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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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| A timely article. Well, not really, but it's about time. That is to say, the subject of the article is time. Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion  Getting human feeling to match the math is an ultimate goal in physics. In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that “time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.” Finally! Someone agrees with me. The article is from back in 2019, but it's not like time's gone anywhere since then. And it's largely a transcript of an interview from 2014; thus, there's more to it than I can cherry-pick. But this question, I felt was important: Is it part of the scientist’s job to explain why things feel the way they do? Part of his reply: As physicists, that’s ultimately what we need to explain: Why does everything feel the way it does? We shouldn’t be so naive as to think that things will always feel the way they actually are, because the history of physics is a long sequence of examples of where we realize that the ultimate nature of things is very different from how they feel. I have some issue with the phrase "ultimate nature," but this is an ad-hoc interview response, so I'm not going to quibble. Take temperature, for example. Temperature is a bulk effect of particle motion/vibration within an object or volume of fluid (air in this sense is a fluid). At the smallest scales we can contemplate, there's only vibration—not temperature. People don't say that temperature is an illusion, but I keep hearing "time is an illusion" even though it, too, is a bulk property of matter. Anyway. The interview goes on to talk about some other interesting aspects of time, space, the universe, etc., with a bonus Monty Python quote, which I'm always a sucker for. But I won't bore you any further, not today. |
| I'mma do some prompts from "JAFBG" [XGC] in addition to my usual fare. Selected at random, as usual, here's the first one: When is tough love appropriate (if ever)? Oh, joy, something that has nothing to do with me. Back before I developed my allergy to physical labor, I worked for a residential construction company in Northern Virginia, one specializing in renovations and additions. We were redoing some rich family's kitchen and were told "If the owners' son Dave [not his actual name, not because I'm trying to protect anyone after nearly 40 years, but because I forgot it] shows up, don't let him in, don't engage, call the cops. He's an addict and they're practicing tough love." Wouldn't you know it, about a week into the project, Dave shows up at the door. Fortunately, I was only like 20 at the time, and my supervisor handled things. It was my first exposure to the concept of "tough love," and it was also my only exposure to it. Not to be confused with "rough love," which I might or might not know something about, but I'm keeping this blog 18+. So I don't really have an opinion on it, other than this: If your kid is an addict, or otherwise self-destructive, okay, fine. I don't know enough about it to know if it's actually effective or not, and I can't be arsed to research it right now. Maybe reducing their dependence on you can reduce their dependence on other things, or nudge them into being responsible. Maybe not; maybe it just steers them toward other enablers. I'll never be in a situation to worry about it, so my interest in the topic is slight, about on the level of sportsball or the finer points of winning a tractor pull. The problem is, the concept got jumped on by the authoritarian segment of the population, and they subvert it into abuse. My son is gay? Send him to a re-education camp, and don't let him back into the family without a girlfriend. My daughter is practicing Wicca? Not in my house! She can only return if she agrees to be rebaptized and go to church every week. Someone who doesn't see the difference is part of the problem, not the solution. |
| Today, I'm going to talk about nothing. And no, despite the borderline clickbait title, this article isn't about philosophical nihilism, but the physical emptiness of space. Just had to clarify that because, well, in this blog, it could go either way. In 1654 a German scientist and politician named Otto von Guericke was supposed to be busy being the mayor of Magdeburg. But instead he was putting on a demonstration for lords of the Holy Roman Empire. With his newfangled invention, a vacuum pump, he sucked the air out of a copper sphere constructed of two hemispheres. He then had two teams of horses, 15 in each, attempt to pull the hemispheres apart. To the astonishment of the royal onlookers, the horses couldn’t separate the hemispheres because of the overwhelming pressure of the atmosphere around them. I vaguely remember seeing an illustration of this when I was quite young. Too young to fully comprehend the implications, but old enough to go "why didn't they use tractors?" Scientists, philosophers, and theologians across the globe had debated the existence of the vacuum for millennia, and here was von Guericke and a bunch of horses showing that it was real. To be clear: it's not that a vacuum has the power to glue hemispheres together. It's that the air pressure that surrounds and permeates us is actually quite strong. We just don't notice it because we (usually) have equilibrium to it. But the idea of the vacuum remained uncomfortable, and only begrudgingly acknowledged. We might be able to artificially create a vacuum with enough cleverness here on Earth, but nature abhorred the idea. My dad, whom I primarily credit with my interest in science (I think he's the one who showed me that vacuum drawing and tried to explain it to me as a kid), always told me "nature abhors a vacuum." I'm still skeptical of that old folk wisdom. If nature abhors it so much, then why is the vast majority of the universe vacuum? Scientists produced a compromise: The space of space was filled with a fifth element, an aether, a substance that did not have much in the way of manifest properties, but it most definitely wasn’t nothing. Lots to unpack here. I think that by "fifth element" they're not talking about awesome Bruce Willis movies, but to the old paradigm of earth, air, fire, and water, which, I feel obliged to point out, is Eurocentric in origin. And I've been saying for years that our current conception of "dark matter" reminds me very strongly of "aether," in that scientists have hypothesized a substance that has properties to fit observation, something without "much in the way of manifest properties." Aether turned out to be something else entirely (the aether bunny doesn't exist); will the same become true of dark matter? Not that there's anything wrong with that. You gotta start somewhere, and that's hypothesis based on observation. If it's disproved later, well, that's science. In the 1920s astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the Andromeda nebula was actually the Andromeda galaxy, an island home of billions of stars sitting a staggering 2.5 million light-years away. As far as we could tell, all those lonely light-years were filled with not much at all, just the occasional lost hydrogen atom or wandering photon. Poetic, but photons aren't particles of mass, so their presence or absence doesn't change what we usually mean by "vacuum." At subatomic scales, scientists were also discovering atoms to be surprisingly empty places. If you were to rescale a hydrogen atom so that its nucleus was the size of a basketball, the nearest electron would sit around two miles away. I didn't bother fact-checking this scale analogy, but it tracks, though it may be misleading to talk about the size of an electron. Within the emptiness that dominates the volume of an atom and the volume of the universe, physicists found something. Far from the sedate aether of yore, this something is strong enough to be tearing our universe apart. The void, it turns out, is alive. Oh for fuck's sake... okay, okay, calm down, poetic license. In the late 1990s, two independent teams of astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, meaning that our universe grows larger and larger faster and faster every day. The exact present-day expansion rate is still a matter of some debate among cosmologists, but the reality is clear: Something is making the universe blow up. It appears as a repulsive gravitational force, and we’ve named it dark energy. This, not the creative prose, is why I saved this article. Because the irony doesn't escape me: the presence of vacuum (so to speak) was proven because teams of horses couldn't pull apart an empty copper sphere containing vacuum (again, so to speak). And now, vacuum-associated dark energy seems to be causing galaxies to fly apart. The trick here is that the vacuum, first demonstrated by von Guericke all those centuries ago, is not as empty as it seems. If you were to take a box (or, following von Guericke’s example, two hemispheres), and remove everything from it, including all the particles, all the light, all the everything, you would not be left with, strictly speaking, nothing. What you’d be left with is the vacuum of spacetime itself, which we’ve learned is an entity in its own right. That's right: there are degrees of nothing. When we talk about "vacuum" (and we're not referring to our Hoover), we usually mean relative lack of matter particles. In any case, there's more to the article, and it's an interesting summary on where cosmology is now as regards emptiness and universal expansion. But I've gone on long enough, and made the point I wanted to make. So I have "nothing" more to say today. |
