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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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August 31, 2019 at 12:19am August 31, 2019 at 12:19am
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For this, my final August post (I'm going back to the 30DBC tomorrow), I'm going to take my chances with Psychology Today.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/think-act-be/201907/what-your-relationsh...
Before I delve into the clickbaity part, I would like to point out the menu bar on top of the webpage:
"Find a Therapist." "Get Help." You know, just in case you were wondering if the universe was trying to tell you something.
Actual article:
What Your Relationship with Money Reveals About You
...and why romantic partners often fight over finances
More like: What your relationship with money reveals about your relationship with money. Come the hell on.
Money is a complicated topic. Most of us tend to feel uncomfortable talking about it, and might even prefer to reveal aspects of our sex lives than to divulge our income.
"Yeah, I like to go to S&M clubs dressed as a pink rabbit, get chased by someone in a fox suit until I can't breathe anymore, then let them have their way with me until I pass out. What's that? How much money do I make? That's personal!"
Do you feel like there’s never enough money, and always too many expenses? Does it pain you to spend money? You may have a scarcity mindset, as described by Steven Covey in his bestselling book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
The book The Seven Habits of Highly Defective People is harder to find, but probably more useful.
And without realizing it, those early experience “can haunt you 20 years later,” said Honda. For example, maybe your parents couldn’t afford the fashions that the other kids were wearing, so you developed a feeling of inadequacy.
My parents could damn well afford them, but I ended up with discount rack seconds anyway, because they were cheap fuckers. You know what, though? It built character, and I don't obsess over what I wear now.
For example, if we dreamed of getting a nice toy but couldn’t afford it, we might come to believe that the things we really want in life will always be out of reach.
The trick to that is to make sure to only want things that are in reach. Life is easier, simpler, more rewarding, less stressful, and happier that way.
As Honda noted, it’s often no accident that people with opposing views of money end up together. “For a saver, a spender looks so attractive,” he said, “because they know how to enjoy life. And a spender is attracted to a saver because they offer security.” And while these aspects may have drawn the couple together, after a while, the same tendencies can become sources of irritation.
No, don't think of that as sources of irritation. Think instead of the great material you're giving comedy writers! |
August 30, 2019 at 12:33am August 30, 2019 at 12:33am
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http://nautil.us/issue/17/big-bangs/the-unique-merger-that-made-you-and-ewe-and-...
The Unique Merger That Made You (and Ewe, and Yew)
All sophisticated life on the planet Earth may owe its existence to one freakish event.
Really, I debated with myself over linking this article here. It's not that it's very technical - it's not, at all; there's some biology lingo, but no math or physics. It's just, on the surface, not very relevant to much outside of biology. I, of course, find it fascinating.
But there's some speculation toward the end that's worth looking at. First, some highlights:
The transition from the classic prokaryotic model to the deluxe eukaryotic one is arguably the most important event in the history of life on Earth. And in more than 3 billion years of existence, it happened exactly once.
Well... [citation needed], I suppose. If it happened more than once, and the resulting organisms were out-competed or otherwise died off, we might never know. But I'll grant that the writer knows more about biology than I do; that's not a very high bar to clear.
If this story is true, and there are still those who doubt it, then all eukaryotes—every flower and fungus, spider and sparrow, man and woman—descended from a sudden and breathtakingly improbable merger between two microbes. They were our great-great-great-great-...-great-grandparents, and by becoming one, they laid the groundwork for the life forms that seem to make our planet so special. The world as we see it (and the fact that we see it at all; eyes are a eukaryotic invention) was irrevocably changed by that fateful union—a union so unlikely that it very well might not have happened at all, leaving our world forever dominated by microbes, never to welcome sophisticated and amazing life like trees, mushrooms, caterpillars, and us.
Now, those who like to deny evolution might ask something like "but if the eukaryotes were so successful, then why are there still prokaryotes?" I would suggest they read up on some basic biology; I'm certainly not going to waste time on that argument or its ilk.
“[Endosymbiosis] was taboo,” says Bill Martin. “You had to sneak into a closet to whisper to yourself about it before coming out again.”
That's legitimately funny.
The article goes on to lay out the case for eukaryotic origins - again, fascinating stuff, and it highlights how science gets shit done, but not really anything worth commenting on here - until we get to the end, where we find stuff that intersects with another of my favorite topics: extraterrestrial life.
This improbability has implications for the search for alien life. On other worlds with the right chemical conditions, Lane believes that life would be sure to emerge. But without a fateful merger, it would be forever microbial. Perhaps this is the answer to the Fermi paradox—the puzzling contradiction between the high apparent odds that intelligent life would exist elsewhere among the billions of planets in the Milky Way, and our inability to find any signs of such intelligence. As Lane wrote in 2010, “The unavoidable conclusion is that the universe should be full of bacteria, but more complex life will be rare.” And if intelligent aliens did exist, they would probably have something like mitochondria, too.
The "improbability" mentioned there is the unlikelihood of the formation of eukaryotes. Again, I'll point out that however improbable something is, once it happens, the probability of it having happened is unity - and since we eukaryotes wouldn't be around without it, we can't argue that something won't happen just because it's improbable. If that makes any sense.
I've also pointed out before that the "Fermi paradox" isn't a paradox. I don't accept the "high apparent odds that intelligent life would exist elsewhere." There's not a single rule, law, or requirement of evolution that those qualities that we call "intelligence" (please, can the "no intelligent life on Earth either" jokes; they're really tiresome) must occur, any more than there's a rule stating that eukaryotes must emerge.
So what this information does, really, is lower the odds of complex life existing in another biosphere. We don't know what those odds are, admittedly, because we simply don't have enough data points (we have precisely one data point - Earth).
Not that this idea is new to me; I've been sold on the Rare Earth Hypothesis for some years now. But this article goes into more depth than I've seen in the past, and does it without getting, as I said, too technical about it. |
August 29, 2019 at 12:03am August 29, 2019 at 12:03am
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You know, usually I'll find something, throw it up here, and pick at it. Sometimes to tear it apart, sometimes to shore it up, and sometimes just to highlight stuff I find interesting in the hopes that a reader or two will, also.
But then, occasionally, I run across something so unspeakably cuckoo that I just have to share.
Today is one of those days.
https://anomalien.com/independent-scientists-claim-that-we-are-living-in-1722-no...
Independent Scientists Claim That We Are Living In 1722, Not In 2019
Today more and more independent scientists come to the conclusion that three centuries have been lost in the history of mankind. But how did it happen and why?
It's... it's one thing to have an open mind. It's another thing to open your mind and stand under a leaky sewer pipe.
Yes, I know, the first clue is the source. But hey, sometimes sources like that are at least entertaining.
Lest anyone be credulous enough to allow for the possibility that what they're saying has some truth to it, just remember this: the "history of mankind" comprises a little bit more than just Europe.
I suppose there's something to be said for not giving these things undeserved attention, but dammit, the world would be a far less interesting place without conspiracy "theories." |
August 28, 2019 at 12:11am August 28, 2019 at 12:11am
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https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/scientists-are-searching-mirror-universe-it...
Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you.
If the "mirrorverse" exists, upcoming experiments involving subatomic particles could reveal it.
Do what now?
At Oak Ridge National Laboratory in eastern Tennessee, physicist Leah Broussard is trying to open a portal to a parallel universe.
Can it be one with sane politicians? Or... no, that's too farfetched.
“It’s pretty wacky,” Broussard says of her mind-bending exploration.
The mirror world, assuming it exists, would have its own laws of mirror-physics and its own mirror-history. You wouldn’t find a mirror version of yourself there (and no evil Spock with a goatee — sorry "Star Trek" fans).
Awwww
Connect the dots, and you reach a far-out conclusion: The neutron experiments might look screwy because physicists unwittingly opened a portal to the mirror world.
Unwittingly opening portals to mirror worlds never turns out well. I have decades of science fiction to back me up on this.
Oak Ridge has an 85-megawatt nuclear reactor that can shoot out billions of neutrons on demand...
Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow! 
“It all comes down to: Are we able to shine neutrons through a wall?” she says. “We should see no neutrons” according to conventional physics theory. If some of them show up anyway, that would suggest that conventional physics is wrong, and the mirror world is real.
