James Hazlett Foreman

Tag: science

  • The Atheist to Agnostic Pipeline

    Plus a Week in Review

    Some weeks are like every other week. They are remarkable in their unremarkableness. They are identical to the weeks that fall behind and unfold before me. But some weeks, friends, I feel like opened a door to a new part of my life and everything after it changes.

    I finish work, I go home, read a book, have a couple of beers, take myself for a walk, and go to bed.

    Rowlf the Dog, The Muppet Movie

    How I Used to Be

    I used to be pretty sure about, well, everything. I knew how the universe worked. I trusted science and reason to lead me, and the entire human race, out of the dark. It went beyond just obeisance to reason—it was a whole hog dedication to the material universe and our ability to figure it all out.

    I had a song to sing, and I sang it. I sang it even when people told me to shut up. I was an insufferable jerk on social media and sometimes in person. Materialism, science, and reason provided me a convenient and loud drum. I sure banged it.

    When I embraced this materialist philosophy (in early adolescence, I think), everything that vexed me or confused me fell into place. The things that didn’t make sense were just waiting to be discovered, either by me or somebody. I believed that everything could one day be understood. We know why the sky is blue, and what causes storms. We learn more and more about how the universe works through observation, hypotheses, and experimentation.

    I read Carl Sagan and watched Bullshit and James Randi.

    • Magic wasn’t real, it was just sleight of hand and gaffer’s tape.

    • Psychics weren’t real, they were hucksters playing tricks with cold readings and boring old human psychology.

    • UFOs and ghosts weren’t real, they were just frail humans with fertile imaginations.

    • Bigfoot? Don’t make me laugh.

    But somewhere along the way, I let that perspective color everything, like the yellow tint they use in movies whenever the characters go to Mexico. Some part of me stopped questioning and adapting. In my youth it, was a comfortable and consistent way to approach the staggering, vast unknown.

    I rejected everything labeled “spiritual” as hokum. And in so doing, I lost something of myself that was vital and affirming. As I got older, and this is the important part, it became a boundary to empathy.

    Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.
    – Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

    I’ll tell you how I got to where I am today. But first, science.

    The Bone Prison

    One of the lessons science has taught us is that our brains are the seat of our essential us-ness. If you take everything else away except for the brain, the person is still mostly the same person with the same memories and feelings.

    Our skulls are protective prisons for our brains. We don’t experience anything directly. The only way to influence the brain directly is to pop open the skull and poke it.

    Our senses provide information and data to the brain via chemical and electrical signals from the organs of sense (ears, eyes, etc.) to our brains via internal network cables called nerves. Those senses are our only awareness of the outside universe.

    If you look at a human being now, right now, you only see the thing in front of you. You don’t see the billions of years of evolution and the millions of generations of reproducing creatures that made that person happen. Even that human itself knows their parents, and maybe their grandparents, but that’s usually the limit of their awareness.

    However this started
    It ends up just the same

    –Psapp, Orekche

    A Brief History of Seeing

    Way back a long ass time ago, a blind little creature mutated and its offspring had a novel new way of experiencing the world around it: light that came from the sun bounced all over the place and it could detect where it was brighter and where it was darker.

    This tiny little mutation let it survive even longer than its siblings, and then some generation later mutated so it could actually detect shapes, and so on down the ages until an eagle flying high up in the sky can see a rabbit from 2 miles away.

    Without that single mutation way back then, we wouldn’t have eyes to look at a beautiful painting or look at the faces of our kids, or anything else. Aside from the physics of light and eyeballs, even the vision you have is tuned to a particular way of seeing.

    For instance, some animals like owls and cats are really good at noticing things that move. This is advantageous to a cat because all of that light bouncing around isn’t as valuable to a cat as noticing when it moves. They have all the same data about the light, and are all seeing the same things, but the cat’s processing of that data is different thanks to a different set of mutations. You can hold up a sheet of music to a cat and he’s not going to understand it. If you hold up that same sheet of music to a person who reads music, and they’ll hear the music in their heads.

    I wrote all of that to write this:

    Holy shit. What the fuck. Are you kidding me?

    Big deal, you might say. Anybody who’s ever played with a cat knows that. But cats are animals just like us, right? I mean, eagles have such good vision it would be nice if we did, too. A ton more humans would have survived if we could see as well as an eagle.

    But we can’t because evolution never went that way. It was never advantageous to our ancestors to see better than we already do. This is the case for everything about us: it was enough for our ancestors to survive up to the moment they made us, and that’s it. Everything we love about ourselves, about humans, is either a direct or indirect result of that process. Humans are good at detecting patterns. Humans are really good at recognizing even subtle, small differences in the faces of other humans. Humans have language and walk upright because our ancestors who had those mutations survived.

    Did you know this: one of the reasons humans are so scary to animals is because of this upright walking. In most of the natural world, an animal is quite a bit longer than they are high. Look at almost any other creature that walks on four legs and its body is like twice as long as its head is high. Imagine if humans were twice as long as we are tall and you can understand why so many animals run away from us (aside from the pointed sticks and the friends we coordinate with).

    Anyway, this is where my mind goes: what kinds of mutations do we have that we don’t even know about? What kinds of mutations do we not have?

    The Last Blind Ancestor

    The little blind creature I mentioned? It didn’t know it was blind. Consider that for a moment. Until its offspring happened to mutate in that specific and random way, neither it nor any of its friends, family or acquaintances had ever heard about light. They didn’t know that there was a whole spectrum of energy in the universe that was colliding and bouncing off everything. How could it know what it didn’t know?

    Imagine that newly-mutated little creature trying to convince its parents that it can detect light. What’s light? They don’t even have a word for it.

    But then again, they didn’t have any words for anything because the peculiar ability for humans to communicate, and our incredible biological bias toward language and communication in very specific ways, is uniquely human.1

    We see the universe the way we do because of a million tiny mutations over the course of all that evolution, mutations that led us to our current us-ness. From the tips of our toes to the thinning hair on our heads, every little mutation in our DNA conspires in our bodies to make us who we are. We can’t be who we aren’t, and we can’t be what we aren’t, either.

    We look at the world, at the entire universe, with extraordinarily limited perspective. How much don’t we see? What kinds of things and spectrums and energies are out there in the humungous universe that we don’t even know we don’t know about? There might be entire symphonies playing in the energy of the universe but we have no idea because we can’t hear it. We don’t even know it’s there!

    Well, we have a pretty good idea about some of those things because we have ways of detecting the things we can’t see. We’re still discovering things we can’t detect without our tools. We know how planets work but we don’t know why.

    We know that gravity exists, and we experience gravity all the time, but we don’t really know what it is or how it works. All the stuff we think we know and one of the biggest most fundamental parts of existence is a big, fat, mystery.

    Here’s Where it All Comes Together

    Those realizations conspired within me to make a brand new person with a brand new way of looking at the universe and humans and everything in it. Well, that’s what it feels like sometimes but I’m still the same dude I always was.

    Instead of looking at the mysteries and dismissing it with “pshaw we’ll understand it eventually” I embrace the vast quantities of other things we don’t even know we don’t know.

    And it’s in there, it’s in the terrifying fullness of an unknown and vastly imperceptible mysterious universe that I find unending, overflowing, oceans of hope, love, and beauty.

    But Maybe It Wasn’t the Realizations

    I’m letting the intellectual deductions carry an awful lot of the weight here, but let me be clear: it wasn’t instant and it wasn’t recent. It was a gradual change in me that coincided with a lot of other things. One of those things is the death of my newphew, Miles. Another is the death of my father, and the death of my Aunt Posy. Another is the death of my friend Elicia. But it wasn’t all death, it was also the pandemic, and my brain tumor, and my relationships and my friendships.

    Through hard work and many years of struggle and medications (both self-medicated an prescribed), I have come to accept uncertainty. Actually that’s not entirely true, not only do I accept uncertainty, I love it. In some ways I fear I have overcorrected in the wrong direction, because I love it so much.2 Now I seek out the things that scared me as a kid, and nothing scared me more than talking to strangers. Now, I love talking to strangers. The stranger the better.

    But looming astride all of these factors is the unmistakable stink of age. I am 47. I am neither young nor particularly old. The things I did to my body and my mind in my youth have come home to roost. But I’ve also gathered up some wisdom.

    Instead of rejecting everything that doesn’t rhyme with my own song, I stop singing for a while and listen.

    The Parable of the Forest

    This isn’t something I read somewhere, it’s something that occurred to me when I was driving and thinking, which I love doing. I am recording it here because I thought it was a pretty good illustration of how I changed my thinking and because I love parables about animals. I might have read this somewhere or heard Alan Watts talk about it, but this version, at least, is mine:

    The worm in the ground knows only the dirt. It knows how it smells, how it tastes. There might be something in the air above it but the worms who go up there don’t come back. All that matters is the dirt. It has everything it could possibly need.

    But the beetle who walks along the surface of the dirt sees the worm and scoffs. You think you know everything there is to know but you can’t see the beauty of the world on the surface. The beetle has everything it could ever need under the roots of the tree. It knows its food and the enemies that want to eat it.

    But the warthog who snuffles and trots along the paths of the forest knows that there is a lot more than just what’s under the roots and in the ground. That stupid beetle is so sure that nothing above it is important, but to the warthog everything that matters is there.

