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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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Last week, I did a bit on an article concerning early-birding: "For a Lark"  And then I found this one, from Popular Science (for whatever that's worth these days) on turning owls into larks: My philosophical stance hasn't changed in five days: that we shouldn't be forcing or shaming chronotypes. But we live in the real world (well, most of us do), and sometimes you just have to fit your square peg into a round hole, or vice versa. So this isn't about the desirability of waking up early, but rather how to go about it if you find yourself in a situation where you have to, as I did for most of my life. It should go without saying, but it won't, that one shouldn't make drastic changes to one's lifestyle based on internet advice, so don't blame me if you try any of this stuff and it goes badly. Ah, Fall: slanting golden light, crisp mornings, and hitting the snooze button 15 times. Yeah, the article is from September of 2021 and biased toward northern hemispherians. Some research suggests that even the most stubborn night owl can indeed shift their natural sleep patterns. Oddly, there's nothing here about larks switching to owl schedules. That's just not as important because it doesn't fit in with the Protestant work ethic. But some people have to do that, too: late-shift workers, for example. Also, we're not "stubborn" any more than we're "stubborn" when we insist that, sometimes, we have to take a shit. The first thing we need to realize is that in each of us, a clock ticks away. There’s a bundle of neurons buried deep inside the brain which regulates our day’s biological rhythms, including our metabolism, when we’re sleepy, and when it’s time to eat, says Gideon Dunster, sleep researcher at the National Institutes of Mental Health. “We call it the master clock,” Dunster says. But the master clock doesn’t always match perfectly with a typical 24 hour day. In fact, on average, it takes about 24.2 hours for people to complete this cycle, says Cathy Goldstein, a sleep neurologist at the University of Michigan Health. I've heard different numbers for that average, but it's always more than 24 hours. I find this fascinating, as I would think that, if anything, we'd have internal clocks left over from the distant evolutionary past, when the length of the day was shorter, not longer. Other factors, including environmental ones, seem to play a role. Light is the most important, and well-understood, of these cues, effectively delaying or advancing people’s master-clocks. Fun fact: I sleep better when it's light out, but I don't sleep well at all with any artificial light around. It wasn’t always so hard to wake up early. “Until 200 years ago, the Industrial Revolution, our biological clocks and environmental clocks were much more in sync,” Dunster says. Now the electricity that lights up our homes at night and powers our bright screens confuses our master clock, which mistakes it for daylight. Right, blame progress, as usual. Sorry, but the advances in laziness technology far outweigh the costs of any sleep disruptions. Is there any hope for night owls to change their ways, especially as those early morning meetings and school bells begin to take over daily life? Maybe. The article goes on to expand upon the "maybe." Scientists in England conducted a trial on 22 “extreme” night owls in their late teens and early twenties. Ah, yes, another study exclusively focused on college students, all in one industrialized country, who are probably not representative of the population as a whole, and with a minuscule sample size. What I mean is, I wouldn't take the results of this study as settled science. (For the exact methodology, in plain English, the link is up there.) At least they add this bit: It’s our schedules that need to change to suit our chronotypes, not the reverse, Dunster argues. Alongside colleagues, he advocates for later school start times for kids. Other studies suggest that similar changes—work schedules catered to a person’s natural sleep and wake rhythms—could benefit adults, too. When shift workers were scheduled according to chronotype, they slept better and enjoyed their free time more, according to a 2015 study published in Current Biology. While this lights up my confirmation bias more strongly, I still wouldn't take it as settled science. One trick I've heard of before, but never really tried, is to adjust forward. That is, if you have the opportunity to do so, instead of forcing yourself to sleep earlier and wake up earlier, do the opposite: every day, go to sleep an hour or two later, and wake up an hour or two later. After a couple of weeks of this, you should find yourself aligned with your desired chronotype. That's the hypothesis, anyway. I suspect that, like almost everything else, it would work for some but not others. And it does require a significant period of time where your schedule isn't being interrupted by external needs, like work or family. Or, I suppose, you could try moving to a different time zone and let jet lag work in your favor. But I still think the best way to handle this sort of thing is to make the world align with you, not the other way around. Good luck with that. |
| As it is Sunday, I'm once again delving into the past to see if anything's changed and, if so, how. Another relatively recent one popped up (though I'm still limiting my retrospectives to exclude the past year), this one from my trip to SoCal early in 2022, when I visited Annette  and her family: "No Fault of Mine" It's a short entry and, since it's not very old, I only have a bit to expand upon. We took a drive around a place that's known for its landslides, marveling at all the doomed houses all built to appreciate a view of the ocean. I'm thinking a lot of them will get a much closer view of the ocean at some point. Oh, and did I mention there's also a fault line involved? Fun! I'm thinking this may have come across as joy in the misfortune of others. That wasn't my intention. While I'm not above a bit of schadenfreude from time to time, I normally reserve it for people I think deserve it for some reason. Just living in a place that you know is subject to seismic events doesn't qualify; there is no place that's not subject to the looming threat of disaster. If not earthquakes, then wildfires, tornadoes, fire tornadoes, sinkholes, meteor strikes, enemy missiles, avalanches, hails of gunfire (mostly limited to war zones and the US), floods, droughts (sometimes both at the same time), and that perennial favorite of the Atlantic coast, hurricanes. And lots of people don't have the luxury of being able to move, even if there is a safer spot to move to. My point is, life is uncertain and I can't fault (pun intended) someone for trading a nice view and generally wonderful weather for the possibility of sliding into the Pacific at some point. In that entry, I spoke of my plans to visit Catalina, a lovely island off the coast near L.A. I did, indeed, manage to get there, and wrote a bit about it in the following entry. Lastly, the link to the Wiki page for Santa Catalina Island is badly formatted; I have no idea if it broke in the past year or if I just didn't bother to double-check it because I was in a hurry. It's easy enough to get there with a couple of extra steps after clicking on the link, but here's an xlink anyway. |
| I haven't been feeling like going to the movie theater for a while (which is why I haven't done any reviews recently). So I missed the D&D movie. This article is from around the time that film came out, and I read it anyway because I'm a gamer. 14 Fun Facts About Dungeons & Dragons Before watching the new movie adaptation, here’s what you need to know about the history of the fantasy role-playing game Of all the publications I'd have guessed would write a retrospective of a role-playing game, with or without a movie tie-in, Smithsonian would be near the bottom of the list, right around the same spot as Proceedings of the International Society of Metallurgists. (I just made up that last one) But this is the timeline we deserve, so here it is. In the early 1970s, Gary Gygax lost his job at an insurance company in Chicago. Never says why. I'm going to go with "fired for being a dick." Living with his family in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, he started working as a cobbler as a replacement gig. But money was tight, and his children had to put cardboard in the bottoms of their shoes instead of buying new pairs. You had SHOES? Luxury! Little did Gygax know that his luck would soon change. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the fantasy role-playing game he co-created with Dave Arneson, became a national phenomenon. That may be overstating the case. National, sure. Widespread? Took a while. Since its debut in 1974, D&D has only grown in popularity. No longer a niche game, it’s been played by more than 50 million people to date, according to Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro division that owns D&D. I played it before it was cool. Incidentally, Hasbro also owns Ponies. I want to see a D&D ruleset that's set in the My LIttle Pony universe. What? No, I'm not a brony. I just think it'd be hilarious. Starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Regé-Jean Page of “Bridgerton” fame, Honor Among Thieves is set in a fantasy D&D world. It follows a band of thieves who attempt to recover their loot from an ex-member of their crew, who betrayed them and used magic to seize control of the kingdom. So, basically, The Italian Job (2003), but with fantasy. No, no, it's fine. That's one of my all-time favorite movies. In honor of the game’s turn on the silver screen, as well as its upcoming 50th anniversary in 2024, here are 14 fun facts about the history of D&D and the people who made it. It's not the first time they've tried to adapt D&D to movies. The last attempt was... how do I put this charitably?... a giant steaming pile of owlbear shit. Anyway, obviously, I'm not going to go over every one of the "fun facts" (some of them aren't much fun at all). The link's up there if you're interested. Mostly, I just want to highlight the stupidest one. 8. In its heyday, D&D sparked a moral panic. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, D&D entered the national spotlight under unexpected circumstances. Critics—many of them religious fundamentalists—argued the game was corrupting America’s youth by promoting devil worship, witchcraft and violence. First, it was hardly unexpected. One early book had a naked boob on its cover (I think it was called "Eldritch Wizardry.") That's a sure way to get fundies to shriek at obnoxious volume. Second, the real reason a lot of these assholes protested was because the game favors cooperation and imagination, not competition and some kind of ball. Third, and this should go without saying but apparently it can't, none of the allegations were true. It's a game. Yeah, there was a lot of emphasis on a few people who played it who committed suicide or whatever, but conveniently left out were all the people who played, say, football and committed suicide. Or were bullied and committed suicide. Or were gay in the 1980s and committed suicide. Take any group of people who share any interest whatsoever, and you'll find both suicides and antisocial/illegal behavior. That doesn't mean there's a correlation. And finally, TSR (the publisher at the time) couldn't possibly have done a better job advertising the product: Repeatedly debunked by researchers, the supposed link between D&D and violence earned the game a bad reputation in the eyes of some—but as Clyde Haberman noted for the New York Times in 2016, it also boosted D&D’s popularity, “with the numbers of players leaping from the thousands into the millions.” 12. The most recent version of the game is the fifth edition, published in 2014. A new edition is on the way. I've played 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th editions (I looked at 4th and went NOPE). I have no idea what 6th is going to look like, and the way WotC has been acting recently, I'm not sure I want to. There is an alternative. Whoever was running things when 3rd Edition came out (I think this was right after WotC, better known for Magic: The Gathering, acquired the rights) based the rules on an open-source system. So another company, Paizo, took that ball and ran with it (to mix game metaphors), creating Pathfinder, which had a ruleset very similar to 3rd Ed. D&D. More recently, they overhauled the rules again to create Pathfinder 2nd Edition. I'm currently playing in a sort-of weekly game (through the magic of teleconferencing) of Pathfinder 2nd Edition, which I find to be a great deal of fun. And isn't that what we play for? |
| This one's from a very, very long time ago. Way back in 2011. Among the surest ways to get me to memorize something is to put it in the form of a song (think Schoolhouse Rock) or a joke. Most certain of all is if it's a joke song. Then, that shit never leaves my head. I don't think I'm alone in this. It is utterly impossible to say the place name "Istanbul" without someone chiming in with "NOT CONSTANTINOPLE." Today's link, a very short one, contains no songs. Just some bad "walks into a bar" jokes that, if you're anything like me, will fix some grammar rules in your head forever, like a pawprint in fresh concrete. 1. A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves. Yeah, this is kind of like the old standby "Eats shoots and leaves." 4. Two quotation marks “walk into” a bar. I used to get unreasonably angry when I saw quotes where they didn't belong. Like one outside a restaurant in my town a few years ago: Genuine Turkish Street "Food." (I wonder if the owner is from not-Constantinople.) Maybe it's just me, but I'd much rather eat food than "food." 6. The bar was walked into by the passive voice. This one cracked me up more than it probably should have. Obviously, there are four more at the link. The only one that I found actually funny was #6 above, but the others at least elicited (NOT ILLICITED) a sensible chuckle. If I had more time today, I could probably make up a few more. Know any others? Feel free to leave a comment below. |
| In an effort to tie today's random article into today's sacred observance of Star Wars Day, I'll just quote our first introduction to the Force: "The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together." -Obi-Wan Kenobi Yeah, I know, it's kind of a stretch. But it relates to the unity of life, at least on our planet. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” the great naturalist John Muir wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century. Like I said. The Force. Because of this delicate interconnectedness of life across time, space, and being, any littlest fragment of the universe can become a lens on the miraculous whole. Sometimes, it is the humblest life-forms that best intimate the majesty of life itself. Take, for instance, lichens. Not midichlorians. Lichens — which are not to be confused with mosses — are some of Earth’s oldest life-forms: emissaries of the ocean gone terrestrial. For epochs, their exact nature was a mystery — until an improbable revolutionary illuminated that they are, in fact, part algae. Also not to be confused with liches, the powerful undead that make for difficult final bosses in a D&D campaign. Or lycanthropes, also common in role-playing games. In the final stretch of the nineteenth century, Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter punctuated her writing and her painting with a series of experiments with spores, demonstrating that lichens — which Linnaeus considered the “poor peasants of the plant world” — are in fact not plants but a hybrid of fungi and algae: living reminders that the supreme vital force of life is not competition but interdependence, that we survive and thrive not through combat but through collaboration. I will take this opportunity to emphasize that the person discovering this wasn't known as a biologist, but as a writer. Okay, I'll stop with the pop culture references for now, and take this opportunity to talk about cooperation. There's a popular interpretation of the theory of evolution that is often described as "survival of the fittest." This was not, as I think most people believe, a term coined by Charles Darwin, or even by a different biologist, but by an economist, Herbert Spencer. The problem with this phrase is mostly that it's a vast oversimplification (though reportedly, Darwin didn't object to it) of an extraordinarily complicated topic. Now, I don't claim to be an expert on evolution or economics (and anyone claiming to be an expert on economics is automatically suspect to me), but stopping there, at that phrase, seems to lead to the conclusion that only the strong survive, and that evolution is all about competing for resources. Certainly, there are elements of competition. But the primary driving force of evolution is, in my admittedly limited view, cooperation. As an analogy, consider an American football game. Or, really, any team sport. You have two teams. They play a game and, usually, there's a winner and a loser. Sure, the teams are competing against each other—but within each team, it's only by cooperation that victory is even possible. Moreover, even the battling teams cooperate to an extent: they agree on a set of rules, and when a rule is broken, they agree on the penalties for doing so. Without that cooperation, both within and between the teams, you don't have a football game. It is cooperation, not competition, that allows organisms to survive long enough to compete, and it obviously takes some cooperation for most organisms to reproduce. Okay, enough of that. Back to lichens. From the article, quoting biologist Lynn Margulis: Like a farmer tending her apple trees and her field of corn, a lichen is a melding of lives. Once individuality dissolves, the scorecard of victors and victims makes little sense. Is corn oppressed? Does the farmer’s dependence on corn make her a victim? These questions are premised on a separation that does not exist. The heartbeat of humans and the flowering of domesticated plants are one life. “Alone” is not an option… Lichens add physical intimacy to this interdependence, fusing their bodies and intertwining the membranes of their cells, like cornstalks fused with the farmer, bound by evolution’s hand. There is, of course, a lot more at the link. And it's not very technical; there's not even any math involved. I'll just add one more thing, though: we all probably learned long ago that lichens are symbiotic organisms, usually consisting of an alga and a fungus. I remember that from high school biology. Most of this article takes this point of view, because that was the accepted science for most of the history of that field. I did see an article recently, though I'm having trouble finding it again, which stated that many lichens contain a third organism, a yeast. There's some discussion of the concept here. So the yeast binds the other organisms together.You know. Like the Force. |
