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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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You know what today is, right? Oh, sure, it's April Fools' Eve, of course, but being Sunday, it's time to revisit an older entry. This one was from five years ago, and follows my usual comment-on-an-article format: "Heartbreak"  The BBC article is still up, as of today. Remarkable, considering how many episodes of early Doctor Who the BBC destroyed to make room for newer things. Maybe they learned their lesson.To summarize, there was some evidence that a particular heart condition is at least partially caused by stress or strong emotion. Me: The more I learn, the more I think that the commonly stated dichotomy between mind and body is bogus. I would probably phrase this differently, now. Also, throughout my entry, I seem to have used "mind" and "brain" interchangeably, which I think I'd be more careful to avoid, these days. My understanding of the internal workings of a person or other animal is rudimentary, but from what I've heard, the brain is a physical, identifiable organ located mostly in one's head. It does lots of stuff, including stuff we don't understand, but it seems to be responsible for, among other things, telling your feet to walk and your chest to occasionally fill with air. The "mind," however, is a far more nebulous concept. I seem to recall doing another entry about that at some point in the not-so-distant past; it involved René Descartes, who asserted that because you can't put a set of spatial coordinates (Descartes invented coordinates) on the mind, but you can on the brain, that there's no way that one can act upon the other. Might as well link it, too, for reference: "Mind, the Gap" In addition to walking and breathing, the brain is sometimes fairly good at thinking. More in some people than in others, but "thinking" is a legitimate activity, even if it doesn't look like much of an activity to other people. But many people think (pun intended) that it's the mind doing the thinking. Once you're done thinking, often, you do some physical activity. For example, writing what you just thought. We draw that separation between "thinking" and "doing" because we love categorizing things, like cats and dogs being different species, or Pluto not being a full-fledged planet after all. Point being, a lot of the seeming contradictions of mind/body dualism, such as in the last entry I linked, go right out the window when you consider that the mind is a product of the body. It's probably more complicated than just being conjured up by your brain, but the brain is a body part too. Descartes' assertion that the mind cannot influence the body is, therefore, wrong. Brilliant guy, but in this case, he was working from a shaky premise. Anyway. The original entry, from up top, ends with the literal video version of Total Eclipse of the Heart, and I'm pleased (state of mind and body) to see that the video is still in existence. I have a whole entry on that song (the actual song, not the parody) coming up at some point; it's in my queue and will pop up at random. |
| What I'm sharing today, from Men's Health, is two and a half years old, so its main target is what was plaguing everyone's lives in October of 2021. Nevertheless, it's still relevant. The Golden Age of Junk Science Is Killing Us Misinformation is being spewed, weaponized, and consumed at a deadly rate. Fortunately, there's a way out. Here's how to make sense of what you're seeing. Considering that not much has changed on the misinformation front, we didn't take the "way out." In a recent Economist/YouGov poll, 20 percent of U. S. citizens surveyed said they believe that Covid vaccines contain a microchip. Again, "recent" here is 2021. Obviously, 20 percent is about 20 percent too high, even if you account for poll trolls. But it's a lower number than I, a pessimist, expected. This survey also found that only 46 percent of Americans were willing to say that the microchip thing is definitely false. Okay, that's more in line with what I expected. It is becoming harder and harder to tease out the real from the unreal. Sense from nonsense. Magical thinking from microchips. Yep. Just look at the nutters trying to attribute the Baltimore bridge disaster to, well, pretty much everything except mechanical failure. Part of the problem is that we have normalized nonsense in some very subtle and some very obvious ways. Heck, there are a host of (very) successful wellness gurus who have embraced pseudoscience as a core brand strategy. "A host of?" No, it's all of them. Unless your wellness "guru" says something like "follow evidence-based medicine," which none of them do. We really should come up with a better term. Using guru like that has got to be insulting to Hindus and Buddhists. And thanks to people like Andrew Wakefield—the disgraced former physician who started the vile “vaccines cause autism” fallacy in a paper published in and later retracted by The Lancet—misinformation about vaccine safety has continued to spread and find new audiences. As I've noted before, the fallacy got lots of attention. The retraction did not. People still believe that bullshit. Besides, even if it were true, which it's not, a person's fear in that area reveals a great deal about how they really feel about the neurodivergent. But there is a way forward! By using a few critical-thinking tools and being aware of the tactics used to push misinformation, we can cut through the noise. Yeah, but we didn't. We know that misinformation can spread fast and far. In August, Facebook released a report on its most widely viewed content from January through March 2021. The winner? The post seen more times than any other was a misleading article implying the Covid vaccine had killed someone. This nugget of misinformation was viewed nearly 54 million times by Facebook users in the U. S. in that three-month period and has been leveraged by countless anti-vaccine advocates, compounding its impact. Even if the vaccine (or any course of treatment) did cause a death, what we have to do is weigh that against the expected number of deaths from doing nothing. It's pretty well-known, for example, that, on occasion, people die during surgery. Maybe from an unexpected reaction to anesthesia, or whatever. Would that mean we should stop dong medically necessary surgery, which many more people would die from the lack of? People make fun of the philosophical Trolley Problem, but there's a practical example of it right there. And that's not even getting into the fact that people die every day (in general, I mean; obviously, no one person dies every day), so it's inevitable, statistically, that some of them will die of unrelated causes after medical treatment. It's like "Frank ate a turkey dinner, then dropped dead! No way am I ever again eating turkey! Or dinner!" Another problem: Lies, fake news, and pseudoscience can be made more compelling (microchips in the vaccines!) than the boring old truth (safe, clinical-trial-tested, actual vaccine ingredients). Indeed, research has found that, yep, as the saying goes, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Fact-checking a statement takes many orders of magnitude longer than making the statement. And, because of primacy bias, often, fact-checking does absolutely no good whatsoever. The Wakefield disaster is a perfect example of primacy bias. "Vaccines cause autism!" has way more staying power than "No, they dont," even though the first statement is provably false. The article also has something to say about my favorite bias, confirmation bias. So, I do what I can. It's not enough. |
| After yesterday's rant (which indeed contained an egregious error made by me; I didn't notice it until today and by my own rules it's now set in stone forevermore), how about something fun from Cracked? This could just as well have been "5 Facts About U.S. Landmarks," but that doesn't get as many challenge-accepted-clicks. What color is the White House? The Kennedy Space Center is named after which U.S. president? These are questions that you, the well-informed reader, are proud to answer with ease. They left out the old classic: Who's buried in Grant's Tomb? That's a trick question, though; U.S. Grant and Julia Grant are interred in sarcophagi therein, not buried. 5. Why Does the Pentagon Take Up So Many Acres? And why are we still using acres? For years, the Pentagon was the world’s largest office building, boasting more than six million square feet of floor space. Let's see... commercial rents in that area go for around $30/sf (okay, yes, I'm using square feet after complaining about acres). That would be $180,000,000 in rent if it were rentable. That's per month. The Pentagon is so large because it’s the headquarters of the Department of Defense, the single largest employer in the world. The DoD employs almost three million people, and 27,000 of them work in the Pentagon. The building is especially large because we built it during World War II, which was the most complicated challenge ever faced by the Department, or by anyone. Um... well... I can think of a more complicated challenge during WWII. They released a movie about it last year. None of that answers the exact question we asked. Even if the Pentagon has to contain six million square feet, why is it so spread out, across 30 acres? Because the banks of the tidal Potomac aren't known for being able to support skyscrapers? Washington, D.C. doesn’t have the skyscrapers many other cities do (no building in that town should be higher than the Washington Monument), but plenty of its buildings have 10 floors or more. (1) The Pentagon lurks in Arlington County, VA, not Washington, DC. (2) My understanding of the DC building law is that no building can be taller than the Capitol. But that's irrelevant, because (1). (3) After checking around a bit, my understanding of (2) was wrong; it's more complicated than that. But that's irrelevant, because (1). (4) Even ignoring all that, the National Cathedral in DC is built on high ground, and its spire exceeds the elevation of the tip of the WM.Normally, a taller and narrower building would be the wiser choice. Land is scarce in most locations where a building this large is desirable. Except that building taller and narrower buildings requires better subsurface features, either bedrock (like in NYC) or massive underground structures to distribute the load. If space were truly an issue back then, there wouldn't be all surface parking around it. Plus, elevators move up and down, not side-to-side. Easy enough to fix. Wonka might have some design ideas there. But for a building to stand many floors tall, you need lots of steel, and during construction, they wanted to use as little steel as possible, to save the stuff for the war effort. Okay, there's that, too. The real question here is: why a pentagon? Even in the early 1940s, they must have expected conspiracy theories. The actual answer is more mundane: the original design was meant to be bordered by five roads. I should note that, while civil engineering technology plods along, it does eventually advance, and I'm pretty sure that right now there are no engineering barriers to building skyscrapers on the banks of the Potomac. Probably not going to happen, though, because engineers don't run governments. 