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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
December 6, 2025 at 9:34am December 6, 2025 at 9:34am
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Science: investigating the really important stuff since 1666.
The Number One reason to go Number Two?
You've downed a cup of strong coffee, and soon you have an urge to poop.
You may be wondering how those of us who don't drink coffee can manage to pinch a loaf every now and then. I mean, sometimes I'm backed up for days or weeks, watching my friends who do drink coffee answer the call of doody and return with a satisfied smile on their faces. I'm jealous.
...Of course I'm joking. Everybody poops.
After you've done your business, you feel a sense of relief. So why does that bowel movement feel so satisfying?
You know, science isn't really about answering "why" questions. They tend to multiply themselves. Better to ask "how."
There are many physical, behavioral and psychological factors that could contribute to this feeling.
I'd think there would be a sound evolutionary reason for it: if it hurts, you don't do it as much, and if you don't do it, you get sick and die, and if you get sick and die early enough, your genes don't get passed on.
As the bowels fill up, nerve endings communicate an uncomfortable stretching sensation to the brain.
Except, presumably, in people who have somehow wrecked 'em.
Typically, thanks to the external sphincter, we don't immediately poop.
Young-person-like typing detected.
Emptying out the bowels by releasing stool relieves this pressure, which feels good.
Can't recommend the smell, though.
"When you relieve the distension, areas like the anterior cingulate gyrus and the insula show a reward response," she said. These regions of the brain play a role in reacting to pain and relief of pain.
Okay. That's still not "why."
The gut communicates to the brain via the vagus nerve, one of the major cranial nerves. Evacuating the bowels stimulates the vagus nerve. This can lower a person's blood pressure and heart rate, creating a relaxing feeling, Person said.
This feels like a circular argument. Stimulating the vagus nerve makes you feel good. Dropping the kids off at the pool stimulates the vagus nerve. Therefore, laying cable feels good.
Don't get me wrong; it's good to investigate the mechanisms behind bodily functions. It might help doctors figure out how to fix you. But it's still a "how" thing, not a "why" thing.
Or maybe I'm just full of shit. |
December 5, 2025 at 10:04am December 5, 2025 at 10:04am
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Wading back in to what we writers work with, here's a listicle about words from Mental Floss:
You know, sometimes, the perfect word doesn't exist, so we have to create it. It worked for Shakespeare. It worked for Charles Dodgson. Fantasy and science fiction are especially prone to the creation of new words, because they deal with new (to us) worlds. Though, admittedly, sometimes they go overboard with it.
Anyway, the article.
Language is ever-evolving, with new words springing up from a variety of places. Some are borrowed from other languages (“karaoke”), others are two words blended together (“doomscrolling”), and some are simply shortened (“decaf”).
And sometimes, we just make them up because we feel like it.
As I've said numerous times, all words are made-up. It's only a matter of how long ago.
Science fiction is a particularly bountiful genre for the introduction of new words, in large part because authors come up with unique and otherworldly terms to describe their sci-fi worlds.
Like, where would we be without "frack" from the original Battlestar:Galactica?
As usual, I'm only going to comment on a few of them here.
Robot and Robotics
The word “robot” can be traced back to Czech writer Karel Čapek and his sci-fi play R.U.R. (1920).
I did a whole entry on that last month: "No Ifs, Androids, or Bots" 
Grok
Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) follows Valentine Michael Smith, a human born and raised on Mars, as he experiences Earth for the first time.
No word is sufficient enough to express my white-hot anger at having this word appropriated for nefarious purposes. Stranger was a life-changing novel for me, and I've read all of Heinlein's published works. Yes, even the weird, self-indulgent, freaky ones. (I'm not saying I loved all of them.) If there's one writer I can credit for instilling in me a lifelong love of science fiction, and reading and writing in general, it's Heinlein. Well, also Niven. But mostly Heinlein.
So Muskmelon comes along and, first, ruins the good name of Nikola Tesla. That was bad enough. Then he goes and appropriates grok?
My anger burns with the fiery power of a million supernovas.
Metaverse
In 1992, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash introduced the word metaverse to the world. Set in a dystopian future, characters use VR headsets to connect to a universally used virtual world called the “metaverse.”
I don't have nearly the same level of seething rage over this appropriation.
For me, the most memorable thing about Snow Crash was the name of the main character: Hiro Protagonist. You'll never come up with a better name. Neither will I. It is, in practice, absolutely impossible to invent a better name for a novel's main character. Simply can't be done, like accelerating past lightspeed, counting to infinity, or finding an honest politician.
Newspeak
George Orwell’s dystopian sci-fi novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) introduced many new words and phrases to the world.
And make no mistake, 1984 was absolutely science fiction. Most lit-snobs refuse to acknowledge this (or many of Vonnegut's works, as well) because they've been programmed to believe that science fiction is all escapist pulp brainrot and can't possibly be Serious Literature Being All Serious.
There are, as I said, more at the link. I like SF and I like word origins, so how could I resist? |
December 4, 2025 at 10:31am December 4, 2025 at 10:31am
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Been a while since I had an astronomy thing to share. This one's from Smithsonian.
I could quibble about their use of "history" there (it's more of a history of humans' lore and science about the cluster than the history of the stars themselves), or the almost-clickbaity "amazing." But that's all I'm going to say about those things.
The Nebra sky disc, as their find is now known, is circular, about 12 inches across and decorated with intriguing gold symbols. Some we can recognize instantly, and others are more ambiguous. But they all appear to be celestial: A crescent shape represents either the moon or an eclipsed sun, and a bright circle depicts the sun or the full moon.
The article includes a sketch of the disc in question, and I can see why the sun and moon might be ambiguous. I also found a photo of the thing from Wikipedia.
Thirty-two stars cover the disc, but seven particularly draw the eye. They stand out, because they form a tight cluster. Given the cost of materials and craft needed to create this rare object, this must have been a deliberate attempt to portray a cluster of seven stars in the night sky. As such, it can represent only one astronomical formation.
The cluster doesn't really look much like the actual Pleiades, but then again, neither does the current Subaru logo.
(As the article notes, "Subaru" is what the Pleiades are called in Japanese. And there's no truth to the rumor that I drive a Subaru because I'm a huge fan of astronomy. That's only, like, 75% of the reason. They're solid vehicles.)
Nowhere else can a tight group of about seven stars be found easily with the naked eye. And this visibility is why we can find references to the Pleiades from almost all civilizations that left records, under many different names.
I met someone once with an interest in astronomy but very little actual knowledge. I'm not ragging on him, mind you; we all start out with very little actual knowledge, and he was eager to learn more, which is always to be encouraged. So, he knew the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and maybe Orion. But then he pointed off to Orion's right and asked, "So is that the Micro Dipper?"
I mean, why not, right? Look at the thing.
Why is it said to have “about seven stars”? While the cluster is easy to spot, the precise number of stars we see will depend on the conditions: A veil of high clouds, light pollution and light from the moon can all have an impact. So can the time of night and our eyesight.
I never was able to count them, even back when I had near-perfect vision, so I just went with the "seven" thing.
In 1961, the late astronomer Patrick Moore put this question to the audience of the popular BBC weekly television program he hosted, “The Sky at Night,” and viewers wrote in with their answers. The numbers varied: Some saw fewer than 7, others saw 8 stars, 9 or even, in one case, 11. But the average number was seven.
I have to wonder how much of that was priming, like I experienced. You're told seven, so you see seven. I don't know.
