Mohan K. V

10/10 would read again

If we stand immediately below a painting in a gallery, it appears foreshortened. But if we stand on the other side of the room, it appears small. Somewhere between these two points must be the optimum viewing position, where the painting fills the widest possible angle in our vision. How can we find it?

The German mathematician Regiomontanus posed this question in 1471. We can solve it using calculus, but it also yields to simple geometry: Draw a circle defined by the top and bottom of the painting and our eye level. Because inscribed angles on the same arc of a chord are equal, the angle subtended by the painting will be constant when viewed from any point on this circle; since the only available such point is the one at eye level, that’s the one we want.

Guys, I did it. I did it! I’m caught up! I experienced every show, movie, webisode, album, book, webcomic, podcast, video game, Twitter feed, Tumblr, Instagram, Reddit AMA, and op-ed you guys were telling me I had to check out. Now we can talk about them and I won’t feel like such an outcast when we hang out. So let’s get to it. What do you want to talk about?

Oh, you mean my headphones? Pretty cool right? After about a week I just started bleeding from my ears kind of on the regular. And I was thinking of putting simple cotton balls there to sop up all that blood, but then I thought, I have a backlog of 400 WTF podcasts that aren’t gonna listen to themselves. So I just use these super absorbent in-ear headphones, gently rinse out the blood every hour or so, and keep plugging away. It’s annoying at first, but after awhile it’s like you forget that you were ever bleeding from the ears in the first place.

What’s that? Why am I pacing? Ha! Funny story. My eyes can’t process still life anymore. I think it happened somewhere around the ninth Doctor Who and the third season of The Wire. I had them running simultaneously on two TVs while I streamed Community on the laptop. I know I know, Nielsen ratings don’t account for it, and I should have thought of that at the time. In my defense, my capacity to hold a thought based in the real world kinda drifts in and out these days.

I know what you’re thinking, and yes it has been tough to hold down a job and consume all this culture. I really thought I might have to ask to take some time off from work. Fortunately, they fired me for “gross misconduct and odor unbefitting of the workplace” and even let me get to a checkpoint in The Last of Us before I was told to pack my things. Bonus! I’ll tell you what though, that game is even scarier when you live out of a broken down car with no rear windshield. Luckily, I did a patch job with the help of a few Sub Pop vinyls that I duct-taped together. It’s a good thing you guys reminded me that vinyl is the only way to experience music or I’d still be fending off raccoons with my copy of Infinite Jest. Poor fellas never stood a chance.

But enough about those open sores that seem to accumulate with each new day. Wait, I didn’t mention those? Nevermind then, let’s talk about webcomics! And before you even say it, you’re right, I don’t have internet access anymore. But it’s cool; I had a system. I just laid low in the bushes outside a Starbucks and waited for a customer to leave his laptop unattended for a bathroom run. Then I slipped an air freshener in my pocket and made my move. I had it down to a science. Last week I made it through the entirety of Lena Dunham’s Twitter feed after I spotted a mark with digestive issues.

That is until a guy caught wind of my scheme and pulled the old pump fake bathroom routine. I was midway through the mouseover text for a hilarious xkcd when he came back and wanted to throw down. I remember thinking, “I’ve seen enough House of Cards recently. I can talk my way out of anything.” I woke up some number of hours later facedown in the parking lot. I cursed the sun for some time and tried to squint my way into a makeshift Instagram filter. Crazy thing is, it worked! The sun even winked at me and recited a few headlines from The Onion to cheer me up. I gave him a friendly wave goodbye and, to make a long story short, passed out once again in a pool of what I can only hope was my own vomit.

This time, I regained consciousness with some change scattered at my feet and a plan. I bought a cranberry orange scone and, as a paying customer, demanded complete control of all laptops in the place for thirty uninterrupted minutes. It was either my impassioned speech about resolution or their collective pity that did it. Either way, they agreed and allowed me to tie up a few loose ends. I jumped to my feet and hugged the nearest barista I could find. I’d done it!

So here I am, a fulfilled man. One who’s seen everything you guys told him to see. I’ve got no job, no home, and no way of getting this cat urine smell out of my coat. But it doesn’t matter, because now we can have a full conversation without any of you bringing up some piece of culture and then chiding me for not being up to speed on it. So for god’s sake, tell me, what do you guys wanna talk about?

Oh, there was a new Scandal last night?

