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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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| From The Guardian, a British publication, we have an undisguised ad for a book about American food. ‘On the brink of extinction’: a food historian’s hunt for ingredients vanishing from US plates  In her new book, Endangered Eating, Sarah Lohman chronicles disappearing foods – and why they need protecting I don't know... I feel like some foods are better off disappearing, such as everyone's favorite horror story: gelatin molds. The American buff goose. Amish deer tongue lettuce. The Nancy Hall sweet potato. The mulefoot hog. When food historian Sarah Lohman stumbled on these fantastical-sounding ingredients in a database of vanishing foods called the Ark of Taste, she set off on a journey across the United States to discover more ingredients and traditions that had been abandoned in the annals of history. Mind you, I think that keeping the knowledge around for the sake of history is a worthy project. Lohman spoke to the Guardian about the cultural and political importance of these near-forgotten foods. Like I said, it's a book promotion, and it's largely in interview form. But endangered foods are the focus of Slow Food International’s work. They catalogue thousands of international and hundreds of national foods that are considered delicious, distinctive and worthy of protection. I've been hearing references to Slow Food for a long time. It's almost always followed by the word "movement." Every time I hear it, every damn time, it sounds like constipation. One major question we need to consider is: who should have access to these foods and at what price? I found people profiting off Indigenous foods, and other people profiting off Black American foodways, who weren’t of that culture and weren’t doing much to provide money or support the original caretakers of these plants. Now, I don't generally accept the idea of food as cultural appropriation. One of the few benefits of living in our society is the ability to get food (and more importantly, beverage) from all over, and combine it in new and improved ways. But the sort of thing she's talking about there, yeah, I can see how that's appropriation, and inappropriate. There's more to the article, of course, but I found it interesting enough to share, even if I can't be arsed to actually buy the book it's promoting. |
| Today's article, from The Conversation, pushes me into the territory of one of the Forbidden Subjects. But ultimately, it's about science, albeit the fuzzy branch known as "social science." One problem with polls is that, often, they don't ask the right questions. Or there's implicit or even explicit bias, like how a political party might send out a poll like: "Who do you plan to vote for at the next election? a) Our fine, upstanding candidate; b) The other party's incompetent fool; c) Not sure; d) Not planning to vote. There, now, I've put politics out there, too. While we're on Forbidden Subjects. The number of individuals in the United States who do not identify as being part of any religion has grown dramatically in recent years, and “the nones” are now larger than any single religious group. Well, now, that's going to depend on how one defines "religious group," doesn't it? I don't have the exact numbers, but if you broke it down by "Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Pagan, Other, None," I strongly suspect Christians would be in the majority here in the US. But if you further subdivide the categories, say, by separating Christian into "Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, LDS, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Pentecostal, Mennonite, etc." then okay, I could believe the bit about Nones. Hell, some of those sects don't even consider some of the others to be Christian; it's only my outsider's perspective that would lump them all under one heading. Not to mention "None" could be extraordinarily confusing in conversation, thanks to homonyms. According to the General Social Survey, religiously unaffiliated people represented only about 5% of the U.S. population in the 1970s. This percentage began to increase in the 1990s and is around 30% today. "Religiously unaffiliated" doesn't imply "atheist." People can be religious without identifying with a particular group, or not religious while identifying with a group. At first glance, some might assume this means nearly 1 in 3 Americans are atheists, but that’s far from true. Indeed, only about 4% of U.S. adults identify as an atheist. As noted above, how these things are worded makes a big difference. "Do you believe in God?" is, at first glance, a yes/no binary question, but it can get complicated, what with varying concepts of God and all. Also, "I do not believe God exists" is an entirely different assertion than "I believe God does not exist." Add to this the demand for self-labeling, and things get really murky (one reason I called social science "fuzzy" above). Hell, if someone were rude enough to ask me flat-out what my religion was, I don't think I could boil it down to one word. Unless I was in a joking mood, in which case I'd answer, "Beer." According to the website of American Atheists, "Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods."Unfortunately, by strict application of that definition, monotheists would also be covered, as they do not believe in "gods" but in one "God." So you see where some of this confusion might be coming from? There is even diversity in how religiously unaffiliated individuals identify themselves. When asked their religion on surveys, unaffiliated responses include “agnostic,” “no religion,” “nothing in particular,” “none” and so on. Break down the categories of belief/unbelief finely enough, and you get to the point where each individual is their own religious category. Our recent research examines two questions related to atheism. First, what makes an individual more or less likely to identify as an atheist? Second, what makes someone more or less likely to adopt an atheistic worldview over time? "Examines" is a good verb there. It would be wrong, I think, to take their findings as the one definitive, true answer, but it's interesting to see how they're looking at it. Said examination follows, and it's brief, so I'll just skip to near the end: On the other hand, we find that adults with more income... are more likely to adopt the stance that they do not believe in God... This could be a function of income providing a buffer against any stigma associated with holding an atheistic worldview... Some social scientists have suggested that both wealth and faith can provide existential security – the confidence that you are not going to face tragedy at any moment – and therefore a higher income reduces the need to believe in supernatural forces in the first place. Which I think a lot of people have internalized, hence why religious groups tend to demand money. Keep the people poor and relying on them, not on their own financial independence. Your first clue that you're being fleeced should have been when they called you a "flock." Agree or not, "In God We Trust" is on our cash. I think many houses of worship should have signs like "In Cash We Trust." I want to try to be clear about this: I'm not ragging on religion in general with those comments. Only on the ones that are such naked money grabs that strippers are going "Okay, now that's a naked money grab." In conclusion, I'm not coming down for or against the ideas presented in the article. But my skepticism moved me to comment on it. |
| Because of the way I usually choose topics here, this BBC article was irresistible to me. Our world runs on randomly generated numbers and without them a surprising proportion of modern life would break down. So, why are they so hard to find? Most importantly, random numbers are used for gaming. Can't play D&D without 'em. We game online now (and we use a different game system, but that's irrelevant). It's important that when it simulates the roll of a d20, there's about a 5% chance for each integer from 1 to 20. The friends did their best to explain what they were looking for – a really crackly radio. You know, the kind that blares a hail of static between stations as you turn the dial. The shop salesman didn't know what to say. Because of the headline, I already figured where this was going. "I think he thought we were quite crazy," recalls Mads Haahr. It was 1997, and he and his pals were nosing around a Radio Shack outlet in Berkeley, California. Ah, yes, Radio Shack. They used to be cool. Before 1997. Haahr and three of his friends had been working on gambling software – digital slot machines and blackjack games that they wanted to host online. Another important use of random numbers. Assuming you want to run a fair game, of course. For various definitions of "fair;" if the House didn't have an edge, they'd have no incentive to run the games. If these