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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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| I really like ghost pepper. I am, however, not a complete idiot. Usually. The ghost pepper, also known as bhut jolokia, is one of the hottest chilies in existence. It scores more than one million on the Scoville heat scale, which should tell you... well, not much of anything because spiciness can’t actually be measured using numerical units. So just picture the spiciest chili you can imagine, and we’ll say this is way hotter. There are supposedly hotter chili peppers, such as the Carolina Reaper. When I tell people I like ghost pepper, they inevitably bring that up, so I'm getting that out of the way. Look. It's not the "heat" that makes me enjoy ghost peppers. I'm not chasing some bragging rights or trying to prove that I have balls. Even if I was ever tempted to play the macho "who can eat the hottest pepper" game or whatever, I'm way too old for that now. It's just that, in small quantities, ghost pepper adds a nice tingly touch to a lot of different foods. And drinks. Hell, I've even had a ghost pepper IPA. I don't normally like IPAs, but this one was good. Because of the pepper. It was the product of a brewery / barbecue restaurant in Tonopah, Nevada (I don't know if it's still there), and one thing ghost pepper is excellent with is barbecue. A little bit of it is like kittens purring in your mouth. Too much, and the claws and teeth come out. Anyway, the point is, I do like spicy food, but not enough to actually eat a ghost pepper like a complete and utter moron. All of which brings us to our story about a ghost pepper challenge at a California restaurant in 2016. "Challenge" = "Dick measuring contest." Our 47-year-old hero, whom the Journal of Emergency Medicine does not identify by name when documenting this incident, came to the restaurant and ordered their ghost pepper burger. So, just a little bit younger than I was at the time. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure 2016 was the year I had the ghost pepper IPA in Nevada. Not sure about that, though; these things tend to blend together. This was not a normal menu dish but part of a contest, as the restaurant believed that most customers would not be able to stomach bhut jolokia pureed over a hamburger patty. However, our hero did down the burger. It's also good on burgers. Again... in small quantities. What you have to do is use a ghost pepper sauce that dilutes it enough so that you can spread it very thinly on the patty, thus capturing the taste without setting your face on fire. His mouth burned afterward, and he chugged six glasses of water, which was expected. Now, one doesn't become a spicy food eater without, occasionally, overdoing it. It's been a while, but there's one thing I remember: water isn't going to help.  He then threw up, which was again something the restaurant likely anticipated. Hot chilis are hot because of an alkaline compound in them. Stomachs are stomachs because there's an acid in them. When acid meets alkaline, they neutralize... sometimes explosively (science fair volcano, e.g.). Plus, enough pain will make you ralph. But after that, he felt chest pains so severe that he needed to go to the emergency room. This is not a normal reaction to eating hot peppers. At times, you may have felt like you’ve thrown up so hard that you shredded your throat. But once doctors examined this guy, they discovered that he actually had torn a hole right through his esophagus — a rip about one-inch long. And I won't be pasting the other gory details here. We’re not calling a slashed gullet the certain result of eating spicy food, but we think the message here is clear: When you inevitably attempt a ghost pepper challenge yourself, be sure to slurp a cool milkshake between every bite. That's not a bad plan. Beer, incidentally, as wonderful as it is, doesn't do much to mitigate capsaicin overdoses. But you know what a better plan is? Don't fucking do stupid triple-dog-dare hot pepper challenges. |
| Today's article is from way back in 2017, but I doubt that matters. I'm guessing that's easier said than done. In 1995, a wounded 35-year-old woman named Anat Ben-Tov gave an interview from her hospital room in Tel Aviv. She had just survived her second bus bombing in less than a year. “I have no luck, or I have all the luck,” she told reporters. “I’m not sure which it is.” Well, I'd say it's luckier to never be bombed at all. I've never been bombed, though, and I don't consider that any luckier than, say, never having been bitten by a rabid coyote. Then there was Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the guy who happened to be in Hiroshima on... you know, that day. He suffered injuries from... you know, that thing, but he survived. The next day, he was even able to return home. "Home," for him, was Nagasaki. And, well... you know. He survived that one, too, but he did have lifelong problems related to radiation, and eventually died. In 2010, at the age of 93. Hell, my father didn't make it to 93, and he wasn't anywhere near Japan when the bombs fell. So... lucky? Unlucky? Well, I guess that depends on your perspective. Which is what this article is all about. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. The news story caught the eyes of Norwegian psychologist Karl Halvor Teigen, now an emeritus professor at the University of Oslo. He had been combing through newspapers to glean insights into what people consider lucky and unlucky. Over the following years, he and other psychologists, along with economists and statisticians, would come to understand that while people often think of luck as random chance or a supernatural force, it is better described as subjective interpretation. Getting hit by lightning is a low-probability event (assuming you're not flying a kite during a thunderstorm), and is generally considered unlucky. Winning a lottery jackpot is an even lower-probability event that is generally considered lucky, at least until you realize you're constantly going to be vultured by scammers and "relatives." Neither of those are supernatural forces, despite how lightning was viewed for most of human history. So again, it's a matter of perspective: does the low-probability event help your life, or harm it? If the former, then it's "lucky." If the latter, then "unlucky." But of course, sometimes things that at first seem unlucky turn out to be pretty lucky. Like if you get hit by lightning, survive, and then meet a woman in the hospital who then becomes the love of your life. But then, naturally, she divorces you and takes the house, the car, and your bourbon stash. So maybe it wasn't so lucky after all. Psychology studies have found that whether you identify yourself as lucky or unlucky, regardless of your actual lot in life, says a lot about your worldview, well-being, and even brain functions. It turns out that believing you are lucky is a kind of magical thinking—not magical in the sense of Lady Luck or leprechauns. A belief in luck can lead to a virtuous cycle of thought and action. That's not really what I think of when I hear "magical thinking," but okay, I can run with it. On the other hand, feeling unlucky could lead to a vicious cycle likely to generate unlucky outcomes. Psychologist John Maltby of the University of Leicester hypothesized that beliefs in being unlucky are associated with lower executive functioning—the ability to plan, organize, and attend to tasks or goals. This is all getting perilously close to that "positive attitude" bullshit I keep railing against. He offers a simple example of running out of ink in the middle of a print job. “The lucky person will have got a spare cartridge just in case because they have planned ahead. When the cartridge runs out they’ll say, ‘Oh, aren’t I lucky, I bought one earlier, that’’ fantastic,’ ” Maltby says. “However, the unlucky person won’t have planned ahead, won’t have done the cognitive processes, so when the printer cartridge runs out and they’re left with something to print, they go, ‘Oh, I’m so unlucky.’ ” Or, if you're me, you congratulate yourself on having planned ahead for such a goddamned predictable occurrence. Like when I hit a deer in South Dakota last year. There were some things I considered lucky that day, not least of which being that it happened within sight of a service station, but even if it had been in the middle of nowhere, I had had the foresight to have insurance and roadside assistance lined up in the event of an emergency. That bit's not luck; it's planning. While personality and gender seem to play a role, random events could also kick-start a virtuous lucky cycle or a vicious unlucky cycle. Economist Alan Kirman of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris realized this could be the case when he worked in an office with relatively few parking places nearby. One guy on his team always seemed to get lucky with parking spots close to the office, while another always had to park far away and walk. To figure out why, the team created a simple game-theory model to simulate the situation. It revealed that if would-be parkers happened to find spots near work early on, they continued to search in a narrow radius in the following days. If they didn’t find spots near work early on, they began to search in a wider radius. Guess who had lucky streaks when it came to finding spots near work? The ones who were actually looking for them. Again, that sounds to me like simple planning. Wait, someone found a parking spot in Paris? Sorry, no, now I believe in miracles all of a sudden. Of course, believing in your own good luck isn’t always a good thing. In gambling, for example, lucky streaks are never what they seem. In gambling, only the house gets lucky in the long run. But again, that's not luck; that's the ability to calculate probabilities and set payouts accordingly. Here's what I felt was the most important bit, though: The key to deciding whether an event is lucky or unlucky is the comparison you make between the actual event and the “counterfactual” alternative you’re imagining, Teigen says. The people asking “Why me?” are making an upward comparison to other people who weren’t assaulted or who avoided an accident. The people who feel lucky to have survived are comparing themselves downwardly to people who had a worse fate. Both are valid interpretations, but the downward comparison helps you to hold on to optimism, summon the feel-good emotion of gratitude, and to weave a larger narrative in which you are the lucky protagonist of your life story. I don't think this is in accordance with the article, but my default mode of hopeful pessimism serves me really well there. See, if I expect the worst, and the worst doesn't happen (which is most of the time), then I automatically feel lucky. Like, to use another gambling example, if I'm playing blackjack and I'm showing 18, and the dealer's got a 10 up, my assumption is she's going to turn a 10 or a 9. Then when she turns an 8 (for the push), I consider that to be good luck. If it's a 7, then it's excellent luck. Like any gambler, I still lose in the long run, but for that particular hand it feels damn good if I'm wrong. And if I'm right, I get that pleasure, too. When times are tough, it might seem frivolous to cultivate a belief in luck. But that belief, psychologists say, can cast a spell that heals our wounds and gives us another shot at success, whether we’ve survived a bombing or just been on a bad date. And I say luck is no substitute for planning. That's why engineers design redundancies into things. And it's why I try to avoid major cities during wars. |
