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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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| The one thing that can make February even worse than it's already is? Well, it's now. Today. Leap days make the worst month of the year even longer, almost as long as other months like April or September, but without their benefits. Since my current daily blogging streak now encompasses two Leap Days, I thought I'd take a look to remind myself what I might have been talking about on February 29, 2020, just a few weeks before we took a leap right into a societal meltdown. But I didn't really acknowledge it then. Hell, I probably wouldn't acknowledge it now, if it weren't for "Invalid Item"  .It's just another day, after all; though, if you're a salaried employee, you're working for free today. Hope you took the day off and told the boss to take a flying leap.I'm going to leap to the conclusion that you already know why there's a leap day. Maybe you even know why it occurs in February within our largely arbitrary Gregorian calendar system. But what I didn't know, so I'm assuming no one else does either, is that the word "leap" in English is etymologically related to "lope," one of the many near-synonyms for "run."Which leads me to ponder: the past tense of leap is either "leaped" or "leapt." I suspect "leapt" is more British than "leaped," but either is correct. This is similar to words like "dream," but, oddly, "sleep" only leaps into the past tense as "slept;" it's never "sleeped," even though it rhymes with "leaped." English is weird. Obviously, the past tense of "leap" should be "lope." "We lope to the wrong conclusion yesterday," for example. Ah well. Further such musings will have to wait another four years. |
| Not every invention is great, but the article I'm linking today, from Cracked, is about great inventions that were unappreciated at the time. The article's a bit on the lengthy side, so I'm not going to mention all of them. Just a few things I want to comment on. 5. Push Buttons At the end of the 19th century, a few different electric devices like the lightbulb were set to change the world. Meanwhile, I'm sure candlemakers and whale oil suppliers were freaking out about their impending loss of revenue. Still, people resisted electricity entering their homes. I truly hope that was an intended pun. Then came a new ancillary invention that made electricity a lot less scary: the push button. The actual definition of "easy," at least according to one well-known marketing campaign. But the push button received unexpected pushback from the scientific community itself. While marketers realized the button would convert people to the church of electric power, educators already had their own plan for managing this: education. They wanted to bring people closer to the inner workings of electricity, not farther. In schools, they were teaching boys and girls about how to put together motors and batteries, not as part of vocational training but just standard learning. Understanding electricity demystified the process. I kind of get it. I liked the internet a lot better when you had to have some level of technical proficiency and the desire to use it. And also when it was less commercialized. Okay, mostly the latter. Still, I kind of get it. Teach people, instead of dumbing things down for them. Problem is, some people refuse to be taught, and some simply cannot be taught. They already know everything they need to. Just ask them, and they'll tell you. 4. ZIP Codes Everyone was being assigned new numbers? That was pointless — and dehumanizing. It was (theorized some people) surely a communist plot, with an uncertain goal. Some random comments from disgruntled customers were preserved so we can marvel at them, generations later. “Dear Sir, Zip Code is a complete boo-boo and you just don’t want to admit it,” wrote one woman. “It has set our mail delivery back 100 years.” Another message claimed, “The Pony Express would be more efficient.” Sound familiar? It should. 60 years later, we're still getting comments from the same kinds of novelty-resistant people, only now with a lot more abbreviations, LOLs, OMGs, emoji, and maybe a few cutting gifs. Which, I suppose, satisfies the definition of "irony." Today, you use them without complaint, but how often do you use the full ZIP code, with the initial five digits as well as the four digits that come after them? Do you even know your own full ZIP code? No, but I can look it up. And therein lies the problem: Anyone can type in an address, anywhere in the US (which is the only place ZIP codes apply; places like Canada and the UK use similar but different systems), and find their ZIP code, complete with the rarely-used +4 suffix. Which means that now, ZIP codes are kinda anachronistic in general. Hardly matters, though, at least for me: I can't remember the last time I had to address an envelope. It's been a long, long time. 2. The Cheese Slicer If you try cutting a block of cheese into slices, you need a steady hand, lots of concentration and also a high tolerance for failure because the result will come out terrible no matter what. You’ll wind up with a bunch of awkward wedges instead of slices. Then, in 1925, a hero named Thor Bjørklund forged a new tool, which would be called the ostehøvel. I suspect it would be very, very difficult to find a more Norwegian name than Thor Bjørklund. Everyone who cut food at home loved the ostehøvel. Professional cheese men did not. If cheese cutting was going to be so easy going forward, why had they wasted all those years getting a degree from Colby College (and then a master’s, from Stilton)? And that should sound familiar, too. Many new inventions threaten to displace old industries. It's only when the industry is powerful enough to have a lobbying group that laws get passed against the new invention. At least, that's how it works in the US. Not sure about Norway. 1. Toilet Paper Look, if you value your mental health, never, ever look up "what did people wipe their asses with before toilet paper?" This article doesn't even go into the real details. For which you should be ever grateful. |
| To wrap up February's "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]... Olive There's a grocery store on Broadway, on the Upper East Side (corner of 80th Street if you're ever in the area) called Zabar's. I get the impression that it's moderately well-known across the land. Maybe it's been in a movie or show or two; I don't know. Maybe its vibe, which more modern and chain-affiliated places can't replicate with their corporate policies, focus on metrics, and eventual enshittification, is just something people respond better to. Since I haven't been there in a while, I can't comment on their prices, but I remember them being about what you'd expect in Manhattan: slightly elevated, though not sky-high like in Hawai'i. But their location means they serve a moderately well-to-do clientele, which means offering some premium selections. The first time I went in there, I nearly dehydrated salivating over the seemingly endless, though really not because we're still talking about a Manhattan grocery store with limited space, selection of cheeses. And then I saw the olive section and almost fainted from delight. I like olives, you see. Not just black, green, and kalamata, but all olives. Want to hear my most idiosyncratic quality? I don't think I've ever admitted to it in here before. Or anywhere online, really. I usually keep it to myself, because the one time I told someone in person, the look I got was so filled with horror and disgust, you'd think I made a habit of munching on baby sandwiches. I get green olives on my pizza. That's right. Pizza. New York slice, of course, with, at minimum, pepperoni and onions... and green olives. I can't be alone in that, even if no one else will ever fess up. If I were, the local pizza shop wouldn't offer it as a topping, would they? And not just the local pizza shop, but the old one, the one that had been around since before I even got to town in 1983, the one that even more closely approximated NY pizza but sadly went out of business because of, well, you know—they offered green olives on their pies, too. Not just because of me, either; it was on the menu when I first visited each of them. Every once in a while, someone will misread the order slip and give me green peppers, which are an abomination, instead of green olives. But usually, they get it right, and they've never been out of stock (to be fair, the whole reason for green olives is preservation, so the little eyeballs might have been sitting around for years, for all I know). Last time I went to pick up my extra cheese-pepperoni-onion-beef-jalapeno-green olive pizza at the place that managed to stay open, I recognized the owner as the one who provided the pie to me. "Ah, good! Green olives!" he enthused in his boisterous, Brooklyn-Italian accent. "You have wonderful taste!" Finally, vindication. |