But the number seven will persist. It’s a sticky number, popular in ancient times and considered lucky by many to this day.
Oh, no, it's not just popular or lucky. Come on. Seven is indelibly associated with astrology, the precursor to astronomy. Early sky-watchers noticed that, against what for all practical pre-industrial Earthbound purposes is a fixed background of stars, a number of bodies persisted (unlike, say, comets) but moved around. And that number was seven: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn; all visible to the naked eye. Or whatever different cultures called those wanderers. The concept of a seven-day week was built around that, though the English version is mostly named in the Germanic, not Roman, style (Saturday is an exception).
When Newton, who was a mystic as well as a scientist, studied the spectrum of sunlight, he identified seven colors, our familiar ROYGBIV rainbow. As the spectrum is, well, a spectrum, a continuum, the mostly-arbitrary number seven was undoubtedly influenced by this ancient astrological tradition. (Can you tell indigo from violet on a rainbow? I certainly can't.)
Point is, yes, it's a sticky number, but it's a sticky number for sound historical (if not scientific) reasons.
In autumn, the Pleiades can be seen climbing above the eastern horizon soon after dusk. In spring, they catch up with the sun, and we soon lose them again.
Those sentences are, obviously, written from a Northern Hemisphere perspective. As the article notes, native Australians and other upside-downers also had a thing for what we call the Pleiades.
The Pleiades rise and set close to northeast and northwest from temperate latitudes. Like all stars that rise over the eastern horizon, they climb until they reach their highest point when they are due south—a moment known to astronomers as “culmination”—before descending toward the western horizon.
Given astronomers' penchant for solitude and isolation, I'm surprised they don't call it "climax."
There is a belief in some circles that the Druids marked Samhain, the precursor of Halloween, using the culmination of the Pleiades at midnight, which is plausible.
Meh. Plausible, I'll grant. But we know little more than jack and shit about the actual Druids, and there's already too much speculation and reinterpretation going on about them.
The Pleiades are not a constellation in themselves, but they’re part of a much larger pattern: the constellation of Taurus, the bull.
Here's where I really break with the article, but not in a "makes the whole article bogus" way. What we call constellations are based, primarily, on the lore of ancient Europe, with maybe some Mesopotamia thrown in. Their boundaries are arbitrary, and the Northern Hemisphere ones in particular borrow from that mythology. Other cultures put different interpretations on the shapes they saw in the stars, with different lore and different arrangements.
In other words, we can say "star A is in constellation X," but that's just a categorization thing, helpful in communicating to the general public and other astronomers, but having no real basis in science. It's kind of like saying "Paris is in France," but, apart from the coastline, the borders of France are a matter of custom, law, wars, culture, and human decision-making, not any fixed and objective measure. (Even when they follow natural boundaries like mountain ridges.) Those boundaries have changed with time, and, before a certain point in time, France didn't exist at all. Neither did Paris. Nor the Pleiades.
Still, yes, we don't consider the Pleiades a constellation in itself. Neither are either of the Dippers. That kind of recognizable shape that's not an official constellation is called an asterism. In an alternate universe where the sky is the same but human culture unfolded differently, our names and boundaries for the constellations would be different.
There's another bit of lore about the Pleiades that I especially like: the story of Bear Lodge, which the North American colonizers called Devil's Tower. "Bear Lodge" is a rough translation of the Lakota name of that prominent landmark. And the Lakota story about it is intimately tied with what we call the Pleiades.
There's more here, and in the references on that page, and elsewhere on the internet, but I'll paste the most relevant section of the Wiki page:
According to the traditional beliefs of Native American peoples, the Kiowa and Lakota, a group of girls went out to play and were spotted by several giant bears, who began to chase them. In an effort to escape the bears, the girls climbed atop a rock, fell to their knees, and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them. Hearing their prayers, the Great Spirit made the rock rise from the ground towards the heavens so that the bears could not reach the girls. The bears, in an effort to climb the rock, left deep claw marks in the sides, which had become too steep to climb. Those are the marks which appear today on the sides of Devils Tower. When the girls reached the sky, they were turned into the stars of the Pleiades.
That story bears (I'd apologize for that pun, but I don't do that) all of the hallmarks of classic mythology: an origin story, interpreted through the lens of the culture that spawned the myth. And I don't mean "myth" in the sense of "falsehood" here; I mean those powerful cultural stories that both arise from and shape the worldviews of the cultures that spawn them.
I couldn't tell you why that particular story resonates with me. As far as I know, I have no Native American ancestry. I guess I just love a good myth, while at the same time acknowledging that Bear Lodge was as much a natural formation as the Pleiades themselves.
The difference being that the Pleiades asterism belongs to everyone.
And no one. |
December 3, 2025 at 8:26am December 3, 2025 at 8:26am
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Now this... this is what science is for. A short but piquant article from PhysOrg:
This is one of those times when it pays to go to the article to see the picture. Because when I saw it, I thought they'd made the artificial tongue look like an actual, disembodied, floppy tongue.
The appearance of a hot sauce or pepper doesn't reveal whether it's mild or likely to scorch someone's taste buds, but researchers have now created an artificial tongue to quickly detect spiciness.
Or you just dare an insecure teenage boy to eat it, preferably when he's around people he's trying to impress.
Inspired by milk's casein proteins, which bind to capsaicin and relieve the burn of spicy foods, the researchers incorporated milk powder into a gel sensor.
Okay, so it's not a step on the way to unlimited free energy or anything, but it's at least useful.
"Our flexible artificial tongue holds tremendous potential in spicy sensation estimation for portable taste-monitoring devices, movable humanoid robots, or patients with sensory impairments like ageusia, for example," says Weijun Deng, the study's lead author.
Except, of course, for the bit about "movable humanoid robots." Don't give them a sense of taste. Have you not read science fiction? They will develop a taste for human flesh.
Still, the article goes into a bit more background, but, as I said, it's short.
As a proof-of-concept, the researchers tested eight pepper types and eight spicy foods (including several hot sauces) on the artificial tongue and measured how spicy they were by changes in electrical current. A panel of taste testers rated the spiciness of the same items.
I have to wonder if they had a diverse group on the panel; that is, some from spicy-food cultures and others from the American Midwest. Because while spice level is objective, reaction to it is subjective.
Now, I'm a fan of spicy food. I don't eat it to show off; I genuinely enjoy the heat... up to a point, but that point is far beyond that of my fellow Americans of Midwestern origin. But this would be useful to anyone, whether they're trying to find, or to avoid, the hotter stuff.
I'm just disappointed that it's not, ultimately, shaped like an actual, pink, floppy, disembodied, human tongue. |
December 2, 2025 at 9:31am December 2, 2025 at 9:31am
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Well, this isn't going to be my usual sort of thing. It's personal and might even border on offensive. A lived experience related by CBC:
What's this got to do with anything? Well, I'm about the same age. Of course, she's female and Canadian, so we couldn't possibly be more different. Still. The writer is only a few months older than I am, still the leading edge of Gen-X, if you have to believe in marketing age categories.
I’ve just passed another milestone birthday, and yet the familiar dread of reluctantly skidding into a new decade seems to have softened somewhat.
I'm almost there, and I don't feel dread. Just a profound resignation.
The quiet realization that my yesterdays outnumber my tomorrows feels less like a threat and more like a gift.
Oh, lucky you. I've had that realization for twenty years now.
Aging, I’ve come to see, is a privilege.
