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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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April 30, 2020 at 12:03am April 30, 2020 at 12:03am
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Old article is old, but what the hell; I'm doing "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  [13+] again starting tomorrow and this will probably be the last of these for a month. Unless I foul up 30DBC, which is always a possibility.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67288/10-inventors-who-came-regret-their-cre...
10 Inventors Who Came to Regret Their Creations
Just because someone's invented something, it doesn't mean that they're happy with the end result.
Unlike Cracked, this site apparently counts up instead of down. This takes some getting used to.
1. J. Robert Oppenheimer/ Albert Einstein — The atomic bomb.
Despite past associations with left wing organizations, Oppenheimer welcomed the opportunity to play a part in the war effort. Later, however, he had mixed feelings about the bomb.
But hey, he was also responsible (along with Civ IV) for introducing the West to the Bhagavad Gita , so there's that.
Einstein was less equivocal.
In retrospect, on balance, I think Einstein probably did more good than harm.
2. Mikhail Kalashnikov — AK-47.
"I keep coming back to the same questions. If my rifle claimed people’s lives, can it be that I…, an Orthodox believer, am to blame for their deaths, even if they are my enemies?" he wrote in a letter to the head of the Russian Orthodox church in 2010.
I skipped quoting a sentence of dubious grammatical provenance there. Pedantry aside, though, between this and the first entry, we should have learned by now that no weapon will bring peace in the long term. Or, well... they all bring peace, depending upon your point of view.
3. Tim Berners Lee — the double slash.
"Really, if you think about it, it doesn't need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //," he said, according to Business Insider.
Yes, the internet is a good thing in general. No, the double slash found in web addresses is far from its worst feature, since these days, no one ever has to actually type it.
4. Ethan Zuckerman — the pop-up advert.
If you've ever found yourself yelling at your computer screen in frustration as yet another pop-up ad leaps into view, obscuring the content behind it, Zuckerman is the person to blame.
WAY worse than the double slash. I wish there were a Hell so that this guy could burn in it for all eternity. On the other hand, if he hadn't invented it, someone else would have.
5. Dong Nguyen — Flappy Bird.
Flappy Bird was a sensation a year ago.
Again, old article is old. I vaguely remember Flappy Bird being a brief flare in the cosmos of the internet. Meh.
6. Bob Propst — the office cubicle.
While working as a consultant for Herman Miller in the 1960s, Bob Propst introduced America to the open plan office and with it, the office cubicle.
This guy should share cubicle space in Hell with Zuckerman.
7. Vincent Connare — Comic Sans.
"If you love it, you don't know much about typography." An anonymous critic of the font Comic Sans didn't say that, for those are the words of its designer, Vincent Connare, talking to the Wall Street Journal. Connare followed up that comment, however, with this: "If you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby."
For a long time, something has been circulating on the Web, alongside all the double slashes and pop-up ads, to the effect of "There is great need for a sarcasm font." I have proposed that Comic Sans become the Official Sarcasm Font. This suggestion has gotten nowhere, perhaps because I keep proposing it in Comic Sans.
8. Tom Karen — Raleigh Chopper.
Before the BMX arrived on the scene in the late 1970s, if you wanted a bike that wasn't of the drop-handlebarred racing variety, Raleigh's Chopper (pictured up top) was one of the few options. Loved by millions for its comfortable saddle, laid-back seating position, and those huge Harley Davidson-esque handlebars, it was one of Raleigh's best-selling bikes in the 1970s.
Hell, I'm old and I don't remember these. Deprived childhood.
9. Kamran Loghman — Pepper spray.
Kamran Loghman worked for the FBI in the 1980s and helped turn pepper spray into weapons grade material. He also wrote the guide for police departments on how it should be used.
Which was then promptly ignored.
10. John Sylvan — Coffee capsules.
"I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it," he said a few years ago. "It's like a cigarette for coffee, a singleserve delivery mechanism for an addictive substance."
Millions of people are going to disagree with him, and probably worship him as a god. I mean, come on, as far as addictive substances go, caffeine is probably the least problematic.
So that's it for April. Yes, for those of you following along at home because you've been home for the past month or more and have lost track of time, it's the end of the month. Tomorrow is May Day, and nothing else is changing.
Except the format of these entries. For a little while. |
April 29, 2020 at 12:02am April 29, 2020 at 12:02am
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Time once again to kill some cherished ideas.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161208-why-vitamin-supplements-could-kill-y...
Why vitamin pills don't work, and may be bad for you
We dose up on antioxidants as if they are the elixir of life. At best, they are probably ineffective. At worse, they may just send you to an early grave.
"We," my ass. I haven't taken supplements in years. Yeah, there was a time I thought they might be helpful, but then I, you know, found out about science.
For Linus Pauling, it all started to go wrong when he changed his breakfast routine.
If nothing else, the article is worth clicking on for the photo of Pauling with a cat on his shoulders.
But it's also worth reading because, in relatively plain language, it goes into why people thought supplements were a good thing to begin with (hint: no, it's not entirely because supplement makers funded the studies).
Just seven studies reported that supplementation led to some sort of health benefit from antioxidant supplements, including reduced risk of coronary heart disease and pancreatic cancer. Ten studies didn’t see any benefit at all – it was as if all patients were given the sugar pill also (but, of course, they weren’t). That left another 10 studies that found many patients to be in a measurably worse state after being administered antioxidants than before, including an increased incidence of diseases such as lung and breast cancer.
True believers: "Well, just look at these seven studies!"
We now know that free radicals are often used as molecular messengers that send signals from one region of the cell to another. In this role, they have been shown to modulate when a cell grows, when it divides in two, and when it dies. At every stage of a cell’s life, free radicals are vital.
Without them, cells would continue to grow and divide uncontrollably. There’s a word for this: cancer.
So the things people take out of fear in order to prevent cancer might actually be causing it.
We would also be more prone to infections from outside. When under stress from an unwanted bacterium or virus, free radicals are naturally produced in higher numbers, acting as silent klaxons to our immune system. In response, those cells at the vanguard of our immune defense – macrophages and lymphocytes – start to divide and scout out the problem. If it is a bacterium, they will engulf it like Pac-Man eating a blue ghost.
It is trapped, but it is not yet dead. To change that, free radicals are once again called into action. Inside the immune cell, they are used for what they are infamous for: to damage and to kill. The intruder is torn apart.
Loving this imagery.
Put another way, freeing ourselves of free radicals with antioxidants is not a good idea. “You would leave the body helpless against some infections,” says Enriquez.
I mean, who ever thought "antioxidant" could be a good thing?
No one would deny that vitamin C is vital to a healthy lifestyle, as are all antioxidants, but unless you are following doctor's orders, these supplements are rarely going to be the answer for a longer life when a healthy diet is also an option. “Administration of antioxidants is justified only when it is evident that there is a real deficiency of a specific antioxidant,” says Villanueva. “The best option is to get antioxidants from food because it contains a mixture of antioxidants that work together.”
But then how can I sell my magic pilllllllls?
It doesn't matter anyway. People are so stuck in their beliefs, so emotionally attached to what they've been doing, that they're not going to change, any more than I'll quit drinking. At least with drinking I know the risks, but I'm willing to bet the pill-poppers think they're doing something to benefit themselves. And not even getting drunk in the process. |
April 28, 2020 at 12:05am April 28, 2020 at 12:05am
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A while back, I talked about the concept of panpsychism. It's in this entry: "Universal Consciousness" . In it, I asserted that there was no real evidence for the idea. And if you want to know what the idea is, read that entry that I just linked, and/or take a look at today's article:
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-panpsychism-fails-to-solve-the-mystery-of-consciousnes...
Why panpsychism fails to solve the mystery of consciousness
So, this article is suggesting that not only is there no evidence for it, there might be evidence against it.
Is consciousness everywhere? Is it a basic feature of the Universe, at the very heart of the tiniest subatomic particles? Such an idea – panpsychism as it is known – might sound like New Age mysticism, but some hard-nosed analytic philosophers have suggested it might be how things are, and it’s now a hot topic in philosophy of mind.
Wait, hang on, just hit pause a minute. I need to wrap my head around the phrase "hard-nosed analytic philosophers."
While I'm processing that, this particular article gives a pretty good overview of what exactly panpsychism is, and the "problems" that it would address. Then:
I remain unpersuaded, and I’m not alone in this. Even if we accept that basic physical entities must have some categorical nature (and it might be that we don’t; perhaps at bottom reality is just dispositions), consciousness is an unlikely candidate for this fundamental property.
Yesterday, I talked about the elegance of complexity arising from simplicity. If one argues for a consciousness that pervades all things, that goes out the window. Might as well drop the fancy language and call it God, which turns it into a much older idea.
[Consciousness] appears to be a specific state of certain highly complex information-processing systems, not a basic feature of the Universe.
"Appears to be" is hardly evidence one way or the other.
Panpsychism offers no distinctive predictions or explanations. It finds a place for consciousness in the physical world, but that place is a sort of limbo. Consciousness is indeed a hard nut to crack, but I think we should exhaust the other options before we take a metaphysical sledgehammer to it.
Without predictions or explanations, it's philosophy, not science. This doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, but, much like ideas such as "honor" or "liberty," it's nothing you can pin down.
So I’m not a panpsychist. I agree with panpsychists that it seems as if our experiences have a private, intrinsic nature that cannot be explained by science. But I draw a different conclusion from this. Rather than thinking that this is a fundamental property of all matter, I think that it is an illusion.
I dislike applying the term "illusion" to something we can call an "emergent property." As Descartes noted, "I think, therefore I am;" as far as I'm concerned -- I know some philosophers will disagree with me -- my consciousness is one of the few things that I can be almost absolutely certain is real. To call it an illusion is to break the entire definition of the word "illusion."
Consciousness, in that sense, is not everywhere but nowhere. Perhaps this seems as strange a view as panpsychism. But thinking about consciousness can lead one to embrace strange views.