| And suddenly, March. I made it through February. Yay. This one wasn't as bad as most, but still not as great as the February I spent on Maui. To celebrate, my final entry into this round of "Journalistic Intentions" [18+], which features a cat prompt: Lounge .Ever notice that most black cats aren't black? Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just the way genetics interacts with kitty development. You almost always see a bit of white on a black cat: maybe the whiskers, maybe just a patch of tuxedo white on the chest. Even absent that, fur color depends in part on lighting. My cat Robin, for example, is so black that she blends into both my blanket and my mood. Cat camouflage. Sometimes you don't even see her unless she blinks, revealing the yellowish-brown eyes most black cats have (those come from the same source: melanin). Her nose is black. Her toe beans are black. Hell, even her whiskers are black. Until you get her out into the glare of the accursed daystar, which is when you discover that okay, maybe she's not black; she's a very deep shade of brown. Robin is also usually silent. Making no noise at all when she walks, she passes her stealth check every time. I think I've heard her meow twice, both times very quietly, in the seven or so years I've lived with her. Unless the lights are on, the only way I know she's there is I hear the double thump as she leaps off of some place she shouldn't be. But sometimes, yes, like most cats, she purrs. Even Robin, though, has three fibers of white hair on her chest, as if to say "I'm not a black cat, really; I'm not." But being a cat person, I possess several statuettes of Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess, in her regal pose, like this one.  (I hope that link works). And Robin looks exactly like that when she's seated.Thing is, though, cat fur color is only loosely correlated with cat behavior. While I've never had a calico that wasn't neurotic, I've heard that many of them are not. Contrary to popular belief, some orange tabbies are highly intelligent. Not all white cats are deaf, though the lack of melanin is sometimes associated with deafness. And black cats certainly aren't bad luck; they're just hard to see at night. They're all just cats, and they're all different. I can't remember ever choosing a cat, so it's not like I seek out certain breeds or coat patterns. Mostly, they were chosen for me, by parents or roommates or wives. Or the cat itself. But one day I'd like to adopt a mysterious raven-black tomcat, and name him Edgar Allan Purr. |
| After yesterday's foray into the deep, murky, turbulent waters at the confluence of science and philosophy, how about a little comic relief, from Cracked? Well, let me guess: with apologies to Mark Twain, there are lies, damn lies, statistics, and marketing. Trendy food-makers, as you've undoubtedly noticed popping up in unprecedented numbers and diversity recently, have two goals: 1) relieve you of your hard-earned funds, and 2) make decent-tasting, more healthful foods. And, sadly, often in that order. Hence why they nearly always fail at #2. I find that people don't actually want good-tasting healthy food. If it tastes good, it must be bad for you, so you have to do penance. Thus: kale. Like non-GMO? Literally, most modern fruits and vegetables were the product of GMOs, and have been since before any of those words existed. Thanks, Cracked. I've been saying this for years. And gluten-free? Gluten is a protein that forms when flour is mixed with water, then kneaded. I think gluten itself has a marketing problem. The problem started with chemists, who called it that to begin with (and make no mistake, all foods are made up exclusively of chemicals; you're not going to find chemical-free food anywhere in this universe). The word "gluten" and its derivatives are all over chemistry; for example, monosodium glutamate. The marketing problem is this: the word resembles "gluteus maximus," which is Latin for ass. So your mind goes "it must taste like ass." Which it doesn't. Now, I know that there's a relatively small number of people who legitimately have a gluten allergy, and it's helpful for them to have those labels. But the marketing comes in when food companies make no effort in saying "this product contains gluten, which is actually quite tasty and not a problem for over 99% of you," instead labeling something "gluten-free" as if that's some sort of health benefit. But trendy food-makers also like to make you think their snack foods, especially chips and crackers, are less fattening than their run-of-the-mill, blue-collar competitors. Sure, and once you label something as "healthier and less fattening," people will eat more of it. Which of course is the whole point of marketing, but it's no better for the consumer to eat two bags of 500-calorie crisps than to eat one bag of 1000-calorie crisps. And yet: But once you check the nutritional info, you'll see that the calories are nearly identical to regular potato chips. Additionally, the vitamin and mineral profile isn’t much better. It's almost as if one would be better off eating an actual vegetable rather than a starch (which is a carbohydrate and gets converted into sugar). Not to mention the glut of gussied-up tortilla chips, with flashy labels and prominent boasts of "red quinoa" and "multigrain" and other buzzwords to conceal that you're eating a corn chip with a sprinkling of birdseed tossed into the industrial mixer. I'm just leaving this here because it made me actually LOL. I have a thing for Frito's. Ever see the ingredients list on Frito's? "Corn, corn oil, salt." That's it. No preservatives (apart from the salt), no monosodium glutamate (not that there's anything wrong with that), and not a single polysyllabic chemical word. I'm not saying they're good for me. I'm just saying they're pretty simple. Other trendy treats will assure you that they're "naturally sweetened" and that their cookies, bars, or balls eschew evil sugar for the inherent, wholesome sweetness provided by dates or coconut. Sounds great, except there's not much difference, especially since dates and coconuts are among the most calorific things you can stuff in your mouth. While this article focuses on calories, I'm aware that there are other measures of the "healthiness" of a food. What they are, though, is still being debated, and I don't trust nutritional science as far as I can throw it (mainly because much of it is funded by these same food companies, so there's an incentive to get the results they want). Plus, though many will hate reading this: sugar isn't evil. So the best way to chisel at those love handles is to track our total caloric intake and not worry so much about the source. Or to make a soul-pact with Lucifer; your choice. Jury's still out on that, too. My understanding is that white sugar is simple carbs (bad) while brown sugar is more complex carbs (not as bad). But who knows what they'll figure out next? Meanwhile, I'm not going to worry too much about it, but, as always, I'll be aware of marketing gimmicks. |
| Ugh. I would get this weighty topic on a Monday. Why the Classical Argument Against Free Will Is a Failure Despite bold philosophical and scientific claims, there’s still no good reason to doubt the existence of free will. There's no good reason not to, either. But I'll get to that. My problem with this article is it uses the strawman fallacy. But if you subscribe, as I do, to the notion that we don't have free will, the author couldn't have written otherwise. Not then. Now, they could, once the strawman is pointed out. But they won't; I've found that some people are invested in the idea of free will, and get upset if you present evidence to the contrary. In the last several years, a number of prominent scientists have claimed that we have good scientific reason to believe that there’s no such thing as free will — that free will is an illusion. I've talked a lot about illusion in here. In short, let's not confuse "illusion" with emergent or bulk properties. For example, consciousness is an emergent property of our bodies, but it's, by definition (cognito ergo sum) real. But some things that people think are real are, necessarily, illusions; the obvious example of that is, well, look up any number of optical illusions online; until they're explained, they certainly seem real. If this were true, it would be less than splendid. Assertion without evidence. And it would be surprising, too, because it really seems like we have free will. It seems that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions that we freely make. "Seems" is the key word here. We need to look very closely at the arguments that these scientists are putting forward to determine whether they really give us good reason to abandon our belief in free will. But before we do that, it would behoove us to have a look at a much older argument against free will — an argument that’s been around for centuries. The older argument against free will is based on the assumption that determinism is true. And that's the strawman here. I'm sure there are scientists who still accept determinism, but once quantum theory began to take shape about a century ago, all that went right out the window (the article notes this later). I won't copy their version of the strawman here, but it's there at the link if you want to read it. There’s a big problem with the classical argument against free will. It just assumes that determinism is true. On this, we can agree. But again, no one's promoting the classical argument anymore. Or, at least, very few are. The idea behind the argument seems to be that determinism is just a commonsense truism. Which is another reason why common sense is neither. Another person's "common sense" might lead them to conclude that we do have free will. After all, as the article noted up there, it certainly seems as if we do. Quantum mechanics has several strange and interesting features, but the one that’s relevant to free will is that this new theory contains laws that are probabilistic rather than deterministic. True. We can understand what this means very easily. False. No one understands quantum physics. But if this is right, then it means that at least some physical events aren’t deterministically caused by prior events. It means that some physical events just happen. This is the crux of the issue, though. These "physical events that just happen" include the quantum effects in your brain. It's not hard to understand that the result of this can be some truly random firing of neurons, which in turn affects our thoughts and/or actions. Despite metric shit-tons of ink wasted on "you can control your quantum reality" bullshit pseudoscience books, it's really the other way around. And so we don’t know whether all physical events are completely caused by prior events. In other words, we don’t know whether determinism or indeterminism is true. And as regards free will or lack thereof, it doesn't matter. Any quantum effects, inside or outside the brain, that we observe or are otherwise affected by, inform our perceptions, which in turn inform our decisions. But now notice that if we don’t know whether determinism is true or false, then this completely undermines the classical argument against free will. Yes, but only the classical argument. Now, to be fair, the article goes on to present that as an argument, along with a more philosophical argument. I take no issue with they way they're both described. But there is no good reason to devote most of the article to debunking determinism, as that has already been done, and thoroughly. My own view is that neither of these new-and-improved arguments succeeds in showing that we don’t have free will. But it takes a lot of work to undermine these two arguments. In order to undermine the scientific argument, we need to explain why the relevant psychological and neuroscientific studies don’t in fact show that we don’t have free will. And in order to undermine the philosophical argument, we need to explain how a decision could be the product of someone’s free will — how the outcome of the decision could be under the given person’s control — even if the decision wasn’t caused by anything. Yes. "It takes a lot of work." Because they're good arguments. I followed the same arguments this author (who is a professor, but let's not add "argument from authority" to our list of sins here; he's a philosophy professor) describes and came to a different conclusion. Well, I guess in the end, we can agree on one thing: More study is necessary. |
