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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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| 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. |
| I've said stuff before about etymology. This is more stuff. Every linguist is familiar with the feeling of delight mixed with vexation when they notice a linguistic connection that had been right under their nose—like that abysmal is the adjective form of abyss. Does someone not know that? I suppose not anymore, now that you've read this or the article. Wait'll you find out that "terrific" originally meant "causing terror" and comes from exactly the same place as "terrible." Because somehow, that's not in today's list. 1. Disaster and Asteroid Doesn't take much knowledge of Latin to know where "aster" came from: "astra" I think "asteroid" would be a better word for "hemorrhoid." These star-crossed words remind us of the enduring human fascination with the heavens and our attempts to comprehend their influence. It would indeed be a disaster if a large enough asteroid crashed into Earth. 2. Galaxy and Lactose Yeah, this is a fun one. As you may have guessed, galaxy comes to us from a Latin word for “the Milky Way.”... French chemist Jean Baptiste André Dumas proposed that name for the natural sugar in milk, using the Latin lac for “milk” plus -ose in analogy to another sugar, glucose. Now I want a Milky Way bar. 3. Company and Pantry The Latin root panis, “bread,” links the words company and pantry. I'll just pause here for a moment while you do your Beavis and Butt-Head impression over "panis." Ready? Okay. Far as I can tell, neither of those words is related to panty. 4. Sarcasm and Sarcophagus I have to admit, I never saw the connection here, unlike with previous pairs. Meanwhile, a sarcophagus is a “flesh-eater,” so named because the limestone used for these coffins was believed to quickly decompose the deceased’s flesh. Perhaps ironically, sarcophagi (look, it's a legitimate plural) are most closely associated with Egypt, which, as I understand things anyway, used them to preserve bodies. Skipping a few. Not because they're not interesting, but because I don't have anything to add. 7. Muscle and Mollusk You might think the shared m and l link these two words, but it’s actually the diminutive -scus suffix connecting them. And here we have an example of a connection I might never have made on my own. And before you ask, yes, as far as I can tell, mussels are so named because of their muscle, and they are mollusks. BONUS: Silence and Silhouette This, they included as an example of words that aren't linguistically connected. Apparently, per the article, a silhouette is so named because the French dude it was named after was named Étienne de Silhouette. It's debatable whether Monsieur de Silhouette actually did silhouettes. He apparently had a reputation for being cheap, and silhouettes are cheaper than portraits. This reminds me of the origin of "guillotine," where Monsieur Guillotine didn't actually invent the device. But. Names have meanings, too. I can't find many references to the origin of the name "de Silhouette," but that form usually makes reference to a place name. An English equivalent would be, like, "Geralt of Rivia." (Yes, I've been watching The Witcher.) In this case, however, the only reference I can find (a literal footnote on a Wikipedia page, so it's not necessarily canon, indicates that the name appears to have a Basque origin, and as Basque is, weirdly, unrelated to other Indo-European languages. Or any other languages, for that matter. So yeah, those words are unrelated. But according to this footnote, the place origin of Silhouette is Zuloeta, which apparently translates to "an abundance of holes."If true, that's something of a coincidence, as well. But in case you were wondering, yes, English has at least one word of Basque origin (even if through French), which is fascinating enough by itself. |
| How do you think the war's going? No, not that war. Or that one. This one: Link is to Cracked, so at least this should be entertaining. For decades now, the American government has been fighting the “War on Drugs.” I always figured it was the conservative response to the liberal "War on Poverty." When a war has been going on for almost a half-century, it’s not usually because you’re winning. But admitting that you lost is embarrassing. Unless the goal was to horrendously overcrowd the nation’s prisons with nonviolent offenders. In which case, you showed them! As incarcerated individuals can legally be slaves, perhaps that was a goal all along: cheap labor. You want murderers digging ditches? I didn't think so. The term crashed onto the scene after it was proclaimed in a speech by actual criminal Richard Nixon. An actual criminal who avoided prison. This was in 1971, shortly before he would resign from office due to the Watergate scandal. Um, no. Nixon was elected to a second term in 1972, and it wasn't until August of 74 that he resigned. Three years is a significant portion of a Presidential term. Here are five of the most embarrassing products and occurrences since the War on Drugs started Yes, it's a countdown. 5. DARE Doesn’t Work Maybe one of the most famous anti-drug campaigns ever created was D.A.R.E., which is what I assume is a backronym of the unwieldy Drug Abuse Resistance Education. Everyone I knew said it stood for Drugs Are Really Excellent. D.A.R.E. probably had more of an effect on the graphic T-shirt business than the drug trade. There was a period in there when dealers would wear those shirts so potential customers could identify them. Or so I've been told. 4. Legal Weed’s Success We have been trying to get weed legalized for as long as I can remember. It's clearly not in the same category as other mind-altering substances, some of which are legal, in terms of potential negative effects, and can have actual benefits. The War on Drugs slammed the brakes on that effort... for a while. The devil’s lettuce was, for ages, one of the chief bogeymen in the War on Drugs’ lore as a gateway drug and the leading cause of reefer madness. The "gateway drug" argument is, and always was, absolute nonsense. Not only that, but the legalization of weed has created a booming business and a positively shocking amount of tax revenue for the states in which it’s implemented. "Wait, we can make money off this instead of spending money to try to stop it?" 3. Quadro Tracker Okay, no idea what this is. Let's find out. It was a small plastic device that claimed to be able to detect things like guns and drugs after you inserted the corresponding “frequency card” (which, of course, cost money). The location was then meant to be indicated by a metal antenna. Now, calling it a device at all might have been generous, given that it turned out to be just a hollow piece of plastic. Basically, police across the country dished out taxpayer dollars in a big way to buy drug-dowsing rods. Normally, I think people who perpetrate scams should be locked up. In this case, however, they should build statues. 