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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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| Another one from Mental Floss today, because my random number generator likes to mess with me. But first, a quick announcement and stealth plug: Starting tomorrow, and running through March 20, Elisa, Stik of Clubs  is hosting another round of "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]. I intend to participate. I'd like some competition, so if you have a blog or are thinking of starting one (and you should, because I've heard a rumor that a blogging/commenting streak Achievement badge is in the works and no, that's not a secret), check it out. I only have a few meager entries left in this one, and my intention is to devote eight of them to that activity.But for today, on to the article: To be clear, sometimes—perhaps even often—experiments fail. If they didn't, they wouldn't be experiments. But sometimes, they fail so completely that it makes you wonder whether the cliché should be "curiosity killed the human." I should initiate the Hughes Award for such experiments. "Mad" Mike Hughes was a flat-Earther who designed and built a steam-powered rocket to prove to himself that our planet is flat. I've written about him before. The rocket, somewhat predictably, exploded with him inside (and even if it hadn't, it wasn't designed to get high enough to rule out the reality that the Earth is roughly spherical). You might say, "Well, there's already the Darwin Awards to cover that sort of thing," but the Darwin Awards only consider a subset of Stupid Human Tricks. Not all of the featured failures are quite that spectacular or, some might say, tragic. Out of the 14 in the article, I'll just highlight a few here. 1. Winthrop Kellogg's Ape Experiment In the early 1930s, comparative psychologist Winthrop Kellogg and his wife welcomed a healthy baby boy they named Donald. No, not that Donald. Or that one, either. Also, not that Kellogg. The psychologist had grown interested in those stories of children who were raised feral—but he didn’t send Donald to be raised by wolves. He did the opposite: He managed to get his hands on a similar-aged baby chimp named Gua and raised her alongside Donald. On the surface, considering the state of knowledge in the 1930s (DNA hadn't been invented yet, for example, but it was known that humans and chimpanzees were closely related on an evolutionary scale), this was a perfectly reasonable experiment—provided one ignores the ethical considerations involved in, for starters, separating a baby chimp from her tribe. As the article notes, the experiment didn't quite pan out (that's a pun, and it's very much intentional). 2. The Stanford Prison Experiment You may have heard about the Stanford Prison Experiment, a social psychology study gone awry in 1971. The point of the experiment, which was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, was to measure the effect of role-playing and social expectations. Lead researcher Philip Zimbardo had predicted that situations and circumstances dictate how a person acts, not their personalities. I can't help but note the similarities between this one and the chimp one, because both were about innate traits vs. environmental conditioning. Most people have heard of this one, but there's a lot of misinformation about it out there, and I suspect that it functions as kind of a test of a person's preconceived notions, much as the novel Lord of the Flies does. If you haven't heard about it, the article goes into more detail—but I wouldn't fully trust Mental Floss to get it right. 3. Franz Reichelt's Aviator Suit Now, this one would be a retroactive candidate for the Hughes Award. In the early 1900s, Reichelt crafted a parachute from 320 square feet of fabric, all of which folded up into a wearable aviator suit. He had conducted several parachute tests using dummies, which all failed. He pinned the blame on the buildings, saying that they simply weren’t tall enough. I think we can all see where this is going, but, again, our state of knowledge in the early 1900s was even more incomplete than it is now. Hell, the first powered flight was late 1903. In 1912, Reichelt planned to test his latest version by flinging a dummy from the Eiffel Tower. But when he arrived at the famous landmark, the inventor surprised the waiting crowd by strapping on the parachute suit himself and taking the leap. Hence, the Hughes Award. The parachute didn’t open, however, and Reichelt became a victim of his own invention. (An autopsy reportedly determined that he died of a heart attack on the way down.) So, the next time someone tells you "It's not the fall that kills you; it's the sudden stop at the end," remember Monsieur Reichelt and how the fall actually did kill him. But mostly I'm including this one in my commentary to note that, from then on, the famous Paris landmark would be known as the I-Fell Tower. 5. William Perkin's Mauve-lous Mistake He had unwittingly discovered a way to produce mauve. The color was a smash hit, especially after Queen Victoria donned it for her daughter’s 1858 wedding. I'm leaving this one here to illustrate that sometimes failures are actually successes in disguise. Not the parachute guy, obviously, though we learned from that, too. 7. The Cleveland Indians' 10-Cent Beer Night In 1974, the Cleveland Indians tinkered with a new promotion to increase game attendance—giving fans the opportunity to purchase an unlimited amount of beer for 10 cents a cup, which wasn't the best idea. Since the article won't do it, I will: 10 cents in 1974 is roughly equivalent to 65 cents in early 2025. Which is about 1/10th of what they sometimes charge for good beer at a drafthouse, but I have no idea what they charge for watered-down swill "beer" at a ball game. At any rate, I think it's pretty obvious why selling cheap beer in a stadium full of already hyped-up sports fans is a Bad Idea. 10. The New Ball The basketball has been tweaked here and there over the years, but the modifications apparently went too far when the NBA experimented with a microfiber ball in 2006. “The New Ball,” as it was commonly known, was cheaper to make and was supposed to have the feel of a broken-in basketball right from the start. You know, I don't see why this even belongs on the list. Sure, it was an experiment of sorts. Sure, it failed. But no one died or even got seriously injured (the article notes cuts on some players' hands, but that's about it), and then they reverted back to the old basketball. Feeling deflated, the NBA officially announced they were pulling the ball from play on December 11, 2006—less than three months after its debut in a game. So I'm mostly including this one to show that I'm not the only one who makes terrible puns. 12. Wilhelm Reich's Cloudbusters Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich managed to draw a straight line from human orgasms to the weather to alien invasion. Influenced by Sigmund Freud’s work on the human libido, Reich extended the concept to propose a kind of widespread energy he called orgone. To give you an idea of how scientifically sound Reich’s concept was, orgone has been compared to the Force in Star Wars. And this one was less a failure of experiment than it was a failure of theory and critical thinking. 14. New Coke April 23, 1985, was a day that will live in marketing infamy. And that’s how Coke describes the failed experiment that was New Coke. On that day, the Coca-Cola Company debuted a new version of their popular soft drink made from a new and supposedly improved formula. Ah, yes: the Great Coke Crisis of 1985, the year I switched to Dr. Pepper (because Pepsi tastes like ass, and RC Cola isn't as widely available as the Big Two colas) and didn't switch back again until around the turn of the century. The message was received loud and clear. Coke announced the return of Old Coke in July, dubbing it Coca-Cola Classic—and they never experimented with the formula again. And that's not completely true. They switched from sugar to HFCS, which some say is the exact same thing and others disagree, but regardless, it's a change in formula. I also think Diet Coke benefited from whatever they learned doing New Coke. Most importantly, though, they did muck about with the formula after that, but this time were smart enough to sell it separately instead of replacing the Real Thing. This eventually led to the development of Coke Zero, which is the greatest invention since the Skip Intro button. Like I said, experiments often fail. If we're smart, we don't die of a heart attack in the process, and can actually learn and grow from the failures. Some of us even have the capacity to learn from the failures of others, though I think "jumping off the I-Fell tower using unproven and questionable gear" isn't something most of us have to be warned against. |
