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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. |
I covered our eight-legged friends in an entry recently: "What a Tangled Web"  . This is a different spider-written article from SciAm: Do People Really Swallow 8 Spiders a Year While They Sleep? Should we worry about arachnids crawling into our mouths while we’re in dreamland? Sure, go ahead. Worry about that. It's not like there's enough other stuff to worry about. Rod Crawford has heard plenty of firsthand accounts of spider-swilling slumberers. “Once or twice a year, someone tells me they once recovered a spider leg in their mouth,” says Crawford, the arachnid curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle. Yes, this is the same Rod Crawford (actually a spider in a trenchcoat and hat) who got quoted in the previous entry. Luckily for all of us, the “fact” that people swallow eight spiders in their sleep yearly isn’t true. Not even close. Yeah, it's more like eighty. Okay, yes, I'm kidding. But if you think it's "luckily for all of us," just think how much luckier it is for the spiders. Three or four spider species live in most North American homes, and they all tend to be found either tending their webs or hunting in nonhuman-infested areas. I'd say it's more like thirty or forty. Okay, I'm kidding again. During their forays, they usually don’t intentionally crawl into a bed because it offers no prey (unless it has bed bugs, in which case that person has bigger problems). Problems that can be solved by introducing spiders. Plus, many people would likely be awakened by the sensation of a spider crawling over their faces and into their mouths. Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night. Spider experts concede that a sleeping person could plausibly swallow a spider, but “it would be a strictly random event.” Given that we swallow a lot less while sleeping, and we sleep only about 1/3 of the time, I think it's far more likely to swallow one while awake. If this article doesn't put your nocturnal arachnophobia to rest, consider this: other arthropods don't have the same fear of us that spiders do. It's far more likely that you've swallowed a cockroach. |
| Huh, and here I thought Sam Vega was Vincent Vega's brother. From Big Think: Saṃvega: The urgent realization that you need a more meaningful life If you feel like you’re missing out on something bigger, you might be feeling saṃvega. Well, at least it's not an idiotic English portmanteau, like maybe, I don't know, "fearpression;" or another catchy acronym like FOMO. It is a feeling most of us will have experienced at some point, but we might not have called it by that name. So, what does saṃvega mean? The article has already answered this in the summary points at the top, but I'll indulge. Saṃvega is hard to define but it pops up again and again in philosophical literature. It might be called angst, absurdity, ennui, dissatisfaction, alienation, or existential dread. So, there are at least six synonymous words or phrases already in English. Got it. Saṃvega is that sense of unease that comes on when you think everything is pointless. Huh. I don't feel unease when I think everything is pointless. No, it's one of the few realizations that actually makes me smile. It's like... "Nothing matters. What a relief! Now I don't have to worry so much or create drama for other people!" Saṃvega is when you sense that there’s something more to the Universe you’re not quite tapping into — as if you’re dancing around some deeper and more meaningful truth that’s always just out of reach. My beer is usually just within reach. Have you ever worked incredibly hard for a long time toward a goal only to find out that, once you’ve accomplished it, things feel a bit flat? That is saṃvega. Okay, now, that, I can relate to. But it doesn't seem nearly the same thing as angst, absurdity, etc. It is there when Karl Marx talks about the alienation of workers from their work. Oh, so it's about how labor is entitled to what it produces? It is in Friedrich Nietzsche’s angry tirade against the social and moral norms of our time. Our time isn't Nietzsche's time. In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the titular character exemplifies saṃvega. Huh, and here I thought he was just being Russian. Like Ivan, saṃvega is a disease with a great many remedies. These solutions or cures for saṃvega are known as pasada. Broadly, these pasadas fall into four categories: And I won't reiterate the categories in detail here. To summarize: religion, existentialism, absurdity, and nihilism. Well, for me, religion is right out; it just makes shit up and offers false hope. Existentialism, as the article points out, encourages us to find our own meaning internally, which, okay, fine, whatever works. Nihilism is... well, let's just say it's a trap. Absurdity, though? Leaving aside for a moment that up there, they just said that absurdity was a synonym for samvega, at least with absurdity we get to have a laugh every once in a while, and that's something I absolutely believe in. But hey, that's me. I know everyone's different, which is one reason we keep going around and around about "meaning" and "purpose:" everyone has a different point of view on the subject. Once I realized that we're all just making this shit up as we go along, I learned to relax and enjoy it. |
| How about a lesson in comparative linguistics disguised as an article about tacos? A recent one from Gastro Obscura: There’s No Right Way to Say ‘Taco’ An exploration of the ways our tongues—and our pride—twist around foreign words, and what that says about how we want to be seen. I'll give a pass to the subhead reference to "foreign words," as the site is obviously aimed at US English speakers. But it occurred to me that even if the headline is correct, and there's no right way to say 'taco,' there are myriad wrong ways to say it: 'extricated,' 'ashtray,' 'flugel,' and 'dimethylethylpropynol,' to name but a few. It wasn’t so much that my friend, a Brit who has lived in Los Angeles for many years, said the word “taco” differently than I do. The confounding thing was that it was difficult for him to hear the difference, and that when he could distinguish it, he insisted that his way was more correct, closer to the way a Spanish speaker would say it. He pronounced it “tack-oh.” If Brits (and Australians and Canadians, etc.) didn't pronounce things differently to USofAmericans, there wouldn't be distinguishable accents. One wonders if he also called his mom 'mum.' “There’s something very strange going on with that particular ‘A,’” says Lynne Murphy, a lexicologist at the University of Sussex who explores the differences between British and American English on her blog, Separated by a Common Language, and further in her book, The Prodigal Tongue. Oh, so this is an ad. Well, it's an ad for a blog and a book, so I can't fault it too much. The way the Brits pronounce “taco,” as well as “paella” (pie-elluh, with the English L rather than the Spanish LL), “salsa” (the first vowel rhymes with “gal,” the second with “duh”), and “Nicaragua” (nick-uh-rag-you-uh), among others, is a glaring siren of weirdness to an American ear. I remember the first time I heard pasta pronounced "pass-tuh" instead of "pahs-tuh," but I can't remember if that was British or just variant American pronunciation. What’s going on is a complex blend of tongue positioning, imperial history, code-switching, language exposure and accommodation, and an unconscious, or uncomfortably conscious, desire not to seem like you just got back from a semester abroad in Barthelona and brought with you an inability to see your friends rolling their eyes. Oh, imperialism gets thrown into the mix. I'm shocked. Shocked, I say. Okay, not that shocked. I don't think I've ever actually heard it pronounced 'tack-oh' instead of 'tah-co.' What I do remember is that people who live in Nevada pronounce the first a like in 'van,' while non-Nevadans tend to pronounce the same vowel like in 'father.' Nevada is, of course, also a word of Spanish origin (from what little I understand, it translates to "snow," and if you're wondering why a state famous for being a desert is named after snow, just remember its western border is a very tall, usually snow-capped, mountain range). My point being that yes, we know that English speakers often mangle the vowel sounds of other languages, and vice-versa. And don't get me started on the dozens of ways different languages interpret the sound of the consonant 'r.' At any rate, the article dives into some of the vowel (and consonant) differences between languages, and even different dialects of the same language. I find it interesting, but no need to quote a lot of it. As is often the case in linguistics, it’s simpler to say how the British and American pronunciations are different than to explain why they ended up this way. One of the more prevalent theories among the linguists and Anglophones I spoke to was a basic lack of exposure. The U.S. has around 41 million native Spanish speakers, and around another 12 million identifying as bilingual... Whereas, as the article notes, Brits are more likely to be exposed to French instead of Spanish. This is a concept called language accommodation, in which speakers tend to modify the way they speak depending on the person or people they’re speaking to. Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty cool superpower to have. This ties in to the code-switching concept mentioned above. Trying to impress someone? You might try to use longer, less common words to seem more intelligent. "Devour feculence." For some Americans, policing global Mexican food is a bit of a hobby. I feel kinda good that this is the first I've heard of this. I mean, I can understand Americans (in this case meaning "US citizens") having strong opinions on pizza, which is actually an American food, and hamburgers—I certainly do—but it strikes me as weird that we'd get all up in arms about other countries' interpretation of food associated with another country. It'd be like, I don't know, a Japanese person pushing away a dish of fries with gravy and curds and proclaiming "this is not poutine!" A word like “taco” is on its way to becoming, or is perhaps already, simply an English word. Oh, it definitely is an English word. Sure, it's of Mexican Spanish origin, but it's also an English word. Like "hors d'œuvres" is an English phrase, despite it being so French that it might as well be wearing a beret, carrying a baguette, and smoking a Gauloise. It's just a more recent loanword, so we're more aware of its linguistic/culinary origin than we are of words like, say, beef (French) or chicken (German). One fascinating aspect of English food words is that the reason we have both "chicken" and "poultry," for example, is that we got the animal words from German but the food words from French, probably because the French are demonstrably better cooks. (Please don't cut me if you're a German cook. German beer is superior; be proud of that.) One thing never brought up in the article: what is the literal translation of "taco" in English? I don't mean the food; I think we can mostly agree on what constitutes a delicious taco, despite differences of opinion on what should and should not go into one. But the word came from somewhere; apparently, that "somewhere" is something akin to the English "plug" or "wad." Why it came from that particular meaning, I can't be arsed to investigate right now. Anyway, I had no idea this was even a thing. I'm pretty sure I've only ever heard it pronounced "tah-co." And now I'm hungry; thanks, Gastro Obscura. |
