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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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| Y'all should know by now that I'm a Star Trek fan. Not enough to dress funny and go to conventions, but I appreciate the various shows and movies (mostly). But despite comments like the one I made the other day about Zefram Cochrane inventing the warp drive, I know it's fiction, mythology, and metaphor, not future reality. For one thing, I doubt very much that there are other tech-capable species in our vicinity (and there are almost certainly none that look like us but with forehead bumps), and for another... Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible?  The concept of the warp drive is currently at odds with everything we know to be true about physics. And yes, I know that our understanding of physics is evolving and that lots of things that used to be considered impossible, aren't. So while some things are definitely impossible (counting to infinity, e.g.), I hesitate to give technological advancements that label. Central to science fiction, and Star Trek in particular, is the ability to travel the galaxy at speeds far faster than light via a fictional technology called a “warp drive.” What is that, and will we ever have one? Trek didn't come up with the concept; it's been around in various forms in SF for probably half as long as there's been SF (which roughly corresponds to the time frame in which we've known that matter cannot be accelerated to or past the speed of light). A provisional answer is “no.” According to the accepted laws of science, nothing can travel faster than light. That is, based on my admittedly limited knowledge, an oversimplification at best. But close enough for our purposes. The distances are so vast that interstellar travel would take lifetimes. Not if we extend our lifetimes by uploading our consciousnesses into machines... another thing that may not turn out to be possible. That makes for a boring sci-fi plot, so the creators of Star Trek invented a convenient, but imaginary, technology. Again, they didn't invent it, even conceptually. Early shows weren't even consistent in how it was supposed to work. They did, arguably, popularize it, though. According to Star Trek canon, the warp drive works by creating a “warp bubble” around the spaceship, inside of which space is literally warped. In front of the spaceship, space is compressed, while behind the vessel, it is expanded. In this way, a spaceship never travels faster than light; it merely passes through a shorter distance. The difference between "traveling faster than light" and "passing through a shorter distance" really needs more explanation here, but the article couldn't be arsed, and neither can I. Plenty of information out there, though, if you look for it. Is this realistic? Maybe. "Maybe" does a lot of heavy lifting here. In 1994, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre found a solution that distorted space in a way very similar to that originally envisioned by the creators of Star Trek. Under exactly the right conditions, it is possible to expand space behind an object and compress it in front. The Alcubierre Drive is something I've seen stuff about before. There's still a difference between something being theoretically possible, and actually attaining it. For example, from what we know about quantum mechanics, it's theoretically possible for an object of arbitrary size to suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere. The chance of this happening, though, would be akin to that of an individual winning a fair lottery... every day for a billion years. If the universe really is infinite, though, this has happened. Hell, it might be the actual origin of the universe. Doesn't mean we can make it happen. There is a problem, though. To accomplish this distortion, researchers would have to use negative energy—that is, reduce the energy of empty space to below zero. According to Einstein, a warp drive requires an impossible premise. That, the negative energy bit, is definitely a serious problem. That doesn't excuse the article's appeal to authority. Einstein was right about a great many things, but we don't just take his word for it; we do experiments to back up the theory. He was human; he was wrong about a great many things. Just ask his wife. Therefore, while scientists try to find loopholes in the conditions required for Alcubierre’s solution, most think that a warp drive will not be created this way; negative energy is a mathematical artifact and not a physical phenomenon. On the flip side of that, for a long time, people considered negative numbers to be mathematical artifacts and not representative of physical phenomena. It took a paradigm shift to start thinking of them as "real" numbers. And don't even get me started on that extension of negative numbers, complex numbers. Altogether, our current understanding of the laws of nature neither allows for faster-than-light travel nor an Alcubierre-like solution to warping space. However, those who dream of traveling the stars should not give up. Scientists do not have a full understanding of the laws of nature. So yeah, I'd hesitate to call it impossible. Within the timeframe of the Star Trek series? Unlikely. Though probably not as unlikely as that other Trek mainstay, the transporter. But that's a story for another time. I have a new episode of Strange New Worlds to watch. |
| My father always told me puns are the lowest form of humor. Then he'd proceed to make jokes like "Why did Adam laugh? Because God gave him two test tickles." No, that kind of joke takes intelligence, cleverness and agility of thought, even if it is painful to hear (or read). The lowest form of humor is the fart joke. Dad jokes rule. In almost every other context, “dad” as a prefix pretty much means “shitty,” but dad jokes are a whole different thing. Whew. Another reason to be glad I'm not a dad. For those unfamiliar with the expression, “dad jokes” generally refer to what used to just be known as jokes, puns or wordplay — generally a gag based around two similar-sounding but different terms. And I'd prefer that these witticisms not be referred to as "dad jokes," but language, like a cat, tends to do what it wants to do regardless of my wishes. Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first English dictionary and one of Britain’s most celebrated intellectuals of all time, viewed puns as the lowest form of wit. And yet, they persevere. It wasn’t always like this. “Every culture, as far as we know, has some form of wordplay,” says Attardo, who has written extensively on the subject. “Every language has syllables, and as soon as you have syllables strung in a row, you can switch them around. That’s universal.” However, he explains, this doesn’t mean all languages use it for humor. In some cultures, for instance, wordplay is used for magical, symbolic or religious purposes. Humor is magical, symbolic, and religious. But yeah, this sort of thing is true. In Japan, they have national days of observance that are entirely based on wordplay. “In the gospel, when Jesus calls Peter his rock, there is a pun in there — not in the English translation, but originally, with the Latin word petrus, meaning rock. But when Jesus does that, he’s not doing it to be hilarious and deliver a dad joke, it’s more about it all having meaning attached to it, and Peter’s role being preordained.” That stuff isn't limited to the New Testament, where the pun was originally in Greek. There's numerous wordplay in the Hebrew original texts, too. Puns, of course, rarely translate outside of their original language, so this makes parts of the Bible real head-scratchers if you only read it in English. Like, I mentioned my dad's Adam joke above. In Hebrew, adam is a word for adult male human, while adamah can be translated as soil. So the writers put a pun right there in the beginning. That, along with many other Biblical names, get lost in translation. Look for the formula "I shall call him x because y," and you're looking at a badly translated play on words. There are puns in the Latin poetry of Horace and Cicero, and Shakespeare is littered with them. At least the Shakespeare ones are moderately intelligible. “By our modern perception, that’s completely inappropriate,” says Attardo. “My guess is that a pun like that would be seen as clever and layered by audiences at the time rather than something to be laughed at.” Puns are not there to be laughed at. Almost all modern humor involves anguish, pain, suffering, or sorrow, because it's a defense against these things. But a pun only causes laughter in the narrator thereof; the listener experiences the suffering. The only form of wit generally seen as an even lower art form than dad jokes is prop comedy, which is the same thing to an even more extreme degree — you haven’t just sat down and written that material, you’ve spent time rendering it into three dimensions, you worthless clown. I'm not generally a fan of prop comedy, but no, fart jokes are still the lowest because they're too easy. But... The net result is the same — making people laugh. If you’re laughing at how crappy a joke is, you’re laughing at the joke. It worked. You might not have wanted it to, and you might consider yourself above it all, but the joke made you laugh, goddamn it. You look that beholder right in the eye. The other reason there isn’t a lot of academic literature on dad jokes is, of course, obvious. Any time anyone tries to interview a dad-joke enthusiast about the subject and says, “Hi, I’m studying how people use jokes,” they’re met with, “Hi, Studying How People Use Jokes, I’m Dad.” It is, of course, impossible to have a serious conversation about humor. But this whole thing reminds me of a pun I'm building towards in my current fantasy RPG game. In it, I'm playing a bard, someone who uses comedy, storytelling, and music more than the traditional swords or sorcery. If you've played such a game, or seen the latest D&D movie or The Witcher, you know what kind of character I'm talking about. Well, I'm going to hook him up with a lyre, which, as you know, is an ancient stringed instrument and therefore perfectly acceptable in a medieval fantasy setting. And then, when we finally face the Big Bad Boss of the plotline, I plan to hold it up as if it were a shield and taunt her by singing, "Come on, baby, fight my lyre!" After all, eventually all villains have to face the music. |