| A rare case of me sharing something relevant to my actual education and career. From The Conversation: Not that I can claim to be an expert at this. Mostly, I designed small subdivisions and commercial site plans, along with their unseen infrastructure. But not being an expert has never stopped me before in here; why start now? I know I've talked about them before, but this is, as far as I can tell, a fresh take. If you live on the East Coast, you may have driven through roundabouts in your neighborhood countless times. Or maybe, if you’re in some parts farther west, you’ve never encountered one of these intersections. But roundabouts, while a relatively new traffic control measure, are catching on across the United States. I've seen a few in what you lot call flyover states, too. Roundabouts, also known as traffic circles or rotaries, are circular intersections designed to improve traffic flow and safety. They offer several advantages over conventional intersections controlled by traffic signals or stop signs, but by far the most important one is safety. While it's possible to go overboard with safety (that is, you reach a point of diminishing returns; for example, why buses don't have seat belts), I don't think that's the case here. As early as the 1700s, some city planners proposed and even constructed circular places, sites where roads converged, like the Circus in Bath, England, and the Place Charles de Gaulle in France. In the U.S., architect Pierre L'Enfant built several into his design for Washington, D.C.. These circles were the predecessors to roundabouts. I think the DC traffic circles are one of the reasons some people freak out about roundabouts. They are, in a word, messy. It's important to remember that they were originally designed for horses, not vehicular traffic. Anyway, the article delves more into the history, and discusses a lot of their benefits, concluding with: The Federal Highway Administration estimates that when a roundabout replaces a stop sign-controlled intersection, it reduces serious and fatal injury crashes by 90%, and when it replaces an intersection with a traffic light, it reduces serious and fatal injury crashes by nearly 80%. I didn't follow the links to those numbers, but it tracks with what I'd already heard. One advantage that I think should be noted, but I didn't see in the article: Traffic light installation is expensive, and it incurs ongoing maintenance and operating costs. While a roundabout often takes up more space, usually requiring the purchase of additional right-of-way, I tend to think the life cycle costs are lower, considering that you're going to be doing things like mowing and repaving anyway. This may vary depending on location; rural right-of-way is generally cheaper and easier to obtain than urban. Another thing kind of glossed over is the psychological aspect. People who are used to stoplights don't necessarily want to, or know how to, deal with this weird new thing. Well, part of that can only be overcome through time and familiarity. I'm sure it took a while to get used to traffic lights and highway cloverleafs, too. An objection that I've heard is something along the lines of "I used to just go through that intersection, but now I have to slow down." I think some of that is selective memory. You might remember when you approached on a green light, breezing right across the intersection, but not so much the multiple times you've been stuck at a red light, fuming, willing the light to turn green through the power of mind alone. Slowing down every time is still, in my view, superior to sometimes having to stop and wait. As with all new things, there's a period of adjustment. If we still have cars in 50 years, I'm sure the future people will view stoplights as an unnecessary and hazardous anachronism. |
| In September of 2020, WDC celebrated 20 years of online activity, and my account reached its 16th anniversary. Today's throwback reminded me of this, because it was from the beginning of that month: "Cheese? What Kind of Cheese? I Want Brie" Hm. Another WDC birthday week. That means I'll be 16 soon. Obviously, that means that, in about six months, I'll be turning 20. Damn, I can't wait until my account can legally drink. No, I mean I literally can't wait; I do it anyway. The linked entry was a response to a prompt from "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" [13+], which I miss, but I have some idea of the amount of work involved, which makes me shudder to think about. The prompt was, in part: "I know this is cheesy, but I have to do it... In your entry today, write about what you love about Writing.Com."Hence the "cheese" reference in the title. You know, my hesitation on prompts like this is not that it's cheesy. I can do cheesy. It's that I've been here for just short of 16 years, and no matter how much I try, there is no way I wouldn't forget someone significant if I tried to list all of the people who are important to me here. Obviously, it's 3.5 years later now. But my attitude on that subject hasn't changed: better to snub everyone equally than to risk snubbing one individual when creating a list of usernames. I've been on the other side of this, of course. Someone I consider a friend will list the people that mean the most to them on WDC, and I'm not on it. Rationally, I know I'm not everyone's favorite (nor do I seek to be). Monkey brain, though, feels slighted at being left out. I don't want anyone else feeling that way, so, like I said back then: Everyone that I've interacted with over the years -- occasionally unpleasantly, usually quite the opposite -- has helped to make me what I am today. That includes you, since you're reading this. One of the major reasons I do these Revisited entries is to see what's changed since the original entry. In this case, it's not much. Just time. Fortunately, some cheeses age better than others. |
| Everyone knows that we nerds are generally immune to problems affecting normal people, such as STDs, sunburn, and athletic injuries. To make up for it, we have today's article, from Cracked: You may, however, come down with a whole series of other specialized conditions that will savage your body or will break your mind. And no, one of them isn't "brain overheats from exertion." Disclaimer: everyone is a nerd about something. This article is about the classic nerds who follow intellectual pursuits far more than is socially acceptable. Like me, for instance. 5. Nobel Disease This isn't the same thing as noble rot. When you get a Nobel Prize, the world is telling you you’re one of its smartest people. You may be set for life. So, there’s always the possibility of the recognition going a little to your head. Winners might go on to pursue ideas unconnected with their specialty, sometimes devolving into total nonsense. First of all, this doesn't apply to the Peace Prize, which hasn't been relevant for decades. Second, I don't think anyone I know is in danger of contracting this dread malady. And finally, this just goes to show that even geniuses aren't immune from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Which may not actually be a thing, but I say it is because I know better than They do. 4. Laptop Thigh If your skin spends lots of time next to a heat source, you may come down with a condition called Erythema ab igne. That’s Latin for “redness from fire.” One way English is superior to Latin is that we use single-syllable nouns for the most common things, such as cat, heat, and red. And nerd. Many gentleman nerds already now the dangers of keeping laptops on their actual laps (it fries the testicles), but laptop thigh can affect anyone. There aren't too many advantages to being a short guy. You're locked out of the dating pool—wait, no, that's an advantage. Another advantage is you don't have a lap, so "laptop" isn't the right descriptive. It does merge two simple one-syllable words, but, for instance, mine is always on a desk or table when I use it. Still, better than the French version: ordinateur portable. 3. Formaldehyde Hunger People tend to become hungry in the close vicinity of corpses. This is dubbed “formaldehyde hunger,” on the assumption that the preserving chemical formaldehyde gets into people’s systems and stimulates their appetites. I thought they mostly quit using formaldehyde, switching to a less carcinogenic preservative. But what do I know? 2. Brain Fag Syndrome No, this isn't about a common slur for nerds, gays, and gay nerds. The British diagnosed this syndrome in their subjects in Africa, who continued to use the term into the 20th century. Over in America, though, people doing lots of brain work were also experiencing mental fatigue. Some doctors dubbed this an exceptionally American problem, naming it “Americanitis.” Nowadays, I'm pretty sure "Americanitis" is used for an inordinate love of firearms, eagles, and eagles bearing firearms. The best treatment, they note, is rest. Yes, you feel better when you take a rest from work. These past 150 years of medical research have produced some marvelous breakthroughs. This is as close as the list gets to "brain overheats from exertion." 1. Dysrationalia English words for uncommon things are allowed to be multisyllabic, and derived from Latin and/or Greek. When we’re measuring brain power, you’ve got your computational power, but then you’ve also got your ability to be rational, and this consists of a bunch of different types of intelligence. There’s reflective cognition. There’s epistemic rationality, your ability to make correct decisions free of various fallacies. There’s syllogistic reasoning, which requires discarding biases. Put it all together, and we find that some people with high I.Q.s score worryingly low in rationality. We describe such people as suffering from dysrationalia. In other words, you can be really smart and still be really stupid. As anyone who's read my blog can attest. |