| This article from Mental Floss comes to us from 2020. I doubt there have been any further notable events in the subject's history since then. Despite the advanced age of the article, I only ran across it in the last week or so, during which time I completely forgot why I felt the article was important enough to feature here. Or maybe I saved it just to add further random chaos to the world, which is sometimes why I do things. During the Seven Years War of the mid-1700s, a French army pharmacist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was captured by Prussian soldiers. Ah, yes, back when there was Russia and P-Russia. As a prisoner of war, he was forced to live on rations of potatoes. Oh no. Clearly, this was before the Geneva Convention. In mid-18th century France, this would practically qualify as cruel and unusual punishment: potatoes were thought of as feed for livestock, and they were believed to cause leprosy in humans. This is coming from people whose national cuisine consists of ground-up pig asshole, snails, and frog legs. The fear was so widespread that the French passed a law against them in 1748. Pomme de Terre Prohibition! But as Parmentier discovered in prison, potatoes weren’t deadly. In fact, they were pretty tasty. See, this is what I don't get, though I could probably look it up from a better source: raw potatoes are disgusting. And why would they take the time and resources to cook the things for prison chow? The story of mashed potatoes takes 10,000 years and traverses the mountains of Peru and the Irish countryside; it features cameos from Thomas Jefferson and a food scientist who helped invent a ubiquitous snack food. Hm. Maybe it was the Jefferson reference that made me save the link. Potatoes aren’t native to Ireland—or anywhere in Europe, for that matter. Count on Mental Floss for helpful and vaguely racist information. These early potatoes were very different from the potatoes we know today. Yeah, for instance, they didn't come in a sleeve from McDonald's. They were also slightly poisonous. They're nightshades, like tomatoes, which Europeans also thought were poisonous. To combat this toxicity, wild relatives of the llama would lick clay before eating them. The toxins in the potatoes would stick to the clay particles, allowing the animals to consume them safely. People in the Andes noticed this and started dunking their potatoes in a mixture of clay and water—not the most appetizing gravy, perhaps, but an ingenious solution to their potato problem. Oh... no, it was this bit. Yeah. That seems awfully specific, and a brief search didn't turn up any corroboration. Truth, or legend? I know I've often wondered about poisonous foods that got eaten anyway because the humans around them figured out how to neutralize the poisons. Pretty sure I've mentioned some of them in here before. How did they figure it out? Some by watching animals, I'm sure. Others? No clue. But during times of hardship, when easier food sources may not be available, I can totally see humans figuring this stuff out, because we're clever and hungry. By the time Spanish explorers brought the first potatoes to Europe from South America in the 16th century, they had been bred into a fully edible plant. That sentence glosses over quite a bit of savagery on the Spanish side. So that's potatoes, and the article says quite a bit more about them. But it's supposed to be specifically about mashed potatoes. In her 18th-century recipe book The Art of Cookery, English author Hannah Glasse instructed readers to boil potatoes, peel them, put them into a saucepan, and mash them well with milk, butter, and a little salt. Whether she innovated the mashing part or someone else had figured it out, that seems to be when the true origin of the mashed potato begins. In the United States, Mary Randolph published a recipe for mashed potatoes in her book, The Virginia Housewife, that called for half an ounce of butter and a tablespoon of milk for a pound of potatoes. She was related by marriage to Jefferson. Was that the only connection? But no country embraced the potato like Ireland. And yet, they didn't invent vodka. I'm skipping over a bit, here. In the 1950s, researchers at what is today called the Eastern Regional Research Center, a United States Department of Agriculture facility outside of Philadelphia, developed a new method for dehydrating potatoes that led to potato flakes that could be quickly rehydrated at home. Soon after, modern instant mashed potatoes were born. This is going to send crowds after me with tiki torches and pitchforks, but I like instant mashed potatoes. Well, there's more at the article, including another really oblique reference to Jefferson. And if you search, you can probably find more information on YouTuber. |
| I believe in coincidence. That is, when two or more seemingly unrelated events appear to converge in a manner meaningful in some way to me or other humans, it's not because someone somehow steered the results, but because of pure coincidence. You know what would make me consider actually believing in the supernatural? If there were never any coincidences. Random chance will occasionally put two or more factors in close proximity, like when, occasionally, a cloud will cover the Sun and Moon during a total solar eclipse. (The eclipse itself is a giant cosmic coincidence, what with the Moon and Sun appearing to be about the same size in the sky.) If no coincidences happened, well, that would require a Vast Cosmic Intelligence to avoid them. Coincidences are simply the occasional ordinary workings of random numbers and/or chaos. But sometimes, I'll run across a coincidence that stretches all credulity, that is so utterly appropriate as to make me gape in speechless awe at the sheer metaphysical metaphor (or metaphorical metafizz) of it all. Well, today's coincidence is not quite on that level, but almost. For complete background, first you have to know that my link queue is, as of this morning, 48 items long, and each of the 48 items have the same chance of being selected at random. A 1 in 48 chance, to be precise. So, roughly, today's article, from the BBC, being the only one in the queue on this subject, had only about a 2% probability of being selected today. And today is the day when I (unless I fall over dead before I get to it) reach a nice round number milestone 2000-day streak on Duolingo. See the connection? It's only meaningful if one attaches significance to numbers with lots of zeros in them. But, let's be real here, most of us note such round numbers as special. But enough about that. Time to take a look at the actual article. I'm standing in line at my local bakery in Paris, apologising to an incredibly confused shopkeeper. He's just asked how many pastries I would like, and completely inadvertently, I responded in Mandarin instead of French. Ah, the age-old tradition of the humblebrag. I'm equally baffled: I'm a dominant English speaker, and haven't used Mandarin properly in years. Pretty sure that's one language I know I'll never learn. Multilinguals commonly juggle the languages they know with ease. But sometimes, accidental slip-ups can occur. I want to be clear, here: I don't consider myself multilingual. I can understand a good bit of written French. Je peux écrire des mots en français. I can't pronounce it well enough to be understood, and I can't follow spoken French well enough to understand most of it. In other words, I'm not fluent. So, any communication in French, I have to translate to English in my head, then compose a sentence in English and translate it into French. In doing so, I make mistakes, English slips in, and it becomes a kind of creole that even my New Orleans-born father would have cringed at. So I'm guessing that such mistakes become rarer as one gains fluency, but I don't know for sure. Research into how multilingual people juggle more than one language in their minds is complex and sometimes counterintuitive. I hope it's counterintuitive. That's one reason we do science: to rise above mere intuition and "common sense." "From research we know that as a bilingual or multilingual, whenever you're speaking, both languages or all the languages that you know are activated," says Mathieu Declerck, a senior research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. I shouldn't make assumptions about people based on their names or where they're from, but I'll point out that the official languages of Belgium include Dutch, French, and German, and English is also widely used; when I was there, I saw signs and heard speech in all four languages (sometimes a sentence would switch easily between them), and more—though I'll be the first to admit that, on hearing them, I'm not sure I could reliably tell Dutch from German. My point is only that if anyone can hold a claim to knowing about multilingualism, it would be Belgium. Or Switzerland. But I'm not visiting Switzerland; it's where my ex-wife lives. Yes, I know it's a relatively large country; shut up. "For example, when you want to say 'dog' as a French-English bilingual, not just 'dog' is activated, but also its translation equivalent, so 'chien' is also activated." Those words also come from different sources. What I don't understand, and can't be arsed to look up now, is why Spanish, linguistically related to French, uses a completely different word, 'perro'. Declerck himself is no stranger to accidentally mixing up languages. The Belgian native's impressive language repertoire includes Dutch, English, German and French. And what did I just say? Yeah, sometimes assuming doesn't make an ass out of u and ming. "The first part was in German and I'd step on a Belgian train where the second part was in French," he says. "And then when you pass Brussels, they change the language to Dutch, which is my native language. So in that span of like three hours, every time the conductor came over, I had to switch languages. Which sounds impressive, but remember, I navigated the Belgian rail system while knowing maybe four Dutch words, and one of them is "clock." Okay, "klok." Train announcements are verbal, though. The article moves on to describe some experiments that study this code-switching and its associated errors, and it's very interesting to me, but not a lot of point in quoting from it. Just one thing from the middle of that section: "The brain is malleable and adaptable," says Kristina Kasparian, a writer, translator and consultant who studied neurolinguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. "When you're immersed in a second language, it does impact the way you perceive and process your native language." What I need, after 2000 days on Duolingo (a streak, I'll reiterate, even longer than my current daily blogging streak), is to find a French speaker as a coach. I mean, I've needed to do that for some time. I couldn't do it in France, because, in general, French people have no patience for that merde. Navigating such interference could perhaps be part of what makes it hard for an adult to learn a new language, especially if they've grown up monolingual. And make no mistake: it is hard. Not impossible, as some claim; that I have had any success at all disproves that. But I'm sure I'd have learned French much faster in my youth, which was wasted learning Hebrew, Latin, and computer programming (all of which I've forgotten all but the very basics of) (pun intended). Some studies have shown bilinguals perform better on executive control tasks, for example in activities when participants have to focus on counterintuitive information. I have no idea if my language learning has helped with that. Speaking multiple languages has also been linked to delayed onset of dementia symptoms. I don't wish to die, but it would be preferable to dementia. And of course, multilingualism brings many obvious benefits beyond the brain, not least the social benefit of being able to speak to many people. These days, smartphones can assist with translation. I witnessed people using them in Europe. They're nowhere near perfect, but I'm sure they do in a pinch. Not only can you get verbal translations, but also text translations. All great technology, but no substitute for learning, in my opinion. And so, I continue to learn. |
