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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
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Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. ![Merit Badge in Quill Award
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| Sometimes, I just share things because I find them interesting. This is one of those times. This is from Cracked, so it's a countdown... Everyone knows that Coca-Cola used to contain cocaine back in the olden days. But then they stopped putting the coke in Coke, and now the only white powders in that glorious sparkling elixir are sugar and caffeine. Right? Wrong! Turns out Coke still contains coca leaf extracts, and the Coca-Cola company is actually deeply involved with the world’s biggest dealers of legal cocaine! Now, I didn't fact-check any of this, and I probably don't need to remind you that this is, first and foremost, a comedy site, and I think it follows Waltz's First Rule of Comedy: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good joke. Or a bad one. Especially a bad one." Still, I don't think it's way off. 7 The First Cocaine Drink: Vin Mariani Let’s start at the beginning. The story of Coca-Cola is intertwined with the story of cocaine, and the story of cocaine starts thousands of years ago when an early human decided to try chewing on some leaves from a coca bush and discovered their invigorating and pleasurable properties. We here in the US, and I think in other anglophone countries, there's a polluted river of puritanism to contend with. We have prohibitionist tendencies when it comes to anything that affects the mind, calling them "drugs" and trying to legislate against them. I'm not trying to diminish the problems associated with cocaine, but the properties of the coca leaves from which it's refined are not much different from coffee. And for some reason, coffee is perfectly acceptable in society, even if one is addicted to it. Just like marijuana is more than just THC, coca leaf is more than just cocaine. Actually, coca leaves don’t even contain cocaine, they contain an alkaloid very close to cocaine called ecgonine, which is converted into cocaine during the extraction process. Like I said, I didn't fact-check anything, but this tracks with what I already knew. The most popular application of coca was created in the 1860s by a French chemist named Angelo Mariani, who mixed concentrated coca leaf extract into wine and called it "Vin tonique Mariani à la Coca de Pérou"—better known as Vin Mariani. This, though, I've never heard of. I assume that the French is easy enough to work out. Unbeknownst to Mariani, he had created something completely new by blending cocaine and alcohol together. The two drugs have a synergistic effect when mixed—they combine to form a third unique drug called cocaethylene, which produces an even stronger euphoric effect than either substance on its own. I can only imagine the Puritanical reaction to that. 6 The Origins Of Coca-Cola In 1884, a Confederate veteran in Georgia named John S. Pemberton created a Vin Mariani knock-off called Pemberton's French Coca Wine. He had found that coca drinks helped him reduce his use of morphine, to which he had become addicted after war injuries. Some might consider that to be like treating radiation poisoning with more radiation. In 1885, Atlanta passed some of America’s first liquor prohibition laws, so Pemberton replaced the wine with carbonated water, added some kola nuts as a caffeine source and for flavoring, and renamed his drink Coca-Cola. So... maybe something good did end up coming out of Prohibition. (Coke is my soft drink of choice. Also, fuck Pepsi.) In 1899, when Coca-Cola started selling their drink in bottles, it suddenly became accessible to the Black community, which led to a racist backlash against a drink associated with cocaine. Gosh. That sounds familiar. This section goes deeper into the history of Coca-Cola, which, again, tracks with what I already knew. 5 Coca-Cola Under Attack, For Caffeine! The Pure Food and Drug Act had become law in 1906, and the feds had two problems with Coca-Cola. First, did it contain cocaine? If not, then wasn’t putting “coca” in the name false advertising? Second, the new law forbade adulterating food and drink—so was Coca-Cola “adulterated” with caffeine, and if so, was the high level of caffeine in the drink harmful? Was Coca-Cola pushing a dangerous drink on the nation’s kids? Kind of a paradox, isn't it? 4 Coca-Cola Helps Write Anti-Coca Treaties When the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was ratified by the United Nations in 1961, it mandated the destruction of all wild coca bushes and complete eradication of coca leaf from the planet. Indigenous people have been using coca leaves for millennia, but the new global treaty demanded a forcible end to their coca-related culture and traditions. Are... are we the bad guys? Anyway, not a lot of point in pasting more extracts (pun intended, as always). The whole thing reads to me like the usual American corporate/government hegemony shutting out developing economies, similar to the whole Banana Republic thing (the concept, not the clothing store). None of which is enough to make me stop drinking Crack Zero. Just one more comment, though: Coca comes from a leaf, not so different from how coffee comes from a seed. The fact that coffee is celebrated and coca leaf is vilified is an arbitrary accident of history which could have easily gone the other way. Frankly, the world would be a better place if coca leaf wasn’t demonized and forbidden, and if Coca-Cola didn’t have a global monopoly on coca drinks. That way, people everywhere could enjoy a variety of coca-based beverages with all the wonderful alkaloids included, and hopefully more of the profits could be going back into the coca-farmers’ pockets. I figured out a long time ago that the reason we have illicit trade in cocaine in the first place is largely because it's way easier to refine it and ship the powder than it is to ship much larger bales of the leaves. Crack takes that process to a further extreme. And prohibition of both is inextricably tied up with racism, as this article points out. I have no dog in the fight -- as you know, my mind-altering drug of choice is mostly-legal alcohol -- but perhaps if we'd drop the whole Puritan act, policies surrounding this sort of thing would become more rational. But it ain't gonna happen. |
Another blind quote from "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+] -- again, I don't recognize where this comes from other than that it's a song, and I'm responding without looking it up."It's the power that gives you the strength to survive." Oh! It must be about beer! Not knowing the source of the quote -- and boy am I going to kick myself if it turns out I recognize the song -- I think it's fun to speculate. A literal reading would lead one to believe the antecedent to "it" would be food. After all, food is power, and if you don't eat it for a while you won't survive, and it keeps your strength up. Or maybe solar energy, because without it, we'd all weaken and die frozen. Or, I know! Money. Money gives us the strength to survive, and with it you can buy food. Still, I like beer as an answer better. Knowing pop music, though, it's probably talking about love or faith or some bullshit like that. In which case it's demonstrably untrue, because I've lived without love for a very long time and without faith for a whole lot longer and, well... here I am, chugging along just fine. Maybe it's not pop music, though. Maybe it's experimental surrealism, in which case "it" could be something like the color orange, or perhaps wombat poop. Or would that be not surrealism but cubism? Okay, that's an obscure joke on several levels, but I'm sticking with it. I wonder what cubist music would sound like (other than wombat shit)? I mean, anything can be surreal, not just art, but cubism is kind of purely a painting thing. And maybe sculpture; I don't know. Maybe someone will need to invent cubist music. I'm certainly not qualified to do so. "Knowledge" could work too. After all, it's well-known (however clichéd) that knowledge is power, so that could be the answer to the riddle. People like to make fun of the song "I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)" (written by Jim Steinman, sung by Meat Loaf) because they apparently can't figure out what "that" is, even though it's right there in the fucking lyrics. Just goes to show, people don't listen to lyrics. They should, though. The good ones (such as anything written by Steinman) are poetry; the bad ones mean you're listening to a bad song and you should feel bad for liking it. In this case, though, the elusive antecedent to the neuter pronoun may be explained in the full lyrics to whatever song that is (I'm sure someone will tell me, or I'll finally get curious and look it up myself), but that's irrelevant to this entry, which is mostly just me writing down whatever thought comes into my head. Oh! That's it! Thought. Thought is the power that gives me the strength to survive. Nah... it's really beer. |
