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“Can people levitate?”
“‘Can people levitate?’”
“Oh, I knew I shouldn’t have asked.”
“‘Can people levitate?’”
“Don’t…. I mean, it’s ‘No,’ right?”
“…… Yes, it is ‘No.’”

ginandtacos.com » Blog Archive » A NATION OF WHINERS AFTER ALL

It’s ironic that the author chooses to quote Ms. Bushnell since this article inspired the exact same reaction I had the first time I saw an episode of Sex and the City - I went in expecting mindless distraction and emerged from the experience a hardcore Marxist.

You know how scientists and historians are liable to liken the total time civilization has existed versus the total time the earth has existed to “the blink of an eye?” At the drop of a hat? I’ve always taken their word for that. I mean, why would scientists and historians lie to me, or be so sloppy that they screwed up on such a common comparison? They’re not typically liars and slobs. But I, for no other reason than I’m here in Miami with time to waste, decided to actually check that comparison. You lucky, lucky people!

First, I want to make it clear that I believe I’m the first one to check this comparison ever, in the history of the world. I realize that’s a powerful statement, but a 50 second Google investigation leads me to believe it’s true, and that’s good enough for me.

Second, to even make sense of the “blink of an eye” statement as a comparison, I realized I needed to know what unit of time the blink was being compared to. I mean, you can’t just say “civilization is to blink of an eye” as “age of the earth is to blank” without providing options for “blank.” That would be thoughtless and cruel. That would also get you a vicious, well-earned beating at an SAT exam if you were proctoring the test.  So I had to apply a little common sense to this. What biological process would a scientist or historian pair with “the blink of an eye” when trying to stun the reader with how really big the time difference is  between  the lifespan of civilization and the lifespan of the world? What biological process could they use? It’s, of course, a gigantic differential, a geological one; no one’s disputing that. At least no one near enough for me to reach out and slap some sense into. In the end, the only thing that seems reasonable to put up against that huge disparity is the human lifespan. And I think that’s a reasonable conclusion for any non-slappable person, especially when I can now word it like this: “civilization is to blink of an eye as earth’s lifespan is to human’s lifespan.” See how pleasing and SAT-ish that looks?

Third, now that I’ve identified my terms, the only thing I have to do prior to figuring out if I’m being lied to is to rigorously define these terms, viz: 1)time-length of civilization, 2)time-length of eye-blink, 3)time-length of earth’s existence, and 4)time-length of human life:

1. The length of time civilization’s been around depends on your definition of civilization. That doesn’t really apply here, of course; I don’t personally care what your definition is. My definition depends only on googling “when did civilization begin?”, clicking through to 2 or 3 different sites that appear the least bit relevant, grabbing some numbers, adding those numbers up, then dividing by the number of numbers added. Civilization’s been around for 7,000 years.

2. Wiki-answers answers “How long does it take to blink an eye” as if the question were about how much time humans go between eyeblinks. That definition had never occurred to me. It seemed, in fact, like bullshit. On the other hand, it also seemed like one of those things that was obvious to everybody else in the world, yet I had somehow managed to get wrong for decades. Luckily for my sanity, searchengineguide.com timed an eyeblink at about a tenth of a second, which conformed to my previous thinking, so wiki-answers is indeed a-bursting with bullshit.

3. If I’d approached the age of the earth in the same way as I approached the age of civilization (1 above), I would’ve had to arrange for some mechanism with which to throw out the Jesus-freak estimates. Instead I relied on high school and college textbook memories of this amount of time that are so ingrained in me that I could probably access those brain cells before I access the ones that tell me how many legs a tripod has. And then I arbitrarily added 500 million to come up with the answer: 5 billion years.

4. 75 years, because I’m all agreed that that’s about what it is.

That settled, I was able to mathematically describe the comparison:

(time-span of civilization)/(age of earth) = (time to blink an eye)/(human lifespan)

or, filling in those statements with the rigorous numbers from above,

7,000yrs/5 billion years = 0.1 second/2.36682 billion seconds

(where 75yrs = 75yrs x 365.25days/1yr x 24hrs/1day x 60min/1hr x 60sec/1min = 2.36682 billion sec).

So, canceling out the units and typing out the zeroes to make my work look more impressive, we have 7,000/5,000,000,000 = 0.1/2,300,000,000, or

7/5,000,000 = 1/23,000,000,000, or even

1/714,286 = 1/23,000,000,000

which we can finally see is utter bullshit.

Therefore (or, if we spent an extra 2 minutes googling it up, and we did, ” ∴ “), the entire span of human civilization is 5 orders of magnitude larger than the blink of an eye, if by “orders of magnitude” I mean what I think I mean.  In other words, my friends, the metaphor is a lie.

