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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'm not above making up words if I don't know a good one for the context. Or even just for fun. None of them have caught on, but English has some words that caught on for a while, and then... caught off? If your dream is to talk like Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek... Who? No. ...look no further than Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words, one of the dictionaries Catherine O’Hara used to tweak her iconic character's lines. Still not interested in the show. The following terms for everyday things are ones you'll want to add to your lexicon ASAP. People who grew up with the internet seem to think they had the monopoly on turning words into acronyms. They did not; ASAP predated widespread use of computers. Some sources claim it's about a hundred years old They also didn't invent weed or sex. Just saying. On the other hand, a bunch of words that people think were acronyms weren't. Those are called backronyms because people love portmanteaux (I, on the other hand, do not). An example of a non-acronym is the ever-useful F word. Anyway. The article lists too many words for me to copy all of them, and besides, lawyers exist. So I'll just highlight a few. 3. Baragouin Another word for gibberish that dates back to the early 1600s. But why bother? Gibberish is easier to spell, pronounce, and remember, and also has the advantage of sounding like what it is. 4. Bumfodder Why yes, this is a 17th-century word for toilet paper. Again, easier to say "bumwad," or even "loo roll" if you're of a British bent. 9. Clinchpoop If you get into a confrontation with a jerk, consider calling them a clinchpoop, which the OED defines as “A term of contempt for one considered wanting in gentlemanly breeding.” I mean, sure, hit 'em with that word if you want them to hit you with their fists. 13. Eructation A fancy word for belching... Everything sounds more proper when using Latin root words. That's one reason we have so many. Defecation. Urination. Flatulence. This one, though, is just showing off. 18. Forjeskit “Forjesket sair, with weary legs,” Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote in 1785’s “Second Epistle to J. Lapraik.” It was the first use of the word, which means “exhausted from work,” according to Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary. Still no definitive word on whether Scots is a dialect of or sister language to English, but I'm pretty sure this word belongs in that language. That's not the only Scots word at the link. 24. Join-hand Another word for cursive handwriting. Some words went obsolete for a reason. 31. Maquillage Another word for makeup that dates back to the late 1800s. And that one's French. Yes, English stole a bunch of words from French, but most of them came from way before the late 1800s. 32. Matutolypea According to Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary, this term means “getting up on the wrong side of the bed.” Macmillan Dictionary notes that the word “is derived from the Latin name Matuta from Matuta Mater, the Roman Goddess of the dawn, and the Greek word lype meaning 'grief or sorrow.’” Unnecessary. Cumbersome. 40. Ombibulous According to Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary, ombibulous describes “someone who drinks everything.” It was coined by H.L. Mencken, who once wrote, “I am ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.” Finally! One I have reason to steal. 47. Scacchic “of or pertaining to chess,” according to the OED. As far as I've been able to figure out, the French word for "chess" is the same as the French word for "failure." Unsurprisingly, it seems to be related to this one, which comes from Italian. 51. Tapster Another word for a bartender. Hey look, another one I can actually use. Anyway, like I said, many more at the link. Personally, I think most of these, however unusual, have better words to describe their concepts. But some writers seem to take great delight in vexing their readers with obscure synonyms, so the article might be useful to them. |
About a year ago, I commented on a Bloomberg article about dining economics. This entry: "Oh Yeah, I Vaguely Remember "Dates""  . I had to go find it because today's Atlantic article rang a couple of chimes in the old belfry. It's not the same thing, so here is what you might call Dining Economics, Part 2.The Economic Principle That Helps Me Order at Restaurants If you’re just eating one dish, you’re missing out. I order at restaurants using just one criterion: Does it look like I'd enjoy it? The only "economic principle" involved in dining out should be "Can I afford this?" In the 19th century, when European thinkers began developing the economic principle of diminishing marginal utility, they probably weren’t dwelling on its implications for the best strategy for ordering food at a restaurant. Probably because they were doing their thinking at taverns, not restaurants. The basic concept that these early economists were getting at is that as you consume more and more of a thing, each successive unit of that thing tends to bring you less satisfaction—or, to use the economic term, utility—than the previous one. This may be a valid economic principle (I'll grant that it is), but for me, it simply doesn't apply to dining. My last bite of delicious steak is just as satisfying as the first. The crust of the pizza makes me just as happy as the point. And my third beer may, in fact, be more satisfying than my first. Recently, Adam Mastroianni, a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School, invoked this idea in his newsletter, Experimental History, to explain why a flight of beer can be more satisfying than a larger glass of a single brew. “The first sip is always the best sip,” he wrote, “and a flight allows you to have several first sips instead of just one.” This may be true for others. For me, it's not about diminishing marginal utility. It's about trying as many beers as possible without getting too drunk to enjoy them. Which I suppose plays right into the thesis of today's article, except that I don't have the same desire for variety in food. The same principle, I’d argue, applies to first bites: If the first half of a dish tends to be more satisfying than the second half, why not have the first half of two dishes instead of one whole dish? In other words, when you go to a restaurant, just share every dish with whomever you’re with. That way, you get more first bites. But what if they've ordered something you know you won't like? I've said this before, but just to reiterate: With a few exceptions, such as some appetizers, or pizza, I don't share food. Long ago, I was on a second or third date with someone. On previous dates, she'd pulled the old "I'll just have a salad" thing that some women think all men appreciate, and then proceeded to steal more than half of my fries. So I ordered more fries. Unsurprisingly, this was our last date. While I'm on the subject of sharing appetizers, can someone tell me why they always come in prime-number servings? Like, five. Or seven. Or whatever number is NOT equal to or easily divisible by the number of diners. It's freaking annoying. Or it would be if I didn't almost always dine alone these days, thus rendering whatever psych trick they're trying to pull invalid. Diversification can free you from indecision when you’re torn between menu items that sound equally awesome. For shit's sake, just commit. For instance, it is the answer to the classic conundrum of brunch: sweet or savory? What? The classic conundrum of brunch is: beer, mimosa, or bloody mary? Even I, a prolific meal-splitter, acknowledge that this approach has downsides and limitations. It can be difficult when people have different dietary restrictions or different budgets, and it doesn’t make sense if there’s a dish you know you don’t want to share. I'm especially not sharing my hamburger. That's gross. Or you have to slice it, which is blasphemy for a burger. Restaurants do show flickers of awareness that many people don’t want to be locked into eating all of a single dish: They serve buffets, which are basically just meals shared by every customer, and they commonly offer to serve dessert with multiple spoons. Confession: With the exception of some Indian restaurants, and even then only sometimes, I do not like buffets and would rather opt for menu ordering. No, this isn't a pandemic thing; I was like this in the Before Time. But a world in which meal-sharing is the default would represent a shift not just in logistics but in values. Whereas a one-dish-per-person paradigm prizes individual choice—and perhaps even endorses a notion of private property—sharing a meal elevates compromise and negotiation. Big fan of compromise and negotiation, and happy to practice it with something other than my pastrami reuben. In conclusion, no, economic principles (which may or may not be sound in the first place) don't apply to restaurant dining, except possibly the law of supply and demand. |
| The best kind of article is the kind that confirms what I already believe. Because it's an epic waste of time? I'm kidding about the "best kind" thing, of course. But let's see what Art of Manliness says about this. No, it's not "make your wife do it." It's not promoting that kind of "manliness." I have a confession to make: I don’t make my bed. I never saw the point in it; I’m just going to mess up the covers again that night. Exactly. Also, I don't like sleeping in a "made" bed. When I'm in hotel rooms, for example, the first thing I have to do in the bed is yank all the tucked-in covers out. I don’t spend much time in my bedroom, and my guests don’t spend any... Well, maybe if you made your bed, it would have guests. I realize that not making your bed has a bit of slovenly shame associated with it. Nope. No shame here. I don't have a drill sergeant coming to bounce a quarter off the sheets or whatever the hell they do in the Army. In fact, when it comes to daily habits, it even has some cool cache. It’s the kind of foundational habit a four-star naval admiral could base a commencement address, and book, around, and even claim could very well help you change the world. You know what you could be doing in the ten minutes you've wasted making a bed? Changing the world. Or, better, sleeping an extra ten minutes. Believe me, when I was working, that ten minutes was damn precious. Given this cool, cleanly cache, I felt surprised (and a little vindicated) when I came across the following passage while recently reading A Bachelor’s Cupboard — a manual for young men on how to live independently published in 1906: A woman who, as the mother of several sons, has many young men as guests at her large country house, says she can invariably judge a man from the care he takes of his room. A young man who has been well brought up, she says, never fails to turn back his bedclothes [sheets and blankets] upon arising in the morning... So, hang on, don't make your bed, but do futz with the covers so they're all folded and whatnot? Still a waste of time. So, the standard for neatness and cleanliness a century back was the opposite of what it is today: rather than pulling his sheets and covers back over his bed up to the headboard, a well-bred gentleman was supposed to drape his bedding over the footboard, leaving both the blankets and the sheet-covered mattress entirely open to the air. Such an airing out was thought to promote freshness and good health (hence why you would also place your pillows by an open window). I will note that 1906 was before washing machines became a widely adopted thing. Back then, washing sheets and blankets would have been an all-day chore. Nowadays, you can even do it as often as once a year. Kidding. But I did just have to buy a new washer/dryer because the old ones broke under the weight of my bed covers. In 2005, a study was published which found that not making your bed may be better for you than making it. "A" study? Not impressed. I don't not do it for scientific reasons, but out of sheer laziness. More than a million dust mites live in your bed. These microscopic critters feed on the flakes of skin you slough off in your sheets, and thrive in warm, moist environments. Remember that next time you're in a hotel room with their sanitized sheets (not so sure about the blankets, though). I'm always sneering at the clean-freaks who take black lights to hotel rooms and never once consider that they're sleeping in far worse conditions at home. Plus, then they go to AirBnBs, which don't have the big industrial-scale steam power washers. Sleeping with dead, dehydrated dust mites may not seem significantly more appealing than lying with moist, live ones, but it’s their fecal matter (yes, dust mites are pooping in your bed) that trigger allergies and asthma. As I don't have allergies or asthma, I'm pretty sure I'm doing it right. Of course, to get the full, freshening effect of this, you should drape your bedding over the footboard of your bed, as The Bachelor’s Cupboard instructs, rather than leaving your sheets in a half-on/half-off rumple. Who the hell has a footboard these days? Okay, me. I do. This is because I went through a period when I'd wake up with severe calf cramps, and pressing my foot against the footboard for a stretch is less disruptive of my sleep cycle than standing up to do it. So I bought a bed frame. Anyway, point is, make your bed, or don't make your bed. I don't care. I'm far more concerned about how you treat other people than what you do in bed. |
