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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
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Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. ![Merit Badge in Quill Award
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| Lots of stuff about AI floating around. Cars, art, writing, etc. It's not always a bad thing. Artist Uses AI Surveillance Cameras to Identify Influencers Posing for Instagram  Dries Depoorter's "The Follower" project combines AI, open access cameras, and influencers to show behind the scenes of viral shots—without them knowing. This article, from Vice, is fairly short, and I found it interesting, partly because of my photography background. Dries Depoorter, the Belgium-based public speaker and artist behind the Die With Me chat app experiment, launched his latest project, The Follower, combining open access cameras and Instagram influencers. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of precious artists. Depoorter recorded weeks of footage from open access cameras, which observe public spaces, and which frequently have livestreams available online for anyone to access, that were trained on famous landmarks, including the Temple Bar in Dublin, Times Square, and the big sign at the entrance of Wrigley Field. This part's important, because it emphasizes just how public this project is. It's not like he had to pull back much of a curtain. The side-by-side comparisons between the casual-seeming photos the Instagram influencers chose to upload, and the footage of them laboring over the perfect way to hold a coffee, sling a jacket over their shoulder or kiss their date reveal how much work goes into a single photo for them—and how inauthentic the entire process really is behind the scenes. As much as I loathe the entire concept of influenzas, and superficiality in general, I mean, that's a big part of what professional photography is: a lot of work. Sure, I spent a lot of time getting candid shots at parties, the kind of thing that anyone with a dumbphone can do now, but those are easy. Getting the right ligthing, the right pose, the right composition... that's work, and that's why professional photography is still a thing. “If you check out all my work you can see I show the dangers of new technology,” Depoorter said. I think the dangers are overreported. How about a project that exposes just how helpful some of this stuff is? “I hope to reach a lot of people of making it really simple. I really don’t like difficult art. I like to keep it really simple. I think I’m part of a new generation of artists that work with technology.” Everyone's hypocritical about something, but this juxtaposition—all within one paragraph of the original article—nearly broke my brain. Capturing people in this way, unsuspecting yet fully public, feels like witnessing something intimate but also shameless. Yeah, not really. To me, it feels like exposing the wires in a puppet show, or getting a tour of a clock tower, or watching one of those documentaries on the making of a Hollywood blockbuster: you see how the magic is done. That's not always a bad thing, either; once people know it's not effortless, perhaps they're less likely to feel inadequate by comparison. It's like... you see your favorite celebrity, all slim and attractive, so maybe you feel like you got the short end of the beauty stick or something. But then you realize the amount of work that goes into that, and, okay, maybe it's not so natural after all. There still might be some feelings of inadequacy—in my case, I can't fathom doing that much work for anything—but at least you know there's more to it than just winning a genetic lottery. It’s also a reminder that everywhere we go in the modern world, we’re being watched, even when we think we can curate and control what the world sees of us. Isn't that what Elf on the Shelf is supposed to train your kids for? |
| Space is cool. And sometimes, we can learn things about it while never leaving our planet. First, confession time: I'm always confused by ton, metric ton, short ton, shit ton, etc. A metric ton is apparently 1000kg, which is the same thing as 1 megagram, which is a separate thing from a megaton, and is a unit of mass, not weight, though on the surface of the Earth, mass units are often used as weight units. See why I get confused? If you're from the US, 15 metric tons is about 33,000 pounds, which for comparison is about the weight of a half-full ready-mix concrete truck. If you're from the UK, it's about 2,360 stone. If you're from anywhere else, it's 15 metric tons. Scientists have identified two minerals never before seen on Earth in a meteorite weighing 15.2 metric tons (33,510 pounds). I'm going to go off on another tangent here. As you know, I'm a big fan of science fiction. Love the stuff. But sometimes it's more fiction than science, like when someone finds an alien artifact and exclaims "This contains elements not found on the periodic table!" or some shit like that. Well, no. You're going to have to do better than that. The periodic table is full; that is, there are no gaps for new, alien elements. Each entry on the table represents a number of protons in a nucleus. You don't get to have half a proton. The only other possibility is elements beyond the end of the current established table, ones that we'd need a particle accelerator to create. While those might exist, their nuclei are so large and unstable that they would have a half-life measured in picoseconds. There is speculation about an "island of stability" of heavier elements with longer half-lives, but even there, they're thinking half-lives of, perhaps, days—still too short to survive an interstellar journey. Sure, it's speculation, so you can pretend there's a superheavy element that's completely stable, but I want to see that in the story, not just "new element!" Unobtainium, my ass. No, I'm still not going to watch Avatar:The Last Waterbender. Okay, so there is one other possibility I can think of for "elements not found on the periodic table": exotic matter. Like, I dunno, maybe atom-equivalents made up of nuclei consisting of particles containing strange and charm quarks, with electrons replaced by tau particles. Speculative stuff like that. I've already banged on long enough, so I'll just say that if you mean exotic matter, freakin' say "exotic matter," and don't pretend that your "unknown element" is a collection of ordinary protons, neutrons, and electrons. All of which is to say that I can easily see someone reading this CNN story and thinking "two minerals never before seen on Earth" and immediately leaping to "exotic matter." No. A mineral is a particular arrangement of a known element or known elements, like quartz (silicon and oxygen), corundum (aluminum and oxygen), pyrite (iron and sulfur), diamond (carbon), graphite (carbon), or chaoite (carbon). What this article is saying is that these unusual arrangements of perfectly ordinary elements don't get formed naturally on Earth (or at least not in sufficient quantity to have been discovered). They have, as the article notes, been created in laboratories. One mineral’s name — elaliite — derives from the space object itself, which is called the “El Ali” meteorite since it was found near the town of El Ali in central Somalia. Herd named the second one elkinstantonite after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, vice president of Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative. Well, I suppose that's one way to try to get someone to sleep with you. “Whenever you find a new mineral, it means that the actual geological conditions, the chemistry of the rock, was different than what’s been found before,” Herd said. “That’s what makes this exciting: In this particular meteorite you have two officially described minerals that are new to science.” Technically, they weren't formed under geological conditions. That would imply that they were indeed made on Earth. If they were made on the Moon, they'd be called selenological conditions; on Mars, areological conditions. I don't know what they're called if they're from a random asteroid, and I can't be arsteroided to find out. Also technically, the minerals aren't new to science; just the naturally-occurring forms are. Incidentally, none of my above ranting is meant to downplay the coolness of finding new minerals from space. It's a potential glimpse into low-gravity mineral formation, and possibly even the early conditions of the solar system, and that's great for science. (And no, it's not aliens.) Two-thirds of the way down the page, they finally get around to describing—sort of—the composition of the minerals: Both new minerals are phosphates of iron, Tschauner said. A phosphate is a salt or ester of a phosphoric acid. I'm sure that clears everything right up for those of you without chemistry backgrounds. Though you're probably familiar enough with phosphoric acid. It's one of the primary non-water ingredients in Coke, which I happen to be drinking right now (look, even I can't drink beer all the time). “Phosphates in iron meteorites are secondary products: They form through oxidation of phosphides … which are rare primary components of iron meteorites,” he said via email. “Hence, the two new phosphates tell us about oxidation processes that occurred in the meteorite material. It remains to be seen if the oxidation occurred in space or on Earth, after the fall, but as far as I know, many of these meteorite phosphates formed in space. In either case, water is probably the reactant that caused the oxidation.” Even if the oxidation occurred on Earth, it's still interesting because the basic materials were there to be oxidized. But there's water in space (that's how it got here in the first place), mostly in the form of ice, but it's not outrageous to imagine a body on an eccentric orbit whose internal ice melts periodically, allowing for liquid water to do its reaction thing. Comets, for example, contain significant amounts of water. But from what I understand, their formation is distinct from that of iron-rich asteroids. The point is, though, that water's out there. Anyway, questionable science reporting aside, I thought this was cool enough to share—but more importantly, to nitpick. |
