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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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Congratulations on winning an honorable mention for Best Blog at the 2018 Quill Awards for [Link To Item #1196512] . *^*Smile*^* This award was sponsored by the blogging consortium including [Link To Item #30dbc] , [Link To Item #blogcity] , [Link To Item #bcof] and [Link To Item #1953629] . For more details, see [Link To Item #quills] .](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/type-Blogging-2180.gif) ![Merit Badge in Highly Recommended
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| Well, here we are at the end of December, the end of 2019, and (in popular imagination anyway) the end of a decade. If I'm being pedantic, the decade ends a year and a day from now (2020 is a leap year). But let's not be pedantic. No one seems to know what to call this past decade. I came up with a name for the first decade of the 21st century: the noughties. It didn't catch on, though I did see the BBC use it once. It is, after all, rather British. I don't have a similarly awesome name for 2010-2019. Next month, I'm once again participating in "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  [13+], so I'll switch back to that format tomorrow. But for today, I have an older article from 2013. I selected it at random, but it's appropriate enough.http://nautil.us/blog/we-are-all-princes-paupers-and-part-of-the-human-family We Are All Princes, Paupers, and Part of the Human Family Chances are, if you have a famous ancestor far enough back that finding out about them is a surprise, you share them with a small city of other people. And the farther back you go, the truer that is. Chances are, you have a famous ancestor, period. Ghengis Khan if no one else. Or at least a significant one. This line of thought led to the revelation that everyone of European heritage alive today is a descendant of Charlemagne, who ruled over much of Europe as the first Holy Roman Emperor. That gives me an excuse to post one of my favorite songs. It doesn’t get any less weird when you look at it from the other angle: While you more than likely have four distinct grandparents and eight distinct great-grandparents, past a certain number of generations back, your number of ancestors stops growing exponentially, because they start being the same people. A good point. Stretch this back a few thousand years and you can see how you wind up being related to every other member of your species. Stretch this back a lot farther than that and you can see how you wind up being related to your cat. Geneticist Luke Jostins did a nice mathematical analysis and estimated that you have only about a 12 percent chance of being genetically related to an ancestor 10 generations ago; by the time you get to a 14-generation ancestor, the probability is nearly zero. And that's why having kids just to pass along your genes doesn't make any sense. Never bought that argument for it, and I have plenty of other reasons not to have reproduced, but people keep talking about it. Yeah, biological drive and all that, but we also evolved to understand these things and have the persistent illusion of choice. (There are, of course, plenty of other reasons to have kids, and for most people, these seem to overwhelm the reasons not to. That's okay. I'm just talking about my own choices here.) And the illustrious folks we might like to lay claim to have so many descendants that being descended from them is kind of a moot point. I have a friend whose brother traced their family line back to Pocahontas. I don't know how accurate the genealogy was, but it was a point of pride for him. While this is cool, if true, I didn't tell him he's probably not one in a million, but one of a million. The article ends with: We’re all part of this enormous human fabric, full of fascinating tendencies and bizarre biochemistry. And research is revealing more and more about humanity as a whole and our incredibly beautiful, incredibly unlikely perch in the universe. That’s a tradition to be proud of. There is no "us" and "them." If I had one wish for the twenties, it would be that we continue to work toward ending tribalism, or at least its more negative effects. It's not going to happen, but the end of the year is traditionally the time for hopes, right? |
| I haven't talked about it much recently, but I'm still working on learning French on Duolingo. 123 day streak as of yesterday. I can now ask a French person what color his or her cat is, and maybe find a hotel. Yay? I'm under no illusion that I could go to Paris tomorrow (well, I could, but that's another story) and carry on a conversation in anything but English. Still, linguistics has long been one of my interests, and I'm kicking myself that it's taken me this long to learn a useful language (Latin doesn't count, and besides, I've forgotten most of it). So today's link is about English. English is not normal No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. Um... have you seen French? But English is not normal. No, it's Norman. Get it? Norman invasion of... oh, never mind. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is. Which generally requires learning other languages. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian Some would say Scots, but others call that a dialect of English. I don't know enough to make a case either way. What I do know is that the Frisians were closely related to the Angles, and it's the Angles who gave their name to English, so, okay. Fun fact: the French word for England is Angleterre. You probably already knew that. I didn't. I do now. Thinking about it, I'm surprised their name for England isn't much ruder, what with their history and all. We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. Well, again, Latin training here - I'm used to words having gender. What I'm not used to is such assignations not making any damn sense. I know that language gender doesn't necessarily correlate with human gender, but still. The word for "cow" is feminine, okay. "Milk" is masculine, what? "Car?" Feminine. And don't get me started on body parts. No, get your minds out of the gutter; Duolingo didn't teach me the word for "breasts" (I figured that one out from *ahem* other sources *cough* long ago). I mean, like, arm is masculine, hand is feminine, leg is feminine, foot is masculine, mouth is feminine, head is feminine... nose is masculine. Quoi le fuck? As an aside, the French word for "shower" is douche. (Also feminine, while "bath" is masculine.) I mean, I knew that's what the English word "douche" came from, but knowing and having to translate it are two different things. One day, I will stop reflexively snorting like a 12 year old every time that comes up on Duolingo. That day is not today. It's probably not tomorrow, either. Hopefully it will be before I'm in a hotel in Paris and have to call down to the front desk to complain that the shower isn't clean. La Réception: "Bonjour?" Moi: "La douche *snicker* n'est pas propre... *snort*." LR: "Pardon, monsieur?" Moi: "La douche- heeheeha" LR: "Est-ce que vous êtes américain?" Moi: snicker "Oui" snort LR: *hangs up* Anyway. Why is our language so eccentric? Just what is this thing we’re speaking, and what happened to make it this way? I saved a quote from the dark recesses of the internet once: "I always thought of English as the bastard child of an orgy of languages ending with a huge bukkake leaving German covered in the messy splooge of all the others. German is seeking a paternity test while Latin fled the scene and French is denying everything." No idea who first posted it, but I stole it fair and square. The first thing that got us from there to here was the fact that, when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes (and also Frisians) brought their language to England, the island was already inhabited by people who spoke very different tongues. Ah, yes, the old "We're taking over now." "Screw you and your stupid language." The second thing that happened was that yet more Germanic-speakers came across the sea meaning business. By "business" he means "war." Finally, as if all this wasn’t enough, English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages. After the Norse came the French. The Normans – descended from the same Vikings, as it happens – conquered England, ruled for several centuries and, before long, English had picked up 10,000 new words. Then, starting in the 16th century, educated Anglophones developed a sense of English as a vehicle of sophisticated writing, and so it became fashionable to cherry-pick words from Latin to lend the language a more elevated tone. "Firehose." Right. You know he wanted to use the Japanese term from the anonymous quote above. The multiple influxes of foreign vocabulary also partly explain the striking fact that English words can trace to so many different sources – often several within the same sentence. And that's why I've been interested in linguistics. Thus the story of English, from when it hit British shores 1,600 years ago to today, is that of a language becoming delightfully odd. I think actual linguists have a different definition of "delightfully" than you or I do. Or than people who have to learn English as a second (third, fourth, whatever) language do. The article provides an interesting perspective, I think. Nothing surprising in it, no world-shattering discoveries, but an excellent overview of our sometimes-maddening language. |
| https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/03/why-exercise-alone-wont-save-us Article's a year old now, but it refers to New Years resolutions, so it's cycled back again. Why exercise alone won’t save us Our relationship with exercise is complicated. Reports from the UK and the US show it is something we persistently struggle with. As the new year rolls around, we anticipate having the drive to behave differently and become regular exercisers, even in the knowledge that we will probably fail to do so. Why do we want to exercise? What do we expect it to do for us? We all know we are supposed to be exercising, but hundreds of millions of us can’t face actually doing it. It is just possible the problem lies at the heart of the idea of exercise itself. Well, duh. It's a pain in the ass and always takes longer than you think, what with having to change clothes twice, probably shower, and maybe get to the gym or back. Like, I always think, "30 minutes on the treadmill and then some weight-pumping" and I end up being gone for nearly 2 hours. Evidence about bone strength and density gleaned from fossils of early humans suggests that, for hundreds of thousands of years, normal levels of movement were much higher than ours today. You know how I'm always bitching about evolutionary arguments? Specifically, there, I'm bitching about wild speculation about how psychological, not physical, traits evolved. The former is guesswork; the latter is revealed by some physical evidence. Whether they're interpreting the evidence reasonably is another issue. After two centuries of trying, we should accept that exercise is not working as a global fitness strategy while it remains an addition to the working day. In the long view, it is starting to look a lot like a fad. Government guidelines in the UK and other countries that encourage sport and exercise are failing. These strategies struggle because we are trying to get people to give up what little leisure time they have to pursue activities that require substantial additional effort. I have a different take on it. First of all, technology got us to this point because it kept inventing things to make our lives easier, as the article points out. Consequently, the obvious solution is technology that keeps our bodies from falling apart if we don't exercise. I think I've posted stuff before decrying the common idea that failing to keep oneself fit is considered a moral failure, a failure of will, whatever - basically, YOUR FAULT. Instead, if we really cared about this sort of thing, we could put all of our efforts to developing a Leisure Pill - something that allows us to sit around all day with no ill effects. You may dismiss this idea as the "easy way out," but the "easy way out" is apparently what got us here; it works for us, and we're really, really good at it, so why not extend the concept? Second, maybe we're looking at all of this the wrong way. The hidden assumption underlying all of these health articles is that the goal is to live longer. Of course, few people want to die, but after seeing two parents live into their 80s and beyond, both dying of mental degeneration, I'm not sure that a longer life is necessarily better. There's something to be said for living life the way you want to. Sure, you could stay active, eat no more than 1100 calories a day, don't drink, don't smoke, breathe filtered air, never climb a mountain, avoid driving, etc., and science says you could live a lot longer. And hey, if that's how you want to live your life, great. But if it's not, if you're more of a hedonist like me, does it really make sense to give up the pleasures that make life worth living, for the possibility - not the guarantee, but the possibility - of a few more years of elderly frailty? |