| Today, in Booze News... A newly discovered cryosphere-dwelling yeast stays alive by making ethanol Rhodotorula frigidialcoholis was isolated from 150,000-year-old permafrost in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica I need to take a moment to point out that this is the best binomial I have seen in a long time: Rhodotorula frigidialcoholis. Most of the Earth’s biosphere is permanently cold and contains environments below 0° C, known as the cryosphere. Not for very much longer. Microorganisms like bacteria and fungi call the cryosphere home, despite the seemingly inhospitable conditions. Some can even stick around in the ice for thousands of years. This is why a lot of people think we could find life in otherwise inhospitable extraterrestrial locations, such as Mars. Not cogitating aliens, but microorganisms. One example of cryosphere adapted fungi are a genus of single celled, pink pigmented yeast called Rhodotorula, which have been isolated and characterized from a range of cold ecosystems. Hm, pink, much like all these elephants I'm seeing. The researchers found it has two novel responses to extreme cold temperatures: it can switch its metabolism from respiration to ethanol fermentation as its main pathway, and can overexpress molecules called small non-coding RNAs (sRNAs) that help regulate which genes are expressed after transcription. That last bit is above my pay grade, but I understood "ethanol fermentation as its main pathway." ...the metabolic switch from respiration to ethanol fermentation by R. frigidialcoholis may help the novel yeast – and potentially others like it – save energy, slowing down the freezing point in their cells as a long-term survival strategy. Not mentioned in the article: new ways to make booze. Too bad. One of my favorite stories concerning drunk history involves how Russian Imperial Stout, one of my favorite beer styles, was created. This is the way I like to tell it (and yeah, I may have mentioned it in here before, but it's been a while): Long ago, during the reign of, I forget, Catherine or Peter (one of the Greats anyway), the British ambassador to Russia introduced the Russian imperial court to the concept of stout: that dark, roasty beer of which Guinness is probably the best-known example worldwide. The Russians loved the stuff, so the ambassador arranged for several casks to be sent to St. Petersburg. In the winter. Naturally, the casks froze and burst during the trip through the frigid waters, disappointing everyone involved. The British, in a fit of genius not seen since Newton invented gravity, found a way to brew the stout with a higher alcohol content, while balancing the flavors of all the other ingredients. Alcohol has a lower freezing point than water, making it an effective antifreeze, so those casks made it to the Tsar, and Russians being Russians, no one complained about the higher alcohol content. And thus was born Russian Imperial Stout -- not a Russian brew at all, but originally British, much as India Pale Ale was invented by the British for parallel reasons -- but that's a story for another time. The point being that these yeast presumably survive extreme cold by creating their own antifreeze in the form of ethanol. Obviously other yeast produce ethanol too, which is what makes some of the greatest beverages on Earth possible, but apparently this is a different mechanism? Or something; the article is a bit short on details where that's concerned. But since it involves ethanol, well, here it is. |
| At one point -- I can't find it now; I think it was in a newsletter -- I discussed the world's oldest surviving joke, which as I recall came from ancient Sumeria. The Sumerian one isn't funny to modern ears (besides, it was a fart joke, which I am above), but let's see what Cracked has to say about "modern" humor. Where does comedy come from? Up until now, the closest thing we had to an answer was: “A childhood sad just enough to make you use humor as a defense mechanism instead of going to therapy, but not so sad that you decide to become a poet.” I am attacked. So, yeah, there is this book titled Philogelos, which is Greek for “laughter-lover,” or “chuckle-schmuck” if you will. It’s a collection of 265 jokes composed by Hierocles and Philagrius, of whom we know exactly two things: 1) jack and 2) squat.It's just as likely, I think, that Hierocles and Philagrius were pseudonyms; sometimes it's important to hide your real identity when making jokes, lest the butts of said jokes come find you and fart in your face. It’s actually kind of reassuring that your misogynistic uncle’s “jokes” about your aunt would solicit as many groans in Ancient Greece as they do today, mainly because everyone back then had already heard it all. I had to look it up, but yeah, 1800 years ago was still technically Ancient Greece. Anyway, I could repost examples of the jokes here, but you can go to the original Cracked link or the one to the source material a few paragraphs ago. I don't feel like trying to be funny right now. Just keep one thing in mind: the best humor relies on puns (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it). And the hardest thing to translate into another language is a pun. There are obviously workarounds, but when people say something is lost in translation, it's usually because the pun only works in the original language. Anyway, I did note that some of the jokes at the source link would have been, presumably, absolutely hilarious puns in 3rd century Greece, but are quizzical-eyebrow-raisers in 21st century Anglophone countries. In any case, none of these are exactly side-splitters, because in the end, comedy requires cultural context and is usually time-sensitive, but they do provide insight into the origins of jokes. Just don't try to tell them at your next open mic night. |
| Some of my entries this month, including this one, will be based on prompts from "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]. As usual, I'm picking them at random. The prompts for that activity are all quotes this round. My goal is to do these entries without looking up the source of the quote until after I'm done, because these are meant to be "blind quotes." We'll see if I can avoid the temptation, because sometimes I want context. And thus, the first entry for JI: "And it hit me, that to me, those are two of my deepest-felt emotions. Justice, equality, fairness, mercy, longsuffering, Work, Passion, knowledge, and above all else, Truth. Those are my primary emotions." Fortunately, math isn't an emotion. I count nine there, not two. I realize most people don't consider those things to be emotions. I have it on good authority, though, that some people indeed feel them as emotions, which seems a bit odd to me, but then, most things involving emotion do. So I simply accept that yes, for some people those are emotions. Which is something I think more people might try to understand: that other people feel emotions differently than they do. It's not exactly empathy, because I'm not asking anyone to feel what they feel, but just to accept that they do feel it. Maybe it's a bit like being blind. As I was losing my eyesight last year, I naturally started to think about what it might be like to be blind in a society that's so visually-oriented. So you're blind, and someone's describing something