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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
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Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. ![Merit Badge in Quill Award
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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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Inspired by "Invalid Item"  , today is...I know I talk more about beer in here, but let's not forget, I'm a wine snob, too. There was a time, before craft beer started really taking off in the 90s, when I would always choose wine over beer, if only because the "beer" available was that rice-water swill from the Big Brands. One reason I don't write more about wine is that, while I enjoy it, I don't have the language for it. I don't mean French; I know some French (at least enough to know that Merlot is pronounced like mare-low and not murr-lott). I mean things like "this dry wine features delicate notes of plum and clover on the nose, and produces a deceptively tart tingle on the palate, where overtones of cherry and fig predominate; the lingering finish is subtly redolent of spices." I just can't. It's okay to say that you detect almost any fruit flavor in a wine... except grape. I imagine we can make an exception for wines made from other fruits. One definition of wine is fermented beverage made from fruit; in practice, this is usually grape, but can be any fruit. But in the case of most wines, made from grapes, "grape" is utterly off-limits in the tasting notes. So I won't describe the difference between Merlot and other red wines, except to say that it tastes almost completely unlike grape. The most widely-known reds include Merlot, Cabernet Sauvingon, Cabernet Franc, Syrah/Shiraz, and Malbec. They tend to get blended together a lot, too, which is an art in itself. There are, obviously, a bunch (pun intended) more, but those are ones I find at a lot of wineries, and many of them come from the internationally-famous Bordeaux region of France. But I've had better Merlot right here in the US. This is not to rag on France; I'm guessing that, like most grape-growing regions, they keep the really good stuff for themselves. One day, I'll find out for myself. Like California. I wasn't overly impressed by California wines until I actually went there and did wine tastings. I'm still not overly impressed with a lot of their beverages; as with beer, there's a rough inverse correlation between how big the producer is (i.e., how many liters they spit out in a year) and how objectively tasty their offerings are. It's not a perfect correlation; you also get real dogs from small vineyards. And Napa is severely overrated. Seriously. Napa is for tourists. Or, as the bumper sticker here in Virginia asserts: "Napa makes auto parts. Virginia makes wine." One big difference between wine and beer, apart from what agricultural product they're made from, is that, with very few exceptions, beer has a much narrower range of prices. You rarely, if ever, see a bottle of beer going for thousands of dollars. Not so with wine; I've seen bottles as high as $30,000—in Vegas, where they're obviously catering to jackpot winners and expense-account holders. They also use that as a decoy price; after seeing a $30K bottle, that $100 for a $20 bottle of Merlot seems almost reasonable. But Merlot is a very common grape, found in many regions that aren't France, as well as being, by some accounts anyway, the most widely-grown grape in its home country. Lots of winemakers in my area produce it. In other words, economically speaking, there's no shortage of supply. So there's no bloody excuse for paying more than around $20 for a bottle; anything more than that, you're just showing off. And I'll always pick it over Cabernet Sauvignon, but when it comes to reds, well, give me an Argentinian Malbec or an Australian Shiraz. |
| Today's article is long. There's a link to the podcast version on the site, if you're into that sort of thing; I'm not. The text is presumably a transcript of the podcast, or the script. It touches on topics I've covered here in the past, related to astronomy, so in contrast to the article, I'm keeping my commentary short. Journey to the Invisible Planet Long-Form/Podcast: The tangled history of humanity’s search for the solar system’s uncharted planets. I wrote about the potential Planet Nine back in August, and I've taken to calling it "Planet Ix" .What we have here is a comparatively brief (compared to the actual time frame involved) history of our discoveries about gravity and the solar system, starting with Newton. There's a discussion of Neptune—the first planet to be predicted by calculation prior to being telescopically observed. But then they tried the same trick on the orbital perturbations of Mercury, thinking that with the success of finding Neptune due to anomalies in (the seventh planet)'s orbit, they could discover a world orbiting between the sun and Mercury, which would throw off our numbering system. Mercury would become the second planet from the sun. Earth, fourth. The seventh planet whose name I will not type in an attempt to avoid juvenile puns, the eighth. Apart from its apparent influence on Mercury, the only evidence for another planet was a long history of spotty, unreplicated glimpses and blurry solar photos. It was the sea serpent of the solar system. Nevertheless, some manufacturers of solar system charts began including the intra-Mercurial body as a presumptive planet, and astrologers began to include Vulcan’s movements in their horoscopes. Said horoscopes would have been just as accurate as those without it, to be fair. In short, this proposed and popularly accepted planet, named Vulcan for its presumed temperature, didn't exist. Instead of modifying the other planets' numbers, we had to modify the theory of gravitation that otherwise worked so brilliantly. By "we," I mean "Einstein." The International Astronomical Union, a body responsible for naming celestial objects, continues to reserve the name “Vulcan,” just in case we do one day detect an invisible planet lurking in the heart of our solar system. You want to tell them, or should I? How this relates to the maybe-Planet Ix is that we're still finding anomalies, even with relativity taken into account, that point to the possibility of another large-ish planet out beyond Neptune. Besides Pluto. Besides Eris, which after all is probably about the size of Pluto and largely the impetus for demotion of that world to dwarf-planet status. If it does exist, it might have an orbit measured in thousands of years. Add that to your charts, astrologers. The article/podcast concludes with a broader discussion of the limitations of the revised gravitational theory. It is tempting to draw parallels between dark matter, dark energy, and planet Vulcan—all of them elusive, invisible influences plugging holes in accepted theories. I have, indeed, drawn such parallels in the past. After all, the universe isn’t obligated to agree with human intuition. Nor does it. |
| For anyone coming in new here, I like to highlight random past blog entries on Sundays. Why Sundays? Well, why not? I like to talk about how things, their context, my opinions, etc. have changed since I wrote the original entries. Today's comes from a very long time ago indeed: June 3, 2008. "60 More Years!" For context, as the entry notes, we here in the US were in the middle of the chaos of an election year.I don't talk about politics much in here. I used to mention it more, in that time period, but at least I wasn't overtly taking sides in that entry. Me: In other words, five more months of whose hair is better-groomed and which candidate's grandmother or great-grandmother was a flapper during the Roaring Twenties, because, of course, that makes a huge difference in who should be president. Turns out that my grandmother, who was around 30 years old at the time, was a flapper during the Roaring Twenties. I don't remember if I discovered this fun fact before or after I wrote that blog entry. But enough about politics. Let's take a closer look at one of those flyover states: South Dakota, land of... land of... um. What the hell is in South Dakota? At the time, I'd never set foot in South Dakota. Between then and now, I've visited maybe three times? I don't mean "drove through," though I did, but I also sightsaw. Last time, I was stranded there for three days, but I covered that fun incident when it happened in 2021. However, during none of my trips have I visited the main subject of that 2008 entry. Not yet. Ah, yes. The Crazy Horse Memorial which, as it happens, was begun sixty years ago today I question my grammatical choices at the time, but whatever. From math, I deduce that the onset of construction of the memorial was over 75 years ago now. There follows a raw link which, not surprisingly for a 15-year-old link on the internet, is well and thoroughly broken. Apparently, it was a retrospective on the 60th anniversary of the monument's official beginning. If you're not familiar with this enormous project, here's the Wikipedia link. There's not much else to the blog entry, but I will say this: upon re-reading this today, it was too easy to interpret the last lines as a tribute to General Custer. While it's difficult to remember much about something I wrote a decade and a half ago, I'm certain that wasn't my intention. I should have phrased that better. I'm tentatively planning another one of my cross-country road trips for the end of the month and on into December. Maybe, if the weather works in my favor, I'll pay a visit to the Crazy Horse Memorial. |
