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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
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Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. ![Merit Badge in Quill Award
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| Breaking from my usual random post this New Year's Eve. You'll see why. Do Americans Sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ Because of a Frat Party?  Or maybe it was the cigars that gave us this New Year’s Eve staple. Article is from Atlas Obscura, and I haven't bothered to fact-check it. Just thought it was interesting, and timely. Guy Lombardo wasn’t thinking about tradition as the clock struck midnight in New York on New Year’s Eve 1929. He was probably thinking, as so many people were after the stock market crash that fall, about money. Even musicians have to eat. In front of a crowd at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Lombardo raised his violin bow and launched his 10-piece band, the Royal Canadians, into a sweet and soothing rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” Speaking of money, that hotel remained in operation until 2020, when... well, you can guess. The revelers on the sunken dance floor likely did not know the meaning of its Scots-language title. When the song went out over the radio waves in the first minutes of 1930, it was not yet a New Year’s Eve staple throughout the United States—and it may never have become one if not for a promised cigar company sponsorship and a raucous University of Virginia frat party. That, of course, is why I'm featuring this article today. Though... shame on the author for not researching UVA; we're adamant about calling our campus "the grounds," our founder "Mr. Jefferson," freshmen "first-year students," and fraternities "fraternities." The song—the modern lyrics of which are most commonly credited to 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns—was commonly sung in the old country when friends parted. (The title translates to “Old Long Since,” meaning something like “Since Long Ago.”) As I understand it, the usual lyrics sung these days are a mix of Scots and English, which I suppose is only appropriate. So Lombardo reached for the tune just as the band signed off from CBS, where it had been booked until midnight. As the ball dropped in Times Square, the band was actually heard on rival NBC, which picked up the Roosevelt feed. One thing I know I will never do and have never done: Times Square on New Year's Eve. And that might have been that—an old Scottish folk song, played by a Canadian band in a New York hotel late one night at the end of a tumultuous year. No one was thinking about the playlist for next New Year’s Eve. Lombardo and his bandmates had other things on their mind, mainly how to make a living as musicians in the first days of the Great Depression. Bring their trombones down to Wall Street and play the wah-wah sound as stockbrokers' bodies hit the pavement? I'd pay for that. But things were starting to look up for the band by around Easter 1930. They were playing regularly on the radio, which brought more people into the restaurant and earned the band numerous invitations to perform on college campuses. In April, they traveled to Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. “It’s funny how that college date remains in my memory,” Lombardo later wrote. It’s funny, too, how it contributed to an enduring American tradition. Article doesn't say, but UVA always used to hold a massive party around Easter. Demonstrating that all of their creativity was used up by "grounds" and so forth, the party was called Easters. It became internationally famous, which is much better than the other thing Charlottesville became internationally famous for. Sadly, they ended Easters in 1982... right after I got accepted into fall semester 1983. Fuck you, Universe. Point being, this might very well have been an Easters gig. After the formal dances—alcohol-free occasions—students often invited the men in the band back to fraternity parties. They brought along their instruments and “libations flowed freely,” Lombardo recalled. Yep. I'm betting Easters. One night the band decided to end the evening with “Auld Lang Syne,” as they had so often in Ontario. We “were amazed by the reception it got from the students. They demanded one encore after another.” Finally, Lombardo leaned down from the bandstand to ask, “What’s so great about ‘Auld Lang Syne’?” At this point, I knew the answer to that question. The school song uses the same melody. For the students, the answer was obvious: Lombardo was leading them in the school’s de facto fight song. “The Good Old Song” had the same tune as the Scottish standard, but instead of “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and the days of auld lang syne,” the students heard “Let’s all join hands and give a yell for the dear old UVA.” Fun fact: the song also contains the lyrics "We come from Old Vir-gin-i-a, where all is bright and gay," after which the school homophobes had to yell "NOT GAY." Dicks. Hopefully. they don't do that anymore. I wouldn't know, because while I can hear a lot of the sportsball games from my deck, I can't make out the singing. Obviously, the lyrics were from an older time before the meaning of the word changed. “We would always keep ‘Auld Lang Syne’ after that,” Lombardo wrote in his autobiography decades later. “The boys at Virginia had given us a reason to retain it.” I'll also point out that UVA didn't start admitting chicks until, I don't know, somewhere in the late 60s, if memory serves. Now, of course, it's mostly dames. By the time 1930 became 1931, the song was the band’s anthem—a joyous callback to those nights at the University of Virginia—and its signature signoff. At midnight, live from the Roosevelt Hotel, Lombardo, as he did most nights, led the Royal Canadians in “Auld Lang Syne.” He did the same for nearly half a century. And that, folks, is the story of how a fraternity party in my hometown changed the world for the better. Unfortunately, the name of the fraternity in question appears to be lost to history. “Should he and his Royal Canadians fail to play ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at midnight on New Year’s Eve at the Hotel Roosevelt Grill in New York, a deep uneasiness would run through a large segment of the American populace—a conviction that, despite the evidence on every calendar, the new year had not really arrived,” LIFE magazine wrote in 1965. But, of course, it arrives whether you like it or not, because time is, as I've banged on about in here before, not an illusion. The convention of celebrating it when we do is arbitrary, but sticky; there's no doubt that the vast majority of folks on the east coast of the US—which includes NYC and UVA, as well as WDC World Headquarters—will recognize the flipping of the digit in just a bit less than 24 hours after I post this. On that note, it should be self-evident that I will not do my usual midnight posting tomorrow night, for obvious reasons. Likely I'll post something later in the day, during hangover recovery. Until then, I wish everyone a happy New Year, and may 2023 exceed your expectations. And there's a hand my trusty friend And give us a hand o' thine We'll take a cup of kindness yet For auld lang syne |
| It's probably shitty of me to rag on this post, but I'm going to do it anyway. Cold Fighting Chicken Noodle Soup The most soothing, comforting, cozy soup for the flu season! Quick/easy to make, you’ll be feeling better in no time! It's the bangs, really. Well, mostly. Everything is just so goddamned exciting! I gotta put exclamation points everywhere! Happy Monday! You do know that stuff on the internet tends to be up 7 days a week and, in this case, for over four years, right? We just got back from San Francisco to watch the Dodgers versus Giants, and we ate so many Gilroy garlic fries and clam chowders in a bread bowl! At this point, I should have just closed the tab. There is nothing I have in common with these authors. But as amazing as their food was at AT&T park, San Francisco is also super cold (compared to us weenies with our LA weather), which means I’m now home with one of the worst colds ever. Article is from the Before Time, when people traveled a lot and happily collected viruses like Beanie Babies. Also, I have sworn to never visit a stadium, arena, or other venue for which some corporation paid for the naming rights. I’m currently on bedrest right now with a giant bowl of this soup. Eating soup in bed, especially while sick (or drunk), takes some serious confidence. It’s the only thing that is making me feel better at this point. And the garlic/lemon/ginger/lemongrass here is doing absolute wonders. I have to admit, that does sound like a great flavor combination. Won't cure anything except maybe hunger, but I don't doubt it would provide some comfort and relief. So as the weather cools down, be sure to stay warm and have this soup on standby! It will be a god-send! Someone from LA telling the rest of us to stay warm can go fuck themselves. As for the recipe itself, well... on the plus side, the usual PhD dissertation food bloggers feel the need to write before getting to the goddamned point is mercifully short (I copied most of it above). On the minus side, I count 16 ingredients; 17 if you note that salt and pepper are on the same line. Worse, I see an awful damn lot of dicing and mincing and grating and chopping and shredding. Way, way, way more work than I want to do when I'm feeling good, let alone when I have a cold. No, as delicious as this soup might be (and it does look tasty), when I'm sick, I can barely muster the energy to nuke a can of Campbell's. Yesterday, in an ongoing effort to try to do new things, I made a batch stuffed grape leaves. Never done that before. Stuffed grape leaves are fairly labor-intensive and time-consuming, but I had a recipe and I figured, what the hell, right? And they turned out just fine. My only point here being that as complicated as stuffed grape leaves are, it was a simpler recipe that required fewer ingredients than this chicken soup from a site whose motto is "Quick and easy meals for the home cook." (It did take longer, though, I admit.) And finally, "ditalini pasta?" I've been cooking various forms of pasta for at least forty years, and I've never even heard of that shape, let alone seen it in a grocery store. My spell checker doesn't even recognize it. Maybe y'all in LA can find it on every street corner, but I haven't even seen it in New York or New Jersey, and there are at least a dozen people there of Italian ancestry. Oh, well. At least I learned something new. Anyway, no, it's not quick, it's not easy, and it's definitely not an antiviral, but hey, despite all that, and despite the exclamation marks splooged all over the page, it really does look good. If you end up making it, invite me over. As long as you're not sick. |