I suppose that's a nice, healthy way to look at it. Naturally, I don't agree.
My dear friend Natalie died after a brief illness almost a year ago at the age of 57.
That sucks. Truly. I'm not trying to diminish anyone's grief here, or play who-had-it-worse. All I want to do is try to understand someone else's perspective, and share my own, which is neither better nor worse, just different.
See, my own experiences with loss lead me to a different conclusion.
First, I spent 20 years watching one parent, then the other, decline into profound dementia, then die frightened and bewildered. Losing one's parents is, I know, the natural order of things. But the dementia thing is spit in the face.
The second thing isn't a direct experience, but something I found out about later. It was about a girl I dated in high school, but later fell out of touch with—not too serious, not too casual, but somewhere in the middle. I asked a mutual friend about her, years later, after a chance encounter on the internet. Not to stalk or anything, but just out of curiosity about an old friend. Turned out that this woman had gotten married, went on her honeymoon, came back and was walking around excited about her new life when she dropped dead on the street. One moment alive; next moment, corpse.
So, reading the article in the link up there reminded me that, if I had the choice between a slow decline into brainless senility, or just getting switched off like a lightbulb, I know which one I'd pick.
Of course, we don't get to pick. No, I'm not suicidal. I'm just not afraid of being dead. Maybe I am, at least a little, of dying.
But I cannot and will not consider aging to be a privilege.
It's just something that happens to most of us, like it or not, until it stops. |
December 1, 2025 at 9:43am December 1, 2025 at 9:43am
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If you like the *shudder* outdoors, here's a secret from SFGate:
Except I guess it isn't a secret anymore, is it? Now that you've told the entire world with a webpage. Way to go, assholes. Way to ruin it.
The article does, of course, include pictures, and they're cool. Though some of them are suggestive enough that you might not want to view them at work or around kids.
The slot canyon’s sandstone layers were so flawless they looked as though they’d been thrown on a pottery wheel.
Careful, there. Wouldn't want to give the creationists any ammunition.
This sculpted maze could easily have been mistaken for Arizona’s wildly popular Upper or Lower Antelope Canyon.
You'll have to forgive me for never having heard of the Antelopes. I live on the other side of the country, and I'm an indoorsman.
Pretty sure I've seen pictures of them, but without attribution.
While smaller in size, this secluded fissure is just as extraordinary, with the same curving walls and an ever-changing orbit of gold and purple shades, occasionally transformed by light rays into vibrant reds and oranges, adorning its narrow passageways — but far fewer crowds.
This is the sort of description that makes travel writing work, incidentally.
And like its more famous counterpart, it’s only accessible through a Navajo tour.
Well, then, maybe it'll just have to be on them to keep the crowds manageable.
Reaching the canyon entrance is an adventure in itself: It requires a 20-minute off-road ride in one of the company’s modified, open-air (bring layers!) Ford F-350s.
Oh, did Ford pay you for the product placement?
For the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with Arizona, the "layers" thing is because, though you might have heard how scorchingly hot Phoenix can get, that state can also get finger-numbingly cold.
Upon arrival, McCabe began walking our group of 12 through millions of years of geological history. “It’s volume and velocity that forms a slot canyon,” he said, referring to the many flash floods that carved the formation through repeated erosion of its soft rock, which was then further shaped by wind.
SCIENCE!
McCabe pointed out sandstone formations that resembled an elephant, some woolly mammoths and even an Egyptian queen as we went.
Somehow, I don't think any of those are Navajo things.
Well, maybe the Egyptian queen. As Steve Martin related in his musical documentary, speaking of Tutankhamen, "Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia."
McCabe explained that to the Navajo people, slot canyons are symbols of creation — linking the physical and spiritual worlds — and are often associated with guardian spirits.
So we come to the main reason I saved this article at all: the combination of science and spirituality. Apparently, not everyone sees a need to choose between the two.
While I haven't done canyon hikes (I haven't even been to the Grand one), I have spent time in Navajo country, and I can attest that it's pretty damn awesome. I try to swing through every time I go out west, sometimes staying in Page or Kayenta.
Maybe next time, if there is a next time, I'll go look at some rocks. |
November 30, 2025 at 8:24am November 30, 2025 at 8:24am
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This article from The Conversation starts out looking like a book ad, but is it really an ad if the book is 120 years old?
Not long ago, a relative of mine told me he had been working so hard in the yard that he’d “literally thrown up”.
As opposed to metaphorically throwing up. Though I suppose "throwing up" is itself a metaphor, or at least a euphemism of sorts.
It was, oddly enough, a boast.
I once worked so hard shoveling snow that I "literally" had a heart attack. My response? Started paying people to do the snow-shoveling. Fortunately, that hasn't been much of a thing over the last 12 years. See? Some good things come from climate change.
Elon Musk once claimed “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”, apparently unaware that people from Archimedes to Nobel laureate Sir Alexander Fleming managed just fine on a normal schedule
Note how he didn't specify changing it for the better.
...today, overwork is one of the few politically neutral ways to show virtue.
If that's the only way to show virtue, I'll stick to my vices, thanks.
Why is work treated, strangely enough, as if it were next to godliness?
Even if I hadn't already seen the headline, I knew the answer: John fucking Calvin.
As an aside: Trust me, I have already thought of all the Calvin (the kid with the tiger) jokes, so there's no need to make any more.
One of the sharper answers came from German sociologist Max Weber. His book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) has become a classic – though we need to be careful about what “classic” means here. Like the Bible or Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, The Protestant Ethic is widely bought, regularly invoked, and rarely read.
Again, I seem to be an outlier. I've read (and own copies of) those other books, but not Weber.
The Protestant Ethic is a study of how religious ideas, especially Calvinism, helped shape the mindset upon which modern capitalism thrives.
What'd I tell you.
Anxious about their prospects for salvation, Protestants looked for signs of divine favour in worldly success. That anxious looking, Weber thought, helped to create – and then helped to reinforce – the disciplined, work-and-future-oriented modern subject that capitalism depends on.
I could protest (pun intended) by saying "not all Protestants," but that would miss the point.
It was one of Weber’s key ideas, and not just in this book, that modernity had lost previous ages’ sense of spiritual meaning...
On the other hand, I'm not a huge fan of "spiritual meaning," either.
What was new, Weber thought, was the moral stance: that working hard, living frugally and accumulating wealth weren’t just practical skills for succeeding, but inherently virtuous forms of behaviour. Profit, for some, was more than a merely desirable personal outcome; it was a duty.
We still see that in today's world.
Calvinists believed in predestination. This is the idea that God has already decided who is saved and who isn’t, long before any merely human act could modify this outcome.
While this makes some sense from a theological perspective—after all, if God can be surprised, then God is not omniscient, and it was important to a lot of people that God be omniscient—I want to point out that, while I've argued against the concept of free will here and in the old blog, "predestination" is not the only alternative.
The result was a kind of compensatory behaviour. Believers began looking for signs of God’s favour. Success in one’s calling – or “Beruf”, a word that means both “job” and “vocation” – became such a sign. Working hard, avoiding luxury, reinvesting profits: these weren’t just sound habits. They might be clues that one was among the elect.
And that is the piece I was missing from my outsider's view of Western religious thought. How do people reconcile the "camel through the eye of the needle" bit in the Bible with the pursuit of wealth? It's long been obvious to me that people do it, but I didn't know why, apart from the very human desire for more.
