for a moment: what if one of them, somehow, did? Would predicting a Presidential assassination attempt (during which other, less obnoxious people actually died) be of any use? I suppose one could say "you will be shot if you stand at point x at time t." So Ronald McDonald, believing unquestioningly in the science and predictive power of astrology, goes to great lengths to not stand at point x anywhere near time t. Then no one shoots at him. This nullifies the prediction. And could anyone, besides the astrologer, say with any confidence, "the only reason you didn't get shot at was because you heeded my advice?" Put another way, I could say, "When you go to the beach this weekend, don't go in the ocean between 2 and 3 pm, because if you do, you'll be bitten by a shark." So you get out of the water at 2, back in at 3, and you can spend the rest of your life telling everyone what a great forecaster I am because you didn't get attacked by a fish. Quigley peremptorily affirmed that she could have predicted the regrettable episode, because it was “very obvious,” if only she had drawn up his charts. Unfortunately, her occupations had precluded her from doing this. Having known several astrologers, when I read this, I laughed. Absolutely something one of them would say. Today, people’s blind belief in the power of astrology to reveal the future strikes us as absurd, because our mental stance is radically different. Who's this "our" person? Plenty of people don't find it absurd. Also, don't disparage absurdity by conflating it with bullshit. (As I've said before, I find astrology interesting as folklore and as the precursor to astronomy; it's still bullshit.) Notable among all divinatory physicians was a man of extraordinary eccentricity and uncommon genius: the Italian polymath from Pavia (some say Milan), Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576); his name is usually transcribed in English as Jerome Cardan, a custom that will be followed here. For context, this was a few years before Shakespeare wrote "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Or anything else that we know of. In his clinical work, Cardan revived metoposcopy, the art of divination by looking at the lines of the face, especially of the forehead. Okay, that word was a new one for me. Also bullshit, but I wonder how much of that translated into the equally bullshit phrenology. Also, I should emphasize that, at the time, science really hadn't been invented yet, and the practice of medicine in general was more empirical and superstitious than evidence-based. The article delves into an overview of metoposcopy, then: The basic underlying hypothesis is simple: The forehead is the scroll on which God wrote His sublime word. In the legend of the Golem, which has Kabbalistic origins, the animating essence is usually a Hebrew word etched upon the forehead of the creature. I always thought we should do that with humanoid robots just to fuck with people. An aside: the most famous Golem story involved the city of Prague. Prague is a Czech city. The word "robot" came to us from the Czech language. Robots, at least the ones that are vaguely humanoid, are basically techno-golems. Also, the Czech are a Slavic people, and Slav is the root for our word "slave," which is also what "robot" means in Czech. I find these coincidences amusing. Well, except for the part where someone, somewhere, considered an entire culture to be a slave race. That's not so amusing, regardless of which race. Furthermore, divination never lacked fervent followers, as its practitioners thrive under the cloak of infallibility. If the event predicted actually occurs, the prognosticator’s clairvoyance will be deemed miraculous and the clairvoyant a being of preternatural acumen. But if the prediction fails to take place, the diviner can concoct elaborate reasons that will explain the failure, deflect the blame, and, in so doing, flaunt a profound learning in the esoteric art of divination. That trick is hardly limited to divination. Thanks to his international renown, he was called to the then remote and barbarous Scotland... "Then?" Okay, okay, I'm kidding. Please don't play bagpipes at me. ...to provide medical care for His Excellency, Bishop John Hamilton (1512–1571). Then, asked to draw his horoscope, the astrologer-physician predicted that Hamilton would live happily, but would be in danger of dying from cardiac disease. What actually happened was that the bishop was taken prisoner during the capture of Dumbarton Castle, summarily condemned to execution, and hanged at Stirling in 1571, thus achieving the dubious distinction of being the first Scottish bishop ever to die at the hands of an executioner. "Whew, he luckily missed dying of a heart attack!" There are a couple of other examples of his confident predictions that turned out to be, and I'm using the literary device of understatement here, slightly off. There is a tradition that Jerome Cardan had engaged in all sorts of astrological calculations by which he determined the exact date — year, month, day, and hour — of his death. The fatidical moment approached fast, yet nothing seemed to indicate that he was about to breathe his last. Therefore, our man decided to lock himself up, refused to eat, and let himself die. Now that, mes amis, is what I call absolute dedication to one's closely-held beliefs. If it's true. Which it probably isn't. He died in Rome, aged 75, while under the protection of Pope Gregory XIII, who had recognized his outstanding merits. And, though the article doesn't say this, this was the same Gregory who codified the civil calendar that the world uses to this day (and which I rail against from time to time). I guess some things are predictable after all. Like the Earth's orbit around the Sun. |
| Stepping into a quagmire today, because the author of this aeon piece is, as stated in her bio, "a philosopher specialising in theology and natural science." So I'm going to have issues from the very beginning, as I consider theology a "subject without an object," in the words of someone smarter than I am whose name I can't find right now. Many worlds, many selves If it’s true that we live in a vast multiverse, then our understanding of identity, morality and even God must be reexamined The word "if" is doing most of the work in that subhead. As far as I'm aware, the idea of a multiverse, while making for some interesting (and not so interesting) fiction, is not something that can be supported or falsified scientifically. It arises as a possible, and terribly misunderstood, consequence of one of many interpretations of quantum physics. Recently, I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. I had a decision to make and, either way, I knew my life would follow a different track. On one path, I accept a job offer: it’s an incredible opportunity, but means relocating hundreds of miles away, with no social network. On the other, I stay in Oxford where I’d lived for a decade: less adventure, but close to my friends and family. Both options had upsides and downsides, so I wished that I could take the job and turn it down, somehow living each life in parallel. Well… there was potentially a way to make this happen. I could have my cake and eat it too. One of the most misunderstood things about multiverse speculation is what would cause the Universe to split. It supposedly happens, if at all, when a quantum entity such as an electron is no longer in a probability function, but acquires a defined state. It's not because of human choice. As electrons do this all the time all over the universe, the number of universes split off in this way is a number so large as to be incomprehensible to us (but still just as far from infinity as the number 1 is). There are smartphone apps that can help you decide between two options by harnessing the unpredictable quirks of quantum mechanics. But this is no ordinary coin toss, where randomness decides your fate. Instead, it guarantees that both choices become realities. It guarantees no such thing, and even if it did, there would be no way to get your money back because the "both realities" thing cannot be verified. In principle, though, this would produce results more truly random than most methods, including the proverbial coin toss and the simple app I use to choose these articles from a list, so it could have its uses. It’s inspired by the ‘Many-Worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed by the physicist Hugh Everett III in his doctoral dissertation in the 1950s. He argued that our Universe branches into multiple worlds every time a quantum event takes place – and thousands happen every second. While "thousands" implies something less than "millions," the actual number is exponentially higher than even millions. But my main quibble here is the conflating of "universe" and "world." Unless you're speaking Hebrew, those words are different: the universe is also exponentially larger than the world. As a philosopher of religion, I am interested in how this mind-boggling scientific theory might force us to reexamine even our most deeply held beliefs. One, it's not a theory; it's a hypothesis. Two, when a theologian says something like this, what they really mean is "how do we still fit God into our