It can also lead one to drink. Speaking of which, it's about that time... |
April 27, 2020 at 12:03am April 27, 2020 at 12:03am
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Today's link is just some really cool theoretical physics.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-simple-rules-bootstrap-the-laws-of-physics-20...
Why the Laws of Physics Are Inevitable
By considering simple symmetries, physicists working on the “bootstrap” can rediscover the basic form of the known forces that shape the universe.
Fear not; there's no advanced math in here. This is mostly of philosophical interest. One of the questions I keep seeing in physics is, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Though that seems to me that it might be asking the wrong question; after all, if there were nothing, we wouldn't be around to ask the question.
To an astonishing degree, nature is the way it is because it couldn’t be any different.
That's probably the answer to the question that they didn't ask. For a long time, I've seen speculation that other universes might exist, somewhere, with different laws of physics. This seems to suggest that can't be the case.
Since the 1960s, and increasingly in the past decade, physicists like Baumann have used a technique known as the “bootstrap” to infer what the laws of nature must be.
It's satisfying when you can come at a question from different angles and get the same result.
That solution is the graviton: a spin-2 particle that couples to itself and all other particles with equal strength.
I'm no expert on these things, but my understanding is that, so far, the graviton is a purely theoretical particle. Physicists have been proposing it for some time, because it would imply quantum gravity, which in theory could bridge general relativity and quantum mechanics, perhaps leading to a Grand Unified Theory, kind of the Holy Grail of physics.
Of course, assuming they find this Holy Grail ("I told him we already got one"), it'll probably just raise more questions. This is why science is fun.
It’s “just aesthetically pleasing,” Baumann said, “that the laws are inevitable — that there is some inevitability of the laws of physics that can be summarized by a short handful of principles that then lead to building blocks that then build up the macroscopic world.”
Complexity emerging out of simplicity just makes so much more sense than the other way around, don't you think? |
April 26, 2020 at 12:19am April 26, 2020 at 12:19am
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When NatGeo got sucked up by the Murdoch empire, I quit paying attention to it. I fully expected articles to crop up with headlines like, "Climate Change: Myth or Hoax?" and "Crony Capitalism: Boon or Blessing?" And I wasn't far off the mark.
Well, it went to Disney when Disney acquired a bunch of Fox properties, so it's okay again now.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-is-givin...
The pandemic is giving people vivid, unusual dreams. Here’s why.
Researchers explain why withdrawal from our usual environments—due to social distancing—has left dreamers with a dearth of “inspiration.”
Personally, I haven't noticed any difference. I'm still biphasic, and I still occasionally get sleep paralysis. I suspect exercise helps with the latter, because my exercise options are limited right now and the condition seems worse again. But I know how to live with it. Anyway, my own experience is probably because my life hasn't really changed much; this is not true for most people, and the article I linked above isn't the first time I've seen something about disrupted sleep patterns in this period.
Science has long suggested that dream content and emotions are connected to wellbeing while we’re awake. Bizarre dreams laden with symbolism allow some dreamers to overcome intense memories or everyday psychological stressors within the safety of their subconscious. Nightmares, on the other hand, can be warning signs of anxieties that we might not otherwise perceive in our waking lives.
Some good things come from even the worst of times. In this case, maybe we'll gain a better understanding of sleep and dreams. But I don't think any of the above sentences should be stated with the certainty that they exude.
At least five research teams at institutions across multiple countries are collecting examples such as Weller’s, and one of their findings so far is that pandemic dreams are being colored by stress, isolation, and changes in sleep patterns—a swirl of negative emotions that set them apart from typical dreaming.
I wish someone would approach me about doing a sleep study. "Hey, you like to sleep, right? How'd you like to get paid for it?"
The neurobiological signals and reactions that produce dreams are similar to those triggered by psychedelic drugs, according to McNamara. Psychedelics activate nerve receptors called serotonin 5-HT2A, which then turn off a part of the brain called the dorsal prefrontal cortex. The result is known as “emotional disinhibition,” a state in which emotions flood the consciousness, especially during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep, when we typically dream.
This connects to yesterday's entry, then.
Multiple studies have shown that our waking activities create a slide reel of memories that influence the content of our dreams. Emotions carried over from the day can influence what we dream about and how we feel about it within the dream itself. Reducing or restricting sources of everyday memories—by being stuck alone in quarantine—may limit the content of dreams or cause the subconscious to reach for deeper memories.
Bold hypothesis, there. Let's see if that plays out.
In Barrett’s latest sample of coronavirus dreams, which she began collecting in March with this survey, some participants reported dreaming they caught the virus or were dying of it. In another set of dreams Barrett collected, participants replaced fear of the virus with a metaphoric element, such as bugs, zombies, natural disasters, shadowy figures, monsters, or mass shooters.
Or as I like to call it, "Thursday."
For those experiencing coronavirus nightmares, there is growing evidence that so-called “dream mastery techniques” can alleviate their suffering.
The article's worth a read if this is affecting you or someone you know. And probably the hyperlinks therein are useful, too, but I couldn't be arsed to check them all.
Last night, I had one of those dreams where you wake up, go about your business, and then realize that you're still dreaming. Sometimes when that happens, I can consciously influence the dream - say, by having Halle Berry show up in the leather catsuit. But this time was different. No matter how I tried, I couldn't make anything happen in the dream.
It was a bit like being awake. |
April 25, 2020 at 12:19am April 25, 2020 at 12:19am
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I'm just going to leave this here for your amusement.
https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis
The 'Stoned Ape' Theory Might Explain Our Extraordinary Evolution
A scientist resurfaces a psychedelic retelling of human evolution.
"Might?" It "might" also be utter twaddle.
In 1992, ethnobotanist and psychedelics advocate Terence McKenna argued in the book Food of the Gods that what enabled Homo erectus to evolve into Homo sapiens was its encounter with magic mushrooms and psilocybin, the psychedelic compound within them, on that evolutionary journey.
Hell of a trip, man.
He called this the Stoned Ape Hypothesis.
Because of course he did.
As early humans, he said we “ate our way to higher consciousness” by consuming these mushrooms, which, he hypothesized, grew out of animal manure. Psilocybin, he said, brought us “out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.”
Granted, I'm no expert on biology, but that sounds awfully Lamarckian to me - heritability of acquired traits, which has even less support than the Stoned Ape Hypothesis itself.
And, because psilocybin mushrooms commonly grow in cow droppings, “the human-mushroom interspecies codependency was enhanced and deepened. It was at this time that religious ritual, calendar making, and natural magic came into their own.”
Take enough drugs and you, too, can confuse correlation with causation.
“What is really important for you to understand is that there was a sudden doubling of the human brain 200,000 years ago. From an evolutionary point of view, that’s an extraordinary expansion. And there is no explanation for this sudden increase in the human brain.”
So we're going to make one up that supports our confirmation bias.
“I suggest to you that Dennis and Terence were right on,” Stamets announced while acknowledging that the hypothesis was perhaps still unprovable. “I want you or anyone listening, or seeing this, to suspend your disbelief … I think this is a very, very plausible hypothesis for the sudden evolution of Homo sapiens from our primate relatives.”
And hey, science is full of hypotheses that started out ridiculous and ended up being... well, mostly true. Really, this one's no weirder than quantum theory. The difference is, quantum theory has experimental support, and makes predictions that can be, and have been, tested. Find a way to do that, and I'll have a nice steaming dish of crow.
McKenna’s theory chalks up the entirety of this complicated phenomenon to a single spark; to him, psilocybin mushrooms were the “evolutionary catalyst” that sparked consciousness by prompting early humans to engage in experiences like sex, community bonding, and spirituality.
Sex has been around since at least the beginnings of eukaryotic life. Community bonding is practiced in many different species. Our nearest cousins, the bonobos, are really, really good at these two things. As for spirituality, there are other explanations.
And yet, they’re equally stumped when asked to answer the question at the root of the debate over the Stoned Ape hypothesis and consciousness research in general: How did consciousness evolve? If it wasn’t psychedelic mushrooms that started the process, then what did?
That's a fair question, and it's good to have competing hypotheses for an answer. But, again... evidence.
If the science behind McKenna’s hypothesis is unstable, what worth does it have in the search for the origin of human consciousness?
I think they're asking the wrong question here. Look, I'm not coming down against the use of mind-altering drugs; that would be hypocritical (even though the ones discussed here are not my cup of mushroom soup). There's plenty of evidence that psychedelics, used carefully, can be beneficial. Maybe they can even expand an individual's consciousness, like the hype promotes. Let's not confuse personal growth with species evolution, though.
And maybe - just maybe - I can see psychedelics being an engine for social evolution. That is, some stoner decides something like, "Hey, we're all ONE, man," and passes that along to his or her fellow apes, who nod in agreement and then proceed to beat each other up over the last roll of toilet paper. But at least they feel sorry about that afterwards.
But in terms of species evolution? It's like the idea that if both of a child's parents had each lost their left pinky fingers in an accident, the kid would pop out with nine fingers. Lamarckian.
However, McKenna deserves credit for sparking an idea in the 1990s that scientists have only recently been able to prove: Psilocybin does alter consciousness and can trigger physical changes in the brain.
Not arguing against that.
The Stoned Ape hypothesis may now be lost to the annals of fringe science, but some remnant of its legacy remains. Now that scientists better understand the way psilocybin physically affects the brain, they can seriously investigate its potential to treat disorders like substance abuse, anxiety, and depression. If that happens — and it looks like it will — psilocybin will become a part of mainstream culture as an agent of positive change. And isn’t that ultimately what McKenna was advocating for?
So the article ends up in the same place I did. This sounds like beneficial research, but it shouldn't be sullied by association with ideas that, at best, are unprovable, and at worst, are made of the same stuff fom which magic mushrooms grow. |
April 24, 2020 at 12:17am April 24, 2020 at 12:17am
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Today, I'm going to talk about nothing.
http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/what-is-space
What Is Space?