4. Where Is the Center of Gravity of the Space Needle? Sure, let's hop to the entire other coast. I did that once. Took off from Washington (actually Arlington) and landed in Washington (actually Tacoma). Skipping to the spoiler: The building may look like a needle pointing from the ground to the sky, but a large bulk of the structure’s mass sits underground. The foundations run 30 feet below the surface, and these foundations weigh 5,840 tons. I told you tall buildings required big foundations. Now, I know way more about foundation requirements in Virginia than in Washington state, but I'm pretty sure the Needle was built on bedrock. Problem is, it's in an earthquake zone. Oh, and here's more fuel for the conspiracy fire: The Needle was privately financed and built by the Pentagram Corporation... 3. What Faces Did South Dakota Want to Carve into Mount Rushmore? If it were up to me, it'd be Curly, Larry, Moe, and Shemp. It started out with a more narrow focus. First of all, the idea for the monument came from South Dakota specifically, rather than from the federal government that provided funding. That's because there is literally nothing else interesting in the entirety of South Dakota. As it was conceived as a South Dakota attraction, it was originally supposed to be themed more to the region. Rather than depicting four presidents, it was supposed to depict figures from the Old West. These included Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea. Lewis and Clark were from around my hometown. We had a big statue of them, along with Sacagawea, at a prominent intersection. Remember that this is Charlottesville, and take a guess if the statue's still there. In fairness, while the statue was meant to depict the white guys staring boldly off into the distant wilderness while their Native guide did some tracking or whatever, it ended up looking like the poor girl was cowering at the heroic-looking pair's feet. I do wish they'd do something with the plinth, though. Right now, it's a big hunk of concrete. Maybe a giant inoffensive abstract hypercube. Except that abstract art also offends some people. 2. Who Was the St. Louis Arch Accused of Plagiarizing? Hint: It's not McDonald's. 1. How Long Does the Grand Canyon’s River Take to Reach the Ocean? If I'm being honest, this is the only one of these that I got right without looking at the text. The Grand Canyon's river is the Colorado, which also supplies some well-known desert reservoirs and a bunch of farms. The answer, if you just consider surface runoff and not the evaporation-clouds-rain water cycle, is infinity. Because by the time you trace the old channel of the Colorado down to the Gulf of California (an arm of the Pacific, so "ocean" isn't the trick part), all the water is gone, diverted to thirsty people or agriculture, or evaporated naturally. This is, of course, a marvel of civil engineering, and I should be quite proud of my field's accomplishments. I'm not. |
| I'm aware that language changes over time. But some things are just always wrong. For example, "alot" is not, never has been, and never will be a word, as in "I have alot of problems with spelling." One does not "loose" one's keys if they're misplaced; one can only "lose" them. "It's" is never possessive, and is always a contraction of "it is." But, being Southern, this one especially annoys me: The South is known for its laundry list of unique, quirky, cultural sayings, like "Bless your heart," "Too big for his britches," and "Well, I s'wanee," to name a few. Okay, I've never heard that last one until now. I don't know everything, but damn if I'm not working on it. But the best-known word in the Southern vernacular is probably our most-loved pronoun: y'all. And make no mistake, it is absolutely a word. Modern English lacks a universally-agreed-upon second person plural, and the other candidates, with the possible exception of the very British "you lot," just don't work outside their regions. The only proper way to spell the contraction of "you" and "all" is "y'all." And that should be the final word on the subject, but I guarantee you, sometime soon, I'll see someone's typed it as "ya'll" and rage will boil up once again. The article goes into why. Basically, an apostrophe serves two major purposes in English: possessives (for words that are NOT pronouns such as "it"), and to replace missing letters. There are a few edge cases, but they mostly involve borrowed words from other languages. "Y'all" is obviously not possessive, so the apostrophe replaces missing letters. The missing letters are "ou." As in "you all" contracts to "y'all." I did say the apostrophe is not used for pronoun possessives, but here, "y'all" is an exception. If you're writing about something that belongs to y'all, it's "y'all's," as in "Where's [where is] y'all's [belonging or relating to all of you] tater tots?" (Never mind that it should be "Where are your tater tots?"; you gotta cut people a bit of slack.) For context, one might ask a helpful grocery store employee this question, usually while standing right next to the freezer containing the tater tots. Though, to be fair, Wikipedia asserts: "The possessive form of y'all has not been standardized; numerous forms can be found, including y'alls, y'all's, y'alls's, you all's, your all's, and all of y'all's."Unlike French, German, and Spanish languages, the English language does not have a designed second-person plural pronoun. I think they mean "designated," because English was far from "designed." But yes, it does. It's "y'all." Anyway, the French second-person plural doubles as the formal second-person singular, and you have to figure out the difference from context. What we desperately need is another second-person plural. Right now, if I said, "We are going to a party tonight," it's ambiguous whether "we" refers to "I and you" or "I and my closest friends, of which you are not one." Call it first-person plural inclusive and first-person plural exclusive. I suggest "ze" for the latter, but no one cares. While we're on the subject of poor spelling, what the hell is up with "Opps!"? Look. I've never, ever heard someone exclaim "opps," which, by that spelling, would be like in "drops." No, I've only ever heard "Oops," though the oo there can be pronounced either like book or like boob. Speaking of boobs, I've been seeing more and more people writing something like "a women" as in "There was a women waiting for the store to open." No. There is no such thing as "a women." There's a woman, or there's several women. Look, I'm not saying I never make mistakes. That would be a mistake. And by Waltz's Second Law of the Internet, because this post discusses spelling mistakes, it probably contains an inadvertent spelling mistake. But come on... at least try. |
| Unless you've been hiding under a rock or on a remote arctic island, you know there will be a total solar eclipse visible from parts of North America in a couple of weeks. I've known about it since 2010 or so, when I decided I wanted to see an eclipse, even if it meant traveling, and I saw that there would be not one, but two solar eclipses within the following 15 years visible from places that didn't even require me to put up with the discomfort, indignity, and humiliation of air travel. Of course, this foreknowledge (eclipses can be predicted to a very high degree of space-time accuracy even several centuries out) didn't stop me from procrastinating the procurement of travel arrangements until very nearly the last minute, but the fault there lies not in the heavans, but in myself. Point is, stuff about the upcoming eclipse is all over the news. Where to see it. How to get the proper viewing glasses. Hell, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if someone didn't have a "what shoes should we wear for the eclipse" (sponsored, of course, by a shoe manufacturer). I hate to add to that cacophony; perhaps you're sick of eclipse pieces by now, and I wouldn't blame you. But I couldn't let this egregious pandering from a formerly distinguished and reputable source (BBC) go unremarked. "Move over?" Look. There is, objectively, no sight more spectacular than that of a total solar eclipse. None. Oh, you may think "except for the birth of my child," but no, babies get born thousands of times a day and they all come from the same place and look exactly the same. A partial eclipse doesn't come close. A lunar eclipse is cool, but ooh, the moon turned red; now what? I thought Avengers:Endgame was a fun movie with great CGI, but it still can't touch an eclipse on the grandeur scale. Photos, no matter how good, cannot capture the experience. No writer has ever been able to pen words that convey even ten percent of the awesomeness. The only thing I can even conceive of that might approach the spectacle of a total eclipse is if there were a nearby (but not too nearby) supernova; those things can outshine entire galaxies and can be visible during the daytime. But even that, while astronomers and cosmologists would absolutely have orgasms over it, couldn't possibly match the unique experience of a total solar eclipse. So this nova had better come with multicolored flashing lights engineered by sentient aliens saying "We did this!" for it to even be in the same galactic quadrant of gloriousness as a total solar eclipse. The nova T Coronae Borealis explodes about once every 80 years. In other words, it's somewhat predictable, but not nearly to the accuracy of eclipses. While the world's attention has been focused on the total