| Because, obviously, the only true measure of self-worth isn't money or power or friends or a Pokemon collection, but productivity... What Happened When I Forced Myself To Wake Up At 5 A.M. Every Day For A Month Some early risers might get more done, but it turns out there are times when getting up earlier can make you less productive. I have another article in my queue about the joyous benefits of waking up at 5 am. I'll get to it eventually. But okay, let's see how this author fared with rising at about the time I prefer to be going to bed: Early risers get a lot of good press: They are supposedly more productive and possibly better problem solvers. I'm not going to reproduce the hyperlinks from the article here. Suffice it to say that people still seem to have an issue confusing correlation with causation, and also with trying to generalize conclusions from a single data point. But after a month of forcing myself out of bed at 5 a.m., I learned that getting up early isn’t always the best thing for you. Or, and bear with me here, because this is a complicated assertion: people aren't all the same, and what works for one person won't work for another. I’m a morning person... Hey, I'm a morning person, too! Midnight to six a.m. is "morning." ...and most days I’m out of bed by 5:45 a.m. Seriously? I had to wake up at that time (or even earlier) in the summer when I had an outdoor job that required sunlight. I managed. I never enjoyed it. I usually have 15 minutes before the rest of my household starts to wake, and I use this time to enjoy a cup of tea as well as the stillness of the morning. I look forward to this time so much that I wondered, What would happen if I expanded the 15 minutes to an hour? Society reinforces the "early to rise" thing as something to admire, something aspirational. What do you think would happen if I wrote an article about the productivity gains you'd experience if you lived alone, unbothered by unnecessary distractions, not for an hour, but for 24 of them? The second day I decided to meditate, a practice I’ve wanted to do but never seemed to have the time for. Unfortunately, I fell asleep in my chair. Duh. As the month went on, I used the time to get a head start on work, but by 9 p.m., I was exhausted and would head to bed. Again: duh. You're cutting off a strip of blanket and sewing it back on the other end. Consider: we're supposed to aspire to 8 hours of sleep a night. Again, people are different, and some need 9 while others need only 7. If you consider this variation, and the fact that "head to bed" implies you're brushing teeth, changing clothes, and whatever other nightly rituals you have, the author was still getting less than 8 hours of sleep (9 to 5 is 8 hours whichever is am and pm). And that's not even getting into the time it takes to perform her marital duties. (That's supposed to be a joke.) The article goes on to quote a purported sleep expert, someone who literally wrote the book on the subject. I won't copy most of it here. And not having a strong plan doesn’t help, says Stevenson. “If you don’t have a reason to get up, and your body wants to rest, forget about it,” he says. “You need something that will fill that space that is compelling.” I can wake up early if I have to. I do it on road trips because my schedule doesn't mesh with hotel schedules. I used to do it to adhere to a work schedule. But I have to have to. Getting up just to meditate or exercise won't cut it for me. It may work for other people, and that's fine; I'm not knocking it. I'm just saying that this whole Puritan ideal of waking up early isn't the only way to get through life. At the risk of overwhelming my readers with links, here's one from a different productivity-porn publication that is closer to my own views on the subject. I should note that I have issues with that article, too, but I'm not going to discuss them here. I'll just point out that it's entirely possible that Ben Franklin was trolling everyone with that "early to bed, early to rise" crap. He was an epic troll, and still my favorite Founding Father. Back to the title article: Being the proverbial “early bird” has its advantages, says Shanon Makekau, medical director of the Kaiser Permanente Sleep Lab in Hawaii. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that, based on the surname, that person is at least part native Hawaiian—a culture not really known for strict adherence to Puritanical ideals of sleep/wake schedules. Or worshiping productivity. But I don't want to fall into a trap of stereotyping; I'm sure Hawaiians, like all other groups of humans, have different chronotypes. “Morning people have been shown to be more proactive, which is linked to better job performance, career success, and higher wages, as well as more goal-oriented,” she says. “These people tend to be more in sync with the typical workday schedule, versus night owls who may be still be waking up at around lunchtime.” The problem, here, is, again, correlation vs. causation. Owls trying to become larks are often doomed, as are larks attempting to stick to owl schedules. Early-morning hours also tend to be more productive because there are fewer distractions. This is, once more, a lifestyle choice. I always found I'm more productive and creative at the end of a day than at the beginning. This might be changing, though; as you may have noticed, I don't usually do midnight blog entries anymore. Age affects preferred sleep schedules, too. I will emphasize, however, that I don't consider one schedule inherently superior to another. I'm also still biphasic, but the timing of my first sleep seems to be changing as well. One of the many advantages of being retired: I go to sleep and wake up whenever I feel like it, for the most part. And yet, according to my CPAP, I usually get the standard 8 hours of sleep per 24-hour day, in total. The point is, even if you have family or whatever, you can still get the benefits of "fewer distractions" after everyone has gone to bed as opposed to before everyone wakes up. As for the author's self-described experiment: Unfortunately, my experiment didn’t produce long-lasting results. When my month was over, I immediately returned to my normal 5:45 a.m., which felt like sleeping in. I even slept until 10 a.m. on weekend mornings–a very rare occurrence for me. I feel more productive now that I’m back to my normal routine. And in the end, at least one of the experts quoted seems to agree with my take on it: “The jury is still out regarding whether or not simply shifting one’s wake time earlier is enough to garner all of the positive benefits of the early bird,” says Makekau. “It may be that one’s internal tendency toward productivity is inherent or, more importantly, is tied to the congruency between the internal sleep/wake clock and one’s external schedule. Night owls could be just as productive as long as they are allowed to work on a delayed schedule.” Shaka, brah. |
| One more travel update before I get back to what passes for normal. Yesterday's random destination was out in the Atlantic. That's okay; I knew it was a possibility and planned what I would do: Find the point on the shore along the line pointing to the destination and go there. This, fortuitously, ended up depositing me on the Outer Banks, in the town of Corolla, one of my favorite places to visit. I haven't been here far too long, several years at least. After a few days of seeing new things, it's nice to see an old haunt, to feel the coastal winds, smell the seaweed, and hear the ocean waves crashing against the ever-shifting sands. Oh, and dine on some excellent seafood. There are no breweries in this vicinity, not yet; I saw one in the process of being constructed, like witnessing Creation itself. It's not like I haven't been near the ocean recently—the Pacific last February/March, and the Jersey shore a couple of times since then—but I don't get tired of it. I would get tired of it if I lived around here, I know. Too ephemeral, too storm-prone. I'm just happy to visit. It's nearly 1 am now, and I think I'm going to venture out into the darkness to see if I can look at the stars. |
