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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| I held on to this article from Polygon, not just because it's about Star Trek specifically, but because it has some insights into writing in general. Not too long ago, I went on a personal quest to watch every single Star Trek episode and movie, in release order. There's a lot to watch, and too much for me to remember. Lower Decks was full of inside jokes, so, as someone who has lived and breathed Trek for their entire life, I've sometimes wondered whether someone without much Trek background would appreciate the show. The article suggests that they might. Most of the article is in the form of an interview with Mike McMahan, the creator mentioned there in the headline. The show McMahan was working on was Rick and Morty, which went on to be a massive pop culture sensation. More confident than ever in McMahan’s instincts, Secret Hideout reached out again in 2018, this time to ask him what he wanted to do. McMahan answered with a pitch for an animated sitcom based in the Star Trek universe, a truly wild swing for the typically reverent and cerebral sci-fi franchise. On the flip side, I have never seen even one single episode of Rick and Morty. I should emphasize that Star Trek has been no stranger to comedy, however serious and dramatic some of the stories and situations have been. From the beginning, many episodes of TOS included humorous moments. Hell, we wouldn't have the show at all were it not for the vision of funny-lady Lucille Ball, back when she and Arnaz were running Desilu studios, before it got bought out by Paramount. But Lower Decks dialed the comedy to eleven. Somehow, though, it not only maintained some continuity with live-action Trek, but also kept the setup-conflict-resolution style of its more serious cousins. It could have devolved into a self-parody. But it didn't. And I want to know how to write like that. As the series comes to a close after five seasons, Polygon caught up with McMahan about how his wacky passion project made its mark on one of American pop culture’s most cherished legacies. The article is from last year; the series has since wrapped up, by design. Everything ends; it's only a question of whether they leave us hanging or not. Yeah. It was cool because when I was becoming a writer in TV and writing my own stuff all the time, I was watching Star Trek with my wife, being like, “Man, I wish Star Trek was still around,” because it was in the in-between phase. And I remember being like, “I’m just gonna write Star Trek whether somebody pays me to or not.” There have been a few in-between phases in Trek history. McMahan was certainly not alone in writing Trek fanfiction. Some of it even became non-canonical, but official, novels. I've read many of them. Some of them suck. Most of them are passable. Some are even excellent. Some SF/Fantasy authors got their start writing Trek fanfiction. I say this because fanfiction has a crap reputation, but it really shouldn't. Not all fanfiction involves crap writers writing crap porn. And this part of the interview ties in to my entry from the day before yesterday: Sure. I mean, luck is usually something that only works in your favor if you’ve done a lot of hard work first, right? Yes. I'm still fuzzy about the definition of "hard work," because I don't think most day laborers would consider what writers do hard work. Whatever you want to call it, sometimes you have to put in the effort, physical and/or mental, to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. Though I think even possessing the ability to do that effort is also dependent on luck. The remainder of the interview, which I won't reproduce here, is relevant to writers, no matter what the genre. Well, maybe not the literary genre, but stories that people actually pay attention to. Whether the article is any more or less accessible to non-Trek watchers than Lower Decks, I have no idea. Since Lower Decks ended, there has only been one other Trek installment: Section 31, which was originally slated to be a series but became a TV movie (which, nowadays, is basically just a movie that never made it to a theater but went directly to streaming). Despite the presence of always-awesome Michelle Yeoh as one of the primary characters, the movie was (for me at least) a huge letdown. But Trek has always had its ups and downs, and I look forward to what's next. |