to you visually... you can't see it directly, but you can accept that they see what they see, right? And in a sense (pun intended, as always), we're all blind when it comes to others' emotions. We can sometimes read it in their faces or their body language, a certain stress in their voice, but to get a better idea of what they're feeling, they have to tell us. Many's the time I've been stressed, and people ask me "what are you angry about?" Well, I wasn't angry until you misread my emotional state; I guess I'm just one of those people who project anger when stressed. It doesn't help that I don't really smile; I physically can't show my teeth when I'm grinning, the way other people do. (At least this helps when I play poker, and when I face apex predators in the forest.) (Just kidding; I don't do forests.) Worse, though, is when I'm depressed. I mean, I guess depression is an emotion, as it's a mental state associated with certain internal feelings Although again, different people process it differently -- some cry, some can't get out of bed, some experience anhedonia (which is something I've never had; even when I'm depressed, I enjoy certain things, such as beer). What I'm getting at, though, is if I bother to tell someone I'm depressed, I get, "What are you depressed about?" Grr. Now I'm annoyed AND depressed, because it's not about anything; it's a brain chemical neuroreceptor thing or whatever. Worst still is when I get, "Are you thinking about suicide?" No, but now I'm thinking about homicide. (Not seriously, though.) Just to be clear, the only times I've ever "thought about" suicide, it's been in the context of fiction writing, much as the writer of a murder mystery "thinks about" murder. The point, insofar as there is one, is that the only thing we can really rely on when it comes to assessing someone else's emotional state is a) what they tell us and b) if they're being honest about it. And I tend to default to "yes" for part (b) there unless I have some reason to think they're lying. Consequently, if someone tells you that the emotion they're feeling right now is one of those nine, fucking believe them. Now, I don't feel any of those things as emotions. Well, I guess "passion" is the exception there (or used to be, back when I had shits to give), but the other eight are what are, for me, abstract principles or, as in the case of "work," activities. Most of them are things I strive for. There's no external source of justice, so I try to be just and I feel satisfaction when someone acts justly. Similarly, there's no fairness, so it's up to me to act as fairly as I can, which also makes me feel good. And so on. The exception for me is work, to which I'm strongly allergic. But regardless, most of these ideas can create emotion in me -- anger when I see injustice or inequality, for example, or happiness when I find some new knowledge or achieve some epiphany of truth -- but I don't feel them directly as emotions. Again, though, I accept that others do. Maybe it's sort of like synesthesia, you know, the people who can hear colors or smell numbers. Just different neuronal firing in their brains. As an aside, I have to wonder why some of those qualities are capitalized, and others aren't. This might be a matter of context, and like I said, I'm just going by the provided quote, rather than trying to find the source. Anyway, I feel that to be... you know... fair, I should present a contrary view, so here it is. New research based on brain scans shows that people who care about justice are swayed more by reason than by emotion. All I can say to rebut that, not being an expert in the field, is that it may be true for the majority, but for something like this, we also have to consider individual differences and outliers. What I mean is, I don't think we should be reading an article like that and assuming that it applies to everyone. It's like... if someone did a study about coffee, and the study showed that people like coffee (not an unreasonable result). So you think, "everyone likes coffee!" Well, perhaps most people do, but it doesn't change the fact that I despise the stuff. With that, I've banged on long enough. And I managed not to look up the quote, so... yay me? |
| I've noted before that, sometimes, these articles that I'm picking at random come up on appropriate occasions. This is one such occasion. A Defense of the Reality of Time Time isn’t just another dimension, argues Tim Maudlin. To make his case, he’s had to reinvent geometry. Why is it appropriate today? Well, because it's Groundhog Day, of course. The meaning of Groundhog Day has changed over the course of my life. It used to be about giant rodents seeing their shadow (or not) and thus making a prediction for the remainder of Northern Hemisphere winter. In 1993, that definition changed forever; it is now about reliving a time period over and over and over again, thanks to the movie of that name that came out that year. I've noted before that GHD (the movie) wasn't the first pop culture story to feature a time loop. ST:TNG did it the previous year. But that's okay. Nowadays, every TV show that is even slightly science-fiction-ish has to feature at least one time loop episode. And almost invariably, one of the characters, sensing they're in a time loop, will use it as a verb. "We're being Groundhog Dayed!" Even Doctor Who referenced it in the last special, which came out at New Year's. Now, the concept of a time loop of that sort is completely unscientific. If time were to loop, we'd never know it, because we wouldn't be able to keep our memories from the previous loop. You might be in one now and not even know it and not even know it and not even know it and not even know it. Okay, that was a cheap joke. Anyway, unscientific or not, it can make for good storytelling if you can explain or handwave why someone knows they're in a loop. And it's still got way more scientific justification than squirrel meteorology. I mean, when I first heard about the mythology as a kid, I was like, "So if the woodchuck sees his shadow, it's six more weeks of winter, but if he doesn't, it's an early spring? How does that make sense? You can only see your shadow if it's sunny. If it's sunny, things warm up faster. That's just logic." And then I went back to eating paste or whatever it is that kids do. I was going to put this rant in this week's Comedy newsletter, by the way, but decided instead to talk about walking in the freezing damn cold. Because if I waited until for my next Comedy newsletter in March, that one would have lost a lot of its timeliness. So it's a good thing the article about time came up because it gave me an opportunity to write in here about ImbolcGroundhog Day on Groundhog Day. You'll note I haven't even started to talk about the article itself. So how about I start now? Physicists and philosophers seem to like nothing more than telling us that everything we thought about the world is wrong. And now you're going to tell us that that's wrong. They take a peculiar pleasure in exposing common sense as nonsense. That's because it generally is. If there's anything I've learned in life, it's that "common sense" is neither. Anyone who insists on leading from "common sense" is automatically a bad leader. But Tim Maudlin thinks our direct impressions of the world are a better guide to reality than we have been led to believe. I've been railing for years against the numinous "time is but an illusion" bullshit promoted by mystics and charlatans and even some serious scientists. Sometimes even here in this blog. Therefore, I'm favorably inclined toward any scientific take on the subject that tickles my confirmation bias. So I'm not sharing this article to rag on it, but because it makes me think I'm right about this particular philosophy. I might not be, and this guy could have it all wrong too, but it's nice to know I have some backup. The rest of the article, honestly, gets into stuff that's beyond most of us, and there's not a lot of point in quoting it out of context. I still think it's worth a read, even if you don't grok it in fullness. I can't say that I did. So take some time and read it. I promise you won't get Groundhog Dayed into reading it again unless you want to. |
