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About This Author
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Complex Numbers
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.
February 26, 2025 at 9:04am February 26, 2025 at 9:04am
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First, an Exclaimer! ▼EXCLAIMER
(explanation/disclaimer)
The theme for this round of Journalistic Intentions is "Banned Instagram hashtags! All of these will get posts shadow banned on Instagram." So there are a few things my readers should know:
#1- I do not have, have never had, will never have, an Instagram account.
#2- Consequently, I have no idea what a shadow ban is or what it entails, only that it has something to do with suppression of posts with the indicated tag.
#3- I do not acknowledge the pronunciation of the octothorpe (#) as "hashtag." That symbol is either "number" or "pound," and that's more than enough definitions for one character. Anytime I see the # with letters following, I pronounce it pound, which made #MeToo way more hilarious than it should have been.
However, I hold the belief that I can write about absolutely anything, regardless of prior knowledge. This contest round tests that conceit. All entries, including this one, were selected at random from the list of 16 prompts provided.
#brain
Not much I can say about "pound brain" except that, from what I hear, the brain itself doesn't contain pain receptors. So no matter how much you pound your brain, it's not the gray matter itself that hurts; it's the slightly harder stuff surrounding it.
Why you'd pound your brain is another issue, but, I mean... *gestures at everything in general* I get it.
My ex-wife had brain surgery. They took out a chunk of brain in an attempt to fix a neurological problem. This happened shortly before we separated. When I'm feeling charitable, I'll assume that the extracted bit was the bunch of neurons that made her fool herself into believing she liked being around me. When I'm not feeling charitable, I'll think that she had the surgery before the separation so that, in case something went wrong (as something sometimes does when someone goes digging around in a brain with surgical implements), I'd be on the hook to care for whatever was left of her.
The reality, of course, is probably something else entirely. Which is only fair, because whatever we think we know about the brain itself, we're probably wrong and definitely operating from incomplete information. And that makes it marvelous that we can even consider poking around in there with scalpels and forceps and whatnot, let alone doing so with any success.
For instance, there was this widespread belief that the two hemispheres of the brain ruled different aspects of one's personality. A "right-brained" person was, by this theory, creative, artistic, emotional, and so on. A "left-brained" person, in contrast, was considered logical, rational, methodical, etc.
Because people don't like to change their brains, this model persists in the popular imagination, but as it turns out, it's about as accurate as phrenology or astrology. Sure, some people are more creative and others, more methodical, but it has nothing to do with dominant cerebral hemispheres.
For another instance, there's a tendency to use metaphors to describe the brain's function. The latest involves comparing the brain to a computer, with different sections serving different functions like processing (CPU) or memory (hard drive). Before computers, it was fashionable to compare the brain to a machine; the image of cogs turning when someone is thinking persists in cartoons and whatnot.
These are more reflections of the current state of technology than of reality. But, like the Bohr orbital model of an atom, they can serve their purpose even though they're inaccurate.
So I say this: the brain is like a car. You don't have to know exactly how it works to use it, but a lot of people are really, really bad at doing so. |
February 25, 2025 at 8:43am February 25, 2025 at 8:43am
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From The Guardian, an article that I'm going to try to be skeptical about, because I already agree with it.
It won't be banished for good, though. People cling to their preconceptions. Hell, I know someone who was absolutely convinced that their cat would "steal the baby's breath." This was someone otherwise fairly rational.
When I was growing up, only children were generally regarded as unfortunate souls; lonely, socially clumsy and often bullied.
Well, being bullied can happen to anyone, but I imagine it would help to have a sibling on your side for defense and/or painful retribution. I'm not convinced, however, that it can make up for the bullying and/or annoyance of having said sibling in the first place. One can avoid bullies, much of the time; one cannot avoid one's sibling.
But the stereotype has proved to be tenacious â so much so that many people still feel anxiety about the issue: parents over whether they have deprived their child of the experience of having siblings, only children that they may have missed out on a crucial part of their development.
Such experience and development could, I will reiterate, go both ways. It can be positive. It can also be strongly negative. I'd imagine it would be worse to have a shitty sibling than none at all. And from my own experience, having none instilled in me a powerful sense of individuality, of not having to lean on anyone else.
Based on current data, itâs estimated that by 2031 half of all UK families will be raising just one child.
Obviously, this article focuses on the UK, and I don't know what the stats are for other countries. I'm not sure the exact details matter; such predictions are like weather forecasts, and shouldn't be taken as absolute truth. The author's point seems to be that being an "only" used to have stigma because the situation was rare; the situation isn't rare anymore, but the stigma remains, so she throws the numbers around to support the "not rare anymore" point.
As a clinical psychologist with more than 40 yearsâ experience working with families and children, Iâd like to reassure parents that having one child is now an excellent decision â and here are some of the reasons.
As someone who lacks all sorts of credentials, I'd like to reassure people that having no children right now is an excellent decision. Have you seen the world? Can you honestly say they'd have a better life than you did? Can you really afford the luxury?
First, a lot of the stigma, the source of so many difficult developmental experiences, has melted away because of the numbers game. Itâs simply much less unusual to have no siblings, and less likely to draw unkind attention.
I think the point here is that kids are mean to anyone who's different, but being an only isn't all that different anymore, so the hammers don't go after that particular nail.
Second, the data that gave the stereotype of an ill-adjusted, unhappy only child a veneer of scientific credibility has been thoroughly debunked. Much of it was the result of a questionnaire that American psychologist EW Bohannon gave to 200 adults in the late 19th century.
This is the bit I'd pay most attention to. Old study, single researcher, small and demographically narrow sample size.
From this âstudyâ â based on secondhand opinions, biased language, and without a control group â Bohannon concluded that only children were generally spoiled, selfish, intolerant and self-obsessed.
I'm not intolerant, goddammit.
More recent, better-designed investigations have, unsurprisingly, utterly failed to uphold these claims.
Go figure.
That isnât to say that there arenât any differences at all between single children and others. For example, recent research in China found that they are often more competitive and less tolerant of others; but they also tend to be better at lateral thinking and are more content spending time alone.
Again, I contend that being able to be alone is a positive personality trait. It's good to not cling to others for validation or emotional support.
Often peopleâs anxieties about single-child families are projected into the future. Isnât it better to have siblings to share memories with in adulthood and who can lighten the load of caring for elderly parents should that become necessary?
I'm always seeing instances where one of the parents' many kids is the primary caregiver in those situations. Hell, it happened to the friend of mine that I had to convince about the cat thing up there.
I still maintain that having kids so you'll have someone to take care of you in old age is one of the biggest acts of selfishness.
Itâs true that Iâve worked with a number of only children who complain of exhaustion as they care for their parents in later life. But I would counter that by noting that the worst relationship issues Iâve had to deal with in my clinics are not those between couples, but among adult siblings when it comes to sharing out responsibility for the care of their parents, and whoâs entitled to what once they die.
When parents are even moderately rich, all the lessons they supposedly taught their kids about sharing and cooperating apparently go right out the window. The common metaphor is that of vultures circling a dying animal, but that doesn't really happen and it's not fair to the noble vulture to compare them to selfish brat offspring.
Finally, are parents who have large families happier than those who have just one child? Apparently not.
Ugh. "Happier." I've ragged on this concept before, I know, but I don't think it should be relevant. Part of this is because people are, believe it or not, different. It could be that a couple wants a large number of offspring, and they might be happier. It could be that a couple wants none, and they'd be unhappy with even one, let alone more. Happiness is notoriously subjective, and someone might convince themselves they're happy just because otherwise, they'd have to change something, and change is painful. Or maybe they can't change, so they do the self-convincing.
When it comes down to it, there are advantages and disadvantages, and any disadvantages for the child can be compensated for by skilful parenting. This is perhaps the key message for mothers or fathers worried about the issue: nothing is set in stone. In the case of only children, helping them learn to share, and prioritising flexibility â even allowing for some disorder â in day-to-day scheduling is extremely helpful, as these are some of the skills children with siblings acquire as a matter of course.
And then you get stuff like this, which is clearly geared toward the neurotypical.
So, this is an example of how I handle confirmation bias: don't just agree with the article; find things to criticize about it. Remember what I just said about happiness? I can't change having been an only child. I couldn't make siblings appear out of thin air (multiverse theory notwithstanding) even if I wanted to, which I don't. My unique situation is the hand I've been dealt; fortunately, it's full of aces. |
February 24, 2025 at 9:07am February 24, 2025 at 9:07am
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First, an Exclaimer! ▼EXCLAIMER
(explanation/disclaimer)
The theme for this round of Journalistic Intentions is "Banned Instagram hashtags! All of these will get posts shadow banned on Instagram." So there are a few things my readers should know:
#1- I do not have, have never had, will never have, an Instagram account.
#2- Consequently, I have no idea what a shadow ban is or what it entails, only that it has something to do with suppression of posts with the indicated tag.