| A Monday update about my Sunday travels: The weather didn't hold out for me as I drove south into North Carolina yesterday morning, and I discovered, or rather, confirmed what I already knew about certain modern car features: rain can confuse the hell out of them. When I was looking for a new-to-me car last fall, I had a few requirements: I knew I wanted a Subaru Crosstrek with a decent sound system and a sunroof. Most everything else was negotiable. Well, it turned out that the one they had on the lot fit the bill; though the system wasn't as high-end as the one in my previous Subaru, it's good enough. I wasn't looking for smart features specifically, but they came with the car. For instance, Android Auto for connecting my phone's Maps to the car's screen. But also things like lane sensing and adaptive cruise control. Well, that's what I call it; I don't know what the official name is. It's like, if you set the cruise control but the car in front of you insists on plodding along at 2 mph below your cruise speed, it senses this and slows down. A lot of people don't like new things, so I've heard all the hand-wringing about it, but it works. The car doesn't force you to use it. What I wasn't sure of was how it would handle real rain. Yesterday, I found out. No, not the hard way; turns out that when the sensors are blocked, it warns you. Okay, cool. Fair enough. Something to consider if we manage to get real autonomous vehicles before civilization collapses: how it'll handle reduced visibility. Probably by using something other than visual sensors. Or maybe by giving up and waiting for the rain to slow down. I don't know; I'm not that kind of engineer. The sunroof is mostly useless in the rain, too, but that's as expected. Hence the name. It's not a rainroof. I've heard it called a moonroof, too, and I always thought that the difference was one can be opened and the other is fixed like a windshield, but apparently not. Whatever. Or maybe one of them is for baring your butt at other drivers? That seems dangerous. The weather cleared up around midday, and I ended up in a small town I'd never even heard of, let alone been to (Kinston, NC) which turns out to have a couple of good breweries, so I stayed. One of the breweries is affiliated with the motel downtown, which, really, I don't know why more people don't pursue that business model. "Can't drive? Stay safe in one of our rooms!" Maybe they're afraid of the cleaning that might be necessary. Today (Monday) is my last full day on the road; I expect to return home on Tuesday, after which I'll return to my usual kinds of blog entries. But so far, I'm calling the trip a success: I had some new experiences, mostly positive, though even the negatives, such as the annoying push-button hotel from a few days ago and the occasional lower-quality beer, were worth the inconvenience, as they gave me stories to tell. That could, of course, turn around ("go south," as it were), and if I were a writer, I'd be able to come up with sixty different plot twists to ruin the trip. Oh, wait. I am a writer. Well, bad things can happen at any time, road trip or not, so I'll just keep enjoying the journey for as long as it lasts. |
| Wrapping up another month in the relentless march to our individual and collective doom. As it is Sunday, I wanted to pull out a past entry and take another look at it. As I've noted before, I don't take anything from the past year for revisiting. Today, though, cuts it pretty close; it's an entry from April 11 of last year: "Asking Persimmon" Since it's so recent, not much has changed. The link, to an Atlas Obscura article, still works. I made my perennial complaint about the inconsistency of labeling delicious fermented beverages: In general, beer is fermented grain, while wine is fermented fruit. However, exceptions abound. Cider, usually from apples or pears, is its own category. Japanese sake is most often known as "rice wine" in English, probably because its alcohol content is higher than most beer and it's generally not bubbly. For example. So if someone wants to call this "persimmon beer," well, they don't need my permission. Well, it's not a complaint, exactly. Just an observation. In the end, though, it doesn't matter all that much, as long as you pretty much know what you're drinking. That is, don't make a sparkling plum wine and call it peach beer. Or whatever. I had a mead yesterday that was also somehow categorized as beer because, it seems, there were grains somewhere in the brewing process. My understanding is that, to be called mead, most of its fermentation product has to come from honey—kind of like something has to be 51% de agave (and from a particular region) to be called tequila. What I'm getting at is, as with many things such as mountains/hills and planets/dwarf planets, sometimes you run into a categorization issue. I'm mostly mentioning this stuff again because, from the article and my quote thereof, there's something that I apparently didn't bother talking about: ...fermenting Diospyros virginiana, the diminutive North American persimmon, with sugar, honey, and yeast... So what I'm not real clear on is how much of the fermentation product is from persimmon, sugar, or honey. Persimmon seems to have enough sugars in it by itself for fermentation; I'd imagine the sugar and honey were about flavor. I highly doubt the ratio of those ingredients was consistent, though. Probably doesn't matter. The story remains the same, and it's still just as interesting as it was last year when I linked it, or the year before when the article came out. |
| I found more new-to-me breweries today. But let me start by recapping yesterday. The town I was in was, if you care to look at it on a map, Wytheville, VA. I'd never spent any time in it before, but it's exactly what I expected from a small town in the mountains: two stoplights, 500 people, 600 churches, and a rustic nonfunctional clock on the courthouse. And, as I noted, two breweries. Here's the funny part, though: as far as I know, the breweries aren't related. But one is called 7 Dogs, named after seven dogs the owner had rescued (with, fortunately, a nod to the rescued cat who kept the dogs in line). The other is named Seven Sisters. Yes, this is important because they both had the number seven in the name. But as I approached this second brewery, I pondered: would it be a reference to actual sisters, or to the star cluster variously known as the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, and Subaru? Because as you know, I'm a sucker for anything astronomy. And I drive a Subaru. So I was pleased to see a nice big print of the Pleiades as I entered. And yet, the beers were named traditionally women's names. Like Rosie, Julia, Edith, etc. Which is fine; it's good to have a theme. But one thing disappointed me: there was no beer named Kate. You see, I like to order tasting flights, which usually consist of 4-6 sampler-sized beers. The missed opportunity was that I could have had my Kate, and Edith too. I will just pause while you absorb the greatness of that joke. Ready? Okay. So, after passing out and sobering up, I spent the better part of the day driving across Virginia, to the east, all the way to the Richmond area, as prompted by my random number generator. Nice drive, great weather. I don't get to the southern part of my state very often, and never before along an east-west route. It could just as easily have landed me back in West Virginia, or Ohio, Kentucky, or Tennessee. Or maybe even a Carolina. But instead, it kept me in Virginia. Fine. Such is the nature of randomness. Here, I found a couple of breweries in Chester, which is a city south of Richmond but north of Petersburg. No, it confuses me, too; as far as I'm concerned, all those cities and everything else in the vicinity is Richmond. There really ought to be a rule: unless there's a significant river (the James doesn't count) or a lot of trees and/or farmland in between, just fucking merge the cities. If you still don't know what the hell I'm talking about, try Google Maps again. I've been drinking. Just one thing of note on the drive: I saw a wake of buzzards. By "buzzards," I mean turkey vultures, cathartes aura, my namesake and the closest thing I have to a spirit animal. It's not unusual to see turkey vultures around here, but usually, they're loners. This is one reason why they're my spirit animal. Sometimes, you'll see a bunch ("wake" is apparently the official collective noun for turkey vultures) of them hanging around, but that's rare. So it surprised me when I saw not two, not three, but five of them just chilling together. I had the windows down, but I didn't see or smell any carrion in the vicinity, so maybe they were just having a chat. Nonsocial birds being social. Now I see that they're only called a "wake" when they're munching on a carcass. As these weren't, there are various possible collective nouns. "Committee" seems to be the leading candidate. A committee of turkey vultures.But I digress. Did the Universe send me a committee of vultures as a Sign? A Message? Well, no, of course not. But that doesn't mean I can't remark on how cool and unusual it was to see a committee meeting. Ugly-ass birds, but they're magnificent anyway. |
| Yesterday's entry was short because I didn't have a comfortable place to type. Today, I found a hotel with a desk in the room, so that's an improvement. But I'm still going to keep it short, because I have beer to introduce myself to and I want to get to it. In contrast to yesterday's lodging, this one has quite ancient amenities, dating back to maybe 2012. The building itself is nearly a hundred years old, but they do have wi-fi and USB charging ports. Most importantly, though, the hotel is within stumbling distance of the two breweries in town, about midway between. This is a good thing. Sure, I'm paying a premium for proximity, but if I stayed in the cheap area, I'd have to pay for Uber. That is, if I can even get Uber here. Since I have nothing to complain about (yet), this is going to be even shorter than yesterday's entry. I will say, though, that driving across mountains is a lot of fun. |
