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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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| Today's article is about avid readers, which I'm sure all of my readers are. Else you wouldn't be reading this. Words we think we know, but can't pronounce: the curse of the avid reader  Do you know how to say apropos? What about awry? We want to know which words you’ve mispronounced – and how you found out your mistake This is from a couple of years ago, but that's probably irrelevant. I just found it last month. What is relevant is that it's an article about English pronunciation in the Guardian (British) written by an Australian woman, and it's well-known that the US, the UK, and Oz pronounce certain words different ways. "Privacy," for example. I think only the US pronounces that with a long i. So just keep that in mind. When I mispronounced tinnitus (ti–nuh–tuhs is correct, ti-nai-tis is not) recently and was kindly corrected, my embarrassment was a fraction of when I said apropos (a–prow–pow instead of a-pruh-pow) to a large table of people in London when I was in my 20s. That day I was not kindly corrected, but only realised my mistake after howls of laughter and a whispered, “Maybe that’s how they say it in Australia?” Now, see, I always thought it was ti-nai-tis. Some sources say both are correct. Officially, the first syllable should be emphasized. If enough people pronounce it the "wrong" way long enough, though, it becomes an alternative pronunciation. As for "apropos," well, at least she didn't pronounce the s at the end, right? Since then, I have learned that mispronunciation is often the downfall of people who read widely as children and form the incorrect pronunciation in their mind before actually hearing the word said aloud. You know what? That shouldn't be embarrassing. It means you read. What should be embarrassing, but too often isn't, is the polar opposite: when you try to write something as it's pronounced, and you spell it wrong. I worked with a guy who kept writing stuff like "part in parcel" (should be "part and parcel"); "save and accept" (save and except), and "beckon call" for beck and call. Those errors aren't proof of illiteracy per se (he would write "per say"), but they do indicate a lack of interest in reading. And don't get me started on affect/effect. What's even worse, of course, is mixing up things like it's and its; there, they're, and their; and your and you're. Now, I'm not saying I always get everything right. Far from it. Only that I have more respect for people who mispronounce things because they read a lot than (not "then") I have for people who misspell things because they hardly read. My ex-wife, for example, pronounced "picturesque" like "picture-skew." I thought it was adorable and never corrected her. Though in hindsight I should have used it against her in the divorce. In short, I'd rather deal with someone who mispronounces "apropos" than with someone who writes it "apropoe." Annals (not ay-nals), Hermione, misled (does not rhyme with thistled) and glower... Look, it should be shining obvious that annals isn't pronounced the same way as anals. No one in the US knew how to pronounce Hermione until the first Harry Potter movie came out. I never thought misled rhymed with thistled. As for glower, well, honestly, I never was very sure about that one so I avoided saying it (turns out it's pronounced like flower). A colleague pronounced facade with a k sound, another thought burial rhymed with Muriel and yet another was mortified to discover that segue was not pronounced seeg. At least two of those are a result of not knowing the French influence on English. English pronunciation can be tricky like that, anyway. We've borrowed so many words from other languages, words where you have to know a bit about the language to pronounce them correctly. Like, if you see the word "sake," you need to know if it's preceded by "oh for fuck's" or if you're talking about delicious Japanese rice wine. French words very often leave English-speakers flummoxed. I’ve heard canapés pronounced in quite creative ways, and amuse-bouche, prix fixe and hors d’oeuvre have seen the odd food lover come a cropper. Before I started learning French, I had a lot of fun deliberately mispronouncing French words. Canapés became can o' peas, for example, and hors d'œuvres became, to my vast personal amusement, horse doovers. And the surest way to annoy a French person is to say "Par-lezz-vouse fran-kais" What word have you always mispronounced? The article recommends commenting there with an answer to that. I wouldn't advise it as, again, this is over two years out of date. It also recommends tweeting same, which I definitely don't recommend right now. But if you want to give me your examples below, feel free. Me? I don't know which words I'm mispronouncing. If I did, I wouldn't mispronounce them anymore. I know I used to think that rappelling (the practice of rock climbing with ropes) was like rapple-ing, but once I was laughed at and corrected I said ra-PELL-ing like you're supposed to. But that was back in high school. I guess what we need is a verbal version of spell check. Something that makes a red squiggly line appear in your vision when you're about to mangle a word that you've only ever seen in print. Alas, we'll have to wait until cyborg technology is more advanced for that. |
| Hell of a hazard. A Woman Was Caught Whacking a Golf Ball into the Grand Canyon, and the Feds Aren’t Happy The latest story of a tourist behaving badly in a national park is a real head scratcher Source is (shudder) Outside magazine. I still don't know why I keep reading their stuff. Somewhere in the dark recesses of my memories lives my long-forgotten teenager sensibilities. This is the version of myself that delighted in immature pranks, like toilet papering a classmate’s cottonwood trees and playing ding-dong ditch. Both of which are annoying but relatively harmless. If no one was injured, a school wasn't evacuated, and nothing caught on fire, you were a goody-two-shoes. I'm not admitting to anything, by the way. Just saying. I’ll admit it: my teenaged self would absolutely understand the allure of whacking a golf ball off of the side of the Grand Canyon and watching it disappear into the chasm below. Okay, so true story: they taught us the basics of golf in sophomore gym class in high school. As I recall, we split up into pairs and each pair got a golf club (don't ask me what its number was or whether it was iron or wood) and a wiffle ball the size of a regulation golf ball. The idea was to learn our swings and recover the ball easily. I was paired up with the class stoner, who, with a level of perception and intelligence only displayed by a high school stoner, found the one real ball in the box of wiffles. One of each pair of students teed up, and on the coach's command, wound up and swung. Everyone else's ball caught a bit of air and then dropped down to bounce sadly on the grass. Ours, however, made a perfect golf-ball arc through the air and ended up 300 yards downrange. Coach got up in our faces. "WAS THAT A REAL BALL?" Stoner nodded. (Like anyone could have done that with a wiffle.) "YOU GO GET THAT RIGHT NOW." So we trudged through the bushes. As soon as we were out of sight, my teammate produced a joint from his pocket and sparked it. Like I said, perceptive and intelligent. As I recall, we did find the ball, and both got lousy grades in that gym class. Which was the only class my parents didn't care what grade I got in, so it all worked out for everyone involved. Coach got to get in someone's face; stoner got to get high in class; and I got a story. Anyway. The relevant thing is that, while I certainly got up to some shady shit in high school, I don't think I ever considered whacking a golf ball off the rim of the Grand Canyon. For one thing, it's 2100 miles away. For another, I don't play golf (it generally requires being *shudder* outside). On Thursday, National Park Service officials posted an update on the Grand Canyon’s official Facebook page about a woman who filmed herself hitting a golf ball into the canyon, which she then uploaded to TikTok. In the video, the woman also loses the grip on a golf club and flings it off the cliffside. If it wasn't recorded and posted on social media, it didn't happen. Now, look. The problem with lofting a golf ball into the Grand Canyon isn't that it might hit someone. The chance of that is infinitesimally small, though admittedly if it did happen the consequences would be terrible. No, it's that it might inspire other people to do it. TokTik trends are a thing, and I can definitely see the "Grand Canyon Hole In One Challenge" going viral. With that many balls flying through the air, the chance of hitting someone increases significantly... as does the amount of litter, which is the real problem here. (The article does mention all this later). Officials acted swiftly, and with the help of the general public, were able to track down the woman. Snitches. At Outside, we come across a litany of stories of people behaving badly in the outdoors, and this year has been a busy one. More reasons not to go into the outdoors. There were the high schoolers who booted a football off of Colorado’s Uncompaghre Peak... Touchdown! ...the dudes who were photographed scrawling graffiti in chalk on a rock at the Grand Canyon... At least it was chalk and not spray paint? ...and the never-ending march of tourists getting too close to animals at Yellowstone National Park. Those, I have mixed feelings about. I mean, it might injure the poor animal if it attacks and kills the stupid human, but other than that, it only harms the stupid human. So while it's true that one shouldn't get cuddly with a Yellowstone grizzly, bison, unicorn, or whatever they have out there in the wilderness, the penalty is built right in. Article doesn't mention my favorite Yellowstone idiocy, which is people who see the pretty pools of azure water and decide to go off the very clearly marked trail festooned with danger signs and warnings (you can't tell me what to do! mah freedumz! stoopid government!) to take a dip. Some of those pools are near boiling and have a pH of like 1.5. Here's someone of whom nothing was left but a foot.I mean, that sort of thing is just par for the course. |
| Speaking of food, I continue to see people raving about sourdough, which apparently a lot of people played with when they were stuck at home over the past couple of years. Me, I just continued buying bread from the bakery as nature intended. Every time I've tried to bake bread, bad things happened. Anyway, this article isn't about pandemic sourdough bakers; it goes back a bit further than that. San Francisco’s Famous Sourdough Was Once Really Gross Gold miners made themselves sick on smelly, hard loaves. Long before it became a viral food trend or social-media sensation, American sourdough was surprisingly gross. So, more like the other meaning of "viral." San Franciscans proudly trace their city’s iconic bread back to the Gold Rush of 1849. That's fair, but it should be noted that before people knew what yeast actually was, almost all bread was "sourdough." I think some was made with repurposed beer yeast, but the origins of sourdough extend way before San Francisco was a thing. The men who flocked to Northern California in search of gold made bread in their wilderness camps not with store-bought yeast, but with their own supply of sour, fermented dough. Yeah, I could be wrong, but I don't think there was a lot of store-bought yeast there at that time. Letters, diaries, and newspaper articles written by and about the 49ers, lumberjacks, and pioneers of the American West are full of complaints about horrible and inedible sourdough. Could bad bread really have inspired San Francisco’s most beloved loaf? Or it could be gold miners protecting their hoard. "Don't come out here. The weather is shit, people are camping everywhere, and the bread sucks." You know, a bit like San Francisco today. In 1849, when gold miners began arriving in San Francisco, most Americans didn’t bake or eat sourdough bread. American bakers typically leavened their bread with “barm” (a yeast derived from beer brewing) or one of several relatively new commercial yeast products. Yeah, see? Look, I comment on these things as I go, and it's nice to turn out to be mostly right. Hm, I wonder... why, yes, that is the origin of the mostly British word barmy. These commercial yeasts were easy to work with, didn’t require constant maintenance, and produced reliable results. They also produced bread that appealed to American taste buds. American taste buds suck. They think Budweiser is beer, pasteurized process cheese food is cheese, and Wonder