| Anyone who's followed me for some time knows I appreciate Ben Franklin. I hope my hometown (known as Thomas Jefferson's stomping grounds) won't call me a traitor for it. But everyone has skeletons in their closet and, as this older Smithsonian article points out, sometimes they're literal: Why Were There So Many Skeletons Hidden in Benjamin Franklin’s Basement? During restorations in the 1990s, more than 1,200 pieces of bone surfaced beneath the founding father’s London home This being an article originally released way back in 2013, I had to check to see if I've covered it before. Not in this blog, certainly, but in the previous one. I didn't find it, so perhaps I didn't. Well, Smithsonian did an unspecified update last year, so even if I did feature it at some point, it was almost certainly before the update. The future founding father left his English home and returned to America in 1775. Two centuries later, bones from more than a dozen bodies were found in the basement, where they had been buried in a mysterious, windowless room beneath the garden. Well, I can understand how that might seem suspicious. If anyone found purely hypothetical bodies buried beneath my purely hypothetical garden, I couldn't blame them for backing away from me slowly. The skeletons had gone unnoticed until the 1990s, when historians decided to turn Franklin’s old haunt into a museum. Presumably British historians, which, when you think about it, is about as weird as American Southerners putting up statues of Union generals. Franklin was a storied revolutionary and high-ranking Freemason, so it’s easy to wonder what dark secrets he may have hidden in his basement chamber. Yeah, like, was he fighting the Revolutionary War one Brit at a time, before the war even started? But the truth, it turns out, isn’t quite so dark. I am both relieved and disappointed. “The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin Franklin’s young friend and protégé, William Hewson,” as the Guardian’s Maev Kennedy wrote in 2003. Franklin was a lot of things, but I don't think "murderer" was one. One never really knows, though. Hewson was an anatomist who began his career as a student of William Hunter, a famous obstetrician who also studied anatomy. Following a dispute, Hewson parted ways with his teacher and started his own anatomy school at 36 Craven, where his mother-in-law, Margaret Stevenson, was the landlady. Imagine going up to your mother-in-law and going "Can I rent out your house to desecrate corpses?" In Franklin’s time, the study of anatomy was an ethically ambiguous business. I have a strong feeling that religious doctrines had a lot to do with that. “[Franklin] was a champion of science—he was supportive of young researchers and others that could exemplify his passion for knowledge and innovation,” Balisciano told Discover magazine. “He probably loved the idea that this scientific work would be going on.” Obviously speculation, but it tracks. In 1774, a 34-year-old Hewson died of sepsis, which he had contracted by accidentally cutting himself during a procedure. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think the idea of diseases spread through invisible microbes really caught on until the following century. While previous generations had some inkling, there was no science backing them up, just empiricism.So, I'm not sure if the mystery is truly solved, but at least there's a plausible explanation that doesn't involve Ben Franklin being an early Jack the Ripper. |
| Yes, sometimes I find an article about actual writing instead of just writing about an article. This one, especially helpful to fellow nonfiction writers, is from Mental Floss: What ‘Sic’ Means—And How To Use It Correctly The way writers use the word ‘sic’ is a little more nuanced than its literal meaning Of course, I knew what 'sic' translates to from a very early age, being a Virginian. "Sic Semper Tyrannis" is our state motto, and it's on the flag right under the boob. But it's a little different when used on its own, in the service of clarifying quoted material. You’re perusing a news article when there, right in the middle of a quote, is the word sic encased in brackets. Since this is far from the first article you’ve ever read, maybe you already know what sic signifies: that the word or phrase directly preceding it hasn’t been altered from the original quote—even though it might be misspelled or simply a strange word choice. I've used it myself, though not without wondering at its utility when posting stuff on the internet. I'd assume that any quote I read online has been copy/pasted (it's what I do), so any errors or typos get copied exactly. Probably no need for the three-letter editorial insertion, and it often feels like I'm just being smug, as in "This is an error I wouldn't make, and I caught it, ain't I smart?" But why sic? The shortest possible answer to that question is this: Because Latin. It's often called a dead language, but I prefer to think of it as a zombie shuffling across the written word. An undead language. It literally means “thus” or “so,” as in sic semper tyrannis, “thus ever to tyrants.” In case you were still wondering what our state motto meant. It was also the most famous line quoted by actor John Wilkes Booth. But that hasn’t stopped people from coming up with a slew of “backronyms” that describe it in slightly more detail: “spelling is correct,” “said in copy,” “said in context,” etc. Okay, first of all, I see what you did there with your sneakly little zombie Latin "etc." Second, backronyms annoy me. Sure, they serve a mnemonic purpose, but then you get people believing and insisting that "tips" came from "to insure prompt service" (it certainly did not) or that "fuck" came from "for unlawful carnal knowledge" or "fornicating under consent of the King" (it absolutely, positively, did not.) The only exceptions for my annoyance are humorous ones, like Ford (found on road, dead) or Chevrolet (cracked heads, every valve rattles, oil leaks every time). I doubt anyone actually believes those car brands started out as acronyms. As for when you might want to use it, there are a couple different scenarios. One is when a quote features a typo, a misspelling, or a grammatical error. One of my smuggest uses for it is when I catch someone doing something like mistaking "its" for "it's" or vice-versa (dammit, zombie!). Sic can also come in handy if you’re writing something that the reader might accidentally interpret as a mistake. That's a little less obvious, but the article provides an example. As the Columbia Journalism Review’s Merrill Perlman put it in 2014, sic “can come off as snarky, giving a sense of ‘we know better,’ at the expense of the original author.” Which is exactly what I'd expect someone hit with a sic to say. In 2019, the Associated Press Stylebook announced that it would henceforth retire sic for good. Yeah, let me know when The New Yorker follows suit. “Most people don’t speak, off the cuff, in grammatically perfect sentences,” the Stylebook tweeted. Okay, but what about written works? We tend to hold them to a higher standard, especially nonfiction works. If I had to slog through a technical paper written in the style of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, I'd give up. Hell, I gave up on Faulkner. For example, if a source says “Using sic make the writer seem insufferably smug,” you could update “make” to “make[s]” without employing sic and proving your source’s point. Nah, I'd rather be insufferably smug. There are, as always, exceptions. Not every technical error in writing results in an ambiguous meaning. Like when someone uses "it's" incorrectly, where it's obviously meant to be a possessive and not a contraction. But that error is so egregious, I'm going to call it out anyway. Which, of course, guarantees that I'll mess it up sometimes, and the zombies will come for my brains. |
| This Bloomberg CityLab article is two years old, but climate change doesn't work that fast, so it's probably still relevant. While a fascinating exercise, the headline is a bit misleading. A Cross-Country Road Trip Where It's Always 70 Degrees An updated map from climate scientist Brian Brettschneider provides year-long interior and coastal routes that span more than 7,000 miles. The misleading bit is the "always 70 degrees" thing (I'm giving the use of Fahrenheit a pass because the article is very clearly US-oriented). But there's no need to be too pedantic about it. For travelers in search of the perfect weather, a climate scientist in Anchorage, Alaska, has mapped out the ultimate US road trip where the temperature is always 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The maps included in the article clarify: the routes follow "70°F Normal High Temperature." His original trips span more than 9,000 miles coast to coast for the contiguous US and more than 13,000 with an Alaska stop — the latter also draws on data from Environment Canada. Why Hawaii was excluded is left as an exercise for the reader. Both of the new routes manage to stay below 8,000 miles, unless travelers opt for a “connector segment” that passes through Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia in April. I'd recommend that segment. Nice scenery. As an avid mapmaker who has made thousands and thousands of maps typically focused on climate, he says it’s hard to know what part of his work will resonate with people. But the overlap between climate and the road trip caught fire. As I said above, it probably doesn't change much in two years. But over longer time frames, sure. Like the first time, Brettschneider says while making the map was a fun exercise, he won’t be making the trip, but he would be interested in hearing from anyone who is planning to do so. It sounds like something I'd do, even though I consider 70°F to be entirely too cold, but I have cats to take care of. |