| Inspired by "Invalid Item" , though this particular observance wasn't in the suggested prompts. The first Saturday in November is officially: One question I get asked on a regular basis, once someone discovers that I'm a beer snob (which happens pretty quickly, but not as quickly as some people tell you "I'm a vegan."): "So, do you brew your own beer?" No. Not just no, but HELL no. I mean, sure, the process is fascinating, and as with most work, I could watch others do it all day. And I'm glad some people are into that, because that's how we get brewers at craft breweries. So, of course, being curious, I looked into it, and discovered that home brewing is approximately 1% enjoying the product; 3% brewing; and 98% cleaning and sterilizing. Yes, I'm aware those add up to >100%; I'm using hyperbole to emphasize just how much I hate, loathe, and despise cleaning. Why do all that work when I can go to a bar or brewpub and, using the fruits of my other labors, purchase a delicious golden beverage that's the result of other peoples' labor? It's not like diamonds, coffee, smartphones, clothing, avocados, or chocolate; you can be fairly confident that craft beer in the US isn't brewed using slave or child labor. Still, I wanted to take a moment to appreciate that here in the purported Land of the Free, we have the freedom to brew our own beer, if we want to put in the really outrageously tremendous amount of work involved. It wasn't always that way. I'm not just talking about those dark times known as Prohibition, either. Once Prohibition was lifted—an anniversary I also celebrate, coming up next month—it took a while before home brewing was legalized. By "a while," I mean "nearly half a century." Before Prohibition, brewing had mostly been done at home, though industrialization facilitated commercial breweries more and more as time went on. Many, if not most, of the Founding Fathers of the US were brewers (or their spouses were; brewing, like cooking, was considered largely a woman's job). The entire idea of the American Revolution was fomented (as opposed to fermented) in pubs, so beer is in our DNA, which made Prohibition that much more of a slap in the face to Lady Liberty. Amendment XXI to the US Constitution, passed on December 5, 1933, repealed the earlier amendment XVIII that created Prohibition. Yay. But home brewing didn't become legal until 1978, 45 years after the repeal of Prohibition. Thanks, Jimmy! Which is not to say that people didn't break The Law on a regular basis, but the legalization of homebrew led inexorably to our craft beer landscape, which remains the primary reason I travel. Last I checked, which was five minutes ago, there were nearly 10,000 breweries in the US. I'm not even sure how many of those I've visited and/or sampled brew from; my records are spotty, as you might expect after I've had a couple. It's also complicated by the fact that, on average, every week, we lose one and gain two. With that much beer to choose from, why bother making my own? No, if I'm going to do work, it's going to be important work, like figuring out how to visit the 9000 or so that I still haven't. |
| No booze-related observances today, so let's dig into the slush pile. From MIT Press Reader: Alien Dreams: The Surprisingly Long History of Speculation About Extraterrestrials The idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings has been part of our thought for as long as we have been looking skyward. "Surprisingly?" Not for people who read. To feel small, all we have to do is look up. Actually, it makes me feel large, because I live amongst a species that has managed to begin to comprehend that vastness. The sun, the Moon, the stars, the planets, and the Milky Way are evidence enough that Earth is not all that is. It wasn't very compelling evidence to some people. They honestly believed that it was all part of, connected to, and/or made for the sole benefit of the Earth. And for as long as humans have had words, we have been sharing stories about the presumed builders and occupiers of those vaulted heavens: the gods, spirits, angels, and demons who were, in a sense, the first extraterrestrials. Speculation about extraterrestrials has long seemed to me to be the tech-age version of speculation about gods and angels. According to a Cherokee story, for example, the Milky Way is a great web spun across the sky by Grandmother Spider, who used it to reach the other side of the world and bring back the sun. Presumably, they exiled arachnophobes. In one grisly Aztec myth, the war god Huitzilopochtli sprang from his mother Coatlicue’s womb fully grown and fully armored. He beheaded his sister, Coyolxauhqui, who had been plotting to kill Coatlicue, and cast her head into the sky, creating the Moon. The Aztec were hardcore. Materialist interpretations of the cosmos eventually began to take the place of mythological ones. But the idea that there might be other beings in the sky has stayed with us, and it found its first protoscientific roots in Greece in the sixth century BCE. I suppose that the article is making a distinction between supposed supernatural beings that reside in some "up" place (heaven, e.g.) and speculation about some sort of natural or created beings on other worlds. Anaximander, a philosopher who lived in Miletus in modern-day Turkey, contributed one key idea. He was the first to propose that Earth is a body floating in an infinite void, held up by nothing. I'm not able to find, definitively, what idea he replaced with this one, but earlier, another Greek dude, Thales, figured Earth was a giant island floating in an infinite ocean of water. Before that? I don't know. Elephants and turtles holding it up or something. The philosopher Karl Popper called it “one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thought.” People can be right purely by accident, and this seems to be one of those cases. As the article notes, Anaximander was also wrong about a lot of things. How do we know? Science. In the fifth century BCE, the Thracian philosopher Leucippus and his pupil Democritus invented atomism: the belief that the visible universe consists of tiny, indivisible, indestructible atoms, churning in the void without purpose or cause. In this picture, worlds aren’t divinely created; they simply form when enough atoms collide and stick together. And scientists were premature in calling atoms "atoms," as it turned out that they weren't indivisible or indestructible, as has been repeatedly and terrifyingly demonstrated. Both Plato (428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) lambasted Democritus’s idea of a plurality of worlds on theological grounds. And so we come to the philosophical tension that has dominated the world ever since: some natural philosopher or scientist proposes something based on observation, and religious folk react with horror and torches. As Christianity swept across the decaying Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries CE, the Church Fathers ridiculed and suppressed the Epicureans and their ideas and allowed their writings to burn or crumble. Atomism, the pursuit of pleasure, the plurality-of-worlds idea — all of it slipped into darkness, where, as Wiker observes, “it stayed for nearly a thousand years.” Such as that. But after those dark ages—which weren't as dark as all that, but still held back scientific inquiry in the West—the article goes into the start of the Renaissance and humanist philosophy. Copernicus is central to the story of extraterrestrials not because he believed in them — the question didn’t seem to interest him — but because he was the first person to propose, based on observation and calculation, that Earth was not the center of the visible universe. Oddly enough, it turns out that Earth is the center of the visible universe... if you're standing on Earth. If you were standing on a planet orbiting some unnamed star in the outer reaches of the Andromeda galaxy, that would be the center of the universe. This premise — that there’s nothing particularly special about Earth and that we aren’t in a privileged, central position to observe the universe — would come to be known as the Copernican principle, and it’s at the core of the modern-day case for doing research related to the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI). I've harped on this in here multiple times, but just as it's arrogant to think we're the only sentient life in the universe, it's also arrogant to think that life on other worlds necessarily produces sentience, or, furthermore, looks anything like Earth life. Copernicus knew his theory would provoke religious objections, which may be why he declined to publish it during his lifetime. His follower Giordano Bruno was not so cautious. And as far as I know, the Catholic Church never did issue a proper apology for murdering him. From Democritus to Galileo, thinkers treated the idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings — the word alien comes from the Latin term alius, “other” — with great seriousness. After all, believing in aliens could get you banished or burned at the stake. It is certainly not on religious grounds that I'm a skeptic when it comes to sentient aliens (see, well, a whole bunch of earlier blog entries). I haven't encountered any positive evidence for them. I enjoy Star Trek as much as anyone and more than most, but I doubt we'll find a universe populated by tech-using aliens who play out our own foibles in metaphor. But in 1686 a Frenchman named Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle became the first writer to exploit the subject’s humorous possibilities. Just to be clear, his writing was humor, fantasy, and probably satire, but not science fiction. The people of Venus, Fontenelle mused, are “sunburnt, full of verve and fire, always amorous, loving verses, loving music, inventing celebrations, dances, and tournaments every day.” The inhabitants of Saturn, by contrast, are “quite phlegmatic. … These are people who don’t know what it is to laugh, who always take a day to answer the slightest question asked them.” Just wild-ass guessing here, but I'm pretty sure Venus there was France, and Saturn was England. Whewell pointed out that humans, according to the geological record then being unearthed, had been present on this planet for only an “atom of time.” If Earth had been, in effect, uninhabited through most of its history, then it wouldn’t be surprising if other distant planets were also empty. In any case, he pointed out, no planets around other stars had yet been observed, and many nebulae, star clusters, and multiple-star systems would be unsuitable places for them. I hate, I mean absolutely hate, the fact that I generally agree with that guy, who was one of those who objected to the idea of sentient alien life on theological grounds. Copernicus was correct to revoke Earth’s privileges as the pivot point of the universe, but that insight by itself says nothing about what else might exist in the universe. Exactly. "We're not special" doesn't necessarily mean "We're not alone." Anyway, I've banged on long enough. The article is relatively short, considering that it covers the highlights of over 2000 years of speculation about other worlds and alien life, and it's definitely worth a read, wherever you fall on the "aliens do(n't) exist" spectrum. Me? I'm still waiting for real evidence. But that's not going to stop me from enjoying science fiction and fantasy. |