    The monkey on the tree scoffs in turn at the warthog and its silly certainty. The monkey can climb up to the trunk of the tree and swing along the high branches. It sees the whole forest floor stretch out beneath it.

    But the eagle sees not just the forest tops and the warthog and the beetle and the monkey and the worm but the wide, wild lands even further afield. It sees the mountains, the plains, the deserts.

    Above it all are the most arrogant of all, the humans who make satellites and helicopters. Surely they know everything.

    The Week in Review

    I was going to start writing these newsletters weekly, but I don’t think my brain works in weeklies. Every two weeks seems like a more attainable goal, so let’s aim for that. So, this would be more light a fortnight in review but let’s focus on the week that was.

    Having said all that, I don’t have a lot to add that wasn’t what you read already. But there are these:

    This Week’s Obtrusive Thought

    I have recurring and, sometimes, relentless thoughts. I think of them as vestigial flailings of the anxiety that is always with me. Sometimes they’re loud and sometimes they’re quiet, but they’re always there. Imagine getting a song stuck in your head but it doesn’t stop, ever, and it goes on and on and on all the time.

    This week, I was worried a lot about choking. I live alone. I have been chewing my food extra hard, just in case.

    Things I Read This Week That I Loved

    Space Crone, by Meghna Rao

    I read this essay about Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog and I enjoyed it so much I subscribed to the writer’s substack. I’ll have more to say about the history of the internet and how the humble blog is still the purest and best mode of communicating on the web, and, of course, how I’ve been on the web and making stuff for it the whole time, but this is a great little piece of writing about it.

    Sobbing on the Subway, by Leah Reich

    I always enjoy reading Leah’s perspective and this issue of her newsletter is my favorite thing I’ve read in a while.

    This Week’s Passport Photo

    I’m taking a trip soon so I had to get my passport renewed. My old passport and the check to pay for it and the form I had to fill out is still sitting in an envelope in my bag because I cannot scape together enough minutes in a day at the appropriate time to carry sad envelope to a post office to mail it.

    I tried to take the photo myself but gave up and went to CVS. Before I did all that, though, Emmitt helped me.

    Interestingly, this is related to what I wrote about vision and stuff because before a few months ago, Emmitt couldn’t see screens. Well, he could see them, but he didn’t realize that there are things there that move around in a pleasing way. Now he can’t get enough and every screen I use is entertaining to him. What changed in his perception? What new pathways did his neurons make?

    This Week’s Song

    1

    Well, maybe not. There’s some debate.

    2

    I don’t mean physically dangerous scary things, so don’t worry, Mom

  • Feelings

    First, a list of things I am not anxious about. This is not comprehensive, but it is illustrative.

    Flying

    Snakes

    Spiders

    Strangers

    Heights

    Public Speaking

    Some of these things are because I’m a white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male. I am largely free from the social fears that plague many members of our society. I acknowledge that privilege.

    Mood is a weird word that carries a morose weight — simple, short, with the long double o. It’s a word derived from Old English. Fittingly, it sounds like it oozed out of a bog. It’s hard to associate the word “mood” with a positive feeling, and it’s even harder to use it in the first person. How often does one say “I’m in a good mood?” Usually we use it to describe somebody else. Is this because it’s easier to gauge another’s state of feeling than it is our own? It feels that way.

    Feelings. Why do we have them? They never did anybody any good. They just lead to broken hearts and bad days. How many crimes would simply cease to exist if feelings were taken out of the equation? Crimes of passion would disappear entirely! Road rage would be a thing of past times. Nobody would ever have their feelings hurt again, so comedians could stop complaining about how sensitive everyone is, and nobody would be sensitive about anything anymore anyway. Cold, clean, clear logic would rule our lives, and everybody would be better off.

    Of course I’m a Star Trek fan, and I’m describing Vulcans. They’re an entire race that, as an entire race, decided, after a period of strife and war, that feelings were doing more harm than good and it was time to get rid of them. They developed a whole big philosophy and it rocketed their society into a many-thousand-year golden age. Nothing illustrates the crappy influence of emotions better than this episode of Star Trek, when Kirk has a transporter accident and it pretty much sucks for everyone. Watch this sequence.

    Spock is trying to be helpful but he acknowledges his privilege as an emotionless being. He can solve the problem at hand (Kirk has been split into two complimentary but opposite emotional beings) but he can’t really relate to what it FEELS like. Spock understands what Kirk is going through only theoretically, but he’s been around humans long enough to know when they might get angry at him that he isn’t more sympathetic: “If I seem insensitive to what you’re going through, Captain, understand – it’s the way I am.” Poor Spock, we’re meant to think. He can’t feel the feelings that everyone around him is feeling. Not me. Lucky Spock, I say! He’s not missing anything!

    I have a severe allergy to evolutionary psychology, but even that broken clock is right once in a while. It’s in that treacherous morass that we find some of the reasons why we feel the way we feel.

    SIDEBAR: why don’t I like evolutionary psychology? Because it’s reductive and easy to manipulate. I know it helps people to imagine that their feelings or thoughts or behaviors are endorsed by Mother Nature, but it’s too often used to abuse people who are already marginalized and to excuse intolerable behavior by the people in power.

    The human internal experience can be broken into three simple states that start big and get smaller: personality, mood, and feelings. Personality stays pretty consistent throughout a person’s life, mood changes with some occasional but reliable regularity, and feelings can vary from moment to moment.

    The one objective fact we can hang our hats on is that the experience of an emotion is universal: anger in one person, no matter what culture they come from, is the same anger in another person. This anger might be expressed differently but the experience of feeling angry is the same for all humans.

    SIDEBAR: Not everybody agrees about this, of course, but not everybody agrees that the earth is flat, either. We have to draw some lines, and for the purposes of this discussion, I’m prepared to draw a line around this.

    SIDEBAR TO THE SIDEBAR: I do not mean to say that the scientists who disagree with the objective quality of emotions are intellectually equal to flat-earthers. They are not.

    We have six distinct emotions, a nice, simple number that is the closest to consensus we’ll get. It’s so common, here’s a graphic for it:

    In 2017, there was a new study that suggested that there are actually 27 different emotions. They aren’t really new discoveries, just more granular segments of the 6 we already have words for.

    This whole thing reminds of me of light. See, there’s just one kind of light, and we call it “white.” It’s a byproduct of lots of important chemical reactions, like the nuclear fusion happening at the center of our solar system. We evolved eyes that can see all that light bouncing around, though we can only see a certain slice of segments with the eyes we’ve got. Other animals evolved ways to detect some of the segments we can’t see. For instance, reindeer evolved the ability see in the ultraviolet spectrum, because the lichen that sustain them in the frigid north glow like rave kids in ultraviolet. If a reindeer could talk, it wouldn’t say “yeah, I see in ultraviolet,” it would just include ultraviolet stuff in the list of its own visible spectrum.

    Feelings are like light. We’ve always been feeling these feelings, but only recently have we come up with names for the segments. For many years, six segments was enough. The 27 “new” feelings are just segments of the same feelings we’ve always felt.

    Wouldn’t it be neat if it turned out there were a whole bunch of feelings we had no access to, yet still existed in the experiences of other creatures? Some scientists think this is exactly what happens among humans and some of us just aren’t capable of feeling some of the things that other humans feel. Our list of 27 (or 6) feelings is just the broadest human approximation of the roughly 276,000 reactions they collected (read more about the experiment at this link https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2017/09/09/here-are-the-27-different-human-emotions-according-to-a-study/#595a22a13359 ).

    I still haven’t answered my question, bellowed into the sky during a bad day: why do I have feelings?

    We’re pretty sure we know why we evolved feelings: to survive. That’s the easy answer. Not everything we’ve evolved was to increase the likelihood of us living long enough to have sex and raise our offspring, but it’s safe to say that feelings are, since they dominate so much of our lives.

    For something like anxiety, I’m prepared to accept that explanation. There is a huge physiological component to anxiety. Play the anxiety home game: give yourself a panic attack by taking 30 deep breaths in rapid succession. It’s guaranteed to work! That simulates the sudden stress of being chased by a hungry tiger. The blood rushes from your extremities to your internal organs. Your bowels release. You might vomit, too. Your pupils dilate, letting in more light. Your body turns off everything that won’t help you survive the next few minutes, from reproduction to digestion.

    Imagine feeling that all day. You know how allergies are your immune system behaving on false information? That’s what anxiety disorder is. It’s your entire body acting like a tiger is going to jump out at any moment, despite the lack of tigers or tiger-like creatures in the vicinity. I have it, so I take medicine that helps regulate it.

    We’re not entirely sure how these medications work, and some of them work better than others on some people and don’t work the same way in everyone. That’s a maddening fact that is crushingly familiar to anyone who has experienced chronic illness (which, if we’re being honest, is most people). If you’ve ever taken an antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication (and if you’re an American, chances are pretty high you have), then you know the experience well. The first one you try probably won’t work, or it will kind of work in some ways but not in others, so the doctor tries another medicine that does more of the stuff you like and less of the stuff you don’t like. My own experience with these medications is common and nonlinear, and supplemented with drugs like benzodiazepines and beta blockers. Clonazepam is the chemical throat-punch that stops anxiety before it gets out of hand, while fluoxetine is the long-term levy that I use to keep the flood of bad feelings in control. I mixed my metaphors there, but you can follow along.

