It is with some uncertainty that I observe that the Yankee republic has wrestled the Golden Spurtle trophy from Scotland. [Link] A spurtle is a baton that looks rather like a constable’s truncheon that has been on a diet and is commonly used as a stirring rod in the preparation of oatmeal.[1]
The uncertainty arises here in that oatmeal, and its derivative haggis, are quintessentially Scots and hence the denuding of the national honor and self confidence in this manner, even by a nation that used to have a sizable fraction of Scots descent, especially here in Nawth Alibam, is telling. The Sassenach English will likely take back the stone and engineers will no longer studiously acquire brogue accents (or shoes.)

I also find some degree of uncertainty that the token was taken by an employee of one of those Pacific Northwest morally superior Birkenstock wearing environmentally conscious corporations.[2] There seems something depressing as well as disillusioning that a corporate organization could be responsible for the best of any experience. What a horrible example to set for General Motors, General Electric, and the present incumbent of the Oval Office. Does this mean that the citizen-consumer can now actually hold large organizations accountable for quality as well as quantity?

We here in the Yankee republic tend to think of oatmeal as something that comes in paper packets and is exploded in a microwave oven. It is, of course, not eaten here in the Old Confederacy as a matter of patriotic fervor for grits, and hence any restaurant one asks for the former is honor bound to prepare in as unpalatable a fashion as possible. It is permissible to prepare cookies (biscuits as the Sassenach would perversely miscall them) from oatmeal, but one is not patriotic is one eats oatmeal instead of grits. It is permissible however to adulterate the grits with any additive one chooses so long as that additive is not oatmeal.

On the rest of Tellus, oatmeal is neither instant nor something made in a microwave. Rather it is an exacting and lengthy – hours – long process involving precision stirring and attention, two things alien to Amerikan nature and society. I once knew a fellow who made an adequate Amerikan substitute from a slow cooker modified with an electric motor attached to a rare earths magnet that coupled magnetically to one of those plastic coated bovine magnets that did the actual stirring. He, unsurprisingly, was a native of Maine.

I am a poor excuse of a Southron in that I consume both oatmeal and hash brown potatoes in preference, nay, to the exclusion of, grits. During my graduate shul days at the campus of the Boneyard, existing on a Teaching Assistant’s stipend, my morning fast was broken daily by a reconstituted packet of cosmetically damaged instant oatmeal. Microwave ovens were unavailable in those days so I had to actually boil water on the stove, which is probably why the stuff was palatable. And returning to work after heart attack, a morning bowl of instant oatmeal made by a Sassenach corporate organization, was sufficient to keep me alive through a morning of raucous subordinates and termagant superiors. After retirement however, my oatmeal consumption was severely curtailed by FD SCP whose overpowered microwave was certain (probability exactly one) to explosively boil the water and oats mixture and require a rigorous cleaning of the cooking compartment of the oven. Happily I could fall back on the production and consumption of cookies.

I suppose I could cultivate the skill of producing traditional oatmeal except for the stirring thing. I am not much for such repetitive activities (hence the heart attack,) and I doubt FD SCP would let me modify a crock pot. But a research trip to Scotland? It could be combined with an investigation of distilleries! Is there ought better than oatmeal and whisky, with a wee dram of Maple syrup for the former?

[1]  Spurtles may be procured in the Yankee republic from the Lee Valley Tool Company [Link] and likely other places and corporate organizations I am unaware of.
[2]  Not MegaHard, of course, since their tree hugging is limited to processed trees imprinted in green ink with the portraits of dead presidents (and the occasional political appointee, but all dead and Western European  in ancestry.)

While we’re being philosophical, U have to make comment on this cartoon, [Link]

I can attest to this as a former miniatures gamer who now suffers from the delusion that (a) if you go to the gym enough you’ll get spry enough again to game, and (b) your flavor of miniatures gaming will come back into usage. Both seem equally futile in the light of day. Getting back to when I could crawl around a 20m x 10m room all weekend playing out a game of modern land combat or Great War fleet combat, living on sugar and animal fat and carbonic acid is as delusional of Coleridge and a lot poorer rhyme.

Actually, that behavior had nothing to do with my reticence to paint miniatures. It was more a matter of aversion to the effort of getting all the paint off my nose. Have you ever tried to paint camouflage – NATO four color or DualTex – on a 1:285 scale tank and not get your nose camouflaged as well?

humans, hobbies, biology, psychology

I got used to this philosophy when I was working for the Yankee army, but seeing this cartoon, [Link]

puts me in mind that it’s an acceptable outcome to the Joe Consumer who wants an appliance, which is the message the cartoonist wanted to convey.

