Althouse |
- And a gold cloth dollar sign stitched to your clothing right over your heart.
- What have they done to my hula hoop?
- "Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a 'mentally unstable' Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council..."
- "Is calling something 'poetic' calling it a 'poem'?"
- "The spelling vendor is the standard spelling. The New Yorker, as part of its bizarre house style, uses the spelling vender. No one else does, besides those trying to emulate The New Yorker’s style."
- "The restoration work not only reveals the rogue addition of an upturned smile, but also a jarring strip of dirty sky added to make the canvas square rather than rectangular."
- "Los Angeles will return to mandatory mask-wearing indoors, even for people who have been vaccinated...
- Sunrise with cattails.
- "One thing that the school board mentioned in their decision to dismiss Hawn was the 'inappropriate' language in your poem. What was your reaction upon hearing that? Did that strike you as being the real reason why?"
- "The engine behind CLIP+VQ-GAN consists of two neural networks – algorithms designed to mimic a human brain – one of which classifies images (CLIP) and one that generates images (VQ-GAN)..."
- "Historically, Wikipedia has been written and monitored by a community of volunteers who collaborated and contested competing claims with one another."
- "Shed of the black robe, he wore khaki shorts, a short-sleeved blue and orange striped shirt and sandals. Still, he remained a cautious conversationalist, declining to speak of the court's confidential deliberations."
- "These past studies of brain plasticity generally focused on gray matter, though, which contains the celebrated little gray cells, or neurons, that permit and create thoughts and memories."
- A reader sends an email at 7:29, commenting on the first post of the day, but it seems to fit even better on the post I put up at 7:33.
- The monetization of the legalization.
- "CPAC did two straw polls: One with former President Donald Trump included and one without him."
- This morning's sunrise — at 5:36:15, 5:36:53, and 5:44.
| And a gold cloth dollar sign stitched to your clothing right over your heart. Posted: 16 Jul 2021 09:53 AM PDT
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| What have they done to my hula hoop? Posted: 16 Jul 2021 08:21 AM PDT I'm reading the "Ask a Cool Person" column at New York Magazine, and I see "100-Teen Poll: What Is Actually Cool to Buy in 2021? We surveyed high schoolers around the country. Here, 19 takeaways about how teens shop." After seeing the cool type of "top" is a corset and something about comfortable sweatpants and favorite "loungewear" brands I get to:
The hula hoop is a workout item?! I was a kid in the late 1950s, when the hula hoop became a big fad in the United States. I had a hula hoop, and I was pretty good at it.* It was all for fun — fun and some thinking about Hawaii, which was about to come in as a state (and my young head envisioned "coming into the United States" as the islands floating steadily toward California and about to connect). No one talked about "working out" back then, and certainly no one — no one anywhere around me — regarded the hula hoop as an exercise device. It was play and a display of skill that was amusing to watch, because it was like doing the hula, which was not treated with politically correct cultural respect in those days, but seen as an entertaining dance, like the twist, that entailed hip wiggling with accompanying arm movements. And, of course, no one talked about "triggering" and being "toxic" or "body positivity" back then. Here's this toy that was perfectly fun for young people in the days when Baby Boomers were kids, and now it's part of a grim agglomeration of everything but fun, where you have to work on your body, worry about it, and also worry about worrying about it. Did you watch the linked TikTok video? It's all about tape-measuring your waist over and over and earnestly attempting to reduce the number by hula hooping. I know I'm old, and I'm even giving this post my tag "these kids today," so I'm aware that I'm speaking like a stereotypical old person, but what are we doing to our culture? The NY Magazine column purports to represent coolness, but it's only finding out what teenagers are buying and assuming that things going on with teenagers are cool. I wish they were! __________________________ * If you told me Wikipedia's photograph — by George Garrigues, at the top of its article "Hula hoop" — is in fact a photograph of me, I could not with 100% certainty say that it is not:   |
| Posted: 16 Jul 2021 07:35 AM PDT "... according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents. The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present. They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow's strategic objectives, among them 'social turmoil' in the US and a weakening of the American president's negotiating position. Russia's three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin's signature. By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party's nomination race. A report prepared by Putin's expert department recommended Moscow use 'all possible force' to ensure a Trump victory. Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin. The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking...." From The Guardian reports, and this is quite a conundrum! If you can believe the story told in the documents, then you should also believe that it's at least as likely that there's a different plot and these documents are crafted to further that plot. If you think Moscow aims to do anything to cause social turmoil in the U.S., then why would it not, after the fact, fake evidence that it affected the election? The Guardian thinks it has a scoop here, and I know I'm encouraging them by linking, but the article on its face is full of skepticism-provoking phrases: "the papers suggest... the papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak... appear to be genuine... come across as accurate... said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking...."  |