| Today, from PopSci, evidence that the US is actually #1 at something other than gun violence and imprisonment: US ranks first in swearing ‘Some may find it disappointing,’ said the new study’s Australian co-author. I especially love how the article anticipates the Krakatoa-scale explosion of doubt coming from Down Under, and states right up front in the sub-head that one of the authors was Australian. While the headline filled me with great joy, as usual, I can't just take a headline's word for this shit. Congratulations, United States. The nation may lag behind in healthcare, education, and life expectancy, but Americans still reign supreme in at least one way—swearing like a bunch of drunken sailors. My father was very careful, as a sailor, to avoid getting too drunk or swearing excessively. While I respect that, I've traveled a different path. Linguists in Australia recently analyzed the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE), a massive database containing over 1.9 billion words from 1.8 million web pages across 340,000 websites in 20 English-speaking countries. Oh, so they're only talking about written works. It's entirely possible that Australia still has the top spot with spoken cuss words, so calm down, kangaroos. “Rather than being a simple, easily definable phenomenon, vulgarity proves to be a complex and multifaceted linguistic phenomenon,” Schweinberger and Monash University co-author Kate Burridge wrote in the journal Lingua. I know people like to say, "What's the big deal? It's just words." Yeah, well, if words are just words, there should be no problem with ethnic or religious slurs, right? No. Words have power. Yes, we give them that power. But the power is there. “Some may find it disappointing, but the research found the United States and Great Britain ranked ahead of Australia in terms of using vulgar language online,” Schweinberger said in an accompanying statement. Now, I can think of one possible reason why the results skewed the way they did: while, as I noted, words have power, they have different power in different cultures. It's entirely possible that, in the US and UK, we have a greater awareness of the base nature of certain words, so using them signals a breaking of a taboo. The taboo (which is a word introduced into English from Tongan by Captain James Cook, the same guy who was the first European to visit Australia) has different strength depending on location. One of the study authors offers a different hypothesis: “One possible explanation is that Australians are more conservative when they write online but not so much when they are face-to-face,” he said. “Australians really see vulgarity, swearing and slang as part of our culture—we’re very invested in it.” Well, then, I guess someone needs to do a goddamned follow-up study. Despite its limitation (focusing on writing rather than speaking), I find the study amusing. As with most studies of this nature, I wouldn't take it to be the Absolute Truth, but at least it's evidence that the US is actually best at something besides fucking everyone in the metaphorical arse. |
| From PopSci, modern alchemy: Refrigerator-sized machine makes gasoline out of thin air The Aircela acts like a mini direct air capture facility, sucking up carbon dioxide and then synthesizing it into real, usable gasoline for cars. When you run a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, in ideal principle, the exhaust consists of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor (in reality, of course, nothing is ideal, so you get other chemicals from incomplete combustion). So the idea that one could, with the proper setup and energy input, reverse this, doesn't seem completely farfetched. And yet, reading this article, every fiber of my being cried out "fraud." In 2022, transportation was responsible for an estimated 28 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The majority of those emissions came from everyday gas-powered cars. Put another way, nearly 3/4 of greenhouse gas emissions came from something other than transportation. Most Americans also still just aren’t interested in ditching their gas guzzlers to save the planet. But what if they didn’t have to? It wouldn't save the planet. At best, it would slow down the destruction. (Yes, yes, I know, "the planet will be fine." "Save the planet" really means "protect the biosphere.") That’s the alluring—if wildly ambitious—vision being presented by New York–based fuels startup Aircela. Earlier this month, the company announced it had created the world’s first functional machine capable of generating real, usable car gasoline “directly from the air.” The article is fairly recent, so the announcement would have been in May. Aircela’s new device, roughly the size of a commercial refrigerator, combines direct air capture (DAC) with on-site fuel synthesis to create gasoline using just air, water, and renewable energy. No fossil fuels, they say, are required. You know, it occurs to me that this technology (if it's real, which, to reiterate, I seriously doubt) could be used for more important things. The manufacture of ethanol, specifically. Aircela demonstrated the process, making gasoline directly from air, in front of a live audience in New York. David Copperfield once made the Statue of Liberty disappear in front of a live audience in New York. Also, alchemists used sleight-of-hand to "prove" to their patrons that they've turned lead into gold. Though most would describe this proof of concept as a “prototype,” company co-founder and CEO Eric Dahlgren takes some umbrage with that label. Sure, go against basic English word usage because it offends you. Is it in mass-production yet? No? Then it's a prototype. “We didn’t build a prototype. We built a working machine,” Dahlgren said in a statement. “We want people to walk away knowing this isn’t too good to be true—it actually works.” It's the first one. It's a prototype. Aircela’s device essentially functions as a compact, portable direct carbon capture facility (DAC) unit. Carbon capture generally refers to the practice of removing carbon dioxide from sources like smokestacks or fossil fuel power plants. Don't get me wrong; I'd love to be wrong. About this. But it really does sound like fakery. A spokesperson from Aircela told Popular Science that their machine is designed to capture 10 kgs of CO₂ each day. From that, it can produce 1 gallon of gasoline. The machine can store up to 17 gallons of fuel in its tank. Yes, we Americans can switch easily from one system of measurement to another even in the same paragraph. That's a superpower. In other words, at least in its current form, the device wouldn’t be capable of filling up a car’s tank with gas overnight. That doesn't seem insurmountable. If it's real. But okay, let's assume for a moment, for the sake of discussion, that it works as advertised, and it's possible to create and distribute a reasonably-sized and -priced machine that turns air into gasoline/petrol. Now, think about how large oil corporations would feel about that, and what lengths they might go through to stop it from cutting into their profits. At the very least, they hand over a few million dollars for the patent and then... sit on it. Cynical? Damn right I'm cynical. It's hardly the first time someone has claimed to pull a rabbit out of thin air. |
| From Big Think, a bit about stuff in space. Confirmed at last: exoplanets found around nearest single star Barnard’s star, the closest singlet star system to ours, has long been a target for planet-hunters. We’ve finally confirmed it: they exist! Couple of things right off the bat: First, the "nearest single star" thing might be ambiguous; the nearest star to the Sun is the appropriately named (for now) Proxima Centauri, but it's in a triple-star system. Two, Barnard's Star doesn't have a Latin or Arabic name because it's too small (about 1/5 the size of the Sun) and faint to see without a telescope, so it was a more recent discovery. Presumably by some guy named Barnard. And third (I know I said "couple;" so what), it's roughly half again as far away from us as the Centaurus triplet. That out of the way, the discovery of exoplanets there is cool, and a testament to scientific tenacity. After more than a century of searching, and a couple of prominent false positives, we’ve finally discovered that it does have planets of its own, after all. Here’s the story behind the discovery. The article indeed goes into the story, which is a good example of science being self-correcting. Barnard’s star was also the alleged site of the very first claimed exoplanet detection: all the way back in the 1960s. That claim, as noted, didn't hold up under further observation. That's nothing new in astronomy. Hell, early planet searches focused on our solar system, and there were even spurious sightings of the hypothetical inner planet they dubbed "Vulcan," not to be confused with the fictional one Spock is from, before those were found to be in error. But we shouldn’t be discouraged by “false detections” in our search for bona fide planets around other stars; just because a scientific endeavor like planet-finding is difficult doesn’t mean we should assume that there aren’t any planets at all! Instead, we should demand that we get better data, and use that data to actually determine whether there are planets present or not, and if so, what their properties are. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, we were pretty certain about extrasolar planets existing long before one was detected. But it's always good to have confirmation. And mistakes often lead to refined methods, which, in this case, paid off. Well, probably. It needs to be confirmed independently, too. This would represent a fascinating find, if confirmed. First off, these four planets would be just a little interior to the so-called habitable zone of its star: where a planet with an Earth-like atmosphere would have the right temperatures for liquid water on its surface. And this is where many readers might get a case of runaway imagination. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but none of the above should be stretched to "there's a habitable planet around Barnard's Star," which in turn leads to speculation about alien civilizations or, worse, the assumption that "habitable" means "we could move there," which it absolutely does not. The point isn't that we shouldn't be looking for aliens; we absolutely should. But let's remember that liquid water is necessary, but maybe not sufficient, for life as we know it, and, above all, that life doesn't have to produce the kind of species that builds telescopes and rockets. In other words, no, we haven't found Earth II. Even though there are reasons to disfavor the notion that these planets might have Earth-like atmospheres, or any substantial atmosphere at all, it’s a remarkable feat to detect them at all. And that's the real point here. While I like science fiction as much as the next person, and more than most, I don't like seeing the popular media sensationalizing discoveries like this. The truth is sensational enough. |