| My penultimate effort for February's "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]... Pike In the original Star Trek series, James Kirk was the captain of the Enterprise. Everyone knows that. If the Sentinelese ever decide to stop killing everyone who sets foot on their island, and decide to join the rest of the world in peaceful harmony, we'd be all like, "Cool. Cool. One question: who's the captain of the original Enterprise?" And they'd be like, "Jim Kirk." But that's not how it was supposed to go. The original pilot episode featured a Spock who wasn't emotionless, a Majel Barrett character who was, and a captain named Pike. (Roddenberry probably thought one-syllable names containing hard consonants were more "manly," which is amusing coming from a guy named Roddenberry.) Most people with even a casual interest in Trek know this, too, because they reused the pilot for scenes in a two-part episode, thus cementing it as canon in the future history they created. It's even canon, in a different way, in the alternate universe that was J.J. Abrams' fault. The first guy who portrayed Christopher Pike was Jeffrey Hunter, which, to be fair, would also make a great name for a square-jawed starship captain. Later, a prequel series would feature a captain named Jonathan Archer, which is close enough. Sad story about Hunter, though. He turned down further work in Trek, wanting to concentrate on his film work or whatever. Reasonable decision for an actor, I suppose. But in 1968, while working on a movie, Hunter got injured in an on-set explosion. A few months later, before the original series aired its last episode, he died of a maybe-related cause. If he'd stayed with Trek, that probably wouldn't have happened. But then, we wouldn't have William Shatner to make fun of, or the Spock who has become a cultural icon, or, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the utter awesomeness that is the Trek series Strange New Worlds, a prequel to the original series with Anson Mount as Captain Pike. It's because of Anson Mount that when some nerd asks me "Kirk or Picard," I can no longer answer "Trick question. It's Sisko." Nope. Chris Pike all the way. |
| Speaking of extraterrestrials... In case you were wondering what it would take for me to go through the process of incorporating an image into a blog entry (might have to scroll down), well, wonder no more. It helps when it's in the public domain. Less work. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Like the infamous Face on Mars, it's entirely possible that this particular example of pareidolia would go away, or at least diminish, under different lighting conditions or at a different angle or whatever.Until then, let us Star Trek fans have our hour of glory. From the linked "article:" Amateur astronomer Scott Atkinson found the stone sculpture of the Starfleet insignia among a pile of rocks on the Red Planet's Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons). Just to be clear, Atkinson didn't travel to Mars or use a giant telescope; he apparently combed through the publicly available images from NASA's Curiosity robot. Well, they call it a rover, but come on; Mars is the only planet known to be inhabited solely by robots (to the best of our knowledge). Curiosity itself (the robot) is a remarkable achievement. You can see more about it, and its images, here. As of this entry, according to that site, the gadget has produced 1,165,040 images over 4105 sols, an average (because I can use a calculator) of over 280 photos/sol. Which would be a remarkable output even for a social media influenza. Oh yeah, if you don't know, a sol is what they call a solar day on Mars. It's not too different from our own solar day: roughly 24 hours and 40 minutes. More, all of those photos are transmitted, pixel by pixel, back to Earth. Truly a monumental achievement that this has been going on for, if I've done the math right, about 11 and a half Earth years, or roughly 6 Martian years. Which is itself about four times as long as the original Star Trek series aired. I wrote yesterday about the possibility of encountering alien life. But if we ever encounter technologically capable aliens, given our own history of exploring with robot probes before sending humans out there, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if our first contact was with one of their machines. Those machines might send back videos of Star Trek, and since a sense of humor appears to be a requirement for technologically advanced life, they'll probably freak us out by showing up dressed as Ferengi. And here I was planning on talking about how the image clearly shows indications of erosion, which is cool enough by itself without invoking science fiction. Oh, well. Sometimes I go in unexpected directions, which proves I'm not an alien robot. Or does it?  |
| Periodically, astronomers announce the discovery of an exoplanet in its star's "habitable zone," and, inevitably, like the old game of Telephone, this gets filtered down to us garbled as something like "Scientists Discover Evidence of Alien Life." Is K2-18b an inhabited ocean world? Don’t bet on it Some fascinating observations of K2-18b have come along with horrendous, speculative communications. There's no evidence for oceans or life. Worse, this gets understood as "sentient alien life," because we've all grown up with Star Trek and Doctor Who, both of which put sentience on top of an evolutionary pyramid, like it's inevitable once you posit life. Much as I love those franchises, I understand that they're not documentaries. I’m sorry, everyone, but we need to talk about Hycean worlds and dimethyl sulfide. Okay, I have some idea of what dimethyl sulfide is (in that it's gotta involve two CH3 groups and sulfur), but I had to follow their link to "Hycean worlds." The link goes to an earlier Big Think article (same source, different author). Basically, they've got a lot of hydrogen. "Hycean" is a portmanteau of hydrogen and ocean (where "ocean" is understood to be a water ocean, and 2/3 of the atoms in water are, of course, hydrogen. But there may also be methane oceans, and 4/5 of the atoms in a methane molecule are hydrogen, but... whatever, I digress.) I also checked up on dimethyl sulfide and, yep, a sulfur atom connected to two methyl groups. It's a bit like water, structurally, with sulfur instead of oxygen and methyl ions taking the place of hydrogen. Except that it's not like water at all. Among other differences, water doesn't usually burn, unless you live in Cleveland. This planet, K2-18b, was indeed observed by the JWST, and did have a fantastic spectrum taken of its atmosphere, revealing many fascinating details about it. The fact that we can do this for a planet 120 light-years away is wondrous enough in itself. However, there is no evidence that K2-18b is a Hycean world at all; no water was detected. There’s only dubious evidence for dimethyl sulfide, and even if it does exist in the atmosphere, assigning a biological cause to it is an incredibly dubious proposition. You said "dubious" twice. Now I'm dubious. Yes, that word can describe both unreliable observations, and our reaction to them. Love English. Yet if you’ve read headlines from around the internet, it isn’t just the usual suspects like the New York Post or the Daily Mail with outrageous, alien life-driven headlines, but normally reliable places like National Geographic, the BBC, and right here on Big Think. NatGeo hasn't been reliable since Fox bought them (though Disney later acquired that property along with lots of other Foxy things, though not the "news" arm); I've been starting to wonder about the BBC; and while I like Big Think as a source, it's still subject to many of the problems all internet-only sources have. Let’s take a look at what’s really going on with exoplanet K2-18b. The article proceeds to do just that, but I won't reproduce it all here. But, in summary: None of these possibilities describe K2-18b, because it’s massive, puffy, and more Neptune-like than Earth-like. Does this mean it definitively doesn't harbor life? Of course not. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. K2-18b is about 2.6 times the radius of Earth and 8.6 times the mass of Earth. This means its density is less than half of Earth’s density, implying that it has a large envelope of volatile gases surrounding it. Let's not be in too big a hurry to compare it to Neptune, either. Neptune is classified as an ice giant, because it's cold. K2-18b probably isn't. But I'll run with the Neptune analogy, because a) the article does, and b) I won't mention the name of the other ice giant in our solar system. There's a bunch of technical details that follow, which I certainly won't reproduce here, but the article is an easy read and the link is right there. While a water-covered Earth-sized world would be an incredibly interesting place to look for life, and in particular to look for the biosignatures associated with the processes that occur in ocean waters, it’s an enormous stretch to apply those same criteria to a gas giant world like K2-18b. Why? Because there was no water detected on K2-18b. Again, this doesn't mean "no life." But it's not a good candidate for water-based life as we understand it. And we absolutely cannot make the jump from "possible simple life" to "Klingons." In other words, it’s not entirely implausible that maybe, just maybe, this is a mini-Neptune version of a water-rich Hycean world, and maybe there really is some sort of extremely exotic form of life that exists on a world like this. After all, the JWST spectrum shows a (weak) indication of dimethyl sulfide, which we know here on Earth is produced biologically. Could that truly be what’s happening here? Short answer: no. Longer answer: probably not. Look, finding extraterrestrial life, even if it's just an archaeum or its equivalent, would be a Big Fucking Deal. I genuinely hope it happens in my lifetime (so hurry it up, already). But jumping to conclusions helps no one, and is especially difficult on a high-gravity planet. Let's also not forget that "habitable zone" isn't the last word on where life might exist. Venus and Mars are (barely) within what's considered the Sun's habitable zone, and despite some flurries a few years back, neither has shown any definitive signs of harboring life. On the other hand, we're looking at moons of Jupiter and Saturn as possible places for life to have gotten a foothold, and those moons are absolutely outside the habitable zone. Meanwhile, though, K2-18b would make a good name for a Star Wars droid. |
| And now here's another one for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]... A good number of my "why the hell is it called that?" questions popped up before there was an internet. As a kid on a farm, I got to know lots of different cultivated plants—whether fruit, vegetable, or flower—whilst perusing a seed catalog. A paper one. That came through the postal mail. This led to a lot of "why the hell is it called that?" moments that my parents, who were what passed for Wikipedia for me in those days (they'd eventually buy me an actual encyclopedia volume set, which I actually read and then promptly forgot most of), had no answers for. "Go look it up." Where? We live on a farm. But I do remember that one of these moments was for the flower known as a dahlia. It seemed an even odder moniker than most plants' names, but the seed catalog didn't have much to say about it. It probably listed the botanical binomial, but I don't remember that. It's dahlia pinnata, according to Wikipedia, and while it's native to Mexico and Central America, it's not to be confused with a piñata. But as with many other cultivated plants, there are several subspecies. It gets confusing and beyond the point of this entry. Nor is Wikipedia much help with the etymology of the name. It seems it might have been named after a botanist named Anders Dahl. Which seems bogus to me, a typical European appropriation of an American species. The least they could have done is mangle one of the native names for the thing, like they did with, say, the raccoon. Except for the French, who call them washing rats, which is unfair to rats, who are often quite fastidious.Also, I can't be arsed to find out if Anders Dahl was ancestral to the far more famous Roald Dahl. None of which was what I set out to write about; I just did my usual assuming that if I don't know something, then no one else does, either. I have my parents to blame for that, too. No, what I wanted to note, apart from the excellent use of depth-of-field in the photograph the title links to, is the petal pattern. Those aren't true petals, incidentally. Each one of those petal-like pieces is a flower unto itself. But that's a bit like arguing whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. No, what struck me is that the arrangement of the florets is similar to other petal and/or leaf arrangements found in nature, such as in sunflowers or artichokes: an instantiation of the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio. Once you notice that particular spiral arrangement, you can't ever miss it. You can even find it all over the Mandelbrot set (which involves complex numbers), if you know what you're looking for. There are solid reasons for plants taking that general form (some animals, such as mollusks, do it, too), and none of them is that plants can do math. No, it's a bit complicated, but, basically, it's because it's easy and efficient. I can appreciate that. |
| Here's one that's a couple years old, but it's not like everyone's suddenly switched to electric cars now. Forget miles per gallon—here’s the best metric for measuring a car’s efficiency It's been right there on the vehicle's sticker all along. In an attempt to thwart clickbait headlines, I'll give you the article's answer right up front: it's the "gallons per 100 miles" rating. The rest of this is me laughing at the idea. “Your mileage may vary.” That’s the disclaimer carmakers apply to the Environmental Protection Agency fuel economy ratings that are listed for their cars. And that's entered the lexicon in other contexts, ones having nothing to do with refined petrochemicals, archaic measurement systems that the US is just too stubborn to change, or driving. Which is fine. You say that, and everyone knows what you're talking about—even me, who avoids commercials like the plague they are. But what seems even more variable is the value of the miles-per-gallon rating itself, which is why in 2012 the EPA started providing fuel economy ratings in another measurement too. But... but why? This is the gallons-per-100-miles rating. Although it is in smaller type than the miles-per-gallon number, it should figure larger in your calculations when comparing cars. That’s because the gallons/100 miles rating makes it easier to compare the efficiency of different cars and estimate their likely annual fuel cost. What? No. European countries measure fuel economy by the benchmark of “liters per 100 kilometers.” A lower number is better, and the moon-shot goal there is the “three-liter” car that scores 3.0 liters/100 km. That’s one that burns no more than 3 liters (about 3 quarts) of fuel to drive 100 km (62 miles). The only thing I can say there is that at least they're using international standard measurements. I have no idea how they rate the expected efficiency of vehicles in the UK, but their petrol is priced in pounds per liter, and road distances are still quoted in miles. That shit confuses me way more than if they'd just stick with one system of measurement. The advantage of measuring fuel consumption this way is that it makes comparisons easier as fuel efficiency improves for a specific vehicle. That’s because the differences are linear. With miles per gallon, efficiency is graded on a curve. For example, for a 15-mpg car, a 5-mpg improvement is a 33-percent gain. But that same 5-mpg upgrade for a 30-mpg car is only a 17.5-percent improvement to a vehicle that is already using half as much gas. Okay, look, this gets to the heart of my objection. I don't like that Americans are, by and large, terrible at math, but the fact is that Americans are terrible at math. Most people just can't seem to grasp simple ideas like incremental tax brackets, and think that entering a higher tax bracket means they'll be paying more tax on all their income. Percentages are almost impossible for many people, and too easily gamed by the unscrupulous (for instance, an increase of 10% could mean that something has increased by a factor of 1.1, or it could mean that instead of 35%, something is now 45%—even I get confused by this sometimes, which I think is the goal). And let's not forget we're talking about a populace that simply can't wrap their little heads around fractions, as seen here: "Math Hole" Mainly, though, what bugs me is this: Miles per gallon, and gallons per 100 miles? You're not reporting anything new. Invert MPG by making it the denominator, then multiply by 100. In other words, it's 100 divided by the MPG. Worse, your experience may still vary. But we can't use "mileage" in that context. What we should be focusing on is why people freeze up when asked to do such basic arithmetic. But you don't even have to do it in your head. There's a calculator in your pocket. 