| It's going to be a short one today. I decided to do one of my random road trips. Today, I ended up in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The only hotel in town (other than The Greenbrier, which is very expensive but you should definitely Google it because it's got a fascinating history) is conveniently located about a block away from the town's single brewery, Big Draft. I have already gone there to sample their wares, and they're very good. This hotel - converted from a schoolhouse, because why would West Virginia need schoolhouses? - is less than a year old, so it's "smart." So smart, in fact, that when I checked in, they had to give me the user manual for the room controls. Everything, and I mean everything, in the room is controlled by a touchscreen. The fucking toilet is controlled by a touchscreen. The icons on that touchscreen are incomprehensible, and they are NOT IN THE USER MANUAL. And I'm not about to call the front desk and ask them how to use the goddamned toilet. Which has a bidet built in. While that's a great idea, again, the controls might as well be in French. Hell, if the controls were in French, I'd actually have a shot at understanding them. Adding injury to insult, the room doesn't even have a desk. Which means I have to balance the laptop on a TV dinner stand. Which in turn means no mouse, and I hate using the touchpad. No, I'm not going to use my phone to blog; that's even worse. This is why I'm keeping this entry short, and not linking anything. I hate this future. You remember the Daffy Duck cartoon where he's in a push-button house? Well, if you don't, Google that too because linking anything right now is a massive pain in the ass (unmitigated by the presence of a bidet and - I am absolutely, 100% not kidding here - the massage capabilities of the room's toilet seat). I thought it was funny when I was a kid. Not any more. I'm in a literal push-button hotel room. The one bright spot in all of this, apart from the proximal brewery (which, again, is very good), is that the hotel has a bar. And I will be availing myself of its services shortly. I just hope it's not staffed by robots. |
| It may seem unbelievable today, what with the push toward so-called "natural" foods and supplements, but there was a time when technology was all the rage in popular culinary culture. This article is from December of 2019, so the writer was contractually obligated to mention the "holiday season." I'll just conveniently ignore that some Americans never used lard for religious reasons and take the history at face value. But for all Crisco’s popularity, what exactly is that thick, white substance in the can? If you’re not sure, you’re not alone. I can't remember the last time I saw Crisco. I'm vaguely aware that it's still around, but it's just not part of my worldview. Neither is lard. Oh, I long ago got over my upbringing with its aversion to all things swine; I simply detest animal fats. I won't even cook my eggs in bacon grease. Nor will I accept bacon with too much fat on it. But okay, that's me, and I know I'm an outlier. For decades, Crisco had only one ingredient, cottonseed oil. But most consumers never knew that. That ignorance was no accident. Lesson learned: keep the populace ignorant and you can sell them anything. A century ago, Crisco’s marketers pioneered revolutionary advertising techniques that encouraged consumers not to worry about ingredients and instead to put their trust in reliable brands. Think that would work today? No? Have you seen the supplement industry? "Made from all-natural ingredients" can mean anything from diddly to squat. For most of the 19th century, cotton seeds were a nuisance. I suspect that for at least one demographic, for most of the 19th century, anything related to cotton was a nuisance. When cotton gins combed the South’s ballooning cotton harvests to produce clean fiber, they left mountains of seeds behind. Early attempts to mill those seeds resulted in oil that was unappealingly dark and smelly. Many farmers just let their piles of cottonseed rot. Admittedly, I don't know a lot about the life cycle of the cotton plant. I could learn, of course, but I don't care enough right now. But before hybridization and complete corporate control over seed stock, couldn't they have, you know, replanted the seeds? I guess not. I'll delve into that when I have more time and energy. It was only after a chemist named David Wesson pioneered industrial bleaching and deodorizing techniques in the late 19th century that cottonseed oil became clear, tasteless and neutral-smelling enough to appeal to consumers. Yes, this is the third blog entry in a week focusing on technological innovations of the late 19th century. I assure you this is a randomly-generated coincidence. Oh, and you've probably heard the name Wesson before. I don't know if it's still around, but when I was a kid, his name was on cooking oil bottles. The key word in the quoted bit there, though, is "industrial." While lard prices stayed relatively high through the early 20th century, cottonseed oil was abundant and cheap. Americans, at the time, overwhelmingly associated cotton with dresses, shirts and napkins, not food. Which is understandable, but, for example, trees are associated with food, lumber, and firewood, not limited to one use. Things can have more than one association. Hemp, e.g., or barley, which is versatile enough to make beer or whiskey. Nonetheless, early cottonseed oil and shortening companies went out of their way to highlight their connection to cotton. I'd think that by that point, cotton could have acquired a bad reputation since it was just as associated with slavery as with clothing. But then I stop and think some more, and realize... nah, few would have cared. When Crisco launched in 1911, it did things differently. Meaning, as the article points out, it didn't mention cotton at all. But it was also a new kind of fat – the world’s first solid shortening made entirely from a once-liquid plant oil. Instead of solidifying cottonseed oil by mixing it with animal fat like the other brands, Crisco used a brand-new process called hydrogenation, which Procter & Gamble, the creator of Crisco, had perfected after years of research and development. It would take nearly 100 years for it to be properly demonized as a trans fat (which can unfortunately be confused with a fat trans, so please don't make that joke because it's rude). Again, though, at the time, it was innovative. Instead of dwelling on its problematic sole ingredient, then, Crisco’s marketers kept consumer focus trained on brand reliability and the purity of modern factory food processing. Sounds a bit discordant to modern ears, doesn't it? Back then, though, it worked. Today, Crisco has replaced cottonseed oil with palm, soy and canola oils. Canola oil is another product of marketing. Based on my limited understanding, it was developed in Canada (hence the "can" part), with the -ola suffix associated with oils (see also once-popular margarine brand Mazola, contracted from "maize"). But that naming convention conveniently hid the true origins of the oil: a mustard family crop called rape. Some other Anglophone countries are okay with this linguistic coincidence. Not us. Words have power, and nowhere is this more obvious than in marketing. Anyway. I'm pretty sure palm oil is even worse for you than cottonseed oil, notwithstanding their vegetative origins. But I've been informed that they cut out most of the trans fats in their new formulation. Once ingredient labeling was mandated in the U.S. in the late 1960s, the multisyllabic ingredients in many highly processed foods may have mystified consumers. But for the most part, they kept on eating. I've said this before and I'll say it again: to encourage people to "not eat anything you can't pronounce" is to encourage ignorance. Everything you eat is made up of chemicals. Here, take a glance at this paper which lists several of the compounds present in that Platonic ideal of health foods, an apple. You can't pronounce most of them. Hell, I have trouble with some of them and I have a background in chemistry. Spoiler: most of them are "healthy."That said, I'm pretty sure it was the 1960s that also saw the shift begin away from processed foods and toward so-called "organic" (all food is organic) produce. Was that a backlash to mandatory ingredient labels? Maybe. We're talking about a populace that rejected a 1/3 pound burger because it sounded smaller than a 1/4 pound burger. Anyway, I'm not here to try to tell you what to eat and what not to eat. No one's paying me and I'm not selling anything. I'm only here to make jokes and note things that I find interesting. |