| Yet another blast from the not-so-distant past today. Such is the randomness of random numbers. "Scare Tactics" is from the day before Halloween, 2021, so only about 15 months ago. It's commentary on a Cracked article that lists a few fearsome folkloric figures.In large part, I do these retrospectives to see if anything's changed since the original entry—not only with whatever information is discussed, but also my thoughts about it. Well, these monsters are from myth and legend, and those don't tend to change much in a year and a quarter. Unlike many entries, I actually remembered this one to some extent, because I like to learn about folklore from different cultures. Doesn't hurt that it's relatively recent. But that also means that I haven't changed my opinions, so there's not much to expand upon here. I didn't even see any embarrassing typos this time. I'm not saying there aren't any; only that I didn't see them. Of course, the source article is still there, too. Here's another link to it for your convenience.One thing that stands out to me is the "band name" trope I used. I'm sure some people find it tiresome, but to me, it's endlessly amusing to take interesting word combinations and come up with what kind of band it would be. In that entry, I said that "Slavic Female Demons" would be an excellent name for a hard metal Go-Gos cover band. I stand by that, incidentally. The Go-Gos were, if I recall correctly (I sometimes don't), the first popular group I saw live, back when they were big and I wasn't. It's not that I was a huge fan (though I totally had a crush on the drummer), but they just happened to have a concert at a nearby amusement park, and being able to visit said park on my own (well, with fellow teen friends and not parents) was a big deal to me at the time. That said, I'd totally go see a band named Slavic Female Demons. As long as there are no actual dziwozona involved. |
| Science isn't always about probing the origins of the Universe, or figuring out quantum entanglement, or curing cancer. No, sometimes it delves into the most important questions. You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is The delivery icon hasn’t changed in 60 years, and it’s making your food worse. I'm not sure that the subhead up there is exactly correct. Yes, as we'll see in this article, the pizza box makes that most perfect of foods somewhat less tasty, but when you consider the extant alternatives, it's really the best we've got. Where the science comes in is figuring out how to make the best better. Happiness, people will have you think, does not come from possessing things. It comes from love. Self-acceptance. Career satisfaction. Whatever. But here’s what everyone has failed to consider: the Ooni Koda 12-inch gas-powered outdoor pizza oven. That's a strong argument, and one I tend to accept, although I don't have one of those. Since I purchased mine a year ago, my at-home pizza game has hit levels that are inching toward pizzaiolo perfection. Like Da Vinci in front of a blank canvas, I now churn out perfectly burnished pies entirely from scratch—dough, sauce, caramelized onions, and all. Now I'm hungry. Though that sounds like a lot of work, it's probably one of those few things that are actually worth the effort. But enlightenment is not without its consequences. The pies from my usual takeout spot just don’t seem to taste the same anymore. Okay, I'll address the elephant in the room if no one else will: Elephant, why would this guy even bother ordering takeout pizza when he has an Ooni Koda? They’re still fine in that takeout-pizza way, but a certain je ne sais quoi is gone: For the first time, after opening up a pizza box and bringing a slice to my mouth, I am hyperaware of a limp sogginess to each bite, a rubbery grossness to the cheese. You don't have to have three and a half years of Duolingo French lessons under your belt to know what "je ne sais quoi" means: "I don't know what." In the rest of the article this author asserts that he does, in fact, know what. Pizza delivery, it turns out, is based on a fundamental lie. The most iconic delivery food of all time is bad at surviving delivery, and the pizza box is to blame. One of my favorite breweries is right here in my hometown. During the lockdown in 2020, I supported them by ordering beer and food for delivery about once a week. Canned, or bottled, beer, isn't as good as draft, but it's not bad. Their burgers survived the 2-mile delivery trip quite well. Their frites, however, arrived soggy and mushy; they're much better if you get them at the restaurant. They put a bunch of frites in a little metal basket, which gets dipped into the fryer oil and delivered, basket and all, to your table. Naturally, the basket doesn't come with the delivered version, which is instead handed to you in a recycled-cardboard container. While this particular brewpub doesn't do pizza, the frites thing is a close equivalent to what this author is talking about. A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. Warm, sure, to an extent. That corrugated cardboard is pretty good insulation. As he describes later, though, that same box concentrates moisture inside, turning the pizza limp. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane. I don't think I've ever ordered a $40 pizza. Sometimes, by the time delivery fees and driver tips are included, I've come close... but never quite $40. I know for a fact I've never had a Lamborghini, or a wooden shed. And yet, the pizza box hasn’t changed much, if at all, since it was invented in 1966. This is probably due to economics. But this is where the science comes in. Or, perhaps, engineering, which is really just applied science: come up with a pizza delivery system that keeps the pie warm but doesn't ruin it, and doesn't cost much. As noted above, Domino's, probably the largest chain, has no incentive to do this; their shit is shit whether it's "fresh" or out of a delivery box. So it's going to be up to actual scientists and/or engineers. Unfortunately, while this article is very descriptive, it doesn't propose actual solutions. To be fair, neither can I. I just want my pizza. Unlike a Tupperware of takeout chicken soup or palak paneer, which can be microwaved back to life after its journey to your home, the texture of a pizza starts to irreparably worsen after even a few minutes of cardboard confinement. If you reheat it right, though, leftover pizza can be delicious. I know I've linked to some scientific experiments along those lines in here before. Ah, here it is, from October of 2021: "What Do You Mean, "Leftover Pizza?"" That discussion doesn't address the problems with the pizza box, though. The basic issue is this: A fresh pizza spews steam as it cools down. A box traps that moisture, suspending the pie in its own personal sauna. After just five minutes, Wiener said, the pie’s edges become flaccid and chewy. Sauce seeps into the crust, making it soggy. Worse, the poor benighted souls who have never ordered pizza from an actual New York City pizzeria and eaten it right there on the spot think that this is what pizza is supposed to taste like. By 1949, when The Atlantic sought to introduce America to the pizza, the package was already something to lament: “You can take home a pizza in a paper box and reheat it, but you should live near enough to serve it within twenty minutes or so. People do reheat pizza which has become cold, but it isn’t very good; the cheese may be stringy, and the crust rocklike at the edges, soggy on the bottom.” What I didn't note is that today's article is also in The Atlantic. Corrugation produces a layer of wavy cardboard between a top and bottom sheet, sort of like a birthday cake. The design creates thick, airy walls that both protect the precious cargo within a pizza box and insulate the pie’s heat while also allowing some steam to escape. I should note that I have gotten takeout pizza (if not delivery) that was packaged in a single-ply, though thick, cardboard box. It's not any better at keeping the pizza at peak. We’ve gotten a couple of pizza-delivery innovations in the past few decades: the insulated heat bag—that ubiquitous velcroed duffel used to keep pies warm on their journey—those mini-plastic-table things, and … well, that is mostly it. I've actually had people ask what the table is for. That's okay; it's not necessarily blindingly obvious. It's to keep the top of the box from contacting the toppings, and potentially pulling them off. Then you have a pizza crust, and a cardboard box top with the toppings on it. Which, to be fair, wouldn't taste much different from Domino's. “Every single pizza that I put in a box I know is going to be, let’s say, at least 10 percent not as good as it could have been,” Alex Plattner, the owner of Cincinnati’s Saint Francis Apizza, told me. Others dream of better days. “After smoking a lot of weed, I have come up with a lot of ideas for a better box,” said Bellucci, the New York City pizza maker. Weed is legal for recreational use in New York City now, so there should be a slew of innovative ideas coming out of that metropolis any day now. Ideas, but not necessarily their execution. Too much work for a stoned person. And I just have to say how hilarious Saint Francis Apizza is. Last year, the German brand PIZZycle debuted the Tupperware of pizza containers, a reusable vessel studded with ventilation holes on its sides. I take back the bit about weed. If it's going to lead to people naming their brand PIZZycle, maybe we should stick to booze. No, there's no evidence that weed was involved in that decision, but there's a strong link between pizza and getting stoned, so I assume the connection in the absence of evidence to the contrary. So we know it’s not a question of ingenuity: We can construct better pizza boxes, and we already have. The real issue is cost. Like I said. Domino’s alone accounts for nearly 40 percent of delivery-pizza sales in the U.S.—on par with all regional chains and mom-and-pops combined. Perhaps these big companies are stifling real pizza-box innovation. I shouldn't be surprised. This is the same "culture" that insists on soft white bread, pasteurized process cheese "food," and rice-adjunct lagers. We, as a society, have crap taste. I don't personally like chicken wings, but when spicy chicken wings became popular, I at least held out some hope that we'd get over our phobia about any spice hotter than mayonnaise, but that hasn't happened. Again, though, if you have your own backyard gas-powered 900 degree pizza oven, why are you even bothering with delivered pizza? I mean, I'm all about lazy, but pizza transcends even that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a frozen pizza to bake. |
