Ancestral memory?

When you recline in a recliner chair, the foot rest unfolds up to form a rest for you, and the sides which protected the seat parts jut out below it. From your point of view this is a comfortable foot rest, but from below this makes a little cave just right for a small enough dog to curl up in.

Signs of the times

AVI has been counting presidential election signs in and out of cities, so I thought I'd toss in some data points.

In Madison and my town Biden dominates, though here and there a Trump sign survives. In the countryside, Trump appears 2-5 times as often. In Algoma (population a bit over 3000), Biden appears twice as often as Trump. Parts of the town are trendy. It has its own Bahai group--in a town of 3000!--so it may not represent small towns well.

The Menominee reservation had very few signs, and they were all Biden--or "Pow-wow the vote" signs, usually in conjunction with a Biden sign. I wonder if they had some tribal discussion on the matter.

Most signs are standard issue, but some are home-made, especially ones about vets, and those are often fairly creative.

I don't think the democrats are going to make Hillary's mistake this year. Back in 2016 I recall rather few Hillary signs--almost as many old Bernie ones. This year they're pushing hard.

Rapids

Watching the water billow over rocks is soothing and eye-bending. Your eyes want to follow the water flowing by, and also to stay on the formations it makes--and you flicker back and forth between the two. Then when you look at the stone wall you are sitting on, it wavers.

Observations about political talk

Political chatter acts like crack.

When you indulge with your friends, you get a feel-good buzz as though you were actually doing something useful. You are, after all, "raising awareness," or at least just keeping each other woken, like a gaggle of night watchmen gazing into the fire.

Each bit of snark is like a dainty morsel going down into the innermost parts. It feels so good that the habit grows. More and more of your conversation involves it. You feel important—perhaps it is the only time you feel important—when you gossip your judgments on your enemies.

And you react with such shock and hatred when anyone harshes your mellow with nuance, or even—God forbid—a contradiction.

It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it

Predicting the future

Why futurism has a cultural blindspot

In his book Predicting the Future, Nicholas Rescher writes that “we incline to view the future through a telescope, as it were, thereby magnifying and bringing nearer what we can manage to see.” So too do we view the past through the other end of the telescope, making things look farther away than they actually were, or losing sight of some things altogether.

These observations apply neatly to technology. We don’t have the personal flying cars we predicted we would. Coal, notes the historian David Edgerton in his book The Shock of the Old, was a bigger source of power at the dawn of the 21st century than in sooty 1900; steam was more significant in 1900 than 1800.

and

But when it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same. Try to imagine yourself at some future date. Where do you imagine you will be living? What will you be wearing? What music will you love?

Chances are, that person resembles you now. As the psychologist George Lowenstein and colleagues have argued, in a phenomenon they termed “projection bias,”1 people “tend to exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes.”

In one experimental example, people were asked how much they would pay to see their favorite band now perform in 10 years; others were asked how much they would pay now to see their favorite band from 10 years ago. “Participants,” the authors reported, “substantially overpaid for a future opportunity to indulge a current preference.” They called it the “end of history illusion”; people believed they had reached some “watershed moment” in which they had become their authentic self.

I generally like science fiction that traces how technology changes behaviors, but not when it loses touch with the fundamentals. The Forever War's military fads lost me, though I must admit that our current politically driven changes are about that stupid.

When the writer gets too disconnected from "the fundamental things" they seem to be writing about aliens instead of humans--and fortunately they're in a genre where that's OK. Still, a stories about worlds where production is so cheap that everyone is idle just don't ring right. We're trying something like that now, and discovering that the devil finds work for idle hands to do. One of those fundamental things is that people need to be needed.

I never thought flying cars would be in every garage--when the subject came up for the first time my father pointed out that drunk driving was fairly common and asked what drunk pilots would do. When I got a little older I started to understand about insurance and liability and the relative fuel costs of flying and driving. Oh well. (Just as well--I like getting a little extra shuteye riding the bus...)

“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

When I looked up that quote, I found another from the same book that suits the topic just as well:

“... just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant,—just as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches to the sky.”

Now that I think of it, for some years now I haven't been reading a lot of science fiction--by a large factor not nearly so much as I did in my teens and twenties. Some of that is lack of time, and some is uninteresting fashions, but perhaps I'm more demanding. The most recent SF/fantasy I read (Somewhither) had a brief reference to an imaginary incident at the LHC that had me rolling my eyes--the alleged mysterious event was one of the things they are always looking for (minus the mysterious writing, of course).

