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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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| Today's article, from Atlas Obscura, covers a subject of major world importance. Everything You Need to Know About the True Origins of the Everything Bagel  There’s a lot of history in every bite. Somehow (I think due to well-meaning gift-givers), I have not one, not two, but three containers of Everything Bagel Seasoning on my spice rack. I have never, not even once, used any. When I think about what to put them on, I'm always at a loss. Other breads? Somehow, that just doesn't work. Vegetables? Blasphemy. Meats? Heresy. And when I want an actual everything bagel, there are lots of bakeries around here that prepare them; some of them are even good. The everything bagel is the king of bagels. On this there should be no argument. With that kind of diversity, I think we're past hierarchical power structures. In the same way that it combines all of the key bagel toppings—sesame and poppy seeds, dried garlic and onion, and coarse salt—it’s also a combination of ancient traditions and new fads, Eastern ingredients and Western techniques. Not to mention its topologically interesting toroidal shape. With cream cheese and lox, it creates, more or less, the perfect bite. Dammit! Now I'm hungry. And I just had an everything bagel with lox and cream cheese yesterday. There are, however, arguments about who invented the everything bagel, and none of them are particularly compelling. This seems to be a trend in food (and drink). Several New Yorkers have staked their claims as its inventor... One thing we can say with some certainty is that it had to have been introduced in New York City. Let’s be honest, it’s probably not possible to have “invented” the concept of putting several different existing bagel toppings on a bagel. I imagine this is akin to putting pepperoni, pineapple, crab meat, ghost peppers, and figs on a pizza and claiming to have "invented" it. ...if there are five popular bagel toppings, it is fairly obvious to make a bagel with all of those ingredients. That’s not invention. Maybe not, but an everything bagel is obviously superior to my purely imaginary pizza creation up there. But there is one element of the everything bagel that is invention, and that’s the name. “Everything” is the accepted name for a fairly specific combination of toppings: It is not a “combo bagel” or a “spice-lover’s bagel” or, as the Canadians might call it, an “all-dressed bagel.” It is an everything bagel, and someone had to come up with that piece of clear, descriptive branding. Especially since it's clearly not "everything." By his own and most other accounts, that person was David Gussin. Around 1979 or 1980, he says, he was a teenager working at Charlie’s Bagels in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, New York. If you're curious, that neighborhood is located very close to JFK Airport. He was doing typical teenage job stuff: cleaning, working the counter—and cleaning the oven, where excess bagel toppings accumulated when they fell off. “One day instead of throwing them out like I usually did, I gave them to Charlie and said, ‘Hey, make a bagel with these, we’ll call it the everything bagel.’ It wasn’t that big of a deal; we weren’t looking to make the next big bagel. Charlie was probably more interested in what horses he was going to bet on.” It's also not far (unless there's traffic, which there always is) from Belmont Park, where they race horses. Soon, a shop across the street started selling their own everything bagels, and word slowly spread. If you're skeptical about having two bagel places across the street from each other without one of them going out of business, well, all I can say is: Welcome to Queens. But there’s more to this story. What exactly is an everything bagel? And more importantly, why did it catch on? I think we know the answers. This article has already described the "what," and the "why" is self-evident: it is delicious. The article proceeds, regardless. In 2009, I moved to San Francisco after spending my entire life in the Northeast. At the coffee shop in my new neighborhood, I ordered an everything bagel. It came with sunflower seeds on it. I appreciate California, but they cannot do bagels. Or pizza. People have strong feelings about the right and wrong ways to prepare and consume certain foods, particularly beloved or traditional ones. Really? I hadn't noticed. I won't rehash the article's short description of the evolutionary origins of the bagel, but it's worth reading. In New York, bagels first gained widespread attention thanks to the sometimes vicious bagel strikes of the 1940s and 1950s. I'd heard rumors about these before. Dark times indeed. Glad I hadn't been born yet. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the bagel went national, thanks to a few innovations: machine-rolling, freezing, and pre-slicing. The Lender’s bagel combined all three of those processing conveniences and blew up the entire bagel industry. Suddenly the entire country was awash in bagels—and not particularly good ones. I want to emphasize that last bit. Lender's bagels are edible, and better than the abominations you can get at McDonald's, but that's the best I can say about them. The room-temperature variety is marginally better than the frozen one, but I don't know what preservatives they use to make that possible. I'd wager the orginals were pretty good, as Mr. Lender was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. But now it's just another processed, mass-produced food product. Back to the point of the article, which is the toppings. I won't go into that, but it's enlightening. To summarize, the toppings came from many and varied locations, as befits a thing invented in New York City. So who invented the everything bagel? An entire culinary tradition spanning continents and thousands of years. That, and David Gussin, since no one called it an everything bagel before he did. Probably. An actual new invention is rare. But sometimes, even an improvement on an existing invention can change the world. |
| I probably overuse parentheses (but I don't care). "Best" in this case (and so many others) is entirely subjective, but okay. I love a good aside. I live for literary intrusion. I want comments on my comments, discursive thinking, footnotes. Footnotes can be a massive pain in the ass, especially in traditionally printed works without benefit of hyperlinks. What I’m saying is this: I can’t get enough parentheticals. So on the watery occasion of it being parenthesis-master Vladimir Nabokov’s birthday (April 22), I have collected few of my favorites... Like many articles I feature, this one's a bit old, over two years. But it's unlikely any truly great parentheticals have been introduced since then (especially here in my blog). Vladimir Nabokov We know this guy was a great writer, at least by lit-fic genre standards, but the article author's explanation of why the particular excerpt achieved greatness is (in my opinion) worth reading. Virginia Woolf No. Elisabeth Bishop Who? ...seriously, though, another good analysis, which I think would be more clear to me had I read the entire poem (which I haven't, and won't). Jamaica Kincaid To be honest with you, I could have chosen almost any sentence from A Small Place for this list. The book positively bristles with parentheses; Kincaid uses them to explain, to criticize, to condescend, to name, to emphasize, to speak the unspoken, to distance herself and at the same time, to implicate herself—reflecting her dual relationship to Antigua (both native and non-resident) and to the text. Well, that's a ringing endorsement for not reading Kincaid. Just because I overuse parentheses doesn't mean I tolerate it when other writers do. I also have a problem with repeating words too often, and it grates on my very last nerve when other writers do that, too. e.e. cummings ah,yes—the verysoul of pretentiousness Okay, yes, I'm biased; I'd rather slog through 10 bad science fiction books than one snobby lit-fic tome. But I think I get what the article is saying about parentheses, and I think we can all benefit from (at the very least) reading this article. |
| Time for another entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]: Strength Interesting word, strength. You don't get too many clusters of four consonants in English; twelfth and angst provide two other examples. Extend them to plurals and you can get five consonants in a row. Together with the three-consonant initial cluster in "strength," you get a strange word indeed: seven consonants with one vowel. There's apparently an archaic word, strengthed, which holds the record, but no one uses that anymore. Apparently we started using "strengthened" instead, giving it two syllables. Some say that the word "rhythm" is the longest consonant cluster in English, but as the "y" acts as a vowel there, I disagree. I'd also argue that the "-thm" cluster there contains a hidden schwa. We use these words often enough that their oddities barely register. As for the concept of strength itself, well, you could say the word does some heavy lifting. That is, you could say it if you wanted people to yeet tomatoes at you. In its most common usage, it refers to a person's physical power, as in how much weight you can curl or press or whatever. It can also refer to mental fortitude, though; and it's not always about muscular or mental power, but often it refers to the amount of stress an inanimate object can take before it snaps. The dictionary definitions of strength generally mention that it's "the quality of being strong" or some such. Which, to me, illustrates one of the problems with dictionaries; you have to also look up "strong." Any language (as opposed to translation) dictionary is entirely recursive. What does recursive mean? Let's check the Waltz Dictionary: Recursive (adj.) see recursive It takes a great deal of mental strength to deal with English. It's no wonder so many of us resort to glossolalia. |