#3- I do not acknowledge the pronunciation of the octothorpe (#) as "hashtag." That symbol is either "number" or "pound," and that's more than enough definitions for one character. Anytime I see the # with letters following, I pronounce it pound, which made #MeToo way more hilarious than it should have been.
However, I hold the belief that I can write about absolutely anything, regardless of prior knowledge. This contest round tests that conceit. All entries, including this one, were selected at random from the list of 16 prompts provided.
#tiktokgirls
Today's title, which is pronounced "Pound TikTok Girls," might seem like it could push the boundaries of this item's Content Rating. What if I said that, in this case, they're asking TikTok Girls to volunteer at the pound? Or that, like it or not, "girl" can describe any female-presenting human or other animal, including adult specimens, as in "girlboss," "Golden Girls," or "cowgirls?" And my cats are good girls, even though they're seniors now. As in "old," not "about to graduate."
So yeah, I'm not advocating violence on anyone underage. Well, unless they steal something from me, but that's not the case here.
In any case, "pound" or otherwise, I'm not going to look this one up. I'm pretty sure doing so would put me on a List, and that's even though I could use a VPN, private browsing, adblock, scriptblock, etc. "They" will find a way to find me just for typing tiktokgirls into a search box.
And, as you might imagine, what I said in the Exclaimer! above about Instagram goes double for DikDok. This has less to do with its ties to the Chinese government (it's not like Instagram's owner is any better) and more to do with just how vapid and insipid (both really fun words) all the KitKots that escape into the wild are, and their insistence on promoting the use of vertical video. My primary connection to the internet is via a laptop, which has a screen in landscape mode. And even when I'm using my Android, I prefer to hold it in that orientation on the few occasions when I watch videos. We've spent several generations training ourselves that landscape mode is the correct orientation for moving pictures, and suddenly the newer generation thinks they have the right to change that? No. They do not.
"Oh, but that's just the style these days?" Yeah? So are Crocs; that doesn't mean I have to like it.
Which, just to be perfectly clear, doesn't mean I want the government to ban either one. No, I want something far more difficult than that: that people decide, all on their own, that things like Crocs and vertical video are stupid-looking and shouldn't exist.
Meanwhile, I'll continue to pretend that they don't.
Consequently, while I continue to assert that there's no such thing as useless knowledge (especially for a writer) and that deliberately maintaining one's ignorance is an affront to Nature and humanity, I'm going to have to maintain my ignorance on this particular tag. It goes into the nearly-empty box in my brain labeled "Things I Don't Really Want To Know." It's in good company in there with "how does it feel to go through a wood chipper" and "what's really in the sausage I just had for breakfast."
So, what the tag is about, and why it'll get a post banned from Instagram, will remain mysteries to me unless someone else wants to tell me. And that's fine; what's life without a little mystery? |
February 23, 2025 at 11:18am February 23, 2025 at 11:18am
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For my weekly trip to the past, this time, we're not going very deep at all. In November of 2023, I wrote this for a blogging activity which is no longer with us, hence the "invalid item" link therein: "Forgive Me, For I Have Zinned" 
The entry revolves around National Zinfandel Day, which in that year fell on November 15 (the earliest it can occur, as it falls on the third Wednesday in November.)
I did a whole blog entry on these calendar events, just a few days ago. In brief, yes, I know a lot of them are just product promotions. This one's no exception; the website lists it as being founded by "Zinfandel Advocates & Producers (ZAP)," which is totally the name I'd come up with if I were putting together an industry coalition for zinfandel.
But then they had to go and make White Zinfandel, which is emblematic of everything that's wrong in the world.
So many of those emblems these days.
Now, to be somewhat fair, I've heard it's improved since the last time I had the misfortune of sipping it.
Nor have I had any in the time since that entry.
The first offense of white zinfandel is that it's actually a blush, or rosé.
True enough, but I don't think I was clear that this is an offense because it breaks the rules of wine categorization. Some rule-breaking is fine and necessary for innovation. This sort of thing just confuses people.
The second offense is that it's inoffensive. It's the wine equivalent of white bread, American cheese, and light beer: something seemingly crafted to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and I'm not low nor common nor a denominator.
Bland, characterless, etc. Apparently, white zinfandel was invented on accident by Sutter Home (which I always called Stagger Home). Other wineries produce it now as well, but the point is, it's unsurprising that white zin is as much an American product as all those other mass-market foods and drinks. Plus, I forgot to add, fake milk "chocolate."
And finally, the wine I tried when it was all the rage in the States was cloyingly sweet. (As I noted above, that may no longer be the case.)
How can I call it characterless and cloyingly sweet at the same time? Because I can.
Finally, "white" zinfandel tastes completely unlike the red variety, such that when I finally got around to tasting actual zinfandel, it was a real epiphany. I might actually like it better than Shiraz.
Jury's still out on that. I can say for certain, though, that I prefer both of those over cabernet sauvignon.
There was a bumper sticker floating around some time ago: "Absolve yourself of white zin."
I haven't seen white zin in stores for a while. Maybe it's just because I haven't been looking, but hopefully, it's at least partly because tastes have improved.
Given the continued presence of those other offensively inoffensive products, though, somehow I doubt it. |
February 22, 2025 at 10:02am February 22, 2025 at 10:02am
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First, an Exclaimer! ▼EXCLAIMER
(explanation/disclaimer)
The theme for this round of Journalistic Intentions is "Banned Instagram hashtags! All of these will get posts shadow banned on Instagram." So there are a few things my readers should know:
#1- I do not have, have never had, will never have, an Instagram account.
#2- Consequently, I have no idea what a shadow ban is or what it entails, only that it has something to do with suppression of posts with the indicated tag.
#3- I do not acknowledge the pronunciation of the octothorpe (#) as "hashtag." That symbol is either "number" or "pound," and that's more than enough definitions for one character. Anytime I see the # with letters following, I pronounce it pound, which made #MeToo way more hilarious than it should have been.
However, I hold the belief that I can write about absolutely anything, regardless of prior knowledge. This contest round tests that conceit. All entries, including this one, were selected at random from the list of 16 prompts provided.
#roosterapparatus
There are things I've wondered about since I first encountered them, and that curiosity was so powerful that I researched it. This was harder in the old days, before the internet made such research simultaneously easier and less reliable. One of the things I wondered about pre-internet was why it is that a rooster crows, but a crow never roosters. But I didn't care enough to look it up.
What I did try to find out, at some point, was why one could use either 'cock' or 'rooster' for the male poultry specimen. As it turned out, the latter word was apparently a US invention, attempting to avoid one of the more salacious meaning of 'cock.' Typical US. If the euphemism origin is true, it would be one of those relatively rare occasions when a euphemism doesn't eventually take on the same connotations as the word it replaced. That is truly weird, as that particular body part is of such paramount importance to the world that almost any word, and several gestures, can, depending on context, refer to it.
One thing I have never attempted to find out, despite having lived on a farm, is how chickens reproduce. At least, apart from the obvious and clichéd chicken / egg cycle. I just didn't care, partly because we didn't have chickens and partly because I just didn't care. But you pick up things here and there, so I know more about the process than I really wanted to.
All of which is to say that roosters don't really have an apparatus as we would identify it.
As per the Exclaimer! up there, the tag in the title, apparently a smushing of rooster and apparatus, is banned on a certain social media platform, but it doesn't seem to be because of its reference to the nonexistent cock cock. No, a brief search revealed that the words refer to a business that sells artisanal glass products which may or may not be pressed into service for smoking the devil's cabbage.
Whether the association with the natural substance which is still illegal in most places is the reason for the ban, or maybe they're just a shady company using legitimacy as a kind of smoke screen, or perhaps something else entirely, the name really is a good one. Not because of chickens or cocks, but because, as my Google search revealed, there aren't many other uses for the particular combination of "rooster" and "apparatus." Memorable and unique; good company name, though I'd have never guessed the product from the tag name. I guess maybe I was expecting it to refer to weather vanes, the clichéd depiction of which almost always involves a rooster.
But no. Not dongs or schlongs, but bongs. |
February 21, 2025 at 8:25am February 21, 2025 at 8:25am
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Here's a great example of science imitating art. From Wired:
The original Spider-Man had Parker sciencing up his own web-shooters and web fluid, which was less a metaphor for puberty and more a comic book shortcut to giving him web powers that weren't inherently gross. Unrealistic? Sure, but so is everything else in comic books, including getting superpowers from being bitten by a radioactive spider, and that's okay.
Slowly but surely, we are making good on the gadgets we imagined, as kids, that the future would hold.
And yet, no phasers.
The Starfleet tricorder from Star Trek? Almost there. But web-shooting? Web-slinging? That wasn't one we really thought would make the crossover.
Yeah, I gotta agree on that one.
And it wasn't exactly in the plans for the scientist who has made the strong, sticky, air-spun web a reality either, Marco Lo Presti, from Tufts Universityâs Silklab.