| A couple of weeks ago, I posted a Cracked piece about ideas that started as jokes: "The Step-Parent of Invention" Today's is similar, only instead of jokes, they started as a giant middle finger. Unless you’re an actual deity (in which case, greetings, Ms. Knowles), you’ve almost certainly pulled some petty shit in your day. Actual deities invented petty. Or, well, as they don't exist, we made up stories about them that projected our own penchant for pettiness upon them. Slowed to a crawl in front of a tailgater, helpfully transferred your neighbor’s dog’s poop from your yard to theirs, squeezed all your roommate’s fruit after the third day of seeing their dishes in the sink — nothing life-ruining, just a risk-free outlet for your anger. I'd like to say I've never done anything like that. But I can't. But have you ever been so annoyed, you changed the world? One person cannot change the world. Not even Beyoncé. 4. The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator I've ragged on this before: astrology for psychology nerds. It was also a fairly useless exercise, as the MBTI has been largely dismissed as pseudoscience, probably because it was invented by a stay-at-home mom with zero psychological qualifications to throw shade on her son-in-law. Hence the "petty" part. She took over entire sections of the library as she embarked on a lifelong study of exactly what factors made her son-in-law suck so much, which her daughter finished after her death, which might have stung for poor Mr. Myers if he had any capacity for emotion. Both of my former mothers-in-law had their issues with me, but not enough to ruin the lives of everyone who ever applied for a job. 3. The Automated Telephone Exchange Let's be real: this was going to get invented eventually anyway. Back in the early days of the telephone, you had to call the operator, who would then put your call through to your mom or your side piece or whoever. And then, if they were bored, they'd listen in. You think internet surveillance is invasive? Ha. They knew who was calling who at all times, and they might even decide for you who you were calling, which must have been frustrating for people who asked for their side piece and got their mom. That was a problem Almon Brown Strowger kept running into in 1878. He was an undertaker living in Kansas City, and he just couldn’t figure out why his business was, uh, not as lively as it could be. You want to piss off the undertaker, it's your funeral. It turned out one of the local telephone operators was the wife of another undertaker, and every time someone called for Strowger, she patched them through to her husband instead. As evil plans go, that one's rather amusing. Of course, when the operators were replaced by machines, few of them likely found that amusing. There's also a nice plot twist, but I gotta save something for the article. 2. The Lamborghini This one, I knew about. What can I say? I don't talk about cars much, but I retain some of Teen Me's fascination with them. Not going to quote this one; the article is funnier than I can be. 1. The Dishwasher I've said before (including in that entry I linked above) that while necessity may be the mother of invention, laziness is the milkman. A lot of labor-saving devices came into being not out of pure necessity, but a burning desire to do less work, which of course is a worthy goal that unfortunately only means you end up filling all the time you saved with other busy work, instead of writing poetry or doing philosophy or whatever the labor-saving advocates imagined our current utopia to consist of. Today, it’s a mark of being Kardashian-level spoiled to not even know how to use a dishwasher, but it was invented by a socialite essentially as an insult to the help. But this one, if a joke site can be believed, wasn't even to save the inventor time, but to diss the servants. The socialite in question was Josephine Cochrane, the wife of a wealthy businessman living in Illinois in the mid-1800s. Must run in the family; their distant descendant, Zephram Cochrane, will invent the warp drive, the ultimate time-saving device. In summary, the dishwasher was invented because servants tended to chip the china. Which is ironic, because rare is the dishwasher machine today that doesn't chip whatever is banging around in there. I don't know about you, but if I were a servant, I'd chip the china sometimes just to be petty. |
| Today, another bit about our solar system, this one certain to be controversial. The article, from The Atlantic, is two years old, but Pluto's label hasn't changed since then. In 2006, astronomers gathered in Prague to consider a very basic question: How many planets are in our solar system? They needed to Czech in with each other. For many Americans, the names of planets were some of the earliest scientific facts we learned, and that there were nine of them seemed like a basic truth of existence. This is a failure of science education in America. There was no consensus among [astronomers] then, and there is none now. Ask one astronomer and they’ll sigh, before saying that it’s time to stop dredging up the past and move on. Ask another and they’ll say the matter desperately needs a do-over. They agree on so much about the cosmos, but on a matter that seems as though it should be straightforward, some of them might as well exist in two different solar systems. You know, I bet you can get them to agree, within a significant figure or so, about the mass of Pluto, the length of its year, the period of its mutual orbit with Charon, and so on. This is, as I've noted before, a classification problem, akin to deciding whether to call a stone a "rock" or a "pebble." In 1801, astronomers deemed Ceres, a rocky object they had spotted between Mars and Jupiter, a planet, but 50 years later, after further observations, they designated it as an asteroid. This is the bit no one remembers. Unsurprising, as I don't think anyone now was around then. Then, in the 1990s, astronomers started finding icy objects beyond Neptune. “People who were paying attention immediately said, Oh, we get it. This is what Pluto is,” Mike Brown, a Caltech astronomer who discovered one of these celestial bodies, told me. “Pluto is not this oddball at the edge of the solar system; Pluto is part of this larger population.” In 2000, when the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, opened a new space wing, curators tagged Pluto as part of the Kuiper belt, the disc of objects floating past Neptune, a decision that prompted a flurry of hate mail from Pluto fans. Make Pluto Planet Again! To Brown, the International Astronomical Union’s judgment was brave, considering how the public would perceive the loss of a beloved world. Pluto isn't lost. We've even sent a space robot flying by it. It hasn't gone anywhere. Well, I mean, sure, it's progressed a bit along its orbit, but it's still in the orbit. Some planetary scientists, whose work doesn’t center on such orbital details, say that there’s much more to a planet than that. They argue that Pluto has a host of characteristics that qualify it for planethood: an atmosphere, geological activity, even five of its own moons. "A hot dog is meat between hunks of bread. Therefore, it is a sandwich, has always been a sandwich, and will always be a sandwich!" "No, it's a taco." "Heretic!" "You call these things 'mountains'? Come out west, I'll show you mountains!" "That's a river." "No, it's a stream." "No, it's a creek." New Horizons flyby in 2015 make discounting Pluto difficult. The mission gave humankind its first close-up of Pluto, uncovering stunning topography, such as a massive heart-shaped glacier made of nitrogen. Fran Bagenal, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, emailed me a picture from the flyby and wrote, “Doesn’t this look like a planet to you?” This is Ceres.  It orbits the sun. It looks like a planet to me, too, being round and having surface features and shit, although admittedly not as visually striking as those of Pluto. As noted above, Ceres was a planet for half a century. As with Pluto, changing what it was called didn't change Ceres.For all their disagreements, everyone I spoke with was on the same page about one thing: that the question of planethood has no bearing on whether Pluto is a fascinating place to study. It could be argued that this "controversy" worked very well to get more people interested in space, which I absolutely approve of. For anyone still wondering why it matters what we call a planet, dwarf planet, asteroid, etc., well, it really doesn't. But it's nice to have a working definition as we discover more and more bodies orbiting other stars. While, to the best of my knowledge, we don't have the technology to detect extrasolar dwarf planets, these questions of classification will go with us to the stars... assuming we make it that far. |
