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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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| Woke up with a case of gamer finger this morning. You know, when you sprain your finger from intermittently pushing the key that makes you go in the game? No? Damn, just me then. So I'd like to keep this short, but considering what I landed on today, I don't know if I'll be able to. Are we morally obligated to meditate?  A growing body of neuroscience research shows that meditation can make us better to each other. Just remember, my default response to headline questions is "no." Starting in 2005, Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar began to publish some mind-blowing findings: Meditation can literally change the structure of your brain, thickening key areas of the cortex that help you control your attention and emotions. Setting aside for the moment the ridiculous idea that "you" are some entity separate from your brain that can control it like a puppet, that finding, if true, is remarkable in itself. It'd be the brain equivalent of weight-lifting. The article does go on to mention follow-up studies, so there may be something to it. Your brain — and possibly, by extension, your behavior — can reap the benefits if you practice meditation for half an hour a day over eight weeks. Which might not be possible for everyone. As with exercise or recipe timing, the duration is misleadingly short. It takes time to prepare for these things, and more time to come down after. So you're looking at a 45-minute chunk of the day, maybe. Now, what are you willing to give up to get those 45 minutes? Sleep? If you do, you'll fall asleep trying to meditate (or, I don't know, maybe that's just me, too). Time with family? Dog-walking? Commute? Work? Lunch? A host of other studies showed that meditation can also change your neural circuitry in ways that make you more compassionate, as well as more inclined to have positive feelings toward a victim of suffering and to see things from their perspective. But what if you don't want to do all that? Still skeptical, I fell down an internet rabbit hole and soon found many more neuroscientific studies. Looking closely at them, I did find that a fair number are methodologically flawed (more on that below). But there were many others that seemed sound. See, this is what I look for in articles like this: some indication that the author didn't just accept whatever bullshit gets strewn about. If it takes such a small amount of time and effort to get better at regulating my emotions, paying attention to other people, seeing things from their point of view, and acting altruistically, then … well … am I not morally obligated to do it? That's not a science question. That's a philosophy question. But the whole next section of the article goes back to the science bit, which is worth reading, but I'm not quoting it here. So, provisionally accepting the science findings, I'm skipping to the philosophy section. After I started wondering if we’re morally obligated to meditate, I soon realized that’s a very Western and Judeo-Christian way of thinking about it. I would very much like for that hyphenated adjective to stop being used. But Eastern traditions like Buddhism or Confucianism aren’t grounded in commandments that come from a divine being. Neither are Western traditions. We've been conditioned to believe that the commandments came from a divine being. Which, from a practical perspective, I suppose produces the same results. Plus, whereas the language of oughts and obligations suggests a prescriptive or proselytizing attitude, Buddhist tradition has generally been more interested in inviting people to try meditation and discover its benefits for themselves, rather than in mandating adherence. Therein lurks an important difference between East and West. I'd say this bit's important to note, too: But there’s a caveat: For a small minority of people, meditation can actually provoke adverse effects, like intense mental distress or impaired physical functioning. Brown University psychologist Willoughby Britton is studying these cases in a project called “Varieties of Contemplative Experience.” More research is still needed, but given that meditation practices might precipitate or exacerbate challenging conditions in some people, it would be wrong to say that absolutely everyone would do well to meditate. This is analogous to people urging us to get out and socialize more. That may be good advice for the extroverted majority, but we introverts would quickly spiral into doom. Or, to be even more simplistic in my analogies, saying that it's a good idea to always use your right hand to write, because studies show that it helps 90% of us to do so. Scientists are publishing more and more studies on meditation each year. But many of these studies are beset by methodological flaws, leading to overhyped results. Davidson calls this “neuromythology.” Yeah, we need to be really careful about that crap. It's like all those "quantum consciousness" bullshit books. So, is the answer to the headline question still "no?" Well, you'll have to figure that out for yourself. Philosophy can guide science, and science can inform philosophy, but they're not the same sport. For me, I've spent too many years trying to figure out how to become more compassionate, but meditation just isn't my thing. I find it more practical to accept myself the way I am right now, flaws and all. |
| I've done entries about categorization problems before. Is it a sea or a lake? A dwarf planet or a planet? A hill or a mountain? Is a hot dog a sandwich or a taco, or is it just a hot dog? Well, here's one that I've wondered about for a long time, yanked from the website at Country Living. Served in a pot? Maybe in your country. In my country, they're cooked in a pot and served in bowls. The article is from January of 2020, but surely nothing's changed since then. When it's cold outside or you're not feeling well—no matter the time of year—there's nothing more comforting than a hearty soup recipe or a slow cooker stew recipe. Sure there is: the actual soup or stew, preferably made by someone else because it's cold outside and I'm not feeling well. On that we can agree—but when you break it down, do you really know the difference between stew and soup? No, but I guess you're about to tell me. Incidentally, I don't really care; I only care that it tastes good. The main difference is the amount of liquid that's used for each. In a soup, the ingredients will generally be completely submerged in liquid, while in stews, they're just barely covered. Okay, but what about when you have ingredients that float? Carrots, e.g., or pasta. You look at it, it's only partly submerged. Like the iceberg, not like the Titanic. The main component of a soup is the liquid. Soups can be brothy (think: a timeless chicken noodle soup), puréed (classic tomato purée soup), or creamy (potato cheddar soup, anyone?). I'm not reproducing the links here, but I'm starting to think this "article" is just meant to promote their recipes. Oh, and to further complicate matters, there are other names for soups. Bisque, a subcategory of creamy soup. Chowder, same. Pho, which I maintain stretches the definition of soup, because it cannot be eaten with a spoon alone unless you have superpowers. Soups are generally easy and fast to make—some can be made in as little as 20 minutes! 20 minutes? To source all the ingredients, prep them, fumble around with cookware, etc.? Hell, if your batch of soup is voluminous enough, it'll take 20 minutes just to bring it to a boil before you turn it down to a simmer. On the other hand, I've made soup in 3 minutes: 1) Open a can of Campbell's 2) Mix it with a can full of water 3) Nuke for 2 minutes. The general rule is that no ingredient should be larger than a soup spoon. See, that's a tough rule for pedants like me. First, define "soup spoon." After that, consider ramen. Each ramen noodle is, well, a noodle. Even if it were possible to fish out the noodles one by one, bits of them would hang over the sides of the spoon, making it larger than a soup spoon. Sure, if you got it all coiled up, an individual noodle could maybe fit in one spoon, but who does that? Also see: French onion soup. Stew tends to be more complex and takes longer to cook than soup. Betting we could find counterexamples if we tried. Unlike soups, which rely mostly on water or stock as the main liquid, stews can contain beer, cider, or wine for additional flavor. I put brandy in my French onion soup. But. The end of the article addresses a long-standing question, one of great import and whose definitive answer could change the world. Is chili considered a soup or a stew? Still, I don't care; I consider it delicious. |