Okay, but Silklab definitely sounds like a superhero hangout. Or maybe a supervillain lair. A very smooth one.
Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor of engineering at Tufts and âpuppeteerâ of the Silklab.
Oh, definitely supervillain lair.
âYou explore and you play and you sort of connect the dots. Part of the play that is very underestimated is where you say âhey, wait a second, is this like a Spider-Man thing?â And you brush it off at first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing.â
What? No! It's a very, very bad thing in the hands of supervillains.
A lot of the Silklabâs work is âbio-inspiredâ by spiders and silkworms, mussels and barnacles, velvet worm slime, even tropical orchidsâso working out whether this sticky web could become something useful might seem like an easy side-step for the team.
Velvet Worm Slime definitely needs to be the name of a band. Probably an emo/punk/EDM one.
In Stan Lee and Steve Ditkoâs original 1960s comic books, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15, Peter Parker builds a âlittle device,â one fastened to each wrist and triggered by finger pressure, to produce strands of ejectable âspider webs.â By the time of the mid-2000s Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, the web-shooting switched from a wrist-worn spinneret gadget to an organic part of his superhero transformation.
And we've never let Raimi hear the end of puberty jokes since.
The article describes the web-fluid development in more detail; of course, despite the hype, we're not going to get friendly neighborhood web-slingers anytime soon, if at all.
So, Spider-Man capabilities when? âEverybody wants to know if we're going to be able to swing from buildings,â says Omenetto with a wry smile. But we're not there yetâso far the Silklab team itself has speculated about some potential uses for the material: the retrieval of an object thatâs lost underwater, perhaps, or a drone that captures something in a remote environment.
When I was a kid, there was this sticky goo that would stretch but hold together, and you could use it to pick up pennies off the sidewalk, at least until it got too dirty to be useful. This doesn't seem much more useful than that goo, at least not yet.
Lo Presti is interested to hear from anyone who has read his paper and thinks they might be in need of a web-shooting silk fiber.
"Hello, I am an aspiring supervillain and I am in need of a web-shooting silk fiber to achieve my plans of world domination."
Some humans are pretty clever, though, and I'll bet they'll find uses for this that don't involve costumed vigilantes swinging from skyscrapers. Still, I do appreciate the comic-book theme here. |
February 20, 2025 at 7:36am February 20, 2025 at 7:36am
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First, an Exclaimer! ▼EXCLAIMER
(explanation/disclaimer)
The theme for this round of Journalistic Intentions is "Banned Instagram hashtags! All of these will get posts shadow banned on Instagram." So there are a few things my readers should know:
#1- I do not have, have never had, will never have, an Instagram account.
#2- Consequently, I have no idea what a shadow ban is or what it entails, only that it has something to do with suppression of posts with the indicated tag.
#3- I do not acknowledge the pronunciation of the octothorpe (#) as "hashtag." That symbol is either "number" or "pound," and that's more than enough definitions for one character. Anytime I see the # with letters following, I pronounce it pound, which made #MeToo way more hilarious than it should have been.
However, I hold the belief that I can write about absolutely anything, regardless of prior knowledge. This contest round tests that conceit. All entries, including this one, were selected at random from the list of 16 prompts provided.
#imfine
Imfine would make a great character name, don't you think? It's perfect for science fiction and/or fantasy, with maybe a little comedy thrown in.
You could have someone named Imfine Owyudoon, for example. "It's pronounced 'ihm-FEEN,' they might insist, much as Young Frankenstein insisted on Fronk-in-steen. Or maybe it's French: "eem-feen-ay."
And it has, as my use of the third person pronoun suggests, the advantage of not being obviously one gender. Sure, it might be close to Imogene, with the above pronunciation, but so what? You can use it for characters of any gender, which is helpful for keeping readers guessing or planning a plot twist.
Other possibilities:
Imfine Andyu
Imfine Thanxforaxin
Imfine Reilly
Imfine Eyeswere
Imfine No'Imnot
So I went ahead and did a search for the word, to see if someone else has already had my idea (as per 99.99% of the time), and, true to the shithole Google has become, the first result was a shopping site with that exact name. I won't promote unfettered consumerism or provide free advertising by linking it here; all I'll say is that it looks like the shop has an Instagram presence, which I'd imagine is somewhat tricky (you have to read the Exclaimer! dropnote above to understand why).
Then there's something called the I'm Fine Project, or imfineproject, "sculpting mental health awareness through art." Look, I'm not going to rag on that; if it helps, it helps (though I have no idea whether it does). But I will say that their description includes the line, "At workshops participants use clay to create a mask..." and that's how I know that, no matter what mental health problems I might have, it wouldn't be for me. Attempting to create "art," unless you count writing as an art, always ends in the same way for me: frustration, increased agitation, and throwing the failed attempt across the room or ripping it up into the trash. In other words, it would make everything worse.
Speaking of artists, according to the search there's also apparently a musical artist called imfine, also somehow with an Instagram presence, so as usual, someone beat me to the naming idea. |
February 19, 2025 at 8:31am February 19, 2025 at 8:31am
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Another one from Mental Floss today, because my random number generator likes to mess with me.
But first, a quick announcement and stealth plug:
Starting tomorrow, and running through March 20, Elisa, Stik of Clubs  is hosting another round of "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]. I intend to participate. I'd like some competition, so if you have a blog or are thinking of starting one (and you should, because I've heard a rumor that a blogging/commenting streak Achievement badge is in the works and no, that's not a secret), check it out. I only have a few meager entries left in this one, and my intention is to devote eight of them to that activity.
But for today, on to the article:
To be clear, sometimes—perhaps even often—experiments fail. If they didn't, they wouldn't be experiments. But sometimes, they fail so completely that it makes you wonder whether the clichĂ© should be "curiosity killed the human."
I should initiate the Hughes Award for such experiments. "Mad" Mike Hughes was a flat-Earther who designed and built a steam-powered rocket to prove to himself that our planet is flat. I've written about him before. The rocket, somewhat predictably, exploded with him inside (and even if it hadn't, it wasn't designed to get high enough to rule out the reality that the Earth is roughly spherical). You might say, "Well, there's already the Darwin Awards to cover that sort of thing," but the Darwin Awards only consider a subset of Stupid Human Tricks.
Not all of the featured failures are quite that spectacular or, some might say, tragic. Out of the 14 in the article, I'll just highlight a few here.
1. Winthrop Kellogg's Ape Experiment
In the early 1930s, comparative psychologist Winthrop Kellogg and his wife welcomed a healthy baby boy they named Donald.
No, not that Donald. Or that one, either. Also, not that Kellogg.
The psychologist had grown interested in those stories of children who were raised feralâbut he didnât send Donald to be raised by wolves. He did the opposite: He managed to get his hands on a similar-aged baby chimp named Gua and raised her alongside Donald.
On the surface, considering the state of knowledge in the 1930s (DNA hadn't been invented yet, for example, but it was known that humans and chimpanzees were closely related on an evolutionary scale), this was a perfectly reasonable experiment—provided one ignores the ethical considerations involved in, for starters, separating a baby chimp from her tribe.
As the article notes, the experiment didn't quite pan out (that's a pun, and it's very much intentional).
2. The Stanford Prison Experiment
You may have heard about the Stanford Prison Experiment, a social psychology study gone awry in 1971. The point of the experiment, which was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, was to measure the effect of role-playing and social expectations. Lead researcher Philip Zimbardo had predicted that situations and circumstances dictate how a person acts, not their personalities.
I can't help but note the similarities between this one and the chimp one, because both were about innate traits vs. environmental conditioning.
Most people have heard of this one, but there's a lot of misinformation about it out there, and I suspect that it functions as kind of a test of a person's preconceived notions, much as the novel Lord of the Flies does. If you haven't heard about it, the article goes into more detail—but I wouldn't fully trust Mental Floss to get it right.
3. Franz Reichelt's Aviator Suit
Now, this one would be a retroactive candidate for the Hughes Award.
In the early 1900s, Reichelt crafted a parachute from 320 square feet of fabric, all of which folded up into a wearable aviator suit. He had conducted several parachute tests using dummies, which all failed. He pinned the blame on the buildings, saying that they simply werenât tall enough.
I think we can all see where this is going, but, again, our state of knowledge in the early 1900s was even more incomplete than it is now. Hell, the first powered flight was late 1903.
In 1912, Reichelt planned to test his latest version by flinging a dummy from the Eiffel Tower. But when he arrived at the famous landmark, the inventor surprised the waiting crowd by strapping on the parachute suit himself and taking the leap.
Hence, the Hughes Award.
The parachute didnât open, however, and Reichelt became a victim of his own invention. (An autopsy reportedly determined that he died of a heart attack on the way down.)
So, the next time someone tells you "It's not the fall that kills you; it's the sudden stop at the end," remember Monsieur Reichelt and how the fall actually did kill him.