| I thought y'all would want to see this. I use "y'all" as a second person plural, a part of speech that English otherwise lacks. And it can't always be inferred from context. Southern Living magazine once described “y’all” as “the quintessential Southern pronoun.” It’s as iconically Southern as sweet tea and grits. I like grits, but sweet tea can kiss my... ass. “Y’all” fills that second person plural slot – as does “you guys,” “youse,” “you-uns” and a few others. "You guys" is considered sexist these days, "youse" is still pretty much limited to a small area in the Northeast, and I'm not sure about "you-uns." I think Pittsburgh uses "yinz." I’m interested in “y’all” because I was born in North Carolina and grew up saying it. I still do, probably a couple dozen times a day, usually without intention or even awareness. I use it too, but more intentionally. I thought I used it more, but a quick search of this blog of over 2,000 entries only yielded 64 entries with "y'all." This would be #65. Back in 1886, The New York Times ran a piece titled “Odd Southernisms” that described “y’all” as “one of the most ridiculous of all the Southernisms.” Damyankees. Like the Southern dialect in general, the use of “y’all” has often been seen as vulgar, low-class, uncultured and uneducated. As someone noted in Urban Dictionary, “Whoever uses [y’all] sounds like a hillbilly redneck.” The only way to change this perception is to use it with intention. The etymology of “y’all” is murky. So is the etymology of a lot of other words. My examples push “y’all” back 225 years before the citation in the “Oxford English Dictionary,” and they show that the word appeared first in England rather than the United States. I think it’s important to point out that it originated in a more formal context than what’s commonly assumed. There are none of the class or cultural connotations of the later American examples. Now, I can't be arsed to research this right now, but I think older versions of English made a distinction between second person singular and plural. That's how we got "thee" and "thou" and other constructions that are now associated with the KJV and maybe Shakespeare. Or something like that; like I said, not looking it up now. Still, there it is, in an English poem written in 1631. Not long after Shakespeare, really. Y'all Brits invented the language; we just perfected it. “Y’all means all” – that’s a wonderful phrase that seems to be popping up everywhere, from T-shirts and book titles to memes and music. Sounds good to me. Now, how about we come up with a first-person plural that distinguishes between "us, including you," and "us, not including you?" Like if I said, "We're going to a party," does that mean you're invited? No. No, it does not, and now I'm embarrassed because you inferred that it did. |
| This one's just an interesting hypothetical question, though not so much for the question or answer, but for the approach to it. Was It Ever Possible For One Person To Read Every Book Ever Written (in English)? Randall Munroe Provides a Serious Answer To a Very Hypothetical Literary Question Munroe is the guy who does the excellent nerdy webcomic xkcd , and also answers questions like this in book format.The obvious, simple, and trivial answer to the headline question is "yes" (unlike most headline questions), because at the very least, once the first book was written in English, one person could then read every book ever written in English. But then you have to define "English," which can be tricky, because languages don't generally spring, Athena-like, from the head of some creator, but evolve over time and by mixing languages together. You've probably heard of Old English, Middle English, etc., but the boundaries between them are pretty arbitrary. The actual question: “At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?” –Gregory Willmot To take a stab at summarizing the beginning of the article, you'd need to know how fast someone can read as well as at what point the sum total of English literature, in a form that can be defined as a "book," exceeded the amount that someone can read in a lifetime. As Munroe puts it at the beginning: This is a complicated question. And the answer is also complicated, but I'm afraid you'll have to read the article itself to find it. Again, the way he gets at an estimate is the interesting part. And it gets into things like writing speed, too, which should be relevant to readers here. There's also the question Munroe himself poses, which is probably more germane to reality: On the other hand, how many of them would you want to read? Fair point. |
| For some reason, I was simply exhausted last night and went to bed early. I suppose it's possible that it's a portent of my inevitable demise, but it was probably just the weather. Speaking of demise, today's article, another one from Field & Stream, is about survival. Four Survival Myths That Could Get You Killed Our expert weighs in on some misconceptions about how to live through real-life survival scenarios Oddly, for me at least, one of these myths isn't "It's okay to go into the wilderness." Spend enough time in the outdoors, and you’re bound to wonder how you would handle a true survival scenario. For me, "enough time" is about five seconds. Could you gather and forage enough food? Could you build a strong survival shelter to keep you warm and dry? Could you start a fire…in the pouring rain? No, no, and no. Myth No. 1: You Can Live Solely off Natural Survival Foods I discovered the truth of this back in college. Turns out you can't actually survive solely on ramen noodles. Who knew? But the reality is if you are only eating “survival foods,” you’ll start feel to sick and weak after a day or two. (Some of these survival foods also have little to zero caloric value, which makes them pointless to eat.) Oddly, a day or two is about how long it takes to start to feel sick and weak if you don't eat anything at all, with the added benefit of not having worked hard for the feeling. Myth No. 2: You Can Complete Survival Projects at a Normal Pace Considering that "a normal pace" for me would make a sloth look like Usain Bolt, I'm not sure this is necessarily true. The lesson here is on focus. Careful observation of the resources in your environment will dictate what’s possible and what the most important things are to spend your time on. Your decision could be the difference between life and death. I'd imagine that shelter is of varying importance depending on the climate of where you've gotten yourself lost. A source of fresh water is always of high importance, if you can't find beer. Myth No. 3: If You Kill a Big-Game Animal, You’re Set for Food I am the furthest thing from a survivalist that you can possibly imagine, but a moment's thought should be enough to disprove this one. Even if you get past the thought, "Bears," you also have the thought, "This stuff will rot." But the article doesn't even get into that, talking instead about the danger of trapping animals that don't have much body fat. Basically, no matter how many rabbits, snails, limpets, or venison stakes you eat, you can still starve to death because your body can’t digest all of that protein without fat. "Venison stakes?" I think someone killed and ate the editor. Myth No. 4: Practicing Survival Skills Is the Same as Practicing Survival This might not be nearly as blindingly obvious as the last one, but it makes sense. This is a skill that only comes with experience. One indicator that you have this skill is you notice that you’re still having fun in a situation that others are complaining about. Accumulated experience in remote areas lets you know when something like feeling cold, getting cut, or eating something rotten is actually a concern and when it’s not—so you know when to be concerned and when not to be. When you get to this point, it may appear to others that you enjoy misery but you don’t, it’s just that it’s not miserable to you anymore. And then you can lord it over them with your superior knowledge and attitude. Maybe this will finally make them appreciate you. More likely, you'll find yourself one morning with a cold campfire and no one to practice survival skills with because they've all gone haring off downstream because "obviously, this person can survive on their own." That's the other thing about survival: we're social creatures; we got to nearly the top of the food chain not by an individual being the best hunter or survivalist, but by supporting each other. One dude can't take down a healthy mammoth alone (without heavy artillery anyway), but a dozen might. Hell, even Thoreau spent a lot of time hanging out with friends while supposedly sequestering himself at Walden (another reason I despise that guy's philosophy: he was a hypocrite). The ultimate expression of survival is civilization, and that's why I stay near it at all times. |