| One reason conspiracy "theories" flourish is that, sometimes, an actual conspiracy is brought to light. While today's article, from MPR, doesn't quite rise to the level of major international conspiracy, it's enough to make you wonder what other similar things are going on. This is like finding out that PETA, the pseudo-animal-rights organization whose idiotic performance art ensured that I will never become a vegetarian, is actually funded by KFC. And yet, this is both hilarious and entirely predictable. Cupcakes. Frozen Pizza. Ice Cream. Cereal. These are some of the sugary foods that a slew of social media influencers are encouraging folks to enjoy guilt free. Honestly, I'm not opposed to that message. One reason we're so damn neurotic as a society is that lots of us have been convinced to feel guilty about everything pleasurable, instead of simply enjoying it. It's Puritanism all over again, and I won't put up with it. But I say these things without any benefit other than my own enjoyment at turning out to be right. Certainly, no one's paying me. Not even attention. However, a joint Washington Post and The Examination investigation found that major food companies, including Minnesota-based food giant General Mills, are reportedly capitalizing on the campaign by paying online dietitians to get people to consume more of their highly processed foods. Calling the people involved "online dieticians" is questionable, at best. Having watched a couple of videos about diet advice doesn't make you a dietician, but that, combined with a helping of chutzpah and earnest confidence and maybe a nice paycheck from Little Debbie, can convince people that you are. It's like how people spread the misinformation about ivermectin and Covid. Recently, General Mills, one of the biggest food companies in America, has started adopting the anti-diet philosophy as a way to promote their products. So, they’re doing this through a multi-pronged campaign that involves funding influencers online to promote this message, funding research and also hiring lobbyists to fight back against federal regulation. Just to be clear: I think that all of these things are acceptable in a society that values freedom of speech and association. What's not acceptable is lying about it, or failing to disclose it. We reached out to General Mills, and they say that they comply with federal regulations, and are working closely with scientific health nutrition experts to make sure that the information that they’re putting out there is accurate and based in evidence. I can hear its nose growing from all the way over here. I think it’s best to, when we’re approaching social media, to have a skeptical mindset. And, probably I would recommend people turn to their doctors for advice, as opposed to influencers online. And sure, doctors are human too, and susceptible to outside influence. The shady practices of pharmaceutical companies are one way they can be led astray. So they're not always right. But they're far more likely to have the knowledge and experience to consult on things like this than some rando on the internet (myself included). Skepticism (that's scepticism if you're British) is a good thing. Better that than naîve acceptance of everything you see online (or in ads or wherever). But that includes skepticism of conspiracy theories. Or conspiracy-adjacent theories. |
| Just an interesting Atlas Obscura article today... Star Forts Are Military History, and the Base of Some Strange Conspiracy Theories Examining why these ubiquitous, obsolete fortifications carry an air of mystery. Anything with even the slightest hint of mystery becomes, in the minds of humans, a conspiracy theory. Or at least something supernatural. It's like: "I wonder why the sun moves across the sky." "Oh, the gods must be pulling it on a chariot." "Oh! Yeah, that makes sense!" Or: "Who left these big footprints in the mud by the edge of the forest?" "Not sure. Must be aliens." "What? Come on. It's gotta be something perfectly natural, like Bigfoot." Star forts, like all forts, having been (most likely) built by actual humans from actual Earth, have nevertheless been subject to these same impeccable lines of reasoning. As usual, I recommend going to the link for the pretty pictures. I've only got a few comments here. I first began thinking seriously about bastion forts after reading W.G. Sebald’s final novel, Austerlitz. The book centers around the eponymous architecture critic, Jacques Austerlitz, who explains to the protagonist early on that “it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.” For once, I don't think this is a book ad in disguise. Though the author's own books are linked at the bottom of the article. “No one today,” he continues, “has the faintest idea of the boundless amount of theoretical writings on the building of fortifications, of the fantastical nature of the geometric, trigonometric, and logistical calculations they record, of the inflated excesses of the professional vocabulary of fortification and siegecraft, no one now understands its simplest terms, escarpe and courtine, faussebraie, réduit, and glacis, yet even from our present standpoint we can see that towards the end of the seventeenth century the star-shaped dodecagon behind trenches had finally crystallized, out of the various available systems, as the preferred ground plan.” For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, no "mystery" question is ever answered by conspiracy theorists with "Because humans can be really clever." They were first developed after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and became widespread throughout the 16th century, until their gradual obsolescence became apparent in the 1800s. Technology advances, in part, because of an arms race. You design a better weapon, I design a better defense. I design a better defense, you design a better weapon. And so on, until you design a weapon good enough to wipe out the planet, and do so, ending the arms race... probably. Meanwhile, a lot of those older weapons and defenses look cool, but aren't useful for their original purpose. I returned to Sebald’s novel again as I learned that there is an entire conspiracy theory built around these fortifications. According to the stranger corners of the Internet, these forts are not elaborate remnants of long-obsolete defense strategies, but rather structures built by some lost, hyper-advanced civilization. "Because I'm not clever enough to have designed them, I guarantee you no human was clever enough to design them." Littered all through Youtube, TikTok, and Reddit are videos and threads with names like “Star Forts: Tesla Technology, Vibration Healing, Ancient Electricity, Sound Frequency Technology,” in which bastion forts are recast as key players in the New Age gobbledygook that makes up so much of social media these days. (Among the regular posters in the starforts.org thread is a man named John A. Warner IV, the son of former U.S. Senator and U.S. Secretary of the Navy John Warner III, who’s self-published a novel that involves star forts, among its many other plots, and argued, for example, that they were not built but rather “grown” through some combination of frequency resonance and “water cymatics,” whatever that is.) John Warner was a senator from my state. He's dead now. I didn't usually agree with him, but I respected him (which I hardly ever say about a politician of any sort). He apparently neglected his kid, though. The star pattern, these conspiracists allege, mimics certain frequency waves as they appear on oscilloscopes, suggesting that these structures’ design reflects not military technology but an organic shape that somehow harmonizes with the natural world. I'm sorry... I can't... excuse me a moment, would you? BWAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAcoughcoughHAHAHAHAHAcough Ahem. Okay, I'm back. I won't quote further. But I will say that the article left me with a sense of the inevitability of rampant speculation and conspiracy "theories" in the wake of our construction of a post-truth society. No evidence in the world—and there is plenty of said evidence—will turn these speculations around, because, in the end, truth is what they believe it is. And that's an arms race we've already lost. |
| I think my random number generator is determined to clear out all the Cracked links from my queue. That's a comedy site, and death is very much not funny... except when it is, like when someone falls off a cliff trying to take the perfect selfie. When someone brings about their own downfall, people sometimes say they were hoisted by their own petard. We avoid using that expression ourselves because what exactly is a “petard” anyway? Now, that's French I knew before I started learning French. The first translation I heard was "little fart." The linked article goes into more detail. Not about farts, but the word "petard." 5. The YouTube Demonstration of How Bullets Can’t Go Through Books We like to make fun of those damn kids and their tikkytokky, but people posted Stupid Human Tricks on YouTube since approximately the day it was released. This particular one, though, is from 2017, well over 10 years after the site launched. As for Ruiz, he will sadly never get to fulfill the promise he made with some of his last words: “Every week, I’m gonna be bringing you guys new videos!” This is why I never make promises. As soon as I start to do so, my mind goes to all the dumb ways I could die and thus break the promise. I'd rather die than break a promise, so I avoid having to make that choice. 4. The Thieves Who Stole Cobalt-60 You know, this wouldn't be the karmic justice that it obviously is if it had happened back when Marie Curie was doing her Nobel Prize-winning shit. But this was in 1999, long after Chernobyl, and in another part of the former USSR. One of the thieves dropped dead within 30 minutes. This was the member of the gang who actually held the material. Sources differ on exactly what happened to the rest, with some saying that two others died next. At least one thief did survive, which meant he went to the hospital and then got arrested. And sadly, not sentenced to help clean up Chernobyl. 3. Ripping Down a Crash Mat, and Crashing In case it wasn’t obvious, all the men had been drinking. Don't freakin' blame booze for this. Booze enhances what's already there, be it stupidity, like these guys, or, in my case, genius. 2. The Trophy Hunter, Crushed by His Trophy Every so often, you’ll hear about some rich American going to Africa to kill a big-game animal and pose with the kill. Theunis Botha was not one of these casual trophy hunters. Botha was an expert trophy hunter, who led hunts in Zimbabwe and South Africa for decades. This one is satisfying on at least two levels. Not only do we get treated to jungle justice, but also we can make "Many Bothans died" Star Wars reference jokes. 1. Joseph Stalin, for Being Stalin One of the few good things you can say about Adolf Hitler is that at least he killed Hitler. Apparently, one can say something similar about Stalin, only his victim was Stalin. It was just a little more indirect, in his case. Kind of a Rube Goldberg self-destruction machine. His staff did not summon his personal physician. They couldn’t, as the man was currently being tortured in the basement of border security headquarters. There's a lot more fatal idiocy you can read about at the link that contributed to his death, but ultimately... he was hoist by his own petard. |