| I know I've linked stuff like this in here before, but it's been a while, and not this particular article. Can money buy happiness? Depends on how you spend it. Contrary to popular research, people with more money are happier, but it’s their spending habits, not their account balances, that move the dial. Personally, I don't care if money can buy happiness or not. Happiness isn't, or shouldn't be, the goal. Staying out of misery is a worthwhile goal, and money can absolutely do that. Happiness is a loving family, a good meal, and an annual salary of $75,000. At least, that’s been the popular wisdom since Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton published their 2010 study looking at money’s relationship to well-being. The two psychologists reportedly found that people’s happiness increases until their annual income reaches $75,000, at which point it plateaus. Given that this was 2010, the threshold is probably up to $100K now. If the study had any merit, which is highly questionable. And also considering that one shouldn't conflate income and wealth. Like the Milgram experiments, the Stanford prison experiments, and the marshmallow test before it, Kahneman and Deaton’s study is one of few to explode into the mainstream. It has been cited in books, on TV shows, and across social media. CEOs set employee wages to match the findings. And smirking aunts everywhere dragged out the figure to prove that “See, money doesn’t buy you happiness.” And like all those quoted studies, it has issues. Also, "CEOs set employee wages to match the findings," but, remarkably, the link there only talks about one single CEO who did that. To his credit, he also lowered his own salary to that level. But before you start singing his praises, you may want to look into this a bit further. But like those other experiments, the popular perception of the research is wrong. Can money buy happiness? No, your aunt is right about that one. But it can facilitate happiness if you spend it thoughtfully. See, part of the problem here is the way it's phrased: "Money can't buy happiness." That's because once you spend it, you no longer have it. Money, in fact, is happiness. Just to give one example: Say you're working at a shit job because you need to live and eat and such. Well, what if you got a windfall? Sure, you can keep working. But now you're working knowing that, at any moment, you can up and walk away. That may not fit some peoples' definition of happiness, but it's a hell of a lot less stress. The article goes on to describe someone who did a different study about the income/happiness crap: His data showed no obvious plateau at which point money stopped mattering. Happiness rose alongside income all the way up. I still have issues with how "happiness" is measured. As the article notes, there's at least two kinds: momentary fleeting pleasure, and general life satisfaction. It's all very subjective. “When you have money, you have options, and that can manifest in different ways,” Killingsworth told CNBC. “Do you buy organic raspberries at the grocery store? Can you quit the job you don’t enjoy, or do you hang on because you can’t afford to be unemployed? … Do you end a relationship with someone that you’re financially entangled with?” Options. I can see how having the ability to make different choices can contribute to satisfaction. And money is one way to be able to do that. Money is a medium of exchange after all. It merely stands in for the things, services, and experiences we purchase with it. So when discussing money and happiness, the question isn’t only how much you have. It’s also how you use it. This tracks. It's obvious that most people wouldn't want to deliberately spend money on things that make them unhappy. What may not be so obvious is that, often, the things you think will make you happy, won't. Like that new iPhone, or an art thing that you just have to have. Those are both destined for the dumpster at some point in the future, when something newer and shinier grabs your interest. If you spend your money on the things, experiences, and necessities that move your happiness dial, then your money will make your life happier. Not perfect. Not blissful. But happier. If you don’t, then your spending habits can actively work against your well-being and life satisfaction. Let's be clear, though: spending on necessities shouldn't be a part of that equation. I think the whole thrust of the studies quoted here is: how much does extra income affect happiness once necessities are taken care of? Another way money facilitates happiness is by bankrolling experiences. People tend to think of money as a way to purchase things, but the joy things provide has a fast half-life. You think that couch is exactly what you need to finally have the living room of your dreams. A few months later, it’s just another thing to sit on. Like I said. One reason for this, Norton points out, is that we tend to buy things for ourselves, but we share experiences with others. I started to snark on this bit, because it seems to exclude introverts. But then I realized: even if I'm not sharing my experiences—road trips, movies, beer festivals, whatever—with someone else in the moment, I do come in here and talk about them (most of the time). That's sharing experiences with others, too. “Even casual interactions with other people make us happier than sitting by ourselves in a room. So experiences are more interesting and all those things, but they also actually kind of serve to commit us to spending time with other people,” Norton said. And that's true even for me. Bartenders are cheaper than therapy. Finally, the more people use their money to give to others, the happier they tend to be. In their research, Dunn and Norton gave participants money to spend in a day. They instructed some participants to spend it on themselves and others to spend it on other people. They found that the charitable groups had a much happier day. Oh, sure, if you're using someone else's money. Look, I'm not knocking the act of giving. I've noticed it does provide an endorphin rush, up to a point, and that point is when it starts affecting your own ability to pay for stuff. If you're playing with free money, of course giving it away is going to feel good for most people. So anyway, I wouldn't put too much stock in this article or the studies behind it. I still firmly believe that "money can't buy happiness" is propaganda to make people feel better about being economically disadvantaged: "I may not have a luxury apartment or a swimming pool or a couple million in the bank, but at least I'm happy!" If I had to choose only one, money or happiness—I'd pick money. Every. Single. Time. Happiness can't buy beer. |
| On December 14, 2019, I wrote a blog entry. It wasn't a big deal at the time, just my default: commentary on something I found on the internet. What I didn't know, didn't plan on at the time, was that it would be the first in what is, as of today, a three-year streak of daily blog entries. I also couldn't have known that, a mere three months later, shit would change because of a global pandemic. I almost certainly wouldn't have this streak if it weren't for that; I had travel plans. In truth, I'd rather have been able to do the travel plans. I still want to visit Belgium, dammit. It's been put off due to travel restrictions, crappy airline service, and World War III. To that end, I have another streak going: over 1200 days on Duolingo. Which, if you do the math, is longer than my daily blog entry streak. I'm very close to being done with the French course, which absolutely doesn't mean I'm fluent in French, though I certainly know more than I did three years ago. I might try Dutch again. Learning two languages at once proved difficult for me, and Dutch is similar enough to English to confuse me. But it's one of the other languages they speak in Belgium. Yeah, I know, lots of people speak English there as well, but this way I might have some idea if someone's insulting me in a different language. My progress is slow, I know. But that's what I get for waiting until my 50s to try to learn something new. Lots of people my age don't even bother. At least I found out that I could do something daily. About the only thing I could do on a daily basis, before this, is breathe. Even eating didn't happen every day. The breathing thing was questionable there for a while, too, but I managed to keep doing it. So, am I going to keep the streak going? Well, I'm not going to deliberately break it at this point. If I do manage to go abroad, I might not have the means. I'll be okay with that, because at least I'll be traveling. Then there's always the chance of the unexpected: no internet access, computer craps out, I get injured or get sick or die, that sort of thing. You'll know that one of those happened because I won't announce it in here beforehand. Tomorrow I'll have another article to comment on, but today I just wanted to reflect on what is, to me, a mighty achievement. |
| I don't have a lot to say about today's article, but it ties in with some other entries I've made; specifically, about the question of mind-body duality—or lack thereof. The Gut Microbiome Helps Social Skills Develop in the Brain New research in fish suggests that gut microbes can have a crucial early influence on the brain’s social development. There are some things that are a bit problematic, but I'll get to that. Two recent papers have shown that during a critical early period of brain development, the gut’s microbiome — the assortment of bacteria that grow within in[sic] it — helps to mold a brain system that’s important for social skills later in life. One thing I've come to appreciate about Quanta: they don't usually bury the lede. The occasional typo, I can understand. Happens to all of us. Scientists found this influence in fish, but molecular and neurological evidence plausibly suggests that some form of it could also occur in mammals, including humans. So take it as a preliminary result, not settled science. If you corner someone at a holiday party and go, "You know, your gut microbiome has an effect on your social skills," a) you'd be jumping the gun and b) you'd better get your microbiome checked out, because your social skills suck. In a paper published in early November in PLOS Biology, researchers found that zebra fish who grew up lacking a gut microbiome were far less social than their peers with colonized colons... Snort. ...and the structure of their brains reflected the difference. I mean, that's a big deal from what I can tell. I've suspected a connection between gut health and mental health for a long time (my mom had problems with both). Again, maybe or maybe not applicable to humans, but seeing a physical difference in the brain because of something in the intestines—something that's even a different genome—I can't help but think is an important finding. In recent decades, scientists have come to understand that the gut and the brain have powerful mutual influences. Certain types of intestinal ulcers, for example, have been linked to worsening symptoms in people with Parkinson’s disease. And clinicians have long known that gastrointestinal disorders are more common in people who also have neurodevelopmental disorders, such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. This is the problematic part. Autism isn't necessarily a "disorder," no matter what the DSM might have to say about it. But whatever the label, the important thing is the potential link between microbiome and behavior. How these anatomically separate organs exert their effects, however, is far less clear. Finding a correlation is one thing. Figuring out the mechanism is quite another, and it sounds like they haven't done much yet in that regard. There's some discussion of possible future studies later in the text. Again, though, mostly I just saved this to link because it hints at some deeper truth about the physical and the mental, especially in terms of those microbes that are just as much a part of us as our own cells. |