| It's Throwback Sunday (maybe I should start doing these on a Thursday), and the random number generator gave me another one from 2009, mid-September: "Random Thoughts" Sadly, this is mostly not my work. While I'm certainly not above quoting sections from an article I link to comment on, it isn't usually my style to just copy something whole-cloth, even if it is something that was circulating widely at the time. I don't know; I may have done it more in the distant past—I don't remember, which is one reason I do these retrospectives. But I don't do it much, if at all, these days. My blog is to emphasize my thoughts, not someone else's. The entry does start out with me: A friend of mine just discovered the wonders of email. Again, this was 2009. I think I first got an email account in 1994, unless you count the one the university assigned to me as a student in the eighties. This means that she's currently forwarding every bit of glurge and misinformation on to all of her hapless friends. I'm at a loss to remember who this was. Probably she's all over Failbook and DikDok now. I was just about to relegate her latest recirculated bit of "wisdom" to the compost pile when I accidentally looked at it. And laughed. What can I say? Wade through enough shit and eventually, you'll find a penny. Re-reading these now, I don't think they're quite as funny. I won't paste all of them again here. I wish Google Maps had an "Avoid Ghetto" routing option. Probably racist, definitely classist. I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger. Inertia is a thing. If I'm awake, I want nothing more than to stay awake. If I'm asleep, I want nothing more than to stay asleep. There is a great need for sarcasm font. Comic Sans is the Official Sarcasm Font. I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in. Wow, that one didn't age well. Map Quest really needs to start their directions on #5. Pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood. Nor did that one. Bad decisions make good stories This one, however, is timeless. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don't want to have to restart my collection. Well, that didn't happen. While watching the Olympics, I find myself cheering equally for China and USA . No, I am not of Chinese descent, but I am fairly certain that when Chinese athletes don't win, they are executed. Eesh. I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Darnit!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What'd you do after I didn't answer? Drop the phone and run away? I have no idea what this means anymore. As a driver I hate pedestrians, and as a pedestrian I hate drivers, but no matter what the mode of transportation, I always hate cyclists. This hasn't stopped. It needs to. Desperately. I think the freezer deserves a light as well. I have a warped sense of time, but I'm pretty damn sure my current refrigerator is one I bought long before 2009. Its freezer features a lightbulb. Well, that's enough of that. Some of the ones I didn't re-glurge-itate here are still legitimately funny, but these days, instead of being forwarded around in email, they'd all be pasted on top of an image of some sort. Because our attention spans really are SQUIRREL! |
| Almost done with February's "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]. Today's randomly selected photo prompt can be found here: To The Skies It should come as no surprise to anyone who's been following along here that one of the highlights of my life was visiting the Johnson Space Center in Houston. I've been to the more famous one in Florida, too, of course. That one's close enough to Disney World for a lot of Disney World to have rubbed off on it. Lines for the ticket booths were long but well-ordered, the whole thing was set up as a tourist trap, and it was highly kid-oriented. I fully expected to see employees dressed up as planets taking pictures with families. It's not terrible, mind you, and I'm glad I went to see one of the world's few spaceports. But its emphasis on mass appeal made it less interesting than its counterpart in Texas. Of the two, Houston is way more appealing to me because it's geekier. Part of the tour involved going into the room where people handled the first Moon landing (among other flights). Having seen the room in action, live, numerous times as a kid, I was just excited to be standing there in Mission Control. Another important thing in Houston was they had a hangar specifically for storing one of the Saturn V rockets. Even if you know, from reading or looking at size comparisons or whatever, how big that sucker was, it's pretty incredible to stand next to it (it's stored on its side, but still). That's the vehicle that took dudes to the Moon, which makes it the most significant machine in human history. And sure, they're using a different rocket now. Things improve and evolve, like how the Hubble Space Telescope is replaced by the JWST, which in no way diminishes the advancements made by Hubble. I expect this new rocket even has an onboard computer more advanced than the pocket calculator the Apollo missions used, and its Mission Control might be using more than slide rules. It's quite likely that society will collapse soon, and all of this will be lost. But for a brief few years, we really did shoot for the Moon. |
| In contrast to yesterday's ramblings about exoplanets, today's article is both humorous (because it's from Cracked) and slightly more down-to-earth. I think that's a matter of definition, but we'll see what the article says about it. After all, when you think of Italian food, what comes to mind? Pasta with tomato sauce? Noodles came from east Asia, and tomatoes came from the Americas. In a nice break, this isn't a countdown list. English food has a reputation as bland at best and outright objectionable at worst, full of vegetables boiled to mush, dubious “puddings” that bear no resemblance to the Snack Packs we love overseas, and jellied eels, possibly the least appetizing combination of sounds in the English language. While that reputation may have some basis in reality, having been to England, I can say it has a lot more than that. All of that is beside the point, though, because it turns out there really is no such thing as English food, or at least not what we think of as English food. Fish and chips, afternoon tea, beans on toast, all manner of meat pies or non-pies that are still confusingly called pies, and yes, even sausage rolls — they or their components all come from somewhere else in the world. The Brits have created an entire cuisine out of little more than theft and colonialism. And? Lots of nations' cuisines came from somewhere else. Japanese tempura? That has the same source as British fish & chips: Sephardic Jews from Portugal. Hell, even the name has a Latin root. Let’s start with what many bewilderingly consider England’s national dish: curry. Obviously, curry wasn’t invented by some dude who looks and sounds like Colin Firth, coming to England via its colonization of India. One thing England did do well on its own: beer. You might have seen the proliferation of the beer style known as IPA, or India Pale Ale. That's not an Indian beer. That's a British beer, hopped-up (hops are a preservative) to survive the long trip around Africa (in the days before the Suez Canal), because apparently that was easier than setting up breweries in India. Incidentally, speaking of curry, Japan has its own take on curry. You'd think they'd have gotten it from India, too. But it turns out that they got it from England, who got it from India, which is about as convoluted as it's possible to get. Whether India or Thailand invented it, I don't know and can't be arsed to find out right now; it doesn't matter. Point is, delicious food gets around. Tea, of course, also came from India, which got it from China, though it’s as entwined with English identity as large clocks and the wrong kind of football. You mean the kind that doesn't give its players brain damage? For their part, scones originated from Scotland. That might sound close enough, but tell some burly Scottish dude that he’s basically English and see what happens. I wouldn't brag about scones. The article doesn't mention that other quintessential British food: crumpets. Depending on who you talk to, they might have actually been an English creation... or, perhaps, Welsh. Another country that England didn’t colonize, despite their best efforts, but still cribbed much of their cuisine from is France. I'm not going to rag on English food, but I don't think anyone except the most committed Anglophile would argue that the French are, in general, better cooks. There's an old joke to the effect of: the difference between Heaven and Hell is that, in Heaven, the Germans are the engineers, the British are the police, and the French are the cooks; in Hell, the French are the engineers, the British are the cooks, and the Germans are the police. Basically, the most traditionally English meals, broken down to their constituent parts, have roots outside England, sometimes literally. For example, the only English part of fish and chips is the newspaper it’s served on, and that might be suspect as well. The fish came from Jewish immigrants, who fried it in flour for religious reasons (it turns out God wants us to live deliciously), and was initially advertised in England as fish “in the Jewish manner.” The chips, which we — probably correctly, it turns out — call French fries, actually do come from either France or Belgium. (We got something right, guys!) Worse, it's not like potatoes are native to Europe. Or even Africa or Asia. The mince pie, an English Christmas staple, came from the Middle East, and anything with custard owes a debt to Ancient Rome. Okay, but let's be fair, here: the British conquered a good chunk of the world and appropriated various cultural foods, but not Ancient Rome. Rome instead invaded the British Isles. "We learned it from YOU, Dad!" Anyway, a fun article if, like me, you enjoy knowing where your food came from. |