But mostly I'm including this one in my commentary to note that, from then on, the famous Paris landmark would be known as the I-Fell Tower.
5. William Perkin's Mauve-lous Mistake
He had unwittingly discovered a way to produce mauve. The color was a smash hit, especially after Queen Victoria donned it for her daughterâs 1858 wedding.
I'm leaving this one here to illustrate that sometimes failures are actually successes in disguise. Not the parachute guy, obviously, though we learned from that, too.
7. The Cleveland Indians' 10-Cent Beer Night
In 1974, the Cleveland Indians tinkered with a new promotion to increase game attendanceâgiving fans the opportunity to purchase an unlimited amount of beer for 10 cents a cup, which wasn't the best idea.
Since the article won't do it, I will: 10 cents in 1974 is roughly equivalent to 65 cents in early 2025.
Which is about 1/10th of what they sometimes charge for good beer at a drafthouse, but I have no idea what they charge for watered-down swill "beer" at a ball game.
At any rate, I think it's pretty obvious why selling cheap beer in a stadium full of already hyped-up sports fans is a Bad Idea.
10. The New Ball
The basketball has been tweaked here and there over the years, but the modifications apparently went too far when the NBA experimented with a microfiber ball in 2006. âThe New Ball,â as it was commonly known, was cheaper to make and was supposed to have the feel of a broken-in basketball right from the start.
You know, I don't see why this even belongs on the list. Sure, it was an experiment of sorts. Sure, it failed. But no one died or even got seriously injured (the article notes cuts on some players' hands, but that's about it), and then they reverted back to the old basketball.
Feeling deflated, the NBA officially announced they were pulling the ball from play on December 11, 2006âless than three months after its debut in a game.
So I'm mostly including this one to show that I'm not the only one who makes terrible puns.
12. Wilhelm Reich's Cloudbusters
Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich managed to draw a straight line from human orgasms to the weather to alien invasion. Influenced by Sigmund Freudâs work on the human libido, Reich extended the concept to propose a kind of widespread energy he called orgone. To give you an idea of how scientifically sound Reichâs concept was, orgone has been compared to the Force in Star Wars.
And this one was less a failure of experiment than it was a failure of theory and critical thinking.
14. New Coke
April 23, 1985, was a day that will live in marketing infamy. And thatâs how Coke describes the failed experiment that was New Coke. On that day, the Coca-Cola Company debuted a new version of their popular soft drink made from a new and supposedly improved formula.
Ah, yes: the Great Coke Crisis of 1985, the year I switched to Dr. Pepper (because Pepsi tastes like ass, and RC Cola isn't as widely available as the Big Two colas) and didn't switch back again until around the turn of the century.
The message was received loud and clear. Coke announced the return of Old Coke in July, dubbing it Coca-Cola Classicâand they never experimented with the formula again.
And that's not completely true. They switched from sugar to HFCS, which some say is the exact same thing and others disagree, but regardless, it's a change in formula. I also think Diet Coke benefited from whatever they learned doing New Coke. Most importantly, though, they did muck about with the formula after that, but this time were smart enough to sell it separately instead of replacing the Real Thing. This eventually led to the development of Coke Zero, which is the greatest invention since the Skip Intro button.
Like I said, experiments often fail. If we're smart, we don't die of a heart attack in the process, and can actually learn and grow from the failures. Some of us even have the capacity to learn from the failures of others, though I think "jumping off the I-Fell tower using unproven and questionable gear" isn't something most of us have to be warned against. |
February 18, 2025 at 10:46am February 18, 2025 at 10:46am
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This article from Mental Floss comes to us from 2020. I doubt there have been any further notable events in the subject's history since then.
Despite the advanced age of the article, I only ran across it in the last week or so, during which time I completely forgot why I felt the article was important enough to feature here. Or maybe I saved it just to add further random chaos to the world, which is sometimes why I do things.
During the Seven Years War of the mid-1700s, a French army pharmacist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was captured by Prussian soldiers.
Ah, yes, back when there was Russia and P-Russia.
As a prisoner of war, he was forced to live on rations of potatoes.
Oh no. Clearly, this was before the Geneva Convention.
In mid-18th century France, this would practically qualify as cruel and unusual punishment: potatoes were thought of as feed for livestock, and they were believed to cause leprosy in humans.
This is coming from people whose national cuisine consists of ground-up pig asshole, snails, and frog legs.
The fear was so widespread that the French passed a law against them in 1748.
Pomme de Terre Prohibition!
But as Parmentier discovered in prison, potatoes werenât deadly. In fact, they were pretty tasty.
See, this is what I don't get, though I could probably look it up from a better source: raw potatoes are disgusting. And why would they take the time and resources to cook the things for prison chow?
The story of mashed potatoes takes 10,000 years and traverses the mountains of Peru and the Irish countryside; it features cameos from Thomas Jefferson and a food scientist who helped invent a ubiquitous snack food.
Hm. Maybe it was the Jefferson reference that made me save the link.
Potatoes arenât native to Irelandâor anywhere in Europe, for that matter.
Count on Mental Floss for helpful and vaguely racist information.
These early potatoes were very different from the potatoes we know today.
Yeah, for instance, they didn't come in a sleeve from McDonald's.
They were also slightly poisonous.
They're nightshades, like tomatoes, which Europeans also thought were poisonous.
To combat this toxicity, wild relatives of the llama would lick clay before eating them. The toxins in the potatoes would stick to the clay particles, allowing the animals to consume them safely. People in the Andes noticed this and started dunking their potatoes in a mixture of clay and waterânot the most appetizing gravy, perhaps, but an ingenious solution to their potato problem.
Oh... no, it was this bit. Yeah. That seems awfully specific, and a brief search didn't turn up any corroboration. Truth, or legend? I know I've often wondered about poisonous foods that got eaten anyway because the humans around them figured out how to neutralize the poisons. Pretty sure I've mentioned some of them in here before. How did they figure it out? Some by watching animals, I'm sure. Others? No clue. But during times of hardship, when easier food sources may not be available, I can totally see humans figuring this stuff out, because we're clever and hungry.
By the time Spanish explorers brought the first potatoes to Europe from South America in the 16th century, they had been bred into a fully edible plant.
That sentence glosses over quite a bit of savagery on the Spanish side.
So that's potatoes, and the article says quite a bit more about them. But it's supposed to be specifically about mashed potatoes.
In her 18th-century recipe book The Art of Cookery, English author Hannah Glasse instructed readers to boil potatoes, peel them, put them into a saucepan, and mash them well with milk, butter, and a little salt.
Whether she innovated the mashing part or someone else had figured it out, that seems to be when the true origin of the mashed potato begins.
In the United States, Mary Randolph published a recipe for mashed potatoes in her book, The Virginia Housewife, that called for half an ounce of butter and a tablespoon of milk for a pound of potatoes.
She was related by marriage to Jefferson. Was that the only connection?
But no country embraced the potato like Ireland.
And yet, they didn't invent vodka.
I'm skipping over a bit, here.
In the 1950s, researchers at what is today called the Eastern Regional Research Center, a United States Department of Agriculture facility outside of Philadelphia, developed a new method for dehydrating potatoes that led to potato flakes that could be quickly rehydrated at home. Soon after, modern instant mashed potatoes were born.
This is going to send crowds after me with tiki torches and pitchforks, but I like instant mashed potatoes.
Well, there's more at the article, including another really oblique reference to Jefferson. And if you search, you can probably find more information on YouTuber. |
February 17, 2025 at 9:09am February 17, 2025 at 9:09am
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I believe in coincidence.
That is, when two or more seemingly unrelated events appear to converge in a manner meaningful in some way to me or other humans, it's not because someone somehow steered the results, but because of pure coincidence. You know what would make me consider actually believing in the supernatural? If there were never any coincidences. Random chance will occasionally put two or more factors in close proximity, like when, occasionally, a cloud will cover the Sun and Moon during a total solar eclipse. (The eclipse itself is a giant cosmic coincidence, what with the Moon and Sun appearing to be about the same size in the sky.) If no coincidences happened, well, that would require a Vast Cosmic Intelligence to avoid them. Coincidences are simply the occasional ordinary workings of random numbers and/or chaos.
But sometimes, I'll run across a coincidence that stretches all credulity, that is so utterly appropriate as to make me gape in speechless awe at the sheer metaphysical metaphor (or metaphorical metafizz) of it all. Well, today's coincidence is not quite on that level, but almost. For complete background, first you have to know that my link queue is, as of this morning, 48 items long, and each of the 48 items have the same chance of being selected at random. A 1 in 48 chance, to be precise. So, roughly, today's article, from the BBC, being the only one in the queue on this subject, had only about a 2% probability of being selected today. And today is the day when I (unless I fall over dead before I get to it) reach a nice round number milestone 2000-day streak on Duolingo.
