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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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| Today's article possesses the unfortunate combination of being long, four years old, and from a source (Town & Country) that I don't usually link. Fake Steak, Well Done  Science is promising us steak that’s heart-healthy, eco-friendly, and still decadent. But will we eat filet mignon from a bioreactor? I don't know about "we," but I absolutely would—assuming it's comparable in taste and texture to actual dead cow. When it comes to eating meat, I don't actually enjoy the idea of killing animals. It's just that the delicious taste of it is more than enough for me to overcome any moral objections. See? I have principles. They're just selfish ones. Now, like I said, this is a long article, so I'm only going to include a few highlights. Aleph is one among an expanding field of companies racing to bring to market what they would rather not be called “lab-grown meat” (they prefer “cultivated” or “slaughter-free”). What you call something matters. For instance, they could have marketed GMOs better as, I don't know, Power Plants or something. Instead, the freaks and astroturfers got a hold of the idea of calling it "frankenfood" and that was so catchy that it caused people to actually believe that there's something wrong with GMOs. Though the technology did not exist even just a few years ago, today at least 33 startups in 12 countries are producing a variety of meats—from dog food to foie gras, pork to duck, chicken nuggets to beef patties. Some are promising cultivated meat in stores next year. As far as I've heard, cultivated meat didn't, in fact, make it to stores that next year, which would have been 2022. Nowhere have I found anything that indicates that the technology has been scaled up for mass production yet. Thanks to our palates, Americans don’t generally eat bats, the animals most widely suspected of harboring SARS-CoV-2’s precursor, but two other potentially fatal viruses, the influenza strains H1N1 and H5N1, have come from poultry and livestock in recent years—suggesting that more are on the way. On the other hoof, this sentence turned out to be prescient. And if pandemics aren’t enough to convince people, maybe antibiotic resistance is. Cattle producers discovered some time ago that giving their animals antibiotics to head off any possibility of bacterial infection also causes even healthy cattle to grow faster. I will give them points for this: every other time I've seen cattle antibiotics mentioned anywhere, the phrase used is "pump them full of antibiotics." It's long past being a cliché, and I'm glad the article avoids this overworn, overused, tired phrase that nevertheless attempts to sensationalize the practice. Overuse of antibiotics has accelerated the evolution of bacteria that can resist them, and now around 700,000 people all around the world die every year from what should be treatable infections. Of all the things science should have seen coming, this is right there at the top of the list. Or maybe they did see it coming, but figured we'd just make better antibiotics. I don't know. But it stems from a basic principle of evolution: the organisms that have resistance to pressures can go on to pass that resistance onto their offspring. Look at it this way: suppose that, every once in a while, a bulletproof deer is born. Normally, the bulletproof trait doesn't breed true. But after you send hunters into the woods with the mandate to reduce the deer population, the bulletproof deer won't be leaving with them. No, it'll stay in the woods with a few lucky stragglers. Eventually, another bulletproof deer is produced. Produce enough of them, and let them breed together, and within a few years, you have an entire population of bulletproof deer who proceed to take over the forest. The only thing left to do, then, is nuke the site from orbit, which has the unfortunate side effects of a) destroying the entire ecosystem and b) accelerating the rate of genetic mutation in the nearby populations. I was at the dentist yesterday, which meant I was subjected to television ads. They've only gotten worse since I last saw them. But I digress. One of them was, appropriately enough for the location, for mouthwash. "Kills 99% of germs that cause bad breath!" the commercial proclaimed. Okay, yeah, sure. Even if that's true (which it's not, except maybe in a petri dish or something), that other 1%? Yeah, those will go on to reproduce into an entire population of Listerine-resistant bad-breath germs. Result: in 20-200 years or so, everyone will have bad breath and there won't be anything we can do about it except maybe nuke the site from orbit. All of which is to say that bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance through selection pressures was entirely and completely predictable, even by non-scientists with some knowledge of science. And that's a major digression, so I won't be quoting any more from the article. My only excuse is that this sort of thing won't apply to lab meats (or whatever marketing name they settle on). As I said, I would absolutely try this sort of thing. Hopefully, it'll be better for the environment. I'm sure there are people, and some are mentioned in the article, who will oppose it on principle. Maybe because they're trying to promote their own meat alternatives. Whatever. But I want to throw a hypothetical out there. If you can do this with pig and cow and chicken... what, besides the ew factor, would stop them from creating lab-grown human meat? There's already talk about 3-d printing human organs for replacement, and no one seems to have ethical issues with that. I guarantee you, I'm not the only one who's had that thought. |
| The link I'm sharing today from Mental Floss is over 10 years old, published on an April Fools' Day, and really, really short. Which is fine, because I don't have a lot of time before I have to leave for an appointment. I saw the headline and thought, "Is it some reason besides that pranks are jokes put into practice? What have I been getting wrong all my life now? Turns out, nothing. Well, except maybe overestimating the linguistic intelligence of Anglophones. Every year on April Fools Day, you might find yourself the victim of a practical joke or two... No, because I trust no one on that day, and I try to spend it in hiding. I call it Comedy Christmas, but the only gifts I want involve other people pranking other people. A prank pulled on me is, by definition, not funny. But why are these jokes called practical? I think I get the confusion. We use "practically" as a synonym for "almost," and "practical" as a synonym for one sense of "virtual", as in "Her victory was a practical certainty." Look, the biggest prank ever played on us is the English language itself. Prop-based hijinks are called "practical jokes" because they require action—like slipping a Whoopee cushion onto someone’s chair—to be put into "practice." See? I wasn't wrong, after all. Unless this article is a prank. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the term was first used in 1804; before that, it was called a "handicraft joke," a term coined in 1741. And it might be less confusing to go back to that nomenclature, except then everyone will expect their pranks to involve knitted fabrics. If that etymology is not a prank, also. "Practical joke" also distinguishes such pranks from strictly verbal or intellectual jokes, such as the one about the Grecian Urn. That's a pun, which is the highest form of humor and definitely intellectual. But it works better in spoken English than written. |
| Whaddaya know—it turns out that nobody's perfect, though some seem to be less perfect than others. Here's a Cracked article for examples, because I am in no way referring to recent real-world revelations. The Most Embarrassing Failures of Famous Geniuses They can’t all be winners, even from the biggest winners in history Yes, even I make mistakes sometimes. 5 Benjamin Franklin’s Turkey Electrocution At one point, he became convinced an electrocuted turkey would be tastier than a normal one, and in attempting to demonstrate this, he accidentally touched the electrified wire intended for the turkey and electrocuted himself instead. As far as I can tell, this, unlike certain other Founding Father stories, actually happened. Except for the word "electrocute." That was unknown until a century or more later, when Edison coined the word in an attempt to make Nikola Tesla look bad (long story). It's a portmanteau of "electro-" and "execute," as in, one can only be electrocuted if one dies from it. As Franklin continued to live, he wasn't electrocuted. 4 Francis Bacon’s Frozen Chicken Mmmm... bacon and chicken. In 1626, Bacon was determined to prove that you could freeze and preserve a chicken by stuffing it full of snow. Okay, fine, a hypothesis. Which he went and tested. This is science. Every scientist makes hypotheses that reach dead ends. So, in this case, it's a literal dead end, which is why this counts as a failure, and not merely a falsified hypothesis. 3 Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talking Doll In 1890, the world wasn’t ready for Chatty Cathy. It may be that the word "electrocute" from above was the only thing this guy ever actually invented, rather than stole from his employees. Point being, he probably didn't actually invent the talking doll, either. But he certainly marketed them, which led to people finding dolls creepy forevermore. 2 Mark Twain’s Ill-Fated Start-ups Twain was one of the highest paid authors in 19th-century America, but it somehow wasn’t enough for him. Some people are good at lots of things. Others, not so much. Thing is, you never know which you are until you try, and possibly fail. 1 Albert Einstein’s Cosmological Constant When Einstein was forming his theory of general relativity, it was believed the universe was static, so when his equations kept predicting some wacky expanding universe, he added a term he called the cosmological constant to make them work. I'm not sure this was such a failure. He seemed to think it was, but it's just an extra term in the equation, easy enough to take out. We did it in engineering school all the time; we called it Ff (read "F sub F"), for Fudge Factor. Let's also remember that this was back when people thought our galaxy was the extent of the universe. I see it more of a lesson about examining your assumptions, even the unspoken ones. Which we should all be doing, scientist or not. |