I can't find the quote, but I think it was cited in Stand on Zanzibar: reality is what has the capability of surprising you. Setting aside "eye has not seen nor ear heard", even in this world we can't quite imagine everything.

Gossip

The Ashley Madison crew are extraordinarily revolting specimens of fallen humanity, and their (mostly male? surprise, surprise ...) customers were remarkably trusting fools (can you say "Please blackmail me"?), but the team that published the records is just as wicked--though probably more self-righteous about it. FWIW, how can you be sure that addresses weren't interpolated into the collections before they were tar'ed up and checksummed?

Gossip doesn't have to be false.

I know, the truth shall make you free--but that's not the purpose of any of the parties here.

Asymmetry

"Big data" analysis, facial recognition (they'd probably do better to use two cameras to get stereo and avoid the problems reconstructing features in the presence of shadows and discolorations), cameras on the street, speed cameras, cell-phone tracking--like living in a small town; everybody knows everything you do. Except that you know nothing about those "everybodys."

Saving money on inessentials

My son-in-law's Kia needed new brakes (very badly, it turned out), and I went over to see how he did it.

The rotor was screwed to the wheel hub with a single large Phillips screw. It had stripped instantly when he tried to remove it. After fighting with it for over an hour, with drill and dremel and hammering the screwdriver into the soft screw to try to get it to bite, he finally got it out. The auto parts store informed him that they didn't have any in stock--because they weren't needed.

It turns out that the screw is a assembly-line-only part, holding the rotor in place while the car moves from one station to another. Once the rest of the parts are on, it isn't needed. If you are repairing the car in one place it isn't needed at all.

So: not an essential part. OK. No point in greasing the thing before you put it in--why waste a step on the assembly line? And no point in getting a real screw, just use one of the soft metal screws like those that you get with cheap curtain hardware. At 6 per car, say 100,000 cars--the factory might be able to save as much as $10,000!

Of course it costs you or me an additional 4 hours or so per car... I don't know how the pros deal with them, but they're probably exasperated too.

Derby

When our Eldest Son participated in a Pinewood Derby race, we went out together to buy the kit. I showed him how to clamp the block down, and started the saw cut for him. His enthusiasm waned as he rasped and sanded and painted. I insisted that the axle positions were critical, and showed him he could try to make sure they went in straight.

In the end, he seemed happy with it--after all, he'd done the work himself, albeit with some impatience. It didn't win, but it was well above most of the pack in speed--seemed to slow down a bit with time (Were the axle positions twisting? I never knew.). It was not a thing of beauty, nor lightning fast, but it was clearly made by the boy and not the father, and it was something any boy could make who could afford the $4.50 for the kit and had a few ordinary tools in the house.

I was browsing while waiting in Hobby Lobby last month, and happened upon the Pinewood Derby shelf. The kit itself is the least of it now: you can even buy a special jig to make sure the axle goes in at the right position and angle. Entry level seems to have gone up to about $50.

The playing field was never perfectly equal in the derby: setting aside the parents who did the work for the boy, those who didn't have a saw or rasp or hammer at home were never going to turn out a fast racer, and those who didn't take the instruction's advice and try to arrange their own axle jigs wouldn't either. And there's nothing one can reasonably do to take out the income advantage, unless everybody is making theirs in the same project room with the same gear. Still it seems like an unhappy additional bias.

Plus, of course, the kids don't get the experience of making their own tools.

Related but not the same

Next to a car dealership on East Washington Avenue sits an enterprise whose sign sports scissors and the name "Lust BeautyWorks".

Am I alone in thinking this a trifle muddled?

There seem to be at least three attributes that get confused: sexy, attractive, beautiful. A few minutes thought should bring to mind women who are clearly more of one of the three but not so much of the other two. (I'm a man. Women can probably find men that fit similar categories, but I won't try to predict how that would work out.)

"What does he see in her?"

You know what I mean, I hope. A woman who doesn't seem to be particularly beautiful but people like to be around her--she's attractive. Another seems to radiate sex appeal, but seems unable to hold onto conquests reliably. And there's glamorous types who excite admiration and envy but aren't the first choice for dreams.