| Not even two weeks ago, I mentioned the writer Cormac McCarthy in a quoted passage. Now I hear he's passed on. So I've been racking my brain to come up with another name to drop here, to test my newfound powers. Sadly—or not, depending on your perspective—I can't think of anyone I'd actively wish death upon. Not even that politician you're thinking of right now. As Clarence Darrow (not Mark Twain) once noted, "I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."To clarify, I didn't hate McCarthy (at least not that McCarthy), but he had little impact on my life. I never read his books or, to my recollection, seen any of the movie adaptations. So I had no reason to wish him dead, or to mourn his passing any more than that of any other individual. But I admit to great satisfaction upon hearing of the death of Pat Robertson last week. (Segué!) Today's article, from Cracked, has nothing to do with death, but does touch on the subject of commonly misattributed quotes. When you were young, you learned about how George Washington cut down a cherry tree, Ben Franklin flew a kite in a lightning storm and an apple hit Isaac Newton on the head. True or not (they are not, except maybe, to some extent, the one about Ben), those are "myths" in the original sense: foundational stories, kin to, but much more recent than, stories about Olympians or Asgardians. They reveal more about us than about the original subjects. You cursed your kindergarten teacher for feeding you those myths and gleefully accepted a new teacher — the internet. For me, that took a while, as the internet as we know it was invented maybe 20 years after I was in kindergarten. But obviously the joke here is that there's more misinformation on the internet than in a whole school full of urban-legend-spreading children. 5. Myth: Marie Curie’s Books Are Now Stored in Lead The Story: ...Her notebooks will be radioactive for another 1,000 years, and the French National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, or BNF) stores them in lead boxes. Setting aside that we know from the setup that this is a myth, it's not like radioactivity happens for a set amount of time and then suddenly disappears. Almost everything is radioactive to some degree, and the ionization fades over time. The question is when it's safe enough to handle, and for how long. We were unable to visit Paris this week, but we reached out to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. They asked exactly which publication we represented. The answer must not have impressed them because upon hearing it, they ceased replying. Probably with a muttered "putains américains." Vairon found the lead idea improbable, but he dutifully checked in with BNF, who confirmed that, no, the books are not stored in a lead-lined container, just in plastic, and they’re kept with the other precious archives. Coincidentally, that's exactly how my comic books are stored. Other people may be getting the fact from Wikipedia, which cites 2005’s A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, who is best known for writing funny travel books. Here, the name does give you a good idea of what it is: It’s a pop-sci book with too great a scope to be an authoritative source on anything. You shouldn’t cite it, for the same reason that you shouldn’t cite Cracked listicles or Wikipedia; you should look to their sources, if they have any. Which is what I've been saying. Yes, I do link to Wikipedia on occasion, but it's not like I'm writing scholarly articles here. As for Bill Bryson, I seem to be the only person on the planet who doesn't find him especially funny. 4. Ernest Hemingway Never Wrote ‘For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn’ In fairness, this does sound like something Hemingway could have written. But as the article notes, he did not (or if he did, he plagiarized it). See also my comment above regarding a quote misattributed to the actual American humorist, Mark Twain. 3. Alfred Nobel’s Inspiration for the Nobel Prize Well, you see, Nobel lived next to a church and got tired of the bells ringing when he was trying to take a nap. So when someone finally removed the bell's clapper, Alfred awarded that person the first No-Bell Peace Prize. Yes, I just made that up. Fortunately, we're in no danger of that joke going viral. Anyway, to summarize this section, people think Nobel founded the Prizes in a fit of remorse after inventing something that blows shit up, but that turns out not to be the case. 2. We Have No Proof Alan Turing Killed Himself The Story: Alan Turing saved the world by cracking the Nazis’ Enigma code, and we did him dirty in return. After the war, Britain prosecuted him for homosexuality and forced him into chemical castration. That’s a terrible way to live. Turing ended up killing himself, in a fairy-tale manner: He injected cyanide into an apple then took a bite from the poison apple and died. As the article notes, there is no proof of this. But as apples have figured prominently in many much older myths and stories (see the above bit about Newton, e.g.), it's easy to understand how this story would have staying power. 1. Franz Ferdinand’s Assassin Never Stopped for a Sandwich This one is maybe a bit obscure unless you're a WWI history buff. Most everyone knows about the assassination itself, but the sandwich detail is the possibly obscure part. Regardless of details, though, we humans love a neat, tidy origin story. WWI started with the assassination of Ferdinand. The Trojan War happened because Helen batted her long, silky eyelashes at some Greek dude. The American Revolution started when some colonists polluted Boston Harbor. WWII was a direct result of the Germans bombing a different Harbor. That sort of thing. In reality, wars usually have complex causes that take actual work to tease out. The Story: Gavrilo Princip managed to shoot Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, thanks to a sandwich. Earlier plans to assassinate the guy didn’t go so well, so Princip ducked into a café for a quick bite. By amazing coincidence, Ferdinand’s revised motorcade route passed right outside this café. Princip dashed outside and took his shot, resulting in World War I, and all of the world history that followed. As the article also notes while dispelling this enduring myth: Nevermind whether, if Princip missed that shot, the group backing him would have pulled off the assassination on some other day, or whether some other event would have sent all the dominoes tumbling regardless. I just have to say one more thing about this, to debunk another myth: The sandwich was invented in the 18th century, and by 1914, plenty of people in different parts of the world ate sandwiches, but not in Sarajevo. The sandwich was not invented in the 18th century. The idea of putting other food into bread and eating it together goes back at least to Roman times, and probably earlier. Hell, the sage Hillel reportedly had the idea back in the first century BCE, and I seriously doubt he invented it. That Earl of Sandwich story? Great story, and maybe it's even true (though I'm somewhat disappointed that it was the Earl of Sandwich and not Lord Penistone, which would have given great humor to the question, "Is a hot dog a penistone?") Sliced bread, as we know it, wasn't invented until the 20th century, as I noted in "The Greatest Thing Since..." . Before then, people had to actually use a knife or break the bread with their hands. Saying that Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, invented the food is a bit like saying that Henry Ford invented the automobile—it's more like Ford invented the assembly line that made cars cheaper, thereby popularizing them.We all have to watch out for misinformation, especially when it sounds like it could be true. Such as the false definition of the Blue Moon, which I'm bringing up again (I hear you groaning) because we're scheduled to have another false Blue Moon in this coming August; the actual next Blue Moon is in August of next year. I'm not entirely immune to myth, myself. But at least I try to switch to the facts whenever I find them. |
| Today's article, from Slate, is almost a year old. Still relevant, though, apart from a few details. Why the Myth of the Miserable Lottery Winner Just Won’t Die Actually, most people do just fine with their millions of fresh new dollars. On Friday night, Mega Millions held a drawing for a whopping $1.28 billion jackpot, the third largest in American history. That's the no-longer-relevant detail. Other sources put it at 1.337 billion, which I find amusing because 1337 is computer nerd code for "leet," meaning elite, meaning awesome.Also, it turned out that the ticket was redeemed anonymously, apparently by a two-person partnership. Some lotteries let you do that. Should you ever win the lottery, I highly recommend going that route, tempting as it may be to shout your good fortune from the rooftops. One in eight American adults play the lottery at least once a week, and almost half buy at least one ticket a year. I'm a gambler, but I don't buy lottery tickets. Because I do play other games of chance, I don't heap scorn upon those who do. Everyone has their thing. Unfortunately, even if you bought your annual ticket sometime in the last few days, that winner is probably not going to be you—unless you happen to be that lucky Illinoisan. Obviously, this article was written before the anonymous partnership stepped forward to claim the winnings. Maybe that’s okay, you tell yourself. Don’t lottery winners end up broke and miserable? It would be great to be rich, but I don’t need $1.1 billion. No one "needs" $1.1 billion. I wouldn't turn it down, though. However, the risk/return ratio on a lottery is too high for my taste. Except most lottery winners do not wind up broke, or miserable, or bankrupt. This is the important part of the article, as evidenced by the headlines. Lotteries have been characterized as a tax on people who are bad at math. I can't fully disagree with that, though it's not an absolute certainty that if you play the lottery, you're bad at math. What is probably true is that if you were bad with money before you win the lottery, you'll be bad with it afterward, as well. Money fixes a lot of things, but carelessness isn't one of them. However, in this particular case, everything about the outcome (as reported in the second link above) signals that the winners made good decisions: - Forming a partnership, which most likely clearly spelled out who would get how much of the winnings; - Remaining anonymous; - "Working with professional legal and financial advisors to support the claim process." Stories about regretful lottery winners are trotted out whenever jackpots get big. But as much as jealous losing bettors might want to think that winners’ unfathomably good luck is balanced out by bad, most people who strike it rich this way settle into lives of quiet, comfortable anonymity. You only hear about the bad-luckers, much as you generally only hear about the few planes that crash, as opposed to the millions that take off and land without major incidents. And yet, the myth of the miserable lottery winner persists. The history of this myth reveals a longstanding national discomfort with gambling, and exposes deep-seated cultural beliefs about the connection between wealth, work, and merit. And as with plane crashes, this sort of thing does happen, and with far more frequency than plane crashes. But, again, it's hardly a certainty. From the 18th through the 20th century, newspapers in the United States recounted the misfortunes of lottery winners from across the globe: A baker and his