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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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| So, speaking of drinking... https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/things-invented-in-bars How Prohibition Tossed a Wet Blanket on America’s Inventors New research reveals the link between bars and new inventions. There have been dark times indeed in the US. But the darkest, most uncivilized period of the 20th century was certainly Prohibition - with McCarthyism running a close second. I've known this on an instinctual level all my life; after all, my country pays lip service to "freedom" without actually allowing freedom, but Prohibition was the most egregious example of this. We also pride ourselves, sometimes to an unreasonable extreme, at innovation. So it shouldn't be surprising that booze - specifically, the public consumption thereof - is linked to innovation. “Researchers tend to think that informal social interactions—people bumping into one another and swapping ideas—is vital for innovation,” Andrews says... “If you press economists on this when they’re giving talks, and ask why it matters that everyone’s in the same city or within a few blocks, they’ll say something like, ‘People get together and talk at the bar,’” says Andrews. “I’ve actually heard this multiple times. [But] I don’t think direct evidence of that has ever existed before.” Hypothesis: Bars are essential for innovation. Here comes the science. He downloaded patent data, compared the number granted to inventors in the wet and dry counties before and after statewide prohibition began, and came up with a measurement of the importance of slightly drunken discussion to invention. The result? A 15 percent decrease in the number of patents. The areas whose saloons shuttered had become less inventive. Dark. Times. Prohibition disrupted much more than nightlife. In a tradition dating back to the country’s origins, Americans had long favored beer and bars over coffee and cafés. “The American Revolution was basically plotted in local taverns in Boston and Philadelphia,” says Andrews. Repudiating the tea-loving Brits they’d fought against, Americans viewed bars as venues of culture. And rightly so. For his part, Andrews came up with the idea for his research while chatting with other graduate students at a bar, Joe’s Place, in Iowa City. “I find the bar to be a great place to air out lots of ‘bad ideas’ in a setting that is safer than the seminar room,” he says So, again, it's not drinking but social drinking that's important. Being around people tends to curb the worst effects of overindulgence, provided you're among people who are looking out for you. And presumably, it doesn't matter if an individual drinks or not; what matters is the free exchange of ideas - yet another miracle brought to you by the wonder compound, ethanol. |
| https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/pour-decisions-better-educated-you-are... Pour decisions? The better educated you are, the more you drink Americans with a graduate degree spend 10 times more per year on booze than high school dropouts do. Let's get the obvious out of the way: People with a graduate degree, on average, have more money to spend on stuff than high school dropouts (again on average). This is addressed deep within the article. Well, if you can call short clickbait "deep." What I did not see addressed and seems obvious to me: Booze prices vary wildly. We know about "Two-Buck Chuck," the discount wine. I wonder what the British equivalent is? Two-Quid Sid? Anyway, I've also seen a bottle of wine priced at $23,000. An aside: a common trick in restaurants and such is to have an item with a decoy price. It's a psychological thing that works like this. Say you have a menu with two bottles of wine; one is priced at $10 and the other at $30. People tend to think the $30 bottle is way too expensive and buy the $10 one (which probably cost the restaurant $5). But if you add a $60 bottle of wine to the menu, suddenly the $30 seems not as bad. A bit decadent, maybe, but at least it's not $60, right? So that $23K bottle of wine is the most egregious use of the decoy price I've ever seen. Some of the other bottles were priced in the $100-$1000 range - way, way more than I would ever spend on a bottle of wine, because I figured out a long time ago that once you get wine above around $50, I can't tell the difference, and I'm not one to buy expensive stuff just to show off. That said, I've bought scotch in that price range - because with scotch, I can tell the difference between a $50 bottle and a $200 bottle. That was in Vegas, by the way - lots of things are overpriced in casino restaurants because of comps and to suck the money back out of the occasional exuberant winner. But I'm getting off-track. My real point here is that people with more money often choose to buy more expensive booze. Maybe not the $23K bottle of wine, but maybe a wealthier person would decide to go for quality over quantity, as I do. I'd rather spend $100 on a bottle of scotch and savor it slowly over the course of months, than blow $5 (or whatever) on a bottle of rotgut every day, because I'm not using booze to commit suicide. In other words, there is no support for the conclusion in the headline: "the better educated you are, the more you drink." The only correlation seems