| All words are made up. Some were made up more recently than others. And some are more made up than others. Here's Mental Floss to not help: What’s the Longest Word in English?  Spoiler alert: Despite what you might have heard, it’s not ‘antidisestablishmentarianism.’ I memorized that one long ago, as well as another contender. If you can find a way to work pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis into a conversation, congratulations! But not that one. You’ve just managed to use the longest defined word you’ll find in any dictionary in everyday chatter. Being in a dictionary just means that someone put it in a dictionary. The word was coined in the 1930s, probably by the president of the National Puzzlers’ League, “in imitation of polysyllabic medical terms,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “but occurring only as an instance of a very long word.” Like I said, made up. In this case, made up less than 100 years ago. Somehow I doubt it ever entered public use the way 'antidisestablishmentarianism' once did. If anyone ever tried to say it, it would have most likely been in connection with longest-word contests. Another pretty long word, floccinaucinihilipilification—meaning “the action or habit of estimating as worthless”—was created by mashing together four words in a Latin grammar book that all meant something with little value and adding -fication at the end. And who doesn't need a -fication? That was the other long word I had memorized, incidentally. It seems appropriate in this context, though, as I consider the competition for longest word to be of little value. There are even longer words than pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis out there—you just won’t necessarily find them in a dictionary. I'm reminded of the Blackadder the Third dictionary scene, which is second only to the "Scottish Play" scene from the same serial in its capacity to send me into paroxysms of cacchination: As the article points out, words of even greater length are possible. They already exist in technical fields such as chemistry, so it's questionable if the matter can ever be settled with any definitization, as words can be crafted at any time by nearly anyone. The thing that's important is the usefulness of the word. Useful ones enter the lexicon with disturbing regularity. One might even say that what matters most isn't length, but girth. |
| I managed to see the lunar eclipse last night. Exactly as expected, the Earth's shadow started munching on the lunar orb a bit after midnight, and it was almost fully dark (matter of fact it's all dark) at around 2:30. And it was dark indeed, darker than previous ones I've seen; I suppose there's less dust in the Earth's atmosphere to create the refracted, then reflected, red glow. But the important thing is: for once, I managed to see a celestial event without clouds interfering. Later this morning, I woke up to thick cloud cover, so it seemed that the atmospheric water vapor held out so I could see the eclipse. One might say I got lucky. Which segués smack into this article from Wired. And here I thought the secret to being lucky was to be lucky. Alexa’s approach to prediction is a revelation: “Today you can look for sunny weather, with highs in the mid-70s.” I was wondering why they'd open the article with a quote from a spying device. Really, what more can or should be said about the future? Look around and see what happens. You can look for your crypto windfall. You can look for the love of your life. You can look for the queen of hearts. Seek and ye might find. You can even look for a four-leaf clover, though the chances are about 1 in 10,000. But if you find one, the shamrock is no less lucky because you looked for it. Oh, I get it. It's going to be about looking. But wait. A shamrock is a clover, but not all clovers are shamrocks. The whole point of shamrocks, at least since Christianity subjugated Ireland, is that it's got three leaves and somehow symbolizes the Trinity. I can't be arsed to look up whether four-leaf shamrocks are a thing, but if they are, I don't know why it would be lucky to break out of the Trinity metaphor. And every four-leaf clover I've ever seen has been non-shamrock in origin, perhaps because shamrocks aren't exactly native to Virginia. I do know that their name has nothing to do with being a fake stone. Anyway. “Diligence is the mother of good luck” and “The harder I work the luckier I get”—these brisk aphorisms get pinned on Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, lest we earnest Americans forget that salvation comes only to individuals who work themselves to dust. I consider this trolling (Franklin) and propaganda (Jefferson). If hard work led to good luck, there would be some damn lucky sharecroppers out there. In truth, the luck = work axiom does nothing but serve the regime and the bosses, by kindling credulity in a phantom meritocracy instead of admitting that virtually every single advantage we get in the world is one we lucked into—by being born to the right parents who speak the right language in the right zip code. Like I said. Trolling and propaganda. Even possessing the capacity for "hard work" (whatever that really means) is a matter of luck. How about we invert the meritocratic fallacy in those aphorisms and create a new aphorism that makes “work” the delusion and “luck” the reality? “The luckier I get, the harder I pretend I’ve worked.” I'm not big on jumping on board bandwagons, but I'll give this one a climb. After all, the chances of the precise sperm colliding with the exact egg in the right fallopian tube and convening to make you—or me—are so low as to be undetectable with human mathematics. And then the article undermines a good point with a spurious example. And not even an accurate one. "Undetectable," my ass. What I mean is this: so what if the odds were really, really low? It obviously happened, so the prior odds are