| By coincidence, today's article also talks about a late nineteenth century innovation, one which was apparently met with some pushback. When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked The mundane interface between human and machine caused social anxiety in the late nineteenth century. Pun, of course, intended. The electric push button, the now mundane-seeming interface between human and machine, was originally a spark for wonder, anxiety, and social transformation. Because it's obviously sorcery. As media studies scholar Rachel Plotnick details, people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” Does this sound to you like almost every other complaint about new technology and/or ways of doing things? It does to me. Right after we invented fire, a bunch of skin-wearing humans probably freaked out, too. "What is this 'starting a fire' bullshit? In MY day, we'd steal it from a burning tree after the gods smote it with lightning, as they intended. This is going to make people lazy and entitled, you mark my words." “Some believed that users should creatively interrogate these objects and learn how they worked as part of a broader electrical education,” Plotnick explains. “Others…suggested that pushing buttons could help users to avoid complicated and laborious technological experiences. These approaches reflected different groups’ attempts at managing fears of electricity.” One thing I remember about the show The Jetsons from when I was a kid (haven't seen it since) was that George Jetson's job in our utopian Eloi-like future involved pushing seemingly random buttons all day, to the point that his finger would cartoonishly swell and throb in pain. Well. At least they got that part right (he typed on his computer keyboard). Still no flying cars, though. By the time we get those, it's all going to be touchscreens and voice interfaces, both of which are going to make people lazy and entitled, you mark my words. Electric push buttons, essentially on/off switches for circuits, came on the market in the 1880s. For those of you who didn't bother with yesterday's entry, that's more than a decade after the invention of blue jeans. The word “button” itself comes from the French bouton, meaning pimple or projection, and to push or thrust forward. I don't claim to be an expert in French, but I learned "bouton" to mean like the button on a shirt (or Levis), and that word doesn't look like a verb form to me. Perhaps archaic French; je ne sais pas. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be “simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life. Like I said, lazy. What I didn't say (at least not yet in this entry) is that I consider that a good thing. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is the milkman. Bill Gates supposedly once said that he hires lazy people because they'll figure out the most efficient way to do things. I have no idea if that quote is correctly attributed, but someone said (or wrote) it, and it rings true. Ultimately, the idea that electricity was a kind of magic would triumph over a more hands-on, demystifying approach. Guilty. For all I understand it on anything but the most theoretical level, it might as well be sorcery. Yes, I'm an engineer by training. No, that training didn't include electrical. Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.” Yep. History echoes once again. 150 years later, we equate button-pushing with "easy." That's the whole point of Staples' ad campaign (from a while back; I have no idea if it's still going on.) But I don't think they invented the concept; they just took an existing concept ("at the push of a button") and made it into a marketing gimmick. No... technology is supposed to make our lives easier, make things more convenient. That's what it's for. Kids these days with their simple-to-use devices, I'm telling you, mark my words... |
| It is now time for me to wrap up my April entries into "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]. Of the nine prompts I haven't tackled yet, which one will my random number generator choose this morning? Let's find out... denim Oh, glorious. My dad always called blue jeans "dungarees." His attire of choice was denim overalls, because by the time I became self-aware, he had retired from the military and become a farmer, and just as military officers wear uniforms, farmers wear overalls. He didn't call the overalls "dungarees," though. I don't know why and I certainly can't ask him now. Probably, like about 80% of what he did, it was to annoy me, because I liked wearing blue jeans and hated the word "dungarees" because it started with the sound "dung," which, as farmers, we were all too familiar with. Still, many people, especially in his day, used the words interchangeably. Nowadays I like wearing black jeans, often faded to what my friends called "gamer gray," but while the color and the waist measurement have changed, they still come from Levi Strauss, complete with rivets at the seam junctions. Turns out that denim and dungaree fabric, while similar, aren't actually the same thing. The latter was apparently invented in India many centuries ago, but the particular combination of dye and weave that go into a pair of blue jeans dates back to maybe the 19th century, with the invention of blue jeans coming shortly after the end of the US Civil War.If you bother going to those links above, you'll see what people like to ding Wikipedia on: one calls dungaree a predecessor or precursor to denim, while the other asserts that the connection is unclear. This is why consulting footnotes and other sources is important. But I'm aware that's a lot of work, and in spite of my predilection for wearing what was originally a working-class pair of pants, I'm allergic to work. No disrespect intended to the Indian subcontinent origin of dungaree—that culture invented many essential things for society, including our counting numbers (they're called Arabic numerals, but it turns out the Arabs borrowed the system from India). It's clear to me, though, that denim as we know it today had its origin in the same place so much fashion came from: France. Specifically, the town called Nimes, in the south. De Nimes apparently got Anglicized as denim. Which makes me think that "jeans" should be pronounced "zhahns" in the manner of Jean-Luc Picard, but that turns out not to be the case. Apparently (at least according to one of the non-Wikipedia sources I looked at), its etymology comes from the port of Genoa, which in French is or was called Genes, not to be confused with chromosomes. Why this is the case, I couldn't be arsed to figure out; I did look at a map, which shows that while Nimes is close to la mer Méditerannée, there are at least two perfectly good French ports (Marseille and Nice) between Nimes and Genes. In any case, you know what the French word for jeans is? It's not pronounced like Admiral Picard's name. No, it's pronounced almost exactly like Anglophones pronounce it (the 'j' sound is a bit different), which must be a source of early heart attacks for members of l'Academie française. But jeans as we know them aren't French; they're indisputably a Jewish invention. Gotcha. No, Levi Strauss (German-Jewish family) didn't invent blue jeans; a tailor of Lithuanian-Jewish origin named Jacob Davis (last name changed upon immigration, as with many immigrants) invented them (or at least perfected their durability by using rivets) in Nevada (which had just barely become a US State), but apparently couldn't keep up with demand, so he partnered up with Levi-Strauss to meet production needs. The rest, as they say, is history. To summarize, it's an Indian inspiration for a French fabric that was perfected as work clothing by Jewish immigrants in the Wild West of the US. It would be difficult to get more multicultural than that, but I suspect you can find other examples of intercultural fashion development if you try. I mentioned in a previous entry the persistence of rivets in Levis despite advances in clothing technology that render them mostly decorative now. At the time of their invention, though, riveting the weak spots was the innovation that made jeans the preferred outfit of the working class. They never did, as far as I know, rivet the crotch. I mean, I can kind of understand why; metal tends to get hot in the sun, and the last place you want to heat up is right under your balls. Or, if you don't have them, your cooch. So that's what always fails first for me on a pair of black Levis (though usually only after a few good years of stalwart service). Hopefully not while I'm in public. Nothing's perfect. But in a world dominated by throwaway fashion, it's good to know some clothing is still built to to stand the test of time. Speaking of which, there's one final thing I want to add: that little pocket on the right where you might keep an emergency quarter or two, or a key? The original purpose of that was to hold a pocket watch. Because no matter how hard you work, you still need to keep track of time. |