| Back in November of 2019, as part of a round of 30 Day Blogging Challenge, I answered the call of a prompt ("Besides music, what are some of your favorite sounds?") with a loud silence: "Hush" When I dig into the past on these weekly adventures, I try not to repeat myself. This one came up at random, today, and I got the feeling that I'd Revisited it before. But, searching around, I didn't find any evidence that I'd done that. Perhaps I'd simply come across this one in another search. When a blog spans 18 years (albeit with a long hiatus in there) and nearly three thousand entries, I suspect it would tax anyone's memory, and mine more than most. As for the entry itself, it's short and contains no external quotes. A while back, I vaguely recall, there was a 30DBC prompt that asked the old question: would you rather be deaf or blind? And I said something like, I despise 75% of all sounds, but the other 25% is music, and I wouldn't want to live without music. While true, I do prefer to be able to hear. If someone has the dedication to swing back and look at what I actually wrote, and finds that it's something different from that, and calls me on it, well, congratulations. This is a universal bit of sarcasm. I don't doubt that I've contradicted myself before, or remembered different details. I don't really mind the little sounds that accompany everyday existence: the hooting birds, the rustling leaves, that sort of thing, but I can't say they're my favorite sounds. Bird chirping, especially, can really get on my nerves. At first, I thought Silent Spring was aspirational. I've been known to reject potential romantic partners if they're the kind of people who leave the TV on all day for "background noise." Seems like this is less an issue now, with more people doing deliberate streaming. I also have no problem with (most) music being used as background noise. At this point, though, and even back when I wrote this, I was done with the whole "romantic partner" nonsense. Not to mention that a non-trivial reason why I never wanted kids is because children noises make me meshuggah. It wasn't the deciding factor (that was, well, look around), but it was definitely on my list. If I can't listen to music, I prefer silence, or as close to it as I can get. Still true. Not that I'd want to be deaf; not just because of music but because I like to have some advance warning that someone is trying to sneak up on me - less likely to have such warning if there were a lot of background noise. No one's successfully snuck up on me in over 20 years, so this must be working. So, between yesterday's prompt and today's, I suppose I've been outed as someone who prefers both silence and darkness. Hello darkness, my old friend. |
| This one, from Big Think, is one of those articles that expresses what I've been thinking about for a long time, but haven't found the words for. How glorifying ignorance leads to science illiteracy If we wish to tackle the very real problems society faces, we require expert-level knowledge. Valuing it starts earlier than we realize. I know something like this has been said before, but if you want someone to fly the airplane that you're in, you find a trained, licensed pilot, not someone who's read a book on birds and thus thinks they know all about flight. All across the country, you can see how the seeds of it develop from a very young age. When children raise their hands in class because they know the answer, their classmates hurl the familiar insults of “nerd,” “geek,” “dork,” or “know-it-all” at them. And yet, people who know things like who lost the AFC championship in the 1989 American football season are valued. Everyone's a nerd about something. It’s a version of the social effect known as tall poppy syndrome: where if someone dares to stand out, intellectually in this case, the response of the masses is to attempt to cut them down. Human life, especially kid life, can be viewed as a tension between wanting to fit in and wanting to stand out. Someone who knows more, is more successful, or who seems to be smarter than you is often seen as a threat, and so in order to prevent them from standing out too much (or surpassing too many others), we glorify ignorance as the de facto normal position. I've said this before, too, but the truth is, ignorance is the default position. We all start out ignorant, and there's so much knowledge out there that we can't help but remain ignorant of all but a few things for our entire lives. But, in my view, what we should be glorifying is not the default position, but the desire to get just a little less ignorant. And I should make this clear: ignorance isn't the same thing as willful ignorance. Choosing to remain ignorant harms your development as a child, but leads to science illiteracy, which harms the entire world. For instance, my limited knowledge of English tells me that there should have been a "not only" in that sentence. That, or change the conjunction from "but" to "and." I get it. I make editing mistakes, too. I find them in previous blog entries, from time to time. There's probably some in here I didn't catch. But I always strive to do better. There are so many remarkable things that we — as a species — have figured out about existence. I cannot argue with this, but there's much left to learn. We know what life is: how to identify it, how it evolves, what the mechanisms and molecules are that underpin it, and how it came to survive and flourish here on Earth. I could get picky about that assertion, and it's a prime example of what I just said. For example, while we have some really good hypotheses about how life started, we haven't quite figured that out to a high degree of certainty. We know what reality is made of on a fundamental level, from the smallest subatomic particles to the nature of space and time that encompasses the entire Universe. I'm not sure this is entirely correct. But, again, we know more now than we did even 100 years ago. Our most valuable explorations of the world and Universe around us have been scientific ones: where we learn about reality by asking it the right questions about itself, and by listening to the answers that are revealed to us through experiment, observation, and careful measurement. And, yes, sometimes it turns out the previous answers were wrong or incomplete, and get replaced by new answers. This is still a better system than the old one, which declared that something was so and brooked no argument or counterexamples. Those, it turns out, are almost always wrong. It’s impossible, in this day and age, for any single individual or entity to be an expert in all possible things. I would go so far as to say that this has always been impossible, but now, we have a better understanding of just how impossible it is. Even as a child, you know when the adults are lying to you, to themselves, and to everyone else in the room. As Mike Brock just wrote recently, it’s the “capacity to think clearly about reality itself” that must be our most unbreakable trait as individuals, particularly when there’s pressure — peer pressure, social pressure, political pressure, etc. — to surrender that capacity over to whatever some arbitrary authority figure says. But here's at least part of the problem, as I see it: Since I don't know everything, cannot know everything, I have to rely on experts and authorities in whatever subject. If I'm going to court, that would be an attorney. If I'm curious about the function of interatomic bonds in a solid, it would be a physicist. If I want to know who lost the AFC championship in the 1989 American football season, that would be a sports nerd. If I want the plane to fly, it would be a pilot. So, some amount of trust is necessary. One way to know who to trust is by credentials, for which one also must trust the credentialing authority (if the pilot, for example, got their license from Bubba's Lurn 2 Flie in rural Nevada, no thanks, I'll walk). Despite whatever your initial intuition might have been about an issue, you must always — every time you acquire new, valid information — re-evaluate your expectations in light of the new evidence. This is only a possibility if you can admit, to yourself, “I may have been wrong, and learning this new information is essential in getting it right in the end.” The willfully ignorant don't take this approach. They're Right, always, and to admit that they weren't would mean others might think they're weak or wishy-washy. You see this all the time. I bet you can come up with at least one example right off the top of your head. (No, I don't mean me, though I do need to fight against this tendency like most people.) Changing one's mind in the face of new evidence is true strength. Changing one's mind without substantial new evidence, now, I can see how that could be perceived as being flighty. There’s a reason why admitting, “I was wrong” is so difficult for so many of us, and why it is rarely an innate talent for humans to have, rather than a skill we must acquire. All of the solutions that require learning, incorporating new information, changing our minds, or re-evaluating our prior positions in the face of new evidence have something in common: they take effort. Yes, well, at least it's not physical effort, so I can do these things and still admit I'm lazy. Glorified underachieving, proclaiming falsehoods as truths, and the derision of actual knowledge are banes on our society. The world is made objectively worse by every anti-science element present within it. This may seem like an assertion without evidence, hanging there in quote form as it is, but I think reading the actual article provides the logical framework to back it up. Or, you know. I could be wrong. The Doctor: Ignorance is… um, what’s the opposite of bliss? Clara: Carlisle? The Doctor: Yes! Yes, ignorance is Carlisle. (If you don't know why that's funny, you can look it up. Then it won't be funny anymore, but at least you'll know a bit more.) |