| We're going back in time, as usual for Sunday mornings. This time, it's just to October of 2020 (specifically, 10/10/20, one of the few dates that work in both American and European style conventions and which can also be turned into a mathematical equation): "Fail" I did the entry for that month's round of "Journalistic Intentions" [18+], which is still an active blogging challenge, though not every month. Also, all the links in the entry are still solid, which isn't too surprising for something less than 4 years old.Anyway, I got curious and looked up the origin of the name Fail. I didn't go into this at the time, but today, I noticed that the ultimate origin of the Scottish surname Fail (which has many alternative spellings) is the name Paul. Don't ask me what kind of linguistic vowel shifts it takes to get from Paul to Fail; I don't know. But the name Paul, from Paulus, is Latin in origin, though it is probably most associated with the Paul of the New Testament. So Paul becomes Phaill (or some similar spelling), and, by the convention of some Scottish clan names, generates MacPhaill, later Anglicized as MacFail or just Fail. At least, that's one possible explanation. I never did trust some of these genealogy websites. But you know the Meat Loaf character in Fight Club? "His name was Robert Paulson." Well, "Paulson" is the English equivalent of MacPaul, which we've already speculated became the name Fail, so I have to wonder if Palahniuk did that shit on purpose. Probably not; his symbolism tends to be more of a, well, a punch in the face. Anyway, back to my original entry: I know, I know, it's rude to make fun of peoples' last names. You should be proud of your last name, even if it's Fail. Or Hogg, as in yesterday's entry (coincidentally, also Scottish). Still, being proud of being a Hogg (or a Fail, for that matter) is no damn excuse to name your kid Ima. There's the story of a Dr. A. Hedgeh, for example, who apparently had a problem with people adding "og" to his nameplate. In case you don't want to bother rereading my 2020 entry, I'm including that link  here again, because I still laugh every time I see it. Fake or not.So, yes, it's rude to make fun of peoples' names. But sometimes, it's so funny you can't help it. |
| I have way, way more links from other sources in my queue, but hit another Cracked article today anyway. Either it's just one of those things with random numbers, or the Universe is trying to tell me something this week. I'm going with the former. At least this one's not a countdown. While there were obviously worse monsters in history—certain dictators come to mind, as does whoever used the next-to-last bit of toilet paper and didn't replace the roll—this guy's nearly up there with them. Of course, they tease us by not revealing the name until we scroll far enough down, and whoever invented that bit of web optimization also needs to be called out and shamed. Spoiler: it's a guy named, appropriately, Hogg. The overdraft fee. A trap disguised as convenience, so nefarious that it feels like it was invented by Mephistopheles himself. Maphi... Meppi... Mephi... the devil had better things to invent, like blister packs and those hard plastic shells that take power tools to open. Not especially surprising, given that currency, something originally invented to make commerce easier, is now basically a way to use math to break a human’s spirit over the course of their lifetime. To hear some people talk about it, the only math that doesn't cause them great anxiety is when the store offers a 30% discount on some gadget in a hard plastic shell. Why hasn't anyone made bulletproof armor out of that stuff yet? Any discussion or criticism of overdraft fees always results in the same defenders bubbling up from the cracks like ichor: People who are frustrated that bank accounts are private information, because they want everyone to know how financially responsible and smart they are. “Maybe you should keep track of how much money is in your bank account, and you wouldn’t overdraft,” they offer smugly, like a straight-A student tsk-tsking at the kid who forgot his homework. Bank accounts, like health problems, are only private information if you want yours to be. For instance, I have a checking account with exactly $500.00 in it. I've never overdrafted it in the 20 years or so that it's been in existence. There, I've shared private information. That said, that "advice" is simplistic and annoying, and ignores Rule #1 of finance: Banks will find a way to screw you. Let’s also make it clear here, in case you were kicked by a horse and are still defending them as a valuable convenience: Banks offer overdraft fees because they make a shit ton of money off of them. The overdraft fee can also be considered interest on a loan. Sometimes, that interest is so high the mob looks at it and goes, "Geez, why can't we charge that much?" 2019, for instance, they made $11.68 billion from overdraft fees alone. Which is the kind of cash that inspired some banks to reorder transactions, deducting big purchases first, so that they might have a chance to hit multiple overdraft fees from some sap by rattling off five unaffordable coffees once they were at zero. They also like to process debits (checks, card purchases, transfers out) before deposits. See Rule #1 of finance, above. While overdraft fees seem like a modern cash grab... Their origin goes all the way back to 1728, and a Scottish merchant named William Hogg. He, together with the Royal Bank of Scotland, worked out the first ever overdraft fee, so that he could conduct business more effectively if he was waiting on a tardy payment. While the link on his name in the article is broken, I'm here for you: {xlink:https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~hogg/genealogy/famoushoggs.html}this page} lists several famous Hoggs, including Ima, whose parents would be roasting on spits in Hell, if Hell actually existed, for naming her that; William Hogg is on there, with a link that confirms that, indeed, he's the guy who helped invent overdraft fees. But Hogg's influence is minor, analogous to whoever invented fire when compared to whoever invented napalm. The problem being, of course, that reliable customers don’t bounce enough checks to make it a revenue stream. Here is when the crown of hell is lowered onto a man’s head: William H. Strunk, who in 1994 came up with the modern overdraft system, “available” to every customer, and consisting of a per-transaction charge. What is it with guys named William, anyway? Are they just mad because no one likes to receive Bills? The final piece of this devil’s triad was the widespread use of debit cards. With people using debit cards for every manner of purchase, instead of larger bank debits and ATM withdrawals, suddenly banks were presented with a smorgasbord of tiny purchases to swat back with a new, double-digit fee attached. Even there, one might think, well, if there's only $17 in your account, and you try to make a $20 purchase with your debit card, shouldn't that just be declined? Well, maybe. But that assumes the bank doesn't want to collect an OD fee, which it definitely does, in accordance with Rule #1. Also, maybe you've just checked your balance using your handy mobile device, and it says you have $117, but what it doesn't say is that the $100 check you wrote to the babysitter hasn't cleared yet. There's certainly an aspect of personal responsibility involved, but no one's perfect, and imperfection shouldn't come with a 2000%+ interest rate. Luckily for us, their day in the sun seems to be ending, as the government is taking on overdraft fees directly. The government? The government that's run by bankers? That government? Obviously, all this applies in the US. In other countries, your kilometerage may vary. |
