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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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Congratulations on winning an honorable mention for Best Blog at the 2018 Quill Awards for [Link To Item #1196512] . *^*Smile*^* This award was sponsored by the blogging consortium including [Link To Item #30dbc] , [Link To Item #blogcity] , [Link To Item #bcof] and [Link To Item #1953629] . For more details, see [Link To Item #quills] .](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/type-Blogging-2180.gif) ![Merit Badge in Highly Recommended
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| Speaking of extraterrestrials... In case you were wondering what it would take for me to go through the process of incorporating an image into a blog entry (might have to scroll down), well, wonder no more. It helps when it's in the public domain. Less work. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Like the infamous Face on Mars,  it's entirely possible that this particular example of pareidolia would go away, or at least diminish, under different lighting conditions or at a different angle or whatever.Until then, let us Star Trek fans have our hour of glory. From the linked "article:" Amateur astronomer Scott Atkinson found the stone sculpture of the Starfleet insignia among a pile of rocks on the Red Planet's Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons). Just to be clear, Atkinson didn't travel to Mars or use a giant telescope; he apparently combed through the publicly available images from NASA's Curiosity robot. Well, they call it a rover, but come on; Mars is the only planet known to be inhabited solely by robots (to the best of our knowledge). Curiosity itself (the robot) is a remarkable achievement. You can see more about it, and its images, here. As of this entry, according to that site, the gadget has produced 1,165,040 images over 4105 sols, an average (because I can use a calculator) of over 280 photos/sol. Which would be a remarkable output even for a social media influenza. Oh yeah, if you don't know, a sol is what they call a solar day on Mars. It's not too different from our own solar day: roughly 24 hours and 40 minutes. More, all of those photos are transmitted, pixel by pixel, back to Earth. Truly a monumental achievement that this has been going on for, if I've done the math right, about 11 and a half Earth years, or roughly 6 Martian years. Which is itself about four times as long as the original Star Trek series aired. I wrote yesterday about the possibility of encountering alien life. But if we ever encounter technologically capable aliens, given our own history of exploring with robot probes before sending humans out there, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if our first contact was with one of their machines. Those machines might send back videos of Star Trek, and since a sense of humor appears to be a requirement for technologically advanced life, they'll probably freak us out by showing up dressed as Ferengi. And here I was planning on talking about how the image clearly shows indications of erosion, which is cool enough by itself without invoking science fiction. Oh, well. Sometimes I go in unexpected directions, which proves I'm not an alien robot. Or does it?  |
| Periodically, astronomers announce the discovery of an exoplanet in its star's "habitable zone," and, inevitably, like the old game of Telephone, this gets filtered down to us garbled as something like "Scientists Discover Evidence of Alien Life." Is K2-18b an inhabited ocean world? Don’t bet on it Some fascinating observations of K2-18b have come along with horrendous, speculative communications. There's no evidence for oceans or life. Worse, this gets understood as "sentient alien life," because we've all grown up with Star Trek and Doctor Who, both of which put sentience on top of an evolutionary pyramid, like it's inevitable once you posit life. Much as I love those franchises, I understand that they're not documentaries. I’m sorry, everyone, but we need to talk about Hycean worlds and dimethyl sulfide. Okay, I have some idea of what dimethyl sulfide is (in that it's gotta involve two CH3 groups and sulfur), but I had to follow their link to "Hycean worlds." The link goes to an earlier Big Think article (same source, different author). Basically, they've got a lot of hydrogen. "Hycean" is a portmanteau of hydrogen and ocean (where "ocean" is understood to be a water ocean, and 2/3 of the atoms in water are, of course, hydrogen. But there may also be methane oceans, and 4/5 of the atoms in a methane molecule are hydrogen, but... whatever, I digress.) I also checked up on dimethyl sulfide and, yep, a sulfur atom connected to two methyl groups. It's a bit like water, structurally, with sulfur instead of oxygen and methyl ions taking the place of hydrogen. Except that it's not like water at all. Among other differences, water doesn't usually burn, unless you live in Cleveland. This planet, K2-18b, was indeed observed by the JWST, and did have a fantastic spectrum taken of its atmosphere, revealing many fascinating details about it. The fact that we can do this for a planet 120 light-years away is wondrous enough in itself. However, there is no evidence that K2-18b is a Hycean world at all; no water was detected. There’s only dubious evidence for dimethyl sulfide, and even if it does exist in the atmosphere, assigning a biological cause to it is an incredibly dubious proposition. You said "dubious" twice. Now I'm dubious. Yes, that word can describe both unreliable observations, and our reaction to them. Love English. Yet if you’ve read headlines from around the internet, it isn’t just the usual suspects like the New York Post or the Daily Mail with outrageous, alien life-driven headlines, but normally reliable places like National Geographic, the BBC, and right here on Big Think. NatGeo hasn't been reliable since Fox bought them (though Disney later acquired that property along with lots of other Foxy things, though not the "news" arm); I've been starting to wonder about the BBC; and while I like Big Think as a source, it's still subject to many of the problems all internet-only sources have. Let’s take a look at what’s really going on with exoplanet K2-18b. The article proceeds to do just that, but I won't reproduce it all here. But, in summary: None of these possibilities describe K2-18b, because it’s massive, puffy, and more Neptune-like than Earth-like. Does this mean it definitively doesn't harbor life? Of course not. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. K2-18b is about 2.6 times the radius of Earth and 8.6 times the mass of Earth. This means its density is less than half of Earth’s density, implying that it has a large envelope of volatile gases surrounding it. Let's not be in too big a hurry to compare it to Neptune, either. Neptune is classified as an ice giant, because it's cold. K2-18b probably isn't. But I'll run with the Neptune analogy, because a) the article does, and b) I won't mention the name of the other ice giant in our solar system. There's a bunch of technical details that follow, which I certainly won't reproduce here, but the article is an easy read and the link is right there. While a water-covered Earth-sized world would be an incredibly interesting place to look for life, and in particular to look for the biosignatures associated with the processes that occur in ocean waters, it’s an enormous stretch to apply those same criteria to a gas giant world like K2-18b. Why? Because there was no water detected on K2-18b. Again, this doesn't mean "no life." But it's not a good candidate for water-based life as we understand it. And we absolutely cannot make the jump from "possible simple life" to "Klingons." In other words, it’s not entirely implausible that maybe, just maybe, this is a mini-Neptune version of a water-rich Hycean world, and maybe there really is some sort of extremely exotic form of life that exists on a world like this. After all, the JWST spectrum shows a (weak) indication of dimethyl sulfide, which we know here on Earth is produced biologically. Could that truly be what’s happening here? Short answer: no. Longer answer: probably not. Look, finding extraterrestrial life, even if it's just an archaeum or its equivalent, would be a Big Fucking Deal. I genuinely hope it happens in my lifetime (so hurry it up, already). But jumping to conclusions helps no one, and is especially difficult on a high-gravity planet. Let's also not forget that "habitable zone" isn't the last word on where life might exist. Venus and Mars are (barely) within what's considered the Sun's habitable zone, and despite some flurries a few years back, neither has shown any definitive signs of harboring life. On the other hand, we're looking at moons of Jupiter and Saturn as possible places for life to have gotten a foothold, and those moons are absolutely outside the habitable zone. Meanwhile, though, K2-18b would make a good name for a Star Wars droid. |