| Today in You're Doing It Wrong... Quick disclaimer: I use a script blocker. I have no idea if the above link will work for you or not. When I was at my most burnt out pre-pandemic, traveling constantly for reporting, working all the time, the muscle under my eye twitching almost constantly, still without the language to describe what I was doing to myself, the one thing that would temporarily calm me down was buying shit. So... it worked. There’s a similar dynamic at play in the desire to go to Target and drop $82 on things that weren’t on your list, in part because you didn’t have a list, because you just wanted to go to Target and encounter solutions for problems you didn’t know you had. I've noticed that I approach buying shit differently from other people. Other people seem to go shopping and thereby find something that they think will be useful in some way. I do the opposite: decide what I want or need, and, if it exists, buy it. For me, the most cogent illustration of this phenomenon is halitosis, a fake medical word devised by Listerine to market its antiseptic liquid, previously used to treat bacterial infections, as an everyday necessity. That's a pretty basic marketing trick: find or invent other uses for your product. Church & Dwight did this very effectively with their Arm & Hammer baking soda, marketed as a fridge deodorizer (one that probably doesn't do dick). Same for Lux Soap, only with body odor — these ads are everywhere in 1920s and ‘30s fan magazines, just straight up targeting women with desirability anxiety. As you can tell by the current nonexistence of Lux Soap, this trick doesn't always hold out for the long term. To be fair, that brand does exist in other countries, and the company producing it (Unilever) sells other soaps in the US. Admittedly, one of them is my preferred brand. Shut up; I use soap at least once a year, and I'm entirely too lazy to make my own. These are textbook examples, the sort so transparent you think how were these people so naive, a company told them they had a problem and they just believed them. But consider Big Pharma, and Big Skincare, and Big Design & Renovation, and Big Tech, and Big Home Remodel, Big Fitness & Wellness, and Big Fashion. None of these industries actually solve the problems they present as pressing, although they certainly purport to. Their products will, however, get you just close enough to catharsis (of completion, of solving your problem, of “fixing” whatever you discovered was broken) that you build faith in a brand as solution — convinced that if you just get the next version, research a bit more, actually take the Wirecutter rec, at least one hole in the leaky bucket of your life will be plugged. My dentist's office has one of those home improvement channels on permanently in all of his exam rooms. Those shows enrage me beyond comprehension, and I finally figured out why: they're all ads, and I despise ads. It's even worse when they show an actual ad. I can only assume he's getting kickbacks from Big Home Remodel. I keep hoping that, one day, people will wise up and decide they don't really need to "tear out that kitchen wall and open this space up," but my inner cynic (who makes up 95% of me) knows that's not going to happen. Worse, the shows give people neurosis if their house isn't pristine, new, uncluttered, and museum-worthy. Which it never is. Going to the dentist is stressful enough without that bullshit. "So find a new dentist." Yeah, right; this was the only one in town that accepted new patients, probably because everyone else got fed up with what passed for entertainment in there and found a new dentist. But then the summer came, and that friction began to disappear. I funneled my enduring pandemic anxiety into leveling up my lawn dad status — and as any lawn dad will tell you, any level of lawn-dadding requires items. Same thing with lawns. Worse, even, because if your house is a mess you can simply have no one come over. But your yard is right there by the street, with all passing eyes on it. Some neighborhoods even mandate certain standards. It's a massive drain on both individual finances and the environment in general, but gotta have that status symbol to keep your sacred property values up. And before you say that many of these activities — including home maintenance — can, indeed, be performed at little to no expense: of course they can. But that’s not the way most of us been trained to approach leisure, lifestyle, ownership or even our own bodies. Nothing is just fine as it is. Everything demands maintenance and, preferably, amelioration — and then more maintenance in its ameliorated form. I kinda figured that out years ago. True, I had my deck replaced last year, but the old one was seriously about to collapse. It's not like I neglect necessary maintenance, but I got out of the vicious consumerist cycle long ago. Sure, I still buy shit, but that's because I'm lazy, not because I want to work harder. The envelopment and distraction inherent to these projects — and their normalization through reality TV and fix-it media — makes it all the more impossible to even imagine a different way of organizing one’s life. “Freedom” and “choice” present themselves as the “freedom” to choose between various products; those choices then fill the void where personality or community might have been. And that's where you lose me. As far as I can tell, most peoples' home "improvement" projects are the result of too much community. That is, you do all that nonsense to meet peoples' perceived expectations. If you're a hermit, there's no need for all that crap. The author goes on to contrast this with the SF utopia of Star Trek, which I gotta admit endears her to me despite some of the over-the-top language in the article. But Star Trek was intrinsically designed to depict a post-capitalist, post-scarcity society, one which, moreover, was only able to be built on the ashes of vast world upheavals. I like the show, as you know, in all its incarnations, but I know it's fiction. We're heading into the upheavals, and won't be able to break out of them so easily. |
| Feeling lucky? I'm guessing it's because when you run out of fingers and feet to count, you're boned. According to the Otis Elevator Co., for every building with a floor numbered “13,” six other buildings pretend to not have one, skipping right to 14. Knowing that the 14th floor is really the 13th could lead one to believe that the 14th is the unlucky floor, if people were logical. Then again, if people were logical, well, you know. Many Westerners alter their behaviors on Friday the 13th. Of course bad things do sometimes happen on that date, but there’s no evidence they do so disproportionately. But when they do, they remember it disproportionately. This is a variant of confirmation bias, kind of like Blue Car Syndrome. As a sociologist specializing in social psychology and group processes, I’m not so interested in individual fears and obsessions. What fascinates me is when millions of people share the same misconception to the extent that it affects behavior on a broad scale. Such is the power of 13. If enough people believe something, it gives that something a kind of reality. Kind of like when a winter storm is coming, and you're terrified that the store will run out of French toast supplies, so you run out and buy extra bread, milk, and eggs—which of course makes the store run out of French toast supplies. The source of 13’s bad reputation – “triskaidekaphobia” – is murky and speculative. And just as with triskaidekaphobia (one of the few words I can never spell correctly unless it's staring me in the face) itself, people will latch on to an explanation and stick with it in the face of any new evidence. Hell, I do it myself; I'm convinced that it's a relic of the Sumerian counting system, upon which we base our clocks. There's a reason 11 and 12 have their own words that don't end in "-teen." The historical explanation may be as simple as its chance juxtaposition with lucky 12. Which might make some sort of sense if people were even a little bit scared of 11, but they're generally not. Joe Nickell ... points out that 12 often represents “completeness”: the number of months in the year, gods on Olympus, signs of the zodiac and apostles of Jesus. Thirteen contrasts with this sense of goodness and perfection. Except that there's about 13 months in a year, if one goes by lunar months. And the apostles thing is disputable; it's quite likely that the number of apostles was codified at 12 to fit the "compleness" argument, and not vice-versa. Twelve is just a fun and easily divisible number, as has been known since ancient times (again, Sumerians), while 11 and 13 are both primes. But the truth is, sociocultural processes can associate bad luck with any number. When the conditions are favorable, a rumor or superstition generates its own social reality, snowballing like an urban legend as it rolls down the hill of time. It's not just bad luck. Lots of numbers, especially smaller ones, have well-known folk associations, irrespective of their usefulness in mathematics. Three, for instance, is the Trinity and the mind/body/spirit beliefs. Four is the number of classical elements, and has associations with the Divine in Western religions; it's also unlucky in parts of Asia (I've stayed in Chinese-owned hotels in the US that don't have a fourth floor, much as many US-owned buildings don't have a 13th). Five is associated with our fingers, and also plays heavily in religious and spiritual symbolism (the pentagram). And so on. The point being that regardless of objective reality, some people believe in all of these associations. In Japan, 9 is unlucky, probably because it sounds similar to the Japanese word for “suffering.” In Italy, it’s 17. In China, 4 sounds like “death” and is more actively avoided in everyday life than 13 is in Western culture – including a willingness to pay higher fees to avoid it in cellphone numbers. And though 666 is considered lucky in China, many Christians around the world associate it with an evil beast described in the biblical Book of Revelation. There is even a word for an intense fear of 666: hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. My spell checker just rattled, sputtered and smoked. There are many kinds of specific phobias, and people hold them for a variety of psychological reasons. There are also levels of phobia, I think (I'm no expert). I've admitted before that I'm absolutely terrified of anything touching my eyeballs. I think many people are at least a little freaked out by the concept, but mine is extreme—though I did manage to make it through eye surgery without losing too much of my shit. Thanks, Valium! Part of 13’s reputation may be connected to a feeling of unfamiliarity, or “felt sense of anomaly,” as it is called in the psychological literature. In everyday life, 13 is less common than 12. There’s no 13th month, 13-inch ruler, or 13 o'clock. Never read Nineteen Eighty-Four, or joined the military, did you? People also may assign dark attributes to 13 for the same reason that many believe in “full moon effects.” Beliefs that the full moon influences mental health, crime rates, accidents and other human calamities have been thoroughly debunked. Still, when people are looking to confirm their beliefs, they are prone to infer connections between unrelated factors. For example, having a car accident during a full moon, or on a Friday the 13th, makes the event seem all the more memorable and significant. Once locked in, such beliefs are very hard to shake. Which is what I was saying up there. Then there are the potent effects of social influences. It takes a village – or Twitter – to make fears coalesce around a particular harmless number. The emergence of any superstition in a social group – fear of 13, walking under ladders, not stepping on a crack, knocking on wood, etc. – is not unlike the rise of a “meme.” Goddammit all to hell, that is the actual definition of a meme. Fortunately, the article goes on to explain that, and even credits Dawkins properly. Also, there are good, practical reasons not to walk under ladders. And I was very, very disappointed when, as a child, my mother's back flat-out refused to break when I'd deliberately stomp on cracks when she pissed me off (that might have been the start of my skepticism about folk "wisdom.") I'm looking at my black cat right now, though. She must have crossed my path 13 times yesterday, and I don't feel any unluckier than usual. Anyway, the article ends by reiterating that despite not having any basis in objective reality, superstitions are hard to displace and can have very real consequences. My black cat, for instance: black cats tend to be adopted less frequently than other cats because of the idiot superstitions surrounding them. Well, their loss is my gain; Robin is a good kitty. Here's a poem I wrote about her, with picture:
In the end, 13 is just another number, and Friday the 13th is just another day on the completely made-up calendar. There's one next month, in fact. It being January, it's very likely that it will snow somewhere in the US that day. If so, I'll bet people will complain that it happened because it's Friday the 13th. Never mind the snowstorm that paralyzed part of the country on Christmas Eve, which practically no one considers an unlucky day, and besides, a "white Christmas" is supposed to be a good thing—just don't tell that to the unlucky folks in Buffalo. |