| Nothing intellectually challenging today. Just an interesting bit of trend reporting. https://www3.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/03/06/miss-walls-cry-for-help-from-woman... People in open-concept homes are realizing the walls were there for a reason When Star Trek premiered on TV back in the 60s, camera equipment was bulky as hell. Ever wondered why the corridors were about five times as wide as they needed to be? It was so they could track with the cameras. It doesn't make sense that there would be wasted space on a starship, but that show, more than any other, has informed our ideas of what a spaceship should look like. Contrast that with the 1960s reality of space capsules smaller than the cars of the period. I mention this because I'm pretty well convinced that open-concept housing became so popular because it's easier to display on TV. “In our old house,” said Didonna, a financial analyst, “I’d come home and make dinner and my husband would be watching TV in the other room, and a good portion of the evening we’d be apart.” She got her togetherness, all right, in a glorious new house in Millbury. Now when she cooks and her husband watches TV, he’s in full view. Relaxing. While she works. “Frankly it’s annoying,” she said. A real estate agent has been called. “I miss walls,” she said. You probably also miss actually communicating with your spouse. Real estate agent? You lot need to call a marriage counselor. I say this with great hypocrisy; I've been known to sit back and smoke a cigar on the front stoop while watching my wife mow the lawn (in my defense, I had a bad back). Now I don't have a wife. I don't fail to see the connection. I think our ideas of how we're supposed to live pretty much come from popular culture. And like I said above, some of these things just track better on TV. It's easier to film a scene where one person is cooking and the other is sitting on the couch if you can do it in one shot. It's also cheaper to do set design with fewer props, and so the "uncluttered" look became the ideal. Is it "life imitates art" or "art imitates life?" I can never remember which was the original platitude and which was the parody. Honestly, I vacillate, myself. I've lived in the same house for something like 25 years now - much longer than I lived in my childhood home - and not only do I like the house, but I like the neighborhood and I like the city. Every time I think of living somewhere else, I think of all the things I have here and go, "...nah." And yet I yearn for the unfamiliar at times, which is why I travel, and it's also why sometimes I think about what it might be like to live elsewhere. If I did, though, would I want an open-concept design, or a partitioned one? I don't have kids, so family time isn't a consideration. I do have friends, and I've been known to host parties at my place, and open-concept would work for that. I'm also quite a lousy housekeeper; I like my stuff (I say again, fuck you, Marie Kondo), and I have a lot of stuff. I'll never conform to the Spartan ideal of minimalist living. So having extra rooms just to keep all the stuff in would be nice. One thing I'd never do, though, that I find extraordinarily amusing: the "show kitchen." It reminds me of the WASP habit of carefully furnishing a living room, say, and then never letting anyone so much as set foot in it for fear its museum-quality pristine shine would be tarnished by an errant footstep denting the carpet. I remember visiting such people when I was younger, and they were always quick to show me the precisely arranged "living" room whilst barring entry to its sacred space. Seemed to me like a waste of money and room. So it is with the show kitchen. But hey, whatever works for you. I do reserve the right to snark about it. |
| I know some people have issues with Inc as a source, but the content of this particular article intrigued me. https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/the-single-reason-why-people-cant-write-acco... The Single Reason Why People Can't Write, According to a Harvard Psychologist This common affliction is behind so much unclear and confusing writing in the world today. My biggest gripe is that the headline is misleading. It's not about why people can't write; it's about why people sometimes can't understand what we write. These are questions Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker asks in his book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. They're questions I've often encountered --and attempted to tackle-- throughout my career as a business writer and editor. My second biggest gripe is that this author seems to be shilling for Pinker's book. I have my own issues with Steven Pinker, but again, the points raised here can be valid. Whenever I see writing that is loaded with jargon, clichés, technical terms, and abbreviations, two questions come immediately to mind. First, what is the writer trying to say, exactly? And second, how can the writer convey her ideas more clearly, without having to lean on language that confuses the reader? Could it be that you're not the intended audience? For Pinker, the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls "the Curse of Knowledge", which he defines as "a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose." Well... sometimes. Other times, it's because of a tenuous grasp of language and structure. "How can we lift the curse of knowledge?" asks Pinker. "A considerate writer will...cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms, as in 'Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant,' rather than the bare 'Arabidopsis.' It's not just an act of magnanimity: A writer who explains technical terms can multiply her readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk." Fair enough. Language, as I see it, can be like a compression algorithm. To follow the advice given here, I'll explain that a compression algorithm is what lets you turn what could be a huge file on the computer into a much smaller one, saving space. The tradeoff is that you then need to decompress it, unpack it, expand it, whatever, in order to be useful in an application or to read a text file. To further follow the advice in the article, I'll give an example, albeit a simple one. To describe the position of a car or an airplane, we can use latitude, longitude, and elevation - as well as a time coordinate. To describe the position of a ball in a room, we can use three different distances along the x, y, and z axes (also in addition to time). We can also describe its velocity, or change in position with respect to time. The word "velocity" here is an expansion of "change in position with respect to time;" we say "velocity" to compress the longer phrase. Similarly, we can use "acceleration" to pack in "change in velocity with respect to time," or "change in change in position with respect to time with respect to time," which gets really unwieldy, which is why we say "acceleration" instead. Most people know what that means on an intuitive level, because we experience it on occasion (technically, we experience it constantly because of gravity, but that's irrelevant to the discussion). Like I said, that's a simple example, even if the actual description of the relationship between position, velocity, and acceleration involves calculus. Calculus was invented, in part, as a compression algorithm. But we take shortcuts like that all the time, as writers. A reader, encountering a new word, can choose to ignore it; or they can choose to glean some meaning from context; or (remarkably easy nowadays if reading on a screen) they can look up its definition. The definition unpacks it. But if you know the word to begin with, you already have the code internalized. As easy as it is to look words up if they're on a screen, doing so repeatedly can be frustrating. So, yeah. As someone once said, "eschew obfuscation ."See, that's funny because those are not common words and are thus themselves obfuscatory, and... aw, hell, once you explain a joke, it's no longer a joke. Jokes are also compression algorithms. If you don't have the code to unpack them, you won't get the joke. As Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't." And see, right there? I know who Richard Feynman was. But if you didn't, the extraordinarily brief nutshell biography provided by this writer at least says, "Oh, Feynman wasn't just some schlub; he was a supergenius." Feynman was good at explaining physics to the masses; further, the thing he's most known for in nerd circles, the Feynman diagram, compresses complex and intricate quantum mechanics equations into simple scribbles. Not that you (or I) are expected to understand these things, but the point is, I think, on some level, he knew that any language - English, or mathematics - was something that occasionally needed to be expanded in order to be understood, and compressed in order to facilitate communication. I know I sometimes fall into the trap of assuming that because I know something, everyone else must know it too. But the polar opposite of that is assuming that your audience is ignorant (not necessarily stupid, just ignorant). Good writing, I think, strikes the perfect middle ground between getting your point across succinctly, and overexplaining everything. There are also people who seem to just write to show off how brilliant they are. A lot of postmodern deconstructionist screeds do that, peppering the essays with words you can only learn after at least four years of liberal arts studies. As an example, I refer you to the following; more criticism of the following quote can be found here .In Terrorist Assemblages I propose a rapproachment of Foucauldian biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s critique of it through what I call a ‘bio-necro collaboration’, one that conceptually acknowledges biopower’s direct activity to death, while remaining bound to the optimalization of life, and necropolitics’ nonchalance towards death even as it seeks out killing as a primary aim. I allege that it is precisely within the interstices of life and death that we find the differences between queer subjects who are being folded (back) into life and the racialized queernesses that emerge through the naming of populations, thus fueling the oscillation between the disciplining of subjects and control of populations. The result of the successes of queer incorporation into the domains of consumer markets and social recognition in the post-civil rights, late twentieth-century era, these various entries by queers into the biopolitics optimalization of life mark a shift, as homosexual bodies have been historically understood as endlessly cathected to death, from being figures of death (i.e., the AIDS pandemic) to becoming tied to ideas of life and productivity (i.e., gay marriage and reproductive kinship). I don't know about you, but my brain stops about halfway through the first sentence and doesn't start up again. The author may, indeed, have good points to make, but any such are obscured by jargon. |
