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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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I considered doing an April Fools' entry but, deciding there's already enough foolishness in the world (and then some), decided against it.
Instead, let's look at a particular brand of fool: the conspiracy theorist.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-intellectual-character-of-conspiracy-theorists
Indeed, peculiar theories about all manner of things are now widespread. There are conspiracy theories about the spread of AIDS, the 1969 Moon landings, UFOs, and the assassination of JFK.
This article is from 2015. I'm sure you've heard the conspiracy theories regarding COVID-19. If not, I don't suggest looking them up.
Sometimes, conspiracy theories turn out to be right – Watergate really was a conspiracy – but mostly they are bunkum.
And Watergate was exposed. In general, the more people there are supposedly involved in a conspiracy, the more vanishingly improbable it is to be true.
A 2009 Harris Poll found that between one‑fifth and one‑quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation, astrology and the existence of witches.
I assure you, witches exist. I've met many. Most of them are actually quite nice, if a little catty in larger groups, and way too fond of New Age music.
The article is fairly long, but worth a read if you're at all interested in why it's so frustrating to argue with conspiracy theorists. Like most internet arguments, it skates perilously closely to epistemology: the study of how we know what we know.
Thing is, I think it would be just as wrong to dismiss conspiracy "theories" out of hand as it would be to uncritically accept them. People in power, for example parts of the US government, have certainly done shady things and covered up mistakes. This, for example.  It's legitimately difficult, sometimes, to separate truth from opinion, opinion from fiction, and facts from speculation.
We see a lot of this on April Fools' Day in particular. The internet is replete with sites that celebrate what I like to call Comedy Christmas by posting something vaguely plausible as fact -- and some people, inevitably, fall for it. This practice, of course, preceded the internet - like this report from 1957 - but the Web has made it easier to get your AFD prank to huge numbers of people.
And yeah, I've been pranked. Chances are you have too. Come on, yes, you have. The only alternative is to accept nothing as fact, and that's just as dangerous as being criminally gullible. Just as foolish, even.
No, the best thing to do is to keep an open mind, but be skeptical at the same time. It's not easy, and I certainly fail at it a lot. We're all fools, but sometimes the fool has the real truth, while others are too blind to see it. The peril lies in believing you're immune to foolishness. |
March 31, 2020 at 12:14am March 31, 2020 at 12:14am
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Wrapping up entries for
Why the hell is this a video?
Let me get this out of the way. This video is over 20 minutes long and it's just a computer geek talking the whole time. Yes, he's good at talking. No vocal tics, few pauses, knows his material. Good for him. But I just wasted 20 minutes watching a video when I could have skimmed a written article and gotten the same outcome.
There are reasons to do video. This is not one of them. Its only saving grace is that it's not formatted vertically like savages do.
Techie Talk
I'm not an idiot, and I've been using computers since the late 70s. But I'm not in the business. I have no idea what half the shit he was saying was. Something about processor speeds and CPU architecture, none of which was really relevant to the point he's making. While it does serve to establish his geek smarts, I think I got the idea after the first phrase of tech jargon.
Rotten Apples
He opens with an analogy with totalitarian Soviet Russia, comparing the Apple user experience to that sort of propaganda cult. I find this especially amusing, because one reason Apple went mainstream was a S*per B*wl ad back in 1984 (long ago when I actually watched football), giving them an opportunity to draw parallels with Orwell. In it, a freedom fighter (supposed to represent Apple) destroys a propaganda film from the Establishment (supposed to represent IBM at the time).
I mean, really, that one ad is probably what started the S*per B*wl ad fad, as well as launching Apple into the consumer spotlight.
Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA
The text at the end of the ad: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."
So yeah, irony.
Same As The Old Boss
The problem with revolutions is, and has always been, that all they do is replace one kind of power structure with another. The replacement power structure might appeal to more people, but I guarantee you there were those who mourned the loss of the French aristocracy during the Revolution. At least briefly, until their heads were separated from their bodies.
I've known a lot of Apple fans, even from before 1984. Some of them are, as the author of the first video above noted, cult-like in their obsession. I understand, to an extent -- their products have always been more elegant, both inside and out. I never owned one of their computers, though, because it's always been easier for me to game on the Windows boxes. But I used them for years; my first career boss was an Apple fanatic. But those machines couldn't run AutoCAD worth a damn, either.
Point is, for me it's a matter of picking the right tool for the job. When I wanted a music device, I picked an iPod, not a Zune. I still use it; I don't trust streaming to not take my music away from me.
And I don't listen to Apple fanboys trying to shame me for using a PC. For fuck's sake, it's just another company.
Just Another Company?
Well, okay, it's pretty much the archetypal company. Their propaganda machine works better than their actual machines, as our intrepid geek above pointed out. This gives them staying power, despite the efforts of their detractors.
I like to point out that Steve Jobs started a company, with a couple of other guys of course, in his garage, and at the time he died, it had grown to be the most valuable publicly traded company in the world by market capitalization, surpassing not only Microsoft but such venerable giants as ExxonMobil and GE.
They're not that, at the moment, but that doesn't matter; the point is that now the revolution is long over and Apple is the Establishment. |
March 30, 2020 at 12:16am March 30, 2020 at 12:16am
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One left to do after this... entry #7 of 8 for
How language shapes the way we think
This harks back to a post I made in the Before Times, way back on March 1: "It Doesn't Count" . It's something that's long been fascinating to me, so I'm glad this one came up in my random walk through the prompts.
Now, I can't be arsed to look it up, but the idea that language shapes thought has its detractors -- or, at least, that it's as pronounced (pun intended) as this speaker asserts. Me, I'm no expert; I'm just drinking from the fountain here.
Part of my own cognitive problem is that I've never bothered to dive deep into any language except my own. My knowledge of idioms and grammatical constructions is very English-oriented, and American English in particular. I can play with it, twist it, and hopefully get my points across even if I don't hew to standard grammar and phrasing -- but it's definitely English.
What little I've learned of French in this regard has been enlightening. For example, we Yanks might say something like, "I have a headache" or "My head hurts." Well, the equivalent French phrase, strictly translated, would be something akin to "I have bad in head" or "I have wrong in head" (the bad/wrong word being mal). If I told someone I had a wrong in my head in English, they'd assume I need to be committed somewhere. I should note that I'm far from fluent in French, so I could have mal about all of this, but that's what it comes across as at this point in my learning.
Point is, that's a language that, as these things go, isn't all that dissimilar from English. I mean, obviously most words are different, English is less inflected, and the French syntax is often scrambled from an English point of view (ours is scrambled from their point of view), but for the most part, there are parallel parts of speech; things are countable; there's a left and right, up and down; colors are recognizable; and so on.
But that makes me pose a different question: why are there different languages in the first place? Language, obviously, evolves in communities that are separated. In that sense, it's similar to, but much faster than, biological evolution. But language also has a feature not usually found in (eukaryotic) evolution, which is cross-pollination. In biology it's known, as far as I understand it, as "horizontal gene transfer," and apart from genetic engineering, you just don't get a lot of that in nature (for the purists out there, it happens a lot in bacteria and other prokaryotes, but I'm not talking about them). But with language, horizontal meme transfer (using "meme" here in the sense that Dawkins originally coined the word) happens all the time.
Answering that question is above my pay grade, though the one thing I can say with a high degree of certainty is that it wasn't God's punishment for building a fucking ziggurat. (If it were, then why did language keep on evolving long after Babel?)
I can only hypothesize that it was groups of people who separated themselves and started thinking independently of each other. In which case, which is more true: that language shapes thought, or that thought shapes language?
I suspect there's a bit of both going on. Our ability to think in new ways when learning a new language is, well, very human. |
March 29, 2020 at 12:06am March 29, 2020 at 12:06am
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Time to do entry #6 of 8 for
Let's start by breaking down the description: Snickers S*per B*wl LIV commercial
1) Snickers
2) S*per B*wl
3) LIV
4) Commercial
1) Snickers. This is actually the least offensive thing to me on the list. If I wanted a candy bar, and there was nothing left available, I'd buy a Snickers rather than not have a candy bar. That's the best thing I can say about Snickers. I hate peanuts with an all-consuming, fiery passion and I almost wish I were allergic to them so I'd have an excuse to keep them the hell away from me.
I like peanut butter, though. Go figure.
2) S*per B*wl. I'm bleeping that out because the actual name of the game is copyrighted, and I don't want the lawyers (paid for out of nonprofit profits) coming after me. The last time I saw that game, it was when Springsteen did the halftime show. That was the only draw for me. I couldn't possibly care less about sports in general, or American football in particular. Know what I did last time that game came on? I went to Alamo to get drunk and watch the Groundhog Day movie. There were a lot of pissed-off employees there, because the movie started like an hour before the game did, and they all wanted to run home to see it. Yeah, the theater closed early that day just so employees could get their halftime commercial break fix. They were open on Christmas Day, but not S*per B*wl evening.
