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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.
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October 31, 2020 at 4:04am October 31, 2020 at 4:04am
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I can't be arsed to riff off a link today. For the first time since March, I'm away from home and staying in a way-too-expensive hotel from whose window I can see a sliver of the Potomac. Also, the vending machine doesn't work.
At least the restaurant was good and had patio heaters for outdoor seating. They had scotch. Yes, I'm just now waking up from passing out from drinking almost enough scotch.
While I'm complaining about lodging (which, really, I shouldn't be, because I should just feel lucky that I finally get a small change of scenery, but in my condition I just want to complain about everything, including the fact that I continue to see today's full moon referred to as a "Blue Moon," which is WRONG), can I just say that if I spend the money to stay at something just a bit fancier than a Super 8, could they possibly put goddamned tea in the room? I don't even need the fancy artisan stuff. Hell, right now I'd settle for shitty-ass Lipton. Not everyone is a coffee drinker, but coffee drinkers get free coffee, and what do I get? I get having to put on my pants and a mask, trudge down to the lobby (because the vending machine is broken) and buy a way-too-expensive Coke Zero to get my needed caffeine to offset my incipient hangover.
Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to remember to bring my room key. One loses one's travel habits after seven months of moping about at home.
Later this morning comes the whole purpose of my travel, which is an hour and a half walking tour of Alexandria with a focus on the city's history of brewing. You'd never know it these days, though, since right now the nearest brewery is four miles away, and while it's big enough that I've had their beers before, I'd never visited Port City Brewing Company. Apparently, at Port City, they reserve the patio heaters for groups, and us lone wanderers have to huddle alone in the frigid shade. Worse, they're not even doing tasting flights, and you have to use a crappy smartphone app to order. How am I supposed to enjoy their full range of beers if I have to order them one at a time and not ask the bartender about them?
Anyway, I'm going to try to get a bit more sleep, but I didn't want to break my blogging streak, so here it is. And here's a link for you to laugh at: https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/food/people-who-pronounce-it-pan-au-shock-oh... |
October 30, 2020 at 12:14am October 30, 2020 at 12:14am
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Do you want to live forever?
Well, a million years isn't forever. Not even close. Not even in the same ballpark. Not even the same sport.
Recently, scientists discovered bacteria that had been buried beneath the ocean floor for more than a hundred million years and was still alive.
This sounds like openers on a really bad horror novel.
What would change if we could live for even just a million years? Two thoughts immediately come to mind. First, tenure in academia would have to be capped.
Oh, sure, the first thing I think of is academic tenure. Sure. Don't tell me, let me guess. "Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University."
Quelle surprise.
Second, a birthday cake cannot hold a million candles.
And sure, that's the second thing I'd think of, too. Uh huh.
With advances in bioscience and technology, one can imagine a post-COVID-19 future when most diseases are cured and our life span will increase substantially.
Science fiction has imagined such things for at least as long as I've been alive, which is not even an eyeblink compared to a million years.
Given the luxury of pursuing longer-term plans, we could accomplish more ambitious tasks. We could decide to care more about our planetary environment and interpersonal cooperation, since pollution or hostilities carry long-term dangers.
Nah. We'd just find ways to make sex kinkier.
But even with shrewd strategies, survival is by no means guaranteed. For example, the known correlation between brain size and body weight did not make dinosaurs smart enough to deflect the asteroid that killed them.
That's... what? Loeb is an astronomer, not a biologist, and I'm neither, but while brain size may or may not be statistically correlated with body weight, it doesn't seem to be correlated with those qualities that we deem "intelligence." Octopuses are intelligent, though not technological, and don't even have the same kind of brain that we do. Or that dolphins do.
Increasing our fertility period in proportion to our life span will bring the risk of overpopulating Earth.
Do you want to tell him, or should I?
Alternatively, travel ports could launch people into space to balance the birth rate and maintain a terrestrial population suitable for the available supply of food and energy.
More science fiction. First, we have to find places for them to live, and we still haven't found such places. It's entirely possible that we could create them, but that's science fiction right now, too. (I'm not ragging on SF. I love SF. But I have some idea about what's plausible and what isn't.)
The good news is that over a lifetime as long as a million years, space travel can take us to the nearest stars using existing chemical rockets. It would take merely 100,000 years to arrive at the habitable planet around Proxima Centauri with a space vehicle that travels at the speed of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.
First off, habitable? Perhaps he knows something I don't; after all, like I said, his specialty is astronomy. Last I heard, there is indeed a planet (or possibly a number of planets) in the presumed habitable zone around PC, but merely being in a habitable zone of a star doesn't make a planet habitable by humans, or give it compatible biology if there is life there, which is still an open question. Venus and Mars are both technically in the Sun's habitable zone, and they'd require massive terraforming efforts.
Second, the logisitical hurdles involved in crafting a livable spaceship that will last 100K years, or even 50K or 10K (assuming we could increase the speed, which isn't out of the question), are formidable. Could we overcome them? Probably. Would you like to live inside a spinning spaceship for thousands of years? I wouldn't. All this changes if we manage to invent warp drive, of course.
And the passengers will have to maintain a stable mindset for their journey’s goal and not lose faith, like a fisherman who, after a long hiatus without finding any fish, asks whether “the real purpose of fishing is catching fish.”
Third, if I spend 100,000 years on a massive, self-contained, self-sustaining spaceship, I'd be sorely tempted to stay there rather than risking the unknowns of a planet that may or may not be compatible with human life.
What does a mature technological civilization look like after such a long time? Can it survive the destructive forces that its technologies unleash? One way to find out is to search for technosignatures of alien civilizations, dead or alive. Inevitably, all forms of life eventually disappear. The universe cools as it expands, and all stars will die 10 trillion years from now. In the distant future, everything will freeze; there will be no energy left to support life.
Bypassing the discussion of the possibility of finding technologically sophisticated alien life -- I've harped on that nonsense before -- even if we find some, there's absolutely no guarantee that it will illuminate our own path. Alien life is, by definition, alien, not large men in forehead prosthetics growling at each other in Klingon.
In principle, one could imagine a life that lasts a billion years, during which stars turn on and off in the sky just like light bulbs. Against the backdrop of that long-term perspective, our current concerns about the world would seem as naive as the first thought in the head of a newborn baby.
Would our sense of time continue to alter? A year in your 50s is noticeably shorter than a year in your teens. This says nothing profound about time itself; it's either a result of a year being a proportionally shorter fraction of one's lived life, or related to the idea that new experiences tend to stretch our perception of time and we have fewer new experiences as we get older. Or a bit of both. Either way, it's not like we'd probably experience a day during one's 100,000th year of life as we experience a minute now.
In any case, this is all pure speculation -- which, don't mistake me, is a good thing. Consider the most common causes of death  here in the US:
Heart disease: 655,381
Cancer: 599,274
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 167,127
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 159,486
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 147,810
Alzheimer’s disease: 122,019
Diabetes: 84,946
Influenza and pneumonia: 59,120
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 51,386
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 48,344
In the past, this list would have been different. Childbirth might have been on it, for example. Or measles or something. We've reduced the impact of those things, letting us live long enough so that heart disease and cancer could climb to the top spots.
So, say we somehow eliminate heart disease, preferably without forcing everyone to adopt a plant-based diet and never smoke. Then you have cancer in the top spot. Okay, we've made great strides against cancer, and I can believe that if we last long enough as a society, we might be able to do something about it.
That might put "accidents" as the leading cause of death. And I don't see how to fully eliminate those, not without taking away some of the things that make life worth living. Driving, to name one common cause of accidental death. We each have a 1/100 chance, or thereabouts , of dying as a result of an automobile accident over the course of our current lifespan. Sure, that's lower than it used to be, and could probably go lower, but the only way to eliminate it entirely is to ban cars (self-driving cars might increase those odds, but no transportation system is perfectly safe). Point being, and I can't be arsed to do the probabilistic calculation here, but all else being equal, people living in a hypothetical world free of disease have a really fucking slim chance of making it to 1000, let alone 1,000,000.
Of course, all else would not be equal, but the point is there's no way to avoid death from accident entirely. Hell, people have died stepping out of the shower at home, or falling down stairs, so even staying home has its risks -- risks that are cumulative year over year, making it extraordinarily unlikely that, even having eliminated disease, anyone would make it to a million years old.
Oh, sure, one can imagine technologies that mitigate those risks. But attempting to eliminate them entirely reaches a point of diminishing returns.
So while these things are fun to think about, let's not take the ideas too seriously. We're a little more complex than bacteria. |
October 29, 2020 at 12:02am October 29, 2020 at 12:02am
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Science is still surprising us. This is a good thing.
Though, actually, it shouldn't be that surprising, since it was only 100 years ago that someone had the idea that maybe the sun (like other stars) generates its power through the process of nuclear fusion. That was only an idea at the time, but it turned out to be -- probably -- the right one. Point is, 100 years isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, and we should still be figuring stuff out.
A decade’s worth of telescope observations of the sun have revealed a startling mystery: Gamma rays, the highest frequency waves of light, radiate from our nearest star seven times more abundantly than expected.
Just don't tell Marvel Studios, or they'll reboot Fantastic Four again.
The surplus light, the gap in the spectrum, and other surprises about the solar gamma-ray signal potentially point to unknown features of the sun’s magnetic field, or more exotic physics.
Again, this is a good thing. Oh, not for astronauts, obviously; gamma rays suck. My understanding is that our atmosphere and magnetic field generally keep the gamma rays from wreaking havoc here on Earth, but once you get beyond Low Earth Orbit, you don't want them zipping through your body. No, you won't turn into the Hulk; you'll just die horribly. But for scientists, hell, here's some potentially new physics to explore.
“It’s amazing that we were so spectacularly wrong about something we should understand really well: the sun,” said Brian Fields, a particle astrophysicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
And why, exactly, is it that we "should" understand the sun really well? I mean, that's why we point instruments at the accursed thing. Because we don't understand it as well as we could.
Not only is the gamma-ray signal far stronger than a decades-old theory predicts; it also extends to much higher frequencies than predicted, and it inexplicably varies across the face of the sun and throughout the 11-year solar cycle.
I mean, sure, we have lots of evidence to suggest that sunshine is ultimately caused by the fusion of hydrogen to helium, a process that releases a metric shitton of energy. That's easy enough to understand. It's the details, and how the energy transfers from the core of the sun to its surface, and what happens above the surface, that we're still working on.
And Seckel, Stanev and Gaisser’s model said nothing about any dip. According to Seckel, it’s difficult to imagine how you would end up with a deep, narrow dip in the gamma-ray spectrum by starting with cosmic rays, which have a smooth spectrum of energies. It’s hard to get dips in general, he said: “It’s much easier to get bumps than dips. If I have something that comes out of the sun, OK, that’s an extra channel. How do I make a negative channel out of that?”
Well, that sounds like an absorption spectrum to me. But I find it highly unlikely that they didn't consider that possibility. Still, you'd think the article would at least mention it, if only to rule it out for nerds like me.
Besides, what exactly is doing the absorbing?
They’ve long suspected that the sun’s core might harbor dark matter — and that the dark matter particles, after being drawn in and trapped by gravity, might be dense enough there to annihilate each other. But how could gamma rays produced by annihilating dark matter in the core avoid scattering before escaping the sun? Attempts to link the gamma-ray signal to dark matter “seem like a Rube Goldberg-type thing,” Seckel said.
I'd imagine that this is because we don't know what dark matter really is. That's why it's called "dark matter" and not "stuff we understand."
I've been saying for a while now that the whole dark matter and dark energy thing reads like the luminiferous ether that was proposed as an interstellar medium before Einstein et al. showed that entirely new physics was involved. Not in the details, of course, but that it's a placeholder for, again, "stuff we don't understand."
The sun is the most extensively studied star, yet its magnetic field — generated by the churning maelstrom of charged particles inside it — remains poorly understood, leaving us with a blurry picture of how stars operate.
I would hope it was the most extensively studied star. It's not like we can go haring off to study other stars up close. Yet. But it's also notoriously difficult to study. Want to know what Mars is made of? Send a robot with sampling tools. Want to know what the moon is made of? Send astronauts, bring crackers and wine. Want to know what the sun is made of? Don't get too close. Figure it out from out here where our instruments won't melt. Much.