to be with the amount spent on alcoholic beverages, which, as I've noted, doesn't correlate to the volume of beverage imbibed. Or take beer, for example (better yet, give me some). I just looked up Buttwiper at Wal-Mart, and it's $16 for a 24-pack of 12-ounce cans. Doing some quick math, that's 67 cents a can or about 5.5 cents per ounce. Dirt cheap. Meanwhile, today I ordered a premium craft brew (albeit of much higher ABV) at $9 for a 10 ounce pour. That's 90 cents an ounce, obviously, which is over sixteen times the cost of Bud at Wal-Mart. Even if you compare ABV, Bud is at 5% while the delicious stout I ordered is around 10%, so if you're going with alcohol content, that's still an eightfold difference. You can do the same thing with wine, whisk(e)y, gin... whatever. There is a weak correlation between price and quality of any kind of booze - you get some outliers, sure, where cheaper stuff can be of good quality, but on average, cheap is rotgut and expensive is nectar of the gods. Consequently, if you're only going to go by amount spent, it says nothing about the quantity of alcohol ingested by richer, educated people compared to poorer, less educated people. Mind you, I'm not ragging on the poor or throwing shade on the rich here, but it seems to me that a poor person who wants to drink can find cheaper options, so it could be that the more economically challenged drunk can spend less to get the same level of inebriation - if that's what they're going for. So - yet another example of not being able to take a headline at face value. While money is just one factor, those averages could also be affected by people who don’t drink. A Gallup survey found that those who do not pursue higher education are less likely to drink. Eight in 10 college graduates said they sometimes drink, while just half of people who reported a high school diploma as their highest level of education said they drink. Now that is an interesting finding. You have this stereotype of the working-class guy sitting on his couch slugging Buds, but it's apparently more likely that the college professor is sipping scotch whilst grading papers or whatever it is professors do. However, beer and wine companies may have a problem. Overall, worldwide alcohol consumption fell 1.6 percent this year, according to IWSR, a market intelligence group focused on the global alcohol industry. Yes, beer and wine companies may have a problem, but it's not a paltry 1.6 percent decline - which is offset by the approximately 1.1% annual increase in world population, which the article leaves out. No, the problem is competition - the market is already saturated, in both senses of the word. Alcohol companies are now seizing an opportunity to appeal to people who are focused on health and wellness by offering lower or non-alcoholic versions of their adult beverages. Heineken sells a brew called 0.0, which tastes like beer, but without any of the alcohol. You do you, but... no, thanks. I'll just drink water. While beer and wine were down, IWSR reported growth in spirits. The biggest driver was gin, which posted an 8.3 percent increase over the past year. I propose a new index of world happiness: the Gindex. There are premium gins, but if you want to get drunk fast and cheap, there's plenty of crappy gin out there that can get you drunk. The marvelous thing about alcohol is that you can use it to celebrate, or you can use it to mourn (the latter is not recommended, even by me, because I embrace an alcohol-positive lifestyle, but it happens). So I think - and this is unsupported by any evidence, but I'm going to go with it for now - that the more gin that gets imbibed, the worse off people think they are. High gindex would be correlated with lower quality of life. Still, I do like my gin, so I'm happy to see it staging a comeback. |
| https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/05/17/railing-about-rails-again-no... It is a truth universally acknowledged that the two most prestigious science journals in the world are Science, published in the U.S., and Nature, published in England. Anyone who trolls Jane Austen fans is okay in my book. But Science slipped up this time when reporting on the independent evolution of flightlessness on the island of Aldabra twice: in an ancient white-throated rail that colonized the island and went extinct when sea levels rose, and then in more modern times (i.e., several hundred thousand years ago) when birds from the same flying lineage colonized Aldabra again and once again evolved flightlessness. This post is fairly old in internet terms; it's been languishing in my blog fodder cache for a few months. But it's important to my crusade to call out crappy science reporting. As this has long ago passed beyond the veil of our collective memory, I'll summarize the situation (the post I linked above goes more in-depth about it): Lots of places reported that "the same species" had evolved twice in the same place, with a new population replacing the old. This is a misrepresentation of what actually happened. Further, the species concept used by nearly all evolutionary biologists deems two individuals members of the same species if, where they meet in nature, they can mate and produce fertile offspring. It’s a concept based on reproductive compatibility and incompatibility. I expect people to get things wrong about evolution. Not all of us are, like the author I'm linking here, evolutionary biologists. But that's why it's important for science journals to get things right. When they don't, the misinformation sticks in readers' minds as True Fact, which is difficult if not impossible to rectify (see also: misattribution of "blue moon" as the second full moon in a Gregorian calendar month). And when it comes to evolution, there's already enough misinformation and outright lies out there. The journal in question ended up printing a correction, but we've all seen what happens with corrections - they get lost in the shuffle and forgotten. See also: Andrew Wakefield and the falsified "link" between vaccinations and autism. So I'm just throwing this out there in case the whole "speciation" thing stuck in someone's memory. |