| And now here's another one for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]... A good number of my "why the hell is it called that?" questions popped up before there was an internet. As a kid on a farm, I got to know lots of different cultivated plants—whether fruit, vegetable, or flower—whilst perusing a seed catalog. A paper one. That came through the postal mail. This led to a lot of "why the hell is it called that?" moments that my parents, who were what passed for Wikipedia for me in those days (they'd eventually buy me an actual encyclopedia volume set, which I actually read and then promptly forgot most of), had no answers for. "Go look it up." Where? We live on a farm. But I do remember that one of these moments was for the flower known as a dahlia. It seemed an even odder moniker than most plants' names, but the seed catalog didn't have much to say about it. It probably listed the botanical binomial, but I don't remember that. It's dahlia pinnata, according to Wikipedia, and while it's native to Mexico and Central America, it's not to be confused with a piñata. But as with many other cultivated plants, there are several subspecies. It gets confusing and beyond the point of this entry. Nor is Wikipedia much help with the etymology of the name. It seems it might have been named after a botanist named Anders Dahl. Which seems bogus to me, a typical European appropriation of an American species. The least they could have done is mangle one of the native names for the thing, like they did with, say, the raccoon. Except for the French, who call them washing rats, which is unfair to rats, who are often quite fastidious.Also, I can't be arsed to find out if Anders Dahl was ancestral to the far more famous Roald Dahl. None of which was what I set out to write about; I just did my usual assuming that if I don't know something, then no one else does, either. I have my parents to blame for that, too. No, what I wanted to note, apart from the excellent use of depth-of-field in the photograph the title links to, is the petal pattern. Those aren't true petals, incidentally. Each one of those petal-like pieces is a flower unto itself. But that's a bit like arguing whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. No, what struck me is that the arrangement of the florets is similar to other petal and/or leaf arrangements found in nature, such as in sunflowers or artichokes: an instantiation of the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio. Once you notice that particular spiral arrangement, you can't ever miss it. You can even find it all over the Mandelbrot set (which involves complex numbers), if you know what you're looking for. There are solid reasons for plants taking that general form (some animals, such as mollusks, do it, too), and none of them is that plants can do math. No, it's a bit complicated, but, basically, it's because it's easy and efficient. I can appreciate that. |
| Here's one that's a couple years old, but it's not like everyone's suddenly switched to electric cars now. Forget miles per gallon—here’s the best metric for measuring a car’s efficiency It's been right there on the vehicle's sticker all along. In an attempt to thwart clickbait headlines, I'll give you the article's answer right up front: it's the "gallons per 100 miles" rating. The rest of this is me laughing at the idea. “Your mileage may vary.” That’s the disclaimer carmakers apply to the Environmental Protection Agency fuel economy ratings that are listed for their cars. And that's entered the lexicon in other contexts, ones having nothing to do with refined petrochemicals, archaic measurement systems that the US is just too stubborn to change, or driving. Which is fine. You say that, and everyone knows what you're talking about—even me, who avoids commercials like the plague they are. But what seems even more variable is the value of the miles-per-gallon rating itself, which is why in 2012 the EPA started providing fuel economy ratings in another measurement too. But... but why? This is the gallons-per-100-miles rating. Although it is in smaller type than the miles-per-gallon number, it should figure larger in your calculations when comparing cars. That’s because the gallons/100 miles rating makes it easier to compare the efficiency of different cars and estimate their likely annual fuel cost. What? No. European countries measure fuel economy by the benchmark of “liters per 100 kilometers.” A lower number is better, and the moon-shot goal there is the “three-liter” car that scores 3.0 liters/100 km. That’s one that burns no more than 3 liters (about 3 quarts) of fuel to drive 100 km (62 miles). The only thing I can say there is that at least they're using international standard measurements. I have no idea how they rate the expected efficiency of vehicles in the UK, but their petrol is priced in pounds per liter, and road distances are still quoted in miles. That shit confuses me way more than if they'd just stick with one system of measurement. The advantage of measuring fuel consumption this way is that it makes comparisons easier as fuel efficiency improves for a specific vehicle. That’s because the differences are linear. With miles per gallon, efficiency is graded on a curve. For example, for a 15-mpg car, a 5-mpg improvement is a 33-percent gain. But that same 5-mpg upgrade for a 30-mpg car is only a 17.5-percent improvement to a vehicle that is already using half as much gas. Okay, look, this gets to the heart of my objection. I don't like that Americans are, by and large, terrible at math, but the fact is that Americans are terrible at math. Most people just can't seem to grasp simple ideas like incremental tax brackets, and think that entering a higher tax bracket means they'll be paying more tax on all their income. Percentages are almost impossible for many people, and too easily gamed by the unscrupulous (for instance, an increase of 10% could mean that something has increased by a factor of 1.1, or it could mean that instead of 35%, something is now 45%—even I get confused by this sometimes, which I think is the goal). And let's not forget we're talking about a populace that simply can't wrap their little heads around fractions, as seen here: "Math Hole" Mainly, though, what bugs me is this: Miles per gallon, and gallons per 100 miles? You're not reporting anything new. Invert MPG by making it the denominator, then multiply by 100. In other words, it's 100 divided by the MPG. Worse, your experience may still vary. But we can't use "mileage" in that context. What we should be focusing on is why people freeze up when asked to do such basic arithmetic. But you don't even have to do it in your head. There's a calculator in your pocket. 100 divided by the MPG. I'm going to call "gallons per 100 miles" "gpcm" because I'm lazy. Look at the example sticker in the article. Big number: 26 mpg. Smaller numbers: 22 city, 32 highway. Below that, the promised gallons/100 miles number, 3.8 gpcm, which, if you'll check, is equal to 100/26. But what's that in terms of city vs. highway estimates? Well, it's 100/22=4.5 gpcm and 100/32=3.1 gpcm. Those aren't on the label. Part of the problem here, as exemplified in the 1/3 pound burger example from the entry I just linked, is that, psychologically, larger numbers are "better." We all know that a 50mpg car (gpcm 2) has better fuel economy than a 25mpg car (gpcm 4). But if you instead compare 2 and 4, brains go "4 better than 2." Those examples are easy. Another easy one would be 33mpg, which inverts to 3 (or close enough). Or 20 mpg, which would yield 5. The alternative rating is easier to understand and has been on the window label of new cars for ten years, but it nevertheless remains almost entirely unknown to American drivers. I dispute the first assertion; as for the second, of course it's relatively unknown. To the extent that anyone looks at those stickers while being pressured by a salesweasel, we see the big numerals and ignore everything else. That popular European “3.0 liter” target equates to 1.27 gallons per 100 miles in the US, which isn’t a very memorable number. A good goal may then be 1 gallon per 100 miles—the ultimate accomplishment for combustion vehicles before they drive into the sunset as EVs gain popularity. That score also works out to 100 mpg, which might make it easier for people to understand this more useful benchmark. Yeah, right. We'll go full EV before they manage to give us a 100mpg car. I mean, we were heading in that direction for a while there, but people decided safety was more important than mileage (I don't necessarily disagree), and safety features tend to add weight, reducing efficiency. No, what we need isn't basic math spoon-fed to us. What we need right now is a way to compare the economy of an EV to that of an ICE or hybrid. The difficulty there is that gas prices seem to fluctuate with the wind, while electricity prices tend to be more stable. And, from what I've heard, some EV manufacturers subsidize power costs to drivers (for now; that's not going to last). And also to get people to stop being afraid of basic math. |