things weren't random, the digital casino wouldn't be very fair and players could even try to beat the system by looking for predictable patterns in the games. The patterns thing sounds farfetched, but there have been instances of people winning lotteries because the lottery was using pseudorandom numbers with a difficult but discernible pattern. And so the four friends were seeking a source of randomness that they could all agree was trustworthy. Something that, by definition, couldn't be biased. The idea had hit Haahr like a tonne of poker chips – the hiss of a dirt-cheap analogue radio. Still not entirely random, but technically chaotic. And chaos gets you close enough, usually. The noise blurted out by such a device is actually a messy signal shaped by lightning and electromagnetic activity in the Earth's atmosphere. If I recall correctly, some of it is actually caused by cosmic rays from the beginning of the Universe. Which is pretty cool, for something we've worked so hard to eliminate. People have long sought external sources of randomness as the basis of random number generators. In this search for true randomness, they have looked practically everywhere for chaotic phenomena that can't be predicted or manipulated. The more precision you measure something with, the more unpredictability you get in the last decimal place. In the end, the little grey radio didn't make Haahr and his friends rich after all. The online gaming business was too much in its infancy back then for the young entrepreneurs to make a killing out of it. But the random number generator they built was, they reasoned, still useful. So Haahr made it public at random.org, where it has been churning out random numbers ever since. It gets a lot of visitors. I've used it. I don't use it to pick articles to discuss here, because that's hardly mission-critical. Mostly, this page is basically throwing darts at a map. It does have the problem that longitude lines are further apart near the equator than near the poles, so the average separation of lots of random points would be closer together near the poles than near the equator. Again, though, I consider it just a fun toy to play with, so it hardly matters.But I do wonder how one would design a random point generator where every point on the surface of a sphere is equally likely. One could, I suppose, treat the Earth like a giant d20 (icosahedron), roll a number from 1-20, then further subdivide that triangular face into arbitrarily small but equal areas, pick one of those at random, and project that onto the sphere's surface. But I suspect there would still be some clumping. I can't be arsed to figure it out further. One man even says he turned to it to help him choose which discs from his 700-strong CD collection to put into his car each week. See, that sounds like something I would do. I'm always listening to songs on shuffle (which probably doesn't use strong randomization, but whatever). Cloudflare, a tech firm that provides cloud security services, uses a lot of random numbers at its data centres. The company has sought some eye-catching ways of generating randomness – including a collection of lava lamps. "Why do you have a thousand lava lamps?" "Random number generation." There's some discussion at to whether true randomness really exists anywhere but we can leave that to the theoretical physicists. You mean the folks who keep arguing about whether everything's an illusion or not? No, thanks. I'd rather ask a mathematician. They at least know they're working with abstractions. Of course, the articles I post here aren't truly random, either. If I find something interesting enough to have comments about it, I add it to a list. It's not like I run random numbers on every webpage in existence (I'm not even sure that's technically possible), but choose from a select list. Most random numbers we encounter are like that: with boundaries. A standard die may roll a number from 1 to 6, but never a -5 or a 42. A lottery may draw winning numbers between 1 and 50 or whatever, but one hopes that each of those has an equal probability, and that the selection is entirely unpredictable. Because life would be a lot less fun if everything were predictable. |
| In another astounding coincidence, the random entry I picked to revisit today, from April of 2020, touches on many of the same topics I discussed last week: the search for alien life, and science in general: "The Truth is Out There" Hell, it even has a similar title to last Wednesday's entry. Look, I'm closing in on 2800 entries here; I'll get there before August is out. I know some titles have been repeated. Sometimes, I make an effort to avoid reusing a title, but much of the time, I can't be arsed. This isn't even a case of reuse, but variation on a theme. In any case, I consider last Wednesday's entry to be the update on my opinion on the subject of the search for extraterrestrial life, so I'll try to focus on other things I wrote back then. I've been following this guy, PZ Myers, for a while now, and while I don't always agree, I appreciate his point of view. Except about movies. I think I've linked his blog at least once again since then. Still reading his stuff, though he's become utterly obsessed with spiders. I don't hate or fear spiders, but I lack that level of obsession. That's not the only thing he posts. And I've grown to appreciate his point of view about movies, to the extent that he's a negative barometer for me: generally, if he hates a movie, I'll like it, and vice-versa. Especially when it comes to comic book adaptations. Just recently, he ragged on the Deadpool/Wolverine movie, which served to make me want to watch it more. Which I haven't, yet. Thanks, Myers, you made me look up a word for the first time in years. The word then was "apophenia." Since then, I've discovered even more words I had to look up (not counting those I chose to look up due to my interest in etymology, which is not the same thing as an interest in entomology, which doesn't include spiders). I count any day when I learn something new as a good day. Well, unless something bad happens to balance it out. Pretty much everything else is either not noteworthy, or was covered in here last week. Except for a big fucking oops on my part, where I apparently pasted a quotation twice. I try to do some basic proofreading before I post these things, but sometimes, something slips through the process. Still not as bad as when I find a years-old typo. Those are truly embarrassing. But hey, at least that's evidence that I don't post using Artificial Intelligence; anything I put here is either a quote or Natural Stupidity. |
| Time for a travel plan update, though it's probably going to be short. But maybe I have some other things to write about. The travel agent I'm going with has a subcontractor for local knowledge. In this case, a French woman. And I'm completely on board with that, but the sub didn't get back to her before Wednesday of this week. And that matters because the agent took off for vacation on Wednesday, so that means no further information until, at least, Thursday of next week. Probably later, because she's the owner of the agency, so she'll be coming back to utter chaos that she'll have to deal with first. Or, you know, maybe she's a better business owner than I was, and everything will run smoothly in her absence. Must be nice to go on vacation when you're a travel agent. You can get yourself the best deals. And there's not much else I can do until I at least know when I'll be leaving, which I don't yet. I tried searching for fun things to do in France, but Google keeps pointing me at the Olympics, and I don't give a shit about that. Which, it occurred to me, may be hypocritical of me, as I've harped in here again and again about how there's no such thing as useless knowledge or experiences. And I do believe that. My rationale (or at least rationalization to make me feel better about myself) is that I also tend to avoid anything that's too popular. Like Taylor Swift (who I acknowledge has talent) or "reality" shows. But yeah, I do have an aversion to sports. You know how kids sit bored in math class wondering how they're ever going to use this? You ever notice no one says that about gym class, even though the vast majority of the kids aren't going to go on to be professional athletes? "But, Coach, when will I ever use sit-ups in my career as a veterinary technician?" "Well, um, strong abs will help you lift big dogs onto examining tables." My argument is that you never know when the stuff they teach you in school will be useful or necessary. Was it "necessary" for me to spend high school in orchestra and drama class, let alone Latin? No, probably not. And I didn't know I was going into engineering until like senior year, so even math was questionable. But I learned all that shit anyway (and promptly forgot most of it). The point being that just as strong abs are generally a good thing (something even I can acknowledge) even if you're not a pro athlete, so it is with a strong mind. Now if only schools would emphasize that sort of thing instead of being all about the football team, we might actually get somewhere. What does this have to do with travel? Well, nothing, except that maybe I can stretch (another good exercise) and claim that travel broadens one's perspective, so it's the same sort of thing. But, mostly, I'm rambling because I didn't accomplish anything else in terms of travel planning this week. Next week, I'm going to look into relatively cheap laptops so I can bring one on the trip. Like a Chromebook or something, so I don't have to use my phone to make blog entries. I don't want to take my expensive gaming laptop with me (the one I'm typing on now), so this seems like a reasonable thing to do. Besides, it never hurts to have a backup here at home in case this thing blows a circuit one day. And then I have to see about getting internet there. I'm well aware that they're ahead of the US in that regard, but that doesn't mean the systems are compatible, kind of like how I have a plug adapter to handle the different electrical outlet configurations. |