| I'll do another one from "JAFBG" [XGC] today: What issue do you think has been misrepresented? Since I pick these at random, I didn't have an axe to grind in mind when I landed on this prompt. It took me a while to sift through all the issues I could remember from relatively recent news stories, eliminate from consideration those that are too divisive to deal with in the short time I take to write these things, and decide on one I gave enough of a shit about to comment on. An AI could probably have done that faster, and indeed, I considered doing this entry on AI, perhaps even using AI (which is not actually AI, but that's a semantic bugaboo for me and a whole different level of misrepresentation). Since I was in NYC last week, though, I decided on crime. No, I don't mean I decided to pursue a life of crime. English is sometimes ambiguous like that, which can be annoying but can also lead to great amusement, so let's not change that anytime soon. What I mean is, I think crime is an issue that's been misrepresented in media, both social and commercial. The reason I mention NYC above is that there's this pervasive attitude that "big city" crime is a huge problem, and in the US, there's no bigger city than New York. And yet, the reality is, though I can't be arsed to look up statistics, that most of NYC is pretty damn safe. Sure, crime happens... but it can happen anywhere, and if you're a victim of assault or mugging or whatever, the prior chance of you being a victim of assault or mugging or whatever is largely irrelevant. Discussing this issue is made difficult by how one defines "crime" as well as other factors. Different localities have different priorities. In my experience, law enforcement makes a big show of drug busts, while mostly ignoring crimes with actual victims, such as burglary (yes, drug use is often a bellwether for other crimes, but that doesn't mean it is, by itself, worse than, say, sawing off someone's catalytic converter). Mainly, though, the issue comes down to one of familiarity. As an analogy, most people in the US drive nearly every day, while they only fly occasionally. The dangers of flying are thus magnified in a person's mind, sometimes to the point of actual fear of getting on an airplane. Statistically, though, it's clear that you're much safer on a jet (even if it was recently made by Boeing) than you are driving to and from the airport. Likewise, someone from a medium-sized town like mine might be wary of the Big City with all its reported crime, while being used to the risks in one's hometown. Similarly, when it comes to threats to your family, other family members (or former family members) are much more likely to be the problem than some stranger. And then you get the politically-charged rhetoric about letting in immigrants and the like, who, according to the opponents thereof, are either lazy and want handouts, or are so willing to work hard that they're taking all our jobs; either way, though, they're perceived as potential criminals, which ignores all the US-born criminals who are much more likely to be the ones who do you some harm. It's understandable to be concerned for one's safety. And it pays to take reasonable precautions. But listening to the media might give a person a warped view of where the actual threats to it are coming from. |
| As luck would have it, we get another Cracked link today. I don't really know why I saved this to my queue other than thinking, "You know what my blog needs more of? Juvenile cringe humor." These are, of course, horrible, and not humorous at all. Stories tell of a boy in China who was impaled by an office chair. This chair was powered by a gas cylinder, and the cylinder exploded in 2009, blasting metal up his butt and killing him. Could have been worse. Could have been a couple inches forward and not killed him. We don’t want to spend too much time on that story, on the technicality that it’s likely completely made-up. Almost certainly an urban legend, but you just checked your office chair, didn't you? 5. Bullion, Milk and Whiskey Up the Butt I will admit to being somewhere in adulthood before I realized that bullion and bouillon were two different things. So I understand getting it wrong Both words come from the same root, a French word that translates to "boil," meaning like heating something to the point that liquid starts to turn into gas, not the painful pimply thing you get on your butt. Had to relate it to butts somehow, in honor of the article. Point being, they stuffed bouillon up the butt in question, not bullion, which would have made it harder to insert the milk and whiskey. Editing is dead. (The text in this section gets the spelling right.) President James Garfield died in 1881, after an escaped lunatic shot him in the arm and back... He died, historians now say, not just from the bullets but from how the doctors treated him. I'd heard this before, but purposely avoided all the details... until now. They shoved liquified food up his butt — beef bouillon, eggs and milk, along with whiskey and opium. They couldn’t let him eat, they said, because the bullet might have perforated his intestines (it really hadn't). See? They got "bouillon" right there, but made up for it by misspelling "liquefied." (In fairness, that might be an alternate spelling and not an incorrect one.) As a final note on this, let's not take this to mean "don't trust medical science." I mean, sure, don't trust 19th-century medicine; we might have advanced somewhat in that area since 1881. 4. Bitten by Your Own Attack Dog I can't do this one justice (pun intended, but you'll only get it if you read the actual link); you'll have to see the article. 3. Filled With Compressed Air No, not the way you're thinking. McCormack didn’t wind up with a hose nozzle up his anus through debatable means. McCormack fell on a hose, and the fitting ripped through the muscle of one buttock, which is an experience no one would desire. I don't know about that; it's probably a whole subgenre of paraphilia. This was a compressed air hose, connected to the brakes in his truck, and the air now flowed through the hose, entering the man. Ow. Ow. Ow. He felt like he were blowing up like a balloon. But he survived, and he’s now available for interviews about how the working class is dealing with inflation. Oh, that's right: that one line is the actual reason I saved this article in my queue. I'm mad that I didn't think of it first. 2. Water Ski Douche No. But it only gets worse: 1. Cooked as Steaks and Fed to Children Someone's been reading too much Brothers Grimm. Knight went on to be the first woman in Australia to be sentenced to life without parole. Authorities have no firm advice on how to stop something like this from happening again. I have some, hard-won from personal experience: 1) Don't go to continent/island/countries where it's well-known that everything, including scorned lovers, is out to kill you; 2) Don't stick it in crazy. |
| Despite my well-known appreciation for Star Trek, the title of this entry has nothing to do with the series with that name, or its namesake starship. Nor does it have anything to do with the cable channel or Land Rover model. It is, in fact, misleading, as today's article, from Cracked, is all about... The problem with history is that someone’s gotta write it. At least before recording technology and a way to preserve those recordings, getting data down required going through the natural bias of at least one human brain. Even with recording technology, one often wonders. Like how cops' bodycams always seem to malfunction right before a suspect punches himself in the kidneys. Here are five pioneers who get credit for things they didn’t really discover… As usual, I'm just going to touch on some highlights. 5. Christopher Columbus Perhaps the most obvious and well-known individual in this category. The premier poster child of false pioneers, and one that got the capital city of a world superpower named after him in the process: Christopher Columbus. And then there's the city in Ohio, which, because of issues with the dude's legacy, some people are trying to get renamed. To Flavortown, in honor of native son Guy Fieri. This is not an improvement. Don't they have an astronaut or something they can rename to? Immediately and obviously, it’s difficult to be the first person to discover a country that’s already fully occupied by a culture and civilization. Unless, of course, your definition of "culture and civilization" is exclusively "15th century Europe," which was apparently the attitude of 15th century Europeans. Even if you do want to give credit for crashing into the right rock, you’d still have to hand it to Leif Erikson, who landed in North America all the way back around the year 1000 A.D. He even named it, calling it “Vinland” or the “land of wine,” a name that seemingly, nobody bothered to put down on any maps, at least the ones that Columbus would later use. I'd totally live in the USV. Hell, these days, I think I do, what with the proliferation of wineries in every state (yes, even Alaska). And every province of Canada. I didn't check on Mexico, but who needs wine when you have tequila? It's entirely possible that the French heard about this "Vinland" thing and did their best to erase it from history in an attempt to keep their monopoly on spoiled grape juice. 