| Hot on the heels of my citrus-themed Comedy newsletter this week, an article about orange juice. (If you missed the NL, here's a link: "Lemons" ) How orange juice took over the breakfast table Orange juice used to be a treat you had to squeeze out yourself. More than a century ago, an overproduction of oranges helped create the morning staple we know and love. Love? Speak for yourself. I'd rather eat an orange. Curious, I tried to look up whether the fruit or the juice is considered better for health; unsurprisingly, as with so much of nutrition science, I got mixed results. I shan't post the links here; just google "orange or orange juice." It’s bright, but somewhat boring, and bears the dubious halo of being something good for you. Few of us give it much thought, other than to recall its oft-trumpeted Vitamin C content. Lots of things have Vitamin C. I've gone months without citrus products, and most of my teeth haven't fallen out. Except in that dream. You know the one. But processed orange juice as a daily drink, you might be surprised to learn, is a relatively recent arrival. Its present status as a global phenomenon is the creation of 20th-Century marketers, dealing with a whole lot of oranges and nowhere to dump them. Of course it's marketers. It's always marketers. The same people who convinced us to buy chicken wings, pet rocks, and bottled tap water. Much has been made about how "Evian" spelled backwards is "naive," but that's ridiculous; after all, "star" spelled backwards is "rats," for example. No, I'd be way more concerned that one of the French words for the kitchen sink is "évier." But I digress. The fruits were shipped all over and eaten fresh or juiced in the home, producing a delicious honey-coloured elixir. California relied on the navel orange and the Valencia orange,; the latter was the best for juicing. The navel orange itself is interesting. You know how it's got this little knob inside, by the "navel?" That's a buried other orange. It's apparently the tradeoff from genetic engineering for them to have no seeds. Seeded oranges are annoying; they're too much work. Citrus itself is quite interesting, genetically speaking, but that's another topic. Florida, however, grew four varieties, and all of these were decent juice oranges. That meant that when, in 1909, the growers met to deal with a burgeoning problem – a glut of oranges, too many for the market to bear – juicing them, rather than curbing their production, was considered a feasible solution. For context, in-home refrigerators didn't start to be a thing until like the 1920s or 30s. Be that as it may, oranges, juiced and otherwise, were the subject of a strenuous advertising campaign by orange interests in the 1920s, when the discovery of vitamins was a current event. Vitamin: what you do when your friends drop by. Vitamin C was a perfect reason to consume more oranges. Things really got off the ground when nutrition personality Elmer McCollum popularised a mysterious ailment he said resulted from eating too many "acid-producing" foods, like bread and milk: acidosis. Right, because no one associates citrus with acid. In fact, true acidosis, which has a variety of causes, cannot be remedied by eating lettuce and citrus, as McCollum claimed. But that didn’t stop the imagination of the citrus industry from taking advantage of this new fear. Classic marketing: If demand doesn't exist, create it. I've mentioned my First Rule of Comedy before: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good joke. Or a bad one. Especially a bad one." Well, substitute "marketing campaign" for "joke," and you have the basics of marketing conquered. The promise of a new way to make juice that could be kept frozen, then reconstituted in people’s homes, prompted them into even more production, however. They ramped up tree planting in the 1940s. Again, though, nothing in here about the parallel development and adoption of the in-home refrigerator/freezer, essential if you're going to sell orange juice concentrate. You might as well write a story about the rise of the automobile and fail to mention gas stations. Wait, this is the BBC. Petrol stations. When John McPhee checked into a Florida hotel for a reporting trip more than 50 years ago, he discovered that even in the heartland of oranges, fresh juice was a dim memory. When you only consume inferior product, you start thinking that it's the best. See also: wasabi, milk chocolate, light beer, dried mashed potatoes. "Next door was a restaurant, with orange trees, full of fruit, spreading over its parking lot," he wrote in his book Oranges. "I went in for dinner, and, since I would be staying for some time and this was the only restaurant in the neighborhood, I checked on the possibility of fresh juice for breakfast. There were never any requests for fresh orange juice, the waitress explained, apparently unmindful of the one that had just been made. "Fresh is either too sour or too watery or too something," she said. "Frozen is the same every day. People want to know what they’re getting." Which also helps to explain why tourists go to McDonald's instead of local restaurants. It had taken a few decades, but with the help of advertising and processing technology, the dumping ground for extra oranges was solidly ensconced as its own product, far outpacing oranges themselves in sales. And don't misunderstand me: people like what they like, and I understand that, even if I sometimes mock it. The problem is that most people only think they've made their own choices. They haven't. Ad agencies have. |
| As far as I'm concerned, history ended in 1969; I can trace my first memories to the moon landing that year. After that, it's "lived experience." Part of my lived experience was being a photographer. I learned early on how to develop film—black and white film, that is; color was beyond my resources, if not expertise. Usually I'd take my color rolls to a reputable photo shop. Sometimes, I'd use Fotomat. Fotomat was in the photography business, offering tiny huts situated in shopping plaza parking lots that were staffed by just one employee. Men were dubbed Fotomacs. Women were known as Fotomates, and management required them to wear short-shorts, or “hot pants,” in a nod to the strategy used for flight attendants at Pacific Southwest Airlines. "But at least we're equal opportunity!" Seriously, though, if you don't remember those kiosks, look at the picture in the article. How's anyone supposed to know if the "Fotomate" is wearing hot pants? Or pants, period? Cars pulled up to the Fotomat location and dropped off film they wanted processed. After being shuttled via courier to a local photo lab, it would be ready for pick-up the following day. Meanwhile, everyone involved got a good look at the naughty pictures you'd taken. In the 1960s, Americans were fond of Kodak Instamatic cameras and film. People submitted the familiar yellow spools full of images from weddings, birthdays, trips, and other social events to photo processing labs, which might take days to return prints. "...and this is a picture of my thumb... and a close-up of my thumb..." You might expect me to rag on Instamatics. I will not do so. They had their place. One of the first lessons I learned while doing photography was, "It's not the camera; it's the photographer." This did not stop me from owning a Nikon and lusting after a Hasselblad. The concept of a kiosk where people could easily drop off and pick up film that would be ready overnight originated in Florida, where Charles Brown opened the first location in 1965. After buying Brown's stock shares and arranging for a royalty, Fleet and Graham founded the Fotomat Corporation in 1967, with Graham president and Fleet vice-president. I didn't know they were quite that old. But that stretches back into what I'm calling "history." Charles Brown isn't exactly a rare name, though I question the morals of any Brown naming their kid Charlie after the mid-50s. Another famous Charles Brown ran AT&T for a while, and, if I recall, oversaw its breakup. Or maybe it was the same guy; I can't be arsed to research it. That Charlie Brown was one of the reasons I got into computers, but that's a story for another day. While it was relatively easy to slot in a Fotomat hut in a parking lot, a business operating as an island surrounded by traffic had its problems. Remembering an old Fotomat in New Dorp on Staten Island, residents on Facebook recalled plowing into the kiosk or backing into it. It had a bright yellow roof for a reason, but Staten Idiots are blind. There was also the matter of bathrooms: They weren’t any. Employees often made arrangements to duck into local supermarkets or other stores when nature demanded it. I guess Amazon followed their lead on a much larger scale. But Graham’s controversial business practices made him a short-timer. In 1971, he was ousted from Fotomat over allegations he was misusing funds for his own personal gain, including his political interests—Graham was a supporter of both Richard Nixon and football player-turned-congressman Jack Kemp, who became an assistant to the president in the Fotomat corporation and referred football pros to become franchisees. Now, see, if I'd have known that, I'd never have used them. Even though 1971 was long before I was able to drive up to one. By the early 1980s, Fotomat—now minus Fleet, who had sold off his shares, and Graham—had opened over 4000 locations. That was both impressive and problematic. Fotomat had far overextended itself, sometimes opening kiosks so close to one another it cannibalized sales. You'd think Radio Shack would have learned from that, but they did not. The real death blow for Fotomat, however, wasn’t over-expansion. It was the emergence of the one-hour minilab. Also known in the photography business as "Freakin' Sorcery." The company tried to recalibrate, converting home movies to videotape and even offering VHS rental during the VCR boom of the 1980s, but it wasn’t successful. Maybe if they'd offered a VHS-by-mail service? Fleet, who had exited Fotomat years prior—the company had been sold to Konica—was no worse for the wear. Prior to his death in 1995, he authored a book, Hue and Cry, which called into question the authenticity of works attributed to William Shakespeare. Questioning the authenticity of works attributed to William Shakespeare is a giant red flag that you're an elitist asshole. "How could a commoner have penned such art?" Graham’s future after Fotomat was far more colorful. Promoting a bogus gold mining operation he named Au Magnetics, he promised he could turn sand into gold. Instead, he was accused of fleecing investors. You can turn sand into gold. It would cost more than you'd get for the gold. That doesn't stop people who have a hard-on for gold. As for the Fotomat locations themselves: Following the company’s collapse, many were repurposed into other businesses. Some became coffee shops; others morphed into watch repair kiosks, locksmith huts, windshield wiper dealers, or tailors. Presumably, none of the owners who took over mandated their employees wear hot pants. It's been a while since I've seen one; I think all the old kiosks around here were completely removed. It's not like they were built to last. Only their memory remains, a faded photograph on a questionable website. I feel no nostalgia for them, however; they were a product of their time, and today's digital photography is far superior to that of the Instamatic era (though not to the late, lamented Kodachrome). And on that note, this song is appropriate today: They give us those nice bright colors Give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph So mama, don't take my Kodachrome away |