| Somehow, I thought I'd covered this Mental Floss piece before, but it didn't come up in the search which probably took up more of my time than writing this entry will. 5 Ways the English Language Breaks Its Own Rules The many ways English flouts its own rules can be confusing even to those who speak it as a first language. As witnessed by, well, everyone, not everybody talks good. English, the language of Shakespeare and the internet, is often touted for its flexibility and adaptability. But with great flexibility comes great inconsistency. Perhaps the inconsistency of the language is what makes so many English-speaking people comfortable with contradictions in other areas. 1. Tenses don’t respect times. “So this guy walks into a bar …” We know a story is coming, and it’s clearly a story about something from the past—and yet, the word walks is in the present tense. Jokes are traditionally rendered in present tense. I can't articulate why, but it just works better. Unfortunately, people have started using it for entire novels, and I find it fatiguing in that context. In the sentence If it rained tomorrow, I would stay home, the past tense rained is used to refer to a future event. I'm no grammartalker, but I thought that's a conditional tense, and it just happens to be the same spelling as the past tense. 2. Definites can be indefinite. The word this is a definite determiner: It picks out referents that are specific and identifiable. If someone says “This is the right one,” they do so because they expect the listener to know which one they mean. But in the story that starts with this guy walks into a bar, this guy doesn’t necessarily refer to any person the speaker expects you to be able to identify. Someone really likes "walks into a bar" jokes. That's okay. So do I: Two guys walk into a bar. The third one ducks. 3. Dummy pronouns serve as subjects. ...But in weather sentences like “it’s snowing” or “it’s sunny,” it doesn’t replace any noun phrase. What is the “it” that’s snowing? The sky? The clouds? Linguists call this it a “dummy pronoun,”... It is true that I have wondered in the past about the antecedent for the pronoun in "it's snowing," but never enough to look up the answer. Now I know, and I feel like a dummy. 4. Objects can be “raised.” On the surface, the sentences She persuaded them to try it and She intended them to try it seem pretty similar, but they differ in syntactic structure. This one gets a little esoteric. It's one of those things that I somehow knew intuitively, but couldn't put a name to the grammar used. Well, I guess now I can. 5. Number agreement doesn’t always agree. I have to admit, this is one I make mistakes with on occasion. Rather than fumble around with grammar rules, though, I generally opt to rewrite the sentence to avoid the awkwardness in the first place. Alternatively, I just don't notice when it's wrong. Which, really, can be said for all of these rule-breakers. |
| Today, being a Sunday, is Time Travel Day. Back near Halloween of 2021, I wrote an entry about squash and its botanical relatives: "Squash Court" The more I learn about squash and its relatives, the less I know. That's a bit of a cliché, but it describes my confusion fairly accurately. It's not like the cabbage cultivars, also mentioned in that entry, which are varied but somewhat limited. In contrast, there's a dizzying variety of gourdlike berries, and even calling them "berries," while apparently correct by botanical definiton, only adds to the confusion. Some are edible. Some are not. Many of the hardier ones are used as decoration, including the always-popular pumpkin. Funny thing about pumpkins. They're all over the place in the fall, which is the season when I wrote that entry. Then they disappear for like 9 months, only to reappear again the following September, along with their associated spices and, largely unrelated but important, Oktoberfest beer. It's not like we have to eat seasonally. One of the few things keeping us from sliding into full-blown dystopia is being able to eat pretty much everything year-round, including stuff from halfway around the world. Some people object to this availability. I do not. And yet, here in the middle of blasted winter, I'd completely forgotten about the existence of pumpkins until my random number generator pointed me to that entry. Sure, it's understandable, as they're a major symbol of fall, at least in my part of the world. But, for instance, zucchini (related to squash) is most definitely a summer vegetable—using the culinary definition now—but they're available year-round. Which makes them harder for me to avoid. Yes, I've gotten over my dislike of zucchini, as noted in the linked entry, but that doesn't mean I go seeking them out. The availability of the actual prompt for that entry, the delicata squash, I still don't know, and I'm not sure I've ever seen it in grocery stores or restaurant menus. One thing I neglected to do back then was look into the etymology of "squash." As a kid, I always figured it was related, somehow, to the verb. Like you're supposed to squash the stuff like you mash potatoes. This annoyed my mother, but that was just a bonus for me; it was easier to pick up bits of squashed squash and eat it with the almost-edible other stuff on my plate. So I never gave it much thought. Until now. Turns out the word squash, used for the food, is completely unrelated to the other definitions of squash (the verb or the ball game) and is, at least according to one source, from the Narragansett word asquutasquash. English people being English, that became squash. Presumably, other Native peoples had different names for it, but I can't be arsed to look up all of them. So there it is: a long-standing mystery to me, finally resolved. Now if I could just figure out all the phylogenic tangle for all their many and various relatives, I might feel a sense of accomplishment. |
| At the end of last year (almost two whole weeks ago), I linked an article that tried to refute arguments against Mars colonization. Today's article, from Inverse, takes a somewhat different trajectory. To Live on Mars, Human Architecture Has to Combine Science and Sci-Fi Human habitats on other planets could be as striking as it could be weird. And already I'm giving it the side-eye because of the headline. "Combine science and sci-fi?" Look, I'll give "sci-fi" a pass (I have to because it's an official genre name here, though I never liked that particular abbreviation), but that phrase is meaningless. A thing that exists is either science or it's fiction, literary genres notwithstanding. I take it to mean that Mars habitats will require technology that doesn't exist yet, except in the realm of speculation (or speculative fiction). But by the time we're colonizing Mars—if we do—it had better be science, not fiction, in the habitat design. As for the sub-head, I think we have over 100 years of awesome SF novel cover art to look at for "striking" and "weird." On Earth, the buildings and dwellings humans spend the majority of their lives in serve as reflections of our society’s culture, beliefs, and values. So if the shelters we make for ourselves truly mirror and influence our everyday lives, how might that sentiment be translated to living in space? I'm not a big fan of this first paragraph, either. Sure, architecture is partly art, but it's also partly pragmatic. We didn't start building stuff out of wood because we thought the result was pretty, or because we hated trees; it happened because the trees were available and useful. A slanted roof didn't get invented to make a statement; it exists to keep the rain out and the snow from piling up too high. Once you get these and other functional basics covered, then you can start thinking about aesthetics. Sure, maybe I have an inherent bias for function over form, but does anyone seriously think the design of first Mars habitat is going to be driven by looks rather than function and durability? One of the most accurate parts of the 2015 movie The Martian is that when Matt Damon ends up stranded on Mars, everything about the planet is trying to kill