I know some people claim that the "eye of the needle" was the name of a gate in Jerusalem's walls, but to me that stretches interpretation to the breaking point.
Over time, these behaviours detached from their religious roots. You didn’t need to believe in predestination to feel the drive to work endlessly, or to prove your value through success.
"Consider the lilies of the field," my ass.
The moral weight Weber saw in the Protestant calling has not vanished. It has been reborn: now it answers to dopamine hits and brand loyalty. We no longer justify our work in relation to God’s glory, but we still work as if something eternal depends on it.
I suppose one could consider intergenerational wealth a kind of "eternal."
Weber certainly wasn’t celebrating what he described. He was, instead, trying to document the moment when a spiritual or theological project hardened into something far more mechanical, compulsive and inescapable.
And look, just to be clear: I'm not advocating for or or against that point of view.
Australian philosopher Michael Symonds has argued that this tragic logic, where the terror of predestination drives believers into a compulsive ethic of work, produces a world where meaning itself becomes hard to grasp.
I do, however, question the validity of the idea of "meaning."
This is one of Weber’s most unsettling points: a system designed to prove spiritual worth ends up building a world whose very operating logic seems to deny that any such worth exists.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that this is hardly the "world." While it's certainly a viral meme that has spread to other cultures, there are societies that don't buy into the grind. The US is not one such society.
The language of “vocation” is everywhere, but it has been flattened into a lifestyle brand. Work isn’t just work anymore; it is supposed to be passion, purpose, identity. You’re not just employed, you’re “doing what you love”. This idea is tempting, but it quickly turns into a trap, because if work is meaning, then failure or exhaustion start to look like moral flaws.
Except that, as noted above, exhaustion, at least, has become a humblebrag.
But the anxiety has shifted. For early Protestants, work was a way of reassuring yourself that you might be saved. For many today, work is a way of proving you’re not disposable.
Just to be clear, because I'm obviously not quoting the entire source text: the idea is not that hard work and success lead to salvation, but that hard work and success are signs of a salvation that has already been predetermined.
One reverberation from this is that, in that worldview, if you're poor, you deserved it. If you're rich, you deserved it. Therefore, helping the poor becomes a kind of sin, while helping to make the rich richer is a kind of virtue.
We feel the pull to be useful, to produce, to stay busy – even when the rewards are uncertain, or vanish altogether.
I've been reminded that there are various connotations of the first-person plural pronoun. The most obvious is the difference between the inclusive "we" and the exclusive "we." If I tell you, "We're going to a party," it may not be clear just from that sentence whether I mean "you and I and maybe some others" or "I and maybe some others." The one less obvious to me is the rhetorical "we," which is obviously the one being invoked here, because I'm certainly not in that "we" group.
Weber’s point wasn’t just that, once upon a time, religion fatefully shaped economics. It was that a certain kind of theology, and the specifically religious anxiety to which it gave rise, engendered a system that outlived its theology and hardened into something else entirely.
While I can't completely buy into the article—all the talk about meaning and transcendence is kind of irrelevant to me, too—I do think it provides some insight into how we (specifically the US and its close allies, to use the rhetorical "we" myself) got shaped. What it doesn't do, and what it says Weber doesn't do, is show us the way out.
I'm tempted to claim that there isn't one, but I'm trying to be less dire in my thoughts. They say knowledge is power. Well, here's some power, if "we" want to use it. |
November 29, 2025 at 9:01am November 29, 2025 at 9:01am
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Turns out you can't spell "ironic" without Inc.
You sure about that?
Few psychological rules have as high a public profile as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
"Few?" Way to weasel out there. What are the rules you're talking about? That only children are selfish? That short men are pugnacious? The one about the bystander effect, which was pretty much debunked?
David Dunning and Justin Kruger showed that the people who were least competent at a given task were also the most confident in their abilities. Meanwhile, the most skilled are the most unsure.
They were far from the first to notice this. Yeats wrote, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," which sounds about the same to me.
A theory that states the dumbest among are often the loudest and most overconfident seems to explain so much about modern life.
Because we need such simple explanations.
As pleasant as it might be to write off those you disagree with as hopelessly dim and deluded, the Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t actually about anyone’s general intelligence, Dunning explained. It’s about what happens when you gain just a little knowledge in a particular domain.
I mean, okay and all. We should all be aware that it can happen to us, and not feel superior to those of unfortunate mental capacity.
“It’s not about general stupidity. It’s about each and every one of us, sooner or later,” he says. “We each have an array of expertise, and we each have an array of places we shouldn’t be stepping into, thinking we know just as much as the experts.”
Yes, but wouldn't stupid people have a bigger "array of places [they] shouldn't be stepping into?"
Dunking on others’ oblivious idiocy, as tempting as it can be, isn’t actually the takeaway message of the Dunning-Kruger effect according to Dunning. Instead, it’s to be mindful of your own overconfidence, especially in areas where you don’t have deep domain expertise.
If you say so. You're the expert.
The point isn’t to help you spot others’ stupidity. It’s to alert you to the constant potential for your own. Or as Dunning puts it: “Our ignorance is an everyday companion that we will all carry for the rest of our lives.”
You know what bugs me most about this article, though? It's that the author and, apparently, Dunning, based on his quotes therein, conflate ignorance with stupidity. They are (I say with great confidence) not the same thing. Ignorance is our default state. Were you born knowing how to ride a bike? Was the Pythagorean Theorem engraved on your little baby neurons? No. Hell, you even had to be taught how to walk and talk (and then, once you mastered those, how to sit down and shut up).
There is no shame in ignorance per se. No matter how aghast I might be at someone who doesn't understand a Star Trek reference joke I made, the simple truth is not everyone has seen Star Trek.
Nor is there real shame in having reduced mental capacity. People who are slow learners deserve help and empathy, not scorn and ridicule.
What deserves ridicule, the thing that I feel free to mock, is willful ignorance: the deliberate refusal to learn, to change one's mind, or consider other points of view. Flat-earthers, for example.
7 ways to avoid falling prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect
I'm just going to touch on a couple of these, here.
Imagine the worst-case scenario.
Oh, I do. That's my entire life philosophy: imagine the worst thing that can go wrong, assume it will, and you can only be pleasantly surprised.
The problem is, maybe I'm too ignorant to see that there are even worse possibilities than the one I imagined.
Think in probabilities. Citing the work of fellow psychologist Philip Tetlock, Dunning observes that people who think “in terms of probabilities tend to do much better in forecasting and anticipating what is going to happen in the world than people who think in certainties.”
I agree and all, but, and I'm not saying this makes anyone stupid, people are generally utter shit at thinking in probabilities. We (and I do mean we) overestimate the risk of things we're not used to, while underestimating the risk of activities we do regularly. The example I usually quote is someone who is scared shitless of flying because of the risk of a fatal crash or whatever, but doesn't think twice about speeding to the airport if they're a little late. The latter is far, far more likely to be fatal, but we're used to driving, so it just doesn't register.
Something similar happens at casinos, too. Playing blackjack, someone sitting next to me will wonder whether to stand or hit. The odds might favor hitting, say, with a >50% chance. But then they look at me like I'm the stupidest fool in the universe when the next card is a 10 and they bust. Don't look at me. Odds were in your favor. Never said it was a guarantee. They call it gambling for a reason. So I quit giving advice.
“Be 10 percent more skeptical of people you agree with—and 10 percent more charitable to people you disagree with.”
Insofar as such things can be quantified, this is something I try to do.