See the connection? It's only meaningful if one attaches significance to numbers with lots of zeros in them. But, let's be real here, most of us note such round numbers as special.
But enough about that. Time to take a look at the actual article.
I'm standing in line at my local bakery in Paris, apologising to an incredibly confused shopkeeper. He's just asked how many pastries I would like, and completely inadvertently, I responded in Mandarin instead of French.
Ah, the age-old tradition of the humblebrag.
I'm equally baffled: I'm a dominant English speaker, and haven't used Mandarin properly in years.
Pretty sure that's one language I know I'll never learn.
Multilinguals commonly juggle the languages they know with ease. But sometimes, accidental slip-ups can occur.
I want to be clear, here: I don't consider myself multilingual. I can understand a good bit of written French. Je peux écrire des mots en français. I can't pronounce it well enough to be understood, and I can't follow spoken French well enough to understand most of it. In other words, I'm not fluent. So, any communication in French, I have to translate to English in my head, then compose a sentence in English and translate it into French. In doing so, I make mistakes, English slips in, and it becomes a kind of creole that even my New Orleans-born father would have cringed at.
So I'm guessing that such mistakes become rarer as one gains fluency, but I don't know for sure.
Research into how multilingual people juggle more than one language in their minds is complex and sometimes counterintuitive.
I hope it's counterintuitive. That's one reason we do science: to rise above mere intuition and "common sense."
"From research we know that as a bilingual or multilingual, whenever you're speaking, both languages or all the languages that you know are activated," says Mathieu Declerck, a senior research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels.
I shouldn't make assumptions about people based on their names or where they're from, but I'll point out that the official languages of Belgium include Dutch, French, and German, and English is also widely used; when I was there, I saw signs and heard speech in all four languages (sometimes a sentence would switch easily between them), and more—though I'll be the first to admit that, on hearing them, I'm not sure I could reliably tell Dutch from German.
My point is only that if anyone can hold a claim to knowing about multilingualism, it would be Belgium. Or Switzerland. But I'm not visiting Switzerland; it's where my ex-wife lives.
Yes, I know it's a relatively large country; shut up.
"For example, when you want to say 'dog' as a French-English bilingual, not just 'dog' is activated, but also its translation equivalent, so 'chien' is also activated."
Those words also come from different sources. What I don't understand, and can't be arsed to look up now, is why Spanish, linguistically related to French, uses a completely different word, 'perro'.
Declerck himself is no stranger to accidentally mixing up languages. The Belgian native's impressive language repertoire includes Dutch, English, German and French.
And what did I just say? Yeah, sometimes assuming doesn't make an ass out of u and ming.
"The first part was in German and I'd step on a Belgian train where the second part was in French," he says. "And then when you pass Brussels, they change the language to Dutch, which is my native language. So in that span of like three hours, every time the conductor came over, I had to switch languages.
Which sounds impressive, but remember, I navigated the Belgian rail system while knowing maybe four Dutch words, and one of them is "clock." Okay, "klok." Train announcements are verbal, though.
The article moves on to describe some experiments that study this code-switching and its associated errors, and it's very interesting to me, but not a lot of point in quoting from it. Just one thing from the middle of that section:
"The brain is malleable and adaptable," says Kristina Kasparian, a writer, translator and consultant who studied neurolinguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. "When you're immersed in a second language, it does impact the way you perceive and process your native language."
What I need, after 2000 days on Duolingo (a streak, I'll reiterate, even longer than my current daily blogging streak), is to find a French speaker as a coach. I mean, I've needed to do that for some time. I couldn't do it in France, because, in general, French people have no patience for that merde.
Navigating such interference could perhaps be part of what makes it hard for an adult to learn a new language, especially if they've grown up monolingual.
And make no mistake: it is hard. Not impossible, as some claim; that I have had any success at all disproves that. But I'm sure I'd have learned French much faster in my youth, which was wasted learning Hebrew, Latin, and computer programming (all of which I've forgotten all but the very basics of) (pun intended).
Some studies have shown bilinguals perform better on executive control tasks, for example in activities when participants have to focus on counterintuitive information.
I have no idea if my language learning has helped with that.
Speaking multiple languages has also been linked to delayed onset of dementia symptoms.
I don't wish to die, but it would be preferable to dementia.
And of course, multilingualism brings many obvious benefits beyond the brain, not least the social benefit of being able to speak to many people.
These days, smartphones can assist with translation. I witnessed people using them in Europe. They're nowhere near perfect, but I'm sure they do in a pinch. Not only can you get verbal translations, but also text translations. All great technology, but no substitute for learning, in my opinion.
And so, I continue to learn. |
February 16, 2025 at 8:43am February 16, 2025 at 8:43am
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Back in November of 2019, as part of a round of 30 Day Blogging Challenge, I answered the call of a prompt ("Besides music, what are some of your favorite sounds?") with a loud silence: "Hush"
When I dig into the past on these weekly adventures, I try not to repeat myself. This one came up at random, today, and I got the feeling that I'd Revisited it before. But, searching around, I didn't find any evidence that I'd done that. Perhaps I'd simply come across this one in another search. When a blog spans 18 years (albeit with a long hiatus in there) and nearly three thousand entries, I suspect it would tax anyone's memory, and mine more than most.
As for the entry itself, it's short and contains no external quotes.
A while back, I vaguely recall, there was a 30DBC prompt that asked the old question: would you rather be deaf or blind? And I said something like, I despise 75% of all sounds, but the other 25% is music, and I wouldn't want to live without music.
While true, I do prefer to be able to hear.
If someone has the dedication to swing back and look at what I actually wrote, and finds that it's something different from that, and calls me on it, well, congratulations.
This is a universal bit of sarcasm. I don't doubt that I've contradicted myself before, or remembered different details.
I don't really mind the little sounds that accompany everyday existence: the hooting birds, the rustling leaves, that sort of thing, but I can't say they're my favorite sounds.
Bird chirping, especially, can really get on my nerves. At first, I thought Silent Spring was aspirational.
I've been known to reject potential romantic partners if they're the kind of people who leave the TV on all day for "background noise."
Seems like this is less an issue now, with more people doing deliberate streaming. I also have no problem with (most) music being used as background noise. At this point, though, and even back when I wrote this, I was done with the whole "romantic partner" nonsense.
Not to mention that a non-trivial reason why I never wanted kids is because children noises make me meshuggah.
It wasn't the deciding factor (that was, well, look around), but it was definitely on my list.
If I can't listen to music, I prefer silence, or as close to it as I can get.
Still true.
Not that I'd want to be deaf; not just because of music but because I like to have some advance warning that someone is trying to sneak up on me - less likely to have such warning if there were a lot of background noise.
No one's successfully snuck up on me in over 20 years, so this must be working.
So, between yesterday's prompt and today's, I suppose I've been outed as someone who prefers both silence and darkness.
Hello darkness, my old friend. |
February 15, 2025 at 10:23am February 15, 2025 at 10:23am
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This one, from Big Think, is one of those articles that expresses what I've been thinking about for a long time, but haven't found the words for.
I know something like this has been said before, but if you want someone to fly the airplane that you're in, you find a trained, licensed pilot, not someone who's read a book on birds and thus thinks they know all about flight.
All across the country, you can see how the seeds of it develop from a very young age. When children raise their hands in class because they know the answer, their classmates hurl the familiar insults of ânerd,â âgeek,â âdork,â or âknow-it-allâ at them.
And yet, people who know things like who lost the AFC championship in the 1989 American football season are valued.
Everyone's a nerd about something.
Itâs a version of the social effect known as tall poppy syndrome: where if someone dares to stand out, intellectually in this case, the response of the masses is to attempt to cut them down.
Human life, especially kid life, can be viewed as a tension between wanting to fit in and wanting to stand out.
Someone who knows more, is more successful, or who seems to be smarter than you is often seen as a threat, and so in order to prevent them from standing out too much (or surpassing too many others), we glorify ignorance as the de facto normal position.
I've said this before, too, but the truth is, ignorance is the default position. We all start out ignorant, and there's so much knowledge out there that we can't help but remain ignorant of all but a few things for our entire lives. But, in my view, what we should be glorifying is not the default position, but the desire to get just a little less ignorant.
And I should make this clear: ignorance isn't the same thing as willful ignorance.
Choosing to remain ignorant harms your development as a child, but leads to science illiteracy, which harms the entire world.
For instance, my limited knowledge of English tells me that there should have been a "not only" in that sentence. That, or change the conjunction from "but" to "and."
I get it. I make editing mistakes, too. I find them in previous blog entries, from time to time. There's probably some in here I didn't catch. But I always strive to do better.
There are so many remarkable things that weâââas a speciesâââhave figured out about existence.
I cannot argue with this, but there's much left to learn.
We know what life is: how to identify it, how it evolves, what the mechanisms and molecules are that underpin it, and how it came to survive and flourish here on Earth.