| I'm still learning new stuff all the time. This is a good thing. Though I'm not taking anything from Cracked at face value. "No One" is a bold statement, for instance. We once told you that the famous quote about learning who rules over you by finding out who you’re not allowed to criticize actually originated in 1993 from a white supremacist sex criminal. That doesn't require any digging to disprove. You're not "allowed" to criticize quadriplegics for being unable to move, for example, and I doubt they rule over you. I mean, you technically could criticize them, but you'd have to be a real dick. And we revealed that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result” came not from Einstein but from Narcotics Anonymous and from a mystery novel about women’s tennis. "If you want your quote to have weight, attribute it to Einstein." -George Washington With the following phrases, you don’t need to have any idea where they came from to use them. But once you do know, ouch, you’ll never think of them the same way again. Now, that phrasing, I can get behind. 5. ‘Yelling Fire in A Crowded Theater’ Comes from A Terrible Court Decision When people say they’re being silenced, their opponents quickly point out that freedom of speech isn’t absolute (these same opponents, when their own side is silenced, will call this censorship deeply discriminatory and unfair). For example, they note you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. The logic here is that the First Amendment has some exceptions, so this latest thing might fall under that exception, maybe. I actually knew this one, kind of, though as they say, the devil's in the details. They're too long to paste here, so you might want to read it. If not, consider the (almost) closing argument: The actual decision that originated that argument was already bad. It was so bad that the judge who wrote that phrase, Oliver Wendell Holmes, changed his mind about speech protections in less than a year. 4. ‘Vox Populi’ Is Really About Why the Majority Voice Shouldn’t Win “Vox populi, vox Dei,” posted Elon Musk recently, when a poll told him to bring back Trump’s Twitter account. The Latin phrase translates as “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” When the people speak, you must pay heed, because their word is law. Again, even the slightest bit of thought could contradict this one. If we have "inalienable rights" at all, the whole idea is that those are rights that can't be taken away with a simple majority vote. To use a possibly extreme example, let's say that the people decide, by majority vote, that all Canadians living in the US should be executed. You can take such a vote, but that doesn't mean that the sentence will be carried out; that would be a violation of the Canadians' human rights. And I'm not even going to get into the theological implications. The earliest recorded use of “vox populi, vox Dei” is actually a letter from the year 798 that says listening blindly to the majority view is a bad idea. “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God,” wrote the scholar Alcuin of York, “since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.” 3. Snake Oil Is Actually Effective, Hence the Phrase When someone claims he can solve traffic using single-lane tunnels, or says you’ll double your money by buying Shiba Inu coins, you might say they’re slinging snake oil. That’s highly insulting — to snake oil. I have to admit, this one was new to me, so I had to verify it elsewhere. Wikipedia is only slightly more trustworthy than Cracked, but feel free to follow the links in the footnotes there.These salesmen weren’t quacks because they sold snake oil. They were quacks because they didn’t sell snake oil. In any case, even if snake oil is "effective," it's hardly the cure-all some of these hucksters made it out to be. That would be like saying that because aspirin cures headaches, it can also cure cancer. It did turn out to offer some protection from heart attacks, though, which is why science is important: you can investigate these claims and support or disprove them. 2. The Guy Who Coined the Term ‘Racism’ Had Some Strange Ideas About Race Racism may have always existed. People were even racist in some Star Wars stories, and those happened a long time ago. But before 1902, if people had a word for the concept, it was “racialism.” The first person to call it “racism” was an army officer, Richard Henry Pratt. And that's not even getting into droid slavery. “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” said Pratt. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: That all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” That was from a speech where he spoke against racism. I'm not a big fan of judging people of the past by today's moral standards, but that seems evil even by the standards of a century ago. 1. ‘Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child’ Comes from A 1600s Sex Poem I'm not even quoting anything from this section. In any case, beating one's children for any reason fell out of fashion sometime in the last century. After I'd already become an adult, of course. One has to be careful with stuff like this, though. Some phrases have been given a fauxtymology. For instance, I've heard people assert with quite a bit of confidence that "rule of thumb" came from an old law against beating your wife with any stick bigger around than your thumb. I even got screeched at once for saying it, because of its association with misogyny. But there's no truth to that assertion at all. Most likely it just came from the association of the thumb with an inch. Language changes over time, and it has a way of fulfilling its own prophecies. But I still think it's important to know where these things come from. |
| Today's article is mostly informational; I don't have the background to really comment on it. But then, I also don't have a background in making movies, but I comment on them anyway. Review below. Anyway, the article, which is from 2019; because it engages with current science, something might have changed in the last few years: Are you an ecosystem? Your mouth, skin, and gut are home to whole communities of microscopic organisms, whose influence on your body ranges from digesting your food to training your immune system and, possibly, impacting your mood and behavior. I've discussed the gut microbiome in here before, but apparently our prokaryotic fellow-travelers aren't limited to the lower digestive tract. What are these tiny tenants, and how do they change the way we think about human health, disease, and even identity? The health questions I leave entirely to the experts. As for identity, well, that overlaps with philosophy. The human body is made up of trillions of cells—well, trillions of human cells. Around the beginning of the 21st century, scientists learned that in fact the human body contains many trillions more microbial cells—possibly three times as many. The history of microbiome studies goes back significantly further than this, though it's my understanding that the last 20 years or so have seen quite an expansion of knowledge. I will also point out that some older estimates were "maybe 10 times as many," but that's outdated. One might wonder "How can there be more microbes than human cells? Where would they fit?" Well, again, I'm no expert, but I've heard that prokaryotic cells are an entire order of magnitude smaller, on average, than eukaryotic cells (those with nuclei and mitochondria). I'm unclear on whether that's volume, area, or a more linear measurement, and I can't be arsed right now to figure it out. The only point is that they do fit. An analogy would be a jar filled with pebbles and grains of sand; there would be significantly more grains of sand by number. It is an especially curious discovery—it has been with us, evolving, interacting, and helping to determine our fate as organisms, since before the emergence of the human species itself. The implication there is that other larger organisms have microbiomes, too. This tracks with other things I've heard; namely, that some of the studies are done in mice. It wouldn't surprise me if most or all complex organisms have one. We now know that the microbiome contributes a substantial amount to human growth, development, and function. Perhaps the most popular is the gut microbiome, which impacts human digestive health (this is the science behind your daily probiotic yogurt). I remain unconvinced that probiotics work as advertised—mostly because I don't think the food makers' claims have to pass any real standards. Like labeling something "natural," it might very well be meaningless. Aside from digestive health, some scientists are studying the relationship between the composition of the microbiome and the development of the central nervous system, and some psychologists want to take this a step further to investigate the relationship between the microbiome and phenomena like emotion, learning, and social behavior. You might recall I recently linked an article that claimed a correlation between digestive disorders and autism. Here it is if you don't recall: "Colony" I'll emphasize again that all of this is still preliminary. Two biologists, Nicolae Morar and Brendan Bohannan, of the University of Oregon, recently surveyed the metaphors scientists use to talk about the microbiome (an “organ” or a “part of the immune system”) and the human-microbiome complex (a “superorganism,” a “holobiont,” or an “ecosystem”). These metaphors influence scientific understanding and can shape medical treatment. This is really what led me to link this. Metaphors aren't limited to writing. For example, some physicians support fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT); that is, swallowing a pill full of someone else’s poo to treat malfunction of the gut microbiome. Ew. You'd think they could deliver that as an enema or something. For some reason that seems less icky to me. Just goes to show that gut microbes are our friends, and with friends like those, who needs enemas? I am by no means apologetic for making that pun. This view is attractive because the human body and its microbiota work to do things that neither could do alone. For example, humans could not get nearly as much energy from digestion without the help of their microbiota, and the microbiota could not survive without a host. Again, I'm not a biologist, but that sounds to me a lot like the definition of symbiosis. In general, the problem with each metaphor is that it only captures a part of what the microbiome is and does, and so the researchers conclude that there is no best metaphor, and we need all of them to truly appreciate and understand the complexity of the microbiome and its role in our bodies. That sort of thing also sounds familiar. The fact that there still isn’t one “best” metaphor for grasping the microbiome might tell us something much deeper about the world—that perhaps the most promising approach to understanding it is to play with a variety of perspectives, prizing none over the others. The thing about metaphors is that they have their limitations. Still, when it comes to science communication, it seems to me that we're stuck with them. Just remember the picture of a thing isn't the same thing as the thing. Speaking of metaphors, I saw my traditional Christmas Day movie yesterday, as I mentioned I would.   One-Sentence Movie Review: The Whale: This movie is an adaptation of a stage play, and it shows; there's basically no action and it mostly takes place within a single set, but that works with the subject matter, which is highly metaphorical and finally made me take Brendan Fraser seriously as an actor. Rating: 4/5 |