    When I lament the burden of feelings, anxiety is my primary target. I highly recommend the book My Age of Anxiety, by Scott Stossel, if you’re interested in learning more about anxiety in general and Stossel’s anxiety in particular (he has it, too). There are two lessons from this book that I want to share with you.

    The first: anxiety as a disorder is very new, and, like ultraviolet light to a reindeer, was probably always there but we didn’t have a word for it, and using what we know about how anxiety was treated over the years, we can see how many people probably had it.

    The second: one story of anxiety that sticks out to me, personally, is that of an anonymous World War 2 veteran. He was so fearful of his panic attacks that he told his therapist that he would gladly trade them in for the experience of storming Omaha Beach again.

    First, the second lesson: this man’s anxiety about his anxiety was so great that he would happily exchange it for the experience of traversing a beach while an enemy army tried to kill him. Anxiety, as a force in this man’s mind, was stronger than the German army, stronger than bullets and mortars. If you’ve ever seen the Normandy scene from Saving Private Ryan, imagine two doors: one leads to a panic attack, but you choose this door instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdBEyitJ7Qc [warning: graphic!].

    The other lesson Stossel teaches us is that anxiety existed for all of human history, but without a name that encompassed all of its fun iterations. Of the many physical effects of anxiety, a common one is diarrhea and general gastrointestinal distress (see voiding bowels as survival tactic, above).

    Here are some famous historical figures who suffered from anxiety:

    Charles Darwin. By Stossel’s estimate, based on Darwin’s copious notes and letters, spent roughly a third of his adult life “either vomiting or in bed.” He suffered terribly during the voyage of the Beagle, but eventually published his discovery.

    Isaac Newton. One of the greatest geniuses the world has ever seen (if you didn’t know already). He discovered calculus but didn’t tell anyone for ten years because he was so anxious and depressed.

    Mahatma Gandhi. While working as a lawyer, froze during his first case and fled from the courtroom in terror.

    Emily Dickinson. She barely left her room after age 40 or so.

    Samuel Johnson. Britain’s greatest academic. He was crippled by anxiety and found it especially difficult to get out of bed at a reasonable time.

    Imagine what these people could have accomplished without anxiety hampering them? Look at what they accomplished despite it!

    So what’s my excuse?

    Again, it comes back to me, like a spotlight at a stage in a dark amphitheater full of people judging me. Or, even worse, struggling in silence with incessant feelings of low self-worth and stupidity to an empty hall. I’m a bad writer. I’m not good at anything. Even my skills at competitive first person shooter video games have been surpassed by younger people with faster reflexes. I don’t even have a job! Woe is me, etc.

    I am a modern day Ælfric, the commander of English forces in a battle with the Danes whose anxious vomiting led to the slaughter of his leaderless forces in 1003 AD.

    I wonder what scenario Ælfric would pick, given the choice between his anxiety and reliving the battle that he so decisively lost. What would he had been able to accomplish if he had been able to pop a couple of Xannies as the screaming, blonde, Danish invaders came over the hill and hacked his men to pieces?

    I am again faced with my original premise, unswayed from the finality implied by it. Feelings are the worst.

    My own age of anxiety began when I was in grade school. I was so terrified of the social pressures of 4th grade that I refused to go. My father promised me anything I could dream of from Toys R Us if I went to school, but I could not. It would be many years after this that I would start therapy and medication that turned my life completely around, but the intervening years were marked by almost constant panic attacks at the prospect of intimate social activities. For instance, I did not learn to greet people by name when I saw them until practicing that very activity with my therapist at the age of 27. I’m still reluctant to do so, to avoid the horror of calling someone by the wrong name.

    Fatefully entwined with feelings of social anxiety are feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. Socially anxious people are more acutely aware of nonverbal signals but are much more likely to misinterpret them as negative. People like me are hyper aware of the moods of the people around us because we’re absolutely certain that they hate us, or think we’re pathetic, and would rather we weren’t there.

    There are some signs of hope, however. Anxiety often falls apart when confronted with facts. It’s simply a matter of reminding ourselves of those facts, and letting ourselves believe them, that give us victory over anxiety.

    The lesson we can all learn, one that echoes down the ages from Ælfric: don’t be so goddamn hard on yourself.

  • Pamphlet 9: "The Moon"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER 9: THE MOON


    The moon is a big, gray disk in the night sky that gets smaller and smaller until it looks like a clipped toenail right before disappearing completely. It comes back gradually, growing from splinter to disk again, and starts the process over.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas.

    Asteroids

    Space is mostly empty. For every cubic centimeter of nothing, space has about 1 atom of hydrogen. Sometimes space has more than that. A whole lot of cubic centimeters of minerals is called an asteroid, and they’re flying through space, minding their own business, until gravity shows up and sends them toward us. Thankfully, earthlings are protected from most by a complex defense grid, a wholly accidental, happenstance pinball board of gravity wells and eccentric orbits known as the solar system. The moon is part of that defense grid. More good news for us: an asteroid with earth’s name on it has to hit a very small target in a very big field — 49 billion square miles. On its way to our little planet, it is tossed and spun among our big buddies Jupiter and his gassy pals named after other gods from the Greek pantheon, and then, if it makes it that close to us without being diverted, encounters our moon.

    Luna, the Greek goddess’s name that we picked for our own moon (to distinguish it from all of the other 180 moons in the solar system), is our second-to-last line of defense. Its gravity diverts some of that space debris, which is why it’s so battered and bruised. It takes the hits so we don’t have to.

    Our final defense against asteroids is our dense and oxygen-rich atmosphere which is so thick it causes a lot of friction with objects that approach it too fast. I also create a lot of friction when people approach me too fast, but this part isn’t about me. Things that are too big to burn completely up get through, and when they hit the surface cause things like mass extinctions, insane YouTube videos, and mysterious Siberian explosions.

    Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. — Carl Sagan


    The Tunguska Event

    One thing that got through that defense grid was the comet that struck Siberia in 1908, near an area called Tunguska. Luckily for us humans, it only killed wildlife. Unluckily for trees, it flattened about 80 million of them. The conservative estimate for how strong the explosion was is 15 megatons of TNT, which would make it 1,000 times stronger than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Humans weren’t able to match that destructive power until the US detonated a bomb with roughly the same strength in 1952. These are just abstract numbers on a screen, but let’s examine it in more human terms.


    The Tunguska Event covered 770 square miles. Even a glancing blow on any major metropolitan area would vaporize millions of people. Humans had to invent bombs that use nuclear fission to match the frisson of a comet strike.

    The impact of a comet on a planet is so common it’s not even worth mentioning, galactically speaking. Something much more interesting happened in the wilderness of Russia, and it’s very spooky.

    The Dyatlov Pass Incident

    In 1959, Igor Dyatlov asked 9 other students from Ural Polytechnical Institute to join him for a bit of a skiing expedition, a common pastime for people living in the Ural Mountains, where there isn’t much to do that doesn’t involve a) the mountains and b) snow. They were all experienced hikers and familiar with the rugged, rocky, snowy terrain. Upon returning from this expedition, they would each become Grade III mountaineers, the highest possible rating. That would put each of them in the highest skill tier of anybody in the Soviet Union. In other words, and this is important, they knew what they were doing. They also knew how grumpy the weather in the Ural Mountains could get in February, so absolutely none of what happened to them should have happened.


    The facts are these: all 9 people (the tenth went back home after unrelated health issues flared up) on this routine skiing expedition died under mysterious circumstances, probably all within 24 hours of each other.

    They started on their trek and were making great progress through an unnamed pass in the mountains when the weather got bad enough to make them lose their way for a bit. They realized this error and decided to just stop where they were, on the mountainside, and set up camp there. They had gained some altitude and, since that was kind of the point of the exercise, the leader of the group (after whom the pass was later named, Dyatlov), decided to stop where they were rather retreat into a wooded area 1.5km away that offered better protection against the elements. These were experienced outdoorspeople (two of them were women). They weren’t new to any of this.

    The only reason we know anything about their expedition at all is because they had diaries and cameras. This is the last photo on the camera found with the bodies and, well, it’s creepy:


    There’s no record of what happened to them or how they died, but 5 bodies were found after the families insisted on a search a month after they were due to arrive at their intended destination. There was one tent in the campsite, which they all shared. There was a hole cut in the tent from within, and two bodies were found a short distance away with the remains of an attempt at creating a fire. Between those bodies, under a tree, and the tent, they found three more bodies. Everybody was severely underdressed for the weather (a couple of them didn’t even have shoes on). The theory was this: something happened that made them all lose their damn minds, cut their way out of the tent, and run into the wilderness. One group of five hid under a tree and tried to make a fire. Three of that group tried to get back to the tent, but collapsed on the way. The little fire wasn’t enough to keep the other two alive and they died, too.

    But wait, that’s only five! What happened to the other four? They found those bodies two months later (there was a lot of snow), at the bottom of a nearby ravine. Three of them had massive injuries consistent with a car crash or other force. These folks seem to have lived a bit longer, as some were wearing the clothes of the others, leading naturally to the theory that some had died before the others and the survivors took their clothes in a futile attempt to stay warm.