4. Captain James Cook Speaking of white sailors that hog credit, let’s take a look at the man given popular recognition for the “discovery” of Australia, Captain James Cook. His name always bugged me, anyway. Are you a captain, or a cook? Only Christopher Pike gets to be both. (I had to get a Star Trek reference in somewhere, right?) Obviously, again, Australia was already populated by humans, as the article points out. Then, something I wasn't aware of: Unlike Columbus, this is much wider than a 1v1, two-explorer debate. By the time of Cook’s trip in 1770, fully double digit European landings on Australia were already recorded. Beyond that, there may well have been visits by Portuguese sailors and Chinese fleets in the preceding centuries. There is one continent that we know was "discovered" in recorded history and that's Antarctica. Even this is disputed, as the Maori claim to have landed there in the more distant past. This claim is unsupported by evidence, as I understand it. But apparently, Cook almost discovered the place, but turned away at the slightest mention of icebergs, making him at least smarter than a certain other captain on the other side of the world a couple of centuries later. Incidentally, Australia also makes some kick-ass wine. 3. Frank Benford Let’s flip to a different textbook: mathematics. And we both just lost half our readers. There is a law, known as Benford’s law, which states that the first digit in any real-world number, regardless of size, is disproportionately likely to be a low number like 1 or 2. It's also not really a "law," in either commonly used sense of the word. Why is this true? I have no earthly idea. As I understand it, it's because real-world numbers tend to count objects, like sheep or dollars. These don't tend to show up with equal probability. For instance, you're more likely to have 100-199 sheep than you are to have 900 of them. You're more likely to have a net worth of $100,000 than $900,000 (or $-10,000 than $-50,000). (You can't have negative sheep, even in Australia.) Lots of things cost in the $100 range; fewer things cost in the $200 range, even fewer in the $300s, etc. To be fair, neither did Frank Benford, the man whose name graces this law. So if he didn’t explain it, he must have received the honor for discovering it, right? Weirdly, also no. It was discovered, and written about, by an astronomer named Simon Newcomb in 1881. To be even more fair, astronomers tend to be recognized for discovering, I don't know, stars or galaxies or whatever, and not number theory statistics. Incidentally, this "law" is used in forensic accounting. People who cook (pun intended; see #4 above) their books tend to put in semi-random numbers, and you get enough of these and they violate the... whoever's "law" it is. 2. Elvis Presley Him and Buddy Holly are often plopped onto Rock’s Mount Rushmore, and sure, they’re significant artists in the genre, but pretending they came up with it themselves is a whitewashing job Tom Sawyer would be proud of. "He and Buddy Holly." Sheesh, editors. Unfortunately, the general populace preferred to ignore the obvious and clear Black influence on his music. Still, I have to question: is a musical genre "discovered" or "invented?" If one takes the Platonic view of the world, everything is discovered, and nothing is invented. Plato invented, I mean discovered, that philosophy. Probably. 1. Edmund Halley Hey, look, an actual astronomer on the list. The fact is, the comet we know as Halley’s was observed and recorded long before he was around. His great discovery was that the comet orbited the sun, making its return consistent and predictable. People had seen Halley’s comet before, they just didn’t realize it was the same one over and over. Splitting hairs, if you ask me. It's still a worthy discovery. That's kind of like saying that whoever figured out that the sun gets its sun-like qualities from the fusion of hydrogen into helium didn't do shit, because we kind of suspected the sun was bright all along. (Okay, I looked it up; it was actually a bunch of people working off Einstein's inventions. I mean discoveries.) In any case, while Halley didn't "discover" the comet named after him, he did make discoveries, like how stars are actually moving around. Which was a bigger deal than it sounds like now, because it was a watershed moment between "the stars are fixed for all time" and "holy shit, those suckers are moving." And thus, he contributed to our better understanding of the universe. Unlike, say, Columbus who, like Blackadder II, discovered bugger-all. |
| Sometimes I have to be reminded of stuff, because apparently I have a problem with object permanence once an item drops off my Favorites sidebar. In particular, "JAFBG" [XGC] is still around, under new management, and there have been prompts to tackle since the beginning of the year. As usual, I picked one at random: How useful do you think anger can be? Well, I'm not a psych-talker person, nor are emotions something I know much about. I can barely identify them in myself, let alone in others. That said, it seems to me that anger is, at base, a manifestation of the well-known "fight or flight" response to a threat. That makes it related to fear, in my book (which I won't write because, like I said, not an expert). The "flight" part probably doesn't involve anger, but the "fight" part does. I hear that, in those cases, anger can be fairly useful to focus one's hostility into action... so long as it doesn't escalate into blind rage, which leads to random flailing around and, eventually, defeat. I used language related to physical conflict there, but this also applies to the mental realm, like when government passes a law you don't agree with, and anger leads you to mobilize. "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" The quote there is from a 70s movie, Network. I don't recall ever seeing the film, but the line is iconic, with or without the context provided by the story. So of course, I looked it up on Wikipedia, because it's not like I have to avoid spoilers for a movie that came out before Star Wars.Which, if you take a look at the link there, provides a nice segué into the other half of the equation. Above, I touched on how useful anger might be to the person feeling it. But if you want to really see how anger is useful, you need to consider how it's used as a tool for manipulation. An angry person doesn't think rationally. This is almost by definition: "mad" is a synonym for "angry," but it's also a synonym for "fucking nuts." If you don't want people thinking rationally, if you want them to react with their limbic system instead of their neocortex, as it were... get 'em angry. Convince them, through emotional language, that their social position, their way of life, their very lives are in imminent danger, and you'll sell more torches and pitchforks. I always thought it would be fun to put a Torch and Pitchfork store into an RPG campaign, to provide helpful tools for the occasional riot. The proprietor would be bored most of the time, so, occasionally, they'd drum up some business by manufacturing some sort of outrage. "The King wants to increase taxes so he can gold-plate his throne! Meanwhile, honest merchants are struggling! Are we going to let that stand?" Might be a little too close to reality for a fantasy role-playing game, though. So, to answer the prompt, anger can be very useful... in the people you're trying to influence. Way more useful there, as an agent of chaos, than it can be for an individual reacting to an actual threat. So, if a headline spurs you to anger... take a step back. While suppressing anger is probably bad (or so I've heard), it may be possible to calm down enough to let some rational thought take over. If I'm right about the fight-or-flight thing, which I can't guarantee, anger is a kind of burst emotion; I imagine a whole cascade of neurotransmitters firing indiscriminately, urging us to action. And that burst can't really be sustained, any more than more pleasant emotions can. Anger is a useful tool for the people in charge. It's way more useful for the rest of us to recognize when we're being manipulated, and sidestep that. In my unprofessional opinion. |
| Snake oil gonna snake. Though snake oil doesn't deserve all of its reputation for fakery. It had a use in traditional medicine (whether it was actually efficacious, I don't know). The problem was, hucksters started promoting it as a magical cure-all, so now "snake oil salesman" is a synonym for fraudster.The business of supplements is booming, and with all the hype around them, it’s easy to forget what they actually are: substances that can powerfully affect the body and your health, yet aren’t regulated like drugs are. They’re regulated more like food. Okay, but let's be clear, here: food can "powerfully affect the body and your health." The line between food and drug isn't always sharp. Hence you get a long string of "superfood" fads. It’s important to consider why so many people believe supplements can help them lead a healthier life. While there are many reasons, how supplements are marketed is undeniably an important one. In my years following the industry, I’ve found that three mistaken assumptions appear over and over in supplement marketing. There follows a discussion of those "three mistaken assumptions" (I'd have phrased that differently, using words like misleading, false, or lie, but I'm not getting paid to mince words to avoid lawsuits). 1. The appeal to nature fallacy The appeal to nature fallacy occurs when you assume that because something is “natural” it must be good. The word natural is used a lot in the marketing of supplements. Leaving aside for the moment the inherent ambiguity of "natural," I've long wondered how they can take, say, a plant, extract its juices, distill out the desired chemicals (everything is chemicals), stuff it into a pill, and still call it natural. To be clear, “natural” does not equate to “better,” but that’s what the marketing wants you to think. Remember, poison ivy is natural. So are those mushrooms that'll kill you horribly and painfully. And the pollen which, even though I'm not technically allergic, is playing havoc with my sinuses right now (and for which I'll happily take a manufactured antihistamine). 2. The belief that more of a good thing is always better There’s another assumption that piggybacks on the appeal to nature fallacy: If something is natural, it must be good, and more of it must also always be better. This seems to be pervasive in human psychology, for whatever reason. I have to guard against it, myself, even though I know it's not the case. Not just with food, but activities as well. You can overdose on anything, even water. 3. The action bias Finally, the supplement industry likes to capitalize on the idea that doing something is better than doing nothing. This is the action bias. Taking action makes people feel like they have more control of a situation, which is especially powerful when it comes to health. This one's pervasive, too. It doesn't help that, in some cases, it seems to be true. Getting five minutes of exercise a day is said to be better than getting no exercise at all, though again, more is better... up to a point. But in this particular case, taking a supplement might not be better than not taking one. Okay, that's a convoluted sentence with a lot of negations. Given the risks, it might be best to avoid supplements. As with most things, I feel like a person should consult with their doctor as to whether a supplement is useful or necessary, and safe. Doctors don't know everything, either, but they're more likely to have the relevant information, based on your own health profile, than good old Doctor Google. On the flip side, if very few people bought these supplements, they wouldn't continue to be manufactured. This might have adverse effects on the people who, for whatever reason, do have to take supplements. It's like how I get snarky about "gluten-free," but the fad helped make available more products that people with legitimate gluten allergies can eat, improving their quality of life. So, if you're a supplement fanatic, maybe rest easy knowing that you're making life better for other people... if not necessarily yourself. |