| https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/animals-and-us/articles/the-deficient-animal The Deficient Animal Only the human species is capable of grasping, analyzing, and interpreting signs as symbols. So, the idea is that the major thing that distinguishes us from other animals is... metaphor. The idea that something can stand for another thing is at the root of language, I reasoned, and we can also nest metaphors. I've been saying this for years, but I don't have any credentials in the field, so mine is just another opinion. Still, I do enjoy some confirmation bias from time to time. The article, of course, takes this a bit further. But the author engages in unnecessary obfuscation through esoteric language, so be warned. The evolution from anthropoid to human was simply a function of the contingencies of adaptation and survival needs within different environments. This increasingly exclusive focus on biological similarities tended, on the one hand, to fold the human being entirely within the continuum of the animal order and, on the other hand, to minimize, downplay, or ignore altogether the distinguishing characteristics of the human species. "Simply?" I don't think there's anything "simple" about evolution, except insofar as simplicity leads to complexity, but again - not really my wheelhouse. This school emerged mostly from the work of German and Dutch biologists, zoologists, philosophers, and social theorists, including Paul Alsberg, Louis Bolk, Max Scheler, Adolf Portmann, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, Konrad Lorenz, and the British-American biologist Ashley Montagu, and has been appropriated and refined in recent decades by Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Hans Joas, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, and others. And the Name-Dropping Award of 2019 goes to... James Davison Hunter! The consensus among the philosophical anthropologists was that the development of human beings was not simply a result of evolutionary progress, but rather of the inhibition of the evolutionary process. Translation: we evolved by losing survival traits. As near as I can tell, anyway. Though that's not an "inhibition" but rather a new set of survival traits, I think. In the late eighteenth century, Johann Gottfried Herder had called the human being “the deficient being”; others, following Herder, described humans as animals “not yet determined,” “unfinished,” “incomplete,” “physiologically premature,” and “organically deficient”—and, therefore, ever malleable. In addition to their unfinished character, humans also have no species-specific natural environment they can call home. Home can be anywhere and everywhere; indeed, humans are capable of adapting to a vast range of environments. They are, as the philosopher Max Scheler put it, “open to the world.” That plopping sound you just heard was more names being dropped. In sum, human beings must of necessity make up for their instinctual impoverishment by actively transforming the world to suit their own ends, mastering and re-creating nature rather than merely adapting to it. The means by which human beings do this is by representing the world symbolically, particularly through language, but more broadly through culture itself. Culture is a “second nature.” And that's where this author goes beyond my simplistic assertion above. The name (or sign) and the object to which the name attaches (the signified) are mediated by an interpretant. In other words, the meaning of a name or sign is manifested in the interpretation it generates in sign users. Until, ultimately, you end up studying various academic subjects, leading to expressing basic concepts with four-dollar Latin-root words. This guy, by the way, is a professor at UVA, here in my hometown; and yes, they all write that way. (No, I don't know him personally.) But we have to address the instances of symbol use in our close cousins: Other species, most famously chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and other primates, are, in limited ways and experimental contexts, able to use signs as designators, combine words into simple sentences, use simple tools, and even create tools. They can do so in signifying, inferential, and ritual ways. They can also interpret the intentions of members of their own species—for example, intentions to mate, to hunt, to attack, or to eat. But they cannot use signs symbolically, as objects of reflection or analysis. Only the human species is capable of grasping, analyzing, and interpreting signs as symbols. In other words, only humans are capable of using signs at a meta- or self-referential level. It helps if said signs and symbols are limited to words of two syllables or fewer, but hey, you do you. So, basically, if I'm understanding this right, the assertion is that without clear, innate survival advantages (claws, sharp teeth, speed, flight for escape, etc.) we had to have some other, more subtle survival advantage, and that advantage is our ability to transfer meaning from one symbol to another or to a referent. This is the foundation of both language and culture, and this adaptation is what eventually led to us doing shit like building skyscrapers and sending robots to explore Mars. I may be projecting my own thoughts onto the essay, so if you got something else out of it (apart from a headache from all the professorese), feel free to chime in below. |