2. ”Fentanyl Overdose” Cop Footage The stories continue to pile up of officers left lying panicked on the ground or looking like they can see directly into the face of death after contact such as brushing it off their uniform, or just being in a car where the drug was found. This has always made me laugh. I don't remember when fentanyl seemed to suddenly burst onto the scene; it wasn't that long ago that I first heard of it. Sometime in the last ten years, maybe. This century, for sure. But it was only because I kept seeing stories like "Officer gets a nanogram of fentanyl on skin, drops dead." Absorption through skin can be an actual thing for some drugs (it's how nicotine patches work, for example), but if it's that deadly, how can it be manufactured, delivered, and eventually used? Even assuming clean-room procedures. By the time the cops find it, it's already out in the open. Why doesn't it kill the dealers, too? 1. Admitting It Was B.S. in the First Place This, really, is the most damning banana in the whole bunch: Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, in an interview from Harper magazine in 1994, finally gave up the ghost on the true motives of declaring a War on Drugs. Even as admissions of guilt go, it was pretty stark. He told the interviewer, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black (people), but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.” You mean... the government can't be trusted? They'll just make shit up to discredit people they don't want having any power or influence? No way! (Of course, Ehrlichman might have been lying, too...) |
| As an Aquarius, I think astrology is nonsense. Eight out of 10 millennials know demographics are horseshit Millennials are no more similar to each other than they are to Gen X or Gen Z, so it’s time to leave this lazy approach to segmentation behind. Yes, this article caters to my confirmation bias. I'm going to give it a look anyway. I've ranted about this sort of thing before, but it's been a while, and this is a new article. The Pew Research Center is one of the most influential and important places for social science on the planet. They do seem to garner respect, but I'm sure someone can come up with an example of why they can't be trusted. But one thing it won’t be doing any more is using generational terms like ‘millennials’ or ‘Gen Z’ to describe different cohorts of society. Which won't stop the rest of the world from doing so. “The question isn’t whether young adults today are different from middle-aged or older adults today,” Parker notes. “The question is whether young adults today are different from young adults at some specific point in the past.” I'm... well, I'm not sure that's entirely true. It's likely a quote out of context, but it seems to me that you want to know, for example, who buys Cheerios, parties with the Druids, or votes Libertarian, broken down by age. You'd also want to see how these things evolve over time, of course. It's mostly the arbitrary cutoff dates between generations that I've objected to. Another problem for Pew is that the United States has seen significant population change during recent decades. When studies do pick up statistically different attitudes and behaviours across generational cohorts, the likely explanation is as much down to its different racial and ethnic constitution rather than any fundamental age related issue. The "likely" explanation? If only there were a place that could do polls and run them through statistical analysis to verify this claim. This part, though, I can accept: Finally, Pew is uncomfortable with the gigantic swathes of society that are suddenly lumped together under a single arbitrary identifier when names like millennials are used. “A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years,” Parker explains in her article. “As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behaviour within generations.” It's one thing to claim, for example, that Millennials as a group tend to buy organic produce (I don't know if this is true or not, but bear with me). You slice up groups by age and see that, of all the arbitrary age cohorts, Millennials buy more organic produce than other generations. One problem comes in when you get people who don't understand statistics and assume that, upon meeting a Millennial, that individual therefore buys organic produce. Another problem is that if you're a Millennial in that scenario and you see "Millennials buy organic produce!" then you may be tempted to do so yourself to fit in. This is like when you find out you're a Taurus, and what Tauri supposedly act like, and you suddenly start playing up the stubborn aspects of your personality. Most of our industry constantly talks about Gen Z, Gen X and their current obsession – millennials – as if these segments are well supported by data and instantly ready for target marketing. But so much of this stuff lacks any legitimate foundation. There are three enormous issues with using demographics to segment markets. The rest of the article deals with these "three enormous issues," and while it's targeted to marketers (now there's an example of recursion if there ever was one), the arguments are worth looking at. When I was young, "laziness" wasn't attributed to youth, as it has been throughout pretty much every other period of human history, but to being part of "Generation X." Well, Gen-X is in their 40s to 50s now, and it's Gen-Z who's called "lazy" and "slackers," because, well, they're young and it's the entire purpose of older people to call younger people lazy, and lie about how much more hard-working and conscientious we were. I can only reply with the rallying cry of my own supposed cohort, Gen-X: "Meh. Whatever." |
