Status 451

This is my favorite joke of all time.

Transcript of a US naval ship with Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland:

Americans: “Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.”

Canadians: “Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.”

Americans: “This is the captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.”

Canadians: “No, I say again, you divert YOUR course.”

Americans: “THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE SECOND LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES’ ATLANTIC FLEET. WE ARE ACCOMPANIED BY THREE DESTROYERS, THREE CRUISERS AND NUMEROUS SUPPORT VESSELS. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE 15 DEGREES NORTH, THAT’S ONE-FIVE DEGREES NORTH, OR COUNTER MEASURES WILL BE UNDERTAKEN TO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THIS SHIP.”

Canadians: “This is a lighthouse. Your call.”

This never really happened. Both Snopes and the US Navy have pages debunking it. But the joke is funny because it’s easy to conceive of a possible world in which it were true — everyone’s either met someone who’s tried to move an immovable object, or been that person themselves. Usually the immovable object doesn’t tell you “We’re a lighthouse, your call” quite so bluntly, which is why it’s a punchline. But it’s a form of ha ha only serious humor — true of a concept, whether or not the event actually took place.

Continue reading →

The other day my friend came to me for advice. She’s going to start a PhD, but she’s worried she can’t handle it. Thing is, her concern is something I hear only too often, from too many people.

“I just don’t think I’m cut out to be a scientist. You hear all these stories of all these people who are passionate, driven. Who want more than anything to learn, to understand. But me? Sure, I like what I do, but it’s not all I want to do. I’m just not that passionate. I’m interested in too many things. I don’t think I can do this all day, every day, my whole life.”

You hear this all the time. “Do what you love.” “Follow your passions.” This advice sounds great, but is it really?

Continue reading →

“Neoreaction” has been much discussed recently, but what is it?

Neoreaction defines itself more in in terms of what it is opposed to than in terms of what it is in favor of.

Fine. So what is neoreaction against?

Democracy.

Neoreaction is the political philosophy that says that democracy is not merely the well-meaning god that happened to fail, but that our current wreckage was predetermined, because democracy fatally intertwined with progressivism since its birth, that it is a tool of progressivism, and that therefore, for a society to accept democracy is for a society to accept its inevitable doom at the hands of progressivism.

Continue reading →

Polus. And is that not a great power?
Socrates. Polus has already said the reverse.

If you’ve ever taken a course that touched on the Platonic dialogues — intro philosophy, intro classics, even some rhetoric courses still — you’ve probably heard them described as a genre. (If you haven’t, well, now you’ve heard them described that way.)

Bust of Socrates. By Sphinx, CC-BY-SA 2.5.

A genre is in fact exactly what they are: a way of telling a story. Folks with swords and magic overcome monsters and armies? That’s a fantasy story. A clever rogue hoodwinks everyone and gets away scot-free? That’s a caper story. Some jerk shows up all the other thinkers (or folks who think they’re thinkers) just by asking a bunch of questions? That’s a Platonic dialogue, and the jerk’s name is usually Socrates.

Continue reading →

The internet has been abuzz over the last few days about a preprint in PeerJ Preprints, “Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women vs. men.” Scott Alexander delivers a summary of popular-media responses to this, among other good discussion, none of which I’ll recapitulate here. I’m more interested in opening a window on how the peer review process works — one that you don’t really get from viral reporting on science. This is something I can shed at least a little light on, because coincidentally, two years ago I coauthored a paper, “More ties than we thought,” that went viral not once but twice — first the preprint on arXiv, then the peer-reviewed version in, also coincidentally, PeerJ.

Just to make things even more interesting, in the preprint version, our result was wrong.

Continue reading →

San Francisco has a disgusting attitude towards the homeless.

San Francisco is hosting the Super Bowl, and the mayor has decided to move all the homeless. He doesn’t want tourists to see the evidence of his corruption and lack of empathy.

Continue reading →

Personal finance is hard. Most of the people I know struggle with it. It’s one of the most important skills of modern life, and yet there aren’t very many resources to help you learn it. This is one of them.

I like simple solutions. Simple solutions are rarely the best, but they’re simple. Simplicity makes them easier to understand, easier to act on. Simple solutions are the good in the blood feud with the perfect.

Continue reading →

People are very serious about what they eat. For many, it’s more than just nutrition. It’s a social ritual. And there are a lot of them. A quick check of Wikipedia shows many. There are people who only eat vegetables. There’s people who only eat meat. There’s people who avoid carbs. There’s people who only eat like cavemen did. There’s detoxes and cleanses. Medical diets. There’s religious restrictions, both ancient and modern. To some, eating well is more important than eating enough. People take their dietary health very seriously, and there’s no end to the things they will try to figure out what works for them.

Continue reading →

There are more than a few things we owe the Dutch props for. Like winning a war against the sea or making futuristic bicycle roundabouts. Reality TV however, is not one of them. When entertainment company Endemol ran its first season of Big Brother in 1999, the public’s initial aversion to invading each other’s privacy was quickly overcome when audiences found themselves captivated. The seemingly off the cuff events became a spectacle more interesting than real life itself. Continue reading →

Imagine you’re telling a story. Great story, unbelievable story. A series of events that if you saw them in a movie you’d roll your eyes and groan, but they actually happened, and you were there to witness them. While you’re in the middle of the story, just as you get to a particularly interesting twist, the person listening to you scrunches up their face and shouts, “Get the fuck out of here!”

How would you react?^[1]

Continue reading →