| Wishing a Merry Christmas to those who observe it. The only observation I'm doing today is a movie, if my plans hold out. No, it won't be Avatar: The Last Waterbender or whatever bullshit Cameron is foisting upon us. Not even Blue Zoe Saldana makes me want to see that one. Today, for me, is Throwback Day. The Random Number Generator gave me something from way back on November 1, 2009: "NaNo?" It's short, so here it is in its entirety to save you a click: Maybe not this year, after all. I got a work deadline that's kicking my ass, and it doesn't look like I'm going to make it - which means I'm not going to be able to start tomorrow, either. Oh well, what the hell, right? It's only my dream. I can put it off again for the sake of doing something I don't really want to do anymore, right? Fuck. Spoiler: I didn't do NaNo that year. I've completed it three times, once getting everything done well before Thanksgiving so I could go on a road trip. I think that was in 2011. My first was the year prior to the linked entry. The point being that I know I can write 50K words in less than a month. That's not the issue. The issue is I can't seem to be arsed to ever edit the damn things. This has two immediate effects: 1) It kills my motivation to do another NaNo; 2) It means all that work is largely wasted. So that's why I haven't done NaNo in a few years, though I'm active in October Prep to help others achieve their goals. And I don't do resolutions, so I'm not going to lie to myself and say I'll do some editing next year, either. Maybe I will; maybe not. Barring emergencies, though, the blog will continue, as will the newsletters I edit. So at least I'll be writing something. |
| There are few certainties in life, but two of them are: 1) you will get a cold and 2) you will get copious advice (most of it wrong) on how to deal with that cold. Turns out, though, that when it comes to chicken soup, my people might have been right all along. Maxims typically date back many years, but “feed a cold, starve a fever” may beat them all. This saying has been traced to a 1574 dictionary by John Withals, which noted that “fasting is a great remedy of fever.” The belief is that eating food may help the body generate warmth during a “cold” and that avoiding food may help it cool down when overheated. And balance the humours. But recent medical science says the old saw is wrong. I'm shocked—SHOCKED—that 16th century medicine turned out to be wrong. Of course, not all of ancient medicine was wrong. It just needs to be examined scientifically. Let’s take colds first. When your body fights an illness it needs energy, so eating healthy food is helpful. For various definitions of "healthy." The reasons to eat for fever are more interesting. Fever is part of the immune system’s attempt to beat the bugs. It raises body temperature, which increases metabolism and results in more calories burned; for each degree of temperature rise, the energy demand increases further. So taking in calories becomes important. This is the refutation of the "starve a fever" part. Even more crucial is drinking. One time I was sick and the doctor insisted I drink "plenty of fluids." I pointed out that tequila is a fluid. He was not amused. “You have to make yourself drink fluids, even though all you want to do is collapse,” says William Schaffner... It's not that I want to collapse, usually. It's that colds and flu make everything taste bad to me. Water especially all tastes like it just came fresh from the sewer. I've been lucky (actually skilled and careful) so far and not had covfefe-19; the most terrifying symptom of that disease is loss of smell and taste (death would be preferable), but I'd almost rather not taste anything than have familiar delicious beverages taste like horse piss. Given the wisdom noted above, Schaffner says, don’t force yourself to eat if you don't feel like it. “But drink,” he adds. “It’s the liquids that are important.” Avoid caffeine and alcohol. Caffeine enhances dehydration. So does alcohol, and it is also a depressant, holding us down. That leaves nothing for me to drink. Piss off with that. While I'm mostly joking about the alcohol, caffeine is the only thing that gets me through sneezin' season. I despise coffee, though, so I get lower amounts in things like tea and Coke. What about some other common conceptions for beating colds and fevers, such as eating chicken soup? One thing I've never been real clear on is whether one "eats" soup or "drinks" it. Chicken soup doesn’t possess any magic ingredients, but it has calories as well as the all-important liquids again. The warm vapor rising from the bowl can also moisten and loosen dried mucus. Ew, but true. So yes, chicken soup does help with cold symptoms. Other hot beverages (or liquid foods) could also. I suspect that the placebo effect is in play for many people; they believe chicken soup will help, so it does. And like the article implies, it can't hurt. Unlike some of the advice you get heaped upon you when you have a cold. Supplements are dubious at best. The data from studies about taking vitamin C are inconclusive, as they are for zinc. Pretty sure vitamin C is relatively harmless. Zinc, however, sounds like something you can overdose on. Fun history fact: when I was in college lo these many years ago, I was a guinea pig in a common cold zinc study. As it has now been nearly 40 years since that study, and zinc use is still inconclusive, I'd have to conclude that zinc for common colds is bullshit. Solid studies of echinacea show no benefit. There's one benefit, and it's to the bank accounts of echinacea supplement producers. Over-the-counter remedies may or may not help, but that’s a whole ‘nother story. They can relieve symptoms but they do not kill off viruses or bacteria. I have never, not once, seen any improvement in symptoms from taking antihistamines and/or decongestants. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're useless; they seem to help other people. But they have no observable effect on me. One thing I'm a bit surprised about is that the article doesn't emphasize the uselessness of antibiotics treatment for viral infections. Not only is it useless, but it can be actively harmful in several ways. Cold and fever germs usually run their course, and the immune system eventually gets the upper hand. In the meantime, drink drink drink. That always sounds like a good idea to me. |
| Regular readers know I source Cracked a lot. This one, however, is from Mental Floss. Cracked started out as a competitor magazine to Mad. The former's current incarnation is, as we know, an internet humor site with short articles and pictures with funny captions. The latter's current incarnation is... well, it's been a while since I've looked it up, but the internet version was lame as hell when I did. Such is the nature of competition. Thanks to satire like The Simpsons and The Daily Show, it’s hard to imagine a time when irreverent humor wasn’t everywhere. But the 1950s were much different. Anti-establishment humor wasn’t part of the mainstream. Not until Mad magazine arrived to poke holes in everything from politics to movies to advertising. And even if you never picked up Mad, you probably know Alfred E. Neuman, its moronic mascot. At some point, I'll need to do a rant on how "moronic" is perfectly acceptable in print, but "retarded" has been relegated to "the R-word," even though they come from the same place. Today, however, is not that day. But who came up with Mad? What prompted a lawsuit over Alfred E.? And why did the FBI feel the need to keep a file on a silly humor magazine? The article, of course, proceeds to investigate these important questions, but I'll take a stab at the last one: "because it posed a danger to the establishment." Free speech, my ass. Today, comic books are the source material for movies that gross billions of dollars. But in the 1950s, adults generally perceived them as hot dumpster trash that would rot kids’ brains. Considering some of the people alive today who were kids in the 1950s, it's clear that something rotted their brains. It wasn't comic books, though. Every so often, older people will latch on to some new thing that "rots kids' brains." Jazz. Comics. Rock and roll. Weed. Video games. That sort of moral panic. For some reason, they never seem to worry too much about things that actually rot brains, such as environmental lead. How did comics get such a bad rap? While characters like Superman and Batman were viewed with suspicion, adults were really fixated on crime and horror comics like the ones published by EC Comics. Founded by Maxwell Gaines in 1944 and later run by his son William Gaines, EC was the publisher behind grisly titles like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. To be fair, some of those were damn explicit. Still, did the adults at the time forget about the long history of horror stories told to kids to scare them straight? I guess they did, because of environmental lead, I guess. The first issue of Mad was actually titled Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad and retailed for 10 cents. You forgot to add "Cheap." That was always below the price of every issue of Mad I ever saw, regardless of price. But that only got added later; a quick internet search didn't tell me when it started, but it wasn't with the first issue. A satire titled “Superduperman” ran in the fourth issue and was significant for two reasons. Mocking DC’s hero created strong word of mouth among readers, and it also led to DC—then known as National Comics Publications—sending a strongly worded legal letter demanding Mad stop mocking their most popular character. Did Mad comply? It did not. Did Mad get a lot of legal letters from that point forward? It did. I'd describe that more as parody than satire, but I'm no expert. I'm skipping a bunch here, but it goes into Congressional hearings and the disputed origin of Alfred E. Neuman. Alfred E. Neuman might have been the most recognizable personality from Mad, but he wasn’t the only one. Over time, the magazine would introduce some popular recurring features in the magazine as well as writers and artists who developed followings of their own. While Mad referred to them as the Usual Gang of Idiots, they were some of the most talented visual storytellers in the business. This is not disputable. One of my most prized possessions is a two-volume hardcover set of the complete works of Don Martin, from Mad. Then after a discussion of the various artists involved, it gets back to legal battles, and this bit, I think, is important: In the 1960s, songwriter Irving Berlin and others went after Mad in court. Mad had printed a collection of joke lyrics to be sung to the tunes of popular songs, and the music industry felt this was copyright infringement. The United States Court of Appeals disagreed and sided with Mad, saying that parody and satire were deserving of substantial freedom both as entertainment and as a form of literary and social criticism. This is, in my entirely amateur opinion, one of the most important free-speech decisions ever handed down by the courts. And apparently it was all due to one silly cartoon magazine. By the early 1970s, Mad had a circulation of over 2 million readers and was increasingly seen as a vital voice in the counterculture movement. I would argue that underground comics, such as those featuring the work of one R. Crumb, were more important to the counterculture. However, the thing about Mad is that it was completely aboveground, yet still subversive in its own way. But by the end of the 20th century, pop culture and humor were changing rapidly. Kids who had grown up on Mad were now crafting their own comedy, and the winking satire once exclusive to the magazine could be seen in films like The Naked Gun, shows like Saturday Night Live, and even The Onion, which would eventually bridge the gap between print and online humor. No acknowledgement of Cracked? That's okay; I took care of that. One must also not discount the impact of National Lampoon. Anyone else remember that, long ago, Mad copied National Lampoon and produced a movie? It was a terrible movie. I have no idea if Cracked parodied it or not, but Mad itself did.Mad Magazine’s time as a rite of passage for teens may be over, but there’s no mistaking the impact it had on popular culture. Without Mad, we might never have gotten the Garbage Pail Kids or “Weird” Al Yankovic (who once guest-edited an issue, incidentally). What is subversive eventually becomes mainstream, and then something else subversive crops up. Iconoclasm is a powerful urge in human nature, as is the urge to suppress it. No need to be Mad about it. |