| I'll give Cracked a pass for using the phrase "scientific facts" like this, because they're a juvenile humor site, not a scholarly publication. 4 Scientific Facts Rational People Should Refuse to Believe If we told you someone’s hiding edible microchips in your cheese, you’d think we were nuts Mmmmmm... cheese and nuts... Ahem. Sorry. Where were we? Oh, yeah. We love telling you unbelievable facts. When we call a fact “unbelievable,” though, we still do expect you to believe it. You’re supposed to say, “I didn’t know this was true before, and it’s surprising, but I believe it now because I trust you.” I trust you to make jokes. Sometimes those jokes are even funny. The idea that I'd trust this source for anything else is funny. Note: We’re not telling you the following facts are untrue. Some of them definitely are true, and they’ll remain true whether you believe them or not. As usual, skepticism serves well here. 4 Baby Animals Evolved to Look Cute So We’ll Protect Them These cute baby animals share a specific set of characteristics, which we’ve dubbed kindchenschema. They have large eyes and small mouths. Animators know this, which is why your favorite cartoon character protagonists have big eyes and small mouths. That much, I don't dispute. What I have a problem with is the reversal of cause and effect. Also, the scientist who first described kindchenschema was a full-on Nazi. Yeah, well, so was Heisenberg. That doesn't mean he was right or wrong about the science. What if so many animals are born with big eyes and small mouths just because they’re still growing into their parts, rather than as a specifically evolved survival trait? Okay, I can accept that hypothesis, but it doesn't address the cuteness factor: why do we find those traits adorable? Look, Occam's Razor demands the simplest hypothesis, which is not that a diverse number of animal species began producing "cute" offspring to please their bipedal, mostly hairless overlords, but that said overlords themselves evolved to find those attributes "cute" because if people didn't find their own babies cute, there would be less reason to hang on to the whiny, poopy bastards. I'm not saying that's correct, either. But it makes more sense. 3 Muscles Grow More When You Concentrate on the Mind-Muscle Connection The fitness industry is full of new and exciting science explaining the right way for you to build muscle. And most of it is bought and paid for by companies wanting to sell their latest torture devices, much like nutrition science is often bought and paid for by companies wanting you to consume their products. One of the strangest factors here is something called mind-muscle connection. You will see more muscle growth if you think very hard about the muscle you’re exercising. Okay, but that's not totally out there. The idea that mind and body are separate entities is obsolete. I'd just want to see real evidence, which I imagine is hard to come by. What if this is a conspiracy, whose sole goal is to occupy your full attention when you exercise, so you’re oblivious to all else around you? This way, the conspirators can take sips out of your water bottle when you’re distracted, saving them from having to walk all the way to their own bottles, which are on the other side of the room. See, now, that's funny. 2 They’re Putting Microchips in Parmesan Cheese If you buy some parmesan cheese in the United States, the word “parmesan” on the label means basically nothing. Well... it means it resembles cheese, but you can be pretty sure it doesn't resemble steak or an energy drink. Europe is a different story. In Europe, that parmesan cheese you buy had better be the real thing, made in northern Italy. One of these days, I'll figure out why this works for, say, champagne vs. sparkling wine, or tequila vs. mezcal / agave spirits, but not parmesan. But today is not that day. Tomorrow doesn't look good, either. The blessed cheesemakers from Parma and Emilia-Romagna have a new tool to let you distinguish their wares from fakes: microchips. Well, now, that's a reference joke that's growing increasingly obscure. It's from Monty Python's Life of Brian. Buncha peasants are standing around trying to hear the Sermon on the Mount, but they're pretty far away and microphones haven't been invented yet. So there are lines like "What'd he say?" "Blessed are the cheesemakers." We’re going to find it hard to invent a conspiracy to explain this story, since our whole issue with it is it already sounds like a conspiracy. If we try, we’ll probably end up concluding that every other piece of food we eat also contains microchips, and the Parmigiano Reggiano ones only got so much attention because they got caught. How about: we only think it's a conspiracy because the microchips we've absorbed from other sources control our minds to think so as a way to deflect blame? 1 Balls Hang Outside the Body to Keep Cool Oh, hey, after the cheese entry, we're back to nuts. Yeah, not going to quote this one. I'll just point out that exposed balls are certain proof that men weren't intelligently designed. Jury's still out on women. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of the author's joke at the end. |
| Wrapping up this round of "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] with the final randomly-selected prompt: Antwerp And seriously, I used a random number generator. It's pure chance that it landed on a city in Belgium at a time when I'm planning a trip to France and Belgium. And I'd love to visit, really, I would. The city hosts the Bollekesfeest every year, which features local beer; if you need to know anything about me at all, it's that Belgian beer is my Kryptonite. Sadly, the event takes place in August, and the timing doesn't work out for me. And it's home to the Antwerpse Brouw Compagnie, which I've heard brews a beer called Seef or Seefbier whose origin dates back to the 16th century. For context, that was before European colonization of the Americas. Hopefully the beer itself isn't that old, but damn, it sounds like something I need to try. (Their more modern brews look awesome, too.) The problem is I don't have unlimited time. Tant de bières, si peu de temps. Yes, that's French, though Antwerp is in the Dutch-speaking part of the country. Hell, it's practically Nederland, another country I'd love to visit. My primary interest in Belgium this trip is their famous abbey breweries. Monk beer. So, Brussels and maybe Bruges. I think. Yes, I'm aware that Brussels and Antwerp are quite close together, maybe 40km; I'm perfectly capable of reading a map. There's still not enough time to do everything. Besides, I gotta save some cool stuff for the next trip. And no, I still haven't picked up much of the language. I tried. It's harder than French, because it's simultaneously very similar to English and very, very different. All of the Dutch-speaking people I know have perfect English, and it's embarrassing that I can't seem to return the courtesy. Well, maybe not "perfect" English (because such a thing does not exist), but still better than that of most Americans. As you know if you've been following along, one of my other interests is etymology, and the origin of the name "Antwerp" is debatable. But, like Rome, in addition to the actual etymology, it has a mythological etymology, and it's glorious. I'll just let Eupedia relate it:The legend says that the name 'Antwerp' comes from the Dutch "hand werpen" meaning "hand thrown". The story has it that a mean and nasty giant controlled the river traffic, demanding exorbitant tolls. Those who refused to pay had one of their hand cut off. But one day, a young and brave Roman soldier named Silvius Brabo managed to kill the giant. He cut the giant's hand and threw it in the Scheldt River, giving the city its name. I need details, dammit. How did Silvius Brabo defeat the giant? More importantly, how did he keep the giant from landing on him when he killed it? I did find that the giant's name was Antigoon, which somehow doesn't mean "he who fights against goons." And is this the first example of classic rent-seeking behavior and its inevitable consequences?Sadly, the likely actual origin of the name is far less interesting: "The name comes more probably from the word ‘aanwerp’ (alluvial mound’), which describes the first settlement's geographical feature." (Same Eupedia source as above.) Yeah, apparently "werp" served double duty, much as its English descendant "warp" does. Though one could make the argument that the alluvial soil was "thrown" there by the river, I suppose. And now I want to visit Antwerp more than ever. Dammit. I don't have infinite funds, either. Maybe I can start charging tolls. |