| As regular readers know, sometimes, I like to delve deep and tackle the biggest, most important questions of existence. What Does the Ship Designation ‘SS’ Mean? The initialism was originally a bit of shipbuilder marketing. Oh, well that explains it then. Have a great day! ...okay, fine, I'll go into details. Often, when you see the name of a boat (or a ship, for that matter), the name of the vessel itself will be prefixed by a short set of letters. One thing I'll always resent my father for is that, despite having been a sailor for over 30 years, he never bothered to explain to me the difference between a boat and a ship. Even now, after figuring out a lot about that distinction on my own, I'm still a little baffled. Even after reading the link at the link, which links to a link about the distinction, it's clearly not clear. Some things are immutably carved into the granite of Fact, though: A ship can carry a boat while a boat cannot carry a ship; a submarine is always a boat; a boat that plies a river is always a boat, not a ship. Also, apparently, even though they don't actually exist yet except in the most rudimentary form, interplanetary conveyances will be known as "ships." There are so many different forms of these letters that you might think they’re little more than a random license-plate style code number. Well, no, because that's one aspect of my education my dad didn't neglect. ...and in civilian vessels, the most frequently encountered of these prefixes is probably SS. Maybe because it's easy to slip an O in the middle? SS dates back to the mid-1800s, when the Age of Sail came to an end and faster coal-powered ships became the norm. The shipbuilders of the day wanted a means of setting their modern vessels apart from the wind-powered ones of the past, and labeling each one SS—meaning “steamship”—did the trick. Not what I'd consider marketing, but okay. As naval technologies continued to change, however, so too did people’s understanding of precisely what SS was intended to mean. Because of course it did. Not all vessels are civilian operated, of course. In the United States, all craft of the U.S. Navy are prefixed with the letters USS, standing for “United States Ship.” As we all know, this convention will be carried into space on the USS Enterprise, only it won't be "United States Ship," but the more contrived "United Space [or Star] Ship," supposedly a reference to the United Federation of Planets. So, there it is: the Big Question, answered. You're welcome. |
| Kinda-sorta still technically a Full Moon this morning (not that I could see it last night through all the clouds), and then this NPR article comes up at random from my queue: The Grand Canyon in Arizona got carved by water over millions of years of slow but steady erosion. Or, if you believe bullshit, it got created that way about 6000 years ago, specifically to fool us. Two similarly-sized canyons on the moon got carved by flying rocks in about ten minutes. Also way more than 6000 years ago. "This was a dramatic impact that was followed by a series of smaller impact events that excavated these canyons in, you know, roughly 10 minutes," says David Kring with the USRA Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. Translation: The Moon's shit got fucked up. The two canyons, called Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck... So, one of them may or may not actually exist, and the other is as small as it's possible to get? If you don't know anything about the history of physics, just take my word for it: that's a really, really funny joke. ...are located on the far side of the moon... Hm. Most far side features are named for Russians, because they were first mapped by a Soviet probe. I guess there are exceptions, and I'm too lazy to look to see if there are other exceptions. ...so they can only be seen from orbit—not from Earth. As this is unclear, I'll jump in to say that they mean either lunar orbit, or an Earth orbit that's so far out that it takes you around the butt side of the moon. Butt Side of the Moon is, by coincidence, the name of my Butthole Surfers style cover of Pink Floyd's greatest album. Each canyon is over 165 miles long and over 1.5 miles deep. Oh, so they're American canyons? The canyons look like remarkably straight lines that extend outward from a circular crater that is the Schrödinger impact basin, the result of a large impact that occurred around 3.8 billion years ago. Or maybe it didn't occur. Look, Schrödinger jokes never get old. Unlike these canyons. When the impactor hit the moon, it was moving at roughly 38,000 miles per hour, says Kring, and would have penetrated to a depth of about 15 miles. And the impactor was also American, it seems. The amount of energy needed to produce these grand canyons on the moon is 1200–2200 times larger than "the nuclear explosion energy once planned to excavate a second Panama Canal on Earth, more than 700 times larger than the total yield of US, USSR, and China's nuclear explosion tests, and about 130 times larger than the energy in the global inventory of nuclear weapons," the researchers write in their report. How much is that in gridiron football fields? You know, since we're measuring everything else with American units. Even though these particular lunar craters aren't visible from your backyard, Kring says there are similar, but smaller canyons on the near side of the moon that's visible in the night sky. Might need binoculars or a telescope, but those are a bit cheaper than hitching a ride on the next lunar orbiter. |
| Many of the articles I feature here are fairly old. This one, from Slate, isn't. Today’s the Day Minor consumer holidays don’t just appear out of nowhere. There’s a method to the madness—and it’s juicier than you’d think. I find these made-up "days" amusing. I like to use them when I do prompts for "The Writer's Cramp" [13+], though I normally use a different calendar. Just to be clear, I don't take them seriously, and recognize that they're mostly marketing gimmicks. As pretty much everything these days is a marketing gimmick, I see no inherent problem with this.Where, exactly, did National Bagel Day come from? I'm guessing: manufacturers and/or distributors of delicious bagels. Who decided that it must be held annually on Jan. 15? Same guess. And how on earth am I supposed to celebrate? By eating a bagel. Are you being deliberately dense, like a proper bagel? My work schedule provides me with 13 days off in observance of everything from Presidents Day to Christmas, but if we are to trust the internet, then I’m clearly getting ripped off. Wait, some writers get days off? Other empty spaces on the calendar are filled with even more esoteric celebrations: Jan. 16, if you didn’t know, is National Nothing Day. May 9 is the eternally solemn National Lost Sock Memorial Day. And I hope you’re already practicing your iambic pentameter, because April 23 is National Talk Like Shakespeare Day. As we shouldst all beest acknown, shakespeare's birthday wast april 23. (I got that from the even more amusing English to Shakespearean translator. )(The date is a guess based on baptismal records and because it rounds the Bard's life with an awful symmetry, as he also died on an April 23. Though both of those would have been Julian calendar dates, and... whatever, I'm getting off track here.) The National Day Calendar website functions like one of those old-fashioned daily tear-off calendars—the ones brimming with Far Side panels or horoscope readings—bringing flavor to otherwise colorless Tuesdays and Thursdays. How does one find purpose in a marginal existence? Perhaps, argues the company, by respecting the tenets of National Hot Buttered Rum Day, National Thesaurus Day, and National Hugging Day. I went looking for another name for National Thesaurus Day recently, but couldn't find one. There is a method to the madness, and a distinct curator of a January 15 filled with bagels, kombucha, and strawberry ice cream. His name is Marlo Anderson. He’s 62, and he describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur.” Which I imagine is kind of like being a serial monogamist, only less expensive. Incredibly, people do actually celebrate these things sometimes. Many of the holidays are essentially leveraged for short-term marketing ploys: For National Bagel Day, Einstein Bros. handed out a free egg sandwich to anyone already subscribed to the chain’s rewards program, while Wolferman’s Bakery offered a 15 percent discount code. As much as I hate ads in general, I can't fault this. Hell, you should see me on National Beer Day. Scratch that; you definitely should not. There are actually several Beer Days, and also days for other delicious fermented and/or distilled adult beverages. Those days are also known as "excuses, as if I need them." The article also goes on to describe one of Anderson's competitors, someone named... Alderson. After that point, I stopped paying a lot of attention, because the names are too similar and I get confused easily in the morning. Alongside the National Day Calendar’s TV show and vast online emporium, Anderson also collects revenue by occasionally partnering with a client to invent a brand-new holiday, out of whole cloth, without any of the historical precedent he usually relies on when creating his schedule. These deals are disclosed transparently on the National Day Calendar website, and they function like a glorified advertisement. Case in point: I am writing this story on National Hyaluronic Acid Day, a holiday that was created in 2022 and is sponsored by the skin care brand La Roche-Posay. Rolls off the tongue, right? National Hyaluronic Acid Day. If you aren’t connecting the dots, hyaluronic acid is a substance found in a lot of moisturizing products. Again, though I despise ads, I can't really find fault with this. As the article says, they're transparent about it, unlike, say, certain click-bait sites or news outlets that write "stories" that are actually ads without telling us. More at the link, so you can judge for yourself. Me, I like the Japanese version of these silly days: their language is, from what I've heard, even more amenable to puns than English is, and their "holidays" reflect this. I'm sure I've mentioned these before. Here's a link to some details, which I have to take their word(s) for because my knowledge of Japanese is severely limited. |