| When I pull the levers on the Wayback Machine, I exclude any entries from the last 12 months. Today's revisit is, however, from last year; specifically, July, after my cross-country trip was cut tragically short by a deer. Well, tragically for the deer; for me it was part minor inconvenience, part disappointment, and part unexpected adventure. "Deep Dive" This was a response to a then-current prompt from "JAFBG" [XGC], one of the blogging activities around here that I sometimes do. It encourages rants, and I like to rant, so, big wins all around.The entry my random number generator landed on was not, however, particularly ranty, just some discussion from a prompt about comfort zones. It's also recent enough that I don't think I've changed much as a person since then, and I mostly remember the context. But I still have some things to expand on. Every time I travel, I step outside my comfort zone (which is about a three-mile radius centered on my house). Oh, sure, there are times I can step back in, even when traveling. Most of the time, I feel at home in a brewery or brewpub. Yesterday, I went to a beer festival. I always loved beer festivals, where a bunch of different brewers set up tables with, usually, 2-4 taps of their product. There weren't any of those for over 2 years. This particular one was kinda expensive, and only had ten vendors, including one vineyard, one cidery, and one sake brewery. Yes, we have a sake brewery here, one of the few in the US, and it's a good one. The one advantage of having so few producers represented is that I was able to try one of everything. Of course, by the time I was done, I was pretty lit. I barely remember the Uber trip home. Point being, I was well within my comfort zone. My near-visioin is still pretty clear, so often, what I'll do is take a picture of the taps or the bottles with my phone, and hold the phone up close to my face to read the words. I find it somewhat amusing that I typo'd "vision" in that sentence. At the time, I was using prescription reading glasses to type, ones that also accounted for the cataracts I had at the time. They weren't perfect. Pretty sure that's not the only typo I made in that period. I don't think I misspell things very often, so when I do, it's somewhat embarrassing. Speaking of comfort zones, I've lived most of my life with near-perfect vision, with only a slight astigmatism to deal with -- this was only a real impediment to stargazing, and I never even noticed it in my daily life. Later in life, I learned to deal with needing reading glasses for computer work and books. Now, in the space of two years, I've gone from near-perfect distance vision to not being able to read beer taps from across the bar. That's uncomfortable, and I don't like it. I don't remember if I noted this at the time: when I went in for a cataract surgery consultation last year, the ophthalmologist went over some different options for replacement lenses. The cheap ones, the ones insurance covered, would be the kind that only worked for distance vision; I'd need glasses for anything closer. There was also an option not covered by insurance that worked for both near and far. But, as he explained, the side effect would be a halo/starburst effect around light sources at night. "Usually that's only a problem if your hobby is astronomy," he said. Well, you know me. Astronomy is one of my hobbies. Still, balancing that with its benefits, I opted (pun intended) for the fancy ones. The surgery was almost a year ago, now. Indeed, lights (and stars and planets and the moon) have a halo/starburst effect. Worth it for not needing glasses. As it was in my younger days, I can switch from reading a screen to watching a far-away cloud, both with roughly equal clarity. Sorcery. My vision with the upscale lenses isn't perfect, but it's good enough, and definitely better than having cataracts. So, would I dive into a dive again? Sure. But I think the real question is, "Would you step out of your comfort zone again?" And the answer to that is still yes. At least, yes, once I buy a car again, which I might just put off until after cataract surgery. Which itself is so far out of my comfort zone that it might as well be on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, and an experience that, once I have it, I doubt I'll be in any hurry to repeat. So, as I noted in here, I did indeed buy another car—though not until this past October. Not because of vision, but because availability was low and prices were high. I feel another road trip coming on, too. Difficulty: possibility of winter weather. We'll see. It'd be another affront to my comfort zone, but at least the car is comfortable. |
| Most marketing is about convincing us to buy stuff we don't need. The ugly story of how corporate America convinced us to spend so much on water We’re being packaged and sold a bottle/can/box of lies on water. Water, however, is one of the few things that we legitimately need. Every now and again I catch an ad for miracle spring water, which promises to cure everything from laryngitis to debt. Pretty sure it does the exact opposite of curing debt. Except for the vendor. It’s fairly obviously a scam seeking to separate people from their hard-earned money. Then again, the same goes for the plastic water bottles people buy at the convenience store every day, or the box of water or can of water that promises to be more environmentally friendly but isn’t especially. "Fairly," my ass. While one could make a case that water cures some things (notably dehydration), that kind of claim is way over the top. If you live in the United States, chances are that the water coming from your faucet is perfectly fine to drink (though there are, of course, some exceptions). It's also often bottled and marketed as "fresh spring water." “We’ve gotten here, step by step, down a dangerous road of converting a public resource into a private commodity,” said Peter Gleick, a scientist and expert on global water and climate and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a research institution focused on water. “Water utilities don’t have advertising budgets; private companies do.” As the author notes, tap water is usually, but not always, just fine. There are some good reasons for bottled water to exist: getting through the occasional municipal supply problem; being on the road and not having access to a tap; living in the American Southwest; that sort of thing. It's not the existence of packaged water I have a problem with; it's that, most places, it costs way too much. In an economic system where virtually everything can be packaged and sold, of course we’re going to fall for it on water, just like we do everything else. I don't remember who it was that spoofed the bottled water trend with canned air marketing. I think it was Mel Brooks. It started to be introduced through imports such as Perrier in the 1970s, explained Gary Hemphill, managing director of research at the Beverage Marketing Corporation, and was facilitated by the proliferation of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the material plastic water bottles are made of. As I recall, Perrier at least was sold in glass bottles (I have no idea if it still is), and had the advantage of being slightly effervescent, which you don't usually get with tap water. I also recall that people laughed about another brand of bottled water, Evian. "It's naïve spelled backwards!" they chuckle. Then, pretty recently, I learned that one of the words for sink in French is évier. Evian, it turns out, is an actual French company. I absolutely wouldn't put it past them to laugh Frenchily at their cleverness in putting an English possessive suffix on it to sell to gullible and monolingual Americans. Companies have a litany of tactics — and cash — to get people to buy, buy, buy. They position bottled water as a healthier alternative to sodas (which it is) and to tap water (which it often is not). They try to entice people with sleek imagery and promises of purity, positioning the packaging as sporty or sexy or extra-healthy or whatever the brand’s schtick is. I mean, that's what marketing is. You could sell surströmming by the truckload if your ads featured attractive young people doing outdoor activities and making flirty glances at each other while slurping the disgusting stuff. Moreso if one of them is a celebrity. There’s a convenience component here, too. If you’re out and about, it’s really easy to pick up a bottle of water from the store around the corner. I'm all about convenience. It's still way overpriced for that. Sometimes when I'm traveling I'll find bottled water that costs less than soda. But not everywhere. What’s more, there are no guarantees that the bottled water you’re drinking is actually safer. Sometimes it’s not, nor is it as tightly regulated as what’s coming out of the tap. There are some water trends that can genuinely make you sick. I didn't click the hyperlink provided for the last phrase there, but I do remember some bullshit a few years back about how wonderful "raw water" is for you. I think the hype finally died off after some of its drinkers did. Water has been turned into a highly commercial endeavor, and there are no easy answers on how to roll that back. A step in the right direction is to try to restore people’s faith in the water coming out of their faucet — a faith that’s, rightfully, been eroded over the years. “The first approach that needs to be taken is making it so people know that their water is safe to drink, that’s the first behavioral bias that we have to get across,” Donworth said. That means water utilities and state and local officials need to get the message out better. Municipal water systems are generally run by civil engineers. Civil engineers, as a whole, suck at marketing. It also entails spending on infrastructure. Which means taxes. People would rather spend $100 for $1 worth of water than pay an additional $1 in taxes. Anyway, yes, I sometimes drink bottled water. But beer is usually made from the municipal supply, so it's good enough for me. |
| Ugh. How to change your self-limiting beliefs Let Descartes, Kant and other philosophers help you view the world through a more positive filter and you’ll bloom I Kant even. Dammit. I was doing so well, and then I had to go and make a Kant pun. And I was so sure I could refrain. So much for positivity. Have you ever decided not to go for that job promotion because you believe you’re not qualified enough? Have you ever considered that maybe you're not qualified enough? Or avoided asking a neighbour for help because you feel you’d be a nuisance? Or because he has a shotgun? Or taken your failure to get what you wanted as confirmation that, yes, your hunch that it was never going to work out was obviously correct? Feels good to be right, doesn't it? Philosophy and coaching are a perfect – and underexplored – partnership. [citation needed] In fact, you can and should change the beliefs that hold you back. Doing so will make your life go better. Assertion without evidence. One thing it will do, though, is stop making other people uncomfortable around you. Being a pessimist is kind of like making puns: it's only amusing to the pessimist or punster; everyone else wants to get away. Source: me, a pessimist punster. What one person views as a job for which she’s underqualified and therefore should not apply, another views as an opportunity that it would be daft not to go for – because, who knows, it might all work out. Or it might not and you can end up worse off than you were before. "But at least you tried!" "Yeah, but now I'm broke." When it comes to finding and digging up problematic foundational beliefs, dusting them off, and holding them up to the light for a closer look, philosophers are old hands. It’s at the core of what we do. This process is vividly illustrated in the writing of Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher. In his essay Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), it occurs to him that everything he knows might turn out to be false, since it’s based on information that initially came to him through his senses, and our senses can sometimes deceive us. He set about rejecting absolutely everything he thought he knew, with the aim of allowing back in only those beliefs that he could be absolutely certain are not mistaken. Eventually – and famously – he arrives at one undeniable truth: that he exists. ‘I think, therefore I am’ expresses Descartes’s observation that, as long as he has thoughts, he can be sure that he exists. Not going to argue that one, but extending that to being absolutely sure of anything else is kinda shaky. (I will note, as an aside, that when mathematics was re-examined from first principles, Descartes' assertion was essentially the first principle.) None of us perceives the world as it ‘really is’. The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between noumena (things-in-themselves) and phenomena (things as they appear to observers). We can never know noumena, according to Kant; we can know only phenomena. I just want to take this opportunity to point out that just because a philosopher says something, that doesn't mean it's true. It's possible to build entire edifices of logic on false premises. In this case, if "we can never know noumena," it stands to reason that it doesn't matter if noumena exist or not. Let me provide this analogy: right now, my chair is keeping me from falling to the floor. Therefore, it exists. A philosopher might argue that the chair doesn't "really" exist because it's made up of materials, which are made up of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, two of which are in turn made up of quarks and whatever. And as science probes deeper, maybe they'll find even more fundamental things. Which are all energy, so the chair therefore can't exist. This is such obvious bullshit that I dismiss it out of hand. It's reminiscent of one of Zeno's several Paradoxes: that you can never get anywhere because you always have to get halfway there first; but by empirical observation, you can indeed get somewhere. It would be like saying that galaxies don't exist because they're made up of stars, when it's bloody damn obvious to anyone who's ever looked through a telescope that they do, in fact, exist. The point being that the reality of my chair is independent of what it's made of, and its existence is very important to my ass. Kant had his own thoughts about what it is about us that determines the particular spin we put on reality – but we needn’t get into that. Our lesson here can be: we view the world through a filter. That filter comprises our deeply held beliefs, among other things. On that point, however, I can concur. This is clear if only because it's obvious that different people have different beliefs. That is, if other people exist at all, which is apparently questionable. Now, okay, I've been ragging on this, but really, some of the things the author writes are worth looking at. You'll need to draw your own conclusions, though. Just as she urges us to examine our fundamental beliefs, I think it's important to think critically about what she's saying. And one of the things she's saying is that writing can help us examine our own beliefs: "Our ideas – including those we find most compelling – often come to us only semi-formed, and this can disguise their flaws. Simply articulating these beliefs enables us to understand them better, and sometimes reveals that they are just bonkers." I can't argue with that. |