| From aeon, an article on a subject I've discussed before: Alien life is no joke Not long ago the search for extraterrestrials was considered laughable nonsense. Today, it’s serious and scientific Though I'm repeating myself here, I feel the need to note that "life" doesn't imply "technologically-capable life." Suddenly, everyone is talking about aliens. For those of us paying attention, people have been talking about it all my life, and even before. The next big multibillion-dollar space telescope (the successor to the James Webb) will be tuned to search for signatures of alien life on alien planets and NASA has a robust, well-funded programme in astrobiology. Good. I hope they find some. Not Klingons, of course. Even just evidence of microbes or their equivalent would be a Big Fucking Deal. Meanwhile, from breathless newspaper articles about unexplained navy pilot sightings to United States congressional testimony with wild claims of government programmes hiding crashed saucers, UFOs and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) seem to be making their own journey from the fringes. On that front, the science is far less secure. For decades, scientists wanting to think seriously about life in the Universe faced what’s been called the ‘giggle factor’, which was directly related to UFOs and their culture. I once tried to start a conspiracy theory that went like: We have been trained to mock UFO enthusiasts because the extraterrestrials among us wanted to ensure that anyone who called them out for what they were got scorn heaped upon them. I suck at starting conspiracy theories. But for me, as a researcher in the field of technosignatures (signs of advanced alien tech) – the new face of SETI – getting past the giggle factor poses an existential challenge. Once again, there's an implied conflation between "life" and "technolife." I call it that to avoid the inevitable tired jokes about "intelligence." You humans can be considered "technolife," but there's nothing that we know of about evolution that requires its development. There's probably exolife in our near stellar vicinity (perhaps even in our solar system), but I'd be surprised if technolife was anything but rare. It is, however, in our best interests to search for both. It's probably not in our best interests to keep beaming signals to Proxima Centauri with messages like "Visit scenic Earth!" There follows a bit of history about seeing UFOs (more recently renamed to UAPs, likely in an attempt to avoid mockery). And also the history of people looking for alien life. I have no doubt that people have seen weird shit in the sky. What I have an issue with is immediately jumping to the "must be aliens" conclusion. It's like seeing ghosts. Perhaps you did see something; that doesn't mean it's a dead person's disembodied spirit. Remarkably, when it comes to exoplanets, we are now also able to see exactly which planets are in their star’s habitable zone, where liquid water (the key, we believe, for life) can exist. That means we know exactly where to look in our search for life (something Drake could only dream of). The "habitable zone" thing is real, but again, some people seem to equate "habitable zone" with "definitely must harbor life." No, it's a probability thing. If you're looking for a bear, you look in the woods, not a desert. If you're looking for a fish, you look in the ocean, not a mountain. Yes, sometimes you get fish in mountain lakes or streams or whatever, but your best bet is ocean. Also, keep in mind there's a real chance that Jupiter's moon Europa harbors (simple) life under its ice cover, and it's not in the Sun's "habitable zone." We’ve also demonstrated that there is no reason to suppose that biosignatures will be more common than technosignatures. Yeah, that sounds like wishful thinking to me. Since the exact same techniques are required to search for both bio- and technosignatures, there’s every reason to carry out both kinds of search at the same time. But please, keep looking. But if my colleagues and I claimed we’d found life on another world, we’d be required to provide evidence that meets the highest scientific standards. While we should let future studies lead us where they may, there is simply no such evidence surrounding UFOs and UAPs that meets these standards today. And that bit is really what I care about: evidence. Not this leap to conclusions that definitely wasn't instigated by the aliens hiding among us. The next big space telescope NASA is planning will be called the Habitable Worlds Observatory. I'm betting that's a working title and it'll end up being named after someone, like the others were. One hopes they choose someone not associated with bigotry, this time. Just remember, when they find biosignatures, don't immediately leap to "little green men" or their pop-culture alien equivalent. We're trying to keep our existence a secret, dammit. |
| This month's penultimate entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] takes us to the Great White North. Montreal A while back, a friend of mine was getting ready to visit NYC for the first time. (I promise this is relevant to the prompt.) She knows I go there fairly regularly, but every time I wanted to give her advice or suggestions, I managed to restrain myself. "I'll answer questions if she asks," I thought to myself. "It's more fun to discover things for yourself there." And then, one day, she texted me with, "Where's the best place to get bagels?" I immediately responded with "Montréal." "Asshole." There are, of course, plenty of great bagel places in New York. While I can't personally vouch for the "Montréal" answer, having never been there, I've heard it from so many different sources that I have accepted this superlative as Truth. Which led me to wonder: How did this Francophone city in the upper reaches of North America become the Holy of Holies? (Get it, because bagels have holes? I'll be here all week.) Obviously, it has to do with the Jewish community there. But the origins of this particular toroidal carbohydrate module stretch back, not to France, but to Poland. Like every near-perfect food, such as curry or pizza, though, they proved too popular to be limited to one country, instead spreading in their glorious roundness all over the globe. It's true, however, that bagels entered the North American diet by way of New York, not Montréal. But they spread like cream cheese on a... well, they spread. Hell, there's even a great and popular bagel place right here in my very Southern hometown. It's even one of the few foods that California does right. They can't make a decent pizza or pastrami sandwich, but there are at least good bagels scattered around California like poppy seeds on a... well, they're scattered. As a side note, I once had a pastrami pizza. I was, of course, initially skeptical, but that particular abomination turned out to be quite delicious. Where was it? South freakin' Dakota, and I never would have discovered it had I not been stranded there for two days. But I digress. We were talking about... what were we talking about? Montréal. I thought about going there before France, mostly to try the bagels. But I was concerned that I'd miss summer. There's a three-day window when the climate there would actually be comfortable for me; the problem is, one never knows exactly when those three days fall on the calendar. Usually in July, but not always. Bagels, however, are a multi-season food. You know, many seasons. Like on an everything bagel. |