| Today is the day for me to delve into the past to see what I was up to then and how things might have changed. The RNG took me all the way back to September of 2021 this time, so let's see what I had to say in "Cryptonite" ......a controversial and divisive topic, one that has been known to destroy friendships, end marriages, and divide siblings. Yes, I'm talking about... cryptocurrency. So not much has changed. Unsurprisingly, the original article link, from Cracked, is still there.It's almost inevitable that I've picked up a few things in the year and a half or so since I wrote the entry, but I still won't touch crypto, not even with someone else's pole. If I remember the timeline correctly (and I probably don't), it was the following February that crypto was pushed heavily during the big sportsball game commercials. Not that I saw them, but it's hard to avoid hearing people talk about them. After that, the price of the leading cryptocurrency, bitcoin, crashed. So, not trusting my own memory, I looked up this chart, which tracks btc vs usd for the last 2 years.Such are the perils of hindsight (and my memory). Someone could easily have come up to me a month after I wrote that September entry and crowed, "You're an idiot. The value of bitcoin has skyrocketed!" Because it had. And then I could have come back pretty much any time after that and said, "No, you're the idiot," because it never again reached the stratospheric level of October 2021 prices. Or even September. Thing is, though, that whatever the value of it, the fact that it's quoted in US dollars doesn't say much about the intrinsic value of Bitcoin, but it says a lot about the intrinsic value of the USD. It's basically a gamble. Not that I think there's anything inherently wrong with gambling; I do it, myself—on an occasional basis, and always with a self-imposed limit that is so low that it's basically my entertainment budget. Other people go to sporting events or rock concerts or Broadway plays; I sometimes go to casinos. So it would be hypocritical of me to dismiss it just because it's gambling. "But the stock market is also a gamble, Waltz!" Well, no. I mean, it can be, if you focus on short-term trading, which is what I think most people do because you're always hearing about day traders and the Robinhood app or whatever. But there's a big difference between investing—that is, long-term buy and hold, much less sexy than the adrenaline rush of day trading—and gambling. A stock generally has some intrinsic value (which is almost always lower than the share price). This is because it represents partial ownership in a company, which will ideally have assets and a semi-reliable income stream, putting a floor on its valuation. Sure, sometimes individual companies get caught cooking the books (Enron, e.g.) or their income stream dries up, or they take on more debt than they have assets, and the share price falls to near zero. But more often, they have an interest in keeping on making money, which drives up the share price because people think it'll be more valuable in the future (this is a gross oversimplification, I know). Overall, the latter outnumber the former, which is why investment advisors harp on about diversification: the wins tend to more than make up for the losses. There's still risk. But the analogy I like to make is that speculation and short-term trading are like playing in a casino, while long-term investing is like owning the casino. You can still fail, but you have the house edge. But what's the actual inherent value of crypto? From what I can tell, it's pure speculation. Still, no, it's not the gambling aspect that keeps me away. It's the same reason I shy away from gold trading: advertising. Also, to a lesser degree, not knowing the odds. It's not just my inherent hatred of ads, either. Consider: if someone pays a premium for a 30-second spot during Big Sportsball Game, that means that they: a) want your fiat currency more than they want whatever they're selling; and b) think that they can make enough fiat currency to offset the high cost of said commercial. Now, to be fair, sometimes what they're promoting isn't the crypto itself, but a new way to store it. Like banks, which run commercials all the time. Since I wrote that original article, at least some of those crypto exchanges have utterly failed, the most public of which was the very well-covered fall of FTX. Still, even in that case, point b above applies. So if someone is promoting, say, Dogecoin on TV, they're already giving away their game, which is "I'd rather hold dollars than dogecoins." If dollars are more valuable to them, taking into account the cost of advertising, why shouldn't they be more valuable to you? I'll never ding someone just for wanting to gamble, because, like I said, I do it myself. Though I have an awareness of the odds, and I don't treat it as a get-rich-quick scheme. But hey, there's at least one actual, legitimate, and valuable use of Bitcoin: Last time I checked, which was around December, WDC is taking it as payment for membership. |
| I was hoping something would come up from the depths of my blog fodder folder today that was somehow related to Earth Day, so that I could once again remind everyone that we're doomed and there's nothing we can do about it, so we might as well just enjoy the slide into oblivion. Close enough. Storm Thorgerson and George Hardie’s image of a light shining through a prism and emerging as a spectrum of color—pitched dead center, slightly raised, cast against a black backdrop—is probably the most famous in rock history. One might even say... iconic? Younger Me spent many an hour listening to the album while contemplating the relationship of the cover art to the music. And I never did come to a satisfactory conclusion. Like most album art at the time, I figured it was either an in-joke or something way beyond my teenage depth, like a New Yorker article. Only thing I could come up with was the traditional rainbow has seven colors and a musical scale has seven notes. But it couldn't have been as simple as that, not from Pink Floyd... could it? I hadn't tried drugs yet. There's a lot more at the link, and even if you're not a big fan of Pink Floyd, it's an interesting (if somewhat circuitous) read. ...the band spent four years indulgently experimenting, with mixed results, before it pared back, tightened up, and achieved global fame with the breakthrough of The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973. Some of their output before Dark Side is... how shall I put this charitably... unlistenable. But it did give the world such glorious song titles as "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict," so it wasn't a total bust. The week of Dark Side’s release, the no. 1 album in both the U.S. and U.K. was Elton John’s Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, whose singles, “Crocodile Rock” and “Daniel,” demonstrate the two dominant trends of that moment. The first song is a kitschy, glammy celebration of rock ’n’ roll; the second is a rippling, downbeat soft-rock song about a wounded Vietnam War vet returning home. As different as they are, I want to emphasize that Don't Shoot Me is also on my list of greatest albums of all time. So Dark Side is likely something that someone would be exposed to for the first time as a teenager, which also means it’s exactly what someone would play when they’re getting into weed. As I mentioned above, I became a Pink Floyd fan before I smoked a single joint. I appreciated the music for what it was, absent mental amplification. That said, yeah, okay, weed helps. But if I had to choose between Pink Floyd or weed, I'd pick the former every time. The album begins at birth and then presents the three major preoccupations of modern life—the scarcity of time, the dominance of capital, and the conflicts between people and nations—before ending by basically asking listeners, “You will go mad and die, so how will you resolve these challenges?” I noticed that thematic progression on, I don't know, my thirty-third or thirty-fourth listening. Figured maybe it was just me projecting my own biases onto the music, like it was a musical Rorschach test or Pollock painting. For the album’s 40th anniversary in 2013, the acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard wrote Darkside, a comedic radio play about various moral philosophers (Nietzsche, Kant, Hobbes) that’s scored by the entirety of The Dark Side of the Moon. You know that now that I know about that, I have to find it. Few, if any, teenage totems have come close to Dark Side’s longevity and reach. Its claimed sales are 45 million copies, making it the fourth-best-selling album of all time. I was curious, so I looked it up: the three that beat it are Jackson's Thriller (fair), AC/DC's Back in Black (also fair), and the soundtrack to The Bodyguard (wtf?) I would be remiss if I didn't point out #5 and #6 which are, respectively, The Eagles Greatest Hits, and Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell, both of which are on my own list of greatests. (Source )Anyway, the article delves into the (sometimes unfortunate) history of the band and its members, and I won't quote much more from it. I just want to point out this bit: Perhaps no example of the mythos around Dark Side is as well known, or as ridiculed, as The Dark Side of the Rainbow, the act of syncing up Dark Side to The Wizard of Oz. In 1995, an article in The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette described how specific songs complement scenes from the first 45 minutes of the 1939 movie. Obviously, I knew about this, but never could be arsed to take the time to sync the album to the movie, myself. Fortunately, someone did that and posted it on YouTube; the video is embedded in the article I'm referencing here. But a few years ago, NBC released a show called Emerald City, which was—how to describe this—a dark and gritty postmodernist reimagining of Wizard of Oz. It was roundly panned and canceled after one season, but I liked it—at least at first; it later devolved into a Game of Thrones parody. In it, Dorothy (with Toto, who's either a German shepherd or Belgian Malinois, I forget, in this one) meets the Wizard, who is also from Earth, maybe halfway through the season. And during this peak, important, emotional scene, when she encounters the Wizard (played by Vincent D'Onofrio, who is excellent in everything), he's got Dark Side of the Moon playing. They knew. Damn right they knew. There's a lot more in the article, but I'll just leave you with this tribute video below. I've posted it before, but it's very appropriate here: an AI-generated music video for the entire album, in honor of 50 years of Dark Side. "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark." |
