Life on a diet is linear. You begin, you lose weight, and you’re done. Then it’s on to the mythical “maintenance” mode (which is also dieting, but for eternity. Congratulations?).
We call fat people lazy. They’re not. Fat people are zealous. They will cleave and push and fight harder than anyone. No one works harder on anything than a fat person works on a diet they believe will make them thin. They’re not stupid, either… At eighteen, I could have written a thesis on calorie content and ketones and insoluble fiber, in iambic pentameter if you wanted. They’re not fat for lack of knowledge or effort. Some fat people become fat for a reason (medical, emotional, environmental). Others were simply born to be larger than you might like them to be. But all those chronic fat dieters are fatter for the dieting.
Kelsey, Miller, “Big Girl,” pp. 18, 83
Tag: rants
Oh Great, So Now Neanderthals Are Being Blamed for Covid
The list of people who have not been blamed for Covid-19 deaths has, as we know, been shrinking daily. And now, even our beloved Neanderthal Woman has just been booted off of it.
“Risk of Severe Coronavirus Linked to Neanderthal Genes from 60,000 Years Ago”
Neanderthal Woman would like to apologize for … you know what, forget it. She is not happy about this. Watch out for the tiny, knitted club!
Can You Decipher this Quote from a Sci-Fi Novel?
Contemplation occurred with consequences resulting. Meditation existed on a plane remote from the familiar. By virtue of reflection, resolution simply was. No human, equipped with the latest and most relevant tools, would have recognized the process for what it was. And yet — there were fine points of tangency.
Among the incredibly diffuse but nonetheless vast aggregate worldmind of which the verdure on board the Teacher were an inseparable part, what Was became what Is. Call it thought if it aids in comprehension. The plants themselves did not think of it as such. They did not think of it at all. They could not, since what transpired among them was not thought that could in any sense be defined as such.
That did not mean that what came to pass among them was devoid of consequence. It was determined that, for the moment, at least, nothing could be done to affect what had transpired. Patience would have to be exercised. The disturbing situation might yet resolve itself in particulars agreeable to those whose awareness of it was salient. Their perception of the physical state of existence humans defined as time was different from that of those who inhabited the other, more-remarked-upon biological kingdom.
Alan Dean Foster, Reunion, pp. 110 – 111
Ancient People … Clever … ZZZ
Wha? Oh, are you still there? I must have dozed off. Apparently I put myself to sleep with the monotony of saying for the one millionth time that people in the ancient world … were much more clever than we …
ZZzzzzZZZzz.
So, it appears that Persians in the 900s or 1000s were making a steel that had some chromium in it, similar to our stainless steel. Technically this period is medieval, not ancient, but it still surprised archaeologists because we modern people think that all the clever inventions and technological innovations were made in about the last 100 years and, really, in the last fifty.
We invented the world we are living in, you see.
We are also the first generation to possess moral virtue, but that’s a rant for another day.
OK, maybe I am being a little hard on the archaeologists. After all, you can recognize in principle that people in the past were just as clever as you and I, without being able to guess in advance specifically what they invented. But the article itself slips into snark, when it says that the ancient Persians “stumbled upon” an early version of this alloy. Who’s to say they stumbled upon it, and weren’t experimenting with different materials? I realize this snark is completely unintentional, but its very innocence does kind of reveal our modern bias.
Yeah, I’m Bilingual
I went often to look at the collection of curiosities in Heidelberg Castle, and one day I surprised the keeper of it with my German. I spoke entirely in that language. He was greatly interested; and after I had talked a while he said my German was very rare, possibly a “unique,” and wanted to add it to his museum.
Mark Twain, “The Awful German Language”
Captain Obvious Looks at the Vikings
Check out this “surprising” finding …
“Vikings may not be who we thought they were, DNA study finds“
… Well, that kind of depends. Who did we think they were?
In the article, “who we thought they were” is a complete straw man where “we” thought that every single Viking was tall, blond and blue-eyed, and all of one monolithic genetic stock.
In fact, even before the age when they spread out across Europe, apparently the Vikings had genetic admixtures from Southern Europe. Also, some people who were not ethnically Viking were given Viking burials.
In other words, people move around a lot and intermarry with each other. And they influence each other culturally.
Also, no large ethnic group is genetically monolithic.
What a surprising finding.
Mark Twain Rants About Language Learning
There are some exceedingly useful words in this [German] language. Schlag, for example; and Zug. There are three-quarters of a column of Schlags in the dictionary, and a column and a half of Zugs.
The word Schlag means Blow, Stroke, Dash, Hit, Shock, Clap, Slap, Time, Bar, Coin, Stamp, Kind, Sort, Manner, Way, Apoplexy, Wood-cutting Inclosure, Field, Forest-clearing. This is its simple and exact meaning — that is to say, its restricted, its fettered meaning; but there are ways by which you can set it free, so that it can soar away, as on the wings of the morning, and never be at rest. You can hang any word you please to its tail, and make it mean anything you want to. You can begin with Schlag-ader, which means artery, and you can hang on the whole dictionary, word by word, clear through the alphabet to Schlag-wasser, which means bilge-water — and including Schlag-mutter, which means mother-in-law.