him and his habitat holding up is his only hope of survival. Okay, I will admit here that I haven't seen that movie (yet). I did, however, read the book, where the main character wasn't Matt Damon (yet). Apart from being jealous that the author managed to get his first novel published (bastard), the survival thing wasn't a "part," but the entire fucking plot. By which I mean, like, in your usual novel, you have a protagonist and an antagonist, right? Unless you're going for snooty literary-genre crap, in which case you can throw out plot, characterization, and making even the slightest bit of sense, usually you have what boils down to good guy / bad guy, and the plot is the tension between the two. In this book, the antagonist is the damn planet, and the hero survives by using his brain. Which is not to say it's a bad book. It's a good book. All I'm saying is that calling this central conflict "one of the most accurate parts" of the story is like calling chocolate one of the main ingredients in a Three Musketeers bar (okay, that's funny because Three Musketeers are produced by Mars Inc., get it?) (Yes, I know it's not real chocolate; shut up, that's not my point.) Yet some sci-fi classics like Star Wars also offer alternative, less bleak visions of humanity’s future off-Earth. And with that, the article completely lost me. Star Wars isn't science fiction. It's fantasy with science fiction props. I've banged on at length about why this is, but for now I'll just stick to the article: it doesn't present humanity's future off-Earth, but rather famously takes place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." Please note that this isn't a value judgement, just a categorization one. Perhaps the author meant Star Trek, which is science fiction, set in the future largely off-Earth, and generally not bleak. But anyone who confuses the two is either a) trolling, which I can appreciate to some extent or b) a complete idiot. As I detect no other signs of trolling in the vicinity, Captain, I'm going to go with b, which means anything else the article has to say can be safely dismissed. Well, I didn't dismiss it entirely. I read the whole thing, and there's some good stuff there. I just don't feel the need to quote from it further. I'll just note one final thing, since we're talking about science fiction. As far as I'm aware, there are no fictional depictions of a Mars colony that do not end in revolution and independence. The idea of a Mars colony remaining indefinitely subject to Earth control runs completely counter to history, psychology, technology, and all of known science. That's something else to keep in mind before we go running off building Mars habitats. |
| Sometimes, I just find something I think explains something pretty well. This is one of those times. From Quanta: Meet the Eukaryote, the First Cell to Get Organized All modern multicellular life — all life that any of us regularly see — is made of cells with a knack for compartmentalization. Recent discoveries are revealing how the first eukaryote got its start. While it's amusing to think of cell organization as a bunch of oppressed worker cells getting together and striking for more pay and better benefits, that's not quite what happened. Three billion years ago, life on Earth was simple. Ah, yes, the good old days. Single-celled organisms ruled, and there wasn’t much to them. They were what we now call prokaryotic cells, which include modern-day bacteria and archaea, essentially sacks of loose molecular parts. In fairness, I know a few people who are little more than sacks of loose molecular parts. Then, one day, that wilderness of simple cells cooked up something more complex: the ancestor of all plants, animals and fungi alive today, a cell type known to us as the eukaryote. Think of the eukaryotic cell as like those old Reese's commercials where "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" "You got peanut butter in my chocolate!" “Eukaryotes are this bananas chimera of bacteria and archaea,” said Leigh Anne Riedman (opens a new tab), a paleontologist who studies early life at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It took me a minute to grok that "bananas" in this case was used in its metaphorical sense of "wild and crazy." Though bananas are eukaryotic life, too. The eukaryotes invented organization, if we use the literal definition of “organize”: to be furnished with organs. It's not like that was directed by consciousness, but okay. For many decades, biologists considered eukaryotes to be one of three main domains of life on Earth. Life is composed of three distinct cell types: bacteria and archaea, which are both prokaryotic cells with some key differences — for example in their cell membranes and reproductive strategies — and then there are eukaryotes, which are a much different kind of cell. Experts believed that bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes each evolved independently from a more ancient ancestor. I know some people might be upset when science changes its mind. They want everything to be known, settled, certain. I kind of get that. But life doesn't work that way. Science correcting its own misconceptions is part of why it's awesome. Then there's a bit in there about some researchers finding some archaea that might be like the ones that first became eukaryotes, and the whole family is named from Norse sagas, which I find amusing. There's speculation out there that the origin of eukaryotic life is an extremely unlikely, once-in-a-planetary-lifetime process, and one that would have to take place for complex life to evolve on other planets. As we have not found even bacteria-equivalents on other planets yet, that's largely speculation. But we owe our existence to the microbial equivalent of a Reese's Cup. |
| Yes, it's a BBC article about a Japanese immigrant to California. And no, he didn't change it with his katana. An hour's drive north of San Francisco, rows of gnarled and twisted vines terrace up the slopes of gently rolling hills in Sonoma County, California – which, alongside its neighbour, Napa, has been one of the world's premier wine-growing regions for more than a century. Much to the annoyance of the French. But California might never have earned such viticultural acclaim if it weren't for the little-known story of a Japanese immigrant named Kanaye Nagasawa. So, you're telling me that immigrants can be a benefit? Born into a samurai family and smuggled out of Shogunate Japan, only to become a founding member of a utopian cult and eventually known as the "Wine King of California", Nagasawa led a life that was stranger than fiction. Okay, you had me at "utopian cult." Nagasawa's extraordinary story goes back to 1864, when 19 young samurai from the Satsuma peninsula of Kagoshima were smuggled out of fiercely isolationist Edo-era Japan on a secret mission to study science and technology in the West. While the BBC seems to have these archaic principles called "journalistic standards," I do not, and therefore I can write that this sounds like the coolest thing ever and why isn't it a movie already? The youngest of the group, 13-year-old Hikosuke Isonaga went to Scotland, changing his name to Kanaye Nagasawa to protect his family, since at the time it was illegal to travel outside Japan. There, he came into the orbit of a charismatic religious leader named Thomas Lake Harris, who was recruiting followers to his version of ecstatic transcendentalism called The Brotherhood of the New Life. Ah, yes, the utopian cult in question. Naming the estate Fountaingrove after a year-round spring on the property, Harris set out to grow grapes, putting Nagasawa in charge of the operation. The winery soon prospered, but the "Eden of the West", as the commune described itself, became ever more wild, making headlines in San Francisco for its bacchanalian parties that eventually led to Harris' ignominious departure. Hey, Hollywood: I know you're kind of busy right now what with the wildfires and all, but when shit stops being on fire, make this fucking movie. All this came to an end during one of the darkest chapters of California's history, when Fountaingrove was seized by the government as part of the state's discriminatory Alien Land Laws, which were instituted in 1913, expanded in the 1920s and forbade Asian nationals from owning land or businesses. Ah, there it is: the America I know. That plus the internment camps a couple decades later, which also feature in the article. And that's why Hollywood won't touch it: there's no happy ending. It would have to be a Japanese movie. They're not focused on happy endings; what's important is that the protagonists maintain their honor. |