| Close to the end of 2020 is where we find today's throwback, an entry in response to a 30DBC prompt: "Pigs on the Wing" It was, if you're too lazy to click, about bacon. The reason for the entry's title, apart from being a Pink Floyd song (actually two songs, or one song divided into two parts, a trick they'd sometimes pull; see, e.g. "Another Brick In The Wall"), is a reference to my preference: When it comes to breakfast meats, I prefer turkey "bacon." As I noted in that entry, I'm not a fan of meat fats in general. You'd think that would make me automatically healthier, but it does not. In an attempt to save face, I also discussed veggie strips, which I call fakon: They do not, in fact, pass for bacon, even though the makers take great pains to make them look marbled. But the important part of the entry is, of course, the joke about the rabbi and the priest. I suppose I should link this, too: We would zigzag our way through the boredom and pain Occasionally glancing up through the rain Wondering which of the buggers to blame And watching for pigs on the wing |
| Today's article, from Nautilus, is a few years old, but it's not like plate tectonics has stopped since then. What Happens to Google Maps When Tectonic Plates Move? Earth’s tremors can tweak your GPS coordinates. It's not just Google Maps, of course; this applies to any GPS receiver. This is a thing I've often idly wondered about, but never enough to go and seek out the answer. As a writer on physics, I’m always seeking new metaphors for understanding Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and while working on my last book, Spooky Action at a Distance, I thought I’d compare the warping of space and time to the motion of Earth’s tectonic plates. Oh look, a book plug. What a surprise. Regardless, this is the kind of thing I mean when I say there's no such thing as useless knowledge: you can more easily find similarities between disparate things. The irony (or whatever) here is that GPS wouldn't work worth a damn without relativistic corrections for the satellites' speed and distance. I discovered a sizable infrastructure of geographers, geologists, and geodesists dedicated to ensuring that maps are accurate. But they are always a step behind the restless landscape. Geologic activity can create significant errors in the maps on your screens. As if paper maps are more accurate. Several factors produce these errors. Consumer GPS units have a position uncertainty of several meters or more (represented by a circle in Google Maps). Less well known is that maps and satellite images are typically misaligned by a comparable amount. All things considered, an uncertainty of a few meters, compared to the size of the planet, may as well be sorcery. I'm pretty sure military hardware has less inherent uncertainty, but it would also be affected by tectonic shifts. For the most part, misalignments don’t represent real geologic changes, but occur because it’s tricky to plop an aerial or orbital image onto the latitude and longitude grid. And this makes sense when you think about it. Not only do you have the Earth's curvature (it is, in fact, roughly spherical) to consider, but also elevation—another parameter that can change, albeit usually slowly. NGS and other agencies recheck survey marks only very infrequently, so what a stroke of luck that a community of hobbyists—geocachers—does so for fun. I had no idea geocaching was going on. I was a guest at a large gathering of theirs many years ago, and they seemed... obsessed. But I suppose we all have our obsessions. Confusingly, the U.S. uses two separate datums. Most maps are based on NAD 83, developed by NGS. Google Maps and GPS rely instead on WGS 84, maintained by a parallel military agency, which has a considerably larger budget. It should be kept in mind that GPS, like the internet itself, started out as a military project, and only later became accessible to civilians. When NGS introduced NAD 83, replacing an older datum that dated to 1927, it was the geographic version of the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. If you’d been paying attention, you would have woken up on Dec. 6, 1988, to find that your house wasn’t at the same latitude and longitude anymore. The shift, as large as 100 meters, reflected a more accurate model of Earth’s shape. Vestiges of the old datum linger. You still see maps based on NAD 27. This change was relevant to my work, as well. As I recall, the datum (the zero reference) for the two systems was different by nearly a foot; I wasn't quite as concerned with the horizontal references, because the parcels we worked with were relatively small, a couple hundred acres at most, and the important thing was relative position, not absolute. Yes, we used inches and acres. “Most surveyors and mapmakers would be happy to live in a world where the plates don’t move,” Smith explained. Considering that plate tectonics is probably linked to the processes that generate Earth's magnetic field, which helps protect us from effects such as solar radiation and the atmosphere floating away into space, no, no, they wouldn't be happy to live in that world, not for very long. Anyway, the article does get a bit technical, but I find the discussion of how this works entirely fascinating... if irrelevant to my quest to find the nearest brewpub from wherever I happen to be at the moment. |
| I'm not sure how much of today's article / book ad from way back in 2017 I'm on board with, but it's interesting anyway. Wanting to understand how Einstein learned physics may, at first, seem as pointless as trying to fly by watching birds and flapping your arms really hard. How do you emulate someone who is synonymous with genius? That's a bit like asking why you should bother to learn how to play piano when Billy Joel already exists. Whatever Einstein did to learn, he clearly did something right, so there’s merit in trying to figure out what that was. I suspect that a big part of it is he never asked, "When will we ever need this in life?" or "Why should I bother learning that?" I mean, okay, I don't know, maybe he did (though he would have asked in German), but I doubt it, or he wouldn't have achieved what he did. One of the most common stories about Einstein is that he failed grade school math. The downside of being an iconic historical figure is that, inevitably, myths accrete around you. Newton's apple, Washington's father's cherry tree, that sort of thing. These myths (some of which might have a germ of truth inside) tell us more about what we want to believe than about what's factual. In Einstein's case, the "failed grade school math" myth is misleading, but tells me that, collectively, we need to remind ourselves that the guy whose picture is in the dictionary next to "genius" was actually human. As the article points out, he didn't fail math, and he was also human: At the end of college, Einstein had the dubious distinction of graduating as the second-to-worst student in the class. Before rejoicing at this accomplishment, keep in mind that this was Germany around the turn of the last century, with an educational system not exactly known for accommodating individual differences in aptitude. I'm not singling out Germany, though; the US and UK weren't substantially different. The difficulty Einstein had was undoubtedly due in part to his non-conformist streak and rebellious attitude, which didn’t sit well in an academic environment. It is better known today that some of the most talented students get bored easily when attending classes geared toward those more in the middle of the bell curve. Not that our current educational system is much better at accommodating that; it's just different than it was 125 or so years ago. Given Einstein’s enormous contributions to physics, I think it’s now worthwhile to ask how he learned it. I mean, sure? There's no such thing as useless knowledge, but if, say, we figured out how Neil Peart learned how to play the drums, we still wouldn't achieve his level of greatness. Einstein learned physics, not by dutifully attending classes, but by obsessively playing with the ideas and equations on his own. Doing, not listening, was the starting point for how he learned physics. There was some emphasis on "learning styles" a while back, which seems to have died down because the concept is... well, I want to say bullshit, but bullshit at least has a use as fertilizer. I still think some ways of learning are more effective than others for each individual; for example, if you want me to remember something, make it a joke or a song (Schoolhouse Rock was like candy for Kid Me). That said, it's not a revolutionary idea to assert that doing something is a very effective way to learn. So is teaching the subject. How do you know when you really understand something? Einstein’s method was to try prove the proposition himself! Also not revolutionary, but that can lead to problems, like the guy who tried to "prove" the Earth was flat by building his own rocket. There's a hell of a lot of knowledge out there, and if you have to prove everything yourself, you'll never get anything else done. There is still value in figuring some things out for yourself. Intuition matters more than equations I'm not sure that's the case, but go ahead and read that section of the article if you want. I have no doubt intuition is important, but as noted in the text: Einstein’s own thoughts were that “intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.” This next section seems contradictory to me: Thinking requires a quiet space and deep focus and Einstein was a master of deep work. He had an incredible ability to focus, his son reporting: “Even the loudest baby-crying didn’t seem to disturb Father,” adding, “He could go on with his work completely impervious to noise.” Sounds more to me like the trick is to ignore the noise around you. Also, some people report thinking better when there's music playing. Einstein’s most famous method for learning and discovering physics has to be the thought experiment. Sure, but that technique has its limitations, and is mostly just a mental exercise unless you can also turn it into actual science. Overturn common sense… with more common sense Sigh. Common sense is neither, and it's the opposite of science. While solitude and focus were essential components of how Einstein learned and did physics, it was often conversations with other people that provided his breakthroughs. I don't find this particularly revolutionary, either. It's pretty common to bounce ideas off other people. Be rebellious Rebellion for the sake of rebellion is just angst. I think it's important to know when to rebel, a trick I have never mastered, myself. But, after all this, there's at least one section that I wholeheartedly agree with: All knowledge starts with curiosity And that's why I keep reading and posting this stuff. You don't have to be a genius to be curious. |