Just the same with Zug. Strictly speaking, Zug means Pull, Tug, Draught, Procession, March, Progress, Flight, Direction, Expedition, Train, Caravan, Passage, Stroke, Touch, Line, Flourish, Trait of Character, Feature, Lineament, Chess-move, Organ-stop, Team, Whiff, Bias, Drawer, Propensity, Inhalation, Disposition: but that thing which it does not mean — when all its legitimate pennants have been hung on, has not been discovered yet.
One cannot overestimate the usefulness of Schlag and Zug. Armed just with these two, and the word Also, what cannot the foreigner on German soil accomplish? … Let him talk right along, fearlessly; let him pour his indifferent German forth, and when he lacks for a word, let him heave a Schlag into the vacuum; all the chances are that it fits like a plug, but if it doesn’t let him promptly heave a Zug after it; the two together can hardly fail to bung the hole; but if, by a miracle, they should fail, let simply say Also! and this will give him a moment’s chance to think of the needful word.
Mark Twain, “The Awful German Language”
Mobs Are Bad.
The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting at the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground. “My lords,” he said, “please turn aside to your servant’s house. You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning.”
“No,” they answered, “we will spend the night in the square.”
But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them.
Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Portland Sodom — both young and old — surrounded the house. They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”
Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. [Note: Lot may have been lying. We are later told that he has sons-in-law.] But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”
“Get out of our way,” they replied. And they said, “This fellow came here as an alien, and now he wants to play the judge! We’ll treat you worse than them.” They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break down the door.
But the men inside the house reached out and pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. Then they struck the men who were at the door of the house, young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the door.
Genesis 19:1 – 11
Ancient People Were Really Smart, Part … What? 10?
“Massive stone structures in Saudi Arabia may be some of the oldest monuments in the world.”
They number in the hundreds, can be larger than an NFL football field and are found across Saudi Arabia. … radiocarbon dating of charcoal found within one of the structures indicates people built it around 5,000 B.C.
“This ‘monumental landscape’ represents one of the earliest large-scale forms of monumental stone structure construction anywhere in the world.”
Ibid
Oooh, so many thoughts.
We keep finding these things everywhere. And every time one is found, it’s older than expected, such that it seems we are constantly being told that “the earliest” or “one of the earliest” has just been found.
There is Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, the earliest (?) stone temple.
There are standing stones, marching stones, and stone circles all over the Middle East and Europe.
There are crannogs in Scotland (apparently Neolithic), and the Stone Serpent of Loch Nell.
The Giza pyramids, and the Sphinx, are arguably much older than commonly believed.
So, I don’t necessarily believe that these monuments in Saudi Arabia are “the first” of anything (even though, I’d like to point out, the monument could be older than the charcoal they found in it).
What I do believe is that they are yet more evidence that the compulsion to build massive stone structures, and the engineering skills to pull it off, was near universal among ancient humanity.
It looks most probable to me that these “earliest monuments” in Arabia were contemporaneous, or nearly so, with the other “earliest stone monuments” and temples and things that we keep finding, all over the world.
Perhaps people were dispersing from somewhere (somewhere near the Fertile Crescent, say), taking this building culture with them as they went. They would have hit northwest Arabia fairly quickly. The Table of Nations, in Genesis 10, lists all the peoples that descended from Noah’s three sons after the Flood. Though this is supposedly a comprehensive list, when it tells where they settled, the homelands listed for them are all in the Fertile Crescent, the Levant, and Arabia, though it is obvious that some of these peoples eventually ended up settling in much more far-flung places.
See also my posts about The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgley, who presents evidence that fully functioning human civilizations existed 10,000, 20,000, or even 30,000 years ago.
Just a thought for the day.
Quote of the Week: Different Cultures Do Different Things Well
The most sweeping denials of performance superiority [between cultures] have been based on redefining them out of existence as culturally biased “perceptions” and “stereotypes.” Those who take this approach of cultural relativism acknowledge only differences but no superiority. Yet all cultures serve practical purposes, as well as being symbolic and emotional, and they serve these practical purposes more efficiently or less efficiently — not just in the opinions of particular observers but, more importantly, in the practices of the societies themselves, which borrow from other cultures and discard their own ways of doing particular things.
Western civilization, for example, has abandoned Roman numerals for mathematical work, in favor of a very different numbering system originating in India and conveyed to the West by Arabs. The West has also abandoned scrolls in favor of paper, and scribes in favor of printing, in each case choosing things originating in China over things indigenous to Western culture. All over the world, people have abandoned their own bows and arrows for guns, whenever they had a choice. Much of the story of the advancement of the human race has been a story of massive cultural borrowings, which have created modern world technology.
Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, pp. 60 – 61
Out of Babel Books 