| As usual for Sundays, I picked an older entry at random to take another look at. This one's old, indeed, as these things go, from January of 2008. It's just a short personal update, so feel free to ignore it. I did: "Exercise" I don't even recognize the person who wrote that. I assume it was a past version of me, someone who lived in my house and drank my beer. Not that I don't still have intermittent back problems, but I've given up on a lot of things, fixing my back being one of them, and swimming being another. I realize that other peoples' dreams are about the most boring things to relate, but since we're talking about exercise, I remembered that I keep having dreams about riding a bicycle. Not a motorcycle, but, like, a mountain bike or a 10-speed—something that I absolutely can't do now. It is, therefore, the only form of exercise that I actually want to do and no, a stationary bike won't cut it. They say you never forget how to ride a bike. I'm betting those dreams are just my brain making sure that's true. |
| Ever notice that it's possible for the same stimulus to evoke pleasure or pain, depending on context? Pleasure or Pain? He Maps the Neural Circuits That Decide. The work of the neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has opened up a world of insights into precisely how much pleasure and pain animals experience during different forms of touch. My only hesitation here is that doing research on pain often means deliberately causing pain, and to me, that's ethically questionable at best. Especially when the subjects can't consent. But it was only a hesitation; I'm doing this entry anyway. As an omnivore, there's a limit to how much hypocrisy I'll tolerate in myself when it comes to this sort of thing. Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has been fascinated by the variety of the natural world since he was a boy growing up in Philadelphia. Probably because there's so much of it in Philadelphia. Yes, I know I've pointed out before that, as we are part of the natural world, so is everything we build. But I never let the facts get in the way of a good joke. Or a bad one. Especially a bad one. Today, he is an associate professor of biological sciences at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, where he studies how the brain determines whether a touch to the skin is painful or pleasurable. From Philadelphia to Manhattan... hm. Anything to stay out of New Jersey, I suppose. To find those clues, Abdus-Saboor probes the nervous system at every juncture along the skin-to-brain axis. He does not focus on skin alone or home in on only the brain as many others do. “We merge these two worlds,” he said. This kind of ties in with other things I've been saying. People tend to draw a boundary between body and brain, probably because of old ideas about mind/body duality, but the brain is part of the body. Abdus-Saboor has also pioneered a new quantitative measure of pain in mice, a tool he and his team adapted to gather evidence for the transgenerational inheritance of opioid addiction. The addiction thing aside, I'm intrigued about the "quantitative measure of pain" thing. Pain in humans is often subjective; hence the classic 1-10 scale doctors ask you to rate your own pain on. Pain in other animals is generally inferred by their reactions, but it gets tricky; for a long time, people thought nonhuman animals didn't actually experience pain as such. The latter part of the article discusses this further. Quanta spoke with Abdus-Saboor about his penchant for starting over in science, his zebra fish eureka moment and his hopes for a newly imported naked mole rat colony. Thus, the rest of the article is in interview format. I won't quote more, but it's there at the link. I find it interesting on several levels, not least of which is the actual science involved, but also because, to me, it illustrates why it's important to have people from different backgrounds, with different worldviews, working on scientific research. |
| A friend of mine sent me this link a while back, and it's just interesting enough to comment on. I have a board game called Lunar Rails. The idea is that you need to create rail links between lunar mines and settlements to facilitate transport of resources and passengers. Occasionally, something bad will happen like a solar flare, moonquake, or meteor strike, and you have to fix your routes or work around the disaster. I haven't played it in a while, because a board game requires friends who can all commit to the same time to play in person, and we have enough problems getting people together to play RPGs over the internet. My point, besides bitching about how hard it still is to get people together even though we're no longer quarantined, is that the idea is hardly new. What is new is, apparently, that people are starting to examine the feasibility of turning it from science fiction into reality. The first U.S. transcontinental railroad, completed with a spike hammered into the track in 1869, transformed the nation. Perhaps the same will happen on the moon in the game. The difference being that the US had major settlements on both coasts before the railroad was built. Last I checked, the number of permanent human settlements on the moon was still 0. Also, that last railroad spike was, famously, made of gold. While there is gold on the moon, it's unclear to me how much there is, and how accessible. Not a lot of point wasting fuel lofting a golden metaphor up there, so they'd need a local source. But any gold found on the moon would probably be more useful for more practical reasons.The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA — an ambitious federal innovations division — has begun collaborating with over a dozen companies on potential future lunar technologies, including a moon railroad. It's called the 10-Year Lunar Architecture Capability Study, or LunA-10, and its mission is to find technologies that will catalyze a self-perpetuating lunar economy. Yeah, so the headline is (big surprise here) a bit misleading. They're looking at the whole picture, which you have to do because it's not like you can go up there and wing it. Now as NASA, global space agencies, and companies return to the moon with robotic spacecraft, the future Nayak sees is one that must be able to progress. It might be mining helium-3 (an extremely rare resource on Earth that could be used in medical imaging, computing, and even energy), harvesting water ice to create rocket fuel for deep space missions, and beyond. Amusingly, helium-3 (a really incredibly rare, stable isotope of helium with just one neutron instead of the usual two) plays a key role in the video game Starfield. Also amusingly, you can mine it from the moon in the game. DARPA recently chose the aerospace and defense giant Northrup Grumman to create the concept for the railroad. "The envisioned lunar railroad network could transport humans, supplies, and resources for commercial ventures across the lunar surface — contributing to a space economy for the United States and international partners," the company wrote. Why I find the railroad thing interesting, above and beyond all the other shit you'd need to establish colonies and/or industry on the moon, is not just because I have the Lunar Rails game, or even because I studied transportation engineering. It's that we sometimes think of railroads as outdated technology, so we might not think about them in a space setting. Since then, we've made trucks and planes and huge cargo ships... none of which would be possible on the moon. Well, maybe trucks, but there's a question of how to keep them powered. You might think "rockets," but then you run into using fuel again. The engineering challenges are interesting, though. I mentioned power above, but with rail, you can power it from various solar arrays at different locations (it's not like the moon has fossil fuels or wind power) and send it along the track like they do in the Northeast Corridor . There's the extremes of temperature to deal with; how do you design rails that will withstand both extreme heat and extreme cold? Not to mention what kind of design they might need to prevent derailments in the much lower gravity. Well. At least they don't have to worry about wind resistance or rain. Now, some people might consider the whole thing a waste of money and Earthly resources. I'm not going to justify it in this entry. Maybe another time. |