| https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-supercentenarians-fr... This flat-out amuses me. Study: many of the “oldest” people in the world may not be as old as we think A new paper explores what “supercentenarians” have in common. Turns out it’s bad record-keeping. Every now and then, some news source runs out of actual news and does a fluff piece about the "oldest person in x" where x is a state, a country, or the universe. This is a massive jinx, because shortly afterward, the second-oldest person in x moves up a rank. But you know what would suck worse than people shoving cameras and microphones in your face when you're like, 110 years old? Being #2 and watching #1 getting all the media attention, and thinking, "Oh shit, I'm next. If I'm lucky. Let's see... how did I reach my ripe old age? I know - I'll tell 'em 'drinking, smoking and fucking.'" Old people make the best trolls because they no longer give a damn. But it turns out some of them are flat-out lying. Or, to be charitable, have shitty memories. That happens when you get superannuated. We’ve long been obsessed with the super-elderly. How do some people make it to 100 or even 110 years old? Why do some regions — say, Sardinia, Italy, or Okinawa, Japan —produce dozens of these “supercentenarians” while other regions produce none? Is it genetics? Diet? Environmental factors? Long walks at dawn? Bong hits. A new working paper released on bioRxiv, the open access site for prepublication biology papers, appears to have cleared up the mystery once and for all: It’s none of the above. Instead, it looks like the majority of the supercentenarians (people who’ve reached the age of 110) in the United States are engaged in — intentional or unintentional — exaggeration. And that's what amuses me. It seems unlikely that living in high-crime, low-life-expectancy areas is the thing that makes it likeliest to reach age 110. It seems likelier, the paper concludes, that many — perhaps even most — of the people claiming to reach age 110 are engaged in fraud or at least exaggeration. "How'd you make it to 110?" "Identity theft.Burger King every day." In other words, all of our research into the biomarkers, habits, and diets that predict extreme old age? Probably worthless, because a significant share of the sample was not actually as old as we thought. Science is a powerful tool, but it's only as good as its inputs. |
| Nothing deep or controversial today, for a change. http://mentalfloss.com/article/58233/21-slang-terms-world-war-i 20 Slang Terms From World War I I just find word origins fascinating. Mind you, I didn't fact-check any of these, but the author seems to have done his homework. So if you ever wanted to know where words like "Blighty" (nickname for England) or "strafe" came from, well, here you go. I'm wary of etymologies, by the way. That's why I said the bit about fact-checking above. I get tired of hearing people proclaiming that, for instance, the lovely English word "fuck" originated as "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" or "Fornicating Under Consent of the King." Those backronyms have been debunked time and time again, but like much bad information, they have sticking power. One time I got an earful from a woman who heard me use the phrase "rule of thumb." She screeched at me about how that's sexist and hateful because "it's from an old law that you could only beat your wife with a stick as big around as your thumb." This, of course, is utter twaddle - it comes from a way of estimating lengths, or something like that - but I doubt she ever let go of her dearly-held belief. Victimhood can be alluring. Point is, don't take any etymology as the last and final word (see what I did there) on the subject. Still - interesting stuff. |
| I swear not all of the links in my blog fodder queue are from a certain British rag. But this one is. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/14/my-patient-swapped-chemoth... My patient swapped chemotherapy for essential oils. Arguing is a fool’s errand These days whenever I see "essential oils" my mind replaces that phrase with "snake oil." Oh, sure, essential oils have their uses. For example, some of them smell nice. “Tell me why I should have your chemotherapy when I can be healed naturally!” Shall I reiterate my various rants about the word "natural" (and its adverbial declension)? No? Okay. I used to think that these second opinions were illuminating for patients and nudged them towards change. But what I have learnt in the last few years is that cancer patients in search of alternative cures are more deeply entrenched than ever in their beliefs. Thanks to the rise of social media, the ability to filter out conflicting viewpoints and a bevy of supporters for every outrageous idea, these people arrive convinced about their theories. If I could change one thing about our language, it would be to stop using the word "theory" (and its various declensions) to mean "crackpot propaganda." A survey commissioned by the American Society of Clinical Oncology spoke to more than 4,000 American adults, a quarter of whom were current or former cancer patients. Nearly 40% of those surveyed “somewhat” or “strongly” agreed that cancer can be cured via oxygen, diet and herbs alone. Again, this article is from a UK source, and it's clear from the discussion of "taxes paying for healthcare" that the anecdote does not take place in the US. But I would be surprised if the level of idiocy in the UK was much different than in that survey. After all, 50% of them or so voted against their own interests on the Brexit referendum (I'm leaving that deliberately ambiguous). Enzymes, waves and magnets do not cure cancer, and they cost the patient every step of the way. Small bottles of unknown and frequently adulterated or plainly toxic substances cost hundreds of dollars, not to mention every consultation that pretends to read the eyes and sense the energy to cure cancer, even as the patient worsens. How do I know? Because dying patients relate these stories in a last attempt to prevent their fellow patients being duped. "Dollars?" *checks author bio* Oh, she's from Oz. My comment above about the level of idiocy remains; just ignore the jibe about Brexit. It has been received wisdom that oncologists can see off quackery through good communication but I’m afraid that isn’t so. That's because of cognitive bias, something that this author doesn't seem to be affected by; good on her. Oncologists have been properly entangled in a web of fake news. Their authority has been undermined and their expertise ridiculed by a determined, global and hard-to-track battalion of quacks and their acolytes. Greater vigilance, stronger regulation and improved health literacy might help, but the pull of alternative cures is strong. The two greatest forces in the universe are compound interest and marketing. Marketing can convince anyone of anything. Hell, it convinced people that Budweiser is beer, Smart Cars are cute, and bottled water should be a thing. I'm not immune, though I'd like to think I have some inoculation against it - but that might be wishful thinking. Philosophical question: Consider a purveyor of quackery. Either they actually believe in their product, or they don't. In the former case, they are deluded. In the latter, they are committing fraud. The philosophical question is: which is worse? I'm not sure either is worse. Both are bad. I sometimes wish I had fewer scruples so I could market my cats' shit as a healing balm. Thing is, though, I have a different perspective than this author. She's an oncologist, who presumably went to medical school and had medical ethics drilled into her. Also presumably, she got into medicine out of a desire to help people - that's reflected in the writing. So her perspective is, "I want to help these patients see the truth so they don't die." My take is, "fuck them." The more people die from stupidity, the less stupidity there is in the world. I know that makes me a terrible person, but at least I'm not selling extract of belladonna as a cancer cure. |
| While we're stealing from The Guardian... https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/27/english-language-global-dominance Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today. Is there any point in resisting? Now, you're probably already aware of this, but The Guardian is a British source, so there may be some bias here. On 16 May, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking Spanish. He reacted with immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and telling one employee: “Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English … This is America.” A video of the incident quickly went viral, drawing widespread scorn. The Yelp page for his law firm was flooded with one-star reviews, and Schlossberg was soon confronted with a “fiesta” protest in front of his Manhattan apartment building, which included a crowd-funded taco truck and mariachi band to serenade him on the way to work. Is that what I have to do to get actual tacos and a personal mariachi band? I... I don't think I could be that big a hypocrite. This is America, dammit; speak Navajo. Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind a lifetime supply of Navajo frybread. That stuff's delicious. Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years. Yeah, look who's bloody talking. Okay, so the author is American. This is still a British rag. Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago... And all the British readers just spat out their tea. One straightforward way to trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has infiltrated so many other languages. For a millennium or more, English was a great importer of words, absorbing vocabulary from Latin, Greek, French, Hindi, Nahuatl and many others. I saw someone comment once: "English isn't a language. It's three languages in a trenchcoat pretending to be one." But the best description was from some other anonymous internet commenter: "I always thought of English as the bastard child of an orgy of languages ending with a huge bukakke leaving German covered in the messy splooge of all the others. German is seeking a paternity test while Latin fled the scene and French is denying everything." ...the Dictionary of European Anglicisms, which gathers together English terms found in 16 European languages. A few of the most prevalent include “last-minute”, “fitness”, “group sex”, and a number of terms related to seagoing and train travel. And I'm starting to understand why the rest of the world thinks Americans are weird. After all, what a work is English, how copious in its vocabulary, how noble in expression, how sinuous in its constructions, and yet how plain in its basic principles. A language, in short, with a word for almost everything, capable of an infinite gradation of meanings, equally suited to describing the essential rights of mankind as to ornamenting a packet of crisps, whose only defect, as far as I know, is that it makes everyone who speaks it sound like a duck. Quack. It’s not that English is bad. It’s fine! A perfectly nice language, capable of expressing a great many things – and with scores of fascinating regional variants, from Scots to Singapore English. Okay, other sources have called Scots a separate language that happens to have a lot in common with English. I'm not sure where the distinction between that and "regional variant" is drawn, but I've heard it said that Scots is probably close to what English would look like if it hadn't absorbed entire dictionary sections from Romance languages. Singlish, on the other hand, I know little about apart from its existence. Several Japanese speakers say that it’s easier to express anger in English, especially by swearing. In my first abortive attempt to learn Japanese, when I was in high school, I studied at the feet of my sensei, a smoking hot Japanese exchange student. Naturally, all I really wanted to know was how to curse in Japanese. I did learn some kanji and some dirty words, but I've forgotten all of that and I never did ask her to go out with me. In some ways, the worst threat may come not from the global onrush of modernity, but from an idea: that a single language should suit every purpose, and that being monolingual is therefore somehow “normal”. This is something that’s often assumed reflexively by those of us who live most of our lives in English, but historically speaking, monolingualism is something of an aberration. I've always known, on an intellectual level, that I was missing out on a lot by being monolingual. But my best effort at learning another language - four years of Latin in high school - didn't make me fluent in that dead-but-zombified language, so I just assumed I would forever be crap at learning languages. Now that I'm actively trying to learn one, I wish I hadn't waited so long. One interesting attribute of English is that it's pretty damn versatile. Of course, I don't have much to compare it to, not directly, but from everything I've seen, the way we can go through neologisms or words stolen from other languages, discarding the ones that don't really work and incorporating the ones that do, makes English fairly flexible. And there's no one true central authority for English - dictionaries, which are as close as we come, are, as I've noted here before, more descriptive than prescriptive. It's also, from what I've heard, the only language that needs a thesaurus. So I don't know if I fully agree with the author, here. Yeah, some languages are dying, but as far as I can tell, that's part of the natural way of things. I'm not convinced that the languages are dying because of English - though some, of course, have gone extinct because of the colonialism of native English speakers. Attempts to make other languages universal - whether existing languages like French, or synthetic ones such as Esperanto - have met with only limited success. If you're going to have a universal language for people to speak in addition to their own tongues, you could do worse than English - even if the structure, spelling and vocabulary are a bitch to learn. And face it, it's either that or Klingon. |
| https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/apr/09/hudson-yards-new-york-25bn-... I don't comment on these things often because it's not really my métier. (See? I learned me some French.) But I spent my career in what you might call an architecture-adjacent field, and my cousin in an architect in NYC, so this caught my eye. Horror on the Hudson: New York's $25bn architectural fiasco It is a billionaires’ playground where haircuts cost $800 and high-rise duplexes go for $32m. So why do the angular towers of Hudson Yards look so cheap? For $800 I'd better get the world's best blowjob with that haircut. Without the snippers being in the room, just in case. That aside, like I said, I've been working with architects for most of my adult life, and this article is the best takedown of an architectural abomination I've ever seen. He can now look down on his co-creation every day from his new office in one of the development’s towers and see hundreds of people climbing up and down Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel sculpture, like tiny maggots crawling all over a rotting doner kebab. And it only gets more creative from there. I mentioned my cousin. His offices used