| All that text in my blog intro? It's nice to have some verification. From Mongabay: The report focuses on Central America. As noted at the top of the article: "Unlike temperate regions with diverse scavenger communities, the neotropical forest system showed vultures as the primary vertebrate decomposers..." I had to look up "neotropical," and apparently it simply refers to New World tropical zones. Anyway, point is, I guess, that other regions have other scavengers besides vultures. “Absolutely disgusting, so grim, the worst fieldwork of my life, but also extremely rewarding in a very odd way,” said Julia Grootaers, describing her three months collecting data among rotting pig carcasses in Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula. I will not make a joke about her name. I will not make a joke about her name. I will not make a joke about her name. Their findings, published recently in the journal Ecology and Evolution, reveal that in the absence of vultures, carcasses take twice as long to decompose, and fly populations double, with significant implications for ecosystem health and potential disease transmission. It's probably good to note that there's more than one species of vulture in Central America. The article includes pictures of some of them in the wild.The experiment consisted of 32 pig carcasses deployed in the southern Pacific region of Costa Rica, half in grassland and half in forest habitats. Eight carcasses were covered with exclusion cages for each habitat to prevent vulture access, while eight control carcasses remained uncovered. Half the experiment took place during the wet season and half during the dry season. While I'm no expert, that sounds like a fair methodology. One unexpected finding was how few vertebrate scavengers visited the carcasses, such as large cats or possums. One might consider that those mammals/marsupials could have an aversion to carrion that's been handled by humans, as these carcasses were. That could be an unrevealed confounding factor. (Also, it's "opossum." Respect the Powhatan.) Fly populations doubled at carcass sites without vultures, a finding with potential public health implications. Slower-decomposing carcasses could have important consequences for infectious and zoonotic (animal-transmitted) diseases in the tropics. Flies are also important contributors to the ecosystem, but unlike vultures, they tend to land on your food and spread germs there. This study is also significant because vulture research has almost exclusively concentrated on Old World species, those found in Africa, Asia and Europe. And apparently, New World vultures represent an entirely different clade than the Old World vultures, not very closely related at all. Anyway, point is, disgusting though we find their habits, vultures are cool. And yeah, I couldn't resist the pun in today's entry title. How could I? |
| From SciAm, an astronomically bad idea. ‘Space Advertising’ Could Outshine the Stars—Unless It’s Banned First Astronomers are racing to protect the dark skies as private companies seek to place large advertisements in Earth orbit Yes, I know there are worse things going on: human trafficking, slavery, rape, murder, war, celebrity gossip (to name but a few). That doesn't stop me from hating this as well. Imagine stepping outside to stargaze on a clear summer night, only to see no stars but rather the garish glow of advertisements streaming across the sky. As usual, science fiction came up with this first. The dystopia subgenre, anyway. This seemingly science-fictional scenario isn’t actually implausible: private companies are inching closer to launching swarms of tiny maneuverable satellites to create billboardlike displays big and bright enough to be seen from the ground. Just when you think we've reached peak capitalism, something like this gets floated. It's one thing to loft satellites up there to broadcast shows and provide internet connectivity, both of which result in a barrage of ads. But they're optional ads. You don't have to tune in or connect, and you can remain blissfully ad-free. This, however, would be inescapable, unless you just stay inside all the time. The suddenly all-too-real prospect of large-scale space advertising prompted Piero Benvenuti, former general secretary of the International Astronomical Union, to raise the issue in February during a subcommittee meeting of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), the United Nations body that governs the use of space for peace, security and development. Speaking of internet connectivity, astronomers are already bitching about Starlink satellite constellations, which tend to be bright and get in the way of observations. Starlink (whatever your opinion of its company's CEO) at least serves a useful function, in theory, providing internet access in remote locations. This? This would serve no useful function to anyone who isn't doing the actual advertising (and even then, it's questionable). “There is absolutely no reason why you should use space in such a useless way to advertise commercials,” Benvenuti says. Well, I wouldn't say "absolutely no reason." Obviously, someone thinks there's a reason, and that reason is money. In 2020 Russia granted Avant Space a patent for a laser-based technology to project messages, logos and other images for advertisers onto the sky. Hey, look, actual space lasers. And they're not Jewish. Their vision, Sitnikov says, is “to prove that space is not just for scientists, not just for the military—it is entertainment, too. And people like entertainment.” It depends on the entertainment. I don't consider ads entertainment. I consider them an interruption of my entertainment. Yes, on occasion, there are entertaining commercials, but they are exceptions. In 2000 such concerns helped to spur the U.S. Congress to pass a federal law that banned the issuance of launch licenses to companies for the purpose of ferrying payloads for obtrusive space advertising. That's nice and all, but at my last count, there were at least six countries and one European Union with their own space capability, and the US is only one of them. This region of space around Earth is home to thousands of defunct rocket stages, dead satellites and discarded hardware that all zip around our planet at dangerously high speeds. On the plus side, maybe this orbital debris can finally have a good purpose: destroying the ad lasers. But, as the article notes, such collisions would create even more debris. In case you can't tell, I'm completely against this idea. I hate ads to begin with, and appreciate astronomy (not to mention the simple beauty of the night sky, which is hard enough to see from most places now). Hey, maybe the US Space Force can finally get something to do: take down the ads. |
| The random number generator laughs at me once more. Here's another bit about happiness, this one from last year in Knowable. Scientists scrutinize happiness research From meditation to smiling, researchers take a second look at studies claiming to reveal what makes us happy "Claiming" being the key word there. As if the answer is the same for everyone. We all want to be happy... [Citation needed] ...and for decades, psychologists have tried to figure out how we might achieve that blissful state. Maybe it's by not paying any attention to psychologists? But psychology has undergone serious upheaval over the last decade, as researchers realized that many studies were unreliable and unrepeatable. This is my shocked face:  Here’s what we know so far, and what remains to be reassessed, according to a new analysis in the Annual Review of Psychology. I'm skimming a bit. I'm late getting to this today, and tomorrow's entry may be early; plus, I just ragged on happiness research yesterday. One long-standing hypothesis is that smiling makes you feel happier. Spoiler: questionable, unverified. Which, again, absolutely shocks me (in a sarcastic way), because if there were ever a perfect example of confusing cause and effect, this would be it. I don't doubt it works for some people. But again, not everyone. For me, if I had to paste a fake smile on my face all day (say if I had to work a ret-hell job), someone would end up getting punched. Researchers have also found that external agencies can promote people’s happiness. Giving people cash promoted life satisfaction, as did workplace interventions such as naps. Huh. By absolute coincidence, having money and taking naps make me happy. The researchers didn’t find clear evidence of benefits for volunteering, performing random acts of kindness or meditation. I take it they also didn't find those things decreased happiness, so if you want to do them, do them. Dunn and Folk didn’t find any preregistered studies at all on exercising or spending time in nature, two oft-recommended strategies. Again, just me here, but I find that exercise has other benefits; spending time in nature, on the other hand, just means I have to check myself for ticks afterwards. It does make me appreciate my nice comfortable house and bed more, so I suppose there's that. Anyway, most of the article is about applying greater rigor to psychology studies, which is probably a good thing overall. And that's probably all I have on happiness for a while. Maybe. Hopefully. |