| "Is calling something 'poetic' calling it a 'poem'?" Posted: 16 Jul 2021 06:44 AM PDT I find myself retorting to a reader, Nancy, who emailed me to say — in response to my calling something "a sincere effort at poetic polemic" — "Polemic, yes, but who would call that a poem?" At the link there's video of a performance called "White Privilege," which Slate called a "poem." I can see that I repeated that word, "poem," before my sentence that began with "I think": "I think it's a sincere effort at poetic polemic." I know I wrote "poetic polemic" to nudge the reader to question whether something that's too polemical deserves to be considered poetry. But, speaking of "White Privilege," isn't it white-privilege-y to question whether this set of words is a poem? I'm resisting googling "What is a poem?" but I do remember watching the "Master Class" course with Billy Collins teaching reading and writing poetry, so let me give you this from the old white man:
"No one else could have written that. This voice is just yours, and yours alone." ADDED: I went back to the email to tell Nancy: "I made a And I see that Nancy has written back to me: "She calls it a poem." "She" is the reciter of "White Privilege," who I see I haven't yet dignified with a naming in this post, so let me say, it's Kyla Jenee Lacey.  |
| Posted: 16 Jul 2021 06:08 AM PDT "Of the 45 examples in COCA, only 17 were actual uses of the spelling vender outside of The New Yorker (compared with over 2000 examples of vendor, a ratio of over 100 to 1). Two were proper names, eleven were from The New Yorker, and fifteen were in foreign languages." The website English Language & Usage gave me answered the spelling question that I had as I wrote the previous post. I'd thought "vendor" seems right, but maybe it's like "advisor," and it's wrong in that pretentious way that is most important to avoid. "Vender" looks wrong, but it has the virtue of adherence to the general rule of adding "-er" to verbs to make them into a noun doing whatever the verb has them doing — "paint" become "painter," not "paintor," and "blog" becomes "blogger," not "bloggor."  |
| Posted: 16 Jul 2021 05:48 AM PDT From "Restoration work wipes smile off the face of Dutch vegetable seller/Painting reclaims former glory as English Heritage rights the wrongs of 19th-century additions" (The Guardian). What I find so interesting here is not the outrage of painting changes onto a valuable work of art, but that the changes are so discordant. Assuming the changes were done at the same time — and there you see an easy off ramp from the conundrum — I wonder: Who would think both that a resting-bitch-face woman ought to give us a smile and that a luscious display of fresh food needs to be offset by a glum, grimy sky? I can see thinking the original painting was too cheerful...  ... and needed a depressing sky to remind us that the pleasures of life are transitory and geographically limited, but then why not leave the woman's face alone, hinting of her awareness that all this food is about to rot?  I see the food display is also darker and sadder. Perhaps the darker aesthetic was thought to be more serious and elevated, but then why not leave the woman with her original expression. Why make her smile? Explanation #1: The original expression makes the woman seem like an ordinary worker, more suspicious of customers that aware of the beauty of the vegetables. A little smile, along with less beautiful vegetables, makes her seem — or so it was hoped — like a full human being aware of the meaning of life and able to convey her knowledge if you, the viewer, stop long enough and gaze into her face. You know, like with the Mona Lisa. Explanation #2: The owner of the original painting found the expression unsettling. She looks uneasy and even hostile. An artist fixed the expression, but then the rest of the painting made the whole thing look too cheesy, like an ad — did they have ads then? — for a vegetable stand, and to pump up the high-art vibe, everything else was toned way the hell down. Explanation #3: It all started with a big square frame that needed using. A strip of canvas was added, and somebody painted that gloomy sky and other dark stuff to fill the space. To integrate this material with the rest of it, shadows were painted down into the vegetables. The artist probably thought something like, I am really maximizing the chiaroscuro, like the big-shot artists do. When the owner of the painting saw what had been done, he just said one thing: Well, can the lady at least be smiling? Explanation #4: The woman never looked right, never looked like a street vendor, and she was probably the daughter of the rich person who commissioned the painting. In the original painting, she looks like who she was, a wilful young girl, forced into stupid clothes and an awkward position. She hates the artist. All that work painting all those vegetables, and the main point of interest is still the human face, and it's a human face radiating ill will. When the painting was redone, toned down, and made more suitable to a posh, somber environment, the face was also toned down, softened into a gentle smile.  |