Bread is bread. Most 19th-century Americans preferred bread that was sweet rather than sour. According to one 1882 advice book for housekeepers, the “ideal loaf” was “light, spongy, with a crispness and sweet pleasant taste.” Sour bread was a sign of failure. As a result, bread recipes from the period used commercial yeasts along with considerable amounts of sugar or other sweeteners to speed up fermentation and avoid an overly sour flavor. The ideal bread is a French baguette with a crispy crust. Period. Sourdough required only flour, water, and fresh air. A sourdough “start” needed care, attention, and regular feedings but offered an inexhaustible, self-perpetuating supply of leavening agent, even in the wilderness. Some brewers make beer with wild yeast, too. The results are all over the place. Some of them are also described as "sour." Bread was baked under difficult circumstances—outdoors, over a campfire or hot coals, and sometimes in the same flat pan used for panning for gold—leading to inconsistent and unsanitary results. But they could have sold it as artisanal sourdough with flaked gold. Sourdough baked by pioneers wasn’t just gross and unappetizing; it could also make you sick. Well, duh. Not all the microorganisms floating around are beneficial. Across the American West, sourdough was considered a food for unmarried men who didn’t know how to cook. As opposed to married men who didn't know how to cook. So it’s worth asking: If sourdough bread baked by miners was so terrible, how did it become one of San Francisco’s most beloved foods? It all came down to the success of the city’s French and Italian bakeries. Yep. That'll fix it, alright. By the second half of the 20th century, tourism boards in San Francisco were placing the 49ers at the center of the city’s history, idealizing life on the frontier and playing up links between the Gold Rush and the City by the Bay. San Francisco bakeries joined in, crafting stories about partnerships between bakers and miners and attempting to market the bread nationwide. And once again, we see that no matter how disgusting something may be, if you market it right, it'll become popular. |
| Yeah... I can relate. Of course, ordering a pizza takes less than 30 minutes. Sure, you usually gotta wait longer than that for it to show up—Domino's nixed the whole "30 minutes or less" thing years ago, and they suck anyway—but at least you can be playing video games while you wait. We’ve all fallen for the trap before. Wooed by the promise of pan-seared chicken thighs in 30 minutes, only to be defeated and left overanalyzing what went wrong more than an hour later. Or worse, we’ve thrown some onions in a pan to caramelize while we’re searing a batch of burgers, only to find ourselves still stirring the onions dejectedly, 45 minutes later. It's not just recipes, either. "Minute" rice can take way longer than a minute to cook. It’s right there, staring at me. Cook time: 30 minutes. But a closer look at the ingredients says otherwise. Five garlic cloves, minced. One stalk of celery, thinly sliced on the bias. Two carrots, peeled and chopped. One yellow onion, finely diced. There go 15 minutes already (on a good day, with a sharp knife, and no distractions), which doesn’t even account for the five minutes needed to compose myself after tearfully hacking at an onion. And that’s only half the battle, if we’re counting the unglamorous process of washing and thoroughly drying all of those vegetables. Not to mention the half hour or so you spend cleaning up what your roommate left in the sink and on the stovetop. Look, I'm a big fan of mise-en-place, and was even before I started seriously learning French. Get all that measuring and chopping crap out of the way before you start cooking and you're not stuck watching your pot burn while chopping the onions in the middle of it all. There will be at least one onion that's started to go bad, too, so you always use more onions than you think. I have managed to keep onion juice from messing with my eyes, though, so there's that. But the problem with mise-en-place is you're not multitasking, so it usually takes more time to cook something if you're careful about getting everything all set before you fire up the stove. Recently I fell into a similar trap after being convinced by a trusted blog that 35 minutes was all I would need to make mapo tofu in my Brooklyn kitchen. Gotta get that humblebrag in. At least in Brooklyn, if you suddenly find you're out of ingredients, it's a much quicker trip to get more than in most parts of the world. After pulverizing Sichuan peppercorns with a mortar and pestle, peeling and mincing a three-inch knob of ginger, finely chopping half a head of garlic, and rummaging through my dish rack to get enough small bowls and spoons to premeasure the rest of the ingredients, I’d already blown past the 20-minute mark, and I hadn’t even turned on the stove. The peppercorn thing is way too much work. Ginger is way too much work, too, but it's worth it. And don't get me started again on peeling garlic. Beneath a fish taco recipe advertised as a “fast dinner for hungry, busy people” in the New York Times, a comment reads, “It’s unbelievably condescending to claim this meal takes 30 minutes. It took me 15 minutes just to make the salsa, 7 for the mayo, 10 to warm all the tortillas, and a full 30 to fry all the fish in batches…. Great recipe, horrifically underestimated execution time, especially for those with kids running around.” If it's taking you 10 minutes to warm up tortillas, either you're feeding the Mexican army, or you're doing something very, very wrong. The conditions we’re under have their own matrices of variables. “Part of it is that recipes don’t account for skill levels—such as how fast you chop or mince and the equipment you have at your disposal,” says Kelly Chan, a Queens-based nonprofit analyst who’s often folding dumplings or prepping Cantonese-style stir-fries. Recipes are written with the presumption that all home cooks have speedy, chef-like knife skills to whiz through a mountain of shallots and tomatoes, or that they know how to butterfly a chicken without pausing, washing their hands, and looking up a YouTube tutorial. Even the Instant Pot—widely adored among home cooks for its shortcuts to complex 20-minute pho broths or five-minute steel-cut oats—still needs time to preheat and depressurize, effectively tripling the cooking time in some cases. (But of course no one tells you that, because it’s called an Instant Pot for a reason.) I've never used an Instant Pot, but my gut told me the name was an exaggeration. Not just that, though, but also the work involved in cleaning it keeps me from buying one (my housemate has one, but rarely uses it, and I'm concerned I'll muck it up). Every time I consider a new kitchen gadget, I mentally figure out how much work cleaning it will be, and usually don't bother. One exception is a blender; those are usually worth the work to clean. Real cooking proficiency isn’t about whipping things up without a recipe—it’s about reading between the lines of that recipe and knowing when an hour means two hours. I usually mentally double a recipe's stated cooking time, and it still often runs longer than that. One time, I was trying to make latkes. I knew going in that it would be labor-intensive; that's just the way it goes. What I didn't account for, though, was that the damn things took three times as long to cook as I expected. To be fair, this doesn't always happen; one should use russet potatoes for latkes, and I had to get some other kind because the store was out of russets (this was around Hanukkah a couple years back; I guess everyone else was making latkes, too. Everyone's Jewish for latkes.) My biggest gripe about cooking for myself, which is the usual case, is that I generally think that a dish shouldn't take longer to cook than it does to eat. Sometimes I do it anyway, for practice. But after laboring over a hot stove for two hours and finishing the resulting meal in less than five minutes, I'm left with the distinct impression that I've wasted my time. Maybe I should buy more frozen dinners. |
| Look, sometimes the Random Number Generator (peace be unto it) gives me the same source twice in a row. But I promise you this one's worth it, because it resolves a question I've had since I first learned what a question was. I know I've commented on this before. For a while, I was methodically going through every single episode of every Star Trek show, plus the movies, in chronological order. I think the first time I noticed any reference to a toilet (or that would be head, since it's a ship) was sometime in the early 90s, some 25 years or so after the show's beginning. But, apparently, I'd missed some. We'll get to that. Without its fantastical future technology, Star Trek would just be a series about people who love sitting in comfortable chairs. People watch shows like that all the time. What has wowed audiences for decades are inventions such as the faster-than-light warp drive, the matter transportation system, and the Starfleet human resources nightmare that is the Holodeck. Someone, I think it was Dave Barry, noted that the holodeck would be humankind's last invention. Personally, I don't think we'll ever invent it. Not because we won't be able to, but because, well, look at the Metaverse. Any real-life implementation of a holodeck will be absolutely loaded with safeguards, to the point where no one will be able to do anything fun with it, it will be a joke, and everyone will laugh at the inventor (who will consequently become a supervillain: "Laugh at ME, will you? Let's see who laughs now muhuahahaha!!!") But anyone who’s ever watched any Star Trek TV shows, movies, or adult movies probably has some serious questions about how this fictional universe really works – perhaps the biggest being: where the hell does everyone go to the bathroom? This is, indeed, one of the biggest questions in the universe. I should note that, at about the same time DS9 was airing, and also around the same time I saw someone in the Trek universe finally acknowledge the existence of a toilet, Babylon 5 (another SF show about another space station that stayed in one place) not only acknowledged it, but set scenes in it. Anyway, the next bit points out that there was a door labeled HEAD on the bridge of the Enterprise-D. That was TNG, before DS9. And while the production “did not design or build the inside of that bathroom,” it was still there, just in case Number One had to take a … well, you know. Also, in the crew members' “various living quarters,” there is an unopened door that “we assume led to a bathroom.” I should also note that this was around the time when, in attempting to answer my own version of the question (and the Trek novels were no help in that regard, either), I finally decided the key had to be transporter technology. Think about it. A transporter, under normal use, records the position and connections of every molecule, atom, proton, electron, and so on in your body (they have "Heisenberg compensators" to handle the Uncertainty Principle) and your clothes and equipment, right? And when you arrive at your destination, your clothes aren't somehow bonded to your body, etc. Well, part of your body is the shit in your intestines and piss in your bladder. Sorry, but it's true: transporting someone necessarily requires transporting whatever waste products are awaiting exit. And with the transporter able to easily distinguish between different molecules, certainly it can tell shit from shinola. So. All you have to do is program the transporter to image you, then pull out the waste. No need to even strain on the throne; just push a button and boom, it's gone. Where it goes is... well, let's keep reading. My theory turns out to be wrong, anyway. But it could have been right. So we know that the Enterprise is equipped with toilets, but do we know what happens to the human waste? Do they make Chief O’Brien beam it out? More sensibly, one would think that the Enterprise crew could simply fire their poop into space from time to time, like a smellier version of Spock’s funeral. Send it all to the Klingons like Scotty did with the tribbles? But it turns out that this might be a terrible, terrible idea. It is, for many reasons, not the least of which is the next starship zipping through the area will come into spacedock with skid marks. Dr. Siegel speculated that, while none of the Trek shows go into much detail about toilet-based issues, “every bit of eliminated human waste is useful matter that you can reconstitute into something else.” Meaning that any waste created could potentially be used to “power the Replicators” – you know, the device that people of the future use to create small objects, cups of piping hot tea, and food. Now, look. Some people are going to be grossed out by this idea. But come on. How do you think it works right here on Earth, and mostly without technological interference? Everything you eat contains atoms that were once part of poo. Everything you drink contains atoms that were once pee. Every breath you take inhales atoms that were in a fart. Hell, worse, they've all been part of dead things. I don't mean fresh dead things like the kind you eat (even if you're vegan), but yummy, delicious carrion... oh, sorry, channeling my spirit animal again. A replicator would just speed up that process. Part of civil engineering, though not a part I ever participated in directly, is sewage treatment. You take all that waste and process it, and (in theory anyway) the water becomes clean enough to dump into a river. It's then either evaporated, falling back as rain that you might eventually drink; or it's processed by fish that you might eventually eat. Solid waste is sterilized and becomes fertilizer. Trek would just use the technological evolution of the same sort of processes. According to Dr. Siegel, this is a pretty solid plan, although admittedly, you have to get over the “gross factor.” Like if you were to replicate a clarinet, à la Harry Kim in Voyager, you’d have to look past how “the atoms making up the clarinet that I'm putting in my mouth and playing right now were defecated out by me and a thousand other crew members onboard the ship.” Again, the only difference between that and the way things occur naturally here on Earth is scale. Still, seems to me that in Trek it would be simpler to cut out the whole "plumbing" bit and use the transporter like I said. But I guess that might set things up for some really gross practical jokes. |