| I mentioned the Basque language a couple of weeks ago, here: "Can I Have Two Words?" . As sometimes (rarely, I hope) happens, I made a mistake there. I said, "Basque is, weirdly, unrelated to other Indo-European languages," which gives the impression that the language is itself of the Indo-European family... which it is (probably) not, and I knew that at the time; I just phrased it badly. I meant to point out that it's unrelated to other languages in Europe. Editing previous blog entries isn't something I do. The reason I'm issuing that correction at this time has to do with today's random article. The unsolved mystery of Europe’s oldest language For linguists, the uniqueness of the Basque language represents an unsolved mystery. For its native speakers, long oppressed, it is a source of pride. Unless you grew up in Spain, chances are you first learned about Basque Country through Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, which follows a group of Lost Generationers traveling across Western Europe after the First World War. Oddly enough, no. I didn't read that until college. It was through an in-depth study, in high school, of this Picasso painting, which merits a mention in the article's second paragraph.In Basque Country, politics is narrowly intertwined with language. This language, called Euskara, sounds nothing like Spanish (gracias = eskerrik asko), nor does it resemble French. What I did not know was the name Euskara. So, another mistake in that previous blog entry, by calling the language "Basque." In fact, Euskara is so fundamentally different from its neighbors that linguists doubt it even originated from Indo-European, the language family that gave rise to Icelandic, Russian, Hindi, and virtually everything in between. I have to take the linguists' word for it (pun absolutely intended). Many researchers have taken a crack at the Basque problem over the years, each coming up with a different solution. Given that region's history, with its historically oppressed minority, I don't think I'd have phrased it as "the Basque problem." Each researcher coming up with "a different solution" reminds me of the field of economy: ask four economists a question, get six answers. It has been suggested that Euskara is a predecessor to and a survivor of Iberian, a non-Indo-European tongue spoken on the Iberian Peninsula before the Romans arrived. Euskara has also been linked to a number of languages spoken in the Caucasus, as well to the Saharan Berbers, a pre-Arab ethnic group from northern Africa. Given my limited knowledge of the spread of humans across Europe, all of those origins seem reasonable to me. While the independent spirit of the Basques undoubtedly contributed to their isolation, the defining factor seems to have been the geography of Basque Country itself. Protected by the Bay of Biscay and Pyrenees mountains, the rugged terrain wards off outsiders as easily as it prevents insiders from leaving. Geographic isolation is one of the forces driving species evolution; there's no reason to believe it wouldn't also affect language evolution, which tends to be much faster. Centuries of persecution have taken their toll on Euskara and Basque culture at large. In many ways, this reminds me of the historical arc of the Welsh language. But this sort of linguistic persecution is hardly unique to Europe; we've done it here, too. It seems to be one way those in power try to erase the identities of those they deem inferior. Basque literature, previously endangered to the point that a single collector — one Edward Spencer Dodgson — is credited with preserving an entire society’s literary canon, is currently experiencing a renaissance. Curious, I looked him up. It's quite ironic to me that the only Wikipedia entry on him is written in French. I'm at the point where I can muddle through that, but not fluent enough to provide an English translation for Wikipedia."Né en 1857 en Angleterre, il s'intéresse à la langue basque à partir de 1886 et se consacre à cette étude jusqu'à sa mort." Born in 1857 in England, he became interested in the Basque language in 1886 and devoted himself to that study until his death. Or something like that. The double irony is that it was the English who tried to pull the same kind of shit with the Welsh. In retrospect, Franco’s attempt to destroy Euskara helped ensure its survival. And we've heard that one before, too. Perhaps the most famous iteration of those attempts, at least on this side of the pond, was when the US government tried to eradicate Native American languages, only to turn to the Diné (Navajo) for help when they needed to send coded messages. The surprising thing is that they provided it, thus claiming the moral high ground once and for all. |
| I wanted to share this article, not just because the story isn't that widely known, but because of a tenuous personal connection to it. This Odd Early Flying Machine Made History but Didn’t Have the Right Stuff Aerodrome No. 5 had to be launched by catapult on the Potomac River on May 6, 1896, but it flew unpiloted 3,300 feet The vessel floated in the shallows of the Potomac River on the leeward side of Chopawamsic Island, just off Quantico, Virginia. It's fairly common knowledge that Maryland claims the Potomac. In contrast with standard surveying practice, which usually puts boundaries in the river's thread or main channel, Maryland gets the whole expanse, up to some defined line (I think it's the mean low tide line where it is tidal, which is all the way up past DC) on the opposite side. This is in spite of the fact that the river is named for an Indian tribe that lived, to the best of my knowledge, exclusively in what is now Virginia. The reason for this isn't relevant to this story, though, except to note that because of this historical oddity, there just aren't that many islands in the Potomac that are part of Virginia. And this one is also claimed by the county where I (arguably) grew up, exactly (I checked) 10 miles from my childhood home. They had to do some creative surveying to include it within Stafford County, but it's there, in a kind of pseudopod-like extrusion. So, that's the personal connection. I told you it was tenuous. History would be made that day, May 6, 1896, as this apparatus—a flying machine, known as Aerodrome No. 5—was started and then launched from a spring-loaded catapult. An "aerodrome" is what we (well, mostly the British) call what's basically a small airport today. In 1896, no airports existed, so I guess the word meant something different. The Aerodrome would take off and travel for 90 seconds some 3,300 feet in an effortless spiral trajectory and then gently land in the river. Both time and distance exceed my best efforts at paper airplanes when I was a kid. To be fair, those experiments usually ended at a classroom wall. The third Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Samuel Pierpont Langley, an astronomer who also enjoyed tinkering with his own creations, was aboard the boat. His winged invention had just made the world’s first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size. Yeah... those are some specific definitions. Not quite the level of success the later Wright Brothers enjoyed, but why let North Carolina get all the credit? As for Langley himself, yes, it was that Langley, the one the famous Air Force base is named for. He was also a Secretary at the Smithsonian (a position similar to Royal Astronomer of Britain), so of course this article is from Smithsonian. With Langley that day, was his friend Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone... Another dubious claim, but that's what history insists upon, though that's really irrelevant right now. It should be emphasized again that this flight wasn't quite as significant as the Wright one, and the article does so: The world rightly remembers that in 1903 the Wright brothers achieved human flight at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. “Langley’s Aerodrome No. 5 wasn’t practical and it wasn’t a working prototype for any real flying machine,” says Peter Jakab, senior curator at the museum. But the largely forgotten unpiloted flight that took place seven years before Kitty Hawk did move motorized flight from the drawing board into reality. Langley was also apparently one of the last great polymaths: “Langley’s real accomplishments in research were in astronomy,” says Jakab. “He had done a great deal of significant work in sun spots and solar research, some of that while at the Smithsonian.” He had a bit of mad scientist about him, apparently: “This was still a period when people didn’t think flight was possible,” Jakab says. “If you were a young person in the 1890s contemplating a career in engineering, flight was not exactly an area you would go into. It wasn’t taken seriously by a lot of people. The fact that someone like Langley was starting to study flight gave the field credibility.” The article goes on to describe his fundamental errors in design, and how he lost out to those brothers from Ohio a few years later. “Those two catastrophic failures in 1903 ended Langley’s aeronautical work,” Jakab says. “He was a broken man because he took a lot of ridicule. He spent a lot of money and did not achieve a great deal in this field.” Perhaps not, but we also learn from failures. And by all accounts, he accomplished great things... just not so much in aviation. Still, he did what few others even dared to try, and isn't that worth remembering? |