| I would accompany this article from The Conversation with a significant amount of sodium chloride, but it's still interesting speculation. In evolutionary terms, the human population has rocketed in seconds. The news that it has now reached 8 billion seems inexplicable when you think about our history. No, it seems inevitable when you think about our history. There's a graph at the link showing population over time. Unsurprisingly, it's a classic exponential hockey-stick. Neanderthals were more inclined to stay in their family groups and were warier of new people. If they had outcompeted our own species (Homo sapiens), the density of population would likely be far lower. For homework, explain why this is a fallacious argument. Hell, I'll save you the trouble: to outcompete sapiens, they would have had to be more social, and thus increase their population density. But okay, let's play pretend. The reasons for our dramatic population growth may lie in the early days of Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago. Genetic and anatomical differences between us and extinct species such as Neanderthals made us more similar to domesticated animal species. Large herds of cows, for example, can better tolerate the stress of living in a small space together than their wild ancestors who lived in small groups, spaced apart. These genetic differences changed our attitudes to people outside our own group. We became more tolerant. I know this is going to raise objections from the down-on-humans brigade, but remember, "more tolerant" doesn't have to mean "very tolerant." We still have in-groups and out-groups. The article then goes into what it says in the headline, speculating (based on data, not wild guesses) how things might be different. I don't find this particular speculation useful, but it still sheds light on the differences between the two human species... assuming, of course, that inferences of their behavior based on archaeology and other disciplines are correct. As an aside, "species" can be a fuzzy concept. Usually it's meant to describe non-interbreeding populations. But, clearly, sometimes sapiens and neanderthalensis did interbreed. The whole designation thing is over my head, but for general purposes, calling them different species is good enough for communication; I'll let biologists hammer out the details. The more technology humankind develops, the more our use of it harms the planet. Intensive farming is draining our soils of nutrients, overfishing is wrecking the seas, and the greenhouse gases we release when we produce the products we now rely on are driving extreme weather. And yet, despite discussing both population and technology, the article stops short of what, to me, is a blindingly obvious connection there. The vast majority of human population increase has occurred over the last 200 years, roughly coinciding with the industrial revolution. But that's not a coincidence. Advances in science have increased average life spans and reduced infant mortality, while at the same time fouling the environment. On the surface, reduced mortality seems like a good thing, but the increase in population requires extraction and processing of ever more resources, feeding back onto the "fouling the environment" part. "Intensive farming" is needed to feed the 8+ billion. So is "overfishing." It's not "the more technology humankind develops, the more our use of it harms the planet;" it's "the more people there are, the more we need that technology to survive and make more people." So far, the benefits of technology have outweighed the downsides. But I doubt that will persist. I feel like the article veers way too close to romanticizing the Neanderthal, kind of a "noble savage" conceit. Sure, maybe the ecosystem would be in better shape had they been more successful, from an evolution perspective, than we were, but that's like speculating about whether dinosaurs would have ended up building rockets if that asteroid hadn't fucked things up for them. |
| Full disclosure: I don't "know" most of these authors. Should You Write What You Know? 31 Authors Weigh In From Toni Morrison to William T. Vollman, an Age-Old Question Answered Yes, sometimes I feature articles that are actually about writing. This is one of them, and I'm linking it because I still see arguments about "write what you know." Hell, I participate in them. Everyone who has ever taken a writing class or read a craft book has heard this piece of writing advice—even if only to have it instantly denounced. First, we should understand that this is what I'd call subjective advice, as opposed to objective advice (an example of which would be "send your ms to lots of different publishers"). (Whether that's good objective advice or not, I don't know.) Obviously, I'm not copying all 31 opinions, just the ones I have something to say about. Nathan Englander: I think what’s behind “write what you know” is emotion. Like, have you known happiness? Have you ever been truly sad? Have you ever longed for something? That's a take I hadn't considered. I guess if it works, it works. But I think that, for example, a childhood longing for a candy bar is quite different from an adult longing for meaningful companionship. Kazuo Ishiguro: It encourages people to write a dull autobiography. And I feel like this is missing the point. It's like the conceit that runs through the movie The Invention of Lying: Since no one can lie, and fiction is lying, the only entertainment available is stodgy guys sitting in chairs retelling the facts of history. Few would actually want that, so it's a stretch to think that this is what "write what you know" implies. Ursula K. Le Guin: I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them. I got my knowledge of them, as I got whatever knowledge I have of the hearts and minds of human beings, through imagination working on observation. I had to include this one because a) I respect LeGuin a lot; and b) we needed a science fiction/fantasy take on "write what you know." Zoë Heller: In fact, the injunction is only to know; the business of how you come by your knowledge is left quite open. And this one gets closer to my own opinion on the subject, which I'll share in a bit. Toni Morrison: You Don’t Know Anything I know that this assertion is postmodernist, anti-intellectual bullshit. Dan Brown: Make the writing process a learning process for you. I felt physical pain upon realizing that his advice is also close to my own thoughts on the subject. Physical pain, because I've never really liked Dan Brown's writing. I read Da Vinci Code when it came out, but, just before that, I read a (purportedly) nonfiction book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail. And it was clear to me that Brown had read it as well, and "wrote what he knew" from reading that book. Harry Crews: It’s true that a writer is told by a lot of stupid people, like English teachers... And I stopped reading there. If you can't respect your teachers, who can you respect? Gore Vidal: I'm not going to quote his actual words here, but I encourage you to go and read them because I love a good takedown of the snobbish "literary" genre. P.D. James: There are all sorts of small things that you should store up and use, nothing is lost to a writer. Not really sure who this is, but this bit touches on something I've been saying all along, which is that, in general and especially for a writer, there's no such thing as useless knowledge. Ernest Hemingway: You throw it all away and invent from what you know. I should have said that sooner. That’s all there is to writing. Appropriately, this is one of the shortest opinions on the list. But, all due respect to Papa, mine is shorter (we're getting to that...) Jillian Weise: I was told to write poems that cost me something to write them. They cost me a lot. I'm no expert on poetry, but this tracks. There's a lot more at the link, pro and con and in between. But I can't help but feel that this wouldn't even need to be a debate if, instead of "write what you know," we all followed the Rule of Waltz: Know what you write. (See? Shorter even than Hemingway.) |