| Another Cracked article, this one tickling my confirmation bias, so I'm sharing it. I know I've written about this sort of thing before. Here's one from eleven months ago: "Out There" . Short version: I note the similarities between alien abduction stories and sleep paralysis, because I've experienced the latter far more than I'd like (that is, more than 0 times).If you’ve followed my work here on Cracked or ever had me corner you at a houseparty, you know that I have a complicated relationship with the supernatural. It’s something which I am deeply fascinated by, desperately want to be true, and am also completely convinced it’s all B.S. of a Q-Ray Bracelet order of magnitude. I can relate, except for the "desperately want to be true" part. I want explanations, not confirmations. Now, I'm not going to do a lot of article pasting today. I just don't have the time. But the article goes into one of the most famous alien abduction stories, Betty and Barney Hill. Then, Abductees generally report a sense of missing time, strange lights, looming ominous presences, and, most notably, some sort of bodily violation, usually with metallic instruments. This is the famous ‘anal probing,’ which when you think about is really bizarre. When we humans discover a new species here on earth, our first step isn’t usually to jam stuff up its butt. Never had that happen to me, but then, I find I'm way less fascinated by butts than most humans. I was just reading yesterday about some guy who went to the ER with a hot water bottle rammed up his ass (Rectum? Damn near killed 'im.) There is only one way to have that happen, and it is not by accident, even if you think you've managed to convince the ER staff that it was. And it is something that I would never, ever consider. As far as I'm concerned, that orifice is strictly Exit Only. But I digress. Yes, odds are you know someone with an alien abduction story. And if you don’t, you do now – because I have one of my own. And yes, he explains this later: Look, I’m not saying there isn’t life on other planets. Probabilistically speaking, there almost certainly is. But I don’t think any intelligent species has visited Earth, at least in any of our lifetimes. We have equipment sensitive enough to detect minor seismic activity on other planets. The amount of energy it would take to propel an object through space at a speed anywhere approaching practical would be so mind-bogglingly enormous we’d definitely know about it. Not only that, even assuming that aliens were visiting from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star system to ours, and even assuming they were traveling at speeds approaching c, we’d still see them coming for about four and a half years. Minor nitpick: no, we wouldn't, because an object traveling at near the speed of light relative to us, headed in our direction, wouldn't... oh, hell, I don't have time to wrestle with general relativity right now. Point is, I still agree with his first points there, as I've banged on in here about way too often. So here’s my theory, based on what happened to me. When I was a teenager, around fourteen or so, I started having night terrors. You don’t remember night terrors, but it didn’t take too long for my grandmother (whom I lived with) and my friends whose houses I would stay the night at to start waking me up in the dead of night, asking if I was okay. Some of you lucky bastards don't remember night terrors. I’d occasionally have nightmares I’d remember, and they’d always be variations of the same themes: I’d be lying down, completely immobilized. I wanted to move, but couldn’t. There was a blindingly bright light and I could hear what sounded like the cadence of speech, but couldn’t make sense of it. There was a looming figure I could vaguely sense, and then there was a blinding pain in my legs. Like hot razorblades being dragged along my calves. Apart from the pain, which I fortunately haven't experienced, that sounds a lot like my own experience with sleep paralysis. In other words, I had almost all of the signs of an alien abduction. But I know I wasn’t abducted by aliens. In fact, I know exactly what happened. See, when I was thirteen, I had a surgery on my legs because I was prone to walking on my tiptoes and it was giving me the backpain of a retired roofer. And that might explain why my experience is different from his: I never had surgery as a child. So, yes, I think that people have been waking up from general anesthetic during surgery, but remember it mostly subconsciously, like a dream. The bodily violation. The feelings of fear and immobility, like sleep paralysis. Confusion. Bright lights. Menacing creatures with bluish-gray skin, no nose (and sometimes no mouth), often with no hair, and strange, dark eyes? What, you mean like this? [picture of surgeon] I think that's a fair hypothesis. It certainly doesn't explain every report of alien abduction, but it doesn't have to. People probably start feeling all of this terror and strange dreams, and, unsure what’s causing it, latch onto the culturally ubiquitous idea of alien abduction. Remember when I mentioned that the Hill’s case, which set the pattern for the prototypical alien abduction story, took place in 1961? Well, in 1956, halothane was introduced as an inhalatory general anesthetic. Sounds like a valid point. Of course, I wouldn't accept it as absolute truth until they do serious studies on it, but it's absolutely worth looking into. Fentanyl, another drug that became used in general anesthesia, was first synthesized in 1960. All of this happened right around the time that there was an explosion in alien abduction claims. Right now, we have possible correlation, but no evidence for causation. So, sure. I've been saying that alien abduction experiences track with sleep paralysis, but this works too. It could very well be both, or even have other explanations. Like I said, though, don't think I'm just swallowing this whole. That would be just as rash as wholeheartedly believing in alien abduction itself. But it's a perspective that might have some merit. |
| I've mentioned before that if you ask four economists a question, you'll get six answers. None of them will be right. If you want "right," you have to go to comedy sites like Cracked. Okay, so not completely right. Plenty of people want to work, and would even if they'd be able to eat if they didn't. But I'm not one of those people, so I'll accept the title as hyperbole, not literalism. An older generation disapproving of the incoming one is a tale as old as time. I don't disapprove of the younger generation. I disapprove of every marketing gimmick assuming that they're the only ones that matter. Well, every marketing gimmick except ads for Depends. And even there, I'm not so sure. The latest bug to crawl up the butt of the boomer generation is their collective decision, in what they’re calling “the Great Resignation,” is the idea that these ding-dang gosh-darn millennial snowflakes just simply don’t want to work anymore. Considering that the youngest of what marketers have decided is the Boomer generation are pushing 60 right now, I know who doesn't want to work anymore, and it's the folks near or past retirement age. The definition of "retirement" is "not wanting to work anymore." Instructor at University of Calgary and Twitter user Paul Fairie, smelling the stench of an argument endlessly made, put together a thread of quotes from publications going back a full century accusing workers of not wanting to work. It's an image, so you'll have to go to the link above to look at it. In summary, it's variations of the phrase "no one wants to work anymore" in publications going back to the 19th century. Once again, the people in need of labor for incredibly unrewarding jobs have pointed their finger at a willpower-less public. After all, they’re talking about fruit-picking, a job that is literally often used as a punchline or example of undesirable work. One that is now the go-to example of the work taken by desperate and less-than-documented migrant workers because, well, the job f**king sucks. I can think of a few jobs I'd hate more than fruit-picking, but the point stands. What’s even more bizarre about these froth-mouthed claims is that simple economic data doesn’t back up the narrative. The current unemployment rate in the U.S., via the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is 3.6%. This is one of the lowest unemployment rates in the last 50 years or more. Mostly I'm including this quote because you're going to hear people claiming that unemployment is at an all-time high. Usually followed by "Vote for me in November." I guess politicians want to work. Or at least provide the appearance of working. So apparently, the amount of people that want to work is the highest it’s ever been, but no one wants to work anymore. How do these two things co-exist? It’s pretty simple: people don’t want to work TERRIBLE JOBS, and they don’t have to. And as far as I'm concerned, this is great. There's a word for being forced to work a horrible job just so you don't die, and it was supposedly outlawed in the 19th century here in the US. The unemployment rate shows that there is a large supply of jobs. If no one wants to work for you, that likely means whatever job you’re offering is in very low demand. So maybe do what the businessman you hold in such high regard would do in this kind of situation: examine why what you’re offering sucks so much that nobody wants it. Of course, it's not always about the paycheck, or at least not just about that, but you know how people would say "I wouldn't do X for a million dollars?" Well, how about ten million? "Hm, I'll think about it." Is paying your workers a living wage not financially viable? Well, unfortunately it seems like your genius business plan was actually financially unviable and was held afloat by simple desperation. We can argue about what a living wage really means, but at the very least it means a single person being able to afford water, food, shelter, and electricity. The words you’re looking for aren’t “nobody wants to work anymore,” they’re “I can’t find anyone desperate enough to do awful things.” Which, for anyone looking at a picture beyond numbers, isn’t the worst state of things. It's not just "doing awful things." I derive immense satisfaction from stories about people quitting decent jobs because of shitty management. Because they can. Employers (remember, I used to be one) and managers have had the upper hand for far too long, and it's about time someone gave them a reality check. By the way, the entire statement “no one wants to work anymore” is inherently dumb. Nobody likes to work, except for mattress testers and candy tasters. People work because it’s necessary to live and do the things in life that actually bring them joy. This is the only part of the article I have an issue with. I know several people who, if they weren't somehow contributing something (aka working), would feel bad. Like I said, I'm not one of those people, but I know they exist. The open question is: would they take that job as a sanitation technician (second class) if they didn't need the money? In conclusion, we're at the point right now where demand is high and supply is low. Classically, when that happens, prices go up to balance things. That's Econ 101, which I actually passed. The product in question, though, isn't bananas, but labor. And yes, this may be a cause of inflation in the short term, but in the long term, you have more people with more money they're willing to spend, and if production ramps up to compensate, things stabilize again. If not, if inflation continues at an astonishing rate, then we've just proven what I've been saying all along: capitalism requires an underclass. Don't like it? Change the system. Not my problem anymore, because I don't want to work at solving it. |
| We're going to have a bit of pun today. Difficulty: other language. Why the Japanese Calendar Is Full of Unofficial Food Holidays A linguistic quirk created both Banana Day and Strawberry Day. Over the last few years, an increasing number of unofficial food holidays have popped up all over the Japanese calendar. Banana Day, Strawberry Day, Curry Day; the list goes on. The only things better than food holidays are drink holidays. I like to think it's always Beer Day somewhere. Each is celebrated with a flurry of online attention and clever marketing tie-ins from restaurants, trade groups, and food companies. Because of course it is. But how does a random date become Strawberry Day, for instance? Part of a larger trend known as dajare no hi, or (bad) pun days, most of these celebrations depend on wordplay, to which the Japanese language is particularly well-suited. You know, if I'd known how much learning other languages would up my pun game, I'd have done it long ago. I only know a few Japanese words, mostly ones related to food, martial arts and cars, but even there, there are opportunities for puns. Nissan, the car company, for example: I've been calling it "23" because it sounds like the Japanese for 2 and 3. That's not where the name came from, though. To make matters worse, 1 through 5 in Japanese is "ich ni san shi go," which I can never forget now because of its resemblance to "Each Nissan, she go." I'm probably butchering Japanese here. If so, sumimasen. But I do know a bit more French, and I am still amused about the French word for seal (the animal, not the seventwo things holding back the apocalypse). I've probably mentioned this in here before, but just in case: The word is phoque, but it's pronounced just like a certain versatile Germanic curse. To make matters worse, if you want to say, "I'm going to feed the seals" in French, you'd say "Je vais donner à manger aux phoques." Since the final s isn't pronounced, and the "aux" is pronounced almost exactly like "oh," well, don't say that in