Just don't come crying to me when you release the Elder Gods into our world with all their unspeakable eldritch horror. |
August 27, 2019 at 12:39am August 27, 2019 at 12:39am
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Oh, this should go over well on a writing site...
https://qz.com/1561426/grammar-expert-benjamin-dreyer-lists-three-rules-you-can-...
The three most useless English language “rules” you can ignore
I have nothing against rules. They’re indispensable when playing Monopoly or gin rummy, and their observance can go a long way toward improving a ride on the subway. The rule of law? Big fan.
I'm just going to take a moment here. Monopoly? Long ago, I made it my personal mission to learn the rules of Monopoly inside and out. Every time I played it, I'd insist on not keeping money on Free Parking, enforcing even-build rules, and so on. The result? I got really, really good at Monopoly and really, really bad at keeping friends. Seriously. Don't play Monopoly if you want friends.
The English language, though, is not so easily ruled and regulated. It developed without codification, sucking up new constructions and vocabulary every time some foreigner set foot on the British Isles—to say nothing of the mischief we Americans have wreaked on it these last few centuries—and continues to evolve anarchically.
I'll say it again: the Brits may have invented it, but we perfected it.
Also simply because, I swear to you, a well-constructed sentence sounds better. Literally sounds better.
Fhweeet! Flag on the play. Unnecessary begging of question. 15 yard penalty. Fourth down for using the word "literally," even if literally.
I say this begs the question because the reason a well-constructed sentence sounds better is that because the "rules" of English grew in part from a desire to make English sound better. So he's saying it's well-constructed because it's well-constructed. Or that it sounds better because it sounds better. But I suppose he's a linguist, not a logician.
A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection.
Show-off. Last I heard, though, the record for "longest sentence" goes not to the asshole who ran a car into a crowd two years ago in my hometown, but apparently to a 3687-word abomination in James Joyce's Ulysses. Personally, I say this doesn't count, because it's Ulysses, and therefore only marginally related to the actual English language.
Why are they nonrules? So far as I’m concerned, because they’re largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting, feckless, and useless. Also because they’re generally of dubious origin: devised out of thin air, then passed on till they’ve gained respectable solidity and, ultimately, have ossified. Language experts far more expert than I have, over the years, done their best to debunk them, yet these made-up strictures refuse to go away and have proven more durable than Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Put together.
That's legitimately funny.
I’ll dispatch these reasonably succinctly...
Really? Because you haven't done anything succinctly thus far.
Remember, these are rules that shouldn't be rules:
1. Never begin a sentence with “And” or “But”
Agreed, as anyone who reads my shit here knows.
2. Never split an infinitive
This is one of those rules that was imposed upon English from above, rather than grown organically. For a long time, English was considered a vulgar language (and, dammit, it still is, but by "vulgar" I mean "common," not "rude'), and Latin, at least the Latin of Caesar's time or thereabouts, was considered the Perfect Language, the Platonic ideal of languages. In Latin, it is physically impossible to split an infinitive. We'd say "to be," but in Latin that was handled by one word: est, or something like it (I don't remember much of my Latin and can't be arsed to look it up). Most Latin verb infinitive forms ended in -are or -ere, as I recall, but the point is, they were all one word each, whereas in English we know an infinitive because it starts with the word "to" and ends with whatever root verb you're talking about.
Consequently, some asshole decided that because you can't split an infinitive in Latin, you can't split it in English either. But you can - it's two words. Whether you should or not is still up for debate, obviously, but I'm with the author here - you want to boldly, calmly, or preciously split infinitives? Go for it.
3. Never end a sentence with a preposition
What's that rule for?
Probably another Latin thing. I'm just guessing here, but as I recall, it was another thing you couldn't, or at least shouldn't, do in Latin.
This is the rule that invariably (and wearily) leads to a rehash of the celebrated remark by Winston Churchill that Winston Churchill, in reality, neither said nor wrote:
“This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
I suppose linguists have their tired jokes, much as astronomers grow weary of finding new pronunciations of Uranus that don't result in Beavis and/or Butthead snickering. Still, I was kinda hoping Churchill actually said that. That particular sentence reads so nicely in his posh accent.
I'm reminded of an old joke from my time at UVA:
A student from Virginia Tech was visiting the UVA grounds for a football game, and he got turned around. He goes up to a typical UVA snob and says, "Excuse me, could you tell me where the Rotunda's at?"
The UVA student looks down his nose at the other guy and says, "You know, you should never end a sentence with a preposition."
To which the Tech student responds, "Okay. Could you tell me where the Rotunda's at, asshole?"
I'm pretty sure there are 14 million versions of that same joke, but that's the one I heard, so it's the one I'll stick to.
See what I did there?
I'll add one of my own: the double negative. Some will say there ain't no use for a double negative, or that, as in math, a double negative makes a positive. Both of these are bogus. While they won't fly in formal writing, in speech or dialogue the purpose of a double negative is not redundancy or cancellation, but emphasis. To eschew the double negative is to deny the color of many of the major dialects of English.
In conclusion, the rules of English, like dictionary definitions, are descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, they reflect usage, not govern usage. One of the great things about English is that it's always evolving. Sometimes, it evolves in ways that piss me off, but it's really a very democratic process - anyone can change English. Really, the only "rule" is to promote clarity - and if you can find a better way to do that, great. Until then, the other rules are there to help. |
August 26, 2019 at 12:10am August 26, 2019 at 12:10am
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A while back, I shared an article on the origins of the semicolon: "Semicolonoscopy"
Today, I want to talk about a far more important symbol.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190528-the-curious-origin-of-the-symbol
The curious origins of the dollar symbol
Despite its ubiquity, the origins of the dollar sign remain far from clear, with competing theories touching on Bohemian coins, the Pillars of Hercules and harried merchants.
Fascinating that this is from BBC, yes? Also note the author's name is Hepzibah, which is on my list of all-time most awesome names.
It’s shorthand for the American dream and all the consumerism and commodification that comes with it, signifying at once sunny aspiration, splashy greed and rampant capitalism. It’s been co-opted by pop culture (think Ke$ha when she first started out, or any number of fast-fashion t-shirts)...
I still call Ke$ha "Key-dollar-ha." When I mention her name. Which isn't often.
If you had to find letters lurking in its form, you might spy an ‘S’ overlain with a squeezed, bend-less ‘U’ providing its vertical strokes. In fact, this accounts for one of the most popular misconceptions about the sign’s origins: it stands for United States, right?
That's actually what my mom taught me at an early age. Even then, I think I had my doubts, mostly because most of the dollar signs I saw had the one upright instead of two.
That’s what writer and philosopher and famed libertarian Ayn Rand believed. In a chapter in her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, one character asks another about what the dollar sign stands for.
Yeah... anything Ayn Rand says is bullshit until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Still, just because she had a character say it, that doesn't mean she believed it.
The dollar, meanwhile, has a far shorter history. In 1520, the Kingdom of Bohemia began minting coins using silver from a mine in Joachimsthal – which roughly translates from German into English as Joachim’s valley. Logically if unimaginatively, the coin was dubbed the joachimsthaler, which was then shortened to thaler, the word that proceeded to spread around the world. It was the Dutch variation, the daler, that made its way across the Atlantic in the pockets and on the tongues of early immigrants, and today’s American-English pronunciation of the word dollar retains its echoes.
This, actually, I knew. I once spent a lot of time researching the origins of various money words (though not the dollar sign). For instance, the word "money" itself comes from the temple of Juno Moneta. Juno, you know. Moneta was an epithet that, as I understand it, translates to "she who warns," or, more simply and less gender-specific, "warner." The connection is that that particular temple in Rome was used as a vault, one giant cache. From which we get the word "cash."
Yet another version centres on the Pillars of Hercules, a phrase conjured up by the Ancient Greeks to describe the promontories that flank the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar. The pillars feature in Spain’s national coat of arms and, during the 18th and 19th Centuries, appeared on the Spanish dollar, which was otherwise known as the piece of eight, or peso.
Ever wonder why a quarter dollar is sometimes known as "two bits?" That's why. Two bits to a quarter = eight bits to a dollar, or, as noted, historically a peso. It wasn't that long ago that stock market prices were quoted in eighths of dollars - that only changed in, like, the 1990s I think? When computers started taking over. Point is, that method of quoting stock prices harks back to the pieces of eight. Still no good reason to quote gasoline prices to 9/10ths of a cent, though.