| Sigh. I gotta start a crappy month off with this bullshit? Thanks a lot, Random Number Generator. No, it doesn't. Octopuses are from space. I know, that sounds like the opening line of a cheesy science fiction movie from the black and white days of Hollywood. But it’s actually the main part of the argument behind a research paper published in an actual peer-reviewed journal. No it actually is not. Except in the most general sense, in that every element in our bodies, those of other animals, plants, and other life, and the Earth itself is "from space." The paper was published in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. Titled Cause of the Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?, the paper digs deep into the origin of life on Earth. Allow me to go on an aside here. Read this section of a Wikipedia article about that particular journal. Note, I'm not calling into question the integrity of that journal; just highlighting this bit:In 2018, the journal published a review article entitled Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic? authored by over 30 authors, including Edward J.Steele and Chandra Wickramasinghe, which argued in favour of panspermia as the origin of the Cambrian explosion, and two articles arguing against that position by Keith Baverstock and Karin Mölling, both highly critical of the notion that life had originated elsewhere than on this planet. So, the paper was published three or four years ago; why is this popping back up in the popular press now? Without any mention of the contrarian papers? Back to the original article. As a result, it posits that life began thanks to a rain of retroviruses, which literally fell from space. Those retroviruses then added new DNA sequences to terrestrial genomes, which the paper says further drove mutagenic change. This is just shitty science reporting. "life began thanks to... retroviruses... from space" but the viruses "added new DNA sequences to terrestrial genomes." Which is it? And do not get me started on using the word "literally" in a science article, even if it is literally being used literally. Where things start to get really interesting, though, is when the paper starts to discuss the arrival of cephalopods. The paper itself claims that certain cephalopods like octopuses, squid, and others arrived on the planet by falling from space, frozen in a kind of stasis. Uh huh. "We don't understand it, so it must be aliens." Also... “Thus the possibility that cryopreserved squid and/or octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted,” the paper reads. Saying that the possibility cannot be discounted is not the same thing as saying that squids are from space. Like "the possibility cannot be discounted" that there is microscopic life frozen in the nitrogen ice of Pluto -- not until someone sends a robot there to sample it, and even then, if they don't find it at the first sample site, the possibility couldn't be discounted that they missed something. Plus, it's far more likely that there's life in liquid water under the ice of Europa, and Europa is closer, so why not check there first? The idea that life originated beyond Earth isn’t exactly a new one. As Stephen Fleischfresser points out in a post about the paper from 2018, the theory of panspermia has been around since Ancient Greece. And now, considering the idea of panspermia itself: There exist perfectly reasonable hypotheses for a terrestrial origin of terrestrial life. Meaning, given chemical elements that indeed "came from space," said elements became organized through natural, terrestrial processes (liquid water, energy source, random movements, etc.) and eventually became self-organizing and able to reproduce. (There's more to it than this but, of course, I'm not a biologist.) While nothing's settled on the subject, this is a far more parsimonious explanation than "life began elsewhere, spored up, survived hard vacuum for an unspecified amount of time, and then came to Earth." Occam's Razor alone is enough to dismiss the idea of extraterrestrial origins before ruling out terrestrial origins. Also, consider this: it doesn't matter where the first life-form became organized. If you are proposing an extraterrestrial origin, you still have to present a reasonable hypothesis for the organization of the first proto-cell, or whatever you're going to consider the first life. Panspermia theories just kick that can down the road, and, worse from my point of view, they seem to come from the philosophical foundation of "Earth just isn't that special," which is contradicted by available evidence, to wit: we have not yet detected extraterrestrial life of any kind. I do expect that we will, and that might shed some more light on the subject, but as of right now, all you're doing is disrespecting the complex web of interactions that makes life on Earth slightly bearable, and likely crapping on all of humanity while you're at it. Like the people who insist that aliens HAD to have built the pyramids, because humans just aren't clever enough. Spoiler: we really are that clever, or at least some of us are. (Yes, I'm aware of the Stargate series which is based around just that assertion. I'm also aware that it's fiction.) And you have to ask yourself: why are some people so dead-set on believing, without evidence either way, that life on Earth didn't begin on Earth? Point being, you're not explaining how life got its start; you're just hand-waving it as "from somewhere else." It doesn't answer the important question. No, saying "Aliens did it" is just like saying "God did it." You're free to believe that, of course, but it's not science. To be fair to the article, it does go on to point out: But this paper fails to put itself above any of the other theories we have out there. Which is... I don't know. What's the opposite of damning with faint praise? Praising with faint damnation? That's not quite right, either. It's an understatement, anyway. From what I've seen, the paper doesn't just fail to put itself above any of the other theories, but fails to rise to anywhere close to the level of some. Still, there’s something interesting about the possibility that octopuses are from space. Sure, and there's something interesting about the possibility that Bigfeet (bigsfoot, bigfoots, goddamn I still don't know what the plural is) exist. It's great fodder for storytelling. Don't for a second believe, as the article implies, just because a couple of scientists floated the possibility, that it's settled science. Of course, it’s going to take a lot to actually prove it, too. And, singling out one specific group of animals could be making the focus far too narrow to actually prove anything. "Prove" is a bad word for science. I'd settle for finding evidence that may support the hypothesis, or at least rule out terrestrial origin. For now, all we can do is look back at the paper and watch to see what other evidence these scientists might bring forward in the future. I'm sure I'll smell that bullshit when it comes out, too. One final thing, though... for which I'll go back to the Wikipedia article I linked above. The editorial of that issue authored by Noble commented that panspermia was a "highly controversial hypothesis with the majority of biologists dismissing it out of hand", and noted that the Origin of Life remained an unsolved problem, and that all conjectures on the topic at this time were speculative. Speculation is a good thing. And dismissing something "out of hand" smacks of having a closed mind, which is also antithetical to science. They know more than I do, obviously, but I think there's nothing wrong with thinking about these things. What I'm railing on here is the penchant for science reporting to sensationalize this crap and treat speculation as fact because they know that people will eat this shit up -- either believing it uncritically, or, like me, taking an hour out of my precious day to rag on it. |