| This Cracked article is from the other side of the Earth's orbit, and focuses on parks in the US where it's summer then, so "freezing you to death" isn't on the list. Like I said, "don't go outside." There’s an anecdote that floats around lots of National Park-adjacent towns: A tourist is preparing to take their family out on a day-long hike, so they line up their kids and hit ‘em with the essential repellants: first the sunscreen, then the bug spray, then the bear spray. A friend of mine keeps bear spray in his car as a self-defense thing. Now he's facing charges for actually using it. This story almost definitely never happened, but at its core is a universal truth. Locals will say that truth is: “Tourists are stupid and can’t be trusted with access to the wild.” Or, to be fair, access to anywhere. Over 300 people die on National Park land every year. Oh, no, over 300 people. That's like one plane crash. Or, to be fair, compare that to the number of people who die in their own bathroom in the US every year, which I can't find the damn numbers on, but it's way more than 300. I just mention that to underscore that my hatred of the outdoors isn't rooted in fear of death, which can happen anywhere, but because it's the goddamn outdoors. Still, you can't die by National Park if you don't go onto National Park land. I guess technically, you could; the chance is very low but not zero. 5 Lethal Selfies According to one study published in the Journal of Travel Medicine, the world saw 379 fatal selfies between 2008 and 2021. Those are rookie numbers! We have to pump those numbers up! Well, no, not really, but it is true that I find it very difficult to work up sympathy for selfie-related deaths. 4 Nuzzled to Death by Bison Another one it's hard to get teary about. Avoiding bison is surprisingly easy. Billions of people do it every day. But each year, one or two budding influencers are attacked by bison after venturing too close to get a sick shot for the grid. Especially if it's an influenza wannabe. That same season, a woman was gored by a charging bison, and although she and her companion appear to have been doing the right thing (hightailing it) at the time of the attack, she was hurt pretty badly (although, thankfully, survived). Sometimes, though, it's not idiocy, and in those cases, I do feel bad for them. 3 Boiled in Hot Springs Hot springs’ body count is more than double that of bison and bears combined. Yellowstone is a literal minefield of geothermal activity. Admittedly, I've never been to Yellowstone. But from what I understand, there's all kinds of signage warning you against going into the hot springs. Another group for whom I have extremely limited sympathy is the "you can't tell me what to do and I go where I want" crowd. 2 Too Darn Much Water If you don’t bring enough water on a long hike, you’re gonna have a bad time. But it’s too much water that can really sneak up on you. Yep, dihydrogen monoxide is a killer. Let’s start with the frozen kind: Avalanches on National Park land have killed 37 people. Movies, shows and cartoons from when I was a kid led me to vastly overestimate the number of times I'd encounter an avalanche. And quicksand, for that matter. When all that snow thaws out, it gets significantly deadlier. Between 2014 and 2019, there were 314 drowning deaths in the parks, second only to motor vehicle accidents at 354. Those tend to happen when someone falls off a boat in a lake or a river, and they’re often selfie-assisted. I don't mean to be rude, here, but there's a reason why life jackets exist. But the scariest water-related death, for my money, is flash flooding. The slot canyons of the Grand Canyon are enormous tributaries, geologically designed over millennia to collect rainwater from intense desert storms and deliver it to the Colorado River far below within minutes. I'll let "designed" slide. But yeah, flash flooding is scary as hell. 1 Just Freaking Explode Everything Let’s travel back to Yellowstone for a moment. The source of all that geothermal activity is our old friend, the Yellowstone Caldera. Huh, and here I thought it was because it contained a direct portal to Hell. That’s a supervolcano lurking just beneath the surface that has erupted every half-million years or so, and is currently running 40,000 years late. That's not how return periods work. Should the Great Pimple ever decide to pop — which it could at literally any moment — it’s estimated that 90,000 people would die instantly, and lava could splash from Calgary to Los Angeles. Just to underscore the point I made earlier: your chance of dying by National Park if you never set foot in a National Park is low, but never zero. Still, we're way more likely to get nuked to oblivion first. |
| A little less rant-worthy today—some history from Smithsonian. After Failing Math Twice, a Young Benjamin Franklin Turned to This Popular 17th-Century Textbook A 19th-century scholar claimed that “Cocker’s Arithmetick” had “probably made as much stir and noise in the English world as any [book]—next to the Bible” But why didn't he just look it up on the internet? Before Benjamin Franklin became a printer, newsman, author, inventor, philosopher, diplomat and founding father of the United States, he failed math twice. They forgot "epic troll." Also, I'd never heard this "failed math twice" thing before, and couldn't find other support for the claim apart from things linked within the Smithsonian article. Those lead to Franklin's words, and, I reiterate, the man was an epic troll and in no way a reliable narrator. This doesn't mean it's false; I just can't confirm or refute it. We like to hear about great people's failings, and there was a similar rumor about Einstein that turned out to be pants-on-fire false. Also that thing about Franklin's fellow Founding Father George Washington chopping down a cherry tree was false. So you'll have to deal with my skepticism.It doesn't change what the article is mainly about, which is the math textbook. Yet the story of the “book of arithmetic” that finally helped Franklin master the subject is little known today—another irony, because in his day, it was every bit as famous as he was. Probably even more famous, at least when he was a brat. Cocker’s Arithmetick was probably the most successful elementary math textbook published in English before the 19th century. It epitomized an age in which the expanding worlds of commerce and capitalism, education and Enlightenment, coalesced to make basic arithmetic the classroom staple it is today. Oh, I thought they'd given up on teaching math. It sure seems that way. Though perhaps unfamiliar to modern readers, in the 18th century, Cocker’s Arithmetick was as close to a household name as any math textbook is likely to ever be. Edited from the writings of London-based teacher Edward Cocker and published posthumously in 1678, the book included lessons on basic arithmetic with a commercial slant, posed as a set of rules to be memorized, as was typical of educational books of the day. So it was kind of like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, but more math-oriented? Cocker’s lessons covered addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, as well as calculation with pre-decimal British currency and a gentle introduction to 17th-century England’s bamboozling array of weights and measures. I often found it ironic (or whatever) that, upon revolting, the US adopted a decimal money system while keeping the "bamboozling array of weights and measures." I think I did an entry about that a while back. Meanwhile, the UK kept the non-decimal money system and adopted, at least officially, SI units. If I remember right, the UK didn't switch from pounds/shillings/pence until around 1970. Finally, the textbook taught arithmetic skills for business, such as dividing profits equitably between partners. No wonder the book fell out of favor. Nowadays, we like books about how to screw over the other partners. Whatever else a student might learn in Franklin’s grand scheme of general instruction, which included everything from oratory and ancient customs to drawing and geography, he maintained that arithmetic was “absolutely necessary.” Nah, best to keep the populace ignorant of math so they don't notice when you short their paychecks or mess with their timeclocks. Toward the end of his life, in a well-known letter of 1784, Franklin reflected in satirical fashion on the importance of waking early in order to save money that would otherwise be spent burning candles at night. I'm just including this bit to emphasize that the "early to bed, early to rise" thing was satire. Lots more history at the link, of course. Mostly, I just found it interesting that I'd never heard of the book before. Probably because no one can make money advertising it. |