A solar panel malfunction kept the Fermi Telescope mostly pointed away from the sun for the last year...
Irony, thy name is Science.
Scientists are also eager to see whether the spatial pattern of gamma rays changes relative to 11 years ago, since cosmic rays remain positively charged but the sun’s north and south poles have reversed.
Misleading, thy name is Science Reporting. Of course cosmic rays are positively charged; they're basically protons moving at relativistic speeds. While electricity and magnetism are of course related, the charge on a hydrogen ion (proton) is independent of the direction of a magnetic field.
Since NASA is publicly funded, “anybody can download it if they want to glance through,” said Linden, who downloads Fermi’s new data almost every day.
No, thanks. I'll rely on science reporting, with all of its flaws. I'm smart but I'm not that smart.
“The worst that can happen here is that we find out that the sun is stranger and more beautiful than we ever imagined,” Beacom said. “And the best that could happen is we discover some kind of new physics.”
Oh, I can think of much worse things that could happen "Sorry, guys, the sun's going to blow up in 10 years instead of 5 billion. Our bad."
But no, I find that unlikely in the extreme. It's exciting to learn new stuff, especially about the thing that, I reluctantly admit, enables life to thrive on Earth.
I suppose I should explain the title of this entry for any younger readers...
Blinded by the light
Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun
Woah, but mama that's where the fun is
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October 28, 2020 at 12:10am October 28, 2020 at 12:10am
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This article is more than two years old now, but nothing's really changed about its subject matter (even as everything else has).
I'm linking this because there is a great deal of false, including dangerously false, information out there on the subject.
As a side note, this one's only going to be applicable to US readers. I have no idea how other countries do this sort of thing.
Your credit score—the three-digit number that creditors use to evaluate the risk when they lend you money—helps determine which loans or interest rates you qualify for and how much you’ll pay. Landlords, utilities and cell-phone companies may also check your score before doing business with you.
This may seem unfair, but it's a much fairer system than "Sure, I'll lend you money; you look like a fine, upstanding white man."
Both grade your creditworthiness on a scale of 300 to 850, with a score of 750 or above generally considered good enough to qualify for the best rates.
One thing that all of these scores have in common is that they don't share their exact methodology used for calculation. Still, there are some things that we know, and this article goes into them.
On-time payments. Both FICO and VantageScore prize on-time payments above any other factor. As long as you pay at least the minimum due each month, your payment history will stay clean (though you will rack up interest on your balance).
The best way to handle revolving credit is to pay off the entire balance every month -- effectively, use it as a debit card. Some people don't have the discipline for this, though, and that's something that it's good to know about yourself. One falsehood I heard is that you *have* to carry a balance; this is utter tripe.
Every credit card I know provides a grace period before charging interest. A balance that is paid off in full, on time, shows up as credit use on the reports, because the scoring people check it at some interval. You can make a charge on, say, November 1, which doesn't show up on the statement until November 20, and that statement is due on, say, December 15 -- effectively an interest-free loan for a month and a half.
Miss a payment, though, and you're in danger of lowering your credit score -- not to mention incurring penalty interest charges, which are usurious. Pay only the minimum payment on time, and there's no effect on the score, but then you start incurring regular interest charges, which are usually just shy of usurious.
But in a pinch, at least make the minimum payment if you care about your credit score.
Limits on your credit usage. Your credit utilization ratio is the amount you owe on your credit cards as a proportion of the total limit on each card, as well as the total limit for all of your cards in aggregate. VantageScore advises consumers to keep their utilization ratios below 30%, but “the lower the better,” says Barry Paperno...
Now, I'm not 100% sure about this, but my understanding is that, unlike with late payments, a ding to your score doesn't hang around very long after you have a high utilization rate once.
Still, as the article suggests, it's better to have a low utilization rate than a nonexistent one. Some people think their credit must be fine if they don't have any balances or don't use credit. Nothing could be further from the truth; this is like saying your muscles must be fine even though you don't exercise.
There are, of course, people who choose to avoid credit altogether. That's a valid choice. Just know that this could limit your options, if, say, you try to rent somewhere that does credit checks.
A long track record. This slice of your score considers the age of your oldest account and the average age of all your accounts.
Unfortunately, this is just one of those things that takes time to build up. Fortunately, it's not a huge percentage of your score. Some people get tempted to close older credit cards they haven't used in a while; this may be a good idea if said account charges an annual fee, but there's a card I've had since the early noughties, with no fee, that I remind myself to use on just a small purchase every year -- because I've had issuers cancel cards on me that I don't use.
Why did I apply for them if I don't use them? Well, for a while there, they had promotional things -- like, spend $2000 in three months and you get $100 cash back sort of thing. They had no fee, and the cards were otherwise useless to me, so I met the minimum, paid it off every month to ensure I wouldn't get an interest charge, and then stopped using the card once I got the $100 check. It was a free $100. Who doesn't want a free $100?
(I think they all told each other about my one weird trick, because I don't get those cherry deals anymore.)
Other factors. A mix of revolving and installment loans also boosts your score. But don’t overdo it when applying for new credit.
This is one thing that keeps my credit score from being perfect; I no longer have a mortgage or auto loan. And the small difference it makes -- 10% of the total score -- is in no way worth the interest I'd pay, even though mortgage and auto loans tend to be much lower interest than credit cards or other revolving accounts.
Every once in a while, I get 0% financing offers, for example, I had to replace my home's HVAC unit a few years ago. That sort of thing usually counts as an installment loan, but some companies run it through their credit card, which makes it just another revolving credit account. If you go for 0% financing, though, make damn sure you never miss a payment -- because the 0% is usually contingent on paying the entire installment, on time, every month. Depends on the terms, of course, but in general, miss one and you end up paying a lot more than you were quoted.
And with cars, e.g., sometimes you get a choice: 0% financing, or some amount of cash back. Say it's $2000 for the sake of discussion. Take your car price and subtract $2000 -- the result is the actual cost of the vehicle, and the $2000 represents interest. That may or may not be worth it, depending on the terms and your own situation, as well as what interest rate that $2000 comes to, amortized over the rate of the loan, and compared to the standard interest rates for an auto loan. Fair warning, though: that will involve math.
Most people are better off paying less money for a used car, anyway.
Having “hard inquiries” on your credit report from potential lenders will temporarily shave points from your score.
Which is one reason it's a bad idea to open a bunch of credit cards in a short span, even if they're offering the free $100 or whatever. But, again -- not a big factor. The biggest factors, by far, as presented in the article, are on-time payments and low utilization rate.
One of these days, maybe I'll tackle misinformation about taxes, for instance, why that refund check is a Bad Thing. But enough for now. |
October 27, 2020 at 12:05am October 27, 2020 at 12:05am
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This one's been kicking around on my list since May, and I'm just now getting to it. Still mostly relevant, unfortunately.
I've linked stuff from David Wong before. This is another of his, and as usual, it's insightful.
At the time of this writing, we're about seven weeks away from what may be the most important cinematic release of my lifetime: TENET, the Christopher Nolan movie that appears to be about handsome modern wizards who use time magic to suck bullets into their guns:
Insightful, but not always right. I saw Tenet. It was... pretty. But not very good, and I could barely see the plot around all the holes. To be fair, I was pretty drunk when I saw it, so it's entirely possible I missed something, but as a long-time consumer of science fiction, I wasn't impressed.
But we should treasure it for another reason: It may be the last big movie that ignores COVID-19 altogether.
And that's truly a scary thought. I don't really buy it, though.
It takes place in a world that has never heard of COVID-19 and I want Hollywood to know that I'm fine if every upcoming movie takes place in that same world.
On that point, I absolutely agree.
1. We Don't Need Movies (Or Even Plotlines) About The Pandemic
Maybe you saw headlines about how Michael Bay is working on a COVID-19 movie (or maybe they'll coyly call the pandemic something else, to make it even more obnoxious). This is a dire example of a creator badly misunderstanding what people want out of him.
Yep. Bay is associated with massive explosions for a reason. I go to the movies to watch massive explosions of... well... explosives, not massive explosions of contagious viruses that I already know happened in real life.
But I don't even need that powerful pandemic movie from a good director, ten years from now. I don't need it from anyone, ever.
Of course, we could, you know... just not go see it.
In fact, I'm good with every future movie just completely ignoring the fact that COVID-19 ever happened. I'm fine if the romantic comedies of 2022 feature unmasked characters having a meet-cute at the chocolate fountain at Golden Corral. Nobody is going to be pissed that they're not following CDC guidelines, for the same reason nobody wants to see James Bond stop to fumble with a condom.
Yep. If we wanted reality, we wouldn't go to movies. By the way, I will throat-punch anyone who uses the term "meet-cute" in my presence. Just be aware of this.
2. We Don't Need You To Evoke The Imagery Of The Pandemic, Either
Hey, remember how after 9/11, action directors started adding scenes that looked a whole lot like Ground Zero?
That, at least, had the advantage of being visually appealing. Not so with tent hospitals or small gatherings of masked individuals. Or large gatherings of unmasked individuals, also known as Trump worship services.
Right now, a whole bunch of filmmakers are likewise thinking of ways to incorporate COVID-19 imagery into the thing they're making, in the same way that not even in Star Trek can we escape shots of buildings collapsing into gray clouds.
Again, at least collapsing buildings look epic. Well. Unless they're happening in real life without benefit of clearing the place out first for a controlled demolition.
3. Actually, You Can Scrap Your Trump Movies, Too
You know what? Now that we're here, just apply everything I said above to the entire Trump era. I don't need a goddamned movie five years from now where Jonah Hill wins a bunch of awards for playing Steve Bannon. I don't need a star-studded HBO miniseries about Jared Kushner or Michael Flynn or James Comey or Sebastian Gorka or Tom Price or Scott Pruitt or Anthony Scaramucci or Rex Tillerson or Paul Manafort or Jeff Sessions or Michael Cohen or Eddie Gallagher or any of the other names I just got off the "Trump Scandals" Wikipedia page.
Movies have been made about Presidential administrations before. I never saw any of them. Again... just don't go see it. I wouldn't. And it wouldn't matter if the movie was trying to be fair, or sucking Trump's dick, or trying to beat him down. I've lived through the last four years inhaling the daily news cycle, and I agree, I don't need some cinematic effort to "put it all in perspective."
While we're on movies, you know what else I'm not going to see? The Avatar sequels.
Oh, I'm sure they'll be pretty. And I kind of enjoyed the first one, once I decided to let go and ignore the plot, science, acting, and dialogue. It's more the utter hubris of Cameron and the studios going, "You know what? We're just going to go ahead and make the next four right now, each with an enormous budget. People loved the first one, and they loved Titanic. Cameron is gold! What could go wrong?"
No, I want to see a boycott of those movies. Not for any silly political reasons, but just to send a message to Disney (the first movie was Fox, but I think Disney picked it up when they bought the studio): We're not putting up with this shit. Release one movie. If we like it, you'll make money, and then you can make the next one.
But, as usual, people are going to make the movies they want to make, despite what internet comedy writers have to say about them. And hopefully there will continue to be movies, and theaters, because the experience of going to the theater (especially the one I go to) just can't be replicated at home.
This year was supposed to be the year of me going to see a different movie in the theater every week or two. That held up well... until March. I started again when they reopened (at a much lower capacity) in August. I've seen movies I wouldn't normally see. I've disliked ones that got great reviews, and liked ones that people panned.
But no. I'm not going to want to see Covfefe-19 references in movies now, or ever. We get enough of that shit in real life. I go to the movies to escape from that shit. And to see explosions, car chases, and people in costumes fighting crime. |
October 26, 2020 at 12:02am October 26, 2020 at 12:02am
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I sometimes find SyFy articles to be interesting. I started following them so I could keep up with Phil Plait, whose Bad Astronomy feature is always educational. But they have other science articles, and this is one of them.
If you die in a dream, you'll die in real life.
Me: Oh, I guess I'm actually dead and this is the afterlife.
*looks around at all this*
Me: Wow, I must have been truly evil.