pregnant wife murdered for his winnings by an employee (Paris, France, 1765). A squandered jackpot invested in a failed shipping venture (Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1883). A winner dying of a heart attack immediately upon hearing news of his windfall (Bilbao, Spain, 1934). Isn't that ironic? University of Buffalo sociologist H. Roy Kaplan interviewed around 100 early lottery winners in the mid-1970s and found most of them happy, despite these challenges. Nonetheless, a narrative was born. I can't really blame journalists, though. It's a well-known truism that bad news sells better than good. "Man wins lottery, gets robbed" is inherently more interesting than "Man wins lottery, keeps working, dies happy." Abraham Shakespeare was killed by an acquaintance three years after winning $30 million in 2006. I'm just including this quote because that dude had an awesome name, worthy of a $30 million win. As an aside, yes, I know that the actual payouts are less than the stated payouts. The $30 million (or $1.337 billion or whatever) is the present value of a 20-year annuity; one usually has the option to take it as a lump sum up front, which reduces the payout by the value of the annuity; and taxes (at least in the US) are automatically withheld at delivery. But the stated payout numbers are still relevant, because it's a way to compare the different jackpot sizes directly. Kind of like how a window sticker announces a car's gas mileage at the dealer, but no one expects to actually get those numbers on the road. Their stories are repeated so often not because they are representative but because they are some of only a few examples of regretful winners. The vast majority of jackpot recipients collect their novelty checks at press conferences and are never heard from again. That may not be the best phrasing. "Never heard from again" can also imply someone's gone missing or dead. Research into winners in Germany, Singapore, and Britain found that winning the lottery does, in fact, make people happier, and a 2004 study found that 85.5 percent of winners in Ohio kept working, a sign of how many carried on with their normal, pre-jackpot lives. Some people actually like working. Not me. But some people. I knew a surveyor who had won a lottery; the payout in his case was "only" about a million bucks, but this was back when a million bucks meant something. Money, it seems, really can buy happiness. I joke a lot about how money can't buy happiness, but it can buy beer, and that's good enough for me. But on a more serious note, the way that old cliché is phrased is a problem: it implies that you trade money for happiness (because when you buy something, you trade money for it). This is rarely the case. On the other hand, having money can result in a peace of mind and contentment, which is basically happiness. Why, despite all the available evidence, does the myth persist? What does it mean that this narrative is believed so widely? The article goes on to answer those questions, though not in as detailed a way as I would have liked. But Americans’ enduring love of gambling has long been in conflict with an important element of the nation’s mythology: that the United State is a meritocracy founded on hard work, a place where the smart, the savvy, and the deserving rise to the top, no matter their background. The implication of this ethos is that hard work always yields a just reward. By design, the meritocracy leaves little room for chance. What they leave out is something that is self-evident to me: that this "mythology" is a myth in both senses of the word: a foundational story, and a fiction. It's abundantly clear that hard work does not automatically lead to financial success; if it did, sharecroppers would be millionaires. Plenty of the "smart, savvy, and deserving" are living paycheck to paycheck, while others make their millions, or more, by cheating and dodging (which, again by American foundational ethics, are no-nos). Also, even people who come by their fortunes "honestly" (hard work, etc.) can often lose it all: sports idols, rock stars, business owners, etc. And it's not always drugs or profligate spending that brings them down; here in the US, sometimes it just takes one visit to the emergency room to go bankrupt. I've written in here before about the role of luck in a person's fortune (financial or otherwise); this is no more or less true with regards to lottery winners. A lottery winner is no more or less deserving than a company CEO or a Hollywood superstar. Sure, the latter two presumably put in the work, but they were also lucky enough to have the talent to do whatever it is that made them money. In truth, the concept of "deserving" is a social construct, a story we tell ourselves. And in the end, just as good luck can happen to any of us, so can bad (the difference, of course, is subjective). And we all die in the end, so why not enjoy things while you can? If that means, to someone, playing the lottery and dreaming of a better or easier life, let them have the fantasy. I'd be more focused on how the government is spending their share. You hardly ever see stories about that. |
| Another one for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]... Swimming Ever wonder why you don't have fur? Other apes are covered with their own pelts, rather than those of other animals. And yet, we humans, who manage to survive in some of the world's most extreme climate conditions, don't. Some are hairier than others, of course, and evolution played an especially big joke on men, who, with age, tend to lose the hair on our heads while gaining it in our ears and noses. (Not me, of course. But some other men.) One hypothesis that was presented a while back is called the "aquatic ape hypothesis." Noting that most aquaphilic mammals are mostly hairless, the idea is that, at some point after diverging from our common ancestry with chimpanzees around six million years ago, some proto-humans spent a lot of time swimming. Fur is generally not suited to swimming. Drag, I suppose. The obvious examples are whales, seals, and any number of other aquatic mammals. The same can be said for feathers; hence, penguins. And then, by this theory, we left the water and yet maintained an affinity for it, as illustrated by the popularity of swimming. There are, of course, counterexamples, such as beavers. Maybe polar bears. The problem with the aquatic ape hypothesis, however attractive it may be, is that it's wrong. Well. Probably. Part of the problem is a misunderstanding of how evolution works. Another problem is the old chicken/egg thing: did we become (relatively) hairless because we were swimming, or did we get (relatively) good at swimming because we were hairless? There's little doubt in my mind that lack of fur makes for better swimming (not to mention drying off after), but there are several other possible reasons for the adaptation. Including that it's not a true survival adaptation at all, but a side effect of other genetic changes, or a result of sexual selection, or some combination of factors. What we do know is that, whatever the evolutionary reason, humans have the capacity to learn how to swim, and many do, and derive great pleasure from it, or even from watching other people swim. Not me, of course (though I did learn as a child and can at least still dog-paddle), but other people. And it can provide a survival advantage, especially when you get thrown off the boat for being too pedantic. |
| Today is Throwback Day, and the random number generator pointed me to this short entry from October of 2018: "Amazon" It really is incredibly short, but I still have a few things to say. Upon looking at my Amazon account today, I saw: "Customer since 1997." It was a better internet all around back then. Except for the relative lack of streaming video. I was in my "no TV" phase, because broadcast TV was crap, and I flat-out refused to pay for cable. "Wait, you want me to pay you and still have to watch idiotic commercials? No." That's right. My Amazon account is now old enough to drink. Obviously, it's even older now. Old enough to drink more due to disillusionment with life. Which is ironic, because Drunk Me keeps buying surprises from Amazon for Sober Me, like Doctor Who boxed sets (complete with sonic screwdriver) and lame Halloween costumes. And, once, a breathalyzer. That doesn't happen as much anymore. Not even during the pandemic. Not because I didn't get blitzed, but because Amazon has become difficult enough to figure out when sober, and almost impossible when you're reeling from that seventh shot of tequila. Like, you go and search something simple, like, I don't know, Star Trek bedsheets. You'd expect, when searching for that particular three-word phrase, that it would bounce back a list of Star Trek-themed bed linens. But no. First you're confronted with Sponsored Items that have nothing to do with Star Trek, or sheets. Star Wars shower curtains. PVC plumbing supplies. DVD boxed sets of Survivor. Glitter-infused dildos. Electric drills. Psychedelic pencils. And then, after the barrage of ads, you still get the same eclectic mix of irrelevant (to the search terms) crap, with maybe, three pages in, one solitary offering of Star Trek bedsheets. For a single-sized bed. Which I suppose is fair. I didn't actually search for Star Trek bedsheets while preparing this entry, so I don't know if those particular items come up. I don't want that in my "suggested items" list for the next ten years. It would be different stuff depending on what you've searched for before, which is fine; if you're going to give me ads, at least give me targeted ones. But my point is, there's a whole lot of irrelevant stuff, most of which don't actually have their names in their titles but search engine terms, like, I don't know, Home Generator Maintenance Supplies Maintenance Supplies for Home Generator Electrical Mechanical Bolts Nuts Replacement Parts Oil Pan Drain Plugs. I really should get an ignition interlock breathalyzer for Amazon. I guess I haven't been drunk enough to do that yet. Turns out I didn't have to, because Amazon has made it virtually impossible to browse drunk. And I'm not even going to get into the other issues with the company. I'm only talking about the site's user interface, here. I still use them, because if there's anything I hate worse than ads, it's shopping in an actual store in an actual building. But damn, I miss the days when it was just a bookstore. |