front of your mom. But I digress. Take Banana no hi (Banana Day) for example. Broken down, the Japanese pronunciation—ba-na-na—corresponds to the Japanese for eight (ba) and seven (nana). The seventh day of the eighth month, August 7, thus becomes “Banana Day.” Don't you dare scoff. We have Star Wars Day here. May the Fourth be with you. The only surprising thing there is that it goes month/day like in the US and not day/month like in civilized countries. Similarly, the Japanese for strawberry—ichigo—corresponds to the number one (ichi) and five (go). Depending on one’s location, Strawberry Day, or ichigo no hi, is marked on either January 15, or even the 15th day of each month. Depending on how many strawberries there are for sale, I suppose. In a 1999 paper for the Japanese Society for Language and Humor Studies, the linguist Heiyo Nagashima explained how puns have existed in Japanese since the time of the Manyoshu, a collection of poetry published in the later Nara Period (710-794). If you have to study humor, it's not funny anymore. Regardless, this long history of puns is probably one reason I've always been interested in Japanese culture. Japanese is also a heavily inferential language, with emphasis placed both on the ability of a writer to convey information as succinctly as possible, and that of a reader to infer the correct meaning. Without knowing that many food-day puns depend on dates, they can be something of a riddle. And that's why I never started any kind of formal study of the language. Pocky no hi: Pocky Day. Observed on November 11, since 11/11 resembles the long skinny shape of the popular sweet snack. Also known as Pocky and Pretz Day, which includes the savory version. Which is probably for the best, not focusing on the other association of that date. And I'm glad this one came up out of my rotation today and not tomorrow, which is the anniversary of Japan's surrender at the end of WWII. Niku no hi: Meat Day. Corresponding to two (ni) and nine (ku), Meat Day is commonly marked by stores and restaurants on the 29th of each month, although February 9 (2/9) is also often observed. The use of the Japanese particle "no" is interesting, by the way. From what I understand, in these contexts, it indicates a kind of possessive. Like we use apostrophes. These puns are not just confined to food. February 22, for example, is Cat Day. In Japanese, cats say nyan, rather than “meow,” which may also be read as the number two. 2022 was particularly notable for its 2/22/22 date, which was naturally dubbed “Super Cat Day.” Any country with a Cat Day is okay by me. How can both "nyan" and "ni" be "two?" you ask. Well, it's not unheard of for there to be several names for one concept, and also, these are transliterations. While bad puns in Japanese produce the same eye-rolls as their English counterparts, there’s no denying that clever wordplay and special foods can make ordinary days into something worth celebrating. A pun is only funny to the perpetrator. At least until the victims come after them with pitchforks and/or katana. |
| Today's article—something from NPR—mostly applies to the US. People from other countries, feel free to shake your heads in disbelief. 1. Move to another country; or 2. Just die. But medical billing and health insurance systems in the U.S. are complex, and many patients have difficulty navigating them. This is by design. One of the great certainties in life, apart from death and taxes, is that you will need medical care at some point. Some people have figured out that we don't really want to die (or move to another country), so they find ways to extract money from us for that privilege. Some cost is, of course, unavoidable, but if you consider other actual needs, you'll find that they're free or heavily subsidized:  Air - generally free Water - Low to no cost, depending on where you live. Mine is provided by *gasp* the government Food - Can certainly be expensive, but some of the basics are subsidized Beer - Okay, you got me there. The cheap stuff is basically water, anyway.The only other basic need that's not cheap is housing. I'm not going to go into the reasons for that, but as with health care, the profit motive can get out of control. If you're worried about incurring debt during a health crisis or are struggling to deal with bills you already have, you're not alone. Some 100 million people — including 41% of U.S. adults — have health care debt, according to a recent survey by KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). 41% is absolutely mind-blowing. But as you should know, there's debt and then there's debt. I'm technically in debt, for example, paying for this dang computer every month—but it's a 0% interest promotional offer, and I'm prepared to pay it in full before the promotion period expires, which will probably piss Dell off, but I don't care. "It shouldn't be on the patients who are experiencing the medical issues to navigate this complicated system," said Nicolas Cordova, a health care lawyer with the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty. But consumers who inform themselves have a better chance of avoiding debt traps. Especially when some of the patients aren't in a position to figure out complicated payment options. Mental health, for example. Or people in comas. Even people with health insurance can land in debt; indeed, one of the biggest problems, consumer advocates said, is that so many people are underinsured, which means they can get hit with huge out-of-pocket costs from coinsurance and high deductibles. I don't think I'm stupid or ignorant, but figuring out what my insurance policy will and will not cover is harder for me than understanding calculus. It seems completely arbitrary. Get the best insurance coverage you can afford — even when you're healthy. Make sure you know what the copays, coinsurance, and deductibles will be. And then watch as you get sick and you find out you're still not covered. If you're uninsured but need health care, you might qualify for public insurance like Medicaid or Medicare. Ask the provider or hospital if they can help you check your eligibility before you commit to a care plan — and then stay with providers who participate in those programs. Easier said than done. I've heard horror stories about people who, while lying helpless in a hospital bed, had a doctor come in to check on them. The doctor happened to be out of network. They got boned. Note, I'm not blaming doctors here. Highly trained medical specialists deserve to be paid. It's a question of who's doing the paying, and how many layers there are between you and the actual doctor. After your doctors map out your treatment plan, check whether all the providers you need to see are in-network and whether any part of the treatment needs to be preauthorized. Ask lots of questions of your insurance provider, doctor's office, or hospital, especially for planned procedures, said Joy Dockter, a lawyer at Central California Legal Services, a public interest law firm. That's great in theory, and it may even work in practice for, say, a broken arm. But some medical emergencies are absolutely time-sensitive, and/or you're not going to be in any position to ask questions. Additionally, said Mark Rukavina, a program director at health equity advocacy group Community Catalyst, if the drug you want isn't covered by your insurance, ask whether the drugmaker has a patient assistance program; many do, though eligibility requirements vary. My doctor wrote me a prescription for a certain medication. It's very expensive, so the insurance won't cover it. They say they'll cover it when I get diabetes. Not before. Never mind that this medication is supposed to keep me from getting diabetes in the first place. Another oddity: I'm on three pills. They're relatively low-cost compared to that other one. The doc writes me a prescription for a 90-day supply of each of them. I take it to the pharmacy, where I find out that my insurance will only let me get a 30-day supply of each at about $30 each. That's $90 a month. Or, if I tell the pharmacist to forget I have insurance, I can get the 90-day supply—also at a cost of $30. That averages out to $30 a month. I also "forgot" to tell the eye doctor that I had insurance, and thus my cataract surgery was cheaper. If you're uninsured, ask for a cost estimate in advance. Rukavina noted that the federal No Surprises Act, which took effect in January, requires providers to give uninsured patients "good faith" estimates of what planned care will cost. From what I've gathered, those estimates would fit nicely in the Fantasy section of your local bookstore. Almost every hospital offers some form of financial assistance, or "charity care." Each hospital sets its own eligibility requirements but typically will waive or discount bills for patients earning less than two to three times the federal poverty level. (Three times the federal poverty level for a household of four in 2022 would be $83,250.) I'm a household of one (housemate doesn't count in this calculation), and my income is sometimes below poverty level, sometimes above. I assume the income calculation is based on last year's tax return. What if I need care the year after a slightly larger income? Even if you're not sure whether you qualify, it's worth trying. Gather up documents such as pay stubs or income tax returns. Do not expect this to be an easy process. For example, Walker said, health care providers often require documentation to be faxed. "One of the most common refrains I heard from experts: Persistence pays," Walker said. So, hypothetical scenario: I'm lying in bed, unable to move, barely able to even stay awake, and I'm supposed to gather up all my old tax returns, then find a fax machine (nearest one's at a Staples about two miles from me, and I don't have a car)? Ambulance services, which can lead to huge bills, might offer charity care programs, so ask whether you qualify. Another hypothetical scenario: I've just been hit by a bus, still alive but concussed, and I'm supposed to ask the EMTs if I qualify for charity care? Keep an eye on costs as they come up, said Louisville cancer patient Lori Mangum, who is now chief operating officer of Gilda's Club Kentuckiana, a cancer support group she relied on. Ask a family member or a support group to help you keep track, she said. I don't have family or a support group. Consumer protections in the No Surprises Act should help limit out-of-network charges. HAHAHAHAHA Rukavina noted that if you are not insured or not using your insurance and asked for an estimate in advance, you can dispute bills that exceed the estimates by $400. For patients seeking more information about the No Surprises Act and what it covers, Rukavina recommended calling the government's No Surprises Help Desk at 800-985-3059. I haven't called that number, but if I did, and got put on hold for four hours, that would be No Surprise. That's what happens when I contact any other business or government agency that's supposed to "help" and gets no direct benefit for it. If you know you cannot pay the bill, negotiate with the hospital administration or billing department. "That's almost always possible" because hospitals want to avoid the costly administrative burden of sending bills to collections, said Ge Bai, a professor of accounting and health care policy at Johns Hopkins University. You know what would avoid costly administrative burdens? A system where everyone pays based on their income, and everything that's not an elective procedure is covered. And isn't tied to work. Yeah, we're back in the Fantasy section. But I look at it this way: I don't have kids, and yet I finance public schools in two localities through taxes. I'm okay with this, because an educated populace is in my—and everyone's—best interests. Similarly, a healthy populace is in everyone's best interests. And in the end, there's no real difference between paying for health insurance, and paying taxes. But a simpler system would benefit everyone except the leeches who currently suck the blood out of every medical transaction. Unfortunately, those leeches are also lobbyists, so it ain't gonna happen. |