No, I haven’t seen it yet.

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I don't know anything about Obamacare except that it's so complicated there's no point in an ordinary person trying to understand how it will all turn out. And evidently the people who try to understand Obamacare come to different conclusions about whether it will destroy civilization or simply help some people who need it.

But interestingly, I'll bet there will someday be an objective way to look back and say, "That worked," or "What the $#%@ were we thinking?"

For example, economists will someday calculate that Obamacare cost X number of jobs, or perhaps even created jobs, or it was a drag on GDP of X dollars, or perhaps helped GDP. And we'll know how many people got health care, especially preventive healthcare, that otherwise might not have. I think economists can calculate the economic value of preventive healthcare. In other words, I'm fairly sure that in ten years we can say Obamacare worked, overall, or it was a huge mistake.

So who is up for some side bets on Obamacare?

I'm sympathetic to the opinion that introducing a huge, complicated, government-run program is just asking for trouble. On the other hand, the Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters says everything will work out.

As a reminder, The Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters says that any disaster we see coming with plenty of advance notice gets fixed. We humans have a consistent tendency to underestimate our own resourcefulness. For example, the Year 2000 bug was a dud because we saw it coming and clever people rose to the challenge. In the seventies, we thought the world would run out of oil but instead the United States is heading toward energy independence thanks to new technology.

Obamacare is a classic slow-moving disaster. Absent any future human resourcefulness, it just might be a nightmare. But my money says that clever humans will figure out how to tame the beast before it triggers the collapse of civilization.

If betting were legal, I'd bet $10,000 that in ten years the consensus of economists will be that Obamacare had a lot of problems but that overall it was neutral or helpful to the economy. I base that hypothetical bet on The Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters, not on the scary first-year state of the law. And I reiterate that I know next-to-nothing about the details of Obamacare. I'm just working off of pattern recognition.

The armchair economist in me thinks there is a solution to the problem of some folks thinking Obamacare will be a disaster and other people thinking it will not. Simply create an online market in which the opposers can buy "insurance" from the supporters. In other words, a hardcore Tea Partier could pay $1,000 now to insure against future Obamacare calamity to his own net worth. An Obamacare supporter would accept the $1,000 and put in escrow $10,000 as a payout in the event that Obamacare heads to the worst case scenario. This idea needs work, but the idea is that opposers and supporters could place insurance-like side bets.

Which way would you bet? And keep in mind that you know as little about Obamacare as I do.

Whee!

To go off and engage in unspecified, usually bureaucratic or administrative, activities that seem highly important but, in fact, are not, or nonexistent. First published by a Dutch author in 1954 referring to a bureaucratic excuse, the word was quickly adopted into Dutch to mean doing absolutely nothing while making it seem like you are immensely busy doing something important, or doing something vague, nonspecific and ultimately fruitless with an inquirer’s letter/complaint/request.

Word donated by Femke

An architectural eyesore (literally: “construction sin”).

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n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

kairosclerosis

n. the moment you realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.

Kairosclerosis is from the Greek: kairos, "the opportune moment” + sclerosis, “hardening.” The Ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos is quantitative and linear—the ticking of the Western clock. Kairos is more qualitative, referring to moments that are indeterminate and sublime, when something special happens, when god speaks or the wind shifts, when a door is left open between one minute and the next. 

This definition is why I ain’t writing The Dictionary of Obscure Pleasures. In my experience, moments of joy tend to die on the examination table. Kurt Vonnegut liked to say, “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” I think the opposite is true. Notice when you’re sad, and dive in and wallow and examine it and pick it apart with forceps and calipers. The sadness will lose its vitality and harden over time into something benign and foreign, like an emotional fossil.

For more sadness fossils, read The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. For more etymologies with my commentary, go here.

Early update because I'll be at Festiblog all day!

n. the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness—to the extent you have to keep reminding yourself that it happened at all, even though it felt so vivid just days ago—which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all your days would run together and you’d never have to call cut.

I haven't eaten at a KFC since it was called Kentucky Fried Chicken. But now I want to take my kids there just so I can do this.

(via Bits & Pieces)

St. Louis teacher William Kottmeyer compiled this list of “spelling demons” in 1973. Which of these words is misspelled?

Click for solution …

In antiquity Aristotle had taught that a heavy weight falls faster than a light one. In 1638, without any experimentation, Galileo saw that this could not be true. What had he realized?