| I'm used to reaching back in time for these retrospective entries, but this one also reaches out into space: "The Big Not So Empty" The link to the original article is broken, but by poking around on the Nautilus site, I found it with a different URL.This is good, because it's an exceptionally long articles, with fun and helpful cartoon illustrations, all focused on the goal of explaining to non-technical audiences what "space" is. I have no need to rehash what I wrote back then, but one of the reasons I revisit these older entries is to see if anything's changed. And in this case, it has, sort of. Near the end of the article, we have this: And the exciting thing is that we are closer than ever to being able to probe these extreme deformations of space. Whereas before we were deaf to the ripples of gravitational waves moving through the universe, we now have the ability to listen in to the cosmic events that are shaking and disturbing the goo of space. Perhaps in the near future we will understand more about the exact nature of space and get at these deep questions that are literally all around us. I remembered seeing something new about gravitational waves recently, so I went and looked for it, and, by cosmic coincidence, this was published just last week. Now, I'm not going to do my usual commentary on that. I'm not averse to spouting off on shit I know little about, as you know, but in this case, this stuff is so far above my pay grade that I don't even know how to respond. I'm told that physicists are deliriously happy about these findings, though, and that link I just posted seems to do a pretty good job of explaining the significance. In brief, as I understand it, they found a way to detect incredibly tiny space-bending gravitational ripples from events in the early universe. Which is cool, and I think it's a nice complement to how the JWST is giving us better (photonic) images of stuff from the early universe. I've even heard that they recently confirmed that time moved at a different rate back then, which... well, let's just say I need to make a run to the liquor store later to deal with all of this. Just one last thing to note, which is more about the ambiguity of the English language: "space" in this context refers to, well, everything we know about, including, say, the space between things here on Earth, while "space" can also mean "the stuff outside the Earth's atmosphere." Outer space. Similarly, though more obscurely, you can sometimes see the term "gravity waves" in relation to weather phenomena , but that has nothing to do with the gravitational waves these science articles speak of. |
| Despite what airy nonsense your life coach may have spouted, it is not possible for one person to change the world. And even if it were possible (which it's not), there's always the chance that no one would notice. Link is from Cracked, so don't try to use this in any world-changing scholarly papers. 5. Rosalind Franklin I agree she got dicked over (pun intended), but I suspect more people recognize her contribution now. Before 1953, though, the structure of DNA was unknown, until the now ubiquitous double-helix structure was modeled by James Watson and Francis Crick. If you know any names related to the study of DNA, it’s most likely theirs. To the best of my knowledge, Watson was unrelated to A.G. Bell's Watson, or Sherlock's. Watson and Crick did admit that solving DNA’s structure without the Franklin data would have been “unlikely, if not impossible,” but apparently putting her name at the top of the paper was a step too far. In case you're wondering, this is one reason I say it's impossible for one person to change the world: everyone has been influenced by others, and, in many cases, others have to let themselves be influenced by that person. 4. Ignaz Semmelweis I didn't recognize the name at first, but the thing he did was something I'd heard of. So what was Semmelweis’ incredible, world-changing medical discovery? It was that doctors should maybe start washing their hands. This really was tantamount to heresy at one point. 3. Michael Delligatti When you think of a central figure related to McDonald’s, you might think of the founder, Ray Kroc, or more likely, a fictional and mildly unsettling clown. Kroc founded McDonald's like Musk founded Tesla Motors: in mythology only. You may have assumed the Big Mac was cooked up in some secret burger laboratory deep beneath McDonald’s HQ. In reality, it was Delligatti who suggested a two-patty burger and developed the special sauce, an idea that McDonald’s hated at first. This may be heresy, too, but I've never really liked the Big Mac. I do miss the McDLT, so it's all for the best that it's no longer available. So what did Delligatti get for forever changing the cholesterol levels of the human race? The ultimate bare minimum: a plaque. We all get plaque from eating at McDonald's. 2. Philo Farnsworth If you’re born with a name like Philo Farnsworth, you basically have two viable career paths: some sort of strange preacher, or a brilliant inventor. You forgot "supervillain." I don't feel like copying much of this section; basically, he invented the television. Which, come to think of it, may have caused as much suffering as the Big Mac. (The part that was surprising, to me, was that said invention was nearly 100 years ago.) 1. Henrietta Lacks As with Franklin above, she's more widely known, these days. Unlike Rosalind Franklin, though, it wasn't what she did that was significant (which in no way should diminish her significance). For whatever reason, her cells reproduced at an unbelievable rate, and “HeLa” cells have been used in research ever since. She did finally get a book and a movie in which she was played by Oprah, but she and her relatives got a whole lot of absolutely nothing for years after her death. Played by Oprah? Talk about adding insult to injury. Moral of these stories: sometimes it just doesn't pay to be influential. |