| I wanted to share this one from Aeon. Not because I completely agree with it, though it does raise interesting points. There’s no planet B The scientific evidence is clear: the only celestial body that can support us is the one we evolved with. Here’s why "Earth first! We'll strip-mine the other planets later." The essay begins with what could be a decent elevator pitch for a science fiction series: We built powerful astronomical telescopes to search the skies for planets resembling our own, and very quickly found hundreds of Earth twins orbiting distant stars. Our home was not so unique after all. The universe is full of Earths! And that is science-fiction, make no mistake. You might have heard that we have discovered earth-size, or even earth-like, planets out there. The former is true. The latter is not. The kind of telescope it would take to find planets that are definitely capable of supporting our kind of life would be much bigger and much more advanced than the JWST. This futuristic dream-like scenario is being sold to us as a real scientific possibility, with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future. Well, that's a non-sequitur. Getting to exoplanets is billions of times harder than getting to our solar system neighbor, which is, by an astronomer's definition, earthlike... but not capable of supporting our kind of life. Many of the highest-grossing films are set on fictional planets, with paid advisors keeping the science ‘realistic’. That should read "with paid advisors who are almost completely ignored to service plot and the rule of cool." There's nothing inherently wrong with servicing plot and making things cool, but we should all be aware that this is what's happening. I know a guy, an astronomer, who got paid to be a science advisor on a minor TV series. Very first episode, they got the astronomy wrong. And I don't mean "mistaking a Wolf-Rayet star for a hypernova" or anything like that, but "being able to see Sirius from Boston in the summer." Basic stuff that anyone who cares to can look up and disprove. And that's not even getting into the stupid cliffhanger they ended the series with before it got canceled. At the same time, narratives of humans trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth have also become mainstream. To be fair, those can be fun. Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind? No. No. See? Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B. Our future is here, and it doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed. No, it doesn't have to. But it does. There is no planet B. These days, everyone is throwing around this catchy slogan. Yes, and I wish they'd stop. Not because they're wrong, but because it's a pun. A pun loses all impact when it's repeated. However, no one actually explains why there isn’t another planet we could live on, even though the evidence from Earth sciences and astronomy is clear. Maybe because the explanation wouldn't fit on a placard, in a tweet, or even in a blog entry hastily done so I can go back to playing Pathfinder:Kingmaker. Or even in an Aeon essay. While human-led missions to Mars seem likely in the coming decades, what are our prospects of long-term habitation on Mars? I'm all for space exploration, and visiting other worlds. With our current technology and near-future prospects, though, terraforming is an opium dream (literally, in the case of some science fiction authors). Which is not to say it can never be within our means, but not before Earth becomes an uninhabitable shithole. Which we'll have to terraform. The essay goes into some technical reasons why we can't make the surface of Mars habitable, and they track with my prior knowledge, but I won't paste it here. I'll just say that they didn't address one of the major barriers: radiation, which our magnetic field protects us from. How many Earth-sized, temperate planets are there in our galaxy? Since we have discovered only a handful of these planets so far, it is still quite difficult to estimate their number. This is complicated by the limitations of our observations. For one thing, most exoplanets are found because their orbital plane happens to be edge-on to our view, and the planet transits the star from our perspective. This severely limits what we can actually find. For another thing, a lot of small planets can be missed. The essay then attempts to predict, with this limited data, how many potential alternative worlds we have out there. I'm not faulting the math, but it is a wild-ass guess... though much less of a wild-ass guess than before we started finding evidence of exoplanets. And then there's a long discussion about how we wouldn't have been able to survive on Earth for the vast majority of its existence. Again, worth reading, but I'm not copying it here. I'll just quote one more part: Earth is the home we know and love not because it is Earth-sized and temperate. No, we call this planet our home thanks to its billion-year-old relationship with life. Just as people are shaped not only by their genetics, but by their culture and relationships with others, planets are shaped by the living organisms that emerge and thrive on them. And to me, that's the crux of the issue. Science fiction (a genre I love) can make the assumption that evolution on other planets works parallel to ours, and that we could fit right in to different ecosystems. But this is obviously not the case. Consequently, we're doomed. |
| Another entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+], based on this photo prompt: Maybe I'm Lost I never get lost. You probably hear that from men a lot, don't you? Or maybe you're a man and you say it to save face, while privately acknowledging, yep, I'm all turned around and I need to penis a way out of this, preferably without asking anyone for directions. But for me, it's true. This is because I have a superior sense of direction, maps, a GPS, and a backup GPS. Even before GPS, though, I could always find my way out of a wrong turn. Now, I may be cheating, because I rarely go into the woods alone. The woods are a classic place to get lost in, because it's hard to estimate direction by looking at a sky that you can't see through the canopy. The old bit of "common sense" about moss only growing on the north side of trees is bullshit, incidentally; one more reason why common sense is neither. I have to say, though, that sometimes I wander around on purpose, and an outside observer might conclude that I'm lost. This has happened several times, like when I got pulled over in Texas for having Virginia plates (okay, I was also speeding, so I deserved it, but I want to emphasize that this was right after I ate the dust of several pickups with Texas tags who blew by me). The cop, who ended up issuing me a warning, asked me: "Are you lost?" Well, while I admittedly didn't know precisely where I was, having never been to North Texas before at the time, I knew exactly where I was going: Vernon, where I would end up eating the absolute worst steak of my entire existence, worse even than the ones my mom would turn into hockey pucks. So, for anyone counting, that's two mis-steaks in one day. I do it walking, too. Mostly in NYC, which is a remarkably large city in terms of area as well as population. Most of Manhattan's pretty easy to figure out, because of the street grid, but the older area to the southwest can get pretty mazey. Also, there are four other boroughs. "But Waltz, aren't you afraid of all the crime?" No. How do I do it, this "not getting lost" thing? Well, remember, my spirit animal is a turkey vulture, and turkey vultures are birds, and birds never get lost. Sometimes they'll wander around looking lost (or in the case of vultures, circle around in an updraft), but their bird's-eye view keeps them oriented. Some of them even have little magnets in their head so they always know which way is north. Once you know which way is north, you always know which way is south, east, west, up, and down. But more importantly, they can get up high enough to see the map. I can't fly, dammit, but I do run around with a little map in my head. As I noted a couple of entries ago, my memory is generally crap—but I'm good with maps. Like, one time, I was chatting with a blackjack dealer in Vegas. She had an accent, so I asked her where she'd come from. "Eritrea," she said. "You probably don't know it." I said, "East Africa, next to Ethiopia." Not saying this sense of mine is perfect, you know. None of our senses are. But I get by. As for the bird in the picture prompt, sure, maybe it's lost. And maybe it wants to be. After all, if it wanted to be unlost, it'd fly. I just have to add, as an aside, that this photo is pretty awesome. You might have heard of the rule of thirds in photography composition. This photo subverts it, and to good effect. While the main subject is close to the lower right compositional point, the bulk of it is in the bottom square, which is almost as big a no-no as centering it in the image. And yet, I find it well-framed. I'd have either gone for the bird's eye at the composition point, or the bird's center of gravity. Instead, what we get is, as near as I can tell, the graceful neck, which is also the only pronounced curve in the image. Contrasting that, most of the lines in the photo, the grasses, are vertical or near-vertical—with one notable exception, which is the blade right in front of the bird, providing counterpoint (I keep calling it a bird because a. it's a bird and b. I think it's a swan but I'm not entirely sure).Yeah, I don't criticize photos much in here (though I'm probably more qualified to do so than most of the shit I criticize), but this one struck me as worthy of comment. |