| Carpenters use saws, cooks use knives, surgeons use scalpels. Writers use words, which you would think wouldn't be in the same class of weapon, but at least according to Cracked, you'd be wrong. People like to pretend that the pen is mightier than the sword, but that’s mostly something nerds say right before they get packed into a school trashcan like a musket ball. And we remember that shit when we grow up to make hiring decisions. That doesn’t mean that words don’t have real power though — whether it’s just emotional damage or something that snowballs into a genuinely dangerous situation. We know words have power, though not usually in the same way as, say, a machine gun. 5. A Deadly Joke Wasn't that an Alan Moore Batman/Joker story? Oh, that was The Killing Joke. One of the most famous documented deaths from laughing goes all the way back to Athens, with a philosopher known as Chrysippus of Soli. "Known" may be overstating the case, as this is the first I remember hearing about him. More interestingly, apparently the joke that ended Chrysippus’ life was his own, saving the Greeks from what would have been a highly confusing murder trial. Apparently, Chrysippus, during the Olympiad, saw a donkey eating figs and hit the ass with the stellar retort, “Now give him some pure wine to wash down those figs!” Look, ancient comedy just doesn't hit the same way with modern audiences, unless they're stoned out of their gourds. Regardless, he sent himself into such a disastrous laughing fit that he collapsed and started foaming at the mouth, later dying. I can just imagine a comedy club audience looking on with a mixture of awe and disgust. 4. Thinking An Injured Man Was Gay This one's not so funny. Language is complicated, despite what that bastard Duolingo owl would like you to think. Ah, yes, my personal nemesis. Even a difference of a couple measly letters, run through one language to another, can completely muddle a very important sentence’s meaning. Oh, it's worse than that. I did a whole blog entry a while back on why one probably shouldn't say "Je suis excité" to a French person, unless you're trying to bone each other. He headed to the hospital and attempted to communicate in Norwegian that he was a hemofil, or hemophiliac. Unfortunately, the Danish doctor, with their ever-so-slightly different language, thought the man was simply coming out of the closet as a homofil, or homosexual. The doctor gave him what he must have thought was a very encouraging talk about how there was nothing wrong with that, and he needed no treatment. At least the doctor wasn't bigoted? 3. A Suspected Wizard’s Final Words When we do consider the potentially lethal power of words, we're usually thinking, like, curses or spells, things mostly relegated to folklore, fantasy, and role-playing games (I'm currently in an RPG playing a bard who can injure enemies by punning). The “witch trials” of the old world have a pretty generous name, considering that they relied less on the rule of law and more on people’s flotation and fire resistance. "Trial" had a somewhat different connotation then, closer to what we mean by "trial by fire." But of course, reading the sentence I just quoted, I instantly flashed back to Holy Grail: "And what do we burn, apart from witches?" "So, if she weighs the same as a duck..." Corey, knowing he was fucked either way, but wanting his children to keep their inheritance, stayed quiet until the end, except for his extremely hardcore final words: “More weight.” This doesn't quite fit the theme of the article, but it's still a badass story, true or not. 2. The Word That Launched Two Nukes Technically, anytime someone on a battlefield shouts "Fire!" (and there are no flames in evidence), it generally results in death. But again, it's not the word that kills, but the bullets. Japanese is an incredibly complicated language, with many words having highly nuanced or multiple meanings. Which makes it even more suited to puns than English, from what little I understand of it. I really should learn more Japanese than "hentai" and "sushi." If you were, for example, trying to negotiate a surrender during World War II, you’d think they’d want to make sure all the kanji was correctly crossed and dotted. Or at least do your own English translation? The language wasn't exactly unknown in Japan. The ultimatum demanded an immediate surrender or threatened “prompt and utter destruction.” Suzuki responded with the word mokusatsu. Correctly translated given the situation, he was basically using the old political chestnut of “no comment.” Instead, his response was translated as “silent contempt” or “not worthy of response.” Again, though, it wasn't the word that killed a bunch of people. It was fission. And I can't imagine "no comment" would have been received with any greater diplomacy. 1. The Word That Almost Launched Even More Nuclear Weapons Hey, now, I've been assured that "almost" only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and atomic b- oh. The butchered blurb came from Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, from the end of a speech, which was translated as “we will bury you.” Now forever immortalized in Sting lyrics. In reality, though, he’d been saying something a little less directly murderous, and that was a more common Russian saying: Something effectively translated as “we will be there when you are buried,” or to translate into American euphemisms — “You’re digging your own grave.” Or: “It’s your funeral.” I'm pretty sure that if you dig around (I can't be arsed), you can find many other examples of poor translations, especially of idiomatic language, that started or exacerbated wars. Just as many jokes get lost in translation, and most puns are utterly useless in other languages, threats, too, can be misinterpreted. Or, you know, you can call yourself a jelly doughnut and have the entire world laugh at you. Unless, of course, "Ich bin ein Berliner" led directly to JFK's assassination. I guess we'll never know for sure. |
| Another one for this month's "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]... Plie I don't know everything. This certainly comes as a shock to some of you, but it's true. Usually, when there's a term I've never heard before (like plie) I take advantage of living in a pre-apocalyptic technological society and Google it. But sometimes it's more fun not to. The only clue I have is that the word is in the "dance" section of the JI prompt list. This may also come as a shock, given my name, but I know almost nothing about dance. It exists, and some people (who are not me) take great pleasure in performing or observing it. My ex was (maybe still is; I don't know) a belly dancer, so I'm not completely ignorant of the art form. I know that they have names, usually derived from non-English words, for certain moves. I don't remember any of them, though. I do have some small knowledge of French, which lends names to some aspects of dance (ballet, e.g.) but I don't recognize "plie" from my limited Francophone vocabulary. So, to me, even though my eyesight is pretty good again a year and a half after cataract surgery, it just looks like someone misspelled "pile." Hell, my browser's spellcheck doesn't even recognize the word. It suggests, in this order: Pile, pie, lie, plies, and plied. The latter two are pretty obviously present and past tense, respectively, of the word "ply," which has several meanings. For one, as a noun, it refers to laminated or layered material. Like plywood. Or 2-ply toilet paper. Neither of which is directly related to dance, unless you're doing it on a plywood stage and/or acting like a mummy. Which is something different from a mummer, who can be, in fact, a dancer. I suppose you can get "plies" and "plied" from it, but that would be an odd construction in English. As a verb, one can ply a a trade or profession, or ply someone with questions to try to pry information out of them. There are some less common usages, but they're all shortened from "apply." One other option that doesn't come up in spellcheck suggestions is "plier," which can mean one who plies (as in the above verb) or the never-used singular version of "pliers," a grabbing tool that has two parts, so that when I was a kid, I imagined that "plier" was one branch of a broken pair of pliers (see also "scissors"). English is weird. Despite its use as a prying tool (maybe it should have been called "priers" instead, resemblance to "priors" be damned because there's plenty of those homophones around), the noun form of "ply" comes from the French "plier" (which I'm guessing is pronounced plee-ay), which means something like to fold. And with that, I think I'm close to the meaning of "plie": something to do with folding oneself. Let's check our work: plié: a movement in which a dancer bends the knees and straightens them again, usually with the feet turned out and heels firmly on the ground. Okay, I was thinking bending at the waist, but fine. Now I know. It's not like I haven't seen ballet before (I just don't know the words), and that seems to be a pretty common move. Doesn't look a lot like folding, though. "Bent" (past tense of "bend") is probably a better translation. Now, see, I could have gotten there more quickly if the accent aigu (é) had been, in the first place... applied. |
| This one may not be too relevant unless you live in NYC. Or visit there a lot. Or are interested in transportation engineering and its associated politics. I meet two of these criteria, so here's an opinion piece from the New York Daily News. For the uninitiated, NYC has five boroughs: Manhattan, an island (with a very small exclave on the mainland—interesting story there); Queens and Brooklyn (part of an island); the Bronx (mainland); and Staten Island (take a wild guess). SI is kind of an outlier there; it's more residential and easier to access from New Jersey than from the rest of NYC. It might help to take a look at a subway map,  (found on Wikipedia), though remember, this is not to scale or up to date. That blue route on the shamefully miniaturized Staten Island is not directly connected to the rest of the system.The very elegant invitation before me, with the seal of New York City, is for 4/14/23 and reads “Breaking of ground for the Brooklyn Shaft” [of the Staten Island to Brooklyn subway]. But it’s not today; it was 100 years ago, April 14, 1923! For reference, the famed subway system in NYC opened in 1904, so they were considering connections to Staten Island within 20 years of its initiation. It's also not entirely a "subway," as much of it runs at or above grade. That 1904 date refers to actual underground subway. Obviously, this 1.5 mile subway extension of the now R train never got built — although about 150 feet of the aborted tunnel lies under Brooklyn’s Owl’s Head Park. It was hailed as a brilliant idea then and frankly it remains a brilliant idea today. Reminder: opinion piece. Not only does Staten Island, a borough of a half-million people, not have a subway, to no surprise it has the highest share of vehicle trips of any borough, matching that of many suburbs. Half a million sounds like a lot of people (and it is by some standards), but the total population of NYC is about 8.5 million. As for