It’s one of those urban legends most of us have heard, the sort of knowledge that gets passed around the playground without being questioned. It was a meme before memes, like the knowledge that Marilyn Manson scooped his eye out with a spoon. Or that Marilyn Manson played Paul in The Wonder Years. Or that Marilyn Manson removed one of his ribs for... reasons. Holy hell, we liked to tell rumors about Marilyn Manson.
Does this guy also write for Cracked?
The "dying in your dreams" rumor persists for similar reasons, not because there’s no internet, but because it’s nearly impossible to fact check. Dreams are nebulous and fleeting and, after all, if someone did die as a result of dying in their dream, how could we know?
Fact: since we became recognizably "human," something on the order of 100 billion humans have died.
Fact: Some percentage of people who die do so in their sleep. I'm unable to find a good figure for this. I suspect it's changed over time, anyway. Even if it's only 1%, though, that's 1 billion deaths during sleep over the last 50,000 years or so.
Fact: We don't dream during the entire sleep cycle.
Still, out of the assumed 1 billion, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if at least some people just happened to die during an REM phase that featured a dream about death. But that says nothing about causation.
The legend, as I originally heard it, was definitive. If ever you die in a dream, you will absolutely die for real. It wasn’t a suggestion or a could-be, it was presented as irrefutable fact.
Like I said, if it's fact, then I'm actually dead right now. So let's dismiss that legend like all the others.
However, if we reframe the question to whether or not it’s possible for you to die in real life if you die in a dream or, even more loosely, whether it’s possible for a dream or nightmare to kill you, the answer seems to be a qualified... yes?
Finally, an answer! Oh, wait.
First, it is possible (though unlikely) for a person to be scared to death. When we’re frightened, the body flings itself into fight or flight mode, which is triggered by a flood of adrenaline. The heart beats faster and blood flow is rerouted to major muscle groups. Particularly in those who are already predisposed, the influx of adrenaline can cause a cardiac event, which could lead to death: An ironic result from a process that is meant to keep us alive when sensing danger.
From what little I understand, rabbits apparently react badly to being cornered by a predator. If they can't fight or flee, sometimes their heart just gives out, presumably so they won't have to actually feel the teeth sinking into their little fluffy bellies. As a friend of mine once pointed out, "Worst superpower ever."
It’s unclear, and in fact unknowable, if reported SUNDS cases were the result of dreams in which an individual died, but there is some correlation between parasomnias (sleep disorders) like night terrors, and the sudden onset of death during sleep.
One of these days, it's possible that we might have the technology to record one's dreams. I wouldn't want to be the one writing the grant proposal for a study on dream-death, though. "Yes, we're going to hook sleepers up to these electrodes and study if they die when they dream about dying." Even absent such technology, though, I suspect we could have the technology to be able to tell if someone died in their sleep while experiencing the symptoms of fear:
We also know that the mechanisms exist for the heart to be catastrophically impacted by overwhelming emotions, like fear. All of which is to say, while dreaming of death is not in and of itself a death sentence, it probably doesn’t help.
It's been suggested, though I can't be arsed to look it up, that one of the purposes -- or at least one of the results -- of dreaming in humans is a kind of emotional rehearsal. Dreams are not real in the sense that the clown standing behind you right now is real, but they can certainly provoke emotions -- which are, at base, electrochemical cascades in the body. So I could certainly imagine it happening that a sufficiently scary dream about death could elicit a surge of adrenaline that might stop your heart.
I just wouldn't lie awake at night worrying about it. That clown, though... you might want to duck right about now. |
October 25, 2020 at 12:01am October 25, 2020 at 12:01am
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I've noted this article's thesis in a previous blog entry. Good to know it's not just my drunk ass that picks up on these things.
I'm not sure that the subheading there is strictly accurate. But the physical similarity between the mid-scale structure of the universe and the neural mapping of the brain is too similar to be ignored. Not that there's anything supernatural at play here; patterns often repeat themselves in nature for perfectly ordinary reasons, such as the way we find Fibonacci's number in all manner of structures... but that's not important right now.
We have predicted that the void-filament boundary is one of the most complex volumes of the universe, as measured by the number of bits of information it takes to describe it.
This got us to thinking: Is it more complex than the brain?
I suspect it has to do with exactly how complexity is defined. The speed of light puts a hard limit on how information can be transmitted through such megastructures, whereas the speed of information in the brain, while much slower than the speed of light, is fast enough for our purposes.
The first results from our comparison are truly surprising: Not only are the complexities of the brain and cosmic web actually similar, but so are their structures. The universe may be self-similar across scales that differ in size by a factor of a billion billion billion.
Physical similarity, however, doesn't automatically translate to similarity of utility.
The article, while fascinating, doesn't really lend itself to a lot more quoting, especially since my own gray matter is perhaps just a bit disordered right now, thanks to a generous infusion of simple molecules involving carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. But it's worth reading, if only as an example of what can happen when you get two vastly different scientific specialties together to compare notes.
It's out of such things that creativity arises, I think -- that finding of similarities in things that are, at first glance, disparate.
But I will quote one more bit, because it relates to a phenomenon I've mentioned in here fairly recently.
Is the apparent similarity just the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random data (apophenia)? Remarkably enough, the answer seems to be no: Statistical analysis shows these systems do indeed present quantitative similarities.
Now, I should probably emphasize that no, this doesn't mean that there's some mystical or metaphysical conclusion to be reached here. But, materialist that I am, I'm also a writer (of sorts) and this kind of thing is one reason why science fiction exists. Could the universe itself have a kind of consciousness? My instinct is to scoff at such an idea, but really, no one really knows what consciousness is, even though one must possess it in order to even ask the question.
But soon it will be time for me to experience its opposite for a few hours. I just thought I'd leave this here for your neural networks to contemplate.
Edit: After completing this entry, as I usually do after one of these entries, I checked the website Astronomy Picture of the Day, which updates around midnight EST. In another cosmic coincidence, today's picture is of a computer simulation that closely resembles the structure of the universe on these cosmic scales, and so I present it as another illustration of the superficial similarity between the universe and a neural net. |
October 24, 2020 at 12:06am October 24, 2020 at 12:06am
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Because I select these things at random from a list, it's not all that common that I hit upon similar topics two days running. Today is one of those days, though.
It would probably be more accurate to say that the equations changed our understanding of the world. The world spins on, regardless of our mathematical prowess (or lack thereof). True, we then go on to shape the world based on the new understanding, but... well, perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Do you know that mathematical equations affect our day-to-day lives?
Trivially true; I mentioned the world spinning on in the last paragraph, and that motion follows mathematical and physical realities.
While there are many mathematical equations that have molded mathematics and human history, let’s have a look at 10 of them:
You'll have to go to the link to see the actual equations, I'm afraid. Especially the later ones use symbols I can't be arsed to reproduce here.
1. The Pythagorean Theorem:
Hopefully everyone knows this one.
The theorem states that: The sum of the squares of the lengths of the legs of a right triangle is equal to the square of the length of the hypotenuse.
This article is brief; don't expect definitions of things like "right triangle," "square," "legs of a triangle," or especially "hypotenuse."
2. Isaac Newton’s Law Of Universal Gravitation:
I've heard it proclaimed that "Newton Was Wrong!" Well, he was, in a trivial sense, but as the article points out, this equation does just fine when dealing with things on a human scale and slightly bigger.
3. Albert Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity:
Oh boy, is this one simplistic. E=mc2 is hardly the totality of the Theories of Relativity. Also, there's another term in the equation that's generally left out of its popular form; it's generally enough to know that a) energy and matter are really the same "thing" and b) the speed of light (in a vacuum) is a constant.
4. The Second Law Of Thermodynamics:
Oddly, this list isn't in chronological order. We knew about this one before Einstein. The weird thing here isn't so much the equation itself, but how it relates to the passage of time.
Rudolf Clausius’second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy can never decrease over time for an isolated system, that is, a system in which neither energy nor matter can enter nor leave.
I have heard this used to argue against the process of evolution. Such arguments conveniently ignore the fact that our planet isn't an isolated system; we get a constant influx of energy from a handy nearby fusion reactor.
5. Logarithm functions:
As the article points out, these lost a lot of their necessity once computers entered the picture. They're still useful to learn, though, as logarithms have the other benefit of turning an exponential chart into an easier to understand linear one.
6. Maxwell’s Equations:
First published between 1861 and 1862, by combining the electric and magnetic fields into a set of four equations they define the key mathematics behind radio waves of all types also called as electro-magnetic radiation by scientists and engineers.
Truly one of the great triumphs of applied mathematics, though understanding the equations and their arcane symbols takes a bit of work. Hell, electromagnetism is sorcery as far as I'm concerned. But apparently even sorcery has mathematical underpinnings.
Also, check out what the UK was doing while we were over here fighting a war over whether or not it should be legal to own human beings.
7. Chaos Theory:
Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics focused on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.
Seriously jumping through time, here. There passed almost exactly 100 years between Maxwell and the beginnings of the understanding of chaos theory. Also, this article doesn't nearly do justice to the topic; I've read entire books on the subject and I only understand the basics, myself.
8. Wave Equation:
The wave equation is a linear second-order partial differential equation...
Don't worry. I noped on out of there when I read that bit, too.
9. Schrödinger Equation:
Today, all of our semiconductors (transistors, integrated circuits, Intel CPU chips, etc.) depend on the science of quantum mechanics that wouldn’t have been possible to understand without Schrödinger’s equation. It also paved the way for nuclear power, microchips, and electron microscopes.
Most people have heard this guy's name in connection with a famous thought experiment involving a cat that might or might not be alive. I prefer living cats, myself. The point is, though, that if you're reading this, you're doing so on a device that relies on quantum mechanical processes. Well. I don't know. Maybe you printed it out from such a device. Still, it's clear that we don't have to understand how something works to use it effectively.
10. Fourier Transform:
The Fourier Transform defines the mathematics that allows us to put many different signals onto one wire, or one radio signal, and to then extract each individual signal at the other end.
Ever wonder how a fiber optic bundle can transmit so much data with little to no loss? That's why. Well, that and the near-magical property of complete, lossless reflection off of the boundary of a medium such as glass (or water for that matter) when the angle of reflection is in the right range.
Like I said, a lot of this stuff is beyond me. There are plenty of resources for anyone who wants to delve deeper into these concepts, and I've done so myself. Also, this list is only a starting point; there are other important equations that advanced our understanding of science and the universe. But you don't need to understand the jargon to feel a sense of wonder at how we products of the universe have worked at understanding said universe, or how far we still have to go.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
--Albert Einstein |
October 23, 2020 at 12:01am October 23, 2020 at 12:01am
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This one's about mathematics, folks. I can already see your eyes glazing over.
Unlike yesterday's link, this one was written in proper American English, so it's "math," not "maths."
Here are some good mental math shortcuts to keep under your hat.
Does anyone (besides me) still wear hats?
To sign your check in record time:
To calculate the amount of a 20 percent tip, calculate 10 percent (or remove the last digit) and double it. For instance, with a $42.50 bill, 10 percent is $4.25 and double it to get an $8.50 tip.
This is so simple, straightforward, and obvious that I would have never thought to put it into an article about "secret math tips." I do it all the time. I do it when drunk. I don't just mean tipsy, I mean forget-the-Uber-call-an-ambulance brain-dead. Of course, at that point, I'm generally inclined to leave more than 20% and then forget my credit card. And my hat, and my glasses, and sometimes my pants. The tip is still easy for me, but I forget that not everyone considers simple mathematics "simple."
Complexity comes in, though, when you decide not to leave a 20% tip. Maybe the service was extra-slow, or the beer was warm, and you want to lower the tip to reflect that. Or, contrarily, maybe the bartender flirted with you and you want to leave something extra. Of course, you could leave your phone number as a tip, but that's generally considered gauche, and besides, unless you're Jeff Bezos, you don't have that much money.
Still easy, though. 15%? Move the decimal place once to the left, add the result to half of it. 30%? Move the decimal and multiply by three. 18%? Only if you're sober or if their machine hands you a handy tipping chart. Still, 18 is 20-2, so once you have 20%, move the decimal one more to the left and subtract the result.
To ace sale shopping:
First, remember that if you're offered a nominally $100 item for $70, you're not saving $30 but spending $70. But, assuming that you absolutely MUST have the item...
