Grooming

A discussion on MeFi about just how good bad was the algorithm for delivering you to social media advertisers yielded this wonderful riff from Mike Hoye:

Some friends and I used to antagonize each other by sending each other bizarre Amazon product links to playfully poison each others recommendations, but I think at one point we some how broke it and I spent a year and a half with this one ridiculous foot-long mall-ninja knife following me around no matter what I was shopping for.

• "Hey, guy buying children's socks: you also need a ridiculous knife, right?"
• "I'm good, Amazon. Thanks."
• "Hey, I see you're buying a soothing, uncaffeinated chamomile tea. May we also suggest this cheap-ass, fuck-off big mall-ninja shiv. What do you say?"
• "Um, no."
• "So. Coffee filters, dishwashing soap... and a shiv?"
• "Calm down!"

Well I don't know what I clicked on at all at all but I've been youtube-awash with a particular sort of grooming product called the Manscape Lawn-mower 4.0 - billiard play - army play - which is designed to trim down there . . . hence the metaphor of two pink snooker balls [L]. What could possibly go wrong?

• BeardTube thinks it's over-priced, under-powered and does a bait-and-switch on a replacement parts contract of $15 every 3 months.
• There are a load of counter reviews from articulate, desperately enthusiastic young men who are getting 20% of the take for their endorsement. 
• It is perhaps ominous that the trimmer is shipped with "Ball Toner" and "Anti-chafing Ball deodorant" containing soothing aloe vera. Cripes lads, if you'd just leave your pubes on, then none of these unguents would be necessary.
• Tommy Tiernan and Des Bishop are of the bumping uglies school of genital aesthetics. But whatever your position on whether groins are pretty, it's hard to accept that that removing the fur makes things more attractive. 
• Emilie Pine on the other side of the gender divide continuum also wonders why depilation is now so common and WTF the subtext is of removing / reducing that attribute of adulthood.

Gödel alKhwarizmi Bacon

The title is a piss-take on Douglas "Up his chuff" Hofstadter's long and pretentious book Gödel, Escher Bach - an eternal golden bore braid [Bloboprev]. Kurt Gödel, Muhammed "Mr Algorithm" al-Khwarizmi and Kevin Bacon are the only people mentioned by name in Milo Beckman's book Math Without Numbers. Although "pythagorean" and "platonism" gives a cautious hat-tip to a couple of ancient Greeks. It must be a deliberate no-name levelling policy to use circumlocutions for other famous mathematicians: 

• Dutch topologist who was booted off the editorial board of Mathematische Annalen [LEJ Brouwer].  
• Author of a book called Principia Mathematica [AN Whitehead and Bertram Russell].

And it's usually polite to cite your sources. Beckman includes a discussion of some infinities being bigger than other infinities similar to mine but I explicitly recognised that the idea is original to Georg Cantor not to me or Beckman. In the same chapter, Beckman joins a long list of people [incl Veritasium] who discuss Hilbert's Infinite Hotel Paradox. The thing is, it's easy to re-tell the story - heck, even I've had a go - but it's a different order of cleverness to have cast the problem in a way that can make it accessible to Joe Blowe and Jan Publiek.

Earlier on in the book, Beckman [and their illustrator M Erazo] show that one of two groups of things is obviously bigger than another. Changing up the picture beyond 3 or 5 {boxes, dots, apples} makes the illustration more visually appealing but lurries in a confounding variable because M's objects are all different sizes. Thus [starfish, halibut, digestive biscuit] has, because 300kg halibut, greater biomass than [crab, whelk, scallop, sea-urchin, augur-shell]. Been there before comparing "abundance" of Prochlorococcus and humanity.

The conceit of Math Without Numbers is explicitly stated inside the dust jacker "The only numbers in this book are the page numbers" but that is explicitly contradicted on p.124 with the statement "zero is a number". In fact numbers are mentioned on almost every page of the book but they are written out in english - seventeen - rather than roman - XVII - or japanese - 十匕 - or 'arabic' - 17. So that's a bit of old bollix. Why pick seventeen?