| Here's a liberating take on food. There Is No Such Thing as “Junk” Food Food hierarchies are, in truth, sorting mechanisms. It does not make you a worse person to eat “junk” food, and it certainly doesn’t make you a better person to eat whole grains. Except that food has been linked to morality and virtue-signaling for a long time. When I was in elementary school, I filled out a well-intentioned worksheet that asked me to sort foods into boxes. What you were really learning was that humans like to stick everything into neat little boxes. The worksheet didn’t consider how to feed your child when you’re a single parent working swing shift and a Happy Meal or a frozen pizza is the cheapest and most reliable way to feed your kids, or if the nearest fresh broccoli was an hour’s drive away. And this is the often-overlooked dirty little secret of food snobbery: eating foods considered healthy is expensive and time-consuming. Being able to do so is a product of privilege. My understanding that certain foods were so “bad” they were junk was complicated by the peculiar diet culture of the ’90s, which convinced me that cheese and avocados were high-fat and to be avoided, bananas had too much sugar and should also be avoided, but Starburst Jellybeans (lot of sugar, sure, but fat-free!) or Snackwell Devil’s Food Cookie Cakes (cake...but diet?) were somehow okay. I've ragged on nutrition science in here before; no need to repeat it. I entered my 20s with deeply illogical ideas about food and nutrition, which became even more contradictory when injected with the sustainability gospel of Michael Pollan, anti-GMO politics, the locavore movement, and the rise of “fast casual” cuisine. But the problem isn't just nutrition science; it's that, as evidenced by the anti-GMO bit, people will believe whatever suits them. Some people, regardless of age, need more salt in their diet, not less; some people need more fat, or caffeine, or dairy, or none at all. And others just need more things in their lives that are delicious—that remind them of the true bounty and delights of being human. And really, as a hedonist, that last part resonates strongly with me. Food isn't penance. Food isn't medicine. Food isn't virtue. Food is about not being hungry, and, ideally, enjoying life. People weren't nearly as neurotic about food before we got all these choices. But now that we have them, sure, it's good to be healthy, but not at the expense of eating cardboard. The article goes on to link food snobbery with racism and classism, and it makes some good points, but it's tangential to my purpose in linking this. This is, to me, the important bit, right at the end: Contrary to what those worksheets might tell us, food does not have moral character, and consuming it does not influence or infect our own character. Food is delightful, and food is fuel, and food is culture. It becomes shadowed with shame—often, the sort that can distort our eating habits for years to come—not when we eat it, but when we restrict it, and attempt to spread that shame to others who do not. I noticed this in particular with the low-carb or gluten-free fads. There has not been a food that I'm aware of in the entire history of agriculture that has been more culturally significant than bread. It is symbolic to many religions, but even just culturally, it's something that brings people together. I can't help but feel that the attempts to demonize it are just another way to separate us from each other, and give us yet another thing to feel shame about—shame that can only be ameliorated if you Buy My Product. |
| Of course the bicycle moved us forward. I've never seen one with a reverse gear. The article, from Mental Floss, is from 2016, but I doubt there have been massive changes in our knowledge of transportation history since then. I'm entirely too lazy to retype section headers. They're in ALL CAPS. 1. IT REVOLUTIONIZED HOW PEOPLE HOOK UP, A CENTURY BEFORE TINDER. I've been on the internet long enough to remember when it was all, "Don't hook up with anyone from the internet." Now it's "Only hook up with someone from the internet." The effect on romance was profound: Long-distance courtships were possible. This section has a distinctly British slant, so remember: In England, 100 miles is a long way; in the US, 100 years is a long time. 2. IT SHOWED THE WORLD THAT AFRICAN AMERICANS BELONGED. And this section is slanted American, like people of African ancestry didn't live anywhere else that there were bicycles. 3. IT GAVE US THE NATION'S FIRST PAVED HIGHWAYS. Having studied transportation engineering, I knew this. It's ironic now, as automobile drivers tend to think the road belongs to them and them alone, and many of them treat cyclists as annoying obstacles. 4. IT DEMONSTRATED THAT SPACE IS SAFE FOR ASTRONAUTS. In 1973, the Skylab space station crew became the first people to pedal in space (on stationary bikes). That's a stretch. 5. IT EMANCIPATED WOMEN FROM THE HOME (AND THEIR WARDROBE). Not only did women love the freedom, they loved the dress, ditching heavy skirts for bloomers to work the pedals. I've made jokes before about how if life made sense, it'd be men's bikes that didn't have the ball-racking upper tie bar. But the historical reason for the design of chick bikes has nothing to do with genitalia, but with fashion. 6. IT HELPED HUNDREDS OF JEWS ESCAPE THE HOLOCAUST. Bartali helped Jews escape the country, carrying counterfeit identity papers in the frame and handlebars of his bicycle on “training rides.” If stopped by police for search, he’d ask them not to touch his “specially calibrated” bicycle. These days, that would result in the cops disassembling the bike into its component parts, bending every single resulting piece, beating the rider for resisting arrest, and then charging the dude for their time. At least, that's how it would work here in the US. 7. IT BROUGHT LIFE-SAVING CINEMA TO PEOPLE IN REMOTE PLACES. In 2013, a charity wanted to screen educational films in Malawi to spread info on HIV prevention, modern farming, and other issues. But most villages lacked electricity or gas for a generator. Enter Colin Tonks of Electric Pedals, who built a pedal-driven cinema that fits in two backpacks and weighs less than 40 pounds—perfect for toting to remote spots. Seems to me there might be easier ways to get the information there, but what do I know? 8. IT CREATED THE PERFECT URBAN AMBULANCE. In 1993, London ambulance driver Tom Lynch was stuck in traffic on his way to a call when he started thinking about how much faster he could get there on a bike. More importantly, bikes make great urban pizza delivery vehicles. 9. IT PROVIDES CHEAP, CLEAN POWER FOR LOCAL ECONOMIES. "Cheap" only if labor is "cheap." 10. IT HELPS ALLEVIATE SYMPTOMS OF PARKINSON'S DISEASE. In 2003, biomedical engineer Jay Alberts was on a high-effort weeklong tandem ride with a friend who has Parkinson’s when the friend’s symptoms nearly disappeared. Alberts then studied a group of Parkinson’s patients who rode at an intense 80-90 rpm clip on a tandem bike, and had a 35 percent improvement in symptoms. What a dilemma: do hard work, or continue to experience symptoms. I'm honestly not sure which would be worse. |