| Something different today, inspired by "Invalid Item" I really don't know who comes up with these promotional or commemorative "days," but they amuse me. Sure, some of them are blatantly commercial, but then, most official holidays are, too. Others are icky heartstring-tuggers, but we have a few of those on the official list, too. The important thing is that, sometimes, there's a day related to fine fermented and/or distilled beverages, such as this one. First, to be clear, the theme of the day is the beer style. The word "stout" itself, as the above link indicates, initially meant proud or brave, but acquired the meaning of strong... though, even later, it became a less offensive way to call someone fat. But that was after we started calling certain beers stout for their strength. Now, sure, you can read the text at the link, which, while I can't vouch for its accuracy, tracks with what I know. And you can also view one of the many entries I've done here talking about stout, such as this one from five years ago: "Stout" But I have one thing to add: as noted at the title link, "stout" used to refer to any stronger beer. Gradually, though, the style came to refer only to stronger porters. So, to recap: Ale refers to almost any beer that's not a lager (it's mostly a matter of what kind of yeast is used, but that's not important right now). Porter is ale made with dark roasted grain. Stout used to be more intense anything, but now is reserved for more intense porter. But that wasn't enough, so they had to invent the imperial stout. A quick rundown of how the first imperial stout came to be can be found here, in another of my earlier entries: "The Yeast You Can Do" And now, "imperial" is used to modify any beer style that has a higher than normal alcohol content. Imperial stout, such as one of my all-time favorites, Old Rasputin. Imperial lager. Imperial pumpkin ale. That sort of thing. Amusingly, imperial porter. Such is the evolution of language, style, and beer. Sure, these definitions can get a bit fuzzy. Where does porter end and stout begin? What's the ABV cutoff between metric and imperial? (No, regular beer isn't called metric; it's just one of my stupid puns.) Is it possible to have a beer that's both ale and lager? (Yes. Cream ale.) These things are at least as much art and marketing as science. It just so happens that I have some Old Rasputin waiting for me right now. Perhaps it's time for breakfast. |
| Well, BBC, if you're trying to frighten me into once again giving a shit about climate change... congratulations. Imagine a clutter of hipsters squatting around a crackling campfire. Shadows flicker, unexplained lights glimmer from the inky depths of the surrounding forest. Engaged in the time-honored tradition of telling scary stories in the darkness, one of them holds a flashlight under his bearded face, casting unnatural shadows and highlighting where he'd forgotten to snip off a stray whisker strand. He pauses in his tale, scanning the rapt audience until he's sure he has their undivided attention. "And then," he intones, "they discovered that all of their beer... had turned into Coors Light!" Everyone: "Gasp!" Yeah, they're hipsters, so they actually say "gasp" instead of gasping. Anyway. I don't think this article is saying it'll be quite that bad, but it's scary enough: Global warming is changing the quality and taste of beer, scientists have warned. "Weather events will get more extreme." "Meh." "Sea level will rise, inundating coastal cities." "Whatever; the people can move." "We'll lose agricultural production." "So? It'll just relocate." "Beer will taste worse." "Holy fuck, something needs to be done right now!" Though I don't know if it'll really change any minds. We already know it's going to destroy chocolate and coffee production, and still not enough people care to do anything about it. Hotter, longer and drier summers are predicted to worsen the situation, and could lead to beer becoming more expensive. Beer always becomes more expensive. If it ever drops in price, they tax it to make up the difference. Hops, the flower of the hop plant, are the crucial fourth ingredient in the beer brewing process - alongside water, yeast and malt. They are added before the boiling process to add bitterness, but can also be added afterwards to change the overall flavour. Yeah, thanks, but no. I mean, yes, adding hops is important for flavor and aroma, but the reason we started with hops in the first place is that they're a preservative, and keep the beer from going bad as quickly. Especially important in the time before refrigeration, or after we stop producing electricity. Farmers have been working to adapt their growing practices to improve yields, such as moving farms higher up valleys where there is more rainfall, and installing irrigation systems. Irrigation systems are great, until their sources dry up, too. Which they will. In summary, we're doomed, and we won't even have decent beer to drown our doominess in. |
| It's a 2.5-year-old article from LitHub, but it's not like style ever goes out of style, right? Parul Sehgal once argued that style “is 90 percent punctuation.” Sure, not like anyone grumps about word choice. As John Mayer once apparently said, for some reason, “Ladies, if you want to know the way to my heart: good spelling and good grammar, good punctuation, capitalize only where you are supposed to capitalize, it’s done.” Apparently, dudes could get away with anything. After all, even among experts, there are disagreements, some of them oddly vehement. (What inner forces would compel someone to demonize or deify the semicolon?) Oh, I don't know... search my blog for "semicolon" and you might find out. (I'm a fan of it, obviously.) Then the article goes into the punctuation marks in general. I'll only highlight the ones I agree with: (semicolon) In compiling the sentence, efficacy—or, more precisely, precision—is important; capacity is important; and clarity is important. This kind of writer, at least, doesn’t think in little stoppered declarative sentences. It isn’t like that. Not really ever. Perhaps for some people. But not for us. For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life’s experience in some semblance of its complexity—for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable. -Claire Messud I have never heard of this author before, but that makes me want to seek her work out. (exclamation point) Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. -Elmore Leonard I think this is one of those things that's going to be different depending on what you're writing. But yeah, I believe in using bangs (easier to say than "exclamation point") sparingly so as to maintain their power. Unlike cuss words, which, as my mom's family was from New York City and my dad was a sailor, to me, are really just punctuation marks. (em-dash) Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that’s not yet complete? Strunk and White—who must always be mentioned in articles such as this one—counsel against overusing the dash as well: “Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.” - "many editors" Contrary to what I said above, I don't really agree with this, but as with the bang, sparingly is good. I can see right through this writer's ham-handed attempt to convert people to their point of view by deliberately overusing it. (comma) [On her editor, Bob Gottlieb, who famously “was always inserting commas into Morrison’s sentences and she was always taking them out”] We read the same way. We think the same way. He is overwhelmingly aggressive about commas and all sorts of things. He does not understand that commas are for pauses and breath. He thinks commas are for grammatical things. We have come to an understanding, but it is still a fight. -Toni Morrison Oscar Wilde rather famously once wrote: "In the morning I took out a comma, but on mature reflection, I put it back again." As the most-used punctuation mark apart from the period ("full stop" for those of you across the pond), it's subject to a great deal of wasted words and time. I admit to feeling somewhat judgemental toward people who misuse them, but I can't always articulate why they're misused in a given instance. I'm more judgemental about apostrophe abuse. (hyphen) No quote here. I did a whole blog entry on it a while back: "Dashing" . In it, I overused and misused emdashes, so take it as you will.(period) Do we really have to argue about full stops? James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. -Cormac McCarthy James Joyce is not a good model for anything, and now I have even less desire to read anything McCarthy wrote. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate. -McCarthy again And that sentence, folks, should be in the dictionary as a sample under "irony." To be clear, I'm not trying to claim I'm always right. I'm aware that I overuse semicolons sometimes (as well as parentheses), and get things wrong on occasion. Especially here, where every entry is a first or second draft. But that doesn't mean I don't consider these things. |
