Archive for the ‘Miscellany’ Category
Monday night miscellany, part 5
None of my longer posts are coming together, so I write short to break the writer’s block:
— Food for thought: The proposed Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar would replace our current calendar — jury-rigged to fit the unequal revolution and rotation of the Earth — with a fixed calendar, where every day of the year always falls on the same day of the week. Christmas would always be on a Sunday. Americans would always celebrate their independence on a Wednesday, while the French would do the same on a Saturday a week and a half later.
To equalize out the calendar, Hanke-Henry would add an extra week every five or six years.
Moreover, they’d also abolish time zones. All time would be UTC — so when it’s 0700 hours in London and the sun is coming up, it’s also 0700 in New York City but the middle of the night, and also 0700 in Honolulu — and the late evening. 0700 hours would always be evening in Honolulu, just as it would always be morning in London.
(It’s unclear how Hanke and Henry expect people to function — whether they want people to continue working 0900 to 1700 every day for synchronization, even if that means people in some parts of the world become nocturnal, or if they want people to continue setting their schedules largely by the sun but just calling it different times, or some combination of both.)
It’s a proposal that’s a big step towards the “rational” and away from the “natural,” and I’m not sold at all that it would be an improvement. But it’s at least thought-provoking.
Monday night miscellany, part 4
In which I really mean it when I say I’m going to be (relatively) brief:
— As a left-handed person, I was morbidly fascinated to see a throwaway paragraph in a review of a book on left-handedness with a theory on the origins of the southpaw-dom that I hadn’t heard before. There are, researchers say, odd connections between left-handedness and twins:
Not only is left-handedness twice as common among twins as among regular siblings, but left-handers are twice as likely as right-handers to produce twins.This eerie link lies at the heart of another modern theory: … that “being a monozygotic [from the same zygote, or "identical"] twin is a precondition of being left-handed.” In other words, only someone who has had a twin in utero can be truly left-handed. The twins are mirror images of one another; one is left-handed, and the other right-handed. Of course, left-handedness doesn’t require that one ultimately be born with a twin. If only one fetus results at the end of term, that means the other died in the womb and was absorbed by the mother: a “vanishing twin.”
In other words, if you’re a lefty and don’t have a twin, it means you DID in the womb — but your twin embryo didn’t make it. Plenty of fertilized embryos don’t make it through the early stages of pregnancy, for whatever reasons, though scientists don’t know exactly how common this is. As the book (summarized by the reviewer) notes, there’s major reasons to doubt this hypothesis and a very real lack of evidence to back it up.
But in the absence of conclusive evidence one way or the other, I may run with this: being a lefty means I had an identical twin for a few days or weeks until he fell off the mortal coil. OR WAS PUSHED… (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)
Monday night miscellany, part 3
Short thoughts (EDIT: after finishing, I can say my expectation of brevity was clearly unfounded) on interesting things:
— Many people, when I tell them where I went to college while making small talk, immediately ask the same follow-up: “Oh, and you majored in journalism at Grinnell?” Well, no, actually, I didn’t. Grinnell, as it happens, doesn’t offer a journalism program. It doesn’t even offer any classes in journalism. My education in being reporter came from throwing myself headlong into the student newspaper (one year as a writer, three as an editor) and then taking internships in the summer. Did my lack of a journalism degree impede my search for a job out of college? Perhaps a few hiring editors shuffled my resume into the “no” pile using “journalism degree?” as a filter, but enough didn’t that I got a second look. My clips and an interview made it clear that I knew what I was doing, or as much as a typical recent graduate does, and I got a job.
Moreover, when I speculate about the sometimes-dismal state of our industry, I’m never terribly worried. Even were I to end up unable to find a reporting job, I’m sure I could find a job someplace. I majored in political science, but the real skills I came away from Grinnell with were thinking and writing quickly and clearly. Those skills can take you a long way in a wide variety of fields.
I indulge in this tangent by way of introduction to an interesting article from Josh Barro in the National Review. Responding to a writer making a defense of classics majors who writes, “students of Arts and Letters do get hired, and they do go on to better jobs as they gain experience,” Barro agrees — to a point:
This is reasonable advice for students at certain colleges–highly selective ones–but is bad advice for the general public. Only if you’re at a top 10 or 20 school do you have the luxury of picking a major that does (not) give you job-specific skills and still being confident that you will find a good job after graduation.
Monday night miscellany, part 2
More spare thoughts from a day off work:
— I don’t own any iOS devices (an interesting subject worthy of another post given my general appreciation for Apple products) but that doesn’t mean I’m not fascinated by the implications of the new Siri software Apple included with the latest version of its iPhone. The witty responses Apple has built in to its digital “personal assistant” are well worth all the tumblrs that have sprung up to chronicle them (my favorite, though it’s hard to choose). But Wired takes a look at the bigger question: does a computer system capable of parsing speech and providing appropriate responses to millions of potential questions and statements could as genuine artificial intelligence?