vehicle trips, because of its lower density, parking is sometimes actually possible in SI, unlike the rest of the city. There is an extensive bus network in the borough, though. Also, some people consider it a suburb, while Jersey City is jokingly referred to as an honorary borough. If we turn back the clock to the dawn of the last century, civic leaders envisioned a unified metropolis of the five boroughs that merged into one city in 1898. In 1900, the president of the Citizens Association of Richmond, David Tysen, lamented that transit from the island hadn’t improved in a half century — a familiar plaint to Staten Islanders of today. Explanation: Richmond is the county; Staten Island is the borough and the island's name. Don't ask me what's up with all the naming confusion; I don't live there. Since 1900, there have been some improvements, like the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connecting SI with Brooklyn... for vehicular traffic. In 1923, groundbreakings were held in Brooklyn and Staten Island. But, bickering by civic leaders as to whether the tunnel would be for freight and/or people delayed the project through the Depression and then World War II. By 1945 the plan was dead. Instead, four bridges were built linking the island with New Jersey and Brooklyn, but for motor vehicles only. With all the traffic delays that entails. If you think this is a “tunnel too far,” remember every other borough has multiple subway lines, some going 10 or more miles deep into the outer parts of the boroughs. By "deep," the author means "away from Manhattan," which is, of course, the center of the universe. Not that the tunnels are 10 miles deep. Just to clarify. Considering how much the Second Ave. subway cost for a mile and a half tunnel, nearly $5 billion, I’d say roughly $3 to $5 billion would be enough. I'd take that with a NYC-sized grain of salt. The 2Av doesn't run under a major shipping channel. Underwater tunnel construction is its own ball game. Discussion of interborough transit would be incomplete without a mention of that mainstay of NYC culture, the Staten Island Ferry. Build a subway, reduce the need for the Ferry. In 1993, nearly two-thirds of island residents voted to secede from New York. If city and state leaders continue to ignore “the forgotten borough,” we better get used to saying the four boroughs of New York. Don't threaten me with a good time. And you're still going to have transportation problems because you're an island. Hey, maybe New Jersey would take you into its loving arms. |
| "None of your business" is always an acceptable response to a nosy question. A growing share of childless adults in the U.S. don't expect to ever have children, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey. Some people gave specific reasons, like medical conditions or finances, but a lot of people said they just don't want to. And yet, almost no one ever asks "Why do/did you want children?" No one needs to give a reason for their life choices. If pressed, "I just (don't) want to" should more than suffice. If that's you, you might find yourself facing unwanted commentary or questions. Angela L. Harris can relate. She's child-free by choice, and she says people often question her choice or want to know all the details. What details? Kids are messy and chaotic and smelly, and a net drain on resources? Those are the details that matter. She says, first of all, to remember that you don't owe anyone an explanation: "If you don't feel like explaining, don't explain. Your life is your life." See? Even the psychologist agrees with me. Sometimes Harris' responses might be more sincere; other times, she opts for levity. "I think there's a playful and joking way in which you can respond," she says. Thing is, having kids, or not, is the actual definition of a major life choice. And yet, you don't get a lot of "Why did you buy that house?" or "Why didn't you choose a hybrid car?" with some slightly less major life choices. Any of those choices usually involve not just one, but a myriad of reasons, and sometimes entire pros and cons lists. There's rarely, if ever, just one reason why someone does something. I know I don't even get out of bed unless I can think of at least two reasons why I should. The article then presents a few of the questions, and her answers, in graphic meme form because that's the only way to get attention these days, except for short-attention-span vertical videos. Format notwithstanding, they're all good answers, even if they do present the questioners in a rather unflattering manner. Even nosy people are often well-meaning, and I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. Harris acknowledges that having this conversation with your parents or your partner can be difficult. She stresses waiting until you feel ready to have the discussion. Okay, sure, parents, I understand. But it seems to me that having this discussion with a potential partner as early as possible would be a good way to avoid wasting the time and energy of everyone involved. Back when I was still dating, I tried to determine pretty quickly if she had baby-rabies, and broke it off before either of us got involved in something we didn't want. If one partner wants seven kids and the other wants two, perhaps a compromise can be reached. But if one absolutely wants kids and the other definitely does not, well, there's no compromise there (unless you're one of those assholes who abandon your family). Your Turn: If you're child-free by choice, we'd love to hear how you respond to unsolicited questions and comments. Well, I won't be commenting to NPR, but that's one of the many reasons I have a blog. "Don't you want a little Waltz running around?" Oh, hell, no; I remember what I was like as a kid. "If you wait until you can afford them, you never will." And? "Who will take care of you when you're old?" Bringing another life into a dying world just so you can have free nursing later in life is the absolute pinnacle of selfishness. "What do you have against children?" Nothing (usually). As with dogs, I think they're just fine; I just don't want to own one. "Why don't you want kids?" Why do you? "When are you going to have kids?" When there's a shortage. |
| Another one for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] Cardio A friend of mine had this hypothesis: that our hearts can only beat a certain number of times, programmed by genetics or God or the universe or whatever, after which they just give out. The actual number is, of course, different for everyone, but usually on the order of 109 beats. Certain things speed up heart rate: too much caffeine (if there is such a thing), stress, panic, and exercise, to name a few. This, according to his hypothesis, has the effect of shortening one's lifespan, as it's compressing more heartbeats into a given unit of time. So he tried to control these heart-rate-increasing situations as much as possible, mostly by not exercising. Most of the medical community disagrees with him, but I trot that out whenever a doctor tells me I should get more exercise, which is every time I talk to a doctor. I don't actually believe his hypothesis, myself, but why take the chance? Haven't seen him in a while; we started moving (very slowly) in different circles. He's several years older than I am, and approaching that 109 heartbeats number now, so I hope he was right. |
| I've written on the virtues of the semicolon before. Notably in this entry, in which Kurt Vonnegut railed against them and then used one: "The Sage of Indianapolis" This one, though, is far more positive than good ol' Kurt on the use of this important punctuation mark, one which I suspect I overuse, but can't help myself. In 1906, Dutch writer Maarten Maartens—acclaimed in his lifetime but now mostly forgotten—published a surreal, satirical novel called The Healers. He should not have been forgotten. He had the most Dutch name since... well, no, he had the most Dutch name that ever Dutched. The Dutch equivalent of Vladimir Vladimirovich, or Jon Jonson. The book centers on one Professor Lisse, who has conjured up a potential bioweapon: the Semicolon Bacillus, an “especial variety of the Comma.” The doctor has killed hundreds of rabbits demonstrating the Semicolon’s toxicity, but, at the beginning of the novel, he hasn’t yet succeeded in getting his punctuation past the human immune system, which destroys Semicolons instantly as soon as they enter the mouth. Maartens wrote before antibiotics. Maartens wrote at a time when the semicolon was still an exceptionally popular punctuation mark—so popular that grammarians forecast the extinction of the colon, which 19th-century writers had abandoned in favor of semicolons. Apparently, the thought that both had their use never crossed their minds. Nowadays, however, it’s the semicolon that is no longer a la mode; and judging by the number of writers who have something like an allergic reaction to it, plenty of people might find a glimmer of truth in Maartens’s vision of the semicolon as disease vector. “Let me be plain,” wrote the novelist Donald Barthelme: “the semi-colon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly, I pinch them out of my prose.” Well, that's one author whose novels I won't read. Semicolons are “idiocy,” Cormac McCarthy scoffed in a Vanity Fair interview. And that's up there among the most Irish names to ever Irish (but McCarthy is American). The semicolon’s fall from favor was determined in part by the contradictions, complications, overcompleteness, and incompleteness of rule books. But if we look past those books to the work of some of our best writers, we can see semicolons used to create music and meaning in language that no other punctuation mark could accomplish. Damn straight. Raymond Chandler is famous for his noir detective novels featuring Philip Marlowe, but he was a brilliant essayist as well, and the semicolon seems to have been one of his favorite punctuation marks. He used it to create expressive rhythm in his writing, in ways that leapfrog rules. I should note that using a semicolon in fiction is a completely different thing from using it in essays (or blog posts). I'm not even sure how to articulate the difference; there's a formality to semicolon usage that only flies in a certain style of storytelling. These moments of rule-chucking in his writing are not accidents: “When I split an infinitive,” he railed to the editor of his film essay, “God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.” While I support semicolon usage, the "rule" about not splitting infinitives is one of the stupidest restrictions to ever be imposed upon the English language. (See what I did there? I crack myself up.) What Chandler and other excellent writers knew is that a book of grammar rules is incapable of answering the question of how, and how often, to use a