| It's widely known that everything in Australia is trying to kill you. Mapping the Many Monsters of Aboriginal Australian Lore A “terrifying pantheon” of ogres, sorcerers, and malevolent mermaids reflects a diversity in geography and environment. This includes, apparently, the cryptids. The rumors about the deadliness of Australian flora and fauna are mostly exaggerated to keep people from the US from going to Oz and polluting their landscape with their presence. But these monsters of folklore are seriously messed up. In the Australian Central and Western Deserts there are roaming ogres, bogeymen (and bogeywomen), cannibal babies, giant baby-guzzlers, sorcerers, spinifex, and feather-slippered spirit beings able to dispatch victims with a single fatal garrote. There are lustful old men who, wishing to satiate their unbridled sexual appetites, relentlessly pursue beautiful, nubile young girls through the night sky and on land, and other monstrous beings, too. I had to Google "spinifex." I'm not any more enlightened than I was before I Googled it. Arnhem Land, in Australia’s north, is the abode of malevolent shades and vampire-like wind and shooting star spirit beings. There are also murderous, humanoid fish-maidens who live in deep waterholes and rockholes, biding their time to rise up, then grab and drown unsuspecting human children or adults who stray close to the water’s edge. Certain sorcerers gleefully dismember their victims limb by limb, and there are other monstrous entities as well, living parallel lives to the human beings residing in the same places. All of these things make the D&D Monster Manual seem like a collection of friendly stuffed animals. The trope of metamorphosis is evident in the real-life stories and media representations in Australia’s dominant culture: Consider the image of the kindly old gentleman next door or the devoted, caring parish priest who shocks everyone by metamorphosing into a child-molester, creepy, predatory, though ever-charming. Okay, that last bit definitely comes from reality. All cultures, it seems, have fairytales and narratives that express a high degree of aggression towards young children. There are many reasons for this, but ultimately it reflects the special vulnerability of the very young with respect to adults and the exterior world. Probably the best reason is to keep the little brats from misbehaving too much. All of these figures materialize fear, bringing it to the surface. At the psychological level, the stories about these entities are a means of coping with terror. To this I would add that such monstrous beings also attest to some of the least palatable aspects of human behavior, to the nastiest and most vicious of our human capabilities. As scary as mythological beasts are, they've got nothing on the worst a human can do. Importantly, in Aboriginal Australia, these figures and their attendant narratives provide a valuable source of knowledge about the hazards of specific places and environments. Most important of all is their social function in terms of engendering fear and caution in young children, commensurate with the very real environmental perils that they inevitably encounter. Because even if the reports of the deadliness of Australian wildlife are, indeed, exaggerated, that doesn't mean that some things aren't out to kill you. The anthropologist Ute Eickelkamp has written persuasively about mamu from a largely psychoanalytic perspective, but also argues in a 2004 article that Western and Central Desert “adults commonly use the threat of demonic attacks [by mamu] to control the behavior of children.” Just in case you were thinking that I was joking up there. There was no doubt in my mind that such narratives are first and foremost about social control with respect to the specific dangers of the desert where, in the summer months, people can die horribly tormented deaths from thirst within a matter of hours. Getting lost in the desert is a very abstract way to perish. Makes sense that we'd construct supernatural beings to give it a more personal terror. The article goes into (sometimes quite gory) detail about several of these monsters, and I found it a fascinating read. But as you know, the whole of cryptid folklore, from ancient to modern, interests me, because it says a lot about who we are, what we fear, and how we deal with what we fear. So of course I had to share. |
| I'm glad this one came up at random this week, on Solstice Day even. Otherwise, I might have had to cheat. This is an important guide to identifying elves in the wild. While it's important at any time of year, December is when the general public actually pays attention to elves, who are then forgotten about for the next 11 months or so. Us Fantasy readers and gamers, of course, always have elves on the brain. Regardless of your feelings about it, Hollywood is pumping out a lot of fantasy shows and the gaming industry is keeping up a steady stream as well. And with all the pointy eared people running around these days, it’s easy to get your Noldor mixed up with your Aen Seidhe. It's hardly a spoiler to point out that the current Black Panther movie features a perennial Marvel character called Namor. While the Sub-Mariner isn't an elf, he does have pointy ears. So do Vulcans, and they're certainly not elves (though a case could be made that the original Star Trek tapped into archetypes: elves for Vulcans, orcs for Klingons, dwarves for Tellarites, and so on). But the pointy ears are definitely an elf's primary physical characteristic. Elf on the Shelf Except for this guy, apparently. Who the hell makes an elf with round ears? It's an abomination. Well... more of an abomination. It’s just parenting 101 to teach kids at the youngest age possible that they are being monitored and any deviance from societal norms will prevent them from getting what they most desire. What I don't get is that kids always misbehave. Always. Without fail, without exception. And yet, "Santa" brings them presents anyway. I'm not going to copy all of these here. The article's there if you want to see. The Elder Scrolls The Mer as they’re known collectively have four distinct branches you can play in the games, each with different base stats and prowesses. One of my favorite gaming universes for over two decades now. I probably know more Mer lore than I have any right to. Dungeons & Dragons There are a ton of Dungeons & Dragons species most people would look at and say “that’s an elf!” And then everyone would dunk on you hardcore. Just because they’ve got pointy ears does not make them elves. True elves are, on average, slightly shorter than humans. That's... only conditionally true. D&D has changed a lot over the years, but various editions featured elven subraces that were taller, shorter, wider, winged, aquatic, space, or whatever. Santa Elves Okay, yes, I'm only highlighting this one here because of the season. Collectively known as Santa’s Little Helpers, these guys are the most mysterious of the bunch. The best historically accurate source we have is from the 2003 documentary film Elf. Confession: I've never seen Elf. Well, one time I saw a big chunk of it on a screen without sound or subtitles (I was in an airport or some shit), and in that mode it looked kinda lame. Lord of the Rings The elves that started it all. Our cultural conception of these noble fantasy folks all stem from J.R.R. Tolkien’s elves. Gimme a Friggin' break. Tolkien stoleborrowed elves from Norse mythology, and the concept of "elf" probably predated even that. Keebler Elves Keebler cookies were the official snack food of my D&D games, back in my DMing days. I called them "Cookies of Elvenkind." For the uninitiated, this was a play on the various "X of Elvenkind" magic items in canonical D&D. So, yeah, the Norse elves are somehow left out of this. I mean, I know a lot of people thought Marvel's Thor: The Dark World sucked, but they saw it anyway, and, well... elves. Not that Marvel didn't play fast and loose with Norse lore; they totally did. And while we're at it, Santa Claus probably has his roots in Norse lore as well. Whether he hims-elf is an elf or not, well, you'd have to remove his hat to check his ears, and who's got the stones to do that? |
| Long one today, but I'll keep this short and try to summarize it at the end, because I don't have a lot of time tonight. The messages that survived civilisation's collapse The Sumerians, Maya and other ancient cultures created texts that have lasted hundreds and even thousands of years. Here's what they can teach us about crafting an immortal message. BBC link, so British spelling. More than 2,000 years ago, in a temple in the city of Borsippa in ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq, a student was doing his homework. His name was Nabu-kusurshu, and he was training to be a temple brewer. We need more temple brewers. These daily tasks, and his devotion to beer, writing and knowledge, made him part of an extraordinarily resilient literary legacy. Beer, writing, and knowledge, huh? Who else do you know with these interests? Makes me want to believe in reincarnation. When Sumerian gradually slid out of common use, and was replaced by the more modern Akkadian, scribes cleverly wrote long lists of signs in both languages, essentially creating ancient dictionaries, to make sure the wisdom of the oldest tablets would always be understood. The modern equivalent would be a Rosetta Stone that translates English to emoji, so your descendants might one day rediscover what English was (in all its spelling variants). Anyway, like I said, not enough time. The article, which continues for a very long time, is about how to keep writing available indefinitely without necessarily inscribing it on stone or clay (of course, it will all disappear someday; that's how entropy works). So it's worth reading. Like I said, though, I'll sum it up, thus: In the beginning, humans invented beer. To keep track of the beer, humans invented writing. Some of the oldest surviving writing had to do with beer. So if you want your words to be immortal, write about beer. |
| From the "whatever happened to" department... Right about the time the "Soup Nazi" episode came out (it was one of the few I actually watched at the time), we had a pizza chef here in town that reminded everyone of that fictional soup-slinger. He was never rude, really, but his pizza was so good that he was always busy, and he had to keep the line going. He did so by conducting the line and his employees in a very loud and boisterous, but serious manner. Guy was obviously from Brooklyn and of Italian extraction, so most everyone was cool with it even though that's not how we do things around here. But I don't think he much liked being labeled the "Pizza Nazi." Can't say I blame him. It would be many years before we had problems with actual Nazis in Charlottesville, but associating his no-nonsense behavior with actual racist, genocidal fascists was probably a step too far. He ended up selling that restaurant, which immediately went from "excellent" to "meh." Then he opened another one. Then he sold that one, too. It's still around, even opened up a second location quite close to my house. This is, of course, extremely dangerous for me. And not because it's run by Nazis (as far as I know, it isn't), but because their pizza is almost as good as when he was running the place. Anyway, according to Cracked here, the actor who played the Soup Nazi is still around, too... and actually cooks soup. But despite the fact that he’s been mock-denying people a bowl of soup for more than 25 years, Thomas himself is actually a pretty generous guy — especially when it comes to the subject of soup. To prove it, he was more than happy to provide us with his favorite fall soups. Yeah, yeah, I know, we're basically in full-on winter now, meteorologically if not astronomically (the solstice is Wednesday). That's how long this link has been hanging around in my queue. He even went a step further and shared a few recipes from his memoir/cookbook, Confessions of a Soup Nazi: An Adventure in Acting and Cooking. Might as well lean into the role, right? I've heard of method acting, but it's not like he's going to play the Soup Nazi again. The