| It's unlikely that any individual is "an average human." To claim so would be mean. What does the average human do every day? The Human Chronome Project finds that the average human sleeps for 9 hours but only works for 2.6 hours. Pun intended, of course, if a bit forced. While each of us has a decent conception of how we spend our own time, the actions of our fellow humans — from our next-door neighbors to people living in faraway countries — can seem quite mysterious. Do they watch as much TV? Work as many hours? Fiddle with their smartphones as frequently? Cook as often? Spend as much time watching their kids? Even some of those questions reveal a developed-world bias. First and foremost, the average human spends about 9.1 hours sleeping or resting. As the article notes, "human" includes everyone, including children. I usually manage something like that, but certainly did not when I was working full-time. While awake, the average person spends close to one-third of their day on passive, interactive, and social activities. These roughly 4.6 hours include reading, watching TV, making art, playing games, going to gatherings with friends or family, or simply doing nothing at all. The idea of "simply doing nothing at all" seems incomprehensible to most Americans. Eating and food preparation accounts for another 2.5 hours. Yes, fast food isn't universally available. Hygiene, including grooming, washing, and dressing, takes about 1.1 hours. Oh, that's what I'm missing. Cleaning and maintaining the spaces we inhabit costs us 0.8 hours of the day. And that. Though employment can be hugely time-consuming for working individuals, when looked at through the lens of the global human day, it appears as a mere sliver of time, just 2.6 hours. Coincidentally, that's about how much actual productive time most office drones achieve. Education also isn’t very demanding, only 1.1 hours. That's because a whole lot of 0s skew the average. The researchers were also curious about how average human time use changes with wealth. One big advantage of being rich is grasping more leisure time by paying others to have more working time. For instance, I (not really rich for an American, but close enough) pay people to mow my lawn. To be clear, though, it used to take me about 4 hours to do it, while they knock it out in 15 minutes. Additionally, people in the richest countries spend an average of just five minutes a day growing and harvesting food, while people in the poorest countries spend well over an hour doing so. As this illustrates, you do, too, if you go shopping at a grocery store instead of growing your own food and butchering your own hogs. By assembling the human chronome, the researchers say that we can compare ourselves to civilizations from the past. Right, because we know exactly how they used all of their days. Also, civilization itself changes its individuals' time utilization. More importantly, we can see from a high-level, empirical perspective what our species is doing on our planet and make more informed decisions about reallocating our collective time to change the world and society for the better. Like that's going to happen. Also, the worst excesses are perpetrated by a very small, average-skewing group with greater resources (aka "the Rich"). So, while this research may be useful (no such thing as useless knowledge), I don't think it has the lofty practical potential that they claim. Not to mention that just looking at an "average" (however that's computed) tells you enough about the range. It's just another way of manipulating with statistics. For example, "the average human" possesses fewer than 2 legs. Think about it, and you'll realize I'm right. But saying that can be misleading, as the vast majority of people have exactly 2 legs. Like me! I always knew I was above average at something. |
| There are several articles in my queue, from various sources, about planets in our solar system. Fittingly, though randomly, the one about Mercury (from Vox) shows up here first. It's still a mystery to me. I've never knowingly seen it in the sky. All the other visible planets, sure, no problem. Venus, when it's visible at all, is very visible, usually the brightest thing in the night sky apart from the Moon. Mars is generally easy to spot for its color; Jupiter, like Venus, tends to be bright, but isn't limited to just after sunset or just before sunrise. Saturn, while you can't see its rings with unaided eyes, is generally recognizable. I've even seen the next planet out, through a telescope that someone else pointed. No, I won't name it until its article comes up, lest someone make a worn-out, juvenile joke about it. But Mercury? Its visibility is even more limited than that of Venus, always close to the twilight horizon if it's visible at all, not to mention much dimmer, and that makes it tough if you don't know exactly what to look for. And despite my interest in astronomy, I never could be arsed to get one of those cellphone apps that tells you what everything is. It's entirely possible that I've seen it and mistaken it for a star near the horizon, where some constellational context is missing. Anyway, that's not what the article is about. Thanks to space robots (we have SPACE ROBOTS), we've seen Mercury quite a bit. On Friday, the US Geological Survey released the most comprehensive topographical map of Mercury ever created, depicting its craters, ridges, volcanoes, and mountains — some rising more than 2 miles high — in fine detail: You'll have to go to the link to see the map. Also, "on Friday" refers to a long-ago Friday in early 2016, as the article is pretty old now. Because Mercury is so small and close to the sun, it's tricky to send spacecraft to visit it — before NASA's MESSENGER probe, the only craft that had come close was Mariner 10, which made a series of quick flybys in the 1970s. The difficulty of getting to Mercury may seem counterintuitive. Woudn't a probe just fall toward the Sun? Well, no, for the same reason Earth (much to our relief) doesn't; you have to cancel a lot of angular momentum, and that takes fuel, careful planning, and lots and lots of math. So, the rest of the article consists of some of the stuff we managed to figure out thanks to fuel, careful planning, and lots and lots of math. 1) Mercury is shrinking And no, not because of #2 here: 2) Mercury has water ice This has long been theorized, but lots of things were theorized that turned out not to be the case. The brief explanation for how ice can exist on the surface of a planet that's famously close to a giant perpetual fusion bomb is that Mercury has no real atmosphere to distribute heat, and the ice is in shadowed craters at the poles. 3) Mercury had a violent, volcanic past While, again, it's good to get evidence, this isn't exactly surprising given that other terrestrial planets (and the Moon) have or had volcanic activity. 4) We can't quite figure out how Mercury formed To be fair, we're a little fuzzy on the details of how any planets formed. What's cool is that we're able to figure out things like how big a planet's core is and what it's made of, and that we have the technology to send robots there in the first place. 5) Mercury has a weird, off-center magnetic field "Weird" meaning "No, we don't understand that yet, either, but it'll help us do more science." So, there it is: stuff we didn't know before, or suspected but didn't have proof of. Always more to find out. |
| As usual for Sundays, I used my handy Random Number Generator to excavate an ancient blog entry. This time, it pointed me to what might actually be my shortest entry ever, though I'm not going through all 2400+ entries to verify that. The entry in question is from all the way back in October of 2008: "Best Waste of Time EVER" It consists of a naked link (this was, if I recall correctly, before the xlink: feature was implemented), the words "Go ahead. Click." and a smirk emoticon. (This was also before the smirk2 emoticon). Hesitantly, I clicked on the link. It is, after all, at least 15 years old. If it's not dead, I thought, it's probably redirected. Or possibly encrusted with ads or other extraneous nonsense. Or, even worse, infested with malware. So I made sure my ad and script blockers were on and fully functioning. This is why I try to always expect the worst: Either I'm wrong, and something other than the worst happens, which is by definition good; or I'm right, which always feels good. And yet, the link is still active. I'm sure some things have changed there since 2008; for instance, now there's the option to get the corresponding app for your smartphone, and there are probably a few extra links near the bottom of the page... but no intrusive ads (I checked on a different browser, but not on my phone) or, as far as I and my extensive guardian plugins can tell, anything dangerous there. This is the link, if you don't care to look at that older blog entry.So what we get is a nice blast from the past, a reminder of what the internet used to be before most everything went to shit and became commodified, intrusive, and sanitized. And perhaps even a place to exercise artistic talent, if you have any, that is; I do not, but there are plenty of examples at the link of the works of people who do. Whether it's still the "best waste of time ever" is debatable. |