At this time, the Alamo is indefinitely closed, for obvious reasons. I wonder how many of them wish they'd spent the rest of February 2 making their wages & tips.
3) LIV. Know what I hate most about that game? The numbering system. Not the Roman numerals; I had those figured out in elementary school. It's that the first one was played the year I turned 1. That means that if you want to know how old I'm about to turn, translate the Big Game number into Indo/Arabic numerals, and there you have it. It's a constant reminder of my age, and I don't like it one bit.
Also, I was kinda pissed about 50. Every other one was numbered in Roman, but apparently they thought our puny little minds couldn't handle L, so they just called it 50. What will they do if they make it to 100? We'll C. Well, I won't. But some of you might.
4) Commercial. Eh. I've ranted about commercials in here before. I hate them with the fiery power of a billion merging black holes. I hate them so much, I've never had cable - the idea of paying upwards of $100 a month and still being subjected to goddamn ads made my blood boil. I'm fully aware that most people find them, at worst, mildly annoying, and I'm not trying to convert anyone to my point of view or make some grand statement about the evils of capitalism (hey, capitalism keeps me alive). It's just that whenever I hear "Oh, I don't care about the S*per B*wl; I just watch it for the commercials," my mind shatters into digital breakdown. I can't compute. I mean, I understand the urge to watch sports, even though I don't share it. That much makes sense to me. But ads are something to avoid, not look forward to.
These days, with streaming, I can avoid commercials, and it costs me less per month than cable. Granted, I don't have every streaming service out there -- notably, I skip Hulu because they like to charge AND show ads -- and I missed out on the whole Game of Thrones fad, which, after having the ending spoiled for me, I have to admit filled me with the warm glow of schadenfreude.
And finally, that particular commercial.
It... didn't age well, and it's less than two months old.
I admit it's pretty damn clever, though, and it pokes fun at a lot of the things that used to be wrong with the world before things we can't even see became what's wrong with the world.
And I do have to say that the ending had me  |
March 28, 2020 at 12:01am March 28, 2020 at 12:01am
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This one's been hanging out in my queue for three months. If I thought I'd still be around in 9.75 years, I'd drag it out then. As it is, I'm leaving it here so y'all can laugh about it at the end of 2029.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/12/new-technology-2020-will-change-life-as-...
“It Won’t Be Pretty”: How the Next Decade’s Technological Tsunami Will Change Life as We Know It
Self-driving cars, iPads, Uber: The technological advances of this decade have happened so quickly that their breadth is difficult to comprehend. The next decade? That, times ten.
The great thing about prognostications is how terribly wrong they all are in hindsight. Even, sometimes, three months later.
This time a decade ago, there was no such thing as an iPad.
As far as I'm concerned, there still isn't.
There were no food delivery meal kits.
Or these.
You didn’t speak to a machine called Alexa or Siri
Still don't.
or get laid with an app called Tinder.
hahahahahahaha
You stayed in hotels, not Airbnbs.
I have a prediction about Airbnb. It's short-term. You can guess what it is. Anyway, I've never used it. Too much potential for scamification.
You telephoned a cab company, rather than pressing a button and waiting for an Uber or a Lyft.
Okay, I do the ride-share thing. Or I did, back when there was anywhere to go.
You didn’t waste hours of your day on Instagram, scrolling from one box to the next like a gerbil running on a wheel as an algorithm watches and takes notes.
Still don't.
Jobs that are now performed by hundreds of thousands of people—Uber driver, gif-maker, social media influencer—didn’t exist.
Out of those three, only one is an actual job.
You likely read the newspaper in the morning, watched the news at night, and consumed a trickle of information in between by going to Yahoo News or through the RSS feed you’d painstakingly constructed, rather than drinking from the fire hose that is Twitter.
What's a "newspaper?" And I've never had cable TV, so no nightly news. I still have an RSS feed I comb through daily, because I fucking hate Twitter with the fiery power of a thousand supernovae.
Things felt slower.
Did not.
Now, this whirlwind of a past decade could be just a taste of what’s to come.
Or it could be the last gasp of a dying civilization.
We’re just now seeing deep fakes used to make even more believable fake news for political gain.
Thus leading to the inevitable conclusion that everything you see is fake, so you start to disbelieve everything.
And yet a decade from now, on the eve of 2030, we’ll look back at today in astonishment at how primitive life was in 2019.
While the last dregs of humanity are stalking bison on the prairie.
By then, it’s likely that cars will drive themselves.
Right, because we'll have convinced people that 10,000 deaths a year from driverless cars is objectively better than 30,000 from human drivers.
They won’t even look like cars, more like traveling gyms or gaming cars or mobile beds to nap on during your commute.
Mine would look like a drunk tank. What's a commute?
Some will fly. (Maybe most of them will.)
Uh huh. And we'll have unlimited clean energy from fusion, and warp drive, and teleportation, and a post-capitalist utopia.
Your phone could be replaced with a contact lens, or some glasses that (finally) look like glasses.
A little bit of actual thought would tell anyone why contact lenses won't work for communication, at least not until we have a better brain/machine interface, at which point, what's the use of lenses?
On the flip side, health care will go through the most substantial changes since the invention of antibiotics.
Snort.
And you might get to live until you’re 150.
In this world? Dear gods, please, no, just end it already.
My guess is that a decade from now, society will look nothing like it does today—and it won’t be pretty.
And finally we get a prediction we can actually bank on.
That's right. I poked my head out of my hole and saw my shadow, and I'm predicting six more decades of winter. |
March 27, 2020 at 12:11am March 27, 2020 at 12:11am
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This is from three years ago, but it seems especially relevant now.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/how-to-break-the-dangerous-cycle-of-lonelin...
How to Break the Dangerous Cycle of Loneliness
Social isolation kills, and in the process it makes it harder to reach out to others. A psychologist explains how to stop the feedback loop.
I ventured out today, for the first time in a week and a half. Of course it was to buy beer. I encountered the brewmaster, who's a friend of sorts (always be friends with the brewmaster; that's your tip for today), and said that I've been pretending my self-isolation is a kind of virtue signaling instead of life as usual. I'll probably use that line, or something like it, in a Comedy newsletter.
Last year Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that Americans are “facing an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.”
Funny, that word.
Loneliness is more dangerous than obesity, and it’s about as deadly as smoking. The threat is considered so serious that England has created an entire “Campaign to End Loneliness.”
So what if you're a fat smoker who is alone? I guess I'm fucked.
Also, if England wanted to end loneliness, maybe they shouldn't have self-isolated from the rest of Europe?
To learn more about this conundrum, and how to resolve it, I recently spoke with John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago who wrote a book on loneliness and has researched the phenomenon extensively.
Oh, hey, we haven't had a good book-shilling in here for hours.
First of all, let me qualify something. Living alone, being alone, and the size of your social network is only weakly related. Think about patients in hospitals: They aren’t alone, they have all the support they could ask for, but they tend to feel very lonely. There’s a difference between being alone and feeling alone.
I have a housemate, and we're friends, and I have other friends, including a bunch of people on this site. Physical distance isn't a barrier to friendship. Hard to drink with internet friends, but lately they've been doing workarounds for that. I'm kicking myself for not buying stock in Zoom before this whole mess started.
For instance, the internet has increased connectivity. But if you ever find yourself [looking at] your texts and emails at an event with your family, you may realize that those digital connections don’t mean that you feel more connected.
I grow weary of people ragging on internet-connected friendships. We've had this thing for more than a generation, now, and I was an early adopter specifically so that I could meet people - not get laid, but meet people - from other places. Family can be oppressive, and it's natural to want to escape their judgment in some cases.
And then the guy gets into evolutionary psychology, so I kinda skimmed that part. Pseudoscience.
Being with others doesn’t mean you’re going to feel connected, and being alone doesn’t mean you're going to feel lonely. It can, but usually we choose to be alone.
The majority of people are extroverts. I have to wonder if all this psych sorcery takes into account those of us who generally prefer to be alone.
Self-preservation depends more on your attention to your outcomes when you’re lonely than when you have lots of connections. [Sometimes] if you talk to a lonely person, they'll start talking to you and you can't get away. So, how do you share rather than just barrage? It’s about interactions, it’s about synergy, it's about mutuality.
Here's the thing about actual loneliness: it feeds on itself. I remember I was dating this chick back in college, and her roommates had put a thing on their bulletin board (we didn't have internet then) that went something like, "Wouldn't the world be a better place if depression and loneliness were attractive qualities?"
People sense loneliness and their instinct isn't to fix it, but to distance themselves from it, like it's some new virus coming around to infect them. This just isolates the lonely, depressed people more, and the cycle continues.