rest of the article is in interview format, a refreshing change from the usual Cracked countdown. First thing first: Do you know how to make your own soup? Oh yeah. I grew up cooking. My dad was a cook. He took off when I was a little kid, but he inspired me to be a good cook. My mom had to be a single working businesswoman and never really learned to cook; so I just grew up cooking and had a knack for it. And since I’d played the Soup Nazi, I had friends telling me I should write a cookbook. I think there are two primary ways to get a cookbook published: 1) be famous 2) have good recipes. Failing those things, sometimes you can get away with it if you have a hook. Like, I have copies of cookbooks that replicate recipes featured in video games. The problem, for me at least, is that it's damn near impossible to find a recipe these days that doesn't start with a Ph.D. dissertation on the food's background, the cook's life story, and something about their dog. The advantage of cookbooks is that it's easier to ignore these things if you're so inclined, and get straight to the recipe. What’s your favorite kind of soup? I’d say white clam chowder. From the time I was a kid growing up on the East Coast, it was always my favorite soup. When I was a teenager, I was washing dishes at a place here in Los Angeles called The Chili Place, and all the guy made was chili and clam chowder. Coincidentally, those are some of my favorites as well. However, we get into a classification problem here: while clam chowder might be soup, chili technically is a stew. Now, you might ask, what's the difference between soup and stew? Well, that's the classification problem. There's probably some overlap. It's a bit like the question, "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" (It's not; it's a taco.) The reason it doesn't matter is that regardless of what pigeonhole you stuff it in, the important thing is if it's good. So don't stuff it into a pigeonhole; stuff it into your piehole and find out. Yes, the article provides the actual clam chowder recipe, and I gotta admit, it looks pretty good. Did you have a favorite soup that your mom or grandmother or someone in your family made? My favorite family soup growing up was the chicken noodle soup my grandmother used to make around Jewish holidays. She made her own kreplach. I want to emphasize here that I picked this article at random, as usual, and it's complete coincidence that I'm writing this on the first night of Hanukkah. What about French onion? I like French onion! That’s a great soup. I don’t have a recipe myself, but whenever I see it on a menu, I get it. Ha! I have something the actual Soup Nazi doesn't: a recipe for delicious French onion soup. No, I'm not posting it. Then they post the recipe for Mulligatawny soup. Unlike the other one, this doesn't appeal to me. (Pun intended, because it involves an apple, and an apple has appeal. ...I'll be here all week.) But someone else might like it. The article ends with another classification problem: Lastly, please settle this online debate: Is cereal soup? Is cereal soup? I’ve never heard that before. I guess, in a way, it is — it’s like cold milk soup. I’ll say “yes” cereal is soup. That's a stretch. But next time you hear someone talk about eating cereal, please, by all means, go "You know that's soup, right?" I've skipped some things, but the link's there for you. Unlike my recipe for French onion soup. Okay, okay, I have mentioned it in here before: "Souperman" . I still didn't provide the recipe there, but there are a few hints at least. So unless you can find one online......no soup for you! |
| It's retro time again. Today we're going all the way back to... the beginning of 2021, with "The Only Certainty is Uncertainty" I probably wouldn't have bothered doing a New Year "looking forward" entry if it weren't a prompt from 30DBC. Or maybe I would have; I don't know. I guess that's part of the "uncertainty" thing. One thing I hope I will not do: repeat my 2020 "blogging every day" achievement. Because if I do that, it would mean I will have been stuck at home all year again, rather than traveling like I want to. Well, we know how that turned out: I did manage to travel, albeit only within the US, and I also did a daily blog entry. Also, the main trip I want to take is to Europe, and last I heard there were still travel restrictions there. I think those have all been lifted now, but there's still a war going on and no reason to think it won't spill over into NATO and the EU. On last year's New Year's Day entry, I wrote: "I have some plans, but life has a way of interfering with them." Prescience? Nah, pessimism. Okay, maybe a little bit of prescience. A few things, besides travel, that I would like to do this year (meaning 2021) see movies in the theater Did that; even reviewed most of 'em. drink Definitely did that, although I disappointed myself because I didn't drink as much beer in 21 as I did in 20. My Untapped stats came in for this year a couple of days ago, and I still haven't returned to 2020 levels. So at least I have a goal for 2023. do the biweekly Zoom meetings for WDC folks Managed to do that through the end of 2021, but we let it go after that. listen to music Yes, but not as much as I would have liked. i mostly do that in the car, and after early July, I no longer had a car. play computer games I always seem to manage that, somehow. blog As you know. learn more French and maybe Dutch Tried Dutch. Found it harder than French. Will try again now that I've gone through all the French lessons. continue doing Comedy and Fantasy newsletters monthly Been doing those for 15 years, or thereabouts. No plans to quit soon, though sometimes thinking of a topic is difficult. Even harder to come up with topics I haven't done before. and attempt to be funny At that, I was successful. The attempt, that is. Whether I was actually funny or not continues to be a matter of opinion. So that was my mindset nearly two years ago. We're coming up again on the time of reflection and prediction, all based on the entirely arbitrary changing of the calendar. Will I, again, fall victim to the New Year zeitgeist? Uncertain. |
| You know, it would help if some of these were backed up by... you know... science. Or at least links. 16. The mind can't actually be "blown" by information alone. 17. There are links to support that site, all of which take crypto. Consequently, I don't trust a goddamn thing it says. Any resemblance to "facts" is coincidental. 18. I browse using an ad blocker and a script blocker. I have no idea what the site looks like without these things. Click at your own risk. Now, the actual "article." 1. The human brain receives and stores 11 million pieces of information per second but is only consciously aware of 40. Not even getting into the definition of "piece of information," the brain doesn't "store" shit. We're not computers. That may be the most popular metaphor for brains right now, but that doesn't mean it's anything but a metaphor. 2. In the time it takes to read this sentence, approximately 1 billion neutrinos from the sun passed through your body. I'm not going to look that up. It seems about right. Thing about neutrinos is they don't interact with ordinary matter very much (which is why they're bloody damn difficult to detect), so this is a great big "so what." 3. Something to remember next time you have a cold, a handshake transfers more germs than a kiss. While there may be some truth to this, I generally don't shove my hand into my mouth after shaking hands, and skin is a pretty effective barrier to most "germs."This is sensationalist bullshit on the same lines as "your phone is dirtier than a toilet seat." Ooh, something that doesn't get sanitized on a regular basis is dirtier than something that (theoretically) does: film at 11. 4. Russia has a bigger surface area than the former planet Pluto. Ugh, this shit again. Pluto never changed; only its classification has. You know how people out west look at the Blue Ridge Mountains and scoff, "Those are just hills!"? Yeah, it's like that. 5. If you were able to drive your car at an average speed vertically, you would reach outer space in about an hour. All this is doing is restating the commonly agreed-upon boundary between "atmosphere" and "space," which is 100 kilometers above sea level. This too is misleading because there's no hard boundary; air just kind of gets thinner and thinner. So it's assuming that 100 kph is an "average" speed, which may be true out in the boonies, but it's still misleading. 6. Sharks can be long lived – up to 100 years. And tortoises can live even longer. Interesting but hardly "mind-blowing." 7. The oldest known living creature, a clam called Ming, was 507 years old when it was accidentally killed by the scientists studying it. Its age means that it was born when Henry VIII was on the throne of England. There are older plants. Also, an argument can be made that since some amoebae reproduce by fission, and there's no way to tell which was the original amoeba and which is the clone, every such amoeba alive today has been alive since amoebae first evolved. 8. There is a method by which peanut butted can be turned into diamonds. I'll ignore the typo, but yeah, duh, it's chock full of carbon. Anything organic (chemical definition, not just nutritional) can be turned into diamonds. There was (maybe still is) a company that turned cremated peoples' ashes into diamond. 9. Eating ice cream can give you “sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia” – better known as brain freeze. Which would be the exact opposite of blowing one's mind. 10. Plants can recognise their relatives and work alongside them to grow stronger. Newsflash: evolution favors cooperation. Yeah, I know, the "competition" aspect is what ordinarily gets played up. But we wouldn't have taken over the world without cooperation. 11. On Venus it doesn’t just rain metal, it rains two different types of metal – galena and bismuthinite. I mean, okay. Those are minerals, not metals. The former contains lead and the latter, bismuth (shocking, I know), which are metals. And to an astronomer, anything heavier than helium is a metal. So... technically? It's also hardly news that Venus' atmosphere is hot enough to melt certain metals. It also "rains" sulfur dioxide, apparently. 12. According to science, the chicken came first – only later did the species evolve the egg as a means of bearing young. Okay, this has got to be a "gotcha" item. It's so wrong it's hard to figure out where to start with how utterly, stupendously, and completely wrong it is. I'll just note that eggs have been a thing since the beginning of sexual reproduction, and I can't be arsed to look up exactly when that was but a billion years sounds like it might be about right. Chickens, and for that matter other birds, are relatively new to evolution. At some point a proto-chicken laid an egg, and boom/crack, out came a chicken (evolution doesn't actually work that way but let's leave that for now). So there's no doubt in my mind that the egg came first. In the interest of fairness, though, I will post {xlink:https://www.newscientist.com/question/came-first-chicken-egg/}this, which makes what I consider a convoluted argument that the chicken came before the egg. Feel free to post that old comic with a chicken and an egg in bed together with the "I guess that solves that age-old question" caption, and I'll feel free to ignore it. 13. Up to 65% of autistic people are left handed. "Up to" is weaselly as fuck (it could mean anywhere from 0 to 65), and it's reprehensible to imply that there's a causal link. (There is evidence that left-handedness is more common in autistic people than in the neurotypical, but I doubt the 65% number.) 14. Scallops have up to 100 eyes – usually blue in colour. There's that "up to" again. It's wrong, anyway; the actual "up to" number is 200. 15. As you read this, you and the earth are spinning at 1000 miles per hour and moving through space at 67,000 miles an hour. That first number depends on where you're reading this. Are you on the equator? Then yes. Actually a bit more than that. Are you in Antarctica? Then you're hardly moving at all, and not just because you're busy freezing to death, but because anything closer to the axis moves slower (angular velocity is the same, but that's not what miles per hour measures). At my latitude, it's about 820 mph. The second number seems about right for Earth's orbital speed around the sun. The difficulty is that the sun is moving too, orbiting the galaxy. The linear velocity there is something like 500,000 mph. And the galaxy is moving. You can't say how fast you're going unless you also specify what that's relative to. Here, I can't be arsed to explain it better.Bottom line: don't trust "factoids," especially when they come from sites funded by Dunning-Krugerrands. Don't trust me, either, of course, but at least I did the tiniest amount of research and I'm not asking for donations. |