As with everything American at the moment, there’s a partisan dimension to the debate about the dollar sign’s ancestry: for duelling political reasons, one faction favours the idea that it’s homegrown, another that it was imported.
Figures.
And as for the first printed dollar sign, that was made on a Philadelphia printing press in the 1790s and was the work of a staunch American patriot – or at least a vehemently anti-English Scotsman – named Archibald Binny, who’s today remembered as the creator of the Monticello typeface.
I remember no such thing. I only care about who created Comic Sans.
Anyway, I just find this sort of thing fascinating, so here it is. |
August 25, 2019 at 12:21am August 25, 2019 at 12:21am
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This one's been in my blog fodder queue for a long time, and I'm finally getting around to it.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90357248/procrastination-is-an-emotional-problem
Procrastination is an emotional problem
If you stop treating procrastination like a time-management issue, it becomes easier to manage.
I haven't made it a secret that I have a problem with procrastination. It's not as bad now as it used to be - perhaps because a daily exercise routine has taken the edge off my depression, at least for now. It'll come back. But what made me finally start exercising in the first place? I don't know.
This emotional avoidance technique that our brain–often subconsciously–employs is similar to that which underlies many types of anxiety. People with anxiety often do everything they can to avoid the perceived external threat and, in turn, shut off access to both good and bad feelings, often leading to depression. By procrastinating, we’re avoiding a task with the assumption that the task won’t feel good, and that means we’re missing out on any feelings of, for example, accomplishment or success. This connection between procrastination and depression has been around at least since the ’90s, and the experimental evidence has poured in ever since.
Yeah, I'm not sure that makes any sense. Sure, we think the task, whatever it is, won't feel good - but we know that procrastinating can only make it worse.
“Giving in to feel good” is the term given to this phenomenon in one paper cited by many procrastination researchers. And it means seeking short-term good feelings at the cost of long-term satisfaction–something we’re known to do as early as toddlerhood.
I think one of the greatest decisions I ever made was to give in to the short-term at the expense of the long-term. It works for me now.
Let’s start with the relationship between self-compassion and procrastination because it’s both counterintuitive and revealing. What’s the first thing you do when you catch yourself indulging in a particularly egregious spell of procrastination? Do you tell yourself, “What’s wrong with you? Pull yourself together and get your work done!” That lack of self-compassion might be exactly what’s causing your procrastination in the first place, according to the research.
This, on the other hand, rings true for me. When I'd procrastinate, I'd mentally beat myself up. "Just do it! Just fucking work! What the hell, Waltz?" Or I'd imagine someone else saying that to me, which doesn't help either.
Another study found that procrastination is “associated significantly with negative automatic thoughts in general as well as automatic thoughts reflecting the need to be perfect.” In both studies, this highly self-critical mind-set created and perpetuated the problem of procrastination.
I had a problem with that, too. "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well" has a corollary: "If it can't be done perfectly, why bother?" That took me a while to shake.
The first, which comes from Buddhist psychology, is the idea of the “monkey mind” that we all share. “The monkey mind never stops and you can’t make it stop,” Pychyl says. “Instead, you’ve got to give the monkey something to do.”
The monkey has plenty to do. Video games, e.g. Wrong. Next.
The second idea, which comes from more traditional psychology, is that our emotions can’t be pushed aside or ignored. So when we have a strong aversion to getting our work done, we can’t ignore this feeling.
Right, like I could ignore it. It's right there in the forefront of my consciousness. Wrong. Next.
The third part comes from David Allen, the founder of the Getting Things Done™ method, which is the idea that we don’t do projects when we work; we do actions. In other words, the mountain of work that we picture ourselves wading through is really just a set of smaller, discrete actions that have to be taken one at a time. We put our pants on one leg at a time and write our articles one word at a time.
This has some ring of truth to it. Any project can be broken down into smaller and smaller sub-actions until you reach the equivalent of the subatomic level. Each indivisible sub-action, then, which I'll call an "acton" to keep with subatomic nomenclature like proton or electron, is easy. It's only putting them together that's hard. The downside to this? A novel, for example, has millions or billions of actons: each strike of a key, each stray thought, every website visited for research, every check of a thesaurus, each mental review of upcoming dialogue. And millions as a number is hard to contemplate, so we usually break it down to words, of which there are only thousands. And then, for something like NaNoWriMo, you might set a goal of 1667 words a day, which feels manageable. Usually.
“Willpower” is a slippery concept. Some researchers believe it doesn’t really exist. Some believe it exists but in finite supply. Others take a middle path.
I'm in the "doesn't really exist" camp. There's an article about that I'll share at some point. In short, though, while it may sometimes seem that mind and body are separate, or that there are competing ideas in "mind," we're really just one unified physical entity. So there's nothing separate from us to provide the "willpower."
Instead, he recommends cultivating another mental skill: mindfulness.
The skills developed in mindfulness meditation, such as concentration, non-judgment, and equanimity, align perfectly with the research showing the vital role of emotional regulation in reducing procrastination and improving productivity.
Sure, if you have the patience for that "mindfulness" crap. Maybe you do and it's not crap to you. But I'd rather do my taxes or clean my bathroom than set aside time for meditation.
Consequently, maybe it would work for me after all: by doing the dreaded task, whatever it is, I can use it to procrastinate mindfulness meditation. Win/win.
One of these days, I'm going to host a procrastinators convention. |
August 24, 2019 at 12:33am August 24, 2019 at 12:33am
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Oh, here's one to have fun with.
https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/these-31-life-hacks-can-improve-your-life-i...
I hate the phrase "life hack," because it's overused; but as this article is from 3 years ago, I'll forgive it. This time.
31 Ways to Improve Your Life in Just a Month
Imagine the possibilities of a life filled with these simple acts of joy that can be done in minutes. Here's a template to get started.
I've noted before that most people don't have "minutes." By the time you attend to basic bodily functions such as sleep; required activities such as work (and the associated commute); and dealing with life's little vicissitudes (such as kids), you're already at 24 hours.
Before this 31-day plan became a lifestyle, I first had to remove the tumors of self-gratification and hubris (trust me, the attitude ruling my life in the old days was all about "what's in it for me?").
While I'm all for self-gratification, I've rarely thought "what's in it for me?" outside of business situations. That is, sure, business transactions are two-sided, but social transactions are not, at least for me. Was I doing something wrong? I guess that's why I have a blog with 12 readers and not a column in Inc. magazine.
Now that you have a glimpse into your own plan, a fair warning: It's not about you. It took years for me to develop the understanding that life is really about giving, service, and meaningful relationships.
Really? Because I learned that at an early age. Again, I suppose that's why I'm comfortably middle-class instead of jetting around the world in my Gulfstream.
Day 1: Do something for someone else.
Do a "five-minute favor" for someone. Five-minute favors are selfless giving acts, without asking for anything in return from the people that you help. Examples of five-minute favors include: sharing knowledge, making an introduction, serving as a reference for a person, product, or service, or recommending someone on LinkedIn, Yelp, or another social place.
More proof that I'm doing it wrong - I don't need shitty advice columns for this.
Day 3: Stop striving to achieve.
We all have a tendency to work too much, lose our balance, and, ultimately, our joy in life. It's the unhealthy feeling that if we don't do something productive every day, we've somehow failed.
Okay, guilty. Or at least I used to be. I got over this when that contributed to a divorce.
Day 4: Put yourself in someone else's shoes.
Empathy and compassion are things you can develop, and it starts with thinking about other people's circumstances, understanding their pains and frustrations, and knowing that those emotions are every bit as real as our own.
I'm starting to get the impression that this author is a sociopath who is trying very hard to not be a sociopath.
Day 7: Give thanks. Your situation could be a lot worse.
I don't care what religion you come from, start your day by thanking your higher power for the things you take for granted. As it turns out, if you make more than $30,000, you earn more than 53.2 percent of Americans. If you make more than $50,000, you earn more than 73.4 percent of Americans. Feeling grateful now? Say a little prayer and give thanks, and then pray for the other 73.4 percent.
Really? Are we measuring success by comparison with other people? Also, all this talk about "higher power" sounds like it comes from AA. So, possibly a recovering alcoholic sociopath?
Day 10: Just. Say. No.