It’s not the one organizations want to convey. They want to save money and restrict what their members do, even when that deviation from the minimal set of clients is part of their work. Nothing is more frustrating or counter-survival (on several levels) than to be hired for your skills and abilities and then being told you can’t use them.

computers, organization, bureaucracy, extinction

With the formal release of Windows 7 by MegaHard, the folks at Lifehacker held a straw poll last week of their reader’s favorite OS. [Link] Now, even while acknowledging that we have to expect the population to be quite skewed from the species as a whole, after all most humans are highly acomputeric, [1] this chart is quite intriguing:[2]

 

The intriguing part is that something of order 0.27 of the responding (sample) population does not use Windows, at least as a favorite OS. If this were the situation with the species as a whole then MegaHard’s Lanchestrian monopoly would be defunct!

I also find it worthy of consideration that XP still enjoys about twice the usage as VISTA and about the same as Linux.

[1]  Computer/information illiterate. The average computer user, a MegaHard mind serf, think that being able to log in, use a browser to run a Gooey search, send and receive email  via Outlook, and use a spreadsheet or key a memo is computer literacy. There are cases on record from the nineteenth century in Amerika where slaves considered being permitted to decide whether or not to wear their (only) shirt was a freedom.
[2] Yes, I did almost use the “I” word there. 

information, computers, operating system, humans

Today is the birthday anniversary of Marie Sklodowska Curie, information courtesy of the Britannica folks. [Link] If you are old enough to have had an analog watch with glow-in-the-dark hands and numerals, then it was because of the work of Marie and her husband Pierre. Supposedly her interred remains also glow.

She is what is sometimes called a ‘twofer’, signifying that she won two Nobel prizes, one in chemistry and another in physics. The first she shared with her husband who died early under the wheels of a beer wain.

Despite the wrangle Hollywood has made of her, she is ample evidence of what is good in the species.

chemistry, physics, science, radioactivity

Courtesy of U Chicago, some statistics.[Link] They deal with changes in the beliefs, at least as indicated by a survey, of Americans between 1964 (or slightly later) and now.

• Belief in deity but not a personal deity: 0.05 -> 0.10;
• Belief in deity: 0.99 -> 0.92;
• Never attend services: 0.09 -> 0.22;
• Organizational non-affiliation: 0.05 -> 0.16;
• Daily prayer: 052 -> 0.59;
• Afterlife belief: 0.69 -> 0.72;

From these statistics it may be anticipated that the evangelical will become even more paranoid, frantic, and obnoxious. That the nation is becoming more rational and perceptive is a surprise but a good one.

That rationality seems to be at a premium here in Greater Metropolitan Arab where the number of churches outnumbers all other forms of businesses (slightly). One can only shudder at the tax revenue lost to the city and county by mysticism.

This also gives pause to reflect on the difference between Order and Organization. Humans want the former; it is programmed into us somehow, probably part of being intelligent. I decline the question of whether that search for order is an accident of nature or the purpose of deity acting. I do reflect however that all too often we humans are unable,[1] or unwilling, or just too lazy to comprehend order and instead substitute organization. Even I have a yearning to get books into cases, or, at least stacks instead of piles, and papers into all manner of box or container. Why, I even stash laptops and bricks in cases.

But too much of our lives is given over to slavish membership or subscription in organization. Organized religion is the epitome of this serfdom. Members are often discouraged from thinking outside strictly defined gutters; if thinking is even permitted. Non-belief organizations are often as bad. Scant wonder so many consider they employment to be a burden and a curse rtaher than a source of growth and enjoyment.

We lose sight of the idea that organization should be for the purpose of comprehending order, not of being ordered about.

[1]  To repeat the sweatshirt cliche, ‘What part of the Quantum Mechanics don’t you understand?” recognizing that the joke is that any of us, even an SCP who has done QM for two score years, can understand very little of QM. The astute can do the maths and note the correlation with observable reality and muse on the whichness of the why, but understand?

Miscegenation. Such an underused word these days when relativism has become the rule and morality has become spatial.

The Neandertal genome project has produced some furor in the media. Seems that researchers at the Max Planck Institut have opined that neandertals and sapiens did indeed have sexual congress. [Link] At issue, happily is the question of whether the offspring, assuming there were such, contributed to the modern sapiens genome.

