Category Archives: Society

May 26, 2024

Stillness and Solitude

In the Science Notes post published last Friday, I didn’t have room for the last article that caught my eye in recent issues of New Scientist. This article was, I thought, a bit different from the others and seemed to require its own post.

Firstly, it has a meaty heft and ties in with an old post of mine as well as some notes I have for a post I thought to call Stillness Redux (in reference back to that old post).

What’s ironic to me is how what the article offers as possible anodyne for modern life is very much the life I’ve lived since I began navigating my own course across life’s seas.

11 Comments | tags: Science Notes, silence, stillness | posted in Society, Sunday Sermons

April 10, 2024

The COVID Toll

By Wyrd Smythe

A bit more than three years ago (on February 3, 2021, to be specific), I posted a Wednesday Wow about COVID-19. Seeing the reported numbers in the news back then inspired me to obtain my own dataset and do some analysis. The results then were jaw-dropping, hence the Wow!

For quite a few months now I’ve been meaning to do an update to see what’s happened since then. Yesterday I pulled a new dataset and re-did the analysis.

The results are still jaw-dropping. And horrific and sorrowful.

12 Comments | tags: charts, COVID-19, death | posted in Society, Wednesday Wow

March 4, 2024

BB #91: Modern Childrearing

By Wyrd Smythe

The old saying “Spare the rod, spoil the child” has fallen into, shall we say, severe disfavor these days, even as just a metaphor for strict childrearing. And forget about actually spanking your kid — that’s child abuse by modern standards.

At the same time, we seem to be in the midst of a serious and growing mental health crisis among teens, especially in the USA (but also the UK and Australia).

A new book by Abigail Shrier suggests these may be connected.

24 Comments | tags: children, kids | posted in Brain Bubble, Society

February 29, 2024

BB #90: The Growth Paradigm

By Wyrd Smythe

My final post in 2023 was about growth curves. It focused on the difference between geometric growth versus exponential growth — which turns out to be not much — and compared them to polynomial growth (see that post for the math-y details; this post isn’t a math post, so relax and read on).

A key characteristic of all these growth curves is that they grow without limit. If we treat the horizontal axis as time, then the longer the growth continues along the curve, the greater whatever growing grows.

The problem is that nothing in the real world can grow infinitely without limit. At some point, something has to give.

9 Comments | tags: Earth population, global warming | posted in Brain Bubble, Society

October 10, 2023

Mummified ‘Member Berries

By Wyrd Smythe

I was going through old files I’ve kept around for too long and found a collection of images a friend sent me years ago. We met in college and have been friends since. She ended up working in advertising, plus her husband had a graphic design business, so she was pretty attuned to and interested in the world of visual arts and advertising.

And she had a great sense of humor. The images in the post are all (as far as we know) actual ads from a bygone era. An era that had its features, but which I think most are pretty glad is bygone.

Caveat lector: In my case, these led to tears of laughter, but for some they could lead to gnashing of the teeth. Try to see it as a sign of how much we’ve grown.

13 Comments | tags: funny images, humor, laugh | posted in From My Collection, Life, Society

June 19, 2023

Juneteenth 2023

By Wyrd Smythe

A badly slanted worldview.

There is a disease of the mind, an awful meme, usually passed from parent to child, that sees a person’s paint job as an all-defining aspect of their personality. This disease blinds the mind’s eye, disabling it from seeing past the color of someone’s skin.

Historically this disease has been one of the great sources of human evil. It’s bestial, a hearkening back to the primitive animal reactions of the perceived other. Tragically, the same minds that rise us so far up give us tremendous power to conceive hate, evil, and destruction.

At its worst, this disease — racism — leads to casual murder of human beings.

5 Comments | tags: Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Juneteenth, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin | posted in Opinion, Politics, Society

April 21, 2023

Sapiens: The Book

By Wyrd Smythe

The previous two posts (this one and this one) each discussed an aspect of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by Yuval Noah Harari. While those aspects grabbed my attention and got me thinking, I took very little from the rest of the book.

In fact, reading the latter two-thirds got to be something of a chore. It had many examples from comparatively modern history (given the full breadth of our existence) but they didn’t seem to amount to a unified whole. The author seems not to connect dots his own text presents.

Final score: two bits I liked and took away (and posted about) but the rest of the book I left behind. I give it a Meh! rating and a thumbs down.

4 Comments | tags: history, homo sapiens, humanity | posted in Books, Society

April 20, 2023

Sapiens: Revolutionaries

By Wyrd Smythe

The previous post focused on a single, to me key, aspect of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by Yuval Noah Harari. This post focuses on the other aspect of the book I found compelling. The last one was about the power fiction gave homo sapiens. This one is about the Agricultural Revolution (the AR).

And other important Revolutions that followed, but the AR wrought a profound change on the human race. It was our first step towards societies and civilization. It ushered in the first cities and led to kingdoms and empires.

It also led to materialism, greed, health issues, theft, and war.

14 Comments | tags: history, homo sapiens, humanity, storytelling | posted in Books, Society

April 19, 2023

Sapiens: Storytellers

By Wyrd Smythe

While not usually my cup of tea, Amazon Prime offered Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by Yuval Noah Harari, and I thought I’d give it a try. I’d never heard of the author, and don’t usually read anthropology or sociology books, but the blurb made it sound interesting (don’t they always).

I did enjoy the first third. The author discusses two aspects of our ancient past that really grabbed my attention. Unfortunately, he went on to lose it. In a big way. For me, the latter two thirds of the book added little and missed what seemed some key connections.

So, three posts (at least): one each for the two attention grabbers; one more for the book overall. This first one is about our special ability as storytellers.

20 Comments | tags: history, homo sapiens, humanity, storytelling | posted in Books, Society

February 23, 2023

George Carlin

By Wyrd Smythe

Last time I described how my feelings changed about what was once my favorite TV series, NCIS. In this post, I’ll describe how something similar has happened with my feelings about George Carlin (1937-2008), who was once, by far, my favorite standup comedian.

In both cases, I have a sense that my dying affection involves a combination of prolonged exposure magnifying perceived flaws, evolution on my part, and changes on their part. With Carlin, the way he changed in the late 1990s is the lion’s share of my disenchantment. I still revere early George, still rank him among the greatest.

But I never liked “angry George” and his writing from that era is disappointing.

5 Comments | tags: George Carlin, standup comedy | posted in Books, Rant, Society