Truly happy people live a simple life. They have a simple schedule. They don't take on more than they can handle. They live according to their values and purpose. They have strong boundaries around what comes into their life. And they have no problem saying no. If it doesn't serve you, if it has little value, and if it doesn't make you better tomorrow than you are today--just ... say ... no.
Call me dense, but doesn't this contradict Day 1?
Day 16: Exercise for 15 minutes.
Achor also told Oprah that if you hate exercise, all it takes is 15 minutes of fun cardio activity, which is the equivalent of taking an antidepressant, but with a 30 percent lower relapse rate.
There is no such thing as "fun cardio." If you think there is, you're probably already exercising. Me, I finally got on board with the antidepressant qualities, but I still have to force myself to do it every day.
Day 19: Find something or someone that will make you laugh.
Humor helps you think more broadly and creatively.
Well, you're reading my blog, so hopefully you're already there on this one.
What would your life look like if you practiced some of these things everyday, extending this plan beyond a 31-day cycle? It just might help you live the life you've always wanted rather than settling for whatever comes your way.
Okay, look, I'm not saying this is bad advice overall. But really, this guy sounds like a douche. Or at least a recovering douche. Not unexpected, given the source. Maybe the real secret to happiness is: Don't be a douche? |
August 23, 2019 at 12:31am August 23, 2019 at 12:31am
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So, yeah, I took some time off to indulge vices (other vices than posting stuff here, anyway), but I'm back home now. And I have a difficult article to present today.
http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious
Is Matter Conscious?
Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics.
I'm of the considered opinion that most headline questions are answered "No."
What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics?
Math, too, has its limitations. Try as we might, for example, we can't precisely describe the shape of a cloud, or a tree, using math. Attempts to do so often result in something resembling a cloud or a tree, but not a particular cloud or tree.
Modern science has given us good reason to believe that our consciousness is rooted in the physics and chemistry of the brain, as opposed to anything immaterial or transcendental. In order to get a conscious system, all we need is physical matter. Put it together in the right way, as in the brain, and consciousness will appear.
Fair enough. But, again, try as we might, even if we could put everything together in the right place to recreate a human (or other animal), such an object would lack life. Life is still an elusive mystery in many ways, but we know it has to come from life, in an unbroken chain all the way back to the first life - whatever that was. Despite our certainty of our identities as individuals - as well as others' identities as individuals - there's a real, non-metaphysical, connection through time and space to all other life as we know it. That's why it will be so important to discover extraterrestrial life: is it connected in some way to ours, or was there a parallel to our own evolution?
My point is that "put it together in the right way" isn't as easy to do as it is to say.
If we were somehow granted knowledge of every physical detail and pattern in the universe, we would not expect these problems to persist. They would dissolve in the same way the problem of heritability dissolved upon the discovery of the physical details of DNA. But the hard problem of consciousness would seem to persist even given knowledge of every imaginable kind of physical detail.
This sort of thing always bugs me. Is it even possible to have knowledge of every physical detail and pattern in the universe? Magic 8-Ball says "No" - if only due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. And also because to fully model the universe, you'd need something at least as complex as the universe, which you can't have, because of the definition of "universe." Even if some of the wildly speculative alternative-universe hypotheses are true, you'd then have to model those, and the problem persists.
We take it for granted, however, that physics can in principle tell us everything there is to know about the nature of physical matter.
For previously unknown values of "we," anyway. Because I, and a whole lot of people who are smarter and more knowledgeable than I am, don't accept this premise.
There is already a tradition for connecting problems in physics with the problem of consciousness, namely in the area of quantum theories of consciousness.
Which collides with my personal tradition of dismissing, out of hand, any article that discusses "quantum theories of consciousness."
The article continues by going way over my head with the philosophy. I kind of get the impression that the author is trying very, very hard not to use words like "god" or "deity," instead mincing around the theological implications. But I could be projecting my own bias; I don't know.
Mind you, I'm not saying the article is wrong, or right, or doesn't have decent points. It just seems to me to be another approach to the "god of the gaps" issue - that is, there are always gaps in our knowledge, no matter how much we learn about the physical universe, and at that point you might as well ascribe the unknowns to an entity of great knowledge and/or power. Science cannot disprove the idea; again, the gaps are always there, and you can't prove a negative. It just seems like a cop-out.
Then again, I've thought that maybe the entire universe could be, itself, conscious; I mean, look at a map of the universe and compare it to a neural network of the human brain .
But that doesn't mean the two have any similarities beyond the superficial.
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August 20, 2019 at 1:01am August 20, 2019 at 1:01am
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robo...
The meaning of life in a world without work
Okay, I'm thinking, this should be good. I haven't done "work" in about a decade, and I almost never miss it.
As technology renders jobs obsolete, what will keep us busy? Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari examines ‘the useless class’ and a new quest for purpose
"Usefulness" is overrated, anyway. So is "purpose."
The same technology that renders humans useless might also make it feasible to feed and support the unemployable masses through some scheme of universal basic income. The real problem will then be to keep the masses occupied and content.
I'm not going to turn this post into a discussion of UBI. Just know that I'm sure that it has positives and negatives, and I'm even more sure that here in the US, we will fuck it up royally.
People must engage in purposeful activities, or they go crazy. So what will the useless class do all day?
Must we? Must we, really? I guess if that's true, then I'm officially crazy. Well, that shouldn't come as any surprise.
One answer might be computer games. Economically redundant people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual reality worlds, which would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the “real world” outside.
Ah. Well, that explains me.
This, in fact, is a very old solution. For thousands of years, billions of people have found meaning in playing virtual reality games. In the past, we have called these virtual reality games “religions”.
Ooooooh! BURN.
Muslims and Christians go through life trying to gain points in their favorite virtual reality game. If you pray every day, you get points. If you forget to pray, you lose points. If by the end of your life you gain enough points, then after you die you go to the next level of the game (aka heaven).
Okay, look, I'm no fan of organized religion, but even I think this may be taking things a bit too far.
The idea of finding meaning in life by playing virtual reality games is of course common not just to religions, but also to secular ideologies and lifestyles. Consumerism too is a virtual reality game. You gain points by acquiring new cars, buying expensive brands and taking vacations abroad, and if you have more points than everybody else, you tell yourself you won the game.
Okay, now you're stretching. Fine, I can see that some people think of things this way, but I'm not convinced.
In the end, the real action always takes place inside the human brain. Does it matter whether the neurons are stimulated by observing pixels on a computer screen, by looking outside the windows of a Caribbean resort, or by seeing heaven in our mind’s eyes? In all cases, the meaning we ascribe to what we see is generated by our own minds.
Saved. Now the author has come back around to what I've been saying for a long time: there is no meaning to life, save that which we impose upon it.
In any case, the end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, because meaning is generated by imagining rather than by working. Work is essential for meaning only according to some ideologies and lifestyles. Eighteenth-century English country squires, present-day ultra-orthodox Jews, and children in all cultures and eras have found a lot of interest and meaning in life even without working. People in 2050 will probably be able to play deeper games and to construct more complex virtual worlds than in any previous time in history.
And that is an interesting point. I've never been on board with the Protestant work ethic, partly because I've never been Protestant, and partly because to me, the only purpose of work is to accumulate enough money to live with all the basic necessities and a few luxuries (with the luxuries becoming more and more important with time).
Problem is this: Back in the 1970s, when computers started to insert themselves into our daily lives, promises were made. These promises took the form of something like: "As computers become more prevalent, our productivity will increase. Paperwork will become a thing of the past, and we could work for no more than 10 hours a week."
Oh, you sweet summer disco children... how wrong you were. Okay, maybe paperwork has become more electronic, but instead of maintaining our 1970s productivity with a reduction in time spent working, we've expected greater and greater productivity... and, worse, we're expected to work more than the standard 40 hours a week to get shit done.
So I take projections like this with a grain of salt. Society, especially a society as rooted in Puritanism and work-worship as ours is, won't let its members have significant downtime. "Idle hands do the devil's work," as the saying goes. No, this utopian vision of the future will never pan out.
Besides, we probably won't be around long enough to give it a chance to do so. |
August 19, 2019 at 6:00am August 19, 2019 at 6:00am
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http://nautil.us/blog/how-will-our-religions-handle-the-discovery-of-alien-life
How Will Our Religions Handle the Discovery of Alien Life?
