Friday Notes (Feb 30, 2024)

The weather has been so weirdly warm this month that I never got around to a Friday Notes for February, so I’m extending the month. Call it a leap year “plus one”. Truth is, I’m at long last finally starting to reach the bottom of my pile. A lot of what’s left is trivial, silly, or outdated, and I may end up doing a thorough spring cleaning on them.

The ultimate goal is for the Notes to be about contemporaneous things rather than from old notes that have been fermenting in the pile.

But for a bit longer, it’ll be a combination of both, so off we go.

Some notes that didn’t make it into my recent post, The Irrational Square (because I forgot I’d jotted them down while thinking about the post — even when I write things down, I forget them):

Squares are cool because they’re the quintessential expression of two-dimensional space. They’re part of a progression of such quintessential expressions that begins with the zero-dimensional point. The one-dimensional line embodies extent in one dimension. The square embodies extent in two dimensions, the cube in three, the tesseract in four, and so on to higher dimensions. [See this post for more.]

In all cases, they’re governed by a single parameter: the length of a side. That’s what makes them so quintessential. That lone parameter embodies the very notion of extent along a dimension.

The other simple shape is the circle (in two dimensions), sphere (in three), or 4+ dimensional hyperspheres. And these, too, are governed by a single parameter: the radius. But note that, starting from the zero-dimensional point, there really is no one-dimensional circular shape, no analog to the one-dimensional line. So, as simple as the circular shapes are, I don’t see them as quintessentially embodying the very notion of dimensional space.

Something cool about both is that the derivative of their area or volume turns out to be their circumference or surface area. [See this post for details.]

And, as mentioned in that recent post, both these simple shapes, when examined closely, force us to accept the irrational numbers.

Back in the day, it wasn’t hip to be square, but squares are actually pretty cool.

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Minor pet peeve: People who start a paragraph with, “Actually, …” It’s something I try to never do.

Actually, I generally succeed.

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Languages evolve, and English is a particularly dynamic language. Many other languages end up borrowing English neologisms. Contrast that with German, for instance, which is notorious for creating words by stringing existing ones together:

Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung

A 40-character word that means “narcotic prescription ordinance”. On the other hand, English lacks great and useful words such as Weltschmerz and Schadenfreude. [See this post about the former word.]

But my note here concerns the evolution of language through misuse. Recently, in a New Scientist article, an author wrote:

I would have struggled to point to it on a map, let alone name which ocean it is.

(Emphasis mine.) To me, that’s backwards. The “let alone” clause should name the more difficult or challenging notion compared to the one named in the first clause. Presumably, picking an ocean is easier than picking a specific island in that ocean. Try reading it the other way around:

I would have struggled to name which ocean it is, let alone point to it on a map.

Doesn’t that feel more sensible? Admittedly, one has to think about it a bit, but you’d like to think a writer for a science magazine would take more care. It’s a trivial thing, but I worry about what we lose when our language becomes less precise. The old argument is, “Well, you know what I meant, right?” And, indeed, yes, in this case, despite a jarring sense of dislocation, the meaning is clear.

But sometimes it may not be. Communication, like the tango, takes two.

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And yet, bear with me for a story from long ago (mid-1980s, I believe):

I had one of those minor life-changing moments where you suddenly see the world from another viewpoint and realize there’s a completely valid way of looking of things that had never occurred to you.

I was at a large family holiday gathering; the sort where you meet relatives you didn’t know you had or, as in this case, meet new spouses (of relatives I’d forgotten I had).

The spouse in question was a professional linguist. “Ah, ha!” I thought sub-consciously. “Here’s a chance for some professional validation on a point that’s been bothering me, but which seems to escape or not bother others.”

So I popped the question, “[As a professional linguist] Doesn’t it bother you how the language has devolved?”

The surprise answer was that, no it didn’t, because professional linguists study the language as it evolves, and linguistic evolution is neither “good” nor “bad”, it simply is (in dynamic languages).

I was left unvalidated but a bit wiser.

But I still regret the devolution of language. Useful terminology becomes diluted through misuse. Speech seems to be more and more context-dependent, iconic, and downright sloppy. (And by “iconic” I refer to desktop or app icons, those simplified pictograms that stand for something more complex. I’ve been complaining for a decade now about how iconic and lazy our storytelling is.)

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It blows my mind, so I have to share this chart (of local temps in February) again:

The highs range from +18° to +65° with an average high of +42.6°. The lows range from +4° to +39° with an average low of +24.6. Not a minus sign in sight! All of which is unheard of.

We had seven days with a high in the 40s and ten days with a high in the 50s (and one with a high +65°). There were only six days with a low below +20° and six with a low in the 30s (and 17 with a low in the 20s).

Mind blown (although maybe melted is a better word under the circumstances)!

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Life is shit and chocolate. This applies to everyone and everything.

I suspect it’s like those optical illusions that are two pictures in one, but you can only see one or the other (for example, the faces/vase and the rabbit/duck illusions).

We simply can’t see both at the same time; we see one or the other depending on how we look at it.

Last night, watching an episode of Northern Exposure (a great TV series from the 1990s), I heard a fitting story told by the character Marilyn Whirlwind (Elaine Miles). As best as I can retell it:

There was a Chief who owned a fine horse. Everyone said how lucky he was. The Chief said, “Maybe.” Then the horse ran away. Everyone said he was unlucky. The Chief say, “Maybe.” Later, the horse returned with a fine string of ponies. Everyone said how lucky he was. The Chief said, “Maybe.” The Chief’s son was riding one of the ponies when he fell and broke his leg. Everyone said how unlucky this was. The Chief said, “Maybe.” Later the Chief led a raid against an enemy tribe, and many fine young men were killed. But the Chief’s son, because of his broken leg, stayed home and lived.

