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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| An article about reading, from Cracked: People Were Apparently Reading ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’ Novelizations in the ‘70s  Possibly the most surprising thing about the Welcome Back, Kotter series of tie-in novels is that they… kinda sound good? Now, Cracked has declined from its peak. Most of their articles are about celebrities, which I have no interest in reading about, and besides, you can get that anywhere. But even in the website's heyday, its target demographic was much younger than I am. That still seems to be the case. That's okay; not everything is about me, but those are the main reason I rarely link to them anymore. I still get their newsletter, though, for the occasional article of relevance to me, like this one. Relevant, because I'm of an age where I saw "Welcome Back, Kotter" when it first aired (contemporary, if I recall correctly, with shows like M*A*S*H and Happy Days), and because... I read the books. In my defense, I was a kid at the time. Ken Jennings has brought us many things: the secrets to Jeopardy!, an increasingly confusing series of patterned suits, and now, awareness of the existence of a series of Welcome Back, Kotter paperback novelizations. On the other side of things, I don't think I'd ever heard of Ken Jennings before this. Game show host? Okay, that's fair; I haven't watched game shows since the WBK era. All things considered, possibly the most surprising thing about the Welcome Back, Kotter series of tie-in novels is that they… kinda sound good? I can't weigh in on their quality. I know that other novel spinoffs of TV shows vary widely in quality, from utter trash (Quantum Leap) to pure gold (a few of the Star Trek novels). But I read them way too long ago to have an informed opinion on them. Certainly, I liked them at the time, but I cringe now at some of the other stuff I liked as a preteen. What they did do, even if they were trash, was keep me reading, which led to me wanting to write. There were other books, of course, mostly science fiction, but those somehow stuck in my head—if not the content, then at least their existence. It’s unclear how well these novels sold, but they ended a good two years before the series did, portending harsh realities the inhabitants of James Buchanan High School couldn’t conceive of at the height of their success. Well, the inherent problem in running a show about a high school (or about kids in general) is that, if it's not a cartoon like South Park or The Simpsons, it has a short lifespan. And, honestly, I don't know what it is about that show (and the books) that made it memorable in the first place. Perhaps it was the diversity of the cast/characters, which I didn't really notice at the time, but, in hindsight, might have been groundbreaking for TV (though, as usual, Star Trek did it first, but Kotter was set in some version of the present, not some idealistic future). Maybe it was just the quality of the writing, which, again, it was too long ago for me to say anything about. Or maybe it was because Travolta went on to be a major actor. In my headcanon, his character Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction was actually Kotter kid Vinny Barbarino, grown up and turned to a life of crime (hence his surname change). That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. |
| I've suspected this for a while now. Good to have something that supports my suspicions, so I don't come across as a complete conspiracy nut. From Vox: How the “Grim Reaper effect” stops our government from saving lives When curing disease is bad for the federal budget. Well, perhaps our (this is a US article about the US) government's job isn't to save lives. There's a bit of background I'll skip just to get to the point: Simply put: Curing hep C means people live longer, which means they spend more years collecting Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits. That could mean that whatever cost savings the actual hep C treatment produces might be wiped out by the fact that the people whose lives are being saved will be cashing retirement checks for longer. Yes. They only need us as long as we're productive. After that, just die already so we can stop paying you. Put together, the deficit and the elder-biased composition of federal spending implies something that is equally important and macabre: Helping people live longer lives will, all else being equal, be bad for the federal budget. I've sometimes speculated (being a writer and all) on what would happen if, by some technology or magic, all human diseases were suddenly eliminated. That's a good thing, right? Yeah, from one point of view. From another, it would cause utter chaos. Worse if we could also eliminate aging and death: that would be reserved for the secret cabal of elite rich overlords. Okay, maybe I'm a bit of a conspiracy nut. I don’t have an easy fix for the situation, but it feels important to at least understand. I'm not even sure it can be fixed, except for leaving the government out of it entirely, which practically nobody in either major party wants to do (perhaps because they are the government). There are a couple more examples, including cigarette taxes and covid, and then they had to go and make a literary reference: It all reminds one of Logan’s Run, in which people are killed off upon hitting age 30 lest they take up too many of society’s resources. That movie is a dystopia — but as a budget proposal, it’d score very well. Okay, look. I get that more people watch movies than read. Hell, I watch more movies than I read books, these days. But Logan's Run was a film adaptation of a book, and, as is usually the case, the book was far superior. One of the many things they changed in the movie was that you hit Lastday at 30. In the book, it was 21. Yes, you read that right. They did keep the idea of Runners; that is, people who rejected the cutoff and tried to escape. Now, it's been a while since I've either seen the movie or read the book, so I may be misremembering some details, but that much, I'm sure of (I just verified it on Wikipedia, I mean). But that's not the important point; just an illustration of why you don't, for example, quote the movie Frankenstein when you're trying to make a point about the book Frankenstein. (Quoting Young Frankenstein is, of course, always appropriate.) No, what I'm trying to say is that the dystopia created for Logan's Run (either version) was that the birth rate got too high, skewing the population young. (This was a big talking point in the 60s, when the novel came out.) The particular dystopia we're suffering through right now is the polar opposite of that. The economists and agencies doing this math are, of course, only doing their jobs. We need to know what government programs will cost over the near- and long-run. I have an intense distrust of any version of the phrase "only doing their jobs." But the fact that increased human longevity on its own worsens the budget picture should lead to some reflection. For one thing, it suggests that sometimes we should embrace policies simply because they’re the right thing to do, even if they don’t pay for themselves. Not something any branch of the government is known for. Lots of things the government does cost money. The military doesn’t pay for itself. K-12 schools don’t pay for themselves. Smithsonian Museums don’t pay for themselves. That doesn’t mean those aren’t important functions that it makes sense to put some of our tax dollars toward. I could argue some of those examples, but I'm not an economist; I just see that the intangible benefits of these things far outweigh the monetary costs. We can also argue about how much of the budget should be spent on them (and I'd add space exploration to the list), and that's okay; that's what we should be doing in a representative democracy. The government shouldn't be run like a business. It should provide those services that the free market finds too unprofitable to consider. But, of course, people can disagree about that, too. There is no law of nature saying the US has to weigh its priorities that way. As long as we do, the numbers will imply that it’s better for the budget for people to die before they get old. I can't be mad at an article that, after talking about US government policies, ends by paraphrasing a song by the very British band The Who. There is, of course, a lot more at the link; I just hit the points I most wanted to address. I'd suggest reading it for yourself, even if you're not in the US, because some of it might be applicable to other governments, as well. |