| So you don't want to live on this planet anymore? Everything About Mars Is The Worst But this jerk planet is still humanity’s best hope for another home in the cosmos. The idea of life on Mars (whether alien or transplanted from Earth) is obviously one of the oldest themes in science fiction and fantasy. It's so pervasive that some people take for granted that 1) we will colonize Mars and 2) at some point after we do, the colonists will rebel and declare independence, most likely resulting in a war. If 1 then 2, because Mars is, after all, a god of war, and because all colonies eventually revolt; but 1 is still questionable. At first glance, Mars seems pretty nice. Compared to the other planets we know of that aren't Earth, sure. No other world in the solar system offers us this chance. Mercury is way too close to the sun. Nearby Venus has far too much atmosphere, whose pressure and noxious gases would crush and choke visitors from Earth. I vaguely recall a thing I linked here a while back that ran the numbers and concluded that the closest planets to Earth, on average, are 1) Mercury 2) Venus 3) Mars. I think it depends on how you calculate it. If this doesn't make sense, consider all the time that these planets spend on the other side of the solar system from us. And yet, thanks to quirks of orbital dynamics, it's easier to get to Mars. Which doesn't mean it's easy. At night, temperatures drop to -100 degrees Fahrenheit. Dust devils and shifting sands cover up solar panels and will test even the most tightly sealed spacesuits and habitats. During dust storm season, Martian winds can stir up haboobs that cover the entire globe in clouds of sun-blotting microscopic particles. That's with an atmosphere that's less than 1% the density of our own troposphere. Also, "haboobs" still makes me chuckle because I'm actually 12 years old. Humans have been slinging spacecraft Marsward for 57 years, and we’re still not even batting .500. It has been pointed out that Mars is the only world believed to be populated entirely by robots. So far, the U.S. is the only country to land anything on Mars, and we’ve stuck the landing on eight of nine attempts. If I recall correctly (and I might not), the reason the one mission failed is that someone forgot to convert metric to imperial units or vice-versa, which is actually kinda hilarious. Anyway, the article continues with details of some of the technical challenges, which I won't go into. Numerous SF authors have, naturally, imagined possible ways around each of them, up to and including terraforming. I've done a bit of fictional speculation along those lines. But I've read enough science fiction to know that it's not going to end well, in any case. |
| Today's callback is a difficult one, and I'm not sure I have the mental energy for it this morning. The original entry was from about two years ago: "Man" The article I referenced there was pretty new when I wrote that, and it's still up. If you don't want to read the earlier entry (understandable, though I promise the entry, if not the article, is short), here it is again.My intro then: "I can admit when I just don't understand something. This is one of those times." And I can't say I've developed a full, nuanced understanding now, two years later. The comments and later blog entry on the topic from Elisa the Bunny Stik  did help me to comprehend some things, but it's just not a subject I'm attuned to.For one thing, I thought, for the vast majority of my life, that being a man simply meant that I was in possession of a todger. Presumably, when I was born, the doctor or nurse checked me out, saw a tallywhacker, and said something like "It's a boy!" I learned of this practice at a fairly young age, and also saw it used on farm and domestic animals, so my mind went "If you see a wangdoodle, that means it's male. Therefore, 'man' is simply defined as an adult human with a pecker." All that other superfluity, such as "boys have shorter hair" (I didn't always, and don't now) or "girls wear dresses" (they don't always, and historically, boys wore dresses too) just seemed like a decision we collectively made as a society, one which could be reversed. Now I see that this stuff is what people mean by "social construct." And it still feels optional to me. After all, my cats don't have a gender identity. Their gender is simply their biological sex. The queens don't wear makeup or hair bows, and the toms don't deliberately grow bushy beards or smoke pipes. Even being surgically altered doesn't change what pronouns you use for the animal. More recently, I realized that this kind of thinking gets you labeled a transphobe, and no amount of denial of that on your part can ever change that label. It's far easier to change your gender than to get people to stop calling you a transphobe. It's kind of like if you say "I'm not an alcoholic," everyone will conclude that you are, in fact, an alcoholic. Especially if you're drunk and slur the words. Anyway, that kind of thinking is why I always considered those outward markings of "manliness" to be superficial and optional. Then, later in life, I realized that I was wrong. I can admit that, too; I'm man enough. So I won't bother offering any support for my assertion that I in no way fear (or hate) trans people. Think what you will of me; I don't care. And that brings me to the actual crux of the matter, at least for me, and for now: people seem to care a great deal about what others think of them, even, in some cases, when they claim not to. In another grand cosmic coincidence (see yesterday's entry for the last time this happened), one of my favorite webcomics touched on this very subject today. {xlink:https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/escape-2}This link should be as permanent as anything is on the internet. In the comic, a man (you can tell from his clothes, hairstyle, and facial features) goes to visit the archetypal Hermit on the Mountain (you can tell from the mountain, his robe/dress, and his beard). His question begins: "Wise Master, how do I escape? I'm a social ape. I'm obsessed with status. All my actions, even private ones, can be perfectly explained if you assume I'm seeking the esteem of other apes." I'll tell you what, though: once I found a way to live that does not require the approval, or escaping the disapproval, of other social apes, I found a freedom that most people can't even conceive of. Once I stopped trying to peacock or scrabble for this mysterious "status" crap, life became a whole lot easier. In short, I'm becoming the Hermit on the Mountain, and I'm okay with that. One other unrelated thing about my earlier entry: Yes, I used to do Merit Badge Mini-Contests. I stopped because readership dwindled (or at least the number of commenters; being not obsessed with status, I don't often check my readership statistics) and because I quit doing entries at midnight in favor of being free to drink in the evenings. The schedule is much more flexible, these days, so it's harder to do deadlines. But I'm also inclined to be generous, so who knows? I may start that up again in some form. |
| Full moon tonight. This article being chosen randomly from my rather lengthy queue is pure cosmic coincidence. Most sources on the internet insist that full moon names are linked to Gregorian calendar months. They are wrong. Giving names to full moons was a tradition of several different and disparate societies before that calendar was forced down their throats at gunpoint. Yes, this is related to my sporadic harping against the false definition of "Blue Moon." Today's full moon is the Hunter's Moon, the second full moon after the northern hemisphere fall equinox. The corrupted sources say it's the full moon in the calendar month of October, but it doesn't always fall in October. Some cultures have different names for this instance of the full moon, but we're going with Hunter's Moon as it's certainly the best-known. So, shout-out here to our very own 🌕 HuntersMoon  !The naming of full moons is a folkloric tradition (which is decidedly biased toward the northern hemisphere seasons), so has little to do with any scientific facts about the moon. But it's my self-imposed Quixotic duty to rail against attempts to shoehorn those names into a calendar that was never meant to track celestial events (though it's certainly useful for calculating solar returns). Hence, to the article, which, like all good fact articles, is from Cracked: If you haven’t been to the Moon, everything you think you know about it might be wrong. “The Moon could be made of green cheese,” people used to say, and we all know how wrong those people turned out to be. I have another article in the queue that addresses the "green cheese" cliché. Maybe it'll turn up on the next full moon (which will be the Beaver Moon). But probably not. Well, okay, no one ever really thought the Moon was made of green cheese. That was a figure of speech about people believing the absurd. I wouldn't say "no one." Never underestimate the power of human ignorance. However, people really were uncertain about the nature of the Moon until we reached there. Well, yeah, that was one of the reasons we went there. The other being a dick-measuring contest against the USSR. Whatever; it got results. I could smugly assert that I knew all these things already. And I'd be right. Except it's almost never right to be smug. 5. It’s Hot Mind you, not all of the Moon is hot. Some of it’s very cold. But many people imagine the whole thing’s cold, because space is cold, and that isn’t true at all. Neither is it true that space is cold. "Cold" and "hot" are imprecise terms for, respectively, things at a temperature below about 75F and things at a temperature above 75F. But in order to have a temperature, something has to be a... thing. A rock, a volume of water, even a gas above a certain density (our troposphere, e.g.). As a vacuum isn't a "thing" in this sense, it cannot have a temperature. The moon is a thing, so it does have a temperature, one which varies quite a lot depending on where you are on or in it. The article goes into details, but also can't resist making a Uranus joke, so I won't give it the dignity of quoting from this section further. 