Poorly, I'd imagine. Because religions are made up of people, and people will handle it poorly.
For the religious, knowing that life on Earth is not unique may demand radical new ways of thinking about ourselves: How special and sacred are we? Is Earth a privileged place? Do we have an obligation to care for beings on other planets? Should we convert ET to “my” religion? These questions point to a deeper issue about whether our religions can adapt to the idea that humans are not the only sentient beings in the universe capable of worshiping God.
And once again we have the conflation of "extraterrestrial life" with "intelligent space aliens." As I've noted before, those qualities we call "intelligence" aren't required to exist by some Law of Evolution. But... that's not the most egregious assumption made here, is it?
I approach the question of alien life from the standpoint of evolution, and science in general. This doesn't mean I'm right, of course, but I tend to ignore the religious / spiritual questions. This sometimes puts my own thoughts in sync with some of the religious thinking as described in the linked article. That is purely coincidental; when I say something like "intelligent life is probably rare in the galaxy," that does not mean the same thing as when a religious person says something like "humans are unique," even though the statements are roughly similar.
At the same time, I'm not going to conclude that humans are insignificant to be contrary, just because some religious people believe we're somehow special (as in chosen by God or whatever). We're not special, nor are we insignificant. We're just... us.
History has also shown us that many religions don’t hold back to invite or even force non-believers into the fold. The efforts by European colonists and Islamic armies to convert native peoples to Christianity and Islam have an oppressive, bloody history. A similar future could unfold in which one or more of our major religious groups attempts to convert aliens.
Just what we need - religious fanatic space aliens. Can we put some First Contact protocols in place to exclude proselytizers from meeting our new alien overlords? That would be great, thanks.
Is it possible that learning of alien life will encourage us to tolerate the religious beliefs of our fellow humans, too?
Ha ha ha ha ha! Oh, wait; you're serious. Let me laugh some more: Ha ha ha ha!
I note that this author didn't list certain religions in the link. Notably absent as far as major world religions go is Hinduism. I have no idea how Hindus might approach the idea of space aliens (unless, presumably, the aliens resemble cows.) (Is that a rude joke? I don't even know. I don't mean to be rude.)
Also absent from the list is Scientology. While I don't think we could call it a "major" religion in terms of number of adherents, the idea that there are space aliens is, as I understand it anyway, baked into the religion. I have to wonder what they'd think if sentient aliens showed up and have never heard of Xenu.
I'd also be interested in the LDS church's take on the idea.
Anyway, there are a number of problems with this kind of speculation. First one I can think of is that we have, by some measures of "intelligence," several intelligent species here on Earth. Sure, dolphins don't build spaceships, and octopodes don't have vast underwater cities (at least, none that we've found so far), but they and some other species communicate with each other with some sophistication - and yet, we humans can communicate in only the most rudimentary way with these other species. These are species with whom we share a common ancestor; how can we expect to be able to really communicate with alien life?
Another problem is about time. We haven't found evidence of intelligent ETs, or even simple life beyond our world. Finding so much as a microbe (or equivalent) would be a significant event. But will it happen next year, next century? How much longer before we encounter any flying-saucer-pilot type aliens? It's laughable to think that world religions would be the same in 1000 years, considering how different they were 1000 years ago.
Then there's the persistent idea floating around that the reason ETs haven't shown their face-equivalents around here is because we're somehow ideologically impure. Maybe they're waiting for us to outgrow this "religion" stuff, or at least the "killing in the name of" part of it. Or maybe they're waiting for all of us to convert to Scientology. I think the whole "waiting for humanity to grow up" crap is little more than self-flagellation, personally. Yeah, yeah, I get it - you think humanity sucks and you're projecting that onto the motivations of purely hypothetical life-forms the nature of which we have no way of knowing. |
August 18, 2019 at 1:55am August 18, 2019 at 1:55am
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Yes, I'm in Vegas. Yes, I'm done indulging my vices for the day. Consequently... blog post. Warning: I've been drinking, so I may say shit I shouldn't.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbwpdb/the-climate-change-paper-so-depressing...
The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy
On average, three people read an academic paper. At least 100,000 have read this—and a lot of them haven't taken it very well.
Well, I'm one of those who haven't read it, so let's see what the article has to say about it.
What if I told you there was a paper on climate change that was so uniquely catastrophic, so perspective-altering, and so absolutely depressing that it's sent people to support groups and encouraged them to quit their jobs and move to the countryside?
Well, I don't have a real job to quit, but I can't get fast fiber internet in the countryside, so... hard pass.
"We're fucked," he told me. "Climate change is going to fuck us over. I remember thinking, Should I just accept the deep adaptation paper and move to the Scottish countryside and wait out the apocalypse?"
On the other hand, the Scottish countryside has one thing to recommend it. Well, two things, but mostly: scotch.
But most of all, there's the stark conclusions that it draws about the future. Chiefly, that it's too late to stop climate change from devastating our world—and that "climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term."
I knew that without reading academic papers. Well, okay. I didn't "know" that. I suspected that. It's one of the reasons I chose not to have kids.
Look, the time to do anything about climate change was 30 years ago. Maybe even 20. Now? I just don't give a shit anymore.
Back in 2017, even Fox News reported scientists' warnings that the Earth's sixth mass extinction was underway.
Yeah... knowing Fox News, they reported it with a smirk and went on to extol the virtues of tax cuts for the wealthy.
He minces his words even less in his paper: "When I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease, and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you won't have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbors for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won't know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death."
This is my shocked face: 
Climate gloom and doom is nothing new—doomsday preppers have been stockpiling their freeze-dried food rations for decades now.
Fuck that. I wanna be among the first to go. Easier that way. In short:
As an aside, nothing makes me laugh harder than people who hoard gold against the possible collapse of civilization, no matter what the imagined cause. Come the inevitable, gold won't be worth the paper it's printed on; its value depends entirely on how shiny we think it is. "But, Waltz, gold has actual uses! It's a great conductor!" Yeah... that'll be helpful when nothing's generating electricity. No, if you're going to prep, the thing to hoard is coffee. It's not a domestic product in the US, and people are fucking addicted to that shit. Have a stockpile of freeze-dried, tinned, preserved coffee beans or grounds, and you'll be the King, Queen, Grand Nagus, whatever, of the Apocalypse. Possess gold, and people will just laugh. Other options include cigarettes and chocolate. Just be sure you can defend your hoard.
So, like I said, I don't care anymore. I used to. But decades of fighting denial, deflection and outright rejection have taken their toll on me. At this point, I'm just going to ride this sucker down with the hot wind in my hair and a grin on my face.
This is still the most fun slide to oblivion of any civilization, anywhere, and I've decided I'm going to enjoy the whirlwind. |
August 17, 2019 at 12:07am August 17, 2019 at 12:07am
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https://www.fastcompany.com/90362562/this-computer-changed-world-youve-never-hea...
Yeah, I know the moon landing anniversary was last month. But the internet is forever.
This computer changed the world—and you’ve never heard about it
NASA needed a supercomputer to get us to the Moon, and it had to be generations ahead of the state of the art at the time.
Well... I had heard about it, but fair enough. I wanted to learn more.
Your dishwasher has more brain power than the computer that flew the Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
I don't know about that - you haven't met her.
If anyone could design the computer and instruments to fly to the Moon, NASA thought, it was MIT.
Besides, hey, grad students = free labor!
The computer not only needed to work; it needed to work perfectly. The very lives of the astronauts depended on it.
Fortunately, Bill Gates was barely out of diapers at the time.
But in 1969, a computer that made its own decisions was unique.
Fifty years later, a human that makes its own decisions is unique. Need to decide something? There's an app for that.
The Apollo computer kept track of what it was working on at all times, and if something bad happened, it wiped its working memory clean and restarted seamlessly in ways that modern computers don’t do a particularly good job of (as anyone who has lost pages of a memo they were working on well knows).
That sounds like nirvana to me. This thing I'm typing on crashes, and it's ten minutes before I'm back up again. Ten minutes in low Earth orbit is a significant chunk of sky, about 1/10 of a circuit.
The Apollo computer would turn out to have a big impact back on Earth, although not an impact that is widely understood or acknowledged.
Anyone still think the space program didn't have tangible benefits?