to be on - I think - 33rd Street, overlooking this pile of manure. A couple of years ago, they moved to a Park Avenue address (they are very good architects). I asked him why the move - they'd had a sweet three-floor space overlooking the river; prime NYC real estate. "Because we didn't want to look at Hudson Yards," he said. I also asked him if he'd seen this article. He knew exactly which article I was talking about, and he just smiled, laughed, and nodded. The surprising thing isn’t that such a development has happened. The real shock is that it’s quite so bad. Yeah, everyone knew the land would be developed at some point. It's NYC. Apart from Central Park, I think this was the most obvious place to turn undeveloped property into skyscrapers, and Central Park is sacred space. There were some interesting engineering challenges, such as building the fucker over an existing, active, and very, very busy train yard, and those naturally interested me more than the visual design aspects, so I kind of ignored the latter for as long as I could. It was hard to ignore the former; every time I took a train into Penn Station, I got to see some of the construction up close. But I won't bore you with the details. Yet it all feels so cheap. From the architectural zoo of convulsing angles to the apparent lack of care spent on the details, this is bargain-basement building-by-the-yard stuff that would feel more at home in the second-tier city of a developing economy. I really hope the architects who designed this towering mess have a good supply of aloe on hand, because the burns are just beginning. It climbs up into the sky in ungainly lumps, with a triangular observation deck wedged into its side near the top, forming a pointy beak that gives it the look of an angry chicken. That sounds like it cost a few bawks. It is a tableau that almost elicits pity, like chubby fowl engaged in their first awkward mating ritual. I'll stop with the fiery quotes, now; you can go to the article for more. Their description of the monstrosity known as Vessel is particularly satisfying. I've seen scathing movie reviews, brilliant takedowns of crappy scientific studies, and deconstructionist critiques of everything from fashion to art - but this piece will stick out in my memory as the most eloquent trashing of a giant pile of ugly that I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. There have been a few architectural disasters in my lifetime - the Hyatt Regency skywalk, for instance, and that bridge in Florida - but those were matters of structural engineering, not their aesthetics. And when something collapses like that, it's perfectly obvious to everybody, whether they're an engineer or not, whether they have any design sense or not, that Something was Wrong. Well, I have no aesthetic design sense, except that when I saw this thing, I thought "ugly." This article eloquently describes exactly why it is ugly. It almost makes me wish the whole thing will collapse like those other architectural failures I mentioned, except that doing so would be tragic - not to the architecture of NYC; it would be a boon to that - but to people who had nothing to do with its design. The best that we can hope for is that it'll be a financial failure, and it'll get demolished in a controlled way, to be replaced by something that New Yorkers can be proud of. Sadly, the Hudson will probably rise to claim it long before that happens. |
| https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinn... Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s A new study finds that people today who eat and exercise the same amount as people 20 years ago are still fatter. I haven't been talking about my weight loss much lately because I suspect no one wants to hear about it, but it's continuing, albeit more slowly now. So articles like this are of interest to me. Let's see if it passes the manure test... A study published recently in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice found that it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise. For the record "a study" doesn't mean diddly-shit. Who funded it? What biases might the scientists have had? How big are the sample... The authors examined the dietary data of 36,400 Americans between 1971 and 2008 and the physical activity data of 14,419 people between 1988 and 2006. Oh. That's... a pretty significant sample size, I think. They found a very surprising correlation: A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans. 2.3 points, or 10%, doesn't sound like a lot. And that certainly doesn't explain why I looked like a marshmallow. That was my own fault. The fact that the body weights of Americans today are influenced by factors beyond their control is a sign, Kuk says, that society should be kinder to people of all body types. Okay, being nice to people is a good idea in general, but that conclusion doesn't follow from the science. If factors beyond our control account for 2 to 3 points of BMI, then any additional points on top of that may be within our control. As someone who struggles with this sort of thing, I know it's easy to make excuses, to lie to ourselves. "Oh, I weigh 300 pounds but it's not like I can do anything about it." (I never hit that number, myself, but I'm just saying.) Seeing a study like this, it's reasonable to assume that someone out there feels vindicated by the numbers, but, again, the numbers