| I vaguely remember discussing this pronunciation in the previous blog, but not recently and not this article. From Mental Floss: The Right Way to Pronounce ‘Gyro’ It’s a notoriously tricky one, so don’t feel too bad if you haven’t been getting it right. And by "gyro" they mean the food, not the spinny stabilizer, which most people seem to get right (insofar as anything is "right" when it comes to pronunciation). Alongside philosophy, democracy, and the Olympics, the gyro is one of the most famous—and delicious—things invented by the Greeks. Matter of personal taste, of course, but I don't find most Greek food all that appealing. The gyro is an exception. I know this because there's a pretty significant Greek-origin population near me, and they used to do a festival every year. Maybe they also still do the festival; I don't know. I'm not ragging on it, mind you. Lots of people, Greek or not, love it. Like I said, matter of personal taste. But like I said, the gyro is an exception for me, and I want to pronounce it right when I order it. But if you grew up outside its nation of origin, you may have a hard time pronouncing the food item the next time you order one. So is it “jee-roh”, “jye-roh”, or “yee-roh”? I've been told it's actually khee-roh, with something like the guttural kh sound found in languages as diverse as Hebrew and Scots Gaelic. But I wasn't aware that Greek was one of those languages. I don't consider my source to be perfect on this point: he was a Brooklyner of Italian ancestry. Gyros consist of a pita wrap containing meat (usually pork and beef in Greece, while lamb is more common in the U.S.) sliced off a vertical rotisserie. The rotisserie thing is probably why it shares a spelling with that other gyro. From 1965 to 1980, the United States experienced a wave of immigration from Greece. The largest number of immigrants ultimately settled in New York, many in the neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. Which is why I don't completely dismiss the opinion of the guy from Brooklyn out of hand. Part of the problem arises from the transliteration of the Greek gamma, or γ. Gamma generally represents the “g” sound in the Greek alphabet, pronounced like the “g” in “gift.” When gamma comes before “ee” and “eh” sounds, however, like the one in gyro, that hard “g” sound turns into more of a rough “y.” Hence the word is “year-oh” instead of “gee-roh.” Still no gutturals involved, though. When in doubt, one might just point with one's finger at the menu or whatever, like one does at East Asian restaurants. Or, like, there's this ubiquitous Thai beer called Singha, which Americans usually pronounce every letter of, but I've been informed it's actually just "sing." But when I tried ordering a "sing" at a Thai place, the server said (in a Thai accent), "You mean sing-ha?" So I'm still not sure. What I am sure of is that pronunciation of a written word can be difficult, which is one reason you still get people wrongly pronouncing .gif like jif. |
| From MIT Press Reader, an article with a title that caught my attention without being overly clickbaity. It is, fair warning, a book ad. As I've repeated numerous times, though I hate ads, I tolerate movie ads before movies and book ads on a site devoted to writers and readers. Now, before I get into the text of the article, I want to try to explain why the picture in the header pissed me off. To understand what I'm saying, you'd have to click on the link to view the picture; embedding it here would be too much work. In brief, the photo's a take on the famous March of Progress artwork, which has, in fairness, been parodied quite a lot in the 60 years since its creation. At the "head of the pack," as it were, is a dude immersed in his mobile phone.I did say the illustration is 60 years old. In those 60 years, we have learned a great deal about evolution in general, and human evolution in particular. We have learned enough to render that illustration obsolete. So the first part of what pisses me off is that, apparently, people still see human evolution as a linear path, which it absolutely was (and is) not. The second thing that annoys me about it is that it seems to be mocking the idea of "ascension" (which, again, has been refuted by science) by the cell-phone guy assuming a posture similar to one of humanity's ancestors. This, of course, ignores all of the great human achievements that enabled the production of mobile phones in the first place. Okay, fine, I get mocking things; I do it quite a lot. But the implication, at least in my interpretation, is that we're "devolving," which is utter nonsense, as evolution doesn't have a direction. And, finally, I'm goddamn sick and tired of people complaining about other people using their phones. Okay, sure, if someone's carrying on a loud conversation on one in a public place, or watching TokTik without an earpiece, complain away. But a person absorbed in what they're doing has no obligation to look at you, or even acknowledge your presence, so leave them in peace. Whew. Anyway. The article doesn't start out by improving my mood: We have long regarded humans as the most rational of animals. Snort. But as polymath Bertrand Russell noted, we spend our lives looking for evidence of that claim and find little. The relevant thing about Russell wasn't that he was a polymath (though that's cool). The relevant thing is that he devoted a huge chunk of his life attempting to discover a self-contained logical system, one in which everything can be explained back to first principles (the "first principles" in this case apparently echoed Descartes' philosophy of the reality of one's consciousness). In the process, he discovered that no such meaningful logical system exists, or can exist. So, my take on this? No, we're not rational. We cannot be rational. We blame others for our mistakes, rationalize after the fact, and make impulsive choices even when patience would yield better rewards. Well, whose fault is that? Certainly not mine. Also, while it may sometimes be true that patience can yield better rewards, humans tend to die at an alarming rate, and what's the point of waiting for something maybe-better when you could get hit by falling space debris tonight? Some behavioral imperfections appear uniquely human. One is what the evolutionist Bill Hamilton referred to as the nonadaptive strategy of malevolence: harming others with no form of benefit for oneself. Like many things that we once thought were "uniquely human," I'm pretty sure some nonhuman animals do that, too. It's just that we don't know as much about their motivations, so we can't say for sure. After all, only humans insult strangers online or back incompetent leaders out of blind loyalty. Despite what some might believe, the reason "only humans insult strangers online" is that there are only two kinds of entities online: humans, and human-programmed scripts. Though we behave like know-it-alls, we are easily manipulated and taken in by charlatans of all kinds. Overly generalized. We prefer a product that is 80 percent lean to one that is 20 percent fat, and an unnecessary item that costs $9.99 seems cheaper than one that costs $10. My all-time favorite example of that is when a fast food chain came out with a 1/3-pound burger at the same price as a quarter-pounder. Turned out people didn't want to pay the same price for less meat. Yes, I meant to type that; they honestly thought 1/3 was less than 1/4, because 3 is less than 4, and "why do I have to learn this math stuff that I'll never use?" I didn't believe it myself, at first, but then I looked it up, and it seems that's really what happened (though I suspect there was a secondary effect caused by "quarter pounder" being a much more fun thing to say than "one-third pound burger"). We are willing to get into our cars, stand in lines for hours, and squish into horrendous shopping centers to save a pittance on a special offer for snacks dripping with sugar and fat. Oh, fuck right off with that "we" bullshit. Not all of us do that. Come on, I'd only do that for a special release of beer. The article devolves (pun intended) into a questionable abyss of evolutionary psychology, during which: A great deal of the data from developmental psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience confirms that, for adaptive reasons that no longer exist, our minds have evolved a strong tendency to distinguish between inert entities, such as physical objects, and entities of a psychological nature, like animate agents. We thus are dualists and animists by nature. As a result, we attribute purposes and intentions to things, even when none exist, and imagine hidden motives and conspiracies where there are none. For us, stories always have a purpose, which can be evident or hidden. This is not the sick burn some might think it is. We are, in short, belief machines, and we manufacture a lot of those beliefs. And when belief comforts us or helps us make sense of a chaotic world, we cling to it, no matter how irrational. We’re even willing to endure ridicule, as in the case of flat-earthers who set out on a cruise to reach the ends of the earth. Thus is the article title explained. I'd been wondering about that. The rest of the article/ad/excerpt is fairly brief, and I've already taken up too much space on this. In summary, two things: 1) I wouldn't take anything here as absolute fact; 2) I've come to the conclusion that humanity is neither good nor evil, but we contain multitudes of both with everything in between; 3) No, I'm not always rational or logical, like when I expect to have two things in a summary and end up with three. |
| A titanically ambitious idea from Scientific American: Let's Colonize Titan Saturn's largest moon might be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live It's not a new idea, mind you. Science fiction has considered it for nearly as long as it started speculating about off-earth colonies, and that was long before the 2016 date on this article. The idea of a human colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn, might sound crazy. From the perspective of some hypothetical person unexposed to science fiction, the idea of a human colony anywhere but within the fragile eggshell protection of our home planet sounds crazy. Then you read a bit of SF and start to think these things might be possible. Then you read even more SF, and maybe some actual science, and you're back to thinking it's batshit. Crazy or not, though, we humans specialize in conceiving the impossible, or, in this case, the extremely improbable. So I'll indulge. Its temperature hovers at nearly 300° below zero Fahrenheit, and its skies rain methane and ethane that flow into hydrocarbon seas. Now, if it were ethanol instead of ethane, I'd be the first to promote an expedition there. The difference, chemically, is that one of the hydrogen atoms in ethane is replaced with an -OH radical to make it an alcohol. Any of the alkanes can make this substitution and it becomes an alcohol instead of an alkane. We're mostly familiar with the least poisonous of those, ethanol. You also have methanol, also known as wood alcohol, which can blind you. And there is, of course, propanol, from propane, usually sold as isopropyl