| I know I've touched on this theme before, but I don't think I've shared this particular article. It's from BBC, and it's a few years old. Why our pursuit of happiness may be flawed It is an emotion linked to improved health and well-being, but is our obsession with being happy a recipe for disappointment, asks Nat Rutherford. Well, for starters, what's a Brit doing talking about a concept enshrined in the founding documents of the rebel colonies? Okay, fine, I'll give them a pass on that one. Perhaps you want to spend more time with your family, or get a more fulfilling and secure job, or improve your health. But why do you want those things? Chances are that your answer will come down to one thing: happiness. Our culture’s fixation on happiness can seem almost religious. By "our," I don't know if he's talking about British, Anglophone, or generally European and its derivatives. Because not all cultures are obsessed with happiness, but it does seem to be a Western thing. It is one of the only reasons for action that doesn’t stand in need of justification: happiness is good because being happy is good. But can we build our lives on that circular reasoning? As regular readers may remember, I distrust "happiness" as a goal. I think it's what happens (yes, those words, happy and happen, share the same proto-English root, one that meant something like "luck") when you're doing other things. A survey in 2016 asked Americans whether they would rather "achieve great things or be happy" and 81% said that they would rather be happy, while only 13% opted for achieving great things (6% were understandably daunted by the choice and weren’t sure). Fortunately, it's not a binary choice in reality. Neither is wealth and happiness. The idea that rich people are miserable while poor people are happy is a lie we tell poor people to keep them from getting too uppity. There is some evidence that the obsessive pursuit of happiness is associated with a greater risk of depression. While I don't trust "some evidence" necessarily, this tracks for me. In his recent book, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, historian Ritchie Robertson argues that the Enlightenment should be understood not as the increase in value of reason itself, but instead as the quest for happiness through reason. Oh look, it's a book ad. That should make the author happy. Or rich. Or both. It’s easy to assume that happiness has always been valued as the highest good, but human values and emotions are not permanently fixed. Some values which once were paramount, such as honour or piety, have faded in importance, while emotions like "acedia" (our feeling of apathy comes closest) have disappeared completely. From what I understand, honor (or honour, depending on your geographical location) is still paramount in some cultures. Not just Klingon, either. Self-help books and "positive psychology" promise to unlock that psychological state or happy mood. But philosophers have tended to be sceptical of this view of happiness because our moods are fleeting and their causes uncertain. Instead, they ask a related but wider question: what is the good life? I believe Conan the Barbarian answered that question definitively: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women." In short, I'm pretty sure the answer is different for each person. For example, lots of people find having children makes them happy (or at least claim it does). For me, that would be the very definition of Hell. One answer would be a life spent doing things you enjoy and which bring you pleasure. A life spent experiencing pleasure would, in some ways, be a good life. But maximising pleasure isn’t the only option. Every human life, even the most fortunate, is filled with pain. Painful loss, painful disappointments, the physical pain of injury or sickness, and the mental pain of enduring boredom, loneliness, or sadness. Pain is an inevitable consequence of being alive. Oh, you've been listening to Buddhists? Yeah, life has its ups and downs. In my view, the downs help us appreciate the ups. Studies have shown that having loving attachments correlates with happiness, but we know from experience that love is also the cause of pain. What if pain is necessary and even desirable? Yeah, no, not unless you're a masochist (not that there's anything wrong with that). But there's something to be said for purposely enduring the painful parts in hope that things will improve. Like getting a root canal, known to be painful and boring (that's a pun, by the way) in the short term, expecting that your toothache will go away. Less dramatically, all the good things in life entail suffering. Writing a novel, running a marathon, or giving birth all cause suffering in pursuit of the final, joyous result. I question those examples, especially the last one, but I wouldn't know. Well, except for the "writing a novel" part. I didn't suffer while writing mine; it was challenging, but I enjoyed the process. The "suffering" happened when I went to edit. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, saw that we do not merely endure pain as a means to greater pleasure because "man…does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering". In Nietzsche’s view, pain is not alleviated through pleasure, but instead through meaning. Ah, well, too bad there's no meaning, then. The American philosopher Robert Nozick came up with a thought experiment to make the point. Nozick asks us to imagine a "machine that could give you any experience you desired". The machine would allow you to experience the bliss of fulfilling your every wish. You could be a great poet, become the greatest inventor ever known, travel the Universe in a spaceship of your own design, or become a well-liked chef at a local restaurant. In reality though, you would be unconscious in a life-support tank. Because the machine makes you believe that the simulation is real, your choice is final. One wonders if he came up with these things before, or after, Star Trek's holodeck and The Matrix, both of which came out during his lifetime (yes, I looked up his bio). Would you plug in? Nozick says you wouldn’t because we want to actually do certain things and be certain people, not just have pleasurable experiences. Okay, Nozick wouldn't. As I mentioned above, I'm pretty sure there are people who would. If the simulation feels real in every way, what's the difference? That you won't be remembered by history, like Einstein or Curie? News flash: most of us won't, anyway. But this touches on my own philosophical point, which is that we get happiness not by aiming for it, but through accomplishment. Nozick’s experience machine aimed to disprove the essential claim of utilitarianism, "that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end". But I can't fault the guy for railing against utilitarianism. Dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and pain are part of the human condition and so "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied", according to Mill. He continued to believe that happiness was deeply important, but came to see that aiming at happiness will rarely lead to it. Fuck me, I agree with John Stuart Mill about something. Shoot me now. (In my defense, with this philosophy, he contradicted his own earlier works.) What Mill recognised was what Aristotle had argued two millennia earlier – the passing pleasure of happiness is secondary to living a good life, or of achieving what Aristotle called eudaimonia. Why'd he have to name it in Greek? Oh... right. Eudaimonia is difficult to translate into our contemporary concepts. Some, like the philosopher Julia Annas, translate it directly as "happiness", while others scholars prefer "human flourishing". Whatever the translation, it marks a distinctive contrast to our modern conception of happiness. Literally, I believe it translates to something like "good spirit," but the problem with that translation is that "good" and "spirit" have multiple definitions. For instance, for me, Scotch is a good spirit. But I think the sense is more like virtue and a pursuit of perfection (though without expecting actual perfection). Virtue, also ill-defined and culturally relative, has fallen out of favor as a goal, replaced by the selfish "happiness." Like our modern conception of happiness, eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of life. But unlike happiness, eudaimonia is realised through habits and actions, not through mental states. Happiness is not something you experience or obtain, it’s something you do. It's not necessarily the "ultimate purpose of life," but okay. There's more at the article, of course, but I've said what I needed to say. I think that, while the author is better-versed in philosophy than I am (and British), we've reached similar conclusions. And that makes me happy. |
| Mother's Day has come and gone, here in the US, with my usual avoidance of anything related to it and ritual blocking of any business that emails me with MD promotions. This article, from Atlas Obscura way back in 2018, can be an exception. The Ultimate Guide to Bizarre Lies Your Mom Told You Turns out mothers all over the world are telling a lot of the same outrageous fibs. One particularly famous parental fib involves avoiding tough conversations with your kids about death. Your dog gets run over by a truck, so you tell the kids he went to live on a farm where he'd be happy running around outside all the time. Well, that wouldn't have worked for us because we lived on a farm. And then they have the chutzpah to tell the kid that lying is bad and you shouldn't do it. Being a mom is a tough job, in large part because you just can’t reason with small children. What you can do, however, is lie to them. In honor of Mother’s Day, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to send us the most outlandish white lies their mothers ever told them. As it turns out, moms all over the world are telling some wonderfully inventive lies. I doubt many of them are "inventive." They were probably passed down from their own lying mother, and so on. Some do, however, have modern twists. Many mothers still tell variations on the classics: If you make a funny face, it will stay that way; if you eat before you swim, you’ll get cramps (or die); moms have eyes in the backs of their heads, and so on. Calvin and Hobbes did a great take on the funny face thing.  