| Today's article, another one from Cracked, is a fun (and sometimes funny) exercise in speculation. And I do mean speculation. Which is okay; you gotta start somewhere, and speculating is better than being incurious. Humanity's most important question, excluding pop media relationship statuses, Incognito rash inquiries, and whether or how various animals would wear pants, is this: are we alone? Well, some of us definitely are. Oh, you mean "we" as a species. Or maybe "we" as a biosphere. Are there any intelligent aliens we could have a brew and watch the game with, or are they all crabs? There was an idea floating around a while back that came out as "everything eventually evolves into a crab." This is, of course, crabshit, as a moment's thought of how evolution works to create and fill environmental niches will conclude. The original idea is that a lot of, specifically, crustaceans, eventually take on the morphology of crabs, and there may be something to that. But it does represent one important leap in popular speculation about extraterrestrial intelligence: the idea that the human form isn't necessarily what evolution works toward (it actually doesn't "work toward" anything). Speaking of which, this article uses "intelligence." I've beaten that dead crab a few times; basically, let's not conflate intelligence with technological capability. And please, please, stow the tired old "but we're not intelligent either" jokes. This article has enough of them. Chillingly, we may be the gleaming example of advanced life in the entire universe. Maybe. The Universe is a big place, though. So I doubt it. In its usual style, the list is in reverse numerical order. Look, it's just their brand. 4. It's Not Just What Other Life Looks Like, But How We See It Plants are green because they reflect green light. But the chlorophyll that powers their photosynthetic planty prowesses is extra reflective in near-infrared. Sadly, we're limited to seeing the visible spectrum of light, which is a tiny portion of the entire spectrum. This is, essentially, true. But there's a decent reason for why we see the sliver of spectrum that we do, and not way out in other wavelengths: it's the relative transparency of water (where our distant ancestors evolved) and air (where our more recent ancestors evolved) to those particular frequencies. Now, some species see higher or lower wavelengths, but our red-to-violet vision is more than acceptable for what evolution produced vision for in the first place: seeing predators coming, and seeing prey. The rest of this section goes deep into the speculation bit, and it has helpful images designed to be seen by our puny-sliver-of-spectrum-seeing eyes. 3. Aliens Could Look And Maybe Even Communicate Like Us, Dawg Regarding convergent evolution, maybe nature isn't as creative as we thought and survival problems "only have a few good solutions." Again, not borne out by evidence right here on our own planet. Every single living thing right now has been subject to evolution just as long as humans (and crabs) have, and this includes such varying survival techniques as nonskeletal molluscs (octopuses), opposable thumbs (primates), claws (crabs), bills (ducks), mushiness (jellyfish), ants, trees, and many other wildly varying features. Photosynthesis necessitated loads of tweaks to many cell types, so plants produce oxygen and not, perhaps, farts. So, such intelligence as ours may occur on only 1 in 100 trillion habitable worlds. But while there may not be any civilizations in our galaxy, it's quite possible that the Milky Way still harbors tens of billions of planets covered in prokaryotic purple slime. This aligns with what I've been saying all along. But remember, we have a sample size of exactly one when it comes to "examples of worlds with life on them." It could be that technology (again, not using "intelligence") happens on 1 in 10. It could be 1 in a googolplex. Personally, I suspect it's closer to the latter than the former. We don't know. 2. They might be robots, or robotic brains the size of your city The problem with organic "wet" brains is that they're limited by size and processing power. Similar challenges are faced by the organic “wet” under-parts that get so many of us in trouble today. But inorganic brains theoretically have no limits of perception or conception, and robotification may be the ultimate destiny of all lifeforms that don't nuke themselves into glowing dust. This is certainly not a new idea. Our own history of space exploration is "send the robot first." It's entirely likely that if another tech civilization exists, we'll meet their robot probes first. Or they'll meet ours; whatever. The logical extension of that would be consciousness transfer to robotic forms, which isn't remotely possible with our current technology (not to mention we don't really know what consciousness is), but hey, we're speculating here. 1. We May Be All Alone Or maybe advanced aliens don't look like anything because they don't exist. We may be the only intelligent (ish) life in the universe. Based on statistical models, Oxford researchers say "average evolutionary transition times likely exceed the lifetime of Earth." And the universe is only a few Earth-ages old. Oh, it's worse than that, though. Life as we know it depends on certain heavier elements. Not just the molybdenum mentioned in a recent blog entry, but something as seemingly basic as oxygen, or the iron that makes our blood work. And such elements just aren't found in the early universe. No, they have to be forged in stars, supernovae, and things like neutron star collisions. This takes time. It's not like life as we know it could have begun early on. "Sure, but what about life not as we know it?" Sure, we can just make stuff up. Still, let's not put too much stock in statistical models, even if they do come from a reputable place like Oxford. Again, we have one data point. My favorite theory? The one with the greatest potential for mindscrewiness: that aliens may, or may have initially, looked like us. That's not a theory. That's more speculation. I also want to take this opportunity to reiterate what I've said in the past: there is no universal law of evolution that requires the emergence of a technology-using species. Plenty of species get along just fine without building computers or rockets. They may even address us in English, which isn't crazy as it sounds. If they can traverse space, why couldn't they learn our language by jamming to Spotify in Moon orbit? More likely they'll be speaking Mandarin Chinese or Spanish; more people speak those. As for what they'd listen to, I'll just note that the radio waves with the greatest chance of punching through Earth's atmosphere are in the FM band. So I really, really hope they're listening to NPR and not some morning show shock jock. When they do show up, just stay out of range of their pincers and you should be fine. |
| Once again, taking a look at a past entry. This one's from way, way back in October of 2008: "Never ends" It's hard for me to remember last week, let alone that far back. I used Wikipedia to remind me of stuff that happened around the time of the entry. At that point, George W. Bush was still President (look, I'm not getting political here, just stating facts), and we were still a month away from electing Obama. The Great Recession, as it came to be called, had just begun; Bush had, a few days earlier, bailed out some of the banks involved. I was still working, still married. None of that mattered to me on October 7-8 because, apparently, on those days, I was in severe pain. This was, obviously, from a very different time in my life, so I'll try to take it step by step. Up until a week and a half ago, I had that nasty, unrelenting back pain and sciatica, the only relief for which was lying down and taking lots of meds. Oh, yeah. I do remember how bad my back pain could get back in the noughties. At some point, I got steroid shots for it, and it got better. You know, those great big needles that they insert into your actual spinal nerves? Yeah. They suck. But not as hard as back pain. I was okay for a week, then. I mean, I still had twinges in my back and leg, but nothing major. Memory of pain is weird. It all blends together for me. Back and neck pain was just part of my existence back then. But this particular episode stands out as being utterly incapacitating. Then, as I reported here, I got sick on Sunday, cutting short our anniversary celebration. This continued through Monday. Hm. Somehow I had it in my head that our anniversary was closer to the end of October. In my defense, once she dumped me, I could release that date from long-term memory storage, so I did. I couldn't find anything in the archives about an anniversary celebration, only about everyone in the house, including the cats, being sick. Monday night, I slept for a few hours, then was wide awake for a few hours, until maybe 15 minutes before my alarm went off. When I woke up, my neck and shoulders were stiff. No big deal, except my stomach was still upset, so I went to work. I left work early afternoon, figuring what I needed was to lie down with some heat on my neck. No, I couldn't call in sick. Hard to do that when you own the company and don't have employees (not at that time anyway). The effects of the Great Recession on the business hadn't taken hold yet. Can't recall what projects we were working on that month, only that we were still able to make money. So I heated up a neck thing and went to lie down, and pain exploded between my shoulder blades such as made the worst pain I experienced with my lower back (not to mention appendicitis) seem like a pleasant day in the Caribbean. Like I said, memory of pain is weird. If I were to rank my pain as I remember it now, that day would only be about #4, behind the appendicitis and my heart attack (which happened later) and that time I got stung by a whole nest of yellow jackets (which happened in the eighties). I couldn't move. Oh, I could move my legs and, to some extent, my arms, but I couldn't sit up or roll over. I couldn't even play dead because I kept looking for a position that minimized the pain. Ha! "play dead." I crack me up. My mobile phone was not nearby, so I couldn't reach it to call anyone. Every time I tried, I felt like someone was pushing a knife into my upper spine. I do remember this particular episode of pain. Until I found this blog post at random, though, I couldn't even have guessed at the year, only that it had to be sometime in the noughties because my wife was involved. I think I dozed off for a while. My phone rang. I had no way to get to it. I could only hope that my wife would come home before she went out to dance practice. These days, I'd be utterly boned. Someone would find my emaciated, cat-chewed corpse. Fortunately, she did. Unfortunately, she had no way of moving me. Fortunately, one of our close friends is a chiropractor. Unfortunately, the chiropractor was still at work. Fortunately, we were able to leave a