    So what happened? Nobody knows! There are theories. Some of those theories are more plausible than others, but even the most plausible ones seem extremely implausible because of the very nature of the disaster. Here are some theories that have been disproved:

    • Yeti attack. Besides the fact that yetis aren’t real, there’s no evidence of any animal activity in the area at all.

    • killed by the local natives, the Mansi. They’re peaceful and there’s no evidence that anybody else was there.

    • killed each other after a romantic dispute. Nah. They were friends, and the massive wounds were not caused by human hands. That also doesn’t explain why they fled the tent in their underwear.

    I invite you to read more about the incident (or, like me, read everything you can about the incident) and come up with your own theories. The one that makes the most sense to me is this:

    The Soviet military was known to be testing parachute bombs in the area. That scared the living crap out of them, and they ran for their lives in a blind panic. One of the bombs got too close and the blast mortally injured the three who ended up in the ravine. The survivors in that group didn’t survive long, but long enough to put on some of their clothes in a futile attempt to warm up.

    If that weren’t spooky enough, investigators recently exhumed the remains of one of the victims, Semyon Zolotarev (also the oldest of the group, at 38). As records from the Soviet era are unreliable, they confirmed that his wounds were consistent with a big concussive force (like a parachute bomb) and that he shared no DNA relationship with Zolotarev’s known surviving relatives. That means the person who lived in the Ural Mountains area of the USSR and was going by the name Semyon Zolotarev was not that guy at all and had, at some point, replaced him. The leading theory on that mystery is that Fake Semyon knew the real Semyon during the war and stole his identity. VERY SPOOKY.

    My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It’s quiet. — Neil Gaiman


    Anastasia Romanov

    In 1918, the Bolsheviks won a very short civil war and took over the Russian government. Because nobody ever accused the Russians of doing anything halfway, they didn’t just kill the C(t)zar, they murdered his whole family. Well, maybe.

    There were immediately rumors that one of them had survived: the youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. That is, until DNA tests on a mass grave known to have the remains of the royal family was tested in 2007 and conclusively proved that she was in there.


    Ten women claimed to be Anastasia over the years, the most famous of whom was Anna Anderson. She had a lot of time to claim to be Anastasia, toiling in the German courts from 1938 to 1970, though they eventually decided that she didn’t have enough evidence to prove her claim — that one of the Reds who shot up and stabbed her family noticed she was still alive, took pity on her, and smuggled her out of the area.

    The story of Anna Anderson isn’t spooky, it’s just sad. She was hospitalized for a suicide attempt in 1922, and her claims to be Anastasia came after. Nobody who knew the real Anastasia was convinced that Anna was her. As early as 1927, the dead Tsarina’s brother (Anastasia’s uncle) funded an investigation that concluded that this Anastasia was actually a polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska.

    Anna died in 1984, never backing down from her claim and supported financially off and on during the intervening years by people who believed her, including her eventual husband, a history professor known as “Charlottesville’s best-loved eccentric.”

    DNA won the day again, proving that Anna’s mitochondrial DNA matched that of a relative of Franziska Schanzkowska, and making a lot of people feel pretty dumb about it.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment

    One person fascinated by the story of Anna Anderson was known goddess Tori Amos, who wrote and recorded an awesome song about it that you don’t haver to listen to but you should anyway:



    Is it because of Steven Spielberg that I love the mixture of suburban simplicity and High Weirdness or did our mutual upbringing in suburban environments foster a love for it in both of us? Who can know? I only know that this love also extends to a man named Simon Stâlenhag, a Swedish painter who combines weirdness and suburbia in his paintings and whose book, The Electric State, is a joy. Joy is good.

    COLOPHON

    Composed entirely on a notebook computer, often in coffee shops, but finished at home.

    Sources:
    The Kuiper belt [Wikipedia]
    The Tunguska Event [Wikipedia]
    The Dyatlov Pass Incident [Vice]
    Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia [Wikipedia]

    This week was the anniversary of my brain tumor diagnosis. I am happy to be able to write this for you, unfettered by headaches or tumors. <3

  • Pamphlet 8: "Brain"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER SEVEN: BRAIN

    If you know me, you know why I picked this noun to begin my first pamphlet in almost exactly a year (the last pamphlet was distributed on July 30th, 2017). On the week of Thanksgiving in 2017, I had surgery to remove an ependymoma from my brain stem. Ependymomas are considered cancerous because they can metastasize into other areas of the brain and spinal column, though they are not usually deadly. They are extraordinarily rare in people my age. Lucky me.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas Trepanning

    I had two brain surgeries (fun fact — I keep misspelling “surgeries” as “sugaries”). Tumor surgeries are not typically emergencies, but mine was. I spent four days in the hospital leading up to my operation because the neurosurgeon only does operations on Mondays and I went to the emergency room on a day that was not a Monday. This lag time also allowed my body to absorb roughly a billion gallons of strong steroids that shrank various structures in my brain to reduce the swelling from the backed-up cerebrospinal fluid. This kind of swelling often kills people when it comes on too quickly.

    This might be one of the reasons why we occasionally find skulls up to 7,000 years old with big holes in them. The tumor on my brain stem caused a backup in the flow of fluid in my ventricles, which swelled up and got bigger, causing a condition called hydrocephaly. The pressure caused “intractable” headaches (the hospital’s word, not mine), which had become so debilitating that I nearly fell unconscious from the blinding pain. It was that incident that made me go to the emergency room the final time.



    Had I been alive in 6000 BCE instead of our current age of miracles, I would have happily submitted myself to the intrepid protodoctor who thought, correctly, that a feeling of pressure in my head would be relieved by releasing some of that pressure.

    The origin of the word “trepanning” is not, as I thought, from “tree panning,” or the practice of hacking open a hole in a tree and letting the sap run out, which is not even called that. I don’t know where that connection in my head came from, but there is a word for using words wrong.

    Malaportmanteau

    I just made that word up. “Malaportmanteau” is itself portmanteau that combines “malapropism” and “portmanteau.” A portmanteau is a word that combines two things to make up a new word (“cheeseburger,” for instance) while a malapropism is a word that is and sounds like another word, except used incorrectly and usually used humorously. Malapropisms are fertile ground for puns, so I love them and hate them.

    Trepanning is not even a portmanteau, as I thought, thus my new portmanteau, which means “a word confidently mistaken for a portmanteau.” The word “trepan,” the root of “trepanation,” is apparently derived from the greek word for boring, like this newsletter.

    That was a pun based on a homonym, which is not a malapropism. Homonyms are a variety of homophone — two words that are spelled and pronounced the same but mean two different things. Another kind of homophone is a heterograph like “to, too, and two,” or words that are spelled differently, and mean different things but sound the same. English can be confusing.

    The Most Difficult Language To Learn

    Don’t get too excited, it’s not english, which isn’t that difficult. This, according to linguists and other professionals who know such things. I’ve only learned one language, though I took three semesters of Russian in college, in a powerful case of Past Jim overestimating how much schooling depressed and anxious Future Jim would be willing to tolerate (thank you, Lena, for passing me when I most definitely didn’t deserve it). Thus, you could say that the most difficult language for ME to learn was Russian.

    But the answer to the question is: it depends. For people who speak Standard Average English (or “unaccented” American english), the answer would be different from someone who grew up speaking Estonian, which has 14 verb cases. Bora, a language from Peru, has 350 noun genders.

    The concept of gender in languages is confusing, as noted most famously by Mark Twain, who wrote this about German, which only has three:

    Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.

    This is true, if one thinks of gender in language as a biological sex thing, when it’s not that at all — it’s closer to the concept of genre, with nouns of similar shape or size or whatever occupying the same linguistic noun classification. Language is a living and moving thing so some languages have different classifications. My favorite is Dyirbal, which is spoken in Australia, and has a genre of nouns that includes “women, fire and dangerous things.” Brother, tell me about it.

    The answer to the question was answered by The Economist, in an article from which much of the above was derived (you didn’t think I actually knew all this, did you?), is a language used by a dwindling number of people (it was about 1000 people in 2008): Tuyuca, spoken in the Amazon. I’ll let them explain why we would have so much trouble with it:

    Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb.

    The Economist article ends with a sobering reminder that one consequence of our age of technological miracles and globalization is the gradual disappearance of languages as people drift toward a common tongue. Different languages make one think in different ways, and that kind of diversity of thought is something worth saving. Language is culture, too — if we lose one, we lose the other.

    Hot Snakes

    It’s one thing to learn a language, it’s another thing to speak it. Metaphors are fraught and all too common. If I were to tell a person who’s just learning english that I wasn’t feeling well and I had “the hot snakes,” they would probably be extremely confused. That’s a bad example, because it confuses lifelong english speakers, too, as in this memorable outtake from Parks & Recreation, which you’ll have to watch if you want to know what hot snakes mean (if you haven’t figured it out on your own already).

    生肖

    Speaking of hot snakes, I was born in the year of the snake, according to the Chinese zodiac. Specifically, the year of the fire snake. According to one website, this is what being a snake-person means:

    In Chinese culture, the Snake is the most enigmatic animal among the twelve zodiac animals. People born in a year of the Snake are supposed to be the most intuitive.