| I really like ghost pepper. I am, however, not a complete idiot. Usually. The ghost pepper, also known as bhut jolokia, is one of the hottest chilies in existence. It scores more than one million on the Scoville heat scale, which should tell you... well, not much of anything because spiciness can’t actually be measured using numerical units. So just picture the spiciest chili you can imagine, and we’ll say this is way hotter. There are supposedly hotter chili peppers, such as the Carolina Reaper. When I tell people I like ghost pepper, they inevitably bring that up, so I'm getting that out of the way. Look. It's not the "heat" that makes me enjoy ghost peppers. I'm not chasing some bragging rights or trying to prove that I have balls. Even if I was ever tempted to play the macho "who can eat the hottest pepper" game or whatever, I'm way too old for that now. It's just that, in small quantities, ghost pepper adds a nice tingly touch to a lot of different foods. And drinks. Hell, I've even had a ghost pepper IPA. I don't normally like IPAs, but this one was good. Because of the pepper. It was the product of a brewery / barbecue restaurant in Tonopah, Nevada (I don't know if it's still there), and one thing ghost pepper is excellent with is barbecue. A little bit of it is like kittens purring in your mouth. Too much, and the claws and teeth come out. Anyway, the point is, I do like spicy food, but not enough to actually eat a ghost pepper like a complete and utter moron. All of which brings us to our story about a ghost pepper challenge at a California restaurant in 2016. "Challenge" = "Dick measuring contest." Our 47-year-old hero, whom the Journal of Emergency Medicine does not identify by name when documenting this incident, came to the restaurant and ordered their ghost pepper burger. So, just a little bit younger than I was at the time. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure 2016 was the year I had the ghost pepper IPA in Nevada. Not sure about that, though; these things tend to blend together. This was not a normal menu dish but part of a contest, as the restaurant believed that most customers would not be able to stomach bhut jolokia pureed over a hamburger patty. However, our hero did down the burger. It's also good on burgers. Again... in small quantities. What you have to do is use a ghost pepper sauce that dilutes it enough so that you can spread it very thinly on the patty, thus capturing the taste without setting your face on fire. His mouth burned afterward, and he chugged six glasses of water, which was expected. Now, one doesn't become a spicy food eater without, occasionally, overdoing it. It's been a while, but there's one thing I remember: water isn't going to help. He then threw up, which was again something the restaurant likely anticipated. Hot chilis are hot because of an alkaline compound in them. Stomachs are stomachs because there's an acid in them. When acid meets alkaline, they neutralize... sometimes explosively (science fair volcano, e.g.). Plus, enough pain will make you ralph. But after that, he felt chest pains so severe that he needed to go to the emergency room. This is not a normal reaction to eating hot peppers. At times, you may have felt like you’ve thrown up so hard that you shredded your throat. But once doctors examined this guy, they discovered that he actually had torn a hole right through his esophagus — a rip about one-inch long. And I won't be pasting the other gory details here. We’re not calling a slashed gullet the certain result of eating spicy food, but we think the message here is clear: When you inevitably attempt a ghost pepper challenge yourself, be sure to slurp a cool milkshake between every bite. That's not a bad plan. Beer, incidentally, as wonderful as it is, doesn't do much to mitigate capsaicin overdoses. But you know what a better plan is? Don't fucking do stupid triple-dog-dare hot pepper challenges. |
| Today's article is from way back in 2017, but I doubt that matters. I'm guessing that's easier said than done. In 1995, a wounded 35-year-old woman named Anat Ben-Tov gave an interview from her hospital room in Tel Aviv. She had just survived her second bus bombing in less than a year. “I have no luck, or I have all the luck,” she told reporters. “I’m not sure which it is.” Well, I'd say it's luckier to never be bombed at all. I've never been bombed, though, and I don't consider that any luckier than, say, never having been bitten by a rabid coyote. Then there was Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the guy who happened to be in Hiroshima on... you know, that day. He suffered injuries from... you know, that thing, but he survived. The next day, he was even able to return home. "Home," for him, was Nagasaki. And, well... you know. He survived that one, too, but he did have lifelong problems related to radiation, and eventually died. In 2010, at the age of 93. Hell, my father didn't make it to 93, and he wasn't anywhere near Japan when the bombs fell. So... lucky? Unlucky? Well, I guess that depends on your perspective. Which is what this article is all about. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. The news story caught the eyes of Norwegian psychologist Karl Halvor Teigen, now an emeritus professor at the University of Oslo. He had been combing through newspapers to glean insights into what people consider lucky and unlucky. Over the following years, he and other psychologists, along with economists and statisticians, would come to understand that while people often think of luck as random chance or a supernatural force, it is better described as subjective interpretation. Getting hit by lightning is a low-probability event (assuming you're not flying a kite during a thunderstorm), and is generally considered unlucky. Winning a lottery jackpot is an even lower-probability event that is generally considered lucky, at least until you realize you're constantly going to be vultured by scammers and "relatives." Neither of those are supernatural forces, despite how lightning was viewed for most of human history. So again, it's a matter of perspective: does the low-probability event help your life, or harm it? If the former, then it's "lucky." If the latter, then "unlucky." But of course, sometimes things that at first seem unlucky turn out to be pretty lucky. Like if you get hit by lightning, survive, and then meet a woman in the hospital who then becomes the love of your life. But then, naturally, she divorces you and takes the house, the car, and your bourbon stash. So maybe it wasn't so lucky after all. Psychology studies have found that whether you identify yourself as lucky or unlucky, regardless of your actual lot in life, says a lot about your worldview, well-being, and even brain functions. It turns out that believing you are lucky is a kind of magical thinking—not magical in the sense of Lady Luck or leprechauns. A belief in luck can lead to a virtuous cycle of thought and action. That's not really what I think of when I hear "magical thinking," but okay, I can run with it. On the other hand, feeling unlucky could lead to a vicious cycle likely to generate unlucky outcomes. Psychologist John Maltby of the University of Leicester hypothesized that beliefs in being unlucky are associated with lower executive functioning—the ability to plan, organize, and attend to tasks or goals. This is all getting perilously close to that "positive attitude" bullshit I keep railing against. He offers a simple example of running out of ink in the middle of a print job. “The lucky person will have got a spare cartridge just in case because they have planned ahead. When the cartridge runs out they’ll say, ‘Oh, aren’t I lucky, I bought one earlier, that’’ fantastic,’ ” Maltby says. “However, the unlucky person won’t have planned ahead, won’t have done the cognitive processes, so when the printer cartridge runs out and they’re left with something to print, they go, ‘Oh, I’m so unlucky.’ ” Or, if you're me, you congratulate yourself on having planned ahead for such a goddamned predictable occurrence. Like when I hit a deer in South Dakota last year. There were some things I considered lucky that day, not least of which being that it happened within sight of a service station, but even if it had been in the middle of nowhere, I had had the foresight to have insurance and roadside assistance lined up in the event of an emergency. That bit's not luck; it's planning. While personality and gender seem to play a role, random events could also kick-start a virtuous lucky cycle or a vicious unlucky cycle. Economist Alan Kirman of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris realized this could be the case when he worked in an office with relatively few parking places nearby. One guy on his team always seemed to get lucky with parking spots close to the office, while another always had to park far away and walk. To figure out why, the team created a simple game-theory model to simulate the situation. It revealed that if would-be parkers happened to find spots near work early on, they continued to search in a narrow radius in the following days. If they didn’t find spots near work early on, they began to search in a wider radius. Guess who had lucky streaks when it came to finding spots near work? The ones who were actually looking for them. Again, that sounds to me like simple planning. Wait, someone found a parking spot in Paris? Sorry, no, now I believe in miracles all of a sudden. Of course, believing in your own good luck isn’t always a good thing. In gambling, for example, lucky streaks are never what they seem. In gambling, only the house gets lucky in the long run. But again, that's not luck; that's the ability to calculate probabilities and set payouts accordingly. Here's what I felt was the most important bit, though: The key to deciding whether an event is lucky or unlucky is the comparison you make between the actual event and the “counterfactual” alternative you’re imagining, Teigen says. The people asking “Why me?” are making an upward comparison to other people who weren’t assaulted or who avoided an accident. The people who feel lucky to have survived are comparing themselves downwardly to people who had a worse fate. Both are valid interpretations, but the downward comparison helps you to hold on to optimism, summon the feel-good emotion of gratitude, and to weave a larger narrative in which you are the lucky protagonist of your life story. I don't think this is in accordance with the article, but my default mode of hopeful pessimism serves me really well there. See, if I expect the worst, and the worst doesn't happen (which is most of the time), then I automatically feel lucky. Like, to use another gambling example, if I'm playing blackjack and I'm showing 18, and the dealer's got a 10 up, my assumption is she's going to turn a 10 or a 9. Then when she turns an 8 (for the push), I consider that to be good luck. If it's a 7, then it's excellent luck. Like any gambler, I still lose in the long run, but for that particular hand it feels damn good if I'm wrong. And if I'm right, I get that pleasure, too. When times are tough, it might seem frivolous to cultivate a belief in luck. But that belief, psychologists say, can cast a spell that heals our wounds and gives us another shot at success, whether we’ve survived a bombing or just been on a bad date. And I say luck is no substitute for planning. That's why engineers design redundancies into things. And it's why I try to avoid major cities during wars. |