On a personal note, I'm leaving for Vegas in a few hours. Don't know if I'll be able to do daily entries for the next few days. Not going to worry too much about it. So if you don't see something here, it's not you; it's me. |
August 16, 2019 at 1:01am August 16, 2019 at 1:01am
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https://theoutline.com/post/7737/abolish-state-lotteries
It’s time to get rid of the lottery
States should not rely on a scam to fund much-needed services.
Despite the one-in-292-million odds of winning the multi-state Powerball jackpot (you have a greater chance of dying from a falling coconut, which is one in 250 million), Americans spent $71.8 billion on lottery tickets in 2017. The bulk of this revenue was generated by the largest consumers of lottery tickets, who also happen to be the poorest Americans.
I've heard it called a tax on people who can't do math. Part of me doesn't have a problem with that.
Also, somehow I doubt that 1 in 250 million chance of dying from a falling coconut. The chance of a coconut hitting me on the noggin on any given day is effectively zero, as the nearest coconut palm is about 500 miles from me. On the rare occasions when I go to tropical paradises, I specifically avoid hanging out under coconut-bearing trees, because duh. According to some interpretations of quantum physics, there's a nonzero chance that a fully-formed coconut could appear in the air above my head, at sufficient height to kill me upon falling, but that chance is way less than 1 in 250 million.
The Cornell study also found that people who made less than $30,000 a year were more likely to play the lottery for money (as opposed to those who play purely for entertainment), meaning that poor lottery players play as a legitimate strategy for financial stability.
As someone who gambles for entertainment on occasion, I believe that there are way more entertaining things than dealing with bored, minimum-wage convenience store clerks and waiting hours to days for confirmation that you lost. Blackjack dealers, for example, are fun to talk to; like bartenders, they have to be nice so they'll get tips. But hey, whatever twipples your nipples.
A 2006 survey found that one in five Americans believe that winning the lottery “represents the most practical way for them to accumulate several hundred thousand dollars.” This number jumps to one in three Americans for those with incomes below $25,000.
I imagine that, for some people, it really is the most practical way for them to accumulate several hundred thousand dollars, in that any other means of doing that is slightly more impractical. Which is not to say that it's actually "practical," only that while the chance of winning, say, $500K is astronomical, the chance of a minimum-wage worker saving that much money is indistinguishable from zero.
“This is California. And if a dream is going to come true anywhere... it’s going to come true here.”
Sure, if that dream involves banning grocery bags, plastic straws and e-cigs, or declaring that every consumer product in the world causes cancer.
As Jonathan Cohen, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia studying Amerian lotteries, told Bloomberg last year: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that state lotteries started emerging in the 1970s and 1980s when rates of social mobility in the traditional economy stagnated and then declined.”
Shout out to the old alma mater... but it might be helpful to know what Mr. Cohen is actually a Ph.D. candidate for. Economics? Statistics? Anthropology? Art history?
The lottery is a narrative of false potential, pacifying the ever more precarious masses by dangling in front of us a better, shinier life. Instead of asking how the system is rigged against you, you ask how you can win.
This just in: marketing is about highlighting the positives about something, and minimizing the negatives. Why do you think the side-effects of prescription drugs are in Ferengi print at the bottom, or, in spoken ads, presented by someone who went to Auctioneer School? "Fukitol can make you irresistible to members of your preferred gender, help to cure your ingrown toenail, and increase your IQ! Possible side effects include intestinal bleeding, growth of a third arm, brain damage, brittle bones, fatal constipation, and loss of sexual function." But I've never seen a state lottery that doesn't have the chances of winning noted prominently. The information is available.
The outcome of the state lottery becomes a deflection of responsibility: it directs players’ frustration away from the state for its failures — to provide sufficient welfare, to fund its public school system without relying on those in poverty, to provide a livable minimum wage — and transfigures the state into a potential fairy godmother.
This is amusing to me because the mascot for the Virginia lottery used to be an incarnation of Lady Luck, and she looked a lot like a Fairy Godmother. But still, okay, you're a state government and you need to raise funds. What's going to play better with the constituency: institute a lottery, giving everyone who plays a chance, however tiny, of hitting it big? Or selling them on a tax increase?
In case I'm not clear, I'm not buying this author's argument. There might be other arguments more compelling; I don't know. Other authors have tried to kick lotteries by highlighting the people whose lives were ruined after winning. News flash: some of the people who play the lottery tend to lack the financial discipline necessary to handle any windfall sensibly.
Would people be better off socking away the money they'd otherwise spend on lottery tickets? Yeah, probably. But many of them wouldn't save it; they'd just spend it on something just as frivolous, and without even the minuscule chance of a return. I've known people who, if the lottery suddenly stopped, would instead just spend the money on cheap-ass "beer," thus still pissing it away.
So there are two facets to this that I can think of.
1) Do we really want to live in a world where everyone is protected from themselves? I know I don't. Sometimes, making non-optimal decisions can lead to enlightenment. But
2) Should our governments be involved in facilitating - as opposed to merely ignoring - those non-optimal decisions? See also: state-owned liquor stores like we have here in Virginia.
I used to think that the way to deal with this sort of thing was through education. A proper grounding in basic finance, and maybe even some decent teaching about probabilities, I thought, would go a long way to addressing the "poor people play the lottery" issue. But some people are immune to facts. I mean, just look around. |
August 15, 2019 at 12:03am August 15, 2019 at 12:03am
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https://www.fastcompany.com/90304574/the-secret-history-of-midcentury-modern-des...
At the intersection of art and functionality lies "design."
I have to admit, most of it is opaque to me. I have no artistic talent, and only a very rudimentary aesthetic sense, so I tend to choose products for their functionality rather than their looks.
Or do I?
It's quite possible that I make unconscious choices based on what something looks like. That would make me a target, not a conscious consumer.
Good design is largely unnoticeable - I do know that. In my field, this concept relied on hiding stuff rather than making it look a certain way. The "looks" part was the domain of architects and landscape architects; all I had to do was make sure things like storm drains were buried. And while a road is largely visible, no one notices anything about the road unless, like me, they design the things, or if something's dysfunctional about it.
Buildings, they notice.
And sometimes I notice things too. Cartoon mascots, for breakfast cereal and the like, are almost always depicted with their mouths open. I don't know the reason for this; I'm guessing it makes people want to put the product into their own mouths. Also, large swaths of "green" or environmentally friendly design - as well as products marketed as "healthy" - possess an aesthetic that says something like "Here is something that is good for you and/or the environment. We're making it ugly so you can feel like you're doing penance for past overconsumption or enjoyment."
That last tide seems to be turning, now, thanks to Elon Musk making electric cars that people might actually not be embarrassed to be seen in, as opposed to the pug-ugly "Smart Car."
That's a subjective observation, of course; there's no One True Aesthetic, or else nothing would ever change.
So, back to the article's premise: design as propaganda.
I never really gave that much thought, although in retrospect I probably should have. We know that grocery stores, for example, do extensive research into human psychology to help them determine a layout that extracts the maximum profit from a shopper. Casinos, too, rely heavily on psychology; my first experience with one was that you had to walk through a gauntlet of flashing and beeping slot machines just to get to registration (this is not as common as it used to be). And just the other day, a friend of mine got lost in an Ikea store; she couldn't find the exit. I told her, "the trick is to buy something, and then the exit magically appears." And behold, she bought something, and the exit magically appeared. (Her attempts to put said something together later led to her having to go back to the Ikea to return it, after which she texted me: "Never. Again.")
Point is, these places don't hire someone like me to do their layout; I'd be trying for the most efficient layout from the point of view of a shopper, just like I used to design roads that were as straight as possible given constraints of terrain and other externalities. No, they employ people who think of design from the viewpoint of maximizing profit.
There's nothing wrong with that, intrinsically. A business exists to make profit. But I think it's important to know that these things are working on you on some level. Go grocery shopping with a list and stick to the list, and you're not swayed by prominent displays of, say, Oreos. Avoid slot machines (generally good advice anyway). And for the sake of everything that's right and pure in the world, stay the hell away from Ikea.
Likely, other people have considered this way more than I have. I don't usually think about it, which makes me a sucker. But I'm going to work on it. |
August 14, 2019 at 12:17am August 14, 2019 at 12:17am
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Continuing yesterday's linguistic theme, today's link is about my personal favorite punctuation mark: the semicolon.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/01/the-birth-of-the-semicolon/
The Birth of the Semicolon
That sounds... painful.