| Well, that holiday's over. Hope everyone still has all their fingers. If not, I'm going to laugh, especially because people all around me were setting off illegal fireworks last night—some of them not quitting until 2am. No, it didn't keep me awake; I was awake anyway, listening for the siren sounds of screams and the screaming sounds of sirens. No luck either way, dammit. Well... one distant scream, but no follow-up siren. Mean? Maybe. But at least I'm not faking positivity. While this article is from almost exactly four years ago, I haven't seen much improvement in attitudes, so here it is. Our culture's smiley insistence on feeling happy 24/7 now has its own name: "toxic positivity." And this happiness pressure has started to raise concern among mental health experts. As I am not a mental health expert, I'm not concerned; I'm just annoyed. More annoyed than by the aforementioned fireworks last night. I reached out to Dr. Allison Niebes-Davis, a licensed clinical psychologist, for her professional definition of the problem: "Toxic positivity is an oversimplified approach to difficult stuff. It insists on people only seeing the bright side, that they be happy, cheerful, and positive. Phrases like 'Just think positive,' 'It’ll get better,' and 'Everything happens for a reason' are frequent offenders." Several sayings are guaranteed to light my fuse, and those are three of them. Mostly that last one. If I punch you in the mouth after saying it, there was a reason for that. Actually, "It'll get better" doesn't bug me that much, but "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" does (it's demonstrably untrue). As for "just think positive," I'm positive that we're doomed, and this is just more evidence of that. As Dr. Niebes-Davis explains to Romper, "Toxic positivity minimizes painful emotions and downplays difficult experiences. It sends a subtle but clear message that there’s no space for sadness or tough stuff. When we insist on only looking at the positive, we shame people for struggling, and as a result, they often feel isolated and alone." I forgot to mention, in case you haven't clicked yet, that the site I linked above is unfortunately named Romper. Below I point out the top three ways it sneaks its rainbow-patterned way into your day. Because it's Romper, and not Cracked, the list actually counts up from 1. 1. Social Media I avoid social media not just because of toxic positivity, but also its opposite. Occasionally, something good will happen there, but those rare instances usually sneak out into my attention sphere anyway. Anyone who's spent any time on Insta is well aware of the endless #positivevibes posts, usually featuring someone in a stylish white fedora hanging off the back of a yacht somewhere off the coast of Croatia. (Guess what, Genius Fedora Woman? It's pretty easy to be positive in that sitch.) See? Money can buy happiness. Take stock of your emotional state post-scroll. Or—and I know I'm fighting an uphill battle here—avoid social media entirely, or at least curate your feeds better. Or whatever it is you do these days. As of this writing, the former has gotten easier for Twatter, which to me is a positive thing. 2. Happiness Merch I'm detecting a tendency on the author's part to use cutesy abbreviations, which is also setting me off like a Fourth of July firecracker. There currently seems to be a surplus of products featuring not-so-subliminal messages of positivity. Happiness is clearly #onbrand. Not to mention number signs. If Twutter goes away, will pound signs? Actually, the name of the symbol is "octothorpe," which I only mention because that's an awesome word. Maybe you just lost your job. Or your dog. Or your mind. You certainly don't want to "Smile!" You probably want to go home and shatter your "Good Vibes Only" mug with ball-peen hammer. And if so, well that is a perfectly normal and healthy response! As Dr. Niebes-Davis wisely reminds us: "Some things just aren’t happy. Some situations just can’t be made shiny." The phrase is, "you can't polish a turd." Or something to that effect. 3. Friends IRL Get better friends. How are they when you try to open up about your struggles? Are they able to just sit with you and your feelings? Or do they immediately try to talk you out of your emotions, and put a "positive" spin on your pain? "I don't want to be around negative people, so either cheer up, or go away until you do." While trying to "stay positive" can of course be a good and sometimes necessary strategy for getting up and plowing through yet another day as a mortal being scurrying over a dying rock floating through space... I'm just including this bit because I love the phrasing, which makes up for the precious abbreviations earlier. And that's what's it's all about, right? The positive and the negative. As writer Harlan Ellison so wisely mused: "For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned." All due respect to the great Harlan Ellison, I think the great philosopher duo of Beavis and Butt-Head put it more succinctly: "If everything was cool, and nothing sucked, how would we know what was cool?" |