One of the biggest misunderstandings is what loneliness is. They equate it with being alone, and that leads to attempts to solve the problem that don’t solve the problem at all. And if you try enough times, you start to feel like, “Well, I’ll never be able to solve this, I’m just a worthless person.” And that's when you start getting social withdrawal.
Exactly. I need my alone time, but I also need some time with friends. Short periods, anyway.
Do volunteer service in something that you enjoy. I've developed the acronym EASE
And I stopped reading there (to be fair, it's near the end of the article). Whenever a shrink starts making up acronyms, they can be safely avoided. Oh, you're probably wondering what the One Weird Trick is to break the cycle. I'll save you the click: it's to go out and do stuff to help others. Thanks, that's helpful in these times. I'm going to crawl back into my shell now. |
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So today I'm going to discuss actual writing again.
https://ideas.ted.com/helpful-advice-for-aspiring-writers-of-all-ages/
Helpful advice for aspiring writers of all ages
I find when something is targeted at "all ages," it often ends up being infantile. Lowest common denominator and all that. Let's see here...
Being a writer is all about expressing your unique perspective with feeling and originality, not about having a huge vocabulary or getting published, says author Jacqueline Woodson.
Let's get this out of the way first: You don't have a unique perspective.
Neither do I.
In the time BI (Before Internet), you only had to be unique among a small group in order to stand out. Two things have happened in the last 50 years to change the landscape entirely: the population of the planet quadrupled, and we all started talking to each other. Now, in order to the the "best," you're competing with 7 billion other people. It can't be done. Not only that, but even if you're not concerned about "best," with that many people, statistically, someone else shares your opinions and talents.
And second, there's no such thing as "originality," unless you want to make up your own language.
“Write something good, and feel good about writing it.”
in response to the question “What’s the goal of writing when you’re 15?”
I know when I was 15, I felt good about my writing. Boy, am I embarrassed. Fortunately, none of that tripe survived.
“Writing is about narrative language and creative language and being able to get a point across in a way that is not ordinary. More than having a large vocabulary, one needs a large vision and be able to see the world in a different way than other people see it.”
Despite what I said above, I think this is decent advice as far as it goes -- though it doesn't express how someone without this ability for perspective might gain it.
If it’s possible, set limits on the initial feedback you receive
“When I first write something, I show it to three people I trust. I tell them: ‘Tell me every single thing you love about it.’
Doesn't really work on this site, unless you have a group set up for just that.
Being a writer means being a re-writer
Yeah, that's where I always stumble.
“Whenever kids start asking me about their stuff getting published, I’m like, ‘That’s not what you should worry about. You should worry about writing the best piece that you possibly can.’ Writing is such a process.
And again, not bad advice. But the promise of the headline - "for all ages" - fails, as usual. |
March 25, 2020 at 12:23am March 25, 2020 at 12:23am
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No escaping human nature. Not yet, anyway.
http://nautil.us/blog/why-we-should-think-twice-about-colonizing-space
Why We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space
Um, have you read science fiction? We've thought about it more than twice.
And the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has conjectured that if humanity fails to colonize space within 100 years, we could face extinction.
The phrase "necessary but not sufficient" comes to mind.
To be sure, humanity will eventually need to escape Earth to survive, since the sun will make the planet uninhabitable in about 1 billion years.
For reference, that's about as long as there have been eukaryotes on land
For example, the astrobiologist Milan Cirkovic calculates that some 1046 people per century could come into existence if we were to colonize our Local Supercluster, Virgo. This leads Nick Bostrom to argue that failing to colonize space would be tragic because it would mean that these potential “worthwhile lives” would never exist, and this would be morally bad.
What the hell kind of stupid, irrelevant argument is that? If you're going to assert that any life that could have existed but didn't is morally bad, you have a lot to answer for.
My conclusion is that in a colonized universe the probability of the annihilation of the human race could actually rise rather than fall.
And we could get hit by another dinosaur-killer-sized comet. Which is why people talk about inhabiting other places besides Earth.
Consider what is likely to happen as humanity hops from Earth to Mars, and from Mars to relatively nearby, potentially habitable exoplanets like Epsilon Eridani b, Gliese 674 b, and Gliese 581 d.
Really, I should have stopped reading right there. I'm no expert in exoplanetary science, but really quickly: EpEri b is basically Jupiter; G674b is basically within the photosphere of its star; and that last one is "potentially habitable" only in the most esoterically theoretical sense; it's a super-Earth.
I have heard of no exoplanets that are what we'd consider Earthlike (remember, to an astronomer, a "terrestrial planet" includes such familiar worlds as Mercury, Venus and Mars), and I'm absolutely certain that I would have heard of one if it had been announced. Hell, you would have too. You haven't. You only think you have because science reporters fucking love the merest glimmer of the possibility of a faint hope that maybe something in a star's habitable zone might be life-capable, and play that up.
I will note that, in a rare case of me actually being arsed to look this shit up, I saw that someone had rather humorously vandalized the Epsilon Eridani b Wiki page thus: Epsilon B was famously visited by the mysterious super space pirate who's life was greatly documented by the late Disco Beavers. There it is said he found vast amounts of funky juice and many beautiful space women, as well as meeting his life long friend and later enemy, Diamond Prince. I'd link it but these things tend to disappear fairly quickly.
Okay, my point is that while there might be "potentially habitable exoplanets," especially since we really couldn't find Earth if we were looking at our solar system from, say, Epsilon Eridani b, we haven't found any, and any claims that we have are spurious.
Anyway, back to the philosophizing.
In other words, natural selection and cyborgization as humanity spreads throughout the cosmos will result in species diversification.
I think that's a fair prediction, though speciation takes a very long time. Your guess is as good as mine as to how quickly some of us become the Borg Collective.
At the same time, expanding across space will also result in ideological diversification.
You know, I haven't read everything in science fiction. That would be impossible. But I have yet to read any fiction where a Mars colony doesn't declare its independence, usually resulting in interplanetary war. Maybe this is because it would be boring if they didn't, or maybe it's because SF authors have already figured out this little tidbit about human nature.
The author goes on to explain the difficulties of having a top-down governing system for far-flung human colonies. But as the argument hinges on not having warp drive, I should note that not having warp drive would also make inter-system war very, very difficult. I mean, imagine, say, Planet England and Planet France.
PF: You have infringed upon our trade rights!
(PF assembles a war fleet)
(70 years pass as a war fleet crawls from PF to PE)
PE: What is that war fleet doing here, and why are they signaling for help with their engines and life support systems?
I mean, really, someone should write books about this stuff. Oh, wait, they have.
The lesson of this argument is not to uncritically assume that venturing into the heavens will necessarily make us safer or more existentially secure. This is a point that organizations hoping to colonize Mars, such as SpaceX, NASA, and Mars One should seriously contemplate. How can humanity migrate to another planet without bringing our problems with us?
In the end, though, I can't disagree with the basic premise here. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It just means we need to account for human nature.
And this last bit, written in 2018, seems prescient enough:
Human beings have made many catastrophically bad decisions in the past. Some of these outcomes could have been avoided if only the decision-makers had deliberated a bit more about what could go wrong—i.e., had done a “premortem” analysis.
And that's enough prognostication for one day. |
March 24, 2020 at 12:15am March 24, 2020 at 12:15am
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Waltz is not sure what to make of this.
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-speaking-to-yourself-in-the-third-person-makes-you-wis...
Why speaking to yourself in the third person makes you wiser
Simple rumination – the process of churning your concerns around in your head – isn’t the answer. It’s likely to cause you to become stuck in the rut of your own thoughts and immersed in the emotions that might be leading you astray.
Waltz doesn't know anybody like that.
Instead, the scientific research suggests that you should adopt an ancient rhetorical method favoured by the likes of Julius Caesar and known as ‘illeism’ – or speaking about yourself in the third person
A lot of us are worried about illism now. Oh, illeism. Nevermind.
The idea is that this small change in perspective can clear your emotional fog, allowing you to see past your biases.
Or, just spitballing here, maybe focusing on changing a particular habit, such as referring to oneself in the first person exclusively, can help you break out of an emotional rut.
Grossmann’s aim is to build a strong experimental footing for the study of wisdom, which had long been considered too nebulous for scientific enquiry.
Good, because priests are just as important to an adventuring party as mages.
Grossmann found that these wise-reasoning scores were far better than intelligence tests at predicting emotional wellbeing, and relationship satisfaction – supporting the idea that wisdom, as defined by these qualities, constitutes a unique construct that determines how we navigate life challenges.
Waltz has known for a long time that intelligence isn't correlated with emotional wellbeing, or Waltz would be one of the happiest people on the planet.
The article goes on to describe some of the studies involved.
I find these emotion and relationship effects particularly fascinating, considering the fact that illeism is often considered to be infantile.
It always makes Waltz think of D&D.