To find out how much you’ll pay for an item that’s a certain percentage off, first subtract the percent off from 100. So if it’s 30 percent off, use 70; 60 percent off, use 40, etc. Divide this number and the price by 10 and then multiply the resultant two numbers.
Still too much work for most people. I'd use the same trick with the tips: 10% is trivially easy, and then just multiply that by whatever. 3 if it's 70% off, 6 if it's 40% off, and so on.
To see your future without a crystal ball:
Use a time machine.
Okay, that's also out of reach for most people.
Use the rule of 72 to calculate how long it would take an investment to double. The rule of 72 is that an investment that earns 10 percent interest will double in 7.2 years.
Which is nice and all, but there are no viable 10% investments. Socking the money into a market-matching ETF will *probably* earn you an average of 8% over a long enough time frame (20 years or more), but that's smoothing out all of the ups and downs along the way and assuming that we won't be in a post-apocalyptic wasteland in 20 years. Any bond that promises to pay 10% annually is junk. Any guaranteed interest, say from a savings account, isn't going to net you more than 2% APY, and probably significantly less, these days.
Use this as a starting point for calculating various interest rates and lengths of time, by dividing the number 72 by your interest rate.
Which is a little more useful, but for a lot of people this is where they whip out their calculator, at which point you might as well use a Future Value equation, which is beyond the scope of this blog entry, but you can find it if you look.
Just don't forget that for an investment to double in terms of real spending power, you'd have to subtract the projected rate of inflation over the time period. Which is a guess.
To do fast house math:
To calculate how much a month more you’ll pay in a mortgage payment for a certain increase in house price, figure roughly 6 dollars per month for every thousand dollars more in total price.
This one, I wasn't familiar with. I haven't had any reason to use it. I've only purchased one house.
To translate temperatures when you travel:
Double it (Celsius) and add 30. Useful if you drive into Canada a lot. But then you also should know the miles/kilometers conversion, which I'll go into in a bit.
The actual conversion is C*9/5+32, but the quick one is good enough at most temperatures you'll encounter -- at least in the southern parts of Canada.
To be the fastest calculator in any room:
Multiply any number by four quickly by doubling the number twice. So 106 times four is 212 plus 212, for a total of 424.
As with the tip thing, I thought everyone did that.
To ease your wage wonders:
Double the hourly wage and add three zeros. $20 an hour is about $40K a year. $8 an hour is $16K annually. One of the first shortcuts I learned. As there are actually 52 weeks in a year, not 50, it'll be off by a bit, but who cares - taxes eat up way more than the error.
This assumes, of course, a standard 40 hour work week.
Another way to compare hourly wages to a salary is to drop the three zeros of a salary and then divide by two. So a salary of $42,000 would be roughly equivalent to $21 an hour.
Unless you work in one of the professions that requires salaried employees to work more than 40 hours a week which, last I checked, was all of them.
What the hell happened to computers allowing for greater productivity, leading to us working two days a week?
To analyze the impact of that coffee habit:
What coffee habit? Oh, fine, I suppose I can apply this to Crack Zero.
To estimate the annual cost of a daily habit, multiply to find the weekly total amount you spend (so, times 5 if it’s a weekday habit, or times 7 if it’s every day a week. Then add two zeros to that number, and divide by two.
Generally, when people do this, they get a nice fat kick in the assets.
To know how hard you have to study:
And this is where my own eyes glazed over. Been a while since I had to study, and all I ever did then was the best I could.
Even in math.
Okay, I said I'd talk about miles/kilometers conversion. This is not actually as bad as it seems at first glance. It's about 1.61 kilometers to a mile (the precise figure is 1.60934, but unless you're doing survey work, who cares?) Now, that's a tough number when you look at it, but one way to remember it is to consider the Golden Ratio.
The Golden Ratio, phi, is an irrational number that starts out 1.618033... and goes on to infinity, but again, who cares? The important thing about the GR is that if you subtract 1 from it, you get its multiplicative inverse, 1/phi: 0.618033... and that it's really remarkably close to the miles/kilometers conversion. This means that in addition to there being roughly 1.61 kilometers in a mile, there's 0.61 miles in every kilometer. Approximately. Good enough for driving.
And when you're actually driving, you don't even have to worry much about the 0.01 involved. 0.01 kilometers is, by defnition, 10 meters, which is about as accurate as most GPS receivers. So I just use 1.6 and 0.6.
As to how to do the conversion quickly, in your head, while driving and with no access to Google (which can give you a very accurate conversion at the risk of you crashing into someone), it's simple.
Take the number of kilometers on the road sign. Let's say Calgary is 30 kilometers away, for instance.
Divide by 2, which is the same as multiplying by 0.5. So, 15.
Add 1/10th of the original distance in km, which is 3, so 18.
Consequently, Calgary is about 18 miles away. The actual value, by Google, is 18.64. So the quick mental math can be improved upon, sure, but again... we're talking about driving, not surveying.
The reason the Golden Ratio comes into play is that reversing the calculation is very similar. Take the number of miles, add half, add 1/10th. So if something is 50 miles away, it's 50+25+5=80 km. Roughly. The actual value is closer to 80.5.
Either way, it's simpler than converting pounds to kilograms, which only works on the Earth's surface anyway and then only approximately, as pounds are a unit of force and kilograms are a unit of mass and gravity is measurably different at different points on the planet.
But the conversion factor is roughly 2.2 kilos per pound under those conditions, which, given the above, should be a dead easy conversion for you right now.
Now, go to England, where petrol is dispensed by the liter and priced in British pounds, and try to figure out how much a gallon of gas costs over there. Solution: a metric shit-ton. |
October 22, 2020 at 12:06am October 22, 2020 at 12:06am
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So, I lied.
I said yesterday that I was done with religion for now, but then this came up at random. (Note: this article uses British spellings. I will try to stick to American in my own commentary.)
When you think of religion, you probably think of a god who rewards the good and punishes the wicked.
If only.
But the idea of morally concerned gods is by no means universal. Social scientists have long known that small-scale traditional societies – the kind missionaries used to dismiss as “pagan” – envisaged a spirit world that cared little about the morality of human behaviour.
That's probably because, as the article theorizes later, in a smaller society, everyone knows everyone else, so anyone who transgresses against social norms is known to do so; they lack the protection of anonymity. Unlike today, when anyone can get on the internet and become a troll.
I should also point out that I read this article as someone who understands that humans created their gods, rather than vice-versa.
Nevertheless, the world religions we know today, and their myriad variants, either demand belief in all-seeing punitive deities or at least postulate some kind of broader mechanism – such as karma – for rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. In recent years, researchers have debated how and why these moralising religions came into being.
The whole "good are rewarded while evil people are punished" thing falls apart in those religions that stress faith alone as the key to salvation. You can be a mass murderer or a child rapist, and if you repent on your deathbed, according to some theologies, you still get the wings and a harp thing. But, in general, at least in the way things are interpreted for the average person, I'll concede the point.
Now, thanks to our massive new database of world history, known as Seshat (named after the Egyptian goddess of record keeping), we’re starting to get some answers.
Which is great and all, except that one wonders about the inputs. Your conclusions are only as good as your observations.
The database uses a sample of the world’s historical societies, going back in a continuous time series up to 10,000 years before the present, to analyse hundreds of variables relating to social complexity, religion, warfare, agriculture and other features of human culture and society that vary over time and space. Now that the database is finally ready for analysis, we are poised to test a long list of theories about global history.
Again, this says nothing about the quality of the data itself.
One of the earliest questions we’re testing is whether morally concerned deities drove the rise of complex societies.
I would put this differently, inserting "a belief in" between "whether" and "morally." But I got the idea.
In other words, gods who care about whether we are good or bad did not drive the initial rise of civilisations – but came later.
This makes more sense than the other way around, really. Sometimes you build something and only later realize that it needs a security system.
We are now looking to other factors that may have driven the rise of the first large civilisation.
Pretty sure it was beer. That, or a desire for mutual protection.
If the original function of moralising gods in world history was to hold together fragile, ethnically diverse coalitions, what might declining belief in such deities mean for the future of societies today? Could modern secularisation, for example, contribute to the unravelling of efforts to cooperate regionally – such as the European Union? If beliefs in big gods decline, what will that mean for cooperation across ethnic groups in the face of migration, warfare, or the spread of xenophobia? Can the functions of moralising gods simply be replaced by other forms of surveillance?
We already have such systems in place, but it's an open question whether they're as useful as religion in controlling peoples' behavior. Think star ratings on Uber, or credit scores, or the Chinese social score.
People game those systems just like they game religion, but I'm not sure to what extent. Like, every once in a while, in my travels, I'll see a sign for a hotel or restaurant or other service that displays an icthys, you know, the fish symbol. Always, without fail, those that do so are more greedy, underhanded, or hateful, to the point where I've quit patronizing those establishments. One hotel I went to turned away a minority family, blatantly and obviously racist. The next people in line, a white couple, noted that "those people" "always bring in their friends and trash the place." The desk clerk nodded knowingly. Yes, I turned around and found another place to stay.
There are none so evil as those who believe themselves to be righteous.
Perhaps I'm also being prejudiced in avoiding such places based on a few bad experiences, but so be it. I don't claim to be righteous. Point is, even with their "eye in the sky," some of them still act like greasy tools.
I've seen it asked before: "If you don't believe in God, what keeps you from murdering or stealing?" Well, heck, if belief in God is the only thing keeping you from doing these things, or worse, then please, for gods' sake, keep believing. I'll just be over here quietly drinking a beer and not murdering anyone.
There's a landmine of an argument I'm not prepared or willing to engage in right now, concerning exactly what is good and what is evil. I've been thinking about it a bit lately, but haven't come to any firm conclusions. Obviously, I don't believe in those concepts as external forces; I'm thinking in terms of human behavior. "I know it when I see it" just doesn't cut it, but I'm not sure what does. But it's clear to me that the kind of religion this article speaks of, with the rewarding / punishing deity, doesn't make much difference.
Perhaps actual surveillance, and the threat of purely human retribution, does. |
October 21, 2020 at 12:01am October 21, 2020 at 12:01am
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I don't have a lot to say about today's link, but I'll say what I do have. Here it is:
Is Dreaming Real?
When you’re lucid, it can feel so real the distinction ceases to matter.
As you've probably noticed, I'm not one to resort to dictionary definitions of things. Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, and the definitions often have a subjective element.
That said, let me put up the pertinent Oxford Dictionary definition of "reality:"
the state or quality of having existence or substance.
And the stated philosophical definition:
existence that is absolute, self-sufficient, or objective, and not subject to human decisions or conventions.
I find these definitions problematic. "having existence or substance" just kicks the can down the road, forcing one to try to define "existence" and "substance." A good example is the question posed in the title of the article above: A dream has existence, if not substance, but that "or" in there means that either condition can be met. A photon has existence, but no substance. On the other hand, I can't think of anything with substance that doesn't possess existence - that would be a chunk of matter that doesn't exist. Perhaps you can think of one.
As for the philosophical definition, perhaps I'm being dense here, but our decisions create things that are objectively real on a regular basis. I can decide to bake a cake, and an hour later, behold, there is a cake.
It could be argued that there's a Platonic ideal of "cake," that it, in a sense, has always existed, will always exist, in the realm of the possible. I promise you, any cake I bake will not be ideal, Platonic or otherwise.
But the realm of Platonic ideals is itself a thing that has no physical, substantive existence. Plato thought that shit up. It's a mental construct. Oh, I suppose it could correlate to a particular arrangement of neural firings in his brain and that of his students, on down to the present day and hopefully beyond. That's hardly what we think of when we consider "reality."
Being a pragmatist of sorts, I tend to my own, ideosyncratic definition of "reality:" that which is still there when we don't believe in it.
I'm not a philosopher; I just read about them. So I'm sure my own definition leads to all kinds of roadblocks and paradoxes, too. Consider it a working definition, a practical tool to help me divide the real from the unreal. The chair I'm sitting in is real and won't disappear if I stop believing in it. It won't even disappear when I die; someone will have to decide what to do with the damn thing. I can imagine a much better chair, one that's more comfortable and with hydraulics that won't jar my spine by giving out every time I lean back to stretch. If I stop believing in this ideal notion of "chair," or die, then poof, this ideal chair exists nowhere. Well. Unless you count this paragraph.