| At some point, I think it was last year, I finally got around to watching Frozen. What can I say? Without kids, I was never forced to, but it's part of my Disney+ subscription, so at least I didn't have to pay more for it. (Still haven't seen the sequel.) As usual, though, truth is stranger than fiction. The Time a Russian Empress Built an Ice Palace and Forced Her Jester To Get Married In It Cruel joke, power move, or both? Now, the truth is, I don't have much to say about this beyond the Frozen reference above. I just thought it was—to understate things a bit—cool, so here it is, shared. It was 1740 and one of the coldest winters St. Petersburg, Russia, had ever seen. But few residents mentioned the bitter winter in letters or accounts. They were, understandably, distracted. While the rest of Europe shivered through the deep freeze, Russians were busy—building a palace. On the orders of Empress Anna Ioannovna, numerous craftsmen were charged with constructing an elaborate, fairy tale–esque castle, one made entirely of ice. On the plus side, I suppose the exertion kept them warm. And the fear of being executed for underperformance, but mostly, the exertion. Rising 66 feet from the surface of the frozen Neva River and nearly 165 feet long, the Ice Palace was built “according to all the rules of the most current architecture,” noted Russian mathematician Georg Wolfgang Krafft. I guess one of the rules wasn't "don't build your palace out of ice." A steam bath, or bania, built from ice sat beside the palace. Decorative ice dolphins blew fire. A life-sized ice elephant’s raised trunk served as a fountain by day and as a stunning torch by night. Gotta say I'm impressed by the violation of the laws of thermodynamics, which, to be fair, hadn't been formulated yet. The palace was, by all accounts, a marvel. But the elaborate, temporary palace isn’t the strangest part of the story. That winter, Anna ordered a bizarre wedding to take place at the Ice Palace between the disgraced noble-turned-jester, Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, and a Kalmyk woman, Avdotia Buzheninova. Okay, I had to look up "Kalmyk." Apparently a Mongol ethnic group in Russia. The article does explain this later, but I hadn't gotten to that part yet. I'm sure their story is fascinating, too, but I'm short on time tonight. “The nobles choose Anna because, as a woman, they think she’ll be very easily manipulated,” says Russian historian Jacob Bell of the University of Illinois. The nobles imposed a list of conditions (creatively dubbed the “Conditions”) on Anna’s power and made her sign on the dotted line. She signed, but Anna was far smarter than they gave her credit for. Within a couple of months, Anna solidified support from a group of nobles and the local guards’ regiments. “[She] then, very dramatically tears the conditions in half and declares she will rule in the way she wants to rule,” says Bell. This is one of the most Russian things outside of depression and vodka. Continuing many of the efforts begun by Peter the Great, she funded the Russian Academy of Science and encouraged Westernization. She founded the Cadet Corps, a premiere military training school, and maintained a brutal secret police known as the Secret Office of Investigation. The Russianness intensifies. Ahead of the nuptials, Anna decreed every Russian province to send a man and woman wearing traditional dress to attend the spectacle. I suppose at least she didn't make them all wear ice? With all of this sort of thing going on, it's surprising that it took over 150 years after the Ice Palace incident for Russians to rise up in revolt. I guess they might have started to, but got cold feet. |
| Today's article is from 2018, but still relevant. Now, this is Harvard Business Review, so the focus of the article is... well... business. But the metaphor they use relates to writing: Long before your favorite movie made it to a theater near you, it was presented in a pitch meeting. Hollywood screenwriters typically get three to five minutes to propose an idea, but it takes only around 45 seconds for producers to know if they want to invest. Specifically, producers are listening for a logline: one or two sentences that explain what the movie is about. If there is no logline, more often than not, there is no sale. I suspect most of us knew that, at least in basic form. The article doesn't explain this, but it's called an "elevator pitch" because the idea is, you find yourself in an elevator with, I dunno, say, Kevin Feige. You've got your perfect screenplay for Squirrel Girl written (or mostly written) and you really want to sell him the script so she can finally join the Avengers. The elevator ride is maybe a minute long, and you have that long to convince him that a) your screenplay is awesome and b) Squirrel Girl is the perfect character for an MCU movie. (Point 2 should be blindingly obvious to everyone, but, at the very least, point 1 is necessary.) The great thing about the name is that it's a pun on "elevate," as in, it has the potential to elevate your idea into reality. Like I said, the thrust of the article is using the elevator pitch to promote your business or product, but publishing is a business, and your writing is a product. And even if, like me, you're not actively trying to sell your writing to a publisher or producer, distilling the essence of your plot down to a couple of sentences is a great writing exercise in itself. You can even do it before your writing project begins; that can keep you on track. Source: me, who's done it. (The fact that this resulted in a final product that was nothing like the elevator pitch is a me problem, not a pitch problem.) Alternatively, write a first draft, then the pitch, then keep the pitch in mind when revising. If you can answer in one compelling sentence, you can hook your audience. According to molecular biologist John Medina of the University of Washington School of Medicine, the human brain craves meaning before details. I would add that most humans crave emotional connection before logic. This is something to remember when creating a pitch. In Hollywood cinema, one of the greatest loglines of all time belongs to the iconic thriller that kept kids out of the ocean during the summer of 1975: A police chief, with a phobia for open water, battles a gigantic shark with an appetite for swimmers and boat captains, in spite of a greedy town council who demands that the beach stay open. Note the emotional charge of some of those words: phobia, shark, appetite, greedy, demands. A logline should be easy to say and easy to remember. As an exercise, challenge yourself to keep it under 140 characters, short enough to post on the old version of Twitter (before the platform allowed 280 characters per tweet). Really wish they hadn't brought Twatter into the discussion. In fairness, this was four years before Musk, but I already despised the platform then. Identify one thing you want your audience to remember. Steve Jobs was a genius at identifying the one thing he wanted us to remember about a new product. In 2001 it was that the original iPod allowed you to carry “1,000 songs in your pocket.” In 2008 it was that the MacBook Air was “the world’s thinnest notebook.” Apple still uses this strategy today. Steve Jobs was a genius, period. Massive cocknugget, sure, but genius. If you can’t communicate your pitch in one short sentence, don’t give up. Sometimes the language will come to you immediately, other times it might take more practice. Be patient. It's possible to spend more time creating a good pitch than it takes to write a first draft. But it could make the difference between people wanting to read your shit and... well... not. |
| With over 2200 entries here, it's difficult not to duplicate entry titles. Oh, sure, I could do it, but that would involve taking the time to use the search function and possibly slogging through entries with the words in the body in order to see if I've used the title before. And that's work, which, as you know, I'm allergic to. But it turns out that the title of today's archive post was one I used twice (and now, three times, sort of). in my defense, it's a great pun: "Meat the Press" .This one's from not all that long ago—while I exclude anything in the last 12 months from these revisits, this was 15 months ago. I just pick them at random. As noted in that entry, I was participating in "Journalistic Intentions" [18+], so I'll take the opportunity to plug that contest now. I think the next round will get going next month, and it can be fun to see where the prompts take you. In the case of my linked entry, the JI prompts were all about food; Elisa the Bunny Stik  runs a different theme each time.As for the entry itself, though, there's not a whole lot I need to add to it. It's a good thing I'm tackling this now. Today and going into tomorrow, I'll need to be on a liquid diet. And not my usual liquid diet, either. So I expect to be mind-destroyingly hungry, which is never how I want to be when I'm reading or writing about food. That intro might be confusing taken out of chronological context, so I'll explain: being the age I am, I occasionally get to have a camera shoved up my ass. As a former photographer, I'm used to people wanting to shove a camera up my ass; fortunately, in this case, it wasn't my camera, and I'd be unconscious for it. Point being, apparently, the procedure was scheduled for shortly after that entry, and I was about to start the necessary preparations for the procedure, which involve taking copious laxatives and not eating anything (or drinking beer). For the record, not that anyone cares, but it turned out that I didn't get all that hungry during the prep, and I got a clean bill of health afterward. You'd never know it, though, the way I overuse semi-colons. (I see an opportunity for a pun and I take it.) I don't remember if I ever followed up to mention that, so I'm doing it now. Still, it would have been annoying to write about food during a period of fasting. And that's about all I have to elaborate upon, so read (or re-read) the entry if you want. Unfortunately, the video the prompt is based on is no longer available. It's not required viewing, though. As I recall, it was moderately interesting, although, naturally, not nearly as fascinating as my writing. |