We couldn’t include all of the fantastic entries we received, but we’ve collected over 100 of our favorites below. Clearly, I won't be commenting on all of them here. “In order to keep us kids from stealing pennies from water fountains, my mother told us the water was electrified and we would die.” —G. Johnson, Georgia Yeah, I would have still had to find out for myself. That's the kind of kid I was. “Mom always knew when I was fibbing. She said she could tell because I had a black mark on my forehead. My grandma used to say the same thing. I would run to the mirror to see it, but it was never there. They said I couldn’t see it because fibbers eventually go blind! I was scared to death.” —Batzion, Chicago, Illinois Would have been funnier if Grandma were blind. “Eating the crusts of your bread will give you curly hair.” —Rosie, Farnham, United Kingdom That seems to be a common one, coming from both UK and US sources. This is the first I've heard of it. Unlike apparently some kids, I never had a problem with bread crusts. Of course, the crap they passed off as "bread" (mostly Wonder brand) never had a real crust. My only hardline objection was I wouldn't eat the end slices of the loaf, and, as an adult, I still avoid them. But it hardly matters because I prefer real bread with firm, chewy crusts. “Eating end of a bread loaf will help to grow breasts.” —Elina, Latvia This is not why I avoided the ends, but it's hilarious. “I wanted a pet very badly and my mother told me that if I could put salt on the tail of a bird, I’d be able to catch it. Hours were spent outside with the salt shaker and various homemade traps.” —Anne Falbowski, Colchester, Connecticut "Mission accomplished." -Anne's mom, presumably. “Not to play in rain puddles. Will get polio.” —Maryann Kelly, Boston, Massachusetts I don't know about polio, but I don't doubt you can catch something from playing in rain puddles. Tetanus, perhaps. “You get canker sores if you pee off a bridge.” —Stacey Henrikson, Rochester Hills, Michigan I had many questions, until I remembered that Stacey is also a boy's name. “My mother told me if I bit my nails, a hand would grow in my stomach.” —Mary Pagone, Los Angeles, California Lie? Yep. Brilliant and effective? Also yep. “Don’t let your umbrella open inside the house or your mommy is going to die.” —Norton McColl, Sao Paulo, Brazil I expect Teenage Norton wasted many hours opening and closing an umbrella in the house, to no avail. “That there was a man that traveled around town and he would chop off your middle finger if you used it to make crude hand gestures.” —G. Johnson, Georgia "But I need that one!" “To deter my brother and me from eating my mom’s delicious homemade chocolate chip cookies she told us the extra crunch to them were frog legs. Really they were walnuts.” —Jen, California I should be offended on behalf of the French for that, but they already do "offended" so well. “Never go swimming in the pool/ocean after eating watermelon (common parental lie in Israel).” —Sharon, Israel One wonders why it's watermelon in particular. I got the "don't go swimming after eating" warning, but for everything. “My mom told me that sugary foods had little bugs on them, and the bugs liked to eat teeth, but if I brushed, then it would take them off.” —Adam Drew, Calgary, Canada I mean, as parental fibs go, that one's not far from the truth. “Everything on the ice cream truck is poison.” —Jon Thierry, Dearborn, Michigan That one too. Delicious, delicious poison. “My pet chickens and rabbits had gone ‘to the farm’ when in fact my former farmer Dad had turned them into dinner.” — Pat, Arlington Heights, Illinois Well? Someone's gotta keep therapists in business. “She told us that if you kissed your elbow you would turn into a boy.” —Tara Bryan, Flatrock, Newfoundland It's a little easier to do that nowadays. “For as long as I can remember when we would drive to Rhode Island, she would tell me that the forest rangers used giraffes to prune the trees. I would always be looking in just the wrong direction and miss seeing one as we went by.” —Edward P. Steele, Connecticut That's a prank, and a really funny one at that. “My mom told me that the gum spots on the sidewalk were actually blood from the kids who didn’t look before crossing the road.” —Ava Moody, Fort Worth, Texas And that one's brilliant. Now, I'm not saying that lying to kids is always a bad thing. (Spoiler: this week's Fantasy newsletter will be about lies.) But you gotta admit, some of them are meaner than others. Lots more at the link, no lie. |
| A few days ago, we had the article about a correlation between hairiness and the speed of wound healing. Well, this one, from PopSci, talks about the hair part. How is head hair different from body hair? There's a reason you can't grow your armpit hair to your belly button. You know if we could, someone would turn it into a fashion statement. Hair can be curly, straight, thick, thin, brown, black, blonde, or auburn. It can be long or short, frizzy or lush. The musical did it better.We have two types of hair, says dermatologist Elizabeth Houshmand. Vellus hairs, or “peach fuzz,” cover virtually our entire body but aren’t easy to see. Our head, chest, armpit, and pubic hair consists of terminal hairs. These are thicker and darker. The author forgot nose and ear hair in the latter category. But not all terminal hairs are alike. For example, the hair on our head can grow far longer than that on the rest of our body. To understand why, we have to dive deep into our skin. Phrases like that really get under my skin. The article goes into a brief bit of scientific detail, then: But bald men can still retain thick body hair. Radusky, who has worked on clinical trials for hair loss conditions, explains this is due to the conversion of testosterone as we get older. An enzyme called 5-alpha reductase changes the hormone into dihydrotestosterone. And so we see how another problem is caused by testosterone. The article's pretty short (unlike my hair) and, I would hope, uncontroversial, so I don't have anything else to say. I'm sure people have something to say to me, though, like "Get a haircut and get a real job."To which I can only reply: No. |
| This is a pretty long article from Vox, though I'll try to keep my commentary brief. Also, it's from December, so some of the information is already outdated, and I'm not always sure which information. You’re being lied to about “ultra-processed” foods Coverage of the latest nutrition buzzword is overly broad, arbitrary, and wildly misleading. The problem goes deeper. Yeah, we're being lied to. We're always being lied to. Sometimes it's malicious; sometimes it's advertising; sometimes it's both. “New research,” the Washington Post reported in June, “found eating plant-derived foods that are ultra-processed — such as meat substitutes, fruit juices, and pastries — increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.” “Vegan fake meats linked to heart disease, early death,” the New York Post declared. There was just one problem: The narrative was totally fake. Meat industry propaganda detected. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to lead US health policy, promises to crack down on ultra-processed foods and has called plant-based meats instruments of corporate control over our food system and humanity. As opposed to the existing corporate control over our food system? You think all the USDA dietary guidelines are science-based? Think again. The American food environment is unhealthy and disease-promoting, and the food industry bears much of the blame. When I was taking a walking tour of Brussels, the tour guide pointed out, "You Americans eat like you get free health care!" No arguments here. But the framing of that University of São Paulo–Imperial College study, and the promotional materials associated with it, might have made it easy for reporters to misunderstand what the research really found. I know we say there's "lies, damned lies, and statistics," but there's also innocent mistakes and repeating something that you're convinced is true, but isn't. For example, "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is usually attributed to Twain, but he attributed it to Disraeli, but there's no evidence that Disraeli ever wrote that, and in the end, we're really not sure who coined the phrase. Attributing it to Twain may not be a lie, but it might be an innocent mistake. If you’re confused, don’t feel bad — some of the world’s top nutrition experts are, too. “You look at these papers, and it’s still very hard to pin down what the definition [of ultra-processed] really is,” Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard, told me. Seems there's always a villain in the food story. I remember when the Bad Guy was fat, then carbs, then gluten, and now UPFs. Things are never simple when it comes to nutrition science, and none of these things are wholly evil. While I don't doubt that a carrot is "good for you" while a Chee-to of the same color is "bad for you," I'm not convinced the problem is processing in and of itself. Some foods absolutely need to be processed to be edible, and while most of us aren't in the kind of situation where we'd have to eat those foods, people have been processing meats, vegetables, and fruits for preservation for at least centuries. This is further complicated, as I hinted above, by the lobbying and promotional efforts of corporations who want to convince you to eat their packaged food as opposed to the other guys' packaged food (or, for that matter, a carrot.) The relevant question about a novel scientific concept is not whether it happens to correlate with stuff we already know is true, but whether it adds something genuinely new to our knowledge, without also being wrong about a bunch of other things, as New York University environmental scientist Matthew Hayek pointed out to me. UPF, at least so far, doesn’t seem to clear that bar — it casts a net that manages to be overbroad while excluding some unhealthy forms of processing that have been around longer. And I'm including this bit because I wanted to remember it for other science articles. Having said all that: I get it. It feels intuitive to think there is something fundamentally not right about ultra-processed foods. I can understand why people would be freaked out by a vegan burger that looks and tastes like meat. I shudder at the junk that was normal for kids to eat when I was growing up — Gushers, Fruit Rollups, Coke — and think: That is not food. No, that's marketing. And no, I'm not immune; I just try to recognize it as such. The breadth and ambiguity of the campaign against “ultra-processed” foods make it vulnerable to sloppy thinking and manipulation by pseudoscience purveyors like RFK Jr. Combine that with a political climate in which multiple red states have banned cell-cultivated meat and meat producers seize every opportunity to thwart plant-based competitors, and you can imagine how plant-based meats could be targeted by an unprincipled, politicized application of ultra-processed food research. I'm glad the author doesn't mince words here. After all, mincing is a form of processing. There's a lot more at the link. But let's not undersell the social impact of the food argument; one of the basic things that holds people together as a community is eating. This is one reason so many religions and cults have dietary constraints of one sort or another: it sets them apart from the rest of humanity. If you can get people to battle each other over what we should and shouldn't be eating, you can control them more easily through a "divide and conquer" strategy. And that seems to be what's happening. |