| It's Sunday, so it's time once again to look back into the dim recesses of the past. This time, I've uncovered a short but fun link from November of 2009: "Cat stuff" I do these retrospectives in part to see what's changed. One major thing that's changed is that I no longer have the cats I had in 2009. That was nearly fifteen years ago (and you thought you'd never have a use for math), and my cats then were already old. One thing that hasn't changed is that I still live with cats. Just different ones. The link in the entry was to The Oatmeal, a fairly well-known webcomic that has not, as far as I know, updated much, if at all, lately. The author had other things to do that presumably were more lucrative, which is fine. But one of those things was a game called Exploding Kittens. I'm not easily offended, and that doesn't offend me, but I still don't want anything to do with it. And I'm still not sure if the bit about Nikola Tesla is true, but I've incorporated it into a novel (unfinished) anyway. |
| Bit out of the ordinary for me today—a link sent by a friend: As I, too, shun the not-so-great outdoors, I found great wisdom in these words. The outdoor industry has spent hundreds of millions in marketing dollars to convince you that everyone belongs outside. To be fair, lots of industries spend lots of money trying to convince us that everyone needs their products. That simply isn’t true. Some People of Color aren’t outside for very valid reasons. As far as I'm concerned, every reason is a valid reason, but I can only imagine how much worse it must be when you have to be concerned that racist rednecks love to be outdoors. With guns. Some don’t like the outdoors and that’s okay. "I don't like it" is a valid reason. So is "I don't want to." They don’t need you to convert them. Unless, maybe, you’ve found the perfect beginner-friendly hike that ends in a waterfall and free universal healthcare. Okay, that bit made me laugh. But failing that, here are eight reasons why you should leave your friends and family alone. Oddly, like Cracked (which this isn't from), it's a countdown list. I won't be covering everything. Some of us occupy entirely different realities from our parents. For us, sleeping on the ground is an adventure. For them, sleeping on the ground is elective poverty and strange (or a bad memory). Why would they pay to do that? I've gone on about this sort of thing before. You live in a nice house, and you want to experience two weeks of homelessness? With bears and snakes? Okay, you do you, but count me out. Some of your friends aren’t interested in hiking or climbing because they can’t afford to get hurt and miss work. They also can’t afford medical care. Laaaaand... of the... freeeeeee! And yes, you can get hurt at home, too. But I'm pretty sure the chances of that go up in areas of uncertain footing, wild animals, and stinging insects. 4. They don’t want to get their hair wet This section turned out to be important for me to read, because I was mostly unaware of this aspect of culture. 3. They don’t have the money We like to pretend that being outside doesn’t cost a thing. And it’s weird. Stop that. While poverty looks different for different people, this point is something to remember when considering a trip to the not-inside. Proper gear (which I'm sure would help reduce the chance of injury, as above) can get expensive. Even those not experiencing poverty might have better (to them) things to spend money on. Why do we pretend that the outdoors costs nothing—that you are required to bring nothing but yourself? Then in the next breath we shame hikers who don’t bring reusable water bottles, moisture wicking technical clothing, wool base layers, wind and water resistant shells, puffers, GPS, a trail map subscription with downloaded maps, a paper map and compass, etc. I read an article about someone who died on Mount Washington in New Hampshire last month. The article described him as an "experienced hiker." Now, I certainly don't claim to be an expert on mountaineering, though, yes, I've hiked mountains, and experienced firsthand how quickly the weather can turn on you there. And I've read that Mount Washington is the worst of the bunch, being well-known for having logged the highest recorded non-cyclonic wind speed of any point on Earth. So my first thought was "Funny; I thought 'experienced hikers' don't mess with Mount Washington in fucking January." It’s winter now and social media is full of photos and videos of happy people skiing, snowshoeing, tubing and snowboarding. One of those things is not like the others... Anyway, while a lot of the cultural reasoning doesn't apply to me, and to be fair, I was privileged enough to spend a lot of time outdoors as a child and young adult before deciding I just didn't like it, I appreciate the article's perspective. And to be clear, it's not "being outside" that I dislike; it's being farther than a short walk from civilization. Now watch, some marketing guru is going to try to take all the stuff in that article into account the next time they need to market a line of rugged-yet-fashionable outdoor wear that'll be lucky to last for a year. |
| Here's a colorful entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]: Violet Try to imagine a color that doesn't exist. Go on; give it a good shot. If you're imagining "violet" because that's what I put in the title, well, no. Insofar as color exists at all, violet is on the spectrum at around 400 nanometers. People hardly ever describe something as "violet," though, unless they're talking about the flower, in which case, according to the ancient rhyme, violets aren't violet, but blue. Actually, I'd wager that there's far more mention of violet's neighbor, ultraviolet. Nope, that's not a color that doesn't exist; we just can't see wavelengths that short. It exists, but not to our eyes. Ultraviolet is such a common word that we don't often stop to think about how cool a word it actually is. Ultra. Violet. Should be a superhero name. "Scatter! Ultraviolet's here!" She'd be way cooler than her archnemesis, Infrared. (That's a deliberate pun on a couple of different levels and I'm quite proud of myself for it.) Getting back to the blueness of violets (the flower), though, I'm sure you learned the mnemonic for the official colors of the spectrum: ROYGBIV. Often—including on Pride flags and iconic album covers—poor indigo gets left out, leaving just six colors. Which is too bad, because indigo is probably just as cool a word as violet. Much cooler than red. Or yellow. There exist, of course, not just seven colors in the spectrum, but a whole... well... spectrum of them. Red only gradually fades into orange, which only gradually fades into yellow, and so on all the way to the invisible end of violet. Why do we say there's seven, then? Well, I'm pretty sure we can blame Isaac Newton for that. In addition to pretty much inventing calculus, science, gravity, and motion (or at least the way we think about these things), Newton did a lot of study on the properties of light, a topic that later generations of physicists would be absolutely obsessed over. But Newton was, like everyone, a product of his time, and he was also greatly intrigued by mysticism. So, I can only assume, when he shone sunlight through a prism to create an artificial rainbow (as reproduced in a certain classic album cover), he decided that there had to be seven colors. Because there were seven planets, see? And each one ruled a different day of the seven-day week. In mysticism, the sun and moon counted as planets, because they didn't know any better. If you're wondering, it went Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. Some of those are obvious in English; others are obvious if you know some French: mardi for Mars, mercredi for Mercury, jeudi for Jupiter (Jove), and vendredi for Venus. English adopted the Germanic interpretation for some of the weekday names, which is why we get Norse god names instead of Roman ones. Back to Newton, though. Researching this entry led me to this site, which is enlightening (pun absolutely intended). Where was I? Oh yeah, seven colors. One major point of what Newton did was his invention of the color wheel, where the seven principal colors he identified wrapped around into a circle, with red touching violet. Okay, that last phrase sounded way less naughty in my head. Anyway, Newton didn't have all the information we do about light's wavelengths, or even its dual wave/particle nature (though he laid the groundwork for that discovery, centuries later). Now, we know that prisms (and rainbows) work because the bending of light in refraction, through glass or through suspended water droplets, depends on the wavelength of the light. But my point is, red and violet are, despite their proximity on color wheels, at opposite ends of the visible spectrum. And there's a lot more invisible spectrum than visible: gamma rays, microwaves, radio, etc.All those invisible (to us) wavelengths are real. But you know what's not real, that doesn't exist anywhere on the spectrum? That mixture of red and blue pigments that we call purple. And that's the answer to the riddle I started with: Purple is a color that doesn't exist. Well. A philosophical argument can be made that no color actually exists. This is related to the holes thing I did a few days ago. But on the spectrum between "definitely exists" and "definitely does not exist," purple is closer to the latter than violet is. Violet is as close as we can get to purple and still be able to identify it in the sun's radiance. |