solar eclipse that will occur later this spring, the distant Corona Borealis binary system – which contains one dead white dwarf star and one ageing red giant star – has been busy gearing up for its own moment of glory: a spectacular nova explosion. I'll say this for the article: it does a pretty good job explaining, based on the best science we have, how and why this happens. So, how will this event overtake the eclipse in the race of awesome? The T CrB star system normally has a visibility magnitude +10 in terms of brightness, according to Nasa. But when the upcoming T CrB nova eruption takes place, the visibility will jump significantly, up to what's known as a magnitude +2, which is far brighter than a +10. To put that into some context, a +2 is a similar level of brightness as the North Star, Polaris. By the time that happens, T CrB will be visible to the naked eye. Magnitude 2? Magnitude 2? And you have the audacity to compare the experience of seeing this to witnessing the moon eat the sun, belch corona, and shit the sun out again? Despite what a certain pop song asserts ("You are as constant as the Northern Star, the brightest light that shines") Polaris is neither all that bright, nor constant. Not only is it a Cepheid variable, which means its absolute brightness fluctuates over time, but apart from its useful position near the north celestial pole, there's nothing distinguishing it from surrounding stars. Hell, the only way I can ever find it in the sky is to locate the Big Dipper (hard to miss) and follow the two "bowl" stars across the blackness to Polaris, which is the tail star of the Little Dipper. Further, due to precession, it wasn't the North Star in the past and won't be in the future. So much for "constant." Don't get your scientific facts from popular music. Well, except maybe They Might Be Giants. And Schoolhouse Rock. The dimmest stars you can see on a clear, cold night in the desert, if you have decent eyesight, are magnitude 6. From a city, you can usually see magnitude 2 stars, but they lack context. It's a logarithmic scale, like with earthquake magnitudes or decibels. I'm a big fan of astronomy and love looking at the night sky, but if a new mag-2 point of light shows up in a small, obscure northern constellation, and I didn't know there was a nova, I'd never even notice it. Those hoping to see the nova display should look in the sky for the constellation Corona Borealis, or the Northern Crown – a small, semicircular arc near Bootes and Hercules, says Nasa. Right, because everyone can recognize Boötes and Hercules at a glance. (The article does helpfully provide constellation illustrations.) Now, look. I'm not downplaying how awesome the nova is from a scientific viewpoint. We certainly have better instruments to observe it with than we did last time it flared, and I bet they'll do some great research on the thing. And I'll do what I can to take a look at it, myself. But from our everyday perspective? It's not going to outdo a total solar eclipse. I think the BBC is just salty that we Yanks get two solar eclipses seven years apart, while they haven't had any in a while. So, speaking of celestial sights, I recently found out that there's a comet visiting us here in the inner solar system, and that it might—just might—become visible during totality.My first thought upon reading that was "That would be so fucking awesome." And then, like a few hours later, it hit me: People are, in general, prone to superstition; and both eclipses and comets have been considered portents of DOOM through most of human history. Having both in the sky at once? Damn, that would be spectacular. Except... idiots. Think I'm being too harsh on the people of the land? Well, consider this article from Atlas Obscura: Why Doomsayers Think the Eclipse Will Bring Disaster to Illinois “If you lived forever, and you never moved from where you are today, on average, you would have to wait 400 years for a total eclipse to come across where you are,” says Frank Close, Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College. The likelihood that you could experience two total solar eclipses in one place in the space of seven years is miniscule. The chances are so low, that some believe something special is going on in Carbondale. In particular, conspiracy theorists believe that a seismic event will be triggered when the eclipse arrives in this part of the state, known as Little Egypt, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Back when I was preparing for the 2017 eclipse, I noticed that the track took it right over Yellowstone. Pretty much everyone knows about the Yellowstone Supervolcano (though the actual danger there may be, pun intended, overblown), so I tried to start a rumor that the combined gravitational forces of the sun and moon would aggravate the magma underneath Yellowstone, causing the doomsday eruption. It's a stupid enough idea that I was genuinely surprised when it didn't gain traction. Now, let's be clear. Something bad is going to happen. Something bad often happens, like just the other day when that container ship destroyed the bridge near Baltimore. There's usually a reason for it, but that reason is never a) we're sinners or b) celestial events (unless the celestial event is, you know, a nearby supernova or a giant meteor hitting the planet, in which case it's still not because we're sinners). But I'm glad my idea didn't take off, even though it logically made more sense than the Carbondale "theory" (and by "more sense," I really mean "slightly less nonsense"). Because shit like that often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like when it's about to snow, and you think the grocery store is about to run out of milk and bread, so you rush there along with everyone else in town to buy out the entire stock of milk and bread. If you want to contemplate cosmic coincidences, the one to ponder is this: the sun and moon appear to be about the same size in the sky. Because of elliptical orbits, sometimes they seem slightly bigger or smaller, which is why you sometimes get annular (ring of fire) eclipses instead of totality. But there's no known scientific reason for this coincidence. In the distant past, the moon was closer and appeared larger. In the future, it will be more distant and all eclipses will be annular. There will, consequently, at some point, be a last total solar eclipse. And that makes me ineffably sad. Me? I plan on going to central Indiana. It's fairly close to here, with some good hang time for totality. Because I'm me, though, I fully expect thick obscuring cloud cover. That would suck. But at least I saw the one in 2017. |
| No article to share today, just a personal update: I wanted to say thanks, everyone, for acknowledging that I have the best opinion. I've always known that, of course, but it's good to have others acknowledge it. ...wait, what? Oh, my mistake. This blog is the 2023 Quill winner for the Opinion genre. Apparently, that's not the same thing as saying I have the best opinions. Who knew? Long-time readers (or anyone who bothered to see all the stuff at the bottom of the intro) will note that it did not win Best Blog this year, after taking the title for several years running. Some might wonder how I feel about that, so let me set the record straight: I'm thrilled. Other people are doing wonderful blogs, and I was starting to get a little embarrassed hogging the limelight for four years in a row. Not that I mind winning too much, you understand; I wasn't embarrassed enough to have voluntarily withdrawn the blog from consideration altogether. So congrats to all the other Quill winners, runners-up, finalists, and nominees. And, of course, huge thanks to the organizers; that project is massive, and I certainly wouldn't be able to do it and still keep whatever remains of my mind intact. I'd link everyone here, but I'd probably mess up and leave someone out, so I'll just post the actual winners / finalists list:
Besides, I'm entirely too lazy to copy/paste all those usernames. And I still say I have the best opinion. Back to articles tomorrow, but not a random one; I have a time-sensitive link to post. |
| Today, I'm sharing a link that shows, once again, that it's fun to set things on fire. Back? As fire as I'm concerned, it never went away. Here at Gastro Obscura, we really like playing with fire. When I was a kid, the thing I got in trouble for the most (and this is saying something) was playing with fire. There was the time that editor Sam O’Brien made feuerzangenbowle, a flaming German rum punch with roots in the rowdy student culture of the 1700s. Then there was the night I risked my fingers and eyebrows with the Victorian party game known as Snapdragon, where players compete to pull raisins and almonds out of a puddle of burning brandy. "Snapdragon." Get it? Huh? There's one problem with flaming food and drink: I have facial hair I'd like to keep. Okay, two problems: it's harder to exercise reasonable precautions when you're drinking flaming booze while already drunk. Both of those were Christmastime traditions, though. I’d argue that adding flaming alcohol to food and drink should be a year-round thing. Absolutely! And April Fools' Day is coming up fast... Setting food on fire with warm booze was considered the height of luxury for a good chunk of the 20th century. Now, I don't know about that. The iconic "height of luxury" was usually champagne and caviar. Champagne can be delicious, but caviar? Meh. Besides looking pretty, what does flambéing do to a dish? There’s the taste of the liquor—which could be rum, bourbon, Calvados, or brandy—with some of the potency burned away, resulting in a smoother taste. I've heard some people assert that it burns away all the alcohol. It does not. I suspect that at least part of the reason it fell out of favor was anti-alcohol attitudes. I’ve flambéed a few things in my time, so I decided to set myself a challenge: to flambé my breakfast, lunch, and dinner over the course of one day. My biggest problem with the technique is that it burns away at least some of the alcohol. This is alcohol abuse. The only time I tolerate it is if it makes something else better, which, generally, flambé does. Doing it for every meal, though? That's a stunt. I guess it worked, because I read the article and shared it. Though we have no way of knowing if the author is completely honest about the "every meal for a day" thing, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, mainly because it doesn't much matter. There follows the actual dishes prepared, with hunger-inducing photographs. I just have one thing to add: absinthe. The first time I tried absinthe was at a Moroccan-themed bar here in my town. I forget the exact ritual they went through, but fire was involved. And I liked it enough to go buy absinthe and try it myself. But the serving of absinthe, with or without fire, is kind of finicky. Sure, you can drink it straight, like other liqueurs, but, like some other liqueurs, it's not really meant to be straight. At the very least, the serving of absinthe involves ice water and sugar. Generally, you pour the absinthe into a specialty glass and then use some contraption to let the ice water drip slowly into it over a sugar cube. As I am, above all, a science nerd, I decided to compare flaming absinthe to not-flaming absinthe. Of course, I used the same absinthe, same water source (my kitchen sink) and the same kind of sugar (Domino's brown sugar cubes), because science is all about controlling variables. The result? In my not-humble opinion, the one without fire had the superior flavor. It was also, I can only assume, more potent because the alcohol hadn't burned off. However... the flaming absinthe was just more fun. |