4. It’s Dull Hey, now, it may not be as smart as the Earth, but that's a low bar to clear. Though the Moon is white, it doesn’t reflect light very well. That’s because it’s so rough. It’s not a polished cue ball, it’s rock and dust, which means it doesn’t have much specular reflectivity. This, too, is misleading. While there's some color on the moon, it's mostly various shades of gray, ranging from nearly black to not quite as black. If it were white, even with a surface just as rough, it'd appear a hell of a lot brighter. It's kinda-sorta related to this optical illusion. Again, folks, don't get your science facts from Uranus joke sites. Still, apart from that, this section has some cool photos. 3. It’s Smooth Well, yeah, in stories and poetry, it is often linked to romance. A few seconds ago, we argued that the Moon is rough, not smooth. On the other hand, it’s also a lot more smooth than people imagine. So's Earth. Sure, up close, we have mountains, valleys, and a nice beard of forest, but I've read (though never bothered to confirm) that those variations are proportionately less than those of a cue ball. 2. It Rings Worth reading this section, but I'll just say this shouldn't be surprising. Sound propagates through solids. 1. It’s Far Only by Earth standards. By cosmic standards, the distance to the moon is undetectable. But, again, the article goes into way more detail, because it's hard for us humans to contemplate cosmic distances. And this time, I have no real quibbles. This section's references to Starfield make me want to play that game. But I'm already hopelessly immersed in Baldur's Gate 3, so maybe later. I'll just close by suggesting that, if it's clear tonight, venture (shudder) outdoors and take a look at the Hunter's Moon. Whatever the facts... it's just plain cool. |
I always wondered about "carmine." Is it a bomb you put on a car to make it blow up? A hole in the ground where you dig for cars? Or is it pidgin for "my car?" Oooh, I know: it's a corruption of "karma mine," which is a place where you take out only what you put in. Well, no. Sadly, it's none of those things, although they would absolutely make the world a more interesting place. It is a not-unpopular name, especially for those of Italian origin, and one with several cognates, including Carmen (as in Sandiego) and Carmelita. But it turns out that the name has two origins, like a river with a fork: one from Latin, meaning song, and one from Hebrew, meaning garden. Not that famous "first" garden, though; that was something like paradise. (No, really, the original Hebrew word for it is also translated as paradise.) Just your regular old garden, though presumably one with flowers and bushes rather than cabbages. If one were poetically inclined, one could say that the name Carmine might mean "garden of song," which would presumably be attached to Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song." The way Hebrew might have gotten mixed up with Latin to create that name, I leave as an exercise for the reader. I say all this because one might be forgiven for thinking that the name and the word for a certain deep red color share an origin. They do not. Though one Carmine I heard of, Carmine Infantino, was a comic book artist well-known in some circles (comic readers) for a great run on the Deadman series, and Deadman wore a carmine-colored onesie. Coincidence? Well, actually, yeah. Infantino was drawing an established character. Also, only the reader (and maybe other dead people in the comic) could see Deadman, as he was a ghost. His superpower was possession, incidentally. What's not a coincidence is that carmine and crimson, the color words, share a linguistic root. In the analogy above, that would be two rivers sharing a single source, which is kind of uncommon for rivers when compared to the other way around, but not so rare in language. No, carmine-the-color came from bugs. Apparently, there was this one species of insect which, when tortured, killed, and ground up, produced the carmine dye. I have no idea if this is still the practice, but at least no insects were harmed in making that color in your photo editing software. After all, something's gotta live in your garden. |
| I put up with reading articles like this one only so I can rag on them. If You Want To Be Truly Free And Happy, You Must Banish These 4 Thoughts Nothing good will happen to you if you're negative all the time. And already I'm negative about it. Are you clinging to something that is not serving you? My cats, for some reason, refuse to serve me; they insist that the other way around is the natural order of things. Do you feel doubt? Failure? Depressed? Are you about to tell me that I can think my way out of clinical depression? It’s time to let go of negativity and pain and accept life as it is. Ha, ha, very funny. ...oh, wait. You're serious. We encounter numerous toxic people every day who deliver subtle negative messages and instill negative ideas constantly. And so we come to the root of why they want us to banish the negative and plaster smiles on our faces and pretend everything's sunshine and peaches: being a grump inconveniences other people. However, in order to cultivate a positive mindset, you need to develop a strong mentality and separate yourself from the general crowd. Once you do those things, you won't need to cultivate a positive mindset. Life will automatically be less stressful. By giving more power to negativity, you will send out negative thoughts to the universe and end up attracting and manifesting negative things only. Ah, yes, the power of magical thinking. Kind of the opposite of "develop a strong mentality" here. If you let negativity creep into your mind, it will steal all your peace and happiness and put you in a dark pit of suffering. Follow Master Yoda you must. Heed his words you should. "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." To be clear here, I work to live my life without fear, anger, or hate. If those are the "negative" things they want banished, well, you're never going to banish them entirely, not without giving up everything that's worthwhile in the process. But that doesn't mean you have to let these things control you. Shift your focus to the positive aspects of life, as there is always a silver lining in even the darkest situations. Conversely, there's always a dark cloud in even the brightest situations. Your reality is not based on what others think or say about you. Neither does it depend on your negative thoughts or self-doubt. ... but you just said that it did, that negative thoughts manifest themselves through the universe's karmic channels or whatever. Which is it? (Answer: neither. Reality includes your thoughts, but is independent of your thoughts. Perception, sure. But not reality.) So start by letting go of negative perspectives, grudges, jealousy, fear, pain, self-doubt, and toxic relationships that might hold you back. I could take these one by one, but I have a dentist appointment later this morning, so I have limited time. While I tentatively agree that a lot of those things stunt one's personal growth, a healthy dose of self-doubt is important to keep a person from being too arrogant. And don't get me started on "pain." Assuming that means mental anguish and not physical pain, first, it's not so easy to get past trauma, and second, sometimes you have to wallow in it for a while before you get better. When you let go of negativity from your past, you will be more mindful and bring your awareness to the present moment and stop worrying about what you cannot control. I'm all for not worrying about what you can't control, but screw this "present moment" and "mindfulness" bullshit. We're nothing without our pasts, and if we don't concern ourselves with the future, it'll smack us in the faces. Here are a few proven ways to help you release negativity from your life. "Proven?" [citation needed] I won't go into the "few ways." The article is there if you want to draw your own conclusions. I'm not even saying everything in the article is wrong. As I said above, I'm not a fan of letting anger control me, and I don't live my life in fear. But there's also a hefty dose of airy nonsense and denial of reality, or at least a lack of acknowledgement thereof. Banish anger completely, and there goes one motivation to make positive changes. Banish fear, and you might think it's okay to take that shortcut through Mugger Alley. Perhaps getting stuck in Pollyanna world is preferable to getting stuck in Eeyore world. But I'd rather not get stuck anywhere. |