| Well, Christmas is over, which means New Year's Day is coming up fast. Which means, for many people, resolutions. Which means failing at them at a breakneck pace. So today's blurgle is about self-control. Or, rather, lack thereof. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/11/3/13486940/self-control-psycholog... The myth of self-control Psychologists say using willpower to achieve goals is overhyped. Here’s what actually works. Incidentally, I am so not looking forward to dealing with the gym after next Tuesday. It'll be stuffed full of amateurs taking up space on the machines, and I expect to spend as much time waiting for a damn weight machine as I do exercising. Maybe for the first two weeks of January, I'll go at like 2 am. It's a 24 hour gym and even the most hardcore resolutionists probably won't swarm the place until 5. After those two weeks, it'll be less crowded. I figure by my birthday in mid-February, it'll be back to normal. As the Bible tells it, the first crime committed was a lapse of self-control. Eve was forbidden from tasting the fruit on the tree of knowledge. But the temptation was too much. The fruit was just so “pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom,” Genesis reads. Who wouldn’t want that? Humanity was just days old, but already we were succumbing to a vice. I've come to understand that particular story as a metaphor for prehistoric human awakening - that moment when some human looked at the stars, maybe, and instead of seeing stars, saw potential. But that's not really relevant. “Effortful restraint, where you are fighting yourself — the benefits of that are overhyped,” Kentaro Fujita, a psychologist who studies self-control at the Ohio State University, says. Lately, I've envisioned temptation this way: you're underwater, about to drown. You can see light above you; it's the surface. Every move you make is, ostensibly, under your control: arms pushing at the water, legs kicking, even holding one's breath. But really, these motions aren't willful, even if under other circumstances, they are. You can, perhaps, direct them, but except in the most rare of circumstances, you can't force yourself to stop. You will claw your way to the surface, no matter what. That feeling, that desperation, is hijacked when a wannabe ex-smoker sees a cigarette, or when someone like me sees a pizza. Speaking of which: A recent national survey from the University of Chicago finds that 75 percent of Americans say a lack of willpower is a barrier to weight loss. And yet the emerging scientific consensus is that the obesity crisis is the result of a number of factors, including genes and the food environment — and, crucially, not a lack of willpower. Every day, on my way to the gym and back, I have to pass a Krispy Kreme. Twice. So far, I've talked myself out of visiting. Many of us assume that if we want to make big changes in our lives, we have to sweat for it. But if, for example, the change is to eat fewer sweets, and then you find yourself in front of a pile of cookies, researchers say the pile of cookies has already won. Now that you've talked about it, it's already already won. “Our prototypical model of self-control is angel on one side and devil on the other, and they battle it out,” Fujita says. “We tend to think of people with strong willpower as people who are able to fight this battle effectively. Actually, the people who are really good at self-control never have these battles in the first place.” My own personal angel is battered from being flicked off of my shoulder whenever temptation strikes. 1) People who are better at self-control actually enjoy the activities some of us resist — like eating healthy, studying, or exercising. I don't like eating healthy, but I've arranged things so that I either have to do it, or do work to not eat healthy, and I'm allergic to work. With exercise, it's a bit different for me; I despise exercise but I like how it makes me feel afterward, so I try to focus on that. It's the same sort of idea as beating one's head against the wall because it feels so good when one stops. 2) People who are good at self-control have learned better habits I think daily exercise has become a habit for me, now. But I'm terrified that as easily as I learned the habit, I could fall out of it. “People who are good at self-control … seem to be structuring their lives in a way to avoid having to make a self-control decision in the first place,” Galla tells me. That tracks. One of the main reasons I get groceries delivered - apart from the aforementioned work allergy, and I consider driving to the store, pushing a cart down the aisle, standing in a checkout line, driving home, schlepping the bags inside, and putting everything away to be work - is because at the grocery store, I inevitably find myself drawn magnetically to the Oreos display, and the cookies have already won. Yeah, delivery is more expensive, but I figure between the lack of Oreos and lower health care bills, I'm still ahead. 3) Some people just experience fewer temptations People are different from each other. Who knew? 4) It’s easier to have self-control when you’re wealthy Yeah... I'm going to need some more convincing here. Take the Oreos again for example (no, really - take the damn Oreos away from me). I'm not poor, so I don't even look at the prices on the Oreos display shelves; I just grab one or six packages. Someone for whom money is tight might look at the prices and then go deeper into debt to obtain them. Assuming they're not one of the lucky ones for whom Oreos aren't a temptation at all, as per #3 above. Another intriguing idea is called “temptation bundling,” in which people make activities more enjoyable by adding a fun component to them. One paper showed that participants were more likely to work out when they could listen to an audio copy of The Hunger Games while at the gym. What little I've read of that series is written in present tense. If I have to read more than a short story in present tense, I get angry and then I want a donut. I'm not saying it's a bad story - I saw the movie and enjoyed it well enough - but reading, or listening to it, would be counterproductive to me. But then, I listen to boring science / math / philosophy lectures while working out, which is probably other peoples' idea of Hell, so whatever works. “Because even if the angel loses most of the time, there’s a chance every now and again the angel will win,” Fujita says. He's going to have to recover from his injuries, first. |
| Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it. As for me, well, a few days ago Drunk Me got into my Amazon account and ordered the final book in a fantasy series I've been following (Brent Weeks, if you're curious, or even if you're not), so I'll be spending the day reading the massive tome. Thanks for the holiday gift, Drunk Me! You shouldn't have! Nah, I'd have bought it sober eventually. But then, seeing articles like this one kinda makes me want to drink: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/astrology-in-the-age-of-uncertaint... Astrology in the Age of Uncertainty Millennials who see no contradiction between using astrology and believing in science are fuelling a resurgence of the practice. Fuck your stupid generation demographical nonsense again, but still, the article has some interesting stuff in it. “That is one of my favorite things, as a Leo and as a person—building community,” she said. It was a little before eight-thirty, and some of the fifty-two participants—who had paid between $19.99 and $39.99 each—were typing hellos; one woman, in Europe, had set her alarm for 2:30 A.M., to log in. You know, I can't even work up outrage over people making money from astrology. Gotta keep the economy going somehow, and I don't know many astrologers with private jets (likely, the planets never told them when would be the optimal time to buy one). In its penetration into our shared lexicon, astrology is a little like psychoanalysis once was. At mid-century, you might have heard talk of id, ego, or superego at a party; now it’s common to hear someone explain herself by way of sun, moon, and rising signs. Psychoanalysis has had - probably still has - its problems, to be sure. Freud is all but dethroned as anything except the guy who started it all, and many closely-held beliefs of early psychology have been turned on their head - "id, ego or superego" among them. But you know, that's how science works: Make a theory. Test the theory. Revise or replace the theory. (That's an oversimplification of the scientific method, but bear with me here.) Just as medicine moved away from balancing the humors and whatnot, psychology advances, in fits and starts, as more studies are done and more data collected. They learn from their failures - most times. There is no science to astrology. I mean, okay, there's math, but as this article points out, that's all done by computer programs now; I'd wager few of these younger astrologers could compute charts by hand as it used to be done. But computing the chart is only the first step; next up is interpreting it. And there's no science to that; only the accumulated guesswork of generations of astrologers. Sure, sometimes it seems to be right, even scary right. There's a lot of stuff at work there, not the least of which is confirmation bias. Back when I was genuinely interested in the practice, a friend of mine who's an accomplished astrologer wanted to do my natal chart. Thing is, I have no idea what time I was born (as the article points out, this is essential). I know the day, and the place, but not the time, and obviously over the course of the 24 hour day any one of the 12 star signs could be "rising." And supposedly the rising sign (the zodiac sign subtended by the eastern horizon) is third in importance only to sun sign and moon sign - which, in my case, are the same thing. So. If there's any science to it at all, we ought to be able to work backwards. I had a pretty good idea of my personality and, being my friend, so did he. So, in theory, if you subtract the influence of sun-in-Aquarius and moon-in-Aquarius, the dominant aspect that remains would be my rising sign, et voilà, I'd know to within a couple of hours the time I was born. It shouldn't come as a surprise that every one of the 12 possible rising signs had near-fits to my actual personality. That's the thing about us Aquarians: we're highly skeptical of astrology. Anyway, I'm not really feeling like quoting more from the article. I've never been a fan of The New Yorker's preferred highbrow, rambling style that usually circles the point like a dog about to take a nap - if it ever gets to the point in the first place. This doesn't, really; it just goes on and on about how different people approach astrology. But, as unscientific as it is, I just can't work up to the point where I get mad about it. Energy crystals? Hogwash. Homeopathy? Dangerous hogwash. UFOlogy? Balderdash. Prosperity gospel? Fraudulent balderdash. Can it be dangerous? Sure. As the article points out, that utter asshat Reagan was a fan; imagine consulting an astrologer to decide when would be the optimum time to launch nukes. But that's an edge case; most of us don't have access to the national weaponry. The way I see it, in the world we live in, we're overwhelmed with choices, and it can be paralyzing. Everything from which laundry detergent to buy to which restaurant to visit is fraught with possibilities that even our recent ancestors would have boggled at. If some people want to turn to the skies and those who interpret them to help them make such choices? I get it. Sometimes I roll the dice, like I do when I decide which of my many waiting articles to post here; that's as good as astrology. I just wish more people actually looked at the stars. Maybe that'd get 'em out of the gutter. In parting, since it's Christmas, enjoy my favorite holiday song: |