    Snakes tend to act according to their own judgments, even while remaining the most private and reticent. They are determined to accomplish their goals and hate to fail.

    Snakes represent the symbol of wisdom. They are intelligent and wise. They are good at communication but say little. Snakes are usually regarded as great thinkers.

    Snakes are materialistic and love keeping up with the Joneses. They love to posses the best of everything, but they have no patience for shopping.

    Snake people prefer to work alone, therefore they are easily stressed. If they seem unusually stressed, it is best to allow them their own space and time to return to normal.

    In other words, it’s nonsense. The above could describe anybody. Having spent many years in school with people who were born in the same year as me, which is how the Chinese zodiac is determined, I can confidently say that lots of people don’t have all of those characteristics.

    As somebody who knows about these things will surely want me to know, the Chinese restaurant menu version of the Chinese zodiac that I’ve cited is merely scratching the surface. The true Chinese zodiac goes much deeper, going from months, to days, to hours (which are called your “secret animals,” which is awesome). It’s still meaningless.

    Recommendatae

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    James Randi on Nova

    Early Jim lived in the dark ages before the internet (people often forget that on-demand video is an extremely new phenomenon), so he derived entertainment from shows like Nova. The best episode of that show probably ever concerned The Amazing Randi, a magician turned professional skeptic. It was because of that, and Carl Sagan’s books, that I am so annoyingly skeptical. This segment, specifically, inspired the person who wrote that stuff about the Chinese zodiac you just read.


    Snowmelt by Zoë Keating

    I wrote this on Facebook so I’m just going to repost it here: Zoë Keating, whose husband died of cancer that began in his brain, released this EP recently. They were together for 16 years. She calls it “four songs from the end of a long winter.” It’s such a gift to be able to follow an artist through these emotional tribulations. The song Possible, for example, has a note of hopefulness enveloped in melancholy and I can’t stop listening to it.

    COLOPHON

    Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.

    jim v3.0 is still compiling

  • Pamphlet 7: "Coffee"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER SIX: COFFEE

    The most important beverage in my life is one that I am also very addicted to. I get cranky headaches if I don’t have it. I’m grumpy before I drink it. I’m drinking it right now (I just took a sip). It’s a cultural artifact of American life that we can’t live without: coffee.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas Africa: Cradle of Civilization

    We can trace coffee’s origins go back to Ethiopia, where the legend of the goats-eating-berries was born. The crux of that legend is that a Christian monk got the idea to make a drink for humans out of the berries that made a bunch of goats jump around like lunatics. The drink propagated throughout Africa and the Middle East and it became a staple of the Arab diet long before it got to Europe. Coffee: invented by Christians, perfected by Arabs. In all the controversy and dispute between the west and the Middle East, it’s good to remind ourselves of the times we worked together to make the world a beautiful place, and there are fewer things more beautiful than a steaming mug of black coffee.



    Aristocratic Performance Rituals

    Coffee was the dominant hot-and-stimulating drink of England, until tea came along in the 17th century and wealthy aristocrats made it a more desirable beverage to the lower classes who wanted to be fancy, too. A common trend in European history is this: fancy aristocrats invent elaborate social performances and then measure each other based on how fancy their peers’ performances are. The finicky and elaborate nature of making a good pot of tea provided the perfect opportunity to create one of those rituals. The poor wanted to be fancy, too. Thanks to the evergreen laws of supply and demand, higher demand led to higher supply, which led to lower prices. Suddenly, poor people could drink tea, too. I used the word “fancy” four times in the above paragraph, but I’m not sure it’s enough.

    The aristos weren’t happy about that, but at least they had their fancy and extraordinarily expensive vessels! You can’t just grow more teapots — those had to be made, by hand, and the best stuff cost around $600 for just one tea cup. Good luck affording a so-white-it’s-translucent ceramic tea cup from China, plebs!

    English “china”

    Proper English tea has milk in it. Adding milk after you’ve poured the tea is the English way, at least for high-nosed toffs. Working class people put the milk in first. The reason for this, so the story goes, is because the clunky, cheap porcelain made in England would shatter at contact with boiling water. Chinese porcelain didn’t do that. It was the good stuff. It was strong, lightweight, translucent and durable. The European knock-offs weren’t.


    Chinese porcelain was so expensive that the introduction of tea sparked a porcelain arms race all over Europe. Alchemists, potters, sculptors, and artisans worked together from France to Germany to England in little skunkworks to crack the Chinese recipe. They churned out a lot of almost-theres with varying levels of success.

    This allegedly changed when a man with the extremely working-class British name Ben Lund added “Cornish soapstone” to the mixture. The humble powder of talc was all it took to keep his recipe for porcelain from shattering. His factory was bought by what is now Royal Worcester, the oldest (or maybe second-oldest) operating porcelain manufacturer in England.

    Eventually, the cost of Chinese porcelain came down, too (supply and demand, baby), but not before England had flooded the market with bad copies and had the audacity to call the stuff “china.”

    “Coffee – the favorite drink of the civilized world.” – Thomas Jefferson


    Tea

    Tea is the most versatile word in the English language (except, maybe, that word). It can refer to

    ⁃ a plant, Camellia sinensis
    ⁃ a small meal between lunch and supper
    ⁃ a drink, drunk at tea time, but not necessarily made of the plant called tea
    ⁃ gossip, as in “the tea,” the telling of which is called “spilling”
    ⁃ a river in Brazil

    Revolution

    Americans don’t drink tea the same way our English friends do because, well, they’re English. We’re Americans. We share a lot of cultural DNA with our English founders, but the big divergence put an end to that (the American Revolution, you might have heard of it). We rejected tea as our National Hot Drink and embraced the hardscrabble, hard-hitting, tar-black working man’s drink. We didn’t have to go without the meal called tea, though, because it didn’t exist yet — that didn’t come about until, you guessed it, a rich English Duchess invented it in 1850, because English aristocratic women had two jobs: socialize with other aristocrats and, most importantly, make male babies. If you’re like me, you can’t even mention making male babies without thinking of the most famous Male Baby Wanter in history, the irascible Henry Tudor.

    Anne Boleyn

    The only wife Henry truly loved was Jane Seymour, because she gave him a son. There’s no reason to doubt that his love was real, because he was a petulant bully who only really cared about himself and his legacy, and the Queen who eventually gave him a male heir was a dream come true. In case you doubt his true love for her, he had himself buried next to her at Windsor, which is the highest honor any dead king can give to a dead queen. Henry Tudor is known for executing his wives, but he didn’t have time to get bored with and subsequently get rid of Jane — she died two weeks after giving birth to Edward, an unremarkable monarch whose only laudable act was to die young and hasten the ascension of his half sister, Queen Elizabeth I.

    The Queen right before Jane was the most famous of Henry’s wives, Anne Boleyn, who was executed on largely fictional charges of treason and incest. The method of her execution is just as noteworthy as the rest of her life — the executioner used a sword to do it (most people got the axe, as it were). This is often cited as a sudden and uncharacteristic honor on behalf of Anne’s royal mien and upbringing in France (where all executed monarchs get a sword).

    But count me among the Anne Apologists, because I say that Henry decided to have a sword swing end her life because of his obsession with the British monarchy that he was so desperately trying to continue in his own image. More specifically, he was really, really into the Arthurian legends and chivalry and all that (French is the language of chivalry, and he wrote some embarrassing love letters to Anne in that language). He even had a big replica of the Round Table with himself in Arthur’s seat. The prime symbol of Arthuriana is the sword, and a monarch executing a traitorous queen with a sword was the ultimate act of Proper English Retribution. Like everything else in Henry’s life, Anne’s execution was about Henry.



    While on the subject of Anne, she’s just about as close as we can get to a feminist icon in Tudor England. She knew what she wanted, and maneuvered herself and the people around her to get it. She was also an intellectual who argued with Henry and won. She refused to have sex with Henry until he made her Queen, which Horny Henry respected. She’s almost certainly innocent of the crimes she was executed for, not only because Henry wanted her out of his life and was capable of doing anything in order to make that happen, but because of what she did while waiting for her death in the Tower — she summoned the Archbishop of Canterbury to her cell and confessed everything to him.

    Confession

    During this confessional with the Archbishop, Anne Boleyn doubled-down on her innocence. For an observant Catholic, this is the Ultimate Truth Zone. If you lie during a confession, you’re heading straight to Hell when you die. You gotta hand it to Catholicism — there is no better way to keep tabs on a the politics of a parish than by a) forcing everybody to tell you every bad thing they did and b) damning them to hell if they don’t. This not only gave a priest leverage and protection (even if the implied, icky bad juju of doing social or physical harm to clergy weren’t enough), it put a lot of power in the hands of a powerful, educated minority. If you’re suspicious of large, pervasive organizations having too much power, maybe you would have been one of those guys throwing tea into Boston Harbor, too.


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    How To Make a Proper Cup of Tea

    Boil water. Put a tea bag in a cup. Pour the boiling water into the cup. Let it steep for as long as you like. Remove the bag, add whatever you like to it (milk, honey, lemon, whiskey). There are a lot of fussy rules, if you want to be fussy (Americans are notoriously non-fussy). I suggest you look elsewhere for those. Like here, for example: http://www.vogue.com/article/english-teatime-etiquette-how-to

    The Hot Jimmy

    One of my favorite fall/winter drinks is a variation of a hot toddy that I’m calling the Hot Jimmy. (I didn’t know what a hot toddy was until after I had invented my version – thanks, Lisa!). I make a cup of herbal tea (which has no tea in it) — lemon ginger is my favorite — add a bit of honey and throw in a shot of Wigle hopped whiskey (which you can’t buy right now). It’s perfect for a damp, dark autumn evening.