alcohol, which has its uses in cleaning because it's so damn poisonous. The "iso-" prefix indicates to chemists where on the carbon chain the radical hangs out. But I digress. There may be clouds of ethanol in space, but they're many light-years away. Titan's in our own backyard. Well, sort of. Not really. Matter of perspective: right on top of us by cosmic standards, really freaking far away by human standards. And besides, it's cheaper to make ethanol right here than stealing Titan's ethane and doing... whatever. Nevertheless, Titan could be the only place in the solar system where it makes sense to build a permanent, self-sufficient human settlement. Ignoring for a moment that they really mean "besides Earth," given an advanced enough technology, and the desire to do so, we could put colonies on Mars, the Moon, certain asteroids, or somewhere in space (in ascending order of batshittery). We don't have the tech yet, especially the part about it being self-sufficient. No matter what certain guanopsychotic public figures have proposed. We reached this conclusion after looking at the planets in a new way: ecologically. We considered the habitat that human beings need and searched for those conditions in our celestial neighborhood. Mostly, we need all the other life on Earth. Our colonization scenario, based on science, technology, politics and culture, presents a thought experiment for anyone who wants to think about the species’ distant future. And just like that, it becomes a bit less insane. Assuming we have a distant future (an assumption I'm not prepared to make), many things that we consider impossible will become merely unlikely, and the unlikely can become quotidian. But although the Moon and Mars look like comparatively reasonable destinations, they also have a deal-breaking problem. Neither is protected by a magnetosphere or atmosphere. Except that the less-batshit proposals involve going underground, letting many meters of rock do the radiation-stopping. And they either use natural caves, or robots to do the digging. Underground shelter is hard to build and not flexible or easy to expand. Settlers would need enormous excavations for room to supply all their needs for food, manufacturing and daily life. But we'll have robot slaves to do that for us. Titan is the only other body in the solar system with liquid on the surface, with its lakes of methane and ethane that look startlingly like water bodies on Earth. Shouldn't be anything startling about it. Landscape is landscape; fill it with liquid, and you get a fractal boundary, and fractals are notorious for appearing similar to each other. And let's not gloss over the temperature. It’s cold on Titan, at -180°C (-291°F), but thanks to its thick atmosphere, residents wouldn’t need pressure suits—just warm clothing and respirators. I am filled with doubt on that. Housing could be made of plastic produced from the unlimited resources harvested on the surface... There was a time we thought Earth's resources were unlimited, too. Titanians (as we call them) wouldn’t have to spend all their time inside. You know they'll just end up being called "Tits." There is no quick way to move off the Earth. We will have to solve our problems here. If only. Look, I have no problem with speculation and dreaming. I've been inhaling science fiction since I was a kid. But speculation like this can be misleading. I am entirely in favor of space exploration and discovery; I reject out of hand the argument that we "should" be using those resources to solve problems on Earth. For one thing, there will always be problems on Earth as long as there are humans here to cause and identify them. For another, it's not like that money gets blasted into orbit; it continues to circulate in the economy. So, yes, let's dream and explore. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. |
| This Guardian article is from last year, so some cultural references have already expired. Yeah, I thought kama muta was when you put commas everywhere, and, anywhere, you, feel, like. What I’m feeling is kama muta – an under-recognised emotion that has been the focus of Fiske’s work for more than a decade. According to Fiske and his colleagues, kama muta evolved to bind us to others and strengthen our relationships. I can accept that there are emotions that need to be recognized. I'm concerned about the evolutionary psychology speculation, but I'll let it slide for now. The article links to a page giving a concise definition of kama muta: "Kama muta is the sudden feeling of oneness, love, belonging, or union with an individual person, a family, a team, a nation, nature, the cosmos, God, or a kitten." Okay, sure, but isn't that just "love?" Don't laugh. I don't know emotions. We experience it at some of the most important events of our lives – births, weddings, and funerals – and it is commonly exploited by writers, directors and marketeers to enhance the emotional impact of their stories. Of course it's exploited by advertisers. What isn't? I imagine it's like when the ad includes a cute puppy for no other reason except to get people to think "what a cute puppy!" Those of a cynical disposition may find the concept cloying and sentimental... This person of a cynical disposition doesn't try to dismiss emotions. ...but the latest research suggests that kama muta can be a powerful force in politics. And that is, in part, what makes me cynical. “All psychologists assumed that crying meant sadness,” says Fiske, yet the tears that Schubert was describing occurred during positive events. I, um, wasn't aware that psychologists assumed that crying always meant sadness. In fact, if they did, I'd question all of psychology because it's pretty clear even to me that people can cry from relief or joy. At the same time, Fiske began looking for a term that would neatly describe the emotion they were hoping to capture. After much searching, he settled on kama muta, an old Sanskrit term that means “moved by love”. Hm. Like the Kama Sutra, I guess? Did Sanskrit have different words for different kinds of love? Because the Kama Sutra is explicitly about one certain kind of love, and it also involves movement. Anyway, I mostly saved this article because it's tangentially about writing, which sometimes involves manipulating a reader's emotions. For that reason, I'm skipping a bunch here. Storytellers across time have evoked kama muta to captivate audiences. Fiske believes that we can trace it back to Odysseus’s return home to Ithaca after 20 years of turmoil, and his ultimate reunion with his wife. “It’s clear from the text that they feel this emotion,” he says. Today, many people report experiencing it when Wall-E reunites with Eve in the 2008 romantic science fiction film. Or I suppose you could just watch Up. Anyway, yes, even I have felt that emotion. And yet, I wonder: does giving it a name diminish its impact? |
| What's going to finally spark World War III? Ukraine? Middle East? Accidental launch of nukes? No, my money's on this. Bad enough someone put pineapple on a pizza. Now this. Italians have reacted with fury after the UK Good Food website published a recipe for a traditional Roman dish that did not include the correct original ingredients and appeared to belittle it as a quick eat. "What? Why? It's just pasta and cheese. They sell that shit in boxes." Good Food's recipe described cacio e pepe as a meal that could be whipped up for "a speedy lunch" using "four simple ingredients - spaghetti, pepper, parmesan and butter". Okay, so it's spaghetti instead of macaroni, but it's still mac & cheese. With some ground pepper. Fiepet Confesercenti, an association representing restaurants in Italy, said it was "astonished" to see the recipe on such an esteemed food site, owned by the BBC until 2018, adding: "There are not four ingredients, but three: pasta, pepper and pecorino." I like to think "astonished" is a mistranslation, and an understatement. Incidentally, I've never prepared cacio e pepe, but from what I understand, building the dish is extraordinarily complicated for something with so few ingredients. In a statement, Good Food said it has been in touch with Fiepet Confesercenti to "explain that our recipe is designed to be easy to use for home cooks using readily available ingredients in the UK". Okay, seriously, though: food changes and, like language, sometimes things get lost in translation. The simple solution would be to call it something else. I don't know what. It's the UK, so maybe something like "pepper cheese noodles," or "strings and cheese." Italians often mock foreigners for their interpretation of their recipes, but the indignation in this case was about something deeper: tampering with tradition. Shh, no one tell them about what they call "pizza" in Chicago. "You can do all the variations in the world – but you cannot use the original Italian name for them, said Maurizio. "You cannot say it is cacio e pepe if you put butter, oil and cream in it. Then it becomes something else." See? Even an Italian agrees with me. "It's terrible. It's not cacio e pepe... What Good Food published, with butter and parmesan, is called 'pasta Alfredo'. It's another kind of pasta," he said. Hot take: pasta Alfredo is macaroni and cheese named something else to make it less embarrassing for adults to eat. On his restaurant's board of pastas, he offers cacio e pepe with lime - a variation. But he says that's ok. Of course it's okay, because he said so. Nicola, who runs a sandwich shop near the Vatican, took particular issue with the inclusion of cream. "Cacio e pepe should not be made with cream; cream is for desserts. For heaven's sake. Whoever uses cream does not know what cooking means." Nicola, you know nothing of British cuisine. Nothing. Fortunately, this happened after Britain left the EU, otherwise you'd have Italians demanding that they be kicked out. I do have a solution, though: Italian cooks should introduce "fish and chips" made with anchovies, and let's see how quickly we can start WWIII. |