| Posted: 16 Jul 2021 05:01 AM PDT "... amid a rapid and sustained increase in Covid-19 cases in the nation's largest county. Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, LA county's public health officer, Dr Muntu Davis... said the county had been recording more than 1,000 new cases each day for a week and that there is now 'substantial community transmission.' Nearly 400 people hospitalized with Covid-19 as of Wednesday, up 275 from the week before. Nine new Covid-19 deaths were reported on Wednesday. 'This is an all-hands-on-deck moment,' he said." Contrary to my initial reaction, upon reading the article, I think this is an appropriate precaution, based on the numbers. You don't want to backslide into over-cautious mask-wearing, but you don't want to backslide into a new spike. But I'd like to know what percentage of the new cases, new hospitalizations, and new deaths involved fully vaccinated persons. If the problem is with the unvaccinated, publicize this information and show them what they need to do. Don't deprive the vaccinated people of a key benefit — taking off the mask.  |
| Posted: 15 Jul 2021 10:13 AM PDT   |
| Posted: 16 Jul 2021 06:18 AM PDT "I know it's not the real reason why. I have their required reading list. And in the books that they are required to read, there's sexual assault, murder, a lot of cursing. So I know that it was just a terrible excuse for their discomfort. And this is coming from somebody who was 16 years old having to, who grew up in a mostly white neighborhood, in my latter childhood, reading Mark Twain and reading the word 'n***er' over 200 times in a book. Huck Finn was bad. That's classic literature, but the fact that I say, 'You're not racist because you don't use the N word, but y'all use n***as every day,' now it's too much? Now, it's superfluous? Fuck out of here." Here's the video of the poem the teacher played for the students. I recommend using headphones. I think it's a sincere effort at poetic polemic, but the "n-word" is said out loud.
As for the firing, I don't like seeing teachers fired, but I don't understand how a teacher could think that could be played out loud in class. Is the unexpurgated "Huckleberry Finn" read in schools anymore? The culture has changed, and the taboo on using the word has become much more intense, so that saying it even when decrying its use is considered a terrible offense. ADDED: Joanne Jacobs blogged about Hawn's firing, here. She says "there's more to the story":
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| Posted: 15 Jul 2021 07:52 AM PDT "... CLIP is trained to recognise images using a mountain of raw data drawn from the internet, where people routinely upload images and identify them with captions. Given the text prompt ('Australia') it combs through a library of 400 million images to find visual elements that correspond with this term. The image results CLIP produces have been described as like a 'statistical average of the internet.' According to the image above, the elements that best correspond to 'Australia' are roads, a desert horizon, the ocean, and a few furry and scaly creatures. Once it has its image results, CLIP then feeds these to VQ-GAN, which has been trained to assemble and compose original images of its own. This happens mostly out of sight, but you can get some sense of the process in this video of CLIP+VQ-GAN making the image." ABC News reports on the awesome computer wizardry that yields some atrocious looking art and a disgusting hint of the junkpile of cliché and obviousness that's out there in the outback of the internet. Here's that video of the AI in action:  |
| Posted: 15 Jul 2021 07:17 AM PDT "In the words of Wikipedia's co-founder, Larry Sanger who spoke to Freddie Sayers on LockdownTV, these volunteers would 'battle it out.' This battle of ideas on Wikipedia's platform formed a crucial part of the encyclopaedia's commitment to neutrality, which according to Sanger, was abandoned after 2009. In the years since, on issues ranging from Covid to Joe Biden, it has become increasingly partisan, primarily espousing an establishment viewpoint that increasingly represents 'propaganda.' This, says Sanger, is why he left the site in 2007, describing it as 'broken beyond repair'.... 'Because there is a lot of influence. Wikipedia is known now by everyone to have a lot of influence in the world. So there's a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the article say what somebody wants them to say.'" From "Wikipedia co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created/Freddie Sayers spoke to Larry Sanger about why he left" (UnHerd).  |
| Posted: 15 Jul 2021 07:04 AM PDT |
| Posted: 15 Jul 2021 09:11 AM PDT "Less research has looked at white matter, the brain's wiring. Made up mostly of fat-wrapped nerve fibers known as axons, white matter connects neurons and is essential for brain health. But it can be fragile, thinning and developing small lesions as we age, dilapidations that can be precursors of cognitive decline. Worryingly, it also has been considered relatively static, with little plasticity, or ability to adapt much as our lives change. But Agnieszka Burzynska, a professor of neuroscience and human development at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, suspected that science was underestimating white matter. 