| This article is a couple of years old, and I'm sure some additional science has been done since then, but since it presses one of my hot buttons, well, here it is. Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream? A radical quantum hypothesis casts doubt on objective reality Every time I see a headline in the form of a yes/no question, I take the default position that the answer is "no." It's not impossible for the actual article (or other evidence) to convince me otherwise, but that's where I start. Further, note the word "hypothesis." The translation of this word for non-scientists is something like "guess." There may be some good reasons to make the guess, but, as I understand things, it hasn't been subjected to rigorous testing, and therefore hasn't really been supported by evidence. My girlfriend, “Emily,” often tells me her dreams, and I, less often, tell her mine, which are usually too murky and disjointed to share. I guess that dynamic works for them. Rare is the occasion when someone's recounting of their dream is actually interesting to the listener(s). Interpreting dreams is an imperfect, highly subjective art, as Sigmund Freud, in his rare moments of humility, would surely have granted. That's a polite way of saying that dream interpretation is bullshit. And yet making sense of dreams, it occurs to me lately, is not wholly dissimilar from making sense of “reality,” whatever that is. Yes, we all live in the same world. We can compare notes on what is happening, and draw inferences, in a way impossible with dreams. If one assumes that solipsism is false, at any rate. And yet your experience of the world is unique to you. So is your interpretation of it, which depends on your prior beliefs, yearnings and aversions, and on what matters to you. This is hardly news. I'm pretty sure there were primitive humans arguing over what to hunt for dinner. Science offers our best hope for achieving consensus about what happens. On that point, at least, I can't disagree. But "best hope" doesn't imply certainty. Scientists accumulate bits of evidence and try to assemble these fragments into a coherent story. After much haggling and second-guessing, scientists converge on a plausible narrative. Remember a few days ago when I wrote about how stories are important and we shouldn't dismiss them as "just a story?" Yeah. But subjectivity is hard to expunge even in physics, the foundation on which science rests. Quantum mechanics, a mathematical model of matter at very small scales, is science’s most rigorously tested theory. Countless experiments have confirmed it, as do computer chips, lasers and other technologies that exploit quantum effects. I agree that physics is the foundational science. Psychology, for example, derives in part from biology, which is really just complicated chemistry, and, in turn, chemistry is, at its core, physics. Also, I have no reason to doubt that QM "is science's most rigorously tested theory." I've seen that assertion in multiple, disconnected places. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies common sense. Well, yeah. That's one reason I disparage the idea of "common sense." Saying that QM "defies common sense" is an indictment of the concept of common sense, not science. For more than a century, physicists have tried to interpret the theory, to turn it into a coherent story, in vain. “Every competent physicist can ‘do’ quantum mechanics,” a leading textbook says, “but the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing are as various as the tales of Scheherazade, and almost as implausible.” I think this is due, in part, to our limited macroscopic experience. A story requires some shared experience; at the very least, the reader must have at least one language in common with the writer for the reader to comprehend the story. And our language, which includes concepts like "something is either a wave or a particle, never both," is incompatible with the language of quantum mechanics. Many physicists ignore the puzzles posed by quantum mechanics. I wouldn't go that far. It's more like they have to decide whether the puzzle is relevant to the outcome. A newish interpretation of quantum mechanics called QBism (pronounced “Cubism,” like the art movement) makes subjective experience the bedrock of knowledge and reality itself. David Mermin, a prominent theorist, says QBism can dispel the “confusion at the foundations of quantum mechanics.” You just have to accept that all knowledge begins with “individual personal experience.” I can accept that assertion. What I don't accept, at least right now, is that it also ends there. But QBism’s core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say. And here's where I start having Issues. I talked about the importance of stories. But what is a story? It can be passed verbally, but these days, it's transmitted through writing on a screen or in a book. We can each read a book and come away with different impressions of it, like, say, how I think James Joyce wrote dreck while other people worship the guy's stuff and even do entire college courses on it. This difference of opinion and viewpoint doesn't change the objective reality that Joyce wrote books. If you want to get really technical about it, a book is a collection of (usually) formerly-living organic matter, bound with more formerly-living organic matter and containing marks made by matter that reflects light differently. Go another level in, and it's an object made of mostly hydrocarbon chain molecules. Another level beyond that, and it's electrons and quarks and whatnot: all energy of some kind. That may be the base "reality," but it doesn't make our ability to read the book and draw conclusions from it some sort of illusion. It's just a different level of reality. Similarly, our different and varied worldviews aren't evidence of illusion. Proponents bicker over definitions, and physicists and philosophers fond of objectivity reject QBism entirely. All this squabbling, ironically, seems to confirm QBism’s premise that there is no absolute objectivity; there are only subjective, first-person viewpoints. Maybe it's irony that people are arguing over whether disagreement indicates that all this shit around us is an illusion. I don't know. I'm still a little hazy on the concept of irony, despite doing a whole entry about it a while back. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Some people might find an inherent contradiction in my disdain for Joyce and my appreciation of Eliot. I can only quote Walt Whitman, a poet I'm not generally fond of: I am large; I contain multitudes. If you are a practical person, like one of the finance majors in my freshman humanities class, you might conclude, along with T. S. Eliot, that efforts to comprehend existence are futile. You might urge friends majoring in philosophy to enjoy life rather than fretting over its meaning. I do consider myself a practical person, mostly. But the idea "enjoy life rather than fretting over its meaning" is itself a philosophy. I'd go so far as to say that I consider our different and varied viewpoints to be evidence of reality, not of illusion. If everyone agreed on every detail, then I'd be suspicious that I was living in some holodeck simulation. In the end, the article fails to convince me that "life is but a dream." It may be different things to different people, but we're here, alive at least for now, to argue about it. And unless you're a solipsist, well, there's the foundation of our shared reality. |
| Yes, the article I'm sharing today was one of my inspirations for the Comedy newsletter editorial that just came out: "Keep the Tip" . It's coincidence that my random number generator picked it out of my queue today. I've also done other blog entries on the subject before, but this is a relatively new take, from NPR. Businesses that never seemed to ask for a tip before — like grocery stores, self-checkout machines and fast food restaurants — are now asking for one these days. As I noted in the editorial, I can't personally confirm the self-checkout tip chutzpah, but this is not the only source that asserts that it's happening. It's rare to find begging that blatant and uncalled-for. If a business you don't expect to ask for a tip is suddenly asking you for a tip, what should you do? Ideally, take your business elsewhere. But Shubhranshu Singh, a marketing professor at Johns Hopkins University, likes to leave a 10% tip. If an establishment is asking for a tip, it's often an indication that the workers there are not getting paid a minimum wage. If the workers aren't getting paid a minimum wage (outside exempt employees such as restaurant servers, who are some of the few that should be tipped), that business needs to face consequences for it. How that would work, though, I don't really know. Some businesses load their payment systems with default minimum tip options of more than 20%. If you don't want to give that much, don't worry about holding up the line to take an extra moment to select the "custom tip" option, says Singh. In those situations, I select the "no tip" option, and definitely try to find somewhere else to shop in the future. I know it's usually not the workers' responsibility to set those defaults. Still, it's bloody outrageous. Don't forget to tip people who you might not have a direct interaction with, like hotel housekeepers, says Singh. I'm torn on the whole tipping hotel housekeepers thing, honestly. I've done it. I've skipped out on doing it. I feel like it should be done for extended stays, on the theory that a tipped housekeeper might go the extra mile for you and hopefully not put itching powder in your undies. This makes it more of a bribe than a tip. Tipping is also a way to