100 divided by the MPG. I'm going to call "gallons per 100 miles" "gpcm" because I'm lazy. Look at the example sticker in the article. Big number: 26 mpg. Smaller numbers: 22 city, 32 highway. Below that, the promised gallons/100 miles number, 3.8 gpcm, which, if you'll check, is equal to 100/26. But what's that in terms of city vs. highway estimates? Well, it's 100/22=4.5 gpcm and 100/32=3.1 gpcm. Those aren't on the label. Part of the problem here, as exemplified in the 1/3 pound burger example from the entry I just linked, is that, psychologically, larger numbers are "better." We all know that a 50mpg car (gpcm 2) has better fuel economy than a 25mpg car (gpcm 4). But if you instead compare 2 and 4, brains go "4 better than 2." Those examples are easy. Another easy one would be 33mpg, which inverts to 3 (or close enough). Or 20 mpg, which would yield 5. The alternative rating is easier to understand and has been on the window label of new cars for ten years, but it nevertheless remains almost entirely unknown to American drivers. I dispute the first assertion; as for the second, of course it's relatively unknown. To the extent that anyone looks at those stickers while being pressured by a salesweasel, we see the big numerals and ignore everything else. That popular European “3.0 liter” target equates to 1.27 gallons per 100 miles in the US, which isn’t a very memorable number. A good goal may then be 1 gallon per 100 miles—the ultimate accomplishment for combustion vehicles before they drive into the sunset as EVs gain popularity. That score also works out to 100 mpg, which might make it easier for people to understand this more useful benchmark. Yeah, right. We'll go full EV before they manage to give us a 100mpg car. I mean, we were heading in that direction for a while there, but people decided safety was more important than mileage (I don't necessarily disagree), and safety features tend to add weight, reducing efficiency. No, what we need isn't basic math spoon-fed to us. What we need right now is a way to compare the economy of an EV to that of an ICE or hybrid. The difficulty there is that gas prices seem to fluctuate with the wind, while electricity prices tend to be more stable. And, from what I've heard, some EV manufacturers subsidize power costs to drivers (for now; that's not going to last). And also to get people to stop being afraid of basic math. |
| It's Sunday, so it's time once again to look back into the dim recesses of the past. This time, I've uncovered a short but fun link from November of 2009: "Cat stuff" I do these retrospectives in part to see what's changed. One major thing that's changed is that I no longer have the cats I had in 2009. That was nearly fifteen years ago (and you thought you'd never have a use for math), and my cats then were already old. One thing that hasn't changed is that I still live with cats. Just different ones. The link in the entry was to The Oatmeal, a fairly well-known webcomic that has not, as far as I know, updated much, if at all, lately. The author had other things to do that presumably were more lucrative, which is fine. But one of those things was a game called Exploding Kittens. I'm not easily offended, and that doesn't offend me, but I still don't want anything to do with it. And I'm still not sure if the bit about Nikola Tesla is true, but I've incorporated it into a novel (unfinished) anyway. |
| Bit out of the ordinary for me today—a link sent by a friend: As I, too, shun the not-so-great outdoors, I found great wisdom in these words. The outdoor industry has spent hundreds of millions in marketing dollars to convince you that everyone belongs outside. To be fair, lots of industries spend lots of money trying to convince us that everyone needs their products. That simply isn’t true. Some People of Color aren’t outside for very valid reasons. As far as I'm concerned, every reason is a valid reason, but I can only imagine how much worse it must be when you have to be concerned that racist rednecks love to be outdoors. With guns. Some don’t like the outdoors and that’s okay. "I don't like it" is a valid reason. So is "I don't want to." They don’t need you to convert them. Unless, maybe, you’ve found the perfect beginner-friendly hike that ends in a waterfall and free universal healthcare. Okay, that bit made me laugh. But failing that, here are eight reasons why you should leave your friends and family alone. Oddly, like Cracked (which this isn't from), it's a countdown list. I won't be covering everything. Some of us occupy entirely different realities from our parents. For us, sleeping on the ground is an adventure. For them, sleeping on the ground is elective poverty and strange (or a bad memory). Why would they pay to do that? I've gone on about this sort of thing before. You live in a nice house, and you want to experience two weeks of homelessness? With bears and snakes? Okay, you do you, but count me out. Some of your friends aren’t interested in hiking or climbing because they can’t afford to get hurt and miss work. They also can’t afford medical care. Laaaaand... of the... freeeeeee! And yes, you can get hurt at home, too. But I'm pretty sure the chances of that go up in areas of uncertain footing, wild animals, and stinging insects. 4. They don’t want to get their hair wet This section turned out to be important for me to read, because I was mostly unaware of this aspect of culture. 3. They don’t have the money We like to pretend that being outside doesn’t cost a thing. And it’s weird. Stop that. While poverty looks different for different people, this point is something to remember when considering a trip to the not-inside. Proper gear (which I'm sure would help reduce the chance of injury, as above) can get expensive. Even those not experiencing poverty might have better (to them) things to spend money on. Why do we pretend that the outdoors costs nothing—that you are required to bring nothing but yourself? Then in the next breath we shame hikers who don’t bring reusable water bottles, moisture wicking technical clothing, wool base layers, wind and water resistant shells, puffers, GPS, a trail map subscription with downloaded maps, a paper map and compass, etc. I read an article about someone who died on Mount Washington in New Hampshire last month. The article described him as an "experienced hiker." Now, I certainly don't claim to be an expert on mountaineering, though, yes, I've hiked mountains, and experienced firsthand how quickly the weather can turn on you there. And I've read that Mount Washington is the worst of the bunch, being well-known for having logged the highest recorded non-cyclonic wind speed of any point on Earth. So my first thought was "Funny; I thought 'experienced hikers' don't mess with Mount Washington in fucking January." It’s winter now and social media is full of photos and videos of happy people skiing, snowshoeing, tubing and snowboarding. One of those things is not like the others... Anyway, while a lot of the cultural reasoning doesn't apply to me, and to be fair, I was privileged enough to spend a lot of time outdoors as a child and young adult before deciding I just didn't like it, I appreciate the article's perspective. And to be clear, it's not "being outside" that I dislike; it's being farther than a short walk from civilization. Now watch, some marketing guru is going to try to take all the stuff in that article into account the next time they need to market a line of rugged-yet-fashionable outdoor wear that'll be lucky to last for a year. |
| Here's a colorful entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]: Violet Try to imagine a color that doesn't exist. Go on; give it a good shot. If you're imagining "violet" because that's what I put in the title, well, no. Insofar as color exists at all, violet is on the spectrum at around 400 nanometers. People hardly ever describe something as "violet," though, unless they're talking about the flower, in which case, according to the ancient rhyme, violets aren't violet, but blue. Actually, I'd wager that there's far more mention of violet's neighbor, ultraviolet. Nope, that's not a color that doesn't exist; we just can't see wavelengths that short. It exists, but not to our eyes. Ultraviolet is such a common word that we don't often stop to think about how cool a word it actually is. Ultra. Violet. Should be a superhero name. "Scatter! Ultraviolet's here!" She'd be way cooler than her archnemesis, Infrared. (That's a deliberate pun on a couple of different levels and I'm quite proud of myself for it.) Getting back to the blueness of violets (the flower), though, I'm sure you learned the mnemonic for the official colors of the spectrum: ROYGBIV. Often—including on Pride flags and iconic album covers—poor indigo gets left out, leaving just six colors. Which is too bad, because indigo is probably just as cool a word as violet. Much cooler than red. Or yellow. There exist, of course, not just seven colors in the