It’s not what you think.
It's the Final Frontier. Duh.
Ask a group of physicists and philosophers to define “space” and you will likely be stuck in a long discussion that involves deep-sounding but meaningless word combinations such as “the very fabric of space-time itself is a physical manifestation of quantum entropy concepts woven together by the universal nature of location.”
I saw graffiti on a bathroom wall once, in college, that went something like:
And Jesus said, "Who am I?"
And his disciples said, "You are the eschatological manifestation of being, the very korygma of our existence."
And Jesus said, "What?"
...yes, this was in the philosophy department. The drama department had a penchant for adding two more arms to the final L of what was printed on the bumwad dispensers: "PRESS DOWN FOR NEW ROLL."
On second thought, maybe you should avoid starting deep conversations between philosophers and physicists.
This is essential life advice.
It turns out that the nature of space itself is one of the biggest and strangest mysteries in the universe. So get ready, because things are about to get ... spacey.
Pick up your favorite mind-altering substance and read the rest of the article.
Space is definitely not an empty void and it is definitely not just a relationship between matter. We know this because we have seen space do things that fit neither of those ideas. We have observed space bend and ripple and expand.
This is the part where your brain goes, “Whaaaaat ... ?”
The expansion of space is, itself, mind-blowing. An astronomer once described to me two variations of what could eventually happen to the universe. In the first variation, gravity pulls everything back together. In the second, in theory, the expansion of space (which is, after all, not just "out there," but everywhere, including within us) will eventually get to the point where not just gravity, but even the forces binding atoms together will be overcome, tearing everything apart.
"I don't know which one will happen," he said. "I'm torn."
I groaned appropriately.
Anyway, the article's worth reading, even though it gets pretty deep. No, because it gets pretty deep. That's why I recommended mind-altering substances above.
If your brain is not yet hurting from all these gooey space-bending concepts, here is another mystery about space: Is space flat or curved (and if it’s curved, which way does it curve)?
People get confused all the time about the "curvature of space." I think of it as analogous to the curvature of the Earth: under normal circumstances, we don't see it, and our brains think it's flat (and a bunch of people with small brains still think it's flat). But it curves in three dimensions. Space, then, curves in higher dimensions.
What would it mean for space to have a curvature? One way to visualize it is to pretend for a second that we live in a two-dimensional world, like being trapped in a sheet of paper. That means we can only move in two directions. Now, if that sheet we live in lies perfectly straight, we say that our space is flat.
But if for some reason that sheet of paper is bent, then we say that the space is curved.
Yeah, like that.
In this case, it turns out that we do have an answer, which is that space does appear to be “pretty flat,” as in space is within 0.4 percent of being flat. Scientists, through two very different methods, have calculated that the curvature of space (at least the space we can see) is very nearly zero.
"Very nearly zero" isn't "zero."
I love Star Trek, but when they get the physics wrong, it annoys me. One example is when the Next Generation crew found a Dyson sphere. A Dyson sphere is a giant shell an advanced civilization could build around a star, harnessing all of its energy and providing a great deal of lebensraum. It's named after Freeman Dyson, who first conceptualized it. Now, we're used to Earth, which, again, is roughly spherical, but our senses perceive it as flat. A Dyson sphere would be many orders of magnitude bigger than the Earth, so being on, or really anywhere near, its surface, it should appear even flatter. But no, this particular episode showed it curved.
That's far from the only time Trek sacrificed realism for the sake of appearances, but it stuck out in my mind.
Because as far as we know, the fact that we live in a flat universe is a gigantic cosmic-level coincidence.
Some things really are coincidences, like how we're living in a time when the moon appears to be about the same size as the sun in the sky, producing spectacular total eclipses every so often. A few million years earlier, and the moon would have appeared much bigger; eventually, there will no longer be total eclipses as the moon continues its slow divorce from Earth. As far as we can tell, this truly is a coincidence. The flat space thing? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe a flat universe (or mostly flat) is necessary to create the conditions under which our kind of life can evolve. Anthropic principle: we wouldn't be around to notice it if it were any different. But hey, I don't know.
Finally, you can ask whether space is actually made up of tiny discrete bits of space, like the pixels on a TV screen, or infinitely smooth, such that there are an infinite number of places you can be between two points in space?
Well, I guess that depends on whether or not we're living in a simulation.
That's a joke. We're not living in a simulation.
If space is quantized, that means that when we move across space we are actually jumping from small little locations to other small little locations. In this view, space is a network of connected nodes, like the stations in a subway system. Each node represents a location, and the connections between nodes represent the relationships between these locations (i.e., which one is next to which other one).
That would put an end to discussion of Zeno's Paradox. Maybe.
Some even suspect that the relationships between nodes of space are formed by the quantum entanglement of particles, but this is mathematical speculation by a bunch of overcaffeinated theorists.
Sometimes caffeine isn't the only drug involved.
Anyway, like I said, the article is worth reading (open it in a private window if you're hitting a paywall). Else I wouldn't have bothered to post it here. |
April 23, 2020 at 12:22am April 23, 2020 at 12:22am
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Remember a few days ago, I said I'd get to another David Wong article from Cracked?
Today is that day.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-common-beliefs-that-make-disasters-worse/
5 Common Beliefs That Make Disasters Worse
As a keen observer of humanity and systemic failure, my pandemic lockdown has made one thing clear: Video game item shops should not close at night.
This is true. However, at least in the video games I play, it's easy to "wait" for several hours for the shop to reopen. This has no effect on the game other than making time pass in the game faster than it does in "real" life.
But the second thing that I've kind of noticed while waiting for the next Animal Crossing item balloon to appear is that disasters have a way of exposing all of our collective brain flaws.
Some asshole wrote an article condemning Animal Crossing recently. I won't link it because I don't want to give it any more publicity than it has already garnered. His point, if you can call it that, was that it's a childish game. I say, so what? You like to play it, then play it. I'm not a fan, myself, but then, how many people are on their 104th run-through of Skyrim? Besides me. We'd do a whole lot better without game-shaming. Or shaming of any kind. I suspect the article was written entirely to generate publicity, because the only thing more certain than trolls on the internet is people feeding said trolls.
This isn't because the world is trying to teach us a lesson -- the world is trying to murder us, not teach us -- but because information sometimes doesn't sink into the human brain unless it comes tied to a rock hurled through our window.
That in itself is an important lesson.
So, on to the Cracked-format numbered list.
5. "Freedom Means Doing The Opposite Of Whatever The Government Tells Me!"
My favorite thing about Americans is that we hate being told what to do.
Which is why game-shaming articles are so ubiquitous. "This asshole is telling me not to play this game! I'll show him by buying the game and playing the shit out of it!" That sort of thing doesn't work on me. At least I don't think it does. There was the time when I started taking a medication that interacts poorly with grapefruit. I've never craved grapefruit in my entire life... until the moment I started taking the medication. Still, craving something is not the same as doing it, and I didn't do it.
Sure enough, the moment the experts urged people to stay home to stop COVID-19, lots of us defiantly flocked to crowded beaches. But who, exactly, were we defying? The government? The virus? Death itself?
I've seen people, even here on WDC, saying stuff like, "If I get it, I get it." And that's an opinion I can respect. You have things you value more than your life or health? That's fine. You do you, as the saying goes. I know I do; I have all sorts of risky behaviors, like drinking, for which I've done an internal, informal, cost/benefit analysis. Well and good. But as Wong points out, it's not about you. It's about the people you could pass the disease on to. I say - controversially - go ahead and play Russian Roulette. It's your skull. But the moment you point that revolver at me, or anyone else, we're going to have a Problem.
Hmm, it's almost as if our society has built up selfish dicks as a heroic archetype...
4. "In A Disaster, It's The Tough Loner Who Survives!"
Some of us literally prefer the fantasy of mass death to the reality, which is that workforce specialization has turned the entire concept of rugged independence into a selfish, childish daydream. Maybe you can learn to grow your own food and purify water, but you sure as hell can't manufacture vaccines or perform a root canal on yourself. Side note: I'm convinced you could kill the post-apocalypse genre forever just by attaching a device that lets the audience to smell the characters. Though I guess the fantasy genre would die with it.
Reality: We're interdependent. Thoreau wasn't just wrong; he was dangerously wrong. In times like these, or with other natural disasters, what's important is how well we treat each other, not who has the most rolls of asswipe.
3. "If I Prepare For A Disaster And It Doesn't Occur, Then The Preparations Were A Waste!"
But the real shock of the Corona Crash has been finding out that apparently our entire infrastructure was operating on this same, "only plan for what you need five minutes from now" philosophy. The US government's emergency pandemic stockpiles were tiny and withered. The billionaires who scolded the poor for not having six months of emergency cash immediately screamed for government bailouts after a single week of bad sales.
I've harped on this sort of thing before. I've noticed that no one is talking about Marie Kondo or that Hoarders show right now. I don't know; maybe it's because the hoarders had the right idea all along? Okay, some of the more extreme ones are just mental, I know; your stash of used pizza boxes isn't going to do you a damn bit of good right now unless you become homeless and have to create a shelter out of them.
If you cut back to plan for the future, they say you're not "Living in the moment." If you stock up on emergency supplies you're a paranoid prepper, if you wash your hands too much you're a germaphobe, if you worry about potential disasters then you need to "Stop and smell the roses." You know, for your own mental health.
In fact, if tomorrow we all collectively decide to slow down, simplify our lives and save for a rainy day, I can tell you exactly what the media will call it: A Worldwide Economic Collapse.
2. "If Someone Warns Of A Disaster And it Doesn't Occur, It Means They Were Wrong And We Should All Laugh At Them!"
If you save a drowning child in a lake, you'll get your face on the local news. If you put up a sign and a fence that keeps all children out of the dangerous lake entirely, you're just the cranky jerk ruining everybody's fun. "Look, it's the mean 'no swimming' guy! Eat my dry ass, old man!"