| I haven't had a good rant in a while. Business Insider has provided the inspiration for an attempt at one. These idiotic, contrived portmanteaux are getting way out of hand. When 25-year-old Josh Nichols had a short work trip to Hamburg, Germany, he and a coworker decided to add a couple extra days to stop by Belgium and France, two places he'd never been. Well, that bit, at least, I can relate to. The combination of business and leisure travel has become so popular that it has a name: bleisure travel... Stop. ... also referred to as blended travel. I get the urge to replace a phrase with a single word, but something about the one they chose is like sandpaper on my brain. A survey published by the American Hotel and Lodging Association in 2023 found nearly half of business travelers said they'd extended a work trip in the previous year, and 84% said they were interested in bleisure. Stop. Hilton's 2025 Travel Trends Report said nearly 30% of global travelers now take trips with "frolleagues" — colleagues who are also friends. By all that's good and pure in the world, please fucking stop. Bleisure can take several forms... Holy shit, stop. ...but it often occurs when an employee is already on a business trip. Business trips weren't really part of my employment, so I don't have any personal experience with it. Just to be clear, I've got nothing against the concept. Just not that word. Many bleisure travelers extend their trips... I'm pleading. I'm begging. Stop! "Anything that lets me try something new when I would otherwise just kind of sit in my hotel and wait for the next day of meetings to come is something I'd consider bleisure," Nichols said. Give me something I can punch. Now. AllFly... has adapted the way it books trips in response to the growing demand for bleisure. How about responding to the growing demand for not using that gods-be-damned word? The article devolves into an ad for AllFly, then: Totten said the demand for bleisure has consistently grown... Remember how my "resolution" was to drink every day in January? It's tougher than I thought it would be, but I've managed so far. Articles like this one are great motivators for me to stick to my decision. And maybe even double or triple down on it. Yes, I'm well aware that "tripling down" isn't a thing, but if they get to make up words, I get to make up my own blackjack metaphors. Nichols, who travels frequently for work, said bleisure is a great way to get the most out of his business travel... Hulk SMASH. He still uses all of his vacation days and views bleisure as a "supplement." How about supplementing my fist? Look. I don't expect much from BI. I could have passed this article right on by, ignoring it like most of their crappy SEO-tactics stealth advertisements (I wanted to add "AI-generated," but I have no proof of that, and I don't think LLMs could piss me off as badly as this article did). I didn't, and that's on me. But if you want to have some fun, pretend for a moment, if you're from the US, that you're not from the US, but some other Anglophone country. UK, e.g. As we all know, some words are spelled differently on either side of the Atlantic, like tire and tyre. Other words, because English is just such a fun language, are spelled the same but pronounced differently. We pronounce leisure as something like "lees-yure." That's not wrong; it's just the American pronunciation. Brits pronounce it more like "leh-zure." For them, it rhymes with "pleasure," which I say is rather appropriate. But if you're going to make a portmanteau like the one in the article/ad, and pronounce it in the British style, well, the initial "b" could be easily confused with "p," making it sound entirely like "pleasure." So not only is it very possibly the worst portmanteau in the history of portmanteaux (hell, even "pleasness" would have been slightly less annoying), but it's potentially a confusing one. Just. Stop. |
| As has become my custom on Sundays here, I rolled the dice and came up with a past blog entry to give it another look. This one isn't that old, from April of 2023: "Stuck in Committee" At the time, I was on a random road trip. We all know I like to play with randomness, but I'm not sure if I've explained how I apply that to a road trip. Well, simply put, there's a website (there might be an app for it, but I haven't bothered) that will generate a random point on a map within a user-defined radius from another point. The site returns lat/long coordinates, which get pasted into Maps. Then you figure out where the closest road is to that point and drive to it. If you're feeling adventurous, you can try hiking to the exact point, but around here, that's a good way to get shot. There are, of course, other ways to do this. And you might have to account for a point ending up in an ocean or lake (which happened to me on the last leg of that particular trip). I expect some people find the idea silly; just pick a destination, already! Well, not me; I like the randomness. Most of the time. From that earlier entry: The town I was in was, if you care to look at it on a map, Wytheville, VA. I'd never spent any time in it before, but it's exactly what I expected from a small town in the mountains: two stoplights, 500 people, 600 churches, and a rustic nonfunctional clock on the courthouse. Some of that might have been hyperbole. And yet, the beers were named traditionally women's names. Like Rosie, Julia, Edith, etc. Which is fine; it's good to have a theme. But one thing disappointed me: there was no beer named Kate. You see, I like to order tasting flights, which usually consist of 4-6 sampler-sized beers. The missed opportunity was that I could have had my Kate, and Edith too. I will just pause while you absorb the greatness of that joke. There's also the one about how you can't have your kayak and heat it, too. Here, I found a couple of breweries in Chester, which is a city south of Richmond but north of Petersburg. No, it confuses me, too; as far as I'm concerned, all those cities and everything else in the vicinity is Richmond. There really ought to be a rule: unless there's a significant river (the James doesn't count) or a lot of trees and/or farmland in between, just fucking merge the cities. I still feel strongly about that. It may be nice for the locals, for whatever reasons, but it's intensely confusing to outsiders (which may be the point). I saw a wake of buzzards. The entry goes into the difference between a wake and a committee, which depends on whether they're dining or not. And apparently, though I didn't note it then, if they're flying in formation, the collective noun is kettle. Don't ask me; someone just made up what a group of something should be called, and people ran with it. I don't really know why. That's how we get a murder of crows or a clowder of cats. The best collective nouns make a kind of linguistic sense, though. Or at least maybe they rhyme or alliterate. Plus, it's boring to call everything a flock, pack, or herd. Doesn't matter. I'm only pointing this out so the entry title makes sense. And I don't know when I'll do another random road trip. Almost certainly not before this blog runs out of room. |
| The article I'm featuring today is old in internet terms: nearly six years. It only popped up on my radar recently, and I have to admit, when I saw the headline, my knee-jerk reaction was close to rage. Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden Toxic masculinity—and the persistent idea that feelings are a "female thing"—has left a generation of straight men stranded on emotionally-stunted island, unable to forge intimate relationships with other men. It's women who are paying the price. I guess "rage" is one of the emotions we're allowed to feel. In this case, it was mainly for two reasons: the overgeneralized headline and subhead; and how a "man" problem is turned around to be a "woman" problem. Then I remembered that the target audience for Harper's Bazaar is chicks, and my rage subsided somewhat. The goal, I figured, wasn't to fix men, but to commiserate with women. Which brought my rage back to a simmer. But okay. Okay. Being a man and all, I choked back all emotion, as we must always do or face social ridicule, and tried to give the article a fair chance. Kylie-Anne Kelly can’t remember the exact moment she became her boyfriend’s one and only, his what would I do without you, but she does remember neglecting her own needs to the point of hospitalization. Starting an article with an anecdote is a time-tested way of grabbing a reader's attention. That's fine. What I have an issue with is that, coming as it does immediately after that headline, it makes it sound like Kylie-Anne's problem (and it is, obviously, her problem, not that of her nameless and ultimately irrelevant boyfriend) is just an ordinary relationship scenario, ho-hum, this is what we're all facing, isn't it, girls? Can't you relate? Kelly’s boyfriend refused to talk to other men or a therapist about his feelings, so he’d often get into “funks,” picking pointless fights when something was bothering him. I don't mean to sidestep the issue or pretend that this sort of thing isn't a problem. It absolutely is, and it's one reason I don't conform to that version of masculinity. But, and I'll just point this out and leave it here, this guy had a girlfriend and I don't. So, clearly, it works, at least at first. After three years together, when exhaustion and anxiety landed her in the hospital and her boyfriend claimed he was “too busy” to visit, they broke up. I've been considering getting a t-shirt with a giant waving red flag on it to wear in public. That way I can skip the small talk and have people avoid me before starting a conversation that reveals whatever internal red flags I project. Saves time and energy that way. Kelly’s story, though extreme, is a common example of modern American relationships. Oh, now they admit it's extreme. Women continue to bear the burden of men’s emotional lives, and why wouldn’t they? For generations, men have been taught to reject traits like gentleness and sensitivity, leaving them without the tools to deal with internalized anger and frustration. Hey, look at that sneaky use of the passive voice! I suppose the implication is that men are taught exclusively and only by other men: fathers, uncles, brothers, male peers. Meanwhile, the female savior trope continues to be romanticized on the silver screen (thanks Disney!), making it seem totally normal—even ideal—to find the man within the beast. Yeah, you know, if it didn't resonate