| Despite occasionally falling prey to sleep paralysis, sleeping is one of my primary favorite activities. So yeah, occasionally I post articles about it, like this one. https://aeon.co/essays/the-cure-for-insomnia-is-to-fall-in-love-with-sleep-again... Falling for sleep When wakefulness is seen as the main event, no wonder so many have trouble sleeping. Can we rekindle the joy of slumber? Sleep has been transformed from a deeply personal experience to a physiological process; from the mythical to the medical; and from the romantic to the marketable. Our misconstrued sense of sleep and consequent obsession with managing it are the most critical overlooked factors in the contemporary epidemic of sleep loss. Okay, look, science is a good thing overall. The more we learn about ourselves, the world, and the universe, the better. That doesn't mean we have to stop being poetic about things. People with insomnia also suffer immensely by night. Beyond obvious frustrations around their thwarted efforts, and growing anxieties about the consequences of ongoing poor sleep, many also experience loneliness, shame and hopelessness. Causation, correlation, or reverse causation? We can no longer deny the striking parallel between global warming and chronic inflammation. Ultimately, our excessive consumption of energy overheats the planet and its people, both of which need to cool at night to sleep. Chronic inflammation can literally raise our core body temperature to a near-feverish point, overheating our brains and bodies and disrupting our sleep. This is what is known as "a stretch." Thomas Edison led a popular charge to dominate and even eliminate sleep. Thomas Edison was a dick. Medicalisation reduces sleep to just another health regimen, so we attempt to manage it the way we do exercise, stress and diet. We compulsively tweak our sleep with an endless stream of expert tips from countless books, articles and blogs. When these patchwork fixes fail, which they inevitably do, we are vulnerable to the seduction of direct-to-consumer advertising for sleeping pills. Who's this "we?" I've had trouble sleeping in the past, but always avoided sleeping pills. Though I will admit to occasionally popping a muscle relaxer (prescribed for other reasons) to help me get to sleep. Great philosophers have taught that most of us mistake the limits of our own perception for the limits of the universe. Nowhere is this conundrum more relevant than in our contemporary take on sleep. We are mired in a pre-Copernican-like, wake-centric era regarding consciousness. We presume waking to be the centre of the universe of consciousness, and we relegate sleeping and dreaming to secondary, subservient positions. This, now... I like this analogy. Is it possible that our more modern sense of the divine encourages hyperarousal? After all, the Judeo-Christian God rarely descends from his abode in the heavens and is known to have worked relentlessly for days on end before taking a day of rest. In sharp contrast, although capable of flight, the gods of antiquity were grounded. They lived on earth, atop a mountain, or like Nyx and Hypnos, underground. Although Nyx ascended nightly in devotion to her duty, she faithfully returned to her subterranean abode for daily rest. And then another stretch. Though I think there might be a causal influence from organized religion, it's, again, the Puritanical drive to always be productive - and one cannot be productive while sleeping. As the body settles into bed, our challenge is to let go of our ordinary mind, our waking sense of self. This part of us, the part of us we usually call I, is simply incapable of sleeping. It can walk us to the shoreline of the sea of sleep, but it can’t swim. Ever been frustrated that you can't point to a single instant and go: This is where I fell asleep? I have. Anyway, the article provides an interesting perspective, I think. While the author sometimes trails off into breathy numinous fogs of speculation, I liked the basic theme, and it's worth reading especially if you have a troubled relationship with sleep. I've seen a few answers to the question, "why do we sleep?" Some of them are purely scientific: it's when memories get fixed in our minds; it cleans the brain of excess proteins; etc. But I also accept personal and psychological reasons. For me, it's a reset button. Like sometimes you have to reboot your computer because it's doing weird shit? That's sleep, for me. Which doesn't explain why I do weird shit all the time, not just when I'm tired. |
| Sometimes in here I like to address the Big Questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Why does my cat knock things off the table? This is not one of those times. https://thehustle.co/the-worst-sales-promotion-in-history/ The worst sales promotion in history 27 years ago, Hoover offered two free international flights with any £100 purchase. Today, it’s remembered as the worst sales promotion in history. There have been a few corporate flubs over the years. The 1986 Coke Crisis comes to mind. I barely survived that dark time. But this... this amuses me on several levels. In 1908, a department store janitor named James Murray Spangler was suffering from a mean case of dust allergies. So, he did what any entrepreneurial asthmatic would do: he mounted a motorized fan motor on a carpet sweeper and filed a patent for the world’s first household vacuum cleaner. Spangler soon sold the patent to his cousin’s husband, William Hoover, who launched The Hoover Company and began selling the devices all over the US and Europe. It is often fun and enlightening to speculate how things might be if something had gone just a bit differently in the past. Hell, whole books and movies have been founded upon such alternate timelines. But it's difficult to imagine an alternate universe in which "Spangler" became a household verb. "Yeah, I'm gonna spangler that right up." "It was dusty until I spanglered the hell out of the floor." I suppose an argument could be made that you could back-form the verb "spangle" from it, but that verb already has a meaning, as displayed in the US National Anthem. For decades, the Hoover brand enjoyed a near-monopoly on vacuum cleaner sales. The machines were so ubiquitous in England that ‘hoover’ became a generic noun (like Kleenex or Band-Aid), used as a synonym for ‘vacuum.’ Its provenance earned it a reputation as one of the world’s most trusted brands. Some companies consider this to be the pinnacle of marketing - to be able to get people to use their name as a generic noun. Coca-Cola succeeded in parts of the US. But the latest example is Uber. "I Ubered over here," I've heard. Which is unfortunate, because Uber is kind of a shitty company (their drivers tend to be nice, though). The UK was entering the throes of a recession, and Hoover, a US-based company with a large presence in the UK, faced stiff competition from sexy newcomers like Dyson. In an effort to compete, they rolled out ill-fated products like a “talking vacuum” that warned users when to change the dustbin. Yeah, come on. Who wants a household appliance that talks to them? "Alexa, who wants a household appliance that talks to them?" Hoover knew that if everyone who bought a product applied, it’d be in trouble — so it made the process of obtaining these flights as annoyingly time consuming as possible: 1 A customer buys a Hoover product for £100+ and mails in a receipt + application within 14 days of purchase. 2 Hoover sends a registration form; the customer has 14 days to send it back. 3 Hoover sends a travel voucher; the customer has 30 days to select 3 departure airport, date, and destination combinations. 4 Hoover has the right to reject the customer’s choices; the customer can select 3 alternatives. 5 Hoover also has the right to reject these alternatives and select 3 combinations of its own choosing; if they don’t work, the customer is out of luck. You could get away with that sort of thing before the internet. Now, companies have to be really creative in discouraging people from taking them up on their offers. Like airlines who offer free miles, but only if you fly between June 22 and 23 on flights that have a minimum of four legs, and checked baggage fees are $250. On November 1, 1992, Hoover expanded its free ticket offer to include flights to America. Dear Brits: We don't destroy your economy on purpose. Pinky swear. Initially, things went according to plan. Department stores all over the UK became an “uncivilized scene” as thousands of people clammored[sic] to buy the cheapest Hoover products they could find. In the US, an "uncivilized scene" in a department store means someone has shit all over the merchandise, someone else's kid is puking on the checkout counter, two women are clawing each other's faces off over the last tube of black eyeliner, and there's a gunfight in Housewares. I suspect that an "uncivilized scene" in a British department store involves a few raised voices and cops going "Wot's all this then?" So, Hoover began to do everything it could to fleece customers out of the free flights. It claimed thousands of customers had failed to correctly fill out the forms. It wrote back offering flights that departed from airports hundreds of miles away from customers’ homes. It sent out request forms on Christmas Eve, hoping mail closures would cause people to miss the 14-day deadline to send them back in. And thus it becomes a textbook case of How To Piss Off Your Employees, Customers, and Shareholders Simultaneously. Customers who’d followed all the rules were told their letters had “gone missing,” or that they’d failed to spot some arbitrary deadline buried in fine print. Honestly, I figured every company with generous-looking promotion offers did this. One of them, Harry Cichy, formed Hoover Holiday Pressure Group, a coalition to hold Hoover accountable for what they’d promised. It swelled to more than 4k members — doctors, lawyers, pig farmers, and electricians. So, three honest professions, and lawyers. In June of ‘93, 42-year-old Dave Dixon took a more dramatic measure: Angered that he hadn’t yet received his free flights, he decided to hold a Hoover delivery van hostage in his driveway in Workington, England. It remained blockaded by his horse truck for 13 days until a high court finally ordered its release. This is the most British thing since drinking tea and eating crumpets whilst watching Doctor Who. Incidentally, it would be difficult for me to post pics here so you'll just have to click the link and scroll down. Near the bottom is a montage of headlines that presumably ran in UK papers. I am disappointed that only a few of them contain "vacuum" or "flight" puns. I expect better from British tabloids. And Hoover vacuums, once the star of every living room in the UK, sit in closets gathering dust. Boy, that sucks. (Come on, you knew I had to make that pun somewhere.) |