| In recent decades, these slender "pencil towers" have been popping up all over NYC. As an engineer, I appreciate the science that goes into being able to build them. As a human with working eyes, I don't like them. And then this happens, as reported in The New Yorker: Well, from what I've heard, no one actually lives in those things. The units are bought up by foreign investors and traded amongst billionaires like beanie babies or bitcoin. I could, however, be misinformed. But that's really irrelevant. The important thing is that one of them is falling over, and it makes me laugh. That is, after you wade through the first few paragraphs, which solidly adhere to The New Yorker School Of Not Getting To The Fucking Point. “The slab edges on the north side of the building are misaligned by up to 8 inches,” the developer disclosed. 1 Seaport was six hundred and seventy feet tall, and leaning. And I find that hilarious. The article further meanders into other examples of leaning towers, accidental and deliberate. An ideal site for a skyscraper is above strong, flat bedrock that is relatively close to the surface, about fifty feet underground. The bedrock below much of midtown is at that depth. I like to think that you can look at the Manhattan skyline (from the west or east, anyway), and you can tell exactly what sections have solid bedrock. 161 Maiden Lane is not such a site. The Dutch, who laid out Maiden Lane in the seventeenth century, were the first to use “infill”—sand, stones, trash, whatever was handy—to expand the contours of Manhattan. And the problem reveals itself. I think this is similar to the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, which, as I understand it, was not only built on loose rock, but exists in an earthquake zone. Later, local officials sold “water lots,” or parcels of land submerged below the East River or the Hudson River, on which developers could dump infill themselves. Ha ha ha oh boy. First, twenty-four feet of Colonial-era infill, composed of gravel, silt, concrete, steel, bricks, and chunks of old shipwrecks and docks. Below that, pancaked former marshland. Below that, sandy deposits left by glaciers thousands of years ago, and a layer of decomposed rock. And yet, they built. The Fortis Property Group, for reasons that remain the subject of multiple overlapping and complex civil litigations, opted for a different kind of foundation, less often used in Manhattan high-rise construction, called “soil improvement,” which involves injecting concrete into the ground to firm it up. The process promised to save the company six million dollars, but it came with some risks. An engineering consultant named Robert Alperstein produced a nearly hundred-page report that warned Fortis that the method could lead to “differential settlements.” In other words, the structure might lean. Aw, what does the licensed and experienced engineer know? We could SAVE MONEY if we do it this way. To build 1 Seaport, Fortis hired Pizzarotti, a renowned Italian construction firm that was trying to break into the New York City high-rise market, as the construction manager. Pizzarotti in turn hired a local company called SSC High Rise to build the tower’s concrete superstructure. The job site was troubled from the start. Hence this entry's title: a pun I couldn't refuse. Rather than pausing to fix what had already been done, an attempt was made to straighten the thing out in midair. To compensate for the lean, higher floors were intentionally poured out of alignment, in the opposite direction. Because that never leads to problems. This compounded the problem. “What happened was, as the building went up, the parties tried to pull it back and it kind of counterweighted,” a lawyer representing Pizzarotti later explained to a judge. “Your Honor,” the lawyer said, “it’s shaped like a banana right now.” Oh, wait, I meant to say that always leads to problems. The tower has continued to sulk over the waterfront, more a ruin than a construction site, its grim façade visible from the Brooklyn Bridge, the Wall Street heliport, and even from the N.Y.P.D.’s headquarters, nearly a mile away. I'm not sure why they put the NYPD in there, except maybe to lend a tone of "this was some illegal shit" to the article. As usual, there's more at the link—quite a lot more, since this is TNY, and not all of it truly relevant—so it's there if you're interested. I know that this may be kind of a niche thing for me, as an engineer with an architect cousin who works in NYC, which I visit almost every year. But while not nearly as good as The Guardian's superb takedown of the architectural monstrosity on the other side of Manhattan, I found this highly entertaining. Well, except for the one guy's death. That wasn't funny. Everything else, though... |
| Logos are kind of the corporate equivalent of a book's cover art, so writers might be interested in this sort of thing from Fast Company: The world’s worst logo also happens to be its best Even after 120 years, the Sherwin-Williams ‘Cover the Earth’ logo is so bad it’s good. Calling something "worst" or "best" is, at best, hyperbole. But we shouldn't just brush off the ideas here. Every time I see the Sherwin-Williams logo,  my brain briefly and hopelessly breaks.I have a very clear memory of myself as a very young kid, seeing that logo for possibly the first time, and thinking, "What? That's not how gravity works!" So my mental break was based on the clear violation of the immutable laws of physics, not the questionable violation of the ever-shifting laws of graphic design. And like any good intoxicant, I enjoy it. Because it is, hands-down, one of the worst logos in all of existence—but also one of the all-time greats. Speaking of marketing, please take note: that quote hedges with "one of the..." before the superlatives. It does not claim that it is somehow objectively the worst or the best. The sentence is clearly both opinion (that of the author) and allowing for reasonable people to argue that, no, there might be a worse logo or a better logo. This is in stark contrast with the headline—you know, the marketing part of the article—which declares with no uncertainty that it's both "worst" and "best," absolute, no nuance, no argument possible. For the uninitiated—and there’s no delicate way to put this—the Sherwin-Williams logo features a moon-size bucket seemingly drowning the Earth with a quadrillion gallons of *blood-red* paint, wholly saturating it to the point where its runoff is in nation-size droplets. 1) the paint can looks to me to be bigger than the Moon at that scale, but okay, maybe they meant "moon" in generic terms. 2) I'd like to do the calculations to see if you'd really need a quadrillion gallons to literally cover the Earth, but I can't be arsed. 3) Nations vary wildly in size, so calling something "nation-size" doesn't mean much. These things matter more to me than marketing fouls. And yet, you may be wondering, as I do every time I peruse a hardware store: How in the name of God is that still the company’s logo?! Well, no, I find it comforting that some things don't change. And maybe we should celebrate that an anachronism as bold and bizarre still exists (not unlike my other favorite dinosaur-of-a-logo, the, um, Sinclair dinosaur). The problem with the Sinclair dinosaur is that it reinforced the false idea that crude oil came from dinosaurs. I suppose it's possible that the SWP logo warped some peoples' understanding of gravity, but I don't think that falsehood is nearly as widespread as "oil is dead dinosaurs" myth. There's a bit more at the link, including a brief history of SWP and its logo, and even more pics of the logo in question (the one I linked earlier is from a different site). I think it paints an interesting picture. |
| Today's the day I usually dig into the past to unearth an old entry at random. Today, we'll take another look at a short entry I did during an ill-fated 2021 summer road trip: "Bloomington" Anyway, I mean the one in Illinois, not the one in Indiana. I wasn't even as clear as I could have been. The Bloomington in Indiana may be more well-known than others, but it's still probably not very famous. I almost went there for the 2024 solar eclipse, because I noticed that the path of totality passed right through the Indiana town. We ended up not far from there, though. But, again, the entry I linked up there was about the next state over. Hey, at least it's not Springfield. Then it could be any state. Sometimes I think it would be fun to visit every Springfield in the country... It would be even more fun to try to find the shortest route that visits every Springfield. From what I understand, an algorithm to do something like that is a difficult computer problem. Point is, it's extraordinarily rare that whatever they've named the place after is still there today. Upon reflection, I shouldn't have said "extraordinarily rare." That was hyperbole at best, and misleading at worst. I do like looking into the origins of place names (as I did in that entry for Bloomington), much as I enjoy looking into etymology. But I shouldn't take wild guesses at the rarity of that sort of thing; I don't have enough data. In any case, since it was a travel update, the entry was short and really only notable for the link that, if followed, will lead to a rare photo with me in it. |