I'm skipping a bunch here, but they're all valid points.
1. "Handling This Is Surely Someone Else's Job!"
It's just basic game theory: why should you make the sacrifice if there's a chance someone else can do it instead? If you don't buy up all of the toilet paper, some other hoarder probably will. Why should they be the one who gets to spend quarantine doing their wacky Mummy character on Tiktok?
I've said this before, too: hoarding toilet paper? Fine. But it's insulting to the rest of us when you take your seemingly-limitless supply of bumwad and do Stupid Human Tricks with it instead of wiping your ass with it. It's like those douchenuggets who light cigars with $100 bills.
Incidentally, I used to wonder why people lit cigars with anything other than a match, until I started smoking cigars. Turns out that the sulfur in a match can ruin the taste of a good cigar. So you light something else first - a cedar chip is preferable to a goddamned C-note, and about 10,000 times less expensive - and use that to light the stick.
In the end, our inability to prepare for the worst is really just A) an inability to grasp which hypothetical futures can actually occur and B) an unwillingness to see strangers as real humans whose needs overlap our own.
I've often wondered about the mentality of those who buy gold against the inevitable fall of civilization. First of all, it's gold. You can't eat it or drink it (well, I suppose you could, but the results range from nothing to burning your digestive tract), and if you build a shelter out of it, someone will come along and kill you for it. Come the actual apocalypse, gold won't be worth the paper it's printed on. Hell, you can't even build effective weapons out of it; it's too malleable. Sure, gold is an excellent conductor of electricity and has many nice industrial uses -- all of which are immaterial in the face of a return to the Stone Age. That's assuming you even survive, which you won't (neither will I).
And second, if gold were so useful, why are people selling it? What do they get out of it? Money. I have this sneaking suspicion that actual paper money will be more useful after a collapse, in spite of everyone's assumption that it'll be worthless. It's not like they'll be making more of it, and, unlike gold, it has a shelf life.
Besides, in a pinch, you can wipe your ass with it. Try doing that with a hunk of yellow metal. |
April 22, 2020 at 12:01am April 22, 2020 at 12:01am
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No.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2391763/stop-reclining-your-seat-airplanes
Stop Reclining Your Seat on Airplanes
You heard me. On cramped flights, the person who reclines their seat in front of me really chafes.
You know what really chafes? Complainers.
I love airline travel.
You're a monster.
The predictable flow of airports soothes me, and I get giddy during takeoff because I still don’t quite understand the science (read: magic) that keeps planes aloft.
And you're willfully ignorant.
Let me be clear: reclining is perfectly acceptable on flights longer than, say, four or five hours, especially if it’s an overnighter.
And who appointed you Arbiter?
So when we all pile into our clown car in the sky, we do so knowing that for whatever time we’re at cruising altitude, we’re going to sacrifice some personal space and our legs are going to fall asleep. Which is why my fellow economy-class members who recline their seats are the worst.
So don't fly.
Let’s get real. Those extra three degrees of slope on your reclined seat back aren’t going to make you more comfortable.
Yes. Yes, they are. And you're engaging in hyperbole.
Did they have a drink on their tray table? You didn’t think to check before you reclined onto their warm Diet Coke, did you? Were they working on their laptop? Now their screen is hunched forward at an angle that makes productivity impossible.
How about: Be aware that the person in front of you will recline their seat, and act accordingly. And for fuck's sake, if you need to spend every waking minute being "productive," you're the one with the problem.
The thing is, you know you suck when you hit that recline button, but just in case you truly are ignorant, hear this: your actions have direct consequences for the people around you—any space you take is taken from someone else.
Damn right. I have one magic button on my shitty airplane seat that makes me marginally less uncomfortable, and I am going to use it.
So if you want to lounge back and make life a little bit worse in an already untenable situation, I suggest you get rich, leave us common folk behind, and live it up in business class, which United is expanding while, you guessed it, shrinking economy.
Oh, I've done that. Not just business class, but first class. And believe me, nothing -- nothing -- gives me more pleasure than sitting in a wide, comfortable first-class seat, sipping my complimentary Bloody Mary, and watching people like you struggle past with disease-vector offspring and more stuff than will ever fit into an overhead compartment, let alone under the seat in front of you.
But when I do fly cattle-class, I always make sure to take off my shoes, fart silently, eat fragrant food, and, yes, recline my goddamned seat.
Want to make air travel more comfortable? Take it up with the airlines, and be willing to pay more for the privilege. You know, if there are still airlines after all this. |
April 21, 2020 at 12:02am April 21, 2020 at 12:02am
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I'm sharing this link, not to get embroiled in a political argument, but because this has implications for all writing.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90208548/this-is-how-tiny-changes-in-words-impacts-t...
This is how tiny changes in words you hear impacts your thinking
In a fascinating look at language, a Professor George Lakoff lays out how political parties can sway supporters with tiny tweaks in word choice.
It's not just political parties, of course; it's generally applicable to writing (including writing for video).
In 1973, America watched as then President Richard Nixon vehemently declared on national television, “I am not a crook” in regards to the Watergate scandal.
Not many people believed him.
Partly it's because of his word choices. Partly it was because everyone knew he was a crook and voted him in anyway.
The major mistake Nixon made was in his framing.
While I know what this author is trying to say here, I think we can all identify what Nixon's "major mistake" was, even if you're too young to remember Tricky Dick.
George Lakoff, a professor in cognitive science and linguistics at University of California, Berkeley, makes the point in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant! that when trying to get your point across, refrain from using the other side’s language.
Buy my book, and this guy's book too! Also, for the eleventeenth time, life isn't binary; there's more than two sides, always.
So, exactly what is a frame?
“A frame is a mental structure that is represented in the brain by neural circuitry,” Lakoff explains. Frames shape the way people see the world, and consequently, the goals we seek and the choices that we make.
I'd like to point out that "neural circuitry" is a metaphor. The brain isn't a computer. Also, that's a shitty definition, because it requires drilling deeper with more definitions.
Not that I believe that could define "frame" any better, but I'll take a stab at it, at least from a writing point of view: a frame is a mental metaphorical structure built on word associations, their emotional content, and their implications.
How'd I do?
Think about it this way: Something that has a “95% effective rate” will sell better than something with a “5% failure rate.” It’s all in how you frame it.
I've gotten into the habit of always turning statistics around in my head, anyway. It's a glass-half-full or half-empty kind of thing. Well, as an engineer, I see a glass overdesigned in capacity for its contents, but that's irrelevant. And as a drinker, I see a need for more beer.
Because subtle differences in languages might shape our thoughts and change how we experience reality, learning a new language can activate new frames. Quite simply, speaking differently requires thinking differently.
I stuck this article in my queue months ago and I'm just now getting to it, but I have a dim recollection of wanting to make a point based on this paragraph, something related to me learning French. But obviously, learning a new language hasn't helped my general memory all that much, as far as I can tell. Probably had something to do with this "thinking differently" thing being one of the reasons I decided to try learning a new language.
The rest of the article deals more directly with the political implications, specifically American politics, and that's not something I want to wade into here. It's the general ideas about framing as they relate to writing that I want to emphasize: word choice is important, and we need to consider not only the words but their possible emotional baggage. |
April 20, 2020 at 12:24am April 20, 2020 at 12:24am
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This article is over a year old, but still relevant to our current situation.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gya8bx/i-tested-the-saving-technique-that-pro...
I Tested the Saving Technique That Promises Retirement at 40
The FIRE—"financial independence, retire early"—movement is all about hoarding enough cash before investing it and living off the dividends.
Not entirely. It's also about not being in debt, and investing along the way.
Like you and every other person in the world, I am no good at New Year puritanism. Two months in, I'm still often drunk and just as unfamiliar with kettlebell squats.
Already I like the author.
Founded in America in the 1990s, the "FIRE" movement stands for "Financial Independence, Retire Early."
A twisted way to force an acronym if there ever was one.
My salary is just under the London average of £34,000 [$44,711]. Taking half my monthly wage for saving, along with rent, bills, and monthly subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify, I'm left with £377 [$495] for the month—a budget of around £12 [$16] a day to cover food, travel, and any other expenses.
So, we're not looking at someone with a great deal of privilege. Saving half your income is easy when you're making 100K a year (quid or bucks, doesn't matter) and don't have kids. Not so much if you're not pulling in even the average for your area.
My first week's budget is almost blown out by the post-midnight beers I buy in the blurry hours between New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.
Yep, definitely wanna have a pint with this guy.
To balance it out, I spend the rest of the week either at work or at home, not spending much, and not really doing much, either. Time stretches out when you have nothing to do.
And this is why it's still relevant today. For people who are lucky enough to still be working, anyway. Most of us aren't supposed to go out, and even if we could, nothing's open.
One aspect of the FIRE movement that appealed to me was its anti-consumerism. A number of the blogs I read argue that if only we bought less and stopped caving into immediate desires for things, we could save more and abandon the daily grind.
Which is easy to say and harder for most of us to actually accomplish.
Some combine the FIRE movement with environmentalism, arguing that if you buy less stuff you can save money and the planet at the same time.
This hypothesis has some merit to it, as I'm sure you've seen in articles about how clean some cities suddenly are.
I'm reminded of an article I saw about Tory MP Dominic Raab eating the same Pret baguette for lunch every working day of his life.
I laughed when I learned enough French to translate the name of the ubiquitous food shop "Pret-a-Manger." I also find it amusing that this conservative British MP is basically being French.
At first, it was easy to fill our weekends by doing free stuff, though a few weeks in they also start to drag. There are only so many free art exhibitions you can wander around before it gets boring. We spend one Saturday getting drunk by downloading some pub and bar apps that give you a free pint just for signing up, while the Dusk app also gives you a free drink a day, but we found the bars it was available in were a bit shitty.