| Normally, I pick things kinda randomly from my list of potential subjects, but as the solstice was at just 11:20 pm yesterday - not that long ago; in fact, it hasn't even happened yet as I start writing this - I wanted to do something appropriate for the season. The article is a couple of years old now, and then some, but it's still timely. https://narratively.com/meet-the-modern-day-pagans-who-celebrate-the-ancient-god... Meet the Modern-Day Pagans Who Celebrate the Ancient Gods I mean, really, I thought pretty much everybody knew about this sort of thing by now, but apparently not. First thing you see at that link is a photo. They're wearing nametags. For some reason I find that hilarious. It is high summer, and we are at White Mountain Druid Sanctuary in southern Washington State. Under the immensity of the mountain, a couple of ramshackle barns stick up from the hayfields. Our priest, a straight-backed, snow-haired man, is delivering a homily on the attributes of the thunder god. Taranis, a powerful thunderbolt-tossing deity, is being honored at today’s solstice celebration because of his association with light, weather and sky. To be fair, I hadn't heard of Taranis, and I've spent a good bit of time learning about different deities of different cultures. As with food, I suppose, there's always something else to learn. I like that. There is a large wooden lodge with bed-and-breakfast facilities, meditation huts, and a stone circle straight out of Stonehenge, where, upon my arrival, about fifty people were pouring whiskey into deep wells and speaking Gaelic. I understand the "sacrifice" aspect of modern Druidry, but I still gotta hope it was cheap whiskey. The Druids I've known were obsessed with mead. Fine individuals, all of them, but as a dedicated aficionado of all things fermented and distilled, that was some of the worst mead I've ever had the dubious pleasure of sampling. I hope they didn't sacrifice that to the gods. I mean, if I were a god and had to drink that mead, I'd be tossing lightning bolts willy-nilly. Loosely overseen by a central office – set in a back room in Thomas’ old house in Santa Fe, New Mexico – Ár nDraíocht Féin (ADF) is a polytheistic neo-pagan religion that draws its inspiration from ancient Indo-European traditions. It’s organized into local groups, called groves, and was founded in 1983 by a charismatic man named Isaac Bonewits, who, after completing a self-study program at UC Berkeley, earned a bachelor’s degree in – yes, really – Magic and Thaumaturgy. True fact: I've met Isaac Bonewits. "Charismatic" is a decent adjective, but I have to raise a bit of an objection; that word is often applied to certain religious figures that have done... questionable things. Like start cults. So the implication is misleading. Bonewits wasn't a cult leader. In fact, he developed the best - in my humble opinion - system for identifying a religious group as a cult rather than a simple religious movement. If you're interested, the framework he developed is here .This doesn't mean there aren't issues with Bonewits. I just wanted to dissociate what he did from any implication of "cult." More and more in America, religion is something people choose (or don’t), rather than inherit. According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, “As the Millennial generation enters adulthood, its members display much lower levels of religious affiliation, including less connection with Christian churches, than older generations.” However, the report also finds that many millennials remain spiritual in a broad sense, expressing “wonder at the universe” and an overall feeling of “gratitude” and “well-being.” Here we go with the "generations" crap again. But okay, fine, I'll allow that there are differences between younger people and older people. Always have been. It's kind of our thing as humans. It hits me that I am standing with a bunch of people I don’t know in the middle of a dark and remote farm being asked to drink unmarked liquid by a dude in a long white robe. The Water of Life shakes between my fingers. Okay, I don't want to minimize the fears that people, perhaps especially women (like the author is, apparently), have in strange situations, but knowing Druids, she was probably safer in that circle than she would have been at, say, the supermarket. Also, what is religion if not a way to address one's fears? The diverse pantheon doesn’t phase anyone. O Editor, where art thou? (It's "faze," not "phase." And yet she probably got paid for that article, while my lifetime sum total of income from writing is exactly 0, unless you count GPs.) Still, there is tribalism in Druidry. Many of the practitioners I spoke with had the awkward, sharp, smart humor of the nerdy kids in middle school, which they wielded at me like little pikes, prodding and jabbing to see if I would laugh. Dr. Magliocco says this is partially constructed as a part of pagan identity. “Humor is a way that we mark insiders and outsiders,” she says. “A joke is a spell. Jokes clearly mark the boundaries. We can all laugh because we’re unusual, but we also draw a firm circle of who we are.” Between all the drinking and joking and general nerdery, you'd think I'd make a perfect Druid. And yet I never quite fit in with the local Druids. I was more comfortable around Wiccans. Another true story, then, concerning some local Druids. The grove I knew was based in Lynchburg, VA, about an hour from where I live. You may have heard of Lynchburg: it's the home of Liberty University, founded by professional asshole Jerry Falwell, and Falwell's Liberty Baptist Church, both of which are now headed by his son if I recall correctly. In other words, it's a major Southern Baptist center and the last place you'd expect to find Pagans, and yet, there they are. I don't know how many states do this, but in VA, they let different groups "adopt" stretches of road, and the groups go out, like, two or four times a year and just pick up litter and whatnot to keep the road clean. It saves VDOT (and thus, taxpayers like me) money and brings the groups some exposure and the feeling that they're doing a good thing, so it's a win-win all around. Being a government run thing, they let pretty much anyone adopt the road, with certain exceptions for known hate groups and whatnot. So one time, a few years ago, these Druids noticed that the road past Liberty Baptist Church was up for adoption. And they started cleaning it up. I still have the yellowed newspaper article discussing this magneted to my fridge, because to this day that situation gives me the warm fuzzies and cracks me up. Anyone who's been following along with me here knows that I'm not a religious person. I find my meaning in the cycles of nature, in the vastness of the cosmos, in the rabid curiosity of science, and sometimes even in booze. But I also have a steadfast belief in freedom of religion: that idea, woven into the fabric of my country, that a person should be free to worship - or not - as one's heart dictates. The solstice has passed now, and we are, as they put it in what has become my favorite Doctor Who special, "halfway out of the dark." To mark this occasion, I've been drinking beer. Quelle surprise, right? Point is, if I had a point when I started writing this, I've gotten sidetracked. We've completed another turn around the Sun. The Darkness is conquered, the Light once more prevails. It doesn't matter what you call yourself - Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Ba'hai, atheist, Hindu, animist, Druid, Jew, pantheist... the list goes on... what matters is that we're still all in this together, and we've done it. Another cycle. Halfway out of the dark. Well done. Well done. Come on. Where else are you going to start with Druids and end with Doctor Who? Here. Only here. Vale Sol Invictus! |
| https://www.vox.com/2016/3/18/11255942/morning-people-evening-chronotypes-sleepi... If you’re just not a morning person, science says you may never be Sure, I'm a morning person. I'm at my best between about midnight and 4am. That's morning. And then I get my best sleep between 4am and noon. That, too, is morning. Afternoons can be dreary. Morning people and night owls are born that way. It's time we accepted that. Yeah, right. People who think there's some moral superiority in waking up while it's still dark aren't going to change their minds. They have to feel superior about something, I suppose. If Cassidy Sokolis ever needs to wake up before 11 am, she scatters three alarm clocks throughout her bedroom. Even then, she still often sleeps through the clamor. Sounds familiar. We all have a preferred, inborn time for sleeping. Science has validated the idea that there are "morning people," "evening people," and those in between. These are called chronotypes. And just like it’s rare for a person to be 7 feet tall, it’s rare for Sokolis to not be able to sleep until 3 am. We all have a chronotype, just like we all have a height. Okay, but we can see your height. And what's more, if we try to live out of sync with these clocks, our health likely suffers. The mismatch between internal time and real-world time has been linked to heart disease, obesity, and depression. Oh, good; I can blame my biggest health issues on being forced to keep an 8-5 work schedule throughout my career. Score! "Our clocks don’t run on exactly a 24-hour cycle," Gehrman says. They're closer to 24.3 hours. So every day our body clocks need to wind backward by just a little bit to stay on schedule. I've heard variations of this in the past. As I recall, they studied this by keeping people in windowless rooms for extended periods of time, with no reference to timekeeping devices, and looked at what rhythm they fell into. If that sounds like hell to you, believe me, I think so, too. After all, there's a clock on the computer. Going for days without a computer? The horror! I have, on occasion, wondered what's up with the extra .3 hours (I've also heard .5 hours, but whatever). You'd think, maybe, "evolutionary holdover," but if anything, the Earth's rotation was faster in the distant past. The second treatment is chronotherapy. Here, instead of pushing the body's clock backward it's wound forward. For a few weeks, a patient will go to bed two hours later every night until she reaches her desired sleep time. "It can work very well, but very few people have the absolute, total control of their schedule for the two weeks that it takes to do that," Gehrman says. Very few of his patients choose this option. Pretty sure I've mentioned this sort of thing in this blog before, but I can't be arsed to look it up. I did do a sanity check to ensure I haven't linked this particular article before, and I don't think I have. In any case, I'm just quoting the bit above because of my confirmation bias. I have also wondered what happens to someone, say, who lives on the east coast of the US and is a night owl, if they move to the west coast. With a three-hour time difference, can they keep an earlier sleep/wake schedule, or does the rhythm of daylight gradually reset them to night-owl-hood? Simply put: Society favors early risers. Think no further than phrases like, "The early bird catches the worm." My favorite rebuttal to that has always been, "The second mouse gets the cheese." In any case, I know I've been on this subject before, because as a night owl, it's bugged me for a while. Not being a night owl - I love being up at night and sleeping through the boring parts of the day - but the general Puritanical scowling at anyone who doesn't rise with the accursed daystar. I'm privileged, I know - I'm in a position where I can (usually) sleep when I want and get up when I want. Does it make me healthier? I don't know; I think the exercise does more for that. But it's just possible that I've been able to keep up with daily exercise for a whole year (an absolute record for me) because I'm not fighting an unnatural, for me, sleep schedule. |
| At some point in like the late 70s or early 80s, someone told me that the plan for Star Wars was to show three trilogies: episodes 4-6, then 1-3, then 7-9. Being a huge nerd, I swore then that I would have to live just long enough to see all of them. So, I just got back from Episode 9. No, I won't spoil it. No, I haven't processed my reaction yet. But hey, at least I can die now. |