| More reasons why Prohibition was a bad idea, from Cracked: Admittedly, the headline turns out to be a bit misleading, but at least it's not from some other shameless clickbait site. My first clue that the article wouldn't match the headline was the opening image which, if you don't feel like clicking, features a pool upon which floats a life saver ring, and inside the ring is nestled a can of Bud Light. So, water floating in water. A deep love of partying is generally not the path to a longer life. No, just a more fulfilling one. Alcohol is a poison, but one that offers some good stories and a possibility to meet your future spouse at some karaoke bar. Too much of anything is poison, and I still follow my ironclad rule, scraped from experience, to never pick up women in a bar. No matter how much I've indulged. But what if drinking could save your life? That would be known as a coincidence. That said, there are a couple people throughout history who have somehow caught a lucky break off a usually harmful substance. Okay, okay, we get it: you're badmouthing booze so you're not responsible if someone walks away from the article with "I should drink more." Enough with the moralizing. 4. Mark Wahlberg Mark Wahlberg, or Marky Mark, was a bona fide rock star back in the day. As I did not know, until reading this article, that these were the same dude, I reject the label "bona fide." When an opportunity to go party at the Toronto Film Festival presented itself, he canceled his earlier plans, bailing on a flight he’d already booked for the next morning from Boston to L.A. In short, the flight he missed was on the morning of 9/11/01. The article implies that Wahlberg wanting to party saved his life. A bit of a stretch. You know what would be really weird? If something like this didn't happen. There's probably at least one cancellation on every commercial flight; this one just happened to be someone moderately famous, and the flight he missed became more than moderately famous. If he'd been a "bona fide rock star," what was he doing flying commercial? 3. Clifton Vial Not even Warhol-famous, this time. Essentially, dude drove around Nome (not exactly known for its tropical climate, lying as it does just a few miles south of the Arctic Circle) with nothing but a 12-pack of Coors Light. He had decided to drive out on the roads to, and I am not joking here, see how bad the roads were. They were bad. I've done that, admittedly. But I live in a well-populated area. When his car got lodged in a snow bank where it, and he, remained for three days, he turned to the 12 Silver Bullets in his trunk for sustenance. Might as well have just melted some of the snow... Not a bad idea, given that any beer drinker can tell you that Coors Light is basically water anyways. See? 2. Moe Berg The amount of alcohol involved in this story isn’t as well documented... a dinner party where the guest of honor was famous physicist Werner Heisenberg... One might say the amount of alcohol was... uncertain. You could be forgiven for thinking that I linked and commented on this article because of the drinking bits. But you'd be wrong. No, I'm highlighting this article because it gave me an opportunity to make that pun. The guest we’re talking about, however, was a man named Moe Berg, who was a major league baseball catcher, a polyglot and an American spy. I bet he got all the chicks. Seriously, though, read about this guy. As the article notes, he really did fucking rule. In summary, Berg's mission was to essentially butter up Heisenberg to see how close the Germans were to making a working fission bomb. If the answer was "close," Berg (in his profession as spy, not catcher) was meant to assassinate the scientist. I do have to wonder why he didn't just do the dirty deed anyway, considering that Heisenberg was, at the time, working for the Nazis, and Berg (despite having part of the physicist's name) was the son of Jewish Ukrainian immigrants to the US. According to some interpretations of quantum theory (of which Heisenberg was a pioneer), there's another universe where he did just that. Probably one where no one at the dinner party had been drinking. 1. People with Antifreeze Poisoning After that last one, this is a bit anticlimactic. Antifreezeactic? Whatever. If someone finds themselves in a situation where they’ve ingested antifreeze or another substance containing ethylene glycol, a drink even more dangerous than rail tequila, alcohol can be used to save their life. Now, look. I don't usually do disclaimers here. But don't take medical advice from a dick joke site. Or from me. Even the article is aware of this: Of course, don’t read this and think if you accidentally chug some car juice, you can head for the liquor cabinet instead of the hospital and sleep it off. Anytime you drink poison, it’s best to have a doctor involved. ...unless that poison is ethanol, naturally. |
You know what's bugged me for a long time? Well, yes, okay, "lots of things." But to keep things related to the topic: Hunting and fishing are two of our oldest occupations. They existed in our evolutionary history long before we were recognizably human, and these occupations are followed today by, for example, cats, as well as many humans, whether for survival, commerce, or recreation. Yes, I know the joke about prostitution being the oldest profession, but the point there is the exchange of goods for services, whereas hunting and fishing provide their own goods, ones you could eat. Or trade to the prostitute. That's not what's bugged me, though. That's just the background. The annoyance is this: in English, one who hunts is called a hunter. Okay, that makes sense and follows the general rules of English. And yet, one who fishes is, traditionally, called a fisherman. So why is that, or, alternatively, why isn't one who hunts called a hunterman? It's a deep linguistic mystery. Now, yes, the language seems to be moving, in its slow plod toward inclusivity, toward "fisher." But that's not my point. My point is that, while both occupations can be and, apparently, were practiced by all genders, we still ended up with "hunter" for anyone who hunts, but "fisherman" for someone who fishes (and "fishwife" for someone who sells the fish, but in that case "wife" meant "woman" and not "married woman," as it used to in Middle English and earlier). As a side note, anthropologists used to assume that in hunter-gatherer societies, it was the men who hunted and the women who gathered. This was an unfortunate projection of then-dominant gender roles upon primitive peoples, which is yet another reason evolutionary psychology is not to be trusted. Turns out, in most cases, everyone participates. Or they don't survive. Anyway. None of this explains why "hunter" also became the name for a shade of green. Apparently, though I don't have a reliable source for this, hunters used to wear that color (which hunters, I don't know; I assume it's ones in the US and/or UK because we're talking about English, here). But by the time "hunter" was used to describe that shade of green, hunters had already started switching to more subdued, camouflage-like colors. As with many words, though, the definition stuck even as the thing it referred to changed. Now you're more likely to see hunters in the US wearing bright orange camouflage—I gather this works because their principal prey, deer, don't have the visual color receptors to distinguish that from green/olive camo, but it does help the hunters to be seen by other hunters, reducing the incidence of hilarious tragedy. |
| "Sorry, we can't hire you. Your natal chart shows Mercury retrograde in Pisces, and Venus square Jupiter, with Neptune ascendant." Deprogramming the Cult of the Workplace Personality Test Introverted, extroverted, thinking or feeling? There’s really only one trait the personality-test industry is ever assigning to you: Gullible AF. Wait, did we forget to actually ask you any questions? That doesn’t matter. Your responses wouldn’t have affected the accuracy of your results, and the $4 billion personality-assessment industry has already decided the outcome for you in any case: As far as it’s concerned, you’re all of the above, your path in life has been determined and there’s not a damn thing you can do to change that. I've been likening that crap to astrology for a while, now. Thing is, yes, in my view, your path in life has been determined... but no one has any way of knowing what it is: no star charts, no genetic assessment, no divine revelation, no personality test, no Tarot reading. The future can go places that the past never dreamed of; you can't change what you can't predict, and if you could, that would lead to paradox. The difference between past and future is this: the past leaves evidence (memories, scars, bloodstains, ash, omelets), and the future does not. As a rough analogy, we've gotten pretty good at predicting the general weather, short-term. While not 100% accurate, most of the time, if it says it's going to rain tonight, it's best to bring an umbrella. This comes from centuries of study, decades of computer modeling, and our very human trait of being able to project past trends into future probabilities. What we can't do, what we will never be able to do, is to predict precisely where and when the first raindrop will hit the ground. And yet, that raindrop was always going to land at that exact location at that precise moment. On being handed his results, John raised an eyebrow at the fact that, according to the test publisher’s blurb at the top, it had color-coded his personality according to the “four humors,” the bodily fluids — yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm — that Ancient Greek medical theory held as responsible for regulating both people’s physical health and the underlying aspects of character, or “temperaments.” As utterly silly as that test is, though (I'd be tempted to believe that the publisher was trolling), it, and other personality tests, don't purport to predict the future. They do, as far as I've heard, claim to predict how someone would react in a given situation—as if that's fixed, independent of other environmental factors, and completely discounting our ability to learn from our mistakes. Did he really want to work for a company