| This SciAm opinion piece from last summer supports the idea that words (including names) have power and should be chosen carefully. Astronomers Should Take a Deeper Look at Naming We should—and must—take careful measure of what we name cosmic objects and the terms we use throughout science For full disclosure, I'm personally acquainted with the author. To summarize the opening, the James Webb telescope (you know, the one out in space that's been taking pictures of the farthest reaches of the observable universe) was named after a controversial figure, and who wasn't even a scientist or astronaut. For these and many other reasons, a large contingent of astronomers, including myself, prefer not to use the telescope’s official name and instead refer to it by its initials, JWST. For similar reasons, I continue to call the airport across the river from DC "National Airport." The observatory is the most visible example of this naming issue when it comes to science; the fight over statues of Confederate figures and buildings and roads named after such individuals is probably the most well known among the public. While this article isn't even a year old, it seems to me that this particular controversy has faded already. We have short attention spans here. For example, astronomers have a lot of nicknames we use for cosmic objects. That’s not surprising; “the Whirlpool galaxy” is a lot easier to remember than NGC 5194, its more official catalog name. It's true that I can't remember official catalog names for most astronomical objects. To be fair, there are quite a few astronomical objects. Not all names are so benign. NGC 2392 is a gaseous nebula, a favorite of amateur astronomers for its brightness and location on the sky, which make it easy to find. For decades, though, it was known as the Eskimo nebula, a term that is considered offensive by many Indigenous people in Canada and Greenland. Because of this, at some point, they tried to rename it to the Clown Face Nebula, which, for whatever reason, some people still found offensive. To whom? Clowns? It's also known as the Lion Nebula, but to the best of my knowledge, no African feline monarchs have come forward to claim offense. Another example is a popular piece of astronomical software used to extract sources from an image. It was given the unfortunate name SExtractor. That should be pronounced “Ess Extractor,” but I don’t think it’s too much a stretch to see where the problem lies. Okay, that's genuinely funny. And it's not even as perverted as the popular image of a business called Kids Exchange, the problem with which should be obvious when removing the space and capitalizing all the letters. Unfortunately, this is one of those times when an article has been hanging around in my queue long enough for it to lose relevance, which it did last month. I mean, I agree with Phil here, don't get me wrong. It's just that, officially, we don't do "inclusivity" or "diversity" or "concern about someone taking offense" anymore. |
| Here's a Vox article about Down Under. No, not Australia. The other Down Under. I'll try to make that the only arse joke in this entry. I'll fail. It’s a truism that everything’s bigger in America — just look at the cars and houses. And people. But perhaps nowhere is the virtue of bigger is better more bizarrely apparent than how toilet paper is sold. Oh, I don't know. Have you seen the latest Ford pickups? That's relevant because both are designed for assholes. A pack of 18 mega toilet paper rolls, for example, magically transforms into 90 “regular” ones. The labeling emphasizes this greater number in large font, lest you foolishly think 18 simply equals 18. Another pack might insist that 12 even-thicker rolls of toilet paper are the equivalent of 96 normal rolls. Basic marketing: change what "normal" is, then compare everything else to the new normal. Americans’ enormous vehicles and palatial abodes may in fact exist in service of conveying and storing gigantic bulk packs of this bathroom essential. Suddenly, everything makes more sense. Still not a lot. But more. There’s some irony, then, that for all the trumpeting of gargantuan sizes, toilet paper rolls are generally getting smaller. It’s a key example of the trend of manufacturers charging the same price (or even slightly more) for less product that’s been dubbed “shrinkflation.” Stop. It makes it more difficult than ever to figure out if you’re getting ripped off. Eh, not really. Are you buying something in the US? Then you're getting ripped off. With dubious numerical claims about how much a “mega” roll is really worth, brands can promote the perception of value without actually having to show their work. It's worse than that. I get my bumwad from one or two sources: the local grocery store, or Amazon (I don't want to hear it). Either way, the company presents a truly dizzying array of options, from 4-packs to giant, bulky megapacks, and of course from myriad different suppliers. A long time ago, grocery stores, in a rare consumer-aiding move, instituted unit prices. Like, they'll put the price of the package in big numbers, but if you look closely, you'll see a price per unit. This could be price per pound, per ounce (this is the US, after all), or, in the case of loo roll, usually per 100 sheets. It makes comparison shopping easier if you can see that one package offers a lower per-unit cost than a different package of the same product; less math is involved. But lately, I've been seeing inconsistencies in the unit pricing for several items, including buttwipe. Sometimes, it's price per sheet. Usually, it's price per 100 sheets. But sometimes, the unit price has magically disappeared (also, sheet sizes can vary between manufacturers). Or maybe they give it in price per ounce, which makes no sense at all. This makes comparison shopping nearly impossible without a calculator. I mean, sure, I can do most simple math in my head, but that doesn't mean I can be arsed when I just want to get the shopping over with. Unsurprisingly, the so-called standard size has no consistency, either. Charmin’s regular roll has 55 two-ply sheets, for example, but it’s often hard to even find the regular size of a brand’s toilet paper in stores. And that's the other problem: "standard" has lost meaning. The sheets-per-roll ratio is also subject to change depending on whether you’re looking at single-ply, two-ply, or three-ply. Honestly, I didn't even know they made three-ply. It’s no wonder people have taken matters into their own hands. I feel like that could have been a butt joke. The cost of making toilet paper may have gone up in recent years, according to the Los Angeles Times, due to a slowdown in lumber production (there’s less available wood pulp, which is what most toilet paper is made of). You'd think they could make "bathroom tissue" (possibly the stupidest euphemism ever) out of recycled paper, but I don't know. It’s something meant to be quickly disposed of, literally flushed away, yet commercials for toilet paper are almost always focusing on its delightful, cushiony softness or a special “quilted” or “diamond weave” texture that adds a premium feel to the product. This. This is one reason I avoid commercials like the cliché. One could switch to commercial-grade toilet paper, which is much cheaper but is of (ahem) crappier quality. Ah! There it is! In any case, the article (which I've resisted the urge to call crack reporting until just now) waits until the end (pun absolutely intended) to propose the optimal solution for wiping away all this confusion: a bidet. |
| I'm made of energy? Then why is it so hard to wake up in the morning? From Big Think: You’re made of energy: The strange truth about where mass comes from “A person’s mass is made not of ‘stuff’ in the way we normally think about it, but rather our mass is made of energy.” "Mass is made of energy" shouldn't be such a new concept for anyone with passing knowledge of science. The equation, from Einstein. describing the relationship between mass and energy isn't exactly obscure or complicated. But it does get a bit weird and, of course, common-sense-defying, because common sense is usually wrong. If I asked you where your mass comes from, your answer might involve an extra muffin or two. Oh, I'm way beyond that point. However, if I ask a science enthusiast the same question, I would expect to hear that the real origin of mass is from a physical phenomenon called the Higgs field. Which opens the question of where the Higgs field comes from, but okay, yes, I've heard that. While that claim is often seen in popular science stories, it turns out not to be true at all. Indeed, the Higgs field contributes very little to the mass of the Universe. The reality is far more interesting. Reality usually is. Except when it's not. The Higgs field was a theory devised in the 1960s as a kind of Band-Aid to save another theory that was popular at the time. Physicists had devised a theory that two of the known quantum forces – electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force – were actually two manifestations of a single underlying force: the electroweak force. (Electromagnetism is responsible for electricity, magnetism, light, and much of chemistry, while the weak nuclear force is responsible for certain forms of radiation.) And there it is again: punting the description of the weak nuclear force. I know I've said before that I've looked into it more closely, and it's way above my pay grade. There was a problem with this new and unified force — it predicted that all subatomic particles have zero mass. Which would, in turn, mean that nothing has mass, because everything is made up of subatomic particles (by "thing" here, I mean something made of matter). This is obviously and demonstrably false, much like Zeno's paradox can be refuted by walking out of the room. This Higgs field theory predicted the existence of a particle called the Higgs boson – often called “The God Particle” by some science reporters. Yeah, and they ought to have known better. If you add up all of the mass of all the quarks in our 200-pound person, you find that the quarks weigh about 4 pounds. I'm going to give this article a pass on conflating "mass" with "weight." This time. I think it conveys the right general idea. It turns out that inside each proton and neutron, the quarks are moving at very high speeds; indeed, these speeds can approach the speed of light. Kind of mind-blowing, yes? Protons and neutrons are very tiny balls, about a quadrillionth of a meter across. I'll give the "balls" thing a pass, too. If protons are composed of outrageously fast quarks held inside that tiny volume, there must be equally outrageously strong forces holding them together. Strong forces can also mean high energy... As I understand things (and I probably really don't), a "force" is carried by a massless particle, making this also counterintuitive. In fact, all matter is made of energy. In a (very loosely true) way, the pseudoscientific woo-woo crowd is right: We are all energy. Yeah, in a sense, they may be right about this one thing. Even a blind squirrel finds the occasional nut, as they say. Obviously, there's a lot more at the link, and you're not going to get the full gist of it by reading my few quotes. It's not very long, though. But what does it mean? Hell if I know. Meaning is the job of philosophers. |