pay workers more without actually raising their wages. It allows restaurants to get more money to workers while still keeping their prices low, says Sean Jung, a professor at Boston University's School of Hospitality Administration. But if tips are expected and customary, as with restaurants, the "low" prices (they've still gone up along with everything else recently) are a lie. Nevertheless, some restaurants have experimented with no-tip options. Usually, this means raising their prices by 20-25%. Then, when comparison shopping, a potential customer sees higher prices and balks, ignoring which places take tips and which don't. Every place I know that tried this route went out of business. In other words, it needs to be across the board, which means either a) collusion, which, as I understand things, is illegal; or b) regulations, which are already overdone. Tipping culture in the US is so ingrained that there's not much will to do either. And even if they did, people will still try to tip, because it's what they're used to doing. Oh, well... at least this article, unlike some others on the topic that I've shared here, doesn't rehash the false TIPS backronym, which, as I've noted repeatedly, has been thoroughly debunked. And yet, the article is light on practical information and encourages way too much work for the consumer, who just wants a damn hamburger. I'm not saying people shouldn't get decent pay. Quite the contrary. I'm just saying it shouldn't be laid directly on our shoulders. I'd prefer to see the actual price of things up front (and this also goes for hidden fees from businesses like airlines, ticket sellers, and hotels). Until that utopia comes into existence, though, I continue to tip waitstaff and bartenders. |
| One thing that always strikes me about New York City is the scale of the dog infestation. I'm pretty sure that having a dog is a requirement of living here. I wouldn't be surprised if people are issued one when moving in: "Welcome to New York. Here's your dachshund." At the very least, even though the internet is telling me that having a dog in NYC requires a license, I'd bet they charge you a fee if you don't have a canine. And the furry barking tail-waggers are everywhere. At any given moment on a typical block (on the Upper West Side, because I can't be arsed to take a subway ride just to support a blog entry), there are at least three dog-walkers on the sidewalk with an average of two dogs on leashes. Doing some quick math leads me to believe that not a single resident of the city is dog-free. Maybe they occasionally just appear in your expensive, cramped apartment via wormhole, complete with a regulation 6-foot-or-shorter leash and a roll of plastic doggie doo bags. At least New Yorkers tend to be good about using both of these items. Whether that's out of a heightened sense of civic duty, or because they have a healthy fear of the NYPD, I don't know, and it doesn't matter, because the result is the same. This isn't a case of "stop liking what I don't like." It's not that I dislike dogs, any more than I dislike kids just because I don't want to own one. Although I can't be arsed to do all the work a dog requires (and I absolutely will not pick up dog shit, with or without gloves), I understand that a lot of people want to hang out with the mopey, needy quadrupeds. It's just that I know what the housing situation tends to be around here, and, even with daily walks, having a retriever in an apartment the size of my spare bathroom can't be good for the dog. Not only that, but right now, it's pretty close to the middle of astronomical spring. This, right now, is one of two weeks of the year when it's actually pleasant to be in NYC, the other being the week of the fall equinox. Between these two events, in one direction, it's either pouring down rain or oppressively hot, or both; in the other direction, it's either pouring down rain or snow, or oppressively cold, or both. And yet, every day, you gotta walk those dogs. Twice, at least. While juggling the three jobs and two side gigs you need to afford to live in NYC. I get that some people want to live with dogs. I get that some people want to live in NYC. I'm just left shaking my head in confusion over the intersection of the two. |
| As I noted yesterday, entries might be short for a few days while I'm out of town, and at odd times. Fortunately, I don't have a lot to say about this one, except for NOOOOOOO. This is an Outrage and Something Must Be Done. Hops give bitter its taste but the plant doesn't like the hotter, drier conditions we've experienced in recent decades and production has plummeted. Researchers in Kent are isolating hop genes in the hope of producing more climate-change resilient varieties. I should note that what the British call "bitter" is still heavy on the malt side. But hops are still used for flavor and aroma, and as a preservative. Yes, the generally super-bitter IPA is originally a British style, but it's more associated with the US. They also want to produce more intense flavours that are now becoming popular. Please don't. "We are just going to be importing beer and we won't have the culture that goes with it anymore." Gosh, if only you could import only one of the ingredients instead of the whole beer. Hops, for example. Anyway, most of the article is about what scientists are doing to mitigate this Very Important Problem, and of course, I think it's awesome that they're devoting their best brainpower to solve this major issue. I don't mean climate change; I mean disappearing beer. Priorities, folks. Don't agree with me that it would be a disaster to go without beer? Well, climate change is also killing off coffee. Oh, now you want to do something about it. |
| I'll be on what passes for vacation for me this week—I have nothing to vacate from, but I do like to go elsewhere from time to time—so entries will happen whenever I get a chance and probably short and even more pointless than usual. For today, though, I'll do my usual Sunday thing and look back at an old entry. This one's from 2020: "Hack This" Worth reading if you want a decent takedown of "lifehacks." Or even if you don't. Especially if you don't. I still see "lifehacks" from time to time, but I see more parodies of them, which warms my heart. Things like: "Life hack: Don't have a mental breakdown at home. Have it at work so at least you're getting paid for it." The article I linked (Medium, 2017) is still up as of today. And my opinions haven't changed much, but maybe a little, and maybe some points need clarification. But first, I'll address the end of the entry, where I discover, too late, that this advice article that is a takedown of advice books and articles is actually an ad for the author's advice books.Also, I hate reading this far along a halfway decent article only to find that it's a commercial in disguise. Bah. Yes, I have said numerous times that I don't mind taking a look at book ads here, on a site that caters to readers and writers, so long as the content is worth commenting on. This one, however, did manage to catch me by surprise. Usually the book-flogging is near the beginning, or in a sidebar, or otherwise obvious when you start reading the article. This one was, I felt, deceptive—moreso because, as I wrote then: "I feel like he has good points, but those are somewhat muted by the fact that he's doing exactly what he's railing against." Now... one might say, "But Waltz, here you are doing it too." Yes. I am. But I'm not trying to sell anything. Besides, if I really objected to it, I'd have scrapped the entry and done a different one. Rereading this entry, I realize it might read as if I'm against self-help books and articles in general. I'm not, necessarily. It's just that most of them only "self-help" the author to make money. There's nothing wrong with making money; most of us want to do that. But doing it by misleading others into doing something that doesn't help, and may even actually harm, is generally called "fraud," and is frowned upon. So, just one more comment on my previous comment: I keep seeing that the true enemy is "processed" or "overprocessed" foods, but I haven't found a good definition for those, yet. I mean, technically, cooking is a process, and - raw-food-diet bullshit aside - cooking is what makes a lot of food more nutritious and digestible. Potatoes, for example. It's probably what allowed our ancestors to evolve these great big brains that most of us don't use. Obviously, it's been four years, so a) "processing" has been better-defined, while at the same time I haven't seen much about it lately; I wonder what the next anti-fad will be. And b) I shouldn't have typed that last sentence; it's misleading and does what I'm railing against here: assertion without evidence or experience. Not that I'm above doing that, but in this particular case, it's evolutionary guesswork, which I have issues with, and it's also what's commonly known as a "chicken/egg" scenario: did we evolve big brains because our ancestors cooked their food, or did they cook their food because they had big brains from some other adaptation? Or was it a synergy of some kind? My only point should have been that cooking food is good. In reality, the "chicken/egg" scenario is easily resolved: eggs existed long before what we call chickens, and the first chickens hatched from eggs laid by some dinosaur descendant that was almost a chicken. That's still evolutionary speculation, but at least in this case, it fits with what we know of evolution. Therefore, it was the egg that came first. Fortunately for chickens and those of us who enjoy eating them, it wasn't cooked. |
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