| Periodically, as I've noted before, I find articles bloviating about things that science fiction authors have "predicted." This is misleading, because unless it was a sealed prediction opened some years later, it's more like they dreamed it up, or someone invented something based on an idea they saw in SF. Today's article is a refreshing change from that because of how the headline is worded. Ideas can come from all sorts of places, and inspiration can hit in a flash—think of Archimedes supposedly yelling “Eureka! Eureka!” in the bath when he realized that irregular items could be accurately measured through water displacement. Probably apocryphal, but for whatever reason, we love our narratives about inspirational flashes. Like that one, or Newton's apple. But sometimes, it’s fiction, not reality, that provides the spark of inspiration. There are sci-fi tales, for example, that have gone beyond predicting technological advancements to directly inspiring scientific progress, from robotics to rocketry and everything in between. And they just lost my good will from the headline by using "predicting" here. In any case, I'm not going to copy all of them here, just the ones I want to comment on. 1. The Taser // Victor Appleton’s Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle Written under a pen name and published in 1911 by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (which also published the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys novels), Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle sees the titular character invent a weapon that looks like an ordinary rifle but fires bolts of electricity. The book was a childhood favorite of Jack Cover and partly inspired the creation of his own electroshock weapon: The Taser. That might have been the ultimate origin; I don't know of any stun devices in SF before that (the genre hadn't been around for even 100 years at that point, anyway). But the idea took off in a big way in SF and, especially, space operas; the ray gun, or zapper, or whatever, became a staple. Perhaps the most famous version was Star Trek's phaser. Now, this article goes on to note that "TASER" stands for "Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle," and other sources back that up—but it was invented starting in 1969, three years after the first Star Trek episode featuring phasers. And phasers, of course, took their name inspiration from the laser. My only point here being that many inventions have more than just one inspiration. 2. Helicopters // Jules Verne’s Robur the Conqueror Leonardo came up with a helicopter concept first. In fairness, though, his wouldn't have flown. 3. The World Wide Web // Arthur C. Clarke’s “Dial F for Frankenstein” Without Arthur C. Clarke’s 1960s-era short story “Dial F for Frankenstein,” there might be no World Wide Web as we know it. The sci-fi story is about a global, interconnected telephone network that gains sentience—and it served as one of Tim Berners-Lee’s inspirations when he created the Web while working at CERN in the 1980s. I'm always amazed at the number of people who, after reading a science fiction story that warns "under no circumstances should we invent this thing," go on to invent that thing. 7. Investigating the Habitability of Mars // Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man Physicist Peter H. Smith, professor emeritus at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, attributes his initial interest in extraterrestrial worlds to Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi stories, including those in The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951). Okay, fine, but let's remember that Bradbury himself was inspired by earlier Mars stories, which in turn were inspired by even earlier Mars stories, etc. Not all of them were science fiction. Hell, Bradbury is only marginally science fiction; he was more interested in poetic prose than in the science behind things. Nothing wrong with that—he was certainly awesome and inspiring; this isn't meant to rag on him at all. 11. Remote Manipulators // Robert Heinlein’s “Waldo” Published under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald, Robert Heinlein’s short story “Waldo” is about a scientist named Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones who invents a device to help him manage his degenerative muscle disease. His machine can perfectly mimic his hand movements, but with greater strength and from a distance. This device is essentially a remote manipulator, also known as a telefactor. Because of Heinlein’s story, some call the mechanism—which, according to Fundamentals of Robot Mechanics, “usher[ed] in the era of teleoperators”—a “waldo.” I'm mostly including this one because the term "waldo" is a legitimate word for this technology, and I get the impression many people don't know where it comes from. Heinlein didn't actually come up with the idea for the remote manipulator; he in turn was inspired by earlier writings. But the name is all Heinlein. If I had to take a stab at which science fiction author was most influential in terms of real-life invention, Heinlein would be in the top 5. He's often credited with the ideas behind the waterbed (Stranger in a Strange Land), and computer-aided design (The Door into Summer), just to name two other examples. It would be wrong to say that any of these writers "invented" the technology they inspired. Invention requires far more detailed design work than most SF writers need to go into, especially in their stories; that would get really boring really quickly, like Melville's detailed descriptions of whaling in Moby Dick. But this is the way things get invented in the first place: it always starts with an idea (or, some might say, a Platonic ideal) which only gradually makes its way through mind and sweat to consensus reality. Who gets the credit? Well, in my personal opinion, the inventor gets the bulk of the credit because they're the one who made it work. But there's good reason to acknowledge the source of one's inspiration. |
| All of us eat, and someone cooks that, so hopefully something like this has some appeal. I saved this article quite some time ago and I'm only now getting around to it. Consequently, I've forgotten what those 15 things were, so let's discover this together. You know you’ve been in the food-writing world for too long when you’re shocked to see someone cut birthday cake with a knife… How does this person not know to use a strand of taut dental floss or baker’s twine, which makes for the easiest, most mess-free slicing? That right there is enough to ensure that I will always cut a cake with a knife. That is, when there is a cake. There usually isn't. Sometimes I forget that not everyone is walking around with a mental catalog of time-saving, energy-saving, sanity-saving, life-saving, money-saving, surefire, guaranteed foolproof, plan-ahead, stress-free, problem-solving shortcuts, tips and tricks in the kitchen. Apparently, we're doing everything wrong, including doing stuff wrong. 1. Don’t make recipes (or trust cookbooks) that have overly cutesy recipe titles like “Struttin’ Chicken.” These kinds of dishes rarely have the kind of staying power that a simple Roast Chicken will. I agree with that on the grounds of cuteness, but my feeling? If you want to try it, try it. A recipe doesn't have to have "staying power" if it looks good to you. Besides, at least the recipe isn't for "Cluckin' Chicken." 2. Buy yourself a pair of kitchen scissors. Agree there, too, but how is it that this isn't basic? Even my mother had kitchen scissors, and she wasn't the world's greatest cook. 3. Some Type-A behaviors worth stealing: Do everything you can in advance when you are having people over for dinner. No matter how easy and tossed-off the task may be. No matter how many times your partner-in-crime says, Why don’t we just do that later? Filling the water pitcher takes 15 seconds! While I object to the psychospeak of "Type-A behaviors" (though at least she didn't use the adjective "anal"), if a task takes 15 seconds, you can do it anytime. The problem is that you have a thousand 15-second tasks, which (math trigger warning here) is over 4 hours and 10 minutes. Sometimes, you have to prioritize; other times, task A needs to be done before task B, which needs to be done before task C, etc. If a task isn't on the critical path, move it around. 4. Brushing dough with a quick egg-wash is the secret to getting that shiny, lacquered, I’m-worth-something-after-all glow to your pies, breads, and galettes. Fair enough, but that's baking advice, and I was looking for cooking advice. Baking is not my strong suit; I've never had any success with pies or breads, and furthermore, what the culinary fuck is a galette? No, I'm not going to be arsed to look it up. 5. Meat will never brown properly if you add it to the pan when it’s freezing cold and wet. It should be patted dry and room temperature. I kind of feel like letting meat sit at room temperature is a great big no-no. I'm no expert at this sort of thing, but doesn't that just invite microbes to party? Especially ground meat. I've also heard that meat browns better if you add a bit of baking soda, but I've tried that and it didn't improve anything, in my opinion. Probably another attempt to sell more baking soda. 6. Add acid. Sounds great! Oh, wait, they don't mean lysergic acid. Damn. Boring. (But true.) Also, fun if you do the baking soda trick. 