| Landed on another article about language. But this one's about the common root of many languages: A new look at our linguistic roots Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where, and when, the first Indo-European languages were spoken, and what kind of lives those first speakers led. A controversial new analytic technique offers a fresh answer. The source, Knowable, is not one I've linked before, and I don't know much about it because I'm way too lazy to find out. As for timing, it's a recent article. Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Another way to put that is that less than half of the world speaks an Indo-European language. Depends on one's perspective. As I speak one, yes, its shared origin with other languages is interesting to me. Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it. I've mentioned this language group in here before. Repeatedly. This is the heart of the discussion: Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years before that, with a community of farmers in Anatolia, in the area of modern-day Turkey. Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter, albeit with an important later role for the steppes. Now, look, I don't claim to be an expert in either linguistics or evolutionary biology. But I've seen the parallels between language evolution and biological evolution. There's at least one big, huge, major difference, though: in the latter, at least for eukaryotes, you don't get a lot of significant horizontal gene transfer. That is to say, organisms' DNA depend primarily on their ancestors' DNA. I understand there are exceptions. But with language, there's little barrier to horizontal meme transfer; that is, languages can liberally borrow from other languages. English is perhaps the most obvious of these; it's stolen pretty heavily from non-Indo-European languages. I'm not saying they're wrong. They know more about this shit than I do. (There is some discussion of that sort of thing near the end of the really quite long article.) I'd also like to point out that it's not like IE sprang into existence from nothing. It developed from an earlier language. I understand linguists call the earlier language Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, which cracks me up. Anyway, the article goes on to describe the process by which they figured out that IE existed, and that's pretty fascinating by itself, but too much to quote here. But then they mention the thing I find most intriguing: For example, the Proto-Indo-European language had a word for axle, two words for wheel, a word for harness-pole and a verb that meant “to transport by vehicle.” Archaeologists know that wheel and axle technology was invented about 6,000 years ago, which suggests that Proto-Indo-European can’t be any older than that. I knew I'd mentioned "the wheel" before, so I went and looked. It was way back in 2020: "As the Turn Worlds (or whatever)" The article speculates about the kind of people who would have used axles and wheels in prehistoric Eurasia: pastoralists or agriculturalists. Personally, I find it glaringly obvious that one speculation is missing. Once you have horses and carts, you can more effectively wage war, which is an even older human occupation than herding or farming. And tends to spread faster and further. This, to me, is a more likely origin for the proliferation of Indo-European languages: a conquering people, not only taking over vast tracts of land, but imposing their language on the cultures they encounter. It happened with the Greeks and Romans, in historic times. Not so much with the Mongols, but not for lack of trying. And let's not forget how English got so widespread. But, again, I'm far from an expert on these things. It just seems obvious that it's at least a hypothesis they can test. Maybe it's wrong. But given what I know of human nature, it could well be right. |
| On this, the darkest and gloomiest day of the darkest and gloomiest month (yes, I know that, technically, in this hemisphere, December is darker and gloomier, and the solstice is the darkest and gloomiest, but metaphorically, it's today), I have an article from Cracked that's about words, a light to pierce the dark gloom. There exist, of course, far more than five. But at least these are five I hadn't heard of before. Imagine if words didn’t mean what you think they do. You read a news report about some victim being murdered by a succubus, but what if a succubus isn’t really a demon? What if it’s some special type of Golden Retriever? With some old words, especially those that have been clumsily translated, we’re just taking shots in the dark. Words often don't mean what people think they mean. You hear or read a word and, usually, you're too lazy to look it up in a dictionary (even now, when a dictionary involves simply typing or pasting the unknown word into a search engine). So you go from context. And sometimes, you get it wrong, and get laughed at. Other times, you use a word the correct way, and you get laughed at because everyone else thinks it means something different. "Decimate," e.g. Anyway, the list: 5. What Does ‘Our Daily Bread’ Mean Anyway? We used to have a bakery here called Le Pain Quotidien. Apparently, it was part of a chain (which I didn't know), and the chain was Belgian, not French. Whatever, even before I started learning French, I wondered if they were going for the Biblical reference, why not "Notre Pain Quotidien" instead? Maybe because it would confuse English speakers. That's never stopped the French, but it might give Belgians pause. I don't miss it; there's a much better bakery in town, and one of my great thrills in life is to go in there and pronounce their offerings "pain de campagne" and "croissant" in the French way. (I'm easily amused.) One story from the Bible tells of the time Jesus taught his followers how to pray. When you pray, said Jesus, you shouldn’t just go on repeating some set words... His followers wrote down the words he said and repeated them verbatim for the next 2,000 years. They taught the prayer to their children, who would learn to recite it long before they had any idea what such phrases like “thy will be done” means. This is the opposite of what Jesus told them to do, but that’s organized religion for you. And don't get me started on indoctrinating schoolchildren with the Pledge of Allegiance, starting when they're too young to know what "pledge" or "allegiance" (not to mention "republic" and "indivisible") mean. That prayer is called the “Our Father” or “The Lord’s Prayer.” Though, people today don’t use the exact words that were said millennia ago, because not too many people speak Aramaic anymore. Fun fact: some Jewish prayers are in Aramaic. Other fun fact: Catholics, at least, were okay with using Latin for that prayer right up until the 20th century, and I'm pretty sure there are some orders who ignore Vatican II. But I digress. This section points out that the word which is commonly translated as "our daily bread" might mean something else entirely. Or maybe it said, “Give us this day our garlic bread.” That’s a prayer to unite people of all faiths. 