    ADDENDUM APPROPRIATUS


    Catherine of Aragon

    I said Anne Boleyn was a feminist icon, but I don’t want to ignore her predecessor, Catherine. She was probably Henry’s true love, despite the way he treated her (annulment, banishment, forced estrangement from her daughter). He left her in charge while he went to fight the French, during which time she fought off an attempted invasion by the King of Scotland. She rallied her troops while in full armor and extremely pregnant, and got super pissed when the English military, fearing for her delicate nature, brought his clothes as proof of King James’s death rather than his actual dead body.

    COLOPHON

    Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.

    keep the coffee comin’

  • Pamphlet 6: Food

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER SIX: FOOD

    This is the first issue of the new year, the sixth issue total and the first in a new series. I’m going to be trying some new things (see the COLOPHON, below, for details). But enough of all that, let’s get into the object of our acts of culinary consumption: FOOD.


    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal editorial; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

    Mayflies

    Here’s a workable definition of life: Life is the acquisition of adequate calories before reproduction. I offer you the mayfly as an example. It hatches underwater as a nymph, with a big digestive system and little else. The nymph eats as much as possible, sometimes for years, only to ascend into the air as a winged imago, its final form. The imago has a mouth, but it’s nonfunctional. It can’t eat. It doesn’t want to eat. It wants to get hella laid. The mayfly lives a day or two. It mates, lays its eggs, and drops dead. The eggs settle on the bottom of a pond and the cycle continues. The eggs hatch, and the hungry nymph starts collecting calories.

    Calories

    I often wonder what humans of the past would think of humans of the now. Drop one of our early human ancestors into our lives and he would be stunned by a whole bunch of things we take for granted. We live in the safest age of human history. We run for fun, not to save ourselves from marauding enemy tribes or hungry megafauna. We have so much food to eat for such little cost that the leading causes of death in humans arise directly from our diets. Losing weight is actually easy, mathematically speaking, for the baseline human (with “normal” bodies not beset by disease, hereditary flaw or misadventure): consume fewer calories than you use.


    Our bodies are made to prefer high calorie foods. This instinctual drive to eat the lowest possible volume with the highest possible calorie content made Americans the fattest people in the world, but it also made us come up with some pretty amazing innovations.

    “My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.” – Orson Welles


    Preparation

    The human life cycle is slightly different, with the same pieces rearranged. We get our calories from food we pick up and put in our mouths. This is true for most animals, but humans developed a unique twist that probably made us who we are today: we prepared it before putting it our mouths.

    You thought I was going to say “we cooked it!” We did! But that came later. We evolved smaller teeth, smaller guts (see below) and smaller faces long before we ever cooked anything. Our ancestors used stone tools to tenderize meat and cut it up into smaller pieces. That’s some pre-human ingenuity!

    The beauty of meat as a food source is that it lets some other poor animal collect the calories for us. Cows spend their lives eating and digesting because they have to. They eat plants, and plants have such a small calorie count for their volume that cows need a four-segmented stomach to get the most nutrition they can out. A cow converts those calories into big muscles that it needs in order to carry around all those big stomachs full of digesting grass, and then a human comes along and skips the boring part and eats the high-calorie muscles.

    This all begins with the most efficient energy-creating system in the natural world, photosynthesis, which lets that crunchy grass grow into tasty food for a cow just by being in the right place at the right time to absorb the energy and carbon created when sunlight snaps ambient carbon dioxide molecules in half.

    The grass uses the sunlight to make itself food for the cow, which uses the grass to make itself food for a human. Every animal takes the work of another to make itself.

    After our pre-human ancestors discovered fire, they figured out how to use it to make their food better. Because meat is the easiest solution to the maximum calories for minimal effort problem, cooking meat was probably what catapulted those proto-humans into the big-brained dummies we are today.

    By cooking meat, you make it easier to chew. You can eat more of it in less time. That little innovation made us who we are.

    Vegetarianism

    We eat meat because we always did. From fish to bison, meat was the high-calorie rocket fuel in our cognitive development. But that was a few thousand years ago.

    As my morality and my politics begin to coalesce and align into a Do No Harm kind of lazy pacifism, I find the act of eating a dead animal less and less justifiable.

    You might have noticed my interest in human evolution (this is the last issue to dwell on the subject). There’s no question that vegetarianism (or, dear god, veganism) in protohumans would have been disastrous. Eating cooked meat was a key to human survival over the last few bottlenecks, migrations and ice ages. But just because it was important then doesn’t make it important now.

    Most of us don’t have to eat meat to survive (note: iron deficiencies and other medical issues still require many people to eat meat, bless them). My sessile, first world life makes me need fewer calories than my ancestors, and I have access to so many high-calorie, low-effort food sources that I probably wouldn’t even lose a single pound if I stopped eating meat (let alone starve).

    I eat meat because I’m lazy and unsophisticated. I like hamburgers. I like hot dogs.

    I believe that our species will one day look upon eating meat as a necessary evil that they will also have grown out of.

    “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” – J.R.R. Tolkien


    Broccoli

    When I was in grade school and was asked what my favorite food was, I said “broccoli.” I will defend this choice to the grave. It’s still my favorite. I prefer it raw, but I’ll eat it any way I can get it. I don’t put salt on it. I don’t put cheese on it. I just eat it. I would not pass up a pizza for a bowl of brocc, but that doesn’t mean pizza is my favorite food. They are not contrary ideas.


    Broccoli was created by the ancient Romans, proving that people who are against genetically-modified foods can’t even be consistent in the foods they purposelessly fear. Broccoli didn’t become popular in the US until the 1920s. It only took broccoli 2500 years to go from a cultivated offshoot of cabbage in northern Italy to a staple food in America, though, be fair, America didn’t exist for most of that time.

    Fractals

    There’s a type of broccoli less popular than the kind you find in most stores here. It’s called “Romanesco,” also called “roman broccoli” (image above). It differs from the other varieties of broccoli in a few significant ways (it has a nutty flavor), but it is best known for its geometric fractal growth pattern.

    You’ve probably heard the term “fractal” but maybe not know what it is. The geometric fractals are easiest to understand, so I’ll make it simple: a little piece of a fractal form looks just like the biggest piece. A fractal triangle would be a triangle made out of smaller triangles, where are also made out of triangles, etc. There’a also a lot of math involved in fractals, which you can see at the link at the bottom of this pamphlet, if you’re into that sort of thing.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    • A lot of kids know the word “fractal” because it’s a word in the song from Frozen, “Let it Go.” Elsa refers to her powers as creating “frozen fractals” and snowflakes kind of look like fractal patterns. Also, it’s a great song with a great message, but saying the message would just be restating the title.


    COLOPHON

    Composed entirely by James Foreman on a notebook computer with additional edits via telephone.

    I wrote five issues last year, so I think that’s how I’m going to continue doing it. Volume 1 was five issues, and Vol. 2 will also be five. I don’t know how much time will be between Volumes, but hopefully not as long as last time. I’ve toyed with the idea of formatting the previous issues for print, maybe with little illustrations instead of photos scrounged from the internet.

    LINKS

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/

    http://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-are-fractals/

  • Pamphlet 5: "Fire"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER FIVE: FIRE

    Burn a log in a fireplace. The light and heat is a mirror of the activity on the surface of the sun. Energized oxygen locks into place with the dormant carbon atoms in the wood and the sunlight used to separate oxygen from carbon during photosynthesis comes bursting back out. That’s what a fire is, but it’s not everything a fire can be.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

    The Sun

    The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace
    Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees

    That’s an old children’s song made famous by They Might Be Giants [youtube.com] and it’s all around exactly right. Without a giant, heavy, dense, ball of gas in the middle of our solar system for earth to orbit, we most definitely would never have evolved.

    The sun is also a star, and stars are the source of all matter in the universe. A star is dense and that density increases as it ages, crunching atoms closer and closer together and pushing the resulting elements into its core, piling them on as it burns. When that star one day explodes, as they often do, it sends all those complex elements into space. When enough of that stuff gets in one spot and cools down, those elements clump together and spin around and, eventually, you get planets.

    It’s such a weird, beautiful concept that I want to state it in the plainest terms: we’re made out of stars. The Big Bang threw all that radiation into space, where it cooled off and came together and got close enough to start slamming hydrogen atoms together, which made helium, etc. That’s the source of every single atom, even the ones in your body.

    It’s tempting to get really deep into the science here, because it’s really, really awesome. For instance, the “necessities” of life seem less and less necessary as we learn more about our universe. We know that sunlight isn’t necessary for life (just look up a little thing called chemosynthesis [wikipedia.org]). Now we’re not even sure a stable orbit around a star is necessary. There is ample theoretical basis for an internally-heatedplanet (by decaying uranium, for instance) that could conceivably sustain an ecology of creatures that have never seen any kind of light at all, on planets drifting silently between stars. But as Richard Feynman says, I have to stop somewhere.