where teams were structured according to human-resources thinking from a time when motor function was attributed to animal spirits that roamed through the muscles and lived in the brain? “‘Where’s David?’” says John, mentally sketching a regular day at the office. “‘Oh, he’s in Meeting Room 2 at the moment, with the leeches on him.” Turns out leeches do have some legitimate, though limited, medical use... but it's not because of unbalanced humors. The most well-known hot-take taxonomy of all, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), is famously the product of a homeschooled Philadelphia novelist, Isabel Briggs Myers, feverishly working in the 1940s and 1950s to graft her own notions about personality onto a typology proposed by her intellectual hero, Carl Jung. Let's be fair, here: "homeschooled" is irrelevant. "Philadelphia" is twice as irrelevant. "Novelist" is misleading: Carl Sagan was a novelist, but he was also a brilliant scientist and communicator of nonfiction. That other Carl, Jung, is worthy of study. But the problem there is not any of that, but the "graft her own notions about personality..." which is kind of like when a pharmaceutical company salts their testing results to get the outcome they want, such as "this drug is entirely nonaddictive and totally doesn't cause liver damage." In her jargon, you were either a “thinking” person or a “feeling” person (your nailed-down psyche wasn’t allowed to straddle both), you were either “introverted” or “extroverted” and you went about the world either “sensing” or “intuiting” it, and either rationally “judging” or irrationally “perceiving” things. It is the binary nature of these purported attributes that should be a massive red flag. Most of us do "straddle both" of any opposing qualities. Meanwhile, throughout the long decades since World War II, while this and similar systems have been refined, promoted and steadily entrenched as indispensable weapons of hiring and firing, pretty much the entire community of professional academic psychologists has been quietly coughing into its hand and saying “bullshit.” For reasons, I'm sure, beyond merely the "binary" objection I have; but then, I don't exactly have the qualifications to be an expert on this sort of thing, either. Having grown up on a farm, I can generally smell bullshit, but that doesn't mean I always know where it lies. (I'm pretty damn proud of that "lies" pun, though.) But, as the article points out, actual experts are calling bullshit. In any case, the article may be of interest whether you love, hate, or fall somewhere on the love/hate spectrum with regard to these sorts of assessments. |
| Today is a Sunday, on which it's been my habit, recently, to take another look at random older blog entries. This time, the dice landed on one from just under two years ago: "A Gift Beyond Price, Almost Free" In it, I comment on a New Yorker article from the previous year, which in turn was a book review. The article is still available as of today.Now, usually, I go through and comment on things that have changed, or point out where I embarrassed myself with my comments. For the latter, I will admit to misspelling Rush drummer/lyricist Neil Peart's name in that entry. Apologies, Neil Peart's Ghost. Not that he read my blog even when he was alive. For the former, I don't think much of anything has changed, which only supports my continued refrain in that entry every time the article points out where capitalism is exploitative: we obviously don't really care, because we don't do anything about it. Even back in 2021, when I wrote the entry in question, I'm pretty sure I'd given up on humanity being able to take collective action for its own good. As if continued denial of climate change wasn't enough proof of that, we were in the midst of a pandemic, as you may recall, one which depended on everyone banding together to keep things from getting worse. Instead, a good half of the US decided the measures asked were too much, or that they knew better than experts. You remember that Dr. Seuss book, "Horton Hears a Who?" I barely do, myself, but two things stand out in my memory: First, the titular elephant is trying to save the microscopic universe of Whoville, and faces ridicule because "anything that can't be seen or heard is nonexistent." In reality, rather than a children's book, those naysayers would win, because all it would take would be one of them to mess up everything (I've referred to this as "Lone Asshole Theory," but the truth of it is, in these cases, it's not just one lone asshole, but a whole group of them). And second, focusing instead on the microcosm of Whoville itself, it turns out (spoiler alert) that the only way to save the village is for everyone in the village, without exception, to make enough noise so that the aforementioned macroscopic deniers can hear them. Almost everyone makes noise like it's Purim and the rabbi's about to say the name Haman. Once the last holdout is convinced to scream "Yopp!" (which I'm almost certain is a Walt Whitman allusion), the disbelievers finally obtain the evidence of their own senses. Again, in reality, as opposed to a children's story, about half of Whoville would disbelieve that all the noisemaking is necessary, and a significant number of them would file complaints against their neighbors in the Mayor's office—that is, they would, if they weren't about to be utterly destroyed in an apocalyptic event. Not only that, but as the deniers had already made up their minds, no amount of evidence would ever convince them otherwise. Yes, people have misinterpreted that book for their anti-choice agenda, too. And those people are also part of the problem. Apart from climate change and pandemic denial ("anything that can't be seen or heard is nonexistent"), there was one more instance, after I wrote that blog entry linked above, that reinforced my conviction that we'll never get enough people to agree on a course of action to produce meaningful change, and that was the 2022 World Cup. Going in, we all knew, or should have known, about the host country's use of involuntary labor, housed in foul conditions and worked to the bone, to build the shiny facilities for the event. We had an opportunity, then, to speak on their behalf, to sound our not-so-barbaric Yopp over the roofs of the world. To send a clear message to all the sponsors and advertisers and organizers: "We will not stand for this." But no... we (by which I mean "you," because I did not watch) sitting at home or gathering in sports bars or even attending in person, sent a different message: "Please, go ahead and enslave people, so long as our entertainment is cheap or free." This sort of thing is why urging individual action will never work to solve our problems, or to save the unheard, invisible people. |
| It's a five-year-old article, but what the hell; it's new to me. From GQ: Why Your Brain is Wired for Pessimism—and What You Can Do to Fix It We’ve evolved to expect the worst. Dr. Martin Seligman, a psychologist, explains why—and what you can do to get some optimism back. Why in the ever-loving shit would I want to fix what ain't broken? How can I get back what I never had? And most of all, am I going to have to once again rage against the misuse of evolutionary psychology in articles? And why do I bother with GQ if I know I'm going to rant about it? Okay, that one I can answer: because it's fun. Ever had someone tell you to just cheer up? Did it drive you crazy? Well, turns out that someone telling you to “be happy” isn’t just annoying—it’s also wildly unhelpful. It's especially unhelpful for people with clinical depression. Seligman compares being happy to falling asleep: it’s not something you can actively do—in the way you can get stronger by lifting more weights. It just kind of has to happen. Okay, sure, but unless you're tired past the point of exhaustion, the way to fall asleep is to get into a comfortable position and pretend to sleep until, at some point, you either fall asleep or say "screw this" and go play a video game. My point is that in order to sleep, we usually first have to act like we're asleep. In that analogy, we'd have to pretend to be happy in order to be happy. So, do you still want to compare being happy to falling asleep? Now, yes, I've said in here at least a dozen times that happiness isn't a goal, but a byproduct. So, sure, I don't completely disagree with that premise; I just had to nitpick the analogy. And as the father of positive psychology—the study what makes a good or meaningful life—much of Seligman’s work has dealt with trying to help people figure how to make it happen. Hurk. “Half the world is on the low positive affective spectrum,” he says referring to positive affectivity, a trait that usually correlates with sunnier dispositions. “I'm part of it, and a lot of the justification for what I work on, and what I write, is to try to help half the world, who is not naturally positive affective, to be more positive and optimistic.” WHY?! OH GODS WHY?!!! What if... what if the only people who benefit from someone being mindlessly optimistic are 1) those around them who don't have to deal with someone's annoying pessimism and 2) our overlords, who will more easily control a populace who believes the best will happen? What he has learned is that well-being can be broken into five elements: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (PERMA). Boy, shrinks love their mnemonic acronyms. Why does it seem like we are wired for pessimism? The species that [was] going through the Ice Ages had been bred, and selected, through pessimism. Not only is that abysmally terrible evo-psych, but it's easily falsifiable terrible evo-psych. Not that I've disproven it, mind you; but consider: not all of humanity was directly affected by an ice age. Many populations were equatorial or near-equatorial. Are their