In memoriam to anonymous

Out walking today, I almost stepped on a small body. It could have been a rat, but could conceivably been an opossum as well. Which mammal it was, exactly, I couldn't tell because it had been dried out and thoroughly picked clean. Weird that it stayed out there so long, but this street doesn't seem to get as much foot traffic as it does merging cars.

Anyway, going on the idea that it might be an opossum, I started looking them up. This is a nice short video. I didn't realize that possums were a different animal, native to Australia. It's thought that marsupials first evolved in South America, and migrated to Australia when they were closer together. The opossum is the one marsupial that migrated north to N. America instead.

They eat ticks? That is handy, especially in Lyme country.

Vote early, vote often

I was at a bookstore recently and, while I was browsing, I figured I'd take a look at their mystery section. Two of the bylines I noticed were two-time Georgia Governor nominee Stacey Abrams and former FBI director James Comey.

This has made me wonder. When did it first happen that a political thriller was written by an actual politician? From the 80s I remember Double Man, by Senators Gary Hart and William S. Cohen, making it at least technically bipartisan. And while I read it, I couldn't really tell you what it's about without looking it up.

Most politicians can't really stop running, stop stumping, even when there are no more offices for them to seek. That's a fatal flaw with this kind of book. But they do likely keep a certain number of ghostwriters employed.

Whoosh

I was just looking at this list of onomatopoeias, which are of course words that sound like the sound they describe. It occurred to me that different languages must have their own varying lists of onomatopoeias. In fact I've seen accounts of different languages having different words for the noises made by, say, roosters. (They apparently don't say cock-a-doodle-do everywhere). So that would be a kind of language barrier, but if you have a little patience it would be a fun one to get over.

Makes sense that "murmur" is on the list. I've heard that REM chose it as an album title because it's the easiest word in the English language to speak.

Get on the good foot

On visits to my grandparents I used to notice that my grandfather had a shoehorn as well as something called a shoetree. The shoehorn was self-explanatory. I really didn't understand the shoetree, though. For one thing it didn't look like a tree. It just looked like a wooden foot you left in the shoe. And what was the purpose of that?

Well, I've learned. Something I've noticed is that a pair of shoes might be my size in theory while in practice they don't fit my feet. A good shoetree helps with that, especially providing more space in the toe area.

Hair splitters united

According to Wikipedia, Roko's basilisk is "a thought experiment which states that there could be an artificial superintelligence in the future that, while otherwise benevolent, would punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement." Whew. Of course the phrase "otherwise benevolent" is entirely vitiated by everything else in that sentence. Assume that instead of an "artificial superintelligence" this is just a guy and he would be considered a psychopath, but probably a stupid one. You wouldn't create ethical thought experiments over the ramifications of his potential existence. You'd just resolve to smack him in the head if you ever met him. Somehow, though, Roko's basilisk has become a topic of debate among untold thousands of nerds.

I myself have a longstanding taste for what-ifs and abstractions that most people aren't thinking about. But there's a difference between thinking about weird mutations for your own amusement and maybe to get somewhere on another personal front; and forming your intellectual quirks into an all-encompassing ethic you believe everyone should obey. It's why I've never gotten behind utilitarianism, extreme rationalism, and the other markers of the San Francisco elite. Sam Kriss says that these philosophies are not for us--humans, that is--and he's probably right.

Kriss also traces the development of modern rationalism from Eliezer Yudkowksy's extensive fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Which made me consider. There's another famed Harry Potter fanfiction from early in Web 2.0. My Immortal soaps up the Hogwarts gang in the context of the now semi-forgotten Hot Topic goth-emo scene of the time. It's bad to a legendary degree, but it doesn't pretend to be anything but silly. There's no philosophy based around it. The author isn't a major figure in tech culture or any other culture. We don't even really know who she is.

There's a lesson here somewhere.

Gossip column stuff

Few things are drearier than when a relatively high-profile actor makes the news for having opinions about Donald Trump.

Because first of all, it's not news. We're talking about someone who started running for President about a decade ago, after having made noise on other fronts for years before that. Nobody has really been holding their tongue about him up till now. And in all likelihood it's going to be someone else running for the Oval Office in three years.

Furthermore Trump is not substantially that different from other recent Presidents, or the political class in general. He's made some adjustments, to be sure. But the majority of big changes have been in style and presentation.

There are plenty of things to talk about in terms of what the government does and doesn't spend money on, and the kind of foreign policy we support and promote. And so on. But anyone trying to be serious about those topics winds up on page A23 of the newspaper, or whatever the internet equivalent is.

Needled

I have a friend who's drawn a line in the sand against tattoos. He's told his nieces, for one thing, that he'll disinherit them if they ever get tattoos. I don't know how much they stand to inherit from them. It's mostly about sending a message, although he doesn't think they're likely to get them anyway.

I'm not as fundamentalist about it, but I'm an ink-skeptic. You see a lot of young people getting them because they're bored and a lot of older people getting them to stay relevant. The latter is especially endemic among rock stars. And as you keep getting more and more you just wind up with an incoherent mass of images, most of which end up the same color as a blue ballpoint. And I just have to wonder, what was the intention here?