Maybe you need to acknowledge that "doing stuff" can include sitting at home and reading or playing video games? And I hate to admit it, but one of the easiest ways to save money is to cut way back on the drinking. Fortunately, I'm past that stage, but now I don't drink as much as I sometimes imply - mostly because I didn't get in the habit when I was younger and broker.
If saving half of your mediocre salary seems a bit extreme to you, as it did to me, you might be wondering if there is a middle ground between extreme frugality and carefree spending. Both bloggers I spoke to agree that FIRE isn't a binary choice—saving 50 percent of your salary each month isn't the only way to achieve a comfortable future—but you don't need another article on "money hacks" and the benefits of meal prep to know that you should probably be saving a bit more than you already do.
Yes. Life is not binary, as I keep yammering on about. You pick a target level and try to stick to it. Even 10% is good, and there are religions that urge or require a 10% tithe. How much better if you can save that for your own security instead?
With global warming triggering the collapse of entire ecosystems, and the constant barrage of other anxiety-inducing news, now does not seem a particularly prescient time to hinge your future on the continuing ability of the global economy to offer returns on your savings at its historic average—and even if it does, some people take issue with the maths behind FIRE.
Prescient. Also, I know a few people who might wish they'd saved up more before they lost their jobs.
Writing for Bloomberg, Jared Dillian argues that "the biggest issue with the FIRE movement is that it's the ultimate bull market phenomenon. FIRE seems to work because the stock market has gone straight up." He says that even if this continues, using the figures that underpin many of the FIRE movement's assumptions, "it's not going to be any fun living on a shoestring budget and watching your nest egg decline in value by 30 percent to 50 percent."
And behold, the stock market did crash, as it inevitably does. However -- and I respect Bloomberg as a financial source -- investors need to internalize the idea that bear markets are temporary, and if you're investing for the long term, they become barely a blip. I agree that seeing it happen to your savings is no fun, but as long as you're not investing on margin, and if you're not using the money in the next 3-5 years, you'll be okay.
Beyond the issues with the maths behind FIRE, to me it just doesn't seem worth it to offset the present in such a drastic way, to reduce life to a series of dispassionate financial decisions, for a shot at something that might never come. "If I just drop dead of a heart attack in six months time, that would be a bummer because I've deferred my spending for the future," says Whiter. "What if I never get to experience that?"
And that is a sentiment to which I can relate. I'm pretty sure I've said many times something to the effect of "sure, I can do everything right, and then get hit by a bus, and then I'll be a dead Puritan." Each person has to find his or her own balance between want-it-now and wait-for-it.
But I also want to address a larger issue, and for this it doesn't matter if you're living in the US, the UK, or some other industrialized economy, and that's the relationship between consumerism and the economy in general. Just as many of us recycle, or work to find other ways to reduce our carbon footprint, on the grounds that "every little bit helps," our spending is what keeps the economy going. This is the sort of thing where an individual contribution doesn't amount to much, but put a lot of them together and you end up having an effect - possibly even bringing on the bear market the above quote touches on.
Governments have, in fact, discouraged hoarding cash, ostensibly for this reason. But also, at least here in the US, it seems like there's another reason, intended or not: here, health insurance is largely tied to one's job. This gives a massive advantage to employers; they can demand people work in shitty conditions and for lower pay, just for the availability of health insurance. These employers like this situation, and the larger ones (including insurance companies) have influence in politics. So it's reasonable to think that The System is working to keep people working, no matter what. Work, and you get insurance. Spend, and you're helping to keep the economy going. Don't hoard cash; don't save, because you don't want businesses to fold, do you? But then you suddenly lose your job, and then what?
This situation, as is now apparent, is unsustainable. A healthy economy isn't about stock prices; it's about an individual's effort being both good for the individual and good for society. But saving is good for the individual; not so much for the economy. Spending is good for the economy; not so much for the individual.
One touchstone for whether something is ethical or not is: what happens if everyone does it? For example, I chose not to have kids. What if everyone chose that? Well, then, the human race would, perforce, come to a screeching halt (that's not going to be what ends us, though). But turning it around, what if everyone decided to have all the kids they could? Well, that would lead to Malthusian collapse. In that example, the only ethical choice is to let people make their own choices. So, what if everyone decided to -- I'll go ahead and use the acronym -- FIRE?
That, I leave as an exercise for the reader. |
April 19, 2020 at 12:07am April 19, 2020 at 12:07am
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One today from someone at my alma mater
https://aeon.co/essays/is-debunking-more-about-the-truth-teller-than-the-truth
Debunking debunked
Secular modernity requires the weeding out of all the baloney. Yet it’s not clear that we are any less credulous than before
What's not clear is that the goal was ever to make us "any less credulous than before."
Just as you can deworm a puppy, you can debunk a religious practice, a pyramid scheme, a quack cure. Get rid of the nonsense, and the polity – just like the puppy – will fare better. Con men will be deprived of their innocent marks, and the world will take one more step in the direction of modernity.
Read articles like this one, and the world will take one more step in the direction of postmodernity.
What we should imagine instead of an impartial skeptic is a person who gets a charge out of being the rational member of the exchange – someone who is drawn, for reasons that might or might not be clear to him or her, and that are probably difficult to articulate, to the drama of unmasking.
"And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for these meddling kids!"
There's really a lot more here, so much that my choice is to either quote it excessively or leave it at that. I'm choosing the latter because I'm lazy. But to summarize my takeaway from it, as I understand it, the author turns debunking into a social exchange, and skewers the idea of "modernity" (as defined by her) throughout. One could even say she debunks it.
My rebuttal? While it's not always easy -- or even possible -- to ascertain the truth of a situation, I think it's important to try. I agree that sometimes people go too far, perhaps by ascribing ill intentions to those they're trying to debunk. Maybe that's not clear; let me give you an example.
I had a friend who's a chiropractor. She spent many, many years at a school learning how to chiropract. It's her job and she makes a decent living at it, last time I checked. Meanwhile, many people consider chiropractic to be nonsense, a thing to be debunked. Someone like that might accuse my friend of lying, turning it on her instead of the practice itself. But she's not lying; she actually believes in what she's doing. Whether it's promoting falsehood or not, in her mind, it's truth. So no, she's not intentionally deceiving anyone, and I'm pretty sure that it would hurt her a great deal to be accused of being a con woman.
As for me, from what I can tell, there's some benefit to chiropractic, but many chiropractors' knee-jerk rejection of "allopathic medicine" is dangerous and a rejection of evidence-based treatments. Obviously, this didn't mean that we couldn't be friends, but it's not like her way would have helped me when I had a heart attack.
Sure did help with my back pain, though. (And yes, I'm aware that's anecdotal and not actual scientific evidence that it works, but that's not the reason I'm relating this.)
Point is, this article has issues, and if you want to debunk it yourself, go for it. Me, I'm going to have another beer. |
April 18, 2020 at 12:03am April 18, 2020 at 12:03am
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One of the most annoying things about the history of mathematics and science is that women's work in those fields is largely discounted or forgotten.
https://massivesci.com/articles/gabrielle-emilie-du-chatelet-voltaire-newton-phy...
Meet Émilie du Châtelet, the French socialite who helped lay the foundations of modern physics
She improved on Newton's work and outclassed Voltaire
One of the few exceptions is Marie Curie, who of course was also French. I don't think I'd ever heard of Émilie du Châtelet, so I found this article interesting.
Mathematician, physicist, French aristocrat, manager of household, wife, mother, and philosopher, du Châtelet lived her short life to its fullest.
Had she lived just a little later, being a French aristocrat, her life might have been even shorter thanks to La Révolution. So would she.
It is clear, though, that she was interested in many “unfeminine” subjects. Home-educated, she learned multiple languages, including German, Greek, Latin, and Italian...
These days, home-schooling is associated with learning less, not more.
She was dedicated to her studies, and creative in finding resources – she used her mathematical talents to succeed in gambling and used her profits to buy textbooks and lab supplies.
I think I would have liked her.
Her time in Paris also brought her in contact with her most famous lover – the philosopher Voltaire.
Describing Voltaire as a "philosopher" is probably a slight to actual philosophers. "Rabble-rouser" might be more accurate. Oh, I know, Enlightenment values, blah, blah, but the guy seems like he was a bit of a tool, even if he was sometimes right.
When he had to flee Paris for his writing on England, which the French royalty and church took as a threat, he went to du Châtelet’s chateau in Cirey-sur-Blaise. Her husband apparently didn’t mind; Voltaire and du Châtelet were together for the next 15 years, all the while building a library and running scientific experiments.
I'm including this here in case you had any doubt in your mind that this story is about French people.
After the success of her previous publications, du Châtelet found herself looking for a new challenge. She decided to take on Newton’s Principia and its accompanying commentaries.
The article explains that Newton's work was in Latin, and she made it accessible to French readers.
Writing sporadically over four years, du Châtelet added in detailed proofs of ideas Newton mentioned offhand and integrates the latest works of her contemporaries, which built on and supported Newton’s ideas.
Now I'm wondering who might have done that for English readers. As it is, I'm beginning to get some idea of why France was scientifically ahead of England for many years, despite Newton being English.
Yet, it would be ten years after its completion before the public would see her masterpiece. She had finished her writing in a frenzy, working until the wee hours of the morning, while pregnant with her fifth child, by Jean François de Saint-Lambert (she and Voltaire had separated). She was 42 – and at the time, a pregnancy at that age was a death sentence.
At the time, any pregnancy was risky. This is one reason why reliable birth control should be considered one of the greatest inventions of modern times.
And in case the science thing wasn't enough, she was also apparently an early advocate of feminism, as it might have been understood then:
She advocates for women’s education: “This education would render enormous service to the entire human race. Women would be enriched by it and men would find new respect for them. Male–female interaction, which too often polishes manners while weakening and shrinking minds, would then rather serve to expand their knowledge.”