| Sometimes, I can relate to the things I share here. This is not one of those times. You just... eat. That's how. But I guess that's not enough for extroverts. In the spring of 2020, as my world shrunk to the square footage of my apartment, food became a mode of injecting pleasure and delight into an otherwise bleak and lonely period of my life. Oh great. A pandemic whine. As time passed, I wondered when, or if, I’d get to dine with friends and family again. I entered a state of despair. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy sharing meals with friends and family. But for me, the despair would be if I didn't know when I'd get to eat alone again. I relied on books, Netflix, and even work to distract myself at dinner. The horror. Eventually I downloaded TikTok, and then that became my new dining companion. The horror! (This time it's not meant sarcastically.) I began seeing myself mirrored on my “For You” page, which served up videos of other people eating alone. In the videos, creators talked to their presumed audiences in animated voices: “I’m so proud of you for eating today,” “No matter what, you deserve to nourish your body,” or “I’m going to take a bite, and then you take one.” Why were these people filming an ordinary, solitary experience and sharing it online? And why were millions of strangers, myself included, watching them every night? At this point, I got the feeling that even if the article answered those questions, I still wouldn't comprehend. How do you go about "not eating?" My entire day, no matter what else I'm doing, is taken up with one of four things: Preparing food, eating food, thinking about the next meal, and, while sleeping, dreaming about food. Even if I decide something like, "I need to not eat for the next twelve hours," I'm still thinking about what breakfast will be. Many of these videos are designed to encourage viewers, especially those with eating disorders or mental-health diagnoses, to eat in tandem with the creator. Okay. Okay, I can accept that some people have mental health issues about it. By no means am I trying to minimize those; I have my own, different issues. But, as with people who are gay or who enjoy anchovies on pizza, I can't fully understand; I can only accept. They found me, in the strange way that the TikTok algorithm knows you better than you know yourself. Which, right there, is enough reason for me to avoid that platform like poverty. ("Like the plague" is overused, clichéd, and it turns out people don't avoid that.) One account that I visited frequently was @foodwithsoy, run by Soy Nguyen, a food influencer based in Los Angeles. I did have a nice laugh at that aptronym, until I got to the "influencer" part and nearly puked. It would be pronounced like "Soy Win." The videos can also balance out messages pushing diet culture and weight loss, says Jaime Sidani, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Pittsburgh. There are real concerns that apps like TikTok can serve as a conduit for harmful eating behavior and poor body image. Okay, so... that much I can appreciate. In conclusion, while I felt no affinity to the article, I'm posting it here in the hopes that it might help someone else. Unless you're already using DikTok, in which case there's no hope for you. |
| Because reasons. Now, there's been a meme that's been around forever stating that the only three countries that don't use the metric system are the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar. That's a bit of an oversimplification. Those three countries definitely use the metric system; they're just the only three countries that haven't officially recognized it as their official measurement standard. Now, we can't speak for the motives of Liberia and Myanmar on the metric issue, but the reasons why the U.S. has had so many problems getting on the same page as the rest of the world range from bad timing to rotten luck and good ol' rootin' tootin' American stubbornness! YEE-HAW! (spittoon ding) … While I'm bilingual when it comes to measurement systems—even if I haven't quite internalized degrees Celsius—a lot of Americans would no sooner start talking in terms of centimeters than they would speak anything but their own regional dialect of English. 6. Why and How the Metric System was Created Before the development of the metric system, there really wasn't any universally agreed upon standard of measurement for anything, which made international trade a nightmare. As opposed to now, when it's mostly just a pain in the ass. So, in creating the metric system, they wanted to base it on something that would remain constant no matter what: the size of the Earth. One metre (spelled METER here in America for no real reason other than screw all y'all) was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator at 0° longitude, a.k.a. the Prime Meridian. This is why you don't get your scientific knowledge from a dick joke site. While they got the basics right, the Prime Meridian that they originally based the meter on wasn't the one we use today. Oh, no no non. The "metric system" was invented in France, and they didn't recognize the stupid Prime Meridian through some obscure suburb of London. They used the obviously superior one through Paris. Which is over 2 degrees offset. Why the Prime Meridian? Well, the curvature of the Earth along that particular longitude has the shortest distance from the North Pole to the Equator due to the fact that the Earth is more of an oblong spheroid than perfectly round. Eh. Not really. I mean, yes, the planet is an oblate spheroid (not "oblong"), but the shortest distance thing? Not really. 5. A Lot of French Aristocrats Had to Die for the Metric System to Really Take Off Well, to be fair, they were going to die anyway. When the metric system was first introduced, there was a lot of hesitancy from other nations to adopt these new standards, particularly from the British. King George III was of the opinion that the British Imperial System worked just fine, and they didn't need to switch. And so now, here in a country that was specifically and famously created as a big fuck you to King George III, we've decided that he was right about something. They also instituted a decimalized measurement of time. Each day would be divided into 10 longer hours instead of 24, which would make each new "hour" last two hours and 24 minutes in standard time. Each of those ten hours would now be divided into 100 new minutes consisting of 100 new seconds, so the new minutes would be 86.4 old seconds long, and each new second would be 13.6% shorter than what we're used to. Decimal time might make sense for some uses, but when you're talking about angular rotation, if you're not also prepared to switch angle measurements to decimal (instead of the 360 degrees we're used to), it breaks down. 24 is a divisor of 360, you know. 4. Why Didn't the U.S. Do This From The Start? Seeing as the French were such great allies to the Americans during the Revolutionary War, and the newly-founded United States were pretty keen to rid itself of all things British, why didn't they jump at the chance to ditch English units in favor of this new-fangled "metric system" from the beginning? Well, it wasn't for lack of trying. Same reason why we didn't invent a new language? To be fair, at least we dropped some extraneous "u"s. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was tasked with proposing an official standard of measurement for the nation, and one of the ideas he had come up with was a system that would be factors of 10 like metric does but use specific imperial units as the base standard. By his plan, an inch would now be 1/10 of a foot. Jefferson was, among other things, a surveyor. Surveyors in the US to this day don't use inches, but tenths of feet. But then, in 1824, the British retooled their methods into the imperial system, which differed somewhat from what America had officially adopted, so that became known as the U.S. Customary Units. Which is one reason you'll get more beer if you order a pint in England than if you order a pint in the US. Incidentally, we had no problem coming up with a new monetary system that was based on (gasp) the decimal system. England didn't do that until about 50 years ago. 3. Other Attempts to Adopt the Metric System In 1875, 17 countries, including the United States, signed the Treaty of the Metre... Because of this treaty, many of the signing nations decided to adopt the metric system as their official standard. The U.S. was not one of them. At the time, we were at the tail end of the industrial revolution. We had built all these railroads and factories using our own measurements, and those industries kinda own everything now, and they don't feel like switching over to metric. Besides, we'd have had to switch all the American football fields from yards to meters. Can't have that! (That's a joke. There's no reason why you couldn't keep yards on football fields.) Fast forward a hundred years, when President Gerald Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, which declared the metric system as "the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce." The act also stated that the use of U.S. customary units was still permissible in all activities and that any metric conversion efforts would be strictly voluntary. It really had no mandate, so it was really more of a passive-aggressive suggestion. Kind of like climate accords. 2. Plot Twist: We've Actually Been Using the Metric System This Whole Time … Sorta For a nation that appears to be so resistant to the idea of adopting the metric system, America uses it a lot. Just look at our food labels. The nutritional facts are all metric. The contents may be listed in ounces, but the metric amount is right there next to it in parenthesis. We buy soda in two-liter bottles, for crying out loud! We're this close to understanding it! One thing that amuses me about England is that while they officially run on the metric system, distances are measured in miles, while petrol is measured in litres. This is probably because the entire nation would rise up in revolt if they found out how much they're paying for a gallon (close enough to four litres). When I was there several years ago, I had to convert litres (US: liters) to gallons and pounds to dollars, and it turns out that they're paying holy shit what the fuck for petrol (US: gasoline). We've essentially always been using the metric system and just adding a math equation to it. One of the last holdouts in the technical fields to the conversion to metric is civil engineering. This makes some sense, because civil engineers are always adding stuff to, subtracting stuff from, or otherwise modifying shit that's already been standardized. For instance, a road lane can be 9, 10, 11, or 12 feet (there are exceptions, but those are pretty standard). Now, do we take a 12 foot lane and add on a 4 meter wide extension to the road, and call it close enough? Or do we make the new road 3.6576 meters (the actual conversion from 12 feet)? Or do we set a new standard, say at 3.7 meters? Or 3.6? Or 3.5? And then how do you deal with sewer and water pipes, some of which have been around since the 1800s? Hell, I once had to connect a brand-new cast iron pipe to a wooden one. I'm not joking here. Well, I didn't have to connect it myself; I just had to spec it. One advantage of being an engineer instead of a contractor is I could sit at a desk most of the day. There's also one formula in drainage engineering where, if you're using Imperial units, the multiplication comes out nice and even. If you do the same calculation in SI units, you have to multiply by a constant. Ironically, the Imperial version is called "the Rational Method." Because of ratios, not because it's logical in any way. Science has long since adopted the metric system, but engineering really hasn't, and NASA can assure you there are 125 million reasons why that is a problem. In 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter was completing a nearly 10-month journey to the red planet. The satellite needed one more acceleration burn to place it in orbit. I've noted this before, I think. They missed an entire planet's gravitational well because someone didn't convert units. 1. The Cost of Switching Over When it comes to the sheer cost of switching over to metric, it's important to look at it in terms of long-term benefits. The initial costs may be pants-poopingly high, but on a long enough scale, the benefits do offset that … at least in business. In manufacturing, going metric could lead to more uniformity in the parts they need and the parts they make. Fewer numbers of parts mean less warehouse space needed to store them all. Plus, going metric means a greater international trade value for the product, which increases sale potential. The long-term benefits can far outweigh the initial costs. It would also eat away at the profits of tool manufacturers. I've always owned Japanese cars, and back in the old days, I'd work on them myself. Thus, I had to buy two sets of wrenches and other tools: one with like 9/16" etched on them, and another with the measurements in millimeters. Somehow, though, we're quite comfortable with firearm caliber being specified in either set of units. Murica! First, we'd have to educate the public. Placing the metric system into school curricula nationwide means printing new textbooks. And if you've attended a school board meeting recently, you'd know that a lot of people are more than a wee bit prickly about kids having to learn anything other than the status quo. For the adults, there would have to be a massive public awareness campaign for the metric system, which would be an uphill battle in and of itself. As we've seen over nearly every political topic over the past five years, a significant part of the U.S. population has a real bad case of I DON'T WANNA AND YOU CAN'T MAKE ME! The American public will not be educated. This is why, whenever someone proposes "education" as a solution to whatever problem is besetting us here in Dystopia, I snort. But no government agency would have a harder time switching to metric than the Department of Transportation. The U.S. has over 164,000 miles of highways, and every mile of them (and tenth of a mile in some places) is marked with a sign. Plus, there are exit ahead signs, overpass height signs, etc., that are all in U.S. Customary units. This would mean a complete overhaul of the highway sign process. But hey, if we ever run out of jobs again, there's a way to create a few thousand. It's not hard to understand why the Department of Transportation isn't ready to cross this bridge just yet because that would mean they have to fix the goddamn bridge first. To amuse myself while driving, I often practice converting miles to km. It's pretty easy, especially if you don't need precision. It's the number plus half the number plus 1/100th of the number. So 100 miles becomes 161 km. (The actual value is 160.934, so you can see that this is close enough for driving). As for the reverse, well, 1.61-1 is pretty damn close to the Golden Ratio, so converting back and forth is a breeze. If, that is, math doesn't make you have an anxiety attack and crash the car. Could the U.S. ever successfully switch to the metric system? Yes, it is possible. Given a long enough timeline, we could ease our way into accepting it. And no matter how gradually we do it, we're always gonna have some Americans who will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. In a country where land is measured in square furlongs? I don't think so. (Okay, an acre is actually a furlong times a chain. But that's a distinction without a difference.) |