I could get picky about that assertion, and it's a prime example of what I just said. For example, while we have some really good hypotheses about how life started, we haven't quite figured that out to a high degree of certainty.
We know what reality is made of on a fundamental level, from the smallest subatomic particles to the nature of space and time that encompasses the entire Universe.
I'm not sure this is entirely correct. But, again, we know more now than we did even 100 years ago.
Our most valuable explorations of the world and Universe around us have been scientific ones: where we learn about reality by asking it the right questions about itself, and by listening to the answers that are revealed to us through experiment, observation, and careful measurement.
And, yes, sometimes it turns out the previous answers were wrong or incomplete, and get replaced by new answers. This is still a better system than the old one, which declared that something was so and brooked no argument or counterexamples. Those, it turns out, are almost always wrong.
Itâs impossible, in this day and age, for any single individual or entity to be an expert in all possible things.
I would go so far as to say that this has always been impossible, but now, we have a better understanding of just how impossible it is.
Even as a child, you know when the adults are lying to you, to themselves, and to everyone else in the room. As Mike Brock just wrote recently, itâs the âcapacity to think clearly about reality itselfâ that must be our most unbreakable trait as individuals, particularly when thereâs pressure â peer pressure, social pressure, political pressure, etc. â to surrender that capacity over to whatever some arbitrary authority figure says.
But here's at least part of the problem, as I see it:
Since I don't know everything, cannot know everything, I have to rely on experts and authorities in whatever subject. If I'm going to court, that would be an attorney. If I'm curious about the function of interatomic bonds in a solid, it would be a physicist. If I want to know who lost the AFC championship in the 1989 American football season, that would be a sports nerd. If I want the plane to fly, it would be a pilot.
So, some amount of trust is necessary. One way to know who to trust is by credentials, for which one also must trust the credentialing authority (if the pilot, for example, got their license from Bubba's Lurn 2 Flie in rural Nevada, no thanks, I'll walk).
Despite whatever your initial intuition might have been about an issue, you must always â every time you acquire new, valid information â re-evaluate your expectations in light of the new evidence. This is only a possibility if you can admit, to yourself, âI may have been wrong, and learning this new information is essential in getting it right in the end.â
The willfully ignorant don't take this approach. They're Right, always, and to admit that they weren't would mean others might think they're weak or wishy-washy. You see this all the time. I bet you can come up with at least one example right off the top of your head. (No, I don't mean me, though I do need to fight against this tendency like most people.)
Changing one's mind in the face of new evidence is true strength. Changing one's mind without substantial new evidence, now, I can see how that could be perceived as being flighty.
Thereâs a reason why admitting, âI was wrongâ is so difficult for so many of us, and why it is rarely an innate talent for humans to have, rather than a skill we must acquire. All of the solutions that require learning, incorporating new information, changing our minds, or re-evaluating our prior positions in the face of new evidence have something in common: they take effort.
Yes, well, at least it's not physical effort, so I can do these things and still admit I'm lazy.
Glorified underachieving, proclaiming falsehoods as truths, and the derision of actual knowledge are banes on our society. The world is made objectively worse by every anti-science element present within it.
This may seem like an assertion without evidence, hanging there in quote form as it is, but I think reading the actual article provides the logical framework to back it up.
Or, you know. I could be wrong.
The Doctor: Ignorance is⊠um, whatâs the opposite of bliss?
Clara: Carlisle?
The Doctor: Yes! Yes, ignorance is Carlisle.
(If you don't know why that's funny, you can look it up. Then it won't be funny anymore, but at least you'll know a bit more.) |
February 14, 2025 at 9:19am February 14, 2025 at 9:19am
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As regular readers know, sometimes, I like to delve deep and tackle the biggest, most important questions of existence.
Oh, well that explains it then. Have a great day!
...okay, fine, I'll go into details.
Often, when you see the name of a boat (or a ship, for that matter), the name of the vessel itself will be prefixed by a short set of letters.
One thing I'll always resent my father for is that, despite having been a sailor for over 30 years, he never bothered to explain to me the difference between a boat and a ship. Even now, after figuring out a lot about that distinction on my own, I'm still a little baffled. Even after reading the link at the link, which links to a link about the distinction, it's clearly not clear.
Some things are immutably carved into the granite of Fact, though: A ship can carry a boat while a boat cannot carry a ship; a submarine is always a boat; a boat that plies a river is always a boat, not a ship.
Also, apparently, even though they don't actually exist yet except in the most rudimentary form, interplanetary conveyances will be known as "ships."
There are so many different forms of these letters that you might think theyâre little more than a random license-plate style code number.
Well, no, because that's one aspect of my education my dad didn't neglect.
...and in civilian vessels, the most frequently encountered of these prefixes is probably SS.
Maybe because it's easy to slip an O in the middle?
SS dates back to the mid-1800s, when the Age of Sail came to an end and faster coal-powered ships became the norm. The shipbuilders of the day wanted a means of setting their modern vessels apart from the wind-powered ones of the past, and labeling each one SSâmeaning âsteamshipââdid the trick.
Not what I'd consider marketing, but okay.
As naval technologies continued to change, however, so too did peopleâs understanding of precisely what SS was intended to mean.
Because of course it did.
Not all vessels are civilian operated, of course. In the United States, all craft of the U.S. Navy are prefixed with the letters USS, standing for âUnited States Ship.â
As we all know, this convention will be carried into space on the USS Enterprise, only it won't be "United States Ship," but the more contrived "United Space [or Star] Ship," supposedly a reference to the United Federation of Planets.
So, there it is: the Big Question, answered. You're welcome. |
February 13, 2025 at 7:01am February 13, 2025 at 7:01am
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Kinda-sorta still technically a Full Moon this morning (not that I could see it last night through all the clouds), and then this NPR article comes up at random from my queue:
The Grand Canyon in Arizona got carved by water over millions of years of slow but steady erosion.
Or, if you believe bullshit, it got created that way about 6000 years ago, specifically to fool us.
Two similarly-sized canyons on the moon got carved by flying rocks in about ten minutes.
Also way more than 6000 years ago.
"This was a dramatic impact that was followed by a series of smaller impact events that excavated these canyons in, you know, roughly 10 minutes," says David Kring with the USRA Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
Translation: The Moon's shit got fucked up.
The two canyons, called Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck...
So, one of them may or may not actually exist, and the other is as small as it's possible to get?
If you don't know anything about the history of physics, just take my word for it: that's a really, really funny joke.
...are located on the far side of the moon...
Hm. Most far side features are named for Russians, because they were first mapped by a Soviet probe. I guess there are exceptions, and I'm too lazy to look to see if there are other exceptions.
...so they can only be seen from orbitânot from Earth.
As this is unclear, I'll jump in to say that they mean either lunar orbit, or an Earth orbit that's so far out that it takes you around the butt side of the moon.
Butt Side of the Moon is, by coincidence, the name of my Butthole Surfers style cover of Pink Floyd's greatest album.
Each canyon is over 165 miles long and over 1.5 miles deep.
Oh, so they're American canyons?
The canyons look like remarkably straight lines that extend outward from a circular crater that is the Schrödinger impact basin, the result of a large impact that occurred around 3.8 billion years ago.
Or maybe it didn't occur.
Look, Schrödinger jokes never get old. Unlike these canyons.
When the impactor hit the moon, it was moving at roughly 38,000 miles per hour, says Kring, and would have penetrated to a depth of about 15 miles.
And the impactor was also American, it seems.
The amount of energy needed to produce these grand canyons on the moon is 1200â2200 times larger than "the nuclear explosion energy once planned to excavate a second Panama Canal on Earth, more than 700 times larger than the total yield of US, USSR, and China's nuclear explosion tests, and about 130 times larger than the energy in the global inventory of nuclear weapons," the researchers write in their report.
How much is that in gridiron football fields? You know, since we're measuring everything else with American units.
Even though these particular lunar craters aren't visible from your backyard, Kring says there are similar, but smaller canyons on the near side of the moon that's visible in the night sky.
Might need binoculars or a telescope, but those are a bit cheaper than hitching a ride on the next lunar orbiter. |
February 12, 2025 at 10:01am February 12, 2025 at 10:01am
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Many of the articles I feature here are fairly old. This one, from Slate, isn't.
Todayâs the Day
Minor consumer holidays donât just appear out of nowhere. Thereâs a method to the madnessâand itâs juicier than youâd think.
I find these made-up "days" amusing. I like to use them when I do prompts for "Invalid Item" , though I normally use a different calendar. Just to be clear, I don't take them seriously, and recognize that they're mostly marketing gimmicks. As pretty much everything these days is a marketing gimmick, I see no inherent problem with this.
Where, exactly, did National Bagel Day come from?
I'm guessing: manufacturers and/or distributors of delicious bagels.
Who decided that it must be held annually on Jan. 15?
Same guess.
And how on earth am I supposed to celebrate?