| Today, we're going to think about thinking. There's a word for that: Metacognition. Which, incidentally, would make an awesome name for a steampunk Metallica cover band. Most people think being smart is about having more facts. I know I've noted this before, and this statement (and its refutation) is one reason I saved this article to my queue. This is probably the least important and useful part of learning though. Instead of facts, I’d prefer to focus on knowledge that acts as tools. The more you have, the more ways you can approach different problems. I don't know about "least important," however. It's certainly helpful to have facts at the tip of one's metaphorical fingers, or at least to know how to find them quickly. For example, I couldn't remember the word "metacognition," but I knew it existed, so I Googled "thinking about thinking." The thing about facts, though, is that not everything is either "fact" or "not fact." For example: The Dallas Cowboys won the 1978 S****wl. This is a fact; there is no disputing it. Denver fans may have been butthurt about it, but they had to acknowledge the result. (The same is true for the last US Presidential election, like it or not.) This, however, is trivia. Other things are plainly NOT facts, regardless of whether you want them to be. Like "the moon is made of green cheese," or "Earth is flat." Some things that we think of as "facts" are really "things we know to varying degrees of certainty." The relative abundance of hydrogen and helium in the Sun, for example. Or that the universe has existed for approximately 13.7 billion years. New discoveries may change or refine these numbers. The point is, what we want to do is to be able to tell facts from not-facts, not to memorize trivia. Unless you're trying to win trivia contests, which admittedly is a perfectly acceptable goal—but it wouldn't mean you're smarter than the other contestants. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s long-time investing partner at Berkshire Hathaway, calls these mental models. More mental models means you have more ways to solve more problems. In my view, how you think is more important than what you think. Unless you think the Earth is flat, in which case, boy are you in the wrong place right now. Professions as Thinking Toolkits Most people define professions by what those professions do. Engineers build things. Economists study money. Psychologists look into people’s minds. However, while this is an obvious distinction, I’m more interested not in what types of problems professions try to solve, but how they try to solve them. Here, we can uncover a wealth of different thinking tools that are often abstract enough to apply well outside the typical interest of the profession. I think (there I go again) this is an excellent way to look at various mental models, or ways of thinking about things. There are, of course, other ways; that's the whole point. But I linked this article because I like the paradigm. Which is not to say that I completely agree. Nor am I going to list all the different viewpoints here; that's what the link is for. I will note this one, because it's of personal interest to me: 3. Engineer: Can I Model This and Calculate? Engineering, being built off of the hard sciences, has some of the most precise and accurate estimates in any profession. That's a stretch, especially in my own field of civil engineering. We overdesign things on purpose to account for unknowns. It's not rocket science, which famously does require precision and accuracy. The rest of this section, though, is pretty much on the ball. Also, this one: 6. Journalist: Just the Facts Journalists rely on a ton of different thinking tools which allow them to write compelling stories that report the news fairly and accurately. One of these thinking tools is fact-checking. Because journalists often need to interview sources who may be misleading (or even hostile), it’s important to corroborate what was said from independent sources. Fact-checking may be time consuming, but it results in a much more accurate world-view than simply blindly following a stray comment. Now, sure, we can make comments on the lack of application of this in the real world, but ideally, yes. That aside, I'm highlighting this one because of the last time I noted the difference between knowing trivia and being smart. That was in this entry: "Know One" (yes, I slogged through old posts to find it; turns out it was almost exactly one year ago). In it, I wrote:I watched a thoroughly mediocre science fiction show on Amazon a while back. As part of the plot, a journalist and a scientist walk into a bar (yes, that could be a setup for a joke). The bar is having Trivia Night. The scientist is portrayed as absolutely confident that he will win the trivia contest, and he and the journalist bet each other. Thing is, scientists are 1) not automatically more intelligent than anyone else; 2) generally focused on one or two narrow fields of study and 3) entirely too immersed in said study to know, or care, who played Steve on Soaps of our Lives or who was the second-string wide receiver for the Raiders in 1997. The show's writers fell into a common trap: conflating intelligence with knowledge. All else being equal, I'd put all the money on the journalist in a trivia contest against a scientist. Point being that journalists, in general, will have broader knowledge, while scientists tend to have deeper knowledge. The two aren't incompatible, however. And as this linked article points out, neither is better; they just come from different thought models. Ironically (or coincidentally or whatever), the article's very next section is: 7. Scientist: Make a Hypothesis and Test It A basic thinking tool of science is the controlled experiment. Keep all the variables the same, except the one you want to test, and see what happens. This requires meticulous preparation and design to prevent outside contamination from breaking your results. Too many people draw inferences from “experiments” that are anything but. Say you have a cold. You take a couple of Snake Oil pills for it. Your cold clears up. Natural conclusion: "Snake Oil pills cured my cold!" Well... no. I mean, maybe. But maybe it would have cleared up at that point anyway. There's an old joke that goes something like: have a cold, do nothing, it lasts 14 days. Have a cold, take medicine, it lasts a fortnight. I don't remember the exact phrasing and I'm running out of time here to look it up, but the point is a study with one data point solves nothing; it could very well be coincidence. Anyway. Like I said, running out of time here. I think the important takeaway from the article is that, regardless of what you do for vocation or avocation, you can benefit from using some of these thinking tools. I'll include just one more, because it's relevant to most of those reading this: 22. Novelist: Does Your Story Make Sense? Novelists understand better than anyone that what actually happens is often not a good story. Stories have characters with fixed traits that make their actions predictable. In real life, people are more influenced by context. Stories have beginnings, middles and ends. Reality is a continuous stream of events without an arc. Unfortunately, people understand stories much better than realities. So often you need to package up the histories you want to tell people in a way that they can interpret. Who is involved? When did those things happen? Give information to make it easier for the listener to follow. While this applies to writing novels or making movies, telling stories is a part of everyone’s life. From “Why do you want to work at this job,” to, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” These are all stories, and we need to understand their structures. Which only reinforces another thing I've been saying: There's no such thing as useless knowledge. And now I can extend that to: There's no such thing as useless ways of thinking. |
| And now it's time for Adventures in Itoldyaso. Ironically (or whatever), this article is from the Before Time: March of 2019. It’s good to be positive, sure. I'm positive I'm gonna need a citation for that. But that doesn’t mean being sunny side up all the time. Keep your frown right where it is. Let your bitch face rest. Ever since I first heard the expression "resting bitch face," it's bugged me. For starters, it's sexist (even if it's also applied to dudes). For finishers, it implies that one should always be "on," or not resting, when other people are around, and that's exhausting for some of us. Americans seem to be down these days. Oh, if only they'd waited about a year. Duhigg argues that the source of privileged people’s unhappiness lies in overly high expectations and too little practice struggling with obstacles early on. Thompson, meanwhile, blames devotion to work—the fact that people have replaced God and family with careers and callings as the source of meaning in their lives. Because we no longer want to make “time for happiness,” he says, we are busy, confused, and sad. Okay, I can follow the logic that one secret to happiness is to set your expectations low enough that you can only be pleasantly surprised. That's a big part of my life philosophy. But that other guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. Struggle helps cultivate resilience, and American “workism” is misguided. I'm not going to argue either of these points, but lots of people struggle and never get any benefit out of it. As for "workism," however they want to define it, well, some people find their meaning in work; telling them they're misguided is only going to get them defensive. The problem comes in when people are expected to always be working, just to make ends meet. But Duhigg and Thompson also ignore a more fundamental issue. It’s clamoring for happiness that makes people miserable. And on that point, I can't disagree. Or I'd be an even bigger hypocrite than I already am. Brock Bastian, a social psychologist at the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences in Australia, argues in a 2018 paper in Emotion that trying too hard to be happy yields the opposite result. Ah, yes, another name that, if one of us fiction writers came up with it, we'd be accused of being unrealistic. “Happiness is a good thing, but setting it up as something to be achieved tends to fail,” Bastian told Time. Which is kind of what I've been saying. Nice to have an actual scientist looking into it, though. Sure, I'm aware this may be confirmation bias on my part, but I'm still willing to hear alternative viewpoints. The best relationships involve pain... Oh, yes, baby, yes. Oh, they're not talking about S&M. Damn. Well, maybe the point of pain (as the author probably intended it) is to better appreciate the pleasurable parts. ...and the greatest jobs are also tedious. Eh, citation needed. Nothing can be fun all the time, and some stuff that ends up enjoyable may seem dreadful while you’re doing it. Pretending otherwise, expecting a steady sense of pleasure and satisfaction, only compounds suffering. Easy, there, you're veering off toward Buddhism. But yeah. Like, doing your taxes, for instance: massive pain in the ass, and I don't know too many people who actually enjoy the process. But