    When you die, you can get cremated, and superheated oxygen collides with the carbon in your body, and the beautiful, glimmering sunlight that triggered the photosynthesis in the plants eaten by you and the animals you ate and then encorporated into the cells of your body splits open in a blaze of subatomic particles and rejoins the thermodynamia of the universe.

    Or you can be buried, and then slowly consumed by tiny organisms that eat the carbon in your body and feed larger organisms that are eaten by even larger organisms that themselves die and on and on until the matter that made you makes a whole lot of things that aren’t you.

    If you’re lucky, all this happens after the miraculous collection of carbon and atomic forces that came together to make you had a grand old time and the people left over on earth can console each other by saying “well, that’s was a good long life.”

    Long Lives

    World records are premised on the ability to document the achievement. The fastest living man could be Usain Bolt, but there’s no way to know without measuring the running speed of every human on earth, which is impossible. Just so, there’s no way to know how old the oldest living person is without a precise measurement of every human life, so we have to trust birth records in foreign countries to tell us who the oldest (verified) person is.

    The oldest (verified) living human being is Emma Morana, an Italian woman who just turned a 117 years old in November. As far as ancient humans go, she doesn’t look quite as corpse-like as some of her fellow Oldest People:

    The oldest (verified) person ever is Jeane Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days. She had one daughter who died at age 36 of pneumonia, who had one son who also died at the age of 36, in a car accident. Jeane lived in the same small town in France for the entirety of those 122 years.
    Don’t let the cigarette picture fool you — she smoked only one or two of them a day, showing a moderation that defined her lifestyle of consistent exercise and clean living. She claimed to have never been sick, and she almost burned her apartment down at the age of 110 because of poor eyesight.

    The list of Most Long-Lived (Verified) Humans shows that death has a clear preference for men: an overwhelming 94 of the 100 oldest (verified) people are women. There’s no consensus as to why women tend to live longer than men or why there are so few ancient men compared to ancient women (85% of centenarians are women).

    One leading explanation puts the blame squarely on the lack of menstruation in men. Women have less iron in their bodies than men because blood and other iron-heavy stuff (I’m not a doctor) is lost at a reliable rate of once per month. More iron means a higher risk for cardiovascular disease, which is one reason why red meat isn’t very good for you and why vegetarians tend to be healthier than the omnivorous among us. Male and female iron levels eventually equal out, later in life, but women have those 50 years or so of a head start.

    If you had to live in the same town and, for most of it, the same apartment for the entire duration, would you want to live to be 122? For some people, a long lifespan spent in one place is no life at all. It’s not how much time you spend on earth, it’s how you spend it. Besides, there’s really no such thing as linear time.

    Nonlinear Time

    Everything that ever happened has already happened, from the beginning of the universe to its end. We experience time at a rate of 60 seconds per minute. Life is a series of now moments strung together — those that haven’t happened yet are purely theoretical and we call them “the future” while nows that have passed are called “the past.” We can only perceive one now at a time.

    I say the future is theoretical because there’s no way to know it will happen. We expect it to happen because of all the nows that preceded it. We’re all natural scientists, hypothesizing that the nows to come will resemble all the nows that came before, because those nows fit a certain pattern. Finding and anticipating patterns is also called “learning” and we immediately start doing it when we’re born. A baby who drops his toy on the floor over and over again is testing his environment (and his parents) and learning about gravity.

    It’s not an easy concept to internalize until you use the flatland thought experiment. Since time is the fourth dimension, we can use the other three dimensions in the illustration.

    Imagine a species of 2-dimensional creatures. They have no height, only length and width. They’re squares or circles or triangles but they’re all living side-by-side. The concept of “above” might exist in the minds of their scientists, but they’re incapable of perceiving it.
    But not us. We’re 3D. We can look down on those poor 2D creatures and see their entire world spread out before us. We can even see inside their 2D bodies and their 2D buildings. No walls they made could keep us out — we could, at a whim, pick any one of them up at any time and take it on the ride of its life.

    Now, add a dimension on top of that one. We’re the flatlanders, now, and some mysterious 4D creatures look at our poor, feeble 3D lives and pity us. We can’t perceive time but it effects us, just as the 3rd dimension effect the flatlanders. Those 4D beings perceive time just as we perceive the third dimension. They see time not as a linear progression of nows but as a set string of nows that they can see all at once.

    It might feel like predestination, but it really isn’t. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, then how can you say what was supposed to happen? It’s not a curse, but a blessing, to not know how things are going to turn out.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    Many of you already know me and already know that my nephew, Miles, died in the summer of 2014. He should be turning 20 next week, but he isn’t. His work lives on, frozen in time, and we can all still enjoy it. In honor of his birthday, I recommend you spend some time with him.

    My other suggestion is to watch this video of Richard Feynman describing the chemical process of fire. He was a genius and a fantastic storyteller and a great bongo player.

    THE ANECDOTUS

    a memory retrieved from the depths of my mind’s ocean by bathysphere; or, a thing that happened recently

    I have never liked the sun. I’ve won every Who’s More Pale contest I’ve ever entered, by clear margins. I burn easily. I’ve never had a tan. The sun stings my skin and hurts my eyes and heats everything up (the only thing I hate more than direct sunlight is too much heat). This is not revisionism based on present biases, and I offer photographic proof:
    Yep, that’s me, hating the sun.


    You light up my life, my sweet reader.

  • Pamphlet 3: "Human"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER THREE: “HUMAN”

    A human being is one of a large group of known animals (and a much larger group of unknown animals) of the genus Homo. All human species are extinct except one: Homo sapiens. Everybody reading this pamphlet is presumed to be a member of this species at the time of writing.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    Homo Sapiens

    I just finished reading a book called Sapiens, which chronicles the history of our species of human. We are not the only humans to have walked on the earth — here’s a list of seven of others, a mere sampling of the probable dozens of our cousins who died before we got to know them. We are unique among them simply because we survived.

    Why we survived is a puzzle of history, but there are tons of theories, most of which agree on the how, if not the why. About 40,000 years ago, humans experienced a cognitive revolution, a fancy term for a simple idea: ideas. You can read more about that at the link, but the basic explanation for human domination of the globe can be illustrated with a line.

    Most species on the earth follow a straight line. They occupy their ecosystems and fall into a temporary equilibrium with the world around them until some external force knocks the ecosystem around and they survive or die off. It’s a predictable trajectory. It’s how life happened and keeps happening.

    Homo sapiens were like that, too, for a hundred thousand years, until the cognitive revolution. Our straight line started zigging and zagging. We developed complex ideas and languages to communicate them. We developed cultures and religions and ideas like trade and currency. We started cooperating in larger numbers. Rather than adapt to our environment, we changed it.


    Neanderthals, as a contrast, occupied Europe for at least a hundred thousand years and had no such zigging or zagging. They showed signs of rudimentary ritual practices and had access to fire, were much more suited to their environment than human beings, yet they became extinct while human beings thrived. For many years (and, in some cases, still today), scientific consensus was that humans had killed them off. This is consistent with human behavior.

    Humans didn’t kill off everything, but most things didn’t survive us. If it was big and meaty, we killed it and ate it. If it was big and dangerous, we killed it and probably tried to eat it, too. Human migration around the world can be traced by mass extinctions of megafauna (a fancy term for big animals). Where people went, the giant sloths and woolly mammoths died.

    But humans shared Europe with neanderthals for five thousand years, and there were a lot fewer of them than there were of us. If we had wanted to kill them, the neanderthals would have been dead. The prevailing theory now is that we probably made love to them, instead.

    I find it comforting and inspiring that our ancestors didn’t slaughter every other human species. In all probability, we worked together, lived together. We only know this happened with neanderthals because we decoded their genome, and we can see their genes buried in our own DNA. Who knows how many other species of human we shared and cooperated with? We didn’t kill them, we carried them with us into the future.

    My Genes

    I have 268 neanderthal variants in my genes. Here’s what my chromosomes look like, with the Neanderthal variants are in blue:

    Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had a common ancestor, and then came back together in Europe for a few thousand years. Modern Homo sapiens with a 100% European lineage, like me, all have Neanderthal DNA in them, but I have relatively little (I’m in the 30th percentile or so). How do I know that I’m 100% European?

    I filled a little vial with my spit and mailed it to 23andMe and in a few months I found out that nobody on earth is more white than me:

    These results are only accurate to about 500 years ago, and confirms what we Foremans already knew about ourselves (though it’s mostly my mother’s side — the Hazletts — that we know about, thanks to extensive genealogical research by my more recent ancestors). These results have no affect on my life at all, since I already knew what I was and where my people came from. There were no surprises in my genome, no secret dalliances with Persian princes (or Greek peasants, for that matter). I’m a little disappointed that my family history is an arrow-straight line from one corner of one continent to me, but that’s preferable to not having a line at all.

    End of Line

    I want this newsletter to be 75% informational and 25% personal, so indulge me: I don’t know if my line ends with me, and I’m not sure I mind either way.

    My parents had six children, so it’s not as if the venerable Foreman line will end with our generation. My brothers and sister are breeding and they’re doing a great job with it. I have no illusions about the feeling of immortality often cited in making decedents. There’s no immortality to be had for us, and that’s okay.