It took a while for that to happen. Equality is a slippery thing, sometimes, and is viewed through the lenses of a period's culture and times -- hence, you have people like Voltaire advocating for the common people while insulting them, or Jefferson writing high-minded polemics about freedom while owning slaves. I'm sure one day our quaint notions of what equality looks like will be scoffed at by future generations (if we have future generations), but hopefully some people will see the incremental progress we've made for what it is. |
April 17, 2020 at 12:08am April 17, 2020 at 12:08am
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Hey look. Another article about being quarantined.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/02/998440/lockdown-was-supposed-to-be-a...
I love how the header image makes sure the Apple logo on the notebook computer is in focus while everything else is out of focus. If Apple didn't pay them for that, the website is doing it wrong.
Lockdown was supposed to be an introvert’s paradise. It’s not.
Calendars cleared by coronavirus are filling up with virtual happy hours, and some people are starting to feel exhausted.
Really? Because I'm not seeing that happen.
This was supposed to be the moment for introverts—the disaster preppers of our new, covid-ravaged social lives. Those who cherished their time alone at home were already experts at voluntary self-isolation.
And you know what? It is our moment. My whole life has been leading to this.
But as people began to adjust to isolation, they started to find ways to bring their outside social lives into their homes.
My outside social life, apart from drinking at bars, involves typing to people on the internet. No one invites me to anything else. Well, rarely. Mostly just in December. You think the bitching level is high now? Imagine if this shit had started in November.
Calendars that had been cleared by social distancing suddenly refilled as friends, family, and acquaintances made plans to sip “quarantinis” at Zoom happy hours, hold Netflix viewing parties, or just catch up over Google hangouts.
Hey, look, three stock recommendations. Four if you count the Apple ad at the top.
“There’s no way you can pass that off as having other plans,” says Jaya Saxena, a staff writer at Eater, who is currently socially distancing with her spouse in her apartment in Queens, New York. “The only excuse is ‘I don’t want to,’ and no one wants to hear that right now.”
"I don't want to." There. That was easy, wasn't it? Or you can always fake a scratchy throat. Just be sure to assure them it's not the 'rona.
The reality is that introverts don’t want to be alone all the time, and extroverts can appreciate moments of quiet. But the division exists as a way to describe how people gather their energy: introverts charge up by having quiet time to process, and extroverts do it by socializing.
That's still very simplistic. Look, I'm not antisocial or misanthropic. I like meeting people. I like hanging out with people. I just can only take so much of it before I have to go do something solitary. This applies online, too; I don't like multiplayer video games.
For some, staying home means solitude and a lot of extra time. Others are trying to finish school, homeschool children, or work under difficult conditions. As one group looks for things to do, the other longs for a free moment to leave the home and hunt for toilet paper.
Not only have I been preparing my entire life for this, but I'm in an extraordinarily fortunate position in that I have no other obligations, and I don't need to leave the house; I have groceries delivered, and I order other necessaries online. I still haven't found a source for toilet paper, but I haven't been looking very hard because I'd just bought a good supply before people started to decide that it was Official Currency of the Apocalypse.
Introverts socially distancing with others might feel an additional layer of stress, even before the first virtual happy hour invitation, Rutledge notes. “Staying at home with others places a burden on introverts because they are not wired for full-time interaction,” she wrote in an email.
I do have a housemate, and she's also home all the time. Fortunately, it's a big enough house, and we generally occupy different areas of it.
Stacy, who works for an ed-tech company near Albany, knows how that feels. She used to meet friends a few times a week to play Dungeons & Dragons. (Like Tarek, Stacy asked to be identified by her first name only.) Now, those physical games have moved online, through the same laptop camera that provides a portal to all her work meetings.
I played D&D with a group online for a couple of years. We're supposed to start up again, but I haven't heard back from the group. But yeah, there are tools out there for doing the standard D&D experience online. It has its advantages. I don't suggest playing D&D on your work computer, though. Unless you're the boss.
So yeah, I feel like I'm handling this better than most. I'm trying not to be smug about it, because the last thing I need is to alienate even more people. I might want to hang out with them again if this ends before I croak. |
April 16, 2020 at 12:30am April 16, 2020 at 12:30am
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One meeeeelion dollars.
*starts to touch pinky to lips, remembers coronavirus, shrugs*
https://www.thecut.com/2020/03/im-a-secret-millionaire.html
‘I Inherited Millions and I’m Hiding It From Everyone’
So far, smart. People find out you have money, they'll try to find ways to part you from it.
But for the wealthiest 5 percent of American households, the average inheritance is $1.1 million, according to a 2014 report from the Federal Reserve.
I can't be arsed to click on that link, but "the wealthiest 5 percent" covers a really broad range of net worth. I'd be interested in how they figured that average, except it's too much work. Whatever. Let's round that down to One Meeeelion Dollars for the sake of argument.
But unlike most heirs, she hasn’t touched the money at all — or told anyone about it.
You know how you're always reading about heirs and/or lottery winners who blow through the windfall and end up broker than when they started? That's because smart people a) don't blow through the windfall b) don't tell too many people about it and c) aren't usually interesting enough to have articles written about them. Fortunately, this one's a (c) exception. Well, she's still not very interesting, but she had an article written about her, so there's that.
I was raised to not flaunt money. My parents always told me it was a stupid thing to do, and we lived a very middle-class lifestyle.
"Middle-class" covers a wide range, too. If you're talking lifestyle, it could be anything from a modest three-bedroom house and a Ford Fuckus to a 7 bedroom, 5 bath McMansion with 3 SUVs in the garage.
The problem is, most people think that the latter indicates greater wealth than the former. It does not. It often indicates higher debt.
They were both self-employed — my dad worked in alternative medicine, and my mom ran a daycare business.
"...and our Housefinders budget is $3.2 million."
My parents left me a seven-figure inheritance, in cash.
Another potentially misleading statement. There is a huge, enormous difference between whether those seven figures start with 1000 and if they start with 9000. The former will yield a safe withdrawal rate of about $40K a year (how much you can pull out, while allowing the principal to continue to grow to keep up with inflation). And that's nice; a lot of people live on that. The latter is closer to $360K a year, which would fund some truly epic vacations.
But, okay, elsewhere it's implied that it was closer to One Meeelion Dollars, so again, I'm going to stick with that.
I made all of my investment decisions on my own, without an investment adviser, from research I’d done while managing my own personal portfolio.
That's great if you have the aptitude and desire for it. I'd venture that most people don't. While there's no shame in hiring a financial adviser, be aware that their fees cut into gains. But if the alternative is "no gains," then yes, you come out ahead.
By the time I inherited money, I already had six figures in my portfolio that I’d accumulated independently.
And for the third time: this is misleading. 100,000 is an incredibly different number than 900,000.
But fine; that's how people talk sideways about money, instead of coming right out and saying "I had a portfolio worth 250K," they'll just say "six figures," even when they're being anonymous like this person is. It's really remarkable. People will talk about their hemorrhoids, but not their money.
But I don't talk about mine, either, so I suppose I can't be too surprised.
I’ve now had this money for three years. It was a lot to handle at first, and there was a steep learning curve, but I’ve already grown the portfolio by 50 percent.
Obviously, this was written (if not dated) before the current pandemic and its associated recession. Fifty percent in three years is pretty good at any time, but pick any three years of the teenies' bull market and you could probably achieve that by picking stocks at random. As a general rule of thumb, money fully invested in the stock market can double every nine years or so - of course, that depends on whether there's a recession in those seven years or not, but on average, that's been the case.
Everyone has different things — what I lost, many other people still have.
And this is important. Money is good, but some people seem to value family more.
My parents had a non-flashy, stealth-wealth lifestyle, and I’m the same way. I don’t even have a car. I don’t wear any labels. I ride a bike everywhere. I make my lunches. Nothing I do would elicit people to think, “How does she afford this?”
I'm of the opinion that those who do flaunt wealth generally don't actually have it; they just want to promote the appearance of having it. Like I said above. I guess it's all about what's important to you, and for me, money is more important than perceived social status.
That doesn't mean I'm not going to buy quality stuff (it's cheaper in the long run), but the only "label" I wear is Levi's.
I think the biggest thing I’ve learned from this experience, and working for over ten years now, is that your job doesn’t have as much of a relationship to your net worth as many people think.
This is really important, I think. It doesn't matter if you make "six figures" in a year if you spend "six figures" plus x, where x is any number, as per algebra. You end up with more stuff, maybe, but come the coronapocalypse, you found yourself just as broke as someone who was scraping by on rideshare tips.
But I see it conflated in articles all the time. A "millionaire" is someone with at least a One Meeelion Dollar net worth, not someone who takes home that amount in a year. The latter person might well be spending most of it on hookers and blow, and wasting the rest, instead of building net worth.
And why is net worth important? Because as we've seen over the last couple of months, your job - your entire industry - could collapse at any moment, and it's clear that significant government handouts are reserved for the likes of airlines and banks, not their customers. Meanwhile, we were encouraged to spend every cent we made, and then some (by going into debt), to fuel the economy. But people with some money saved up are weathering this crisis much better than the rest of us.
And if they're smart, they're not bragging about it. |
April 15, 2020 at 12:21am April 15, 2020 at 12:21am
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Sometimes, I share a link because it gives me an excellent opportunity for a pun in the blog entry title.
This is one of those times.
Also, the subject is fascinating.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-make-the-perfect-mirror-physicists-confront-th...
To Make the Perfect Mirror, Physicists Confront the Mystery of Glass
Sometimes a mirror that reflects 99.9999% of light isn’t good enough.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory can sense movements thousands of times tinier than the width of an atom partly because of the instrument’s near-perfect mirrors. The mirrors bounce laser beams back and forth down the arms of LIGO’s L-shaped detectors. Changes in the relative lengths of the arms reveal when a gravitational wave flutters past Earth, stretching and squeezing space-time.