semicolon, because the answer is a matter of what you, the writer, are trying to accomplish. In other words, it's more a question of style than of prescriptive rules. No matter what you’ve read in a book or been told by an English teacher, for instance, a sentence can’t be too short or too long in an absolute sense. A sentence can be too short or too long to suit its purpose. Yeah, no, that one in Ulysses is entirely too long. Hell, Ulysses is entirely too long. Perhaps the best use of the semicolon I’ve ever read is in a sentence that’s 318 words long—just under a third of the length of this entire essay. That sentence is in Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and if you look up the letter, you’ll know exactly which sentence I mean when you get to it. King is describing why he is unwilling to continue to wait for change without taking action, and to make his point strongly felt, he makes you wait in pauseless discomfort while he recounts injustice after injustice, all semicoloned together one after another, never letting you rest on a full stop. Read it out loud and you’ll be exhausted and breathless: justly so. King's genius wasn't just in his ideas; it was also in his rhetorical prowess. Chandler and King were so deft with their punctuation because they invested time and attention in reading other good writers, and they poured just as much time and attention into crafting their own sentences. Meanwhile, I write these posts in less than an hour and then promptly forget about them. Alas, to punctuate well requires deliberation. “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” —Oscar Wilde But perhaps that’s a good thing. According to the CDC, mindfulness-based practices like yoga and meditation rose significantly between 2012 and 2017. Venture capital firms have poured millions into apps like Calm and Headspace. If we all scanned our emails, texts, Tweets, reviews, and essays, looking for opportunities to use something a little more interesting than the now ubiquitous, catchall em-dash, we might find that thoughtful punctuating is an occasion to stop, reflect, and immerse ourselves in the contemplative art of the well-judged pause, with no monthly subscription required. And, unlike yoga, meditation, and mindfulness apps, proper punctuation isn't a derivative of copium. In Maartens’s The Healers, Professor Lisse eventually discovers that the semicolon isn’t a toxin as he initially believed; instead, when formulated properly, it’s a source of vitality. And apparently for this excerpt's author, a source of income. |
| As per usual for Sundays, I picked an old blog entry at random to comment on. This one's from 2009, and it's just a short personal update: "I'm in Hell." Last night, my wife went willingly to a Katy Perry concert. Apparently, I was still married in April of 2009. I never can remember when we separated. I think it was a couple of months later, but I don't care enough to chase that down. You know, the "I kissed a girl" chick? I didn't actually hate Katy Perry. Nowadays, I actually kinda respect her. Not the music, just her. What I despised, and still do, is fads. Wait, it gets worse: Apparently, the concert is part of the... Hello Katy tour. The context here is that I used to have this shtick about hating Hello Kitty, and juxtaposing a vapid-sounding pop singer with the nefarious neko would have been enough to clue readers at the time that I was, indeed, in hell. If you need me, I'll be over there in that room with all the cushions on the wall. Yeah, I shouldn't have made light of mental illness, but I did, and still do, a lot of things I shouldn't. |
| For "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]... Pole Vault It's important to store your poles securely and safely. Be sure to build extra-thick steel and concrete walls, and a biometric lock on the door that only works for your thumbprint. Of course, that's just begging someone to amputate your thumb to get at the valuable poles inside. Oh, wait. Sorry. Pole vault. You know, just in case Russia invades Poland next, you have to be sure to build vast, arched, underground chambers to protect the population. Best to secure them against nukes. Not that, either? Damn. Well, I suppose it would be easier to build a vault in Antarctica, where the pole is at least on dry (if ice-covered) land, than it would be to build one under the Arctic Sea. But the Arctic Sea one would be more accessible to survivors after the zombie apocalypse, assuming it affects everyone in the world roughly equally. Or, you know, after the inevitable workers' re-vault. |
| Throwing shade on solar power... Hm, I wonder who would be motivated enough to fund such a group... let me think... nope, coming up empty. Citizens for Responsible Solar is part of a growing backlash against renewable energy in rural communities across the United States. It's important, when fighting against things that are net social goods, to use certain keywords to make people believe that you're not evil. It worked for various "democratic people's republic" dictatorships. "Family" is a perennial favorite. Or "children." But "responsible" and "citizens" are up there. Citizens for Responsible Solar was founded in an exurb of Washington, D.C., by a longtime political operative named Susan Ralston who worked in the White House under President George W. Bush and still has deep ties to power players in conservative politics. See? Evil. And when Ralston was launching the group, a consulting firm she owns got hundreds of thousands of dollars from the foundation of a leading GOP donor who is also a major investor in fossil fuel companies. Oh, wow. Wow. I never would have guessed, not in a million years. Analysts who follow the industry say Citizens for Responsible Solar stokes opposition to solar projects by spreading misinformation online about health and environmental risks. The group's website says solar requires too much land for "unreliable energy," ignoring data showing power grids can run dependably on lots of renewables. And it claims large solar projects in rural areas wreck the land and contribute to climate change, despite evidence to the contrary. Evidence? Who needs evidence when you have money? And you know what form of energy has well-documented, proven health and environmental risks? I'll give you a hint: it rhymes with ossil uels. People often have valid concerns about solar development. Like any infrastructure project, solar plants that are poorly planned and constructed can potentially harm communities. But misinformation spread by groups like Citizens for Responsible Solar is turning rural landowners unfairly against renewables, says Skyler Zunk, an Interior Department official under President Donald Trump and chief executive of Energy Right, a conservative-leaning nonprofit that supports solar projects that preserve ecosystems. Any change in land use comes with potential hazards to the environment. Change the way runoff works, and you change erosion patterns and a watershed's hydrological characteristics. But there are ways to mitigate that. Solar restrictions are gaining traction as the stakes for addressing climate change keep rising. Construction of more renewable energy is key to the country's plans to cut greenhouse gas pollution and avoid the worst damage from extreme weather in the years ahead. Such is the nature of humanity that avoiding "the worst damage from extreme weather in the years ahead" will mean absolutely nothing, because the damage has been avoided. Kind of like people scoff at the giant nothing that was the Y2K problem, because they didn't notice efforts to keep it from happening. Ralston reportedly said to E&E News in 2019 that no money from fossil fuel interests went to Citizens for Responsible Solar. Since then, she has declined NPR and Floodlight's requests to identify the organization's sources of funding. I thought "why not tell the whole truth if you have nothing to hide" was a core conservative "value." Many grassroots activists today credit their success in stopping solar projects to Ralston. One of them is Kathy Webb. Webb says she learned that a company wanted to clear a forest for a solar plant near her home in Rowan County, N.C., days before local officials planned to vote. I gotta admit, I'm not sure that clear-cutting forests for solar energy is a net positive. Trees are kinda important for carbon capture. But I don't have any real data one way or the other. Misinformation spreads easily online. It bounces around in echo chambers where dubious articles, videos and memes are posted and shared repeatedly. Longtime critics of the wind industry like John Droz cultivated opposition strategies that are now being used in the fight against solar, says Anderson, the renewable energy lawyer in Kansas. And really, my point here isn't to rag on one group or another. I want to see decisions based on facts, not misinformation (or deliberate disinformation). Lots of people on both sides of the US political spectrum bang on about questionable or outright disproven studies or statements. Every form of energy creation has its downsides. The question is whether the benefits outweigh them or not. But, you know. Keep promoting coal and oil if you need to. By the time it all runs out and we can no longer sustain an industrial, technological society, I, too, will be long gone. Sucks for your descendants, though. |
First, a plug for the June round of