Scientists are trained to look for evidence to disprove their hypotheses, which acts as a brake on the Dunning-Kruger effect. But you don’t have to be a scientist to think like one.
This too. Admittedly, I don't always succeed.
Practice saying “I don’t know.”
This one time, I drove through Columbus, Ohio in a car full of friends. I remember seeing a billboard that urged something like: "Help wipe out ignorance and apathy!" I said, "I don't know; I just don't care anymore."
That got a laugh. Was it appropriate?
I don't know. |
November 28, 2025 at 9:40am November 28, 2025 at 9:40am
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Here's Mental Floss trying to answer the important questions, again.
One of the most recognizable cheeses is the Swiss variety.
Well, that's what we call it in the US. Which would be kind of like calling cheddar "English cheese" or brie "French cheese," ignoring all the other glorious cheeses produced by those countries. But it's too late; "Swiss cheese" is a metaphor-turned-cliché, and there's no going back now.
Even if you don’t know the taste, you’re likely familiar with the distinctive appearance characterized by an abundance of holes, also known as “eyes.”
That's because it's also a trope. That is, when a cartoonist wants to draw "cheese," they will always draw Swiss because the well-known holes instantly say "cheese" like a portrait photographer's subject. Without these iconic features, you're just drawing a wedge or wheel or slice of some unidentifiable substance.
According to U.S. Dairy, a farmer-funded trade group, the eyes in Swiss cheese derive from a genus of bacteria often found in raw milk called Propionibacteria, or Props.
All cheese relies on microorganisms. Well, anything that actually deserves the name "cheese," anyway. This is not gross unless you're, I don't know, six years old.
In the case of Swiss cheese, Propionibacteria gobble up the lactic acid that’s left behind, which creates carbon dioxide. This gas expands parts of the cheese and forms the characteristic bubbles.
Lots of microorganisms fart out carbon dioxide. It's one reason beer is carbonated. And sparkling wine. Also, it's why bread dough rises.
In the U.S., people often use Swiss cheese as a generic term, but those in Switzerland refer to the dairy item as Emmental.
Stop the presses. Also, the French refer to French bread as "bread" (only in French, so it's "le pain"). And Canadians refer to Canadian bacon as "bacon" or "backbacon," and Brits refer to English muffins as, I guess, "muffins." Despite an attempted marketing campaign, though, I'm pretty sure Australians don't call beer "Foster's."
While most Swiss cheeses have eyes, some don’t, according to U.S. Dairy.
Couldn't be arsed to ask the Swiss what they have to say about it, could you?
Anyway, okay, MF is there to explain things to people who aren't as traveled, informed, or obsessed with cheese as I am. And to be fair, I hadn't known the name of the actual bacteria involved, so I learned something, too (though the full binomial of this particular strain, which I had to look up, is apparently Propionibacterium_freudenreichii ).
I've simply spent too much of my adult life, and a good bit of it before then, enjoying the products of this and other microorganisms to agree that it's "gross." Cheese was invented long before we knew about microbes, and the discovery thereof only improved the production of that delicious food. |
November 27, 2025 at 8:59am November 27, 2025 at 8:59am
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Ah... Thanksgiving in the US. A day to commemorate a bunch of people escaping religious persecution in their home country so they could start some of their own religious persecution in a new one.
Here's an article from that home country (via The Guardian). It's about my all-time favorite punctuation mark; don't worry, it's short, so my fellow Americans can get back to eating politics and talking turkey.
Good. Another convert. Let's keep on proselytizing.
Is there any punctuation mark more divisive than the humble semicolon?
Um, yes? The emdash has started arguments and caused friends to take an extra-long pause, and don't get me started on the interrobang.
The use of exclamation marks (particularly by women) makes some people very excitable.
I only start to get antsy when I see more than one, and I don't discriminate by gender.
The Oxford comma has sparked vigorous debate among friends, family and internet strangers.
Oh ho ho ho. I see what you did there. Or, rather, what you didn't do there. You absolute philistine.
Still, while competition might be stiff, if there was a Most Provocative Punctuation contest, I reckon the semicolon would win it.
I will admit that, superlative or not, it's controversial, in much the same way that the pronunciation of .gif is.
Thrust into the world by an Italian printer called Aldus Manutius in 1494, the semicolon has amassed a legion of passionate supporters and haters.
You know what's worse than using semicolons? Using commas to splice complete clauses together.
Meanwhile, Kurt Vonnegut (hater) called them “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
Vonnegut also refused to admit he wrote science fiction, so anything he has to say is dubious at best.
For most of my life, I was agnostic about the semicolon. Then I had a dalliance with a woman with a bizarre fetish for the things; she even used them in text messages.
You know how I weed undesirables out of my life? I see how they react to me texting in complete sentences. If they don't like it, we're not compatible in any way.
Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades, a study from language-learning company Babbel found in May.
I will admit that overusing them gets distracting. But telling me something's fallen by 50% is useless; were there two books a year with semicolons, and now there's one? Big deal.
Another found that 67% of British students – rebels without a clause – rarely use it.
Mostly I'm mad someone else used "Rebel Without a Clause"
Still, it’s been going strong for more than 500 years, so I doubt we’re going to see the end of the semicolon anytime soon.
At least not if I have anything to say about it.
One final note: it's one thing to use punctuation. It's another thing entirely to use it appropriately. I see writing all the time that demonstrates unease with even simpler marks; usually, these are commas, either put, in, where, they're, not, necessary (like a Shatner monologue) or left out entirely in which case the sentence just runs on and on without pause or breath causing the reader to become completely exhausted by the time they finally hit the full stop or as we call it in the US a period. |
November 26, 2025 at 9:55am November 26, 2025 at 9:55am
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Some things just amuse me too much not to share. Thing is, this is one of those times when you absolutely have to visit the link (which is from SoraNews24) in order to get the full effect. There are illustrations there that, were I to attempt to describe them, I would fail, and even if I didn't, you wouldn't believe me.
Kids, hell. I want one for myself.
Christmas is just around the corner, and many of us have children in our families that are really hard to shop for.
Another argument for remaining childfree.
It’s difficult to keep up with the changing trends, and even if you do, how can you know which Skibidi figure the kid already has?
Well, if they're YOUR kids, why aren't you keeping track of these things?
It’s a problem our reporter Masanuki Sunakoma was facing, so he decided to check out Amazon Japan for some ideas. However, after years of seeking out the lowest-rated items sold there, his algorithm is a little skewed towards the abysmal.
This amuses me almost as much as the toy itself: how if you look for low-rated items on purpose, the site's algorithm will feed you only crap. Well, worse crap than usual.
The body of the train is see-through, and having young ones view the rotating gears inside is thought to help them develop early mechanical concepts, imagination, cognitive ability, and motor skills.
I don't think their "cognitive" pun was intentional, so I'm making it intentional.
Criticisms mentioned that “It has the vibe of a seedy Shinjuku bar,” “It spins so fast you can’t see the gears moving,” and “The music is like weird EDM, so it doesn’t seem like it’s good for education.”
On the contrary, what could be better for education than weird EDM?
The locomotive began to emit brilliant colors in all directions.
Maybe I should get one for my cats.
And then it started spinning wildly…
"Oh hell no" -my cats
This, by the way, is where you really need to go to the site for full effect. There are gifs.
In addition to rotating at insane speeds, it played some sort of ear-splittingly loud Chinese techno music.