| I know I've linked stuff like this in here before, but it's been a while, and not this particular article. Can money buy happiness? Depends on how you spend it. Contrary to popular research, people with more money are happier, but it’s their spending habits, not their account balances, that move the dial. Personally, I don't care if money can buy happiness or not. Happiness isn't, or shouldn't be, the goal. Staying out of misery is a worthwhile goal, and money can absolutely do that. Happiness is a loving family, a good meal, and an annual salary of $75,000. At least, that’s been the popular wisdom since Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton published their 2010 study looking at money’s relationship to well-being. The two psychologists reportedly found that people’s happiness increases until their annual income reaches $75,000, at which point it plateaus. Given that this was 2010, the threshold is probably up to $100K now. If the study had any merit, which is highly questionable. And also considering that one shouldn't conflate income and wealth. Like the Milgram experiments, the Stanford prison experiments, and the marshmallow test before it, Kahneman and Deaton’s study is one of few to explode into the mainstream. It has been cited in books, on TV shows, and across social media. CEOs set employee wages to match the findings. And smirking aunts everywhere dragged out the figure to prove that “See, money doesn’t buy you happiness.” And like all those quoted studies, it has issues. Also, "CEOs set employee wages to match the findings," but, remarkably, the link there only talks about one single CEO who did that. To his credit, he also lowered his own salary to that level. But before you start singing his praises, you may want to look into this a bit further. But like those other experiments, the popular perception of the research is wrong. Can money buy happiness? No, your aunt is right about that one. But it can facilitate happiness if you spend it thoughtfully. See, part of the problem here is the way it's phrased: "Money can't buy happiness." That's because once you spend it, you no longer have it. Money, in fact, is happiness. Just to give one example: Say you're working at a shit job because you need to live and eat and such. Well, what if you got a windfall? Sure, you can keep working. But now you're working knowing that, at any moment, you can up and walk away. That may not fit some peoples' definition of happiness, but it's a hell of a lot less stress. The article goes on to describe someone who did a different study about the income/happiness crap: His data showed no obvious plateau at which point money stopped mattering. Happiness rose alongside income all the way up. I still have issues with how "happiness" is measured. As the article notes, there's at least two kinds: momentary fleeting pleasure, and general life satisfaction. It's all very subjective. “When you have money, you have options, and that can manifest in different ways,” Killingsworth told CNBC. “Do you buy organic raspberries at the grocery store? Can you quit the job you don’t enjoy, or do you hang on because you can’t afford to be unemployed? … Do you end a relationship with someone that you’re financially entangled with?” Options. I can see how having the ability to make different choices can contribute to satisfaction. And money is one way to be able to do that. Money is a medium of exchange after all. It merely stands in for the things, services, and experiences we purchase with it. So when discussing money and happiness, the question isn’t only how much you have. It’s also how you use it. This tracks. It's obvious that most people wouldn't want to deliberately spend money on things that make them unhappy. What may not be so obvious is that, often, the things you think will make you happy, won't. Like that new iPhone, or an art thing that you just have to have. Those are both destined for the dumpster at some point in the future, when something newer and shinier grabs your interest. If you spend your money on the things, experiences, and necessities that move your happiness dial, then your money will make your life happier. Not perfect. Not blissful. But happier. If you don’t, then your spending habits can actively work against your well-being and life satisfaction. Let's be clear, though: spending on necessities shouldn't be a part of that equation. I think the whole thrust of the studies quoted here is: how much does extra income affect happiness once necessities are taken care of? Another way money facilitates happiness is by bankrolling experiences. People tend to think of money as a way to purchase things, but the joy things provide has a fast half-life. You think that couch is exactly what you need to finally have the living room of your dreams. A few months later, it’s just another thing to sit on. Like I said. One reason for this, Norton points out, is that we tend to buy things for ourselves, but we share experiences with others. I started to snark on this bit, because it seems to exclude introverts. But then I realized: even if I'm not sharing my experiences—road trips, movies, beer festivals, whatever—with someone else in the moment, I do come in here and talk about them (most of the time). That's sharing experiences with others, too. “Even casual interactions with other people make us happier than sitting by ourselves in a room. So experiences are more interesting and all those things, but they also actually kind of serve to commit us to spending time with other people,” Norton said. And that's true even for me. Bartenders are cheaper than therapy. Finally, the more people use their money to give to others, the happier they tend to be. In their research, Dunn and Norton gave participants money to spend in a day. They instructed some participants to spend it on themselves and others to spend it on other people. They found that the charitable groups had a much happier day. Oh, sure, if you're using someone else's money. Look, I'm not knocking the act of giving. I've noticed it does provide an endorphin rush, up to a point, and that point is when it starts affecting your own ability to pay for stuff. If you're playing with free money, of course giving it away is going to feel good for most people. So anyway, I wouldn't put too much stock in this article or the studies behind it. I still firmly believe that "money can't buy happiness" is propaganda to make people feel better about being economically disadvantaged: "I may not have a luxury apartment or a swimming pool or a couple million in the bank, but at least I'm happy!" If I had to choose only one, money or happiness—I'd pick money. Every. Single. Time. Happiness can't buy beer. |
| On December 14, 2019, I wrote a blog entry. It wasn't a big deal at the time, just my default: commentary on something I found on the internet. What I didn't know, didn't plan on at the time, was that it would be the first in what is, as of today, a three-year streak of daily blog entries. I also couldn't have known that, a mere three months later, shit would change because of a global pandemic. I almost certainly wouldn't have this streak if it weren't for that; I had travel plans. In truth, I'd rather have been able to do the travel plans. I still want to visit Belgium, dammit. It's been put off due to travel restrictions, crappy airline service, and World War III. To that end, I have another streak going: over 1200 days on Duolingo. Which, if you do the math, is longer than my daily blog entry streak. I'm very close to being done with the French course, which absolutely doesn't mean I'm fluent in French, though I certainly know more than I did three years ago. I might try Dutch again. Learning two languages at once proved difficult for me, and Dutch is similar enough to English to confuse me. But it's one of the other languages they speak in Belgium. Yeah, I know, lots of people speak English there as well, but this way I might have some idea if someone's insulting me in a different language. My progress is slow, I know. But that's what I get for waiting until my 50s to try to learn something new. Lots of people my age don't even bother. At least I found out that I could do something daily. About the only thing I could do on a daily basis, before this, is breathe. Even eating didn't happen every day. The breathing thing was questionable there for a while, too, but I managed to keep doing it. So, am I going to keep the streak going? Well, I'm not going to deliberately break it at this point. If I do manage to go abroad, I might not have the means. I'll be okay with that, because at least I'll be traveling. Then there's always the chance of the unexpected: no internet access, computer craps out, I get injured or get sick or die, that sort of thing. You'll know that one of those happened because I won't announce it in here beforehand. Tomorrow I'll have another article to comment on, but today I just wanted to reflect on what is, to me, a mighty achievement. |
| I don't have a lot to say about today's article, but it ties in with some other entries I've made; specifically, about the question of mind-body duality—or lack thereof. The Gut Microbiome Helps Social Skills Develop in the Brain New research in fish suggests that gut microbes can have a crucial early influence on the brain’s social development. There are some things that are a bit problematic, but I'll get to that. Two recent papers have shown that during a critical early period of brain development, the gut’s microbiome — the assortment of bacteria that grow within in[sic] it — helps to mold a brain system that’s important for social skills later in life. One thing I've come to appreciate about Quanta: they don't usually bury the lede. The occasional typo, I can understand. Happens to all of us. Scientists found this influence in fish, but molecular and neurological evidence plausibly suggests that some form of it could also occur in mammals, including humans. So take it as a preliminary result, not settled science. If you corner someone at a holiday party and go, "You know, your gut microbiome has an effect on your social skills," a) you'd be jumping the gun and b) you'd better get your microbiome checked out, because your social skills suck. In a paper published in early November in PLOS Biology, researchers found that zebra fish who grew up lacking a gut microbiome were far less social than their peers with colonized colons... Snort. ...and the structure of their brains reflected the difference. I mean, that's a big deal from what I can tell. I've suspected a connection between gut health and mental health for a long time (my mom had problems with both). Again, maybe or maybe not applicable to humans, but seeing a physical difference in the brain because of something in the intestines—something that's even a different genome—I can't help but think is an important finding. In recent decades, scientists have come to understand that the gut and the brain have powerful mutual influences. Certain types of intestinal ulcers, for example, have been linked to worsening symptoms in people with Parkinson’s disease. And clinicians have long known that gastrointestinal disorders are more common in people who also have neurodevelopmental disorders, such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. This is the problematic part. Autism isn't necessarily a "disorder," no matter what the DSM might have to say about it. But whatever the label, the important thing is the potential link between microbiome and behavior. How these anatomically separate organs exert their effects, however, is far less clear. Finding a correlation is one thing. Figuring out the mechanism is quite another, and it sounds like they haven't done much yet in that regard. There's some discussion of possible future studies later in the text. Again, though, mostly I just saved this to link because it hints at some deeper truth about the physical and the mental, especially in terms of those microbes that are just as much a part of us as our own cells. |
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