To be accurate–and scientists and historians are nothing if not accuracy fetishists–they pride themselves on it, they live for that shit–the metaphor should really be phrased something like this: “Civilization began 7,000 years ago, which, in geological terms, is around 32,000 blinks of an eye” (computation available upon request). Or if that doesn’t float their boat, “Civilization began 7,000 years ago, which is like everybody in Tupelo, MS, blinking at once, provided 4,000 of them are on vacation at the time.”  Granted, the phrase has become kind of verbose and pitiful, but I didn’t make this bed, and I’m not the one who has to sleep in it.

In conclusion, “Beeyatch.”

Could Twitter’s Realtime World Blur Our Moral Compass?

Emotions linked to our moral sense such as admiration and compassion- awaken slowly in the mind, according to a new study from a neuroscience group show that emotions linked to our sense of morality are aroused slowly. The study was led by Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.

This makes three different ways I’ve seen people try to make a cautionary tale out of this study. And this is one of the more subtle consequences of growing older: since I’ve seen this process several times before (the ‘new study of a particular process is abstracted to give a potential overall insight into why we’re fucked up’ process), and I’ve seen the process almost without exception sputter toward final inconsequence, I have become, if not scornful, at least indifferent to it. Is that wisdom? If it is, wisdom blows.

I miss the days when this sort of thing fired my imagination.

This meme is very similar (if not identical) to the one in which a fairly technical discovery in some particular scientific field is immediately seized upon by the media and extrapolated to construct a probable future in which wild, weird, new things become as common and important as the car or air travel or the cellphone. The media delight in telling us these things to the point that they will make one up if a ‘real’ one hasn’t come along for awhile.

Obviously, the fact of cars, air travel and cellphones indicates that, sometimes, the “probable future” actually happens. I’m aware of that. But by the same token, the fact that there are no personal submarines, no cures for cancer, no cold fusion, no teleporters, no huge starships trolling the asteroids for uranium and gold, no robot salad makers squatting inside kitchen cupboards, no cheap solar panels on every home, no healthy cigarettes, no fat pills, no telepathic communication–it makes it hard to pay attention when tidings of “the next greatest thing” worm their way into the popular consciousness.

Another similar if not identical media process is the one in which a particular thing happens (eg: USAir’s plane ditching in the Hudson after a birdstrike) which is so exciting that they are compelled, for awhile, to over-report other happenings that have even the slightest chance of producing the same outcome (eg: any birdstrike on any plane that forces the plane to return to the airport for a landing). Because I’m a pilot (and so through professional channels heard about many birdstrikes that required emergency landings that weren’t considered worthy of mainstream reporting until after the USAir incident) I know that these things happen all the time.

This new study shows that there is a difference in the speed that more and less visceral displays of tragedy matter to people.  That’s interesting: there are differences in the speed at which things matter. For example, seeing someone break an ankle elicits a response of compassion more quickly than seeing someone being told that her mother died. It’s an interesting study. But interesting psychological studies happen all the time. And because I was a psych major (and also because I’m a human being that pays a certain amount of attention to things that may impact my human being-ness), I know this new study should be interpreted narrowly until proven to matter more generally. That’s just the way it is. You can’t go from this study to a pronouncement on the moral effect of Twitter in one go and not sound like a shrieking ass, at least to experts. That’s just the way it isn’t.

The tricky part is knowing the difference between a carefully constructed hypothesis and the shrieking of an ass when the subject is not one you know well.  Years of being led to believe things were important that in the end turned out not to be very important have taught me to delay judgment on anything that isn’t already completely obvious. While that may be wise, it’s hard on optimism.

I know when things that happen in my areas of expertise are being stretched to fill a news vacuum. Birdstrikes and psychological studies happen all the time. They happen all the time. So where was CNN the thousand other times these things happened? I’ll tell you where CNN was: CNN was busy over-reporting some other goddamn thing that, since I’m not a professional sailor or bond-trader, I had no idea that they were over-reporting. So because I’m not an expert on everything, I am potentially duped by the media, day in and day out, to believe things are more consequential than they really are.

I know the media don’t do this on purpose. They don’t get up in the morning and say “Let’s over-report tsunamis today.” I know it’s just the lousy way things work. I know one of the functions of the media is to find whatever excitement there is in the daily crush of happenings in the world and offer it to the public, so that they can make money and continue existing. Or if there’s nothing really inherently exciting that day, to find the hook into something else that was exciting before and offer that. To blur potential and real if real doesn’t look like it will sell. I know all that.