    Indulge me this, too: what was the first name of your great-grandfather? Do you know your grandmother’s middle name? These are things that can be found in public records, so no bonus points for finding out later. More to my point, do you know what your grandmother’s friends called her when she was little? Do you know what her favorite color was? What was her first crush like? How did your grandfather feel when he got his first job? These things are accessible, if they’re still alive or anybody currently alive ever asked them, but good luck answering those questions for your great-grandparents and don’t even bother with the great-greats. Even if that data was accessible, would you read it? Would you read all of the autobiographies of all of your great-great grandfathers? Be honest.

    Unless you happen to be particularly noteworthy, you won’t be remembered for very long past your death. Did you write a book? It’ll go out of print. It’ll join a vast store of digital copies of books written by hundreds of thousands of people, likely so similar to others of its kind that nobody will read it. Did you paint a famous painting? If it’s in a national gallery or famous collection, maybe somebody will see it again. Were you ever such a famous movie star that you dominated an entire genre for decades and everybody in the country knew you by name, like William Hart? Good luck finding someone who knows him now. Another fun game is to ask a teenager to name more than one Beatle.

    Imagine the burden of our information on our descendants. The autobiographies of their ancestors won’t be theoretical, they will be key-word searchable and accessible from anywhere on earth. And they’ll be exhaustively complete. We wonder what our great-great grandparents did for a living? Our great-great grandchildren will know who our friends were (Facebook), who we dated (Match, Okcupid), where we went (4square, Yelp) and have insight into our most intimate thoughts (email, blogs). More information is better, but when is it too much?

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    Thinking about my descendants is a bit theoretical at this point in my life, as I sit alone in a coffee shop, single and loving the voluntary seclusion of living alone, kids aren’t near the top of my priorities list. Love and marriage are the standard western human precursors to kids, and my favorite love songs are not about the fire of lust but the warmth of comfortable domesticity. The gold standard of that kind of love song is This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads. If you know me and you know the same kind of music, then you already know about that, so what’s the point in a recommendation? Instead, I’ll recommend this video for a live version of another favorite Talking Heads song, Houses in Motion — this one has bonus choreography and Canadians wearing wigs:

    THE ANECDOTUS

    I first fully became aware of my species during early adolescence, but not for the reasons that implies. I grew up in the homogenous neighborhoods of suburban West Virginia. From kindergarten to high school, there was one black student in my class (though not the same one throughout). I did three things in that period of my life: 1) watched tv 2) stayed up late 3) wrote stories. Every Saturday night, after SNL, WTOV played Star Trek episodes.

    Star Trek informed my idea of what it meant to be human, contrasting our species with others. To me, different races were Klingons and Romulans, not dark-skinned humans. There was no racism in our household. The topic was rarely even discussed. There’s some kind of privilege in that, but I think it helped me rather than hurt.

    ADDENDUM APPROPRIATUS

    We’re still finding little secrets in our genes, and I’m happy to report evidence that supports my thesis that humans cooperated with, and loved, strangers they encountered: a new non-sapiens human relative found in our genes.

    thank you for reading, fellow human

  • Pamphlet 2: "Light"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER TWO: “LIGHT”

    Light is one of those subjects that you can’t stop thinking about, once you let it in your head. Einstein couldn’t stop thinking about it, and thank goodness for that. Another person couldn’t stop thinking about it, either, a person who led a far more interesting life than his mathematical descendent (sorry, Al).

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

    Isaac Newton

    Isaac Newton invented an entirely new branch of mathematics before he was 30 (though Leibniz begged to differ). He came up with those laws of thermodynamic laws we all know and love, too, and a whole bunch of other things that are beyond the scope of this newsletter. Concordant with the theme of Pamphlet 2, Newton was also obsessed with the properties of light.

    Newton walked the halls of Trinity College and littered the ground behind him with his optical discoveries: how prisms work, the intrinsic nature of colors, designs for new kinds of telescopes, how to grind better mirrors. Curious about the behavior of light against the human eye, he stuck a large needle between his ocular bone and his eyeball to see if how his vision changed when he squeezed it. No joke. He even diagrammed it:
    Oh, and he was 24.

    Isaac Newton was also a grade-a jerk with a thin skin. Another scientific luminary in a time when one could throw a stick in a random, filthy, street and hit three luminaries was Robert Hooke (he discovered the cell structure of living creatures and named them such), who made some mild criticisms of some of Newton’s discoveries. Newton’s reaction was to take his ball and go home, withdrawing from public discourse altogether.

    Newton didn’t stay away from the public eye forever, and eventually, in his old(er) age, found himself in charge of the Royal Mint, which was plagued by the circulation of false coinage. He is credited with successfully prosecuting dozens of forgers by disguising himself and hanging out in pubs, gathering evidence and conquering counterfeiters like a 17th century Sherlock Holmes. How has this footnote of history never made it to a quirky BBC detective show? Speaking of whom…

    Bartitsu

    Sherlock Holmes was no mere fighter — he was a practitioner of an obscure “gentleman’s martial art” of the 1800s, a style of combat that utilized the gentleman’s walking stick and was always depicted in practice by a gentleman with a gentleman’s hat, tails and gentleman’s mustache.


    Bartitsu (or, as Doyle miswrote it, baritsu) was invented by the extremely English-sounding E.W. Barton-Wright. The name Bartitsu was a combination of his name and “jujitsu” which was, among a large number of extant martial arts, a major source of inspiration. In fact, Barton-Wright is credited with being one of the first westerners to teach Japanese-style combat, a manifestation of the era’s obsession with orientalism.

    Barton-Wright did not just make up a martial art using a modern version of a club, he founded a capital-C Club called the Bartitsu Academy of Arms and Physical Culture. He encouraged a well-rounded martial arts education, believing that one should master many forms of combat. Pursuant to this, he imported martial arts masters from all over the world and even hosted a group of historians experimenting with ancient fencing techniques. As if all that weren’t Elizabethan enough, he also employed (and in some cases, invented) a slew of therapies involving electricity, heat and radiation.

    Bartitsu was essentially forgotten, but has seen a resurgence in the 21st century as another generation discovers its own incarnation of Holmes.

    Jackie Chan

    Speaking of bridges between asian and western cultures, Jackie’s nickname as a child was 炮炮, which means “cannonball.” It’s a pretty accurate description of Jackie Chan as an adult, too.

    Contrary to popular belief, he never did all of his own stunts. He has the world record for having personally performed the most stunts on film, but he had a team of extremely talented stunt performers who worked on every Jackie Chan movie for most of the 80s, when his most dangerous stunts took place, like the stunt in Armour of God (Jackie fell from a tree and fractured his skull).

    Some of Jackie’s greatest assets are his humor — kung fu comedy is a genre he is credited with inventing — and his willingness to embarrass himself, something that his late co-star Bruce Lee didn’t do. Jackie’s producers want him to be more like Bruce (so he could be the next Bruce Lee), but Jackie didn’t find real success until he purposefully went the opposite direction. Where Lee was a stalwart paladin, Jackie was flawed and bumbling.

    During my research, I found a video by the folks at Every Frame a Painting that perfectly sums up everything I just wrote, so you should just watch that instead.

    This is my earliest recollection of ever even hearing about Jackie Chan, when he won a lifetime achievement award from the MTV movie awards (which they discontinued because the last winner, Clint Howard, seemed to be so legitimately touched by what nobody else took seriously). This award was given to him when he was finally breaking through in Hollywood and preceded his most famous American movies.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    It’s finally feeling like autumn around here, a season that makes me want to listen to music like The Handsome Family, whose song, My Sister’s Tiny Hands, I heard Andrew Bird cover at his most recent Pittsburgh show. I had no idea it was a Handsome Family song, but reading the lyrics (sample: “The sunlight spread like honey/ Through my sister’s tiny hands”), it makes perfect sense. The descriptions of light, shadow and darkness are some great writing.


    Not every recommendation in this newsletter will be a music video, which is good because I have another one:

    I used IKEA’s “Dioder” LED light strips to make my grandfather’s > aunt’s sword into a lamp. They’re bright and warm and don’t have that weird, bluish LED flicker and you can use command strips to temporarily attach them to something that you treasure. I probably don’t have to worry about this sword’s preservation, considering it lived much of its life as a stake for tomato plants in one of my grandfather’s patient’s gardens.

    QUOTUM INTERRUPTE

    “Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” – Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

    THE ANECDOTUS

    a memory retrieved from the depths of my mind’s ocean by bathysphere; or, a thing that happened recently

    Despite being a modern, medicated American, I still have the occasional bout of depression. It’s not capital-D Depression, which I do have, which is managed by the medication. Its symptoms include an unwillingness to leave one’s safe little spaces, an avoidance of social situations, a sinking sense of malaise. It’s Depression Junior, a sad feeling for a little while. But there are things you can do. In order of importance:

    • drink at least one glass of water, and more than one is better

    • eat a little something with lots of protein in it

    • pick one small task (take the garbage out, wash a few dishes, etc.) and do it

    • call somebody who loves you and talk for a bit

    • turn all the lights on

    Light therapy is useful in cases of seasonal affective disorder, but lots of light is just good for you. It chases shadows away, and when you’re sad, you don’t need any damn shadows around.



    Thank you for reading, dear reader.