Alternatively, it can be taken to be the sign of a narcissistic personality – the very opposite of personal wisdom.
Or, perhaps, narcissists are the only ones who have it right.
Previous experiments have shown, for instance, that rumination leads to worse choices in poker (hence why expert players strive for a detached, emotionally distanced attitude), and that greater emotional awareness and regulation can improve performance on the stock market.
Oh, like that's going to help NOW.
...actually, it probably would. Wisdom says "don't sell now that everything's tanked," but emotions are like "SELL, MORTIMER! SELL!"
It is notoriously difficult to increase general intelligence through brain-training, but these results suggest that wiser reasoning and better decision making are within everyone’s power.
Waltz is not holding out any hope that people will suddenly become wiser by referring to themselves in the third person. Or the second. |
March 23, 2020 at 12:01am March 23, 2020 at 12:01am
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I found this interesting because it's a kind of insight into the writing process. It's from a couple of years ago, but whatever.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers-neighborhood-talkin...
Mister Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children
The TV legend possessed an extraordinary understanding of how kids make sense of language.
And, yeah, it's kind of a plug for a book, but again: whatever.
For the millions of adults who grew up watching him on public television, Fred Rogers represents the most important human values: respect, compassion, kindness, integrity, humility.
And cardigans.
He insisted that every word, whether spoken by a person or a puppet, be scrutinized closely, because he knew that children—the preschool-age boys and girls who made up the core of his audience—tend to hear things literally.
This is something I think every writer needs to keep in mind: not the talking-to-children part, unless that's your goal, but the necessity of knowing your audience. Or as a comedian might put it, "Read the room." Only for a writer, the room is the world, or at least a part of it.
For instance, Greenwald mentioned a scene in a hospital in which a nurse inflating a blood-pressure cuff originally said, “I’m going to blow this up.” Greenwald recalls: “Fred made us redub the line, saying, ‘I’m going to puff this up with some air,’ because ‘blow it up’ might sound like there’s an explosion, and he didn’t want the kids to cover their ears and miss what would happen next.”
You know, ordinarily I'd say that demands like that would be enough by themselves to raise peoples' blood pressure, but I choose to believe that Fred Rogers knew how to speak kindly to adults, too.
And Rogers’s secretary, Elaine Lynch, remembered how, when one script referred to putting a pet “to sleep,” he excised it for fear that children would be worried about the idea of falling asleep themselves.
I'd think that pet euthanasia, or really death in general, would be a difficult topic to work into any kids' programming (though I'd certainly have fun with it in a parody aimed at adults). But if anyone could do it, Rogers could. Of course, I grew up with that show, but I don't remember too many specific scenes; certainly none involving dead puppies.
Rogers also wrote a song called “You Can Never Go Down the Drain,” because he knew that drains were something that, to kids, seemed to exist solely to suck things down.
Oh, man, I wanna have so much fun with that. "You Can Never Go Down the Drain, But Your Soul Can."
In 1977, about a decade into the show’s run, Arthur Greenwald and another writer named Barry Head cracked open a bottle of scotch while on a break, and coined the term Freddish. They later created an illustrated manual called “Let’s Talk About Freddish,” a loving parody of the demanding process of getting all the words just right for Rogers.
Can you say "scotch," boys and girls? Scotch is a fountain of creativity. Do you know what creativity is? It's what happens when you drink a lot of scotch. Ask your parents where they keep their scotch.
This is one of the reasons Rogers was so particular about the writing on his show. “I spent hours talking with Fred and taking notes,” says Greenwald, “then hours talking with Margaret McFarland before I went off and wrote the scripts. Then Fred made them better.” As simple as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood looked and sounded, every detail in it was the product of a tremendously careful, academically informed process.
Getting back to being serious for a moment... again, I think this is important for all writers. Well, not this specifically, but the general idea - editing, researching, being aware of your audience, and knowing what you're writing.
But mostly what's important is scotch. |
March 22, 2020 at 12:06am March 22, 2020 at 12:06am
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Today in "Just Because You Can Think It Doesn't Mean It's True..."
(Buckle up, folks, this one's a bit complicated.)
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/01/17/panpsychism-an-interview-and...
Panpsychism: an interview and a critique
"Panpsychism" is, as I understand it, the philosophical position that consciousness exists because everything is conscious.
Is that the whiff of bovine excrement my nose detects?
Harris gives the same two justifications for panpsychism as does Philip Goff in the interview below: there is no way to understand how subjective perception (“qualia”) can arise from purely materialistic phenomena in the brain (this is the “hard problem of consciousness”, and, second, because science cannot tell us what the real intrinsic nature of matter is. Supposedly philosophy can, and that intrinsic nature includes consciousness. How philosophy alone can supply this conclusion baffles me.
Now, I don't think it's a bad thing to come up with ideas like this. All great discoveries start out with an idea. But most ideas don't lead to great discoveries. But where's the supporting evidence? Hint: lack of evidence isn't supporting evidence. Worse, it can't be disproved.
It's like the pernicious idea that we're living in a simulation, like in The Matrix. I maintain that a well-designed simulation wouldn't give us the leeway to conceive of this possibility; therefore, if we are living in a simulation, it's not a well-designed one. If it's not a well-designed one, we should see cracks in it ("glitches in the matrix"). We don't, at least not compelling ones. Therefore, we're not living in a simulation. But that's not disproof; that's just my personal argument against it.
Besides, even if we were, we can't get out of it, so what bloody difference does it make?
From a quoted section of text:
But when I use the word consciousness, I simply mean experience: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera.
If you simply mean experience, then say experience.
Assertion:
The qualitative experience of consciousness cannot be understood by a program of scientific materialism.
Any actual proof of that, or are you just declaring it to be so?
No need to quote much else, I think. The link is worth a read if you like to think about thinking.
I used to hang out with people who would say things like, "The Universe loves you and wants to keep you alive." This is demonstrably untrue; as far as we know, we can stay alive in a shell, proportionally thinner than an eggshell, surrounding the Earth. Even some parts of this shell, like Antarctica for instance, aren't very hospitable and will kill you in hours. Everywhere else? Everywhere in the entire universe? Dead in less than a minute.
But the people saying this really believed it, because they wanted it to be true.
(I should acknowledge here that there very well might be other shells that can support our life processes. As I've noted before, it's a big universe. Still, the number of such places surely rounds off to zero when compared to the vast emptiness of space and the burning hearts of stars.)
But hey, the panpsychists very well might get the last laugh; they might turn out to be right after all. After all, the Universe has been known to throw us a few curveballs every now and then. But until we see some evidence, it remains just as much wishful thinking as the idea that the Universe is actively working to keep us alive. |
March 21, 2020 at 12:03am March 21, 2020 at 12:03am
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This one has been hanging out in my queue for quite some time. Sure, it's Cracked, but it's David Wong from when Wong was still with Cracked.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/20-facts-that-will-make-you-understand-america-or-n...
20 Facts That Will Make You Understand America (Or Not)
There's an old joke: What's the difference between America and yogurt? Give it enough time, and yogurt develops a culture.
Also, I'd dispute the word "facts" in the headline.
20. 4 In 10 Americans Would Save The Life Of Their Dog Over A Foreign Tourist
Applied Trolley Problem.
To be fair, I'd save my cat over... well, anyone.
I mean, I'd probably save the tourist myself, but I wouldn't tell the pollster that on the phone. It'd make things too awkward between me and my dog if she overheard.
"Messing with pollsters" is a time-honored American tradition. Still not culture.
19. Most Americans Think Political Correctness Is A Problem
I'm just going to leave this part here without comment:
What annoys me is that usually we only aim the "PC" complaint in one direction. "I'm offended by the misuse of gender pronouns" is mocked as being "PC," but "I'm offended because you didn't stand for the national anthem" is not, somehow. I'd love to see the poll results when people are given both of those examples before answering. Actually, I probably would not love those results at all.
18. Empathy Among Young People Has Fallen 40%
Yeah, but fuck young people and their ilk.
As the author of the study explains, empathy for strangers has been replaced with intense loyalty to one's own group (which in turn creates hatred for strangers). But you already know that if you have ever used the internet, or even just walked past someone who has.
17. Churchgoing Americans Are More Likely To Support Torture
Well? Their whole theology depends on people being tortured for all eternity if they have sex with the "wrong" person, and by "wrong" I don't mean "underage."
"Hold on," you might be saying, "isn't these Evangelicals' entire religion based on a Middle Eastern man being wrongly tortured to death by the state?"
16. Nearly 8 In 10 Say American Morality Is Getting Worse
Well, duh. See #17.
15. About 40% Support Discouraging The "Wrong" People From Having Kids
I try to discourage everyone from having kids. But not very adamantly.
14. 33% Still Say Homosexuality Is Immoral
Again, see #17.