Point is, any attempt to define what is reality and what isn't is a bit like gripping a bar of soap, or trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.
Getting back to dreams, though, as is so often the case on the internet, the headline is somewhat misleading. It's not asking these deeper, subjective, and possibly unanswerable questions; it mostly talks about lucid dreaming, and the difference between being a passive observer in one's dreams and taking an active role in their unfolding. There are implications on dreams' effects on our minds, and hence our brains -- which, for most people who aren't politicians, I'm prepared to postulate the real existence of.
Consequently, the article is interesting -- which is why I linked it in the first place -- but I feel like it asks the wrong question, precisely because we can't really define what "real" is. We all dream, whether we end up remembering them or not. Since it's a subjective experience, a dream unremembered might as well never have happened at all. Most of us, myself included, only remember fragments of dreams, with a vague idea that more happened but we just can't seem to grasp what it was.
I don't doubt that, as the article suggests, unlike Vegas, what happens in dreams doesn't always stay in dreams. It can impact our thoughts in the waking world. This can even change other peoples' entire perception of the world; the article uses Einstein's dream as an example, something that led to one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in history and has had an effect on all of us, whether we believe in it or not.
And if something changes perceptions or actions in consensus reality, is that something not, in some sense, real?
Well. Like I said. I don't have much to say about the article itself, but it turns out I had quite a bit to say about its philosophical underpinnings. There are those who assert that we each create our own reality, and there are certain interpretations of quantum mechanics that seem to bear that out -- though by no means all of them.
Perhaps those who remember their dreams can do so more effectively than others. |
October 20, 2020 at 12:04am October 20, 2020 at 12:04am
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The thing about predictions is that people tend to remember the ones that come to pass, and selectively forget those that were off.
Though I'm still sore about not owning a flying car. I was promised a flying car long before 2020. Instead I got a pandemic, during six months of which I didn't even drive my boring, surface-grubbing Subaru. Yes, I know, prototypes exist for flying cars. Prototypes exist for a lot of things. The point is, I don't have one.
Now, Hawking had, beyond all doubt, a brilliant mind. He thought deeply and logically and, most importantly, had a sense of humor. That doesn't mean he knew everything or had a crystal ball, though.
This article is two years old, but it's not like Hawking could change his predictions, as he remains deceased.
The late physicist Stephen Hawking’s last writings predict that a breed of superhumans will take over, having used genetic engineering to surpass their fellow beings.
I, too, watched Star Trek. Still watch it, in fact, in its many incarnations. I can't imagine Hawking didn't, as he had a cameo in TNG at one point.
I don't pretend for a moment that its future will come to pass. Oh, sure, pieces of it, maybe, but it is, in the end, like all science fiction: there to make us think, be entertained, and possibly serve as a warning or roadmap.
Hawking delivers a grave warning on the importance of regulating AI, noting that “in the future AI could develop a will of its own, a will that is in conflict with ours.”
Again, anyone who has read more than a little bit of science fiction is going to be familiar with this trope. Hell, it's the entire plot of Terminator, to name just one of the more popular franchises.
Every movie, book, or TV show that I've seen on the subject dances around one simple question: How would such a thing be powered, and why can't we just, you know... flip a switch or pull a plug. When Trek brought it up, it tapped into the purely fictional near-unlimited power of the Enterprise's matter/antimatter engines, and created for itself a force field to keep it from being unplugged. Ultron had Iron Man's plot device power source. That sort of thing.
In objective reality, we have neither limitless energy or force fields... though I will concede that it's possible an AI could invent these things before making its nefarious intentions known.
The bad news: At some point in the next 1,000 years, nuclear war or environmental calamity will “cripple Earth.” However, by then, “our ingenious race will have found a way to slip the surly bonds of Earth and will therefore survive the disaster.”
Optimism and pessimism in the same paragraph. I'm impressed.
Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete. Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant.
Yeah, I like the X-Men stories too.
Hawking acknowledges there are various explanations for why intelligent life hasn’t been found or has not visited Earth. His predictions here aren’t so bold, but his preferred explanation is that humans have “overlooked” forms of intelligent life that are out there.
Every time I talk about something like this, I have to pre-emptively thwart any jokes or snide remarks about there not being any intelligent life down here, either. The sense of "intelligence" used here is the ability to use technology and be curious and self-aware. We fit the definition, even if some of us are dumber than a box of rocks and twice as dense.
That said, I've made my opinion known on this subject on multiple occasions, so I'll just summarize: I would be greatly surprised if we were the only "intelligent" life in the universe, but just as surprised if we weren't the only ones in our galaxy. Intelligence is not an inevitable product of evolution, and most species here on Earth get along without it just fine -- some better, in fact, before we came along with our tools and machines and pesky communication skills.
Skipping the "Does God exist?" section here. His opinion is no more informed on the subject than mine or yours, and I already did my religion argument for the month, back on the 14th.
The biggest threats to Earth: Threat number one one is an asteroid collision, like the one that killed the dinosaurs. However, “we have no defense” against that, Hawking writes. More immediately: climate change. “A rise in ocean temperature would melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide,” Hawking writes. “Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus with a temperature of 250C.”
I wouldn't say we have "no" defense against asteroids. While the chance of one in any given year is vanishingly small, the cumulative probability increases over time. Eventually, a giant rock is going to be on track to slam into the Earth. It's inevitable. But we keep improving rocket technology and sending people and robots into space. A rock big enough to cause a catastrophe will be seen early, and, in the near future, we will in fact have the technology to do something about it... that is, if the other thing doesn't happen to us first.
For my fellow Americans, 250C translates to "Really goddamned hot. You think Phoenix in the summer is hot? You ain't seen nothin' yet."
The best idea humanity could implement: Nuclear fusion power. That would give us clean energy with no pollution or global warming.
And power the vicious AIs bent on world domination and enslavement of humans, super and otherwise. I mean, come on, is it too much to ask for some consistency from one of the greatest minds of our generation? |
October 19, 2020 at 12:01am October 19, 2020 at 12:01am
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Entry #8 of 8 in
 hairtherapy@gilbertneurolgy.com
There exists an animal called the Japanese Dwarf Flying Squirrel.
Each word in its English name has a specific meaning:
Japanese: from Japan
Dwarf: smaller than usual
Flying: able to soar
Squirrel: Cute rodent with bushy-ass tail
Nothing really special about any of these individual words. Quite common, actually. We see examples of most of them every day, either in our backyards or on the internet. Well, maybe I see more Japanese than others because... well, just you never mind.
The point is, put those words together and you get Epic Awesomeness. A Japanese Dwarf Flying Squirrel. Seriously, go to that link above and look at it. LOOK AT IT. And look at this picture, too.
If that is not one of the cutest, if not THE cutest, thing you have ever seen, there is something seriously wrong with you. Possibly even a neurological disorder.
Perhaps, then, you need hair therapy.
See, unlike four words forming a unique synergy, as with the squirrel, sometimes you get four words that make you go... "Huh?"
Hair - humans' answer to fur; some have more than others
Therapy - a process to help restore a person's mind or body
Gilbert - somebody's name, presumably
Neurology - the study of the brain and nervous system
Each one of those words, taken individually, is rather innocuous -- though my personal connotation of neurology stems from when they took out part of my ex-wife's brain.
Taken together, though, they make no sense, not even a little.
I am, however, reminded of the hairshirt that penitents supposedly wore, and perhaps still do. Something deliberately uncomfortable that focuses the mind, hopefully forcing one to contemplate the numinous and esoteric rather than the pleasures of the flesh.
As a dedicated hedonist, though, I prefer cotton or silk. Just not squirrel fur. That would be cruel.
Mini-Contest Results!
I appreciate all the comments, but only one seemed to address the question in my last entry. So today's Merit Badge will go to WakeUpAndLive~doingNaNo'24  for:
Scientists discovered how to control a biomechanical hand, just by thoughts- 2009
Amputee Pierpaolo Petruzziello learned to control a biomechanical hand connected to his arm nerves with just wires and electrodes and became the first person to make movements like finger wiggling, making a fist, and grabbing objects using just his thoughts.
Which is truly cool (and, serendipitiously, ties in to the "neurology" thing in this entry, which was chosen at random). However, can you imagine what would happen if someone figured out a way to hack it?
"Why are you punching yourself?" |
October 18, 2020 at 12:02am October 18, 2020 at 12:02am
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Cribbing from Cracked again today. Because I haven't done one in a while, let's make this a Merit Badge Mini-Contest! (Details below.)
Now, keeping in mind that Cracked is, first and foremost, comedy, I wouldn't take any of these as the last word on the subject. Those of us who try to be funny would sacrifice the truth for a good laugh at the drop of a hat. Do people still drop hats? Hell, do people still wear hats? Other than those stupid-looking backwards baseball caps, which don't count.
Chances are you're not keeping up with science news these days, what with the world being four different kinds of on fire.
I'm keeping up with science news because the world is fourfive different kinds of on fire. After all, the only way we're getting out of any of this is science. Maybe also voting. But mostly science.
And even if you tried, 90% of it now boils down to headlines saying: "There's still no vaccine, put your goddamn mask back on."
Still, this bears repeating.
5. Dinosaurs Had So Much Cancer
Despite Spielberg trying to drill it into our brains every few years, it's hard to fathom dinosaurs really existed. That they were actual flesh and blood critters instead of the mythic tar-breathing dragons we like to imagine them as.
Interesting you should mention dragons. My pet theory, which is mine and isn't actually a theory but a hypothesis I'd look further into if I weren't so damn lazy, is that dinosaurs were dragons.
Well, not exactly. Okay, bear with me here: you're a pre-scientific cave-dwelling humanoid, wandering through a wilderness of everything unknown, inexplicable, and potentially carnivorous. Kind of like Australia today. One day, you kick over a clod of dirt and uncover a bone.
Not just any bone, mind you. A big bone. You've seen bones before, of course; you've probably cracked them for the marrow. Some of them are quite large, like the ones the woolly mammoths leave behind after you've munched on their soft parts. But this particular bone is not only bigger than any that comes from a mammoth, but bigger than your shaggy frame.
How do you explain this, as you've never seen a creature that could leave a bone so large? Well, you come up with the idea of a secretive, giant creature, and you take this story home with you, along with the bone to provide incontrovertible evidence that such a creature must exist. You have no idea of evolution, or deep time, or maybe even the entire concept of the possibility of a species going extinct everywhere.
Over time, the legend grows, takes wing, maybe spits fire, and becomes what we now know as dragons.
While this is not inconceivable as an origin story, keep in mind that I have absolutely no evidence for it. Like I said: pet hypothesis. It's just as likely that it's entirely a figment of our messy collective imagination, which doesn't explain to my satisfaction why people as disparate as East Asians and Western Europeans both had dragons in their mythology, albeit of entirely different mien.
Anyway.
The Cretaceous cancer patient in question was an unfortunate Ceratops (an ancestor of the Triceratops named after the deathless ancient that is Michael Cera). While the beast likely drowned with its entire family before the cancer could kill it (a mixed blessing) it suffered from such aggressive osteosarcoma that this bone cancer had visibly warped its lower leg bone -- which is how it came to the attention of the oncologist researchers.
While it's good, in a sense, to have confirmation of these things, it should really come as no surprise to anyone. Cancer, in my admittedly very rudimentary understanding of the subject, is the result of errors in cellular replication, errors that exceed the body's natural powers to fix. Thus, any living thing has the potential to contract cancer. If this happens after the organism has already reproduced, there's no evolutionary tendency to wash it out of the gene pool.
What's amazing isn't that dinosaurs had cancer, but that some of them lived long enough, what with all the predators, tar pits, time travelers, asteroids and whatever, to develop it in the first place.
4. Gardens Are Being Overrun By Superpowered Poison Ivy
Thanks to climate change, poison ivy has become the poster girl of (post)apocalyptic prosperity, having doubled in size since the 1950s. And much like the world's shittiest Pokemon, Dr. Jacqueline Mohan of the University of Georgia warns, this poison ivy has also evolved to be "significantly more poisonous."
You know, once, just once, I want to hear of a good thing that comes from climate change. Like, maybe, no more ice storms in Virginia. That would be nice. Well, up to a point, anyway.