| Today, I'm just linking someone else's blog. This author describes himself as an "existential psychologist," so, okay, with that in mind: The title interested me, because I'm already curious. It's good to be a curious person. Curiosity is associated with personal growth, intellectual engagement, psychological well-being, stronger relationships, professional success, and healthy ageing. I don't disagree, but there is a such thing as taking curiosity too far. Especially in relationships. We often think of curiosity as one of those personality traits you either have or you don't. No, "we" don't, if you're including me in this "we." But what if curiosity is a characteristic we can actually grow throughout our lives? Are you curious about that? Specifically, a recently published study from psychologists Madeleine Gross and Jonathan Schooler at UC Santa Barbara demonstrates that we can boost our curiosity levels through deliberate practice. Well, that's encouraging. But as usual, I'll point out that it's only one study. The post goes into the basic methodology used. Participants also reported feeling more creative and finding more meaning in life, both outcomes linked to curiosity. Again, I'm an outlier, it seems: I'm not creative and I revel in life having no meaning, and yet, I am curious. This study adds to growing evidence that personality is more changeable than we typically think. It's a question as old as the nature/nurture debate, and almost as intractable: can people actually change? I've always felt like the answer was "yes," but I had nothing but anecdotal evidence to back it up. But we are also an agentic species, capable of actively shaping who we become. As an example of my curiosity, "agentic" is a new word for me, so I looked it up to be sure, even though I felt pretty confident because that sentence basically defines it. As I suspected, its root is "agent." What surprised me was that it seems to be an adjective normally associated with what we call AI. It's also classified by at least one online dictionary as slang. Want to become more curious? Act more curious on a regular basis, and you become more curious over time. One can say that about lots of different personality traits. It's another way of saying "fake it 'til you make it." One effective strategy involves connecting new information to personal relevance. Studies show that people become significantly more curious about scientific topics when they understand how those topics matter to their lives. I think that's a good place to start, but I don't believe it should be the end. I feel a bit of rage every time I hear someone say some variant of "but when will I ever use this?" like in the context of math class or whatever. It doesn't matter. The more you learn, the more you know, and the more you know how to learn. Besides, for a writer, there's no such thing as information you can't use. Another powerful technique is making question-asking a regular habit. Again, though, it's possible to take this too far, especially in social situations. There's a fine line between curiosity and nosiness. I don't know where that line is, so I tend to err on the side of not asking people personal questions. This is probably something I could work on. In our current moment, when many feel pessimistic about the future, cultivating curiosity becomes vital for advancing a more hopeful vision. This is what resonated the most with me, because I am pessimistic about the future. But I'm working on that. And I'm still curious. |
| A horse walks into a bar. Bartender says: hey, buddy, Why the Long Face? Sadness makes us seem nobler, more elegant, more adult. Which is pretty weird, when you think about it. Now, this article, from aeon, is over 10 years old. I doubt the human expression of emotion has changed much since then, though. Surely what people want is to be happy. Whole philosophies (I’m looking at you, utilitarianism) rest on the premise that more happiness is always and everywhere a good thing. I've been railing against this for years now. I almost wish I'd seen this article back when it first came out; I might have saved a lot of typing. It’s good to be happy sometimes, of course. Yet the strange truth is that we don’t wish to be happy all the time. You know who's happy all the time? Idiots, dogs, and idiot dogs. Perhaps there’s a sense in which emotional variety is better than monotony, even if the monotone is a happy one. But there’s more to it than that, I think. We value sadness in ways that make happiness look a bit simple-minded. Like I said. There's a dialogue from the popular episode "Blink," from Doctor Who. The one with the Weeping Angels, if you're wondering. It predated this article by about seven years, so I don't know, maybe the author was thinking about it, too. Most people, if they remember it at all, know some Doctor quotes from it: "Don't blink," and "timey-wimey." But the one that stuck out to me was: SALLY: I love old things. They make me feel sad. KATHY: What's good about sad? SALLY: It's happy for deep people. And that's the part that really stayed with me, because that's me. Sadness inspires great art in a way that grinningly eating ice cream in your underpants cannot. In his essay ‘Atrabilious Reflections upon Melancholy’ (1823), Hartley Coleridge (son of Samuel Taylor) praised melancholy as a more refined state of mind than happiness. Okay, sure, fine, but... "atrabilious?" Apparently it means bad-tempered. Maybe someone else already knew that. I didn't. I'll have to start describing myself that way. Melancholy, Coleridge is arguing, is more dignified than happiness. I suspect this is a sense that most people have – that joy is, at root, a kind of idiot pleasure, the idiom of the lobotomy, a balloon just waiting to be popped. Which is what I've been trying to say. It takes more muscles to frown than smile, and maybe that’s the point. It signals ones capacity to squander a resource precisely by squandering it. Any fool can live and be happy. It takes greater strength to live and be sad. Why bother expending the energy at all? Unless I'm responding to someone, my face stays neutral. No muscles involved, except maybe the occasional involuntary eyetwitch when I see some idiot touting the pursuit of happiness. So, in summary, this article made me happy. Briefly. |
| Fair warning: the link here, from The Guardian, is damn near nine years old, an eternity in internet time. I don't think it matters much, though some things mentioned therein may be outdated. New York monument honors victims of giant octopus attack that never occurred Cast-bronze sculpture by Joseph Reginella, who made up the story of a Staten Island ferry disaster, directs people to a fake museum nearby For instance, since the article was published, Spider-Man also managed to wreck a Staten Island Ferry, and a lot of lives might have been lost were it not for the timely intervention of Iron Man. Oh, wait. This just in: that was fake, too! Who knew? A cast-bronze monument for the victims of the sinking of a steam ferry recently appeared in Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, near other somber memorials to soldiers, sailors and mariners lost at sea or on the battlefield. This was reported on in several outlets at the time, not just The Guardian. What I couldn't find was any follow-up articles. The 250lb monument, which depicts a Staten Island ferry, the Cornelius G Kolff, being dragged under the waves by a giant octopus, is part of a multi-layered hoax that includes a sophisticated website, a documentary, fabricated newspaper articles and glossy fliers directing tourists to a phantom Staten Island Ferry Disaster Memorial Museum, across the harbor. I'll give the hoaxer credit here: he really went all-in. Even way back in 2016, most hoaxes involved thinking up something false and then posting it on the internet, in hopes that it would go viral. “The story just rolled off the top of my head,” he said, and it evolved to become “a multimedia art project and social experience – not maliciously – about how gullible people are”. "People are gullible, and I'll prove it" isn't the flex you think it is. Puzzled tourists looking for the memorial museum on Staten Island and its supposed collection of wreckage with “strange suction-cup-shaped marks” sometimes wander into the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, asking for directions. Now, I'm of two minds about this. One mind says, "Yes, yes, fuck with tourists in this relatively harmless fashion." That part of my brain also likes whimsy and absurdity. The other mind thinks, "We have enough misinformation in the world already. Adding to it isn't helping anything." It's kind of like with that Godzilla statue in Japan that I featured here a while back. That's undeniably glorious. But the difference is, the vast majority of people know that Godzilla is a movie thing. As with most fiction, we willingly partake in the lie, for fun. This, however, was trolling. And however well-executed, it's not even plausible trolling, relying on low-information people to act like low-information people. It also might have engaged those who had heard of the filming, off the coast of Japan in 2015, of a deep-sea giant squid. In short, it has all the hallmarks of a "social experiment," which is misnamed because it's antisocial and not much of an experiment. We don't need to be reminded how gullible people are. It makes people feel stupid because they're suddenly exposed to something outside their normal range. And, at worst, it adds to general public distrust of everything, weakening the social structure and perpetuating the idea that nothing is real. The best I can say about it is that at least the guy didn't bilk people out of money for it, like a certain famous con-man over a century earlier, who sold shares in another method for getting the hell out of Manhattan. So yeah, if you believe a giant octopus sank a ferry in 1963, I have a bridge to sell you. |