then you get to enjoy not being in jail, so there's that. Also, things like cooking can be difficult or tedious while doing them, but hopefully the outcome is enjoyable as well. Although the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the US Constitution, to act upon that right guarantees displeasure. Desire causes suffering, or so the Buddha believed. Aaaaaand now your GPS plopped you straight into Lake Buddha. In fact, this whole section is about that philosophical tradition. Still, liberating yourself from the expectation of happiness lightens your load. It makes life a little easier when you are realistic but resolved, rather than deluded, desirous, and determined to have the impossible. By calculating discomfort and struggle into the mix, you can remain cautiously optimistic, knowing there’s surely trouble ahead, but that you will face it with grace. Or, and bear with me on this, maybe you can be, instead of cautiously optimistic, hopefully pessimistic. That is, if you expect the worst possible outcome, then you're either right (which is nice), or pleasantly surprised (which is almost as nice). Happiness is necessarily not lasting, and if you chase it, the emotion will elude you. It’s precious and momentary. That is what makes it so delightful. Being transient doesn't make it less real. In fact, I think its ephemeral nature makes it all the more worth savoring. But I do agree that chasing it is counterproductive. Beyond understanding happiness more deeply, we can train, actively cultivating perspective with practices both ancient and new. If meditating your way to the understanding that emotions are like clouds flitting across the sky of your mind isn’t your thing, for example, there’s a bot that will talk to you about feelings and train you to reframe your thinking. Isn't the future a wonderful place to live? We can talk about our feelings with artificial intelligences. The Woebot... As soon as I read that, I became transcendently happy. Seriously. What a name! I'm only a little bit angry that I didn't come up with it. ...is an app designed by Stanford psychologists, based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Aaaaaaand there goes the happiness, fleeing like a ninja in the night. CBT my ass. Over millennia, no one has avoided suffering. It’s unlikely any of us will be the exception. So the wise thing to do is to accept this sad but funny fact. The joke is on all of us and the quicker we are to see the humor in it, the better our chances of sometimes having fun. Of course humor is essential. And, for me, so is beer. |
| Science is cool. A Dream of Discovering Alien Life Finds New Hope For Lisa Kaltenegger and her generation of exoplanet astronomers, decades of planning have set the stage for an epochal detection. Just to get this out of the way: we're not talking about finding Vulcans, here. But even finding so much as a microbe somewhere other than Earth would be a Big Deal. Kepler had glimpsed its first two Earth-size exoplanets with a decent chance of having liquid water on their surfaces. These were the sort of strange new worlds that everyone at the conference — and possibly most of the human race — had imagined at least once. Would Kaltenegger confirm that the planets might be habitable? Another disclaimer: "habitable" doesn't necessarily mean "by humans." Water, in its liquid form, is essential (but not by itself sufficient) for life as we know it. Sure, the possibility of life not-as-we-know-it is something to consider, but if you're going to be looking for alien life, it makes sense to start with the conditions we know can produce and support life. Kaltenegger, at the time an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, started running new climate models before the conference was over, incorporating basic facts like the planets’ diameters and the lukewarm glow of their star. Her ultimate answer: a qualified yes. The planets might be suitable for life, or at least for liquid water; they could even be water worlds, encased in endless oceans without a single rocky outcrop poking above the waves. The caveat was that she would need more advanced observations to be sure. I'll also note that there's at least one other place in our own solar system that is potentially habitable (if not by humans): Europa, a moon of Jupiter. It's not in what astronomers would call the habitable zone of our system, but other factors make liquid water there a possibility. From what I understand, they're sending a probe to Jupiter to get more data. So we're not even sure about that, yet, but that's not stopping astronomers from searching exoplanets as well. Her overarching quest — the search for alien life — is entering an unprecedented phase. Barring the bolt-from-the-blue arrival of something like an extraterrestrial radio broadcast, most astronomers believe that our best near-term chance of encountering other life in the cosmos is to detect biosignature gases — gases that could only have come from life — floating in exoplanets’ atmospheres. When life first arose on Earth, it sucked in carbon dioxide and produced oxygen as waste. Plenty of life still does that here. So yes, our entire biology is about using other life's waste products (not just the alcohol that beer yeast produces). Oxygen is very reactive, so it probably doesn't stick around in an atmosphere for very long unless it's continually being produced by some process, including what we call life. I've known for some time that finding oxygen in a planet's atmosphere would be a promising sign that there could be some sort of life there. There are other telltales, but oxygen is a pretty obvious choice to look for. The trick, however, is to detect it. The sort of remote measurement necessary to make that kind of detection has strained the capabilities of even humanity’s most advanced observatories. But with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) now in its first few months of observations, such a discovery has become possible. Remarkable that the same telescope that can tell us stuff about the early universe could also tell us about things relatively close by. Most optimistically — if biospheres bloom easily from Earth-like worlds — the telescope may detect odd ratios of, say, carbon dioxide, oxygen and methane on one of these planets. Astronomers may then be sorely tempted to attribute the concoction to the presence of an extraterrestrial ecosystem. Astronomers, tempted or not, probably wouldn't jump to that conclusion. It would be a real "giant leap," and not in a good way. The best you're going to get from them is "maybe." Science reporters, on the other hand, will confuse the issue in the public's collective mind by hopping from "oxygen in the atmosphere" to "life" to "OMG ALIENS." I've said this before and I'll say it again: life is probably out there, but there is nothing about evolution that requires the emergence of sentient life, the kind that might build spaceships or write science fiction. It would still be a big damn deal if we could remove "probably" from that sentence. Not only will the atmospheric signals they’re looking for be weak, but she and her colleagues must model a planet’s possible interplay of starlight, rock and air accurately enough to be sure that nothing besides life could explain the presence of a particular atmospheric gas. Any such analysis must navigate between a Scylla and Charybdis, avoiding both false negatives — life was there but you missed it — and false positives that find life where there is none. Points to this reporter for the Odyssey reference. Unlike most scientific endeavors, the search for signs of extraterrestrial life happens under an unavoidable spotlight, and in a turbocharged information ecosystem where any scientist crying “Life!” warps the fabric of funding, attention and public trust. Because immediately, people are going to expect an alien invasion, or we will prepare to stage one of our own. The goal at the time was to compare spectra from rocky, temperate planets to what Earth’s spectrum would look like from far away, seeking conspicuous signals like a surplus of oxygen due to widespread photosynthesis. Kaltenegger’s objection was that, for the first 2 billion years of Earth’s existence, its atmosphere had no oxygen. Then it took another billion years for oxygen to build up to high levels. That's another thing I hadn't considered: that for more than half the time we know life existed here on Earth, it wouldn't have produced enough oxygen to be detectable. But then, I'm just a spectator; I don't get paid to think about these things. The most pertinent case study rocked the astronomy world in the fall of 2020. A team including Seager announced that they had spotted an unusual compound called phosphine in the upper atmosphere of Venus, a sweltering, acid-washed planet typically dismissed as sterile. On Earth, phosphine is commonly produced by microbes. While some abiotic processes can also make the compound under certain conditions, the team’s analysis suggested those processes weren’t likely to occur on Venus. In their view, that left tiny floating Venusian organisms as a plausible explanation. “Life on Venus?” the New York Times headline wondered. I remember that. You probably do, too, because, as with the Martian meteorite from even further back, any time someone says "maybe life," it gets blown up to "OMG ALIENS." Spoiler: no aliens on Venus. Probably not even microbes. Well, let me qualify that: no definitive evidence; it's remarkably hard to prove a negative, and the possibility remains, however unlikely. Anyway, the article is long but thorough, and I barely scratched the surface here—much as our Martian robots have barely scratched that planet's surface in their quest for even the slightest hint that life might once have had a foothold on the Red Planet. Nothing yet. But we'll keep looking, because that's what we do. |
| Today, some in-depth historical investigation from Cracked. It wasn't even a month ago that I linked an article from the same source about pooping on the Enterprise: "Captain's Log" . Instead of the (fictional) future, though, we're contemplating the past here.Maybe one of the greatest drivers of any sort of modern innovation is convenience. Convenience, of course, being a more polite way of saying “not requiring a bunch of annoying bulls**t.” I'm saying this again because I'm quite proud of coming up with it: if necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the milkman. There is one modern convenience, however, that, despite being only about 2 centuries old, is massively underappreciated. That, of course, is the existence of a modern toilet that’s never more than a room or two away. It really is quite remarkable when you think about how long we've been pooping. Which, of course, other animals do without the need for porcelain. Maybe a sandbox, though. The dirtiest dive bar toilet with a kicked-off stall door would seem medically sterile compared to some of the solutions the human race utilized for its waste in the past. Having used more than my share of those, I concur. 3500 BC - First Pit Toilet Mesopotamia is the site of one of the first known examples of a pit toilet, from around 3500 BC. I had to look it up, but apparently that was Sumer, not Babylon. You know, the same culture that invented beer. I can't help but think the two were related. The article implies that this was the first time we had a dedicated place for taking shits (or, well, technically, leaving shits), but it might well have happened earlier and we just haven't found evidence for it yet. Or, more accurately, Cracked didn't bother looking for evidence for it. Incidentally, analyzing (heh heh he said anal) prehistoric shit is common enough that shit-fossils have a name: coprolites. 2000 BC - The First Flush Versus a cesspit, which would have to be emptied by (a very gross) hand, the first “flush” toilet has been traced back to the ancient city of Knossos, with similar systems showing up in the Indus Valley (now Pakistan and India). Again, not necessarily the first. This exists with a latrine that had channels where water could be manually poured to clear the, uh, waste, down into the sewers. The invention of the sewer is the important part, here. No matter how primitive or advanced the toilet, it relies on a sewer system. Okay, maybe as a civil engineer I'm biased here. 1300 BC - Chamber Pots The next development comes from a battle with one of mankind’s oldest and most relatable battles: the desire not to get out of bed when you have to pee. We may have to trudge only a couple feet to relieve ourselves nowadays, but when toilets were massively less common and probably also included going outside? Well, you come up with a solution. A horrible, horrible solution. Still a better solution than pissing the bed. Or, worse, trudging to an outhouse in the snow. 750 BC - Rome’s Public Toilets Rome is a massively important location and empire in history, responsible for many developments and advancements that contribute to our modern lives. That may be a massively Eurocentric perspective. These public latrines, usually located in bathhouses, had rows of marble seats with holes where you could do your business directly into the running water of the sewer systems below. But there's little doubt that they at least made massive improvements to water delivery and sewage disposal. Hell, they even had a goddess dedicated to the sewer: Cloacina. When you get a god involved, you know your culture takes something seriously. 