Anyway, what, exactly, has doubled in size? Its range? Leaf size? Individual plant size? The link at the article doesn't make it much more clear than the Cracked article itself.
I guess it doesn't matter. Poison ivy sucks. (Harley Quinn is a much more interesting villain.)
Over the past decades, the weed has been given a CO2 boost of 149%, making them bigger, stronger, and faster growing.
My backyard is a testament to that. Oh well. Maybe it'll keep the burglars away. It certainly keeps me from doing yardwork.
So the next time some climate change denier starts their bullshit about nature finding a way to cope, feel free to use that as an invitation to rub a gloved handful of super poison ivy into their dumb faces.
They're probably not wearing a mask, so this should be easy.
3. Florida Fights Its Mosquito Problem By Releasing 750 Million More Mosquitos
I know we here can be a tad harsh on Florida, that unnoticed meth-head booger hanging from America.
I have... more colorful, pus-filled anatomical metaphors.
Since we're still decades away from creating a continent-sized bug zapper, many scientists have accepted that we are unable to wipe out the mosquito population. But you know who's even better at wiping out populations? Mosquitos. So under the maxim "if you can't kill 'em, breed 'em" biotech corporations have been creating clouds of genetically modified male mosquitoes.
At least one semester of reading, analyzing, and writing papers about science fiction/horror books and/or movies should be required for anyone pursuing so much as a bachelor of science degree. Preferably two semesters. Otherwise, those things that we ordinary people take for granted as a Bad Idea, like unearthing mummies during a pandemic, or freakin' genetically engineering freakin' mosquitoes, will just keep happening.
2. Using Mindfulness Meditation To Cure Depression Can Cause Depression
DUH. "When I think about how I'm in an existential void, I'm sure it will help to concentrate on how void-y my existence is."
Mindfulness is the latest mental health fad that loses a lot of its medicinal cred if you just add "whoa" and "like" to its description. According to Psychology Today, mindfulness is, like, to live in the moment and, like, reawaken oneself to the present, whoah, rather than dwelling on the past or, like, anticipating the future *mind blown gesture.*
In other words, try to shed the third-most important thing that makes us human (after comedy and Oreos). Yeah, I'm not a fan of mindfulness. I've mentioned this before.
That kind of ongoing pose-posing is downright dangerous for these one out of twelve meditation practitioners. When they start experiencing the supposedly non-existent side-effects of meditation, they have no idea what's going on. This can make their suffering even worse, both by them now clueless on how to address mental issues that clearly require medical treatment but also by making them feel like they're somehow doing sitting down and not falling asleep wrong.
Fortunately, I haven't seen too many "you're doing it wrong" articles on the internet lately. They used to crop up in my article-searching on a regular basis. Maybe there's finally been enough backlash? Or maybe there's just as many, but the Great Algorithm has finally realized I won't read them. At its nadir, I would not have been one bit surprised to see a "you're falling asleep wrong!" headline, which I would have proceeded to shred here in this blog. (The sitting down thing is... well. Lots of us sit wrong.)
1. We Finally Know Where Stonehenge Got Its Stones
And, sorry, History Channel fans, it's not Procyon 5.
The mystery of the rolling stones was finally uncovered by a team of historians from the University of Brighton. Using a portable X-ray gun (how's that for living in the future?) they managed to analyze the sandstone's unique chemical composition.
Nope, not really living in the future until I have a ray gun, a jet pack, and a flying car. And maybe a robot maid. Preferably a sexy one.
And while the team never dreamed of matching them to a nearby quarry, they did exactly that, tracing 50 out of 52 boulders to a site in the nearby West Woods of Wiltshire.
The article goes on to quote both 25 miles and 35 kilometers as the distance the stones were carted. I'm not completely unfamiliar with either unit of measurement, though, and I'd tend to think that the units were simply interchanged, but 25 miles is more like 40km, so... well, like I said, don't fully trust comedy sites for accurate science. If you care, pull up Google Maps. They have a neat-o linear measuring function now.
But remember, this was 3000 BC Britain. A time when the known world ended forty feet past the nearest tree line and a place where traveling straight for 5 miles meant you no longer understood people's dialect (not unlike contemporary Britain).
Just quoting this because I laughed my ass off. Since it's true.
But the distance doesn't matter. To pull forward monoliths the size and weight of the moon (you assume, since you're from the Bronze Age) alone took ingenious levels of engineering.
Nah, you just get a dragon to carry it for you.
Merit Badge Mini-Contest!
What's your favorite cool (or, as with the genetically engineered mutant skeeters or world-devouring poison ivy, potentially apocalyptic) scientific discovery, breakthrough, achievement, or whatever? I don't care if it's a recent one, as with the above, or an older one (though, fair warning, "harnessing fire" ain't gonna cut it). As always, you have until midnight WDC time. Comment here below, please. The one I like best will earn its writer an appropriate Merit Badge. |
October 17, 2020 at 12:00am October 17, 2020 at 12:00am
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Trying a slightly different way to present links to the articles I'm discussing. It's not like I never use the xlink ML, but normally I've been using it for secondary links in a blog entry.
Have we murdered the apostrophe?
Last year, the Apostrophe Protection Society was disbanded, having supposedly failed in its mission. But what is the correct use of the grammatical mark anyway, asks Helene Schumacher.
Okay, look, I'm not saying I never make typing errors --- the term "typo" is itself the wrong word for such things -- but I do believe I have an innate understanding of the difference between its and it's; there, their, and they're; and your and you're. It's really remarkably simple and basic, and I have to fight my natural tendency to assume that anyone who gets it wrong is necessarily a subhuman moron.
Before I go on, though, I'd like to remind readers of Waltz's First Law of the Internet, which is that any post that criticizes someone's spelling, grammar, and/or punctuation will inevitably contain spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. So I wouldn't be surprised if this entry has a few. If I catch one, I'll edit it later.
Apostrophes can be tricky – especially if you’ve never been properly taught how to use them. Faced with a troublesome conundrum, many will err on the side of caution and leave them out altogether. But of course this is technically wrong too, even if a slew of companies arguably set a bad example by doing the same.
No, their not tricky at all. (Okay, that one was on purpose in hopes of subverting Waltz's First Law of the Internet.) The only time I find them tricky at all is when trying to do a possessive of a proper name or a plural ending in -s. "The book that belongs to James." James' book or James's book? "The favorite movie of my favorite people." My friends' favorite movie or My friends's favorite movie? I'm inclined toward the latter in the first example and the former in the second example, but to be honest, I can never remember the rules. So I cheat by rearranging words.
Still, "it's" is really quite remarkably fundamental: it always expands to "it is." Always. Without exception. I think what throws people off is that you say "Robert's blog post" and "its meaning;" that is, pronouns have different rules for possessives than nouns.
The British bookseller Waterstones, the chemist Boots, and the media organisation Reuters are among the many brands that have dropped their apostrophe over the years.
Those are, in my view, stylistic things. If your name is Waterstone and you open a bookstore, you might start out as Waterstone's Books, later dropping the second word to become Waterstone's, after which it's a matter of marketing to drop the apostrophe.
By contrast, the US clothing company Lands’ End is an example of a company that has maintained the use of an incorrect apostrophe and built it into its heritage.
Of course the BBC (or is it just BBC now) pokes fun at an American's misuse of the language.
The so-called 'greengrocer’s apostrophe' – a British phrase referring to the mistaken use of an apostrophe, in a plural noun ('Cauliflower's – two for a pound!') is everywhere.
Here in the US, we don't use the construction "greengrocer," having long ago settled on "grocer." But I have heard it called the "grocer's apostrophe."
But, does it even matter? And who’s to say what’s right or wrong anyhow?
Yes. Yes, it does matter. The more you deviate from accepted norms, the more context is needed to know what's actually meant.
One person who cares more than most about apostrophes is John Richards, who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001.
That said, I'd be sorely, sorely tempted to address a letter to them, with "Apostrophe's Protections' Society." I think I have a bit of troll DNA.
Richards is certainly not alone in feeling so strongly. In the 1980s, the late novelist, playwright and journalist Keith Waterhouse founded and appointed himself Life President of the Association for the Annihilation of the Aberrant Apostrophe.
I'd like to found the Association for the Abolition of Asinine Alliteration.
“The AAAA has two simple goals," wrote Waterhouse. "Its first is to round up and confiscate superfluous apostrophes from, for example, fruit and vegetable stalls where potato's, tomato's and apple's are openly on sale. Its second is to redistribute as many as possible of these impounded apostrophes, restoring missing apostrophes where they have been lost, mislaid or deliberately hijacked – as for instance by British Rail, which as part of its refurbishment programme is dismantling the apostrophes from such stations as King's Cross and shunting them off at dead of night to a secret apostrophe siding at Crewe."
As I found this passage particularly amusing, having read it in my mind's voice in a posh London accent, I decided to highlight it here lest you skip the above link and miss it. Your life is now better for having read it.
The apostrophe probably originated in the early 16th Century – either in 1509, in an Italian edition of Petrarch, or in 1529, courtesy of French printer Geoffroy Tory, who seemingly had a fondness for creating linguistic marks, as he is also credited with inventing the accent and the cedilla.
Probably just to further distinguish French from English and provide headaches to 21st century American users of Duolingo trying to muddle through French.
Grammatical apostrophes originally denoted absence of a different kind, signalling that something had been removed from a word, usually a vowel that was not pronounced. They were also used to show that several letters were missing, not just one.
Well, clearly, we still use them for that purpose. Don't. Won't. Can't. Bo's'n.
Interestingly enough, the infamous Gadsden flag, originally used during the American Revolution and now adorning enormous pickup trucks all over the US, sports the motto, sic, "dont tread on me." However, it's unclear whether the original Gadsden flags contained the correct apostrophe or not.
During the 17th and 18th Centuries, apostrophes began to be used to indicate the genitive (possessive) role of a noun.
This is, obviously, a much different use than standing in for missing letters.
It’s worth remembering that there has never been a time when people agreed on the ‘correct’ function of the apostrophe. "Not only does such consensus not exist in the past, it doesn’t exist now: the role of this troubling little punctuation mark is still in flux," as Merriam Webster puts it.
People never agree on much of anything. But at some point, there have to be some sort of guidelines, or all is chaos.
However Colin Matthews, head of English at Churchfields Primary School in Beckenham, England, says he doesn’t think the evolution of language is "an excuse not to be clear and unambiguous". For him, teaching grammar is about avoiding ambiguity; it’s not about "knowing how an apostrophe is used; it's about clarity in meaning.”
And that's fair enough.
There are, of course, multitudes who survive perfectly well without knowing how to use apostrophes, but Matthews believes that while there are still prospective employers "who will throw a job application in the bin if the apostrophes are wrong," we need to continue teaching children how to use them correctly.
I have to be honest, here: I was one of those prospective employers. I don't care that your degree is in engineering, not English, but we had to write reports, specifications, letters, emails, narratives, directions on construction drawings, etc. And I wanted to do engineering, not copy editing.
This kind of linguistic ‘gate-keeping’ has been responsible for many precepts, for example the shunning of double negatives (eg ‘I didn't see no-one’). Hundreds of years ago, they were considered perfectly acceptable: highly educated merchants and nobles used them as the norm. Over time, this changed and, MacKenzie says: "the community of English speakers decided that it was no longer a sophisticated or intelligent way of speaking."
Fortunately, that's shifting back again, at least here in the US. Language isn't arithmetic (though it is, in a sense, mathematical), so a double negative doesn't automatically create a positive the way it does in algebra. Instead, in English, a double negative is an intensifier: not just no, but HELL NO.
I'm reminded of a joke about an English teacher who once pointed out that while there are numerous examples of double negatives indeed forming a positive, there's no situation in which a double positive can create a negative -- to which one student replied, "Yeah, right."
Matthews describes it as "a difficult mark" because it has two uses. But the biggest problem with the apostrophe, he says, is that in its possessive usage, it makes a singular noun sound "exactly the same as the plural – and because there’s no difference when you speak it, you have to have the understanding of its purpose in order to get it right when you write it."
Oh, cry me a river. I'm trying to learn French here, and usually the third-person singular sounds exactly the same as the third-person plural; the second-person plural sounds exactly the same as the infinitive and the passé composé... you get the picture. In other words, suck it up and learn it.