| While "fascinating" is a value judgement, and "facts" is questionable, I thought this Mental Floss thing was interesting enough to share. I just don't fully trust the accuracy. Well, first of all, did you know it's in the mint family? Oh, wait, you said time, not thyme. Did you know that a day on Earth used to be around six hours shorter than it is today? Yeah, like, billions of years ago. Or that Julius Caesar once implemented a 445-day-long year? That's not about time. That's about timekeeping. It's not like he slowed the Earth's orbit down, or that it affected anyone outside the Empire. Don't worry; I'm not going to comment on every single point. 1. Every person on Earth is living in the past. Our brains don’t perceive events until about 80 milliseconds until after they’ve happened. This fine line between the present and the past is part of the reason why some physicists argue that there’s no such thing as “now” and that the present moment is no more than an illusion. Which is what I've been saying all along. Except I'm shying away from using the word "illusion" (time itself is most definitely not an illusion) because it's been misused. I'd say the present moment is an infinitesimal. 2. Throughout history, different cultures around the world have experienced time in different ways. Those who read languages that flow from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew, generally view time as flowing in the same direction. The Aymara, who live in the Andes Mountains in South America, consider the future to be behind them, while the past is ahead. In their view, because the future is unknown, it’s behind you, where you can’t see it. Some Indigenous Australian cultures, which rely heavily on direction terms like north, south, east, and west in their languages, visualize the passage of time as moving from east to west. Newsflash: different cultures conceptualize things differently. 4. Science has a number of different ways of defining time. To cover just a couple: There’s astronomical time, which is measured in relation to how long it takes Earth to rotate on its axis. In astronomical time, a second is 1/60th of a minute. And then there’s atomic time, which dictates the numbers that you’ll see on a clock. I feel like this section is misleading. There's only one official way to define a second, as the article goes on to note. The duration of one second was based on the length of an average solar day, but, as implied up there, the length of a day is increasing over geological epochs, and at some point, the Earth's solar day will average more than the current 86,400 seconds. To complicated matters further, there's the sidereal day, which is the amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate with respect to some other star; this is different from a solar day because of the Earth's orbit. 8. Gravity is also the reason why our days are getting longer. Over a billion years ago, a day on Earth lasted around 18 hours. Our days are longer now because the moon’s gravity is causing Earth’s spin to slow down. A bit simplistic, but okay. In Earth’s earlier days, the moon wasn’t as far away, which caused Earth to spin much faster than it currently does. Causation reversal. Flag on the play. 15 yard penalty. 9. There are two ways to think of the length of a day on Earth. Though you probably learned that one day on Earth is 24 hours, it actually takes the planet 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.0916 seconds to rotate on its axis. Which I know I already said, but I'm glad the article acknowledged it. 12. At the same time, Caesar asked the astronomer Sosigenes to help reform the calendar. And Caesar took all the credit, as usual. To be fair, "Julian calendar" is a lot easier to say and spell than "Sosigenean calendar" would have been. 13. But Sosigenes made a bit of a miscalculation, so the calendar continued to be a little off. Yeah, well, this was over 2000 years ago, so I can forgive the miscalculation. It eventually led to George Washington having two birthdays and the October Revolution taking place in November. 16. Even with the advent of standardized time, people still struggled to keep their clocks in sync. One London family used this to their advantage, and made a living by selling people the time. That story is definitely interesting. 23. Sundials read differently depending on the hemisphere you’re in. This one should be obvious, but not everyone thinks about it. Our concept of “clockwise” is based on the way sundials in the Northern Hemisphere told time. Yet another example of the Northern Hemisphere hegemonic conspiracy. There's more at the link, as one might expect. Most of these aren't about time, though; they're about timekeeping, which is not the same thing. |
| An interesting article from Smithsonian today, demonstrating that evolution involves trade-offs. Human Evolution Traded Fur for Sweat Glands—and Now, Our Wounds Take Longer to Heal Than Those of Other Mammals Even compared to chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives, humans’ scrapes and cuts tend to stick around for more than twice as long, new research suggests I'm sure you realize by now that "research suggests" is a flag that this isn't (yet) a high-confidence finding. That's okay. It doesn't really affect our day-to-day lives, like cancer research or nutrition science. In experiments, human wounds took more than twice as long to heal than those on other mammals—including chimpanzees, which are one of the closest relatives to Homo sapiens. "What's your research about?" "We're going to cut chimps and see how long it takes for them to heal." This is why we have ethics committees, folks. To gather data on the other mammal species, they anesthetized and surgically wounded captive lab mice, rats, olive baboons, Sykes’ monkeys and vervet monkeys. They also studied naturally occurring wounds—mostly caused by fighting—on five captive chimpanzees. In case you were wondering about the ethics. Researchers were not entirely surprised by the results, because skin healing is affected by hair. The follicles at the root of each hair contain stem cells, which, in addition to producing hair, can grow new skin when necessary. Since humans have much less hair than other mammals do, it makes sense that our wounds would also take longer to heal. As we also know by now, just because something "makes sense" doesn't mean it's true. But it does mean possibly less chimp-cutting in the future, because now they don't have to figure out why some result doesn't make sense. “When the epidermis is wounded, as in most kinds of scratches and scrapes, it’s really the hair-follicle stem cells that do the repair,” says Elaine Fuchs, a biologist at Rockefeller University who was not involved with the research, to the New York Times’ Elizabeth Preston. Now, that does raise a couple of questions in my mind. First: humans have places without hair follicles (we have them pretty much all over, but they only produce really thin hair). So what about comparing similar cuts from those places with the hair-having places? Like, we don't have hair follicles on our palms (well... YOU don't), so maybe compare a cut there to one on the forearm, which does have hair? (Unlike other animals, humans can consent to being used in research, up to a point.) Second: humans aren't the only mostly-hairless mammals. Elephants come to mind, though they have a famously thick skin, more resistant to wounds. Seals, whales, hippopatamice, and other aquatic or semi-aquatic mammals are left out of the study. (To be clear, the "aquatic ape" hypothesis has been pretty thoroughly debunked, so no, we're not technically semi-aquatic.) Yes, "hippopotamice" is a made-up plural. I do that sometimes. At some point in the evolutionary journey, humans lost most of their body hair. Eh, as I said, not really; it just... changed. There's also a difference that's correlated, though not perfectly, to natal sex. This is where evolutionary trade-offs come in: whatever the reason for the change (there are hypotheses, my preferred one being sexual selection), if this research is on the right track, the "longer heal time" thing might be a by-product, because it certainly doesn't seem to increase survivability. It also doesn't significantly decrease it, or it wouldn't have happened. One might be tempted to guess that men kept more body hair because early men got injured more than early women, but I'd shy away from such speculation. It’s not entirely clear why early humans lost their hair. But it seems our species swapped the once-abundant hair follicles for sweat glands, which are not as efficient at healing wounds but help keep us cool in hot environments. More evidence for my assertion that humans aren't meant to live in cold environments and that anyone who prefers the cold is an aberration. In theory, this slower wound healing rate should have put humans at a disadvantage. But the researchers speculate that support from friends and family, as well as the use of certain plants as medicine, helped humans survive. And I'm including this bit to support my (more serious) assertion that it's cooperation that got us to where we are today, for better or for worse. And also to address my "doesn't seem to increase survivability" bit above. Though, as noted, it's still speculative. There was a bit of buzz a few months ago, as I recall, when observers saw an orangutan using a medicinal plant; this reminded me of that. Like I said, interesting article and conjectures, despite the animal-rights angle. I'd say I'd like to see more, but while I don't object to eating meat, I feel like the true meaning of the cliché "curiosity killed the cat" is that scientists got out of hand with their curiosity. |