7. Figure out the correct way to slice and dice an avocado. You will not only save time, energy and sanity by doing this, but you will find yourself giving tutorials to awed, in-the-dark observers every time you make guacamole in front of them. I actually followed the link to the video in this one, even though I absolutely detest learning shit from videos. That may not be the worst way ever to deal with an avocado, but it's not the best, either. Besides, if you're making guacamole, who cares what the cut-up avocado looks like? It's only going to get mashed anyway. I never make guac, though, and my slicing method may take a bit longer, but it gives me nice, clean, even avocado slices or dices every time. That is, if the avocado is in that fifteen-second window between "too hard" and "rotten." No, I'd say "figure out the best way to dice an onion." Onions get used a lot more often than avocados, especially in my house, and I long ago perfected the quickest way to dice 'em up without getting blood everywhere. The only difficulty I have is peeling them; often, I give up and take the outer layer off along with the peel to keep myself from getting too frustrated to cook. 8. Ice in the cocktails, people. Fill that glass all the way up! No. Just, no. Unless you really want a watered-down cocktail, or one that's more ice than booze. And some cocktails aren't served with ice at all. Martinis, e.g. Or single-malt scotch. Sure, some people like those on the rocks, but it's not a universal thing. 9. Learn how to make a handful of healthy dinners without using a recipe. Whether it’s scrambled eggs on toast or your great-grandmother’s 19-ingredient mole sauce, making dinner is so much more enjoyable when you can do it on autopilot, catching up with your kid or your partner as you go, or just savoring the aromas of sautéing leeks, instead of bobbing back and forth from cookbook to stovetop. How is scrambled eggs on toast "dinner?" I mean, sure, it's fine to eat it anytime, but you're having breakfast for dinner. And who uses cookbooks directly anymore? Even if I do, I take a picture of the page or scan the text into my dumbphone. Keeps the cookbooks from getting messy. Phones are easier to clean than paper. 10. Compliment the cook. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t like the food! Someone took time from his or her day to plan, shop, and put together a meal for you to enjoy. Be exceedingly, absurdly grateful always. Nevertheless: don't lie. Obviously give the cook a participation trophy; the work was the same whether the meal was tasty or disgusting, and that needs to be appreciated. But you're not doing your spouse (or whatever) any favors if they ask "how was the meatloaf?" and you answer "This was ambrosia of the gods!" when the truth is it tasted like sawdust and gypsum. I mean, you're not doing yourself any favors if you're brutally honest like that, but after a few days on the couch, they'll probably forgive you and figure out a way to fix the meatloaf. (The danger here is if they don't forgive you and next time they mix in actual sawdust and gypsum.) 11. A salad is not a salad without some sort of crunch Oh, please. 12. Food trends come and go, but spaghetti and meatballs are forever. I can't argue with that, but keep in mind that, 60 years ago, people thought aspics would be forever. (In fairness, there are probably still aspics around that were made 60 years ago, close enough to forever. Kind of like the family fruitcake.) I'll skip the rest; you can go read them yourself. I don't think any of it is bad advice, exactly, but there's a lot of personal preference in there. And that's fine. I think we all have to do what works for us. The avocado thing, for example. Or maybe you like different things in salads than I do. Whatever. The thing about articles like this is that a lot of cooking has to be figured out from experience. A recipe leaves out a lot of steps, by necessity: steps like "Pull the pan off the hook it's hanging on," because some people don't hang their pans. Or precise instructions for washing vegetables, which is also a matter of personal preference, space, and other factors. Still, as with any other advice article, you take what works for you and leave the rest. Unlike with my mom's meatloaf, which was more "leave" than "take." |
| Getting back to articles, here's one from Cracked that should be of interest to readers. Since you're reading this, I assume you're a reader. The title should more properly be "Ways Librarians Used to Be Hardcore." While every profession employs miserable people doing jobs just because they’re told to, librarians are an exception. Librarians are heroes. Every hero needs a catchphrase. For librarians, traditionally, it's "Shh." 5. Libraries Sterilized or Even Incinerated Books, and Laws Kept the Sick From Borrowing We used to care about public health. You were touching all these items that other people had fondled, people whose hygiene and morals you had no way to evaluate. We don’t have many public shoe exchanges, or rent-a-bra companies, because despite the obvious advantages of such facilities, such ideas repulse people. Maybe we should be just as weirded out by borrowing books. Unlike with machines in gyms, there's no "wipe the books down when you're done." Fuel for these fears came from a scientist named William R. Reinick, writing in the American Journal of Pharmacy. Someone once caught smallpox from a book, he said. Someone caught gonorrhea from a book, he claimed (exactly what they’d been doing to the book, he did not say). You could even catch cancer from books, he asserted. Then he shared the results of an experiment, where he kept 40 guinea pigs and gave them library book paper as bedding. All the guinea pigs died. This was damning evidence, if you don’t know much about how experiments are supposed to have control groups. And also that guinea pigs live about two years, anyway, if they're lucky. Not to mention those suckers will eat anything, and I'd think it more likely the ink poisoned them. Then as now, such studies were usually publicized so that the studier could sell their solution to the problem they've just created. Some health measures make sense, while others do not. Examining books tells us that, yeah, they might have some germs on them, but still, it seems no one ever gets sick from handling books. 4. During the Depression, Librarians Went Out on Horseback to Bring Books to Mountain Folk These mounted quests weren’t easy. Sometimes, the horse (or mule) would keel over and die. The librarian would have to continue the remaining many miles on foot. Sometimes, locals didn’t take kindly to these strange women bearing written words, forced on them by the government. Nice to know nothing's changed in 90 years, except the caliber of firearms used to shoot at trespassers. 3. Librarians Put on Uniforms and Went to War (as Librarians) "Bang!" "Shh!" In Vilnius, Lithuania, the Nazis set up a Jewish ghetto and banned anyone from entering or leaving. Librarian Ona Šimaitė managed to go in and out anyway, using the excuse that she was collecting overdue library books. During these trips, she smuggled in food and arms, and smuggled out documents for preservation. She also smuggled out children, in sacks. Legitimate badassery, right there. 2. Police Arrested People in the Middle of the Night Out of Their Beds for Overdue Books Take New Jersey in 1961. Harold Roth, the director of the East Orange Public Library, decided he was through waiting on people to return their late books, and so, he called in the police. The cops staged midnight raids on 14 homes. People who had cash on them to pay the fines did so, while others had to go right to jail. Fortunately, jails have libraries. Today, libraries find that abolishing fines is actually the more effective tactic at getting tardy patrons to bring their books back. "What are you in for?" "Murder, rape, larceny, rape, resisting arrest, rape, and loitering. You?" "Overdue library book." 1. J.P. Morgan Locked the Nation’s Financiers in a Library Till They Agreed to Bail the Country Out This one was interesting to me because it involves a place I've actually visited. In 1907, the economy was in real trouble. ...the burden for saving the country fell on J.P. Morgan. J.P. Morgan, librarian. It's a stretch to relate this to librarianism, though technically it happened in a library, albeit a private one at the time. It's still a really interesting bit of history. Full disclosure, though, I couldn't be arsed to fact-check it, and I don't recall seeing any plaques about it when I visited the building in question. Hell, I don't think most people have heard of the financial crisis of 1907, though it's what led to the formation of the Federal Reserve System. It was comparatively brief, and later overshadowed by the Great Depression (see #4 above). The country survived, as did the library. Visit it today, to see some books, or to see a third-century Roman sarcophagus that Morgan installed. The building in question, since the article neglects to mention this, is on Madison Avenue, a short walk from the Empire State Building. I don't remember the sarcophagus, though. |