| It's been a while since I did a cooking article. Well, this is sort of cooking-adjacent, anyway. I always figured a smidgen was what you get when you run over a pigeon. Turns out, I was wrong. This article is basically an ad for a book, as is common around here, but uncommonly, it's a book I actually would like to read. It also delves into more than just the "smidgen;" the first section goes into how "stone" became a unit of measurement: For example, an English statute from around 1300 set a London stone at 12.5 lbs.; however, a stone for weighing lead was said to be 12 lbs., while a stone for measuring beeswax, sugar, pepper, cumin, almonds and alum was 8 lbs., and the stone for weighing glass was 5 lbs. The inconsistent and archaic use of stones continued in Britain for some time. And, colloquially, they still speak of some weights in terms of (far more standardized) stones there. It took me a while, as an American, to figure out that one stone was 14 pounds, and even longer to convert that to kg (which isn't a proper conversion either, as kg is a unit of mass, not weight, but whatever). An interesting side note is that, although the stone was not greatly used in America, in 1790 Thomas Jefferson suggested a new decimal system of coinage, weights and measures. His decimal currency was adopted, but his idea to introduce an American stone of 10 lbs. (with each pound weighing ten ounces) was rejected. I think I did an entry a while back on how we managed to decimalize our currency as a newly-independent nation, but attempts to decimalize anything else failed miserably. The UK, in contrast, didn't use a decimal-based currency until almost 200 years later. Smidgen, pinch, dollop, dash, and drop I did promise a cooking-adjacent thing up there, and this is it. Most people recognize that they refer to a small amount of something, but just how small is left open to interpretation. In fairness, some recipes are more forgiving than others when it comes to quantities. Smidgen is generally used to refer to an almost trace amount, a few grains or a tiny sliver. Still wiggly, since it doesn't specify the size of the grains or how tiny "tiny" is. To assist novice cooks it seems some American food writers have begun giving exact measurements (as fractions of teaspoons) to the traditionally inexact terms. A dash is said to be 1/8 of a teaspoon, a pinch 1/16 of a teaspoon, a smidgen 1/32 of a teaspoon, and a drop 1/64 of a teaspoon. You can now even purchase a set of measuring spoons for these tiny amounts. Meanwhile, I wish we'd get rid of "teaspoon" and just measure everything in grams. Far more precise. Some ingredients don't fit nicely into a teaspoon, tablespoon, or even a cup. Ever try to measure 1/4 cup of brussels sprouts? No amount of precision in the manufacturing of the 1/4 cup measure can fix the problem. There's a lot more explanation at the link, including (my favorite part) the etymology of some of these words. And, clearly, there's even more in the book. |
| I do like a "you're wrong about that" article... if the article itself isn't wrong. Almost everything you know about cheese is wrong Shredded cheese doesn’t melt as well and other fascinating facts about fromage. Forcing French for funny fails. A bag of pre-shredded cheese from the supermarket can really come in handy if you’re in a hurry and looking for a quick fix of salt and fat. And you're not starting out stellar, here: cheese contains those things, but its purpose is protein. And, of course, flavor. Unfortunately, many pre-shredded cheeses also come with a dose of cellulose, which is essentially wood pulp. It's a nature-derived preservative. Would you prefer an "artificial" preservative? The solution then is to grate the cheese fresh off the block or skip the grating process completely, says Mary Rizzo, owner of The Cheese Traveler shop in Albany, New York. I mean, sure. But that's work. Not just the shredding part, but the cleanup afterwards. The convenience of pre-shredded cheese is enticing. If you banned shredded cheese, you'd Make America Grate Again. Here are some other common fixes (or upgrades) you can make to your cheese game... Shredded cheese snobbery is right up there with pre-chopped garlic snobbery, in my book. I admit it's better, but it's also often too much like work. Some of these other items, though... Venture beyond processed cheese Yeah, I've ragged on this in here before. Unfortunately, lots of people have come to believe that Kraft Singles is what cheese is "supposed" to taste like, or perhaps Velveeta, and there is no fixing that attitude. Don’t always use air-tight plastic for storage I have to agree with this one, too, but again, you have to balance the benefits with the extra work involved. Learn why certain cheeses are crunchy Because they're coated with nuts? Okay, no, the article explains this as a natural product of cheese aging. Which, admittedly, I didn't know the details of. So I learned something, too. Sample real American cheese I'm all for local artisanal food (I am, after all, a craft beer and local wine snob), but let's not limit ourselves to America, even if we live in the US. It is good to know that, according to this article, local cheese is finally happening in the US; I hadn't heard much about it. Choose your pairings wisely This is the kind of thing that can only come with experience, and perhaps someone else to act as Cheddi Master. Everyone's taste is different, even discounting the wrecked palate that leads some people to prefer process "cheese," and what works for me might not work for you. But in the end, this is work that is worth it, to me: finding out which cheese pairs best with which wine or beer, or with other foods. It only improves one's enjoyment of life, and isn't that the whole point? |
| No streak lasts forever, so today's article comes from Rolling Stone: How ‘Disney Adults’ Became the Most Hated Group on the Internet “People were saying Disney fans are a plague upon society," says one expert. "That they will be the end of Western civilization” Most hated group? Really? I thought that was predators of children. Or maybe aficionados of that abomination they call "pizza" in Chicagoland. Article is about 13 months old, though, so anything might have changed since then. By all reasonable definitions and standards, I am a Disney Adult. I have seen all of the movies multiple times, and enjoy most of them at least a little bit. "Enjoy most of them at least a little bit" is damning with faint praise. The author goes on to build her (I looked up the bio, so that pronoun is correct) Disney bona-fides. I can't relate—I've seen quite a few of the movies, myself, and liked them, but I haven't been to a park in 40 years, nor do I have any intention or desire to do so. But I still don't hate her. On the internet, however, being a Disney adult is nothing short of an embarrassment. A Disney adult is someone who lives and breathes the brand, buying limited-edition mouse ears and popcorn buckets and branded fitness trackers the moment they drop, constantly posting free advertisements for the park in the form of Cinderella’s Castle and Purple Wall selfies (so named for the violently mauve wall in Tomorrowland) whilst wearing rose-gold mouse ears. "Strong dislike" is building after this bit, however. At no time was this distaste drawn into sharper relief than earlier this month, when a post on Reddit’s Am I the Asshole forum went massively viral. The post, which was reportedly written by a bride who had opted to pay for Mickey and Minnie to appear at her wedding rather than feed her guests, was, like most things on Reddit, anonymously written and poorly sourced. As a reminder, that would be last June. Before Reddit imploded. But from what I've seen, my default for AITA posts is "they're making shit up." Which is fine; hell, I'm a fiction writer sometimes, myself. “People were saying Disney fans are a plague upon society, that they will be the end of Western civilization,” says Jodi Eichler-Levine, a professor of religious studies at Lehigh University who studies the intersection of Disney and religion. I'm just going to pause here a moment to absorb the new knowledge that there is at least one actual PhD professor who "studies the intersection of Disney and religion." Oh hey, look, a bird is divebombing one of my cats. She probably deserves it. Okay, now, where was I? Oh, yeah. Disney is a business that sells products and experiences to consumers. So are most religions. So I guess that's fair. Is this accurate? Do Disney adults truly signal the end of Western civilization? No. For fuck's sake, are you so far up the Mouse's ass that you don't recognize hyperbole when you see it? To find out, and to learn where the concept of the “Disney adult” comes from in the first place, I talked to a slew of academics, internet culture and fandom experts, and, yes, Disney adults. The article is fairly long, and I'm not going to waste a lot of your time repeating it. Just a few choice quotes. On its most basic level, it strikes outsiders as deeply embarrassing to throw oneself into a subculture ostensibly aimed at children — despite the fact that the Disney parks, as Walt Disney first conceived of them, were very much intended for people of all ages. The problem with "for all ages" is that it leaves out quite a bit of the full human experience. Sex, for example, or violence past a certain level. Cussing. Having to pay taxes. But I understand that some people would rather pretend these things don't exist, or at least gain respite from them. Adding an extra layer of repulsion to outsiders, Disney adults’ ability to escape into this fantasy is almost entirely dependent on their ability to afford it. Ever since I got berated for wanting to waste money gambling by a guy who had a literal, actual monkey (that he paid money for) on his back, I've shied away from judging people by how they spend their money. If it's not Disney, it's sports, or luxury travel, or hitching a ride on a rocket that technically reaches space. Though I do admit to some residual judgment of people for spending money they don't have, even that isn't always their fault. As early as the 1990s, coverage of Disney’s fairy-tale weddings programs prompted plenty of sarcastic headlines about why grown people would want to get married in the vicinity of a cartoon mouse. Look, it's not for me, sure. Marriage or cartoon mice. But hey, these days, if you want, say, a Jedi wedding, that makes you a Disney fan too. Just saying. And where people choose to get married is their business, not ours. “There’s a real moralistic judgment of Disney adults,” she says. “It’s like, ‘How dare you, instead of putting all this money into buying a house or raising a family, put [it] into fleeting experiences?’ But that probably corresponds with changing cultural expectations for young adults.” How DARE you not live according to my preset life script? But this has, ironically, led most people to conceive of Disney adults as female and to bring their accompanying stereotypes along with it, even though the fandom is pretty evenly split gender-wise. I could probably write a thesis to conclude from this that mocking of Disney adults comes down to anti-feminism and sexism, but I'm already banging on long enough, and it really should be obvious. But we do have the male-dominated equivalent, which is comic book fandom. Yes, there are women in that group, too, but if you picture someone with a love for the superhero genre, it's probably a big, bearded guy. Me, e.g. And of course, now there's overlap there too, as one of the big superhero publishers is owned by Disney. “There was a lot of judgment on women who participated in that kind of activity. It was like, ‘Oh, you’re enjoying this fun thing that I consider childish? I’m going to make fun of you.'” How DARE you have fun when there's serious shit going on, and you should be bringing children into a doomed world instead? [Eichler-Levine] refers to the fandom as “a place where meaning and ritual and capitalism all come together, just like MLB, just like Star Trek. Name your fandom.” Just like I've been saying, and I don't need a PhD to recognize that. On a related note, sports fans long ago lost the right to complain about the rest of us dressing up and putting on body paint, etc., to celebrate the things we enjoy. I am not, and never have been, a person for whom joy really comes in consistent supply. But at Disney, it’s nothing less than an IV in my arm. Even the meticulous planning of the daily schedule gives me more of a sense of satisfaction than I feel in my everyday life. And considering how hard joy is for me to come by, I feel no need to apologize for that. And you shouldn't. "Stop liking what I don't like" is a meme for a reason. No, you're not ushering in the end of civilization; capitalism in general is doing a damn fine job of that. Until it happens, though... enjoy the ride. |
| For the ultra-rare three-in-a-row Cracked hat trick. I promise I have a variety of sources in the queue, but random numbers, like farts, often create streaks. Well, that's misleading. There are always rules. A world without these rules is the dream of the angriest teenage punks and Libertarians alike. Angry teenage punks and Libertarians just don't want to face consequences. Leaving the well-being of your neighbors and the continued functioning of society up to the natural good in people might sound feasible, if the only people you’ve ever met in your life were two nuns. Have you met nuns? 5. Slab City The city has no public oversight, or any of the services that comes with it — running water, electricity or the other niceties that are modern requirements for living. Sounds like a libertarian paradise, all right. And yet, if you read the article, sometimes the cops do respond there. Hence, rules, even if unwritten ones. 4. Antarctica Since there’s no owner or governing body, technically, there are no laws on Antarctica. Except that there actually are. And that's not even going into the whole "Don't go outside without a parka" thing; that's more of a natural law. 3. The Autobahn If you’re looking to the Autobahn for pure, unregulated freedom, though, you might be disappointed. In order to keep it from being basically a long stretch of twisted metal, there are plenty of other rules, some of which are policed more closely than elsewhere. "No speed limit" is hardly the same thing as "no rules." 2. International Waters Those are how certain pseudo-religious groups with lots of money and wide-eyed recruits get around pesky things like "child labor laws" and "regulations against slavery," but still... Thanks to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, jurisdiction in international waters is pretty cut-and-dry. First, there is international maritime law that applies regardless, and second, legal jurisdiction is decided by the country the vessel in question is registered in. 1. Your Imagination The cops can’t arrest you for what you do in your dreams… yet. But for just $19.99 a month of a low annual payment of $149.99, you can subscribe to DreamVPN. Keep those annoying Dream Police outside your head! |
| The random number gods have blessed us with back-to-back Cracked links. Not really useless, though, are they? Apart from my assertion that there's no such thing as useless knowledge, they at least get the site some clicks. For me, and most of us, space is like retirement: It seems cool, but there’s little to no chance I’ll ever personally experience it. Maybe stop buying lattes and you'll be able to afford a trip on the Muskrocket? Or retire. But not both. Along those lines, here are five of the most useless facts science has provided us with about outer space… Which might all someday be useful, if we don't blow ourselves up like a Muskrocket first. 5. Parts of It Smell Like Rum There are way worse things to smell like. There’s a cloud known as Sagittarius B2 that’s floating out in our own little Milky Way galaxy. In space, "cloud" is relative. From what I understand (I could always be wrong), it's even less dense than the Martian atmosphere. Specifically, it’s the chemical that gives rum its distinctive smell, meaning that, somewhere out in our galaxy, there’s a space cloud that, if you smelled it, would make you retch remembering your 21st birthday party. No, for that, it would have to smell like tequila. There is also an alcohol cloud in space; unfortunately, it's mostly methyl (the kind that makes you go blind if you drink it). But space is big, and in my headcanon, somewhere out there is a cloud of Everclear.SF idea: a spaceship dives into one of these clouds to replenish its fuel supply. 4. A Year on Venus Is Shorter Than A Day on Venus A year on Venus is shorter than a day, even though that is not what we have agreed those words mean like 99 percent of the time. It’s because Venus spins incredibly slowly on its axis, so much so that it completes a full revolution around the Sun before it rotates a full 360 degrees. This fact may indeed have little use—after all, on the surface of Venus, it doesn't much matter whether you're facing the sun or not; it's still hotter than actual hell. Not to mention corrosive and under more pressure than an intern on a deadline. But for a long time, we didn't know what the rotation rate of the planet was. All we had to go by was cloud top rotation, and that can be different. So the remarkable thing isn't that Venus rotates more slowly than it revolves, but that we know it. 3. There’s A Huge Diamond Out There That was an entire Doctor Who episode. The diamond is actually a huge, dead star known as a white dwarf. It's probably wrong of me to yawn at the idea of a white dwarf. It is, after all, an example of just how scary outer space can be. Larger stars, like our Sun, which so generously provides us with melanoma and the ability to burn ants with a magnifying glass, end with a supernova, one of the coolest things I hope to never see. Wrong. Our sun will also leave behind a white dwarf remnant. Supernovae start at, can't be arsed to look it up, a star much bigger than our sun.Once the sun starts fusing helium, however, it's likely to expand to Earth's orbit, so the distinction doesn't much matter to us. Also, whatever happens will happen billions of years from now. Probably. It’s so far away there’s nothing we can possibly do about it, but maybe, someday, we’ll figure out a way to send poor people there to harvest bits of it at great bodily danger to themselves. Another SF plot that writes itself. Unfortunately, one would have to first overcome the crushing gravity, not to mention the heat. 2. We’re Eventually Going to Crash Into the Andromeda Galaxy That's certainly not useless knowledge for a writer. It's just that this will happen just about when our sun expands; that is, billions of years from now. You tell me we’re about to collide with another galaxy, and when I ask, “So Earth and all the planets we know are just going to smack into the Andromeda ones?” I get hit with a “well, not exactly.” That's because space is largely made up of—you might want to sit down for this revelation—space. We've looked at galaxy collisions; the biggest effect is gravitational fuckery. 1. It’s Infinite Er... maybe. Probably not. Likely, it's very, very big. Maybe it's looped in four dimensions, the way the surface of the Earth is looped in three. Very, very big is just as far from infinity as 1 is.But from a practical standpoint, "very, very big" might as well be infinity, as there will always be things we don't know. And that's awesome. |