| The Guardian asks the tough questions. From last year: The cult of 5am: is rising at dawn the secret of health and happiness? It has been called the morning miracle – getting up before everyone else and winning the day. But does it actually make you more productive and focused? I'm just going to address the obvious first: if "everyone else" got up at 5am, you'd have to get up a 4am to awaken before them. Then there'd be articles about the wonders of waking up at 4am. And people will buy into it, and soon you'll have to wake up at 3. And so on, in a never-ending cycle of backing off in time. But that's about as realistic as everyone suddenly turning vegan. I just wanted to call out the logical fallacy. It is 5.15am and I am walking down my street, feeling smug. The buildings are bathed in peachy dawn light. “Win the morning and you win the day,” suggests productivity guru Tim Ferriss. The prize is within my sights: an oat-milk latte, my reward for getting up ridiculously early. This implies that the oat-milk latte is to be acquired from a coffee shop, not the author's own kitchen. This means, wait for it: the coffee shop is already open. This further implies that the workers there have awoken even earlier in order to get the magic beans, or whatever, prepared. Are the baristas "winning the day?" Or have you already lost because you've slept in later than they did? Or are they just NPCs to your main character? On to the deserted six-lane high street where supermarket delivery vans and the occasional bus are the only signs of life. More NPCs. There is no coffee to be had at any of the eight shuttered cafes I pass... Oh, so I guess the baristas got to sleep in, after all. ...so I head for a patch of green space to meditate. Which is about the same thing as sleeping, so what's the point? Other than smugness. Why am I doing this? Because, in an attempt to become one of the elite superbeings who are members of the 5am club, I am trying a week of very early starts. It's okay to try something new. Doing so may even provide a temporary mood boost, as you are more deliberate in your actions and discovering new things, like the cafés being closed in this case. But doing it because celebrities are doing it? Or because some soi-disant "guru" says you should? I'm not impressed. To a sceptic, there is a degree of magical thinking to much of this. If you can just do this one thing – get out of bed while others snooze – you will have time to get fit, eat healthily and achieve all your goals. Again, if everyone did it, well, that infinite regression is something I've already covered. Also, the "you will have time" part is negated unless you get less sleep by going to bed at the usual time, because there are only 24 hours in a day (absent things like time zone travel or the clock switches in spring and fall). And getting less sleep isn't healthy for most of us, as I've noted before. So, yes, I'm skeptical (look, I understand British spellings, but outside of quotes, I'll generally use American English). And yet, as I said, changing one's routine can also have benefits. Sometimes that's what it takes to shoehorn in a workout or time to cook or whatever. Ordinarily, I get up at 6.30am without an alarm. I am not at my best at this hour. I mainline instant coffee and doomscroll for 90 minutes, and then it is time to get ready for work. Ah. I think I see the real problem. When I was working, both blue and white collar jobs, I never had time in the morning for more than shower, dress, quick bite (maybe) and commute. The few times I woke up earlier than absolutely necessary (by choice or not), I didn't see the point in doing anything else before work. Of course, this was before "doomscrolling." At 4.50am, my alarm, set to Arcade Fire’s Wake Up, blares out of my phone at top volume. There is a thud from above: I have accidentally recruited my neighbour into the 5am club. On behalf of your neighbor: Piss off, wanker! I decide to do some meditation, which is lovely, but 40 minutes later I have pretty much dozed off. What'd I tell you? There follows some description of the author's attempt, and then: Why is this so hard? I put the question to Russell Foster, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at Oxford University. But he wants to know why I would want to sign up for the 5am club in the first place. To say he is scathing about the fetishisation of the early start would be an understatement. “There’s nothing intrinsically important about getting up at 5am. It’s just the ghastly smugness of the early start. Benjamin Franklin was the one who started it all when he said, ‘Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’ and it’s been going on ever since. It goes back to the Protestant work ethic – work is good and if you can’t or won’t work, that is, by definition, bad. Not sleeping is seen as worthy and productive.” As I've noted before, Ben Franklin was an epic troll, and I insist that this particular quote was satire. And yet, I have to agree with "it's just the ghastly smugness of an early start." Brits use "ghastly" more than we do here in the US, and I aim to change that. (Also, why are Brits listening to the words of someone who, to them, was a traitor?) By day four of my experiment, I am grumpy and miserable. I’ve had to cancel a trip to the pub because, newsflash, an evening of merlot and a dawn wake-up isn’t a good combination. Coward. Day five is a new low. I sleep in until 5.43am and then eat a salted caramel Magnum for breakfast to compensate for missing out on the pub. At this point, I laughed out loud. On day eight, I wake up at 5.04am without an alarm. The morning beckons. Do I bound out of bed to seize the day? I do not. I decide to return to my usual wake-up time, only now with a renewed focus. As I suggested above: changing one's routine does have benefits. But there's nothing magical about particular times. Humans naturally fall on a spectrum from extreme lark to extreme owl (I've talked about this before too, I know), and I hold the considered opinion that arranging your life around your sleep rhythm would be optimal. What happens, though, is that the world is generally made for larks, so larks do better at things like focus and creativity during the standard workday, leading to the classic conflation of causality and correlation (I'm going to have to remember that particular alliterative phrase). In other words, it's not waking up at 5am that does it for them, it's happening to possess a metabolism that wants to wake up at 5am. Musicians, for instance, who tend to play late-night clubs and concert halls, well, I can't see them benefiting from a schedule like that. But we can't all be musicians. Still, I can't fault the author for trying. As an experiment, it fails because the sample size is exactly one. But it's not like there's a perfect schedule that would work for everyone; we're all different, so I don't think science can ever answer the question "What are the ideal times for awakening and asleepening?" with a single answer that works for absolutely everyone. Because that answer depends on individual chronotypes, and we don't all fit into neat little industrial cog-boxes. |
| There should be some relationship between the letters in a word and its pronunciation. Should be, but sometimes isn't. There are places like that in the US too, but no one visits the US anymore, so it doesn't matter as much. Inhabited by a succession of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians and Normans, Britain has spent centuries simmering into a confusing toponymic soup of counties, cities and castles. And that's one reason English itself is confusing. Over time, their names have further shifted and skewed, taking on their own idiosyncrasies and sometimes becoming utterly unpredictable. Happisburgh is “Haze-bur-ruh.” Cholmondeley is “Chum-lee”. Leominster is “Lem-stuh.” Some of these are just so the locals can instantly identify who doesn't belong there. As if having an American accent itself isn't enough. London loves to find ways to befuddle. At least most people get the pronunciation of London somewhat close. Except for the French. You know what they call it? Londres. We get even by calling Paris Paris instead of Paree. I'm only including a few of these here. The well-to-do neighborhood of Marylebone is commonly mispronounced. It has a picturesque etymology which has everything to do with a Mary and nothing to do with bones; it stems from “St Mary at the Bourne,” a church called St. Mary’s built on the banks of the old Tyburn river. Huh, and all this time I thought it was derived from mangled French. Oh, wait, it probably was, maybe, though from a different root word than I was expecting. The word appears in the Scots language, too, meaning the same thing (stream). Of course, "burn" means something else in English, which may be why it fell out of favor. Then there's born and borne, which have entirely different meanings.I told you English was confusing. (Holborn) No doubt you’ve already guessed that it’s not “Hol-born”, because that would be too easy. What we’ve got here is “Ho-bun”, derived from “hollow spring.” And now we have another meaning of something that sounds similar to "burn." Yes, sometimes a spring becomes a stream, but that's still a different thing. Bicester and Cirencester Screw this; I'll just visit a different city. (Edinburgh} “Burg” is a common suffix for a number of European cities — think Hamburg in Germany, or Johannesburg in South Africa. It means “castle” or “fortified town,” and both of the above “burg”s (and many more besides) are pronounced as they’re spelled. Astute readers may note that South Africa is not, in fact, a European city. But Europeans spread out all over the planet, and named some cities like the ones they were used to. Hence, here in the US, we have city names like Harrisburg or Fredericksburg, neither of which are particularly fortified. To make matters more complicated, lots of US place names end in "-ville," also, which is, you guessed it, French in origin. (Frome) Picturesque winding cobbled streets welcome tourists to the Somerset town of Frome, although the locals must get exhausted correcting visitors whenever “Frome” leaves their mouths. And this has nothing to do with Rome, which doesn't stop the article from making a terrible pun: "...when in Frome..." (Beaulieu} One glance at “Beaulieu” tells you this is a French influence. The name of this idyllic Hampshire village — home to a 13th-century abbey and the National Motor Museum, which houses one of the vehicles from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” no less — means simply “beautiful place”. Très simple. Yes, except, for this native English speaker (albeit the American version), the French pronunciation is very difficult to wrap one's tongue around. Except that if you think the “beau” here is said how the French would say it, you’ve got another think coming. It’s “Byoo-lee”. That first part makes sense when you think of how we altered the word in, say, "beautiful," but the second syllable makes no sense whatsoever. And that’s not even the strangest bastardized French name: this honor goes to Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, which is pronounced… “Beaver Castle”. Meanwhile, here in Virginia, we have a Fort Belvoir (which is not in a burg), and that's pronounced closer to the French version. And don't get me started on the mangled French-origin towns in the Mississippi Valley, like New Orleans or St. Louis, or Terre Haute or Versailles. Llanfair... I've been informed that long words (or place names) break the site on mobile view, so I'm not typing this one out. You know the town. I've been there. The only thing notable about it is the name, which I still haven't mastered. Somehow, it's also derived from a St. Mary's Church, which is probably about as common in England as Notre Dames are in France, and for the same reason. Anyway, like I said, more at the link. I'd consider it required reading if you're planning to claim asylum in the UK anytime soon, for whatever reason. |
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