descendants happier today, controlling for all other variables? But the main reason why it's horrible evo-psych is that, as usual, it assumes that the only evolution that mattered to us started with humans, instead of us having ancestors dating back to the dawn of life, each of which contributed factors to evolution. So is this at odds with something like mindfulness, which argues you should be present in the moment? If you're focusing on optimism, you're also sort of missing the present moment, right? Well, I think, if you look at what people are doing, and what you're doing right now when we're talking, you're prospecting into the future. But if positive psychology is at odds with mindfulness, and I also despise mindfulness, oh no! Cognitive dissonance! Wait, no, I've got it—I can hate both. I've read a few people have said that you might be better off cultivating a sort of non-attachment to well-being: be mindful that a lot of life is going to be suffering, and if you can find contentment in that, you might be better off than seeking out happiness. I think the good thing about meditation—mindfulness, concentrating on the present, detaching—is as good anti-anxiety, anti-anger tools. "A few people have said," interviewer? A few people? You do know that that's Buddhism, one of the most widespread spiritual practices in the world, don't you? Of all the things you've studied, or learned, is there one idea you constantly find yourself encountering most frequently? I think it's hope. Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cageI do believe in hope. I'll leave off quoting the article and explain that now. So, let me simplify things, but with a simplification that can easily be extended to our more complex lives: You have two possible outcomes, A and B. Maybe they have predefined probabilities, like drawing a certain card from a shoe in blackjack, or maybe not, but it doesn't matter. Let's say you label A bad and B good, or at least less bad. From what I understand of positive psychology, it tells us that you should believe that B will happen. You should manifest that B will happen. But then if A happens, which it still might because no amount of manifesting will change the fact that it can happen, you're crushed, devastated, forlorn, lost. Whereas if A happens, you might feel a fleeting jolt of accomplishment, serotonin momentarily coursing through your neural network, and then it's gone. On the other hand... if you convince yourself that A will happen, if you predict A, if you act as if A were the only way that the universe could possibly work... when A happens, you're not nearly as devastated, because you expected it. Whereas if B happens, you're not just experiencing fleeting pleasure, but absolute joy. In other words, being pessimistic, seemingly paradoxically, must lead to greater overall happiness. But that's probably only true if you still hold out some hope that B might occur; and that's what I mean by "I do believe in hope." This philosophy is most usually expressed by "expect the worst, but hope for the best." No, I'm not deliriously happy all the time. But I have something I consider far more valuable: contentment. I may not be where I envisioned myself when I was younger, but I'm doing okay. And that's the real trap of optimism: you think you can always do better, so you strive, you make changes, you expect things to improve, and then you're discontented when they don't. You're disappointed that you don't have what you want, instead of being satisfied with wanting what you have. Or hell, I don't know. Maybe optimism works for you. I'm not judging. I only take issue with the idea that everyone should strive for some nebulous, glorious state of "happiness" at all times. Incidentally, this is not the last GQ article in my queue. And the other? Well, it's even worse... |
Of all the weird, strange, or just plain incomprehensible names for colors, "navy" stands out as one that almost makes actual sense... from a certain point of view. Under certain ideal conditions, the ocean appears that deep, dark blue color, for reasons I can't be arsed to go into right now but you're right; it does involve physics. But our word, navy, comes from a Latin word that referred more to ships than the ocean. Still, you know, you can't have a ship without something to float it in. Which reminds me that another word from the Latin navis is navigate, whose meaning should be limited to finding one's way around on a body of water. But, naturally, it's not, because we're pretty good at making new meanings for old words, and new words for old meanings. Take, for example, space. Thanks to years and years of science fiction, we know what a vessel that carries things around in space is: a spaceship. And again, that makes sense from a certain point of view. But the harsh reality is that if we do get to the point where we have spacecraft transporting people or things around out there, the vessels will have far more in common with a submarine than they do with a ship. And, by naval convention, submarines are always boats, not ships. "Spaceboat" just doesn't have the same ring to it, though, does it? Don't ask me to define the difference between boats and ships further. My dad was a sailor, and I never fully understood the distinction he made, when he bothered to make one. Near as I can tell, a boat goes out from port or ship and returns to the same port or ship, while a ship carries cargo and/or passengers from one port to another (hence the verb "to ship," which also refers to sending parcels by road or rail). But by that definition, a ferryboat should be a ship, but it's not (I sidestep this by calling it a "ferry"). A ship can carry a boat, but a boat can't carry a ship, though a tugboat can push a ship, despite "tug" having the connotation of "pull." Anyway. The other thing we get from science fiction is the use, in spaceships, of a "navigator," like on the original Enterprise. Properly, this should be "astrogator," but that would just lead to alligator puns (though some SF does use this term), so probably best to repurpose the word. And don't get me started on the etymology of "bridge," as in a spaceship's control room, which takes its origin from Mississippi River steamboats... dammit, I said don't get me started. Still, sometimes it bugs me that landlubber GPS uses "navigation." I mean, we want fewer people not paying attention and driving their cars into lakes, right? But again, there's not much to choose from in terms of better words. "Orienteering" is the process of finding one's way around on land, but that doesn't really work in cars or trucks, does it? So we're stuck with navigation. But even that makes more sense than calling a web browser a "navigator." Which you don't see much these days in English, but one early web browser was Netscape Navigator. And the French word for browser is "navigateur." This wouldn't bother me so much if the defining metaphor of the Internet weren't a spiderweb, rather than an ocean. You could say all the contradictions give me the blues. |
| I've been saying that every cliché started out as profound insight. Before They Were Cliches: On the Origins of 8 Worn Out Idioms Erin McCarthy and the Team at Mental Floss Examine Some Famous Phrases While they call out Mental Floss, the above link is from LitHub. Worn-out phrases can make a reader roll their eyes, or worse—give up on a book altogether. "Roll their eyes" is itself a cliché. Clichés are viewed as a sign of lazy writing, but they didn’t get to be that way overnight; many modern clichés read as fresh and evocative when they first appeared in print... Which is what I've been trying to say. But of course, many clichés are tired and worn-out, but they have to be used sometimes, or else how will people know when you subvert them or make a joke out of them? Add Insult to Injury The concept of adding insult to injury is at the heart of the fable “The Bald Man and the Fly.” In this story—which is alternately credited to the Greek fabulist Aesop or the Roman fabulist Phaedrus... Look, if anything's that old and passed into cultural mythology, it's not a cliché; it's an allusion. Or just part of the language, like a word, only it's a phrase. Like "part and parcel" or "cease and desist." Though no one knew the origin of this phrase. Except us, now. Albatross Around Your Neck If you studied the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in English class... We skipped that one, and I still haven't read it, but I haven't seen this phrase used enough to consider it cliché. Also, it's an allusion, too. Forever and a Day This exaggerated way of saying “a really long time” would have been considered poetic in the sixteenth century. My nitpicky mind always thinks "but when time runs out, we have no way of knowing the length of a day." Happily Ever After This cliché ending line to countless fairy tales originated with The Decameron, penned by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century. Okay, look, no. Used at the end of a fairy tale, it's not a cliché; it's a formula, the flip side of opening it with "Once upon a time." Other languages use different formulae. You might as well claim that "amen" at the end of a prayer is a cliché. It Was a Dark and Stormy Night Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford opens with “It was a dark and stormy night.” Oh, come ON. I thought this list was about overused phrases that were fresh and wondrous in the beginning, but this infamous story-opener was widely hailed as "bad" from the get-go. That's why it makes great comedy material. There are a few more, but I'll be honest, here: Yesterday, I finally broke down and purchased Baldur's Gate 3. And I'm in a hurry to get back to gaming. So feel free to see for yourself; I don't have the same sort of commentary on the others, anyway. |
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