| Clearly, it's sorcery. Or maybe ghosts. No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air Do recent explanations solve the mysteries of aerodynamic lift? Actually, what "no one can explain" is why I fell for the clickbait headline. Maybe because I expected better from Scientific American. In December 2003, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first flight of the Wright brothers, the New York Times ran a story entitled “Staying Aloft; What Does Keep Them Up There?” One could say it doesn't much matter, because it's obvious that they do stay up. The vast majority of the time, anyway. But that's not science. This is like the old nonsense about how bumblebees can't fly (spoiler: they actually can). To answer it, the Times turned to John D. Anderson, Jr., curator of aerodynamics at the National Air and Space Museum and author of several textbooks in the field. Okay, I can accept those credentials, for now. What Anderson said, however, is that there is actually no agreement on what generates the aerodynamic force known as lift. “There is no simple one-liner answer to this,” he told the Times. "There is no agreement" is not the same thing as "there is no simple answer." In the interest of full disclosure, I had, for a long time, been under the impression that it's all about Bernoulli's Principle (airfoil causes air above the wing to have higher velocity and thus lower pressure), though it never really seemed to explain everything. And it doesn't. For instance, you know those old planes that could fly upside down? Can't be explained by airfoils alone. By far the most popular explanation of lift is Bernoulli’s theorem, a principle identified by Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli in his 1738 treatise, Hydrodynamica. Told you so. The article goes into this in more depth, of course, but I won't reiterate much of it here. Basically, there are other factors involved as well. The controversy, as far as it goes, seems to be about how much each of those different factors contribute. There's also unstable, chaotic effects at play, which are poorly understood right now. But that's not why I linked the article. I mean, sure, this stuff's fascinating to me, but I don't expect everyone to be riveted by the article or whatever. No, my main points here are to show that a) just because you don't fully understand something doesn't mean it's not real; and b) I'm really annoyed that SciAm would use a headline like that. It fosters distrust in science, something that's pervasive enough in the world right now. "Why should I trust scientists?" I can hear the willfully ignorant saying while clutching a Coors Light. "They can't even explain how airplanes fly!" It's true that science sometimes gets things wrong. I'm not contesting that. It is even more true that without it, we'd get a whole lot more wrong. |
| Finally, some vindication. Good news: America has officially entered its messy-house era. Like I needed to wait for permission. Then, this past week, Marie Kondo herself admitted her house is a mess now that she has kids, a statement that was received like a divine pardon by mothers the world over. I guess the mess finally sparked joy. I’ve been waiting for this change for a long time, not because I love a mess, but because I have always had conflicted feelings about the moral supremacy of cleanliness. I want to make a distinction here that the article kind of glosses over, at least at first: there's a difference between mess and clutter. Mess, to me, is not cleaning up your cat's puke, having pizza boxes lying around, or leaving dirty dishes in the sink. There are reasons to deal with messes that have nothing to do with morality, such as minimizing bug infestations. Clutter, on the other hand, is just stuff being organized in non-traditional ways. The problem comes in when the clutter gets in the way of cleaning up the mess. ...mess is a sign of minds engaged in more important pursuits than tidying up. And that used to be my excuse. We need our ideas about cleanliness to catch up with reality, because they are stuck in the mid-20th century, when most women didn’t work outside the home. We also need to stop using staged real-estate ads as an ideal. Women were responsible for housekeeping for thousands of years, up until just a few decades ago. [citation needed] For two-income families who can’t afford a full-time housekeeper, maybe caring less is where the solution lies. There is, indeed, a great deal of freedom when you finally stop giving a shit. I know there are some readers who bristle at this because it smacks of lowering one’s standards to accommodate masculine laziness. The messiest people I have ever known, not excluding myself, were my first wife, and a woman I dated for a while in the 90s. I freely admit that I'm lazy, but compared to them, I'm a cleanaholic. Valid point! No, it's not, you sexist sow. The neatest person I know was a guy who lived in my spare room for a couple of years. Cleanliness has historically been about well-being, peace, and, to a lesser extent, health. But “clean” and “dirty” are also categories dreamed up by social groups. I'll also point out that there's an element of privilege involved. My parents came of age during the Great Depression. That period, at least in the US, left scars on the people who lived through it. They hated to throw anything away, on the grounds that it might come in handy one day. It's a scarcity mindset. If you keep throwing your stuff out, then you have to keep buying more stuff to replace it later on. This only helps merchants, and I'm pretty sure that's why they keep promoting minimalism: it's basically a marketing ploy. Best to not buy all that shit in the first place, but obviously, the marketers don't go in that direction. Meanwhile, product marketing has convinced us that we have to clean obsessively for our health. I can report from extensive first-hand experience that things can get quite filthy before people are actually getting sick. And that's the other marketing push: buy these cleaning products to improve your life! In conclusion, while I have some issues with the way the article is presented (not just the stereotyped gender roles, but way too many mentions of DikDok), I appreciate that someone else understands the value of not living in a perfectly curated space. It's one less thing to be neurotic about in a society that tries to make us neurotic about everything. |