spectrum, but a whole... well... spectrum of them. Red only gradually fades into orange, which only gradually fades into yellow, and so on all the way to the invisible end of violet. Why do we say there's seven, then? Well, I'm pretty sure we can blame Isaac Newton for that. In addition to pretty much inventing calculus, science, gravity, and motion (or at least the way we think about these things), Newton did a lot of study on the properties of light, a topic that later generations of physicists would be absolutely obsessed over. But Newton was, like everyone, a product of his time, and he was also greatly intrigued by mysticism. So, I can only assume, when he shone sunlight through a prism to create an artificial rainbow (as reproduced in a certain classic album cover), he decided that there had to be seven colors. Because there were seven planets, see? And each one ruled a different day of the seven-day week. In mysticism, the sun and moon counted as planets, because they didn't know any better. If you're wondering, it went Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. Some of those are obvious in English; others are obvious if you know some French: mardi for Mars, mercredi for Mercury, jeudi for Jupiter (Jove), and vendredi for Venus. English adopted the Germanic interpretation for some of the weekday names, which is why we get Norse god names instead of Roman ones. Back to Newton, though. Researching this entry led me to this site, which is enlightening (pun absolutely intended). Where was I? Oh yeah, seven colors. One major point of what Newton did was his invention of the color wheel, where the seven principal colors he identified wrapped around into a circle, with red touching violet. Okay, that last phrase sounded way less naughty in my head. Anyway, Newton didn't have all the information we do about light's wavelengths, or even its dual wave/particle nature (though he laid the groundwork for that discovery, centuries later). Now, we know that prisms (and rainbows) work because the bending of light in refraction, through glass or through suspended water droplets, depends on the wavelength of the light. But my point is, red and violet are, despite their proximity on color wheels, at opposite ends of the visible spectrum. And there's a lot more invisible spectrum than visible: gamma rays, microwaves, radio, etc.All those invisible (to us) wavelengths are real. But you know what's not real, that doesn't exist anywhere on the spectrum? That mixture of red and blue pigments that we call purple. And that's the answer to the riddle I started with: Purple is a color that doesn't exist. Well. A philosophical argument can be made that no color actually exists. This is related to the holes thing I did a few days ago. But on the spectrum between "definitely exists" and "definitely does not exist," purple is closer to the latter than violet is. Violet is as close as we can get to purple and still be able to identify it in the sun's radiance. |
| Landed on another article about language. But this one's about the common root of many languages: A new look at our linguistic roots Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where, and when, the first Indo-European languages were spoken, and what kind of lives those first speakers led. A controversial new analytic technique offers a fresh answer. The source, Knowable, is not one I've linked before, and I don't know much about it because I'm way too lazy to find out. As for timing, it's a recent article. Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Another way to put that is that less than half of the world speaks an Indo-European language. Depends on one's perspective. As I speak one, yes, its shared origin with other languages is interesting to me. Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it. I've mentioned this language group in here before. Repeatedly. This is the heart of the discussion: Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years before that, with a community of farmers in Anatolia, in the area of modern-day Turkey. Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter, albeit with an important later role for the steppes. Now, look, I don't claim to be an expert in either linguistics or evolutionary biology. But I've seen the parallels between language evolution and biological evolution. There's at least one big, huge, major difference, though: in the latter, at least for eukaryotes, you don't get a lot of significant horizontal gene transfer. That is to say, organisms' DNA depend primarily on their ancestors' DNA. I understand there are exceptions. But with language, there's little barrier to horizontal meme transfer; that is, languages can liberally borrow from other languages. English is perhaps the most obvious of these; it's stolen pretty heavily from non-Indo-European languages. I'm not saying they're wrong. They know more about this shit than I do. (There is some discussion of that sort of thing near the end of the really quite long article.) I'd also like to point out that it's not like IE sprang into existence from nothing. It developed from an earlier language. I understand linguists call the earlier language Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, which cracks me up. Anyway, the article goes on to describe the process by which they figured out that IE existed, and that's pretty fascinating by itself, but too much to quote here. But then they mention the thing I find most intriguing: For example, the Proto-Indo-European language had a word for axle, two words for wheel, a word for harness-pole and a verb that meant “to transport by vehicle.” Archaeologists know that wheel and axle technology was invented about 6,000 years ago, which suggests that Proto-Indo-European can’t be any older than that. I knew I'd mentioned "the wheel" before, so I went and looked. It was way back in 2020: "As the Turn Worlds (or whatever)" The article speculates about the kind of people who would have used axles and wheels in prehistoric Eurasia: pastoralists or agriculturalists. Personally, I find it glaringly obvious that one speculation is missing. Once you have horses and carts, you can more effectively wage war, which is an even older human occupation than herding or farming. And tends to spread faster and further. This, to me, is a more likely origin for the proliferation of Indo-European languages: a conquering people, not only taking over vast tracts of land, but imposing their language on the cultures they encounter. It happened with the Greeks and Romans, in historic times. Not so much with the Mongols, but not for lack of trying. And let's not forget how English got so widespread. But, again, I'm far from an expert on these things. It just seems obvious that it's at least a hypothesis they can test. Maybe it's wrong. But given what I know of human nature, it could well be right. |
| On this, the darkest and gloomiest day of the darkest and gloomiest month (yes, I know that, technically, in this hemisphere, December is darker and gloomier, and the solstice is the darkest and gloomiest, but metaphorically, it's today), I have an article from Cracked that's about words, a light to pierce the dark gloom. There exist, of course, far more than five. But at least these are five I hadn't heard of before. Imagine if words didn’t mean what you think they do. You read a news report about some victim being murdered by a succubus, but what if a succubus isn’t really a demon? What if it’s some special type of Golden Retriever? With some old words, especially those that have been clumsily translated, we’re just taking shots in the dark. Words often don't mean what people think they mean. You hear or read a word and, usually, you're too lazy to look it up in a dictionary (even now, when a dictionary involves simply typing or pasting the unknown word into a search engine). So you go from context. And sometimes, you get it wrong, and get laughed at. Other times, you use a word the correct way, and you get laughed at because everyone else thinks it means something different. "Decimate," e.g. Anyway, the list: 5. What Does ‘Our Daily Bread’ Mean Anyway? We used to have a bakery here called Le Pain Quotidien. Apparently, it was part of a chain (which I didn't know), and the chain was Belgian, not French. Whatever, even before I started learning French, I wondered if they were going for the Biblical reference, why not "Notre Pain Quotidien" instead? Maybe because it would confuse English speakers. That's never stopped the French, but it might give Belgians pause. I don't miss it; there's a much better bakery in town, and one of my great thrills in life is to go in there and pronounce their offerings "pain de campagne" and "croissant" in the French way. (I'm easily amused.) One story from the Bible tells of the time Jesus taught his followers how to pray. When you pray, said Jesus, you shouldn’t just go on repeating some set words... His followers wrote down the words he said and repeated them verbatim for the next 2,000 years. They taught the prayer to their children, who would learn to recite it long before they had any idea what such phrases like “thy will be done” means. This is the opposite of what Jesus told them to do, but that’s organized religion for you. And don't get me started on indoctrinating schoolchildren with the Pledge of Allegiance, starting when they're too young to know what "pledge" or "allegiance" (not to mention "republic" and "indivisible") mean. That prayer is called the “Our Father” or “The Lord’s Prayer.” Though, people today don’t use the exact words that were said millennia ago, because not too many people speak Aramaic anymore. Fun fact: some Jewish prayers are in Aramaic. Other fun fact: Catholics, at least, were okay with using Latin for that prayer right up until the 20th century, and I'm pretty sure there are some orders who ignore Vatican II. But I digress. This section points out that the word which is commonly translated as "our daily bread" might mean something else entirely. Or maybe it said, “Give us this day our garlic bread.” That’s a prayer to unite people of all faiths. 