world-views, given this information?" It's like they almost get it, but not quite. In fact, I believe that the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics encourages us to radically reconceptualise our understanding of ourselves. Perhaps I am not a single, unique, enduring subject. Perhaps I am actually like a branching tree, or a splitting amoeba, with many almost identical copies living slightly different lives across a vast and ever-growing multiverse. Even if Many-Worlds is fact, which I'm not saying it is, there's a really important difference between that hypothesis and trees or amoebae: a tree is an entity that we can see in its entirety, and each branch continues to contribute to the whole; the daughters of a splitting amoeba continue to co-exist and might even bump into each other; but once the Universe splits off, that's it: no further contact between the branches. At all. Ever. Not even in "theory." Only in popular fiction. (I've written such fiction myself, though I wouldn't call it "popular," before I realized it was just adding to peoples' confusion about this sort of thing.) I also believe that this picture encourages us to rethink our ideas about moral responsibility, and what religion tells us about God – maybe, even, abandon the traditional idea of God altogether. So close. SO close. For starters, if we live in a universe where there are multiple versions of you, thorny questions are raised about whether these versions of you can be considered the exact same person. There's that "if" again, but this time, it's even more iffy: we do not "live in a universe where there are multiple versions of you." Assuming, again, MWH is real (which, again, I do not), the clones all occupy different and forever separate universes. There's a somewhat-logical philosophical consequence to MWH called quantum immortality. It asserts that if a quantum event could either cause your death or not, your consciousness follows the "alive" path. I say logical, but logic can rest on false premises. Theology, for example. The article goes into other possible philosophical implications (most of which I find to be spurious), and then: An additional thorny problem raised by a universe of many worlds is that of moral responsibility. Most ordinary people’s moral intuitions about right action – whether some action was freely made, whether it accords with shared moral principles, and whether a person can be held responsible for it – were formed under the assumption that we live in a singular universe. Ha! Wait until you start thinking about the moral-responsibility consequences of our lack of free will as it is traditionally understood. The problem is, Many-Worlds is a deterministic theory – and determinism is considered by many, though not all, philosophers to be incompatible with genuine freedom. Oh... so close. So very, very close, but not quite. Consider this: Assume an entity that exists outside of space and time, for whom the past, present, and future has already happened, is happening, and will happen, all at once, and they're aware of all of it. To them, what we call the future is just as immutable as what we call the past, because it's all the same "thing." From the point of view of such an entity, we don't make choices; we're a train that never jumps the tracks and runs on an entirely predictable schedule. That entity could never be surprised. If they could be surprised, they wouldn't be all-knowing. In other words, if God can be surprised, He's not omniscient. If He cannot, then we don't have free will. (This assumes such an entity in the first place, of course.) Across the multiverse, everything that can happen does happen; each branch is inevitable. If that’s the case, even if we feel like we have the freedom to choose what actions we take, this may in fact be an illusion. We wouldn’t think me morally responsible for pushing over my grandmother if someone held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me if I didn’t. Similarly, if all my actions are determined by physical forces outside my control – like the laws of quantum mechanics – then it seems pretty unjust to punish me for them. There are plenty of reasons to punish people who do what we consider to be wrong, whether we have free will or not. I won't go into that here. Lots more at the article, but, as I said, it's possible to build entire logical edifices on nonexistent foundations, which results in the entire building sinking into the quagmire that I just waded through. It's fine to do the thinking, though. One of our superpowers as humans is the ability to imagine the impossible; as with all superpowers, though, it's possible that we abuse it sometimes. |
| I can't recall where I found this particular article. It's from a source I know nothing about (Farmingdale Observer), and it's not a topic I'd usually comment on (except for the "happiness" angle). But okay, at some point, I dumped it into my pile and the random numbers pointed at it today, so here it is. Before anyone replies with "I prefer working in an office setting," remember that any conclusion like this, assuming it's a valid study, applies in aggregate. It's like claiming "going to parties is fun," which, while a majority of people might agree, some would vehemently disagree. The researchers are unequivocal: this flexibility significantly improves the well-being and happiness of employees, transforming our relationship with work. I'm betting many employers consider their workers' "well-being and happiness" way down the list of things they give a shit about. Their study, which was unique in that it began before the health crisis, tracked changes in the well-being of Australian workers over a four-year period, offering a unique perspective on the long-term effects of teleworking. One immediate problem jumps out like a kangaroo: can this be extrapolated to the US? Japan? Singapore? Italy? Namibia? Different countries can have vastly different work cultures, not to mention not everyone lives in a capitalist paradise. Yes, I'm aware that the problem is usually reversed: US researchers studying US people, and then projecting the result to the rest of the world. Point is, maybe there's something unique to Australia that skews the results in favor of working from home—like, maybe, not having to deal with the stress of knowing that all the wildlife is actively trying to kill you on your commute. Though here in the US, you can replace "wildlife" with "gunfire," so it might translate well after all. One of the first things we noticed when we started confinement was an increase in sleep time: almost half an hour more per night for teleworkers. This gain is not insignificant. Before the pandemic, the average Australian spent around 4.5 hours a week travelling for work. That sounds like a lot, I guess, but I just mathed the shit out of that, and it translates to a 27-minute commute time. For shiggles, I looked up the average US commute time, and discovered that it's, shockingly, roughly 27 minutes. Now, for most of my working life, I had a commute that was less than 15 minutes each way, so I may be biased. But half an hour doesn't seem that bad—though, depending on how they figured "average," it means that maybe half the people commute longer than that. Eating habits have also changed. The proximity of the kitchen may well have encouraged an increase in snacking. However, the study highlights a deeper trend towards healthier food choices. Again, I suspect this is a bulk result. It may be that more people chose to munch on carrots (or the Australian equivalent thereof) than gorge on cookies (are they biscuits there, like in the UK? I don't know), but the latter group may include people who, lacking people around to judge them, indulged their baser instincts. While some managers express fears about a drop in performance, sometimes pointing the finger at a lack of supervision, the Australian study, corroborated by other research, suggests that professional performance and productivity are maintained and even improved when employees work from home. Seems like it'd be easy enough to determine if someone's productivity has dropped or increased, whether they're remote or not. But I'm not a middle manager at a large company, and never have been. Working from home is not a universal solution, a one-size-fits-all model that can be applied to all situations. Rather, it appears to be a valuable option among others, capable of contributing to a better, more inclusive and flexible working environment. At least they acknowledge these things. Now, to be clear, being retired, I don't care one way or the other—except that if you take that average (let's round it a bit) half-hour commute each way, which is an hour a day, and consider the environmental impact of all those hour-long drives that may not be necessary. Eliminating that won't solve all our problems, any more than banning plastic bags did, but it could put a dent in them. And any corporation that claims to "care about the environment" while making its white-collar workers come in when it's not strictly necessary gets put on my greenwashers list. Yeah, yeah, I know, carpools, public transportation, etc. My point stands. Obviously, some jobs can't be done from home, but we're not talking about those. And some prefer the office culture, which would clearly be impacted if a lot of the workers chose remote work. There's no fits-all situation here; I just thought the study was worth taking a look at, if only to find ways to do more studies to clarify a few things. |