Even within what is generally considered to be the 'correct' usage of apostrophes, there can be some variation according to personal preference. For example, 'James' car is red' is correct, but so is 'James's car is red'. There is some debate and ambiguity over whether, if the possessor is a singular noun that happens to end in an -s, an apostrophe should simply be added to the end, or whether an apostrophe and an additional 's' is needed.
AHA! So it's not just me (see above). Yes, I comment on these passages before I read the whole thing, shut up.
Probably the best rule of thumbs is, whichever you decide to use, make sure you are consistent.
"Rule of thumbs?" Is that the proper British English for that idiom? Around here we call it "rule of thumb."
As an aside: a woman once screeched at me for using the phrase "rule of thumb" because "it comes from when it was allowed for a man to beat his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb." This is arrant nonsense. There is nothing sexist about the phrase.
Like many linguists, MacKenzie explains that she started out as a "raving prescriptivist", who was militant about punctuation rules, but in time she learned the extent to which these can serve as gate-keeping mechanisms and remove opportunities for some. Linguists aren't grammarians, but rather study how language is used in the real world, she says. "We're not here to tell people what they're doing wrong. We're here to tell people what they're doing is great."
And I think that swings too far in the other direction. Dictionaries are, necessarily, descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. People who back up their arguments citing some dictionary or other are the worst kinds of pedants (and yes, I've done it). But eventually you find yourself waging a losing battle, like whenever someone uses "decimate" incorrectly. "The Black Plague decimated Europe." "No, it didn't; more than 10% of the population died." "Yes, so they were decimated." "No, they were devastated. Decimate means removing one tenth of." "You don't know what your [sic] talking about."
That said, I'm never going to bend on the definition of Blue Moon. It's not the second full moon in a calendar month. Ever.
But, even if we believe there is a correct way to use apostrophes, perhaps we should be a little less quick to judge slip ups. "Language is so tied up in power and class," says Matthews, "and if you can't follow [certain] rules, then you are disadvantaged." By contrast, those in a position of power, such as the companies who choose to drop the apostrophes in their company names, are allowed to change the rules at will.
There is a bit of a power dynamic involved, which is one reason I don't never condemn double negatives; it's a common practice in African-American English, and to deny its use as an intensifier is maybe a little bit on the racist side.
Besides, Mick Jagger did it.
And yet, in most cases, apostrophe use serves a purpose, and as long as it does, we should all make an effort to use them correctly. That said, I usually have to look up the correct uses in New Year's Eve or April Fools' Day. We're talking about a thing that belongs to a singular year, so the apostrophe goes before the s; but all fools are celebrated on April 1, and we are legion, so the apostrophe goes after the s.
Just don't get me started on how some other languages use them to stand in for glottal stops. That's where things get really confusing to English speakers. |
October 16, 2020 at 12:01am October 16, 2020 at 12:01am
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Rage forthcoming...
https://www.domino.com/content/things-you-home-doesnt-need/
30 Things Your Home Doesn’t Really Need
Let it go, let it go…
The title is bad enough without introducing a Frozen reference. I don't have kids and I've only seen that movie once, but it made me understand why people are so short-tempered these days, even before the pandemic.
There are plenty of things we hold onto for good reason.
Such as my incandescent rage at "decluttering" advice articles.
While we aren’t here to push a hyper-minimalist agenda, we do believe every object in your home should serve a distinct purpose or, at the very least, brighten your day a little.
You're not my supervisor!
The ominous cloud of plastic bags under the sink
I'll have you know I either reuse plastic bags as trashbags, or bring them to the grocery store for recycling. As I have groceries delivered, this is usually a separate trip for me. (I walk there, so don't give me shit about wasting gas to recycle.) Whether the bags actually get recycled or not once I leave them in the designated bin at the store is Not My Problem. Point is, I don't have a plastic bag issue.
All those spices that are past their prime
I am convinced that 99% of decluttering advice exists for the sole purpose of encouraging people to Buy More Stuff because once you throw something out, you don't have it anymore, and then when you need it, you have to buy more. The entire purpose of having dried spices is their long shelf life.
The microwave—the stove or oven does the job just as well (if not better) without hogging counter space
You can just truck right off with that bullshit. First of all, my microwave is up under the cabinets, not taking up counter space at all. Second, while there are certainly things that are better off not being microwaved (such as leftover pizza or steak), if I need boiling water I'd damn sure rather nuke it for two minutes than wait the interminable amount of time it takes for it to boil on the stove. And finally, normally this is where I'd just stop reading, but no, I can't turn my eyes away from trainwrecks.
The logo-heavy cups and shot glasses from your college days
That way you can Buy More Stuff.
Stemmed wineglasses (simple drinking glasses work for water, juice, and vino)
Bite my ass.
The top sheet, unless you really love to bundle up
That way, you don't have anything between your sweaty thighs and the blanket, so you have to wash the blanket more often, which wears it out quicker, so you then have to Buy More Stuff.
The shack of books you’re done reading (donate them to a used-book store—or pass along to a fellow bibliophile)
Go to hell. Go directly to hell. Do not pass GO...
The obscene amount of decorative pillows you purchased during your boho phase
I don't have decorative pillows. I'm a man. Also, what in the name of Inanna's tits is a "boho phase?" Do you mean "bohemian?" That shit went out with the sixties, and this article is clearly not aimed at 70-year-olds.
Every hotel toiletry you’ve ever stolen
Those little bottles of shampoo, conditioner, mouthwash? Those are meant to be taken. Also, I leave them in my travel kit and only replace then when they're empty. And if you're stealing anything else from a hotel, screw you for making my lodging expenses higher than they need to be.
Sad towels with holes or makeup stains
Because then you have to go out and Buy More Stuff to use for cleaning rags.
Expired medications, makeup, and sunscreen (yes, they all have expiration dates!)
...even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Unless it's a digital clock, in which case it's never right. This article is a stopped analog clock.
The dead plants you keep trying to revive
I know better than to bring plants into the house. They immediately realize that they're living with me, and, seeing no other means of escape, commit suicide.
A china cabinet (repurpose your plates as wall art instead!)
My china cabinet was old when I was a kid. I inherited it. Besides, it's in storage for now. Also, people who use plates as wall art are the kinds of people I avoid hanging out with.
The dead batteries rolling around in your desk drawer
Uh huh. You're not supposed to throw batteries in the trash. Recycling won't take them. There is no place to drop them off. Honestly? Sometimes I throw them in the trash while walking by and whistling innocently. Look, it's still less of an asshole move than stealing from goddamned hotel rooms.
Supplies for the creative projects you’re going to pick back up “someday”
That way, when you do get around to it, you'll have to Buy More Stuff!
Obviously, I didn't copy all of the stupid advice here. The microwave one is especially infuriating, but the others have their own special blend of inflammatory herbs and spices.
This article reminded me of a tumblr I used to subscribe to, one which, sadly, is no longer being updated. But I found it again and it's still glorious. (Don't go here if repeated F-words offend you.) https://fuckyournoguchicoffeetable.tumblr.com/
Okay, look, I admit to being a clutterbug. It's a tendency I have to wrestle with. But I don't think the answer is to go all the way in the opposite direction. Could I use a bit of a purge right now? Sure. Am I too lazy to actually do it? Absolutely. But keep your rotten, filthy, COVID-infested hands off of my microwave, books, files, tools, and craft supplies. Especially the microwave. |
October 15, 2020 at 12:02am October 15, 2020 at 12:02am
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Entry #7 of 8 for
 Kissing Camels Surgery Center
Okay, this one I just had to do a search on.
Contrary to an impression I might have given, I haven't been everywhere. Hell, I haven't even been everywhere in the US.
The problem with travel, for me, is that I'm always torn between revisiting places I've enjoyed and experiencing new locales. That's one reason I employ a jolt of randomness in my road trips. This, by the way, is in addition to the problem of deciding between traveling and staying at home. The former is tiring and costs money; the latter can be boring.
Lately it's been all boring, no traveling.
Point is, I looked up what in Newton's name Kissing Camels is, and found that it's a thing near Colorado Springs,which is a place I haven't been to yet (I have, however, visited nearby Denver and environs). And no, it's not an adult version of a petting zoo, or anthropomorphic slash fiction.
Kissing Camels is an example of pareidolia.
Here's a link to a picture of it.
As far as I can tell (I also found numerous other photos of the same rock formation), that's not photoshopped. Oh, sure, it probably got color-balanced, cropped, contrast-enhanced, etc., but that's approximately what the rocks look like.
So, as is common in these sorts of things, there's a community nearby also called Kissing Camels, and apparently there's a surgery center there. BOR-ing. 
I was hoping it had something to do with when they tried to wrangle camels out West.
Yes. That was a thing. Someone presumably looked around at the Mojave Desert, scratched his head, looked at his horse, looked back at the vast barren wasteland, and then back at his horse, which in his mind turned into a camel, because camels live in the desert, while horses, well, not so much.
Then (in my headcanon), his eyeballs became large dollar signs as he realized that he could make a humpload of money by importing camels from a different desert, and immediately set off to Arabia or Egypt or some such.
Well, no, that's not how it happened at all. It was more of an Army thing. They wanted to adopt the use of camels as beasts of burden in the Southwest, but for various reasons it didn't work out.
So did they return the camels to Egypt or whatever? Oh, no. Not at all. This is America, dammit. They kissed the camels goodbye and the stubborn sand llamas eventually died out.
Or did they? Spend a night in the desert soutwest. Listen very carefully. Look, up on that ridge! Is that a hump, or... ?
The desert is huge, and habitation there is sparse. I like to think that a few survived, bred, and are sitting in the shade of a rock somewhere, plotting their revenge.
After all, "camel invasion" would not be the weirdest thing to happen to us in 2020.
Don't believe me about the camels? |
October 14, 2020 at 12:06am October 14, 2020 at 12:06am
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While I try to stay away from the Big Three subjects guaranteed to ruin a good relationship (politics, religion, and Monopoly), sometimes my amateur interest in philosophy intersects with one of them.
This is one of those times. I saved this link a few months ago; it's only now come up at random, and I'm completely sober (for the moment), so fasten your seatbelts and let's go.
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-a-huguenot-philosopher-realised-that-atheists-could-be...
How a Huguenot philosopher realised that atheists could be virtuous
I admit to having, for most of my life, only a very vague idea of what a Huguenot was. All I knew for sure was it was a religion thing, and not in any way related to an astronaut. Fortunately, the internet came along and I obtained a better idea. For those who are wondering and can't be arsed to look it up, they were French Protestants in the 15th-16th century who were persecuted for their religious beliefs.
Sound familiar? It should.
Here's a bit about their history.
Anyway, the Aeon article.
For centuries in the West, the idea of a morally good atheist struck people as contradictory.
I'd even go so far as to extend that from "atheist" to "anyone who didn't follow your particular brand of religion."
But today, it is widely – if not completely – understood that an atheist can indeed be morally good.
Widely? [Citation needed].
One of the most important figures in this history is the Huguenot philosopher and historian, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706).
I'm just leaving this here because, unlike certain websites, I don't tease and then fail to deliver. That was the philosopher mentioned in the headline above.
Bayle introduces his readers to virtuous atheists of past ages: Diagoras, Theodorus, Euhemerus, Nicanor, Hippo and Epicurus. He notes that the morals of these men were so highly regarded that Christians later were forced to deny that they were atheists in order to sustain the superstition that atheists were always immoral.
Sounds like a variation on the No True Scotsman fallacy . "No true Scotsman puts brown sugar on his porridge. The fact that Angus MacGregor puts brown sugar on his porridge just proves that he's no true Scotsman!"
From his own age, Bayle introduces the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini (1585-1619), who had his tongue cut out before being strangled and burned at the stake for denying the existence of God. Of course, those who killed Vanini in such a fine way were not atheists.
"It is wrong to kill. Anyone who disagrees with us on any other point probably disagrees with us on that one, too, so we must kill them."
The really pressing question, Bayle suggests, is whether religious believers – and not atheists – can ever be moral.