| As an Aquarius, I'm way too skeptical to believe in astrology. I do, however, find it fascinating. This is akin to how I find Star Trek fascinating, but unlike astrology, the vast majority of people know that Star Trek is fiction. The belief in astrology, despite being scientifically debunked, can be attributed to a range of psychological factors that tap into how people think, perceive, and emotionally engage with information. And that's one of the reasons I find it fascinating. As there are 19 of these (the number of Zodiac constellations plus the number of traditional "planets"), I won't touch on each one. But here are some highlights: 1. Confirmation Bias People tend to pay closer attention to and primarily remember those astrological predictions that align with their knowledge, aspirations, goals, and desires, while ignoring or downplaying evidence that does not support them. I've banged on about confirmation bias here quite a bit. Everyone is susceptible to it, including me. I try to overcome it by identifying when and how it strikes, and attempting to be more critical of those articles that tickle my confirmation bias. Including this one. 3. Cognitive Dissonance People do not like admitting that they were wrong or that they’ve wasted their time and money on something that turns out to be a scam or simply not valid. I don't think that's what cognitive dissonance is. My understanding is that it's when you hold two (or more) conflicting beliefs in your mind at the same time. It can be uncomfortable. For belief in astrology to be considered as part of cognitive dissonance, then, one would need to also hold an acceptance of the scientific method and its findings, which indeed conflict with astrology. I do think we're all susceptible to cognitive dissonance, just like with confirmation bias. I could be wrong about that, though, and only one counterexample would be enough for me to abandon that belief. 4. Social Proof or the Bandwagon Effect Seeing large groups of people believe in astrology—not to mention that the practice has a long history, stemming from ancient times—can lead individuals to adopt the same attitude toward it. An idea being ancient is no reason to believe that it's true. Just because our ancestors were convinced the Earth was flat doesn't mean it's flat. Incidentally, I feel like believing in flat-earth and astrology is also cognitive dissonance. Yes, one can hold two false but mutually contradictory beliefs. To me, this is evidence that the human mind is actually pretty cool, even when it's wrong. 8. Cultural Conditioning and Cultural Pressure. Some cultures have made astrology a significant segment of their traditions and social interactions. One could make the same argument about religion. 11. The Placebo Effect and Emotional Reasoning Even though it is not scientifically valid, astrology can act as a trigger for a variety of positive psychological outcomes for those individuals who believe in its divinatory power. Which is one reason why I can't completely dismiss it. While I'm concerned about the potential harm of believing something that's simply not factual, such as superstitions, I can't deny that on occasion, belief can be a tool for personal growth. 15. Attribution Bias Astrology can offer external explanations for one’s successes or failures. But to me, that falls into the "harm" category. It can be scary to have agency, so some people give it up voluntarily. As I said, there's more at the link. I feel like many of them are applicable to other forms of belief without evidence, such as "natural" remedies (some of which do have evidence backing them up, but many are just magical thinking). To me, the mathematics and folklore behind it are what's interesting. It's kind of like myths or fables, or Shakespeare, to me: fiction, but an insight into human nature and the cultures that produced them. |
| How about some applied science from Gastro Obscura? How to Make Fluorescent Food A UV light and specific ingredients can make a dish or drink change color. Because the greatest thing about science is all the cool shit we can do with it. When I was in college, I went to a party that I’ll never forget. Then it wasn't that great a party. But the real spectacle was inside. There was not a piece of furniture to be seen. The walls of all the empty rooms were covered in newspapers, and all the overhead lights had been replaced with black-light bulbs, filling the air with a purple haze. I sometimes idly speculate whether you can still get those bulbs, and if they make LED versions. But I don't care enough to look it up. Of course, there was beer on offer, but everyone was drinking gin and tonics. Because of the black light, the drinks all glowed an eerie blue, due to the quinine in the tonic water. I've seen that effect. They used real quinine, though, not the severely watered-down stuff from Schweppes or Canada Dry. I don't know if it would still work with those; I think so, but not to the same intensity. In any case, a gin and tonic is one of Nature's most perfect cocktails. So when my coworker showed me a post about making a fluorescent cake, I knew I had to try baking one myself. Someone got baked, anyway. Extracted from the bark of the Peruvian cinchona tree, quinine was once the only known treatment for malaria. Legend has it the G&T was invented by Brits in India. They used quinine for its antimalarial properties, and to make it more palatable, they added London dry gin. Leave it to Brits to add gin to something to make it taste better. George Gabriel Stokes, the Irish physicist, coined the term fluorescence in 1852 after scientists observed that a quinine sulfate solution glowed when exposed to what is now known as UV light. Thus leading to possible confusion in chemistry class: it doesn't have much to do with the element fluorine, whose etymology has to do with "flow." Fluorescence was named for one fluorescent material, which happened to have fluorine in it. But fluorine isn't the only element that can be involved with fluorescence. Quinine doesn't contain fluorine. I told you it could be confusing. Outside the minibar and medicine cabinet, there’s another extremely common substance that gives off a shocking glow under ultraviolet light: chlorophyll. I don't have houseplants. Every time I've tried, they realized they were living with me and lacked locomotion, so committed suicide. But if I did, I'd totally put them under black light every once in a while. So I went to the health-food store and bought a tiny bottle of liquid chlorophyll—which some people consume for its supposed health benefits, ranging from weight loss to improving the skin. I don't doubt that vegetables have health benefits. Liquid chlorophyll sounds more like a duck: quack, quack, quack. The author goes on to describe the psychedelic-cake-making process, which didn't end up involving liquid chlorophyll solution. You know, in case you might want to try it. Personally, I at least see no harm in trying, but I don't know everything. Or you could simply pour yourself a glass of tonic water. The gin is optional. No, it is not. |
| Anyone remember a couple months ago, during the depths of the holiday season, when people panicked over mysterious lights in the sky over New Jersey? We even had some sightings here in Virginia. No? Don't remember? Yeah, maybe a few other things have happened since then, and we generally have the memory of a... whatever that fish is that has a short memory. Or maybe we all got mem-wiped for our own protection. Still, here's a reminder of other lights-in-the-sky incidents, from Gizmodo: An Incomplete List of the Times We’ve Panicked Over Lights in the Sky The planet has a not-so-proud tradition of getting scared about what it sees among the stars. And by "getting scared about what it sees among the stars," they don't mean an inauspicious horoscope. Hm. Inauspicious Horoscope should be the name of my Blue Öyster Cult cover band. We blotted out the stars and became frightened when we saw our own lights amidst the darkness. That's almost poetical. America is in the midst of a full-on drone panic and it’s gotten very stupid. People in the northeast part of the U.S. are freaking out about strange lights in the sky and spinning all kinds of conspiracy theories. Yeah, the article was timely when it came out. And to be fair, people are going to spin conspiracy theories no matter what happens. I think there's an official competition now, run by a shadowy worldwide cabal, to see how fast a conspiracy theory can go around the disc. I mean, study it out. We have been here before. Recently. And what’s frustrating, to me, about this is that we’ll do it all again in a few years. And when it happens, we don’t remember all the sky panics that have come before. Clearly, that's because there's a government agency tasked with removing our memories of certain encounters. It’s natural to be afraid of things we see in the sky and don’t understand. It’s been happening for hundreds of years. Try thousands. The only thing that changes, from century to century, is the explanation for the fear. The answer to that question tells you about the society that’s afraid, but it may not give you an explanation of what actually happened. There are only three possible explanations: supernatural entities such as angels or gods; extraterrestrial entities such as space aliens; or inimical foreign actors showing off their technological superiority. Okay, four: Maybe it's a helicopter. “We know for a fact that drones can sometimes be used to do harm, and we probably shouldn’t lose sight of that fact just because a bunch of people see drones in the sky that do not, in fact, exist.” Sure, and if we keep mocking the people who cry "drone!" the panic will lose its edge an no one will believe them when it actually is a drone. I believe there's an ancient fable warning us of that effect. In the last month of 2019 and the first month of 2020, people in Colorado were convinced they’d seen unexplained lights in the sky. So, did they not actually see the lights? The cases that could be verified and chased down had