with viewers, they wouldn't keep depicting it. The Mouse has many faults, but this looks to me like another dodging of responsibility. They also, classically, depicted male heroes saving helpless damsels in distress, but that trope, at least, seems to be fading, or at least morphing, because people demand that women save themselves, instead. Incidentally, though, I do sometimes wonder about a gender-swapped Beauty and the Beast. I'm nowhere near good enough to write something like that, and besides, if I can think of it, it's already been done. The article continues to describe the problem, and, I'll grant, it's not unjustified. After a while, it finally names an actual man: So Shepherd turned to the internet, downloaded a men’s group manual, and invited a few guy friends who he knew would be receptive. He capped the membership at eight and set up a structure with very clear boundaries; the most important being what’s talked about in men’s group stays in men’s group. I'm not saying it's a bad idea by itself. But are we sure that downloading instructions from some site on the internet is really the way to go? At that point, you might as well use the movie Fight Club as an instructional guide. Not to rag on that film; it's still one of my favorites. But it's fiction. Lots more at the link. My gender-role-approved rage has settled down to a dull feeling of numbness, which is also gender-role-approved. Now to order that giant red flag T-shirt. |
| Today, instead of picking an article at random, I decided to go with this one from Lifehacker, which plans for the year that's (mostly) still ahead of us. Considering the source, though, you might want to double-check any of these that you might care about. The few that I did check out didn't really track, so I don't trust the rest of it without verification. Mark These 2025 Celestial Events on Your Calendar Here's when to look up for full moons, meteor showers, and planetary parades. No, I'm not going to repeat all of them. That's what the link is for. Jan. 3–4: Quadrantid meteor shower. The Quadrantids are active from Dec. 28 to Jan. 12 but are expected to peak around 4 a.m. EST on Jan. 4. Yeah, this is the main reason I jumped this one out of the queue. I've never had much luck with meteor showers—it's always cloudy when the good ones happen, and every time I travel to a darker place to see one, it ends up being a dud—but your experience may vary. Jan. 13: Wolf Moon. The first full moon of 2025 has extra appeal, as it will pass close to (almost in front of) Mars. If I had one wish, like from a genie or whatever, I could, of course, wish for world peace. Or an end to homelessness. Or, to be selfish, a billion dollars. But no, if I had one wish, it would be to end this bogus association of moon names with Gregorian calendar months. That's the crusade I'd choose (mainly because I can see how all those other wishes could be twisted to horrific effect, like ending homelessness by disappearing all the homeless). The Wolf Moon is not defined as the full moon in January, no matter how many websites and "authoritative" sources say it is. It is the first full moon after the northern hemisphere winter solstice. Yes, this year, those happen to be the same thing. But they are not always. This, as usual, maddened me so much that I almost missed the cool part about Mars. And I also almost missed this: The red planet will appear to disappear behind the moon at 9:16 p.m. EST and reappear at 10:31 p.m. EST. I'll give "appear to disappear" a pass, but the last sentence was "close to (almost in front of) Mars" and this one implies it would occult Mars entirely. This. This is why people don't trust Lifehacker. So, to break this down a bit: A Moon/Mars conjunction occurs just about every lunar month. Because most solar system bodies orbit at a slight tilt to each other, eclipses don't happen at every conjunction. This is true for the Sun/Moon conjunction, which is why we don't get a solar eclipse every month, but also for when the Moon appears closest to any given planet. Plus, sometimes, it happens when Mars is in the daytime sky and we can't see it. Additionally, as with solar eclipses, the timing of the event varies with location, because of parallax. So if you're going to say "9:16 pm EST to 10:31 pm EST," you also have to note the location on Earth where that's true, and it's not "the entirety of places that observe Eastern Time." Now, a quick glance tells me that other sources give different timings for the eclipse (I guess it should be considered a Martian eclipse), but the January 13 date appears to be correct for both Full Moon and Martian Eclipse. Remember when I said eclipses don't happen at every conjunction? Well, one happening at a Full Moon is remarkable, both for its rarity and spectacle. Of course, it's not happening precisely at the Full Moon (5:27pm EST), but close enough for spectacle. One wonders if Mars will even be visible against the glare of a Full Moon. I guess we'll find out. Well, other people will find out; something this rare and mars-velous (I couldn't resist) practically guarantees that, wherever I am, the sky will be covered in a thick blanket of clouds. Nevertheless, I've noted it on my calendar. I've been known to beat the odds before, including during two solar eclipses, and I would very much like to see this. Well, that took up way more space (pun also intended) than I expected. I'll just throw in some highlights from the rest of the calendar year 2025 skywatch forecast: February's main event is a planetary parade, when the planets appear to be in one line in Earth's sky. The parade actually begins on Jan. 10 when the Moon joins up with Jupiter and continues through February. See, again, misleading. The planets will appear to line up, sure, but halfway through that period, the Moon will be on the other side of the sky. There were a few consecutive nights maybe 30 or so years ago when all the visible planets lined up in one quadrant of the sky. Or at least most of them; it's been 30 years and I barely remember the details. What I do remember is going up to the Blue Ridge Parkway on one of those nights, with some friends and a telescope. It wasn't cloudy. But it was colder than my ex-wife's lawyer's heart. As this is happening in January and February, well, it'll be cold again here. Saturn will drop off mid-month, but tiny Mercury will be barely visible in the parade on Feb. 28. And maybe, just maybe, I'll finally be able to see Mercury and know that it's Mercury. I've bitched about that before. I might have seen it at some point in the past, but it's only ever visible just after sunset or just before sunrise, and at those times, the twilight washes out a lot of contextual stars. So I don't know if I've ever actually seen Mercury in the sky. As a side note, last night, I got treated to a post-sunset very bright crescent Moon not far from a very bight Venus. It was cool. But I expect tonight, the Moon will appear even closer to Venus and it'll look even more awesome. Provided the clouds don't roll in. March 14: Total lunar eclipse... Though the total lunar eclipse will be visible around the world, the full 65-minute totality will only happen in the Americas and Antarctica. Nice for our continent. Unless it's cloudy. I fully expect it to be clear everywhere but Virginia that night, unless I go to, say, Wyoming to see it, in which case it'll be clear everywhere but Wyoming. Saturn will be at opposition on the night of Sept. 21. Just like Mars in January, this event will show Saturn at its brightest, visible to the naked eye. To clarify, if Saturn and Earth are in the right alignment such that Saturn appears at night, that planet is always visible to the naked eye. Doubt we'll be able to see the rings without aid, but even binoculars might be enough to make out that distinctive feature of the planet... provided, of course, that the rings aren't edge-on, which I don't know. And if it's not cloudy. The rest is mostly meteor showers, which, as I said, are cool, but I've never had much luck viewing them. Maybe this year will be different, but I say that every year. And there's a few "supermoons," too, toward the end of the year. Again, though, that just describes a Full Moon near perigee, which happens every year and I think it doesn't deserve all the hype attached to it. Still, if it gets people to look up, I'll allow it. Just stop with the association of Full Moon names with Gregorian calendar months. |