| Today is the day when I dig into the archives for a past post and talk about what's changed—in me or in the world. Unfortunately, what's changed in this case is that both of the links I shared are now broken: "Took the train down to Athens" , from 14 years ago.On one talon, it should be no surprise that 14-year-old links are broken. On the other talon, they were from The Daily Mash (kind of the British version of The Onion, still in existence) and Cracked (which, though it's gone through its own changes, I continue to read and, on occasion, share). Everyone knows that Greece's economy has taken a turn for the worse, right? I reiterate: this was 2010. Lots of economies had already tanked. Some had even begun to recover. (There followed a movie reference that was probably a lame attempt at a joke even way back then.) But it's the next-to-last paragraph that had me rolling on the floor laughing my acronyms off. And sadly, whatever that funny bit was is probably lost in the mists of time. Someone might be able to find it by searching the internet archives. But that someone will not be me. The world has moved on since then, and there are more relevant jokes around. Besides, I just can't be arsed. Bonus link is from Cracked: Back then, that site ran Photoshop contests that schlubs like us (not me, though, because I suck at photo editing). This was apparently one of them. Incidentally, The Daily Mash was paywalled last time I tried to look at it (it's been a while). They're funny, but not funny enough for me to subscribe. The title of the post was, as with some of my other entry titles, a reference to a song. If you feel cheated by all the broken links, at least I can post the relevant music video, Euro-Trash Girl from Cracker, who I once had the pleasure of seeing in concert: Took the train down to Athens And I slept in a fountain Some Swiss junkie in Turin Ripped me off for my cash Yeah, I'll search the world over For my angel in black Yeah, I'll search the world over For a Euro-trash girl |
| Got a long one for you today. It's from Truly*Adventure, a source I've never used before, and it's a few years old. As the title is kinda vague, and the subtitle is kinda long, I'll sum it up as quick as I can: A volcano erupted, people fled, and other people saved the animals left behind. What makes this interesting to me is that I've visited the volcano. While it was active. The Soufriere Hills Volcano had been threatening the small Caribbean island of Montserrat for two years. I mean, technically, the island of Montserrat is the Soufriere Hills volcano. It was dormant for so long they thought it was extinct. Turns out it wasn't. The article is, as I said, long. So this is more to share it, and recount my own experience, than to make comments on it. There exists a photo of me—rare, I know— standing next to the volcano exclusion zone sign on Montserrat. Really, I should have put at least one foot over the line to demonstrate just how rebellious I am. But it's probably wrong for me to joke (though that's never stopped me before). What happened to Montserrat is a real tragedy. Thousands displaced. City destroyed. Fortunately, they're a Commonwealth country, so England took a bunch of them. But how do you go from living on a tropical island paradise to cold and windy Old Blighty? Not that Montserrat isn't windy. There's a distinct difference between the windward and leeward sides of the island. One's mostly barren, with sporadic trees that grow diagonally because of the winds off the Atlantic. The other's a tropical rainforest. Or, well, was, before it turned to ash. And a few holdouts remained on the island. To avoid the exclusion zone, they migrated to the inhospitable (barren and windy) northern lobe. I haven't been there for 20 years, but I recall makeshift dwellings and such. Hopefully, things have improved by now. At the time, I considered myself lucky to get a tour of the island, at least those parts open to travel. Unless you live in a volcano zone, it's not every day you get to observe an active one, and even rarer that you can do so in relative safety. Standing on a windy hillside, I watched the mountain blow plumes of smoke while the ground vibrated beneath my feet. Clouds hovered around the summit, and, despite the wind, never cleared. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but it's too early in the morning for me to tease it out. |
| Good writers shun clichés, and avoid them like the plague. Then there's Cracked: Every cliché starts from somewhere. As I've said so many times it's become cliché: Every cliché was once profound wisdom. Often, these tropes don’t simply stay exactly the same until we’re all sick of them. Hunt down their debut, and you’ll see something different from what you’re now picturing. There is an important distinction between a cliché and a trope, but I can't be arsed to get into that right now. But it's like... in action movies, explosions are tropes. Hard to have an action movie without at least one explosion. It's part of their charm, along with car chases and fight scenes. But the action hero calmly walking toward the camera while shit explodes in the background? That's cliché. But the first time we saw it (I don't remember what movie), it was fresh, cool, and different. 5. The First Damsel Tied to Railroad Tracks Was a Man If you’re a mustachioed villain, and you have a helpless maiden in your clutches, you know what you have to do. The villainous mustache has transcended trope and cliché and achieved icon status. The article delves into the history, here, and it's worth looking at if only for the photo of greatest villainous mustache of all time. But, as the header suggests, the first fictional track-victim was male. I'm sure someone could get their college thesis done on just this topic alone. In any case, this seems to be an instance of the original idea being twisted, and that twist becoming the cliché. 4. The Emperor’s New Clothes Was About Fear of Being Disinherited That story isn't so much trope or cliché as it is an important literary reference that everyone should know. In the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, the emperor walks around naked, and no one’s willing to point this out, having been told that only smart people can see the clothes. This offers lessons for everyday life. Sometimes, people are just pretending to know what they’re talking about. Sometimes, the stuff that wins awards is garbage. Also: A whole lot of people are afraid of looking stupid. One might even suggest it's a ready-made metaphor. 3. The First Man Who Asked for Three Wishes Was a Dick Joke A man finds a lamp, and when he rubs it, out comes a genie. “I will grant you three wishes,” says the genie. “Great,” says the man. “I will wish for two normal things, and for my third wish, I will trigger the punchline.” The "rule of three" doesn't only apply to comedy. That's only where it's most apparent. The header here is perhaps misleading, as the original format (from the One Thousand and One Nights) was less joke than fable. 2. The First Bad Boy Was Pretty Lame We use the phrase “bad boy” to describe not just actual children but excitingly rebellious men. We consider that normal, but it’s a little odd. There are only a handful of arenas in which it’s considered okay to call a man a boy. And there's at least one situation where one should never, ever do that. But apart from that, clearly, the author of this piece isn't Southern. We call rebels “bad boys” because of an 1870 novel called The Story of a Bad Boy. The main character, Tom Bailey, is a rebel but is also very much a boy. His antics include scaring people by setting off a cannon and pushing a car into a fire. As the "car" as we know it wasn't invented for almost another 20 years, this must be one of the other definitions of "car." 1. “The Butler Did It” Wasn’t a Cliché But a Cheat Another one that makes great joke fodder, but is cheating in detective stories. Apparently, it's always been a cheat. You might think that The Butler Did It became an unforgivable trope after tons of murder mysteries pulled that trick, until it got old. That’s not really what happened. Instead, in 1928, an author of detective novels published a set of rules that he claimed mysteries should follow, and among them was a rule saying the culprit must not be a servant. I'm just going to pause here and bask in the elitism of it all. Moving on... That set of rules was written by S.S. Van Dine, who went by “Willard Huntington Wright” when he wasn’t writing detective fiction. The rules start out reasonable enough, talking about how the author must play fair and provide all necessary clues. Then it makes some questionable blanket statements about what all mysteries must do — there must be just one detective, the crime must always be murder and “there must be no love interest.” By Rule 16, Dine is insisting that mysteries must have “no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations.” I don't usually subscribe to the notion that rules were made to be broken. In this case, though, I'll make an exception. Breaking my own rule, as it were. Rule number 11 says, “A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.” Elitism intensifies... Dine’s rules laid out a few other solutions that he says stories should never use. The death should never be revealed to be an accident, he said, or a suicide. The detective must never be the culprit. There must never be multiple culprits. The solution must not involve the killer committing the murder after the police have broken into the crime scene. Yeah, those aren't rules. Those are story ideas. In other news, I'm going to attempt to make this my last hyphen-pun-titled entry for a while. It's becoming cliché. |