| I talked about poisonous mushrooms a few weeks ago, here: "Everyone Calls Me Mushroom Because I'm Such A Fun Guy" . Today's article, from Atlas Obscura, is about a non-poisonous one. Well, sort of. Well, not really. You mean... go... (shudder) outside? Also known as burn morels, these fungi grow exclusively and prolifically in the ashen moonscapes of recently burned forests. I have to wonder how many cases of arson were people wanting rare shrooms. They’re toxic raw but have a subtle, umami flavor when cooked. And that right there is enough to make them a great big nope from me. If you have to cook something to make it non-poisonous—especially if you happen to be camping in the middle of a burn scar—it's not worth it. I mean, what if you don't cook it enough? Fire morels, which Steinruck says have a mild smokiness to them... If they didn't, I'd be concerned. More concerned. The trek is challenging, from the terrain and from the fire. Spivack warned me that “after a fire, it’s even harder to get a toehold after everything’s burned. The slippery wet ash seems like an ice rink under the duff, without tree roots holding the soil in place. Burned-out stump holes and root channels can lead to a nasty fall if you’re not paying attention to where you step.” And you thought a trip to the grocery store was loaded with (morel) hazards. Apart from the stupid amount of time and work required to forage for these fungi, there are some interesting bits. “There’s such big questions on how [fungal roots] can persist for so long before a fire,” says Ron Hamill, a mycologist who has been researching burn-related fungi for the last 15 years and is currently working on a book. Please, please let the book be titled something like "Loose Morels." I'll also accept "Morel Support." One reason that morels remain so mysterious is that they are nearly impossible to distinguish from each other. “We were really limited [in research] before by our ability to just identify fungi,” says Sydney Glassman, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. But technologies such as DNA testing and stable isotope testing are changing that. Her lab uses molecular analysis and bioinformatics to identify pyrophilous, or “fire-loving,” fungi. And another reason not to bother: the possibility of misidentification. I know I don't carry a DNA kit around with me when I go (shudder) outside. All of that notwithstanding, I still think it's cool as hell that even after a raging inferno, life, uh, finds a way. Mostly, though, I had to make the pun in the entry title. |
| A bit of philosophy, without much in the way of commentary from me. Okay, maybe a little. I've been seeing quite a bit about Camus recently. I don't believe the universe is trying to tell me something, but perhaps it's time to listen anyway. The point of the talk was to say that the entire Western world lived in a civilization that elevated abstractions over experience — that ultimately removed people from the reality of human suffering. The "talk" in question was nearly 80 years ago, and it's possible that these things have only gotten worse since then. For Camus, nihilism wasn’t so much about belief in nothing; it was about refusing to believe in the world as it is. And killing in service to some idea is just as nihilistic as believing that nothing is true and therefore everything is permitted. It's hard to wrap my head around this idea, so I can't say if I agree or not. The immediacy of a war or a natural disaster collapses the barriers between us because it’s so clear what has to be done. And while nothing redeems a tragedy, there’s at least some comfort in the solidarity that emerges from it. Yeah, that doesn't happen anymore. It happened for about 15 minutes after word of 9/11 spread, but since then, nope. It's all about our differences now. Camus always said that he was pessimistic about the human condition and optimistic about humankind. Maybe that’s a contradiction. If so, that's one that I can understand. I simultaneously hold the belief that we're utterly boned, and that we're going to get it together enough to fix some things that really matter. Of course there will always be problems—and how boring a world it would be if that weren't the case? Camus always returned to the myth of Sisyphus as the model of human defiance. The problem wasn’t that Sisyphus had to roll his boulder up a hill forever; it’s that he had to roll it alone. And that's the metaphor for what I was just talking about. The article is much longer and has some interesting points, though, again, I can't say I fully agree. I'll just leave you with one Camus quote that didn't make it into the article, but that always stuck with me: In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger – something better, pushing right back. Perhaps I should pick up some of his books. Not ready to tackle the original French, though. |
| Oh, look, a cooking article from The Guardian. I know, I know—you're probably thinking the same thing I was: eggs come in dozens, not 17-packs. It is a time of scarcity, but also of glut; a time when you might buy 18 eggs at the supermarket, just because the last time you tried, they didn’t have any. Yeah, the article's from 2020; how did you know? This could present an opportunity for creativity, but 18 eggs is enough to induce a failure of imagination in anyone: you boil them, fry them, poach them – then what? Uh, hard-boil the lot of 'em so they last longer and become a quick, handy source of protein? Here are 17 delicious and slightly further-afield recipes to use up your eggs, most of them employing simple ingredients you may already have. Look, I don't eat eggs every day, but I still manage to get through a dozen before they go off. I get the feeling the "use the whole box" thing is just the hook here. But even if so, why stop at 17? What happens to the lone, leftover egg from the dozen and a half? Also, I counted nine dishes here, not seventeen. Maybe my script-blocker cut something off; I don't know. Mayonnaise I get way too much credit for making my own mayonnaise – it just isn’t very hard. Ah, the rare sighting of the wild Humblebrag. Everyone should make their own mayonnaise. Why, when it's right there in a jar? French toast Call it what you want, but as an American, I find it hard to say the words “eggy bread” without pulling a face. Yeah, I'm with him on this one. Having said that, the recipe is more or less the same. Beat some eggs with milk, dip in slices of slightly stale bread (almost any kind will do, from crappy supermarket white to brioche), fry on both sides in butter until light browned and … voilà is possibly not the right word to use here. No. No, it is indeed not. If you're gong to murder French, at least call the stuff le pain perdu. That said, I haven't made it in a while, but my preferred French toast involves challah bread, and I use cream instead of milk because fuck you, heart (look, even though yesterday's article was all about not worrying about full-fat dairy products, it's still calories). Also: maple syrup and vanilla extract. Still, it's almost impossible to create le pain perdu avec seulement un œuf... sorry, with only one egg, unless you're using only one really small piece of bread. Thomasina Miers offers a version with salted caramel pumpkin puree (and tequila). I would die. It would be worth it, though. The monte cristo This is more an artefact than a meal, a forgotten fossil of the American diner experience. The monte cristo is basically a ham and cheese sandwich (the cheese is usually swiss – emmental, say) that has been dipped, in its entirety, in some beaten egg and then fried as a solid mass. hurk Soups OH COME ON Skipping a couple of Spanish-themed ones here, not because I don't find them appealing, but because I don't have much to say about them. Eggs benedict Okay, look. I love Eggs Benedict. I would never even consider creating it, usually because when I'm craving it, I'm too hungover to cook anything. What generally stops people making eggs benedict at home is the hollandaise sauce, which is fiddly and prone to splitting and curdling. But without it, we’re just talking about poached eggs on toasted muffins. Yep. Screw making hollandaise. Also keep in mind that because even though the writer is American, the article uses British names for foods, including simply "muffins" for what we'd call "English muffins." Soufflés Nope. Too much work. Crostata di limone When this lemon tart appeared in the first River Cafe cookbook, it fascinated the amateur: it looked easy, if highly improbable. There is still something highly daunting about a recipe requiring six whole eggs and nine additional yolks. And there goes 15 of your 18 eggs right there. No way is that "easy," especially the bit about separating nine of them. "Easy" is cracking a couple of eggs into a pan and frying them. Also, and no one has ever answered this to my satisfaction (remember, my mom was a crap cook): what the hell do you do with the other parts of the egg when you separate them? Are you obligated to, I dunno, make a meringue or something, or do they just go down the drain? Anyway, someone who is not me might try some of these recipes. The only one of these that I have done, or would do, is the French toast. In my defense, it is very, very good French toast. |
| I like food. I like science. I do not like food science. The Vindication of Cheese, Butter, and Full-Fat Milk A new study exonerates dairy fats as a cause of early death, even as low-fat products continue to be misperceived as healthier. Nevertheless, this article seems to have its head on straight. Though that may be confirmation bias on my part. As a young child I missed a question on a psychological test: “What comes in a bottle?” The answer was supposed to be milk. I said beer. Already, I like this guy. Milk almost always came in cartons and plastic jugs, so I was right. But this isn’t about rehashing old grudges. I barely even think about it anymore! Which is obviously why you led with it. The point is that the test was a relic of a time before me, when milk did come in bottles. It arrived on doorsteps each morning, by the hand of some vanishing man. Dude, that's no way to talk about your biological father. And just as such a world was alien to me as a kid, the current generation of small children might miss a similar question: “Where does milk come from?” The grocery store, duh. Many would likely answer almonds or beans or oats. But it's so hard to squeeze their little teats. Indeed, the already booming nut-milk industry is projected to grow another 50 percent by 2020. Much of this is driven by beliefs about health, with ads claiming “dairy free” as a virtue that resonates for nebulous reasons—many stemming from an earlier scare over saturated fat—among consumers lactose intolerant and tolerant alike. Except that most of those "milks" come from produce grown in the Southwestern US. In case you haven't heard, the Southwest is running out of water. No water, no faux milk. It all happened quickly. In the 1990s, during the original “Got Milk?” campaign, it was plausible to look at a magazine, see supermodels with dairy-milk mustaches, and think little of it. Now many people would cry foul. Not that quickly. That was 30 years ago. Difficult as it may be for Millennials to imagine, the average American in the 1970s drank about 30 