As I've mentioned before, I run a script blocker, and there are certain domains I refuse to let through. So I don't know if they reproduced the music. It's disappointing to me that I don't get to hear this thing.
It begged the question, what is a train? He wasn’t familiar with any actual trains that spun around in one place and sounded like a rave in Kowloon. Sure, it was shaped like a train, but is that enough to call it a train? We don’t call a train-shaped cookie a “train,” so why should this be one?
Ah, yes, the eternal philosophical question. How do you say "ceci n'est pas un train" in Japanese?
In that way, maybe this was an educational toy, but not in the sense of mechanics. Rather, it made Masanuki consider existentialist principles...
The world needs philosophers as well as engineers.
And if that's not enough contemplation of the absurdities of existence for you, consider this other article I found on the same site:
Hello Kitty says hello to Godzilla in new kaiju/Sanrio crossover collaboration
Ah, yes. My most hated and most loved Japanese creations, together at last. Makes me re-examine my life as well as all of existence. |
November 25, 2025 at 8:28am November 25, 2025 at 8:28am
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Unless you've been living under the proverbial rock, you've probably heard of this phenomenon. I know I have, even though I have no offspring. From Atlas Obscura, though this time it's not about a physical place:
Admittedly, I'm skeptical. How is repeating what other people are doing "creativity?" Seems like the polar opposite of that.
Have you heard about 2025’s word of the year? It’s causing a bit of controversy because it’s actually not a word. “67” (pronounced six-seven) is all the rage with Gen Alpha, a phrase often accompanied by an up and down hand movement.
If not, you've heard about it now.
...it has become inescapable in 2025, causing outright bans on the phrase in classrooms as well as extensive head scratching by parents.
Because everyone knows that the way to keep kids from doing something is to ban it.
Oh, wait, sorry, that's the way to ensure they keep doing it.
But other than its initial spread via TikTok, there’s not much that separates “67” from centuries of absurd, nonsensical kid culture.
The internet, and is associated social media, spreads these things faster, and to audiences that might not otherwise have been exposed. But yeah, when I first heard about it, I was like "Hmpf. Kids these days." Then my second thought was "What about non-Anglophone kids? Are they aping this meme too?"
The Opies were a British couple who dedicated their lives to the study of children’s folklore, games, traditions, and beliefs.
Kids are gonna kid, and people gonna people. Our tech has changed drastically since their research, but, like the Ship of Theseus, humanity keeps the same general shape. So yeah, even stuff from the middle of last century can still have relevance.
Part of their obsession with documenting children’s traditions had to do with refuting an idea, common at the time, that television and mass media was “ruining” childhood. (Sound familiar?)
As the article notes, they were amateurs, albeit very effective ones. The practice of doing science, or science-adjacent research, shouldn't start with the conclusion you want. It taints the science. It would be like if someone did a study on childhood cannabis use with the express purpose of showing that it's a good thing.
Still, they were challenging others' unfounded assumptions, so I can forgive them.
The Opies didn’t use the word “meme” because that term wasn’t coined until the 1980s, with Richard Dawkins’ work on “the selfish gene,” but they were essentially demonstrating that these rhymes were memes, being passed along from child to child in a long unbroken chain, being modified somewhat from generation to generation as they mutated to survive.
This also has relevance to folklore in general. No doubt, when writing was invented, some old folks would have been like "Damn, this newfangled 'writing' crap is going to rot the kids' minds, you mark my words!"
So is “67” a sign that screens and algorithms are “ruining childhood” with “brainrot?” Far from it—this trend actually shows that despite a screen-mediated culture kids are actually managing to generate new entries in the playground canon.
And if you want them to just fucking stop already, the answer isn't to ban it. It's to adopt it yourself, and use it unironically around children. Then it stops being relevant to them.
Problem is, they'll just come up with some other way to annoy and baffle adults. And the cycle continues. The only saving grace is that, barring global catastrophe, most of them will grow up eventually, and some of them will have kids, and those kids will find ways to annoy and baffle them in turn. |
November 24, 2025 at 8:11am November 24, 2025 at 8:11am
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Considering the source, I wouldn't trust this Mental Floss article to be fully accurate or complete. Still, I found it amusing, and I never let facts get in the way of amusing.
First item of amusement: "No capes!" was a famous line from The Incredibles, which, being a Pixar thing, is a Disney property.
Second: The visual image of someone impersonating (would that even be the right word?) Goofy.
In 1967, the same year the Pirates of the Caribbean ride debuted, park officials a Disneyland made a curious declaration: They were banning all “hippies” from the premises.
Gotta admit, that's on-brand.
“If we allowed people with weird outfits into the park, that might cause other patrons to make derogatory remarks, and that could lead to trouble,” a park spokesperson told the Associated Press.
And, of course, they get to decide what's "weird" and what isn't. Which is rich coming from a company whose mascot is a talking mouse wearing clown shoes and white gloves.
After another generational skirmish in 1970, this one involving antiwar and pro-marijuana demonstrators taking over Tom Sawyer Island, the park also banned "long-haired youths" from the premises.
Today, those former "long-haired youths" are the ones fussing about "kids these days."
But there are still a number of prohibited items and behaviors at Disneyland and its sibling park, Disney World...
As always, it pays to know what the rules are so you can follow them or break them as you see fit.
The rest of the article is basically a list of items, clothing and behaviors that are considered contraband. I'll just highlight a few.
Weapons
No surprise there. But, you know, for some of us, anything can be a weapon.
Marijuana
What? The only way most adults can even deal with the parks?
Selfie Sticks
Good.
Non-Coast Guard Approved Flotation Devices/Swim Noodles (Prohibited only at water parks}
Perfectly okay to bring one onto Space Mountain, I suppose.
From the "activities" list:
Sales
So much for healthy capitalistic competition.
Commercial Photography Photos or video for commercial (non-private) purposes, i.e. shooting a film
Especially if you're with MGM, Warner, or Paramount, or whatever combination/permutation of Disney competition exists these days (I can't keep up with all the mergers, buyouts, and spinoffs).
From "clothing," though I don't think some of these qualify as such, like:
Objectionable Tattoos
Presumably, Daffy Duck would count, being from a competitor and all.
Multiple Layers of Clothing
Fortunately, both of Disney's US parks are located where layers aren't usually required. Not included on the list but presumably implied: no clothing at all. Unless, of course, you're a duck named Donald. Or Howard. Hm. A Donald/Howard crossover could be EPIC. I should put that on my list of pitches to Kevin Feige along with the Squirrel Girl movie.
Honestly, most of these prohibitions are understandable, if not from a safety perspective, at least from the point of view of them wanting people to focus on the theme park itself and ensure that all money spent flows to Disney alone.
I just feel sorry for anyone who visits who just happens to look like Cinderella or Ariel. Or Goofy. |
November 23, 2025 at 8:50am November 23, 2025 at 8:50am
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Here's something, from Open Culture, that I'm definitely unqualified to comment on. And yet, here I am, commenting on it.
To many of us, the concept of solitary confinement may not sound all that bad: finally, a reprieve from the siege of social and professional requests.
The article, and its accompanying video (which, for once, I actually watched—it's relatively short, and the narration is clear and almost soothing) concentrates on the effects of involuntary solitary confinement, such as one might experience in prison.
But according to the animated TED-Ed lesson above, written by psychiatrist and correctional mental health expert Terry Kupers, the negatives of the experience would well outweigh the positives.