| I thought about summarizing this Futurism article with AI: Once You Notice ChatGPT's Weird Way of Talking, You Start to See It Everywhere It's not useful, it's slop. I didn't do that summary, of course. I've played around a bit with the LLMs people insist on calling AI, and of course one cannot avoid it while doing a Google search these days, but I've never used their results in my writing. Graphics, now, sure, such as the blog picture. Difference is, I have absolutely no artistic talent, but I like to think I have some small ability to write. It's not written by humans, it's written by AI. It's not useful, it's slop. It's not hard to find, it's everywhere you look. People love to call it "slop," but I've seen human writing just as sloppy, or even worse. Once you notice it, you start to see it everywhere. One teacher on Reddit even noticed that certain AI phrase structures are making the jump into spoken language. As much as I try to avoid LLM output, like I said, it's ubiquitous these days. I even mentioned to a friend that a certain sentence structure they used reminded me of ChatGPT output, even though I was sure the sentence wasn't thus generated. It's a fascinating observation that makes a striking amount of AI-generated text easily identifiable. It also raises some interesting questions about how AI chatbot tech is informing the way we speak — and how certain stylistic choices, like the em-dash in this very sentence, are becoming looked down upon for resembling the output of a large language model. There are two punctuation choices that I make, ones which you can pry from my cold, dead fingers: one is the semicolon; the other, the emdash. Beyond a prolific use of em-dashes, which have quickly become a telltale sign of AI-generated text, others pointed out the abundant use of emojis, including green checkboxes and a red X. On the other talon, I use emojis only sparingly. Tech companies have struggled to come up with trustworthy and effective AI detection tools, more often than not leaving educators to their own devices. This article is from June, and I haven't heard anything about those detection tools recently. Last I heard, they weren't very trustworthy or effective, often generating false positives. It's gotten to the point where teachers have become incredibly wary of submitted work that sounds too polished. So, my takeaway here is: don't be too polished. Throw in some deliberate typos, miss an obvious commma that sort of thing. As a side benefit, the teacher gets to use their red pen. They love using those red pens. Sure, you might get points taken off. But is that really worse than being accused of AIing when you didn't AI? |
| One of the worst insults I could receive when I was a kid was that my jokes were old and not funny. Actually, still is. From BBC: Compared to the jokes, the article is fairly new: just three and a half years old. The phrase "the old ones are the best ones" might not always be true. But some of the oldest jokes in history are still in use today. Even if they're not funny, they're still windows into the past: into what people found funny back then, and into cultural contexts. After months spent poring over medieval texts for her PhD, Martha Bayless made a surprising discovery. She was looking at some of the earliest jokes written in Latin by Catholic scholars (some in excess of 1,000 years old). Few had ever been translated into English before, yet many were still funny – and some even made her laugh out loud. Semper ubi sub ubi? Shortly after, while waiting for her train, Bayless was reading a copy of Truly Tasteless Jokes 3 – a popular joke anthology from 1983. She was surprised to find, almost word for word, a joke that she had been transcribing just a day earlier. Oh, I remember that series. While I couldn't quote a single joke from the TTJ books now, I know for certain that they helped shape me into the clown I am today. It struck Bayless that the joke had continued to be shared through a spoken culture of joke-telling, starting with the Latin text and culminating with her modern joke book, without needing to be written down for centuries in between. But that was a more common means of joke (meme in the original sense) transfer, pre-internet: word of mouth, mostly kid-to-kid. Even the ones that were written down or, later, recorded with video and/or audio, were subject to censorship. Not so the underground joke economy: anything was fair game, be it sex, body functions, racism, or even worse topics. Now, we even have documentaries on what might be the foulest joke of all time, but things haven't always been so permissive.This is good, in a way. But it does have a downside, which is: kids need to feel rebellious, and they'll find something to secretly transgress against. If it can't be sick jokes, it'll be something else. Bayless, now a director of folklore and public culture at the University of Oregon, has written a number of books on early comedy. She says, "the earliest jokes were dirty jokes. People couldn’t resist them." Well, she's the one with the Piled Higher and Deeper degree, and I've no doubt that many early jokes were what we'd call "dirty jokes," but you're dealing with survivorship bias here. Like I said, jokes tend to be an oral tradition, with all the generational changes that implies. If you limit yourself to the ones that were written down (or, in the case of Sumeria, etched into clay tablets), you're not getting the full picture. Flatulence, for example, is funny because it shows our "uncontrollable physicality", says Anu Korhonen, a professor of cultural studies from the University of Helsinki in Finland. I disagree. Fart jokes aren't funny. They are, in fact, the lowest form of humor. What is funny is peoples' obsession with fart jokes. Some researchers suggest that because humour brings us together it might have an evolutionary purpose. Here we go again with evo-psych speculation. At least they wiggle out of it a bit by using "might." But not all rude jokes translate well across cultures. Peter McGraw, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains that cultural norms vary so widely, finding a universally funny joke is challenging. I don't think there's a universally funny joke. It's all relative to your own culture. This goes especially for the highest form of humor: the pun. They generally only work in one language. I can't deny that part of my motivation for learning French was to be able to pun in more than one language. You might call it committing merde-er. Who knows what audiences thousands of years in the future would think if they unearthed videos of contemporary comedians. Probably the same thing I do: 95% of it isn't funny, but the other 5% makes everything worth it. |
| An important message from Self from two years ago: What to Do When You’re Super Cranky and Hate Everyone When the group chat ping instantly makes you irrationally irritated, it’s time to take a beat. Wait, I thought that was the default state for everyone. No? Just me? Fine. Go away. Once in a while I wake up inexplicably cranky. There’s nothing specifically wrong, per se. It’s just that, for whatever reason, everyone around me gets on my nerves. They used to just call that "waking up on the wrong side of the bed." My husband will come into our home office and distract me at the exact moment I start writing effortlessly after struggling with writer’s block. What? That's his JOB. My mom will call with some gossip about a person from high school I haven’t thought about (by choice) in 18 years. What is this supernatural ability to choose not to think about someone or something? A friend will send me 10 photos of their baby that I just don’t feel like looking at (I’m terrible). Nope, you're normal. Babies are ugly to everyone except their parents, and sometimes, I think even they are lying. My dog, it seems, is the only creature I can tolerate being around, and that’s because he’s perfect. And yet, if there were a human who acted exactly like the dog: finding some way to wag their tail, for instance, barking at nothing, begging for walks, whining, licking your face, etc., you'd be enraged at them, too. Adjoa Smalls-Mantey, MD, a psychiatrist based in New York City, tells SELF that there are lots of reasons why you might suddenly feel so irritated with the people around you—sleep deprivation, for example, can put you on edge, as can feeling stressed out about work or school. As can living and/or working in New York City. All of these things can influence the amount of cortisol—the primary stress hormone—in your body, Dr. Smalls-Mantey says, and turn you into a real-life Scrooge. Oh, yeah. Cortisol. The latest buzzword in pop biopsych. When I’m peeved, the last thing I want to do is reflect on and accept how fundamentally frazzled I am, but this can actually help you perk up a bit, according to Tom McDonagh, PsyD, a clinical psychologist at Good Therapy SF in San Francisco. If the quoted person didn't go on to compare this favorably to mindfulness, I might be inclined to agree. When I’m having one of these days, I’m miffed before anyone actually does anything to annoy me: I’ll see a text pop up on my phone and be like, Ugh, this is going to suck! without even seeing what the message is about. Rather than assuming your interactions with people are going to be dreadful, try to flip your POV and consider that they might be tolerable (who knows, they could even be positive!), Dr. Smalls-Mantey suggests. Or, and hear me out here, just accept that it's going to suck. That way, either it doesn't, and you're pleasantly surprised, or it does, and you're pleasantly smug because you were right. Another way to get through this testy time: Come up with a game plan that’ll make your hangs less irksome, Dr. Smalls-Mantey recommends. Apparently, they're calling casual social interactions "hangs" now. This irks me. Dr. McDonagh says that irritability, in general, is a result of shifting into fight-or-flight mode—the stress response that occurs when your body perceives some sort of danger or threat. As a result, he says, certain hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline, flood your system, and that can temporarily make you tense. To cope, he suggests taking some deep breaths. Bullshit evo-psych "fight-or-flight" speculation. But hey, if the controlled breathing works, then it works. Unless you're in an area currently blanketed by pollutants and/or wildfire smoke, it probably can't hurt. Sleepiness is one of the top reasons people get cranky with others, studies show. “If you’re tired or exhausted, you have to stop and rest,” Dr. Smalls-Mantey says. This would be at the very top of my personal list. But then, I'm not in a situation where I have to interact all that much with other people, and can sleep more or less when I choose. Now, as the disclaimer at the bottom of the linked article states, this isn't medical advice. Personally, I accept that I'll be in a bad mood from time to time, and I call it another opportunity to convince people to leave me alone. There's a doormat I need to obtain somehow. I saw it in the Marvel series Ironheart. It reads: Live. Laugh. Leave. |