gallons of milk a year. That’s now down to 18 gallons, according to the Department of Agriculture. Stop lumping everyone into one generational bucket. Full disclosure: I don't drink milk. I'll eat the hell out of milk derivatives, though: yogurt, cheese, butter. And just as it appears that the long arc of American beverage consumption could bend fully away from the udder, new evidence is making it more apparent that the perceived health risks of dairy fats (which are mostly saturated) are less clear than many previously believed. By "less clear" you mean "probably nonexistent." An analysis of 2,907 adults found that people with higher and lower levels of dairy fats in their blood had the same rate of death during a 22-year period. Decent sample size, fair methodology. I would like to know the ages of the "adults," however. If there were negative consequences to consuming dairy, I don't think they'd show up for adults in the 18-40 (22 years) range. The implication is that it didn’t matter if people drank whole or skim or 2-percent milk, ate butter versus margarine, etc. The researchers concluded that dairy-fat consumption later in life “does not significantly influence total mortality.” Pretty sure it's margarine that's horrible for you. The researchers also found that certain saturated fatty acids may have specific benefits for some people. High levels of heptadecanoic acid, for example, were associated with lower rates of strokes. Yeah, thanks. I'm not ignorant about chemistry, but I'd never heard of that particular chemical, and the article is silent about where it may be found. As an aside, yes, you CAN pronounce that if you sound it out, everything consists of chemicals, and we shouldn't be promoting ignorance by smugly claiming we don't eat things we can't pronounce. I know I've said all that before, but it's important. De Oliveira Otto believes that this evidence is not itself a reason to eat more or less dairy. But she said it could encourage people to give priority to whole-fat dairy products over those that may be lower in fat but higher in sugar, which may be added to make up for a lack of taste or texture. Yeah, I think the real problem involves replacing fats with carbs. You're still getting a similar number of calories, but your macros can be way off. Veganism is not encouraged given a national interest in continuing to consume the dairy the country produces. Good. The takeaway is that, from a personal-health perspective, dairy products are at best fine and reasonable things to eat, and avoiding butter and cheese is less important than once believed. While the narrative that cheese and butter are dangerous is changing, it also remains true that dairy isn’t necessary for children or adults. It may not be necessary, but it's also a decent, lower-cost source of protein. And there's always that middle ground between veganism and not having an eating disorder: vegetarianism, which allows for consumption of dairy products but not meat (which is expensive as shit anyway). A diet rich in high-fiber plants has more than enough protein and micronutrients to make up for a lack of dairy... So you're saying that dairy is necessary for an American diet. ...and the vitamin D that’s added to milk can just as well be added to other foods, taken as a supplement, or siphoned from the sun. Screw supplements, and the alternative is venturing (shudder) outdoors. At this point, the clearest drawbacks to consuming animal products are not nutritional but environmental, with animal agriculture contributing to antibiotic resistance, deforestation, and climate change. Well, then, so be it. Seriously, though, I might take this study more seriously than others, but I can't say the science is settled. All I know is, our predecessors managed just fine drinking whole milk, and we didn't start having neuroticism about food until that stopped. |
| Posting late today because The Sandman dropped yesterday, so of course I had to start watching it. I say "start" because I haven't finished the series yet. I'd say "don't you dare spoil it if you have" but hell, I've only read the graphic novel sixteen times. But today's article isn't about that. It's about money, which I hope Gaiman makes a lot of from this (and that's the worst segué in the history of segués) Budget Culture and the Dave Ramseyfication of Money How financial "experts" ruined our relationship with money First of all, Ramsey can bite me. Sure, he has some good ideas, but they come from a distasteful framework. Unlike previous editions, which have focused on reader Q&A, this edition, from personal finance writer Dana Miranda, focuses on a particularly noxious ideology about money: where it comes from, how we internalize it, and how it haunts us for the rest of our adult lives. I haven't read these "previous editions," so I probably lack some context here. Before Ramsey’s call-in talk show (“The Dave Ramsey Show”) and his book (Financial Peace) financial advice was largely for people who were already rich. It went straight to stock picks and skipped what to do if you had credit card debt or lived precariously from paycheck to paycheck — assuming people were in those situations because they didn’t care about financial education. It is true that before you even think about investments, you need to get your spending and debt under control. This was easier in the past. Other budding financial experts saw the need for similar advice that dropped Ramsey’s religious exclusivity, and a new “everyman” niche in personal finance emerged around the turn of the century. It ballooned in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the popularity of personal blogs, where so-called everyday millionaires could chronicle their journeys out of debt and into the middle class. To be clear, I benefited from some of that advice, myself. The trick is to adapt whatever they're saying to your own situation—if you can. No single process works for everyone. It's important to do something, though. You know those stories about lottery winners and heirs who blow through their windfalls and end up in worse situations? That's because if you don't know squattly-dick about how to handle money in the first place, no amount of money will fix your life. I have another article about that sort of thing in my queue, so eventually I'll get around to expanding on that topic. Ramsey and his successors put the “personal” into finance so anyone could find success through a new set of rules made just for us, like paying down debt, starting a side hustle and — above all — making a budget. There's nothing inherently wrong or scary about budgeting, but this article is about to tell us otherwise. This promise appealed directly to the work ethic of middle America: You can get rich with steady work and self control. The marriage of personal finance and self improvement — the Rich Dad Poor Dad, Millionaire Next Door, Finish Rich ethos — set a tone for our current dominant paradigm, which I’ve come to call budget culture. If hard work were all it took to become financially secure, sharecroppers would be the richest people on the planet. Budget culture is the damaging set of beliefs around money that rewards restriction and deprivation — much like diet culture does for food and bodies — and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial success. I've noted before the parallels between diets and budgets. The simplest problem with this approach is that budgeting, like dieting, doesn’t work. Restriction and deprivation are unsustainable; accurately tracking spending is hard; income fluctuates, and costs don’t operate on a perfect monthly reset. Budgets don’t account for the way lives work, so they’re hard to keep in our lives consistently. It doesn't work for everyone. Author may be projecting. The broader problem with budget culture is its emphasis on individual responsibility and insistence on ignoring the varying levels of access and privilege in our world. It vilifies and oppresses anyone who doesn’t live up to the ideal, regardless of their circumstances. And that ideal is, unsurprisingly, rooted in maleness and whiteness in the way many of our cultural ideals are. It is true that individual responsibility is often over-emphasized. There are myriad factors outside our control that need to be accounted for (pun intended). Those factors can only be worse if you're already in a marginalized group. The only sure way to make money is to have money, but no personal finance expert wants to admit their wealth is built on anything other than a solid foundation of hard work and self-control — not their degrees in finance, Ivy League educations, middle class upbringings… or their ability to sell you a fantasy. It is also true that any self-help book—not just the personal finance ones—are mostly there to self-help the author get rich. Me? I'm not making any money from this. That in itself is a privilege, because I don't have to, but neither am I obligated to censor myself or present an approved point of view. Anyway, the article has some other interesting points, but I'll stop here. Back to The Sandman... |
| I have only a passing interest in marketing, and suck at graphic design, but I find logos interesting. So, apparently, does Cracked. "Bizarre" is too strong a word here, but such are clickbait headlines. You won't believe what happens next!!! In the quest for that perfect logo that will stand out but not in a bad way, companies have reached back into the scary, briny depths of human creativity, taking inspiration from everything from strip clubs to Greek gods. So there you have it: the answer to the question (which nobody ever asked), "What do strip clubs and Greek gods have in common?" (Other than "Both will smite you if you put your hands somewhere you shouldn't.") I'm not quoting all fifteen here. Just the ones I have something to say about. 14. Chupa Chups You’d never know it from the lack of ants or anything decaying, but the Chupa Chups lollipop logo was designed by Salvador Dali during his “anything for money” phase in 1969. This one, I knew. (Actually, I think I knew most of them, but there's always something else to learn.) 12. Starbucks Hopefully everyone knows by now that the original "mermaid" was bowdlerized to appeal to prudes. What might be news is where the big-titted mermaid originally came from. It probably actually came from the artwork in a 15th-century German book. "Probably?" Okay. Speaking of titties... 11. McDonald’s The golden arches were adopted as an ode to the ones that framed the original restaurant, but they were kept because they were Freudian. During a branding overhaul in the ‘60s, one psychologist advised them to keep the logo because it “symbolized a mother’s nourishing breasts.” We're talking about two of the biggest franchise chains in the US, and thus the world. The moral of this story is: boobies work. 9. Michelin This mind-blowing about the Michelin Man comes in four parts: 1) He has a name. 2) That name is “Bibendum.” 3) He’s made of tires. 4) He partied like a rock star. Early advertisements featuring the Michelin Man from the late 19th century often depicted him smoking a cigar and drinking champagne... I think they accidentally a word there. Also, the Michelin Man is apparently a badass. Or was, until they turned him into a marshmallow. 8. MGM The first MGM lion was apparently such a beast that he was buried under a marble slab to “hold down the lion’s spirit,” as if it might leap out and turn someone awesome via possession, but that’s nothing compared to the next one, who was the first to actually roar. As far as corporate logos go, it's hard to beat an actual lion. (Food Lion, aka Shitty Kitty, doesn't count.) Why hasn’t Marvel given this guy a movie? For the same reason Cracked doesn't do an exposé on Alfred E. Neuman: competition. Marvel is owned by Disney, and the Mouse has more lawyers than a lion can eat. 3. Facebook “Blue is the richest color for me -- I can see all of blue,” he later explained, because that’s Mark Zuckerberg’s top business concern: Mark Zuckerberg. Colors aside, I always hated the facebook logo's font. 1. Gucci Those two interlocking G’s don’t just stand for the brand name -- they’re actually the initials of the founder. Yes. The poor man’s name was Guccio Gucci. And based on the movie House of Gucci (an MGM film, incidentally), you could probably power all of Florence if you attached a dynamo to his spinning corpse. To be fair, insiders have said the movie's not accurate, but at least you got to see Lady Gaga's boobies. |