4. One Mystery Verse of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ Education means different things in different eras. Today, to be a properly educated scholar of culture, you need to be able to explain where every Disney remake went wrong, even though you have never watched any of them and rightly never intend to. In the past, in certain circles, an educated person was someone who’d studied Greek and Latin. Also, you need to know the convoluted overarching plot of all the Star Wars properties, as well as the various timelines of Star Trek. Not to mention Monty Python movies, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and several others. Perhaps you would have to translate the ancient works of Virgil, which sounds hard. It is hard. Third and fourth year Latin in high school, as far as I can recall, was all about studying Virgil's Aenid. Much easier, surely, would be translating a poem written 1,300 years after Virgil, featuring Virgil as a character. Confession time: I've never read the Divine Comedy. Not even a translation. But then you’d come upon a verse that goes like this: Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi. What does that mean? We don’t know. It’s not Italian. Nor is it any other language we know of. The character who says it is Nimrod, a hunter from the Bible guarding the ninth circle of hell, and it seems like this line of his may be gibberish. Even the name of Nimrod has changed meaning, thanks to Bugs Bunny. Pretty sure I've touched on that subject in here before. In any case, the article speculates, but their guess is as good as yours. 3. The Vowel Vow of the Royal Habsburgs The Hapsburgs, starting with King Frederick III in the 15th century, used the following motto: “A.E.I.O.U.” This is what passed, in the 15th century, for wordplay. Could mean a lot of things, but as the section notes: Let’s be sure to keep an eye on any man born in Austria. Some of them seem to harbor sinister ambitions. 2. Who the Devil Is Betsy? “Heavens to Betsy!” says the old exclamation. It’s a way of expressing shock. Descriptions of this idiom liken it to “for heaven’s sake,” a phrase that began as a euphemism... I don't think this requires that much analysis. Betsy is, or was, a common nickname for Elizabeth, one of the most common girly names, along with about a thousand other nicknames like "Beth" or "Liz" or "Betty," not to mention variants in myriad other languages. The name Elizabeth is now synonymous with royalty, but like many other names of European origin, it derives from Hebrew via the Bible. And in Hebrew, the name (which was Aaron's wife's and John the Baptist's mama's name, though those were probably two different women given the centuries separating them) means something like "God is my oath." Combine that with the way "Heavens to Betsy" just rolls off the tongue, and you have a near-perfect minced oath. Other speculations abound at the link. 1. Is Copacetic a Word at All? Of course it's a word. Sure, someone made it up. This is the case with all words. Some were simply made up longer ago than others. |
| My (usually very reliable and speedy) internet's been out since last night. Apparently a tree fell on a power line, and they have to wait for the power company to clear it, and then do whatever arcane ritual spell necessary to restore the servers or whatever. The only thing saving me from losing my mind is that I have a backup connection. Always have backups for critical systems. Consequently, I'm able to post this (somewhat relevant) entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]: I call it somewhat relevant because that link is to a photo and, as the title suggests, there are trees. There's also a deer. I have trees. My house backs up on a ravine. The ravine meanders down to a stream. The stream flows through woods, and the woods extend all the way up the ravine, on several private lots, ending with my own. Sure, I live in a town, but not far from the edge of it. Much as I like to rag on the outdoors, I like having trees in my backyard. Well, apart from the occasional anxiety attack whenever it gets windy around here, anyway. Sometimes, deer wander up the ravine and, on rare occasions, they'll snoop around my yard. Now, you might think I have a hate on for deer ever since one of them totaled a car that I quite liked, stranding me in the middle of South fucking Dakota, but I don't blame the deer population here for that. Besides, I felt sorry for the one who hit me; that must have hurt. So, no, I enjoy seeing the deer when they come around. I've never been able to get a good picture of any of them, as they spook at the slightest sound or movement, but they've been here in groups or alone. The guy across the street from me was a hunter, so I can only imagine them driving him crazy. But what I'm sure is even more maddening for him is that, for a while, one of those deer was white. Now, white deer are rare, but not that rare. They do tend to stand out, though, especially at night, glowing like a unicorn while their deer brothers and sisters are partially camouflaged. I wouldn't be surprised if spotting white deer at the limits of firelight contributed to the unicorn legends, but I have no proof of that happening.Nor do they have mystical powers. And yet, being visited by the white deer on several occasions, I felt lucky. I'm not saying she brought luck, just that I was lucky to see her. But that's not the weirdest part. Lucky enough to glimpse a white deer, but, one night, out on my deck, I caught a white streak out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look... and beheld not the one white deer, but two of them, accompanied by a bevy of ordinary-colored ungulates. And, naturally, they ghosted off into the woods before I could get a photo. I guess that encounter was meant for me alone. These days, the only way people accept something happened is to have a photograph of it, so it wouldn't surprise me if people don't believe me. That's okay. I know I saw them, and they saw me. |
| Today, courtesy of Cracked, a brief discussion of one of the greatest movies ever made. Mel Brooks’ landmark 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles turns 50 today... The date on the article is February 7, so as of today, it's fifty years and five days. In 2024, it’s tough to uncouple the movie from the heated discourse around its place in modern pop culture, namely thanks to the dead horse of an argument that Blazing Saddles “couldn’t be made today” due to its pervasive racist language. Well, no, it's not that tough. Just enjoy the damn movie and ignore the "heated discourse." Or don't watch it if you don't like that sort of movie. Not to mention, the conspiracy theory that the radical left is somehow trying to censor Brooks’ film. Which is amusing since the film is about as radical left as they let you do in the early 70s. For context, when the movie came out, Nixon was still President; he wouldn't resign for another 6 months. Now, on its golden jubilee anniversary, a lot of people are revisiting Blazing Saddles on streaming, and some folks are outraged to find that it is currently preceded by a “trigger warning” on Max. Most of the article goes into exactly what that "warning" is: apparently, a three-minute context video. Which is approximately two minutes and forty-five seconds longer than the "trigger warning" on pretty much every single other piece of professionally-produced entertainment: the MPAA rating or its TV equivalent. Of course, we have a similar system here on WDC, and I can't count the number of times someone has cried "censorship" over getting their content rating changed. Because your story had the word "fuck" in it and its content rating was raised to 18+ (passive voice there used on purpose), we're obviously offended by that and they've been censored and we're worse than Hitler. I bring this up only to point out that this sort of thing exists so that audiences have some idea what they're getting into, and to help parents decide what stuff they want their kids watching or reading. If a grown-ass adult decides they don't want anything to do with R rated movies or 18+ rated items here, that's their choice. Wouldn't you rather know you have a choice than, say, be shocked and surprised by a fun cartoon about bunny rabbits suddenly dropping the F-bomb, showing bunnies doing what bunnies do best (making more bunnies), and maybe exploding into fuzzy blobs of goo with long ears? In short, content ratings and context pieces aren't censorship. Also, pulling your own content because you suddenly had an epiphany that you maybe shouldn't have done that (e.g. the Dr. Seuss books his estate decided were too racist, or Disney pretending Song of the South never existed) isn't censorship. Back to the movie in question, though, as the article points out, the movie has the bad guys being racist, while the good guys aren't. It's not a celebration of palefaces being able to say the N word. It's a condemnation of it. And that's not even getting into the other good reason for context explainers: now, 50 years later, there's entire new generations who didn't grow up with Nixon and casual racism, and helping these newer viewers understand history can only be a good thing, since no one pays attention to that shit in school. If it's even taught these days. |