| This article, from Atlas Obscura, is US-centric; I'd like to see one on other countries' parks. Or perhaps this is a problem unique to the USA. Beware the Legends Behind These National Park Souvenirs Removing items from national parks is illegal—and at these sites, legend says, it can also come with paranormal consequences. Of course I don't accept the existence of the paranormal. But if myths stop people from being massive dicks, I say: fine. When I was nine years old, my family took a road trip across the American Southwest, including a stop at Petrified Forest National Park. I never visited that as a kid. At some point, I learned that it wasn't a bunch of stone trees, but basically just rocks, I was disappointed. I mean, sure, it's still cool, but I was hoping for a massive grove of petrified trees. Before I could ask, I saw the signs at the museum, warning not only of the guilt (and possible criminal charges) that follow anyone who removes a stone, but also of the people who had taken them anyway, and how they’d lived to regret it. I kind of get the urge to swipe stuff like that. It's true that, like with littering, if one person does it, the impact is minimal. But then, multiply that by something like a million, and you get a problem. Not only do national parks generally have strict rules about removing things from the grounds (hence the old adage, “take only pictures, leave only footprints”), but beyond legalities, legend says that there might be supernatural consequences for taking something from the parks that doesn’t belong to you. "God will punish you for that" is an effective way to keep kids, and some adults, in line. While an appeal to a person's better nature might be preferable, some of us don't have a "better nature." So, what are these cursed souvenirs? Where do you find them, and what happens should you acquire one? I'm not sure it helps to say, "Oh, here's where you can go to get illicit souvenirs, if you don't believe in curses." For visitors to the Petrified Forest, who may be encountering petrified wood for the first time, it’s tempting to bring a piece of this unique substance home. But those who do are breaking the law—and risking one of the infamous national park curses. I also get the urge to be a rebel and break laws. It's probably true that some laws exist to keep us from annoying the rich, but ones like this are for the benefit of everyone. Some Americans, as we've seen especially over the past 9 years, don't want to benefit everyone; just themselves. Now, one might say, "But Waltz, if you don't believe in curses, how do you explain all the people who snuck a hunk of petrified wood out and then their genitals shriveled up or whatever?" Well, bad things happen to people on a distressingly regular basis. If a hundred people smuggle out a chunk of rock, chances are that within the next few months, something unfortunate will happen to one or two of them. They then associate the bad luck with invoking the curse, rather than acknowledging the inherent semi-randomness of life. One of the most dramatic, and perhaps broadest-reaching, “souvenir curses” is associated with Haleakalā National Park—and all of Hawai’i more broadly. Unlike the Petrified Forest, I've actually been to Haleakalā. According to legend, the “curse of Pele,” the Indigenous Hawaiian volcano goddess, will befall anyone who removes the natural materials of Hawai’i, like pumice, black volcanic sand, and obsidian, from the islands. I didn't remove any natural materials from Hawai'i (unless you count their local beer as "natural"), and nothing especially bad has happened to me. Yet. Still, I've often wondered what a former famous footballer had to do with Hawaiian curses. However, despite the name, this curse doesn’t date back to Indigenous Hawaiian beliefs, but to a frustrated park ranger in the middle of the 20th century. This is unbearably hilarious to me. Gettysburg National Military Park is the site of President Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address and, prior to that, one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles... According to Gettysburg Battlefield Tours, a local touring company, those who’ve taken stones have faced divorce, debt, and even jail time after taking stones. Presumably, the jail time is unrelated to theft of park souvenirs. Again, though, let's remember that divorce, debt, and jail time are fairly common hazards of life. Without them, where would country music be? Regardless of personal opinions about the supernatural, I find this sort of thing fascinating, if only as a window into human nature (both good and bad). And, again, even if they're fiction, stories have power. |
| I covered our eight-legged friends in an entry recently: "What a Tangled Web" . This is a different spider-written article from SciAm: Do People Really Swallow 8 Spiders a Year While They Sleep? Should we worry about arachnids crawling into our mouths while we’re in dreamland? Sure, go ahead. Worry about that. It's not like there's enough other stuff to worry about. Rod Crawford has heard plenty of firsthand accounts of spider-swilling slumberers. “Once or twice a year, someone tells me they once recovered a spider leg in their mouth,” says Crawford, the arachnid curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle. Yes, this is the same Rod Crawford (actually a spider in a trenchcoat and hat) who got quoted in the previous entry. Luckily for all of us, the “fact” that people swallow eight spiders in their sleep yearly isn’t true. Not even close. Yeah, it's more like eighty. Okay, yes, I'm kidding. But if you think it's "luckily for all of us," just think how much luckier it is for the spiders. Three or four spider species live in most North American homes, and they all tend to be found either tending their webs or hunting in nonhuman-infested areas. I'd say it's more like thirty or forty. Okay, I'm kidding again. During their forays, they usually don’t intentionally crawl into a bed because it offers no prey (unless it has bed bugs, in which case that person has bigger problems). Problems that can be solved by introducing spiders. Plus, many people would likely be awakened by the sensation of a spider crawling over their faces and into their mouths. Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night. Spider experts concede that a sleeping person could plausibly swallow a spider, but “it would be a strictly random event.” Given that we swallow a lot less while sleeping, and we sleep only about 1/3 of the time, I think it's far more likely to swallow one while awake. If this article doesn't put your nocturnal arachnophobia to rest, consider this: other arthropods don't have the same fear of us that spiders do. It's far more likely that you've swallowed a cockroach. |
| Huh, and here I thought Sam Vega was Vincent Vega's brother. From Big Think: Saṃvega: The urgent realization that you need a more meaningful life If you feel like you’re missing out on something bigger, you might be feeling saṃvega. Well, at least it's not an idiotic English portmanteau, like maybe, I don't know, "fearpression;" or another catchy acronym like FOMO. It is a feeling most of us will have experienced at some point, but we might not have called it by that name. So, what does saṃvega mean? The article has already answered this in the summary points at the top, but I'll indulge. Saṃvega is hard to define but it pops up again and again in philosophical literature. It might be called angst, absurdity, ennui, dissatisfaction, alienation, or existential dread. So, there are at least six synonymous words or phrases already in English. Got it. Saṃvega is that sense of unease that comes on when you think everything is pointless. Huh. I don't feel unease when I think everything is pointless. No, it's one of the few realizations that actually makes me smile. It's like... "Nothing matters. What a relief! Now I don't have to worry so much or create drama for other people!" Saṃvega is when you sense that there’s something more to the Universe you’re not quite tapping into — as if you’re dancing around some deeper and more meaningful truth that’s always just out of reach. My beer is usually just within reach. Have you ever worked incredibly hard for a long time toward a goal only to find out that, once you’ve accomplished it, things feel a bit flat? That is saṃvega. Okay, now, that, I can relate to. But it doesn't seem nearly the same thing as angst, absurdity, etc. It is there when Karl Marx talks about the alienation of workers from their work. Oh, so it's about how labor is entitled to what it produces? It is in Friedrich Nietzsche’s angry tirade against the social and moral norms of our time. Our time isn't Nietzsche's time. In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the titular character exemplifies saṃvega. Huh, and here I thought he was just being Russian. Like Ivan, saṃvega is a disease with a great many remedies. These solutions or cures for saṃvega are known as pasada. Broadly, these pasadas fall into four categories: And I won't reiterate the categories in detail here. To summarize: religion, existentialism, absurdity, and nihilism. Well, for me, religion is right out; it just makes shit up and offers false hope. Existentialism, as the article points out, encourages us to find our own meaning internally, which, okay, fine, whatever works. Nihilism is... well, let's just say it's a trap. Absurdity, though? Leaving aside for a moment that up there, they just said that absurdity was a synonym for samvega, at least with absurdity we get to have a laugh every once in a while, and that's something I absolutely believe in. But hey, that's me. I know everyone's different, which is one reason we keep going around and around about "meaning" and "purpose:" everyone has a different point of view on the subject. Once I realized that we're all just making this shit up as we go along, I learned to relax and enjoy it. |