| Today's article is just something I found interesting for a couple of personal reasons. A New Drug Switched Off My Appetite. What’s Left? Mounjaro did what decades of struggle with managing weight couldn’t. Welcome to the post-hunger age. Sure, welcome to the post-hunger age, if you can afford it. A decade ago I lost 100 pounds. I did it in my web-nerd way—by building a custom content management system using the Django framework in the Python programming language. I lost way more than that, but I wasn't that big a nerd about it. But I did have a plan and a system, and it worked... until it didn't. It worked very well. For the first time in my life my doctor seemed glad to see me. People noticed. Strange how the bigger you are, the more invisible you are. Of course, I knew that scientists had found, in study after study, that basically everyone who loses weight gains it back, and then some. But there was no chance I would eat my way back to misery. I had a system! And a PostgreSQL database! And I could buy pants in a normal department store! Guess what happened. Yep. We both became a cliché. What health professionals call my morbid obesity—that “morbid” is a helpful reminder—is what you see. But it’s a side effect of what I am, which is insatiable. Literally: I never seem to feel full. This is different for me. Eating and drinking are some of my greatest joys in life. I want you to think about what your greatest joys in life are, and whether you could give them up entirely for the possibility—not the assurance, but the possibility—of five more years of life. Could you enjoy life without ever talking to the one you love most? Or your kids? Or a dog? Or whatever brings you the most happiness? And if so... is it really worth it? In practice this means that at certain times of day, I watch in horror as my body reaches for the cheapest, easiest calories nearby—out of the pantry, out of a vending machine, at a party. I scream, “Stop!” But the hand keeps reaching. I have experienced this, or something like it. Not just with calories, but with other things too. "Just make that phone call to get your front door fixed," I'll tell myself. "No!" stomps my inner child. You might say: Come off it! What happened to good old-fashioned willpower? No such thing. There’s a sin for this—it’s called gluttony! My concept of "sin" is limited to doing something that directly harms others. Not oneself. The author goes on to describe how he got put on a weight-loss drug, and this is the part I wanted to rant about. Not the existence of those drugs in the first place. I've long felt that my job is to live, while the doctor's job is to keep me alive. People always scoffed at the idea of a "magic pill" for weight loss (these are actually injections, from what I understand), but I'm a fan of technology and not a fan of the idea of doing penance. No, what I want to rant about is this: My doctor prescribed me one of those medications (I can't keep all their names straight, but I don't think it's any of the ones he mentioned). It's a miracle drug, according to her: not only does it promote weight loss, but it provides cardiac protection over and above whatever you get from weight loss itself, and it helps prevent diabetes. The catch? It's insurance-approved for diabetes only. So I'd have to wait until I became diabetic (which I consider a sure thing), which comes with a whole host of other health problems, or bypass the insurance and pay for it out of pocket—to the tune of $800 a month, which happens to be right about what I'm paying for my health insurance. So either I'd have to drop the insurance, or stop eating entirely. Both of which also come with a whole host of other health problems. You'd think that, with what the insurance company would have to pay out for diabetes care, they'd be glad to pay for a preventative instead. But that turns out not to be the case. So, in brief, I don't use the med. After this author started using it: I went alone that night to a Chinese restaurant, the old-school kind with tables, and ordered General Tso’s. I ate the broccoli, a few pieces of chicken, and thought: too gloopy. I left it unfinished, went home in confusion, a different kind of sleepwalker. I passed bodegas and shrugged. At an office I observed the stack of candies and treats with no particular interest. I gotta say, I'm not sure I'd want that, either. Give up the last things that bring me pleasure in life? Again, though, my issues are somewhat different from his. How long is it before there’s an injection for your appetites, your vices? Maybe they’re not as visible as mine. Would you self-administer a weekly anti-avarice shot? Can Big Pharma cure your sloth, lust, wrath, envy, pride? Is this how humanity fixes climate change—by injecting harmony, instead of hoping for it at Davos? Certainly my carbon footprint is much smaller these days. Are we going to get our smartest scientists together, examine the hormonal pathways, and finally produce a cure for billionaires? Really, people need to read more science fiction. This, and many other issues at the intersection of technology and society, has already been covered. Technology, however, neither causes problems nor solves them. People do. |
| I don't remember when I saved this article, but it's from January, so it couldn't have been that long ago. Want to improve your memory? Try these unexpected tips. Your memory probably isn’t as bad as you think. What? I can't even remember what I had for breakfast this morning, and it's 8:30 am as I write this. The brain is an extraordinary organ, with many wonderful qualities, including the ability to forget — which may actually be a good thing. “If we remembered everything that we experienced, our brains would be hoarders, clogged with all sorts of useless crap that gets in the way of what we really need,” says Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California Davis. Yeah, except my brain decides that I really need jokes, song lyrics, and something embarrassing I said when I was 9, rather than where I left that damn screwdriver or someone's name five seconds after they tell me. In today’s constantly plugged-in, always-on world, people are faced with a barrage of information — emails, news, pointless meetings, traffic updates, chitchat from family members — far more than anyone can process, Ranganath explains. I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of people blaming tech for everything. These issues with remembering often rear their heads at the least convenient times: when you’re in a rush and can’t find your keys, when you enter a room and don’t know what you came for, when you’re talking with an acquaintance whose name escapes you, when a friend refers to a nice moment you shared and you have no recollection. The room-entering thing at least has a plausible explanation: you're in, say, the living room, and you notice that a panel of your awesome vintage 70s wood paneling is loose. So you decide to get a hammer and some finishing nails from the garage. You step out of the gloriously golden light of the wood-paneled room into the harsh LED glare of the shop, completely different surroundings. And your memory is tied to the visuals from the living room. You shake your head, go to the kitchen, make a sandwich, return to the living room... where you suddenly remember, oh, yeah, hammer and nails. Another method to help you pay closer attention to the tasks at hand is what Braun calls the PLR technique: pause, link, and rehearse. This can help you both remember someone’s name and recall the reason you walked into a room. If you’re hiding a birthday present for your kid but fear you won’t remember where you put it, take five seconds to pause and focus on where you’re putting the gift, as “opposed to just putting it down and looking away and doing something else,” Braun says. Then look at the surroundings — this is the “link” step — and contextualize where you hid the present with its environment: in your closet, next to a bin of shoes. That supports my surroundings hypothesis. Use technology to your advantage, Ranganath and Schacter agree: Put meetings in your phone’s calendar (be detailed about who you’re meeting, where, and why) and make sure alerts are turned on, set reminders, and take photos of events to refer to later. See? Tech is also a solution. No, I don't always remember who played the weird cousin in that obscure buddy movie from somewhere in the 70s or 80s, but Google does. I refer to it as my auxiliary memory. Events that occur during heightened emotional states — fear, joy, anxiety, excitement, sadness — are more memorable. It’s why you remember your wedding day and perhaps not your 10th date. In order to remember more mundane things — where you’re storing dress shoes you wear once a year, a name, an item you need to pick up at the store — make these things extraordinary, says five-time USA Memory Champion and memory coach Nelson Dellis. So, hire someone to scare the living shit out of you when you have something you'd like to remember. Got it. Dellis recommends spending five minutes before bed recalling what happened that day. Did you see a beautiful sunset? Did your kid have a funny retort to a simple question? Did you eat something delicious? Replay small but lovely occurrences you’d like to savor. That sounds nice in theory, but in practice, you're going to spend those five minutes berating yourself for neglecting to tip the delivery driver, or coming up—finally—with the perfect retort for that zinger your friend shot your way at lunch. Okay, look, I'm not saying this article doesn't have some value. On the contrary. I just like to make snark. But as someone with a memory like a steel sieve, I'll probably forget to implement any of its suggestions. |