| As it's now Sunday, I'm going back in time. The destination is late 2021, and it's a response to a 30 Day Blogging Challenge prompt: "Epiphany" I have, before I save this one, 2380 entries in this blog (the max is 3000, so you're stuck with me for a while yet). While I try not to reuse titles, sometimes it happens, especially when I can't be arsed to search for a title before I use it. "Epiphany" was one of them. According to my search, which I did this time, I have three entries with that title (one of them includes a question mark). This annoys me, but I doubt anyone else cares. The prompt in question, in this version of Epiphany, was to "write about a moment in your life that changed the way you view the world." I've had a few moments like that, and it seems I wrote about most of them. The one in particular noted in the linked entry was that whether something is created or destroyed depends on your point of view about it. That insight was an example of itself. My old worldview was destroyed, a new one created. Which one's superior? Obviously, I think the later one is. Others might have a different perspective. Nothing since that epiphany (or since the entry where I wrote about it) has changed my mind about its truth, but, admittedly, it's not something that much affects my life. I continue to consider things like erecting a building to be "creation," while things like bombing that building to be "destruction." Likely, most people do that; it's a rare situation when you have to think about it to decide whether something is created or destroyed. The word itself apparently comes from Greek and Latin, with the original meaning of "reveal." It's now inextricably tied to religion, as Epiphany is a celebration associated with Christmas. (It's either about the coming of the Magi, or the baptism of Jesus, depending on whose church you're talking about.) There's a lesser-known definition that's more broadly religious, meaning some sort of manifestation of the divine, not limited to Christianity. As I'm not religious, though, that's almost never the connotation I mean when I use the word; it's the more secular meaning of a sudden insight, which anyone can have, whether they're religious or not. As I noted in that 2021 entry, nothing is actually created or destroyed, only transformed. As others have noted, the only certainty in the universe is transformation. Well. That, and death and taxes. |
| Going by Eastern Daylight Saving Time, there's a full moon coming up on July 3. The next one occurs on August 1, and the one after that, August 30. There has already been media hype about the third one being a Blue Moon. As I've noted before, repeatedly, and with little effect, this is incorrect. The Blue Moon is not the second full moon in a calendar month. No, I will not stop pointing that out, and you're going to see it again from me as we inevitably get more articles about it in the near future (there's already another one in my queue). But today's article is, in part, related to a different label, a more recent one: the "supermoon." How Far Is the Moon From Earth? And Everything Else You Need To Know About Our Glorious Natural Satellite What is it actually made of? How far is the moon from Earth? And is there really water up there? I don't actually have a problem with the label "supermoon." Maybe it's a bit overhyped; all it means is that the full moon occurs near perigee, so the familiar cratered face seems a bit larger than usual. Here’s everything you could possibly want to know about the moon. Nonsense. There's always more to learn. How Did the Moon Form? Pick a culture, and they probably have a story about that. The most commonly held theory for the moon’s creation is known as the “Giant Impact Hypothesis.”...A NASA study from 2019, for instance, cast doubt on the Giant Impact Theory. Specifically, scientists couldn’t find enough of a large group of Earth elements in the moon, even though the moon should contain them, per the Giant Impact Theory. See? More to learn. How Long Does It Take the Moon to Orbit Earth? One month, duh. That's why we call it a month. But not the mostly arbitrary months of the Gregorian calendar. It takes a little over 27 days—27.322, to be exact. Coincidentally, it also takes the moon 27 days to rotate on its own axis. That's not "coincidence." Coincidence is that we're around at a time when the moon and sun are roughly the same apparent size in the sky. The moon is tidally locked; that's physics. The moon’s orbit of Earth follows what scientists call an elliptical path, shaped more like an oval than a circle. So while we can’t see the moon spinning, we can see it change in size. It’s just a matter of perspective, but it reflects how the moon interacts with Earth. When the moon is farthest away from Earth, scientists refer to that as the “apogee,” and when it is closest, it’s at its “perigee.” Ugh. Everyone calls it an elliptical path, not just scientists. I feel obligated to point out that there is some variation in the face the moon presents to us; this is called "libration" (okay, that one's mostly scientists). So, sometimes, we can see a little more of one edge or the other. How Far Away Is the Moon From Earth? This is the bit that's related to the "supermoon" concept. At its apogee, it’s 252,088 miles (405,696 kilometers) from Earth. At its perigee, it’s closer, at 225,623 miles (363,104 kilometers). Perigee occurs once per orbit. It's only when the full moon happens close to perigee that we get the supermoon thing, but really, it's always slightly bigger at some point once a month. That works out to an average of 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers). That’s around 60 times the radius of Earth, or enough distance for 30 Earths in between. I read somewhere (can't be arsed to look it up now) that it's also enough space for all the other planets in between. Which in reality would be catastrophic; this is just a size comparison. How Does the Moon Affect the Tides? ...seriously? Okay, sure, the actual physics is a bit complicated (it took me a while to fully grok why there's a tidal bulge on the opposite side of the Earth, as well as the moon-side, and the article glosses right over that bit), but I thought it was common knowledge that the tides are caused by the moon. What’s the Dark Side of the Moon? A classic rock album by Pink Floyd. A classic rock album by Pink Floyd. I TOLD YOU SO. But seriously, there’s no actual dark side of the moon, because the moon rotates just like Earth; as the moon rotates around Earth, it also rotates around the sun. This hidden region is better known as “the far side of the moon.” Uggggghhhhh. I mean, okay, not completely wrong, but just wrong enough to annoy me. Just like half of Earth always faces away from the sun, giving it a "dark side" (we call it "night"), the same is true for the moon, which is how phases work. There is a bit of a complication, because when the dark side faces Earth (near the new moon), it's lit up by reflected sunlight from Earth. Earthshine. (I have to wonder if our future lunar colonists will make illicit hooch and call it earthshine.) There is a dark side, but it cycles through every month. But yeah, don't confuse the far side (not the comic, but the hidden face of the moon) with the dark side... except during a full moon, when they're basically the same. Or, as is noted on the aforementioned album, which I've quoted here multiple times: "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark." Which it is. From a certain point of view. |
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