message. Unfortunately, the ditzbrain who took the message didn't give it to her. Fortunately, I called her mobile phone an hour later to see if she got the message. Unfortunately, she hadn't. Fortunately, she was still able to come over and fix it so I could at least stand up - albeit with intense pain. Remember a week ago I said some of these entries made me cringe? This is one of them. It's a bit embarrassing to me now. The idea of going to a quack to crack my back wouldn't fly with me these days. Sometimes you have to learn these things the hard way, I guess. It's entirely possible that chiropractic was the actual cause of much of my back pain in that era, though obviously there was some short-term relief from it. Once I stood up, holding my head straight and not twisting or raising an arm, I was okay. We got back to the chiropractic clinic and she worked on me some more on the table. Then she said I couldn't get on the computer, so I sat with ice on my upper back. Like I said, short-term relief. I haven't been to a chiropractor in well over ten years, and I rarely have these bouts of pain anymore. The one time I remember since then was neck pain coinciding with my month-long trip to Maui in... 2017, maybe? Some February in the teens. Really cramped my style; it's hard to snorkel when you can't move your head around to see where you're going. Bouncing around on the roads wasn't pleasant, either. At least there was copious alcohol. I can only imagine how antsy I was without being able to compute. I don't think I've gone a day since 1979 (with the possible exception of a couple of vacation trips) without using some computer, somewhere, for work or school, or the internet or gaming. Not even that day; I would have used one at work the day of the incident, and obviously I was using one to make the blog post about it the following day. The thought of going without a computer for so much as a day fills me with the dread of possible boredom. And look, I'm not trying to come down hard against alternative medicine. And I'm certainly not dissing my friend (I still call her my friend even though we've barely seen each other in the last decade or more. People drift apart; it happens.) It's just that these days, I need more scientific evidence before trying a course of treatment. Chiropractic has been shown to work for several things, but it's also been reported that there's a risk involved with adjustments, especially neck adjustments. To me, right now, the risk isn't worth the benefit. I might change my mind if I find my neck in that much pain again, though. People in general will go to great lengths to make pain go away, especially hedonists like me. I'd be like "Fine, even having a stroke would be better than enduring this much agony." But it was around that time that I came up with this: I used to say "My back is killing me!" Now I say, "My quack is billing me!" |
| Hope you're not hungry. "Delicious" is, of course, a matter of opinion. The headline would have probably been too long if Cracked had qualified that, though. As usual with such a long list, I'm only going to share a few of these. 15. Lobster Lobster was so plentiful in the areas colonized by early Americans that they stopped eating it as soon as they could. Only prisoners, the poor, and livestock -- which were pretty much considered the same things -- would deign to eat it, and it was even used as fish bait. You know, I've been hearing this for so long and with such certainty of delivery that I started to question it. So I checked a source that's marginally more verifiable than Cracked, and discovered that while this probably is the case, in Europe it was often associated with wealth, before a bunch of Europeans came over here.So this is more of a case of changing popularity over time, which happens with many foods. Also, keep in mind that sometimes the wealthy like to eat expensive things just because they can, and because the poor can't. This has little to do with the actual taste of the food. See also: caviar. That shit's disgusting. 14. Chicken Wings Though now a staple of [sportsball game whose name is copyrighted] parties and other manly gatherings, chicken wings were considered the grossest part of the chicken, to be either unceremoniously thrown out or used for soup stock at the most. Ah, one of my favorite things to rag on. "Let's take the chicken part that used to be made into dog food and turn it into sports food." Look, they're still the grossest part of the chicken (except maybe the beak and intestines) and are only popular because they're marketed to be. And because of the hot sauce, of course. 12. Foie Gras There is so much wrong with this entry that I'm not even going to paste it here. Also, everything about foie gras is foul. Pun intended. 9. Peanuts Peanuts came to America from Africa, and like most delicious African foods, they were immediately dismissed by colonizers as unfit for humans until three things happened. First, the Civil War reduced people to choking down whatever protein they could get their hands on, and peanuts were definitely preferable to rats. I'm no fan of peanuts, but yes, if I had a choice between peanuts and rats, I'd eat the peanuts. Then P.T. Barnum began selling peanuts as circus food. Having been marketed by the Platonic ideal of "huckster" ("sucker born every minute" etc.) is not something that I'd use to recommend a product. Finally, peanut butter happened. Even the most frothing bigot can’t resist a spoonful of peanut butter. Admittedly, I'm okay with peanut butter. I still don't know why I like peanut butter (but only the real kind, not the candy kind like Skippy) and not peanuts, but I never claimed to be entirely consistent. 7. Mushrooms The Western world shunned mushrooms on account of their tendency to make you see God and/or kill you until the French insisted they were the height of cuisine in the 18th century I do like (commercially available) mushrooms. I know several people who can't stand them, mostly due to the texture (they say). I can understand that. When you really think about it, eating mushrooms is weird. It's a fungus, neither animal nor plant (but, oddly, closer to the former than to the latter), and thrives in shit. There aren't many fungi that we eat. Yeast, sure, but we were ingesting that (as part of bread or fine fermented beverages) long before we knew what yeast actually was. On the other hand, when you really think about a lot of things that we eat, you start to question them. Eggs, for example. Or: 3. Oysters The story of oysters is a very straightforward one of supply and demand. They were once so plentiful that Charles Dickens characters looked down on the patrons of oyster houses that lined the London streets one “to every half-dozen houses.” Then we filled the oceans with so much pollution that it was hard to get a good oyster, prices went up, and the rich just equated “expensive” with “good.” Like I said, sometimes rich people do rich people things just because the poor can't. Still, you have to wonder how people figured out oysters in the first place. "Let's crack open this rock and see if there's a tasty treat inside." 1. Burgers There are people who, not unreasonably, would take a juicy burger over the finest steak any day, but back in the Upton Sinclair days, ground beef was seen as unclean at best and possibly containing dude at worst. It's actually more complicated than that, and ground beef certainly predates fast food. I'm pretty sure, though, that the popularity of hamburgers didn't take off until there was enough supply to make them cheaply, and that required access to electricity to power the grinders. When I was a kid it confused the hell out of me that hamburgers didn't contain ham. Just another linguistic weirdness of English, in this case with the word deriving from the city of Hamburg which may or may not have had nothing to do with the invention of the hamburger. Nowadays you can talk about beef burgers, veggie burgers, turkey burgers, even cheeseburgers (which aren't made out of cheese) but never ham burgers. And no one calls it a hamburger anymore, either. Now you're hungry, aren't you? |
| Just like UFOs are only UFOs until they're identified (then they're just FOs), it's only a cryptid until you know what it is. Beware Montana’s Shunka Warak’in, the ‘Rocky Mountain Hyena’ Is one of these crafty cryptids on display in a small museum? Not to be confused with the Rocky Mountain Oyster. Something has been preying on domesticated animals across the plains of Montana for centuries. Yeah, wolves. It has been given many names over the years, below most of which burn angry red squiggly lines when typed into Microsoft Word: Shunka warak’in. Ringdocus. Guyasticutus. All of which would be awesome band names. Still. Wolf doesn't freak out my spell checker. But it’s also been called the Beast and the Rocky Mountain hyena—in fact, any name but wolf, although the creature could easily be called a wolf. Which is what I've been saying. Perhaps that’s because wolves were extinct in the state for about half of the 20th century. Yeah, sure they were. Here in Virginia, and down into North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, people occasionally claim to see a mountain lion (which also has multiple names: puma, cougar, whatever). Officially, mountain lions are extinct in the eastern part of the US. Unofficially, everyone knows there are mountain lions up there. Lamest cryptid ever: unlike the Jersey Devil or the Mothman, we're pretty sure what a mountain lion is. I'm not saying cougars aren't cool. Just that we lack imagination when it comes to cryptids here in the Blue Ridge. If only we had a carcass, we could figure out what this creature is once and for all. Oh, wait. Turns out, we do. It’s on display in a museum in Montana. There are museums in Montana? (I know at least two of my occasional readers are from Montana. Relax. I'm joking.) The article (which is actually a book excerpt, but whatever) goes on to describe how someone actually killed one, and it ended up stuffed and mounted because that's what we do, apparently. Then: The ringdocus outlasted Sherwood and was on display at least into the 1980s. And then it disappeared. Probably stolen by Bigfoot. Or maybe a wolf. Meanwhile, Lance Foster, a historic site preservationist, paranormal enthusiast, and member of the Ioway tribe, speculated that the beast could be a shunka warak’in, a canid non-wolf beast from Native American lore that would sneak into camps at night and make off with dogs (the name translates to “carries off dogs”). Okay, fine. Not a wolf. Maybe Bigfoot's dog. Apparently, they tracked down the taxidermied whatever-it-was (turns out it wasn't stolen by Bigfoot, but just transferred to a museum in the one state less likely to have a museum than Montana) and put the thing back on display. Today, the creature is the museum’s most popular exhibit. They just call it the Beast. And we're back to no imagination. Or is it just a bad taxidermy mount? Only a DNA test could tell, and all interested parties have decided not to do that. The mystery of the shunka warak’in has gone on so long that nobody wants to risk solving it. It may be the case that some mysteries are best left unsolved, but in this case, come ON. It's like when they tested hair that supposedly got rubbed off of a Bigfoot, and it turned out to be bear or cow or whatever. People still believe in Bigfoot after all that, because it's hard to prove a negative. (See my entry from last year, "Tales from the Cryptid" .) Even though we have hard evidence that all the blurry pictures of that particular cryptid were definitely hoaxes.It would be like refusing to test the DNA from the multiple taxidermied jackalopes in neighboring Wyoming: they just don't want people to think that jackalopes are completely made up. |