4. One Mystery Verse of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ Education means different things in different eras. Today, to be a properly educated scholar of culture, you need to be able to explain where every Disney remake went wrong, even though you have never watched any of them and rightly never intend to. In the past, in certain circles, an educated person was someone who’d studied Greek and Latin. Also, you need to know the convoluted overarching plot of all the Star Wars properties, as well as the various timelines of Star Trek. Not to mention Monty Python movies, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and several others. Perhaps you would have to translate the ancient works of Virgil, which sounds hard. It is hard. Third and fourth year Latin in high school, as far as I can recall, was all about studying Virgil's Aenid. Much easier, surely, would be translating a poem written 1,300 years after Virgil, featuring Virgil as a character. Confession time: I've never read the Divine Comedy. Not even a translation. But then you’d come upon a verse that goes like this: Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi. What does that mean? We don’t know. It’s not Italian. Nor is it any other language we know of. The character who says it is Nimrod, a hunter from the Bible guarding the ninth circle of hell, and it seems like this line of his may be gibberish. Even the name of Nimrod has changed meaning, thanks to Bugs Bunny. Pretty sure I've touched on that subject in here before. In any case, the article speculates, but their guess is as good as yours. 3. The Vowel Vow of the Royal Habsburgs The Hapsburgs, starting with King Frederick III in the 15th century, used the following motto: “A.E.I.O.U.” This is what passed, in the 15th century, for wordplay. Could mean a lot of things, but as the section notes: Let’s be sure to keep an eye on any man born in Austria. Some of them seem to harbor sinister ambitions. 2. Who the Devil Is Betsy? “Heavens to Betsy!” says the old exclamation. It’s a way of expressing shock. Descriptions of this idiom liken it to “for heaven’s sake,” a phrase that began as a euphemism... I don't think this requires that much analysis. Betsy is, or was, a common nickname for Elizabeth, one of the most common girly names, along with about a thousand other nicknames like "Beth" or "Liz" or "Betty," not to mention variants in myriad other languages. The name Elizabeth is now synonymous with royalty, but like many other names of European origin, it derives from Hebrew via the Bible. And in Hebrew, the name (which was Aaron's wife's and John the Baptist's mama's name, though those were probably two different women given the centuries separating them) means something like "God is my oath." Combine that with the way "Heavens to Betsy" just rolls off the tongue, and you have a near-perfect minced oath. Other speculations abound at the link. 1. Is Copacetic a Word at All? Of course it's a word. Sure, someone made it up. This is the case with all words. Some were simply made up longer ago than others. |
| My (usually very reliable and speedy) internet's been out since last night. Apparently a tree fell on a power line, and they have to wait for the power company to clear it, and then do whatever arcane ritual spell necessary to restore the servers or whatever. The only thing saving me from losing my mind is that I have a backup connection. Always have backups for critical systems. Consequently, I'm able to post this (somewhat relevant) entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]: I call it somewhat relevant because that link is to a photo and, as the title suggests, there are trees. There's also a deer. I have trees. My house backs up on a ravine. The ravine meanders down to a stream. The stream flows through woods, and the woods extend all the way up the ravine, on several private lots, ending with my own. Sure, I live in a town, but not far from the edge of it. Much as I like to rag on the outdoors, I like having trees in my backyard. Well, apart from the occasional anxiety attack whenever it gets windy around here, anyway. Sometimes, deer wander up the ravine and, on rare occasions, they'll snoop around my yard. Now, you might think I have a hate on for deer ever since one of them totaled a car that I quite liked, stranding me in the middle of South fucking Dakota, but I don't blame the deer population here for that. Besides, I felt sorry for the one who hit me; that must have hurt. So, no, I enjoy seeing the deer when they come around. I've never been able to get a good picture of any of them, as they spook at the slightest sound or movement, but they've been here in groups or alone. The guy across the street from me was a hunter, so I can only imagine them driving him crazy. But what I'm sure is even more maddening for him is that, for a while, one of those deer was white. Now, white deer are rare, but not that rare. They do tend to stand out, though, especially at night, glowing like a unicorn while their deer brothers and sisters are partially camouflaged. I wouldn't be surprised if spotting white deer at the limits of firelight contributed to the unicorn legends, but I have no proof of that happening.Nor do they have mystical powers. And yet, being visited by the white deer on several occasions, I felt lucky. I'm not saying she brought luck, just that I was lucky to see her. But that's not the weirdest part. Lucky enough to glimpse a white deer, but, one night, out on my deck, I caught a white streak out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look... and beheld not the one white deer, but two of them, accompanied by a bevy of ordinary-colored ungulates. And, naturally, they ghosted off into the woods before I could get a photo. I guess that encounter was meant for me alone. These days, the only way people accept something happened is to have a photograph of it, so it wouldn't surprise me if people don't believe me. That's okay. I know I saw them, and they saw me. |
| Today, courtesy of Cracked, a brief discussion of one of the greatest movies ever made. Mel Brooks’ landmark 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles turns 50 today... The date on the article is February 7, so as of today, it's fifty years and five days. In 2024, it’s tough to uncouple the movie from the heated discourse around its place in modern pop culture, namely thanks to the dead horse of an argument that Blazing Saddles “couldn’t be made today” due to its pervasive racist language. Well, no, it's not that tough. Just enjoy the damn movie and ignore the "heated discourse." Or don't watch it if you don't like that sort of movie. Not to mention, the conspiracy theory that the radical left is somehow trying to censor Brooks’ film. Which is amusing since the film is about as radical left as they let you do in the early 70s. For context, when the movie came out, Nixon was still President; he wouldn't resign for another 6 months. Now, on its golden jubilee anniversary, a lot of people are revisiting Blazing Saddles on streaming, and some folks are outraged to find that it is currently preceded by a “trigger warning” on Max. Most of the article goes into exactly what that "warning" is: apparently, a three-minute context video. Which is approximately two minutes and forty-five seconds longer than the "trigger warning" on pretty much every single other piece of professionally-produced entertainment: the MPAA rating or its TV equivalent. Of course, we have a similar system here on WDC, and I can't count the number of times someone has cried "censorship" over getting their content rating changed. Because your story had the word "fuck" in it and its content rating was raised to 18+ (passive voice there used on purpose), we're obviously offended by that and they've been censored and we're worse than Hitler. I bring this up only to point out that this sort of thing exists so that audiences have some idea what they're getting into, and to help parents decide what stuff they want their kids watching or reading. If a grown-ass adult decides they don't want anything to do with R rated movies or 18+ rated items here, that's their choice. Wouldn't you rather know you have a choice than, say, be shocked and surprised by a fun cartoon about bunny rabbits suddenly dropping the F-bomb, showing bunnies doing what bunnies do best (making more bunnies), and maybe exploding into fuzzy blobs of goo with long ears? In short, content ratings and context pieces aren't censorship. Also, pulling your own content because you suddenly had an epiphany that you maybe shouldn't have done that (e.g. the Dr. Seuss books his estate decided were too racist, or Disney pretending Song of the South never existed) isn't censorship. Back to the movie in question, though, as the article points out, the movie has the bad guys being racist, while the good guys aren't. It's not a celebration of palefaces being able to say the N word. It's a condemnation of it. And that's not even getting into the other good reason for context explainers: now, 50 years later, there's entire new generations who didn't grow up with Nixon and casual racism, and helping these newer viewers understand history can only be a good thing, since no one pays attention to that shit in school. If it's even taught these days. |