| With the end of the month comes the last prompt from "JAFBG" [XGC]. What's your unpopular writing or book opinion that you know is a bit controversial? I've discussed some of these in here before. Honestly, though, most of my opinions are about movies, not books. It's still writing. Some book opinions:  Ulysses is overrated. It's the literary equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting: random noise upon which the reader can project their own patterns. No, I never read the whole thing. One should not have to read an entire book to know one doesn't like it. This is more general, but present-tense narratives suck. They're fine for flash fiction, and practically indispensable for joke-telling ("A priest, a rabbi and an imam walk into a bar..."), but with anything longer than a short story, it's exhausting. Like reading a 70,000 word headline. (Yes, I've written stories in the present tense. Short stories.) The first Harry Potter book was poorly written. It's been a long time since I read it, but what sticks out in my mind are way, way, way too many adverbs, clumsy scene changes, and some truly cringeworthy moments. To Rowling's credit, she got better at writing as she went along. In that case, though, I did read the whole thing. No, I'm not going to weigh in on her personal opinions; I'm only talking about the actual writing in the actual books.Television: "Reality" shows suck, full stop. They're not a guilty pleasure for me. Or any kind of pleasure. They are the worst kind of manipulation. And they're scripted, so their entire existence is a lie from the get-go. I'm not against lying (that's what fiction is), but don't pretend it's real. (See also: Blair Witch Project, which wasn't TV so doesn't belong in this section.) Deep Space Nine was the best Trek. Also, Enterprise was better than Voyager (though Janeway was awesome).Movies: I don't get the hate for Cats. It's like everyone has to jump on the hate bandwagon once it reaches some sort of critical mass. Was it a great movie? No. But it doesn't deserve the opprobrium heaped upon it, either. I liked the Abrams Star Trek movies. All of them. I guess that's not all that controversial an opinion, but since I mentioned Trek up there, I figured I'd say something about the reboots. Another more general thing, but the Academy Awards are nonsense and have been for a long time. I guess the clue is right there in the name: it represents what other people in the industry think of particular movies. Which is fine. But that doesn't mean that an "Academy-Award-Winning" or "Oscar-nominated" flick is going to appeal to the uncultured masses (in which I include myself), so I don't get why people keep trying to make that a Thing. So what you end up with is people writing, directing, producing and acting in movies tailored to try to win Oscars, instead of telling a compelling story like a movie is supposed to do.Yes, those are my opinions (though I know the prompt only asked for one; consider the others a bonus). And no, I don't expect people to agree with me; otherwise, it wouldn't be "controversial." Speaking of movies, you might note that I haven't done any movie reviews lately. That's because the only theater I care to go to right now is the Alamo near my house, and for the last three weeks, they've had nothing I wanted to walk in the freezing cold to go see. It doesn't look good for this week, either. Naturally, this happens right after I subscribe to their effectively unlimited (one free movie a day) pass. Hopefully they'll get some soon that might be worth it to me to check out. As for next month, I've got some articles to share, but I'll also be doing some prompts for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]. I'd recommend checking it out if you feel like blogging a bit next month (eight entries over the course of the month). It's not like there's much else to do in February, after all.And finally, thanks to the folks at "JAFBG" [XGC] for giving me stuff to rant about and for putting up with my daily posting over there. |
| Only two left from "JAFBG" [XGC]. After this, only one. Which I may or may not be able to post at the usual time. Global supply chain issues. Is it a labor shortage, wage shortage, something else? How do we fix it? Hell if I know. I'm not even sure it needs to be "fixed." Not that it isn't inconvenient, but if we could fix everything that was inconvenient, we'd... you know, actually, that would be awesome. Get right on that. I say that because these things tend to sort themselves out. Either we get shit moving again, or, if we don't, we get used to it. As for the labor shortage / wage shortage thing... well, anything I say about that will be political. So I'm going to say it anyway: you want people to work, pay them more. If you want businesses to pay people more, don't be surprised when inflation happens. If people start getting paid better, and then inflation happens, don't be surprised when they end up being paid the same, adjusted for inflation, as they were before they got paid more. The system pretty much requires that some people be paid dogshit wages so the rest of us aren't inconvenienced. Don't like it? Change the system... or at least try not to be one of those getting dogshit wages. Of course, it's not just about being paid more. It's also about not being treated like shit at work. I'm glad workers are finally starting to get the upper hand, because managers have become too complacent in thinking that they can do whatever they want and the peons will come to work anyway because they have no other choice. Well, now they have a choice. Just know that every time someone complains, "No one wants to work," what they're really saying is: "No one wants to work for me (because I'm an asshole)." One thing I'm certain of, though, is the people who said that the exploited workers would come begging for their shit jobs back once stimulus ended were, obviously, completely wrong. Because it ended, and people are still not interested in working at your soul-deadening, productivity-optimized, unpredictable-schedule, doing-the-work-of-three-people, no-chance-for-promotion craphole business. Don't get me wrong; I'd like to see the supply chain problems improve because I've been holding off on buying a car and a new laptop, both of which require computer chips that I hear are still in short supply. But I'm patient. So far. |
| I haven't visited Asheville, NC for about 10 years. In that time, apparently it's gained approximately 16,000 new breweries (and it had about 4,000 to start with). I'm going to try to drink at most of them today. But first (because I doubt I'll be able to do it later), a "JAFBG" [XGC] prompt:There has been talk recently about imposing upper age limits on political roles. Do you think there should be a maximum age limit for political positions? Only for members of the other party. Again, this is going to be US-centric, though I might mention the Queen of England, who is about to celebrate her 70th year on the throne (she might want to get up sometimes). However, that's not a political position. And now that I've gotten British royalty out of the way, back to Freedom Land: Nah. Why bother? You're either going to be able to hold the office, or you're going to die, or you might become mentally incapacitated, which, from what I've seen, no one will be able to tell the difference (see: Ronald Reagan). I say for age limits the same thing I say for term limits: We have them. It's called voting the bastards out of office. No one seems willing to do that, though. But if you don't like how old someone is or how long they've served... don't vote for them. Yeah, this doesn't apply to judges, but that's not technically a political role either. While we're at it. let's eliminate lower age limits, too. Right now, to be President, you have to (among other qualifications) be 35 years old. Senators, 30. Representatives, 25. These aren't new things; they're right there in the Constitution. So eliminate 'em. Hell, any given 8-year-old would probably do a better job than some of the fuckers in office right now. Of course, this means lowering the voting age to 0 too. Well, I'm willing to compromise on that a bit. You have to be able to go through the voting queue without shitting your diapers. This would, of course, eliminate a lot of older voters as well. Which is an added benefit. |