| Today's trip down Memory Lane (a street which, for me, is a winding dirt road with numerous potholes) involves what was, apparently, a rare personal update from August of 2009: "No Links" It's been pointed out to me (though I already knew it) that most of my recent blog entries have been, well, links to funny stuff. People like links to funny stuff, but maybe someone's reading this to actually find out what I'm up to. I've since expanded my repertoire to add links to serious stuff (that I sometimes make funny), blogging contest responses, and Revisited entries like this one. Thing is, not much has been going on in Waltzland. My wife's away for a few days, leading me to discover that bare skin sticks to my computer chair. I want to clarify that this was what's known in comedy circles as a "joke," and is not reflective of reality. However, it was August, so I don't know; maybe I was wearing shorts. And yet, that's the part most of the comments latched on to. Work is slow, because despite the stock market's optimism, the economy still sucks golf balls through garden hoses. 2009 was, as I recall, the beginning of a bull market that would last over a decade, finally turning bear just last year. But we couldn't have predicted that then, nor could I have predicted when the local real estate market, which kept me able to eat and drink beer, would start cranking back up. Turned out okay for me, though. It's been raining a lot around here, which means I haven't heard shit about "drought," "water restrictions," or "hot enough for ya?" First person to mention "drought" to me this summer gets a super-soaker in the face. As I recall, there was a local drought one summer in the 90s or noughties. The details, and the year it happened, escape me, but I do recall that after a sweltering summer with constant reminders to take shorter showers, let your lawn die, and not flush the toilet until it became absolutely necessary, and other exhortations to please, for the love of god, conserve what little water we have left in the reservoir... after all that, the local water authority complained about having lost money that year, and thus wanted to institute a massive rate increase. This led to me swearing to never conserve water again, because the only reason to do so would be so that they could raise rates afterward. Well, we haven't had a significant drought since, and I do try to conserve water, so, so much for that. I've been going to a local science fiction & fantasy book club for the past few months. We meet once a month to discuss the assigned book, plus whatever other books we've been reading, and to complain about crappy science fiction movies (that is, this year, every one except Watchmen and Star Trek. Shut up, Stik.) That was a fun club. I don't remember what other movies came out in those genres that year, and can't be arsed to look it up, so I also can't remember what I'd been arguing with Stik about. (Stik, your memory is much better than mine, so feel free to remind me.) I think I'm the only married person there. Surprisingly enough, at the last meeting, women outnumbered men (and we didn't end up discussing Twilight). Yes, that was a sexist comment, I know. After that, no one invited me to be a public speaker. Oh, wait, no one invited me to do that before the comment, either. Oh, and I went to New York City over the weekend. Somehow never got around to mentioning that. I've been there three times this year, now, so it almost seems routine. Got some good pictures, though. Three times might be my limit. Usually, I visit once or twice. During the... you know... that dropped to zero for a couple of years. Which reminds me - I finally broke down (literally broke) and bought a Nikon digital SLR. It fucking ROCKS. That was a good camera—for the time. Haven't used it in years. Smartphone technology quickly left its picture quality in the dust. As I have no intention of getting back into professional photography, or even serious amateuring, the built-in camera is good enough for me, and it's way easier to carry around and back up. |
| Entry #5 into "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] this month: Happy Ride You know what always struck me as idiotic? And I do mean "always," as in "from the moment I first found out about it as a kid." Gendered bikes. It took me a while to figure out the reason for it, and to this day I'm not sure if I came up with the right idea or not: girls' bikes have the lowered crossbar to accommodate a skirt. I mean, that was the only thing I could figure out, as all genders have legs (barring accidents, disease, or thalidomide), and you don't ride a bike with your genitals, so what else could possibly be the difference? I keep calling it a crossbar. It probably has a more proper name. But you know what I'm talking about: that upper rod between the saddle thingy and the handlebar whatchamacallit. I may not be an expert on bicycles, okay? The ones in the linked prompt picture both have the lowered crossbar doohickey. Anyway, it didn't help my bewilderment that where I spent my childhood, I didn't see a lot of girls wearing skirts or dresses. It was a rural area, and everyone wore pants or shorts, including my mom. But enforcement of strict gender divides was even more of a thing back then (though I thought it was silly), so you'd see these girls riding around with their girly bikes (rarely pink) with the lowered crossbar. "They're just doing it because their parents thought: 'have girl. girl want bike. girl need girl bike. girl on boy bike may grow up to like girls.'" Or something like that; I don't know. Worse, the "boy" bikes were considered standard, and the "girl" bikes, the aberration. Seriously. No one rides a bike wearing a skirt, dress, or kilt, do they? I don't think I've ever seen it. Nor have I seen a woman riding a horse side-saddle except in, like, picture books or period (not that kind of period) movies. ("What has two legs on one side and four on the other?" was an actual riddle I saw in a kids' book at one point. "A horse with a lady riding." "What?") And then I reached puberty. Most kids "hit" puberty; for me, it was more of a gradual thing. And that's when I realized the terrible, awful, what-the-fuck truth about life: in a sane world, in a world that makes sense, it should be the other way around, with the bikes for guys having the lowered crossbar. And yes, I learned that the hard way. That is a pain I will never, ever forget. I'll be lying on my deathbed, racked with cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and a toothache, and I'll be like "Remember that time you racked your brand-new balls on a bike when you were 12?" Didn't stop me from riding a bike (well... for more than a day or so, anyway). But I never did make sense out of gendered bikes. |
| Before I get into things today, please note that for the next few days, blog entries will be at unusual (for me) times. My birthday's coming up and I'll be drinking. Today's article is another one that's (partially) about tipping. I didn't expect another one to come up so quickly, but such are the dangers of using random numbers. No, I don't know how to behave, beyond always returning my shopping cart to the corral or standing on the right side on an escalator. But it's always fun to see what so-called experts have to say on the subject. Our social graces have atrophied. Speak for yourself. If I had "graces," I wouldn't be the misanthropic hermit I am today. We wanted to help. So we started with the problems — not the obvious stuff, like whether it’s okay to wear a backpack on the subway or talk loudly on speakerphone in a restaurant (you know the answers there). I think I do. Yes, and yes. Going only by what I've seen in NYC. By the way, who the hell decided it was fashionable to hold your dumbphone like a slice of goddamn pizza? For fuck's sake. From there, we created rigid, but not entirely inflexible, rules. That's a contradiction. Also, if the rules are so rigid, why do they change often enough that these articles have to come out every year? There's a lot of these, so I'm just highlighting the lowlights. 1. You don’t have to read everyone’s book. I take this one as a personal affront. 3. Don’t be loudly naïve about dating apps if you’re in a relationship. I sometimes used dating sites (before there were apps) back in the time when most people thought they were dangerous. Now that everyone else is using them, I don't want anything to do with them. 4. When shopping with a friend, don’t cut them in the rack. Someone needs to explain this to me. On second thought, no, don't. I never shop with friends. 6. Never wake up your significant other on purpose, ever. Never wake them up accidentally, either. 10. Straight people can use the word partner only when they’re trying to get something out of it. Bull. Shit. 12. On a date, all individuals present should gently and politely compete to pay the entire bill. No. They want to pay? Let 'em pay. (This may be why I haven't been on a date in 23 years.) Skipping a whole lot of other ones, mostly concerning dating, because I don't care. 26. If someone mispronounces a word but you knew what they meant, move along. On the flip side, if someone misspells a word (or, worse, mistakes its for it's or vice versa, or things to that effect), set 'em straight. 28. Don’t ask people how they got COVID. 29. Or why they’re wearing a mask. No, please ask me why I'm wearing a mask. Depending on my mood, I might answer with "to mess with facial recognition," "because I get compliments on my cat mask but never on my face," or "to keep you from running away screaming." 30. When casually asked how you are, say “Good!” Valid only in English-speaking countries. And not even then; if someone asks me that, I assume they really want to know. 34. Actually, it’s great to talk about the weather. It was 60 degrees in January. There’s lots to say. No. Talking about the weather is just going to start an argument about climate change. It's now a topic more fraught than sex, politics, or religion. 38. Always wink. What the bullshit is this? 47. Listening is not the time for you to silently rehearse what you want to say next. Say something interesting, then. 51. No deciding your order at the counter. When you roll up, speak up. NO SOUP FOR YOU! 78. Don’t talk about a movie when leaving the theater. Oh, but one of the highlights of my life was shouting out "I can't believe Snape killed Dumbledore" while walking out after that one movie. 84-91. There are new rules of tipping. This might irritate or confuse you, but the reality is there are new social expectations around what deserves a tip. Finally got to that. Also, as per my post a few days ago on tipping, bite my ass. 110. Saw someone shoplifting? No, you didn’t. Ditto for jumping the turnstile. Snitches get stitches. 120. Even when a kids’ party says “no gifts,” you’re supposed to bring a gift. Bite my ass harder. Not limited to kids' parties (which I don't go to anyway), but how absolutely moronic is it to do the exact opposite of what a person says? The list goes up to 140, though most of the explanations are mercifully short, and there are sidebars with even more inanities. If you make it through to the end, congratulations, and go ahead and do what you want anyway (within the boundaries of being mindful of other people). |