| Well, it missed the full moon by a couple of days, but this one finally came up from my queue for me: Why the Moon’s two faces are so different The far side of the Moon is incredibly different from the Earth-facing side. 63 years later, we know why the Moon's faces are not alike. Article has a helpful picture of both hemispheres of the moon up at the top, and lots of other pretty pictures scattered throughout. The Moon, by far, is the brightest object and largest object that’s visible to human eyes in Earth’s night sky. I was about to object to this until I realized that it means that it appears the largest, not that it's the largest object, in absolute terms, that we can see. That would probably be a star somewhere, depending on your definition of "object." So to satisfy my urge to be pedantic, I'll point out that one can often see the moon in the daytime sky, as well, during certain phases when it doesn't appear too close to the sun. With even an off-the-shelf pair of binoculars or the cheapest telescope you can find, there are two main features about the Moon that you can’t miss: That it's made of cheese and it's round? In addition, because the Moon’s orbit is elliptical, moving faster when it’s closest to Earth and slower when it’s farthest away, the face of the Moon that’s visible changes ever-so-slightly, a phenomenon known as lunar libration. Even though this means, over the course of many months, we could see up to a total of 59% of the Moon, it wasn’t until 63 years ago, when the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 swung around to the far side of the Moon, that we got our first pictures of the far side of the Moon. Because of this, most of the features of the far side are named in Russian. Although it wasn’t very impressive in terms of image quality, it was remarkable for an unexpected reason: the near side of the Moon appears vastly different, in terms of both cratered features and maria features, from the far side that always faces away from us. This discovery came as quite a shock, and for decades, even as our imaging and understanding of this elusive side of our nearest planetary neighbor improved in quality, we lacked an explanation as to why this difference existed at all. The rest of the article explains just that, and it's pretty cool, not only for the explanation, but for the observations, deductions, and science that got us there. Which is fascinating, but there's not a lot of point in rehashing it here. Then: No matter how wild or unusual your idea may be, if it has sufficiently strong explanatory power to account for what we observe, it just might be the necessary idea to solve whatever puzzle it is that you’re considering. Until some better observations come along, of course, and change everything we think we know. But that, too, is part of the awesomeness of science. |
| Whenever Cracked claims to be "scientific," I always take it with a huge chunk of pink Himalayan sea salt. Still funny, though. Of all the things you want control over in your life, who you have sex with probably ranks pretty high. Right, because not controlling it means someone's committed a felony. Fortunately, considering that we have not, in fact, descended into a Handmaid’s Tale dystopian nightmare (yet), it probably feels like you do. We're getting there. Well, we’re sorry to tell you that free will is an illusion and you’re as beholden to the tyranny of biology as the grubbiest little worm when it comes to who you rub your genitals on. Well, duh. Some of these are not so "secretly." I'm not going to go through all 15 here, just some highlights (lowlights?) 14. Whether You’re Ovulating Ovulation (that is, the phase of a woman’s menstrual cycle when she’s fertile) lowers women’s standards... Anything that lowers women's standards can only work in my favor. 12. How Much They Smile This one depends largely on who you are and who you’re trying to get with: Men prefer women who smile more, while women like men who smile less (or even look vaguely ashamed). This one didn't sit right with me—it is physically impossible for me to smile in the standard bare-your-teeth fashion, and yet I'm somehow not swimming in sex—so I went to the link they helpfully provided, and oh boy. A note to single dudes: If you're looking to pick up a woman at a bar, whatever you do -- don't smile at her.I have a hard and fast firm (dammit, there's not an adjective here that can't be misconstrued, is there) rule about not picking up women at bars. "But Waltz, didn't you just say that you want women with lower standards? What lowers a person's standards more than alcohol? Don't say 'ovulation.'" Yeah, that was what's known in the rarefied circles of advanced comedy as a "joke." The obvious difficulty here is that if I'm out in public, I'm probably at a bar. Full disclosure: I did it a couple of times when I was younger; why else do you think I developed that rule? Researchers asked more than 1,000 volunteers to rate the sexual attractiveness of hundreds of images of the opposite sex.Images don't cut it. Smiles, and other expressions of emotion, are generally fleeting, unless you work for a retailer and thus have to have one plastered on your face at all times. No, maybe an image can give someone a good or bad first impression, but I suspect I'm not alone in wanting to see more body language—even if I'm terrible at reading it. (All were heterosexual, ages 17 to 49 years, with a median age of 21. Fifty-two percent of participants were Asian, and 48 percent were Caucasian.)I think a few demographic groups are missing here. While it's irrelevant to me what gays, for example, prefer to see in such a study, I'm sure a lot of people do want to know that. What is relevant to me is if that still holds true at age fifty-something. I suspect that, like most studies of this nature, the majority of the guinea pigs were university students (or possibly teachers/researchers in the case of the older ones) who got enough bread for a couple of pints out of the deal. They found that women ranked the smiling guys as less attractive -- but they were into the prideful and ashamed men. But the male participants were most attracted to the smiling women, and least attracted to the ones who seemed proud.Missing some instances of "most" here. I seriously doubt everyone had the exact same reaction. It's like asking people what their favorite candy is. Most people say "Reese's cups." I despise Reese's cups. Anyway, enough of that. Suffice it to say this is one instance of me needing that huge chunk of pink Himalayan sea salt. (How sea salt got up into the Himalayas, I leave as an exercise for the reader.) 11. Whether They Touch Your Arm Lightly touching a woman on the arm makes her more likely to agree to dance or give out her phone number because touchers are considered more attractive and (sigh) more dominant. Touching a woman on the arm (or anywhere else) if you don't know her that well is a good way to get mace in the face. Or so I'm told. Maybe that's just me. 7. Genetics You have a secret superpower, and it’s sensing immune profiles. (We never said it was cool.) Women prefer the smells of men whose genetic immune profiles are the most different from their own, which is helpful for your future offspring but also to everyone hoping to avoid a distant cousin. Or, sometimes, people just stink. You can't avoid a distant cousin, by the way. Close relatives, maybe, but everyone who isn't a close relative is your distant cousin. And I've seen other "studies" that imply that people too distantly related won't be attractive to a given individual. Case in point: 4. What Your Parents Look Like The Freudians weren’t right about much, but we do gravitate toward people who look like our preferred-gender parent. This would seem to counteract the whole “genetic diversity” thing... I have no idea what my genetic parents looked like (other than that they probably resemble me, if they're still around). Who I find attractive has historically been all over the place, though, and I can't think of anyone I looked at and said, "oh, wow, she's short with black hair just like my mom!" I mean, ew. 3. Your Parents’ Ages Similarly, people raised by older parents tend to have older partners... No idea if this is genetic or environmental. My adoptive parents were a lot older than me, too old at the time I was adopted to have given birth to anyone. And while my first wife was two years my senior, my second was nine years younger (fun fact: they were both 27 when I married them). 1. Who You’ve Had Sex With Before Think you don’t have a type? Wrong. You might not have started out with one, but one of the biggest factors of our perception of beauty is familiarity. We prefer faces similar to those of our friends, loved ones, and yes, exes, because we associate those people with good times. Yeah, no, not in my case. Women I've dated tend to be all over the spectrum in terms of height, hair color, body type, etc. The one thing they all have in common, the one characteristic that could be considered "my type" is that they were all batshit crazy. Which I'm aware says more about me than about them (me being the other thing they all have in common). Which in turn is one reason I'm single. That and my refusal to pick someone up at a bar. |
| Full moon tonight. Also a lunar eclipse, but one that's too late to stay up for and definitely too early to wake up for. So instead, we get to read about the Incredible Shrinking Brain. Given the state of the world right now, I would think "thirty years ago" rather than "three thousand years ago." Did the 12th century B.C.E.—a time when humans were forging great empires and developing new forms of written text—coincide with an evolutionary reduction in brain size? Well, it's not in the headline; it's the lede. The answer is still "no." Think again, says a UNLV-led team of researchers who refute a hypothesis that's growing increasingly popular among the science community. One thing I should note: brain size isn't strongly correlated with intelligence. If it were, elephants would be ruling the planet. While I'm convinced they're intelligent, it's not like they've invented the internet, sliced bread, or beer. Last year, a group of scientists made headlines when they concluded that the human brain shrank during the transition to modern urban societies about 3,000 years ago because, they said, our ancestors' ability to store information externally in social groups decreased our need to maintain large brains. That's... not really how evolution works, anyway. Their hypothesis, which explored decades-old ideas on the evolutionary reduction of modern human brain size, was based on a comparison to evolutionary patterns seen in ant colonies. "What is this, a study for ants?" That by itself would raise a bunch of red flags for me. "We re-examined the dataset from DeSilva et al. and found that human brain size has not changed in 30,000 years, and probably not in 300,000 years," Villmoare said. "In fact, based on this dataset, we can identify no reduction in brain size in modern humans over any time-period since the origins of our species." The date for the appearance of what's called "anatomically modern" humans, from what I've read, is about 100,000 years ago. The UNLV team says the rise of agriculture and complex societies occurred at different times around the globe—meaning there should be variation in timing of skull changes seen in different populations. However, DeSilva's dataset sampled only 23 crania from the timeframe critical to the brain shrinkage hypothesis and lumped together specimens from locations including England, China, Mali, and Algeria. The only information we have on human brains from that long ago is cranial capacity, which puts an upper limit on brain size. But, again, the relationship between brain size and intelligence isn't absolute. I'm linking this article because, while I didn't see reports on the original study (the one that claimed brain size reduction 3,000 years ago), apparently, lots of people did. And when a study like that comes out, it's natural for people to want to share it, especially if it fits in with their worldview. In this case, it would be the (demonstrably false) worldview that we're stupid and never should have invented agriculture or civilization. Or possibly that we shouldn't be relying on what I like to call "auxiliary memory" (my smartphone) or we'll become even stupider. (Incidentally, there's a picture making the rounds purporting to show a misshapen human with a cell-phone-holding claw and a crooked neck and calling it "the future evolution of humankind;" that's also utter bullshit.) It's like when a nutrition scientist says "dark chocolate is good for you," and people crow about it while stuffing their faces with Godiva, and then never hear that the study was suspect because it was funded by Willy Wonka. So I'm here setting the record straight to the best of my ability. Now you can be That Person at the party who, upon hearing someone confidently proclaim that our ancestors' brains shrank 3,000 years ago, can go, "Well, ackshually..." |