Just do eight entries (chosen from 16 prompts) in a month. I'll be participating, myself... but not today. Today, we try to talk sense about senses. I've noted in the past that we really have more than the classical five senses, but I don't think I'd seen this article, which is from 2017. It's talking about different "extra" senses, anyway. The world we experience is not the real world. I think several philosophers would agree. Several other philosophers would vehemently disagree. As for me, first you'd have to define "real," and good luck with that. It’s a mental construction, filtered through our physical senses. Yesterday, I banged my shin on a mental construction. How would our world change if we had new and different senses? Could they expand our universe? We already have new and different senses, courtesy of technology. They translate input into output discernible by one of the Five. A Geiger counter, for example, detects ionizing radiation (which we have no sense for) and converts it to auditory (the clicking sound) and visual (a gauge), which our brains can interpret. The article also treats writing as sense-substitution, trading the auditory (language) for the visual (writing on a page). More recently, researchers in the emerging field of “sensory enhancement” have begun developing tools to give people additional senses—ones that imitate those of other animals, or that add capabilities nature never imagined. Here’s how such devices could work, and how they might change what it means to be human. Some animals can detect electrical fields. I can't imagine what that would feel (or look, smell, sound, or taste) like. Which gives me an opportunity to once again trot out my great epiphany about the Classic Five: They are all, at base, touch. Even vision, which relies on the impact of photons on our retinas. Researchers are working on other technologies that could restore sight or touch to those who lack it. For the blind, cameras could trigger electrodes on the retina, on the optic nerve, or in the brain. For the paralyzed or people with prosthetic limbs, pressure pads on real or robotic hands could send touch feedback to the brain or to nerves in the arm. All of which sounds pretty cool, and used to be relegated to science fiction. Well, yesterday's science fiction often becomes science. Autistic people might even gain a stronger social sense. Careful, there. I know several autistic people with strong social sense. They tend to have different perspectives, and those perspectives are often more useful. Don't fix stuff that ain't broke. Last year, MIT researchers revealed the EQ-Radio, a device that bounces signals off people to detect their heart rate and breathing patterns. Finally, a device that can tell you if someone's into you. We can also substitute one sense for another. The brain is surprisingly adept at taking advantage of any pertinent information it receives, and can be trained to, for instance, “hear” images or “feel” sound. Sounds like induced synesthesia to me. Scientists are also exploring ways to add senses found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. The article talks about things like direction sense and echolocation, but echolocation is basically hearing. I've read that some humans, especially blind ones, have learned this trick without technological aid. In the future, cochlear implants could be tuned to pick up really low frequencies, such as those used by elephants, or really high ones, such as those used by dolphins. Bionic eyes could be built to allow humans to see ultraviolet rays (as butterflies, reindeer, dogs, and other animals can) and infrared light (as certain snakes, fish, and mosquitoes can). As cool as all that would be, all it would do is extend our existing classical senses. Some researchers think we may eventually install a port in our brains that would allow us to swap in different sensors when we need them. Because that always ends well in SF stories. We might also gain senses that no other animal has. The vibrating vest Eagleman created can be programmed to receive any input, not just sound. He says it could be used to monitor the stock market, or sentiment on Twitter, or the pitch and yaw of a drone, or one’s own vital signs. Ah, yes, 2017, when Twatter was still marginally relevant. “You can do whatever you want,” says Neil Harbisson, a “cyborg artist” who’s originally from Spain. “You can design a unique sense that is related to your interests or to your curiosity.” Well, I know some people who could benefit from a sense of humor implant. Also... "cyborg artist?" Come on. Perhaps we’ll even achieve that so-called sixth sense: ESP. That's not as farfetched as the article implies. It's not much of a stretch to imagine electrodes that pick up signals from one brain and transfer them to the electrodes of another, either through implants or induction. Doubtful that we'd be able to "read" the minds of unwilling subjects anytime soon, though. But last I heard, we still haven't figured out how to keep the brain from outright rejecting any implanted electrodes. Yeah, yeah, Neuralink (also mentioned in the article; it was new at the time). As with most Muskmelon projects, that's more hype than anything else. Exactly how all this tinkering will change us remains to be seen. And this is what science fiction is for. |
| Hey look, we made it to the end of another month. Apropos of nothing: It’s Time to Ban “Right Turn on Red” The dangerous maneuver is allowed thanks to a flawed idea about emissions from the 1970s. We don’t need it. Last time I checked, RToR is the law of the land in the US, everywhere except New York City. That is, in not-NYC, a right on red after stopping is not only permitted but encouraged, unless there is a sign prohibiting it. In NYC, turning right at a red light is illegal, unless there's a sign permitting it. There are no signs explaining this as you drive into NYC, or out of it. None. It's just something you have to know, and of course NYPD doesn't give a shit and you'll generate some revenue for the city if they catch you. Even knowing the law, I've made the mistake in that city. No cops around, so no consequences. I was just so used to doing it that I forgot I was in NYC (not hard to do in most areas of the city that aren't Manhattan). This article talks about the potential ban of the practice in DC. There, it makes more sense to ban it. Driving in DC is way worse than driving in NYC, and what's the point of defaulting to RToR, if something like 75% of your intersections are signed to forbid it? But, in that case, there's only a river along one edge; for most of the city's boundary, you may not know when you're in DC as opposed to Maryland. Article is from 2022, and honestly, I can't be arsed to check to see if that ban has been implemented, because I only drive in DC under duress. Regardless, I have a few minor issues with the article. It’s an obsolete relic of the 1970s oil crisis. "Obsolete" is an editorial value judgement. It’s dangerous to pedestrians. Read further, and you'll see that this statement isn't well-supported by data. And, if you drive a car in the United States, you likely do it every day. Unless you live in NYC or, like me, don't drive every day. It’s time to get rid of right-turn-on-red. Opinion. Nothing wrong with stating your opinion, of course. Source: my opinion. But usually, it's clearly labeled as "opinion," not in the "Environment" section and written by someone whose byline says "News writer." But in the United States, drivers are generally permitted to turn right at a red light, if there’s a big enough gap in the traffic for them to squeeze into. In fact, you’re likely to get honked at if you don’t do it. Or, as it we are talking about the US, shot at. I've been honked at for not turning right on red at intersections clearly and plainly labeled No Turn On Red. Article states RToR isn't a thing in Europe (would be LToR in the UK), but doesn't mention Canada, which I know has RToR. Apparently, it's not a thing in Mexico, but people there do it anyway. I don't know; I've never been to Mexico. Still, sometimes drivers fail to yield to pedestrians who have the right of way in the intersection. The data on right-turn-on-red crashes might be scarce, but the existing studies suggest that these types of collisions—while rare—frequently involve a pedestrian or cyclist. Like I said, not well-supported by data. However, from a driving point of view, it makes sense that there would be a hazard. You're at a red light, about to turn right, and you're twisting your neck way to the left to see when the break in traffic comes. When it does, you might peel out into the intersection without really looking to your right—which is, of course, when a pedestrian is just stepping off the curb in front of you. As for bicycles, some drivers make a game out of hitting them on purpose, anyway. Last week... Again, article is from October of last year. ...the Washington, DC, city council voted to ban right-turn-on-red (RTOR) at most city intersections (and to allow cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs). If Mayor Muriel Bowser signs on and the bill receives Congressional approval, DC will become the second US city after New York not to allow RTOR. DC, which has struggled to curb traffic fatalities, hopes that ending RTOR will make its streets safer for cyclists, pedestrians, and wheelchair users. As I noted above, a large number of intersections in DC (my 75% number was pulled out of my ass based on experience in that city) are already signed NToR. Banning RToR would likely remove these signs. This seems like a very good way to increase revenue by catching unwary drivers from VA, MD, or points further away, who are used to it being permitted-unless-signed. As with many traffic laws and enforcement policies, they talk about safety, but they're really about revenue generation. So, why do US cities allow RTOR in the first place? Blame the oil crisis. The article proceeds to delve more deeply into this idea. By 1980, RTOR was the law of the land nationally, except in New York City. I didn't get my driver's license until 1982, incidentally. Take into account the growing number of hybrid and electric cars, and RTOR makes even less sense. Schultheiss says that electric cars are actually likely to increase the number of RTOR crashes “because their acceleration rates are dramatically quicker than gas powered vehicles.” This ties in to my "not looking to the right" comment above. Critics of the DC bill have pointed out the lack of data showing the dangers of RTOR, but many people who don’t use cars know instinctively how dangerous turning vehicles can be. And yet, they step in front of right-turning stopped vehicles anyway. And even people who do drive can be inattentive as pedestrians. I'm not trying to victim-blame, here. Sometimes, it can be the driver's responsibility even when it's the pedestrian's fault. Anyway, you know what would significantly improve pedestrian safety while at the same time reducing idle times at intersections? Traffic circles. "But, Waltz, there are traffic circles all over DC; in fact, they're one of the main reasons driving in DC sucks." True. But those roundabouts are terribly designed, relics of Pierre L'Enfant's original horse-and-buggy design for the city. Now, it's been a long time since I've been in continental Europe, since before I could legally drive on streets. But one thing I noticed when I was in England, more recently, was the absolute reign of, not QEII (at the time), but roundabouts. I never drove there, but I rode with other people, and circles are pretty much everywhere. So they don't need LToR. After that rant, you might think I have a strong opinion about RToR in the US. I do not. (I do have strong opinions about the benefits of roundabouts, though.) It doesn't matter to me whether it's allowed or not. What I do care about is that it be consistent, which, given the major exception of NYC, and the proliferation of intersections where it's not allowed and sometimes poorly signed, it never has been. |