13. Only 43% Say Pornography Is Morally OK
The US was founded by Puritans and still maintains a lot of their values, if only in an undercurrent. This means our attitudes about sex tend to be whacked in general.
12. Most Think Men And Women Have Equally Difficult Lives
My only issue with this, really, is that it overgeneralizes, like saying something like "men tend to have more upper-body strength than women." Technically true on average, but we're talking about two bell curves that overlap; you can always find exceptions. And since most Americans can't grasp the subtleties of probability theory, making claims like this is problematic. Show me someone with a difficult life, and I can show you someone of a different gender with a more difficult one. Unless of course the one person you show me is the one out of 330 million of us who happens to have The Most Difficult Life.
Surprisingly, the difference in responses between men and women isn't nearly as dramatic as the difference between political parties. Sorry, I realize now that's actually not surprising at all.
11. We Tend To Only Befriend People Exactly Like Ourselves
I don't find this shocking at all. And Wong should know better; he's the one who elucidated the whole Monkeysphere concept. People always gravitate toward people with more stuff in common.
The issue is that many people don't even try to branch out.
10. 11% Of Americans Have Never Left The State They Were Born In
As Wong points out here, it's harder to travel if you're poor.
9. Around 10% Are Anti-Vaxxers
While that number is appallingly large, and should be 0% (okay, I'll adjust that to 1% to account for stubbornness), it's much less than my internet browsing leads me to believe.
I bet it goes down soon, though. "I'm against vaccination." "A shitload of people have COVID-19." "When will the vaccine be ready?"
8. 90% Of Americans Believe In God
... or some kind of higher spiritual power
Yeah, that last bit is kinda important.
This one, together with the last one (and a few others on this list) illustrate the basic problem with democracy: the "majority" is not always right, and public policy can seem contradictory as a result.
7. 1 In 4 Haven't Read A Book In The Last Year
There are still panicked articles insisting that Americans are reading less than ever, with some data to back them up, but even they seem to dismiss the idea that "browsing the internet" can count as "reading." I mean, look how much smarter this article is making you.
I'm pretty sure we don't have that problem here.
6. 65% Believe They Are Of Above-Average Intelligence
We also believe we're above-average drivers.
5. The Number Of Vegetarians/Vegans Is Tiny, And Hasn't Grown In Decades
I'm okay with this.
But this is why you'll continually hear "They're coming for your hamburgers!" as a talking point against environmentalists.
You know, I actually kinda like veggie burgers. And great strides have been made toward vat-grown, cruelty-free meat. I'd switch to that in a clogged heartbeat.
4. Americans Spend Less Time Cooking And Eating Than Almost Anyone
Don't get me started on The Causes of Obesity. But cooking and eating are, in general, big time-sucks. I have more interesting things to do than cook, and I like to do other stuff (like read or watch shows) while I eat.
3. Nearly 80% Of Americans Pee In The Shower
Okay, look, confession time: I can't say I haven't done it. But I certainly don't make a habit of it.
Also, 20% of us bring a drink into the shower. Or at least, that's how many of us thought it would be funny to tell that to a pollster.
There's a local brewery whose flagship product is called Shower Beer. It's a light Pilsener. I don't like it, myself, and I can't say I've ever brought anything into the shower with me except soap and a razor (hey, shaving in the sink is a pain in the ass).
2. 43% Have Assigned Seating In Their Living Room
I don't, but I live with a housemate who has basically taken over the living room. This is fine; I have my own space, and I prefer to watch things on my laptop, which could sit anywhere.
1. 1 In 5 Are In Chronic Pain
And how many are addicted to painkillers? And how much of that addiction is actually pain-avoidance? I don't know; just throwing it out there.
One out of 12 people you pass on the street are in absolute agony.
That's something to keep in mind the next time you run into a rude driver, or a raging customer, or an antagonistic person on the internet. Pain messes with your mind, drains your energy, ruins your concentration.
I do try to be aware that someone else might be having a bad day, week, year, life. Sometimes I fail at that.
Society is, at the end of the day, just a big pile of other people's coping mechanisms. I guess we should try to remember that.
Yeah, especially now. |
March 20, 2020 at 12:04am March 20, 2020 at 12:04am
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This seemed to matter more in a world where people still used airplanes, but I'm posting it anyway.
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-security
The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them
The TSA's inefficiency isn't just aggravating and unnecessary; by pushing people to drive instead of fly, it's actively dangerous and costing lives.
People make fun of the Trolley Problem. But as I've said before, it has real-world applications.
The TSA is hard to evaluate largely because it's attempting to solve a non-problem. Despite some very notable cases, airplane hijackings and bombings are quite rare.
I've been saying this for years, possibly even before the 9/11 singularity: people have no sense of risk management. As a group, they're scared shitless of flying, but think nothing of speeding to the airport if they think they might be late. Which of those is more risky, in terms of mortality? Go ahead, take a guess.
"No terrorist is going to base his plot on getting a gun through airport security if there's a decent chance of getting caught, because the consequences of getting caught are too great."
Yeah, except that if you have a 95% failure rate in your screenings, that implies that 19 times out of 20, your bomb (or whatever) is going to make it through security. Send two bombers through security, and your success rate climbs to 99.75%. If I'm doing my drunk math right. Someone check me. Regardless, it's less than 5%.
Still, they had no problem practically sending me to Gitmo for having a cigar cutter I'd forgotten about in my carry-on.
Also, stop being sexist. Chicks can be terrorists too.
What about the most loathed TSA rules: the shoe removal requirement, and the ban on all but the tiniest containers of liquids? There's never been any evidence that these are effective. Remember: We caught the people who tried to attack with their shoes and with liquid explosives, without these rules in place. Europe is gradually phasing out the liquid ban.
The shoe thing is bullshit, has always been bullshit, and by making people take off their shoes, they're basically saying, "our nudity scanners aren't good enough to detect shit in shoes."
The TSA doesn't save lives, but it probably ends them. One paper by economists Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel Simon found that, controlling for other factors like weather and traffic, 9/11 provoked such a large decrease in air traffic and increase in driving that 327 more people died every month from road accidents.
And this is where the trolley problem becomes relevant.
I'm too drunk to quote any more of the article, so go read it for yourself, but here, I'll relate that situation to our current state of abject fear.
People are dying from COVID-19. There's no denying that (unless you're a hardcore conspiracy theorist, of the kind who believes that "crisis actors" or whatever staged Sandy Hook to promote gun regulations, in which case, buddy, you are reading the wrong blog).
But consider the measures we're taking to mitigate that mortality: social isolation, closing both optional service industries like hairdressers and essential ones like bars, making it socially unacceptable (and in some cases illegal) to go out.
Now, look, I'm an introvert. This doesn't bother me much. Hell, I'm home most of the time anyway, and I have an enormous stash of booze here at home, subscriptions to four different streaming services, and more video games than I can play in what's left of my life. But I recognize that most people are extroverts, just like most people are right-handed or most people watch sports on TV, another thing we don't have anymore.
Here's the trolley problem: given that social isolation is poison to extroverts, how many people will die from suicide or other causes, or go literally crazy, because of the isolation -- compared to the death rate from getting sick?
That's the social calculus we need to be using. No, it doesn't take into account one's particular situation, or the idea that different people will die in each scenario. I'm just talking cold, hard numbers. And no, I don't have these numbers. If I were more sober, I could probably get a handle on it, but as it is, I can't be arsed. I'm just saying this: just because this virus thing is new and different doesn't mean we should fear it more than other causes of death.
It's the driving vs. flying thing all over again. Now, look, I prefer to drive, myself, but it's not out of fear; I'm well aware that my chances of getting killed in a car wreck on a trip to Vegas (24 hours by interstate) are much higher than my chances of getting killed in an airplane incident on the same journey (4 to 5 hours each way). But that's not my primary concern; I simply like to drive, and the TSA has made flying, which should be a fucking miracle, into a nervous chore. Not because of any fear of terrorism, but because I could get arrested for having goddamn nail clippers in my carry-on.
Not that it matters now. Vegas is closed. Hooker out front shoulda toldja.
It's the unknown that we, as a group, fear. I'd just like to see some more rationality, is all I'm saying. And if I can be rational after downing a fine Belgian beer, everyone else can be rational while sober. In theory, anyway. |
March 19, 2020 at 12:13am March 19, 2020 at 12:13am
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I'm sure you'll all use all that toilet paper. Eventually.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/buying-in-bulk-when-is-it-a-mistake.html...
When Buying in Bulk Is a Mistake
I like the way Andrew Tobias talks about bulk buying in The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need: You can think of each bulk purchase as an investment, with a return equal to the savings you accrue by not paying a higher unit price for smaller purchases. If you lay out $110 today to buy a 12-bottle case of wine you’ll drink over the next month, instead of buying bottles one at a time for $10 each, that’s like earning a $10 return on a $110 investment in one month. On an annualized basis, that’s a rate of return well over 100 percent — far better than the stock market.