| When faced with the unexplained, obviously, the explanation is aliens. How did life on Earth start? No one knows. But we have some pretty compelling hypotheses. We know all about evolution and DNA replication... No, we do not. ...much more than our ancestors did, but we still have nothing but theories when it comes to explaining how nonliving matter ever started living. Cracked here is using "theories" in its layperson sense, not scientifically. One theory says this process, abiogenesis, never happened on Earth at all. Life came to Earth fully formed as simple microbes from some other planet, then it spread and evolved. Earth has never had the conditions for abiogenesis as far as we can tell (whatever those conditions might be), but an alien planet could have those conditions. Except that we're pretty sure Earth did have such conditions at one point. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but going to "aliens did it" just kicks the can down the road. What we know beyond any reasonable amount of doubt is that life, somehow, started; as evidence for that, well, look in a mirror: life on Earth exists. I'm not saying it definitely, absolutely, got its start from non-life here on Earth, but I think we'd need to rule that out before jumping to any extraterrestrial origin hypotheses. Which doesn't mean that I think life doesn't exist elsewhere also. I'm just saying it's within the realm of possibility that nonliving matter began to do its organizational thing right here in our own oceans, leading eventually to the development of DNA, cells, mitochondria, and, eventually, Instagram influenzas, without aliens being involved in the process. Though I'm still not sure about the influenzas not being aliens. Francis Crick—Nobel prize winner and part of the team who first observed the structure of DNA—weighed in on the subject in 1973. Crick, of course, didn't work alone (James Watson got co-credited for the discovery, which happened almost exactly 70 years ago), and there's good reason to believe that it was Rosalind Franklin who actually discovered DNA as such, though for some reason—I can't quite put my finger on it—he got a Nobel Prize but she did not. None of this, however, diminishes Crick's contribution to the field. Going on about aliens might, though. The idea that spores from a different planet just happened to make their way to Earth ("panspermia") is too unlikely, said Crick. But you know what he said is a lot more likely, and which we have to consider? A theory dubbed "directed panspermia": Aliens seeded life on Earth on purpose. Again, sure, maybe. We don't know. But we shouldn't jump to that conclusion. (Also, it's entirely within the realm of possibility that spores can survive interstellar travel.) And it still doesn't answer the actual question, which is: how does nonlife become life? That is, whether it happened here or elsewhere. Crick also had some more specific arguments beyond this speculation (at one point in his paper, he says, "the psychology of extraterrestrial societies is no better understood than terrestrial society," realizing his reasoning is getting kinda "out there"). Life evolved to require such rare elements as molybdenum, which would make more sense if it started somewhere in which that element was more common. Also, Crick discovered that all life shares a universal genetic code, which is odd but would make sense if we all evolved from one kind of germ that infected our planet. That germ's home planet, however, probably had numerous separate very different genetic codes. That's a whole wheelbarrow of speculation right there. I'm certainly not an expert in biology, but there are multiple ways that rarer elements can get concentrated here on Earth through natural, pre-biotic processes. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't find deposits of said elements. All it would take would be one well-placed deposit. One straightforward way is a meteor hitting Earth, which I suppose actually qualifies as an extraterrestrial origin, though not "directed panspermia." Around the time that life started here on Earth, there were a lot more meteors flying around. As for the "life shares a universal genetic code" thing, that can be explained by DNA out-competing any other potential blueprint for life, analogous to how sapiens eventually out-competed neanderthals. We're all comforted to learn that aliens might have sent life to Earth, like in Prometheus. No, I'm not comforted by that at all; I'd still want to know how life began in the first place, here or elsewhere. Not that comfort has anything to do with science. Besides, I didn't like that movie. At least this article correctly labels this as "speculation." Speculation is an important part of science. But just because someone's a Nobel Prize winner doesn't mean they're always going to be right. Occam's Razor indicates that we shouldn't needlessly multiply entities, and throwing sentient aliens into the mix absolutely multiplies entities unnecessarily. It's equivalent to saying "we don't know, so God did it." Sure, it could turn out that he was right all along. I'll be sure to ask the aliens when they finally show up here. |
| Before I get back to posting commentary on articles—I still have a large selection to choose from—I thought I'd try something different today. This blog is now nearly 16 years old and contains 2142 entries (this one will be #2143). Sure, most of them are from the past few years, and I took a long hiatus in the middle there. But recently I've had occasion to go back to revisit old entries. Some of them made me laugh, because I didn't remember typing them. Others made me cringe because, newsflash, I change over time. I wanted to revisit some old entries to see how my views might have shifted. True to form, I picked one at random for this purpose. If I do this again, I'll pick a different one at random. I'm excluding anything from the past 12 months. So here's one from March 19, 2019: "Good and Gooder" It's based on this article, which, fortunately, is still available. I'll link it here again in my currently favored format: While I don't have anything to change about that entry, I wanted to do what I didn't back then, and actually list the "seven moral rules" as presented in the article: 1. Help your family 2. Help your group 3. Return favors 4. Be brave 5. Defer to superiors 6. Divide resources fairly 7. Respect others’ property What strikes me now (and might have struck me at the time, but I didn't mention it) is what's excluded from this list, moral/ethical rules that, if they're not universal, I think should be. First and probably most obvious, "Don't murder people." Most societies that I'm aware of draw a distinction between the illegal killing of people, and the legal killing thereof. There are also gray areas in between, as with self-defense. Some examples of legal killing would be warfare or capital punishment. I'm not saying these things are right, mind you; just that they're legal. But walking up to someone on the street and putting a bullet in their head is generally frowned upon in most societies I'm aware of, though it happens more often than we'd like. I guess I assumed it was the same everywhere, though with its exclusion from this list, I have to wonder if "don't murder people" just isn't a major no-no in other societies. Sometimes, it's okay to kill someone from the out-group (North Sentinel Island comes to mind) but not the in-group; more on this later. There might be different lines drawn elsewhere, but I've heard of very few cultures that say it's okay to murder someone—though the definition of "murder" can vary. Second glaring omission: refraining from child abuse. Again, what's considered abuse can vary. For example, there was a big deal made a few years of the practice of female circumcision in some societies, though I haven't seen anyone railing against it recently. This is usually done to children, so from our Western perspective it's child abuse. And then some people noted "what's the difference between that and male child circumcision," a practice strongly rooted in the West, so I think that's one reason the moral panic died out. It's a false equivalence, and most people recognize that. That's just one example, though. When I was a kid, it was expected that corporeal punishment (not to be confused with corporal punishment) was acceptable to keep kids in line. My elementary school principal even had a paddle with "School Board" on one side (the other side was engraved with my name). In a nod to changing morality, though, the school needed parental permission to use it. My dad gave them blanket permission, because he knew me. My mom, on the other hand, was more on the side of alternative punishments. Nowadays, even thinking about spanking your kid gets you labeled as a child abuser. Point being that what we define as child abuse changes over time, just as it changes between cultures. Yet I feel like some version of it should be on that list (as a negative), and it is not. Third omission: don't rape. I don't have much more to say about that except that, again, it should be right there. I suppose it is possible that the list was constructed to include "positive" morality; that is, "do these things" rather than the "negative" morality of "don't do these things." But in that case, one could turn all three of these things around to "respect the autonomy of others," and the fact that this is not on the list is still worrisome, in that it implies that there are cultures where that's not a moral rule. The list, however, purports to be about what is, and not what one random blogger thinks should be. If I were writing codes of morality, I'd make some changes. For example: 1 and 2 would be combined into "help humanity." If you just help your family and your group (which I read as tribe, or political affiliation, or extended family, or religion, or whatever sets you apart from the rest of the population), you're part of the problem. Thinking in such small terms appears to be baked into the tribal psychology of humanity, and it's not easy to change. But hell, some people take it even one step further to "help the biosphere." I don't have a problem with 3, "return favors." This seems like basic reciprocity, which helps smooth social interactions and ties into 1 and 2. 4, "be brave," can be problematic. There's a blurry line between bravery and stupidity. It's fine to respect someone for being brave, but being brave by itself doesn't cut it, in my view. As an example, it would be brave of me to take off all my clothes and walk up the street. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. 5- I don't have superiors. Nor do I have inferiors. In certain circumstances, a person does have these things; a job, for example, or military service, in which case, well, okay. But the idea that one person is inherently superior to another (rather than being in a manager / employee situation) is, again, part of the problem. 6- "Divide resources fairly." By that measure, the US is a highly immoral society. I'm not going to argue against that. But "divide resources fairly" is not what we practice. Why, that would be soshulism!!! Also, who gets to define what's "fair?" 7 seems to contradict 6, anyway. We tend to idolize the Robin Hood types, but they don't respect others' property. One can make the argument that Robin Hood was just correcting economic injustice, and I won't argue there, but stealing is wrong, whether a rich person or a poor person is doing it (I can make moral, if not legal, exceptions for those who steal to alleviate hunger, but our legal system isn't set up for such nuance). And I'd add the bits about respecting others' autonomy that I discussed above, with "slavery is wrong" added to that mix just to be clear about it. That's enough for today. Back to regularly scheduled random programming tomorrow, unless something major happens. |