| Here's one from The New Yorker that, when I first read it, I thought: This has comedic potential. When Philosophers Become Therapists The philosophical-counselling movement aims to apply heady, logical insights to daily life. I mean, think about it. "Doc, I'm distressed because I can't find meaning in life." "That's because life has no meaning, so stop looking for it." "Wow! That's deep! Thank you." "Sure. That'll be $180." "Here's $200." "Thanks!" "Can I have change?" "You already did." Around five years ago, David—a pseudonym—realized that he was fighting with his girlfriend all the time. On their first date, he had told her that he hoped to have sex with a thousand women before he died. All the TNY pieces I've seen start out with anecdotes and then, maybe, bit by halting bit, go around and around in circles until they get to something more general. Sometimes they never even get there, which I call "The New Yorker School of Not Getting to the Fucking Point." This one contains a whole lot of anecdotes. My point, which you'll note I'm getting to very quickly, is that I'm going to skip a lot of it here. In brief, he worked with a philosophical therapist named Lydia Amir. I might have missed it, but I don't think the article notes whether he had sex with her or not. Between meetings, Amir sometimes gave him reading assignments: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hume. Oh yes, definitely, if I'm having an existential crisis, those are absolutely the philosophers I want to read. Amir is one of a small but growing number of philosophers who provide some form of individual counselling. In the United States, two professional associations for philosophical counsellors, the National Philosophical Counseling Association (N.P.C.A.) and the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (A.P.P.A.), list dozens of philosophers who can help you with your problems. Well. Philosophy tends to pay jack shit. Therapy, however, can bring in the bucks. Philosophy is both a natural and a strange resource for helping people resolve the problems of life. Ancient philosophical traditions such as Stoicism and Buddhism focussed on practical ethics and techniques for alleviating suffering, but much modern philosophy seems to aim to express suffering, rather than reduce it. I wouldn't call the aim of those philosophies to be "alleviating suffering," but there's always the possibility that I don't really understand Stoicism or Buddhism. Some think that the practice of philosophical counselling should be more standardized. Others worry that philosopher-counsellors will miss serious mental-health issues. The two major American professional organizations stress that philosophical counselling can’t address certain severe psychiatric disorders, and urge counsellors to refer clients to mental-health providers when their issues do not fit a philosophical scope of practice. Well, that's somewhat relieving. It's one thing to seek someone else's point of view, or be able to talk things through with a neutral party. It's another to have legitimate mental health issues that need more medical treatment. So, anecdotes (and jokes) aside, this kind of thing obviously exists (in the same sense that anything can be said to truly exist), and it mildly amuses me. Does it work? All the TNY anecdotes in the world won't convince me one way or the other; I want to see a study. I'm sure a philosophical therapist would have something to say about my need for evidence-based science. But, you know. Whatever. |
| Well, "Spring is Sprung" , as they say, so for no reason other than random chance, here's a Wired article in praise of Wikipedia. Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it's a beacon of so much that's right. Of course, Writing.com is really the Last Best Place on the Internet, but I'll accept Wikipedia as a close second. Remember when Wikipedia was a joke? In its first decade of life, the website appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. I've noted before that WDC came into being prior to Wikipedia. Not by much, mind you. September 2000 and January 2001. I remember when those years seemed so futuristic. We expected interplanetary travel, jetpacks, flying cars, suborbital transport, and asteroid mining. What we got was the internet. The article is long, but here's a few select comments. To confess that you've just repeated a fact you learned on Wikipedia is still to admit something mildly shameful. It's as though all those questions that used to pepper think pieces in the mid-2000s—Will it work? Can it be trusted? Is it better than Encyclopedia Britannica?—are still rhetorical, when they have already been answered, time and again, in the affirmative. I remember back then, someone took a random sampling of articles from both Wiki and EB and fact-checked the hell out of them. They came in about equal. Of course, that was 20 years ago, and a few things have changed. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. It does do a fundraising event every year, kind of like public radio. I'm not the least bit embarrassed to say that I contribute. Money, that is. I don't have the will to contribute content there. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked? I have, at times, noted that it's the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. Like that ancient institution, I fully expect it to be overrun and destroyed by the know-nothings, at some point. Until that happens, I continue to use it. Wikipedia and Britannica do, at least, share a certain lineage. The idea of building a complete compendium of human knowledge has existed for centuries, and there was always talk of finding some better substrate than paper: H. G. Wells thought microfilm might be the key to building what he called the “World Brain”; Thomas Edison bet on wafer-thin slices of nickel. Wells was a science fiction writer, and Edison was a hack. They were both products of their time and prognosticated the best they could with the technology available to them. Wells couldn't foresee some storage medium denser than microfilm, and there was no way Edison or anyone else (not even Tesla) could have predicted semiconductor technology (or, if they did, it was by mere chance). There is, as I said, lots more interesting information in the article. One reason I'm sharing this is that I have a tendency to hyperlink Wikipedia entries here, and I wanted to justify that. Two things can happen with crowdsourcing. Well, more than two, as usual, but at the extremes, you can get the worst of humanity, or the best. As the article notes, Wikipedia isn't perfect. Nothing is. But it represents the best of humanity, while social media usually represents the worst. |
| The equinox will occur later today (or early tomorrow if you live in certain time zones), so it's appropriate that this cosmological link resulted from my random die roll today. Warning: It's from Salon, a source I don't normally use and that might be problematic. Sure, we're all made of stardust. But what does that really mean? We often hear that our bodies contain elements from the stars. But how do we know this for sure? Personally, I think it's the most meaningful, profound insight in all of science. As far as I know, most cultures have an origin story: we were shaped from trees; we appeared out of literal nothing; we were formed from clay; whatever. I use passive voice there because, usually, gods were involved, powerful entities that predated humanity. Some origin stories also attempt to explain where those creator gods came from, but you quickly run into the turtle problem: if Earth is a flat disc resting on the back of a giant turtle, what's holding up the turtle? Another turtle? Well, what's holding up that one? It's turtles all the way down. Now, you could say, "But science runs into the same problem. If all that exists was created in a Big Bang, how and where did the Big Bang... well... bang?" This is a fair question, however it's stated. And science doesn't have a definitive answer. The difference between that and creation myths is that science doesn't pretend to have a definitive answer. In any case, one reason I find it meaningful is that it doesn't just focus on one human tribe, or even on humanity in general, but the entire universe; that is to say, everything. How humans came to be from non-humans is the focus of evolutionary biology, not cosmology. And how different tribes formed is in the purview of, among other disciplines, anthropology. I'll grant that the creation stories our ancestors came up with have a certain poetry to them (and say an awful lot about the cultures involved), but to me, they all read like "Just-So" stories. Or, well, vice-versa. But my point stands. With that, I won't be quoting too much from the article. That was really the thing I most wanted to say. As the poets at NASA put it, “from the carbon in our DNA to the calcium in our bones, nearly all of the elements in our bodies were forged in the fiery hearts and death throes of stars.” Poetry again. It depends what you mean by "nearly all." By mass, it's mostly oxygen (the "ox" in "Hydrox" from yesterday's entry). By number of atoms, we're mostly hydrogen (the "hydr" in "Hydrox" from yesterday's entry). You might also recognize these elements as the atoms of water, and I'm sure you've heard that we're well over 50% water, so that all tracks, though both hydrogen and oxygen are part of other molecules in our bodies, notably carbon-based ones.Point being that hydrogen is mostly primordial, not forged in stars. Though an argument could be made that, at the very least, protons are mostly primordial, no matter how many of them are in a given nucleus. And they’ve been around far longer than we have. Light elements started forming an estimated 14 billion years ago, actually, in the first few minutes after the Big Bang, though others didn’t come around till a few hundred thousand years later when the universe cooled down enough for electrons to stay in orbit around atomic nuclei. That... doesn't quite mesh with my understanding, though I admit my understanding may be off. An element is defined by the number of protons in its nucleus, irrespective of the number of electrons associated with it. A proton is a hydrogen atom (technically, it's a hydrogen ion, but whatever). So once you have free-roaming protons, you have hydrogen. Therefore, it doesn't matter if a proton (or a bound pair or triad of protons, together with the appropriate number of neutrons) has electrons or not; it's still hydrogen, helium, or lithium, respectively. In fairness, the article calls out these elements in the next paragraph; I just have quibbles with how the information is phrased. But you don’t just kill a star and get an entire cupboard of elements suitable for whipping up whatever material good — whether Uranus or, with apologies, your anus — you’re after. Apology absolutely not accepted. Seventh-planet puns are never funny. Well, almost never. Apart from that, well, the article delves into the science of it all, and I won't rehash it further. Suffice it to say, for my purposes, that we know, insofar as we can ever truly know anything, that we are indeed stardust. So is your dog. And poison ivy. And plastic and concrete. The good, the bad, and the ugly. |