LIGO, by itself, is incredibly cool. Well, not as cool as a liquid helium superconductor (that's another pun), but it's one of those triumphs of physics and engineering that's clever as hell and allows us to probe the depths of the universe. With it, scientists have detected the gravitational waves produced from black hole mergers halfway across the visible universe -- and thus verified another of Einstein's predictions.
But this article isn't about gravitational waves or astronomy. It's about something much more familiar, something most of us see every day and so don't think about much.
LIGO’s mirrors are imperfect, however, because of a strange form of noise that is baked into glass, a mysterious substance in general. Glass consists of atoms or molecules that are haphazardly arranged like those in a liquid yet somehow stuck, unable to flow.
I just wanted to throw out an aside here. I remember being told as a kid that glass is a "solid liquid" and that, over long periods of time, it flows very slowly, and that's why glass windows in older buildings exhibit wavy distortions.
I keep hearing references to this, but it is utter and complete nonsense.
The reason windows in older buildings give a distorted view of the world is that the technology to make the glass wasn't as refined as it is today, and so there are small variances in thickness across the pane. This leads to inconsistent refraction of whatever light passes through it, giving the scene that slightly distorted appearance. To be perfectly clear (pun intended), glass is as solid as it gets; it wouldn't exhibit any noticeable flow in the couple of hundred years since clear glass became a thing for windows.
The reason for this confusion is that glass is, in a sense, a solid liquid. "But Waltz, you just said that was nonsense." What I mean by a solid liquid is that in silica glass, the arrangement of atoms is chaotic, not regular as in a crystal or a metal. In that sense, it's kind of like a liquid, with atoms in an irregular configuration. That's not why it's clear, of course; many plastics are also amorphous, even the opaque ones, and quartz (also silica), a crystal with a regular atomic structure, is transparent as well.
But anyway, back to the article.
Hellman’s group is looking for something approaching “ideal glass,” a hypothetical phase of matter predicted decades ago. The molecules in ideal glass are theoretically packed together in the densest possible random arrangement...
And whenever I try to imagine a "densest possible random arrangement," my mind blanks. This is why I'm not an actual physicist or materials scientist.
The rest of the article gets a bit technical ("Oh, like it wasn't already"), but again, this stuff is fascinating.
And pun-worthy. |
April 14, 2020 at 12:14am April 14, 2020 at 12:14am
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Perhaps you've caught something going around this past month. No, not a virus; a meme in the original sense of the word.
https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/03/31/the-trouble-with-triscuits/
The Trouble with Triscuits
On March 25, Sage Boggs shocked the twittersphere with his revelation that the brand name Triscuit was a portmanteau of “electricity” and “biscuit.”
You know, in British English (and in French), the word "biscuit" refers to what we here in the US would call a "cookie" - a sweet baked product. In the US, a "biscuit" is a light, fluffy, savory, doughy thing (I think I got the adjectives in the right order there) that you eat for breakfast. In neither case is it a crunchy, lightly salted, whole-wheat square. That's a "cracker" in American English. No idea what the Brits call it. Or the French, for that matter. So the whole thing smacked of marketing to me.
The account even added a lightning bolt to its username and changed its bio to “elecTRIcity biSCUIT.”
Yep. Marketing.
Triscuit’s confirmation of the theory satisfies many that Boggs’s theory is correct, and it also helps that the theory is the sort of surprising factoid people love to share at parties.
What are these "parties" to which the author refers? Besides, even if we could have parties, by this time pretty much everyone knows this "sort of surprising factoid" via internet. I'm not even on Twitface and I've heard it.
In 1903, Triscuit ads proclaimed that Triscuits were the first commercial bread product to be “baked by electricity.” Some of the earliest designs even incorporated lightning bolts into the lettering of “Triscuit.”
You know why I want to believe this, though? Not because it's compelling, but because the early ad shows they were made in Niagara Falls, which, combined with the "electricity" thing, harks back to Tesla, and Tesla was awesome.
But did the Natural Food Company name their cracker “Triscuit” specifically to evoke the middle syllable of “electricity?” That’s a much harder question, and requires both a broader understanding of the culture of advertising in the early 20th century and also a deeper inquiry into how the “Triscuit” name operated at its inception.
Which, of course, the article delves into, and I'm not going to reproduce the argument here. Just read it.
Other theories about the name exist, some more plausible than others. Many have suggested the name derived from triticale, a late-19th-century hybrid of wheat and rye, but there is no evidence that this was used to make Triscuits.
To paraphrase James T. Kirk, "Who put the quadrotriticale in the Triscuits?"
A more compelling explanation is that the Triscuit is just a next-level Biscuit, perhaps referring to being thrice-baked, relying on the etymology of “biscuit” as meaning “twice-baked.”
And so we have yet another meaning of "biscuit." Language is confusing, especially since all the cookies and biscuits I've ever made have been baked exactly once.
Even if the electricity biscuit thesis is true—and that certainly remains a possibility—electrical baking as a selling point was obsolete within two years of the invention, when Pillsbury rolled out electrically baked biscuits in 1905.
I'm sure baking things via electricity back when electricity was young and vibrant was a huge selling point. I prefer gas for cooking; one of the first things I did for my house after I bought it was replace the electric oven/range with a gas-fired one. In neither case does it impart any particular flavor to the food, not like charcoal does, so my choice is for reasons of control and economy.
The sheer enthusiasm on display renders any skepticism a buzzkill.
I can hear people groaning inwardly whenever someone starts a sentence with "Well, actually..." Even when it's not the dreaded "mansplaining."
In any case, there’s far more to the Triscuit story than this etymological quest. The early days of the Triscuit take us to a world newly powered by electricity, a nation obsessed with scientific progress and pure food.
That same progress also brought us white bread, which is a pox on our existence.
Triscuits and Shredded Wheat were intended to be a central part of the daily diet, topped with everything from creamed peas to fricasee of oysters to Bromangelon, a pre-Jell-O gelatin dessert. It was a wild time.
Okay, ew. I'll take today, pandemic and all, rather than having to eat that stuff. Today is a much better time for a pandemic. After all, the internet, which certainly didn't exist 120 years ago, is the only thing keeping a lot of us semi-sane right now, by doing stuff like this. Even if it was on that blasted Twitface site.
I like Triscuits; I keep them in stock when I can (which, these days, is sporadically), but I generally only eat them topped with cheese.
Anything else is too much work. |
April 13, 2020 at 12:35am April 13, 2020 at 12:35am
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I'm not the only one who riffs off of articles I find online. Meta-riff today!
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/03/03/nee-ned-zb-6tnn-deibedh-siefi...
NEE NED ZB 6TNN DEIBEDH SIEFI EBEEE SSIEI ESEE SEEE!!
I've been following this guy, PZ Myers, for a while now, and while I don't always agree, I appreciate his point of view. Except about movies. Guy has no taste in movies, except occasionally and by accident. Fortunately, this isn't about movies, but science, and Myers is a scientist, not a movie producer.
Wired tries to defend SETI and UFOlogy. They argue that there are 3 branches of inquiry — exobiology, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the study of UFOs — and each has their place in our battery of methods.
For reference, here's the article he links:
https://www.wired.com/story/what-scientists-can-learn-from-alien-hunters/
I've been by the place in the article's header photo. It also gained notoriety last year, as it was mentioned as a gathering place for the Assault on Area 51, or whatever it was called, that internet hoax that blew up. Simpler times...
Anyway, it's worth reading the original Wired article, even if it's not up to Myers' standards.
Speaking of which...
There’s a continuum of legitimacy [the Wired article argues], and it’s entirely arbitrary that we place UFOs in pseudoscience, and don’t fund SETI, and think exobiology is valid and interesting. That is a good point, except that I think there is a solid criterion that is rooted in how we do science.
Arbitrary, maybe, but if you can defend something, is it truly arbitrary? To give an example, it's entirely arbitrary that we start the year on January 1, which in turn is about 10 days after the winter solstice. There's no defense of that other than "it's the way we've done it for centuries," which is no defense at all. With science, on the other hand, you can set boundaries and then see where shit falls with regards to the boundaries.
Here’s the deal: early in our training, we’re taught to keep an open mind — you use hypotheses to guide a line of research, but we must be prepared to find unexpected results and alternative explanations. We’re adapted to thinking, “My experiment to test my hypothesis should find X, but if it finds Y we’ll have to modify the hypothesis, and if the answer is Z, well, back to the drawing board, but gosh, that would be exciting.”Here’s the deal: early in our training, we’re taught to keep an open mind — you use hypotheses to guide a line of research, but we must be prepared to find unexpected results and alternative explanations. We’re adapted to thinking, “My experiment to test my hypothesis should find X, but if it finds Y we’ll have to modify the hypothesis, and if the answer is Z, well, back to the drawing board, but gosh, that would be exciting.”
In case you're wondering how science is meant to work, well, that sums it up well.
Myers goes on to explain the difference between exobiology, SETI, and UFOlogy, as they relate to science.
It’s as simple as asking, “What will we learn from doing the observation/experiment?” SETI’s answer is nothing, unless we find a one in a trillion possibility, then it’s the jackpot. UFOlogy’s answer is that they already know little green men exist, so we just have to photograph thrown pie plates until we’ve persuaded the establishment. Neither is good science.
I haven't had much experience with SETI, but I was always under the impression that whenever they found something interesting but not clear evidence of ETI, the data could be used by astronomers. Seems to me that there's been at least one case of that. So I wouldn't call their negative results, or lack of results, entirely useless.
Both SETI and UFOlogy are strongly susceptible to apophenia as well. They are trying to fit complex data to a prior expectation, so there’s a tendency to impose patterns on noise. Here’s a classic example: NASA has observed complex sand dune formations on Mars.
Thanks, Myers, you made me look up a word for the first time in years. Apophenia: the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. I tend to think of writing as a kind of imposed apophenia (without, I admit, using that word); when I write, I look for metaphorical connections. But I don't labor under the delusion that these connections have significance outside of what I'm writing.