irrelevant, except as an intellectual exercise. Some sperm collides with some egg and whips up a unique combination of genes every fucking minute. Pun absolutely intended. If there’s any method of prediction that never fails, it’s luck. You look for your horse—or your candidate—to win, and she wins? What luck. What if she loses? Better luck next time. If Alexa says you can look for rain, and you look and find it—lucky you, you brought an umbrella! Luck is fate and fate is what happens and a prediction of what happens is a perfect prediction. Is it just me or is that argument as circular as something drawn with a compass? If so, we were lucky to be treated to this article (selected at random from around 60 possibilities) on Pi Day. But work and diligence can never be the parents of luck, because luck has no mother, no father, no precedent or context. Luck is a spontaneous mutation, signaling improbability; it shows up randomly, hangs around according to whim, and—as every gambler knows—makes an Irish goodbye. I can't let this slide by without cringing at the more-than-slightly racist final words of the quote. But apart from that, I got to thinking about the possibility that evolution is really selecting for luck. I can't take full credit for this idea; Larry Niven proposed something similar in Ringworld. But his version was more narrow: a character was lucky because she was the result of several generations of ancestors winning a lottery that allowed them to reproduce. I'm taking a broader view, that species survival depends on not the strongest or the fastest or even the fittest, but the luckiest (which might include strong or fast or fit). As luck is pretty much unquantifiable, it's not a scientific hypothesis. Just something to contemplate for stories and whatnot. So where does the “looking for” luck come in? Ah—your agency comes in the almost-passive search for luck. The noticing. Congratulations. You've just rediscovered the power of observation. When opportunity knocks, it helps if you don't have your noise-canceling headphones on. Einstein didn’t like the idea of God “playing dice” with the world. Lucky for Einstein, dice, in a world determined by luck, are not thrown by anyone, much less a God who is said to have Yahtzee skills. Instead, the chips fall where they may—and really they just fall, unpredictably, spontaneously. And that's a bit misleading, too. It's like, okay, let's limit ourselves to the standard cubic six-sided dice for the sake of discussion. It's true that we don't know what number will come up on the roll of a pair of dice, absent some cheating-type intervention. But there are boundary conditions. Most obvious is that the result will be between 2 and 12 inclusive. A fair throw of 2 standard dice will never come up with a 1, or any number greater than 12. It certainly won't come up with a noninteger number, a negative number, zero, or an imaginary number. Those are boundaries. Perhaps a bit less obvious is that the chance of rolling a 7 is much greater than the chance of rolling a 2 or a 12 (specifically, 1 in 6 as opposed to 1 in 36). No, you can't predict what the next throw will bring (assuming no cheating, of course). But you can predict, with a very high degree of certainty, the frequency of each result occurring after multiple rolls. If that were not true, casinos couldn't stay in business. Point being, even randomness has constraints. That's why "everything happens at random" is just as nonsensical as "everything happens on purpose." We then look for patterns in them. And humans are, probably for reasons related to the luck of evolutionary development, very, very good at spotting patterns—even when there are none. The arrangement of tea leaves at the bottom of a tasseomancer's cup is random with constraints. Sometimes, the leaves seem to form patterns. Whole books have been written about interpreting the patterns. Whole books have been written about a lot of bullshit things. You'd be lucky to ignore them. |
| Well, then, let's just jump right in, shall we? I've got a pretty big backlog of interesting articles to tackle. Today's is from MIT Press Reader, and it makes for an appropriate-enough premier entry here. The Greatest Unknown Intellectual of the 19th Century Emil du Bois-Reymond proclaimed the mystery of consciousness, championed the theory of natural selection, and revolutionized the study of the nervous system. Today, he is all but forgotten. I suppose he's no longer unknown now, at least by me and anyone with the talent, taste, good looks, and perspicacity to read my blog. Or to read the linked article. Or to buy the book that the linked article is nakedly promoting. As much as I hate ads in general, I have no issue with sharing book promotions here, as long as they're transparent about it. Unlike Charles Darwin and Claude Bernard, who endure as heroes in England and France, Emil du Bois-Reymond is generally forgotten in Germany — no streets bear his name, no stamps portray his image, no celebrations are held in his honor, and no collections of his essays remain in print. You know who is unknown to me? Claude Bernard. Or, I should say now, was unknown to me. Yeah, that sounds like someone I