Click for solution …

Also known as “markets in everything”:

Wealthy Chinese are hiring American women to serve as surrogates for their children, creating a small but growing business in $120,000 “designer” American babies for China’s elite.

Surrogacy agencies in China and the United States are catering to wealthy Chinese who want a baby outside the country’s restrictive family planning policies, who are unable to conceive themselves, or who are seeking U.S. citizenship for their children.

Emigration as a family is another draw – U.S. citizens may apply for Green Cards for their parents when they turn 21.

The story is here, and for the pointer I thank Fred Smalkin.

icharos asked: “I think you could make a living creating words to describe such deeply intimate sorrows. It would be like going to a doctor but instead of prescribing medication, you give the torment a name, and suddenly tangled emotions fall neatly into place and with that quiet word, you can breathe.”

Beautiful idea, and my dream job. I think the act of naming something implies, very simply, that you’re not alone. We give names to things so we can talk about them. Once there’s a word for an experience, it feels contained somehow—and the container has a handle, which makes it much easier to pick up and pass around. Kinda comforting.

Ask dictionaryofobscuresorrows a question

n. to find yourself bothered by someone’s death more than you would have expected, as if you assumed they would always be part of the landscape, like a lighthouse you could pass by for years until the night it suddenly goes dark, leaving you with one less landmark to navigate by—still able to find your bearings, but feeling all that much more adrift.

The author is Mark Lawrence Schrad and the subtitle is Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.  This is a gripping and original book, even if it overstates its conclusions sometimes.  Here is one bit:

Shcherbakov — Stalin’s today drunkard — died from a heart attack two days after the Nazi surrender…at the ripe old age of 44.  While Stalin valorized him, Khrushchev and the rest of the circle “knew that he died from drinking too much in an effort to please Stalin and not because of any insatiable urge of his own.”  Likewise, Andrei Zhdanov — once thought of as Stalin’s heir apparent — died less than three years later at 52, to the end ignoring his doctors’ frequent warnings to stop drinking.  It was clear to all that this situation was disastrous both for their work and their physical health.  “People were literally becoming drunkards, and the more a person became a drunkard, the more pleasure Stalin got from it.”

…the use and abuse of alcohol is crucial to understanding the dynamics of autocratic rule in Russia.

What else do you learn from this book?  It seems that Raymond Llull, still an underrated figure, is the one who spread vodka-making techniques to much of Europe (he also discovered an early version of social choice theory in the 13th century, not to mention he advanced the theory of computation).

I liked this bit:

The financial needs of the early Russian state dictated pushing the more potent and more profitable distilled vodka over less lucrative beers and meads.  To maximize its revenue, the state not only benefited from its subjects’ alcoholism, but actively encouraged it.

As late as 1927, the state’s vodka monopoly accounted for ten percent of government revenue.

Gorbachev, by the way, was known as “Mineral Water Secretary,” because he did not drink like the others did.  Here is a joke from the book:

Q: What is Soviet business?

A: Soviet business is when you steal a wagonload of vodka, sell it, and spend the money on vodka.

From the Yeltsin years to the Putin years, the average Russian boy lost a measured eighteen percent of his muscle mass.

Recommended, and you can pre-order the book here.  Here is my earlier post, “The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol.”

Shortly following the announcement of a delayed taper:

The rupee rallied 2.8 percent to 63.4950 per dollar, according to prices from local banks compiled by Bloomberg. Thailand’s baht rose 1.2 percent to 31.850, the Philippine peso gained 1.4 percent to 43.87 and Malaysia’s ringgit appreciated 1.2 percent to 3.29. Global funds pumped $5.7 billion into the stock markets of India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand this week, according to exchange data.

Pay special heed to quantitative magnitudes.  For how long are we delaying the taper?  One or two months?  How much is the taper anyway, relative to the stock of relevant financial assets?  Taking $10 to $15 billion off of $85 billion a month in purchases, when the asset stocks are in the trillions?  Woo hoo.

Here are some interesting comments from Stephen Jen.

I’ll say it again: none of you understand what is going on here, and neither do I.  I am not seeing enough admission of this basic fact.

Addendum: Scott Sumner offers a response.

What was the point of that? Sheesh.

Book shop here

Hey, I was on The Collapsed Psi talking about BAHFest. Check it out!