1100s - Garderobes Garderobes aren’t the most complicated form of toilet, but they might be the funniest. Garderobes would emerge mostly in medieval castles and some manor houses, and were basically little rooms that let you s**t off the side of your house. Ah, yes, those rooms hanging off castles and manors. Peasants had no access to them, and some probably had to clean them. This was likely the origin of the idea of "trickle-down economics." 1596 - First Modern Flusher The first toilet that resembles anything we might use today was invented in 1596 by Sir John Harington. It used water stored in a cistern above to flush away waste. Like Leonardo, Harington was a man ahead of his time. 1770s - Water Closets It would take until the 1770s for flush toilets to actually catch on. Central to this was Alexander Cumming’s 1775 patent for a flush toilet which included one of the most important developments, the S-Trap. See, the central problem with crapping into an open sewer like the Romans did is it probably smelled worse than a porta-potty at a beer festival. This design exists in modified form today, after many advancements, including the U-Trap, often attributed to, I’m not kidding, Thomas Crapper. Some have attributed the invention of the modern toilet to Crapper himself, but I think that's more of a desire for history to make sense in a punny sort of way. And no, the word "crap" didn't come from his name. "Crap" had different meanings in the past, and the surname was probably one of the many surnames based on a family's historical profession, like Weaver or Hunter or Smith. 1850s - Indoor Plumbing With all these advancements, it would still take until the 1850s for toilets to be generally sanitary and, well, not completely disgusting enough to be brought into regular rooms of an indoor home. Not surprisingly, this roughly (pun intended) coincided with the invention of toilet paper in 1857. Truly, that was the actual beginning of the modern age. |
| In my ongoing quest to find random old blog entries so I can express how I might have changed over time (among other reasons), I hit on this one from almost exactly 15 years ago: "Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?" The entry contains two links and, remarkably, the first one hasn't rotted away. For your amusement, in case you can't be arsed to visit the original post, I present it as an xlink here. I'm pretty sure those are the original images from over 15 years ago. So, what's changed? Well, back then, I wrote, by way of introducing the link: These days, it's hard to find just one, solitary thing that you can point to and say, "There it is. There is the Sign that the end is near; that we've reached the Cosmic Cul-de-sac and some asshole's U-Haul is blocking the turnaround." But here's a candidate And oh, my, I bet I thought I was clever as hell when I wrote that. The photos are now mildly amusing to me and in no way a sign of the impending apocalypse. We've been through so much in the last 15 years that I guess the needle moved further in the direction of Armageddon, making these pictures of a couple of young people doing stuff in Stormtrooper helmets a refreshing chunk of normal. And maybe even slightly day-brightening. Worse, though: Okay, so I spent my career designing, among other things, subdivisions, and most of those subdivisions included roads with a cul-de-sac. Not once in the 20 or so years I spent doing that did I ever bother to find out what the English translation of cul-de-sac is. It's "ass of the bag." Okay, no, not really, but 'cul' is, from what I hear, slang for ass (buttocks, not animal); the more polite translation would be "bottom of the bag." The point being that these days, I wouldn't have juxtaposed it with the English word "asshole" meaning "unbearable person." Worser and worser, it turns out that the French translation of "cul-de-sac" is "voie sans issue," probably because 'cul' has that slang meaning. Okay. Anyway. The second link in the original entry has, unfortunately, expired, surviving only in a couple of lines I quoted back then. Here they are again: A man who called himself "Papa Pilgrim" and took his family far from civilization to raise them according to his interpretation of the Bible was sentenced to 14 years in prison for sexually assaulting a daughter. ... Hale insisted that he had a perfect spiritual understanding, his wife, Kurina Rose Hale, testified Monday. Which was fucked up enough that I had to do a search on this fine, upstanding gentleman, and I almost wish I hadn't, but since I did, here it is. I won't paste stuff from that link here. It's dark as shit. It details charges against a man who tortured and abused his family on religious principles. I'm not too worried about that link going invalid at some point, because this good Christian man has his own Wikipedia page too—according to which, fortunately for everyone involved, this outstanding specimen of humanity croaked just a few months later. Back then, I discussed at moderate length how there are decent people and horrible people in every religion, and ended with "judge by the deed, not by the creed." Today, I'd add: There are none so evil as those who proclaim themselves righteous. Not even Stormtroopers. |
| Call me skeptical. Air Force claims ‘no intent by the pilots’ to draw sky penis near Russian base in Syria Sometimes miracles happen. And sometimes, we make miracles happen. The leadership for U.S. Air Forces in Europe has determined that a KC-135 aerial tanker did not mean to fly in a phallic flight pattern near a Russian base in Syria recently... You'll have to visit the link to see the actual recorded flight path. Or you could take my word for it that it does, indeed, create the general shape of a dong, complete with balls. While these adjustments and movements appear to create a vulgar outline, there was no intent by the pilots or the unit to do so. Sure. I believe that. I also believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and honest politicians. As we continue to look into this, USAFE-AFAFRICA, AMC [Air Mobility Command] and the USAF will continue to maintain the highest standards of professionalism and airmanship. ...even if we have to lie through our collective teeth to do it. Earlier this week, the aircraft took off from Chania International Airport and flew east of Cyprus. FlightRadar24, a flight tracking service, shows that the KC-135’s flight path included an oval and two circles, prompting the Italian newspaper la Repubblica to speculate that the plane had drawn a sky penis in front of Russia’s naval base in Tartus, Syria. Now, keep in mind that schlong drawings are nothing new in Italy (and elsewhere). People have been scrawling schlubs on walls for as long as there have been walls. Here's one on the Roman Coliseum. The ancient Romans could only dream of being in flying machines that can trace the outlines of a gigantic knob in the sky.That said, it's not really that close to Syria, is it? It's way out in the Mediterranean, closer to Cyprus, like it's about to stick itself into Turkey. The article acknowledges this: But Cyprus is roughly 163 miles from Tartus, and while it’s unclear how close the KC-135 was to the Russian base, the aircraft was never in Syrian airspace, an Air Force official said. However: While U.S. officials say that the KC-135’s aircrew did not mean to fly in a pattern that resembled the male anatomy, there have been previous incidents in which American pilots intentionally drew large penises in the sky. Two Navy aviators were administratively disciplined in 2017 for using the contrails of their aircraft to create a large penis-shaped pattern over Washington state, and two Marine aviators were grounded the following year for their aerial rendering of the male sex organ. It makes me feel all kinds of secure that our pilots, across military disciplines, have the sense of humor of a middle-schooler. Eventually, the Space Force will draw one over the Moon, you watch. Moreover, in October 2019 U.S. troops left penis drawings for the Russians to find when they moved out of their base in northeastern Syria. Okay, that's legitimately hilarious. For reasons that remain not fully understood, phallus imagery has become an integral part of the American warfighter’s psyche. "Not fully understood," my fat white ass. “The core of a military identity is tied into this warrior ethos of being strong and tough,” Ramon Hinojosa, a sociology professor at the University of Central Florida, told Task & Purpose in 2018. “This notion that being tough and strong and having a sexual prowess is just a core part of what we as Americans see masculinities are. That translates across institutions, at least as far as the military is concerned, into strong, tough, heterosexuality. Of course, the depiction of a penis just sort of boils that right down to the essence of the masculine norm.” You want "strong and tough?" That would be the other sex organ. How "pussy" ever became an insult meaning "soft and weak" is what's "not fully understood." Those things are tough, or so I've heard. (I so badly wanted to phrase that "those things can take a licking," but I would never stoop so low.) They might be a bit harder to draw in the sky, though, I'll grant that. |
| I ran into this article a while back, and I figured I'd probably have some things to say about it. I'm guessing one of them isn't "Don't follow random advice from the internet?" Clutter is just a fact of life. Stuff piles up, messes are made, and dealing with it all becomes one of many things on your to-do list. There's a difference between mess and clutter. Either way, though, it is true that it is often far easier to acquire something than it is to dispose of it. Easy enough to manage when life is calm and work is steady, but when things get hectic, it’s more and more tempting to let things slide and deal with them later. I've been saving stuff for later for decades. I think there are unopened boxes from when I first moved here. I moved here in the nineties. And eventually, all that procrastinating can turn into what feels like an impossible cleaning challenge. Or you just decide you can live with the mess. Or the clutter. And, the best way to regain control is by focusing on and changing your behavior, one bad habit at a time. I don't have bad habits. I have habits, and if you don't like them, don't visit. So, read on, and for any behaviors that you know you are guilty of, make an early resolution to start breaking them now — you’ll be surprised how quickly your space will turn around. I don't do resolutions. And I'm not guilty. Tossing random items in a “junk drawer” Drawer? Amateur. I have an entire room for that. Not cleaning up while you’re cooking Oh, sure, I'll just wipe that spill off the hot stove burner. Not treating stains and spots right away I don't do carpet, either. Not sorting your mail as it comes in Oh, come on; doesn't everyone have a stack of mail they'll get to sorting eventually? Sometimes I have to re-stack it if a cat finds it. Hoarding stacks of magazines you never read People still read magazines? Okay, granted, I have subscriptions to exactly two print publications: one for craft beer, which admittedly I rarely read (look, it came with an online subscription thing that I do use); and one for cigars, which I also rarely read, but they like to put glamour photos of hot chicks on the cover. It's just so blatant that I have to admire that publisher. And yes, I collect the latter. That's different from hoarding. Putting off laundry until your last pair of socks I don't wear socks. Laundry gets done when I'm down to my last pair of underwear. That's when I don't say fuck it and order another pack of Calvins from Amazon. Throwing clothes and accessories on a chair Oh, bite me. I sit on exactly one chair. The others' sole purpose is to hold my jackets and such. And cats. ...well, okay. That article wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Usually this sort of article is all about "throw away everything you haven't used in the past week" so that when you do need it you end up buying it again, preferably from one of the publisher's advertisers. So maybe this will help someone. Me, I'm at the point where changing my habits is more painful than occasionally digging through the junk room for something I just know is in there somewhere. |