Wellll, because TIL that there are exactly 17 distinct types of 2-D repetitive wallpaper symmetry patterns with which a plane may be covered with no gaps. They right purty:

And that, in this our Universe, there are only 17 combos of mass and charge which are tolerable to make the fundamental particles from which everything else is constructed. They are far too small to be pretty but they have a certain orderliness:

For all my snippy snark, this book has clearly made me think. Not worth buying a copy, but worth checking out of the library. But we'll give Milo a chance to convince you otherwise:

• 5 minutes on the domino tiling chessboard puzzle . . . and buy my book

St Carnegie of Library

 There's been a bit of traffic recently about Chuck Feeney, an Irish-American entrepreneur who made an $8billion fortune from the duty-free trade . . . and gave it all away. I may come back to that, but the give-back story made me reflect on Andrew Carnegie who was the Jeff Bezos of his day: ruthlessly exploiting workers to enrich shareholders [incl himself]. Carnegie spent his declining years endowing libraries in the USA and Ireland and elsewhere. Jessamyn West, librarian and Metafilterian from Vermont has just put manners on a website documenting all the Carnegie Libraries in New England. That sent me whooshing down a madeleine-scented rabbit-hole to 1982.

In June of that year we made a weekend trip from Boston to the town of Milo, slap-dab in the centre of Maine . . . for the sole reason that, 6½ years previous, we had attached that handle to The Boy. We wandered around town taking photos of the chap in front of "his" Fire Station, his Hardware, his Library [L], his town limits etc etc etc.  Apart from the fishing, it was the most tourist attention the town received that year. The building has the look&feel of a Carnegie Library and indeed it's on the list. It was one of the very few such trips we made out into the New England countryside, and we left the US the following year.

 From Boston we had 7 years in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and returned to Ireland in 1990 with a teenager having left with a toddler. In those pre-internet days, The Boy was mighty in the world of Dungeons and Dragons but it was hard to find people to play with where we lived in rural chill out near the airport. In the background of this dilemma, we had house-guests who were looking to return to Ireland. The draughty rambling farmhouse which we lived in was . . . rambling to the extent of 5 bedrooms upstairs, so there was plenty of room for a couple of wanderers. Long before we'd got tired of Kevin and Lesley, they went all independent on us and rented a small flat in Dun Laoghaire. We went to visit a couple of times and, because it was there, paused at the fruit and veg outlet at the bottom of our lane to bring some fresh greens and a sack of potatoes to the city-dwellers. It was more of a joke than anything else: instead of a brack or a packet of biscuits, like. Years later, after Kevin died, Lesley told us that our random sack of kindness spuds was the difference between feast and going to bed hungry in the financial knife-edge they were living. Sadly, they couldn't make Doldrum Ireland work and they left for better fortune in British Columbia.

Mais revenons nous à nos biblioteques! It transpired that, every Tuesday evening, a D&D coven assembled in the dungeons of Carnegie Free Library in Dun Laoghaire. The Boy really wanted to go, I really really didn't want to collect him in the car at 2200hrs. But Kevin and Lesley offered their couch to crash on after the boy had finished slaughtering goblins and promised to fire him out the door early enough on Wednesday for him to catch the DART to school. The Boy got to play D&D but more importantly he got to develop a relationship with two wonderful and inspiring adults who weren't his parents. It was an important step in his journey to become his true self. 