should have heard of.But it wasn’t always this way. Du Bois-Reymond was once lauded as “the foremost naturalist of Europe,” “the last of the encyclopedists,” and “one of the greatest scientists Germany ever produced.” Which is high praise, considering some of the other scientists from Germany. Though Einstein came later and probably overshadowed him. Their lives did overlap, though only for about 17 years. If Wikipedia can be trusted for that. Those familiar with du Bois-Reymond generally recall his advocacy of understanding biology in terms of chemistry and physics, but during his lifetime he earned recognition for a host of other achievements. That alone is pretty significant, though it's almost certainly a case of "if he hadn't done it, someone else would have." He pioneered the use of instruments in neuroscience, discovered the electrical transmission of nerve signals, linked structure to function in neural tissue, and posited the improvement of neural connections with use. I'm curious what neuroscience was like before instruments, but not curious enough to make a side trip. He owed most of his fame, however, to his skill as an orator. Now this is the most interesting part, at least to me. Doing science is one thing. Being able to communicate it effectively is, I believe, an entirely different skill. Our modern-day science communicators may write books or record YouTube videos in addition to holding in-person lectures, but, well, not all of them are really suited to explaining big new concepts to non-scientists. In matters of science, he emphasized the unifying principles of energy conservation and natural selection, introduced Darwin’s theory to German students, rejected the inheritance of acquired characters, and fought the specter of vitalism, the doctrine that living things are governed by unique principles. It turns out that, under certain circumstances, some acquired characteristics (here the article's proofreader failed; it's not "characters") can be inherited. That's okay. Scientific theories get modified and revised over time; that means the process is working. In matters of philosophy, he denounced Romanticism, recovered the teachings of Lucretius, and provoked Nietzsche, Mach, James, Hilbert, and Wittgenstein. I hold the conviction that science and philosophy are symbiotic: science informs philosophy, while philosophy guides science. Others insist they should remain separate, which is self-contradictory because it is itself a philosophy of science. In any case, anyone who provoked Nietzsche is okay in my world. In matters of history, he furthered the growth of historicism, formulated the tenets of history of science, popularized the Enlightenment, promoted the study of nationalism, and predicted wars of genocide. Funny thing about predictions. Sometimes, they're not predictions but plans (though maybe someone else's plans). I hope that wasn't the case here. And in matters of letters, he championed realism in literature, described the earliest history of cinema, and criticized the Americanization of culture. All of which is extra amusing now that some of the world's most popular cinema involves fantasy stories originating in the US. Today it is hard to comprehend the furor incited by du Bois-Reymond’s speeches. One, delivered on the eve of the Prussian War, asked whether the French had forfeited their right to exist; another, reviewing the career of Darwin, triggered a debate in the Prussian parliament; another, surveying the course of civilization, argued for science as the essential history of humanity; and the most famous, responding to the dispute between science and religion, delimited the frontiers of knowledge. Oh, I don't know. Some speeches today still incite fury. They're often labeled "controversial." High on that list remains arguments concerning the dispute between science and religion. The important thing to note, as far as I'm concerned, is that just because you're a great communicator and can give a fiery speech, it doesn't mean you're right. Du Bois-Reymond supported women, defended minorities, and attacked superstition; he warned against the dangers of power, wealth, and faith; and he stood up to Bismarck in matters of principle. It also doesn't mean you're wrong. The rest of the moderately long article goes into more detail about du Bois-Reymond's life and times, and touches on why he might have been all but forgotten despite his celebrity status. Despite the memory hole he seems to have fallen afoul of, I think echoes of his ideas remained; those, after all, are more durable than mere individuals. As support, I'll just provide one more quote, from near the end of the page: Du Bois-Reymond reminds us that individuals mark their times as much as their times mark them. “If you want to judge the influence that a man has on his contemporaries,” the physiologist Claude Bernard once said, “don’t look at the end of his career, when everyone thinks like him, but at the beginning, when he thinks differently from others.” I do hope we can forgive his then-contemporary stylistic use of masculine pronouns. I'm pretty sure that idea applies to all people. |
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