Stuff and nonsense.
For starters, as much as I like wine, I recognize that it's not a necessity. "If you lay out $110 today to buy a 12-bottle case of wine," then you have spent $110. While I agree that this is better than spending $120 on 12 bottles of wine, it is not an investment; it's an expenditure.
Also, this article is from January. Everything is far better than the stock market now (at least in the short term).
But that analysis relies on a few assumptions, the most important being that you will use the items you purchase. If you let products spoil, or you decide you don’t like them anymore halfway through the box, or if you forget what drawer your huge package of batteries is in, then you’re not getting as much value out of your bulk purchase as you had planned.
That's not the most important assumption; the confusion of "spending" and "investing" is. But going with it, using the wine as an example, if you're drinking a case of wine every month like the article stipulates, sure, that $10 you're saving is probably worth it. But contrary to popular belief, most wines don't get better with age; they spoil just like any other consumable. If your consumption is one a month, then by the time you get through the case, the last bottle may well taste a bit off.
And let me just throw another curveball at the bulk-buying thing: poverty. Assuming you're poor but still want wine (for which you can get a better deal than $10 a bottle), you probably don't have $110 sitting around just begging to purchase wine. Maybe you have $10 left at the end of every paycheck, if you're lucky. So you can only buy one bottle at a time.
In other words, it may be cheaper overall, but people living paycheck to paycheck simply don't always have that luxury.
Fortunately, toilet paper doesn't spoil. It does suffer from overabundance losses, though -- if you have a lot of something, you tend to value it less, so you waste more of it. This can be overcome with discipline, but given all the loo roll memes floating about, it looks like at least some people bought 20,000 rolls of bumwad and proceeded to cover their house with some of them because it was there and we have plenty. This is more than just a waste of money (unless you consider your 15 seconds of internet fame to be an effective deployment of capital); it's a slap in the face to people who legitimately needed Charmin and the stores were out because of your fear and greed, you fucking monsters.
Time is money, and if you’re tying up your money in bulk products for many years instead of weeks, a 10 or 20 or even 100 percent return may no longer look attractive compared to keeping your money in the bank or the stock market.
Again, dubious math. Money certainly has a time value, but, in defense of bulk purchases that do make sense, there's this thing called "inflation." It means that most products increase in cost over time. Not all, of course, and not always smoothly, but it might make sense to stock up at lower prices. The trick there is being right about the price increasing. And then, of course, when you finally do run out, the price has gone up anyway.
Author goes on to examine the additional problems with bulk purchases for someone living in a closet in Manhattan, which I will excuse because this is, after all, a magazine called New York (not to be confused with the stylistically problematic New Yorker).
I did get a good per-ounce deal on the pound of Tellicherry peppercorns that I bought a decade ago and will probably still be working through during the Donald Trump Jr. administration.
Oh, hey, an optimist.
I think I've found the secret to getting something actually published: take a thing that people are doing, and put out an argument for doing exactly the opposite. Maybe I can do that with the Marie Kondo crap that this author keeps referencing. As we're clearly headed for another Great Depression, the time is probably right to tout the value of keeping things around for when you need them.
Prime takeaways here:
 Spending is never investing. The sooner you internalize this, the better.
Thinking before you buy is a good idea whether it's bulk or not.
Apparently, some magazines will pay actual money for crap articles. Maybe even in bulk. |
March 18, 2020 at 12:16am March 18, 2020 at 12:16am
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It's understandable, in this difficult period, to search for meaning and look for answers.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/06/i-was-an-astrologer-how-it-...
I was an astrologer – here's how it really works, and why I had to stop
Customers marvelled at my psychic abilities but was that really what was going on when I told their fortune?
I was a fortune teller. Every Sunday, I climbed the stairs of an old terrace house in Sydney’s historic Rocks district, to sit in the attic and divine the future. I would read Tarot cards or interpret horoscopes.
Remember what I said yesterday, about a holistic experience? Setting is important.
As a teenager, I’d devoured a book called Positive Magic. An instruction manual for witches, its central idea was that if you wanted something, and you had good intentions, you just told the universe and magic would happen.
And if magic didn't happen, then you didn't want it badly enough, or your intentions weren't good enough, or you didn't phrase it properly.
I also learned that all things are connected, and everything is a symbol of something else. Suddenly, I saw signs and omens everywhere.
All things are connected. That doesn't mean we can see, or exploit, the connections.
Although astrologers use Nasa data for their calculations, horoscopes aren’t a true map of the heavens. The Babylonians who invented astrology believed the sun rotated round the Earth; modern astrologers still use Earth-centred charts, as if Copernicus had never existed. That’s only the start of the scientific problems.
There's also this problem: because of precession, which is the rotation of the Earth's axial tilt, the astrological signs are off by about a month, or an entire sign. To expand on this: a "sun sign" is what's commonly known as your birth sign. For example, mine is Aquarius (though just barely; if I'd been born a day later I'd be a Pisces). Astrologically speaking, that means that the sun was crossing the 30 degree (that is, 360º / 12) section of sky associated with Aquarius. Aquarius is also a real constellation, but because of precession, the sun isn't actually in the constellation of Aquarius during Aquarius. I don't know if that means it's actually in Pisces or in Capricorn, and honestly I can't be arsed to look it up because it's irrelevant.
Full disclosure: I've been drinking, so I hope that was clear. My point is that these things were defined so long ago that they've disconnected from the astronomical world -- and that's not even getting into the more-than-dubious claim that your personality is defined by what house your Sun is in.
You forecast by combining meanings with planetary movements. Say Saturn, planet of restrictions, is about to transit the First House of self – your life will contract! You’re going to get more responsibilities than usual. Or maybe you’ll be denied the chance to take on more responsibilities. Or maybe a cold, critical person will come into your life. But anyway, it’s a good time to go on a diet.
Astrology is one big word association game.
But here's the thing: such games have their place.
I know that's going to sound odd coming from me, or even from Drunk Me. But bear with me and maybe I can make myself more clear.
Association is what we do, as humans and especially as writers. Whether "everything is a symbol of something else" or not, by finding these connections, we exercise our minds, and possibly find new meanings and new ways of looking at things. There is a danger, of course, of falling down a rabbit-hole, of believing our own thoughts even when it's unwarranted, but with the proper preparation, the process can open up new avenues of thought, maybe even stop us from thinking around in circles.
Metaphor is a tool. It's a bad idea to mistake it for reality, but approached with the right mindset, it can illuminate reality.
We charged A$50 an hour, a significant sum at the time, and I wanted to offer value. No fishing for clues from me – I printed a horoscope or laid the cards and started interpreting immediately, intending to dazzle the customer with my insights.
Half the time, though, I couldn’t get a word in. It turned out what most people want is the chance to unload for an hour.
And it's probably about as useful as psychological sessions.
I couldn’t say, “because my third eye is open”, so I reflected for a moment. Then it hit me. “You sounded happier when you said ‘photography’,” I said. My psychic teacher was right – the signals we pick up before conscious awareness kicks in can be accurate and valuable.
Here's the thing with so-called "psychics" and some of their readings: yes, the methods they use are bullshit; yes, some of them are pure scam artists. But there's a real art to reading people. And most folks are so wrapped up in their own problems that they miss the small signals from others; a "psychic" is really getting paid to interpret body language, microexpressions, and other subtle cues that even friends sometimes miss. I'm not saying people should consult psychics for advice and then follow it blindly, but if it helps you come at a problem from a new angle, hey, it just might be helpful.
Hell, sometimes all it takes to resolve a problem is to articulate it well enough to describe it to a stranger. The stranger doesn't even need to say a word. Maybe psychics should stick to being passive listeners.
On the other hand, separating the utter frauds from those who truly want to help is very difficult.
To conclude here, I was curious enough, after re-reading the article above, to see what astrologers might have to say about our current pandemic crisis. The result was... I want to say enlightening, but it's hard to be enlightened when your head has a dent from banging it on the desk.
https://astrologyking.com/coronavirus-pandemic/
I'm not quoting it here. See for yourself. But maybe put a pillow on your keyboard first, so it doesn't hurt as bad when you slam your forehead into it.
As always, I'm not going to begrudge anyone what psychological or spiritual comfort they might need in these troubled times. In the end, though, it's not religion or psychology or Tarot or astrology or prayer or ritual circles or meditation or anything mystical that's going to fix our current situation.
It'll be science.
But that won't stop people from insisting it was sky fairies, unicorns, or Saturn coming out of retrograde. |
March 17, 2020 at 12:01am March 17, 2020 at 12:01am
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In these days of plague, economic disaster, and impending environmental collapse, it's important to remember to maintain a negative attitude.