just aren't that compelling past a certain point. Just to be clear: Definitely be nice to fat people (and everyone else while you're at it), but this is a study about the mechanics of weight gain, not psychology. “There's a huge weight bias against people with obesity,” she said. “They're judged as lazy and self-indulgent. That's really not the case. If our research is correct, you need to eat even less and exercise even more” just to be same weight as your parents were at your age. As a lazy, self-indulgent person, I can say with some certainty that you can lose weight and still be lazy and self-indulgent - just not to the extremes you may be used to. Full disclosure, though: the three hypotheses mentioned in this article - industrial chemicals , prescription drugs, and microbiome issues - I've had my suspicions about for quite some time. So there might be some confirmation bias here on my own part. It's important to remember that a "hypothesis" is somewhat higher than a "guess" and lower than a scientific "theory." So more research is warranted. Conclusion: passes the manure test, within limits. Now I want to see if anyone in this puritanical, "everything is your own fault and you can do something about it if you just try" society takes notice. |
| https://narratively.com/lessons-from-a-local-food-scam-artist/ Working summers at an authentically quaint roadside produce stand, a teenage salesperson is schooled in the not-so-subtle art of how to con a foodie from the big city. I'm gradually coming to the realization that some people are just asking to be scammed out of their money. I met my first New York foodie over twenty years ago, when I was seventeen, hawking “local bananas” at a roadside produce stand in rural New Jersey. For instance, anyone who believes that bananas grow in New Jersey. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you, and it's even closer to your apartment. But “local” was the magic word hand-painted on our signs; it was what made our customers, most of them New Yorkers driving to country vacation cottages, slam on their brakes and pull over. Now, I could make jokes about growing anything in New Jersey, but I'll refrain. It's not like the whole state is the Northeast Corridor, which looks like the set for the next Fallout game. Parts of it are actually kind of nice. Still can't grow bananas there. Oh, I suppose you could get a couple of bushes, or trees, or whatever started in a greenhouse, but you're not going to get the volume needed for sales. “Give me Jersey peaches over Georgia peaches any day.” Those were Georgia peaches they were palming to their kids, whispering, “eat up,” before the fruit had been weighed and paid for. More evidence that it's perfectly okay to scam some people out of their money: they're stealing from you. “I wait every year for the real Jersey tomatoes. You can’t get that country flavor in the city!” They couldn’t get it here, either: These were New Mexican beefsteaks, greased with mineral oil to an enticing sheen and petroleum fragrance. Didn’t they notice the absence of any roses-and-resin tomato-y perfume? Well... it is New Jersey. The foodies argued. “But I bought local Silver Queen from the stand down the road last week!” I said, “The stand down the road is lying. Local Silver Queen won’t ripen till August.” They didn’t believe me. They couldn’t bear the challenge to their connoisseurship. Or maybe - bear with me on this - they're experiencing various cognitive biases, and have put up walls against contradictory information. Their quest for authenticity didn’t stop there. They asked me, “What are you people doing here? Last year, an American owned this stand.” He still owned it. He had hired me – an Asian-American who didn’t look the part of the rustic local – and a bunch of other kids for the summer. One New Yorker opined, “I’ve been summering here since I was a kid, but people like you keep coming here and buying up the local businesses.” They wanted to know where I came from, originally, and how selling them melons fulfilled my American Dreams. None of the other employees got these questions. Perhaps I spoiled the New Yorkers’ nostalgia for the countryside. To some of them, my provenance was far more suspect than that of the produce. But I've been assured that racism only happens here in the South. They never even learned that, if you hector a nonwhite teenager about displacing white people’s jobs, she’s going to hide rotten tomatoes in the bottom of your bag. Trolling level: epic. So, when my boss’s son put up the “local bananas” sign, I let it alone. A few foodies laughed. A few questioned me accusingly: How could the bananas be local? “Greenhouses,” I said one day. “Miles and miles of greenhouses. In Andover Township.” The word “township” got them; it was so quaint. See? Greenhouses. I told you. Also, for the unaware, "township" (usually abbreviated as "twp" on signs) is what they call certain municipalities in NJ. It's just a technical term, like "village" or "city." You'd think New Yorkers would know that, but they tend to be oblivious to everything on this side of the Hudson. For a long time, I despised New Yorkers. You know why I believe you when you say you're from New Jersey? Anyway, since the 30DBC is over, I'm back to snarking on semi-random internet articles, and this one just happened to be in my queue. |
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