I'm thinking here of public attributes. Plenty of women and men who don't stop traffic are more than adequately sexy behind closed doors. If not there'd be many fewer children born. And the old husband who says his old wife is beautiful isn't kidding--he sees better than the simpleminded public eye does.

Maybe magazine covers(*) make it clearer. (Since Borders closed I don't see magazine stands so often, so I'm not up to date.) Playboy's covers, at least the ones I remember, featured beautiful women with an air of "You're here. Dinner can wait." The beauty was from a rather restricted palette, but was always beauty. It was always on the far side of the line, into erotica, but with enough plausible deniability that you could, for a moment, kid yourself that it was mostly about beauty. Other mags posed their models in postures designed to emphasize secondary sexual characteristics, regardless of whether this was a beautiful pose or not. Sex appeal was the goal, though it sometimes looked too silly to be appealing. But when Jackie Kennedy was on a cover, she was always made to look glamorous: beautiful but not sexy, and not very approachable either--except when the image made her seem helpless and in need of a defender.

If that's not clear, how about Ginger or Mary Ann? Mary Ann was played to appear approachable and attractive, not just beautiful; Ginger played to appear beautiful and slightly artificial, and not approachable and attractive. (And beside me is a Dominican University alumni magazine featuring an airbrushed young nurse with an attractive friendly smile.)

If you are young and healthy it is probably easier to take shortcuts with clothing and styles to appear sexy than it is to try to look beautiful. Teens in particular seem prone to taking these shortcuts. (Compare high school pictures today with those from 80 years ago.) But I suspect that the women who frequent Lust BeautyWorks would prefer to excite admiration for their beauty rather than lust, at least from the general population. Though I could be wrong again.

---

(*) "magazine covers" = superficiality squared

Stroller changes?

Back in the days when we used a stroller, we made sure it collapsed. Even the twin stroller (a double-wide, to keep a todler and a baby more or less in one place) folded down fairly compactly, though with treacherous projections. I saw strollers on the bus, too--generally folded down when they were brought on.

These days I see a lot of strollers on the bus, and even on the sidewalks--double strollers (fore and aft, the double-wides are, thankfully, out of style) as often as not, and none of them apparently easy to fold up. The double strollers almost invariably have just one child aboard. The weight, volume and square footage per child is much larger than before.

Is that because strollers are so much cheaper, or because nobody worries about folding them up anymore?

My sampling may be biased, since most of the strollers on the bus are with women going to/from the homeless shelter (no car, no need to compress), and many of the rest are with people touring the square, who may not be representative.

Still, the new style seems much bigger and more padded, and I'll bet harder to clean.

Moses or Ipanema?

Her stride is cultivated grace, her hair elegantly coiffed, her skirt cut to swirl above her knees just so, her back slightly arched for best projection.

But she does not walk in joy, granting a Mona Lisa smile to her admirers. Her head is bowed as if rapt in prayer to the tablet in her hand.

It shines, but her face does not.

Screen insects

I don't know how many of you remember xroach: an X-windows game that would generate a lot of images of roaches which hid behind your terminal windows or browser or what have you. When you iconized a window the roaches revealed would scurry around the screen looking for a new place to hide. You could click on them to squish them. Minutes of fun--but much more amusing if you could distract some unsuspecting soul and invoke it on their machine.

The old flat-screen I'm using at work has several layers, and an ant got in between them somehow. All morning it wandered to and fro, looking at all the backwards text. (Not that unix commands are that much odder forward...)

Patron of bloggers

Elihu

I too will have my say; I too will tell what I know.

For I am full of words, and the spirit within me compels me;

inside I am like bottled-up wine, like new wineskins ready to burst.

I must speak and find relief; I must open my lips and reply.

Mea culpa

"The world deserves my insight, and I must out with it or bust." About 25 years ago I noticed how much of the Bible study I was in was "me talking." I had to make a conscious effort to shut up and not bring every discussion point to its maximum precision. I still have to make that effort.

Blogging, unfortunately, is not usually much of a conversation. The temptation to be the final word on subjects makes it even less of one. Linking feels derivative, but restating in your own words ... "Small wit is theirs, in shopworn phrases dressed, What oft was thought, and twice as well expressed."

AI

The new movie "her" (it doesn't sound that interesting) has the thesis that a man falls in love with an AI. I gather the AI programmers are getting more and more sophisticated, and of course the speech recognition and voice reconstruction is better and better. And if it talks like a woman... um, no. It may be a good parody, but the AI is a predictable construct.