St Eadwold's Day

Tis the feast of St Eadwold of Cerne, patron of tennis-players

• Danish is hard, even for Danes
• Icelander explains Danish isn't a language, it's a throat disorder
• Professor Stanley Unweberin  demonstands his expertaglioness
• Competitive salmon filleting
• ISB! The Hedgehog Song
• Chinese White
• Prescription cascade for elders

Black & Irish

Tommy Tiernan was for a long time a stand-up comedian but has more recently slipped into an RTE seat as a no-holds-barred interviewer.  This is weathering the pandemic reasonably well - fewer hugs and more edge maybe?  The 3rd episode in the current series features Brenda "My Left Oscar" Fricker, David "LGBTei Defensor" Norris and Bashir Otukoya, Assistant Professor in Advanced European Union Law at the School of Law and Government of Dublin City University. Chances are, if you have a drop of the ould Irish in your veins, that you didn't need me to ID Fricker or Norris. Likewise, you've prolly never 'eard of Bashir Otukoya. This is only partly because he's been on the planet for 50 years less than the other two guests but also because he black and we're not ready to cede the talking stick to New Irish like him.

Note: TT and Fricker talk frankly about depression [meds, hospitalization, Anthony Clare] while TT and Norris agree to differ about how delightful is the sight of human groins. So that's not particularly fluffy in the entertainment stakes.

Tiernan is imo basically a kind and empathic guy but he's got some history in provoking outrage after incorporating The Downs and The Holocaust into his patter. I don't think he's better than Patriarch me [or Patriarch you] in being down with The New Irish. "down with" here being an internalization of the crap which black folks have to wade through every day in Ireland. "At least they don't get shot by the cops on the regular" is a very low bar, lads. That time all my white students secured their work placement and none of the black kids did: it outraged me but I didn't feel it.

So TT asked almost-Dr Otukoya [R] where he comes from [A. Drogheda] which you have to be really careful doesn't come over as where do you really come from. Which is what Dau.I, who has the best hair and best tan in the family, gets all the time. Colleagues and customers justify / exemplify this intrusive curiosity by making circular motions with one hand around their face. As if to say, _I_ have this pasty white dial with freckles, what's your story.

And here's the answer to getting work-experience. "Bashir Otukoya" failed to get an interview for a job, so "Richie Bashir" re-submiited his application with an identical CV and was called back the next day. Don't it make you tear your hair?

TT: I know a school in Galway where the kids are so confident with their different ethnicity that they're able to play blacks vs whites soccer matches at lunch-time.
Dr O: Sure, we did / had that but [I paraphrase] WTF! It's not "wonderful" to be separated into groups as a child based on your skin colour. It doesn't affect the white kids but it ghettoizes the blacks. And it doesn't help with integration later on for employment, housing, get the attention of bar-staff. 

I hope Tommy Tiernan learned something from that exchange . . . and by extension a million other, slightly complacent, RTE regulars. It's not quite 100 years since the Black & Tans were meting out similar treatment on the plain vanilla Irish. A lot done, lads, but lots still on the To Do list.

getting to egg

When I was staying with friends in Boston in the early 80s, I felt the urge to make a layer cake. It must have been a birthday. A 3-decker chocolate fudge cake with orange butter icing featured in the available cook book and I duly plugged through the recipe. It was a towering success! and I added Joyce's Fudge

Cake to my repertoire. There came a time when I was fired up to make this party piece but could only locate 2 cake tins. Cranking down the ingredients to 2/3 of the original recipe should work, except for the question what is 2/3 of two eggs?  My notes indicate that I found two small eggs and used less butter; keeping the measurable quantities (flour, sugar, soured milk, cocoa) in 2/3 proportion. It was fine. But a fudge cake is supremely forgiving; it's meant to be a bit gooey and it's impossible to overcook. Overcooked fudge cake is called cookies. Heck; how big is "an egg" anyway? How long is a piece of string?

My pals at metafilter recently asked about a similar problem. The recipe requiring 3 large eggs but Cookie having only 2 large eggs and 4 medium eggs. My nerdnik answer was 

• Weigh the two L eggs you have: call that E2
• You goal is E2 * 1.5
• Weigh the 4 M eggs: call that M4
• IF |M4 - E2*1.5| > |(E2 + M) - E2*1.5| THEN DO E2+M ELSE DO M4

The shoulder bars on |M4 - E2*1.5| indicate the difference between M4 and E2*1.5 regardless of which is bigger.In words, whichever of LLM or MMMM is closer to LLL is your best guess. Others noted that this was not the obsessive hill to die on. Carrot cake will be fine so long as there is some egg in there. But I like the idea of compensating a deficiency / abundance in one ingredient by tweaking another. In the ingredient space, margarine has more in common with eggs and milk than any of them do with flour.