By eating a bagel. Are you being deliberately dense, like a proper bagel?
My work schedule provides me with 13 days off in observance of everything from Presidents Day to Christmas, but if we are to trust the internet, then Iâm clearly getting ripped off.
Wait, some writers get days off?
Other empty spaces on the calendar are filled with even more esoteric celebrations: Jan. 16, if you didnât know, is National Nothing Day. May 9 is the eternally solemn National Lost Sock Memorial Day. And I hope youâre already practicing your iambic pentameter, because April 23 is National Talk Like Shakespeare Day.
As we shouldst all beest acknown, shakespeare's birthday wast april 23.
(I got that from the even more amusing English to Shakespearean translator. )
(The date is a guess based on baptismal records and because it rounds the Bard's life with an awful symmetry, as he also died on an April 23. Though both of those would have been Julian calendar dates, and... whatever, I'm getting off track here.)
The National Day Calendar website functions like one of those old-fashioned daily tear-off calendarsâthe ones brimming with Far Side panels or horoscope readingsâbringing flavor to otherwise colorless Tuesdays and Thursdays. How does one find purpose in a marginal existence? Perhaps, argues the company, by respecting the tenets of National Hot Buttered Rum Day, National Thesaurus Day, and National Hugging Day.
I went looking for another name for National Thesaurus Day recently, but couldn't find one.
There is a method to the madness, and a distinct curator of a January 15 filled with bagels, kombucha, and strawberry ice cream. His name is Marlo Anderson. Heâs 62, and he describes himself as a âserial entrepreneur.â
Which I imagine is kind of like being a serial monogamist, only less expensive.
Incredibly, people do actually celebrate these things sometimes. Many of the holidays are essentially leveraged for short-term marketing ploys: For National Bagel Day, Einstein Bros. handed out a free egg sandwich to anyone already subscribed to the chainâs rewards program, while Wolfermanâs Bakery offered a 15 percent discount code.
As much as I hate ads in general, I can't fault this. Hell, you should see me on National Beer Day. Scratch that; you definitely should not. There are actually several Beer Days, and also days for other delicious fermented and/or distilled adult beverages. Those days are also known as "excuses, as if I need them."
The article also goes on to describe one of Anderson's competitors, someone named... Alderson. After that point, I stopped paying a lot of attention, because the names are too similar and I get confused easily in the morning.
Alongside the National Day Calendarâs TV show and vast online emporium, Anderson also collects revenue by occasionally partnering with a client to invent a brand-new holiday, out of whole cloth, without any of the historical precedent he usually relies on when creating his schedule. These deals are disclosed transparently on the National Day Calendar website, and they function like a glorified advertisement. Case in point: I am writing this story on National Hyaluronic Acid Day, a holiday that was created in 2022 and is sponsored by the skin care brand La Roche-Posay. Rolls off the tongue, right? National Hyaluronic Acid Day. If you arenât connecting the dots, hyaluronic acid is a substance found in a lot of moisturizing products.
Again, though I despise ads, I can't really find fault with this. As the article says, they're transparent about it, unlike, say, certain click-bait sites or news outlets that write "stories" that are actually ads without telling us.
More at the link, so you can judge for yourself. Me, I like the Japanese version of these silly days: their language is, from what I've heard, even more amenable to puns than English is, and their "holidays" reflect this. I'm sure I've mentioned these before. Here's a link to some details, which I have to take their word(s) for because my knowledge of Japanese is severely limited. |
February 11, 2025 at 9:05am February 11, 2025 at 9:05am
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In recent decades, these slender "pencil towers" have been popping up all over NYC. As an engineer, I appreciate the science that goes into being able to build them. As a human with working eyes, I don't like them. And then this happens, as reported in The New Yorker:
Well, from what I've heard, no one actually lives in those things. The units are bought up by foreign investors and traded amongst billionaires like beanie babies or bitcoin. I could, however, be misinformed.
But that's really irrelevant. The important thing is that one of them is falling over, and it makes me laugh.
That is, after you wade through the first few paragraphs, which solidly adhere to The New Yorker School Of Not Getting To The Fucking Point.
âThe slab edges on the north side of the building are misaligned by up to 8 inches,â the developer disclosed. 1 Seaport was six hundred and seventy feet tall, and leaning.
And I find that hilarious.
The article further meanders into other examples of leaning towers, accidental and deliberate.
An ideal site for a skyscraper is above strong, flat bedrock that is relatively close to the surface, about fifty feet underground. The bedrock below much of midtown is at that depth.
I like to think that you can look at the Manhattan skyline (from the west or east, anyway), and you can tell exactly what sections have solid bedrock.
161 Maiden Lane is not such a site. The Dutch, who laid out Maiden Lane in the seventeenth century, were the first to use âinfillââsand, stones, trash, whatever was handyâto expand the contours of Manhattan.
And the problem reveals itself. I think this is similar to the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, which, as I understand it, was not only built on loose rock, but exists in an earthquake zone.
Later, local officials sold âwater lots,â or parcels of land submerged below the East River or the Hudson River, on which developers could dump infill themselves.
Ha ha ha oh boy.
First, twenty-four feet of Colonial-era infill, composed of gravel, silt, concrete, steel, bricks, and chunks of old shipwrecks and docks. Below that, pancaked former marshland. Below that, sandy deposits left by glaciers thousands of years ago, and a layer of decomposed rock.
And yet, they built.
The Fortis Property Group, for reasons that remain the subject of multiple overlapping and complex civil litigations, opted for a different kind of foundation, less often used in Manhattan high-rise construction, called âsoil improvement,â which involves injecting concrete into the ground to firm it up. The process promised to save the company six million dollars, but it came with some risks. An engineering consultant named Robert Alperstein produced a nearly hundred-page report that warned Fortis that the method could lead to âdifferential settlements.â In other words, the structure might lean.
Aw, what does the licensed and experienced engineer know? We could SAVE MONEY if we do it this way.
To build 1 Seaport, Fortis hired Pizzarotti, a renowned Italian construction firm that was trying to break into the New York City high-rise market, as the construction manager. Pizzarotti in turn hired a local company called SSC High Rise to build the towerâs concrete superstructure. The job site was troubled from the start.
Hence this entry's title: a pun I couldn't refuse.
Rather than pausing to fix what had already been done, an attempt was made to straighten the thing out in midair. To compensate for the lean, higher floors were intentionally poured out of alignment, in the opposite direction.
Because that never leads to problems.
This compounded the problem. âWhat happened was, as the building went up, the parties tried to pull it back and it kind of counterweighted,â a lawyer representing Pizzarotti later explained to a judge. âYour Honor,â the lawyer said, âitâs shaped like a banana right now.â
Oh, wait, I meant to say that always leads to problems.
The tower has continued to sulk over the waterfront, more a ruin than a construction site, its grim façade visible from the Brooklyn Bridge, the Wall Street heliport, and even from the N.Y.P.D.âs headquarters, nearly a mile away.
I'm not sure why they put the NYPD in there, except maybe to lend a tone of "this was some illegal shit" to the article.
As usual, there's more at the link—quite a lot more, since this is TNY, and not all of it truly relevant—so it's there if you're interested. I know that this may be kind of a niche thing for me, as an engineer with an architect cousin who works in NYC, which I visit almost every year. But while not nearly as good as The Guardian's superb takedown of the architectural monstrosity on the other side of Manhattan, I found this highly entertaining. Well, except for the one guy's death. That wasn't funny. Everything else, though... |
February 10, 2025 at 7:55am February 10, 2025 at 7:55am
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Logos are kind of the corporate equivalent of a book's cover art, so writers might be interested in this sort of thing from Fast Company:
Calling something "worst" or "best" is, at best, hyperbole. But we shouldn't just brush off the ideas here.
Every time I see the Sherwin-Williams logo, my brain briefly and hopelessly breaks.
I have a very clear memory of myself as a very young kid, seeing that logo for possibly the first time, and thinking, "What? That's not how gravity works!" So my mental break was based on the clear violation of the immutable laws of physics, not the questionable violation of the ever-shifting laws of graphic design.
And like any good intoxicant, I enjoy it. Because it is, hands-down, one of the worst logos in all of existenceâbut also one of the all-time greats.
Speaking of marketing, please take note: that quote hedges with "one of the..." before the superlatives. It does not claim that it is somehow objectively the worst or the best. The sentence is clearly both opinion (that of the author) and allowing for reasonable people to argue that, no, there might be a worse logo or a better logo. This is in stark contrast with the headline—you know, the marketing part of the article—which declares with no uncertainty that it's both "worst" and "best," absolute, no nuance, no argument possible.
For the uninitiatedâand thereâs no delicate way to put thisâthe Sherwin-Williams logo features a moon-size bucket seemingly drowning the Earth with a quadrillion gallons of *blood-red* paint, wholly saturating it to the point where its runoff is in nation-size droplets.