| I don't have a lot to say about today's article from The Guardian; I went to the movie theater yesterday (review below) and I'm worn out from all the sitting, drinking, and popcorning. Most headline questions are answered "no," but this one's not so simple. Besides, the brain is part of the body. In 2018, billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman paid a startup called Nectome $10,000 to preserve his brain after he dies and, when the technology to do so becomes available, to upload his memories and consciousness to the cloud. Cheaper than most funerals. This prospect, which was recently popularised in Amazon Prime’s sci-fi comedy series Upload, has long been entertained by transhumanists. People who actually read science fiction, like me, have been exposed to the concept for far longer than transhumanists, or even Amazon, have been around. Although theoretically possible, it is rooted in the flawed idea that the brain is separate from the body, and can function without it. How, exactly, is it "theoretically possible?" I've never heard a compelling reason why it should be. The idea that the mind and brain are separate from each other is usually attributed to the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, who believed that the body is made of matter, and the mind of some other, non-physical substance. Remember a couple entries ago I said Descartes was "right about a lot of things, but...still subject to human biases and observational inconsistencies?" This is an example of those things. Besides, mind/body duality goes back way before Descartes, though as I understand it he codified it somewhat. Modern brain research rejects the distinction between the physical and the mental. Most neuroscientists agree that what we call “the mind” is made of matter. The mind is hard to define, but the consensus now is that it emerges from the complex networks of cells in the brain. I don't know about "made of matter," but there's a lot I don't know about this. But most people still view the mind and brain as being distinct from the body. It's a useful metaphor to think of mind and body as separate, but that's all it is: a metaphor. Like thinking of atoms as if they were little solar systems. Being conscious does not just mean having awareness of the outside world. It means being aware of one’s self within one’s surroundings. The way we experience our body is central to how we perceive our self. If you want to get really philosophical about it, you can go off on how the "outside world" is filtered through our senses and thus an inaccurate representation of the actual "outside world;" it's all really inner experience. As interesting as that may be to contemplate, it's irrelevant. Phantom limbs are a striking demonstration of the importance of the body for self-consciousness. The article then goes into how that phenomenon relates to consciousness, and also gets into body dysmorphias, but what I found most relevant to writers is the bit about how people didn't believe in phantom limbs at first, and it took a fictional story to bring it into public awareness. I mean, behold the power of fiction, right? So I'm skipping over a lot, but in the end: If self-consciousness is based in bodily awareness, then it is unlikely that a lab-grown “mini-brain” could ever become conscious, as some ethicists have claimed. I always wondered about that aspect of consciousness "uploads." Of course, you have people thinking we're all uploads, and that the universe is a big computer simulation, but that raises way more questions than it answers. By the same token, transhumanists’ claim that we will one day gain immortality by uploading our brains to supercomputers will probably always be science fiction. I'd be very cautious about saying something will "always" be science fiction. We can be quite clever in figuring stuff out and inventing things. But I would bet that it's a very, very long way away.   One-Sentence Movie Review: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: I suppose it would have been asking too much for this sequel to be as good as or better than the first one; it certainly didn't suck (and was very respectful to the memory of Boseman), but it's a little incoherent in parts and significantly short on action for a MCU movie. Rating: 3.5/5 |
| This article is a few years old now, but that's a rounding error compared to the subject matter. 500 Years Later, MIT Proves That Leonardo Da Vinci's Bridge Design Works If accepted at the time, the design would have likely revolutionized architecture. More like engineering. Researchers at MIT have proven Leonardo da Vinci correct yet again, this time involving his design for what would have been at the time a revolutionary bridge design. Leonardo was undeniably a genius (though, as with anyone, not always right), but one limitation on genius is the mindset of the people around you. When Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire put out a request for proposals for a bridge connecting capital city Constantinople (now Istanbul) with its neighbor city Galata, da Vinci was eager for the chance to win the contract. I'm just leaving this here so you can take the time to get They Might Be Giants out of your head. It is not possible to contemplate Istanbul (not Constantinople) without thinking of their song. Da Vinci's proposal was radically different than the standard bridge at the time. As described by the MIT group, it was approximately 918 feet long (218 meters, though neither system of measurement had been developed yet) and would have consisted of a flattened arch "tall enough to allow a sailboat to pass underneath with its mast in place...but that would cross the wide span with a single enormous arch," according to an MIT press statement. It would have been the longest bridge in the world at the time by a significant measure, using an unheard of style of design. And see, that's why I'm putting this in the realm of engineering, not architecture. I admit I may be biased on those subjects, but bridge design is solidly in the realm of civil engineering, no matter how elegant the design may be. There is, of course, significant overlap in those disciplines. But if the focus of the construction is structure and transportation, I'd call that civil engineering. It wasn't just length or style that set da Vinci's bridge apart. It also had safety features unheard of at the time. One of the biggest challenges facing any bridge design is that it has to exist in nature no matter the conditions, including wind. In theory. In practice, lots of things have brought bridges down, including unexpected floods and, yes, wind loads. Strong winds have forced many bridge, including relatively modern bridges from the 20th century, into lateral oscillations leading to collapse. I don't think it's possible to become a civil engineer without seeing the video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge failure.To be clear, though, that collapse was due to aerodynamic effects that were barely understood even in the mid-20th century, and as smart as Leonardo was, the math for it didn't exist in his time. Since building a full-scale bridge would have been unwieldily,[sic] the team resorted to building a model. Using 126 blocks, they built the bridge at a scale of 1 to 500, making it around three feet long. Modeling things like this properly is a challenge in itself. You run into things like the square-cube law, which has to be taken into account. "It's the power of geometry" that makes it work, she says. "This is a strong concept. It was well thought out." Further tests showed that the bridge could have even stood its own against earthquakes to an extent far beyond other bridges at the time. Math: it works. There are still mysteries surrounding the project. "Was this sketch just freehanded, something he did in 50 seconds, or is it something he really sat down and thought deeply about? It's difficult to know." It's entirely possible that the sketch built on things Leonardo would have already been thinking about. I mean, it's basically a freestanding arch, right? They figured arches out long before his time. Putting that together with other concepts, such as the wind loads mentioned above, might not have taken him very long at all (genius, remember). It's this combination of disparate ideas that's the hallmark of true genius, and it's one reason there's no such thing as useless knowledge. While it's difficult to know da Vinci's intentions, one thing is now relatively certain: the bridge would have worked. And I gotta admit, it looks cool. |
| Science is hard. Controversy Continues Over Whether Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold Decades after a Tanzanian teenager initiated study of the “Mpemba effect,” the effort to confirm or refute it is leading physicists toward new theories about how substances relax to equilibrium. Not all counterintuitive results involve quantum effects. It sounds like one of the easiest experiments possible: Take two cups of water, one hot, one cold. Place both in a freezer and note which one freezes first. Common sense suggests that the colder water will. And this is one reason I don't trust common sense. But luminaries including Aristotle, Rene Descartes and Sir Francis Bacon have all observed that hot water may actually cool more quickly. To be fair, Aristotle was wrong about a lot of things; those other dudes were right about a lot of things, but they were still subject to human biases and observational inconsistencies. This is why we do science: to counteract the effects of human bias, error, and "common sense." The modern term for hot water freezing faster than cold water is the Mpemba effect, named after Erasto Mpemba, a Tanzanian teenager who, along with the physicist Denis Osborne, conducted the first systematic, scientific studies of it in the 1960s. Probably you've seen those videos of idiots living in the snow who throw boiling water from its pot and it freezes solid before it hits the ground. This is not the same thing; that happens, they're pretty sure, at least partly because hot water evaporates quickly, and because throwing it increases the surface area, which means it can evaporate even more quickly. They're not idiots for doing this; they're idiots for living where the world is trying to turn them into corpsicles. No, this is talking about hunks of water under conditions identical except for the temperature. Even then, as it turns out, it's not always observed. Over the past few years, as the controversy continues about whether the Mpemba effect occurs in water, the phenomenon has been spotted in other substances — crystalline polymers, icelike solids called clathrate hydrates, and manganite minerals cooling in a magnetic field. All of which may have profound technological implications, but we want to know about water. You know, that stuff we literally can't live without. “A glass of water stuck in a freezer seems simple,” said John Bechhoefer, a physicist at Simon Fraser University in Canada whose recent experiments are the most solid observations of the Mpemba effect to date. “But it’s actually not so simple once you start thinking about it.” One cool thing (pun absolutely intended) about this article is how it highlights the international, multicultural process of science. “My name is Erasto B. Mpemba, and I am going to tell you about my discovery, which was due to misusing a refrigerator.” Thus begins a 1969 paper in the journal Physics Education in which Mpemba described an incident at Magamba Secondary School in Tanzania when he and his classmates were making ice cream. Okay, see, right there I'm already running into a contradiction. Ice cream has a high water content, sure, but it's not water. Most water isn't water, either; it contains various minerals. Even distilled water is rarely 100% pure, and even if it were, doing experiments with it doesn't necessarily translate to real-world applications. Basically, I suspect that at least part of the problem with replicating the results here is that different trace elements