| I am fatigued from my journey, though at least my good fortune held out. The trip home was entirely uneventful apart from, again, some minor delays for construction. There's a reason why I use the phrase "as sure as construction on the Capital Beltway" to describe a thing that is absolutely certain to happen. I even found street parking in Manhattan, which has never happened before. More, the spot was right across the street from my cousin's apartment building. I triple-checked; it was a legal parking space, though only until 9:30 am yesterday. Fortunately, I'd planned on leaving before then, anyway. I'm still waiting for the universe to throw me a curve ball to compensate. Watch this space; I'm sure it'll happen soon. So it'll be tomorrow before things get back to what passes for normal here in the blog. Since the trip was so ordinary, I had little to write about today, so I decided to use the Wayback Machine, and behold, the entry it landed on was "Eruv L'olam" from early August, 2020.That month was an off-month for 30DBC, with the theme of travel, which, going in, I thought would be a good fit for me. Couldn't have been more wrong, as it started off in Antarctica. I can only reiterate what I said about it at the time: Nope. So instead of participating in that, I did my usual article-linking. In yet another example of cosmic serendipity, the article (which still exists as of today) concerned... Manhattan.More specifically, it concerns the Jewish population of Manhattan, which, if memory serves, is higher than the Jewish population of Jerusalem. Now, a bit of a personal aside: I make no secret of my heritage, as anyone who reads here regularly knows. But to me, that's all it is, a heritage. My life is almost entirely secular. I'm aware of Jewish holidays, but I don't observe any of them. Well, I have been known to make latkes on Hanukkah, but as I've said before, everyone's Jewish for latkes. What makes a person Jewish can be complicated. Essentially, by tradition, a person is Jewish if their mother is Jewish. This matrilineal descent is rare in the West. I think other groups practice it, but there's a strong focus on paternal inheritance. This is most obvious when you consider how many WASP men have Jr or III after their name, signifying a continuation of one's father's line. Reality is messy, however, and I think it was the absurdist playwright Bertolt Brecht (not a Jew, but fled Nazi Germany anyway) who pointed out that a father can never be completely sure that a child is his, while the mother usually is (I say "usually" because there have been recorded instances of inadvertent baby-switching at hospitals, including at the one I use, which implies that there were probably unrecorded instances as well). This is not meant as a slight against women in general, incidentally. Lots of people raise children that aren't biologically theirs. My parents were two of them. Which leads me to the Talmudic question of whether I'm "really" Jewish or not. The matrilineal descent thing doesn't help me there. My mother was Jewish, but she wasn't my biological mother. I don't know, and don't care to know, anything about my birth mother, but as she lived in the Midwest, I find it highly unlikely that she was Jewish. But I was adopted shortly after birth, and raised Jewish in a Jewish household and even went through a Bar Mitzvah. On the other hand, my religious life ended many years ago, so it's more like a fourth-generation American tracing their ancestry to, say, Scotland, calling themselves Scottish. I even asked a rabbi about this conundrum once. He thought about it, shrugged, and said "I don't know." I'm sure other rabbis would have different opinions. Being able to say "I don't know" is, however, the beginning of, if not the very soul of, wisdom, so I will always accept that answer. It's very scientific. Just to be clear, while I still find the subject of that 2020 blog entry interesting (and still believe that my solution to it would change the world, or at least the tiny percentage of it which is Jewish), it's mostly an academic thing to me, like learning about quantum physics: it makes no difference whatsoever to my life. Even when I was a kid, we weren't the kind of Jews who were careful about doing / not doing certain things on Shabbat. Hell, we lived out in the country; the only way to get to Shabbat services was to drive, which is a big no-no for the Orthodox. Which is why so many Orthodox Jews in the US live in cities like New York, and preferably within walking distance of a shul. Me, I only care about living within walking distance of a bar. Which I do. Several, in fact. Not as close as if I were living in New York, but at least I can afford to live where I do. Manhattan is bloody expensive. If that sounds irreligious to you, well, I am irreligious. But even if I weren't, keep in mind that the Jews have a holiday where the whole purpose is to get so completely danchu that you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys. Even if that's a bit of an exaggeration, I wasn't raised with the whole Puritan anti-drinking ethos. I may take it a bit too far sometimes, but consider that a compensation for living in a country that's still reeling from the aftershocks of Prohibition, 100 years after. As for that referenced blog entry, I even found a way to relate it to the Antarctica theme of the 30DBC prompt. Damn, I'm good. Oh, and one more thing: I never did explain that entry's title. "Eruv" is explained in the text and in the linked article. The rest of the story is that "L'olam" is the transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning "of the world." Or, in modern usage, it can also mean "of the universe." |
| Heading back home later today. I just wanted to point out that to a nerd like me, the Museum of Natural History is like the Sarlacc pit from Star Wars. See? Even my similes are nerdy now. Let's try that again. It's like a black hole whose gravit- nope, still nerdy. It's like the tractor beam on the Enterpr- nope, still nerdy. Oh, well. It's worth going to New York just for that museum. There might be a few other things to do in town, but that's among the nerdiest. |
| I did a thing yesterday that I've never done before. It's not much of an accomplishment, really. And I didn't exactly set out to do it. It was only toward the end of the experience that I said to myself (and my passenger): "Huh. In all of my half-century plus of visiting New York, I've never done that before." Also, in fairness, it's very easy to do something in New York that you've never done before. It would take more than a lifetime to do everything in this city, after which there would be a whole buttload of new things to do. Kind of like my life goal of visiting every brewery. Anyway, after that buildup, the thing that I did seems even more anticlimactic, even trivial, but I'm going to tell you anyway: in one afternoon, I visited all five boroughs of the city. Starting in Staten Island, I drove over the Verrazano into Brooklyn, around the Belt Parkway into Queens, stopped at my mother's grave just outside the city on Long Island, then crossed over into the Bronx and thence into Manhattan. I'm told that one can accomplish this feat on foot by participating in the New York Marathon. Hahahahahaha no. Besides, it would take me more than one afternoon to runcrawl the marathon. More like a week. There are myriad other ways to do it, too. One interesting routing problem would be to develop a route, whether walking, driving, biking, or public transportationing, of minimum distance while still touching ground in all five boroughs. My route wasn't in any way efficient; it was mostly just a result of getting from New Jersey to the cemetery and then to Manhattan. It's not an accomplishment at all, just a fun bit of trivia. Want to impress someone? Visit all 50 US states in one day. Sounds difficult, but I'll bet someone with a private jet and lots of money could find a way, and probably get all kinds of publicity for it. Me, I once drove all the way from the easternmost point to the westernmost point of the Continental US (walking the last steps between road and coast), which I thought was a bit of an accomplishment even though I purposely took my time, but no one put me on the news for it. And hell, I haven't visited all 50 states yet. Alaska, Nebraska, and Michigan are still on my list, though never in winter. |
| ...or close enough. Can't resist the Springsteen reference. I'm just here overnight, and then it's back to NYC for a couple of days before I head home. I really like beach towns in the winter. Well, to clarify, I despise winter. Too cold. But yesterday wasn't that cold, so I actually spent a couple of minutes (shudder) outdoors. Not walking on the beach, though. I hate walking on the beach no matter the season. You know how everyone's dating profile says "loves long walks on the beach?" Not mine. Well, if I had one, it wouldn't contain that line. There's not much that annoys me more than sand in my shoes. Walking on a New Jersey beach barefoot isn't recommended, either. In the winter, it's too cold; in the summer, it's too hot; and in every season, it's too used-needly. Still, beach-adjacent is pretty cool. Last night was just a day after a full moon, which means that to a casual observer, it might as well be full. Also being a full moon, it hovered above the Atlantic after rising, and honestly, if you've never seen the moon reflected on the ocean, you haven't lived. Often known as the Wolf Moon, it's not, as most sources assert, necessarily the full moon of January, but the first full moon after the solstice. Didn't look like a wolf, though. Just looked like a moon. One thing I particularly enjoy about beach towns in the winter is that restaurants tend to be less busy—the ones that stay open, anyway. It's more relaxed, fewer tourists (I'm not a tourist; I'm a visitor), and even if the food isn't as fresh, at least it's prepared with more care. Sometimes, if you're really lucky and hit it at just the right time, you're the only one there. The one we went to yesterday, though, was damn near packed. Disappointing. Food was still delicious; it's been a while since I've had linguini with clams, and what better place than the shore? Well, okay, there are probably better places to eat seafood than the Jersey Shore, such as "anywhere else." I've even had good sushi in Iowa, and that's almost as far from the ocean as it's possible to get in North America. Anyway, whatever; it was good and barely tasted like mercury at all. |