| Sundays are my day of reflection on past blog entries. I suspected that, due to the nature of random generation, eventually, I'd land on one I'd already revisited. Or, worse, land on the revisited entry—some of which are now old enough to be technically eligible for a review (though I've decided to exclude those, as well). And today, my first attempt yielded an entry I'd covered as recently as November, so I rolled the dice again. This time, they took me back to the final day of December, 2018; consequently, the entry, "So It Ends" , was about the ending of the Gregorian calendar year. (The subsequent entry, New Year's Day, was titled "So it Begins." Apparently, I couldn't even be consistent with capitalization of titles)It's short, and even contains an external link which, over five years later, is still active if you're interested. I didn't make any comments about it, though. I've been thinking about what to post for this final blog entry in 2018. My daily posting streak was still a year away from beginning, though of course, I didn't know that, yet. I think I was trying, but failing, to post something every day back then. This is relevant because, in that entry, I also wrote: I've never yet been able to accomplish any of the goals I set at the end of a year, and I'm sure as hell not going to start now. Resolutions piss me off. At least I'm consistent at succeeding at being an utter failure. Since then, I've gotten better, and less prone to self-flagellation. Though not completely immune. The entry concludes with a Counting Crows song, which I absolutely do not regret, as they remain one of my favorite bands. |
| Today's article, from Aeon, is about holes. I'm going to pause here for a moment so you can get the obvious juvenile jokes out of your system. Ready? Okay. In pursuit of the hole Dig into the voids, pin-pricks and cut-outs of art and history, and those absences speak volumes about what’s been missed Now, the article itself is about art history, written by an art history teacher. This is not a subject I touch on much, but it's not like I've never presented subjects here that I knew very little about. Besides, while the article is interesting, that's not the primary reason I'm sharing it. So there's the link if you want to read it. I'm only going to quote a couple of passages from the not-very-short text, and besides, as befits an art history piece, there are illustrations there. Holes are full of potential. Okay, but this is your absolute last chance to get your mind out of the gutter. Seriously, I'm not talking about those holes. Archaeologists use soil analysis to identify postholes, the marks of ancient settlements. They excavate sewers at the Colosseum to find things the Romans thought not worth writing about. Holes leave space for projecting both forwards and backwards in time. That last bit is a little too philosophical, even for me. I'd say rather, in the context of the article, holes can inspire imagination and creativity; I don't know about this timey-wimey stuff. Museum and library collections are full of holes. Some are the product of hungry bookworms and moths. Others are deliberate, made by humans. These holes are, arguably, the most crucial bits, even though they are missing. This is the hole’s paradox. A hole points, through absence, to importance. The object wasn’t just used; it was used up. Philosophers struggle mightily over this question: is the hole something or nothing at all? And that's all I'm going to quote from the article, because it provides me a jumping-off point for my own thoughts, which go way beyond just one academic subject. The concept of a "hole" (look, seriously, stop snickering now) has intrigued me for a while. Leaving aside those astronomical objects called black holes, which are, in some sense, not holes at all but rather locations where space and time switch places, a hole can only be defined by what it's a hole in. That is to say, they occupy a place on the reality spectrum that's neither completely real nor completely unreal. Still doesn't help? Okay, well, try this: Some nouns are concrete, and others are abstract. Concrete nouns describe everyday objects: a bed, a table, a tree, the sun, raindrops, my cat. They are what I consider real. I know some philosophers love to deny the reality of these things, and their arguments are worth thinking about, but these are, for all practical purposes, real things. Abstract nouns point to concepts that we humans have come up with, such as justice, mercy, liberty, or Santa Claus (a name is a proper noun). There are also, and there's probably a word for this already but I don't know it so I'll call them "Platonic nouns." These are concepts that have some bearing on reality, such as a circle, a number, food, writing, or a game. They're not real in the same sense that the Sun is real; they're on the abstraction spectrum, being more conceptual than concrete. And yet, they're not entirely abstract, either. You can point to examples of circles, for instance, but you can't really point at a specific, everyday object, and say "that is liberty." You can count multiples of any object, like "I have two cats" or "I have two sleeping bags." Cats and sleeping bags are (arguably) very different objects, but the same number can apply to both. Likewise, the concept of "sphere" can apply (approximately) to any number of objects: a basketball, the Sun, a crystal ball. The point of all this philosophizing is that, while a hole is a concept as well, it has no physical presence. No one points to some place in the air around them and says "This is a hole." No, a hole is, and can only be, defined by what's around it. A bagel, say. The handle of a teacup. The ground. Your memory. This reminds me of the concept of zero, for which I have another article in my queue. Would zero have meaning if we didn't conceptualize the number line? Hell, the way we represent it is telling: 0. An oval or circle, which has a hole. That doesn't mean much, though, as many of our numeral representations have holes: 4, 9, 8, 6, and even that polar opposite of zero, ∞. Holes are real, as anyone who's twisted their ankle by stepping into one can attest. And yet, they're also... not real, because they're voids. I mean, sure, here on Earth, they're almost always filled with air or water, but they're not defined by air or water. Topologists also draw a distinction between an indentation (which is what a hole in the ground or the place where you put your morning coffee before you drink it actually is) and a true hole (like the handle of the coffee cup, or the inside of a donut). But for my purposes today, I'm lumping them together. Insofar as you can lump several examples of nothingness together, anyway. Imagine a hole in the ground, then, viewed from the side. From this perspective, the Platonic ideal of "hole" is something like a cylinder with no top: straight sides, flat bottom. Now imagine the sides getting dug out, like in a strip mining operation. It becomes like a trapezoid, as viewed from the side. Now, at what point does it cease being a hole and start being a crater? And at what point in this mining operation does it become an indentation? Taken to the logical extreme, you can further excavate until it's absolutely flat, its edges intersecting the curvature of the planet. Keep excavating, and you no longer have anything even resembling a hole, but what used to be the bottom becomes the peak of a hill. Or mountain. I keep running into classification problems, don't I? Anyway, those are my thoughts, completely tangential (another abstract concept) to the article's topic, and yet something I wish they'd touched on more. |
| Here's another one for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] Running Stitches My running days are long behind me. I'm a safe bet to take on a hike now, because of bears. If you encounter a bear, you don't need to run faster than the bear; you just need to run faster than your hiking buddy. This is, of course, one reason I avoid going *shudder* outside. Not that I was ever great at running, anyway. I used to have some stamina, at least, but speed? Forget it. Short legs and lack of competitive instinct. I might have been okay at running a marathon, though I'd never have finished first, unless I was the only one running it. Those times when I did try to run fast, for whatever reason, it never failed that I developed a stitch in my side. I've never been really clear about why they call that particular stabbing pain a "stitch." It's a pang, a twinge, a spasm. The only other time I can think of when "stitch" is related to one's body is when there's a cut deep enough that they sew the edges of the wound together with stitches. As I have never had those kind of stitches, except in my eyeball, I can't compare the pain. Eyeball stitches are no fun, though. I suspect the word is used for running-related pain because the Germanic root means something like sting, or prick. Not that kind of prick; the kind a needle does. For a long time, smart people who study these things weren't sure what caused a running stitch. Apparently, these days, it's technically called an exercise-related transient abdominal pain (ETAP). I like to think they were trying to make a pun, because the French word for step is étape. In any case, that link attempts to explain its cause, though apparently, there's still some debate on the topic. I say its cause is exercise. You can avoid it by not exercising.Because English is weird, "running stitch" also describes the most basic embroidery technique, but I don't know much about that, so I chose to rag on exercise instead. |