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-13/how-much-money-do-you-need-to... Money is, apparently, a taboo subject. Few people admit to how much they make, let alone their net worth. And I'm no exception, even on the internet where I'm mostly anonymous. So we rely on articles like this one, possibly comparing ourselves to the statistics presented therein. To me, this is akin to comparing your body to the models you see in magazines and movies. How Much Money Do You Need to Be Wealthy in America? Rich is relative. Well, duh. Also, if your relatives are rich, chances are you are, too. Merely having a net worth of $1 million, it seems, doesn’t mean you’re wealthy. In Charles Schwab’s annual Modern Wealth Survey, the amount people said it took to be considered rich averaged out to $2.3 million. This, too, is hardly news (except maybe for the average value thing). It's been a long time since being a millionaire made someone feel "rich." Even ignoring investment or other means of growing principal, a million bucks will give someone the equivalent of $50K a year for 20 years, or $100K a year for 10 years. Depending on where you live, this might seem like a lot, but the median household income in the US is somewhere in the mid-60s annually (yes, I looked it up; the exact value I found was $63,179 - and now you're comparing yourself to that.) And 10-20 years just doesn't seem like that long a time to me. Now, assuming investment and a commonly accepted safe withdrawal rate of 4%, one could eke out $40K a year on investments alone for at least half a lifetime. Again, that may or may not be enough to live on if you live in a place like San Francisco or New York, but it's comfortable in the flyover states - where incomes tend to be lower. More than three-quarters of [millennials] said their personal definition of wealth was really about the way they live their lives, rather than a discrete dollar amount. I hate the generational warfare we've been fed in the US, and I consider generation names and their cutoffs to be entirely arbitrary, but this is one subject where there might be some value in assigning people to cohorts, so I'm running with it for now. With 59% of the Americans surveyed saying they live paycheck to paycheck, instant gratification comes with a high price. While a strong economy and low unemployment are helping consumers stay current on their debt payments, the largest U.S. banks are seeing losses on credit cards outpace those of auto and home loans at a rate not seen in at least 10 years. It's possible that the real problem here is debt, but I think it goes deeper than that. Most people don't go into debt for no reason. Sure, some are just bad with money, but there are externalities to consider. Health care is a big one, these days, but so are housing costs and the price of an education. And let's not forget advertising, which above all tries to sell a lifestyle. If you can just get a little more money, you'll finally be able to buy all the things you want and then you'll be content! Except you won't, because that big-screen TV you can afford keeps playing those ads... Now, I'm not trained in economics, so take these observations with as much sodium chloride as you need (I do have some background in chemistry). But it seems to me that easy credit has the effect of pumping up the price of things. Taking education as an example, it's well-known that tuitions have skyrocketed in recent decades, even when adjusted for general inflation (the measurement of which is a topic for a separate rant). This increase coincides with the general availability of student loans. The economic reason for this seems pretty clear to me: it's a manifestation of the classic supply and demand curves. If more people can afford higher education due to lending, and there are only a limited number of spots in higher education, that means the demand goes up while the supply is relatively constant. This causes the price to go up. You can also apply this concept to housing, though it's somewhat different there because people tend to keep building dwellings (which kept me in dosh for most of my career). Back in the noughties, I saw that some lenders were starting to offer 60 year mortgages. The traditional mortgage had a 30 year term; a 60 year mortgage could, potentially, allow someone's monthly payments to be less than they would otherwise. So what happens? Price of housing goes up to compensate. I wasn't smart enough (or perhaps I just didn't have enough information) to predict the ensuing crisis, followed by what's been termed the Great Recession, that occurred subsequent to this. I don't know if they still offer 60 year mortgages. I'm not saying that this alone caused the housing crash, but it was a warning signal. The situation with healthcare is different, but related. In that case, it's not easy availability of credit; there are no "medical loans" of which I'm aware. But insurance companies have deep pockets, and so hospitals can get away with charging $1000 for use of a tongue depressor. Consequently, if you don't have insurance, you're boned. Hell, these days if you do have insurance, you're boned. Now that I'm going to have health insurance again, I have nightmares about things that could happen to me that they won't cover, meaning the exorbitant premiums I have to pay would be just money down the drain. And even though I'm not what you'd call poor, all it would take would be another heart attack to throw me into instant poverty, absent insurance coverage. I've told my friends, if that happens, to just let me die. I'd rather die rich than live poor. And when the bottom does finally fall out, the last thing most Americans will be thinking of is whether they qualify as wealthy. Way to end the article on a positive note, there, Bloomberg. But you're right - we're boned. |
| While we're on the subject of weight loss... https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-myth-burn-calories Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight, explained with 60+ studies Oh look, another "You're Doing It Wrong" article! - or is it? "I'm going to make you work hard," a blonde and perfectly muscled fitness instructor screamed at me in a recent spinning class, "so you can have that second drink at happy hour!" Remember yesterday when I said I wouldn't be caught dead in a spin(ning) class? This reinforces that. Anyway, the article dives into some science, much of which could stand to be replicated or at least extended. When it comes to nutrition (or, in this case, exercise) science, I approach it with a healthy (pun intended, as always) dose of skepticism. And I'm not going to quote a lot from it. Instead, I'm just going to summarize: Exercise is good (and necessary), but it probably isn't enough, on its own, for losing weight. This tracks with my own experience, but of course my own experience is a data point of one and when it comes to fitness, I always find out later I've been lying to myself. So I don't trust my own experience, either. Still, it was true for me that diet alone, without additional exercise (that is, more than what it takes to walk from the couch to the bathroom and back again a few times a day) doesn't work. It requires both. So what's the point of exercise? I ask myself that every time I get on the elliptical trainer, and I have to remind myself that it makes me feel less dumb and helps fend off depression. That alone is usually reason enough to keep going; any weight loss benefits are icing on the donut. Mmmmm... donut... *drool* Ahem. Anyway. That works for me until it doesn't, and then I get back into the funk of "I'm depressed." "I should exercise." "I don't feel like it." "But it'll make you feel better." "I don't want to feel better." "But I hate being like this." "So? Shut up and have another bottle of tequila." Yes, I talk to myself like that when I'm depressed. Does it help? No. This article, to get back to the point, still doesn't address the question I had yesterday: So what happens if I reach my goal weight? I mean, this can't be a fully linear process, can it? Like, say you're losing a pound a week. Just as an example. Somehow, you manage to do this regularly and consistently. But there's got to be a limit, right? Else you waste away to nothing (which, now I think of it, would make an excellent story- shit, Stephen King already did it). You keep eating less and less and exercising more and more, in order to keep that pound-a-week thing going, and at some point, it turns into the Red Queen's Race - it takes all your energy just to stand still. That's what worries me, if I'm being honest. That there's no end to this self-deprivation; that I'm consigned to a lifetime of gray purgatory. They say success requires a lifestyle change, and while I'm perfectly okay with some lifestyle changes, especially if I know that I can relax at some point... some things just aren't worth the rewards. It's frustrating, really. |
| Yes, I'm linking GQ today. Remember yesterday when I said most of the child-choice pieces I see are by and for women? Well, that's equally true for weight loss articles. https://www.gq.com/story/what-i-learned-when-i-lost-50-pounds Not that there's anything wrong with that. I mean, most of us, male, female or otherwise, could stand to lose a few pounds. In my case, it stretched the definition of "a few" past the point of tearing tendons. Still, it's come to my attention that male and female bodies are different - who knew? - so I seek perspectives more similar to my own. What I Learned When I Lost 50 Pounds Last summer, Rohan Nadkarni decided to get in shape. He expected it to be difficult; he didn’t expect a whole new set of anxieties. Fifty pounds? Amateur. The stars were aligning. From that day in early August through Christmas I had lost weight rapidly—at one point reaching the 50-pound mark. So, (math) that's ten pounds a month. Seems a bit fast, but my own story isn't much slower: 80 pounds in 12 months, or 6-7 per month on average. But when I stepped on the scale Christmas morning, and the display showed an arbitrary number I’d chosen for myself months ago, I felt as flustered as I felt accomplished: What the hell was I supposed to do now? Yeah, see, that's the part that hooked me, not the earlier bits. What do I do ifwhen I reach my goal weight? But what happens after you achieve these goals? Losing weight was always this huge mountain for me: I thought once I climbed it, I would be able to conquer anything. It hasn’t been that simple. Fortunately, that isn't my problem. I know damn well I'll still have things to work on. I've probably said this before, but I fully expect to find that the problem isn't my weight, but my personality. I can't exercise that away. I was lucky to have the fake (and flexible) job of being a “writer,” a steady income, and access to resources like groceries and a gym... Oooooh, look at Mr. Makes-Money-From-Writing over here. I made healthier choices when I could, and went to the gym/a spin class/for a long walk when I could. My own journey is a bit more regimented, with short breaks (a week or less) every now and then because if I can't travel, what's the point of living? I eat 1300-1500 calories a day, get on an elliptical trainer (or walk) for 30 minutes a day, pump weight machines (not free weights) six days a week, and obsess over shit. You won't catch me dead in a "spin class." Especially when I finally found out what one was: you get on an exercise bike with a bunch of other people and, presumably, listen to music and/or motivational shouts from some drill instructor-type trainer. No, thanks. I spend my time on the elliptical thingie watching science, math, philosophy, and/or writing lectures. Yes, just lectures; no fancy CGI. No one talks to me besides the guy or gal on the screen. I like it that way. Point is, everyone has to find what's right for them. Spin classes worked for the author here? Great. I haven’t eaten an added sugar in weeks: Is it okay for me to eat this brownie? Should I be calculating and tracking how many calories I’m about to consume, or can I scoop these cashews up by the handful since I’m high as hell right now? Substitute "drunk" for "high," and that's closer to my own experience. One disconcerting side effect of trying to be healthier is that people feel way more comfortable commenting on your body than they ever did in the past. Body dysmorphia isn't limited to women. This is why I wanted a dude's perspective. It's somehow more socially acceptable to call fat guys fat. I don't think it hurts any less, but whatever. I think that so many of the anxieties I’m describing are ten times worse for women, for whom the definition of the “ideal body”—as far as I can tell—has historically been much narrower than for men. This may be true, but we're held up against skinny and/or muscular guys on TV, movies, magazines (*cough*GQ*cough*) all the fucking time. What I wish someone had told me in August 2018 is: Be healthy, but also broaden your definition of what “health” is. Here's the thing for me: I'm not necessarily chasing "health." Yeah, I want to avoid another heart attack and diabetes and maybe improve my sleep apnea (I think I've made progress in some of this), but you want to know how I keep from eating more than I should? I'll tell you anyway. Nicotine is a very effective appetite suppressant, and cigars take long enough to smoke that I can put off eating while I'm smoking one. Is it