Knowing that doesn’t make me happier. And one of the cardinal attributes of wisdom, I think, is that once you become wise to something, it’s very hard to become un-wise to it. In other words, I can’t go back to being optimistic about such things even if I wanted to. Wisdom is a jealous god.

I used to think that, given the choice, I would choose wisdom over innocence every time. Every time. I used to think that, given the choice, accurate knowledge of the probability that something is true is always preferable to ignorance of it. Do I still think that? It’s hard to say.

I guess I just wish wisdom wouldn’t trash optimism quite as thoroughly as it seems it has to do.

And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight
So I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house, Hey! what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in
If God was here, he’d tell you to your face, man you’re some kinda sinner!

Ecto, 12 years old: “Yeah! There’s way too many signs! And I hate people telling me what to do all the time, too!”

Ecto, 45 years old: “Just keep off the man’s fucking lawn, a-ight?”

The Quiet Coup - The Atlantic May 2009

Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

I don’t pretend to understand the convoluted way we got here. I do understand why we got here; we got here because of greed. Pure and simple. And when the greedy are the very ones making the rules, you have disaster.

Citigroup is too fucking big. So is JP Morgan, Delta/Northwest, Microsoft, and Mosanto. They’re too fucking big. So when disaster hits one of these gargantuas, disaster hits everyone. And the answer is NOT to allow them to gobble up other companies in the name of market efficiency. Because, given enough time, disaster always strikes an individual company; always. That’s why there is no company called Amalgamated Boulders or Amalgamated Myrrh.

Those that didn’t understand this either weren’t paying attention or had a vested, selfish interest in playing the violin while the ship went down. Unfortunately for us, the violinists were the ones writing the rules. How could the government, even a Republican government, be so obtuse that it would let this happen? It’s hard to believe.  I’m afraid that it’s easier to believe that they were evil.

I used to like to say this: Republicans are evil, and Democrats are stupid. I’m now inclined to think that I was at least half right when I said that. Hopefully, that’s all I was: half right.

If Obama fucks this up, we are in a world of hurt.

So when do you think the people who keep calling World Depression I “The Great Depression” will be considered old-fashioned and quaint? I’m thinking ‘12 or ‘13.

What am I, 45? I only now noticed that embedded in the rock group “The Beatles” name is the word “Beat.” Which is pretty much probably why they chose that name.

I know, it’s fucking inexplicable how I could have survived this long.

I just realized that if I do this long enough, eventually I’ll blog the exact same thing I blogged previously without even knowing it. It’ll be like noticing that today’s Beetle Bailey is a slight re-working of a Beetle Bailey from 1977. Except that instead of being disgusted with Mort Walker’s cynical or senile recycle of an old strip,  I’ll be the senile old guy recycling old ideas. In fact, it might have already happened. There’s really no way to know for sure.

(as far as I know, today’s Beetle Bailey is not recycled from 1977)

In the Sun Herald there’s a page, usually not far past the editorials page, which I call the ‘fluff’ page. It may even have a name, but I don’t know it. It’s the page that contains a smattering of celebrity gossip, a ‘this day in history’ section, and a ‘birthdays’ section. Maybe a crossword puzzle or sudoku too. I at least glance through most of the page, but I find myself actually analyzing the ‘birthdays’ section. It’s a 2-column list, usually of 20 or 23 or so famous living people, why they’re famous, and how old they are today. The two things I particularly notice are 1) why exactly each person is famous, and 2) how many people are older and younger than I am. The first is to be moderately outraged that it’s a list of ‘famous’ people, not ‘important’ people. So it’s very heavy on actors, very light on, say, physicists and philosophers. The second is to be disturbed when the bottom person in the first column is younger than I am. Which, of course, means that more than half the famous living people born that day were born after me.

I find that I’m not disturbed very often. Yet. But the bottom of the first column can only become more disturbing as time passes.

I do this to myself every day.

Air Force One is one ’spiffy ride,’ Obama says - CNN.com

“Hey guys, what do you think of my — this spiffy ride here?” the president asked the group of reporters traveling with him on the presidential plane.

All I’m saying is that Obama needs to be careful. The Press is dangerously close to changing the meme from “fresh new non-Bush” to “dangerously-underqualified un-President.” And when a new meme leaves the station, it leaves the station.

This is the perfect time to get rid of pennies and phase out the dollar bill. I mean, if you can’t do something so fiscally sensible in the worst of times, when can you do it?

Today I retired my ‘GetYourWarOn’ link from its regular spot in the always-open ‘Humor’ folder in my bookmarks to its new spot in the almost-always-closed ‘Old Humor’ sub-folder. It was indeed a sad day, but David Rees left me no choice when he retired GYWO. What’s he got left at mnftiu.cc after GYWO’s gone? Ironic overuse of ‘lol’s and ‘rofl’s? That goes only so far. In fact, Wednesday Feb 11 2009 is as far as it goes.