Perhaps it was a pressing question for Bayle in the 17th century, but it's clear to this atheist that, certainly, religious believers, as well as atheists, can be moral. You mostly just have to watch out for individuals of whatever stripe who want to do wrong things, and for believers (or unbelievers) in larger groups.
Left alone to act on the basis of their passions and habitual customs, who will act better: an atheist or a Christian? Bayle’s opinion is clear from the juxtaposition of chapters devoted to the crimes of Christians and chapters devoted to the virtues of atheists.
And, clearly, counterexamples of both sorts (and from other religious groups) can easily come to mind.
In Bayle’s time, to be truly good was to have a conscience and to follow it.
Here's an interesting philosophical puzzle I've been turning over in my head for some time. I'm sure if I had more than an amateur interest in philosophy, I could find some proposed answer to it out of some grizzled head or other, but I haven't run across one yet.
Suppose you have two people, let's call them Alice and Beth. Alice has a strong desire to do a particular immoral thing. Let's keep this simple and say, "shoplifting." So Alice really, really wants to kife things from stores and take them home without paying for them. But she doesn't; she restrains herself because she knows it's wrong, or maybe simply because she doesn't want the hassle involved with getting caught. Doesn't matter; the point is that she controls her urge. Beth, on the other hand, has no such desire; she understands that shoplifters exist, but she has no desire to do it, herself. Very, very different motivations here -- but the result is the same: neither Alice nor Beth engage in stealing shit from stores.
The puzzle is this: Between Alice and Beth, who is more praiseworthy? Alice, for keeping her inner monster at bay? But she acknowledges that she has that inner monster, that desire to do something wrong, and is that not itself evil by some definition? Or is it Beth? But the reason Beth doesn't shoplift is because she has no desire to do so; her motivations are "pure." Consequently, why should that be praiseworthy? She's just following the dictates of her nature. And yet... the outcome is the same for both of them: no shoplifting. An external observer only sees the result, not Alice's inner turmoil or Beth's lack thereof. Unlike with Cindy, who doesn't have a job and really needs food so she occasionally swipes a few apples from the grocery store. Or Debby, who just does it for the thrill of it.
For the sake of this line of thought, assume all four of these ladies have similar religious beliefs (or lack thereof, whatever).
The point, as regards this article, is that merely following one's conscience doesn't always lead to an outcome that we external observers would consider moral. Or immoral.
The challenge Bayle undertakes is to explain how atheists, who do not recognise a moral cause of the Universe, can nevertheless recognise any kind of objective morality.
Well, that's easy enough, I think. What are the effects of your actions on the rest of the world, and the people around you?
This article limits itself to Christianity and atheism, but of course myriad other religions exist. Christianity is itself a form of atheism: it rejects all of the other gods ever imagined by humankind. As do I. The only real difference is that I believe in one fewer god than they do.
God cannot make killing innocent people a morally good action. Respecting innocent life is a good thing that reflects part of God’s very nature.
"Therefore, we declare that anyone who disagrees with us is not innocent, et voilà, we can kill them." Also, see the book of Joshua. "Those people have the audacity to be living peacefully in the land I think God wants us to have. To the siege engines!"
At bottom, these Christian views do not differ from what atheists believe about the foundation of morality. They believe that the natures of justice, kindness, generosity, courage, prudence and so on are grounded in the nature of the Universe. They are brute objective facts that everyone recognises by means of conscience.
Okay, look. That's nice to hear and all, and I'd like to think it applies to me, but any sentence that begins "Atheists believe..." should be rejected out of hand. The nature of atheism is to accept that there are no gods. It says nothing about what we believe, only about what we do not believe. Personally, I'm convinced that these enumerated virtues, and others, are a result of human evolution, a kind of social lubrication because we are social animals. They are traits that help us get along with each other, to be able to live among others. And, naturally, they're ideals that few of us humans, religious or otherwise, always live up to; that's the way "ideals" work. Of course, dig deeper and yes, human evolution itself is grounded in the nature of the Universe, so I agree with this assertion for myself - but I don't claim to speak for anyone else.
According to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor...
"Canadian philosopher?" That's a phrase I've never heard before.
...our age became secular when belief in God became one option among many, and when it became clear that the theistic option was not the easiest one to espouse when theorising about morality and politics. Through his reflections on atheism over three decades, Bayle demonstrated that resting morality on theology was neither necessary nor advantageous.
And just to be clear, because I'm not sure I have been, I'm not trying to convince anyone over to my point of view, or to disrespect anyone's religious views. As I noted above, this article focuses on Christianity because it's about a philosopher who lived in a Christian country during a time of religious upheaval and persecution, but similar arguments can be made with any belief system. My goal here is only to expand on the article itself, and present my own point of view. But part of my point of view is radical freedom of religion: you practice yours (or not) and I practice mine (or not), and we can still try to get along. Yes, religious people and atheists have both committed atrocities in the past. That doesn't mean we have to continue to do so. |
October 13, 2020 at 12:01am October 13, 2020 at 12:01am
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Meaning? Purpose? A Jedi craves not these things.
https://theconversation.com/lifes-purpose-rests-in-our-minds-spectacular-drive-t...
Life’s purpose rests in our mind’s spectacular drive to extract meaning from the world
What is the purpose of life?
Life needs no purpose. What's the purpose of a rock? Its destiny is to be ground down into dust, but that doesn't make it the rock's purpose. We can give it another purpose - a paperweight, say, or a weapon - but that doesn't mean it was destined for that.
Whatever you may think is the answer, you might, from time to time at least, find your own definition unsatisfactory.
Every definition is unsatisfactory.
Humanity’s purpose rests in the spectacular drive of our minds to extract meaning from the world around us.
That's not a purpose, either. That's a result. You're basically talking about what we talked about in here a while back: apophenia, the seeing of purpose or meaning when there isn't one.
For many scientists, this drive to find sense guides every step they take, it defines everything that they do or say.
Which is not to say that curiosity isn't a good thing.
Take words, for instance, those mesmerising language units that package meaning with phenomenal density. When you show a word to someone who can read it, they not only retrieve the meaning of it, but all the meanings that this person has ever seen associated with it. They also rely on the meaning of words that resemble that word, and even the meaning of nonsensical words that sound or look like it.
I've actually been thinking along these lines for a while now. It came from beginning to study another language. Not only must one know what a word means, there's all kinds of metadata associated with it: what it applies to, how other people have used it in sentences, perhaps where you first encountered it, and (in the case of pronouns and words in certain other languages) its gender... just to name a few. And for people like me, the "meaning of words that resemble that word" is how I make puns. Like the one I've been suppressing since I started writing this, about having to go swimming to find one's porpoise in life.
There, I feel better now that I've gotten that out of my brain.
And yes, you do it too, even if you don't realize it. For example, I'm willing to bet that if you've encountered The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, you're poised to include the number 42 in a comment below, especially if you read this entry's title.
Recently, we have been able to show that even an abstract picture – one that cannot easily be taken as a depiction of a particular concept – connects to words in the mind in a way that can be predicted. It does not seem to matter how seemingly void of meaning an image, a sound, or a smell may be, the human brain will project meaning onto it.
Just like we project meaning onto life, even when it's not there.
In other words, the goal of our existence ultimately seems to be achieving a full understanding of this same existence, a kind of kaleidoscopic infinity loop in which our mind is trapped, from the emergence of proto-consciousness in the womb, all the way to our deathbed.
As was eloquently pointed out in Babylon 5, "we are what the universe has created so that it can figure itself out."
I don't believe that either, but as guiding principles go, it is rather appealing.
The proposal is compatible with theoretical standpoints in quantum physics and astrophysics...
I'm glad they didn't lead with that, because it would have made me stop reading the entire article. Hijacking quantum physics to support your pet philosophy is cheating, like ending a story with "...but it turned out it was all a dream."
Perhaps it does not matter if you find this proposal satisfying, because getting the answer to what the purpose of life is would equate to making your life purposeless. And who would want that?
*raises hand*
I'm comfortable with the lack of meaning or purpose. At least, I am today. I wasn't always. And as usual, ask me again tomorrow and I'll probably say the purpose of life is to enjoy beer. Right now, I have too much of a headache from doing that earlier. And sometimes I think that the sole purpose of life is to increase overall entropy (which all life does), thus hastening the eventual heat death of the universe.
But look, I'm not dismissing the article entirely. If I did that, I wouldn't have linked it. I find it interesting, but that doesn't mean I agree with it. It's perfectly reasonable for an individual to create their own meaning, or purpose, and live for it. I only object to the idea that there's one answer for everyone.
Even if that answer is 42. |
October 12, 2020 at 12:04am October 12, 2020 at 12:04am
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Entry #6 for
politicalwatch@appliancerepairscottsdaleaz.com
I haven't been to Scottsdale, but I've been pretty close.
On one of my excursions, I decided to follow U.S. Route 60 from beginning to end. Or... I suppose it was end to beginning, considering that the US mostly developed east to west, and I was traveling back east.
Route 60 ends just east of the California border, because apparently, a while back, in a transparent attempt to begin its process of secession from the US, it took over the old US routes that ran across it, giving them new designations.
It's not as well-known as the storied Route 66, but I figured, hey, I'm in Vegas and I want to get back to Virginia, and the other end of the old route is in Virginia Beach. So I drove south from Vegas until I reached the end point of U.S. 60 and began the long trek home.
I don't live in Virginia Beach, of course, so this route would take me past my town (missing it by about 35 miles), but I'd long been wanting to trace one of the older, pre-interstate US routes from beginning to end. I have a friend who, until earlier that year, lived on a farm adjacent to Route 60 in Virginia, but that, and Pacific Avenue in Virginia Beach, had been my only experience with that road that I remember.
It's worth mentioning that yes, I'm fully aware that interstates get you where you want to go much faster and with more services available. But I don't travel for the destination; I travel for the experience of traveling.
Still, US 60 through Phoenix was one of the most stressful experiences of my driving career - and I've driven in New York, Boston, DC, LA, Atlanta, and the SF Bay area, just to name a few traffic-heavy places.
Phoenix. Sucked.
A few months after this trip, I saw a news story about a high-speed chase that the cops were involved in through Phoenix. My comment was I didn't believe it, because the top speed you can make through that shithole is, in my experience, approximately half walking speed. Okay, probably it's not a shithole, because clearly people want to live there. But the traffic sucks.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that Scottsdale is essentially part of Phoenix. Oh, sure, it has its own separate designation, but my rule is that unless cities are divided by a major river, a significant park, farmland, or a big honkin' wall or something, stop calling them different cities. It's annoying and confusing to anyone who doesn't live there, and I say that as someone who lives in the only state where cities are separate political entities from their surrounding counties.
But U.S. 60 doesn't go through Scottsdale, instead bypassing it to the south. Though "bypassing" doesn't convey the right flavor of traffic jam. After slogging through Phoenix, it was getting dark (I'm pretty sure I entered it in the morning), so I pulled off to spend the night at a motel in Mesa, which is another annoyingly city-that's-not-a-separate-city, directly south of Scottsdale. Or I don't know, maybe it was Tempe. Look, I've only been to Phoenix once and the chance of me being there again is minuscule. Okay, no, maybe it's not; I didn't have time to visit any breweries there, so it's still on my list. I'll just have to remember to allow a few extra weeks to get around the city.
From what I can gather, Scottsdale is, like, the rich people part of Greater Phoenix, so I wouldn't be allowed across the border anyway.
Which does nothing to explain or even hint at an explanation for the actual prompt, so my headcanon is that the appliance repair company is a front for a right-wing conservative pedophile, undocumented immigrant, human trafficking, and opioid distribution ring (hey, they're not the only ones who can make shit up), and that particular email address is for someone who follows the ebb and flow of politics so they'll have some warning when the government decides to start rounding them up.
Though they won't, because the government is in on it.
Following an old US route can get tricky at times, especially when it goes through a city and signs are missing or unclear. I must have looped around Louisville, for example, three times making sure I stayed on track.
And then, when I finally rolled into Virginia Beach a few days later, I stopped for the night just a few blocks short of the other end of Route 60, because that's where my favorite bar in the entire world is located.
Well. Was located. It closed last year, and I'm still sore about it. Add Virginia Beach to the list of cities I have no further reason to return to.
Unless a new brewery opens there, of course. |
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