My current book, recommended by Tim Harford channelled by Dau.II is Math Without Numbers by Milo Beckman. Beckman's boast is that the only numerals in this math book are the page numbers. His early chapters are about LWH dimensions and beyond that to n-dimensional hyperspace of which I acquired some intuitive understanding in my synonymous codon usage days. You can lose your readers quickly in such abstractions, so Beckman talks about the dimensions of bakery. 

It cooking time and temperature are independent and quasi-complementary units of measurement. Meringues can either be made quickly at a high temperature or sloowwly in a "cool" oven. You don't get the same result but both varieties are supremmmnmmely edible. But there are the other dimensions alluded to above: flour, cocoa, eggs, butter, cream, milk, sprinkles. In this multi-dimensional bakerverse there is a region called cookies and others called cake and bread. Throw too many sultanas in the bread and you're stepping into cake territory and may need an egg for credibility.

Niburu

One of my neighbours was born a sheep- and turnip-farmer but re-invented himself as a stone-mason. He was talking to an acquaintance about megaliths and the Earth Mother and mentioned Old Bob, the Guardian of the Ringstone. The thought being the deed, said acquaintance appeared in our yard last year talking a streak about the interface between chromosomes, cthulhu, catastrophism, cuneiform, comets and catholics. It was quite intense, but not without interest. I knew he'd be just the chap for Magicians of the Gods by Graham Hancock. But I couldn't locate my copy of the book to unload on this new reader. Graham Hancock is university educated journalist and book-author and writes engagingly. The probby is that his publications are not peer-reviewed and he extrapolates to the skies from rather sparse data. I've cited him prev for the distinction of having his TED talk cancelled / suppressed.  

Hancock tl;dr: a large extraterrestrial body slammed into an ice-sheet in Canada causing a) a megamaxima-tsunami of ice-melt which altered the N. American landscape forever b) had similar geoglobal effects as the Chicxulub meteor that terminated the dinosaurs 65 mya c) ended a sophisticated civilisation which had considerable engineering skills. Capital S for Science has absorbed Chicxulub into the canon but baulks at Hancock's arguments; labelling them pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology etc.

Needless to say, I found the book the day after the questing acquaintance QA left our yard and sent him a free-post card saying how much I'd enjoyed our chat and giving the citation for the book. From a vague description of where he lived I was able to abstract an Eircode and a townland even if he'd never shared his last name.

Last Monday arvo QA rocked up again and we picked up our conversation where we left off . . . and I gave him the book. He is currently rootling around in a section of the outréverse described by / invented by Zecharia Sitchin. When I was growing up Immanuel Velikovsky [ Worlds in Collision] and Erich von Däniken [ Chariots of the Gods?] were selling like hot cakes and Sitchin was running in the same race, albeit beyond my orbit. The 12th Planet "Niburu" is revealed by close reading of Sumerian clay tablets. It is "12th" because ☿ ♀ ♁ ♂ ♃ ♄ ⛢ ♆ ♇ ☾ ☉ = 11! Although why the Sumerians would have recognised ♇  Pluto rather than the much more easily observable large asteroids like Ceres and Vesta is yet another mystery. 

According to Sitchin, current humanity is the result of a genetic engineering experiment carried out by the Anunnaki alien inhabitants of Niburu to make them more tractable domestic and industrial slaves. As I suggested above, in my book people can write whatever they want, so long as they don't require me to believe them. I declined the loan of two of Zecharia Sitchin's many books - I'm currently busy with Doughnut Economics and a history of British cheese; which are both much tastier.