| Here's an article about an important component of life. The curious case of the disappearing Hydrox cookies Oreo, the Hydrox knockoff, has been accused of burying its competitor by scoring sweetheart deals with grocers. Does it wield too much power over smaller rivals? Yes, Oreo was a Hydrox knockoff, not the other way around. But that crap happened around 1910. Maybe stop worrying about who was first? Audrey Peard is searching for an elusive, chocolatey piece of Americana: a package of Hydrox cookies. Come to think of it, I haven't seen them in a while, either. Can't go to the grocery store without hearing the siren call of Oreos (which I usually ignore because they produced, then yanked, my favorite ones), but haven't seen Hydrox since before I can remember. She’s visited multiple grocery stores near her home in the Bronx, followed a Facebook group, and even talked to a manager at a production facility in El Segundo, California, about supply shortages. El Segundo may sound like an obscure California town, but in reality, it's right next to LAX. Hardly obscure. Hydrox was the original chocolate sandwich cookie, predating Oreo. With a mildly sweet creme and a crunchier cookie that has a darker chocolate taste than its rival, Hydrox developed a reputation as the dessert of the discerning eater. It was, according to legendary food writer Calvin Trillin, the “far superior” cookie. Sure, but this is the US. We ignore the superior in favor of the cheap and/or flood-marketed. That's kind of our thing; we even apply it to countries. Hydrox, meanwhile, was discontinued in 2003. It came back in 2015 thanks to Leaf Brands, a San Diego-based company that specializes in reheated nostalgia. Well, that might explain why I haven't seen any for a while. Like almost anything else, you can buy Hydrox on Amazon (in bulk). Don't fucking tell me that. Dammit! In March 1912, the first batch of Oreos produced for sale was shipped from Nabisco’s six-story Romanesque-style headquarters in Manhattan to a grocer in Hoboken, New Jersey. It would’ve been a historic moment of American innovation if not for an inconvenient fact: Nabisco totally copied the cookie. Another US thing. See also: Thomas Edison. A smaller rival, Sunshine Biscuits (then known as The Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company), was started by Jacob and Joseph Loose in 1902. Now, this is where my inner linguist starts asking questions. Nabisco was originally National Biscuit Company. Obviously, they both mostly made cookies, not biscuits. Except that in British English (and also in French), what we call cookies, they call biscuits. And what we call biscuits aren't technically biscuits at all ("biscuit" comes from Latin words for something like "twice baked"), though obviously they're delicious in their own way. But these were clearly American companies, as evidenced by their locations in New York and Kansas City. So why "biscuits?" Did we only split off from British usage after the watershed moment when someone invented the first delicious creme-filled sandwich biscuit/cookie? Apparently not. And it looks like we can blame the Dutch for, among other things, "cookie."To complicate matters further, some cookies are called crackers. All of which is to gloss over the fact that it's too bad they didn't stick with Loose-Wiles. Anyway, the article goes off on a tangent about corporations and unions in the US, before going on with: In 1908, Sunshine created one of its most popular products, Hydrox. If you're thinking that's a portmanteau of hydrogen and oxygen, well... According to company lore, the name stemmed from the elements of water — hydrogen and oxygen — chosen to symbolize the cookie’s cleanliness at a time when materials like chalk and plaster of Paris routinely appeared in baked goods. I mean, technically they should have called them Carbohydrox, but whatever. Remember, this was before some other marketing convinced people that chemicals are bad, despite everything being made of chemicals. Sunshine bragged that chemists tested Hydrox for purity and that workers made them at “thousand window” factories with natural light. Yeah, right. Hydrox also stood out against Oreo by promoting its more adult taste and kosher ingredients — in advertisements that bordered on erotic. The "kosher" thing wasn't just to grab the Jewish market, either. It had the cachet of being more "pure" back then, kind of like "all-natural" is today. Whether it was/is or not is up for debate. The article goes on with history for a while, and I think lays out a compelling case for why Oreos ended up reigning supreme. There's also quite a bit about the anti-competitive world of grocery stores, which I find fascinating. Usually, doing articles like these makes me hungry. Not this time. All I can think of is the abomination known as Swedish Fish Oreos, so... no, thanks. |
| When I do these Sunday retrospectives, I can usually find a lot of things in common with the guy who wrote the earlier blog entry. The further back in time I go, the less I find in common, but such is life. This personal update, though, from February of 2008, is tough for me to relate to, and difficult to re-read: "Power" The wind has been crazy here, today. It started sometime during the night, whistling between the houses and threatening to spin my attic vents right off. While I still live in the same house, I've replaced the roof since then, and goodbye old-fashioned spinning attic vents. When I woke up, at around the crack of noon, it was still going on. I'm always a late to bed, late to rise person, but, with age, my ability to sleep until noon has vanished. I figured I'd grab some breakfastlunch and go write this week's Comedy newsletter. Well, I'm still writing Comedy newsletter editorials, at least. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. That, of course, is when the power went out. I've since purchased and had installed a whole-house generator, an automatic start one hooked up to the city gas line. While I justified it to myself and others with my medical devices and a basement sump pump that tends to be most necessary at the times when the weather's lousy enough to cut the power, the real reason is so I never lack internet access. I'm sure the neighbors appreciate the blast of a nat-gas engine cranking up and running like a combination leaf blower / lawnmower every time we lose electricity, but if anyone ever said anything to me, I'd absolutely claim medical necessity. Now, I don't have my truck this weekend. A friend of mine is using it to move. I don't drive pickups anymore, either. And that's one of the reasons why: someone inevitably asks to borrow it or, worse, me. My wife was out in her car, so I was stuck. No longer married, either. I worked some crosswords for a while, but then started feeling antsy about getting the newsletter in. I miss old-style paper crossword puzzles. Probably they still make them, but there's plenty to do on the internet. So I called my wife to drive me to my office. Nor do I have an office. Or a business. Or a job. (My choice.) I booted up my computer, checked some email, started looking for items to include in the newsletter (funny things about romance, mostly - it's the Singles Awareness Day issue of the Comedy newsletter), and the power went out. Well, I continue to rag on Valentine's Day most years in the Comedy NLs. Again, good or bad thing? I don't know. With my memory the way it is, I'm sure it gets repetitive. Before we went home, though, we visited the hospital, where my dad's still being treated for his UTI. Dad would go on to pass on the following month. Not of the UTI. When the doctor called back, she said, "I don't know too much about that patient. UTI. Tested positive for influenza. Going to have to keep him at least a couple more days. Did they make you wear a mask in the room?" As a reminder, this was 2008, long before masks became a political statement and were merely an effective means of helping to prevent disease transmission. "Oh, and there's some question about whether we can send him back to assisited living or if he'll have to be moved to a nursing facility." Wow, a rare misspelling. Eh, it happens. And I'm certainly not going to edit out that wart at this late date. Anyway, as I recall, they eventually moved him back to the assisted living facility (which specialized in Alzheimer's care). He didn't die of the flu, either. Which would have been an irony I would not have appreciated. See, he had been born in New Orleans in 1917. A year later, his mother, quite a young woman at the time, dropped dead. The family never told me more details than that; when I was a kid, I just accepted that dying is what grandparents do. It wasn't until much later in life that it dawned on me: New Orleans. 1918. Death of a young person. Oh... right. Spanish Flu. Not going to leave you in suspense. Official cause of his death was "complications from Alzheimer's." But I got home and did the Comedy newsletter anyway. Sometimes you just have to be funny, even if there's nothing left to laugh at. And that philosophy, folks, seems to be the one thing about me that does not change. There's a kind of power in that. |