| An important piece of music history here, from Smithsonian. How Bruce Springsteen Created the ‘Greatest Rock Album Ever’ Fifty years ago, the Boss was at a pivotal moment in his career. A new book details what it took to launch ‘Born to Run’ Okay, yes, it's clearly a book ad. But it's an informative book ad. In the late summer of 1975, Bruce Springsteen’s third studio album, Born to Run, launched to critical acclaim and rapidly climbed the Billboard charts, holding at number three. Some might argue, well, "How can something that peaked at #3 be considered the greatest of anything?" I say: because quality isn't always recognized as such. Consider Vincent van Gogh, severely underrated in his own time, only later to become one of the world's most recognizable names in art. So it is with Springsteen. Yes. Yes, I did just compare him to van Gogh. “I can listen to it now 50 years later and think that every note and word are in exactly the right place,” says Peter Ames Carlin, Springsteen’s biographer and author of the just-released Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run. Hence the book ad. Does it make me buy the book? No. I was going to buy it anyway. The album continues to draw audiences with an estimated total of seven million copies sold in the U.S. alone over the past five decades and is listed for its cultural importance in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. The actual 50th anniversary of the album's release isn't for another few days. I should probably put it on my calendar to remember to listen to the thing on that day. I was pretty young when it came out, and it wasn't on my radar at the time. It wasn't until a few years later that I discovered the awesomeness that is Bruce. I won't bore you with the rest of the article, which is long. It's linked there for anyone interested; I know not everyone is into it. Regular readers know I don't indulge in celebrity gossip. But I don't think of Springsteen as a celebrity; I think of him as a guy who makes great music. And music matters. So you're scared and you're thinking That maybe we ain't that young anymore... |
| Some science as reported by MSN: I don't know why it took them so long. Anyone who went to university knows what forces the brain to sleep: philosophy lectures. We spend nearly a third of our lives sleeping... Ideally, more. I've considered the idea that the purpose of life is to sleep, and anything we do during waking hours is in support of that. ...yet the biological trigger behind sleep has remained elusive. My above attempt at humor aside, this is pretty cool. Researchers have found that the pressure to sleep may come from deep inside our brain cells, from the tiny power plants known as mitochondria. Certain phrases have become cliché. One such phrase is calling the mitochondria "power plants." Despite the similar-sounding name, these are not the same things as the midichlorians that enable one to harness and use The Force. Pretty sure they were going for a similar-sounding name, because mitochondria are the power plants of the cell. Here in consensus reality (that is, not the Star Wars universe), almost all known macroscopic life possesses cells that have mitochondria. This is, to the extent that I understand it, the result of an ancient and perverted union of an archaeum and a bacterium, both unicellular, with the archaeum failing to digest the bacterium and instead incorporating its guts into its own cytoplasm. If it weren't for that lucky chance, which vastly increased the energy available in cells, we wouldn't be here. The team, led by Professor Gero Miesenböck and Dr. Raffaele Sarnataro, discovered that a build-up of electrical stress inside mitochondria in specific brain cells acts as a signal to trigger sleep. I suspect that, as with most scientific breakthroughs, this will need to be replicated before one can confidently use words like "discovered." The research, carried out in fruit flies, showed that when mitochondria become overcharged, they leak electrons. “When they do, they generate reactive molecules that damage cells,” said Dr. Sarnataro. If this holds up, it's a good enough reason to not skimp on sleep. We know, empirically, that sleep deprivation causes all kinds of unpleasantness. Apparently, we didn't (and still probably don't) know all the reasons why. “We set out to understand what sleep is for, and why we feel the need to sleep at all,” said Professor Miesenböck. I still say that they're probably looking at it from the wrong perspective. The question shouldn't be why we need to sleep. The question should be why we need to spend so much time awake. My cats, for instance, are keenly aware of the value of sleep. Small animals that consume more oxygen per gram of body weight tend to sleep more and live shorter lives. The phrase "tend to" is doing a lot of the lifting there. The correlation is apparent when talking about housecats, who are smaller than humans, sleep more, and live shorter lives. But, from what I've heard, big cats also require more sleep, as do, famously, bears. I expect if you graphed body weight vs. sleep requirements, though, you'd end up with one of those scatter charts with a bunch of outliers. “This research answers one of biology’s big mysteries,” said Dr. Sarnataro. “Why do we need sleep? The answer appears to be written into the very way our cells convert oxygen into energy.” "Answers" is also probably overstated. It's a step in the right direction, but there are still mysteries. That's a good thing. Hopefully, there will always be mysteries. Some might even be solved after a good night's sleep. |
| Going Outside again, with another reason to avoid going outside: The Case for Killing the Campfire Outdoor tradition or dangerous, polluting, wasteful relic of the past? The article is from almost nine years ago, and since then there have been several more wildfires and one pandemic that spread like wildfire. But I don't know what the current campfire policies are anywhere. Will you be able to enjoy a fire on your next camping trip? For residents of California, Oregon, and Washington, the likely answer is already no. For much of this summer, most wilderness areas in those three states were under a total campfire ban. Outside of the metal fire rings in organized campgrounds, you could not have a fire on public land. And I understand the reasons, but if I were otherwise inclined to go camping, and someone told me "no campfires," I'd be like "Hard pass." If they didn't tell me until we were up on the mountain, I'd hike right on out of there. In the dark. But the risk and cost of wildfires is only one nail in the campfire’s coffin. And that means they could also be at risk in areas less prone to conflagration. Let’s look at the problems campfires cause. If this were a newer article, I'd wonder if an LLM wrote it. Pollution Wood smoke contains fine particles of unburnt wood. That may not sound like pollution, but reduced in size to 2.5 microns or less, these microscopic particles become toxic. Yes. We have cars, airplanes, trucks, ships, trains, coal-rolling rednecks, fossil fuel power plants, industrial manufacturing, and at least one perpetual underground coal fire. But you can do your part by... not having a campfire. Health Problems As nice as we all think wood smoke smells, inhaling all of the above isn’t good for you. See above. Litter Campfires leave behind charred wood, piles of ash, and blackened rocks. People often use them to burn trash, which may only be partially destroyed, frequently leaving behind remnants of cans, bottles, plastic, and foil. The author's assumption here seems to be that, in the absence of a campfire/incinerator, assholes wouldn't leave their thoroughly unburnt trash lying around in the wilderness. I reject that assumption. Tree Damage We all know we’re supposed to harvest only dead, fallen wood for our campfires. But in large volumes, removing even that stuff can cause problems. One of the greatest epiphanies of my existence was when I realized that creation and destruction weren't opposites, or two sides of the same coin, but the exact same thing, indistinguishable except by the value we impose on the change. You're not destroying a tree; you're creating a fire. Invasive Species Firewood that you harvest or buy can be home to invasive species like the Asian long-horned beetle. The irony of complaining about invasive species in an article promoting the roaming of an invasive species (H. sapiens) isn't lost on me. Still. Spiders. Injury There’s no national tally of campfire-related injuries, but a study in Oklahoma found that 57 people were injured and one person was killed due to campfires in a ten-year period. There's probably no national tally of campfire-related injuries because DOGE cut that departmentit happens so rarely that there's no need for one. Also, one must balance any CRIs (I'm not typing that out again) with injuries resulting from flailing around a campsite in the pitch blackness, tripping over snakes and, as per the article from last week, getting eaten by bears. I’m an odd person to be writing this article. To me, having a fire has always been a fundamental component of enjoying a night outdoors. And also, your arguments are weak. You might think I'm an odd person to be commenting on this article. It's true that this has no personal relevance to me. Still, in my younger days, I "enjoyed" the occasional wilderness trip, including a (sometimes-illicit) campfire. What, you didn't think I was ragging on a thing I'd never experienced, did you? But mostly, while the risk of wildfires is real, most of those other items don't stand up to much scrutiny. And that got me thinking: perhaps the real lesson here is that the campfire has had its day. So we have rules about them, and one can no longer escape to the wilderness to avoid human-made rules. |