| How about a lesson in comparative linguistics disguised as an article about tacos? A recent one from Gastro Obscura: There’s No Right Way to Say ‘Taco’ An exploration of the ways our tongues—and our pride—twist around foreign words, and what that says about how we want to be seen. I'll give a pass to the subhead reference to "foreign words," as the site is obviously aimed at US English speakers. But it occurred to me that even if the headline is correct, and there's no right way to say 'taco,' there are myriad wrong ways to say it: 'extricated,' 'ashtray,' 'flugel,' and 'dimethylethylpropynol,' to name but a few. It wasn’t so much that my friend, a Brit who has lived in Los Angeles for many years, said the word “taco” differently than I do. The confounding thing was that it was difficult for him to hear the difference, and that when he could distinguish it, he insisted that his way was more correct, closer to the way a Spanish speaker would say it. He pronounced it “tack-oh.” If Brits (and Australians and Canadians, etc.) didn't pronounce things differently to USofAmericans, there wouldn't be distinguishable accents. One wonders if he also called his mom 'mum.' “There’s something very strange going on with that particular ‘A,’” says Lynne Murphy, a lexicologist at the University of Sussex who explores the differences between British and American English on her blog, Separated by a Common Language, and further in her book, The Prodigal Tongue. Oh, so this is an ad. Well, it's an ad for a blog and a book, so I can't fault it too much. The way the Brits pronounce “taco,” as well as “paella” (pie-elluh, with the English L rather than the Spanish LL), “salsa” (the first vowel rhymes with “gal,” the second with “duh”), and “Nicaragua” (nick-uh-rag-you-uh), among others, is a glaring siren of weirdness to an American ear. I remember the first time I heard pasta pronounced "pass-tuh" instead of "pahs-tuh," but I can't remember if that was British or just variant American pronunciation. What’s going on is a complex blend of tongue positioning, imperial history, code-switching, language exposure and accommodation, and an unconscious, or uncomfortably conscious, desire not to seem like you just got back from a semester abroad in Barthelona and brought with you an inability to see your friends rolling their eyes. Oh, imperialism gets thrown into the mix. I'm shocked. Shocked, I say. Okay, not that shocked. I don't think I've ever actually heard it pronounced 'tack-oh' instead of 'tah-co.' What I do remember is that people who live in Nevada pronounce the first a like in 'van,' while non-Nevadans tend to pronounce the same vowel like in 'father.' Nevada is, of course, also a word of Spanish origin (from what little I understand, it translates to "snow," and if you're wondering why a state famous for being a desert is named after snow, just remember its western border is a very tall, usually snow-capped, mountain range). My point being that yes, we know that English speakers often mangle the vowel sounds of other languages, and vice-versa. And don't get me started on the dozens of ways different languages interpret the sound of the consonant 'r.' At any rate, the article dives into some of the vowel (and consonant) differences between languages, and even different dialects of the same language. I find it interesting, but no need to quote a lot of it. As is often the case in linguistics, it’s simpler to say how the British and American pronunciations are different than to explain why they ended up this way. One of the more prevalent theories among the linguists and Anglophones I spoke to was a basic lack of exposure. The U.S. has around 41 million native Spanish speakers, and around another 12 million identifying as bilingual... Whereas, as the article notes, Brits are more likely to be exposed to French instead of Spanish. This is a concept called language accommodation, in which speakers tend to modify the way they speak depending on the person or people they’re speaking to. Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty cool superpower to have. This ties in to the code-switching concept mentioned above. Trying to impress someone? You might try to use longer, less common words to seem more intelligent. "Devour feculence." For some Americans, policing global Mexican food is a bit of a hobby. I feel kinda good that this is the first I've heard of this. I mean, I can understand Americans (in this case meaning "US citizens") having strong opinions on pizza, which is actually an American food, and hamburgers—I certainly do—but it strikes me as weird that we'd get all up in arms about other countries' interpretation of food associated with another country. It'd be like, I don't know, a Japanese person pushing away a dish of fries with gravy and curds and proclaiming "this is not poutine!" A word like “taco” is on its way to becoming, or is perhaps already, simply an English word. Oh, it definitely is an English word. Sure, it's of Mexican Spanish origin, but it's also an English word. Like "hors d'œuvres" is an English phrase, despite it being so French that it might as well be wearing a beret, carrying a baguette, and smoking a Gauloise. It's just a more recent loanword, so we're more aware of its linguistic/culinary origin than we are of words like, say, beef (French) or chicken (German). One fascinating aspect of English food words is that the reason we have both "chicken" and "poultry," for example, is that we got the animal words from German but the food words from French, probably because the French are demonstrably better cooks. (Please don't cut me if you're a German cook. German beer is superior; be proud of that.) One thing never brought up in the article: what is the literal translation of "taco" in English? I don't mean the food; I think we can mostly agree on what constitutes a delicious taco, despite differences of opinion on what should and should not go into one. But the word came from somewhere; apparently, that "somewhere" is something akin to the English "plug" or "wad." Why it came from that particular meaning, I can't be arsed to investigate right now. Anyway, I had no idea this was even a thing. I'm pretty sure I've only ever heard it pronounced "tah-co." And now I'm hungry; thanks, Gastro Obscura. |
| Anyone who's followed me for some time knows I appreciate Ben Franklin. I hope my hometown (known as Thomas Jefferson's stomping grounds) won't call me a traitor for it. But everyone has skeletons in their closet and, as this older Smithsonian article points out, sometimes they're literal: Why Were There So Many Skeletons Hidden in Benjamin Franklin’s Basement? During restorations in the 1990s, more than 1,200 pieces of bone surfaced beneath the founding father’s London home This being an article originally released way back in 2013, I had to check to see if I've covered it before. Not in this blog, certainly, but in the previous one. I didn't find it, so perhaps I didn't. Well, Smithsonian did an unspecified update last year, so even if I did feature it at some point, it was almost certainly before the update. The future founding father left his English home and returned to America in 1775. Two centuries later, bones from more than a dozen bodies were found in the basement, where they had been buried in a mysterious, windowless room beneath the garden. Well, I can understand how that might seem suspicious. If anyone found purely hypothetical bodies buried beneath my purely hypothetical garden, I couldn't blame them for backing away from me slowly. The skeletons had gone unnoticed until the 1990s, when historians decided to turn Franklin’s old haunt into a museum. Presumably British historians, which, when you think about it, is about as weird as American Southerners putting up statues of Union generals. Franklin was a storied revolutionary and high-ranking Freemason, so it’s easy to wonder what dark secrets he may have hidden in his basement chamber. Yeah, like, was he fighting the Revolutionary War one Brit at a time, before the war even started? But the truth, it turns out, isn’t quite so dark. I am both relieved and disappointed. “The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin Franklin’s young friend and protégé, William Hewson,” as the Guardian’s Maev Kennedy wrote in 2003. Franklin was a lot of things, but I don't think "murderer" was one. One never really knows, though. Hewson was an anatomist who began his career as a student of William Hunter, a famous obstetrician who also studied anatomy. Following a dispute, Hewson parted ways with his teacher and started his own anatomy school at 36 Craven, where his mother-in-law, Margaret Stevenson, was the landlady. Imagine going up to your mother-in-law and going "Can I rent out your house to desecrate corpses?" In Franklin’s time, the study of anatomy was an ethically ambiguous business. I have a strong feeling that religious doctrines had a lot to do with that. “[Franklin] was a champion of science—he was supportive of young researchers and others that could exemplify his passion for knowledge and innovation,” Balisciano told Discover magazine. “He probably loved the idea that this scientific work would be going on.” Obviously speculation, but it tracks. In 1774, a 34-year-old Hewson died of sepsis, which he had contracted by accidentally cutting himself during a procedure. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think the idea of diseases spread through invisible microbes really caught on until the following century. While previous generations had some inkling, there was no science backing them up, just empiricism.So, I'm not sure if the mystery is truly solved, but at least there's a plausible explanation that doesn't involve Ben Franklin being an early Jack the Ripper. |
| Yes, sometimes I find an article about actual writing instead of just writing about an article. This one, especially helpful to fellow nonfiction writers, is from Mental Floss: What ‘Sic’ Means—And How To Use It Correctly The way writers use the word ‘sic’ is a little more nuanced than its literal meaning Of course, I knew what 'sic' translates to from a very early age, being a Virginian. "Sic Semper Tyrannis" is our state motto, and it's on the flag right under the boob. But it's a little different when used on its own, in the service of clarifying quoted material. You’re perusing a news article when there, right in the middle of a quote, is the word sic encased in brackets. Since this is far from the first article you’ve ever read, maybe you already know what sic signifies: that the word or phrase directly preceding it hasn’t been altered from the original quote—even though it might be misspelled or simply a strange word choice. I've used it myself, though not without wondering at its utility when posting stuff on the internet. I'd assume that any quote I read online has been copy/pasted (it's what I do), so any errors or typos get copied exactly. Probably no need for the three-letter editorial insertion, and it often feels like I'm just being smug, as in "This is an error I wouldn't make, and I caught it, ain't I smart?" But why sic? The shortest possible answer to that question is this: Because Latin. It's often called a dead language, but I prefer to think of it as a zombie shuffling across the written word. An undead language. It literally means “thus” or “so,” as in sic semper tyrannis, “thus ever to tyrants.” In case you were still wondering what our state motto meant. It was also the most famous line quoted by actor John Wilkes Booth. But that hasn’t stopped people from coming up with a slew of “backronyms” that describe it in slightly more detail: “spelling is correct,” “said in copy,” “said in context,” etc. Okay, first of all, I see what you did there with your sneakly little zombie Latin "etc." Second, backronyms annoy me. Sure, they serve a mnemonic purpose, but then you get people believing and insisting that "tips" came from "to insure prompt service" (it certainly did not) or that "fuck" came from "for unlawful carnal knowledge" or "fornicating under consent of the King" (it absolutely, positively, did not.) The only exceptions for my annoyance are humorous ones, like Ford (found on road, dead) or Chevrolet (cracked heads, every valve rattles, oil leaks every time). I doubt anyone actually believes those car brands started out as acronyms. As for when you might want to use it, there are a couple different scenarios. One is when a quote features a typo, a misspelling, or a grammatical error. One of my smuggest uses for it is when I catch someone doing something like mistaking "its" for "it's" or vice-versa (dammit, zombie!). Sic can also come in handy if you’re writing something that the reader might accidentally interpret as a mistake. That's a little less obvious, but the article provides an example. As the Columbia Journalism Review’s Merrill Perlman put it in 2014, sic “can come off as snarky, giving a sense of ‘we know better,’ at the expense of the original author.” Which is exactly what I'd expect someone hit with a sic to say. In 2019, the Associated Press Stylebook announced that it would henceforth retire sic for good. Yeah, let me know when The New Yorker follows suit. “Most people don’t speak, off the cuff, in grammatically perfect sentences,” the Stylebook tweeted. Okay, but what about written works? We tend to hold them to a higher standard, especially nonfiction works. If I had to slog through a technical paper written in the style of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, I'd give up. Hell, I gave up on Faulkner. For example, if a source says “Using sic make the writer seem insufferably smug,” you could update “make” to “make[s]” without employing sic and proving your source’s point. Nah, I'd rather be insufferably smug. There are, as always, exceptions. Not every technical error in writing results in an ambiguous meaning. Like when someone uses "it's" incorrectly, where it's obviously meant to be a possessive and not a contraction. But that error is so egregious, I'm going to call it out anyway. Which, of course, guarantees that I'll mess it up sometimes, and the zombies will come for my brains. |
| This Bloomberg CityLab article is two years old, but climate change doesn't work that fast, so it's probably still relevant. While a fascinating exercise, the headline is a bit misleading. A Cross-Country Road Trip Where It's Always 70 Degrees An updated map from climate scientist Brian Brettschneider provides year-long interior and coastal routes that span more than 7,000 miles. The misleading bit is the "always 70 degrees" thing (I'm giving the use of Fahrenheit a pass because the article is very clearly US-oriented). But there's no need to be too pedantic about it. For travelers in search of the perfect weather, a climate scientist in Anchorage, Alaska, has mapped out the ultimate US road trip where the temperature is always 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The maps included in the article clarify: the routes follow "70°F Normal High Temperature." His original trips span more than 9,000 miles coast to coast for the contiguous US and more than 13,000 with an Alaska stop — the latter also draws on data from Environment Canada. Why Hawaii was excluded is left as an exercise for the reader. Both of the new routes manage to stay below 8,000 miles, unless travelers opt for a “connector segment” that passes through Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia in April. I'd recommend that segment. Nice scenery. As an avid mapmaker who has made thousands and thousands of maps typically focused on climate, he says it’s hard to know what part of his work will resonate with people. But the overlap between climate and the road trip caught fire. As I said above, it probably doesn't change much in two years. But over longer time frames, sure. Like the first time, Brettschneider says while making the map was a fun exercise, he won’t be making the trip, but he would be interested in hearing from anyone who is planning to do so. It sounds like something I'd do, even though I consider 70°F to be entirely too cold, but I have cats to take care of. |
| Today, from PopSci, evidence that the US is actually #1 at something other than gun violence and imprisonment: US ranks first in swearing ‘Some may find it disappointing,’ said the new study’s Australian co-author. I especially love how the article anticipates the Krakatoa-scale explosion of doubt coming from Down Under, and states right up front in the sub-head that one of the authors was Australian. While the headline filled me with great joy, as usual, I can't just take a headline's word for this shit. Congratulations, United States. The nation may lag behind in healthcare, education, and life expectancy, but Americans still reign supreme in at least one way—swearing like a bunch of drunken sailors. My father was very careful, as a sailor, to avoid getting too drunk or swearing excessively. While I respect that, I've traveled a different path. Linguists in Australia recently analyzed the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE), a massive database containing over 1.9 billion words from 1.8 million web pages across 340,000 websites in 20 English-speaking countries. Oh, so they're only talking about written works. It's entirely possible that Australia still has the top spot with spoken cuss words, so calm down, kangaroos. “Rather than being a simple, easily definable phenomenon, vulgarity proves to be a complex and multifaceted linguistic phenomenon,” Schweinberger and Monash University co-author Kate Burridge wrote in the journal Lingua. I