| Ironically, the tagline for The Takeout, which provides today's link, is: "Food is delicious." You know what else is inflating? My rage at portmanteaux. Every time I see a cutesy one, it's like I have an anger bar (like a health bar in a video game) and it just keeps getting fuller and fuller. I call it... rageflation. It's okay when I do the portmanteau. If you swear your go-to snacks and candies all seem to taste different—and worse—these days and you can’t quite put your finger on why, you’re not alone. I mean... it is supposedly true that one's sense of taste dulls with age. Business Insider has taken a deep dive into food manufacturers’ increasing adoption of what BI calls skimpflation or flavorflation, aka modifying recipes in order to (you guessed it!) maintain or increase profit margins. Oh, good, now I know what entity to blame for the maddening portmanteau. Call it what it actually is: enshittification. Ingredient costs, obviously, are a huge factor in the pricing of any consumer product. So are employee wages, which is why we replace them with robots. Business Insider cites an instance of Conagra reducing the fat content in its Wish-Bone House Italian Dressing by 10%, replacing it with additional salt and... water. On the bright side, we're running out of fresh water, so the price of that is going to go up, too. In 2013, Breyers, the ice cream of my childhood, had to legally change the labeling of its products from ice cream to “frozen dairy dessert.” Why? Because the company had reduced the amount of dairy fat in its product to the point that it didn’t legally qualify as ice cream anymore. Good to know there are standards. I eat "frozen dairy dessert" so infrequently that I'd probably never notice. Part of the reason is that I have cold-sensitive teeth. But once a "quart" of ice cream became 3.75 cups or whatever, I quit buying it. Apologies for the shitty measurement system to anyone using a logical one; what you need to know is that one quart, which is a bit less than a liter, is equivalent to four standard cups. Speaking of logical measurement systems, I remember when soda was sold in half-gallon bottles (and they were made of glass, prone to shattering, and heavy). At some point, they switched to 2-liter plastic bottles. As I noted, a liter is slightly more than a quart, and 2 liters is thus more than a half-gallon. Again, apologies to metric users: it's called a quart because it's a quarter of a gallon, okay? I'm not really sure why. Perhaps they were thus able to increase the price beyond what it cost them to include those few extra drops in the bottle. If so, that would be one way to sneak a price increase past us: give us a bit more of the product, while charging disproportionately more. I digress. This is about (ugh) skimpflation and not (blech) shrinkflation. The most egregious example of so-called skimpflation we’ve seen recently was October 2022, when Conagra dropped the amount of fat in its dairy-free Smart Balance spread from 64% to 39%, which meant water became the most plentiful ingredient in the product. I guess someone there found a smarter balance on their accounting spreadsheet. My solution? Use butter. As an aside, I'm going to complain about English muffins (or, as I believe the English call them, muffins), which are one of my favorite foods. I even use them for hamburger buns. For a while, though, the only kind sold by my go-to grocery store was Thomas', so I didn't buy them (or I made a special trip to Whole Paycheck to get the good kind). Thomas' is to English muffins as Lender's is to bagels; that is, a piss-poor replica. Unsurprisingly, those are now both products of the same soulless corporation (aptly named Bimbo). Bread is food; everything else is a condiment. Anyway, more recently, the nearby grocery store started selling its store-brand English muffins. One time, they were out, and the shopper (yes, I get groceries delivered, because I am remarkably lazy) subbed Thomas'. Not only are they inferior in taste, but I noticed that they seemed to be quite a lot thinner than they used to be, so thin it took hours of careful work with specialized tools to split them without destroying them. Now, that could have been my own perception, colored by comparison with the much heftier thickness of the store-brand muffins (which, I should note, are also cheaper), but it could also have been (gag) shrinkflation. Either way, now I have to include a note with my delivery order: "DO NOT substitute Thomas'." I'd rather go without than deal with that bullshit. In conclusion, however, the headline is wrong: Not everything tastes worse than it used to. Beer, for instance, has vastly improved in quality with the advent of craft breweries. More expensive? Sure. But worth every penny. Well. This discussion didn't lower my rage bar. I'm going to go eat an English muffin with butter. |
| Yes, I used to get paid to do photography. No, that doesn't make me an expert. Not being an expert has never stopped me from posting stuff here. This one's from, surprisingly enough, Business Insider. I take such good travel photos of myself that people swear I have a secret photographer. Here's how I do it. Like this author, I tend to travel alone and take photographs. There's one important difference, though: never, in the history of the world, has even one photograph been improved by my presence in it, and, more often, it ruins the whole shot. At least once, it literally cracked the camera lens. So, sure, if you just gotta be the focus (pun intended) of every picture, and you're attractive enough to justify it, great. Otherwise, there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking general landscape shots to prove you've been somewhere. Now, honestly, the article's three-bullet summary should be enough, though even then, the first one is superfluous:  As a solo-travel content creator, I've learned lots of tips for taking great photos while alone. I always travel with a smartphone tripod and use my smartwatch as a remote shutter. If I have to ask someone to snap a photo of me, I always take a photo of them first.So that's all, folks. ...okay, no, I have a few more things to say about the article. First, the example photos really are good, so she's not just blowing wind, here. The last one, especially, with the cacti? It's the first time I've looked at a nature shot and said, "Wow, this picture really is improved by having a human in it." Mostly because the human is wearing something deep red, which nicely complements and contrasts the other colors in the picture. Second, she uses her smartphone for the pictures. These days, there is nothing wrong with this. Phone cameras can be remarkably good, now. Fifteen years ago, I might have scoffed at the idea, but not now. There are things you can do with a standalone camera that you just can't with a phone, but they don't involve composition. On to details: A smartphone tripod is the No. 1 thing I pack on any trip or hike. I would think that the phone would be "No. 1," but whatever. Really, that's it. That's the secret. That, and... I use the Bluetooth connection between my smartphone and smartwatch to create a remote shutter and snap a picture. No matter the camera, selfies, being by definition shot at arm's length, distort features. Most people aren't going to be that close to you, excepting crowded subways, concert pits, and intimate situations, so you're going to look different. Also, it's rather difficult to get a whole body pic (assuming you have a body worth photographing, and/or an outfit you want to emphasize) that way, even with a selfie stick. So the remote thing is a good idea, I think. I used to use a manual cable. I never could get Bluetooth to ever work reliably on anything, so best of luck with that if you try it. A few other tips, and then: There are times when it's not possible to set up a tripod, but I still want to get some photos in a beautiful location. In those instances, I may ask someone to snap a photo or two of me — and, of course, I return the favor. One, that's always been kind of a gray area in my knowledge. If someone else uses my phone to take a photo following my basic requested directions, should they get the photo credit? Like I said, I'm not an expert. And two, I hope you have a backup camera/phone, because not everyone you meet is trustworthy. Most are. But sometimes, you get unlucky. Now, in a way, this article is an ad, not only for the author's material, but also for the products she mentions. That doesn't mean there isn't something useful in there. |
| Remember Rebecca Black's squirmy earworm song, "Friday?" No, I will not link it. Well, this morning, I was tempted to do a parody in honor of today called "Pi Day," but my cats talked me out of it, so we all get to keep our sanity. Unlike this guy, apparently. From Big Think: Tesla’s pigeon: How the great inventor fell for a bird "She understood me and I understood her. I loved that pigeon.” The main trouble with Nikola Tesla's legacy is that his name was appropriated by a mediocre band, and then run into the ground by one of the most successful con artists in history. The only way to reclaim what shouldn't be a laughingstock, I think, is to remember the inventor's life, accomplishments, and, yes, even his apparent madness. On a February morning in 1935, a disoriented homing pigeon flew into the open window of an unoccupied room at the Hotel New Yorker. That hotel, though it's been through a few changes over the decades, still exists. I've stayed there. I don't think the windows open anymore; with air conditioning, it's not necessary, and maybe it prevents some jumpers. While management debated what to do, a maid rushed to the 33rd floor and knocked at the door of the hotel’s most infamous denizen: Nikola Tesla. When I was there, I even made a pilgrimage to the 33rd floor. “Dr. Tesla … dropped work on a new electrical project, lest his charge require some little attention,” reported The New York Times. "Charge?" They just couldn't resist, could they? Revolting how some people just plug in the most obvious puns. Nikola Tesla—the Serbian-American scientist famous for designing the alternating current motor and the Tesla coil—had, for years, regularly been spotted skulking through the nighttime streets of midtown Manhattan, feeding the birds