healthy? No. Does it work? Oh, hell yes. Point is, it's not health I'm after; it's a 32-inch waist. By any means necessary. Not every decision you make about food or your diet should be made in service of being thin. You should value your comfort and mental well-being just as much. Be physically healthier, for sure, but not at the cost of your sanity. And that's the takeaway for me. This author wants to try "every bubble tea in Southern California." Me? I want to try every beer in existence. It'll never happen, but a guy has to have goals. There's no point to living longer if you have to give up all the things that make life worth living. If someone told me I could die next month, or stop drinking beer, I'd make sure my will was updated while swigging a nice Imperial stout. You can do everything "right," and get hit by a meteor. (Technically it's a meteor until it hits the ground, at which point, when someone finds it next to my corpse, it'll be a meteorite.) And if you're worried about what other people think - it seems the author of the linked article is, moreso than I am anyway - rest assured no one cares if you're "healthy." They only care if you're thin. In four days, I'll have been at this crap for one year, so consider this the update: 80 pounds lost, more to go, and I've surprised myself by actually sticking to the plan for that long - again, with a week off here and there so I could travel. Oddly enough, that seems to help in the long run even if it slows progress in the short term. I don't know why; maybe it resets metabolism or something? Like I'll come back from a trip and I'll have gained five pounds, but it comes back off fairly quickly, as does subsequent avoirdupois. In August, I have plans for another cross-country road trip. By then, I'll have either reached my goal weight - or finally given up on the whole idea. I'm aware I will fail at some point. Just not today. |
| As certain as I may seem to be about some things, there's always at least a seed of uncertainty. In some cases, it's more of a sapling, or even a massive tree. So with today's link, I'm eschewing snark and a lot of my usual opinions, and mostly just throwing it out there as food for thought. Yes, I know it's an old article, but the points it brings up are still applicable, given the proliferation of mass shootings in recent times. http://nautil.us/issue/2/uncertainty/parenthood-the-great-moral-gamble Parenthood, the Great Moral Gamble The decision to have a child is more ethically uncertain than you might realize. So far, I'm in agreement. Parenthood is, in our age, a choice. It's one that I decided on a long time ago: that I did not want to father a child. I should note, as an aside, that almost every article or think-piece I've ever seen on the choice of parenthood is written from a woman's perspective - this one included. Rarely is a man's opinion on the matter sought or appreciated. I'm aware that there are many men out there who desperately want (or wanted) to become fathers; my own father was one of them (one thing an adopted person can usually say with certainty: I was wanted). I'm also aware that many other men run from the responsibility, and leave the child and its mother in a difficult situation. I don't think much of those men. While I didn't want children, if one fell into my lap (so to speak), I'd accept my share of the responsibility. I don't consider it irresponsible to avoid making that decision in the first place. Anyway, back to the article. It touches on some philosophical points I encountered recently in another context: that of moral luck, and the dichotomy between intention-based and outcome-based judgements. I didn’t choose to have a child. Not if “choosing” means something rational—weighing pros and cons, coming to a conclusion. I tried that process but ran away from it because, even though I wanted a child, it seemed to me that creating a whole new person was such an enormity that no one could rationally decide to do such a thing. English is a funny thing. "I didn't choose to have a child" is, on the surface, semantically equivalent to "I chose not to have a child," but the implications are very different. Later in the article, she clarifies exactly what she meant. The child might bring happiness to others, or he might ruin people’s lives. It seemed to me that creating life was an act of astonishing hubris because it made me responsible, maybe morally responsible, for huge consequences. I gotta be honest, here: the moral responsibility issue wasn't a big part of my thought process when I decided I didn't want to be a father. Not that it was something that happened overnight. I didn't wake up one morning and go, "You know what? I don't want to have a kid." It was more of a gradual realization. Lots of considerations went into it, not the least of which was plain laziness; I saw what other men were going through and I didn't want any part of it. And yet, while it wasn't a big part of my thought process, it was a part of it nonetheless - even though, at the time, I probably couldn't have expressed exactly what I felt about the repercussions. This article does that. It's a long article and I'm not going to quote much more from it, but it's worth reading, in my opinion (obviously, or I wouldn't have bothered with it). I'm just going to touch on one of my major bugaboos whenever this sort of discussion comes up: Cushman speculates that we have a basic instinct to punish bad outcomes arising from a period in our evolutionary history when we were not able to communicate intention reliably, and the best way to encourage pro-social behavior was to punish harm and reward benefit, whether accidental or not. Can we stop with the fucking evolutionary psychology already? Even if it did matter where our behaviors originated 'way back when, we simply don't have the data to do any more than what the first verb in that sentence says: speculate. Some years ago, I read a book written (ostensibly; there may have been a ghost) by Jeffrey Dahmer's father. As I'm sure everyone recalls, Dahmer was a notorious serial killer and cannibal who, once caught and incarcerated, died in prison. It's been a long time, so I don't really remember if the senior Dahmer took any responsibility for his son's actions, whether deserved or not. I think a lot of prospective parents think, if they think about it at all, "maybe my kid will grow up to be the next Einstein." (Or insert someone else glorious in Al's place.) No one I know thinks, "what if the kid grows up to be the next Dahmer?" This is a cognitive bias; one of optimism, perhaps. I'm pretty sure you have about the same number of people with major positive contributions to the world as major negative ones, so the chance is about equal. And there's a far greater chance that the kid would grow up to be just another cog in the machine, probably then begetting more cogs in the machine. In other words, there's a far greater chance of not winning the lottery than there is of winning it, or of getting hit by lightning. I chose not to play that lottery. I don't want to give the impression that I'm judging others' choices. I'm not. But I feel like, in a society as parent-centric as ours is, sometimes I have to justify my decision to others - I've already justified it to myself. Parents, on the other hand, are almost never asked, even implicitly, "what made you decide to have children?" It's just assumed. That assumption - not an individual's choices - is what I challenge. |
| Today I'm linking an article about Occam's toothbrush. Wait, no... razor. That's it. https://fs.blog/2019/10/occams-razor/ How to Use Occam’s Razor Without Getting Cut Occam’s razor (also known as the “law of parsimony”) is a problem-solving principle which serves as a useful mental model. A philosophical razor is a tool used to eliminate improbable options in a given situation. Occam’s is the best-known example. Before you go running away, this isn't limited to profound scientific inquiries. It's a useful tool for ordinary life. For example, if you come home to a messy house after a short vacation, you can make up all kinds of scenarios: an opossum got in, burglars trashed the place, the cops executed a search warrant, aliens teleported in and were looking for their missing zap gun, etc.; but if you have a teenager, well, Occam's Razor says it was probably the teenager. Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. A "hypothesis" is basically a possible explanation. In the above example, all of the possible scenarios are possible. Well, except maybe the aliens one. Maybe. In simpler language, Occam’s razor states that the simplest explanation is preferable to one that is more complex. Simple theories are easier to verify. Simple solutions are easier to execute. More importantly, simpler theories are easier to falsify. Your car is rattling? Check the easy stuff first. If it's not that, move on to the more complex. For example, the principle of minimum energy supports Occam’s razor. This facet of the second law of thermodynamics states that wherever possible, the use of energy is minimized. Physicists use Occam’s razor in the knowledge that they can rely on everything to use the minimum energy necessary to function. That's certainly true for me. Why expend more energy than necessary? The article goes on to expand upon the use of this philosophical tool in several disciplines, but, like I said, it's also useful for everyday life. It is important to note that, like any mental model, Occam’s razor is not foolproof. Use it with care, lest you cut yourself. This is especially crucial when it comes to important or risky decisions. There are exceptions to any rule, and we should never blindly follow the results of applying a mental model which logic, experience, or empirical evidence contradict. When you hear hoofbeats behind you, in most cases you should think horses, not zebras—unless you are out on the African savannah. When you hear hoofbeats behind you, best not to think too hard about it - just run. To the side. Don't do what they do in the movies and when there's something bearing down on you, just keep running in a straight line. I've heard this called "The Prometheus School Of Running Away From Things," but nobody remembers that awful movie now. This is why it’s important to remember that opting for simpler explanations still requires work. They may be easier to falsify, but still require effort. And that the simpler explanation, although having a higher chance of being correct, is not always true. And that bit is why I bothered to link the article. Too many people stop thinking once they've worked out the simplest explanation. To go back to the example I used above, when you come home to a messy house and blame your teenagers, what if it turns out they weren't home, either, and there are also scorch marks in your front yard? Well, then, the space alien explanation is looking more probable, isn't it? |