| It's been a while since I had a bit about cooking here, partly because I haven't found many lately, and partly because I haven't been doing much cooking, opting instead for convenience. But here's one from bon appétit: How to Measure Sticky Ingredients Without Losing Your Gosh Darn Mind I spent 30 years measuring sticky ingredients like a fool. Amusingly, if you preview the URL at the link above, it provides a handy spoiler answer to the clickbait headline. There used to be exactly one thing I didn’t like about baking. I called it the Peanut Butter Problem and it happened every time I made my favorite three-ingredient cookies. Are you going to share the magical recipe with us along with the sorcerous solution to the problem? No? Oh, well, there's always Google, if you can stand scrolling through pages and pages of anecdote before getting to the actual recipe. The Peanut Butter Problem was, as you may have guessed, my best attempt to get a precise amount of peanut butter from a measuring cup into a mixing bowl, and it involved multiple butter knives, my pointer finger, and swearing. From my lofty perch of having figured out two different solutions to this problem many years ago, I could only laugh at this imagery. It's like those commercials that show people failing at different tasks before presenting the One True Solution, Only $19.95 While Supplies Last CALL NOW. Do they still have those? I avoid ads. You'll be getting my solutions for the low, low price of free. And then came TikTok. hu... hu.... HURK The trick? Simply oil your measuring spoons and cups before measuring sticky ingredients. I can't trust any other content from this author, because, like I said, I figured that out decades ago. There are two ways to do it: The first is to dip a finger in oil (hereby referred to as your “oily fingie”) and swoop it around the inside of a measuring spoon or cup, using your oily fingie pad to grease the bottom like you’re coloring it in. And also because she finds "oily fingie" somehow amusing. Anyway, I know a better solution. This whole "measuring ingredients by volume" thing is imprecise. With or without "oily fingie," two cooks measuring the same ingredients with the same tools can come up with different quantities, because of how void spaces get filled or not. No, for the absolute best method, and one that requires fewer steps, is to measure ingredients by mass, not volume. Yes, this does require you to figure out the proper number of grams or ounces in a standard volumetric measure of, say, peanut butter. But you only have to do this once. A quick Google search yields 256 grams for 1 cup. Now, set a sheet of wax paper on a kitchen scale and tare it. Add peanut butter until you reach 256 grams. If you go over, put a dab back into the jar. Then dump the ingredient into your mixing bowl or whatever. For ingredients that are sticky but spread out more, line a bowl with wax paper and tare the scale with that. Better yet, find recipes that give quantities in mass/weight (really, as long as you're on Earth, it doesn't matter) in the first place. This has the other important advantage of requiring less cleanup. Just chuck the wax paper into the trash afterwards. Sure, it contributes to landfill problems, but at least you waste less water. But then you won't get to give it a cutesy name like "oily fingie." Unless you're cool with "waxy scaley." |
| My weekly trip into the archives only took me back two years, this time, to July of 2022, almost to the day. It's a fairly long set of musings on a fairly long article from aeon: "Smiley" And it is, as one might guess, all about smiles. Now, it's only been two years, as compared to the many years of history discussed by the article. One of the reasons I do these things is to see how things have changed, and, well, not much has changed in two years. There's some discussion of face masks, which were more prevalent in public in 2022, but that's about it. I will, therefore, just point out a couple of things I either missed or left out in a failed attempt at brevity back then. First, as academics are wont to do, the article includes a foray into Latin: Ancient Romans showed another variant. If we take their vocabulary at face value, they did not distinguish between a smile and a laugh, contenting themselves with a single Latin verb – ridere – for both. Only towards the end of the Roman Empire did a diminutive – subridere – enter the language. This came with the derived noun sub-risus (later, surrisus) a ‘sub-laugh’– a little or low laugh – associated with mockery. It retained this lesser status and this diminutive form, distinguishing it from the laugh as it entered the Romance languages in the High Middle Ages. Around 1300, for example, French contained words for laughing (rire) and laughter (le rire or le ris) and smile (sourire, from sous-rire). I'll point out now that the Latin ridere is the known origin of our words "ridicule" and "ridiculous," which today don't conjure up much in terms of smiley laughter, but rather lip-raising scorn, such as I occasionally heap upon stupid articles in here. Not the one under discussion today, but others. Second, it's been bandied about that forcing a smile also forces the underlying emotions of happiness, contentment, or relaxation, and supposedly makes one appear more friendly and approachable. Neither of these things is always good, in my opinion. Sometimes it's best to work with the emotions you're actually feeling (or so I've heard, at least for actual humans). And one does not always want to look friendly and approachable, because someone might approach you and try to get friendly. It could even be a symptom of the foul practice of toxic positivity. And to me, forcing a smile is the exact opposite of relaxation. I'm not suggesting frowning as an alternative, but just... letting it be. Unless you're in the kind of situation where people shouldn't know what your actual emotions are, lest you get intrusive questions like "Why the long face?" or "Okay, what are you grinning about?" Or if, you know, you're at a poker table. I still pity the retail workers who have to go all day with a fake smile plastered upon their face. Even worse are the ones who are genuinely happy to have to present their customer-service face to the world. I mean... why? Smiley faces are for people who aren't paying attention. So anyway, the original entry and article are there at the link, and I still think the article's interesting. But I don't think I smiled even once. |
| Travel planning update: I still haven't heard back from the travel agent. They're supposed to come up with an itinerary that I can then tweak if necessary. I was going to call them yesterday, but, as everyone knows by now, someone (probably a Russian spy) pulled the plug on a bunch of servers, including transportation ones. I figured bugging them could wait until Monday. There's no reason to believe the early autumn dates will shift, so late September / early October. As I have been active in "October Novel Prep Challenge" [13+] for the past few years, I thought it would be courteous to inform Brandiwyn🎶  that I'd be out of the country and thus unable to perform my usual essential support tasks this year. In retribution, she told me that she knows people in France and maybe I could meet them.This is retribution because now I'll need to make adjustments to the schedule to allow for meeting actual people (not other tourists). Joke's on her, though: I can do that easily. Oh, and yes, this is a stealth promotion for "October Novel Prep Challenge" [13+].Since they haven't gotten back to me yet, the only other thing to report is how much I'm procrastinating getting other things ready for the trip. Oh, well. There's always tomorrow. |
| As soon as I saw this Atlas Obscura headline, I knew it was blog fodder. Ancient Egyptians Celebrated the Feast of Drunkenness with Blood-Red Beer One of history’s earliest mixed drinks was made to appease a ferocious goddess. Yeah, they had me at "Feast of Drunkenness" and kept me with "Blood-Red Beer." Even though the beer would have borne little resemblance to the delicious fermented beverage we enjoy today. There’s a whole lot of hair-splitting about who came up with the first cocktail. If one defines "cocktail" as "the combination of an alcoholic beverage with something else," it probably happened approximately 15 seconds after fermentation was invented. A quick Google search will reveal a litany of opinions. Some claim that the Sazerac, which first appeared around the 1830s, holds the distinction. Others would say that the unnamed concoction of spirits, sugar, and bitters—essentially, an Old-Fashioned—published by an anonymous American bartender in an 1806 newspaper is the winner. One could also quibble that fermented beverages shouldn't count for cocktails, at which point I'd pour them a mimosa. Last year, I spoke with cocktail historian Amanda Schuster, who has a recipe for a boozy Scottish drink with roots dating back to the 1400s in her book Signature Cocktails. And to be fair, if I had to guess who made the first mixed drink, I'd guess Scotland. She pointed out that people have been mixing stuff with alcohol to make it taste better for a very, very long time. But alcohol is delicious. According to Dora Goldsmith, an Egyptologist at Berlin’s Freie Universität, the ancient Egyptians were making mixed alcoholic beverages in the Ptolemaic Dynasty, around 300 BC. This is where you really need to go to the link. There's a picture of her there. I wanna cast her as Morticia Addams. While there’s evidence of distilled liquor dating back to 800 BC in parts of Asia, Egyptian “cocktails” more resembled fortified wines and beers. And when the