at all hours. He invented way more than that. Some say, rather poetically, that he invented the 20th century. While a bit hyperbolic, it's not that far off the mark. In the dark, he’d sound a low whistle, and from the gloom, hordes of pigeons would flock to the old man, perching on his outstretched arms. Look, all I'm saying is, that's a remarkable image and if someone hasn't painted that, someone definitely should. Tesla said that he and his bird could speak to one another mind to mind, and that sometimes, as they silently conversed, beams of light would shoot from her eyes. This is the sort of thing I meant by "madness" above. But is it really? Or was he operating on a different level of reality? With genius like Tesla's, there's always that seed of doubt: maybe he was right, and it's the rest of us who are blind. Tesla’s love of pigeons was an obsession with a capital O. Likely followed by a capital C and a capital D. He seems to have suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder, and his case was severe. Anyone with only a passing knowledge of Tesla's life, and of pop psychology, would immediately jump to the same conclusion. While it can be dangerous and rude to diagnose someone from some distance in space and time, all the signs were absolutely there. I'd even throw in the possibility of autism. I won't quote more from the article, which is fairly long, but, and I can't emphasize this enough, beautifully written. It weaves quite the tapestry of history and science, and, of course, there's a bit of Mark Twain in there. This is where I'd usually relate the subject of the article to Pi Day, but all I could think of was the relationship between pi and the sine waves of electrical current, but maybe that's a bit too obvious while at the same time too esoteric. So I'll just leave it at that and go find me some pie. |
| I pronounce it "collection of endorrheic basins," but apparently, that's wrong. Why Do Nevadans Pronounce Their State’s Name So Strangely? How you say it certainly says something about who you are. Look, it's an occupational hazard when you make a career out of hydrology to see the world in terms of drainage areas. Seriously, though, I, too, pronounced Nevada in the non-Nevadan way until I spent some time as a guest of someone who lives there. Then, I learned the One True Pronunciation, ensuring that never again would I be caught by that particular shibboleth. How exactly is the name of this state pronounced? Nevadans say “neh-VAD-uh.” Non-Nevadans typically say “neh-VAH-duh.” To get it out of the way, there isn’t really a “correct” or “incorrect” way to pronounce Nevada in any objective sense; both “neh-VAD-uh” and “neh-VAH-duh” are perfectly understandable to all English speakers, which is really the only thing that matters. Yeah, not really. Watch what happens if you mispronounce quinoa, for example. It is not unusual for the residents of a state to have their own pronunciation of their state’s name; regional accents and dialects can affect all kinds of words. Which, I suppose, is how we get Mississippi when the people who live in that state call it Misipi. And don't get me started on Ar-Kansas. Even worse, few countries pronounce their names the same way that foreigners do. I'm sure that the way we say "France" here in the US grates on the very last nerve of the French. Proponents of “neh-VAH-duh” will often say, look, nevada is a Spanish word (meaning “snowy” or “snow-capped,” and the state’s name is probably derived from the Sierra Nevada mountain range, part of which lies within its borders. And the area, like most of California, was once claimed by Spain and Mexico, which ex-Spains all the Spanish names in the area. Want to piss off some Southern Californians? Pronounce La Jolla like you're English, not Spanish. The problem is that Spanish, being a much more sensible language than English, has five vowels, and five vowels only. (Well, if we’re not counting dipthongs. Or tripthongs. All languages are complicated but stay with me here.) I think there are more problems here than that. There are a couple of possible explanations for this phenomenon. One is that Nevada, being a fairly new and historically largely unpopulated state, traditionally did not have much to differentiate it. If you’re proud to be a Nevadan, what could you do to present that to the rest of the world? Until the creation of the Vegas Golden Knights NHL hockey team in 2017, the state had no major professional sports team, which is often a way to signify geographical pride. You know who else doesn't have a major professional sports team? Virginia. And I don't hear too much crap about pronouncing my state wrong, except for the hillbillies out west who insist on Virginny. In any case, the article (from AO) is like candy to me because it involves history, linguistics, sociology, and philosophy. So there's no hard science; nothing's perfect. In other words, everyone can learn something there, if only the "correct" pronunciation of Nevada. |
| This one's from Quanta, and was probably written by a human. New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text Far from being “stochastic parrots,” the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to understand the words they’re processing. Difficulty: how do you know anyone understands the words they're processing? I'm sure you think you do, and therefore by extension, other humans do, but can you really know for sure that anyone else is anything more than a biological robot? Artificial intelligence seems more powerful than ever, with chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT capable of producing uncannily humanlike text. Article is less than two months old and already outdated; Google changed the name of its AI bot from Bard sometime since then. I don't remember what they changed it to. I liked "Bard," so I simply quit messing around with it. Was I programmed to do that? Absolutely. Do such models actually understand what they are saying? “Clearly, some people believe they do,” said the AI pioneer Geoff Hinton in a recent conversation with Andrew Ng, “and some people believe they are just stochastic parrots.” Stochastic Parrots is absolutely going to be the name of my virtual EDM Jimmy Buffet band. This evocative phrase comes from a 2021 paper co-authored by Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington. I shouldn't do it. I really shouldn't. But I'm going to anyway, because my algorithm requires it: It suggests that large language models (LLMs) — which form the basis of modern chatbots — generate text only by combining information they have already seen “without any reference to meaning,” the authors wrote, which makes an LLM “a stochastic parrot.” Seriously, though, I see one important difference: an actual parrot is, like humans, the product of billions of years of evolution. She may not understand the words when you teach her to repeat something like "I'm the product of billions of years of evolution" (nor do many humans), but she, like other living creatures, seems to have her own internal life, a sensory array, and desires (apart from crackers). She seeks out food and water, and possibly companionship. She observes. She may not know that her ancestors were dinosaurs, but she inherited some of their characteristics. In other words, calling LLMs "stochastic parrots" may be an insult to parrots. Also, the actual definition of stochastic, via Oxford, is "randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely." Which would seem to apply to most living things. These models power many of today’s biggest and best chatbots, so Hinton argued that it’s time to determine the extent of what they understand. The question, to him, is more than academic. “So long as we have those differences” of opinion, he said to Ng, “we are not going to be able to come to a consensus about dangers.” I've been wondering why so many people talk about the "dangers" of AI, but never about the very real and somewhat predictable danger of bringing another human life into the world. Said human could very well become a mass murderer, a rapist, a despotic tyrant, a telemarketer, or any number of despicable things. The only time I hear about the dangers posed by new humans is when someone's ranting about immigration, and that doesn't count. New research may have intimations of an answer. A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. This theoretical approach, which provides a mathematically provable argument for how and why an LLM can develop so many abilities, has convinced experts like Hinton, and others. And when Arora and his team tested some of its predictions, they found that these models behaved almost exactly as expected. Maybe it's just the way this was worded, but that seems paradoxical. If an LLM were truly autonomous, independent, understanding.. sentient... then you'd expect the unexpected, no? “[They] cannot be just mimicking what has been seen in the training data,” said Sébastien Bubeck, a mathematician and computer scientist at Microsoft Research who was not part of the work. “That’s the basic insight.” Except... we humans also mimic what was in our training data. Sure, some of us can take it apart and put it back together in new ways, build on what's been done before, but for the most part, even our innovations are really just variations on a theme. These abilities are not an obvious consequence of the way the systems are built and trained. An LLM is a massive artificial neural network, which connects individual artificial neurons. "Not obvious," you know, unless you've read, like, even a small sampling of science fiction. Big enough LLMs demonstrate abilities — from solving elementary math problems to answering questions about the goings-on in others’ minds — that smaller models don’t have, even though they are all trained in similar ways. And that sounds quite a bit similar to what shrinks call the Theory of Mind. “Where did that [ability] emerge from?” Arora wondered. “And can that emerge from just next-word prediction?” This is what is meant when people claim that consciousness is an emergent property. Anyway. The article goes on to describe some of the tests they put the models through, and I can't really comment on the methodology because my training data set doesn't really cover those protocols. Is it conscious? I don't know. I don't know for sure that you are, and vice-versa. |
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