The sand dunes he mentions here lead to the title of Myers' post. To me, it's a bit like looking for patterns in a Jackson Pollack painting. We're pattern-seeking animals; when we see a pattern, we try to interpret it, to make sense out of it, when sometimes it's just a meaningless pattern. Might as well look for meaning in the coastline of Great Britain. Sure, if you squint just right, maybe you can see something else, but it's coincidental. The only "meaning" involves land formation and shoreline erosion, or, in the case of Mars, natural wind sculpting.
In fiction, everything has a meaning. That's why we like fiction. This isn't the case for observed phenomena.
Right. So someone, probably as a bit of lark, tried to interpret them as dots and dashes, and then translated them into Morse code (why ancient Martians would have used a code devised by a 19th century American is left as an exercise for the reader).
Because Samuel Morse didn't die; he was transported bodily to Mars, along with John Carter, only Morse was too geeky for Burroughs to have written about. Duh. What? You can't disprove that.
That’s the problem with SETI, though. The universe produces patterns all the time, and human brains strain to impose interpretable derivations on them — SETI will milk that for all the news and attention they can get, even if it is ultimately meaningless.
Meanwhile, UFOlogists already know that the aliens are living on Mars, and have trained Bigfoots raking the dunes to send secret messages to the fleet hovering invisibly in our atmosphere, and you ignore it at your peril, you fools.
Is it Bigfoots or Bigfeet? When I see one, I'll be sure to ask him. Or her.
So my point here is the difference between being open-minded, and being certain. As I pointed out in my last entry, we can't be absolutely certain about anything, even if we think we are. The open-minded person may have ideas, and then looks for ways to refute the ideas. That, ideally, is how science is supposed to work. Whereas having a conclusion already set in one's mind and then looking for evidence to support it (and usually ignoring or downplaying evidence to the contrary), well, that doesn't get anyone anywhere, except in their own minds.
Now, I've said this before, but it bears repeating: the universe is a big place, and I would be very surprised if there wasn't other machine-building life out there... somewhere. But I'm not certain of it, and I haven't seen any evidence to support it. Consequently, I don't think SETI is utterly useless. But the odds, I think, favor the existence of non-sentient life at least in our galactic neighborhood, and so I'd have to put my money on the exobiologists to get there first. |
April 12, 2020 at 12:20am April 12, 2020 at 12:20am
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Today's article is a couple of years old now, but from what I've seen in the news, it's relevant to our current situation.
https://theconversation.com/the-thinking-error-at-the-root-of-science-denial-960...
The thinking error at the root of science denial
Currently, there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among laypeople: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination.
Sigh. Four, now. I just saw something today that indicated there's a great deal of overlap between those who deny climate change and those who ignore social distancing guidelines.
This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.
I'm the first to admit that science isn't perfect -- it has a history of false starts, wrong turns, and outright reversals. The one I keep going back to is research on the benefits, or harm, associated with eggs in one's diet. In my lifetime, eggs have switched from good to bad and back again at least four times, probably more; I've lost count.
The problem isn't that science isn't perfect, though. The problem, apparently, is that people want something to be perfect and won't settle for less.
Spectrums are sometimes split in very asymmetric ways, with one-half of the binary much larger than the other. For example, perfectionists categorize their work as either perfect or unsatisfactory; good and very good outcomes are lumped together with poor ones in the unsatisfactory category.
In the early days of streaming Netflix, they had a 5-star system for rating their movies / shows, much like we do here on WDC. It allowed for nuance. Maybe there's something you like about a particular movie and something you dislike, so you gave it three stars. Some years ago, they switched to the very Roman thumbs system. Either the gladiator (or Gladiator, in the case of Netflix) lives, or he dies. There's no in-between, no room for mixed feelings.
At that point, I quit rating shows on Netflix. In fairness, I blame Siskel and Ebert from when there was a Siskel and Ebert. But that just goes to show: I don't think in binary; I can understand, sort of, why they did it, and still refuse to participate.
This sort of thing has bothered me for a long time. I've known people who really had this binary system in their own heads. To them, everything, to paraphrase the great sages Beavis and Butthead, either sucks, or it's cool. There's no in-between.
In my observations, I see science deniers engage in dichotomous thinking about truth claims. In evaluating the evidence for a hypothesis or theory, they divide the spectrum of possibilities into two unequal parts: perfect certainty and inconclusive controversy. Any bit of data that does not support a theory is misunderstood to mean that the formulation is fundamentally in doubt, regardless of the amount of supportive evidence.
Whereas, as I've noted before, I can never be 100% certain about anything. I give the sun a very close to 100% chance of rising tomorrow, but hey, you never know. Very close isn't absolute.
There is no ‘proof’ in science
In my view, science deniers misapply the concept of “proof.”
I can't stress this point enough. I agree, with a high level of certainty.
Deniers exploit the distinction between proof and compelling evidence by categorizing empirically well-supported ideas as “unproven.” Such statements are technically correct but extremely misleading, because there are no proven ideas in science, and evidence-based ideas are the best guides for action we have.
They take this even further, I think, into the realm of "what makes experts any better at this than I am?" In politics, perhaps, your opinion is just as valuable as anyone's; our whole political system is founded on that hypothesis. Science doesn't work that way. Someone who's studied, say, the inner workings of a cell and how a virus attacks it, is going to know more about covfefe-19 than someone who's studied auto repair.
I have observed deniers use a three-step strategy to mislead the scientifically unsophisticated. First, they cite areas of uncertainty or controversy, no matter how minor, within the body of research that invalidates their desired course of action. Second, they categorize the overall scientific status of that body of research as uncertain and controversial. Finally, deniers advocate proceeding as if the research did not exist.
And there is always uncertainty, as I've noted above. Additionally, knowledge gets refined over time. To pick a less controversial field, consider physics. Newton developed a theory of gravity that predicted, to a high degree of accuracy, the orbits of planets. Astronomers used this theory, combined with observations of the seventh planet (it shall remain nameless to forestall bad puns), to predict where the eighth planet should be, and behold, Neptune was discovered, right where the theory predicted.
And yet, it wasn't perfect. They found small discrepancies in the orbit of Mercury. It took Einstein to figure that out, and his equations refined - not overturned, but refined - Newton's. There is some evidence that they might need to refine Einstein's theories as well. And yet, when it comes to our everyday lives, and practical engineering of, say, bridges and buildings, Newton's equations are all you need.
I think it's a very human characteristic to want certainty. The danger lies in assuming that, since we can't have it, then everything is equally uncertain. |
April 11, 2020 at 12:02am April 11, 2020 at 12:02am
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Many people dislike nightmares. I'm not a big fan myself, but they do sometimes give me story ideas.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/dreams-what-do-they-mean/58...
Bad Dreams Are Good
Your night life prepares you for what’s to come.
I've come to be wary of anyone who states, conclusively, that they've finally figured out what purpose dreams have. But speculation? That's fine.
A handful of theories predominate. Sigmund Freud famously contended that they reveal hidden truths and wishes.
I'm pretty sure every single thing Freud said has been debunked, which is remarkable, given that even Donald Trump has been caught telling the truth at least once. You'd think Uncle Sig would have been right once or twice by accident, but no, I don't think so.
More recent research suggests that they may help us process intense emotions,
"process?"
or perhaps sort through and consolidate memories,
init defrag
or make sense of random neuron activity,
But what's doing the sense-making? Other neurons.
or rehearse responses to threatening situations.
Great, if I'm ever in a situation where I can fly away from a threat, I'll know exactly what I need to do.
Others argue that dreams have no evolutionary function, but simply dramatize personal concerns.
I'd be even more wary about "evolutionary function" arguments, pro or con.
Eight percent of dreams are about sex, a rate that holds for both women and men—though women are twice as likely as men to have sexual dreams about a public figure, while men are twice as likely to dream about multiple partners.
Sex? These days, some of us are wistfully dreaming about even casually touching another human being.
Anxiety is also rife: A study of Canadian university students found the most common dream topics, apart from sex, to be school, falling, being chased, and arriving too late for something.
So, Canadians are hyper-worried about being late. Interesting.
Which reminds me of a recurring dream I have. I suddenly remember, most of the way through the semester, that I signed up for a course I never showed up for, and now I have to take the exam.
I still have those dreams even though I haven't been in school for centuries.
A 1958 study determined that compared with Japanese people, Americans dreamed more about being locked up, losing a loved one, finding money, being inappropriately dressed or nude, or encountering an insane person. Japanese people were more likely to dream about school, trying repeatedly to do something, being paralyzed with fear, or “wild, violent beasts.”
Kaiju!
Speaking of trying repeatedly to do something in a dream, does anyone else have the thing where you keep trying to enter a number into your cell phone (or wherever), but you keep messing it up and have to start over? Or is that just me? It's like, in any dream, I find it impossible to ever type in the right numbers or spell anything correctly.
So the next time you dream about an education-related sexual experience in which you are both falling and being chased, don’t worry: It’s probably totally meaningless. Then again, your brain might be practicing so you’ll be ready if such an event ever comes to pass.
And like I said, if I'm ever in a situation where I can escape danger by zipping into the sky like Superman, or running away on all fours, my dreams will have prepared me well.
Here's a bit more on dream theory: https://www.sleep.org/articles/dream/
I probably would have gotten more out of the Atlantic article here if I'd bothered to follow the reference links. As it is, I remain unconvinced.
Perhaps I'll sleep on it. |
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For diving into the prompts for Journalistic Intentions- thanks for joining the fun!](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/genre-Opinion-1150.gif)
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For your inventive entries in [Link To Item #2213121] ! Thanks for the great read!](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/Kudos-High_Five.gif)
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For winning 3rd Place in [Link To Item #2213121] . Congratulations!](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/general-Enlightening.gif)
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For your awesome Klingon Bloodwine recipe from [Link to Book Entry #1016079] that deserves to be on the topmost shelf at Quark's.](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/group-Quarks_Bar-2046190_12.gif)