No, really.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160809-why-it-pays-to-be-grumpy-and-bad-tem...
Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered
Being bad-tempered and pessimistic helps you to earn more, live longer and enjoy a healthier marriage. It’s almost enough to put a smile on the dourest of faces.
Oh, believe me, this makes me happy. See? This. This is my happy face. (By way of illustration, I look something like this  right now.)
The pressure to be positive has never been greater. Cultural forces have whipped up a frenzied pursuit of happiness, spawning billion-dollar book sales, a cottage industry in self-help and plastering inspirational quotes all over the internet.
All of which have the opposite effect than intended on me.
Now you can hire a happiness expert, undertake training in ‘mindfulness’, or seek inner satisfaction via an app. The US army currently trains its soldiers – over a million people – in positive psychology and optimism is taught in UK schools. Meanwhile the ‘happiness index’ has become an indicator of national wellbeing to rival GDP.
Hire... a happiness expert? No wonder society needed a reset.
The truth is, pondering the worst has some clear advantages. Cranks may be superior negotiators, more discerning decision-makers and cut their risk of having a heart attack. Cynics can expect more stable marriages, higher earnings and longer lives – though, of course, they’ll anticipate the opposite.
As I've always been saying: Expect the worst, and then you can only be pleasantly surprised. Either you're right, which makes you feel good; or you're wrong, which also makes you feel good because the worst didn't happen after all.
Good moods on the other hand come with substantial risks – sapping your drive, dimming attention to detail and making you simultaneously gullible and selfish. Positivity is also known to encourage binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.
Now, see? If I were a jovial, positive, upbeat person, I'd binge drink and overeat even more than I do now! On the other hand, maybe I'd have sex.
The article goes on to describe the actual science behind this, which I'm going to choose not to be skeptical about (even though it takes a detour into evolutionary psychology speculation) because dammit, I want affirmation every once in a while. But, you know, feel free to grump about it yourselves.
All these physiological changes are extremely helpful – as long as you get a chance to vent your anger by wrestling a lion or screaming at co-workers. Sure, you might alienate a few people, but afterwards your blood pressure should go back to normal. Avoiding grumpiness has more serious consequences.
Alienating a few people? Sounds like heaven.
In fact, scientists are increasingly recognising that grumpiness may be beneficial to the full range of social skills – improving language skills, memory and making us more persuasive.
See? If I weren't grumpy, I'd have no social skills at all.
Then there's more science describing some more studies to explain just how happiness is a Bad Thing.
So the next time someone tells you to “cheer up” – why not tell them how you’re improving your sense of fairness, reducing unemployment and saving the world economy? You’ll be having the last laugh – even if it is a world-weary, cynical snort.
Now sod off. I'm social-distancing. |
March 16, 2020 at 12:52am March 16, 2020 at 12:52am
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Past the halfway point, entry 5 of 8 for
It's been a while since I listened to The Planets suite -- high school, probably.
The Great Oracle
So I consulted Wikipedia . Apparently, and I don't know if I knew this or not, the music was inspired not by planetary science but by astrology.
An Aside
Ever been in a cathedral? Or a major mosque, or some other religious edifice, built with the intent to awe?
Humans have, in our short time on the planet, shown a great capacity for telling ourselves stories based on dubious ideas. Sometimes these ideas take root and grow, and people do stuff based on them, and sometimes the stuff we do has real, lasting emotional effects. Such is the case with cathedrals, and such is the case with certain kinds of music.
These constructs are often meant to reinforce said beliefs, and for some, that's the case. A believer might find herself, in a cathedral, closer to God; take that same believer to a Shinto shrine and all they see is the artistry. Or possibly vice-versa. Point being that we don't always align with the motivations of the creators of these structures, but we can usually appreciate the end result. There aren't any authentic followers of the ancient Egyptian religion around anymore (though some try), and yet many of us are fascinated by the Pyramids.
When it comes to art -- painting, architecture, sculpture, music, writing, whatever -- I can appreciate the end result even if I'm not on board with the motivations behind it. When Notre Dame de Paris burned, for example, I felt a great loss, even though I'm not French, or Catholic, or even religious in any conventional way. People built that thing, and it was art by any definition of the word, and its loss transcended any particular nationality, philosophy or religion. We can be inspired to do great things by made-up fairy tales, which to me only illustrates the human capacity for doing great things.
Consequently, even though I believe I have used the term "bullshit" to describe astrology in here before, I can appreciate The Planets as art, regardless of the compositions' provenance, just like I appreciate the sweeping arches and vaulted ceilings of a Gothic cathedral.
That Said...
Sometimes I have trouble interpreting art. I've gotten better at it, I think, but a lot of its subtlety is entirely lost on me. Taking the music linked above, for example, imagine listening to it for the first time without any background. What is it supposed to do? What feelings does it evoke? Do these feelings change when you know the title of the composition? What about when it's placed in the rest of the orchestral suite? How about knowing the bit about it being inspired by astrology?
I'm going to take a minute to compare this with beer, so you'll have to bear with me here. Or not; your choice, but I am doing this to make a point.
I think I'm fairly knowledgeable about beer. Not how to make it; that's too much work, and I lack the artistry to brew beer properly (or to paint, or build a cathedral, or compose a piece of music). But I have a decent working knowledge of the various styles and categories of beer.
Periodically, someone will arrange a blind taste-test, just sampling different beers without any prior knowledge of brewer, style, relative quantities of each ingredient, any adjuncts included, etc. I don't do many of these, myself, because beer isn't just about aroma and flavor; it's about the entire experience. My enjoyment (or lack thereof) of a particular brew does include what I'll call metaknowledge: what brewery it came from, what the label looks like, its name, whether I'm alone or with friends, the style it's trying to be, which hops are used, the ethanol content, and dozens of other data points. A blind tasting limits this to: color, head, aroma, flavor. And it's fine if you're the kind of person who wants a more objective experience; hell, I'd be the worst kind of hypocrite if I support scientific endeavors without allowing for a scientific beer-tasting experience.
Beer is art, much like music or architecture, and some background of the art is essential, for me, to its appreciation.
I should point out that my views on this have evolved. I have an aunt who was married to a professional artist, and we've argued about this before. Her claim was that an education in art history is important to appreciating the result; I argued that pieces of art (we were discussing, in particular, painting and sculpture) should stand on their own, and be appreciated, or not, for what they are.
I've gradually come around -- mostly -- to her point of view. Don't tell her; she's old now and her heart probably couldn't take the strain of having me finally agreeing with her on anything.
You Said You Had A Point
Yeah, I did, didn't I? I'm not sure I was entirely truthful there.
Back up there, I linked the wiki page for The Planets. In it, the composer, Holst, is paraphrased thus: "Although The Planets remains Holst's most popular work, the composer himself did not count it among his best creations and later in life complained that its popularity had completely surpassed his other works."
Which reminded me of Radiohead, who are also from England. They grew tired of their song Creep and its popularity, and for a long time refused to perform it. Which was too bad, because their other songs kinda suck. I don't have any opinion about Holst's other work, because I'm not aware of it. Could be I've heard it. Probably not. Sometimes you're the victim of your own popularity, and you can't really control which of your stuff people are going to like.
Once you put art out there, it's largely out of your control. Oh, you can defend copyrights and whatnot, but there's no accounting for taste. Art exists, independent of inspiration or source, and people are going to make of it what they will.
As for me, I think I'll crack open a cold one and listen to Jupiter again. |
March 15, 2020 at 12:32am March 15, 2020 at 12:32am
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Entry 4 of 8 for
Admission time
I, a lifelong comic book fan; I, an enthusiastic follower of fantasy, science fiction and action movies; I, a firm believer in the power of cinema to bring to life the tropes originating in comics; I have not yet seen Joker.
One reason? Same reason I never saw Titanic. Too popular.
Another reason? Incels online like it way too much, and online incels are poison.
Yet another reason? Well, this third reason is kind of nuanced and I'll get in to it below.
And also I just couldn't be arsed to leave the house when it was in theaters. Of course now that there's a dread disease going around, NOW I want to leave the house and be social, because I'm contrary that way.
Third Reason
It's one thing to appreciate a movie villain as a foil for the protagonist. It's another thing entirely to turn the villain into the hero.
I know there's a lot of that going around these days, and to be fair, no one is perfectly good or perfectly evil (or at least they shouldn't be if you're telling a compelling story), but when you're telling a story specifically designed to make the audience relate to a mass murderer, I'm not sure I'm on board with that. Don't get me wrong; I'll see it eventually, because I see every comics-inspired movie eventually. And I may turn out to be completely misguided in my assessment; after all, I can't review a movie I haven't seen. But I did see Birds of Prey in the theater, and I feel the same way about turning Harley Quinn into a protagonist.