| The theme for this Atlas Obscura article is clearly not timely here in August, but there are good reasons to consider this essential information that's valuable year-round. 6 Historical Burgers to Make for July 4th Boozy fillings, peanut butter toppings, and other interesting recipes of yore. Those reasons are: 1) There is no one time of year to eat burgers. It's not like it's eggnog, which is only acceptable in December. 2) Lots of people who see this on the internet are from places where July 4 isn't a special holiday; and 3) The holiday has become irrelevant in the US, as most of the country's founding principles have been shredded. Now, the article itself is short, with links to the specific burger recipes. Consequently, I'll be brief, as well. I am firmly anti-gimmick burger. A well-grilled patty on a soft bun is already a fine dish that needs little embellishment. So every time I see a new version with foie-gras filling or doughnut buns, I cringe. Okay, I'm not entirely contrarian to what this author is saying, but, for starters, "doughnut buns" aren't something new and inspired; they're a long-standing tradition in my town, one that's even older than I am. Burgers on donuts were originally called, as I understand it, "grillswiths." As this is a college town, it's not surprising that the idea spread to other places, but it's not some sort of "new version." For finishers, there's another long-standing tradition, this one pretty much global, that you take street food and/or subsistence food and, later, embellish it with variations that can be labeled "fancy" or "high-class," like the aforementioned foie gras, or caviar, or one place I vaguely remember that put gold flakes on their burgers just for the novelty of it (and probably for the 1000% markup opportunity). But I will always hold a place in my heart for the slugburger. A Depression-era hack meant to stretch meager meat supplies, the recipe combines ground beef or pork with potato flour. This will probably never work in the next Great Depression, as ground beef/pork has stopped being a cheap food. From a Prohibition-era speakeasy that still slings bitters-filled patties to a roadside stand that’s carrying on a century-old tradition of steaming burgers, American history is filled with unusual burgers born of unusual times. Like I said, burgers have slipped past our border controls and can be found in lots of different places. The article has links to six specifically American burgers, but who knows what burger variations you might find on the streets of some foreign and exotic land? |
| Sometimes you hear about people out wandering around doing idiotic things. The key here is that they're out wandering around. From Outside: Selfies Don’t Kill People And no place has ever been ruined by an Instagram post, either. It's time to stop blaming social media for the world's troubles. The article (an opinion piece) is six years old, published back in the Before Times. Since then, more people have had the opportunity to do something stupid in the not-so-great outdoors, like petting the fluffy cows at Yellowstone or slipping off the rim of the Grand Canyon. No one has ever been killed by a selfie. A lot of people have been killed by stupid behavior. I mean... technically? Sometimes taking a selfie is stupid behavior, like when you're at the edge of the Grand Canyon. I don’t know if it was the poppies in California, or the tourists who died in the Grand Canyon, or the guy who fell off a cliff in Yosemite National Park, but it seems as if the social-media outrage cycle has come full circle. Now, rather than being mad at a dentist who shot a lion or a zoo that killed a gorilla, everyone is outraged at social media itself. Okay, but look, hear me out here: there have been several Grand Canyon incidents. What I tried to explain is that so-called selfie deaths aren’t anything new. There’s not been any sort of increase in the frequency of accidental deaths since the advent of Instagram or Snapchat; people have always managed to find stupid ways to die. Fair enough, but with almost everyone carrying a camera around with them at all times, more people dying in stupid ways have been recorded for posterity. Smartphones could stop working tomorrow, and a teenage boy will still find a way to put his life at risk in order to impress a girl, even if he can’t snap a photo in the process. The biggest change would just be that the rest of us wouldn’t see a photo of the shenanigans and would never get the chance to get outraged about it. Outraged? Hardly. In the immortal words of Elvis Costello, "I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused." When people get the opportunity to visit a really cool national park, or a field full of beautiful wildflowers, or see a neat animal, it is only right and normal that they want to document the experience and share it with their friends. I just saw one yesterday about a man in India who tried to take a selfie with an elephant, and the elephant chased him down, knocked him over, pulled down his pants, and stepped upon him. Guy survived, so it's not a "selfie death." But it was a pretty stupid thing to do, and I totally get where the elephant was coming from there. I like to think the beast purposely left him alive to teach him a lesson. Again, this is not a new phenomenon. Are Ansel Adams’s photos of Yosemite Valley really that different from every Instagram photo every tourist snaps in the same spot? Ahem... yes. And just like Adams’s work, all those Instagram posts from Yosemite make people want to go visit. This isn't the flex you think it is. Finding a cool camping spot is no longer something that requires navigation skills; you just click on the geotag to open Google Maps, then tell that app to lead the way there. Neither is this. Social media represents change. New people from more diverse backgrounds can now easily reach massive audiences. Change can be scary but it can also be powerful. There is indeed something new under the sun. The problem is that it's under the sun. I suppose it's possible that people have also died or been injured from taking selfies in the comfort of their own home, because one constant in the universe is the human desire to show off, but it seems to me that the problem is these people went outside. With or without phone cameras. Well, despite the age of the article, it's probably relevant again, because I see a stupid stunt death in the news at least once a month, maybe more. And again, my reaction isn't outrage. Sometimes, it's schadenfreude. |
| A bit about human nature from BBC: Everyone's selfish. The only question is how much your selfish desires overlap with helping others. Like, if you give money to disaster relief, you've helped someone (mostly the charity's organizer, though some might actually get to the victims). But it also feels good. Doing something that feels good is selfish. Whenever I fly, one line jumps out from the pre-flight safety briefing. Somewhere between "welcome aboard" and "use this whistle for attracting attention", we're reminded to "put on your own oxygen mask before helping others". This is, essentially, an official instruction to be "selfish". What? No, it's not. It's pure, undiluted practicality. Most of the pre-flight videos I've seen illustrate this by showing an utterly calm and in no way panicking woman sitting next to a little kid, presumably her offspring. She methodically fixes the oxygen mask over her face while the kid's sitting there like he's waiting for the dentist, also, in the words of Tyler Durden, "calm as Hindu cows." Then she reaches over and masks up the extraordinarily well-behaved kid. In reality, the kid would be screaming, freaking out, and squirming all over the place (if, that is, it hasn't been sucked right out of the plane by whatever depressurized the cabin enough for the masks to drop). And there's a reason it's always a woman in these videos: it's generally women who are socialized to put everyone else before themselves. So, it's a clear reminder that a) you should try to stay calm while the plane you're on drops 10,000 feet in 2 seconds; b) adults are responsible for kids and c) the kid's not going to be in any position to help you if you put their mask on first, so make sure you're relatively stabilized before assisting the little brat. But on the other hand, in a world that often seems to reward narcissism, there could be a risk that that same line speaks to a somewhat troubling life philosophy. The idea that you should always put yourself first – and that selfishness trumps altruism. Again, in reality, there's a balance to be struck between pure self-interest and pure altruism, both of which are probably, like, infinity and negative infinity: useful concepts, but there's a whole infinity of range between the two extremes. Or, to put it another way if math(s) freaks you out, life isn't about one or