know people like to say, "What's the big deal? It's just words." Yeah, well, if words are just words, there should be no problem with ethnic or religious slurs, right? No. Words have power. Yes, we give them that power. But the power is there. “Some may find it disappointing, but the research found the United States and Great Britain ranked ahead of Australia in terms of using vulgar language online,” Schweinberger said in an accompanying statement. Now, I can think of one possible reason why the results skewed the way they did: while, as I noted, words have power, they have different power in different cultures. It's entirely possible that, in the US and UK, we have a greater awareness of the base nature of certain words, so using them signals a breaking of a taboo. The taboo (which is a word introduced into English from Tongan by Captain James Cook, the same guy who was the first European to visit Australia) has different strength depending on location. One of the study authors offers a different hypothesis: “One possible explanation is that Australians are more conservative when they write online but not so much when they are face-to-face,” he said. “Australians really see vulgarity, swearing and slang as part of our culture—we’re very invested in it.” Well, then, I guess someone needs to do a goddamned follow-up study. Despite its limitation (focusing on writing rather than speaking), I find the study amusing. As with most studies of this nature, I wouldn't take it to be the Absolute Truth, but at least it's evidence that the US is actually best at something besides fucking everyone in the metaphorical arse. |
| From PopSci, modern alchemy: Refrigerator-sized machine makes gasoline out of thin air The Aircela acts like a mini direct air capture facility, sucking up carbon dioxide and then synthesizing it into real, usable gasoline for cars. When you run a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, in ideal principle, the exhaust consists of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor (in reality, of course, nothing is ideal, so you get other chemicals from incomplete combustion). So the idea that one could, with the proper setup and energy input, reverse this, doesn't seem completely farfetched. And yet, reading this article, every fiber of my being cried out "fraud." In 2022, transportation was responsible for an estimated 28 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The majority of those emissions came from everyday gas-powered cars. Put another way, nearly 3/4 of greenhouse gas emissions came from something other than transportation. Most Americans also still just aren’t interested in ditching their gas guzzlers to save the planet. But what if they didn’t have to? It wouldn't save the planet. At best, it would slow down the destruction. (Yes, yes, I know, "the planet will be fine." "Save the planet" really means "protect the biosphere.") That’s the alluring—if wildly ambitious—vision being presented by New York–based fuels startup Aircela. Earlier this month, the company announced it had created the world’s first functional machine capable of generating real, usable car gasoline “directly from the air.” The article is fairly recent, so the announcement would have been in May. Aircela’s new device, roughly the size of a commercial refrigerator, combines direct air capture (DAC) with on-site fuel synthesis to create gasoline using just air, water, and renewable energy. No fossil fuels, they say, are required. You know, it occurs to me that this technology (if it's real, which, to reiterate, I seriously doubt) could be used for more important things. The manufacture of ethanol, specifically. Aircela demonstrated the process, making gasoline directly from air, in front of a live audience in New York. David Copperfield once made the Statue of Liberty disappear in front of a live audience in New York. Also, alchemists used sleight-of-hand to "prove" to their patrons that they've turned lead into gold. Though most would describe this proof of concept as a “prototype,” company co-founder and CEO Eric Dahlgren takes some umbrage with that label. Sure, go against basic English word usage because it offends you. Is it in mass-production yet? No? Then it's a prototype. “We didn’t build a prototype. We built a working machine,” Dahlgren said in a statement. “We want people to walk away knowing this isn’t too good to be true—it actually works.” It's the first one. It's a prototype. Aircela’s device essentially functions as a compact, portable direct carbon capture facility (DAC) unit. Carbon capture generally refers to the practice of removing carbon dioxide from sources like smokestacks or fossil fuel power plants. Don't get me wrong; I'd love to be wrong. About this. But it really does sound like fakery. A spokesperson from Aircela told Popular Science that their machine is designed to capture 10 kgs of CO₂ each day. From that, it can produce 1 gallon of gasoline. The machine can store up to 17 gallons of fuel in its tank. Yes, we Americans can switch easily from one system of measurement to another even in the same paragraph. That's a superpower. In other words, at least in its current form, the device wouldn’t be capable of filling up a car’s tank with gas overnight. That doesn't seem insurmountable. If it's real. But okay, let's assume for a moment, for the sake of discussion, that it works as advertised, and it's possible to create and distribute a reasonably-sized and -priced machine that turns air into gasoline/petrol. Now, think about how large oil corporations would feel about that, and what lengths they might go through to stop it from cutting into their profits. At the very least, they hand over a few million dollars for the patent and then... sit on it. Cynical? Damn right I'm cynical. It's hardly the first time someone has claimed to pull a rabbit out of thin air. |
| From Big Think, a bit about stuff in space. Confirmed at last: exoplanets found around nearest single star Barnard’s star, the closest singlet star system to ours, has long been a target for planet-hunters. We’ve finally confirmed it: they exist! Couple of things right off the bat: First, the "nearest single star" thing might be ambiguous; the nearest star to the Sun is the appropriately named (for now) Proxima Centauri, but it's in a triple-star system. Two, Barnard's Star doesn't have a Latin or Arabic name because it's too small (about 1/5 the size of the Sun) and faint to see without a telescope, so it was a more recent discovery. Presumably by some guy named Barnard. And third (I know I said "couple;" so what), it's roughly half again as far away from us as the Centaurus triplet. That out of the way, the discovery of exoplanets there is cool, and a testament to scientific tenacity. After more than a century of searching, and a couple of prominent false positives, we’ve finally discovered that it does have planets of its own, after all. Here’s the story behind the discovery. The article indeed goes into the story, which is a good example of science being self-correcting. Barnard’s star was also the alleged site of the very first claimed exoplanet detection: all the way back in the 1960s. That claim, as noted, didn't hold up under further observation. That's nothing new in astronomy. Hell, early planet searches focused on our solar system, and there were even spurious sightings of the hypothetical inner planet they dubbed "Vulcan," not to be confused with the fictional one Spock is from, before those were found to be in error. But we shouldn’t be discouraged by “false detections” in our search for bona fide planets around other stars; just because a scientific endeavor like planet-finding is difficult doesn’t mean we should assume that there aren’t any planets at all! Instead, we should demand that we get better data, and use that data to actually determine whether there are planets present or not, and if so, what their properties are. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, we were pretty certain about extrasolar planets existing long before one was detected. But it's always good to have confirmation. And mistakes often lead to refined methods, which, in this case, paid off. Well, probably. It needs to be confirmed independently, too. This would represent a fascinating find, if confirmed. First off, these four planets would be just a little interior to the so-called habitable zone of its star: where a planet with an Earth-like atmosphere would have the right temperatures for liquid water on its surface. And this is where many readers might get a case of runaway imagination. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but none of the above should be stretched to "there's a habitable planet around Barnard's Star," which in turn leads to speculation about alien civilizations or, worse, the assumption that "habitable" means "we could move there," which it absolutely does not. The point isn't that we shouldn't be looking for aliens; we absolutely should. But let's remember that liquid water is necessary, but maybe not sufficient, for life as we know it, and, above all, that life doesn't have to produce the kind of species that builds telescopes and rockets. In other words, no, we haven't found Earth II. Even though there are reasons to disfavor the notion that these planets might have Earth-like atmospheres, or any substantial atmosphere at all, it’s a remarkable feat to detect them at all. And that's the real point here. While I like science fiction as much as the next person, and more than most, I don't like seeing the popular media sensationalizing discoveries like this. The truth is sensational enough. |