'It's been like the ugly, neglected stepsister' of gray matter, she says, ignored and misjudged.... So, for the new study... they divided the volunteers into groups, one of which began a supervised program of stretching and balance training three times a week, to serve as an active control. Another started walking together three times a week, briskly, for about 40 minutes. And the final group took up dancing, meeting three times a week to learn and practice line dances and group choreography.... In the new scans, the nerve fibers in certain portions of their brains looked larger, and any tissue lesions had shrunk. These desirable alterations were most prevalent among the walkers, who also performed better on memory tests now. The dancers, in general, did not.... Meanwhile, the members of the control group, who had not exercised aerobically, showed declining white matter health after the six months, with greater thinning and tattering of their axons and falling cognitive scores." Why would dancing and walking produce different results? Burzynska suggests that it might be that these dancers spent time watching instructors rather than moving, so maybe dancing continuously would be as productive of neurogenesis as walking. I couldn't tell if the walking was done outdoors. Maybe the difference is not in the exertion but in the experience of moving through and encountering the real physical world. And here's something else, as expressed in the most-liked comment over there: "One aspect not addressed by this article: While walking, one is engaged in a kind if relaxed thinking. I walk a lot and constantly think about things - important and mundane things. I make plans, solve problems, talk to myself about issues - walking provides a kind of meditative state while you're doing it. Not sure why this article never mentions this aspect." Yes, walking — and, I find, low-key running — does release and sustain a certain kind of flowing, creative thinking — especially if you don't use earbuds to pipe words or music into your head. AFTERTHOUGHT: The post title I'm thinking of too late: White Matter Matters.  |
| Posted: 15 Jul 2021 06:20 AM PDT There are thematic convergences today, and I'll celebrate the phenomenon by making this a new post. Here's what George just sent me, a propos of the mention of Howard Dean in the first post of the day, and with no awareness that I was working on a post about the monetization of the legalization of cannabis:
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| The monetization of the legalization. Posted: 15 Jul 2021 06:03 AM PDT I'm reading a NYT article titled "Travel's Back. And It's High Season/While the pandemic had travelers cooped up, a growing number of states legalized cannabis. Love it or hate it, you will probably encounter it on your next trip" by the aptly named Julie Weed. (Excellent illustration by Russell Cobb, by the way.) The article begins:
I don't understand what's crazy. A mother, daughter, and grandmother got their hands held so they could get inebriated and buy bad souvenirs in Las Vegas. It's all subjective. They felt they were having a crazy time. I guess these ladies are not from the set of people who have abstemiously excluded the word "crazy" from their vocabulary, as we were discussing 2 days ago. Looking for that post in my archive, I ran across a post from 2018 where I noted the problem "crazy":
Back to the NYT article. It begins with that Caitlyn Hunter birthday story, but you have to read quite far down to get to the cold facts: Those ladies paid $150 apiece — that's $450 — to get driven around and cracked dirty jokes at for 2-and-a-half hours. What else is there in the world of cannabis travel? According to the head of the Cannabis Travel Association International, there are "things like the cultivation tours at Huckleberry Hill Farm and Papa and Barkley Social, which offers a cannabis-themed spa, dispensary and consumption space," and "cannabis pairing," where you "get advice on the strain of marijuana that might best enhance a hike or specific meal." So... don't think of cannabis as the equivalent of alcohol generally, think wine specifically, and there's your monetization of the legalization. ADDED: In the comments at the NYT article, there's a lot of talk about involuntary encounters with cannabis while traveling: Smelling marijuana smoke in your hotel. Of course, the hotels ban smoking anything, but that smell is there — or is there a smell of something else that was used to mask the smell? One solution is to steer people toward edibles, but with edibles the effect is different and it's also delayed, as Maureen Dowd famously demonstrated. I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me. Crazy!  |
| "CPAC did two straw polls: One with former President Donald Trump included and one without him." Posted: 15 Jul 2021 08:40 AM PDT "In the first, Trump crushed with 70%, which, if you've followed politics over the past, say, five years, will not surprise you. DeSantis came in second with 21%, the ONLY candidate not named Trump who got more than 1% in the straw poll. In the second straw poll -- without Trump -- DeSantis took 68%(!) of the vote. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo came in second with 5% followed by Donald Trump Jr. and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at 4% and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem at 3%." From "The leader of the Republican Party *not* named Donald Trump" from Chris Cillizza (CNN). Meanwhile, about that "Don't Fauci My Florida" campaign merchandise — which we talked about yesterday — there's "Ron DeSantis' Anti-Fauci Florida Merchandise Prompts Outrage: 'This Is Madness'" (from Newsweek):
They really are helping him sell more merchandise.  |
| This morning's sunrise — at 5:36:15, 5:36:53, and 5:44. Posted: 14 Jul 2021 05:21 PM PDT     |
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