| Ever notice that there are very few, if any, tolls to go into New Jersey, but a lot of tolls to get out of New Jersey? My cousin, who has a beach house in NJ, says it's that way because if you charged people to go into the state, no one would visit. Funny, but a little unfair. A lot of New Jersey is actually quite nice, including his beach house, which is just south of Asbury Park. No, he's never met Springsteen. Most of the drive was rather pleasant, absent the perpetual traffic jam in the DC area. My one gripe apart from that is that I was forced to listen to commercial radio. By which I mean, I have to listen to something, and commercial radio was really the only option. See, on long-distance trips, I was used to plugging in my iPod Touch, setting my vast music collection on shuffle, and just letting it play. I had enough songs to drive all the way across the country and back without ever hearing a repeat. And now they've discontinued the iPod, or so I've heard, so if mine breaks, I'm fucked. Besides, I don't see a plug for it. Maybe there is one and it's just hard to find. So I did this trip without the iPod to see what options I had, and I am not pleased. But maybe there's an option I'm missing, so here's what I understand about the current sad state of listening to music while driving. 1. Commercial radio. Emphasis on "commercial." Ads piss me off at the best of times, but the week before an American election? Oh boy. Road rage. According to every single ad, the ad purchaser's opponent punches pregnant women, kicks puppies, eats babies, was once caught jaywalking, is unbearably stupid, and will destroy America. The only thing I can glean from this is that no matter who we vote for, they will destroy America. The only choice, therefore, is to pick the one you think will give us the best bread and circuses during our slide into oblivion. (At least I haven't heard any holiday ads yet; those will definitely take over the airwaves after Tuesday). 1a. Apart from goddamned ads, which I can always switch stations for, again, I like to travel cross-country. There are entire swaths of America where the only options are Christian music stations, Christian talk radio stations, broadcast church services, evangelical emissions, country music, or static. I don't mind country music so much, but too much at one time gets real old real fast, so static it would have to be. Which would put me to sleep, not a good idea while driving. 2. Satellite radio. Advantage: lots of formats to choose from, only drops out in tunnels and maybe some mountainous areas (in which driving is perilous enough that I wouldn't get lulled to sleep). Disadvantage: another monthly subscription to pay for, one that I'd only use like 2-3 times a year, max. Bigger disadvantage: also ads (unless they've changed that, which I doubt), and if there's one thing I hate more than ads, it's paying and still having to put up with ads (this is why I never got cable TV). 3. One of those online music services, like Amazon Music or Pandora or whatever the hell is out there right now (I won't get Spotify under any circumstances) on my mobile, which I think (but I'm not sure) I can use while also using the phone's GPS. Advantage: no ads. Disadvantage: there are entire swaths of America without mobile coverage, during which the streaming stops working. Result: asleep at the wheel again. 4. Downloading some tunes on my smartphone (I will take this opportunity to note that my new car has a feature where if you plug in your phone, it'll transfer the GPS (I use Google Maps) to the car's screen for a totally hands-free experience, which is nice). Advantage: doesn't cut out, ever. Disadvantage: I have limited space on the Android, and that space is even more limited if I download offline Google Maps because, again, entire swaths of the country have no cell coverage; consequently, I could fit maybe two albums' worth of music on there. Repetitive. 5. Bring a big stack of CDs and use the car's CD player. Advantages: no ads, never cuts out. Disadvantage: can't shuffle between CDs. Bigger disadvantage: Come on, it's nearly 2023. Now, I managed to make it to NJ and back without becoming too enraged by the lack of options. This is because that involves driving through areas with good stations: DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia. Basically anywhere in the Northeast Corridor is fine for radio if I can put up with the occasional ads and lame DJ chatter. But eventually, I'm going to want to drive through the Midwest again, perhaps even next month (we'll see). So, what do people do for driving music these days? And don't suggest listening to recorded books. I don't have anything inherently against them, but they also take up limited smartphone space. Same goes for podcasts, except I don't like them in general anyway. I want to hear music; I want to hear it in random order (radio station programming counts as random as far as I'm concerned); I want no-to-very few ads; and I want the music to not repeat every few hours. My iPod met all those criteria and also had the advantage that I didn't have to fiddle with it while driving. Without a good setup, I don't know if I can handle a cross-country trip. So... help? |
| I ever tell you why I don't like gambling in Atlantic City? Yeah, yeah, I know, I do it anyway. But I get to bitch about it if I want. When I play blackjack, I generally prefer the second chair. Picture a casino table, right? Dealer on one side, six player positions on the other. Chairs are numbered from the dealer's left, not the players' left. Sometimes it's called second base, which is weird when you think about it because there's almost always six chairs at a table. Anyway, I'm not that picky about it, but if I have a choice I'll take second so I don't have to deal with the idiot decisions of too many people to my right. More about that later. The dealer proceeds from their right to left, so if all the seats are filled, the deal goes: one card to 1, 2,... 6, dealer up card, second card to 1, 2,... 6, dealer down card. Then the players make their hit/stand/double/whatever decisions also in order 1, 2,... 6. Like any pastime, blackjack has its own insider lingo. Probably everyone knows the basics: hit, stand, double down, split. One particularly annoying piece of lingo that I think is of more recent origin is "monkey" for any card worth 10 points (ten, J, Q, K). This apparently originated in Asia, where presumably the word was in a different language and maybe it has an association with the number 10 in one of those languages. Or maybe a monkey symbolizes luck. I don't know. But Americans picked that shit up and overused it. So you're sitting there at a table, getting into the groove, when some lily-white trust fund brat chips up. He gets dealt an ace. Slap the table, "MONKEY!" Then, next hand, he gets a four-seven. Double down and slap the table. "MONKEY!" Next hand, dealer's showing a six, flips another six. Slap the table. "MONKEY!" On that last one, it's almost worth watching the dealer draw a nine for a total of 21 just to listen to the kid moan about it. Point is, for fuck's sake, mix it up a little, okay? To be fair, this isn't an AC problem; it happens everywhere I've played blackjack. Then you get the ten-splitters. Which I do see more of in AC than in Vegas. There's nothing inherently wrong with splitting tens, but the odds aren't in your favor if you do that. Let me see if I can explain without too much math. So you get dealt two monkeys (ugh). That's a 20. In something like 9 out of 10 hands, that's at the very least a push, if not a win. There are no sure hands in blackjack (even the namesake hand could be a push), but a 20 is pretty good odds, no matter what the dealer's showing (if they have 21, they show before you get a chance to split, and you lose anyway unless you have 21 also). And yet you get greedy people who split tens. They're then basically playing two hands. You can split again. In AC, you can have as many as 4 hands from splits. it's rare. Now, on each 10, you've got a 4/13 chance (roughly) of getting another 10, and a 1/13 chance of each other card. It could even be an ace. But that ace doesn't give you blackjack; that's only a thing on your first two cards. It's still 21, guaranteed to at least push (tie with the dealer). But again... low odds of pulling an ace. Some players think it messes up the odds for the other players for someone to split tens. I disagree. Decks are thoroughly shuffled, and that next card could be anything (I'm talking about multiple-deck blackjack here). But it's maddening as hell if you've got, say, an 11, and you want to double down, and you watch the ten-splitter to your right keep getting monkey after monkey when the card you want is a monkey, and when they're finally done you end up with a five (that gives you 16, which sucks ass, especially after doubling). I mean, sure, it can also go the other way, but it's still annoying, and that's why I like to sit at 2; it minimizes the risk of people to your right making questionable choices. Also, some people like to play two spots. That's fine; it's allowed, with dealer permission, when things aren't too busy. I've done it myself on occasion. So yesterday, I'm sitting there at second, and there's a couple at 4 and 5, leaving open only 1, 3, and 6. Some dude comes up and sits next to me at 1. "Hey man, can you scoot over? I wanna play two hands." Now, look, changing seats at a blackjack table is a Big Damn Deal (no pun intended for once). The dealer probably doesn't care; they just slap cards down at whatever spots have chips in 'em, but the pit bosses are all keeping track of your betting patterns and whatnot. This isn't as intrusive as it sounds; come on, you're in a casino and there are cameras everywhere already. They do this to keep track of your points for comps and tier credits or whatever the casino uses to determine if you're spending enough money to earn Free Parking (that is a pun; Monopoly was based on Atlantic City). Being a relatively nice guy, I'm fine with switching seats so the one dude can play two spots. So I go through the hassle of moving my beer, my chips, my cigar, and my secret card counter (just kidding about the last bit) one seat to my left. Game pauses while the pit bosses mess around with the touchscreen to sort everything out. Guy finally settles in and throws a chip at 1 and 2, and also plays the sucker bet on both. He loses. He gets up and walks off. Look, blackjack is a grind, not an instant jackpot. More often than not, you're going to lose the first hand. Sometimes, over time, you can amass some winnings, but your chip stack is going to go up and down like the Apple stock ticker in the meantime. That is, if you're not me and you're not playing in Atlantic City. I have better luck playing the game in Vegas, for whatever reason (the rules aren't significantly different, so that's probably just chance, or possibly confirmation bias). On the other hand, for some reason, I do better at slots in AC. Go figure. Slot machines are heavily house-weighted (blackjack is only slightly house-weighted), so I don't play them often, but for some reason, yesterday, I won back most of my blackjack losses by hitting a (very minor) jackpot on a slot. That's when I quit gambling for the week. I'm leaving today anyway, so no big deal. With all that, why do I keep going back here? Well, I had a vague memory of talking about AC in an earlier blog entry, so, being done with gambling for this trip, I had time to look it up, from way back in 2018: "Atlantic City" Excerpt: "But they still have bars, and blackjack, and usually you can avoid the scam artists wandering in off the streets for long enough to let casino security kick them out. And, unlike Vegas or Reno, if you look out the window you can sometimes see the ocean, and forget for a moment that those waves will one day drown the city in a flood of sharks and used needles. Sometimes the only purpose of a place is to remind you of how good you actually have it." |
| Still a couple more days out in the wild here. My system for visiting breweries to sample their nectar of the gods is to use rideshare. Yesterday, I visited four different breweries in this general area, paying a whole hell of a lot to Uber for the privilege. I need self-driving cars to happen, like, right now. This is because two of the trips, between breweries, were done by the same driver. A driver who, it was clear from several clues, is an adherent of a religion that forbids drinking. Which doesn't mean they forbid it for others, I know, but I could just feel the disapproval oozing from the driver's seat, and it's not like I could talk about my experiences in a way that he could relate. At the same time, though, if you're an Uber driver; you have to know that your primary purpose in life is to get drunk people from one place to another. With autonomous vehicles, sure, these drivers would be out of a job, and that's unfortunate, but let's stick to what's really important here: my ability to be shuttled semi-anonymously from one brewery to another. I say semi-anonymously because, obviously, I'd still be tracked. But at least I wouldn't have to deal with awkward conversation. Fortunately, the weather is unseasonably warm here, which meant I could at least comment on that. At least for a little while, until I felt the conversation start to drift to climate change, which becomes a political issue, and you don't want to discuss politics or religion with an Uber driver, lest they give you something less than five stars. As for the beer, it was mostly very good. There are always outliers, but they serve as a point of contrast; it helps to drink stuff I don't like now and then to help me appreciate the stuff I do like even more. I've rarely had a bad brewery experience in New Jersey. Rideshare, sure. Not beer. |