The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly.
I imagine it would be hard to experiment with punctuation symbols these days; the computer keyboard and the extended ASCII set of characters are pretty well fixed. Dammit, there I go using a semicolon.
The modern equivalent would probably be some godawful new emoji.
I've seen other articles promoting ideas for new (or possibly resurrected) punctuation marks, such as the interrobang (‽), which is what you get when an exclamation point (known in geekery as a "bang") fucks a question mark. No one uses the little bugger - it's rare that it's needed, and when it is it's much easier to type two characters than to look it up. I think it even has an ASCII representation; I don't know what it might be, because I just did a copy/paste to get it to show up there. Goddammit. Another semicolon.
Nearly as soon as the ink was dry on those first semicolons, they began to proliferate, and newly cut font families began to include them as a matter of course. The Bembo typeface’s tall semicolon was the original that appeared in De Aetna, with its comma-half tensely coiled, tail thorn-sharp beneath the perfect orb thrown high above it. The semicolon in Poliphilus, relaxed and fuzzy, looks casual in comparison, like a Keith Haring character taking a break from buzzing. Garamond’s semicolon is watchful, aggressive, and elegant, its lower half a cobra’s head arced back to strike. Jenson’s is a simple shooting star.
Waxing eloquent about the shape of punctuation marks? I guess everyone's a geek about something. Who the hell is Keith Haring, anyway? Can't be arsed to Google the name.
(For the postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme, none of these punch-cut disguises could ever conceal the semicolon’s innate hideousness: to him it was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.”)
Yet another reason why postmodernists should never be taken seriously.
The rhetorical question mark, on the other hand, faltered and then fizzled out completely. This isn’t too surprising: does anyone really need a special punctuation mark to know when a question is rhetorical?
Oh ho! I see what you did there, asking a rhetorical question and ending the sentence with an actual question mark.
Still, a few cranky complainants notwithstanding, most humanists believed that each writer should work out his punctuation for himself, rather than employing a predetermined set of rules. A writer or an annotating reader was to exercise his own taste and judgment.
As if writers can be said to have those qualities. Also, that way lies anarchy.
Anyway, just a fun bit of punctuation history. I probably overuse semicolons, myself; some would say any use of one is overuse. (DAMMIT) They're technically unnecessary, because a semicolon separates two related, but independent, clauses, and you can do the same thing by simply starting a new sentence or using a conjunction.
Still, I'd hate for any key on my keyboard to wither away from disuse - even though that's the ultimate fate of any ~/` key for me. Hell, it nearly didn't work just then.
Semicolons are, to be sure, hard to get right, but they do adjust the flow of your writing. Without them. You sound. Like Shatner. Or Hemingway. |
August 13, 2019 at 12:26am August 13, 2019 at 12:26am
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https://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/43-embarrassing-phrases-even-smart-peopl...
English doesn't make a lot of sense. I'd like to be able to say that this is by design, but no one "designed" English. It's what you get when a bunch of other languages get into a bar brawl with no clear winner, while drunk.
The upside of this is that people who can make any sense at all out of it get the privilege of feeling superior.
When someone uses grammar incorrectly do you make an assumption about his or her intelligence or education?
Yep.
For all the people who insist that "spelling doesn't matter" and "you're being pedantic if you care about grammar," I make an effort. I'm not always successful - few are - but at least I try.
I'm supposed to be the lazy one, here.
On the other paw, spelling and grammar change organically over time, and some changes have good reasons behind them. Anyone who screams at the highway department for signs like "No Thru Street" has Issues. Everyone knows what is meant, and you've only got a short time to look at that sign; it just makes sense to shorten the word from "through," which could be confusing as it looks like "trough," "tough," "thorough," "though," etc. - all of which are also pronounced differently, just for funsies.
In short, it's okay to make changes I'm okay with, and it's not okay to make changes that piss me off. I never said I had to be consistent; hell, English isn't.
Anyway, the article.
Like it or not, words, spelling, and punctuation are powerful and can leave a lasting impression on others. But even the most educated people often unknowingly make common writing and speaking flubs. Check out this long list of ubiquitous grammar mistakes.
I'm not going to copy most of them here; I'm just going to note the ones I take issue with.
4. "I" as the last word in a sentence.
Yeah... that's too simplistic. I can think of examples where a sentence should end in the first person singular pronoun. "There but for the grace of God go I" is a pretty famous one. The real trick is to figure out whether the pronoun is a subject (I) or object (me); the former is rarely placed as the last word, but it does happen.
5. "Me" as the first word in a sentence.
Okay, sure, this is technically wrong from a purist point of view, but I grew up in the South, and that's just how we talk.
24. Hot water heater
If anything, it's a cold water heater. Just use "water heater."
Except for the edge case when you have a new water heater and it fills up with cool water, the water in the tank is already hot when the gas, or heating element, kicks in and makes it a bit hotter. Okay, maybe also if you live in a shitty apartment and you use up all the hot water in a five-minute shower. Point is, I wouldn't ding anyone for saying "hot water heater," even though "water heater" is more appropriate.
28. Subject and pronoun disagreement.
This one is subject to debate...
Yeah, it really is. Despite numerous attempts, no one has been able to come up with a genderless singular pronoun that's widely accepted. (Don't get me started on the idiotic "xir" bullshit. Nothing natural in English starts with x. Before you say "xylophone" or "xenophobia," those are from Greek roots.) Until then, if the antecedent is of indeterminate or nonbinary gender, by all means, use "they/their" unless they (see what I did there) have made their (again) preferred pronouns plain.
34. Throws of passion
Just know that a throe is a sharp attack of emotion. So, to be in the "throes of passion" is to be violently consumed by something.
I'm highlighting this one because of the mental image I got of "throws of passion."
Again, it's not that I never make mistakes. I just think that, as writers, we owe it to ourselves and our readers to do the best we can, and keep learning this weird-ass language. |
August 12, 2019 at 12:07am August 12, 2019 at 12:07am
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Science!
https://www.wired.com/story/get-to-know-maxwells-equationsyoure-using-them-right...
Electricity and magnetism weren't something I really dug into back in college. In many ways, they might as well be magic to me, for all I understand how they work.
But that link above - well, I find it helpful, mostly because it includes jokes.
Turns out that if you want me to remember something forever, make a joke about it. For example, I once heard the following joke:
"A wave function walks into a bar. It says, 'Man... I've been everywhere,' and collapses."
That is one of the most important features of interpreting quantum mechanics - reduced to a "walks into a bar" joke. Now that I know the joke, I'll never forget the concept.
Or, take Avogadro's number, which counts the number of particles that make up one "mole" (an important unit in chemistry) of a substance. This number is roughly 6.02x1023. Outside of chemistry classes in high school, I have never once used or needed to use this knowledge. How do I remember it? I imagine that many avocados (which would immediately become the ninth planet of the solar system and a prime target for mining - for about 15 seconds.)
The joke doesn't have to be particularly funny, or even make sense, as long as it's a joke and tangentially related to the concept. So, like, for the article I linked above, I might do a riff on the "walks into a bar" joke: "A loop of wire walks into a bar magnet..." No idea how to finish that one, yet. Something about keeping up with "current" events.
Everyone has their own way of remembering shit, I suppose. For me, it's gotta be comedy. Or music. Music works, too. Bonus points if it's a funny song. |
August 11, 2019 at 12:26am August 11, 2019 at 12:26am
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Oh, here we go again.
https://undark.org/article/pitfalls-of-searching-for-alien-life/
The Pitfalls of Searching for Alien Life
Scientists looking for evidence of extraterrestrials can draw media attention but also cynical, even hostile, reactions from their colleagues.
This just in: scientists are humans (as far as we know), and humans have opinions.
In October 2017, a telescope operated by the University of Hawaii picked up a strange cigar-shaped object (artist rendering in top image), which had slingshotted past the sun at a more-than-brisk top speed of 196,000 miles per hour. Scientists at the university dubbed it ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for scout, and at first labeled it an asteroid, then a comet, but agreed that it came from another solar system.