Did I miss something here? Has some tryst site been discovered? Are there pictures? Or is this one of those dataless pronouncements made occasionally by overconcentrating scientists?

Not that I am adverse to the theory. In my mind it rather makes more sense for sapiens and neandertals to have had congress than not. That is opinion, no data. And I am not a biologist nor an anthropologist. But I am at sea a bit on how one can make definite statement without data? Or is science different in Europe?

The only way I can hypothesize getting to this is to have not only the neandertal and modern sapiens genomes, but the ancient sapiens genome as well. And then if it does develop that part of the modern sapiens genome is due to neandertal DNA, then we may reasonable, evidentially, infer sapiens-neandertal congress via Occam’s Razor.

But don’t tell the Cabots or the Lodges.

Hope, now, is that we can survive the current administration.

Monday is back to gym day where I normally listen to a podcast of CBC’s “The Best of Ideas”. I listen to a disproportionate fraction of CBC podcasts not because I think the Canadians have it right and we here in the Yankee republic have it wrong, just that I have not found any Amerikan podcasts good enough to take over the niche in the time environment.

It is also a matter of common knowledge to those few, those happy few, who regularly visit here that I am a bit critical of the media. Hence it will come as a bit of a surprise today, to these, at least, that I am going to say a few good things about a journalist. The podcast this morning was one from back at the end of August – I do tend to stockpile the things for lean periods when the casters go on holiday, said holidays being of excessive and indecent length. The subject was the presentation of the Dalton Camp lecture by Kenneth Whyte. [Link] Dalton Camp is a discorporated journalist who was evidently a kultur hero in Canada, Kenneth Whyte is the editor of a magazine – not one I read – and has recently published a book on William Randolph Hurst.

What impressed me with Whyte’s presentation was its candor and, to me, at least, accuracy. The latter is as subjective an assessment as the former since no data was offered. So at worst, Mr. Whyte entertains the same prejudices and observations as myself, except in greater depth, and at best he, and I, are accurate in our observations.

The core of Mr. Whyte’s discourse, or at least the part that I let filter through to my attention and consideration, may be paraphrased as vellum versus paper. I mention this because it is an often forgotten aspect of the previous information revolution, the one largely attributed to Gutenberg. What we tend to overlook is that that revolution was made possible by the inexpensive availability of paper.  The availability of cheap printing would have not made the difference it did without cheap paper. So in a sense we may say that paper forced out vellum.

The media (as opposed to journalism) model of the Twentieth century is one where the bulk of the cost of media, mostly newspapers but including wireless and television as well, is bourne by advertisers rather than consumers. In the case of the electromagnetic transmission media, all of the cost is bourne by advertisers except for public media. What Mr. Whyte reminded me of, rather embarassingly since it is one of my favorite socio-economic models, is that this means the advertisers tell the media how to behave and that behavior is banal journalism so as not to distract the consumers from the propaganda being fed them from the advertisers. Thank you, Mr. Whyte.

He then went on to explain that the demise of newspapers flows from that banality in that it destroyed the loyalty of the readers. That in itself would not do in newspapers however, as evidenced by their survival through the Twentieth century. What ultimately destroys them is other, faster ways of getting the news. Certainly newspaper readership has declined in proportion to the proliferation of electromagnetic transmission. But what has accelerated this has been the internet, the paper as it were. And evidently this is a case of newspapers being rock, internet being paper.

Another thing Mr. Whyte mentioned was that one of reasons for failure, part of the banality, was that newspapers became faceless. I was struck with how accurate this is. Certainly the Huntsville Times is faceless to us outside the city limits of Huntsville, Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill. But I suspect that the Huntsville Times is faceless even inside the city limits. Not so the Arab Tribune. Except for the few who only sleep here and have no life in Arab, everyone knows of the Tribune. They know where its offices are, who at least some of the people are who write for it. In this a canny strategy becomes apparent.

But  I am worried. The Tribune has begun to let slip that it already plans to discontinue its paper existence. Not a strange thing in this day, but seemingly a blow to destroy its deliberate association. Once the Tribune is only on the web will it too go away?

Last night was All Hallows Eve and once more FD SCP and I had no callers. Just as well as I was reminded this morning as I did my morning rounds of blogs and comics. This one epitomizes our experiences with the holy day:

humans, society, insanity,