Four degrees to South Sudan
Today, the tiny little globe atop my bookshelf became a little bit more obsolete*.
The southern region of Sudan officially became an independent country, with the reluctant blessing of the rump state of Sudan and the enthusiastic support of much of the western world. Its independence was hard-won, after a decades-long civil war in which millions died and millions more were driven from their homes.
Former South Sudanese leader John Garang, 1969 graduate of Grinnell College. Photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons: http://dmont.co/1u
As it happens, I’ve got a little bit of a distant connection to South Sudan, even though I’ve never set foot on the African continent. My alma mater, the small Iowa liberal arts school Grinnell College, has a number of famous alumni — jazz musician Herbie Hancock, Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, FDR advisor Henry Hopkins — but hands down the coolest has to be John Garang de Mabior ’69.
Instead of doing something lazy like becoming a musical innovator or inventing the integrated circuit, Garang went back to his native Sudan and proceeded to become a rebel leader.
As an officer in the Sudanese army under a tenuous peace deal, it was his 1983 mutiny that kicked off the second wave of the Sudanese civil war. During his years leading the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, Garang was accused of human rights abuses and murdering political opponents, all while leading more than 50,000 soldiers in a guerilla war against the technologically superior Sudanese army.
Why I blog
Or part of the reason, anyway.
Via Kottke, I stumbled across a post called “10 Myths About Introverts” by a writer named Carl King.
The post looks at a book about introverts, that mysterious order of humans to which I (and King) belong who turn our energies inwards rather than out to the world. The book, given a self-helpy title “The Introvert Advantage (How to Thrive in an Extrovert World)”, does helpfully note that introversion is chemically rooted:
If the science behind the book is correct, it turns out that Introverts are people who are over-sensitive to Dopamine, so too much external stimulation overdoses and exhausts them. Conversely, Extroverts can’t get enough Dopamine, and they require Adrenaline for their brains to create it. Extroverts also have a shorter pathway and less blood-flow to the brain. The messages of an Extrovert’s nervous system mostly bypass the Broca’s area in the frontal lobe, which is where a large portion of contemplation takes place.
Bringing it all back home
The town where I worked for more than two years out of college, until eight months ago, found itself back in the news today — ironically for an event that had never occurred while I was there despite writing about its possibility for two springs in a row.
Pierre, South Dakota — the state capital — is built around a bend on the Missouri River, right below the massive Oahe Dam. The dam was built several years after a devastating 1952 flood deluged the town (and its smaller neighbor across the river, Fort Pierre) with flood control as one of its major purposes. It worked well — while spring snowmelt caused flooding in other parts of the state over the past half century, Pierre never saw anything more serious than a bit of high water in 1997.
Do you want to know a secret [door]?
Photo by Jessamyn West, via Flickr, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. Original: http://dmont.co/1h
I’ve got relatively reasonable ambitions when it comes to money. I’d like to earn enough, with an eventual partner, to support ourselves and our family in comfort, while still saving a large portion of our income for the future.
But if I should happen to find myself fabulously wealthy for one reason or another, there’s one useless luxury I’d love to be able to dump money into: a secret-riddled home.
Maybe I read too many mystery novels as a kid, or (more likely) all the hours I spent playing the “Myst” series of computer have left me enthralled by the concept of secret passages, hidden doors and the like. But a bookshelf that swung open to reveal my private office when a particular volume was depressed would be the height of awesome, as a Wired.com feature today reminds me.
Would there be any practical use to expending large amounts of money on hidden doors, secret passages and staircases and the like? I suppose it could come in handy as a more stylish “panic room” in the event of a home invasion — but that’s not something I spend a lot of time worrying about. Mostly, it’d just be really, really cool. And I’m relatively modest in my grandiose dreams — one hidden room would be enough. If I could think bigger, maybe a network of passages. I certainly don’t need some of the demands secret-door-provider Steve Humble of Creative Home Engineering can provide, like “an underground complex with 10 secret-passage doors made from Kevlar-steel ballistic armor, blast-resistant hinges, and multiple redundant locking systems.”
Still, it’s nice to know there are people out there dedicated to making these ludicrous dreams a reality.
Now, to go about making those millions…
Monday night miscellany
A few spare thoughts from a day off work:
- One of the best things on the Internet right now is the New York Times’ Disunion blog — a day-by-day recounting of the Civil War, 150 years to the day after the events happened. It started late last year, right before the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s election. And now, FINALLY, cannons are about to be fired on Fort Sumter. Not that the other stuff was bad — it’s been a fascinating multifaceted look at the political, military, social and economic situation leading up to the most devastating conflict in American history. But it’s like watching “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” — you know how the movie’s going to end, and as good as everything else is, you’re really waiting for Robert Ford to shoot Jesse James. Well, the guns are about to fire. Now I can’t believe I’m going to have to wait two years for Gettysburg.