| From aeon, an article aged over seven years: Oh, a new word, eh? Cool, cool. This is an essay first published in 2017, so surely that word's been spread to the farthest reaches of the travel community by now, right? One thing I’ve noticed over the years of bringing my students to Ireland – my homeland – is that they pay rapt attention to the little things. This heightened and delighted attention to the ordinary, which manifests in someone new to a place, does not seem to have a name. So I have given it one: allokataplixis (from the Greek allo meaning ‘other’, and katapliktiko meaning ‘wonder’). I'm not really mocking. I've invented dozens of words that never caught on (and one that did in ways I could never have anticipated). Okay, but I'm also mocking, a little, because there's no fucking way a word like allokataplixis would ever go viral, except maybe if it were the name of a new penis-enlarging drug. Even then, we'd shorten it to allo, which could get confusing. For the past five years, I have travelled around Ireland each summer with a bunch of allokataplixic American kids. And there it is: the adjective form. Marvellous to them also is the slight smell of salt in the air when you arrive in Dublin, the raucousness of seagulls crying overhead... [loads of poetic imagery] ...the sun setting on the Atlantic viewed from the beaches of the west, the melancholy slopes in County Kerry that were abandoned during the famine. Well, yeah. What's ordinary to locals is often fresh and exciting to visitors. It's not just Dublin (never been, but want to go), but almost any place you're not used to. Like how millions of New Yorkers pass by the Empire State Building without admiring its art-deco grandeur. This is why some of us travel: to find the beauty in the mundane, to see it with new eyes and, maybe, pass along some of that newness to those jaded by familiarity with it. Yet over the years that I’ve been bringing students to Ireland I’ve observed that their thirst for fresh experience is contagious. It oftentimes brings out the best in people. A tourist generally has an eye for the things that, through repetitive familiarity, have become almost invisible to the resident. It can also bring out the worst in people. One does not need, however, to be an outsider or a tourist to be allokataplixic. Is it not the task of most writers to awaken us from the dull, the flat and the average sentiments that can dominate our lives? Many of the Irish writers that my students read before travelling have a knack for noticing the marvellous in the everyday, and of making the quotidian seem wholly other and amazing. Just in case you were wondering if this had anything to do with writing. I don't take issue with the general ideas in the article (there's even a foray into the fractal, which is always like candy to me). It's just... that word. You'd think we could come up with something better, something with fewer syllables, something less pretentious than an obscure phrase from Ancient Greek. You'd think so, but I'm stumped. |
| Well, now that that's over, let's get back to it. What better way is there to start a new calendar year than by pointing out a mistake made in the previous calendar year? A bit from Ars Technica: Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index Chemosphere cut from Web of Science, which calculates impact factors. Some people might not have noticed the black plastic crisis. I didn't see anything about it until the retraction, myself, so I was less prone to primacy bias. This article goes beyond one single retraction, but I'll point this out anyway: usually, people hear about the study, usually through some breathlessly urgent reporting by someone trying to be first out of the gate, and then the retraction happens... and radio silence ensues, leaving people believing the first report. Worse, some people (exhibiting the aforementioned primacy bias) do hear about the retraction, but the falsified original stays in their brain. Rarer is the case where an entire journal faces consequences for publishing shoddy studies. The publisher of a high-profile, now-corrected study on black plastics has been removed from a critical index of academic journals after failing to meet quality criteria, according to a report by Retraction Watch. If you've been lucky enough to avoid the whole made-up controversy, this article does a fair job explaining the events timeline. It's there if you want to read it. However, it gets worse. It appears that the people responsible for the original, retracted study on black plastic kitchenware did make a math error. This is bad enough, as it contributes to primacy bias, though anyone can make math errors or other mistakes (which is one reason you have peer review in science). But the worst part is, it looks like the authors of the original study had an Agenda: The statement says that, regardless of the math error, the study still found unnecessary flame retardants in some products and that the compounds can "significantly contaminate" those products. That is not science. That is opinion contaminating science. It's like if the Committee for Bug-Free Food found that 1% of the contents of canned tomatoes was bugs (there is, as I understand it, a maximum allowable bug level in food, as attempting to remove all insect parts reaches a point of diminishing returns, but I can't be arsed to research what it is), but then said they misplaced a decimal and it's actually 0.01%—and then still insisted that there's still bugs in the food and so canned food should be avoided at all costs. Usually, the next thing you find out is that the Committee for Bug-Free Food is in the employ of someone with a vested interest in selling their own line of (more expensive) bug-free food. Now, I'm not weighing in on whether you "should" use these plastic utensils or not. It's not an issue of grand global importance, the way the Wakefield disaster was, and still is. I just think any such decision should at least take the science into account. The actual science, not the one with math errors and strongly-held opinions. |
| Well, here we are at the end of another trip around the sun (or close enough), at a purely arbitrary date on a purely arbitrary calendar. I had what I consider to be the beginning of the new cycle ten days ago, on the solstice. If anything should mark a transition on what's really a continuum, let it be something real and measurable. But, most of the world uses the Gregorian calendar for recordkeeping and consistency (it is, I'll grant, remarkably good at calculating solar returns), and it's one of the few things most of us share. So we want to impose meaning on December 31 / January 1, fine. Impose it. At least it's usually celebrated with two of my favorite activities: Drinking, and staying up late. Now, I don't usually make resolutions. I think they're artificial, and set the resolutor (or whatever) up for failure. Besides, it's a bandwagon thing, and I hate bandwagon things. Another bandwagon thing is the concept of Dry January: the idea of abstaining from ethanol during that calendar month, perhaps in penance for December's overindulgence. This concept legitimately offends me, and I don't get offended easily. In past years, I've simply ignored it and gone on doing what I usually do. Thing is, contrary to popular belief (that I promote), I don't actually drink every day. Usually once or twice a week. More, perhaps, when I'm on a trip, but only if I'm not subsequently driving. But this New Year's, I've decided to throw personal tradition into the trash and actually make a (gasp) resolution: Be it hereby resolved that, in protest of the abominable concept of Dry January, Waltz is determined to drink an alcoholic beverage every day during the calendar month of January. This could be a cocktail, a shot of tequila, a dram of scotch, a tot of rum, a bottle of beer, a glass of wine, or the equivalent. More than that is acceptable. Less is not. I do reserve the right to deliberately fail at the resolution in the case of illness or severe injury that requires painkillers, but apart from that, no excuses. Don't get me wrong: anyone who genuinely wants to stop drinking, temporarily or permanently, as a resolution or otherwise, I wish them well. This is for me. I just have major issues with following a crowd or participating in what's probably little more than abolitionist propaganda. We'll see how it goes. Knowing me, I'll fail at it like most of us fail at resolutions. |
| For my last link of 2025 (I expect to do a personal update tomorrow, New Year's Eve), we have a 2.5 year old article from a source I don't think I've linked before, Planetocracy. I don't know anything about the site besides this one article. Judging by the spelling in the headline, this author isn't from the US. Which is fine; it's good to have non-US perspectives on space. When people who are either uninterested in space colonisation, or actively opposed to it, comment on the prospects of travelling to Mars they often make the same or very similar arguments, unaware that these arguments were either ill-formed to begin with or have already been convincingly refuted. On the flip side, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith wrote some compelling arguments against it in a book that, if I recall correctly, came out after this article. I don't usually mention books directly here, but I'll make an exception: A City on Mars (Amazon link)“Humans can’t live on Mars because it lacks a magnetic field” Remember, that's an argument the author claims is refuted. But on the basis of this article alone, I'm not convinced. The lack of such a field on Mars is by no means a showstopper for colonisation, however. The main protection we have from cosmic rays on the surface of Earth is not our magnetic field, it is our atmosphere. Okay, and Mars has a much thinner atmosphere. On the plus side, it's further away from the source of most radiation, the Sun. But it seems to me that building habs underground (using robot diggers to start with) would mitigate a lot of the radiation hazard. Replenishing Mars’ atmosphere, if necessary, would thus be fairly trivial. Even with the math leading up to it, I find that statement questionable. “Humans can’t live on