| Today's article, written in the Before Time (way back in 2018) but still pertinent, is from The Conversation. Sounds like my kind of article! Except I don't actually spend my time doing "nothing." I spend it doing "nothing productive," and I like it that way. In the 1950s, scholars worried that, thanks to technological innovations, Americans wouldn’t know what to do with all of their leisure time. Whew! Good thing we dodged that bullet! Yet today, as sociologist Juliet Schor notes, Americans are overworked, putting in more hours than at any time since the Depression and more than in any other in Western society. Did I say "still pertinent?" I probably should have said "even more relevant." It’s probably not unrelated to the fact that instant and constant access has become de rigueur, and our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamoring messages: “Urgent,” “Breaking News,” “For immediate release,” “Answer needed ASAP.” Oh, for fuck's sake. You had me, and then you lost me. Blaming the technology while acting like we don't have agency makes it sound like we have no choice. Well, perhaps on some level we don't, but I'll save the "free will" arguments for later; another article in my queue tackles that. I've been connected to the internet since the early 90s, more hours on than off, and I know how to turn off notifications. Hell, I even opted out of Amber Alerts. Over the past decade, I’ve tried to understand the social and psychological effects of our growing interactions with new information and communication technologies, a topic I examine in my book “The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times.” Oh hey, another book promotion. No wonder this article is free. In an age of incredible advancements that can enhance our human potential and planetary health, why does daily life seem so overwhelming and anxiety-inducing? Endgame capitalism. Why aren’t things easier? Endgame capitalism. It’s a complex question... No, it's not. It may have a complex answer (I'm not convinced of that), but it's a pretty damn simple question. ...but one way to explain this irrational state of affairs is something called the force of acceleration. If you borrow terms from physics, at least try not to mix your metaphors. Oh, well, at least they don't call it "quantum." Whether it’s in the grocery store or in the airport, procedures are implemented, for better or for worse, with one goal in mind: speed. Yeah? There's nothing wrong with speed, especially when I'm in line at the grocery store waiting while the lady in front of me is arguing over the price of a goddamned onion. The problem, in my view, isn't the quest for speed, but the demand for ever-increasing efficiency and, yes, productivity. Noticeable acceleration began more than two centuries ago, during the Industrial Revolution. But this acceleration has itself … accelerated. Acceleration, in physics, is the rate of change of velocity—that is, the derivative of velocity. You can also take the derivative of acceleration to get its rate of change. There's a mathematical term for that, too, which I find appropriate in this context: "jerk." Unchecked acceleration has consequences. It's not "unchecked." There's always a limit. At the environmental level, it extracts resources from nature faster than they can replenish themselves and produces waste faster than it can be processed. All the fossil fuels we've dug up in the last, oh, 200 years or so represent the stored solar energy of billions of years of living entities. I won't venture to guess just when it's all going to run out, but I'm certain it's less than a billion years. Replenishment was never in the cards. At the personal level, it distorts how we experience time and space. I mean, lots of things do that. Drugs, e.g. American workers’ productivity has increased dramatically since 1973. What has also increased sharply during that same period is the pay gap between productivity and pay. I was promised that, by now, we'd be working two days a week and fishing five. I was also promised a flying car. (Don't bother sending links to flying cars; those are prototypes and I don't have one.) Instead of maintaining pre-automation levels of productivity, we decided that to compete, we had to work more instead of less. And don't even get me started on how, while wages have stagnated, the excess productivity has enriched the owner class. Clearly, acceleration demands more work – and to what end? There are only so many hours in a day, and this additional expenditure of energy reduces individuals’ ability to engage in life’s essential activities: family, leisure, community, citizenship, spiritual yearnings and self-development. I get by perfectly well without most of those things, and I'm not overworked. Family? No thanks. Community? I have the internet. Spiritual yearnings? Don't make me laugh. And yet, rants aside, the basic premise of the article still appeals to me: In a hypermodern society propelled by the twin engines of acceleration and excess, doing nothing is equated with waste, laziness, lack of ambition, boredom or “down” time. Gotta worship at the altar of Holy Productivity. Like I said, I don't do "nothing." And I don't get bored easily. As legends go, Isaac Newton grasped the law of gravity sitting under an apple tree. Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy relaxing in his bathtub, while Albert Einstein was well-known for staring for hours into space in his office. Sadly, at least two of those are apocryphal. Still, mythology reflects human attitudes, and those clearly show that our attitude used to be "sometimes you just gotta sit." Danish researchers found that students who disconnected from Facebook for just one week reported notable increases in life satisfaction and positive emotions. That's funny. I've been disconnected from Facebook since before this article was written. Never even had a Twatter account. Different social movements are addressing the problem of acceleration. The Slow Food movement, for example, is a grassroots campaign that advocates a form of deceleration by rejecting fast food and factory farming. Now that's a phrase I haven't heard in a long time. A long time, indeed. I wonder if it's still going on. Not that I care. Factory farming is essential to feeding the teeming eight billion of us, which makes that "movement" the absolute picture of privilege (if it's not astroturf to begin with). And as "slow food" is always immediately followed by "movement," all I can think about is constipation. French philosopher Albert Camus perhaps put it best when he wrote, “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.” All due respect to Camus, but the vast majority of us are mediocre. But that doesn't mean we can't improve through idleness. |
| I don't have much of an opinion about Brutalism. This entry is for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]; specifically, it's about one of the picture prompts: Brutalist Bench. Some people love it; others hate it. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground... except for me, of course. On a recent visit with my cousin, an architect, we had a discussion about Brutalism whilst driving around the Jersey Shore, which features several buildings done in something approaching the Brutalist style. The name isn't based on the English word "brute," or the deodorant brand (which I was surprised to find is still around), but on the French word "brut," meaning, essentially, "raw." In this context, from what I can gather, it basically means the whatever-it-is—usually a building, but sometimes something else, like a bench—isn't painted or otherwise covered, relying instead on the colors and textures of the raw materials of its construction (hence the "raw," I suppose). It's generally the triumph of function over form, which appeals to me as an engineer. My cousin wouldn't come out and say it, but I don't think he's a fan. Considering some of his work, this doesn't surprise me. The stuff I've seen come out of his office ranges from traditional (including some buildings right here in Charlottesville) to what I can only describe as avant-garde. Yeah, I know, sorry, more French. Point is, I don't think he's done many Brutalist buildings, if any. Brutalism is most commonly associated with bare concrete, but really, any (mostly) unadorned material would do. Including brick. I do have an opinion about brick, which is: painted brick sucks. But no, the reason I don't have an opinion on Brutalism is that, to my untrained, function-over-form eye, there's a great deal of variation among examples of the style. This is actually one of the cool things about concrete (which I devoted an entire entry to a couple of days ago): as it is a liquid (actually a slurry, but whatever), it can be molded into many different shapes. If you look at the Wikipedia page on Brutalist architecture, you'll see a lot of different examples of the style. They're all different. Some suck. Others don't. Which is which is a subjective decision.I've said this before, but architecture is art with function. That is, it's meant to do more than be looked at; people live, work, or pass through architecture, while pure art just kind of sits there daring us to criticize it. But make no mistake, it's also there to be looked at. I mean, usually, you can't miss it, so you might as well make it pretty. Same for a bench, though on a much smaller scale. The primary purpose of a bench, in my view, is to be a place to sit. Lots of forms can achieve this purpose. The one from this prompt, though? Well, to me, it just kind of looks uncomfortable. Like the designer was more concerned with form than function, its flowing shape at odds with the heaviness of the material. On the other hand, it's indeed made of concrete, so at least we know it'll handle some weight. That's important, these days. |