Let me get this out of the way, since it's in the lede: it's remarkably easy to eject a perfectly natural, orbiting thing from a solar system. All you need is the thing you're ejecting, and an enormous mass to overcome the gravity of the primary. Hell, Jupiter could do it - and we've found many, many objects more massive than Jupiter orbiting other stars. Eventually the objects in their orbits line up just right, and *sproing*.
Consequently,
...Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard University’s astronomy department, published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters the following year theorizing that the object could be artificial.
Hey, it's great to speculate, isn't it? "Could be artificial" translates to "can't rule it out," but as I noted above, it's unnecessary to postulate an artificial origin. Occam's Razor does the rest.
I've gone into my argument against a proliferation of intelligent
| by which I mean spaceship-creating - just to forestall the inevitable jokes about "no intelligent life on Earth either," which are, in the study of the universe, second only to Uranus puns in their annoyance factor |
The long version: It comes down to one term in the infamous Drake Equation. Specifically, fi, the fraction of planets with life that go on to develop intelligent life (the definition in the popnote above will suffice for this). Naturally, all we have for that is one data point: us. This tells us nothing about the probability of a planet producing intelligent life. As an analogy, think about if you won the lottery, but you have no idea what the odds were of winning the lottery - all you know is that no one you know has won the lottery. You don't even know how many of those people have played the lottery. The chance could have been one in a thousand or one in 10100; it doesn't matter, because your chance of having won the lottery is exactly unity, once you've won it.
We do know that it didn't take long for life to develop on Earth, and that it took a comparatively very long time for "intelligent" life to emerge. And we've only been building spaceships for half a century, compared to the 4 billion + years life has existed, or even the 1 million + years that humans have existed. Meanwhile, other species are thriving just fine on our planet, having evolved for exactly the same amount of time that we have (they would probably be doing better if we weren't around, but that's another issue entirely), so there's zero evidence that evolution must produce that kind of intelligence. All we know for sure is that it can, and we know that because we define ourselves, as a species, as "intelligent."
The article I linked, though, seems to make the usual mistake I see in journalism on this subject: it conflates "life" and "intelligent life." Throw a dart at the timeline of Earth thus far, and you're almost certain to hit a time containing "life," and almost entirely unlikely to hit a time containing "intelligent life."
“I’m really surprised they get blowback,” said physicist Richard Bower of Durham University in England. He’s never gotten flak for his research in cosmology, which entails making computer simulations of possible parallel universes. He’s concluded that life elsewhere could be quite common, and others in his field back him up. “We used to say that life is incredibly rare and we’re lucky to live on a habitable planet,’’ he said. “But we’ve now observed so many planets that are plausible habitats. It seems, based on scientific evidence, there’s no reason to think that planets like the Earth are rare.”
I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that Earth may well be a galactic outlier in terms of producing a species that has space travel capabilities (as rudimentary as they are right now). We also don't know how common any kind of life is in the rest of the universe - but as it's a big universe, it's probably safe to say it exists, somewhere.
It's also important to draw distinction between scientific inquiry and fantasy, though. The search for extraterrestrial life is important. Finding so much as a microbe, even just a strand of proto-RNA or its equivalent on another world, well, that would have a huge impact on our understanding. But the topic has been forever tarnished by fringe UFO conspiracies and popular imagination, to the point where even writing serious papers about it invites speculation about flying saucers, death rays, the JFK assassination, and whatnot.
Hence the blowback when serious scientists start speculating about alien intelligence. Such speculation is not without merit - it needs to be done. It's just that when being reported on, it gets all wrapped up in popular imagination and cultural zeitgeist.
Now, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, here. You want to believe in little green men, or storm Area 51 next month, hey, that's your choice. And I could be wrong. I actually hope I am. All I'm doing is critiquing the way these things are presented in media. So when you see things like "this might be artificial in origin" or the ever-present "astronomers discovered an Earthlike exoplanet," just remember to take the news with a grain of salt. After all, to an astronomer, Mercury and Venus are Earthlike - and the last so-called "earthlike" planet I heard of was six times the size of our little world.
Imagine trying to escape that gravity well. |
August 10, 2019 at 12:23am August 10, 2019 at 12:23am
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I don't know why I keep going back to this guy's blog.
https://dariusforoux.com/if-you-can-believe-you-can-achieve/
If You Can Believe It, You Can Achieve It
It's generally the epitome of corporate-style motivational affirmations. I'm linking this particular one because he talks about writing, and, well, here we are on a writing site.
I think the world has no shortage of motivational articles, books, videos, or Facebook posts.
You know what motivational quotes make me want to do? Give up. That's what.
Belief is a practical instrument that you can use to shape reality.
No. No, it really isn't. You can use it to shape your attitudes about reality, but reality is reality, by definition, q.e.d., etc.
Have you ever considered that you decide what you believe? Not your friends, colleagues, family, or even the media.
You'd be surprised. There's a whole industry devoted to making sure we believe what someone wants us to believe. Often these beliefs are contradictory. The amazing thing about being human is that we can believe contradictory things simultaneously. This is both a benefit and a detriment.
It comes down to one thing: Do you believe that you can, or can’t live the life you want?
I am living the life that I want. The thing is, it's not necessarily the life that I wanted 10, 20, 30, etc. years ago. Over time, I've adjusted my expectations. I find that that, more than belief, more than motivation, more than anything else, is the secret to happiness. Adjusting expectations meant I could stop, for example, believing that I could invent a flying car, or even own one.
So now we come to the writing part:
I always wanted to become a writer. Back in school, I wrote poems for my girlfriend. It was kind of pathetic, but hey, she enjoyed my weird poems. But all jokes aside, I loved to read and enjoyed putting my thoughts on paper.
But no, every adult in my life was trying to scare me to death. “You can’t make a living as a writer.” They were probably right. It’s not easy to make a living by writing.
True enough. My parents wisely steered me away from creative pursuits so I could make a decent living. "Wisely" for two reasons: 1) it's hard and 2) I'm not very creative.
So what? Everything that’s worth it is hard. I didn’t realize that back then.
That's simply not true, in my experience. The things I appreciate most are the things I didn't work hard for. The harder I work for something, the less satisfying it is - because by the time I'm done putting in the work, it's never as bright as my expectations were.
But, okay, I'll accept that some people feel that way. Fine.
Granted, I’m not fully paying the bills by writing yet. I run a business and do consulting. But I do make some money with my blog. And that’s pretty good to know for the seventeen-year-old version of me.
Meanwhile, I've never made money from writing. Well, that's not entirely true; I suppose Gift Points count, sort of, as do Amazon gift cards - because you can buy stuff with them. I'm not sure I want to make money from blogging; I'd have to take the time to "build a brand" or whatever, and I'd be limited in what I could say.
Sure would be nice to get published, though, but I'm still not convinced that if I just believe hard enough, it'll happen.
Because my mind can conceive it. And if your mind can conceive it, you can achieve it.
That’s not a motivational quote. That’s a fact.
Do you believe it?
No.
My mind can conceive that I'll have a romantic encounter with Halle Berry. It may or may not be that I've put a lot of mental energy into this belief, but let's say for the sake of argument that I have. Will it happen?
No.
My mind can conceive of faster-than-light travel. Could be we'll discover that, one day, but it won't be me doing the discovering, and unless it happens soon, I won't even be around to enjoy the results.
My mind can conceive all sorts of fantastic scenarios, but the closest I'll ever be is if I write a story about them. Worlds made of gold. Time travel. Honest politicians. Flying pigs. Talking cats.
Look, I can accept that attitude makes a difference. But some things are simply unattainable, on a practical level. I've done many things I never thought I'd do, like horseback riding through a jungle and viewing an active volcano. I've also not done many, many more things that I thought I would do, because no, it's not entirely up to me. Sometimes things happen, or they don't happen; you can't make someone fall in love with you, for example.
So I'm not sure why I waste my time with this kind of mind-massage. Maybe I keep hoping that I'll finally read something that is actually applicable to me. Maybe I'm just fascinated by how people - people who are not me, that is - can seem to put whatever New Age word salad on a screen or a page, and get read, while I languish in obscurity.
Obscurity has its benefits, of course, so I can embrace it. At least no one picks apart my verbal vomit, quote by quote, on their own blogs.
Until, at least, someone's analytics finally point them to this blog, at which point I'm probably going to be in big trouble.
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