debauched Feast of Drunkenness rolled around, these fragrant, sweet elixirs flowed freely. You know, there are very, very few things that one can mix with beer today. Lemonade comes to mind, but not much else. Though I have had some success mixing sour beer with sparkling wine. Goldsmith has translated what may be instructions for two such libations from a religious text. “This is a hymn, as far as the text genre goes, but behind that hymn are traces of a recipe,” Goldsmith explains. Sounds weird to modern ears, but remember, one of the bits of evidence for the importance of beer to ancient cultures is the Sumerian Hymn to Ninkasi. Versions of that same sacred song, known as “The Menu Song,” were chiseled onto the temples of Dendera, Philae, and Athribis. Gotta love "The Menu Song." “The Menu Song was probably sung on these [feast] days, while they drank this fragrant beer, and were in complete ecstasy,” Goldsmith says. “What is important to understand is that beer-brewing here is a mythological act. The brewing itself ensures that the cosmic order remains intact.” Well, look at that, something I agree with the Ancient Egyptians on. Before we look at the drinks themselves, let’s talk about Hathor, the goddess for whom they were created... “She has two sides,” Goldsmith says. “On the one hand, she’s very loving, but she can also be a raging lunatic. She’s a cute little kitty cat one day and a raging lioness the next.” Sounds like my ex. Goldsmith attempted to recreate the elixir that got the population so wildly intoxicated by following 18 steps laid out in the hymn. Because of course she did. There's quite a bit more at the article (though not the recipe itself), mostly the mythological underpinnings of the celebration, which of course I find fascinating. Not because I believe them, of course, but because of what they say about the people who promulgated them. And what they say in this case is that Egyptians loved their beer. |
| Got another "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] entry today: Jessica Fox When it comes time to write on a subject about which I know next to nothing, my obvious first stop is Wikipedia. Sure, it's not perfect, but is anything? Earning a gold medal in the Olympics is about as close as one can get.And I do have respect for anyone talented and dedicated enough to do that. I also have respect for the talent and dedication required to be an opera singer, but that doesn't mean I want to subject myself to the experience of sitting through an opera. As much as I enjoy learning new things, there's just not enough time to be interested in everything. Some things get pushed to the bottom of the queue, like opera or sports. So while it may shock some people that today is the first time I've ever heard of Jessica Fox, today is the first time I've ever heard of Jessica Fox. Would I have heard of this medal-collecting canoeist—that is, would some news story about her have impinged itself on my consciousness before now if she were from the US instead of Oz? Maybe. Maybe not. If so, that wouldn't be my fault. A lot of the news I get is from the US, but I also get information from international sources, and it's not like she's from some obscure country with a weird language. Okay, weird language, sure, but Australia is hardly obscure. In any case, I actively avoid sports reporting. It's a practice I inherited from my parents. I'm sure it's somehow bad that my first thought was "sure, you pretty much have to be an Olympic athlete to outrun/outswim/outrow the local wildlife there." That's gone past the "tired old joke" phase to "always funny." It's especially funny because I'm pretty sure Australians promote the exaggeration in order to keep ugly Americans from wanting to visit. It's not working on me. I'd love to visit, drop bears and all. The thing that's stopping me is the thought of a 24-hour-plus flight (with connections) cooped up in a flimsy aluminum can with a bunch of American tourists. For shiggles, though, I just looked up some flights (I had to in order to confirm the duration), and the prices are remarkably reasonable. For riding steerage, anyway. Less than 2000 US dollars for a round trip with one stop. Yes, that's a lot of money, but not bad for flying nearly halfway around the Earth, which, I feel I must reiterate, is round. But I digress. Remember up there I said I inherited an aversion to sports news from my parents? Apparently, things like that run in the family, because Fox's parents were also world-class paddlers. I guess you could say they're all in the same boat. |
| I consciously saved this article from Big Think a while back. There were only a couple of things I had saved from that source; it's random coincidence (operating on a limited set of possibilities) that I got both of them to pop up in the same week. Considering my issues with the last one, which I discussed two days ago, it's just as well that I've cleared my queue of these; I'm not sure this one's much better. Can the known particles and interactions explain consciousness? At a fundamental level, only a few particles and forces govern all of reality. How do their combinations create human consciousness? Again, I'm not sure that they're asking the right questions. How odd is it that these particles and forces fit together so precisely as to enable conscious beings like us to exist? It’s a cutting-edge question, but one that we’re closer than ever to answering definitively. We're also "closer than ever" to developing usable fusion power. Instead of 20 years away, as we were back in the 1960s, we're now only 19 years away. Living creatures can be divided into cells; cells themselves are composed of organelles; organelles can be broken down into molecules; molecules are made up of atoms; atoms are comprised of electrons and atomic nuclei; electrons cannot be broken down further, but nuclei themselves consist of quarks and gluons. As I've noted before, every hard science discipline is, at base, physics. We should, therefore, be able to take these fundamental constituents of matter — quarks, gluons, and electrons — and assemble them in various ways to explain everything that we encounter in everyday life. I'm not sure that follows. There are probably things we can never fully explain, but that's a good thing in my book. The question that inspired that article is quoted within it, and it goes like: “It has always puzzled me how come the particles & forces in the original quark gluon soup fit precisely to form: nuclei, and when joined by electrons, atoms (each with their distinct properties), countless molecules (each with their distinct properties), capable of forming life, which can achieve consciousness, and ultimately lead to astrophysicists? This precise “fitting” can hardly be a pure coincidence.” And that sounds to me like the question of a disingenuous religious person, trying to tie scientists up into a big knot of explanation to try to shore up his (the name is Ottho Heldring, so I'm assuming gender based on that) belief. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but believers have been known to do exactly that, with baseless questions like "if humans evolved from chimps, why are there still chimps?" Which is a question that rests on several false assumptions. Coincidence or not, if such a history as he briefly described in the question had not taken place, we wouldn't be here to argue about it, now, would we? As I've said before, it doesn't much matter what the odds were after you've won the lottery. The article itself isn't that long, but it manages to provide a brief history of the physical processes that, ultimately, led to the universe as we knew it, up to and including cats. I won't quote from the meat of it; it's there at the link, and while I have some quibbles, that's going to happen when you take something it requires a PhD to describe (which I definitely don't have) and boil it down to a couple thousand words. Then, in summary: But this is not necessarily miraculous. So long as there are a few simple rules and properties to nature: And a restatement of what I said above: If the laws of physics were so different that we couldn’t have come into existence, we never would have arisen to find these things out. Pretty sure both of those are a version of the Anthropic Principle, which has its own problems because it doesn't really explain anything.Ultimately, we know that complexity can absolutely arise from simplicity. There's a random element to it, but it's not completely random; it's subject to physical (in the sense of "physics," not "physicality") rules. And isn't that a more likely hypothesis than complexity arising from even greater complexity? The latter just raises the question of where the "greater complexity" comes from. "It was always there" is deeply unsatisfying, akin to "it's turtles all the way down." |