| Today, from New York (not to be confused with The New Yorker), an article about the quicksand bog that tipping has become. Some of y'all are going to go out for dinner tonight because of social pressure from some made-up holiday, so it's just as well that this came up at random today. Fortunately, I'm immune. I'll just be staying home and cooking my own dinner, so the only tip I have to give is "don't get sucked in by the commercialism of Valentine's Day." I've tackled this tipping topic before, most recently just last month: "Tipping Point" In that entry, I pointed out the following: Now, before I get shit from foreigners here, yes, I'm fully aware that American tipping culture is fucked up in the first place. Whole etiquette articles are written about it, and no one seems to agree on anything. Like the one I linked in the entry above. It's a maze of unwritten rules and expectations; it's vaguely racist, absolutely classist, and seemingly designed as one enormous shibboleth to weed out foreign tourists. It reminds me of the convoluted unwritten but absolutely essential bribery rules in other countries. I'd like to see it go away almost entirely, with prices raised across the board so servers are making a decent wage without the need for tips. Until that happens, if civilization doesn't collapse first, we're going to have to deal with this sort of thing. Once a complex set of rules exists, people who have mastered it (or in this case, think they have) don't want to see it go away. See also: US income tax filing, English grammar and spelling. My opinion hasn't changed in a month and a half. It is now almost impossible to make any sort of purchase without being confronted with a Square screen asking for 15, 20, or 25 percent. The previous article said 10, 15, or 20. This may be a New York City thing (today's article is definitely written from a Big Apple perspective), or it may be that it's already creeping up. I've also mentioned before that I've seen much higher "suggestions" in taxi cabs in Las Vegas, so I'm leaning toward the former. And not just for a coffee: Buying a water bottle at the deli or crackers at a specialty grocery store now sometimes also prompts the option. Oh, hell no. This might irritate or confuse you, but the reality is there are new social expectations around what deserves a tip. I want to know exactly who decides these things. It ain't me. At restaurants, the previous range of socially acceptable and ethically expected tips was 15 to 20 percent; now, it’s 20 to 25. This goes for whether you’re at an Olive Garden or I Sodi and whether you liked the service or not. What in the New York hell is I Sodi? (googles) Oh. It's an upscale northern Italian place in Greenwich Village. Look, I don't live there, and even people who do never discover everything about the place. Especially concerning restaurants in the Village, which have a half-life of 2 years. But that's irrelevant. It occurs to me that the way to end tipping culture, apart from the necessity of pricing things higher and using the excess to pay your wage slaves decent salaries to begin with (said decent salary being significantly higher in NYC), would be not to assert that one doesn't have to tip, but to start a rumor that the only socially acceptable tip is over 100%. If that spreads around, people will freak out and stop going to restaurants, and the entire industry will have to clean up its act or collapse. It's a natural progression of tip inflation, after all. Which is worse than regular inflation, because if you used to tip 15% on a $10 meal, and the meal is now $24 and you're expected to tip 25%, well... (math) your tip that was $1.50 is now $6, a 300% increase on a 140% meal price increase. Blame this on inflation, COVID, the heightened awareness of the fact that more than half your servers’ salary probably comes from tips. It’s just the rules; don’t complain. Oh, screw you. Like I said above, the price of the meal is what's affected by inflation. Damn right I'm going to complain. Not to the server, though; I'll still tip and then rant about the entire class-division-enforcing practice right here and to anyone else who'll listen. At coffee shops, coffee carts, cafés, and bodegas, tip at least 20 percent. No. Absolutely not. Line in the sand right there. I tip at restaurants because I'm paying for them to take my order, bring the order, bus the table, and generally be of service. Never at coffee shops where you're the one doing 90% of the work, with the other 10% being just like working at McDonald's. Even though their pay isn’t as tip dependent as waiters’, the average salary for a barista in New York is just above minimum wage. Sounds like it's time for them to organize. For food delivery, tip a minimum of $5, or 20 percent, whichever is greater, and even more in bad weather. On this, I actually agree. Again, they're doing you a service. Would I prefer a system that pays them better where I'm not expected to tip? Sure. When picking up takeout at a restaurant, it’s easy to understand why you might not tip anything — but you must tip at least 10 percent. No. At a bar, the conventional wisdom stands: Tip at least $1 per drink if you’re just getting a beer and 20 percent for a cocktail. Always tip bartenders. If you’re at a food counter — a cheese shop, a deli counter, or a fast-casual lunch spot where employees are telling you about the items, slicing, or mixing you a grain bowl — you must tip something if prompted. I kind of agree with this bit. They're doing you a service, and tips are meant to be for service above and beyond the job description. (I know I've noted this before, but do not be taken in by the myth that TIPS is an acronym.) Tip Uber drivers the same way you’d tip a cabdriver — at least 20 percent. I tried tipping a cab driver only 20% in NYC once and got the world-famous New York City attitude for it. Happened in Vegas, too, only worse. But I do tip Uber drivers, for the same reason I tip delivery drivers. For everything else — hairstylists, waxers, movers — tip 20 percent minimum. And, always, more if you can. Again, this doesn't seem unreasonable, except that the whole system is unreasonable. It needs to stop, but we're not going to stop it by not tipping; until someone does something to break the cycle once and for all (an apocalypse might do that), I can see the need to tip underpaid service workers. Just not at coffee shops. Come on. |
| Some of my blog entries can get kind of abstract. This is the opposite: concrete. It's one of those rare times when I get to talk about something I actually know a few things about. The Secret to Making Concrete That Lasts 1,000 Years Scientists have uncovered the Roman recipe for self-repairing cement—which could massively reduce the carbon footprint of the material today. Turns out 1000 years is an underestimate, in some of these cases. Rome’s Pantheon stands defiant 2,000 years after it was built, its marble floors sheltered under the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. Let's get this out of the way: cement is a component of concrete. It is not concrete. Calling a pavement, wall, or other concrete structure "cement" is common, but wrong. While one could make an argument that the usage is a form of synecdoche, it's a lame-ass synecdoche. Stop it. For decades, researchers have probed samples from Roman concrete structures—tombs, breakwaters, aqueducts, and wharves—to find out why these ancient buildings endure when modern concrete may crumble after only a few decades. They might endure even longer if scientists would stop coring them. Not only is Roman concrete exponentially more durable than modern concrete, but it can also repair itself. Creating a modern equivalent that lasts longer than existing materials could reduce climate emissions and become a key component of resilient infrastructure, like seawalls. You see a concrete structure, and you can be forgiven for thinking it's permanent. Well, as permanent as anything is, which is to say that even stone wears away over time. But we always figured on a 50 year lifespan for most concrete installations. Which I used to think was "forever," but I've lasted longer than that. Concrete exposed to salt water can be even more ephemeral. The article does mention this later. “We are dealing with extremely complex material,” says Admir Masic, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led this new research on Roman concrete. “To kind of reverse-engineer or understand the original way these civilizations made this material is just a nightmare.” What's worse is we have actual science to work with, and instruments that the Romans would have considered sorcery, and it's still been a chore to figure out. I can only assume they used trial and error to come up with their mixtures; what we're seeing now with Roman concrete is survivorship bias. I'd bet a lot of Roman concrete just isn't there anymore. Until now, efforts to explain the longevity of Roman concrete have pointed to its use of volcanic tephra—the fragments of rock emitted in an eruption—mined in the Naples area and shipped to construction sites throughout the sprawling Roman empire. Basic concrete, in our world, is essentially water, cement, and aggregate. You can add other things (admixtures). One of the most common when I was actually working with the stuff was fly ash. Fly ash is a very fine powder, a waste product of coal burning. It makes the mix more workable and lowers the production cost because you don't need to use as much cement. My only point here being that adding other stuff to concrete is very common. But Masic and his MIT colleagues, along with researchers from Harvard and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, suggest another reason: heat. The curing of concrete (not "drying") is an exothermic reaction. Thus, it produces its own heat. But what if the Romans used lime in a more reactive form, called quicklime, Masic wondered. When mixed with water, quicklime reacts and produces heat. More heat. Jackson also studied cores drilled from concrete in Roman harbors, determining that seawater moving through the concrete reacts with it to create new minerals that make the concrete more cohesive and resilient over time. I gotta say, that's pretty impressive (though it was very likely a lucky accident). Like I said, salt water is bad for concrete. It's even worse for reinforced concrete, as not only does the matrix deteriorate, but the water then seeps in to the steel reinforcement, and you know what water does to (most) steel. Roman concrete, in comparison, is strong, requiring no steel reinforcing it, unlike its modern counterpart. Okay, I gotta quibble about this bit. I think what they mean has to do with applications that are compression-only, such as foundations, walls, sidewalks, streets. You put steel mesh in most of those situations to hold the concrete together after it cracks. But other uses for concrete, such as the floor/ceiling beams, are partly in tension, and no concrete can handle significant tension. So I think that's probably misleading. Well, I've rambled on enough; as I said, it's one area I actually have some training in, though I wouldn't call myself an expert. I mostly wanted to point out that the Roman concrete wasn't the result of them being somehow smarter or more knowledgeable than we are, but largely a fortunate result of trial and error. Replicating that, or even approximating it, would certainly be cool. |
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