| I was halfway to Atlantic City yesterday when I got a phone call from my insurance company. I called them back (after pulling into a gas station of course), using my neat new phone-car link feature for the first time. "So we couldn't add your new car to the policy last week because we got the VIN wrong." Why are you telling me this now, when I'm 150 miles away from home? We got that straightened out, but if I'd known the car wasn't insured, I'd have driven a lot more carefully up to that point. On the way, I stopped by Balić Winery which, as I noted earlier, was the primary reason for my trip. It's one of the places with non-grape wines, featured on Gastro Obscura, that I wanted to try. The owner himself was running the tasting counter, and I was the only one there, so we got to talking."How did you hear about us?" he asked. Oh, I saw an article on Gastro Obscura. "Who?" Part of Atlas Obscura? "Never heard of it." Well, whatever. They had some standard grape wines too, and everything I tried was exceptionally good. So I bought a case of mixed bottles. Don't look at me like that. Their pricing is very reasonable for such excellent product. Having fulfilled the entire purpose of my journey, I had absolutely nothing else to do. Just kidding. I found something to do in Atlantic City. And today I'll be visiting local breweries. |
| I don't know why I keep finding Outside articles. But this one, at least, isn't directly about the (shudder) outside. Speaking of which, I'll be venturing (ugh) outside (sort of) for the next few days. It's been a while since I did a road trip, and now that I have a car I can do one. Remember a couple of months ago, when I linked an Gastro Obscura article about non-grape wines? No? Well, here it is: "Keep Wining" . There, I noted that one of the featured wineries is in New Jersey, which isn't that far away from me, considering that I have, several times, driven all the way across the country and back.I described it as "might be a good overnight trip," but then I found out that it's actually half an hour away from Atlantic City (hookers and blackjack), and that there are other wineries in the area, as well as breweries. So I'm going until Friday. Blog posts may happen at hours unusual for me, but they will happen (barring catastrophe, of course). That's got nothing to do with today's article. I Got a Vasectomy Because of Climate Change Getting one was, by far, the most powerful personal action I could take for our planet I'd like to say that my decision to remain childfree was primarily motivated by concern for the ecosystem. I'd like to, but I can't. Oh, sure, it factored into it—I almost never make decisions based on just one thing, and absolutely never with something of that magnitude. But mostly, it was the other way around: I couldn't ethically justify bringing a child into a declining civilization. The article itself is from the Before Time, almost three years ago. I’ve always struggled to combine the idea of personal responsibility with the overwhelming need for human society to address the threat posed by climate change. That's because it's our problem, but it's not our individual responsibility. Since at least the 1970s, the massive energy corporations responsible for the vast majority of our carbon emissions have known about, and done nothing to mitigate, the harm they cause. Because they own politicians worldwide, there doesn’t appear to be any will to take government-level action. But I’m supposed to turn off a light? What possible impact could that ever have? And why is all this on my shoulders and not theirs? Which is what I've been saying. Bad example, though. Turning off a light has a direct impact on you: you pay a lower power bill. A better example might be, oh, I don't know, not taking road trips that waste gas just so you can try exotic New Jersey wines. Incidentally, several years ago, I replaced all the lightbulbs in my house (except for oven and refrigerator) with low-consumption LEDs. Again, I'd like to say this is because I'm concerned with the environment, and that was certainly a part of it. Another part was spending less on electricity. But mostly it's because I'm too lazy to replace lightbulbs, and these LEDs are supposed to last 20 years. When I got engaged, my fiancée, Virginia, and I started planning for the future. It wasn’t just my dog Wiley and me against the world anymore. All of a sudden, I started thinking ten to 20 or more years ahead. Huh. I didn't need to get engaged to plan for the future. Children are an obvious thing to plan. With a sudden focus on responsible decision-making, it no longer made sense to leave hypothetical future offspring up to chance. When should we have them? What did our careers look like on that timeline? Who’d be responsible for staying home and raising them? Couldn’t we just have one of the dogs do that? To be fair, they'd do a better job than a lot of humans. Is this a world we want to bring kids into? Is this a world it’s responsible to bring kids into? No. Of course, that's my opinion. Others have different opinions. That's okay. I would no more want everyone to decide to have all the offspring they can than I would want everyone to suddenly decide to stop breeding. It looks like the pace of climate change is speeding ahead of science’s ability to understand or forecast it. Lately I've been seeing more hopeful articles about climate change forecasts. By "more hopeful," I mean "we're still boned, but not as much as our worst fears." I suppose that's something, but it's still going to suck. I can't help but think that the impetus behind such articles is to keep people from spiraling into despair. Despair isn't good for the economy. Gotta keep the economy going. The future might be worse than any of us currently fear. Again, older article. But even the "optimistic" predictions are pretty bad. Then Virginia and I started talking about something we could do—for ourselves and to make a meaningful impact on the bigger problem. We could just forego the whole kid thing altogether. Such a decision would certainly do more than, say, using only reusable bags, or foregoing plastic straws. The image of personal climate change action doesn’t really match the reality. If I gave up my 15 mpg pickup truck—basically the mascot for climate inaction—and rode my bicycle everywhere, I’d save the planet 2.4 tons of carbon emissions a year. That’d be a massive sacrifice, but it’s nowhere near the carbon emissions I’ll save by skipping becoming a daddy, which comes in at around 58 tons annually, per kid. Any other action we could take, even all the actions we could ever possibly add up together, pale in comparison. One can quibble about the math, but a) do you really need that pickup truck and b) the basic idea is sound: if your carbon footprint ends with you, you've done a lot. That’s because there are simply too many humans on this planet. Arguable. I mean, I happen to agree, but every time I say so, someone chimes in with "so why don't you kill yourself?" as if that's equivalent to not reproducing. There's some basic disconnect there in peoples' brains that I just don't understand and it may be that I never will. Urging someone to kill themselves is otherwise frowned upon, unless it's in that context. Makes no sense to me. So, we’re not having kids. I found a colleague’s brother here in Bozeman who performs vasectomies and made an appointment. I was afraid of getting my scrotum operated on, but the procedure ended up being quicker and less invasive than most dental appointments. It is true that, like most men, I can count the number of people I want holding a scalpel near... there... on the fingers of one foot. But, as with my eye surgery last year, sometimes you just gotta overcome your fears. Once the anesthetic wore off, it felt like someone had kicked me in the balls pretty good, a feeling that dissipated over the next seven days. I took a Valium before the surgery and a few handfuls of ibuprofen afterward but otherwise didn’t need painkillers or even an ice pack. Dude. Frozen peas. Come on. Also, it's not nearly as bad as getting kicked in the nuggets, unless you get it done by your sister's friend's cousin's coworker's uncle in some back alley. The worst part was taking a week off from the gym; I’d been making good progress. Where's my tiny violin? I left it around here somewhere. Anyway, it's certain that a lot of people had, or will have, a visceral hatred of this article. The suicide comment above makes me sure of it. I want to emphasize again that I'm not judging people who do have kids. It's a choice that should be neither mandatory nor forbidden. Nor should we cave to social pressure either way. There are, as I said, other reasons to get the procedure done. It could be argued that, well, why would someone without kids even care about the environment at all? Oh, I don't know, maybe we have a broader view of humanity than just our own immediate family? |
| When it comes to words, "correct" is a bit ambiguous. Or should that read: "korrect" is a bit ambiguous? In honor of the 182nd anniversary of the first-ever appearance in print of O.K. (in The Boston Morning Post) I am here to start an internet copyediting war. Said anniversary was apparently last year, as this article dates from March 2021. Also, "an internet copyediting war?" Right, like anything actually gets copyedited on the internet. As you can see, the original “O.K.” was very clearly an acronym, in this case of “oll korrect,” a popular slang misspelling of “all correct” (we can probably blame this on the teens of the era). Lest anyone think that teens making up expressions to piss off their stodgy elders is a new phenomenon. As with most language that drifts into common usage, the origins of O.K. slowly receded from collective awareness and the word began to assume different shapes and sizes: the slightly more streamlined and dashing OK; the drawling and onomatopoetic okay; the abrupt and minimalist ok. (Who knows, maybe mmmkay will achieve formal status one day.) And yes, the "oll korrect" origin story is disputed, though that seems to be the leading hypothesis.What's not in dispute is that it was made up at some point. All words were; it's just a matter of how long ago. So what is a copyeditor to do? One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from an old alt-weekly copyeditor at a bar, who didn’t really prescribe to this fixed style or that, but rather believed first and foremost in the “ugly rule.” In truth, I'm pretty sure most style rules are the result of copyeditors going to bars. One thing I think most of them would agree on, though, drunk or sober, is that this author should have either used "...prescribe this fixed style or that..." or "...subscribe to this fixed style or that..." The way it's written makes no linguistic sense. He held (correctly) that language and its rules are slippery and ever-changing, and that convention and usage should always supersede institutional formality. While this may be "korrect," there's still no excuse for mixing up its and it's; there, their, and they're; or prescribe and subscribe. So, within that admittedly wild and wooly ethos he came up with the Ugly Rule, which privileges the reader’s eye above all else, and seeks to minimize typographical distractions (in practical terms, the New Yorker’s truly eccentric insistence on diacritics is a direct and egregious violation of the rule). Which is what I've been saying. Whether it should be "wooly" or "woolly" is also up for debate. He also believed that words, over time, tended to shed their size: compound hyphens disappeared, capitalization faded, and spaces closed up. Hence to-day became today, Band-Aid became band-aid, and (thank god) Web site is becoming website; and if these contractions were inevitable, why not just get in early? They're not inevitable. But it is the way trends go in English. I've done entire blog entries on the phenomenon. Here's one that coincidentally (or is it ironically?) riffs off a New Yorker article: "Dashing" Can you see where I’m going with this? I can, but don't you get paid by the word? This is why, as an editor, I prefer ok to OK or okay. Why fight it? Why waste the extra ink? What ink? The problem with ok is that it looks like it should be pronounced with one syllable, similar to oak or ach. The problem with O.K. is that it's absolutely archaic; hardly anyone puts periods into acronyms or abbreviations these days. OK is a decent compromise, but okay is closest to how the "word" is actually pronounced. Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure I use them all interchangeably, but I think I lean more towards "okay." I also had to go and look up some "texting rules" post I made several years ago, because I had a vague memory of being told not to use "k" for "okay." Here it is: "Unwritten, Expanded" The important excerpt: "So... wait... we're supposed to, on the one hand, condense our texts into emojis and "u" for "you" and acronyms such as IDK or LOL or whatevs, but you're going to get pissed because someone typed "K" for "OK?" Good gods." So, in conclusion, this author doesn't actually answer the headline question. My personal opinion? Look at how The New Yorker handles it, and do whatever they don't. That'll be okay. |
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