I suspect many people here in the US would be like, "So what? These are bad people. Why should I care if they experience mental anguish?" I think such an attitude misses a lot, like how we also like to say that improvements in mental health might do something to reduce crime.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, isolation takes its greatest toll when imposed against the will of the isolated, and even more so when imposed for an indefinite duration.
And I think, again without much evidence because this is so not my field, that there's a big difference between choosing to be alone and being forced into it by external circumstances. One's level of introversion must play into this somehow; some of us are more well-suited to alone time than others. And there's also the confounding variable of simply having something to occupy our time, be it writing or video games or that old shut-in standby, solitaire.
I ask myself: is it better to be forced to be alone, or forced to be surrounded by potentially dangerous people? Because that's what I imagine happens in prisons.
While traveling in the United States, Charles Dickens bore witness to the punishment by solitary confinement already in effect in American prisons, coming away with the impression that it was “worse than any torture of the body.”
All due respect to Mr. Dickens, but how would he know?
After much research on the matter, Kupers has come to the conclusion that, in fact, it “does immense damage that is contrary to rehabilitation, while failing to reduce prison violence.”
And I'm not going to argue about it with someone of his credentials. I only question the applicability of this to ordinary, non-forced situations, such as what we experience outside of the penal system.
On the other side of the equation, though, we have Jean-Paul Sartre, who elegantly noted, in a stage play: "L'enfer, c'est les autres," usually translated to English as "Hell is other people." In the context of that play, Huis Clos or, again the common translation, No Exit, the line is delivered from literal Hell, by someone who is forced for all eternity into close proximity to two other people, specifically selected for incompatibility.
One could stretch Sartre's metaphor into life, and note that we're stuck here with a lot of incompatible people. And yet, sometimes, we do connect to others. The important point, I think, is having the choice. And, for me at least, having the ability to retreat into solitude for some period after spending time even with people that I like.
As with many things in life, it's about balance. Which is, ironically, commonly used as the symbol for justice. |
November 22, 2025 at 9:33am November 22, 2025 at 9:33am
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For some reason, this important site wasn't included in my Paris tour guide. Oh, well, I guess that's what Atlas Obscura is for.
What does a urinal have to do with La Résistance? Other than the French being pissed off, that is.
Just outside the notorious La Santé prison in Paris's 14th arrondissement lies the city's last public urinal, or "la dernière vespasienne de Paris", as its accompanying plaque declares.
One amusing thing is that the plaque, a picture of which accompanies the article, refuses to translate "vespasienne" in the English description.
It is possible that it is described somewhere in the plaque's text, but it was too small for me to read in the pic.
In the early 19th century, public urinals began to be installed all across Paris to fight the city's unsanitary conditions, which had led to various epidemics...
What's remarkable is that, at that early date, they made the connection between unsanitary conditions and disease. Not everyone figured that out. London didn't, not until the middle of that century.
...(public toilets for women were not installed, as they were deemed to take up too much room on public thoroughfares).
So much for egalité.
They were named vespasiennes after the Roman emperor Vespasian, who famously placed a "urine tax" on the purchase of urine collected from public toilets which was commonly used by laundries and leather tanneries for its ammonia.
I know you were wondering. And yes, I have heard that this was absolutely a thing.
These public urinals unintentionally created a public place for secretive activity, leading to their use by clandestine homosexual men as early as 1862, and as place to exchange information for those in the Resistance during WWII.
Possibly even both at the same time.
In 1876, right-wing Catholic politician Eugène de Germiny was arrested in what became a political scandal for engaging in what was termed indecent exposure with an 18 year-old man...
Gosh, that sounds familiar.
Even stranger subcultures, such as 'soupeurs', who enjoyed dipping stale bread in others' urine evolved around these odd pillars of Parisian society.
You know I hardly ever use emoticons in blog entries. I prefer to let my writing do the emoting. I have nothing against them, of course; just, you know, time and place and all that.
That said...
Most vespasiennes were dismantled from the 1960's onwards, and today the only one remaining is the one outside La Santé prison.
You don't need to know much French to know that "santé" translates to "health." What that has to do with a prison is not clear to me, even when I looked at the Wiki entry for the institution. Was the prison named after an adjacent street, or vice-versa? I'm not going on a research journey today, though. I need to do something else to distract me from that last mental image. |
November 21, 2025 at 9:22am November 21, 2025 at 9:22am
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Notice how almost everything sucks now? With the exception of here, of course.
Don't tell me that "what we're supposed to do about it" is "go outside." And the next person who tells me to touch grass is going to get a mouthful of it.
The concept of enshittification, as coined by the author and activist Cory Doctorow, just feels right. Whether you’re searching on Google, shopping on Amazon, or scrolling on Facebook, large platforms often feel like they’re not trying to bring us value so much as extract every bit of value they can out of us.
Well, yeah. That was the inevitable result when the internet stopped being about hobbyists and started being about trying to make a fortune.
It wasn’t always like this, was it?
No, it wasn't. The frog in a pot thing comes to mind. You know, how you put a frog in a pot and set it to boil, and they don't notice the incremental heat changes until it's too late and you end up with cuisses de grenouille?
Except that doesn't really happen. The frog will notice and jump out if it can. Humans? Not so much.
On this episode of The Vergecast, Doctorow has an answer: no, it wasn’t always like this, and yes, we can get it back.
I don't believe the latter.
Doctorow’s new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, is filled with explanations about how large, successful, once user-focused products go wrong, and the ways in which regulators and competitors can make things better again.
Irony. See, one of the biggest problems is people trying to make money, and this... this is an ad.
Doctorow’s work focuses largely on bigger-picture regulatory issues and technical changes, and his book largely advocates for changes at those levels. There’s no rousing speech in Enshittification about how users need to demand better, embrace friction, shop local, or get off Zuckerberg’s platforms.
Good. I mean, we should do all those things (I haven't touched anything Meta in years), but it's like the environment: it's less about us peons than it is about the overlords.
But he’s also quick to say that the way things are is not your fault. And fixing it is not your problem. (Unless you have the power to change bad laws — then it’s very much your fault and your problem.)
The laws are always written in favor of the corporations. Always. At least in the US.
The good internet is still out there, he says, and we have to go get it back.
Well, Wikipedia is pretty close.
So, apparently there's a link somewhere on the siteto the actual interview. I didn't bother to check because I don't do podcasts. Which reminds me: Doctorow isn't the only one who can make up words. I can, too.
The word for the day, then, is: anachronym.
An anachronym, per my definition, is a word for the way we used to do things, that no longer applies to current technology. For example, "footage" in reference to video is an anachronym, because most video is no longer measured in feet of film shot. For that matter, "filming" is an anachronym. Another would be "dial" meaning phoning someone.
Well, another anachronym now is "podcast." You see any new iPods for sale? No? Then "podcast" is an anachronym. |
November 20, 2025 at 9:09am November 20, 2025 at 9:09am
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From a source I know little about, The Packer, here's some good news from the produce section.
Cool. Now do purple cows.
Eating the rainbow has become easier and more flavorful in recent years...
That phrase, "eating the rainbow," always cracks me up. Mainly because I knew this very cute chick in college who went to costume parties as Rainbow Brite.
...especially when it comes to anthocyanins — the purple pigment that’s in blueberries, blackberries, red grape skins, eggplant and now — thanks to genetic modification — the purple tomato.
I suppose it's too much to hope for that they transfer to red wines.
Nathan Pumplin...