| They say necessity is the mother of invention. I say laziness is the milkman. Leave it to Cracked to point out a third option: comedy. Have you ever had a moment where you’re, say, shopping for pants, and you find a barren pocket field where the pockets no longer grow. So you say, “I guess I’ll just stick my phone up my butt.” Someone overhears, and the next thing you know, intra-anal wallets are a billion-dollar business? No, because I'm a man, and our trousers have pockets. Hell, I won't even buy sweats that don't have pockets. Still, that idea would go a long way toward reducing pickpocketing. 4. Schrödinger’s Cat I always had a problem with this thought experiment, and no, that problem wasn't "that poor cat." It was, after all, only a thought experiment. Austrian or not, torture wasn't Erwin Schrödinger’s thing. No, my problem is that it gives primary focus to the role of humans as observers, when there is one sentient observer who knows if he's alive; to wit, the cat. Physics in the 1930s was a wild west, or at least as wild as a bunch of nerds can get. There was all this quantum shit going around, things that can be nowhere and everywhere until you look at them, and not everyone was on board. For a dick joke site, this is a remarkably thorough but succinct summary of the situation in physics in the 30s. In response, he developed the “Cat Paradox,” which was supposed to illustrate what Schrödinger regarded as a flaw in the theory in the most ridiculous way possible. Obviously, a cat can only be either alive or dead, not both, and it doesn’t particularly matter who’s looking at it. Any cat owner can tell you they couldn’t give less of a shit about the actions of humans. That, too. But the joke was on Schrödinger. Quantum mechanics is now a pretty uncontroversial theory, and we’ve differentiated the behavior of quantum particles and non-quantum, catty objects, but that hasn’t stopped physicists from taking Schrödinger’s supposed paradox as a challenge. But still haven't actually involved real cats, to the best of my knowledge. Anyway, QM is indeed uncontroversial in its description of effects, but there's still debate about interpretations thereof. But yeah, it's all because one physicist was trying to get cute with a gedankexperiment. On a somewhat related note, the term "Big Bang" was coined by someone who didn't accept the idea of an origin for the universe. 3. America’s (Possibly the World’s) First Female Mayor To be fair, lots of politicians are jokes, regardless of gender. Or party. In 1887, when women were only kind of considered people, the ladies of Argonia, Kansas had just won the right to vote in local elections but still really only had the power to be mad about drunk dudes. I'm not going to blame the evils of Prohibition on females alone. The Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) was passed before the Nineteenth (chicks can vote). But seriously, it's shameful how long it took for women to be able to vote even locally. ...they did underestimate how much local Republican Party officials disliked election tampering. Contrast that to today, when that party has it as an official platform plank. 2. Pickering’s Harem Unfortunate name for the surprising discovery that women are people and can do jobs. Pickering was well aware that Williamina Fleming, the immigrant single mother he’d recently hired as a maid, was brilliant. His wife, the daughter of a former Harvard president, had even previously told him he should hire her to do more than dust. He eventually reached a point where doing so seemed advantageous on a number of levels. For one thing, women could be paid a lot less than men, but as an added benefit, her success would humiliate all those guys he just fired. How... progressive. It turned out Fleming and the other women on the team she oversaw, grossly referred to as “Pickering’s Harem,” really were much better than the men they’d replaced. They were only supposed to do tedious clerical and computation work based on photos of the night sky, “but they were very bright, so they drew their own conclusions and made several important discoveries." Imagine that. 1. Trickle-Down Economics I can't even see that phrase without imagining Reagan and Thatcher pissing down on the general public. Or without getting spitting mad about it. ...but the man who articulated it best was mostly in the business of dancing around in silly cowboy costumes. No, not Ronald Reagan — humorist Will Rogers. Like I said, comedy. Like many of the comedy greats, Rogers was mostly talking out of his ass. He was a vaudeville performer with a 10th-grade education, not an economist. But he turned out to be right: Trickle-down economics has been a disaster for the American economy. No, it hasn't, not for the ones doing the trickling. Despite my blinding rage at the entire concept, it is a concept, and it started (unintentionally) with a comedian. Yet another reason we really should watch what we say. |
| Reaching deep, deep into the past today, this entry comes to us from January of 2008: "Exercise" It's just a short personal update from a previous incarnation of myself that I can't recognize today. I went to the gym today for the first time in over a year. Younger Me had no good excuse other than "working too much" and "playing video games." Me? I haven't been to a gym since March of 2020. Mostly, I hate the gym because I never quite know what to do there. Yeah, "excercise," I know, but on what? It has been pointed out to me since then that many people don't actually go to the gym to exercise, but to socialize. This makes no sense to me, like going to the movies to do something other than watch a movie, visiting a bar for any purpose other than drinking, or going to school for some reason other than learning. While it is true that I almost never do anything for only one reason, I always had this thought in my head that the primary purpose of a gym was to work out. Apparently not. Also, note the embarrassing typo. I spelled exercise wrong in the entry but not in the entry's title. Blame it on the pain. But with my back the way it is, it was pretty much "swimming." At some point after this entry, I went to a doctor and got one of those steroid epidural shots. I don't have the greatest memory, but I remember pain quite vividly, and that was incredibly painful, for a few days. After that, my back pain lessened to the point where I could usually live with it. Made my leg so parts of it couldn't feel anything, but hey, less pain. |
| This guy looms large around here. Sometimes literally, what with all the statues. Like many of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson was a dad. I mean, it's right there in the group's name. Article is from Art of Manliness, which is biased toward fatherhood as a prerequisite for "manliness," whatever that is. I'm not defending the site here, or Jefferson's personal life. And like a lot of dads, he often took the opportunity to dispense unsolicited dad advice to his children. I like to think he made numerous, cringeworthy puns as well. They're called "dad jokes" now, but I'm living proof that you don't have to be a dad to make them. In an 1825 letter to John Spear Smith, Jefferson laid out his refined list of adages that he called his “Decalogue of Canons for observation in practical life.” You might recognize "decalogue" as the Greek name for what we call the Ten Commandments. Jefferson, as should be widely known, was not above editing the Bible. I'm not going to get much into the explanations of the rules; you can go to the link for that. No, as a fellow Charlottesvillian and graduate of the University he founded, I'm going to note my own version of the Rules, updated for life nearly 200 years later. 1. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Waltz: Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow. Life's too short to focus on productivity all the time. 2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. Waltz: Never do yourself what you can pay someone else to do for you. (And I can't resist pointing out that this Rule is pretty fucking ironic coming from a slaveholder.) 3. Never spend your money before you have it. Waltz: Own, don't rent. 4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you. Waltz: Never buy what you do not want. (This Rule took me a while, I guess because language changed in two centuries. I think that last phrase can be translated as "it will be more expensive in the long run.") 5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold. Waltz: We really need to come up with a different word; there's good pride and bad pride. (Did Jefferson, landed gentry, know hunger or thirst? Cold, I have no doubt of.) 6. We never repent of having eaten too little. Waltz: Don't go hungry if you can at all avoid it. It's distracting. 7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. Waltz. Doing nothing is always an option. Unless you're hungry. 8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened! Waltz: How much pain have cost us the embarrassing things we did that we only remember at 3 a.m. 9. Take things always by their smooth handle. Waltz: Laziness is productive. 10. When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred. Waltz: Actions speak louder than words. Okay, I stole that last one from my mom, who was fond of repeating proverbs (which are things entirely different from pronouns, again illustrating how freakin' weird English is). And obviously, I don't actually believe it, because here I am typing words. Anyway, I'm sure you'll have your own opinions on these things. Let's not fall into the trap of thinking that because a famous person from history said it, it's any more profound than if a nobody from today says it. |
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Finally. Fascinating stuff. All of them. There is something rather philosophical about comedy. You are certainly right there. 