Yin-Yang, lucky-unlucky, faces-vase, it’s all in how you look at it. And sometimes, if you wait, things change.

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A very old note due to a 2012 article in The Daily Beast, Consumption Makes Us Sad? Science Says We Can Be Happy With Less:

It may seem as though “how much is enough” is a very individual question. But it turns out that psychology has a good deal to offer us in the way of an answer. Psychology has developed a pretty rich understanding of what it is that produces happiness—what is sometimes called life satisfaction or subjective well being. And for the most part, what produces happiness isn’t stuff. People thrive when they have a network of close relations to others and when they have meaningful work that they find engaging. Stuff just doesn’t do it. And one major reason stuff doesn’t do it is a pervasive phenomenon known as hedonic adaptation.

Hedonic adaptation is just a fancy label for what we already know: we get used to things. The new car gets us all excited—for a while. But before long, it’s just our ride. The new tablet or smartphone is so enticing that we can’t keep our hands off it. But before long, it’s just another way for people we don’t want to hear from to lay responsibilities on us. There’s no denying that we get tremendous pleasure from the things we have. But the pleasure is disappointingly short-lived. And although this adaptation happens to us again and again, we never seem to learn to anticipate it. The result is that even when we get exactly what we want, we often end up disappointed.

This ties in with other studies I’ve read about that suggest that too many choices in life can also be source of discontent. Have you ever gotten stuck (like Buridan’s Ass) trying to pick what to watch amid the vast array of possibilities? It’s interesting that our rich and varied lifestyle may actually be a source of life dissatisfaction.

So, food for thought, if you ever find yourself wondering what’s missing in life. Maybe it’s not what’s missing so much as all the stuff that’s already there.

This also ties in with yesterday’s post about our obsession with growth. Simply put, humanity has become a victim of its own success.

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As long as I’m quoting old texts, here’s another I found worth saving. It’s from The Trouble with Physics (2006), by one of my favorite theoretical physicists, Lee Smolin:

Science is one of several instruments of human culture that arose in response to the situation we humans have found ourselves in since prehistoric times: We, who can dream of infinite time and space, of the infinitely beautiful and the infinitely good, find ourselves embedded in several worlds: the physical world, the social world, the imaginative world, and the spiritual world.

It’s a condition of being human that we have long sought to discover crafts that give us power over these diverse worlds. These crafts are now called science, politics, art and religion. Now, as in our earliest days, they give us power over our lives and form the basis of our hopes.

Nice sentiment! One reason I like Smolin is his embrace of philosophy in science, something that many scientists sorely lack. The book is, as the title suggests, an examination of where physics seems to have run off the rails (or jumped the shark, if you prefer).

I agree and have written many times here about fantasy and science fiction in science. [See, for instance, Fairy Tale Physics, Our BS Culture, and Our Fertile Imagination for just a few examples.]

As an aside, theoretical physicist Peter Woit, the same year, wrote Not Even Wrong, which is a similar analysis that focuses on the foolishness known as String Theory.

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For Christmas, and as a reward for all the Bentley-sitting I do (which, believe me, is its own reward, so this was gravy), BentleyMom gifted me with a set of four copper mugs for Moscow Mules. If you like mixed drinks and have never had a Moscow Mule, I highly recommend you try one. They’re currently my favorite mixed drink.

I discovered them several years ago while sitting in a bar with my bro-in-law. There was a row of shiny copper mugs on a shelf behind the bar, and I asked what they were for. The bartender replied they were for Moscow Mules. Never heard of them, says I, what’s in them? She listed the ingredients, which sounded delicious, so I ordered one.

And it was just as delicious as it sounded. Here’s a recipe:

• 1.5 ounces of vodka
• 0.5 ounces of lime juice
• 4.0 ounces of ginger beer
• 0.5 ounces of limoncello (optional)
• ice cubes
• lime wedge for garnish
• mint leaves for garnish

Ginger beer comes in 12-ounce cans, and I recommend using an entire can, so triple the first two ingredients to 4.5 ounces of vodka and 1.5 ounces of lime juice (and an ounce of the limoncello). The tripled recipe, along with the ice, fills two of the copper mugs to the brim.

Those copper mugs are said to add to the taste, the interaction between the ingredients and the copper. (One of these days I’ll try one in a glass to see if it tastes different.) Some have expressed concern about the potential for copper poisoning, but others feel the cold temperature and short durations involved remove any problem.

But none for Bentley! She has a hard time holding the mug in her paws.

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Speaking of mixed drinks, I celebrated an expensive week with a couple (okay, three) caramel appletinis last night. Sour apple flavored vodka and butterscotch schnapps in roughly equal amounts, but more vodka and less schnapps unless you like them really sweet and butterscotch-y.

I would have preferred a Mule, but I’ve had that flavored vodka and schnapps in my fridge since around 2003. Decided I’d use them up despite not being particularly into appletinis anymore (my ex-wife and I were—discovered them in the bar of the 50s Prime Time Café at MGM Studios at Disneyworld—one of the few places you can get drinks there).

The week was expensive because Tuesday I did my taxes and owed the Feds again (but got some back from the state). On Wednesday I took my car in for service (and got a rental while they worked on it), and that ended up being over $2,400 all told. Ouch!

But it’s two huge items off my TODO list, and that feels pretty good!

Stay linguistic, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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