| Today's article is... well, see for yourself: What we can learn from people who take the Flat Earth theory seriously “Flat Earth enables people to cast out all previous information that they didn’t want to believe and rebuild the world from scratch.” You know, I can almost appreciate that. Almost. There's a certain allure to things that tell you that everything you've learned is wrong, and here's the Truth. Problem is, they're the ones that are almost always wrong. Sure, science is always revising itself, but when it comes to some really basic shit like the general shape of the planet, it's as close to certainty as it's possible to get that it's round. Across the globe, millions of people believe the Earth — that whirling blue sphere, spinning through space — is, in fact, a flat plane. Old joke: "The Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe." Another old joke: "We know the Earth isn't flat because if it were, cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now." It’s unclear how many people believe some version of Flat Earth theory. And it doesn't matter. One would be too many. If it were eight billion, they'd still be wrong. And polling gives us some sense of the scale of this belief system: As many as 1 percent of Americans (that’s more than 3 million people) and 7 percent of Brazilians (11 million people) say they believe the Earth is flat, for example. Polling? "Polls just tell you what They want you to think." The modern Flat Earth movement has its origins in a snake oil salesman and utopian named Samuel Rowbotham, said Kelly Weill, a journalist who covers fringe movements for the Daily Beast and spent years researching this movement and its adherents. "Snake oil salesman" is all you should need to know. Weill spoke to Grid’s misinformation reporter, Anya van Wagtendonk, about the movement’s appeal, its overlap with religious beliefs and the QAnon conspiracy theory, and how we’re all susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. "Misinformation reporter" could have two distinct meanings. Just saying. The rest of the article is the interview, which doubles as a stealth ad for Weill's book. But I think there’s an emotional truth to Flat Earth. People come to it when they feel like the world is very broadly wrong. Oh, but the world is very broadly wrong. For instance, there are flat-Earthers living in it. Samuel Rowbotham, the theory’s inventor, used a lot of biblical tools in his writing, saying that the globe model conflicted with a round Earth. A lot of modern Flat Earthers will use the theory to get into other alternative Christian beliefs. A lot of them are creationists. It is the case that a purely literal reading of the Bible (were such a thing actually possible) supports a flat Earth. It also sets the value of pi at exactly 3. I take this to indicate that the facts in the Bible are wrong. The same literal reading says that the sky is, in a real sense, a "firmament," keeping the waters above from crashing down (as supposedly happened in a certain flood). We know that this is not the case. ...a lot of Flat Earthers — depending on their belief in why there’s a Flat Earth cover-up — believe that, when the flat earth is finally revealed, that it will usher in a new era of peace or religious enlightenment, things that conveniently align with their vision of utopia. Which is, incidentally, my version of dystopia. Not the peace part, but the religious endarkenment part; but remember: peace can be achieved by wiping out all of humanity. Peace is great, but it's important to know what one means by it. I’ve had people tell me that there’s going to be a societal breakdown, but that we will rebuild a more enlightened, Christly version of society. There is going to be a societal breakdown if we don't rein in these flat-earthers. And an enlightened society is the exact opposite of a Christly one. Don't believe me? Look at history. Individual belief is fine; I'm all for it. But when a bunch of True Believers get together, bad things happen to innocent people. There’s a tendency to think of conspiracy theorists as tinfoil hatters, as crazy people. But the processes are really ones that we’re all susceptible to. I would tend to agree with that. I catch myself in conspiracy thoughts sometimes. I'm usually able to logic my way out of them, but I'm still not convinced, for example, that PETA isn't run by synthetic fur and vegan food manufacturers. Maybe we can bring that empathy to those conversations and use that as a basis for bringing people back to reality. I don't want to bring them back to reality. I want to push them off the edge of the planet. Wait... |
| I don't have a lot to say about today's article. But I figured, if you're reading this blog, you might have a passing interest in science. And you know how to read. So... Nightstand? Didn't science figure out that to get good sleep, one should use one's bedroom only for sleeping and sex? I don't think science books qualify as the latter, though they might help with the former. Fans of nonfiction enjoy diving into the infinite, intricate worlds that exist on our planet and beyond. I quibble with "infinite," but since our lives are time-limited, I'll accept "more than we can ever explore." Below, five science book recommendations for smart people with a range of interests. And maybe also for dumb people who don't want to be dumb. I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong Ed Yong makes it easy to understand the complexities of our bodies, perhaps muddling your definition of self in the process. I haven't read this one, but we've discussed the human microbiome in here before. Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan It annoys me that the pictured book cover reads, "Author of Contact." Like that's what we should know Sagan from. Anyway, of course I've read this. Everyone has, or at least lies about it. Where Buddhism Meets Neuroscience, the Dalai Lama  One of these things is not like the others... To be fair, the elevator pitch: "Experts in the fields of consciousness, dreams, memory, psychiatric illness, meditation and more summarize the latest research and then engage in a dialogue with the Dalai Lama." Still, I've about had it with books that claim consciousness is quantum and we can affect the world with our minds, or whatever. Maybe it is, but we can't, except the old-fashioned way through the medium of our bodies. She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, Carl Zimmer This lengthy, meaty read provides a new framework for thinking about what we inherit from our parents and ancestors, DNA, genes, race, inheritance, and the moral and ethical questions surrounding new procreation technologies. Might be worth a read. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, Joshua Foer Join writer and co-founder of Atlas Obscura Joshua Foer on his thoroughly entertaining yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top “mental athletes,” and discover the bizarre, niche world of the United States Memory Championships. Aw hell no. We invented the internet, and computer files, and paper, and writing utensils, for a reason: so we didn't have to remember every damn detail. Considering what most of our lives are like, it can be a good thing to forget. Incidentally, I've linked to Atlas Obscura in here before, and almost certainly will again. It's one of my favorite websites. Also incidentally, Foer's brother is also a writer; I've never read his stuff, but one of his semi-autobiographical fiction stories was adapted into a movie. It's called Everything is Illuminated, and it's absolutely wonderful. And topical right now, as it deals with Ukraine's troubled history. So that's it. Like I said, not much commentary here. I've only read one of these books so far, but I might give some of the others a shot; it's been a while since I've gone on a nonfiction binge. I'm also happy to hear your recommendations. |
| If you're somehow tired of the song "Hallelujah," don't bother with this entry today. Also, what is wrong with you? ‘More than a song’: the enduring power of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah In a new documentary, fans and experts explore the legacy of a song originally shunned before becoming a timeless classic This Guardian link is basically a plug for a film called Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, but as long as they talk about Leonard Cohen, I don't much care. I know I've gone on about him in here before, but it's been a while, so deal. Directed and produced by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, the film takes both a micro and macro view of the song and Cohen, along with their respective and deeply intertwined places in culture. I've probably said this before, but my introduction to Cohen was through his poetry, not his music. Although the music is also poetry, of course. “Leonard Cohen, in short, was a prophet,” said Goldfine, who, along with Geller, has assembled a stacked career directing expansive documentaries focusing on music including 2005’s Ballets Russes, about the early 20th-century Russian ballet company. “Leonard [was known for] timeless writing and timeless poetry that floats outside of any particular epoch,” Goldfine said. “It addressed the deepest of our human concerns about longing for connection and longing for some sort of hope, transcendence and acknowledgment of the difficulties of life.” See, now, that's not what I generally get from his work. But okay. That just makes it greater: that different people can have different interpretations, mostly valid. Why Hallelujah reached the heights it did is due to a unique mix of inventive cover versions, cultural happenstance and a magic-in-a-bottle quality the song no doubt possesses. Search the track on Spotify today and it’s Jeff Buckley’s version, not Cohen’s, which is the top result; the pairing of the song’s seemingly haunting subject matter and Buckley’s raw 1994 recording, coupled with the singer-songwriter’s drowning death aged just 30, adds another layer of weight. I mean, the Buckley arrangement is clearly superior, musically. And that's okay. Hell, the two times I saw Cohen live (which I feel absolutely lucky to have done before he died), he drew more from Jeff Buckley for the music. The important part, though, is the lyrics, and those are entirely Leonard Cohen's poetry. But oddly enough, the song’s modern ubiquity can be traced to its prominent placement in Shrek, the second-highest grossing movie of 2001, which effectively launched Hallelujah into the upper echelons of popular culture. Also oddly enough, it was almost exactly one year ago when I did an entry here wrestling with this same outlet's brutal takedown of Shrek. Here: "Whipshrek" . In that entry, I quoted the idiot reviewer as saying this: "(Nothing screams “unearned gravitas” like slipping in a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.)"Perhaps it’s fitting that an animated comedy would propel Cohen’s legend, considering that according to Geller the biggest misconception about Cohen himself is that he was originally considered the singer of gloom and doom. I'm not going to argue. Cohen's work tends to the philosophical depths. That's why I like it, though. To paraphrase a line from Doctor Who, "What's wrong with sad? It's happy for deep people." In recent years, Hallelujah has had dozens of placements in TV and movies (from Scrubs to Zack Snyder’s Justice League) and has been sung by everyone from Bob Dylan to Bono, Brandi  Carlile to Il Divo.Okay, I might have inserted an editorial emoticon there. A few points to unpack from that brief quote:  I have enjoyed every movie Zack Snyder has made. Yes, that one. Yes, also that one. And oh yes, absolutely that other one that you hated. Around the third Snyder movie, though, I started to notice that he puts Cohen in most of his movies. It's led me to believe he's a fan, which would help explain why I like Snyder movies when so many people don't. I can't imagine Dylan singing it. (Hell, I can't imagine Dylan "singing" anything, and I've seen him on stage twice.) But it has got to be better than Bono's ridiculous interpretation. Also, fun fact: I saw Cohen and Dylan perform on the same stage, separated by several years: the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan (I also once saw David Gray there). The BrandiCarlile version is on her Live at Benaroyal Hall album, and it's gorgeous. I wrote about it before. Here: "Hallelujah" Who the fuck is Il Divo?“It’s a Rorschach test,” says Light of the various interpretations of its lyrics, including the idea that it’s meant to be a Christian song. In reality, as the film chronicles, Cohen was Jewish. With a name like that? Say it ain't so! ...Okay, but it's not that simple. Saying he was Jewish is like saying I am: true from a cultural perspective, but his relationship with religion was quite complicated. The complications are explored in much of his music. Adds Geller of Cohen’s musical output: “He has these lyrics and very beautiful musical arrangements that step out of time and can last and be relevant for audiences of all ages.” And if you only know that one song, please do yourself the favor of discovering more of his work. You can thank me later. As usual, I can't let an entry on music go by without including a video. Since by now everyone who's still reading this has heard at least one version of Hallelujah, allow me to provide a different Leonard Cohen song. With any luck, it's one I haven't linked in here before. Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin |
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