To summarize: apparently it's okay to make audiences relate to mass murderers in movies, but gods forbid you depict any character smoking a fucking cigarette; that would be BAD. Also, violence is just fine, but depict acts of love and you can't let CHILDREN see THAT.
ANYway
Don't let the above make you forget that I'm not much of a grouch; I do, actually, have a sense of humor, and that video was goddamned hilarious.
My comments on antagonists notwithstanding, I find the "dark and gritty" trends amusing, for the most part. I mean, Zack Snyder, whose movies I generally like, shouldn't have done that with Superman, but apart from that, hell, give me a dark, gritty remake of, say, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and I'll watch the SHIT out of that.
"Hello, neighbor. You might have noticed the blood on my cardigan. That's because I was just the victim of a drive-by shooting. Can you say 'drive-by shooting?' I knew you could. Now I'm going to have to call Mr. Ambulance to come pick me up. It might be an hour before they get here because this is the ghetto, so meanwhile I... I... I don't think..." *thud*
Also, can I have an adult-themed drug-fueled dark remake of H.R. Pufnstuf ? Please and thank you.
Point being, if you're going to combine Sesame Street, Joker, and dark and/or gritty remakes, I'm all over that shit. Saturday Night Live has had its ups and downs over the years, but when it's up, it's spot on.
Now someone just needs to parody SNL itself and we'll have reached Peak Parody. |
March 14, 2020 at 12:02am March 14, 2020 at 12:02am
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Today, in Adventures in Book Promotion:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/oct/08/online-poor-part-time-job
Online, no one knows you're poor
Shauna M Ahern used to make her living by writing a food blog. But when times got tough, she realised keeping up appearances can make you lose sight of life’s meaning
But what if life's meaning is keeping up appearances?
I am a James Beard award–winning gluten‑free cookbook author. And for nine months, I worked in our local grocery store for $15 an hour.
1) I'm only giving her a pass on the "gluten-free cookbook author" gig because she is apparently diagnosed with celiac.
2) $15 an hour? Stocking groceries? I'm not saying that's a lot of money, but it's above average for unskilled workers.
Online, no one knows you are poor. No one is posting photos of the basket of bills overflowing, some of the envelopes with urgent stamped on them. Very few people write about the choices they make out of fear of going bankrupt, like selling expensive camera lenses that feel less important than rent.
Maybe they should. One gets weary of seeing people's carefully curated photos and videos of their perfect lives. It's like watching those sitcoms set in the big city where no one seems to have a real job and yet they live in enormous apartments. Other people see that shit and, consciously or unconsciously, they wonder why they can't measure up. But hey, maybe if I buy the products advertised during the next break, I'll finally have a perfect life too!
And few of us want to admit that we are struggling with money, even though we live in a culture where the rich have grown astronomically rich and the rest of us have grown anxious about health insurance. As my friend Ashley Ford wrote online one day: “I’m trying to choose an insurance plan, but I’m pretty sure the only good insurance is wealth.”
No one wants to bitch about being poor, but also no one wants to brag about being rich. In general, no one talks about money. I don't think this is a good attitude, even though I'm cagey about it myself.
But yes, the only good insurance is wealth. In the US, anyway. I'm assuming this is US because even though it's a British rag, everything's in dollars and the author writes with the sort of humblebragging that one generally only finds in this country.
I never shared online the time that my husband Danny and I looked at our bank account and saw $85 left for the last week of the month.
Well, you have now.
Still, we were like most Americans – living paycheck to paycheck (almost eight out of 10 Americans, according to reputable studies) and unable to pay for an unexpected bill of more than $500 (nearly six out of 10 Americans). We were struggling. And we were terrified. I realized that the mindset of worrying that we might go broke was damaging us.
I can't be arsed to check those numbers, but if true, they're kinda horrific. And yeah, being broke, or close to it, damages one's mind. The crappy cheap food you have to buy if you're poor doesn't help with that.
I found out that working part‑time at the grocery store – three days a week – would give me health insurance for the entire family.
Tying health insurance to employment is good for employers. Not great for people who'd rather spend their time running a small business.
I noticed that the people who lived on the day‑old breads looked around furtively to make sure no one saw when they reached into the discount bin.
And we've established, somehow, the idea that there's some sort of moral failing, some shamefulness, in being poor. Like human worth is somehow tied to net worth. This is utter bullshit.
I learned that very few people make the highly styled dishes offered on Instagram.
YA THINK?
Over and over, I saw that what my fellow recipe developers and I hashed out to make ourselves relevant – Vegan treats for the whole family! How to use hempseed! – was not being made in most homes. It humbled me.
Good. Veganism is a product of privilege. And yet the same people who tout a "vegan lifestyle" tend to be the ones who spout "check your privilege!" It's a jarring contradiction.
Danny is the one working three days a week now, expediting in a restaurant, mostly for the connection with our community. I no longer earn any money online.
I'm not sure "earn" is the right verb. And again - you are making money online, shilling your book on the Guardian's website. Hey, there's no shame in that, either. I'd love to make money from writing; I think many people here would. But if this is the kind of writing style in the book, I'm not interested. |
March 13, 2020 at 12:01am March 13, 2020 at 12:01am
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One thing that we share with all the other animals is the need to eat. But humans tend to take things a bit farther than everyone else.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333
How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely?
In 1860, Robert Burke and William Wills famously led the first European expedition across the largely unknown interior of Australia.
It did not go well. Due to a combination of poor leadership, bad planning and misfortune, Burke, Wills and their companion John King ran out of food on the return journey.
The Master Race, ladies and gentlemen.
The local Yandruwandha people seemed to thrive despite the conditions that were proving so tough for Wills's party.
The Yandruwandha gave the explorers cakes made from the crushed seed pods of a clover-like fern called nardoo.
Burke then fell out with them and, unwisely, drove them away by firing his pistol.
I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Within a week, Wills and Burke were dead. It turns out that safely preparing nardoo is a complex process.
Maybe not in hindsight.
Toxic plants are everywhere. Sometimes simple cooking processes are enough to make them edible. But how does anyone learn the elaborate preparation needed for cassava or nardoo?
No single person does, according to Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary biologist.
There's been pushback lately against "processed" food (the verb being ill-defined), but processing makes some materials more digestible, or even edible at all.
That said, the article proceeds to venture into evolutionary speculation, which I have railed on in here before.
He argues this knowledge is cultural. Our cultures evolve though a process of trial and error analogous to evolution in biological species. Like biological evolution, cultural evolution can - given enough time - produce impressively sophisticated results.
Somebody stumbles on one step that seems to make cassava less risky; that spreads and another step is discovered. Over time, complex rituals can evolve, each slightly more effective than the last.
In South America, where humans have eaten cassava for thousands of years, tribes have learned the many steps needed to detoxify it completely: scrape, grate, wash, boil the liquid, leave the solid to stand for two days, then bake.
I've often wondered about the development of bread. It's not like you can look at a stalk of grain and go, "You know, I think I'll grind this up really fine, add some water and other stuff, knead it, and bake it. I bet that will be delicious!" At least, not if you don't have any idea what bread is. It's a complicated process, and the learning curve has been lost to antiquity.
I've wondered the same thing about beer. They're very similar in some respects. But at least grain is, by itself, not usually poisonous, just inedible. Some of these other foodstuffs barely register as food at all, until they're processed, and the techniques of processing are, as the article explains, very specific.
Point is, the thing about humans is we have language and society, so we can pass these things down from one generation to another. But that doesn't answer the question about how you get the techniques in the first place. The article speculates, but that's about it.
Further studies show that the verb to ape, meaning to copy, is ironically misplaced: the only ape with the instinct to imitate is us.
Tests reveal two-and-a-half year-old chimps and humans have similar mental capacities - unless the challenge is to learn by copying someone. The toddlers are vastly better at copying than the chimps.
Now that's more concrete. And it speaks to something I've been tossing around in my head for a while (and even made it a central theme in a novel) -- the idea that while individual humans may not be very bright, we're pretty good at imitating things that smarter people have done. It took the likes of Newton and Liebniz to invent calculus, but anyone of moderate intelligence, with the will to learn about it, can achieve a working knowledge of its principles -- even if we're not smart enough to have come up with it on our own.
If Henrich is right, human civilisation is based less on raw intelligence than on a highly-developed ability to learn from each other.
That's a big "if," but it tracks with other things I've been thinking about. Every time someone brings up the possibility of intelligent alien life, some wag says something along the lines of "but there's no intelligent life on Earth either." The wags are wrong; there is intelligent life here; it's just rarefied, and the rest of us are good at copying.
Case in point: I didn't invent any of the letters or words I'm typing here. I'm copying language I learned from others.
Now, by claiming this, I don't mean to diminish the contributions of the copy-apes. Society takes all kinds of people, and each of us has things we're good at. I'm just saying we can't all be Newton. |
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