| Sweet dreams are made of cheese... The Next Generation of American Cheese The founders of New School cheese say they are making the first “quality” American cheese When I visited England some years ago, it took me a while to convince my British friends that there was (still is) a vibrant craft beer community in the US; they thought we all drank Bud Light or whatever. Then they asked, "What about wine?" I was like, "Oh, definitely. Wineries everywhere, some even as good as or better than the French." (That didn't take nearly as much convincing.) But then came the question I was dreading: "And cheese?" I hung my head in shame. Yes, some small, local artisanal cheeses exist, but they're not nearly as widely distributed as the biggies are. Wisconsin notwithstanding, most of the actual cheese produced in the US is a copy of various European styles, such as cheddar, brie, or Swiss. A few are uniquely American... sort of. Monterey Jack might be an exception, though it was developed in an area that was, at the time, controlled by Spain via Mexico (which is part of North America, but despite the existence of it and Canada, when people say American, they generally mean US.) And then there's Colby, from Wisconsin, but it's basically cheddar that's mild enough to be suitable for a bland Midwestern palate, which generally thinks mayonnaise is quite enough spice. The other big cheese in America is American, which in its most common form is a factory food. My point being that when it comes to "craft" (as opposed to Kraft) products, cheese has a long way to go in the US if it's going to catch up to wine and beer. This article is, as the headline suggests, a step in that direction. The joke that people love to hate — or hate to love — American cheese is outdated. We’re at the point where we can all admit it’s good. No. No, we are not. Because I do not admit any such thing. At best, it's a pale (sometimes literally) shadow of cheddar. You ever top a burger with fresh mozzarella and watch as it sits there and does everything but melt? No, because the only cheese I admit on a burger, if I have any kind of choice, is cheddar or Swiss. Maybe provolone. If I don't have any kind of choice, I put up with American. Ever try putting a slice of cheddar on ramen only to witness the puddles of fat sweat out from the clumpy solids? No, because who the fuck puts cheddar on ramen? American cheese is not a quality product. Finally, something I can agree with. In fact, its lack of quality is often the point, a grand embrace of the lowbrow and cheap that is the cornerstone of so much comfort food. I don't believe in the concept of comfort food. Food is either delicious, or it's not. Sometimes somewhere in between. The closest I come to the concept is making easy meals, like sandwiches. In fact, Kraft Singles, the standard for American cheese, cannot legally be called American cheese, or even “cheese food,” due to being made with milk protein concentrate and consisting of less than 51 percent actual cheese. (The company itself refers to the product as a “pasteurized prepared cheese product.”) Cheese may be the first ingredient, but the slices are mostly made of whey, skim milk, and various preservatives. I've described Singles as a product whose only relationship with cheese is that the truck passed a dairy farm on the way out from the factory. That may be an exaggeration, but not by much. For decades, the options have been to either accept American cheese as it is, or instead eat better-quality artisanal cheeses that, while delicious, are never quite right. You shut your disgusting mouth. Last fall, Greenspan and his friend Alan Leavitt, who has worked at and invested in early-stage packaged consumer goods companies, launched New School, what they claim is the first attempt by anyone to make a “quality” American cheese. Eh. Maybe. Depends on definition of quality. Pre-industrialization, it was some bastard variant or mixture of cheddar or Colby. “It’s hard to imagine processed food being good. What’s good? Does that mean taste? Does it mean quality? Does it mean health?” asks Helen Veit, associate professor of history at Michigan State University, who specializes in food and nutrition of the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, most Americans’ blanket assumption about processed foods is that they are unhealthy. But during the advent of many food processing methods in the early 20th century, “processed” wasn’t really a bad word. A processed food could actually be made well. Or at least better than what exists now. I've touched on this subject before. "Processed" is now a buzzword, as in "processed food is bad for you." But when you start thinking about what "processed" really means, there are all kinds of gray areas. It's the new "don't eat anything you can't pronounce," which as I've noted in the past, does nothing but encourage ignorance. “The initial intent of this product was to improve shelf-life of cheese shipped to warmer climates,” Zey Ustunol wrote in a 2009 article for the Michigan Dairy Review. In Illinois, James Kraft was working on a similar product, and received patents for processed cheese in 1916 and 1921, the latter of which was for processed cheese packaged in a loaf form. The whole purpose of cheese in the first place was to preserve milk in a time before refrigeration. This is, I think, analogous to the addition of hops to beer, which had the effect of preserving it for a longer period of time. What’s more, a new generation raised on processed food turned a more critical eye toward the entire food industry. “The broad skepticism about the benefits of processing was really a product of the 1960s and ’70s...” You might recognize this period as also being when the use of refrigeration in the US and other industrialized nations really exploded. It is true that many preservatives aren't ideal in a person's diet, and refrigeration liberated us from so much need for preservatives. There's a lot more at the link, and despite my conviction that the author must have lost their taste buds due to COVID, there's some interesting stuff in there. Including the shocking revelation that artisanal cheese is going to cost more than "pasteurized prepared cheese product." Well... duh. If nothing else, read the end of the article for a truly groan-worthy pun. |
| Today in "You can get what you want and still not be happy": The Unbearable Costs of Becoming a Writer After years of hard work and low pay, the risks I took to work in publishing are finally paying off. But now, I wonder about the price my family paid, and whether it was too steep. When I was younger, I was always told: "Be careful what you wish for; you might just get it." So I stopped wishing. My parents didn’t understand my job. No one's parents understand them. There were stretches when I made so little money writing or editing that I couldn’t blame my parents for assuming they were hobbies. Most people think it's easy and anyone can do it. And then they try, and they think they've done a good job because they get positive feedback from those who are afraid of crushing them with negative feedback. But in reality, they suck. I'm aware I'm probably in that category, too. After all, I've never made money from writing (or editing), unless you count GPs for WDC newsletters. That's how we're measuring success now, right? But, okay. I get it. Sometimes outsiders don't understand that it's work, whether you're getting paid for it or not. Often rewarding work, and requiring very little physical activity, but it's no less work than, say, website development. I became an editor by volunteering for an Asian American magazine, a nonprofit mission-driven labor of love where no one drew a salary. Ten to fifteen hours of unpaid labor a week in exchange for the editorial experience I wanted was, to me, an acceptable trade—nearly all my labor then was unpaid. And I get this. (Obviously; I do that sort of thing, myself.) But it's a symptom of a larger problem, which is that what creative-types do is largely undervalued. Hey, can your band do this gig? We can't pay you, but you'll get experience and exposure! Say, I like your art. Can you do a poster for me? I don't have a lot of money, but you can put your contact info on it. Then one of my favorite indie websites hired me to edit on a part-time basis. The job started at thirteen dollars an hour, twenty hours a week, and after a couple of months I was brought on full-time and granted a salary in the mid-30s. Don't mistake my above complaints for bitterness. Would it be nice to be paid for my writing? Sure. But if that did happen, I know it would come with a raft of requirements. Like, right now, I can write about anything I want to, say anything I want to, be honest about my opinions (or at least honestly lie about them). My only restrictions are self-imposed. But consider what might happen if, say, someone approached me to do a beer blog. I'd then be beholden to them, and two of my favorite hobbies (writing and drinking beer) would become, by definition, work, with deadlines and expectations. Everything becomes promotion, then. Hell, even the article I'm highlighting today is basically an ad for the author's book. (I know I've said this before, but that never stops me, by itself, from featuring something; writing ad copy is also a writing skill, and this is a site about writing.) Fortunately, I don't need the money. So I can pursue it as a hobby. (Still, free beer would be a nice perk.) But there was also a reality I had to face: I was running out of time to help my family. My diabetic father’s health was in decline, and my parents were struggling to pay for his care and medications. My husband and I couldn’t pay for full-time childcare for both our kids, let alone provide the kind of support my parents needed. The little assistance I could offer wasn’t enough to make a dent, and as my father grew sicker, my guilt and anxiety intensified. This is understandable, too, though I neatly sidestepped a lot of it by not having kids I knew I wouldn't be able to afford. I continue to grapple with the instability of this industry and what kind of opportunities will be available to me in the years to come, as well as larger questions about whether my editorial work was valued. Editorial work is, if anything, even less valued than writing. Don't believe me? Pick a few articles off the internet and see if they look like an editor saw them. Or, hell, this blog, which certainly doesn't have an editor. I do try to catch obvious typos and awkwardly-phrased passages, but I don't always succeed. I think about who gets to be a writer or an editor, who can afford to wait for that livable salary or that higher advance. Who can choose to prioritize their creative goals, take potentially career-making risks, invest precious years in this work without the guarantee of financial stability. And this is why I chose engineering way back when. Fortunately, for me, it wasn't an either-or situation; I'm equally bad at both tech and creative stuff. |
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Talk about retaining water... 