| I'm back! Actually been back a while, but it's taken me this long to recover enough from my trip to concentrate on a blog entry. This getting-old shit sucks. Today's link is from several months ago, but I think the underlying information is worth highlighting, if only to mock the living hell out of it. I touched on some of this in this week's Comedy newsletter, "Unwritten" , but I can get more personal (and snarky) here.https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/02/22/15-unwritten-rules-calling-textin... 'Use at least one Emoji per text': The new rules of communicating in the digital era And already my bullshit meter needs replacement, because the headline broke it. I, and the people I text with regularly (a select few), use emojis sparingly, if at all. We also use complete words, spelled correctly (absent the inevitable occasional typo), and proper punctuation. Yeah, it takes longer, but it's less annoying. But also easier is unwittingly getting caught up in a major disconnect by violating a tangle of new rules for communicating. A big one for some: Don't call until you've texted to confirm it's OK to call. But that's just the beginning. As I pointed out in the newsletter, once you've done an article like the one I'm linking here, the rules are no longer "unwritten." By definition. However, they're not necessarily "rules," either. This one, for example? Whatever. If someone has my phone number, I expect they might call at some point. That's okay. As long as they don't expect me to answer, especially if they're not on my contact list. Any unidentified number is a health insurance telemarketer, as far as I'm concerned. Come to think of it, I wasn't plagued by insurance scam calls all week. Could this be because I finally signed up for an Obamacare plan? Yes, I'm going to have health insurance, after two years without any. Thing is, how the fuck do the telemarketers know this? Don't answer that. "I'm usually pretty chill and not much bothers me," said Mark Angiello, a 29-year-old office manager from White Plains, New York. But the one thing that really gets under his skin, that he "hates more than anything else in life" is the horrendous one-word message – "K." So... wait... we're supposed to, on the one hand, condense our texts into emojis and "u" for "you" and acronyms such as IDK or LOL or whatevs, but you're going to get pissed because someone typed "K" for "OK?" Good gods. Twitter user @Ryannlawrence writes, "If I give you an emoji in a text, you have to give me one back. Those are the rules. "Twitter user @Zelvel writes: "It's an unsaid rule in texting if you weren't the last person to send a text before you fell asleep, you should be the first to send one in the morning." Neither of these "rules" make any sense whatsoever and this is why I despise and avoid Twatter. Other examples include don't leave a message after the beep... If you don't leave me a voicemail, and you're not on my contacts list, I will not return the call. Period. To be safe, leave a gods-be-damned message, even if it's just "Hey, it's ***. Call me back." ...don't send too many texts in a row... Two? Five? Seventeen? 42? How many is too many, you unutterably idiotic prat? ...and don't just start a conversation with "Hey." How about "yo?" Does "Yo!" work for you? Thor's balls... "These rules are simply a new manifestation of a phenomenon we've seen in the past," said James Ivory, professor of communication at Virginia Tech. All due respect to Virginia Tech (I'm a UVA grad; that's a joke), but are you being descriptive or prescriptive here? So, not everyone gets the memo. Oh? Maybe you should have texted me to find out if I got the memo. Oh, wait, you can't. Look, you might be thinking this is an "age" thing for me, or a "technology" thing, but no. For me, it's a refusal to conform to social norms until a) I know what the freaking norms are and b) I have internalized a damn good reason for conforming. "As soon as people aren’t talking face to face, the first thing that gets lost is some of the richness of the nonverbal communication," Ivory said. Or you could, you know, learn how to frakking write. But I suppose if everyone knew how to write, writers would be out of a job. Not that most of us have that job, anyway. "People immediately fill that gap by trying to approximate it," either by using emoji, adopting informal etiquette or sending gifs – those animated images that seem to sum up a sentiment in seconds. You mean like this? So, okay, now the article gets to the inevitable numbered list that makes it clickbait. As usual, I'll just highlight a few select items. 2. One word texts like OK and LOL are conversation killers. Don't respond with one word, unless you don't want to talk anymore. K. 6. Don't ask for likes, comments or shares. This one, I can actually get behind. I don't believe I've ever done it. My posts - such as they are, avoiding Failbook and Tweeter - need to stand on their own. And as a rule, I never like or share if you beg for it. It's like begging for a kiss; it makes you look desperate and lonely. But hey, if you ask for comments, as long as you're not begging, okay, I can sometimes accommodate that. 8. You don't actually have to leave a voice message. As I noted above, yes. Yes, you really do. If you want me to get back to you at all. 14. If you don't get a response, you don't have to get angry. It's not always that big of a deal. Anyone who gets angry when I don't respond immediately gets ignored forever. I sleep at irregular intervals, and I turn my phone volume off when I'm napping, lest I be woken by an "urgent" robocall. If I don't respond, it's because I was asleep. Maybe I'll miss something important like a new beer release, but so be it. Anyway, what all of these boil down to is the usual: be mindful of others. Hell, even I can do that (most of the time, anyway), and I'm generally known for having no shits to give. I don't need vapid internet articles that mostly quote Twunter users and professors at second-rate colleges (  ) to tell me that. |
| Today's link comes to us from the UK, so be prepared for British spelling. In contrast to yesterday, it's a short one and probably more relevant to our daily lives. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/27/lonely-short-of-friends-loo... Lonely? Short of friends? Try looking at it differently You never see your friends at home alone in their pyjamas, eating pickled onion Monster Munch... Okay, so I was prepared for "pyjamas," but what in the culinary hell is "pickled onion Monster Munch?" Jeez, England... Psychologists are regularly berated for spending their workdays reaching blindingly obvious conclusions about the world... At first glance, it’s tempting to respond that way to a new study from the University of British Columbia, explaining why people tend to assume that their friends have more friends, and lead less solitary lives, than they do. Can you guess? That’s right: because every single time we see our friends, they’re socialising. That's like every time my friends see me, I'm drinking, so they probably assume I'm an alcoholic. But I rarely drink when there aren't other people around. Don't get me wrong; I'm not averse to drinking alone - it's just that alcohol helps me socialize, but what it does not help me do is play video games, read, or follow TV shows. Perhaps if I actually wrote more, I'd drink more. You’re never there when [your friends] wake in the dark at 3am, wondering where their lives are headed. I'm not immune to existential crises, but this never happens to me. Is it common? Maybe it doesn't happen to me because I like to stay up until at least 3 am. Okay, that's a technicality. But in general, the only times I wake up when I ought to be sleeping are a) a cat has knocked something off of something else or b) I just had a nightmare, in which case I think, "Gah, another nightmare. Oh well. Just a dream" and go back to sleep. So, yes, the fact that we only ever experience loneliness when it’s happening to us is blindingly obvious, I suppose. But blindingly obvious in an almost literal sense: it’s so self-evident, we barely ever see it. I'm pretty solitary by nature, so I'm rarely lonely. I'm not even sure that I've ever experienced it in the way that others do, kind of like I'm never sure if my "yellow" is your "yellow." I like people, in general; I just can only deal with so much socializing before I have to retreat. Anyway, so add "observability bias" to those things we have to watch out for. Speaking of which, I'm about to travel again, so posts aren't guaranteed for the next week or so. I'm sure you'll all find a way to cope. |
| Today, I'm going to snark on physics. Don't worry; it's an article for the uninitiated. https://www.quantamagazine.org/einstein-symmetry-and-the-future-of-physics-20190... The Simple Idea Behind Einstein’s Greatest Discoveries Lurking behind Einstein’s theory of gravity and our modern understanding of particle physics is the deceptively simple idea of symmetry. But physicists are beginning to question whether focusing on symmetry is still as productive as it once was. The flashier fruits of Albert Einstein’s century-old insights are by now deeply embedded in the popular imagination: Black holes, time warps and wormholes show up regularly as plot points in movies, books, TV shows. Yes, and most of them get it wrong. I mean, seriously, how hard is it to get the damn science right? I personally know a guy who works as a science consultant to certain TV shows, and the problem is they don't listen to him. Perhaps ironically, though, what is arguably the most revolutionary part of Einstein’s legacy rarely gets attention. It has none of the splash of gravitational waves, the pull of black holes or even the charm of quarks. You know, probably about 5% of your readers got that last pun. I hope it was worth it. The key insight came to Einstein in one of his famous thought experiments. He imagined a man falling off a building. The man would be floating as happily as an astronaut in space, until the ground got in his way. 1. There weren't any such things as "astronauts" then; 2. Newton figured shit out with falling apples, not humans. WTF, Albert? It took a while for him to pin down the mathematical details of general relativity, but the enigma of gravity was solved once he showed that gravity is the curvature of space-time itself, created by massive objects like the Earth. For the record, this is a little bit misleading. Yes, he solved one "enigma" of gravity (the article specifically mentions the one; it's how heavy and light objects fall at the same speed). But physicists are still ultimately puzzled by gravity. Maybe if they find (or fail to find) the hypothetical "graviton," some of that will clear up, but science is science, meaning that'll just lead to more puzzles. So the one fundamental force that we all feel all the time - with the notable exception of a select few astronauts, for brief periods - is the one we have the least understanding about. Life is funny that way. Nearby “falling” objects like Einstein’s imaginary man or Galileo’s balls simply follow the space-time path carved out for them. That's going to be my new curse. "Hey, Waltz, someone keyed your car." "Galileo's balls!" At the same time, symmetry-based reasoning predicted a slew of things that haven’t shown up in any experiments, including the “supersymmetric” particles that could have served as the cosmos’s missing dark matter and explained why gravity is so weak compared to electromagnetism and all the other forces. 1. Dark matter isn't "missing;" they're all but certain it's there; it's just that they have no idea what it is. 2) The relative weakness of gravity starts to make sense if you hypothesize invisible dimensions. ... which I suppose doesn't help much. Periodically - and fortunately, this particular article doesn't do this - you see someone going "Einstein was WRONG!" This plays to the masses, who yearn to see some genius or authority taken down a peg or two. But it displays an ignorance about the way science works. Was Einstein wrong, ever? Most definitely. For all his vaunted intelligence and insight, he was human, and humans are wrong from time to time (some more than others, granted). Einstein was no more "wrong" than Newton was wrong; he just didn't have all the data. Newton's theories about gravity work to a really high degree of accuracy in both our everyday lives and the things we observe. Einstein extended them. It's analogous to how we think of the Earth itself: it's basically a sphere, and can be modeled as such for all kinds of purposes, such as charting airline flight paths or drawing maps. But to get greater precision you have to take into account the difference between the equatorial diameter and the polar diameter, which is (roughly) 40 miles, for most purposes a rounding error in the average diameter. Discovering the equatorial bulge doesn't make "the Earth is round" wrong; it just adds precision. And of course it's also lumpy, but not 40 miles worth of lumpy; Everest, for example, tops out at only about 5 or 6 miles above sea level. Point is, though, the theories Einstein came up with have withstood numerous experimental tests. So no, he wasn't "wrong" in that sense. But we keep searching for more refinements to the theories. And I find that sort of thing fascinating. |
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