One fat-fingered typo away from being the most awesome aptronym ever.
...is CEO of Norfolk Healthy Produce, the company behind the Empress Purple Tomato, a bioengineered tomato made by adding two genes from snapdragons.
Cue "mad scientist" memes.
These tomatoes are a rich source of antioxidants because the purple pigments are in the whole tomato, not just the skin.
More importantly, they look cool.
But the trained molecular biologist, who has worked for nearly 20 years in R&D and commercializing new types of plants that solve problems, says bringing a GMO purple tomato to market has not been without challenges.
I'll bet. On the one side, you have people who have a knee-jerk reaction to anything "new." On the other, you have people who have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that whiffs of "artificial."
Adding to the challenge is the reality that most consumers don’t know what a GMO is, making education critical to driving demand for the purple tomato.
You know, I used to have a knee-jerk reaction, myself: that education would solve many problems. I have since lost my youthful naïveté on the subject, as I have learned that most people flat-out refuse to be educated.
While Pumplin says backlash against GMOs halted innovation and new product development for years, now he sees things coming full circle.
Education or not, sometimes, people just need time to get used to the ideas.
“We also have the Pinkglow pineapple from Del Monte on the market. We have the Arctic Apple, which is growing and doing very well in a lot of segments.”
That said, I'd draw the line at pink pineapple, myself.
Every bit of produce we eat has been genetically modified, either through the process of artificial selection or hybridization, or both. GMOs just continue that fine agricultural tradition. Could they be used for evil? Sure. All technology could. But that's no reason to have a blanket fear of genetic modification. |
November 19, 2025 at 9:07am November 19, 2025 at 9:07am
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Everyone's a nerd about something. Here's a language nerd with some negativity, from Upworthy:
Learning about language—whether diving into newfangled phrases taking over the current zeitgeist, or examining the unexpected threads that tie seemingly unrelated languages together throughout history—is endlessly fascinating. All at once, clues about humanity’s past, present, and future are revealed.
As with many things, I find this stuff fascinating, but I still have a lot to learn.
For instance, why do so many words with a negative connotation begin with the letter “n”? Sure, there are obvious exceptions, like nice, nifty, neat, etc., but when you think about not, never, nothing, nihilistic, nought, and yes, even the word negative itself…seems like a lot.
I have heard that "nice" started out kind of negative. It had the denotation that's now its sarcastic connotation, and wasn't at all a good thing to say about someone or something.
Also, this is one reason why I insist that the first decade of this century should be called the noughties.
In a short-and-sweet video, he explains that in the days of Old English, the word “ne,” meaning “not,” was used to negate, or give the opposite meaning, of virtually anything. N + one + “none,” n + either + "neither," and so on.
Spoiler: I didn't watch the video. I'm not giving clicks to portrait-oriented video. It's my little act of naughty rebellion.
Even with English words that were borrowed from Latin, as well as other non-English languages like French, German, Russian, and Sanskrit, we see this pattern. That’s because the Proto-Indo-European language, the mother of all these languages, also used the word “ne” to negate meaning.
As far as I know, French is the only surviving one of these languages to still use the word "ne." It also features double negatives as standard grammar, which I'm sure pisses off math nerds. Oh, wait, I'm a math nerd, too, and it doesn't piss me off.
If there are other languages that use it, feel free to contradict me there. Like I said, I still have a lot to learn.
However, just to complicate things a bit, we also see this in languages that did not originate from Proto-Indo-European, like Japanese and Vietnamese. This prompted a linguist by the name of Otto Jespersen in the late 1880s to theorize that there must be some primal association of negative feelings with the “n” sound.
I'd call it more "hypothesize" than "theorize," but I'm also a science nerd.
Over a hundred years later, researchers tested the theory, and found that this correlation was more of a coincidence.
So it never reached the level of "theory" as used in science.
Obviously, the biggest takeaway from all this is a new level of appreciation for the Knights that say Ni!
Well, obviously. Duh. |
November 18, 2025 at 10:25am November 18, 2025 at 10:25am
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Sometimes, I'll find something that's just too cool not to share. In the case of this AP article, you can take "cool" literally.
This is the AP website, so I don't think there would be any issues with malware or whatever; it's about as legit as it gets. And you really do need to go to the link, because the photo options here are severely limited.
Polar bears that have taken over an abandoned polar research station off Russia’s far eastern coast were intimately captured in drone footage by Vadim Makhorov.
I'm going to go ahead and guess that Vadim Makhorov is Russian. Not just from the name, but because not many people would willingly get that close to apex carnivores, and all of them are Russian.
The photographer was filming the landscape of Kolyuchin Island during a cruise in the Chukchi Sea in September, when he noticed polar bears using one of the abandoned buildings as a shelter.
I like to think that the polar bears were continuing arctic research there.
The rest of the article is, of course, photos (with captions), so not much else to say here. Just go look at the damn bears. |
November 17, 2025 at 8:54am November 17, 2025 at 8:54am
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All words are made up. Some were made up more recently than others. Here's Mental Floss with words that were, at some point, made up.
11 Real Words That Sound Totally Fake
Start sprinkling bumfuzzle, snickersnee, and collywobbles into everyday conversation—but maybe let quomodocunquizing rest in obsolescent peace where it belongs.
Now I want to start a band called Quomodocunquizing just to bring that one back. Difficulty: no musical talent. But it would be an appropriate name for a band, considering its definition (which you can find below or at the link).
The English language is well known for having complex rules about grammar and spelling, often loaded with exceptions and special use cases.
Except when it's not.
But the quirks of English don't stop at confusing grammar—our language also happens to be a treasure trove of words so delightfully absurd, so wonderfully preposterous, that they sound like they were plucked straight from the pages of a Dr. Seuss book or improvised during a comedy sketch.
Those are still words.
The words below are legitimate, dictionary-certified terms that have survived for centuries, passed down through generations of English speakers who apparently had a sense of humor about their vocabulary.
"Dictionary-certified" isn't the flex they think it is. All it means is enough people have used the word that it's included in the list.
A few are so obscure that even seasoned word nerds might not recognize them.
I will admit that some of them were obscure to me. Also that, after I post this, they'll fade back into my version of obscurity.
This list celebrates real words that might evoke a double-take—and will definitely make you want to slip them into your next conversation.
Or not. Language exists for communication. Throwing in words that hardly anyone knows the definition of is, at best, an exercise in ensuring that the context is sufficient to show their meaning; and at worst, a way to show off your erudicy.
Skipping a few here.
Bumfuzzle
Bumfuzzle is a verb meaning “to confuse, perplex or fluster.” It may be a variation on dumfound.
And here I thought this one was pretty well-known.
Snickersnee
Not to be confused, I suppose, for the sound the Vorpal Sword makes as it beheads the Jabberwock.
Wabbit
The etymology of this adjective, which comes from Scottish, is uncertain, but it means “weary or exhausted”...
Which Scottish, I wonder? Quick research doesn't give me an answer. (And yes, the article acknowledges the more modern definition of wabbit.)
Quomodocunquizing
Quomodocunquizing, a verb from the 1600s that combines the classical Latin word quōmodocunque with the suffix –izing, means “to make money by any means,” even if they’re questionable.
And even classical Latin took it from somewhere.
Kakorrhaphiophobia
This noun describes a fear of failure or defeat.
And if words could experience fear, this one would experience itself because I'm pretty sure this is the first I've ever heard of it.
More at the link. And now to do my best to forget most of these. |
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