| A reminder: postings here will be at irregular times for the rest of the month due to an epic beer adventure upon which I am about to embark... weather permitting. Meanwhile, one of the last few prompts from "JAFBG" [XGC]:If you could delete one website or tv channel from existence, which one would you delete and why? Here is where I normally come up with an obvious joke answer, but to be honest, I don't want to. For one thing, censorship sucks. "I don't like what you have to say, so I'm going to make sure no one else hears it." Sure, some censorship is unavoidable, because if you allow things like unrestricted ads or hate speech, things get ugly real quick and people will leave your site. But in my view, restricting what goes on in a forum that you control is a different matter than deciding that someone else's platform must be deleted. I mean, age-restrict it, put up content warnings, whatever, that's fine; people should know something about what they're getting into. Banning something should be a last-ditch thing for truly despicable and/or illegal content (on the level of videos / photos of child abuse). Since I don't know any website or TV channel that portrays that, my answer is still "none." For another thing, okay, let's say you don't agree with me (which is fine) and you decide to nuke... I don't know... Twitter. (Look, I understand. That was the one I was going to make the obvious joke about up there.) So you eliminate Twitter completely, dismantle its servers, send its administrators off to a gulag, and ban its corporate executives from going anywhere near a computer or a venture capitalist. You do all that, and within a few months, there will be a new Twitter, run by different people. If there's a demand for a service, someone will provide it. Eliminate Fox News? Something else will take its place. Pull the plug on Wikipedia? It'll take a while, but there will be a Wikipedia II at some point. When there are both ethical and practical reasons for doing something (or in this case, not doing it), I'd say it's not worth doing (not worth... not doing... okay, whatever). So, no, I can't answer the prompt because I wouldn't delete any website or TV channel from existence. I sure as hell avoid a lot of them, though. Which if you don't like something, that's the way to go, instead of imposing your own standards on everyone else. |
| By my estimation, at this point 96.7% of all New Year's Resolutions have failed. And I finally got this "JAFBG" [XGC] prompt in my random selection. It's time for new year's resolutions. What do you not care about doing in 2022? Let's go over the most common resolutions, shall we? 1) Lose weight. Did that, succeeded for a while, failed. Yes, I became a cliché. A new year isn't going to make an ounce of difference. Pun intended. Verdict: Don't care. 2) Exercise more. This can overlap with 1, but doesn't have to. Again, don't care. 3) Drink less. 4) Read more. That would involve doing something else less, so... no. 5) Stop smoking. Yeah, still don't care. 6) Learn a new language. 882 consecutive days of learning French, and counting. I intend to continue. That's not a resolution; never was -- if you do the math, you'll see I started on some random day in late August of 2019. Do resolutions work for you? If so, great. They don't work for me, so I quit trying, based on my core philosophy of not setting myself up for failure. I do try to do things to improve myself; just not based on the Gregorian calendar. You could say I've resolved to not make resolutions. But that leads to paradox, so... whatever. |
| First of all, there might be erratic post timing from me over the weekend. I'm going beer tasting out of town. (Still don't have a car; someone else is driving.) And now for a "JAFBG" [XGC] prompt...Have you ever run into the "Is this all there is to life?" existential crisis? How do you get past it? No. It's not like I've never asked myself that question; it's just that it never sank to the level of "existential crisis." The root cause of existential crises, as I see it anyway, is that we're fooled into believing that life has a meaning, or a purpose. It does not. Believing that it does necessarily results in thinking about what that might be. Some people might find their own meaning or purpose, and they're content to live in accordance with it. That's fine, too. All I'm saying is that the initial assumption is faulty. You can build a house on a strong foundation, but if the underlying soil is unstable, it doesn't matter how solid the house is or how strong the foundation is; it will crack, tilt, sink, or get washed away in the next flood. Once you realize that, ultimately, nothing has a meaning save that which we project upon it, you can just live life. I'm sure a bunch of people would question the invalidity of that assumption. "Isn't the purpose of life to reproduce?" That's a big part of the definition of life, but it's not a "purpose." Besides, we can choose not to do so, as I have, and still lead a satisfying life. Sometimes more satisfying, because there's less drama and disappointment involved. (Let's table for now the question of whether we actually choose anything.) "But what about all the bearded philosopher types who claim to have found the meaning?" What about them? None of them stand up to objective scrutiny, as is obvious because the beards each have their own, often mutually exclusive, take on it. "Forty-two!" Oh, give it a rest already. I guess the philosopher who sums it up best for me is Jim Steinman, who wrote the following immortal lines for Meat Loaf to belt out: Who am I? Why am I here? Forget the questions, someone get me another beer What's the meaning of life? What's the meaning of it all? You gotta learn to dance before you learn to crawl You gotta learn to dance before you learn to crawl If you want my views of history, then there's something you should know The three men I admire most are Curly, Larry, and Moe Don't worry about the future, sooner or later it's the past If they say the thrill is gone then it's time to take it back If the thrill is gone then it's time to take it back |
| You'll be pleased to know that there's only a week left of me doing prompts from "JAFBG" [XGC]. The world changes pretty quickly. What are some things that have changed in society since you were a kid and what things have stayed the same? I guess the biggest change is the extinction of the woolly mammoth. Those things used to shake the ground in their herds, but then one day, boom, gone. Or maybe it was the invention of the wheel. Well, actually, wheels were around before I was born; it's the axle that really changed society by letting us load captured enemies on carts instead of dragging them behind horses. Okay, okay, fine, something serious. Society ebbs and flows, and most changes are fads and fashions, superficial stuff. But technology has the potential to bring lasting changes to society, so I'm mostly focusing on technology here. And again, this is a U.S. perspective because that's where I live. My birth year was a little more than 60 years after the first powered controlled flight. The first 747 took off a few years after I was born. In just a few years, more time will have passed between "now" and my birth than between my birth and the first flight. A lot changed in those first 60-some years, but commercial air travel since then? Apart from a few details, such as trip volume, engine efficiency, security theater, and the willingness to pack us into those damn aluminum tubes like pickles in a jar, it hasn't materially changed since I was born. Oh, we toyed with supersonic jets for a bit, but they never made a lot of commercial sense. Nor has automobile travel changed much, except for increased safety measures -- interstates were mostly built before I was born. What I'm getting at is we're using the same modes of transportation as we did in the 60s. The only exception is urban scooter rentals and the like, which hardly count. Other countries introduced higher-speed rail, but that's still just rail. Electric cars are still just cars. The reason I mention this is that there is one thing that has changed radically, which is communication. The internet has connected all of us in a way transportation doesn't -- for better and for worse. And even with all the downsides of it, I'd rather have the internet than not. Being able to communicate in real time with people from all over the world? That's very cool. Streaming video on demand? Absolutely cool. Knowledge at my fingertips? Love it (even if I do have to double- and triple- check most of it). Best of all, I can usually avoid the parts of it that suck, such as vertical video, social media and intrusive ads. I can't let this go without nodding in the direction of the most important U.S. societal change in my lifetime. On October 14, 1978, President Carter signed federal transportation bill H.R 1337 into law. It included Amendment Number 3534, proposed by Senator Alan Cranston of California, authorizing the home production of wine and beer. This federal legalization of home brewing created many hobby brewers, some of whom went on to open craft breweries, thus changing society for the better. We don't live in a perfect world, of course, but having microbreweries around at least keeps this timeline from verging into absolute dystopia. So which was more important, craft breweries, or the internet? I really can't say. I do know that I'd never find as many beers to try if it weren't for the internet... but on the flip side, I'd have less use for the internet if I couldn't use it to find breweries. So... both? Sure. Why not both. |