| Oh good. If this prompt for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] hadn't come up at random, I might have had to write an extra entry. boning Ever boned a fish? I haven't, because I don't fish, but I've seen people do it. And not on one of those websites, either. Seems like a lot of work, though as with anything, practice improves skill. Some fish just don't like to be boned, though, which can lead to oral discomfort or even penetration. The word "deboning" in this context means the same thing, which is just one of those weird things about English, like flammable/inflammable or contronyms like "cleave." But for this blogging activity, which is all about clothing, we're not talking about fish, or anything we do with our clothes (mostly) off. And for once, I don't have to do extensive research to know what it means. Not fish, then. But whales, which live with fish but aren't them. Back before the inspired invention of the brassiere, for a while, corsets were all the rage. And back before plastics (see previous entry on nylon), corsets were stiffened by whale bones. Which is oddly appropriate. See, "corset" comes from an old French word meaning "body." The modern version is "corps" (pronounced more like "core" just like with the Marine Corps, and not to be confused with "cœur," which translates to "heart" and is pronounced more like "curr," as in "no1curr") and from one of these we get the English "corpse." So you had people (it's associated with women's wear but for a long time all genders wore a kind of corset) wearing parts of whale corpses to support part of their own living bodies. An endoskeleton turned exoskeleton. We (mostly) don't kill whales for fashion, or lighting, or meat, anymore. Instead, we use older corpses. Not of dinosaurs, per popular misconception and one oil company's brontosaurus logo, but ancient marine life. They're pumped out of wells, refined, and some of them get molded into plastic boning (yes, people still wear corsets; see any RenFaire). Eventually, and not too far in the future, we'll run out of the corpses that took billions of years to accumulate. And then, we're well and truly boned. |
| More proof that we're utterly obsessed with size: What is a black hole’s actual size? What do we mean by a black hole's size? A photon sphere? The minimal stable orbit? The event horizon? The singularity? Which one is right? Out there in the Universe, size definitely matters. Always lead with a subtle dick joke. Objects that are stable, both microscopically and macroscopically, are described by measurable properties such as mass, volume, electric charge, and spin/angular momentum. And, lately, political affiliation. But “size” is a bit of a tricky one, particularly if your object is extremely small. Snort. After all, if all the mass and energy that goes into making a black hole inevitably collapses to a central singularity, then what does the concept of “size” even mean? Obvious jokes aside, I've long wondered how you can measure the size of something that warps spacetime, which makes the concept of "size" very slippery (as if covered with K-Y) The first thing you have to know about a black hole is this: in terms of its gravitational effects, especially at large distances away from it, a black hole is no different from any other mass. I've mentioned something like this before, I know, but can't be arsed to find it right now. Black holes have some legitimately scary properties, but if they were going to eat entire galaxies, they'd have done it by now. After all, we’re taught that black holes have an irresistible gravitational pull, and that they suck any matter that comes too close to their vicinity irrevocably into them. But the truth is that black holes don’t “suck” matter in anymore than any other mass. I'm not well-versed in the math involved, but there's a region around a black hole within which orbits decay in a predictable way. Outside that region, black holes act like any other mass. This is complicated by the prevalence of gas, dust, and debris in the vicinity, all of which would cause any orbit to eventually decay. When a black hole rotates, it no longer has just one meaningful surface that’s a boundary between what can escape and what can’t; instead, there are a number of important boundaries that arise, and many of them can make a claim to being the size of a black hole, depending on what you’re trying to do. From the outside in, let’s go through them. The rest of the article does just that; it's very interesting, and only a little bit math-oriented, but there's no need for me to comment on it. After all, I just wanted to make the point (pun intended) that even science writers are not above making the occasional dick joke. |
| Today, another entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]: Nylon "There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?" -Mr. McGuire, The Graduate If Dustin Hoffman's character had actually heeded those words (frankly, I don't remember enough about the movie to know whether he did or not), he might have found himself in trouble. Shortly after the movie was released, "just one word: plastics" started to fall out of favor. But there was a time when nylon, and other plastics, were heralded as positive agents of change. As with most innovations of the 20th century, this was largely driven by marketing, with a hint of racism thrown in (nylon was heralded as an alternative to silk, which came from those countries.) I don't need to rehash the Wikipedia page for nylon, so for facts (or near-facts) and history, you can go there. Warning: a lot of it is chemistry. You can skip that part. I did, and I have some knowledge of chemistry.But I do want to focus on one nearly throwaway sentence from that article: In 1946, the demand for nylon stockings could not be satisfied, which led to the Nylon riots. The... Nylon... RIOTS? This, I gotta learn more about. The nylon riots were a series of disturbances at American stores created by a nylon stocking shortage. Anyone else spot the inherent pun there? Anyone? I'll ruin it by explaining it: they had trouble stocking stockings. During World War II, nylon was used extensively for parachutes and other war materials, such as airplane cords and ropes and the supply of nylon consumer goods was curtailed. I'm just going to leave this here and hopefully remember to, at some point, research the effects of the rise of synthetic fabrics on the demonization of hemp. I can't help but think there was a connection, but it's irrelevant to this discussion. The riots occurred between August 1945 and March 1946, when the War Production Board announced that the creation of Du Pont's nylon would shift its manufacturing from wartime material to nylon stockings, at the same time launching a promotional campaign. On the other hand, I think I have a pretty good grasp on the link between overpromising stuff in promotional campaigns, and consumer riots. It is imperative that I add: it sounds like there was a run on stockings. In one of the worst disturbances, in Pittsburgh, 40,000 women queued up for 13,000 pairs of stockings, leading to fights breaking out. If only we had camera phones then. Imagine the beautiful videos that would have resulted. It took several months before Du Pont was able to ramp up production to meet demand, but until they did many women went without nylon stockings for months. Imagine the sheer horror (pun intended). During World War II, Japan stopped using supplies made out of silk, and so the United States had difficulty importing silk from Japan. Pretty sure there were other reasons why importing silk from Japan wasn't possible during WWII. Nylon stockings became increasingly popular on the black market, and sold for up to $20 per pair. WTF, Wikipedia. Dollar amounts are useless unless we can compare them to today's dollars. Here, I'll help: $20 in 1945 is like $335 today. There's more at the link. Maybe you'd heard of them; I had not, and despite the very real plight of the American stocking-wearers (or, technically, stocking-not-wearers) in the mid-1940s, I had a good laugh reading the section. I have no idea what the current status of demand for nylon stockings is. I don't see them much, but I don't go to department stores or frequent the kinds of events where people would wear stockings or hose or pantyhose or whatever. Most of the ladies I see pictures of on the internet don't seem to wear them, but that may be selection bias, as most of the ladies I see pictures of on the internet don't wear much of anything. No, I think people these days prefer "natural" fabrics, but not fur, though artificial fake fur can be made of nylon or nylon blends. I mostly see it in more bulk form, not fabric: fishing lines, zippers, even car parts. The first Wiki link above lists a bunch of uses. As a plastic, it's very versatile. But as a fabric? I can't remember the last time I could identify a pure nylon fabric. I think I had a raincoat made of it as a kid, but I'm not sure even of that. I guess you could say that if you're looking for nylon stockings today, you might be hosed. |
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