Things I wrote In My Notebook: November 2024.

November 28, 2024

Fun statistical error: (part of) the reason that great white sharks are the species most often reported in shark attacks, is because people know what a great white shark looks like. If you get bitten by an Atlantic sharpnose shark and you don’t know how to identify it, your case will end up being recorded as just “shark.” If you get bitten by a great white, you know it.

Another shark species that has recorded a lot of bites on humans is nurse sharks. This is because nurse sharks are particularly calm and docile sharks. Which encourages divers to push their luck.

Man, the federal government has a lot of different job positions for goons. Obviously there’s the military and FBI and CIA and Secret Service and ICE and DEA, but there’s also the Diplomatic Security Service. And the US Marshals. And the Federal Air Marshals, who are completely distinct. And the Federal Protective Service, to guard federal buildings. And the DoD Police to guard federal military buildings. And the Capitol Police. And the Park Police. And the Smithsonian Institution Office Of Protective Services. And a security service that only exists to drive nuclear warheads around. It’s such a rich environment for the development and advancement of career-oriented goons.

Maybe the most evil kind of guilt is feeling guilty for feeling happy in a fallen world. The world’s always falling, you gotta be happy sometime.

The final boss of post-cringe is admitting that American cheese is versatile and tasty

Remember when porn videos were called things like Jiggling Asses 17 and were produced by actual studios? On physical media, that you could buy in stores? It was a different world.

I still maintain that everything Ian Malcom says in Jurassic Park is either wrong or uselessly general – yeah, the behavior of large systems is unpredictable, but that’s more in the formal sense of “we cannot say where every animal will be at every moment with centimeter accuracy.” Mathematical chaos does not have the same meaning as as “everything has descended into chaos.”

Anyway I really do want to teach children that gender is fake. Not that they can’t have one! People have lots of fake things that are very important to them, like names and property. But you gotta know the difference between things that exist because we say so, like Wednesday and authority, and things that actually exist, like the Earth spinning and fancy uniforms.

“POV” stands for “imagine a situation.” No one knows why the letters are P, O, and V. There are many theories.

The correct way to write the shortened binomen of Tyrannosaurus shirt is T. shirt.

Great white sharks make me feel a little bit the way tyrannosaurs do. It’s just so much power in an animal that barely knows what it’s doing. And because it’s a real thing but it’s so far away in time/place that I will probably never see a live one in person, it feels almost mythic. They’re basically dragons.

Apparently tortoises are slow because their shells are heavy? I always just thought they had super slow metabolisms. Well, probably both.

Remember during the Iraq War when people would have fundraisers for soldiers to have body armor? That was so fucked up. They asked the Army for ballistic plates and the Army was like “go tell your mom to hold a bake sale.”

Gameshow where contestants have to guess the gender identity of the butch in a butch/femme relationship. It’s called Het or Miss.

The line under that in my notebook says “what if people get mad about this one because like the butch could be nonbinary or could be a woman who doesn’t go by miss or they could be bisexual or” and then the line under that just says “breathe.”

I didn’t know our model of what the Milky Way galaxy looks like had changed so recently! In 2005 we were updated from a spiral galaxy to a barred spiral! I guess it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at when you really, really can’t get a view from the outside.

I just realized X-ray machines aren’t really “cameras,” they’re lights that create a camera-less photogram on the film.

True fact: in the 1920s you could get X-ray hair removal. Works great, no regrowth, maybe a few minor side effects.

Although I will always excuse the people of olden times for thinking radiation cures everything. Because one of the first things they learned about it is that it cures cancer! Radiation therapy for cancer is more than a hundred years old. Understanding that radiation can also cause cancer is somewhat more recent.

Hey so how were there plant patents in 1940? They didn’t have genetic testing then, were they really enforcing these based on a drawing and a description? Seems like you could have a lot of legitimate convergent evolution going on. Especially considering how many of the descriptions are essentially “the distinguishing feature of my plum tree is that it has better yields and bigger fruits than previous plum trees.”

(Or maybe they were zealously enforced because plant cultivars actually are that distinct to the naked eye? I don’t know, it’s possible. Agriculture is a big field.)

The reason ninjas are always depicted wearing all black is because they’re actually dressed like stagehands. Real ninjas were spies so they didn’t have uniforms, they dressed to blend in. But Japanese theater directors would portray the stealth of a ninja assassination by having one of the stagehands suddenly jump out and stab a character. It was kind of a fourth wall thing. So a stagehand outfit became known as a ninja outfit.

I looked up some nearby “ninja academies” so I could make fun of them for being dressed like Edo-period tech crew, but they’re all just wearing workout clothes because it turns out that the contemporary US meaning of “ninja” is “adult monkey bars.”

Aged urine is known as lant, and was heavily used as a cleaner (for wool but also various household uses, also for making gunpowder) in the ancient and medieval world. People would routinely save their pee in jars to sell to the cloth-fuller.

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