| And another one I can't fully answer from "JAFBG" [XGC]... but I'm going to try anyway. Channel your inner Seinfeld and tell us the most petty reason you've broken up with someone or lost interest in dating them. I don't know, because I haven't broken up with, or dated, anyone except my most recent ex-wife since Seinfeld was originally on TV (you don't want to know how long ago that was; it was longer than you think and you'll feel old). I wasn't the one doing the breaking-up, usually, and the few times I did the reasons were eminently justifiable and not at all petty. No, really. No. Really. Stop laughing. (Stupid canned laugh track.) There was one time in the 90s when I dated this one chick, briefly. She was nice but incurious, and desperately wanted children while I desperately didn't. But that wasn't why I broke up with her (I was just very, very careful to never let the condoms out of my possession). No, I broke up with her because she declawed her cats. Like I said, not a petty reason. Though some might find it to be so. She certainly did. I consider it to be an inexcusable, barbaric practice which usually only serves to protect one's precious, precious furniture. There are other ways to protect the furniture besides mutilating cats. And even if there weren't, a living thing's welfare is almost always more important than that of furniture. (One exception: cockroaches.) It's not that I didn't know her cats were declawed when we started getting serious. It's just that I wasn't aware, at first, of how horrible it was, thinking it was only slightly bad and you just couldn't let the cats outside, which wasn't an issue for her at the time because she lived in an apartment. The internet was in its nascent stages back then, populated mostly just by nerds like me -- long before Failbook, before Wikipedia, even before WDC. (Did you know Writing.com predated Wikipedia? By about four months. Now you do.) But I started digging around on there and became appalled. There really wasn't anything I could do about the poor kitties. She treated them well enough otherwise, and unlike in civilized countries, declawing isn't illegal in the US. But I just couldn't see the relationship going anywhere because a) I will always have cats, b) I will never have them declawed, and c) that was all I needed to know about her priorities. And don't get me wrong -- I may be a little judgey on this subject, but I never hated her for it; I wished her well and moved on. She wasn't so cool with the breakup, though, so, unlike with most of my exes, I have no idea where she is or what she's doing (but I am certain based on discussions with mutual friends that the condoms, indeed, worked as designed). Since it's been about 25 years, the cats in question have long since gone to meet Bast. It was simply a sign for me that we were, ultimately, incompatible. Hell, if she got what she wanted in life, she's got fully grown kids by now. I just hope she didn't declaw them, too. |
| Another tough one today from "JAFBG" [XGC] Tell us about something that has been difficult for you to discuss in the past, but that you're ready to talk about now. It's not tough because of the subject matter, but because the few things that are difficult for me to talk about are still difficult to talk about. And while I've mentioned some of these things to close friends, none of them are ready for this very public forum (I have the blog set to "Allow Everyone" in the so-far-thwarted hope that offsite people will read it and want to join WDC). I think most people, confronted by this failure of ability to directly address the prompt, would just skip it. Not me, though. Because while it's difficult to talk about certain traumatic experiences in my early life, as any regular readers can attest, I don't have a problem spewing words on damn near any other topic, whether I'm qualified to or not. For the sake of discussions, I'm going to use language as a compression algorithm, and rename that-which-we're-not-ready-to-talk-about to the letter Z. And I don't give a shit whether you pronounce that Zee or Zed. Since I don't want to address Z directly, I'll come at it from an oblique angle. In a meta sort of way, this is a direct response to the prompt, because I don't think I've even acknowledged the existence of Z in here. I just kind of assumed that people would know that I had stuff I was going to keep Z-cret (yea, I couldn't help myself, but to get that pun you have to pronounce that letter as it is in the US). Because, well, doesn't everybody? Maybe you tortured animals as a kid, but didn't grow up to be a serial killer, though if you admitted to it, people would assume that you were. Maybe you're sexually attracted to ten-year-olds but never do anything about it. Maybe you stole your brother's teddy bear and tore out the stuffing because he annoyed you, then blamed it on the dog, who ended up "on a farm." Maybe you know that your parents abused you, and you're not repressing the memory, but keeping it to yourself because they weren't all bad and you don't want people to think less of them. Whatever. Everyone has a Zkeleton. Okay, that one was a bit forced, I admit it. Or maybe it's a secret so dark, so terrible, that you can't even tell your closest friends about it. Or your religious leader, or your therapist. Instead, you bottle it up inside, erecting a wall between it and your everyday life, and most of the time you manage to forget about it. But sometimes, usually at three in the morning when you can't sleep because you drank too much the day before and the alcohol-induced coma has worn off, leaving a hung-over wakefulness, and you hear a scratching on that wall, and you remember. But you don't dwell on it too much, because right now, that wall is one of those Japanese rice paper partitions and if you acknowledged the full and horrible truth, it would come tearing through, panting and slavering. Sure would be nice to have some cinderblocks right now, wouldn't it? And some mortar. Or at least something stronger than booze. It's good to know that everyone has a Z, though. At least, I assume everyone does. Wow, what if someone doesn't have a Z? I just now realiZed that this is a possibility. How well-adjusted would they be? It's hard to imagine. But I call myself a writer, so I have to try: All the contortions, all the action movie laser-grid acrobatics you have to go through to keep anyone from finding about Z, well, you don't have to do those, do you? You don't have to spend most of your waking hours desperately trying to forget it, and the rest carefully ensuring that no one finds out about it. On the other hand... in that imaginary, utopian situation... where's your mystery? You have nothing to hold back, so those few people who give enough of a shit about you to get to know you, well, eventually, they just... know you. And then you're boring. So yeah, maybe I'll hold on to all of my Zs for the foreZeeable future. I just hope I die before I get AlZheimer's and end up Zpilling the beans anyway -- the one bright spot being that no one would believe me if I'm Zpewing Ztuff if I've got dementia. I'm something of a fiction writer, after all, and maybe it was all part of some plot or another that never got written. Or maybe it did, and I've passed off unbearable fact as fiction. You'll never know. |