I gather Frank Herbert wanted to avoid predicting the future of computing and instead deal entirely with living characters, so in Dune's Orange Catholic Bible it says "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." One of our little gods is intellect--it is an article of faith that we know more and are wiser than all humanity before us. So I suppose we like to construct idols of intellect. But it isn't logical to draw conclusions about the nature of humans' intelligence from the nature of imitations.

Mondegreen wisdom

When singers don't have good articulation or when the mix is too instrument-heavy I find when I reassemble the babble into something nearly intelligible it doesn't seem quite relevant to the rest of the song. (I often must look up lyrics online, and I find that songs that seemed muddy back in the 60-70's are still muddy today--it wasn't just the static-y radio.)

I did the same with speech when young and unfamiliar with exotic uses of words, and do the same now that I'm older and people mumble more.

Sometimes the revision is better than the original. A line from the religious controversies of a few centuries ago ran something like: "Confess a man against his will; he's of the same opinion still." Perfectly true; compelling somebody to recite a creed doesn't make him believe it. But when I was 10 I'd not heard the word confess used that way, and I reconstructed the lines as "Convince a man against his will; he's of the same opinion still." That is an unpleasant indictment--and every day we run across that kind of stubborn refusal to see.

A rattle of dishes disguised "self deluded" as "self diluted," which is a polite way to describe lives that should have overflowed with works of grace and kindness--but instead drip self-absorption.

Maybe there are advantages--but I wish people wouldn't mumble.

Studying primitive tribes

A few years ago National Geographic carried an article about native American culture, lamenting the losses, especially of their religion. One of the letters they got in reply explained that while there had been many problems, the one thing he and his family were grateful for was that their family had been introduced to Jesus a century before.

It's a curious reversal of attitudes. There was a time when it was thought progress if aborigines picked up civilized paraphernalia and attitudes, but now there always seems to be a little groan in the reports about South American Indians explaining why the photos show t-shirts.

People just don't want to sit still for us to study them. Some little prejudice about having their own lives to lead...

The ordinary anthropologist is one who spends six weeks or six months (or even sometimes six years) among, say, the Boreyu tribe at their settlement on the Upper Teedyas River, Darndreeryland. He then returns to civilization with his photographs, tape recorders, and notebooks, eager to write his book about sex life and superstition. For tribes such as the Boreyu, life is made intolerable by all this peering and prying. They often become converts to Presbyterianism in the belief that they will thereupon cease to be of interest to anthropologists; nor in fact has this device been known to fail.

AVI noted the bitterness of disputes in anthropology. The only one I heard much about was the Margaret Mead vs Freeman feud: were Mead's informants pulling her leg? Or was Freeman following the lead of his mentor's mentor who was Mead's rejected lover? I thought I knew a little about it--when I looked it up for this post I found it was weirder than I suspected.

Maybe somebody should study the behavior of this strange tribe called anthropologists. They have taboos, rites of passage, totems and feuds--should be lots of material.

Who picked the vanity plate?

A stubby little grey car of very recent vintage aggressively weaved through traffic this morning, hitting well over 75mph as he shot past me on the right. (Don't ask how I got that estimate, OK?)

The plate said Eeyore 1. Conflicting messages... was he trying to compensate?

A place for not quite everything

They replaced the billboard last Friday, probably because the lease was up instead of because the subject was unendurably silly. A 20-something woman used to sit yoga-like beside some boxy shelving full of clothes and fabrics and oddments with the overall title "California Closets Will Make You Happy."

I rarely see an ad fatuous enough to make its buried assumption explicit: "X will make you happy." Being that clear gives the suckers a chance to decide whether the proposition is really true; hide the hook and they may not notice.

And then they made the mistake of showing a sample closet. In winter. In Wisconsin. Maybe in LA you can get away with such miniscule hanger space, but in places where you get a little weather it is nice to have space to hang up your coat and some heavy shirts. Those tend to hang a little wider than silk blouses.

And then I noticed that the closet wasn’t shared. The woman was all alone in the picture.

Koans

Zen novices live in a monastary to meditate on questions like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" or of Gutei's finger or "What is Buddha? Three pounds of flax." This they hope to bring them to enlightenment.

Down a different road one finds other koans: "Does this dress make me look fat?" and "Surprise me" and the child playing with the emptiness of the box instead of the toy. The patient student finds enlightenment there.