mundane answers. They were planes, commercial drones, and other common objects. And swamp gas. And weather balloons. In 2016, a passenger plane was landing at Heathrow International Airport when it collided with what it thought was a drone. I'm way more concerned that passenger planes have achieved sentience, which that sentence clearly implies. One of the first great panics about lights in the sky happened in Canada, not the U.S. Thus shoring up my hypothesis that people are easily spooked everywhere, not just in the US where we're used to the sound of random gunfire. No attack came and later some kids admitted to sending up balloons loaded with fireworks in a village near Brockville. They wanted to scare people. Well, mission accomplished, my poutine-munching friends! During World War II, America trained its citizens to be paranoid about what it saw in the sky. That was probably about as hard as training a cat to shit in a litter box. In 1947, a military balloon crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, and it kicked off the first great sky-watching panic of the post-war years. I see that They have gotten to this article's author and publisher already. Anyway, the article does end up giving a passing nod to pre-airplane sky sightings, because while the technology has changed over the years, the people really haven't. It is, as the author points out, perfectly natural for humans to fear what we don't understand or can't identify. But what really makes us human, I think, is to get over that fear, and work to understand and identify. Or make up conspiracies about it. That's human, too. |
| Well, it's Groundhog Day. Again. It's also Sunday, so we get to dredge up something from the murky depths of the past. Before I spin the wheels of the timeship today, a brief personal update. You remember how I promised myself I would drink every day in January, because the concept of Dry January deeply offends me? Well, remarkably, I did it. I actually followed through on a (sort-of) resolution, and managed to down at least one serving of alcoholic beverage every single day. Sometimes this meant taking a shot before midnight and then another one just after, but that's still "every day." It was harder than you might think, knowing me. I really don't drink every day, usually. Still, I feel boosted, poised, confident, because I actually did something I said I was going to do, powering through despite naysayers and my inner critic. I'll never be able to do that again. Fulfill a commitment, I mean. I'm absolutely drinking again, after I take a couple days off. Anyway, getting back to the past now. In September of 2021, I featured a Cracked article about an interesting historical figure: "Friend" The article it references is still available. I haven't been sharing much from that source recently—certainly less than I used to—because it seems to have become more about promoting various TV shows than providing interesting articles. Whatever; it's bounced back from crap before. Like the elevator industry, it has its ups and downs.As for the article itself, if "nonbinary doomsday prophet" doesn't hook you, nothing will. I really wouldn't change much about what I said back then. The only thing that jumps out is when I wrote "No, no relation." That made perfect sense to me at the time, but I can see where it might have been confusing. I was referring to the name Jemima, and joking about the person being no relation to Aunt Jemima. So I'll just comment on one quote from the article that I left out back then: This good news was that the world would soon end. Which might sound like bad news to some people, but times were tough in the 18th century, before Bluetooth and deodorant, and many were happy to hear Jesus was about to destroy everything and spirit us away. It has, of course, been a perennial American tradition for some doomsday prophet to come out of nowhere testifying for the end of days or whatever. It's happened again and again. Sometimes, it even happens outside of the US, but as with hamburgers and Black Friday, we do it more and better than anyone else. And they keep getting followers for it. I'm sure lots of doomsday prophets have popped up and, for lack of charisma or maybe just being introverted, didn't get the cultists they needed to become famous. But again and again, we've been subjected to end-of-the-world prophecies, with some prophets even declaring the exact date and time of the Rapture (or whatever), which, as I understand things, should be grounds for God to zap them with a lightning bolt. Or is that Zeus? I forget. Anyway, the point is, for a country that claims to love freedom and individuality, some of us are remarkably susceptible to following prophets of the End Times. And not just the religious kind, either. Nothing like a good scientific doomsday story, like the imminent Yellowstone Supervolcano (not actually imminent), the certain destruction of the biosphere by climate change (not going to be sudden), or maybe the impending supernova of Betelgeuse (won't have a damaging effect). But, face it, it's mostly the religious kind that gather minions and cause problems for everyone else. But sometimes we get great stories out of it. |
| Sometimes I'll hear about science that seems nearly useless, like, I don't know, the effectiveness of positive reinforcement whilst teaching pigs how to sing. But every so often, a study comes out that truly pushes the limits of human knowledge and has a profound effect on our everyday lives. Like this one, from a two-year-old article in Smithsonian: What Makes Cheddar Cheese Taste So Good? After a year-long cheddar-making experiment, scientists have unraveled the microbial underpinnings of the cheese’s buttery flavor And here I was, thinking that the buttery flavor of cheese is because it's made from the same stuff as butter. Another point against "common sense." Eating cheese, for many, is one of life’s great pleasures. Yep, it's right up there with eating good bread. And there are few greater pleasures than doing both at the same time. Gods, I miss France. And while cheese-makers and scientists have long understood that bacteria transforms milk into the creamy, flavor-packed product, they haven’t fully understood the roles different microorganisms play in developing the unique flavors of cheeses. Now, researchers are one step closer to unraveling some of this delicious mystery for cheddar. While the US just doesn't have the cheese culture that France does, or even the UK, cheddar (a cheese of British origin) is quite popular here and, from what I understand, pretty much everywhere. Cheese is a fermented food—just like beer, kombucha, kimchi and yogurt, to name a few. While I appreciate beer being categorized under "food" there, I don't think "just like" is the proper description. To produce it, cheese-makers add bacteria to milk. The bacteria chow down on the sugars present in the milk, transforming them into lactic acid—which helps give cheese (and other foods, like sourdough bread) its tangy taste. For one thing, yeast is an entirely different microorganism to bacteria. They're not even in the same kingdom; yeast is a eukaryote. To better understand what’s happening at the microbial level, researchers set up a cheddar-making experiment. This. This is what science is for. The article goes into how the experiment worked, then: Though past research has explored the roles of individual microorganisms, the paper “brings together the bacterial communication that are at play in the complex metabolic landscape that leads to the overall cheese flavor profiles,” says Bart Weimer... On a more serious note, this sort of thing really is different from a lot of science, which tends to work by isolating variables. This research combines variables, and acknowledges that cheese, like life, isn't all about the effect of one factor, but rather about the interplay between different factors. And look, I made it all the way through the article without making a cheesy pun. Well, except for the entry title. |
| I know I've banged on about this sort of thing before, but as long as I'm getting confirmation bias, I'm sharing it. From Inc., and from way back in 2018: Why ‘Early to Bed, Early to Rise’ Is a Myth (and Night Owls Can Finally Rejoice) Waking up early isn’t the secret to success–focusing on your chronotype is what’s more important. It's not a "myth." Franklin was trolling us. Nearly everything in this world is structured to suit those who sleep early and wake up with the sun. Otherwise known as "smug assholes." This indoctrination of needing to be an early riser starts as a little kid with our parents harping on us to go to sleep. Okay, wait a minute, here. Parents can be blamed for a lot of things, but this isn't one of them. Unless their kids are homeschooled, the parents are just accommodating the "nearly everything" suited for larks. And maybe trying to get an hour or two of peace in the evening, but who could blame them? And the kids learn the important life lesson of: the world's not going to change to suit you, so you have to change to suit the world. Of course, that doesn't excuse my father always bursting into my room at 6am every school day and shouting, "Rise and shine!" I'd growl, "Pick one." It’s centuries-old: Ben Franklin famously believed that “early to bed, early to rise” was ideal. No, he did not. That was satire. Franklin believed in staying up late, drinking heavily, banging supermodels, and waking up with a hangover at noon. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, but each of us are at our best at different times during that period. I'm probably at my best when I'm asleep, but that's just me. The days of needing to justify your late night habits or feel guilty about it are over. No, they're not. We have to be made to feel guilty for whatever we're doing. You're sleeping wrong. You're eating wrong. You're doinking wrong. Only by making us feel guilty can they sell us stuff to assuage that guilt. Religion figured this out millennia ago, and capitalism only caught on relatively recently. Anyway, the article ends with three "tips" that I'd feel free to ignore, personally. I'm more concerned with the problems surrounding the emphasis on "productivity," but I expect nothing better from that source. |
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