| All that text in my blog intro? It's nice to have some verification. From Mongabay: The report focuses on Central America. As noted at the top of the article: "Unlike temperate regions with diverse scavenger communities, the neotropical forest system showed vultures as the primary vertebrate decomposers..." I had to look up "neotropical," and apparently it simply refers to New World tropical zones. Anyway, point is, I guess, that other regions have other scavengers besides vultures. “Absolutely disgusting, so grim, the worst fieldwork of my life, but also extremely rewarding in a very odd way,” said Julia Grootaers, describing her three months collecting data among rotting pig carcasses in Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula. I will not make a joke about her name. I will not make a joke about her name. I will not make a joke about her name. Their findings, published recently in the journal Ecology and Evolution, reveal that in the absence of vultures, carcasses take twice as long to decompose, and fly populations double, with significant implications for ecosystem health and potential disease transmission. It's probably good to note that there's more than one species of vulture in Central America. The article includes pictures of some of them in the wild.The experiment consisted of 32 pig carcasses deployed in the southern Pacific region of Costa Rica, half in grassland and half in forest habitats. Eight carcasses were covered with exclusion cages for each habitat to prevent vulture access, while eight control carcasses remained uncovered. Half the experiment took place during the wet season and half during the dry season. While I'm no expert, that sounds like a fair methodology. One unexpected finding was how few vertebrate scavengers visited the carcasses, such as large cats or possums. One might consider that those mammals/marsupials could have an aversion to carrion that's been handled by humans, as these carcasses were. That could be an unrevealed confounding factor. (Also, it's "opossum." Respect the Powhatan.) Fly populations doubled at carcass sites without vultures, a finding with potential public health implications. Slower-decomposing carcasses could have important consequences for infectious and zoonotic (animal-transmitted) diseases in the tropics. Flies are also important contributors to the ecosystem, but unlike vultures, they tend to land on your food and spread germs there. This study is also significant because vulture research has almost exclusively concentrated on Old World species, those found in Africa, Asia and Europe. And apparently, New World vultures represent an entirely different clade than the Old World vultures, not very closely related at all. Anyway, point is, disgusting though we find their habits, vultures are cool. And yeah, I couldn't resist the pun in today's entry title. How could I? |
| From SciAm, an astronomically bad idea. ‘Space Advertising’ Could Outshine the Stars—Unless It’s Banned First Astronomers are racing to protect the dark skies as private companies seek to place large advertisements in Earth orbit Yes, I know there are worse things going on: human trafficking, slavery, rape, murder, war, celebrity gossip (to name but a few). That doesn't stop me from hating this as well. Imagine stepping outside to stargaze on a clear summer night, only to see no stars but rather the garish glow of advertisements streaming across the sky. As usual, science fiction came up with this first. The dystopia subgenre, anyway. This seemingly science-fictional scenario isn’t actually implausible: private companies are inching closer to launching swarms of tiny maneuverable satellites to create billboardlike displays big and bright enough to be seen from the ground. Just when you think we've reached peak capitalism, something like this gets floated. It's one thing to loft satellites up there to broadcast shows and provide internet connectivity, both of which result in a barrage of ads. But they're optional ads. You don't have to tune in or connect, and you can remain blissfully ad-free. This, however, would be inescapable, unless you just stay inside all the time. The suddenly all-too-real prospect of large-scale space advertising prompted Piero Benvenuti, former general secretary of the International Astronomical Union, to raise the issue in February during a subcommittee meeting of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), the United Nations body that governs the use of space for peace, security and development. Speaking of internet connectivity, astronomers are already bitching about Starlink satellite constellations, which tend to be bright and get in the way of observations. Starlink (whatever your opinion of its company's CEO) at least serves a useful function, in theory, providing internet access in remote locations. This? This would serve no useful function to anyone who isn't doing the actual advertising (and even then, it's questionable). “There is absolutely no reason why you should use space in such a useless way to advertise commercials,” Benvenuti says. Well, I wouldn't say "absolutely no reason." Obviously, someone thinks there's a reason, and that reason is money. In 2020 Russia granted Avant Space a patent for a laser-based technology to project messages, logos and other images for advertisers onto the sky. Hey, look, actual space lasers. And they're not Jewish. Their vision, Sitnikov says, is “to prove that space is not just for scientists, not just for the military—it is entertainment, too. And people like entertainment.” It depends on the entertainment. I don't consider ads entertainment. I consider them an interruption of my entertainment. Yes, on occasion, there are entertaining commercials, but they are exceptions. In 2000 such concerns helped to spur the U.S. Congress to pass a federal law that banned the issuance of launch licenses to companies for the purpose of ferrying payloads for obtrusive space advertising. That's nice and all, but at my last count, there were at least six countries and one European Union with their own space capability, and the US is only one of them. This region of space around Earth is home to thousands of defunct rocket stages, dead satellites and discarded hardware that all zip around our planet at dangerously high speeds. On the plus side, maybe this orbital debris can finally have a good purpose: destroying the ad lasers. But, as the article notes, such collisions would create even more debris. In case you can't tell, I'm completely against this idea. I hate ads to begin with, and appreciate astronomy (not to mention the simple beauty of the night sky, which is hard enough to see from most places now). Hey, maybe the US Space Force can finally get something to do: take down the ads. |
| The random number generator laughs at me once more. Here's another bit about happiness, this one from last year in Knowable. Scientists scrutinize happiness research From meditation to smiling, researchers take a second look at studies claiming to reveal what makes us happy "Claiming" being the key word there. As if the answer is the same for everyone. We all want to be happy... [Citation needed] ...and for decades, psychologists have tried to figure out how we might achieve that blissful state. Maybe it's by not paying any attention to psychologists? But psychology has undergone serious upheaval over the last decade, as researchers realized that many studies were unreliable and unrepeatable. This is my shocked face:  Here’s what we know so far, and what remains to be reassessed, according to a new analysis in the Annual Review of Psychology. I'm skimming a bit. I'm late getting to this today, and tomorrow's entry may be early; plus, I just ragged on happiness research yesterday. One long-standing hypothesis is that smiling makes you feel happier. Spoiler: questionable, unverified. Which, again, absolutely shocks me (in a sarcastic way), because if there were ever a perfect example of confusing cause and effect, this would be it. I don't doubt it works for some people. But again, not everyone. For me, if I had to paste a fake smile on my face all day (say if I had to work a ret-hell job), someone would end up getting punched. Researchers have also found that external agencies can promote people’s happiness. Giving people cash promoted life satisfaction, as did workplace interventions such as naps. Huh. By absolute coincidence, having money and taking naps make me happy. The researchers didn’t find clear evidence of benefits for volunteering, performing random acts of kindness or meditation. I take it they also didn't find those things decreased happiness, so if you want to do them, do them. Dunn and Folk didn’t find any preregistered studies at all on exercising or spending time in nature, two oft-recommended strategies. Again, just me here, but I find that exercise has other benefits; spending time in nature, on the other hand, just means I have to check myself for ticks afterwards. It does make me appreciate my nice comfortable house and bed more, so I suppose there's that. Anyway, most of the article is about applying greater rigor to psychology studies, which is probably a good thing overall. And that's probably all I have on happiness for a while. Maybe. Hopefully. |