1) the paint can looks to me to be bigger than the Moon at that scale, but okay, maybe they meant "moon" in generic terms.
2) I'd like to do the calculations to see if you'd really need a quadrillion gallons to literally cover the Earth, but I can't be arsed.
3) Nations vary wildly in size, so calling something "nation-size" doesn't mean much.
These things matter more to me than marketing fouls.
And yet, you may be wondering, as I do every time I peruse a hardware store: How in the name of God is that still the companyâs logo?!
Well, no, I find it comforting that some things don't change.
And maybe we should celebrate that an anachronism as bold and bizarre still exists (not unlike my other favorite dinosaur-of-a-logo, the, um, Sinclair dinosaur).
The problem with the Sinclair dinosaur is that it reinforced the false idea that crude oil came from dinosaurs. I suppose it's possible that the SWP logo warped some peoples' understanding of gravity, but I don't think that falsehood is nearly as widespread as "oil is dead dinosaurs" myth.
There's a bit more at the link, including a brief history of SWP and its logo, and even more pics of the logo in question (the one I linked earlier is from a different site). I think it paints an interesting picture. |
February 9, 2025 at 9:24am February 9, 2025 at 9:24am
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Today's the day I usually dig into the past to unearth an old entry at random. Today, we'll take another look at a short entry I did during an ill-fated 2021 summer road trip: "Bloomington"
Anyway, I mean the one in Illinois, not the one in Indiana.
I wasn't even as clear as I could have been. The Bloomington in Indiana may be more well-known than others, but it's still probably not very famous. I almost went there for the 2024 solar eclipse, because I noticed that the path of totality passed right through the Indiana town. We ended up not far from there, though.
But, again, the entry I linked up there was about the next state over.
Hey, at least it's not Springfield. Then it could be any state. Sometimes I think it would be fun to visit every Springfield in the country...
It would be even more fun to try to find the shortest route that visits every Springfield. From what I understand, an algorithm to do something like that is a difficult computer problem.
Point is, it's extraordinarily rare that whatever they've named the place after is still there today.
Upon reflection, I shouldn't have said "extraordinarily rare." That was hyperbole at best, and misleading at worst. I do like looking into the origins of place names (as I did in that entry for Bloomington), much as I enjoy looking into etymology. But I shouldn't take wild guesses at the rarity of that sort of thing; I don't have enough data.
In any case, since it was a travel update, the entry was short and really only notable for the link that, if followed, will lead to a rare photo with me in it. |
February 8, 2025 at 9:21am February 8, 2025 at 9:21am
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This SciAm opinion piece from last summer supports the idea that words (including names) have power and should be chosen carefully.
For full disclosure, I'm personally acquainted with the author.
To summarize the opening, the James Webb telescope (you know, the one out in space that's been taking pictures of the farthest reaches of the observable universe) was named after a controversial figure, and who wasn't even a scientist or astronaut.
For these and many other reasons, a large contingent of astronomers, including myself, prefer not to use the telescopeâs official name and instead refer to it by its initials, JWST.
For similar reasons, I continue to call the airport across the river from DC "National Airport."
The observatory is the most visible example of this naming issue when it comes to science; the fight over statues of Confederate figures and buildings and roads named after such individuals is probably the most well known among the public.
While this article isn't even a year old, it seems to me that this particular controversy has faded already. We have short attention spans here.
For example, astronomers have a lot of nicknames we use for cosmic objects. Thatâs not surprising; âthe Whirlpool galaxyâ is a lot easier to remember than NGC 5194, its more official catalog name.
It's true that I can't remember official catalog names for most astronomical objects. To be fair, there are quite a few astronomical objects.
Not all names are so benign. NGC 2392 is a gaseous nebula, a favorite of amateur astronomers for its brightness and location on the sky, which make it easy to find. For decades, though, it was known as the Eskimo nebula, a term that is considered offensive by many Indigenous people in Canada and Greenland.
Because of this, at some point, they tried to rename it to the Clown Face Nebula, which, for whatever reason, some people still found offensive. To whom? Clowns?
It's also known as the Lion Nebula, but to the best of my knowledge, no African feline monarchs have come forward to claim offense.
Another example is a popular piece of astronomical software used to extract sources from an image. It was given the unfortunate name SExtractor. That should be pronounced âEss Extractor,â but I donât think itâs too much a stretch to see where the problem lies.
Okay, that's genuinely funny. And it's not even as perverted as the popular image of a business called Kids Exchange, the problem with which should be obvious when removing the space and capitalizing all the letters.
Unfortunately, this is one of those times when an article has been hanging around in my queue long enough for it to lose relevance, which it did last month. I mean, I agree with Phil here, don't get me wrong. It's just that, officially, we don't do "inclusivity" or "diversity" or "concern about someone taking offense" anymore. |
February 7, 2025 at 9:51am February 7, 2025 at 9:51am
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Here's a Vox article about Down Under. No, not Australia. The other Down Under.
I'll try to make that the only arse joke in this entry. I'll fail.
Itâs a truism that everythingâs bigger in America â just look at the cars and houses.
And people.
But perhaps nowhere is the virtue of bigger is better more bizarrely apparent than how toilet paper is sold.
Oh, I don't know. Have you seen the latest Ford pickups? That's relevant because both are designed for assholes.
A pack of 18 mega toilet paper rolls, for example, magically transforms into 90 âregularâ ones. The labeling emphasizes this greater number in large font, lest you foolishly think 18 simply equals 18. Another pack might insist that 12 even-thicker rolls of toilet paper are the equivalent of 96 normal rolls.
Basic marketing: change what "normal" is, then compare everything else to the new normal.
Americansâ enormous vehicles and palatial abodes may in fact exist in service of conveying and storing gigantic bulk packs of this bathroom essential.
Suddenly, everything makes more sense. Still not a lot. But more.
Thereâs some irony, then, that for all the trumpeting of gargantuan sizes, toilet paper rolls are generally getting smaller. Itâs a key example of the trend of manufacturers charging the same price (or even slightly more) for less product thatâs been dubbed âshrinkflation.â
Stop.
It makes it more difficult than ever to figure out if youâre getting ripped off.
Eh, not really. Are you buying something in the US? Then you're getting ripped off.
With dubious numerical claims about how much a âmegaâ roll is really worth, brands can promote the perception of value without actually having to show their work.
It's worse than that.
I get my bumwad from one or two sources: the local grocery store, or Amazon (I don't want to hear it). Either way, the company presents a truly dizzying array of options, from 4-packs to giant, bulky megapacks, and of course from myriad different suppliers.
A long time ago, grocery stores, in a rare consumer-aiding move, instituted unit prices. Like, they'll put the price of the package in big numbers, but if you look closely, you'll see a price per unit. This could be price per pound, per ounce (this is the US, after all), or, in the case of loo roll, usually per 100 sheets. It makes comparison shopping easier if you can see that one package offers a lower per-unit cost than a different package of the same product; less math is involved.
But lately, I've been seeing inconsistencies in the unit pricing for several items, including buttwipe. Sometimes, it's price per sheet. Usually, it's price per 100 sheets. But sometimes, the unit price has magically disappeared (also, sheet sizes can vary between manufacturers). Or maybe they give it in price per ounce, which makes no sense at all.
This makes comparison shopping nearly impossible without a calculator. I mean, sure, I can do most simple math in my head, but that doesn't mean I can be arsed when I just want to get the shopping over with.
Unsurprisingly, the so-called standard size has no consistency, either. Charminâs regular roll has 55 two-ply sheets, for example, but itâs often hard to even find the regular size of a brandâs toilet paper in stores.
And that's the other problem: "standard" has lost meaning.
The sheets-per-roll ratio is also subject to change depending on whether youâre looking at single-ply, two-ply, or three-ply.
Honestly, I didn't even know they made three-ply.
Itâs no wonder people have taken matters into their own hands.
I feel like that could have been a butt joke.
The cost of making toilet paper may have gone up in recent years, according to the Los Angeles Times, due to a slowdown in lumber production (thereâs less available wood pulp, which is what most toilet paper is made of).
You'd think they could make "bathroom tissue" (possibly the stupidest euphemism ever) out of recycled paper, but I don't know.
Itâs something meant to be quickly disposed of, literally flushed away, yet commercials for toilet paper are almost always focusing on its delightful, cushiony softness or a special âquiltedâ or âdiamond weaveâ texture that adds a premium feel to the product.
This. This is one reason I avoid commercials like the cliché.
One could switch to commercial-grade toilet paper, which is much cheaper but is of (ahem) crappier quality.
Ah! There it is!
In any case, the article (which I've resisted the urge to call crack reporting until just now) waits until the end (pun absolutely intended) to propose the optimal solution for wiping away all this confusion: a bidet. |
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At my job, we only sold a cheap house wine for white zin, and when people ordered it I had to try to restrain my facial muscles from giving stank face. 
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