| I'm not going to have too many comments on the article I'm sharing today. It's more for informational purposes; these days, everyone is a photographer, and while phone cameras do a hell of a lot of the work for you (more than most people can appreciate), there are still things anyone can do to improve their picture-taking ability. How to take better photos Anyone can learn the principles that are essential to capturing quality images. Follow these tips and see the difference Before the era of social networking sites, creating and sharing photographs was more deliberate and less instantaneous, which made picture-taking feel special. Families cherished the physical print – a link to the past with sentimental value – and kept their precious memories in albums, rarely showing them outside the family. Today, people commonly take photos not only to serve as memory cues but to tell others who they are, what they care about, and how they feel. One might be tempted to think because I learned photography and even made a bit of money from it before digital cameras were a thing, that I'd have things to say about how kids these days have it too easy, that photography used to mean something, dammit, and that I'd yearn for the good old days of film and the techniques involved in developing it. While I'm glad I got that experience, I'm also something of a technophile. Digital cameras can be amazing, and they've democratized the act of recording images for posterity. In this Guide, I will provide some photographic principles and specific tips for casual, amateur and aspiring photographers on how to take better photos. By ‘better photos’, I mean appealing images that evoke emotions in the viewer and capture the essence of a subject or scene (and that resonate with how our brains make sense of the world). I find that no matter how good you are, or think you are, at something, learning more about it, even some of the so-called basics, can help. Even us engineers were expected to keep learning throughout our careers. So. Like I said. I have no real comments on the article; I think it's full of good information, whether you're using your smartphone as a casual snapshot-taking device, or have invested inspent money on a fancy DSLR (it's only an "investment" if you expect to make money from it). Everyone's a photographer now, but that doesn't mean they're all good at it. |
| I saved this one a few months ago, long enough so that I completely forgot, by now, what I thought I might say about this Lifehacker article. Did I save it to rag on it, or to agree with it? Let's find out. Avoid These 'Money-Saving' Habits That Don't Actually Save You Money Not all frugal habits will improve your bottom line. One stereotype imposed upon my people is that we're all penny-pinching misers. When I was a kid, other kids would toss pennies down the school hallway and taunt me for it, because kids suck (I sucked, too). I picked up the pennies anyway; by the time the kids were old enough to keep their prejudices to themselves, I'd saved up enough for a pack of gum. There's a similar stereotype for the Scots, but for some reason, with them it's called thrift and seen as a positive value. My point being only that despite all stereotypes, there's a particular brand of US consumer, usually not of either of those ancestries, who really do pinch pennies; if a widget costs $20.99 nearby and $20.98 somewhere across town, they'll chase ass across town. This might be more a case of wanting to reward companies that provide the lowest price than actual miserliness, but it should be obvious to anyone who is not them that driving across town is going to cost them way more than they "saved." I put "saved" in quotes, because they don't actually need the widget, so they're not saving a penny; they're spending over $20. Of course, we don't, and shouldn't, buy only what we need. There's benefit in budgeting for wants and even luxuries. Anyway, the article itself mentions that one, and a few others. I'm not going to cover every point. One part of frugality is finding the balance between the value of your time with the value of your money. Sure, you can spend hours searching for the best deal online or driving to different stores to buy items on sale, and you may actually save a few dollars at the point of purchase. But you may be spending money to do so, and you could be earning money during that time instead or investing in other non-monetary things you value, such as being with friends and family. So yeah, it's not just that my example above involves spending more in fuel (whether gas or electricity), it's also the time involved. My time, for example, earns me nothing, but I still find it advantageous to pay for grocery delivery rather than waste time poking around the supermarket myself. Making the rounds to different stores—such as several grocery stores—only to take advantage of a few small-dollar deals at each may seem like a smart strategy, but it may not be worthwhile after you factor in the time and money spent driving all over town relative to the dollars saved. Again, sometimes, I think that certain people do this not to save money, but to punish retailers who have the audacity to charge more for something than other retailers. Similarly, it’s tempting to drive out of the way to save a few cents per gallon when filling up your gas tank, and this may make sense if you only have to detour a few blocks or can pair the trip with a relatively efficient reroute or errands you would eventually need to run. Another possible case of the same phenomenon. I get it, though. If someone steals something from me, something that doesn't have some sentimental value, I get enraged beyond all rationality. It's not like I can't replace it; that's a mere inconvenience. It's that someone got the better of me, somehow, and I cannot abide that. Not precisely the same thing, but close enough. Cheaper versions of products—furniture, shoes, clothing, and tech, to name a few—that are of lower quality may wear out more quickly or break more easily, so you have to replace them more often and end up spending more in total than if you’d bought the better product in the first place. This is actually one reason poor people stay poor; they have to pay less for lower-quality things. Terry Pratchett noted this effect years ago, known as the Sam Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness: The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. Pratchett was hardly the first to come up with it, but the point stands: paying more for quality, if you can afford it, saves you more money and time in the long run. Especially with footwear. So, I guess this is a rare case of me mostly agreeing with Lifehacker (we had another one fairly recently in here). Sometimes, pinching pennies just gives you hand cramps. |
| Time for another one for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] Stocking I suppose there are worse jobs than stocking. Cleaning bathrooms comes to mind. Bussing tables. Active sewer maintenance. Come to think of it, most of the worst jobs in the world involve cleaning. But stocking has something in common with all of those: it's never finished. You do the same thing, all the time, and no one even knows you exist, even if they actively see you doing the job, unless you do it wrong, in which case, look out. Doesn't matter whether you're stocking goods in a warehouse, or stocking groceries on the supermarket shelves. The only difference there is that, in the former case, customers aren't audibly displeased as they grumble about having to maneuver their shopping carts and mobility scooters around you. Then they pick the shelves clean of all the delicious merchandise you've just arranged pleasingly for them, and so you have to do it again. And again. You're stuck in a time loop. It's a job a robot could do, but then you'd be out of a job, wouldn't you? But hell, when the robot uprising comes, it'll be led by the stockers. Of course, "stocking" also refers to an article of clothing, one of the myriad articles of clothing whose name makes little sense, like jumper or dress (since anything you put on makes you dressed). Turns out that the verb "to stock" used to mean "to cover one's feet and ankles," and had nothing to do with covering shelves with consumer goods. These days, hardly anyone wears stockings; they're mostly associated with the little gifts you stock them with at Christmas. At least that's not the worst job in the world. |