| Still waiting for that other shoe to drop. It's going to happen. It's inevitable, because it didn't hit the ground yesterday. I had some time to myself yesterday, so the gravitational pull of breweries was irresistible. There's a cluster of them in Queens, just across the river, and I felt them tugging at me all the way from Central Park. As it was too cold to swim (and I wouldn't swim in the East River on a good day for any amount of money—well, maybe a billion dollars, but no less), and subways didn't go quite where I wanted, I summoned an Uber. Uber's very convenient and all, but I have no doubt that they, like every other bastard company in the world right now, is sucking up every bit of data they can find on you. This isn't normally a big deal, but most of my Uber rides either begin or end at breweries, and I'm sure that's part of their dossier on me. So while I was sitting there in the back of the car (the rideshare drivers in NYC have started installing bulletproof plastic shields just like the taxi drivers did years ago), I took the opportunity to check the weather online... and got treated to an ad for beer. Well, not really beer, but that mass-produced swill you find everywhere, but still, it's direct competition with actual beer. This was almost as uncanny as the other day, whilst sitting in the doctor's office waiting for the goddamn slow as shit doctor, I went to play a game on my phone (there were signs up urging us not to use phones in the office, but fuck you; you make me wait one minute past the scheduled appointment, and my distraction comes out), and what ad did they push at me? Blood pressure medication. That was even more eerie because at the time there was a sphygmomanometer staring me right in the face. Look, if I have to put up with ads anyway, which it seems that I do because we're in the end stage of capitalism and everything is a goddamned ad, I'd rather they be targeted than not. Obviously, I'd prefer to never see another ad. What's the point of having all my privilege if I can't use it to avoid getting bombarded by beggars? But failing that, it's better for me to see ads for fermented and/or distilled beverages than for, say, camping supplies. Anyway. I did figure out one way around the Uber destination/pickup thing a while back, and it's especially useful in cities: instead of putting in your actual destination if it's a bar, brewery, or bordello, you use Google to find a more puritan-friendly business nearby. Like, I dunno, a nail salon or lawyer's office or bookstore. You have the driver drop you or pick you up there instead. Of course, this often means walking half a block, which I know is a tall order for some, but it might be worth it just to randomize their algorithm on you. The downside of that is, naturally, that then you'll start getting targeted ads for nail polish or personal injury attorneys or the latest garbage NYT fake "bestseller." Might be worth it, though, just to mess with them. I didn't do that trick yesterday. Maybe later today. Oh, as for the breweries? I visited four of them, and they were all decent. |
| Yesterday, I drove up to NYC by means of the usual I-95/NJT route. Apart from one construction constriction, there were no traffic slowdowns. And that one exception lasted less than a mile. It gave me this eerie feeling, like watching an alien spacecraft landing, or seeing unicorns dancing with frog people in quicksand: simply something that never, ever happens. Like hearing an honest politician, or going on a second date with someone, or having the IRS owe me money. This unbalances the universe, you know. It's all out of whack now. Something terrible has to happen to me, personally, in order to return the etheric flow to its proper equilibrium. Maybe I'll get mugged (which hasn't happened to me in New York before). Or trip on a curb and break an arm. Or get food poisoning, or that nasty new 'rona strain, or hit by a taxi and die. The parking lot will wreck my car, or someone will steal it. Something. Or maybe I'll just encounter an 8-hour backup on the way back home. |
| Reminder: entries here will be at irregular times for the next week or so, while I'm away from home. Appropriately enough, today's article, from CNN, is about tipping. Coincidentally, the last time a tipping article popped up out of my queue was also the day I was scheduled to leave on a trip: "Hot Tip" A new checkout trend is sweeping across America, making for an increasingly awkward experience: digital tip jars. Article is from last month. Last. Month. "New trend?" I don't get out much, and I noticed this "new" trend several years ago. You order a coffee, an ice cream, a salad or a slice of pizza and pay with your credit card or phone. How dare they. How DARE they not mention beer. Then, an employee standing behind the counter spins around a touch screen and slides it in front of you. The screen has a few suggested tip amounts – usually 10%, 15% or 20%. There’s also often an option to leave a custom tip or no tip at all. Yes, that sucks. It can feel like begging. But I want you to keep in mind that, as noted, you do have the option for no tip, however embarrassing you might think that is. That's a you thing. The worker is directly across from you. Other customers are standing behind, waiting impatiently and looking over your shoulder to see how much you tip. And you must make a decision in seconds. Oh lord, the stress. Someone sounds paranoid. Do you tip at Burger King? No? How about at a movie theater concession stand? No? The cash register at the 7-11? No? Then why be expected to tip at a self-service coffee shop? Sure, if someone goes above and beyond, maybe. In situations where you're seated and a server takes care of you and someone cleans the table before you arrive and after you leave, absolutely. 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. Although consumers are accustomed to tipping waiters, bartenders and other service workers, tipping a barista or cashier may be a new phenomenon for many shoppers. Like I said, not new. Oh, by the way, always tip bartenders. What's the difference between a bartender and a barista? Well, for starters, the barista usually doesn't have to put up with your drunken opinionated rambling. That alone is worth a tip. “I don’t know how much you’re supposed to tip and I study this,” said Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell University and one of the leading researchers on US tipping habits. At least, unlike the "expert" interviewed in the previous tipping article I shared, this professor doesn't seem to have fallen for the fauxtymology of tips being an acronym. Adding to the changing dynamics, customers were encouraged to tip generously during the pandemic to help keep restaurants and stores afloat, raising expectations. Nonsense. Unless the restaurant is breaking the law, the tip should go straight to the worker, never to the restaurant's bottom line. Customers are overwhelmed by the number of places where they now have the option to tip and feel pressure about whether to add a gratuity and for how much. I treat it like I do the begging for change "for the children" at any checkout: ignore it. “If someone can afford Starbucks every day, they can afford to tip on at least a few of those trips,” added the employee, who spoke under the condition of anonymity. I need to find or create a name for this fallacy. I see it everywhere, in different contexts. Like "If you can afford a Porsche, you can afford the insurance on it." This is absolutely illogical and it's utter nonsense. It also leads to an infinite sum. "If you can afford A, you can afford B. If you can afford A+B, you can afford C. If you can afford A+B+C, you can afford D." Tipping spread after the Civil War as an exploitative measure to keep down wages of newly-freed slaves in service occupations. Hence my "vaguely racist" comment above. Critics of tipping argued that it created an imbalance between customers and workers, and several states passed laws in the early 1900s to ban the practice. Hence my "absolutely classist" comment above. Just how much to tip is entirely subjective and varies across industries, and the link between the quality of service and the tip amount is surprisingly weak, Lynn from Cornell said. He theorized that a 15% to 20% tip at restaurants became standard because of a cycle of competition among customers. Many people tip to gain social approval or with the expectation of better service. It's not "entirely" subjective. Most everyone in the US knows that the standard tip for restaurant servers is 20%. This, however, is a new development; when I was a kid, the standard was 15%. Now you get shamed if you tip only 15%. As for the "expectation of better service" thing, think about it. You tip at the end of the meal, when the service is complete. If you're a regular, sure. If they remember you next time. But if you're in another town, that's not an incentive. You can walk out without tipping, and there will be no repercussions to anything but your conscience. No, you do it so the next schlub doesn't get a surly waitress. An MIT study released in 2019 found that customers are less likely to tip when workers have autonomy over whether and when to work. Nearly 60% of Uber customers never tip, while only about 1% always tip, a 2019 University of Chicago study found. Well, I'm in that 1%. Unless the Uber driver crashes or tries to convert me to their religion. Neither of these things have happened yet. Etiquette experts recommend that customers approach the touch screen option the same way they would a tip jar. If they would leave change or a small cash tip in the jar, do so when prompted on the screen. So, no. Got it. Okay, so maybe this wasn't the best article to pop up while I'm trying to pack for my trip. I tend to get ranty about it. |
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