| An entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] today: Stockholm It's impossible for me to see the name of this city without thinking "Stockholm Syndrome." I imagine that name for hostages developing sympathy for their captors stuck because of the neat alliteration, rhyme and rhythm of the phrase. It really has nothing to do with Sweden's capital, except for it being the place where the "syndrome" was identified. Probably, we should find another name for it like we've started to do with actual diseases, no longer naming them after places. And I say "actual diseases" not because mental illness isn't real, but because Stockholm Syndrome isn't officially recognized as such.Even if it were, from the time I first heard of it, I was skeptical. It's easy to look at a situation from the outside and make value judgements. Captors=evil, hostages=good. It's probably the oldest dichotomy in history: the contrast between good and evil. What I don't think people take into account is that usually, the hostages are ordinary people, and ordinary people have some level of empathy and compassion. Those qualities are generally attributed to the "good" side of good vs. evil. And even the hostage-takers might have some signs of humanity. Otherwise, why would they care enough about a cause to go to extremes to achieve it? It's been noted by better thinkers than me that, once people actually get to know each other, some level of understanding gets reached. Given all that, it doesn't surprise me in the least that in some situations, captives can start feeling empathy for their captors (hell, sometimes it's even the other way around). Point is, people are complicated, and if you've never been in that sort of situation, it can look like an aberration from the outside. But with a little bit of empathy, one can maybe see how it's perfectly natural. |
| By random coincidence, hot on the heels of yesterday's recapitulation of a philosophical blog entry from the noughties, we have a philosophical question from Big Think: Everyday Philosophy: Is praying fundamentally egotistical? God is not a vending machine, but is it wrong to treat him like one? Based on the subheadline there, the article's focus would seem to be Western Christianity, not one of the many other religions that involve prayer. Being an English language website, though, I'd expect most of their target audience to be familiar with that religion, so, okay, I can ignore the lack of universality in this case. To answer this week’s question, we look at the work of Sigmund Freud on religion and the theologian Friedrich Heiler on prayer. And already, I spot red flags. Freud was, famously, the prototypical psychoanalyst; while psychology and religion are necessarily intertwined, pretty much everything Freud actually said was later debunked, so it's worse than citing Wikipedia (which is usually factual but needs to be checked). And while I'd never heard of Heiler, the entire field of theology is suspect because, unlike with psychology (for instance), you can't design experiments to support or falsify the hypotheses. I'm not saying the question isn't worth examining. Just that I'd probably have looked elsewhere for inspiration. The whole thing starts with a question purportedly posed by a reader: Is it egotistical to think your prayers will be answered or that what you wish for will come true? The question itself is framed in a way that bugs me, but I can't quite put my finger on why. Is the implication that "egotistical" is necessarily bad? Do a lot of people hold the worldview that what they wish for will necessarily come true? Mostly, I hear about people who claim their prayers were answered in an unexpected or twisted way, meaning they didn't get what they wanted but were okay with that on some level. It’s 1590, and two armies stand in the fields just outside Ivry in France. Both armies are a rag-tag shamble of children, old men, cripples, and foreign mercenaries. After 30 years of civil war, that’s all that’s left. In this latest, macabre chapter of the French Wars of Religion, priests walk up and down the lines. They tell everyone standing that “God blesses you,” “This is all for God,” and, most importantly of all, “Please God, give us victory this day.” Protestants and Catholics are praying to the same God to give them both victory. God will have to disappoint a lot of people. I don't know enough about history to know who won that battle, and can't be arsed to look it up. But we all know that religious wars happened, and they happened with alarming frequency, and in each case, both sides thought that the Supreme Being was on their side, and at least one of those sides were apparently wrong. Still, I might have used a different example. A football game, say. A few months ago, a bunch of 49ers fans fervently prayed to God to make their team win. A bunch of Chiefs fans fervently prayed to God to make their team win. And yet, after the Chiefs won, as far as I've been able to tell, the 49ers fans didn't suddenly become atheists en masse. Sure, that's lower stakes than an actual fighting war, but it's probably more relatable to an audience. You could also use the example of elections, where presumably people are praying for their candidate to prevail, while only one can win. My point being that it's blindingly obvious that it's impossible for [deity] to answer every prayer. Unless, of course, [deity] is actually the interpretation of quantum physics that splits the outcome of every probabilistic event into different, separate universes, and elsewhere outside of our spacetime, there's a universe where San Francisco won—but that's irrelevant, because that's not visible in our reality. Not only that, but because it's demonstrably impossible for [deity] to fulfill every desire due to inherent contradictions, anyone who thinks [deity] does isn't egotistical, but delusional. That, or extremely, unbelievably powerful. I look at it this way: Does [deity] grant your every wish? Then [deity] is your bitch, which makes you the true ruling force in the universe. Please don't smite me. Does [deity] grant none of your wishes? Then why bother wishing? Alternatively, you can use that to your advantage by praying for the exact opposite of what you want. Please smite me. Does [deity] grant some wishes and not others? Then how is that distinguishable from random chance operating within the structure of physical laws? So I won't quote the rest of the article. It does provide different perspectives, but, as with all philosophy... draw your own conclusions. |
| Today, my random time machine took me all the way back to the beginning of February, 2007, with this entry that turned out to presage many of my later musings: "More On Philosophy" In case it's not obvious, one thing I clearly remember after all this time about that title (while forgetting most of the contents) was that I deliberately crafted it to be a pun on "moron philosophy," a bit of self-deprecating humor because the entry was about my views on existence. The entry begins with, and was inspired by, a quote from a comment made by a former site member: "Would you agree that nothing is truly 'discovered', that it is just a question of a new awareness of this or that, which may have existed all along?... we live in a bigger world than what we are 'aware' of, proven by many 'discoveries' starting with the planet not being flat... being newly 'aware' of its real shape does not take away the fact that it always was round." I should emphasize here that I have exactly no formal training in philosophy. But my philosophy is that someone shouldn't have to in order to draw their own inferences about life, the Universe, and everything, any more than one needs a PhD in art history to decide whether they like a certain painting or not. The danger, of course, is that you're just restating what Plato or Camus or Nietzsche or Springsteen, or whoever, has already said (or sung). I like to think that my philosophy is pragmatic and realistic; that is, I don't concern myself much with the question of whether all y'all exist or not. Solipsism is an easy trap to get into, especially on the Internet, but it's also easy to get out of: I'm real, you're real; my computer is real. I have, of course, joked around about solipsism many times since then. I'm also not "a butterfly dreaming I'm a man;" that observation strikes me as some straw-grasping from a guy who doesn't want to deal with reality. I'm not sure I'd put it exactly that way today, but I still don't think it's nearly as profound as some people make it out to be. I'm willing to accept variant definitions of reality, but they all have to embrace the fact of me sitting here on my lunch break and typing in my blog; the idea that this is all illusion is simply preposterous, not worthy of consideration outside the walls of University philosophy departments and Buddhism. With the cushion of time between then and now, I can see how this might come across as a rag on Buddhism. I doubt that was my intent. I think it was a reference to the "butterfly dream" above, which was first promulgated in Daoist philosophy, which at the time I confused with Buddhism, because I never did get everything right and never will. Even so, to "get" the reference, one must be at least glancingly aware of Eastern philosophical traditions, which contradicts my assertion above that one shouldn't need to study philosophy in order to do it. Self-contradiction is a key component of human thought, in my view. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't all run around with illusions, or that these illusions don't affect our reality. That's the symbolism of all the math discussion in my blog header, if you haven't figured it out by now: the idea that there's a real part and an imaginary part, and that most of what we see isn't purely one or the other but some mixture of both. I can't be sure if that was my first attempt at explaining the title of this blog, but it might have been. Finally, I get around to addressing the past member's comment: So, yes, to me the definition of "discovery" is finding something that existed before you knew about it (as a species or an individual) AND incorporating that into your worldview. Like, for instance, I have a "Discover" card, so named because you have to run around and discover places that actually take it. They took it before I found them; I merely found what was already there, and others already knew about. Once I find them, they're on my mental list of "places that take Discover cards." Again, I'd probably change the first part of that paragraph now (while keeping the funny bit about the Discover card). I'd emphasize that something had to exist before it could be discovered. Sometimes that existence is "real" as I view it: an exoplanet, maybe, or a fountain in a city I'd never been to before. The exoplanet discovery is universal to the human race, while the fountain discovery is unique to me; the people who live in that city would have already known about it. In the former sense, Columbus never discovered America, as humans already lived there. In the latter sense, he did, as it was new to him. This is the source of much confusion and righteous indignation, but it turns out to be partly an issue of semantics. A third sense of discovery is when someone discovers something that doesn't have a physical reality. One example would be the discovery of complex numbers. Another is Einstein's famous equation; E has always equaled mc2; but no one articulated that relationship before Al did. All of which makes it difficult, sometimes, to separate invention from discovery. When the Wright brothers built and flew that first airplane back in 1903, they brought something new into the world, but was it invented, or did they draw from the Platonic realm of ideals? That's why we have discussions about these things, preferably while on mind-altering substances. I won't bother with the rest of the blog entry. Suffice it to say that I saw in it the seeds of several later discussions, but, as is proper, my views have changed a bit over time. |
| A brief travel planning update: I met with the travel agent on Wednesday. As a reminder, I'm using a travel agent this time because a) I'm entirely too lazy to coordinate my own itinerary; b) I don't know exactly what I want; and c) I've never done it before, so it'll be a new experience for me. I told her basically what I wanted to do (wine and beer tourism in France and Belgium), so she suggested three locations in France: Loire, Burgundy, and Paris. "So you'll fly into Paris and spend... how long there? Five days?" (I'd told her maybe three weeks for the entire trip.) I'm like, "I'm not exceptionally interested in Paris. The city is dirty, and the people are rude and will be tired of foreign tourists after the Olympics." I mean, I get flying into Paris. There's a big international airport there, and the other places I want to visit are generally in the northern part of the country. But thinking I want to spend time there is a big assumption. Then I remembered that I'd heard the Paris craft beer scene had developed nicely in the past few years. Plus, she dangled "reservations at a Michelin-starred restaurant" in my hungry face. (I think they make most of their money from kickbacks, which is fine.) So okay, sure, Paris. Just not a lot of the touristy places. And maybe three days, not five. I know it's an enormous city and you can spend years there without running out of new things to do, but I'd rather focus on other locations. The rest of the trip is countryside and small towns. Well, mostly. Nothing's detailed yet, but Belgium might involve staying in Brussels, for which I don't have any objection. The problem with France, I've found, is that there's pretty much nowhere in the entire country that I don't want to spend time in. Well, maybe some of the freezing cold snow-peaked mountain parts. I wouldn't mind visiting them briefly, or seeing them from a warm, comfortable distance, but, as with every other high mountain range, the combination of colder temperatures and lack of air pressure is anathema to me. Plus, I might be expected to "ski," or "hike," or do any number of disgusting outdoor activities. Yes, I've done it, like when I spent a week at a science camp in the Colorado Rockies. That's how I know it's not for me. So, now I'm waiting for them to stitch together a draft of a travel plan. I'll get to look at it and change things if I want. I told her, "Don't worry; I like surprises... but only if they're pleasant ones." She didn't find that nearly as amusing as I did. |
| Apologies for the Torygraph link today. If it helps, I'm going to rag on the article. Today in "You're doing it wrong!": Millions of cooks are endangering their health by cooking their rice incorrectly, scientists believe. Which scientists? The link provided with that lede goes to another Torygraph article scaremongering about lung cancer risk from high glycemic index carbohydrates, which violates at least two principles: 1) make your link relevant to the argument; 2) don't freakin' cite your own prior article as a source. Putting more water in the pan or even steeping it overnight is the best way to flush out traces of the poison arsenic, they found. Arsenic is well-known as a poison, but it's part of the natural environment (yet another reason I distrust "natural" claims). I can't be arse(nic)d to go into much detail here, but it's an element on the periodic table, not some factory-produced compound. The chemical contaminates rice as a result of industrial toxins and pesticides which can remain in the soil for decades. It is true, however, that certain processes can concentrate and redistribute the element. Experts have long debated what level of arsenic is safe, with new limits set by the EU in 2016. "Safe" is misleading. The only thing I found on limits has to do with American public drinking water, where the limit is 10 parts per billion. Usually. But that's for inorganic arsenic; organic arsenic (which, as that link points out, has nothing to do with the marketing concept known as "organic") is less toxic. Remember, it's an element, so it shows up in different kinds of molecules.But experiments suggest that the way rice is cooked is key to reducing exposure to the toxic but naturally occurring chemical. Or we could, I don't know... stop polluting everything? Prof Andy Meharg, from Queens University Belfast, tested three ways of cooking rice for the BBC programme Trust Me, I’m a Doctor. I'm way more inclined to trust the BBC than the Torygraph. Which doesn't mean they're perfect. In the first, he used a ratio of two parts water to one part rice, where the water is “steamed out” during cooking. In the second, with five parts water to one part rice, with the excess water washed off, levels of arsenic were almost halved. And in the third method, where the rice was soaked overnight, levels of the toxin were reduced by 80 per cent. That first one is the usual method, at least here in the US. There's just one problem with the alternative methods. Well, perhaps more than one, but the one that jumped out at me was: that's a lot of water wasted. Which I guess isn't much of a problem if you're in the UK, where, I'm assured, it rains all the goddamned time. But in many parts of the world, water is precious (and becoming more so as time goes on). This isn't usually much of an issue in what we've called "first-world" countries, but they get a different problem: insecure and sometimes questionable water supply. Which, as I've noted above, has a maximum arsenic level greater than 0. Wells and other sources aren't formally tested at all. To summarize, rice is a staple for more than half the world; rice has been found to have an unspecified but presumably risky level of arsenic; and using 2-3 times as much water, and possibly even more for rinsing after, might reduce arsenic levels... at the cost of time, water, and effort. And once again, fixing the problem of industrial pollution falls squarely on our shoulders, rather than those of the companies who did the pollution in the first place. |
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