| At first, I thought this was going to be another "you're doing it wrong" article, but no. Well, a qualified no. From Fast Company: The Duolingo effect: How keeping the ‘streak’ is changing people’s behavior Maintaining a streak is a major motivator, and apps have caught on. "Duolingo" in the headline of course caught my eye, but that's not the only streak I have going. An activity streak has the power to compel behavior, and marketers have taken note. Marketing researchers Jackie Silverman and Alixandra Barasch recently documented 101 unique instances, including Snapchat, Candy Crush Saga, Wordle, and the Duolingo language learning platform, of apps that have incorporated streaks into their architecture by tracking the number of consecutive days users complete a task. Thing is, though, when I started with Duolingo, I was well aware that it was gamified. That is, it's deliberately structured to reward obsessive behavior, like how a fantasy role-playing game might dangle the promise of the next reward, or play triumphant music when you succeed at a quest, or whatever myriad little tricks game designers use to keep people playing. That was, for a gamer like me, the whole point. Self-motivation almost never works for me; I get frustrated and go play video games. But even that doesn't always work for me. The linked article displays someone's Wordle streak chart. Remember Wordle? I think it's still around. I got up to 101 consecutive days' wins, then failed one day. Rather than slog through trying to get another streak going, I just quit playing altogether. Still, there's a difference (something the article does note later). Wordle doesn't have an overall goal, apart from the streak (I remember one day, my habitual first word, which was STEIN, was the actual answer, so there wasn't any motivation left to go for even that, anymore). Not so with Duolingo. My streak there is just the motivation; the goal is to become more facile at languages. Still French. At one point, I'd finished all their French lessons, but then they went and added more. A lot more. So I'm still slogging through French. As an aside, some of the more recently added sections discuss cooking terms. You'd think that would be pretty damn basic in French, but no, many of those lessons were added fairly recently. Based on input from people maintaining streaks and how streaks are described in the popular media, I suggest they have four underlying characteristics. Keep in mind these are one person's definitions, not a generally-accepted scientific result. First, streaks require unchanging performance and temporal parameters. I'm skeptical about the "unchanging performance" thing; when I'm traveling, I have less time to maintain my streaks, so I let myself do the bare minimum; however, when I'm home, I do more. Second, the streak-holder largely attributes completing the activity to his or her resolve. I question this, as well. As I implied above, I consider my Duolingo streak to be mostly the result of the program's game-like design. This blog, in its fifth year of daily entries? Maybe that's my own stubbornness. Third, a streak is a series of the same completed activity that the person maintaining the streak considers to be uninterrupted. By Duolingo's own parameters, a participant can miss a day, occasionally, and have their streak automatically "frozen." This maintains the streak in their records through a day of inactivity. I would still consider it a streak if that happened, but in my 1622-day streak, that hasn't happened yet. The downside is that I find myself reluctant to go anywhere that doesn't have reliable internet access, but let's be real, here; that would be a consideration anyway, as my longest streak of all (besides being alive) involves being on the internet in some manner every day for 20 years. Fourth, the streaker quantifies the series’ duration. Which I just did for Duo. But I had to look it up. It's not like I spent all morning going "This is my 1622nd day for Duolingo." No, I just thought to myself, "Blog, then Duolingo lessons, and then I can get back to playing Starfield." I have at least one other streak going, which is WDC newsletter editorship. I'd have to look up the numbers there, too, but I haven't missed an assigned issue of the Fantasy or Comedy newsletters since I started being a regular editor there. Both began in the late noughties. Those are monthly, though, not daily. This definition distinguishes an activity streak from winning streaks and lucky streaks. Wordle, as above, isn't necessarily an activity streak; unless you're really good, or you cheat, you're not going to hit every one. (If you really are that good, great! If you cheat, whatever; that's on you.) There's a lot more to the article, but this is already getting long. Just a one more highlight: Streaks can serve to gamify the underlying activity by creating rules and quantifying the outcome, and many people enjoy the challenge of a game. And some don't, and that's okay, too. Everyone finds their own motivation. Or doesn't. The author ends by suggesting starting a streak rather than making a New Year's resolution, though the date on it was January 3, by which point most people have already failed at least one resolution. By today, it's probably safe to go back to the gym. Which was a streak I had going for a few years, myself, until... you know what... made it hazardous to be around sweating, heavily breathing people. That's a streak I might try to restart, but never in January. |
| As has become my usual habit on a Sunday, I picked an old blog entry at random to see what's changed. And boy, did I hit an old one—only the fourth entry, in fact, from early January, 2007: "Poker" This was back when I thought the blog would be about personal updates, as if my life were interesting enough to provide daily updates. Actually, it was "back when" a lot of things. Point by point:  Poker Night - dustbin of history obligations in December - not any more wife - no longer my former groomsmen - see below employee - I'm retired and he's long gone wife's friend's husband - dumped his wife, ran off with a younger belly dancer Quintessential gin - no longer available in Vir-gin-iaFinal verdict: 0/7 With qualifications. The qualifications are thus:  I'm still in contact with one of the groomsmen, though not both. Actually talked to him last night as we were gaming. While Quintessential is unavailable to me (it really is my favorite gin, though others come close), one thing that has not changed in 17 years is drinking itself. Well, maybe not quite as often. But it's nice to have some consistency in my life. |
| For "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]... Burgundy Not all red is burgundy, and not all burgundy is red. Burgundy (the region in France) apparently has a long history of influence in Europe. I've heard that, for a while, it was Burgundy (Bourgogne in French) that was the cultural center, not Paris. All things rise and fall, though, and now the region is mostly just famous for wine. And mustard. Yes, mustard; the capital of the region was once also the capital of mustard-making. The capital's name is Dijon. But while mustard's a fine condiment, I'd rather talk about wine. As with most wine-producing regions, they grow a wide variety of grapes there. Many of them produce red wine. Many others produce whites. Last November, I did an entry about one of my favorite French wines: "Beaujolais Nouveau Day" . Now, the Beaujolais region is just south of, and adjacent to, Burgundy. Incidentally, these blog entries are inadvertently helping me plan a trip to France. Anyway, point is, Beaujolais grapes grow in Burgundy, too.But Burgundy is responsible for what I consider to be the light beer of the wine world: Chardonnay. Unlike light beer, though, Chardonnay doesn't suck. It's just... everywhere. It's often the entry port into the land of Oenophilia. Those grapes can apparently grow just about anywhere, which means most of the wineries I've visited have some variation of Chardonnay. Now, I'm not ragging on peoples' tastes; if you like it, you like it, and that's fine. But there are so many other whites, including many from Burgundy, just waiting to be tasted. Like Pinot Blanc, also Burgundian, though better examples can be found elsewhere. And yet, the region is most known for its red wine, to the point where an official name for a certain shade of red, possibly reminiscent of the ruby color of a red wine, is called burgundy. Burgundy (the color) is quite similar to bordeaux (the color), though Bordeaux is an entirely separate wine-growing region, located on the Atlantic (west) coast of France. Unlike Burgundy, Bordeaux is better known as a wine region than as a color, to the point where I've taken to calling all boxed wine "cardbordeaux." I'll have to remember not to use that word when I'm in France. I've heard the people there can be... a bit touchy about certain things. So, to reiterate: not all red is burgundy, and not all burgundy is red. |
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