So now the link is officially retired to a sub-folder. It had a good run, but now it’s over. And it’s not like it’s in bad company, either; lots of good old links creaking around down here, links that gave a lot of value once upon a time. Like ‘Cockeyed.com’ and ‘Halfbakery links.’ And ‘LILEKS (James) Welcome!’ And ‘SpinWeb’ and ‘FARK.com’ and ‘Fuck the South.’ And ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture…’ and ‘Institute for Naming Children H…’ and ‘GorillaMask.net: Updated d…’ and ’sometimes, Sigmund,’.  And even ‘Doonesbury;’ Doonesbury is down here in the Old Humor sub-folder, but only because my Doonesbury fix is now supplied from the ‘Chron comics page’ link in the main folder.

The Old Humor sub-folder has value; I open it from time to time. Every few weeks or months, I remember it’s down here, and roll through some of the offerings in four or five minutes, to see if the links still go somewhere. It’s not like the ‘really old humor’ sub-sub folder, which only gets an airing every year or so, and from which there’s nowhere to go but away. It’s not like that.

So now the Humor folder is pared back down to places I really do go every day or every other day, places like ‘Chron comics page,’ and ‘Comics I Don’t Understand,’ and ‘The Onion,’ and ‘Museum of Hoaxes.’ Except for ‘Museum of Hoaxes,’ which I really don’t click on all that much anymore. Not much at all anymore, really.

I guess I need to review the ‘Museum of Hoaxes’ charter soon, see what the hell that’s still doing up there.

I tried to get my little pickup truck an inspection the other day, but the guy at Snowball & Sons & Daughter–it may have been Snowball–told me the window tinting was too dark. I figured it might be, even though I bought it last year with a valid sticker on it. I guess I don’t know the right inspection guy to go to. So I’ve been driving it around for the last few weeks with an expired sticker, steeling myself to either get a professional tint remover to charge me a couple hundred bucks to remove the tinting, or set aside an entire day to do a bitter, half-assed job of it myself with a scraper and some razor blades. Then I remembered about the Google thing you kids have on the internets today, and typed in “how to remove tinting from a car window,” which returned this, which in turn saved me a bucket of time and money and made me feel very good about myself and the world for a few hours.

In sum, the Google you kids have today is substantially better than the card catalog system at Long Beach Public Library ca. 1979, which is worth remembering from time to time.

Whenever I watch The Colbert Report, I find my eyes drawn to Stephen’s hands and the way he moves them. He has extremely graceful hands, fascinating to watch; like two nervous birds attached way out there on the ends of his arms. He appears to know exactly where each one of his fingers is at all times, and exactly where it’s going to go next.

On the other hand, Nick Cave in the video down below has hands that often appear to be controlled by two entirely different brains. They’re like two people learning to dance together to this one song they both kind of know. And sometimes they’re like one person reading the newspaper and the other person eating a ham sandwich, in two different houses on opposite sides of the planet.

And this is also graceful.

“What the fuck is Vitter’s problem?” still googles empty, but it’s only been a week. It’s just a matter of time before people start using the correct verbiage.

“I can hear my mother wailing and a whole lot of scraping of chairs; I don’t know what it is but there’s definitely something going on upstairs.”

At Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog: Profitable Until Deemed Illegal

I’d never heard of this thing before. But it is amazing. Somebody called it a tax on people who are bad at math. Jeff Atwood says

In short, swoopo is about as close to pure, distilled evil in a business plan as I’ve ever seen…. It is almost brilliantly evil.

It really is amazing.

Just now I finally took the Obama-Biden sticker off my truck, because I’m hauling it down to Long Beach to give it a general enema. It may be paranoia–but I don’t think so–to think that it will be serviced inadequately (if not actually sabotaged) because of a bumper sticker. But that’s my feeling, living here. Frankly, I can’t afford the courage of my convictions just now.

Bellamy salute - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Bellamy salute is the hand gesture described by Francis Bellamy 1855-1931 to accompany the American Pledge of Allegiance, which he had authored. The gesture was derived from the Roman salute.

This was originally what American kids did at school when pledging allegiance. They’d still be doing it if Hitler and Mussolini hadn’t happened. Here’s Bellamy’s directions for a proper pledge:

At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute — right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” At the words, “to my Flag,” the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side.

In my heaven I get to ask Francis Bellamy and dicks of his ilk just exactly what did they think they were doing. Then it’s back to the beer and dancing girls.