Mars because terraforming is impossible/impractical/takes too long” I'd hesitate to agree with "impossible," because engineers can be pretty smart, and technology continues to advance. I don't think we could do it right now, though. Hell, we can't even terraform Terra. “Humans can’t live on Mars because they have to live underground and would go crazy” I'd think a lot of that depends on available space and other factors. “Humans can’t live on Mars because perchlorate in the soil will poison them” That, however, has an engineering solution, so I don't think it'd be a dealbreaker. There's much more at the link. Mind you, I'm not advocating for the author's position, or for its opposite; I don't have the information needed to support or refute these arguments by myself. If we really wanted to colonize—as opposed to visiting or doing short-term stints on— Mars, most of these are problems with engineering solutions. The question, then, is going to be: is it worth it? And I don't just mean monetary return, but also scientific and engineering advances. Unless we find life (by which I mean microbial life or its equivalent) there, only two reasons to do it that stand out to me: 1) as a stepping-stone to asteroid mining; and 2) as a hedge for the human race against Earth catastrophe. Right now, I don't think we're anywhere close to making either of those things practical. Even if we did find life there, I don't think it would require a permanent colony to study. There is, however, one compelling reason to do what we need to do to make it happen, which is: because it's there. The one argument against it that I see most often is some variant of "why spend money on space when we need it to fix things down here," which I find disingenuous. It's not like we're "throwing money into space." It's like the proponents of that argument think we just bundle a bunch of bills into the payload of a rocket and shoot it into the Sun (which, by the way, would take a lot more money than sending it to Mars would). All that money goes back into the economy, creating jobs and helping to develop new technologies. Besides, we could fix things down here, even with an active space program. But we don't. |
| Today's dip into the murky well of the past takes us back over five years, before the beginning of my current daily blogging streak (but not much before), to an entry for 30DBC: "None More Black" The prompt was: What is your favorite color? Do you have a favorite color pairing? What’s something in your life that you picture when you think of your favorite color? Do you choose to wear clothing that is your favorite color? Has your favorite color changed over your life? Now, we all know I have a lousy memory, but I'm pretty sure I remember that when this prompt appeared, lo these many years ago, I read the first question and immediately thought of the "Questions Three" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Quoting certain movies and/or books has that effect on me. One cannot mention the number 42 without evoking my memories of Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide, for example. I see a Twinkie, and the Twinkie scene from Ghostbusters plays in my head. Sometimes, I can suppress the urge to blurt it out, especially when I'm writing and can deliberately avoid the subject. With this one, however, I managed to suppress the Python reference only to get caught up in a Spinal Tap reference. Luckily, the gif I found for "none more black" is still active after all this time. I'll post it again for anyone unwilling to go see the earlier entry: There followed a short treatise on the beauty of black, and really, not much has changed for me in that regard since then. And the film This Is Spinal Tap (released 40 years ago) continues to be a cultural touchstone. |
| SciAm takes on a spelling challenge. Or, it did, nine years ago. Well, actually, it was an opinion piece even then. The Difference between ExtrAversion and ExtrOversion What's the correct spelling: ExtrAversion or ExtrOversion? Let's find out what they say, then, if we can crawl out of our introvert holes long enough to give them a look. Jung may be rolling in his grave. Lots of people are. I propose wrapping them in copper wire, installing some magnets, and turning them into power generators. Folklore has it that when Carl Jung was once asked which was the correct spelling—ExtrAvert or ExtrOvert—Jung's secretary wrote back something like, "Dr. Jung says it's ExtrAverted, because ExtrOverted is just bad latin." That's rich, claiming folkore in a story about Jung. The thing about Latin is, as a dead language, all of its rules are set in stone. When people actually spoke it, though, it was widespread enough that it changed over time, and we, at some point, decided that the Latin in administrative use around Julius Caesar's time (if I recall all this correctly) was the Latin, and the usages and spellings were calcified. In reality, people went on speaking and writing it, and it eventually morphed into Italian, French, Spanish, etc. If it helps, the French translation of the adjective extraverted is extraverti(e). But. This is English. A very widespread living language, subject to change and regional variations. What's the correct way to spell humour? Gray? Tire? Kerb? Once something gets set loose in the public, at some point, it stops being a mistake and starts being a variant. Yes, sometimes I rail against those variants, but I have to remind myself that I'm witnessing a linguistic shift as it occurs. It's always a mistake to use it's as a possessive pronoun, though. One of the first times Carl Jung introduced the term is in 1917, in his book "Die Psychologie der Unbewussten Prozesse", he spelled it "ExtrAvert". Exhibit A (ha ha): You'll have to go to the link to see the example, because it's a graphic, but please note that it's in German. English is about as much German as it is French, and neither language controls English spelling. So why do so many people spell it ExtrOversion today? At this point in my first reading of the article, I took a wild guess: to conform better with the spelling of its antonym, introvert. The article then dates the English "o" spelling to one Phyllis Blanchard in 1918, which, as you might note, is but one year after Jung's book above. It also specifies American English, which, as we all know from the above examples I provided, need not conform to other Anglophone countries' spelling. Not only did she change the spelling of the word, but she also changed the definition! Definitions, too, change over time and culture. You know what the French translation of the English verb "to request" is? "Demander." This is, of course, cognate with another word in English that has a much stronger connotation than "request." What I think probably happened is that she was translating Jung and used the "extro" form to imitate the "intro" form for symmetry. That is, as the author admits, a guess. But it was my guess, too. We now know that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality (extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and intellect/imagination), each one on a continuum. Yeah, as with any other psychological "knowledge," this, too, is subject to alteration over time. But usually, it changes in a somewhat more technical manner than spelling or everyday word usage. Under this framework, extraversion is defined as being outgoing, sociable, expressive, and assertive. Introversion is defined as the opposite of extraversion (reserved, quiet). Anyone who's met me can tell you I'm not very reserved or quiet, and yet I don't identify as an extrovert. Why does this matter? Trust me, I'm not usually this pedantic. But I am. Being an introvert and all. Maybe a solution is to just have both spellings in existence, but define the terms differently. Oh, gods, no, no, no, please don't. I went down a rabbit hole recently on the difference between kluge and kludge (in the process discovering that neither one is actually of Yiddish origin, much to my disappointment), and, well, let's just say I left the rabbit hole even more confused than when I fell into it. How about instead we bury ExtrOversion once and for all, and all embrace the same spelling to honor Jung. The author, in passages I didn't quote, appears to be a massive fan of Jung. I can kind of understand this (he was better than Freud, at the very least), but, again, he wrote in German. Which is a fine language, but, as I said, has no direct connection to English (which I've come to understand as a mature creole of earlier forms of French and German). Fortunately, the author ends with a sentiment I can certainly support: I do believe it's helpful for scientists to listen to the experiences of individuals, but I also think it could be helpful for individuals to listen to the latest science. Science, however, does not and should not dictate word spellings. Hell, they can't even dictate word usage; "theory," for example, means something completely different to a scientist than it does to an ordinary person. And yet, I'm going to continue to spell it "extrovert," because it's totally acceptable in English, if not Latin (or German). If you're more familiar than I am with the word in other Anglophone countries, or even in other languages, feel free to chime in. |
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