| Sundays are my day of reflection on past blog entries. I suspected that, due to the nature of random generation, eventually, I'd land on one I'd already revisited. Or, worse, land on the revisited entry—some of which are now old enough to be technically eligible for a review (though I've decided to exclude those, as well). And today, my first attempt yielded an entry I'd covered as recently as November, so I rolled the dice again. This time, they took me back to the final day of December, 2018; consequently, the entry, "So It Ends" , was about the ending of the Gregorian calendar year. (The subsequent entry, New Year's Day, was titled "So it Begins." Apparently, I couldn't even be consistent with capitalization of titles)It's short, and even contains an external link which, over five years later, is still active if you're interested. I didn't make any comments about it, though. I've been thinking about what to post for this final blog entry in 2018. My daily posting streak was still a year away from beginning, though of course, I didn't know that, yet. I think I was trying, but failing, to post something every day back then. This is relevant because, in that entry, I also wrote: I've never yet been able to accomplish any of the goals I set at the end of a year, and I'm sure as hell not going to start now. Resolutions piss me off. At least I'm consistent at succeeding at being an utter failure. Since then, I've gotten better, and less prone to self-flagellation. Though not completely immune. The entry concludes with a Counting Crows song, which I absolutely do not regret, as they remain one of my favorite bands. |
| Today's article, from Aeon, is about holes. I'm going to pause here for a moment so you can get the obvious juvenile jokes out of your system. Ready? Okay. In pursuit of the hole Dig into the voids, pin-pricks and cut-outs of art and history, and those absences speak volumes about what’s been missed Now, the article itself is about art history, written by an art history teacher. This is not a subject I touch on much, but it's not like I've never presented subjects here that I knew very little about. Besides, while the article is interesting, that's not the primary reason I'm sharing it. So there's the link if you want to read it. I'm only going to quote a couple of passages from the not-very-short text, and besides, as befits an art history piece, there are illustrations there. Holes are full of potential. Okay, but this is your absolute last chance to get your mind out of the gutter. Seriously, I'm not talking about those holes. Archaeologists use soil analysis to identify postholes, the marks of ancient settlements. They excavate sewers at the Colosseum to find things the Romans thought not worth writing about. Holes leave space for projecting both forwards and backwards in time. That last bit is a little too philosophical, even for me. I'd say rather, in the context of the article, holes can inspire imagination and creativity; I don't know about this timey-wimey stuff. Museum and library collections are full of holes. Some are the product of hungry bookworms and moths. Others are deliberate, made by humans. These holes are, arguably, the most crucial bits, even though they are missing. This is the hole’s paradox. A hole points, through absence, to importance. The object wasn’t just used; it was used up. Philosophers struggle mightily over this question: is the hole something or nothing at all? And that's all I'm going to quote from the article, because it provides me a jumping-off point for my own thoughts, which go way beyond just one academic subject. The concept of a "hole" (look, seriously, stop snickering now) has intrigued me for a while. Leaving aside those astronomical objects called black holes, which are, in some sense, not holes at all but rather locations where space and time switch places, a hole can only be defined by what it's a hole in. That is to say, they occupy a place on the reality spectrum that's neither completely real nor completely unreal. Still doesn't help? Okay, well, try this: Some nouns are concrete, and others are abstract. Concrete nouns describe everyday objects: a bed, a table, a tree, the sun, raindrops, my cat. They are what I consider real. I know some philosophers love to deny the reality of these things, and their arguments are worth thinking about, but these are, for all practical purposes, real things. Abstract nouns point to concepts that we humans have come up with, such as justice, mercy, liberty, or Santa Claus (a name is a proper noun). There are also, and there's probably a word for this already but I don't know it so I'll call them "Platonic nouns." These are concepts that have some bearing on reality, such as a circle, a number, food, writing, or a game. They're not real in the same sense that the Sun is real; they're on the abstraction spectrum, being more conceptual than concrete. And yet, they're not entirely abstract, either. You can point to examples of circles, for instance, but you can't really point at a specific, everyday object, and say "that is liberty." You can count multiples of any object, like "I have two cats" or "I have two sleeping bags." Cats and sleeping bags are (arguably) very different objects, but the same number can apply to both. Likewise, the concept of "sphere" can apply (approximately) to any number of objects: a basketball, the Sun, a crystal ball. The point of all this philosophizing is that, while a hole is a concept as well, it has no physical presence. No one points to some place in the air around them and says "This is a hole." No, a hole is, and can only be, defined by what's around it. A bagel, say. The handle of a teacup. The ground. Your memory. This reminds me of the concept of zero, for which I have another article in my queue. Would zero have meaning if we didn't conceptualize the number line? Hell, the way we represent it is telling: 0. An oval or circle, which has a hole. That doesn't mean much, though, as many of our numeral representations have holes: 4, 9, 8, 6, and even that polar opposite of zero, ∞. Holes are real, as anyone who's twisted their ankle by stepping into one can attest. And yet, they're also... not real, because they're voids. I mean, sure, here on Earth, they're almost always filled with air or water, but they're not defined by air or water. Topologists also draw a distinction between an indentation (which is what a hole in the ground or the place where you put your morning coffee before you drink it actually is) and a true hole (like the handle of the coffee cup, or the inside of a donut). But for my purposes today, I'm lumping them together. Insofar as you can lump several examples of nothingness together, anyway. Imagine a hole in the ground, then, viewed from the side. From this perspective, the Platonic ideal of "hole" is something like a cylinder with no top: straight sides, flat bottom. Now imagine the sides getting dug out, like in a strip mining operation. It becomes like a trapezoid, as viewed from the side. Now, at what point does it cease being a hole and start being a crater? And at what point in this mining operation does it become an indentation? Taken to the logical extreme, you can further excavate until it's absolutely flat, its edges intersecting the curvature of the planet. Keep excavating, and you no longer have anything even resembling a hole, but what used to be the bottom becomes the peak of a hill. Or mountain. I keep running into classification problems, don't I? Anyway, those are my thoughts, completely tangential (another abstract concept) to the article's topic, and yet something I wish they'd touched on more. |
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