| I've been kind of dreading this one from "JAFBG" [XGC], but here I am taking a stab at it anyway. What's something going on in the world or in your local community right now that you think people should be more aware of? To be honest, I don't know. That's the simple answer. Of course, you don't expect me to stick with the simple answer, do you? Anyone reading this necessarily has an internet connection (my apologies to anyone who's reading a printout of this a hundred years in the future -- congratulations for surviving, by the way). Anyone with an internet connection can find out pretty much whatever they want, whenever they want, with the only caveat being that one must use some discretion to separate fact from fiction -- which is a skill that some of us don't seem to have. So I'm aware of a bunch of stuff, not all of which I can fully trust. And, presumably, so are you. I'm probably aware of stuff that you're not, and vice-versa, but I have no idea which is which. The big global stories right now involve the pandemic, Ukraine, and the volcano in Tonga. And Meat Loaf's recent death, which is somehow related to at least one of those things, but not everyone cares about that. And that's the problem: not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of giving a shit. As there is plenty of stuff that I don't give a shit about (sports, for example), I can understand that. If you don't care, I can't make you care. The information is out there. All you have to do is ask the right questions. Humans are capable of profound intelligence and equally profound stupidity (sometimes even within the same individual). I try to highlight some cases of both in this blog -- scientific discoveries as well as completely misguided philosophy. So, "What's something going on in the world or in your local community right now?" Everything. And nothing. It depends on your point of view. |
| Let's see what the random numbers give me for "JAFBG" [XGC] today. How was 2021 vs. your expectations for the year? What are you expecting in 2022? That's the great thing about having low expectations: Usually (not always), they're exceeded. I expected 2021 to be a massive, epic shitshow. As it turned out to be merely an epic shitshow, I was pleasantly surprised. I don't think I had any specific predictions for last year. I'm not Nostradamus. I couldn't have nailed the January 6 trators' insurrection, or the death of Betty White at the end of the year (though those two events neatly bookended the shitshow); I just expected Bad Shit to happen in general. On New Years Eve of 2020, I wrote in a blog entry: "I just think all the folks who are going to breathe a huge sigh of relief just because the clock strikes midnight are going to be in for a rude surprise." Bad writing aside, the other great thing about having low expectations is I either get the pleasant surprise of something good happening, or the pure joy associated with being right. In this case, it was the pure joy of being right. On a personal level, the year wasn't so bad, even with getting my car totaled. But it sucked from a global perspective. As for what I'm expecting in 2022? Well, more of the same, of course. Probably worse. Almost certainly worse. Want some specific predictions? Go here. Who knows? Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised again. If not, I'll settle for being able to smugly say "I told you so." |
| A provocative one from "JAFBG" [XGC]. Should there be limitations on free speech. And if so, what should those limitations be? Of course there should be: anything I don't like should be banned. Okay, no, of course I'm joking. Still, it seems some people actually think that way. This is not a jab at any one political side; it's an actual rare case of "both sides are bad," or, rather, extremists on both sides are bad. True freedom begins when you realize that it's better to hear opinions you don't like, and to have the opportunity to refute them, than it is to ban them. Keeping in mind that I am and have always been a US citizen, and this is therefore written from a US point of view. There are of course some limitations on free speech. We've seen what happens when there aren't: internet boards getting filled up with ads, for example. The limit most often trotted out involves shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater, on the theory that doing so could lead to injury or loss of life in the ensuing panic. (The actual court decision adds the word "falsely" to that -- just so you know, in case you're ever in a theater and you actually see something burning and want to warn people.) Never established, as far as I know, is if it's okay to shout "Movie!" in a crowded firehouse. But the basic idea -- that some forms of unfettered speech can cause imminent harm, and should thus be proscribed -- seems to have some validity. It's the "imminent" part that leads to gray areas: there's a difference between "Trespassers should be shot" and "Let's shoot those trespassers now." And there are always gray areas. That's why we have arguments. As I see it, anyway, imminent harm isn't the only criteria. We've decided that public pornography isn't acceptable, for example. Or naming your business something containing a curse word (though I find it hilarious that there are actual Vietnamese restaurants named Pho King, because I'm secretly 12 years old). The point is, yes, there are always limits, because speech isn't the only right worth protecting. Sometimes it comes into conflict with our other rights: life, liberty, privacy, whatever; and a balance has to be maintained there. Where exactly that balance lies is why we have courts and shit. And the freedom to argue about it. Most importantly, private companies and other entities get to set their own limits on free speech, which I think a lot of people miss in their whining about being silenced. Someone comes into my house going "Hitler was right," and while I would never say that they shouldn't be allowed to say that, they'd be unwelcome in my house forevermore. In fact, I want to know if someone's a racist, classist, Judeophobe, sexist, etc., so I can know who to ignore, and I can't know that unless we give them free rein to express their idiotic opinions. |
| Yep, still doing "JAFBG" [XGC]. But all this time, I've been dropping links into my Blog Fodder folder so I'll have stuff to write about after January. What's your strongest held belief that you would defend at all costs? At all costs? I don't know that I could possibly believe in anything strongly enough to defend it at all costs. I mean, it's like: Me: Science is the best method we have for underst- Them: *chambers a shotgun round* Me: Religion works too. Or: Me: Cats make far superior pets than d- Them: *holds knife at my throat* Me: Dogs are great pets. I suppose that means that my most strongly held belief is that no one should kill me, but I'm not willing to die or be tortured to defend that one, either. I don't even know what that would look like. Some sort of infinite recursion paradox, I guess. The closest thing I can think of, the one hill that I've said I would die on, is the one involving the definition of a Blue Moon. I know I've banged on it in here before, but the tl;dr is: People think a Blue Moon is what you call the second full moon of a Gregorian calendar month -- this is false; it is actually the third full moon in a season containing four full moons. Like I said, I've ranted about this before: "Once in a Blue Moon" "More Tricks Than Treats" "Cold Moon" "Balance" And even more from my dust-collecting offsite travel blog.It's not just the naming thing itself that hackles my raises, but that, even when the error is pointed out, people still stick with the false information that was first presented to them. So if there were anything I'd defend at all costs, it'd be- *notices red laser dots on my chest* Um, clearly the moon is blue because it's made of Stilton. |
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