| I know I've touched on this theme before, but I don't think I've shared this particular article. It's from BBC, and it's a few years old. Why our pursuit of happiness may be flawed It is an emotion linked to improved health and well-being, but is our obsession with being happy a recipe for disappointment, asks Nat Rutherford. Well, for starters, what's a Brit doing talking about a concept enshrined in the founding documents of the rebel colonies? Okay, fine, I'll give them a pass on that one. Perhaps you want to spend more time with your family, or get a more fulfilling and secure job, or improve your health. But why do you want those things? Chances are that your answer will come down to one thing: happiness. Our culture’s fixation on happiness can seem almost religious. By "our," I don't know if he's talking about British, Anglophone, or generally European and its derivatives. Because not all cultures are obsessed with happiness, but it does seem to be a Western thing. It is one of the only reasons for action that doesn’t stand in need of justification: happiness is good because being happy is good. But can we build our lives on that circular reasoning? As regular readers may remember, I distrust "happiness" as a goal. I think it's what happens (yes, those words, happy and happen, share the same proto-English root, one that meant something like "luck") when you're doing other things. A survey in 2016 asked Americans whether they would rather "achieve great things or be happy" and 81% said that they would rather be happy, while only 13% opted for achieving great things (6% were understandably daunted by the choice and weren’t sure). Fortunately, it's not a binary choice in reality. Neither is wealth and happiness. The idea that rich people are miserable while poor people are happy is a lie we tell poor people to keep them from getting too uppity. There is some evidence that the obsessive pursuit of happiness is associated with a greater risk of depression. While I don't trust "some evidence" necessarily, this tracks for me. In his recent book, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, historian Ritchie Robertson argues that the Enlightenment should be understood not as the increase in value of reason itself, but instead as the quest for happiness through reason. Oh look, it's a book ad. That should make the author happy. Or rich. Or both. It’s easy to assume that happiness has always been valued as the highest good, but human values and emotions are not permanently fixed. Some values which once were paramount, such as honour or piety, have faded in importance, while emotions like "acedia" (our feeling of apathy comes closest) have disappeared completely. From what I understand, honor (or honour, depending on your geographical location) is still paramount in some cultures. Not just Klingon, either. Self-help books and "positive psychology" promise to unlock that psychological state or happy mood. But philosophers have tended to be sceptical of this view of happiness because our moods are fleeting and their causes uncertain. Instead, they ask a related but wider question: what is the good life? I believe Conan the Barbarian answered that question definitively: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women." In short, I'm pretty sure the answer is different for each person. For example, lots of people find having children makes them happy (or at least claim it does). For me, that would be the very definition of Hell. One answer would be a life spent doing things you enjoy and which bring you pleasure. A life spent experiencing pleasure would, in some ways, be a good life. But maximising pleasure isn’t the only option. Every human life, even the most fortunate, is filled with pain. Painful loss, painful disappointments, the physical pain of injury or sickness, and the mental pain of enduring boredom, loneliness, or sadness. Pain is an inevitable consequence of being alive. Oh, you've been listening to Buddhists? Yeah, life has its ups and downs. In my view, the downs help us appreciate the ups. Studies have shown that having loving attachments correlates with happiness, but we know from experience that love is also the cause of pain. What if pain is necessary and even desirable? Yeah, no, not unless you're a masochist (not that there's anything wrong with that). But there's something to be said for purposely enduring the painful parts in hope that things will improve. Like getting a root canal, known to be painful and boring (that's a pun, by the way) in the short term, expecting that your toothache will go away. Less dramatically, all the good things in life entail suffering. Writing a novel, running a marathon, or giving birth all cause suffering in pursuit of the final, joyous result. I question those examples, especially the last one, but I wouldn't know. Well, except for the "writing a novel" part. I didn't suffer while writing mine; it was challenging, but I enjoyed the process. The "suffering" happened when I went to edit. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, saw that we do not merely endure pain as a means to greater pleasure because "man…does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering". In Nietzsche’s view, pain is not alleviated through pleasure, but instead through meaning. Ah, well, too bad there's no meaning, then. The American philosopher Robert Nozick came up with a thought experiment to make the point. Nozick asks us to imagine a "machine that could give you any experience you desired". The machine would allow you to experience the bliss of fulfilling your every wish. You could be a great poet, become the greatest inventor ever known, travel the Universe in a spaceship of your own design, or become a well-liked chef at a local restaurant. In reality though, you would be unconscious in a life-support tank. Because the machine makes you believe that the simulation is real, your choice is final. One wonders if he came up with these things before, or after, Star Trek's holodeck and The Matrix, both of which came out during his lifetime (yes, I looked up his bio). Would you plug in? Nozick says you wouldn’t because we want to actually do certain things and be certain people, not just have pleasurable experiences. Okay, Nozick wouldn't. As I mentioned above, I'm pretty sure there are people who would. If the simulation feels real in every way, what's the difference? That you won't be remembered by history, like Einstein or Curie? News flash: most of us won't, anyway. But this touches on my own philosophical point, which is that we get happiness not by aiming for it, but through accomplishment. Nozick’s experience machine aimed to disprove the essential claim of utilitarianism, "that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end". But I can't fault the guy for railing against utilitarianism. Dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and pain are part of the human condition and so "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied", according to Mill. He continued to believe that happiness was deeply important, but came to see that aiming at happiness will rarely lead to it. Fuck me, I agree with John Stuart Mill about something. Shoot me now. (In my defense, with this philosophy, he contradicted his own earlier works.) What Mill recognised was what Aristotle had argued two millennia earlier – the passing pleasure of happiness is secondary to living a good life, or of achieving what Aristotle called eudaimonia. Why'd he have to name it in Greek? Oh... right. Eudaimonia is difficult to translate into our contemporary concepts. Some, like the philosopher Julia Annas, translate it directly as "happiness", while others scholars prefer "human flourishing". Whatever the translation, it marks a distinctive contrast to our modern conception of happiness. Literally, I believe it translates to something like "good spirit," but the problem with that translation is that "good" and "spirit" have multiple definitions. For instance, for me, Scotch is a good spirit. But I think the sense is more like virtue and a pursuit of perfection (though without expecting actual perfection). Virtue, also ill-defined and culturally relative, has fallen out of favor as a goal, replaced by the selfish "happiness." Like our modern conception of happiness, eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of life. But unlike happiness, eudaimonia is realised through habits and actions, not through mental states. Happiness is not something you experience or obtain, it’s something you do. It's not necessarily the "ultimate purpose of life," but okay. There's more at the article, of course, but I've said what I needed to say. I think that, while the author is better-versed in philosophy than I am (and British), we've reached similar conclusions. And that makes me happy. |
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