in a sample of water can cause it to behave differently in certain circumstances, like when you're doing freezing experiments. I don't know that for sure, though. I'm sure the scientists involved have already thought of that, but if so, the article doesn't say much about it. Space was limited in the students’ refrigerator, and in the rush to nab the last available ice tray, Mpemba opted to skip waiting for his boiled-milk-and-sugar concoction to cool to room temperature like the other students had done. An hour and a half later, his mixture had frozen into ice cream, whereas those of his more patient classmates remained a thick liquid slurry. When Mpemba asked his physics teacher why this occurred, he was told, “You were confused. That cannot happen.” Some teachers don't have open minds. Many kids do, at least until teachers close them. Over the decades, scientists have offered a wide variety of theoretical explanations to explain the Mpemba effect. Water is a strange substance, less dense when solid than liquid, and with solid and liquid phases that can coexist at the same temperature. And that's another problem: even if it happened with consistency, you have to come up with a reason why it happens, and then test that. Still, Burridge and Linden’s findings highlight a key reason why the Mpemba effect, real or not, might be so hard to pin down: Temperature varies throughout a cup of rapidly cooling water because the water is out of equilibrium, and physicists understand very little about out-of-equilibrium systems. Stacking on yet another problem. Statistical physicist Marija Vucelja of the University of Virginia started wondering how common the phenomenon might be. “Is this like is a needle in a haystack, or could it be useful for optimal heating or cooling protocols?” she asked. Just leaving this bit here because I like it when my alma mater is involved. If nothing else, the theoretical and experimental work on the Mpemba effect has started giving physicists a handhold into nonequilibrium systems that they otherwise lack. Another fun thing about science: sometimes a result, or even a failure, can have secondary benefits. Fortunately for lazy-ass me, the article ends with a brief description of whatever happened to Mpemba himself: After igniting a decades-long controversy with his teenage interrogations, Mpemba himself went on to study wildlife management, becoming a principal game officer in Tanzania’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism before retiring. So he didn't end up working on pure science, and the effect named after him might never had any impact on his life. Remember that next time some kid complains that they'll "never use" whatever they're studying at the moment; it's still important. Osborne, discussing the results of their investigations together, took a lesson from the initial skepticism and dismissal that the schoolboy’s counterintuitive claim had faced: “It points to the danger of an authoritarian physics.” And also to the danger of a stubborn "common sense." |
| This one's been in my queue for a long time, such that every time I see it on the list, I go, "Now what am I going to say about this?" Kurt Vonnegut’s Greatest Writing Advice "Literature should not disappear up its own asshole," and other craft imperatives After all, how can I, being just me, comment on writing advice from one of the most acclaimed, award-winning, and all-around great writers of the 20th century? Someone who is, moreover, dead and therefore can't rebut anything I say? ...Easy. I just read, paste, format, and type. (Article is from 2017, the 10th anniversary of Vonnegut's tragic, untimely and completely unexpected death, but that shouldn't matter.) Today, if you can believe it, makes it ten years since we lost one of the greatest American writers—and, no matter how he tried to deny it, one of the greatest writing teachers. Certainly one of the greatest writing advice list-makers, at any rate. Like I said, 2017. As list-making became the default method of communication on the internet, once again, Kurt was ahead of his time. Plus, it’s no-nonsense advice with a little bit of nonsense. Like his books, really. I don't want anyone getting the idea I didn't like Vonnegut. Far from it. But he's not up on a pedestal for me like Twain or Poe. Find some of Vonnegut’s greatest writing advice, plucked from interviews, essays, and elsewhere, below—but first, find some of Vonnegut’s greatest life advice right here: “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” On that point, at least, we can agree completely. On proper punctuation: Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. These days, Vonnegut would be soundly thrashed on social media for using the words "transvestite hermaphrodites;" times and words change. You'll note I used a semicolon in the previous sentence; I do that when I damn well feel like it. I agree it probably shouldn't be (over)used in creative writing; this is a blog entry, so I can get away with it. However, someone as well-versed in satiricism as Vonnegut must have known that there's a place for semicolons even there, once you know the "rules" so well you can break them. On having other interests: I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak. And yet, like all art, it often does. What's not clear to me here is how he meant "literature." For me, the term encompasses all fiction writing. Depending on context, though, it can be used by snobs to differentiate high art from low art, which they snobbily call "genre writing." News flash: every work of fiction is genre fiction in that it has a genre. So that quote is kinda rich coming from someone who resisted acknowledging that he wrote science fiction because some science fiction writers were hacks. On the value of writing: If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. Or, you know, lean into the stereotypes and do both. On plot: I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. Seriously, the link is worth clicking on just to read this one section. I can't do it justice here with cherry-picked quotes; just trust me on this. Also, I'm skipping a few of them here, so if you want to read more, well, there's the link. On a good work schedule: I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours. Everyone has their own preferred schedule, but I'm pretty sure the "eight hours a day" thing is industrialist nonsense. Thing is, though, writing is different from some other professions: whether you're actively typing or not, your brain is going through plot, characterization, descriptions, whatever. At least that's how it works for me. Like I said above, every time I saw this one in my list, I started thinking about what I was going to write. Some of that even made it in here. On “how to write with style,” aka List #1: Reverse the numbers in this section and it might as well have come from Cracked. Not that it's especially amusing, but this list, more than his other advice, rings true for me. Too long to quote; just give it a look if you care. I ignored his gushing about Joyce, of course. I am, however, going to reproduce the second list in its entirety. It's brief, and it's been passed around quite a bit already, so of course I have something to say about it. On how to write good short stories, aka List #2: 1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. Great advice, but the devil's in the implementation. 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. So many stories these days don't bother to do that. 3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. This is probably Vonnegut's most quoted piece of advice. It's definitely important, but it's insufficient by itself. 4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. See my multiple rants about overlong descriptions. 5. Start as close to the end as possible. Lots of writers lately have taken this literally, starting at the very end, thus relegating the rest of the story to flashbacks. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but sometimes it's difficult to follow too many jumps around in time. 6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of. On that point, I agree. 7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. I came up with this one independently, I think. I noted that some of the greatest works of literature (using the term in its broadest sense, as above) were written with just one person, or possibly a small group of people, in mind; they didn't get their start from an author using focus groups or brainstorming what demographic he or she was shooting for. Examples include Alice in Wonderland, pretty much anything by Poe, and freaking Lord of the Rings. My personal corollary to this is: you have to expect that some people won't like it. That's still better than blandly trying to please everyone. 8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. I can't completely get behind this one, but like I said: he's Vonnegut and I'm not. I'm mostly commenting here from a reader's perspective, and two of my preferred genres are fantasy and science fiction. In those, you want to withhold some information; it helps keep the reader reading so as to eventually discover, say, why the world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or who the MC's father really is (yes, that's mostly a Star Wars reference). I'm not quite as big a fan of mystery, but in that genre, it should be glaringly obvious that you withhold some information. As for horror, if you explain the monsters too much, they cease being monsters. The danger of putting too much information up front is obvious: you end up writing The Silmarillion before Lord of the Rings, and you'll lose readers. No, I say (again from a reader's perspective): start with the story, not the Book of Genesis. On ignoring rules: And there, I’ve just used a semi-colon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules. Told you so. |
| Today's blast from the past is a short entry I wrote near the end of August, 2008: "I can't get no..." I've been trying to put words to the malaise that seems to have overtaken my life. It's not that I'm not happy, or I'm severely lacking in anything (except maybe motivation). I don't think I wallow in self-pity to that degree anymore. If I do, I don't write about it, because that leads to a) people shunning you even more; b) advice that doesn't work for me (as per some of the comments on that entry); or c) people being happy about it because at least they're not you. Anyway, I did finally figure out what was bugging me, I think: work. The fact that I had to do it. It was interfering with my video game time. What I want to focus on, though, is the first comment, from someone I sadly haven't seen in a while but used to comment here a lot: It's "midlife crisis," buddy. I've experienced it and know men who experience it until either they self destruct or they do something to sate it. Some people treat a midlife crisis, especially in dudes, as a joke. And to be fair, sometimes it really is funny, like when someone goes out and blows all their money and credit on a Porsche and a 21-year-old hooker (neither of which I've ever done). But that shit's real, and as much as society pushes men to squash their emotions, doing so is generally a Bad Idea. That shit can ruin lives. I had an uncle who had an affair with a grad student, and ended up destroying his family. Fortunately, the kids reconciled with him before he croaked, and he expressed regret at his actions. Anyway, I don't think that was one; I've always been prone to depressive episodes, regardless of age. And even if it was, I didn't have a family to ruin. Sure, I ended up getting divorced the following year, something which was in no way my fault [Narrator: It was a little bit his fault]. But having glanced at a few of the intervening blog entries, they weren't all gloom. Some of them were about my epidural for back pain, and anyone who's experienced chronic back pain can tell you it definitely affects one's mental health. And then there was a vacation, which apparently helped, too. I did end up, over the following year, buying a new car, retiring, and traveling (in that general order). But the car was a Subaru, not a Porsche, and traveling is something I'd always wanted to do but was difficult while working full-time. Whilst out and about yesterday in my new-to-me Subaru—after over a year without a car, I wanted to see what changes happened in my town, and besides, it was sunny and 70 damn degrees outside—I saw that we now have a Porsche dealership in my town. I wasn't even the slightest bit tempted. |
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