the other; it's about balancing your own needs and desires against the needs and desires of others. Elements of psychology, economics and biology – not least the ideas of selfish genes and neo-Darwinism – have normalised the assumption that competition means humans are intrinsically cruel, ruthless or selfish, says Steve Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University. Even in competition, there's an element of cooperation. If you're playing a football match (either kind), you're obviously cooperating with your teammates while trying to score more goals than the other team. But you're also, in a way, cooperating with the other team: you've agreed on the rules of the game (or had them imposed upon you), and there are penalties for breaking the rules. Take the "bystander effect", which first emerged in the 1960s. This is the widely cited idea that people typically avoid intervening in a crisis when others are nearby. The theory followed outrage over the 1964 New York murder of Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender who was reportedly raped and killed in front of nearly 40 witnesses, none of whom helped. But the final detail of the story behind the "bystander effect" appears to be an apocryphal one. While, tragically, Genovese really was sexually assaulted and murdered, investigations suggest that reports of there being 38 passive bystanders were inaccurate. I know I've pointed this out before, but I still keep seeing people referring to this incident as if it proceeded in accordance with the early tabloid sensationalism, so I'm quoting the above to emphasize that the bystander effect isn't nearly as pronounced as people think it is. Research suggests that people are actually more than willing to prioritise others' safety over their own in many situations. I expect it depends on the person, but, okay, here's something I see a lot of: Some asshole leaves a kitten by the side of the road. Someone who's probably not as big an asshole hears the poor thing's plaintive cries, and catches the feline, takes it to the vet, and generally ends up keeping it, or at least ensuring it's got a proper home with caring people. What's the big takeaway here? Usually, there are a lot of "people suck!" involved, emphasizing the cruelty of the kitten-abandoner. But I, as cynical as I am at times, draw a different conclusion: there's someone who cares enough to rescue the kitten; there's someone else whose entire job is to make kittens (and puppies) healthier; and there are a whole lot of anonymous internet commenters who would do the same thing in the same situation, and yet, they'd rather condemn the one person who did a bad thing. And for fuck's sake, that's not even our species. The vast majority of us are altruistic enough to take the time to help an entirely different expression of life. Even the act of condemning the asshole who dumped a kitten off to fend for itself speaks volumes about one's priorities. Never, not once, have I seen anyone comment on such a story with "Well, it's just a cat" or some version of "I'm sympathetic to the kitty-dumper." Are there bad people? Absolutely. Are they the majority? Do they represent humanity as a whole? Hell, no. There are evolutionary reasons for human altruism, Taylor says. For most of our history, we have lived in tribes as hunter-gatherers – highly cooperative groups. Oh, for... stop with the evolutionary guesswork. Most of our evolution happened before our ancestors could even be considered "human." I've ranted about evo-psych before, though, and I won't go into that again right now. "There's no reason why early human beings should be competitive or individualistic," says Taylor. "That would not have helped our survival at all. It would have actually endangered our survival." Within a tribe, sure. Between tribes, well, we see the result of that every day. And yet, there are still things we agree on. Mostly. Science suggests that most of us have the hardware to be selfless, often extraordinarily so. But that doesn't mean we can – or should – be selfless all the time. Whether we prioritise ourselves or others depends partly on circumstances, our prior experience and our culture. The rest of the article, which is moderately long, continues in the same vein. But, again, my takeaway here is that no one is completely selfish or completely altruistic; there are only gradations in between. That hypothetical pet-dumper I mentioned? On a good day, I might guess, without evidence, that the reason they did what they did was because they had limited resources, and prioritized their own family over the life of a cat. I've been in dire situations, myself, and I know that you don't always think things through when your main concern is feeding you and yours. And they might even think, "the cat has claws and teeth and can catch mice" (however wrong that is when you're talking about a domesticated animal). Point being, it's entirely possible they thought they were doing the right thing. Or, possibly, they're just a terrible person. Plenty of those around. But they're outnumbered. |
| I'm trying to get to the movie theater more often again, so finding this article was timely. From Delish: What Nutritionists Wish You Knew About Popcorn Think twice before reaching for the movie theater butter. They call it "movie theater butter" because it has nothing in common with actual butter; that is, no cow titties were ever involved. Popcorn is one of the most versatile snacks in the world. Sure. You can eat it, or you can string it up for decoration. But there are a lot of contradicting opinions about the nutritional merits of popcorn. Of course there are. Is popcorn actually a good-for-you snack, or is it something you should avoid if you're trying to eat better? Uh huh. That depends. Are you a Calvinist (John-not-cartoon-kid) who believes that everything that tastes or feels good must be, by definition, evil? Since it’s whole grain by nature, it is filled to the brim with fiber. They couldn't come up with a more appropriate metaphor? According to experts, another major benefit of popcorn is the high concentration of polyphenols. "But that's a CHEMICAL!!!" From a macronutrient perspective, popcorn on its own is an extremely low calorie food. Right, well, I suspect here is where people start to confuse "popcorn" with "popcorn how people actually eat it." Look, we can all agree that, say, brussels sprouts are good for you, right? Green vegetable, basically cabbage, and until fairly recently they tasted so bitter people started calling them the Devil's Hemorrhoids. Okay, maybe they didn't, but they could have. The taste was proof (to Calvinists, anyway) that they had to be good for you. To make them more palatable, people slathered them in butter and cheese and all those things that, at the time, they thought would clog your arteries right up, and even if they didn't, it still increased the calorie count by several orders of magnitude. The point is, while I'm perfectly content to munch on lightly salted, but otherwise plain, popcorn, not everyone can or will do that, instead adding things that would make even brussels sprouts (or kale, which is really the same plant) unhealthy. This happens to every "healthy" thing, by the way. Take coffee. No, seriously, take it; I don't drink the stuff. But I don't have to drink it to know about the studies that seem to support its health benefits. But any benefits are from black coffee, which very few people drink. Instead, they'll go to Starsucks and order a venti whipped caramel mocha chocolate frappe latte, or whatever, to the point where you're like "You want any coffee in your flavorings?" Or yogurt, which is supposedly good for you, but not if you're going to turn it into candy. Now, look. I'm not saying "don't eat or drink these things." That would be hypocritical. Eat and drink what you want; enjoy life. All I'm urging is that you don't load up your healthy thing with sugar, salt, and fat, and then pretend it's still healthy. Okay, fine, back to the article. Popcorn kernels on their own can be considered a healthy food, but its most popular preparations are anything but. “Not all popcorn is created equal," says Elisa Kosonen, RHN, CHC, NNCP. "The biggest concerns come down to how it’s made and what’s added to it." I suppose all of the capital letters and commas after her name are there to lend gravitas to her statement, which is, after all, practically a tautology. And they might do that if I had the slightest clue what all those initials meant. Sure, I could look it up, but that would be cheating. "A lot of the pre-packaged or movie-theater versions are loaded with butter, salt, and artificial flavorings, which can turn a light snack into something super high in calories, sodium, and unhealthy fats," Ortiz says. Which is what I've been saying, but the initials after my name only make my statements about civil engineering meaningful. That's one reason I hardly ever talk about civil engineering: I don't need the liability if I'm wrong. The other is that it's generally boring as shit. (Yes, that's an attempt at a sanitary sewer pun.) Another thing to worry about? The packaging. "Microwave popcorn is often packaged in bags that may contain chemicals, such as perfluorooctanoic acid," Routhenstein adds. Oooh, another scary-sounding chemical, followed by the equally scary "acid!" In this case, though, the scariness may be somewhat justified. So like I said. I believe in eating what you want. But I also believe in being educated about things. As such, I might actually look up that quoted person's credentials. Later. |
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) with two serious chronic health conditions. These analyses are necessary. When you run out of money, you can't pay for anything at all, which is why we have to prioritize our household spending. Governments are subject to the same arithmetic rules, even if (or maybe especially because) they spend other people's money.
