Thing I would like banned: using ‘times’ to refer to a reduction, as in ‘[new measurement] is a hundred times lower than [old measurement].
Division. That’s division. Let’s say ‘…is one hundredth of…’ or some other formulation that doesn’t invoke multiplication like this.
Just sitting on the sofa not going to bed, and I thought of Penny Lane again, and how great a song it is.
When I was young, I listened to the music only, not paying much attention to the lyrics, and I thought this was a slightly twee, light pop song.
Later, when I was (older and) paying much more attention to the lyrics, I heard the song completely differently: the music reinforcing the gentle and loving nostalgia of the words.
Here’s a thing my brain served up this morning, that I considered posting:
“I’m thinking of playing an April Fools joke on my therapist later this morning.”
I’m definitely not doing that. But my brain thinks it is funny, and it has a habit of doing this, creating joke-shaped things.
But it’s not diegetically funny (not funny in the scenario it creates), and I am finding it (a product of my own head) distasteful outside the scenario too. This may be due to being a bit more aware of my emotional states and their subtle shades of meaning. Or just empathy for the me-in-the-joke and the therapist-in-the-joke.
If it’s a joke, it is of the unexpected transgression type.
I’m not sure how I feel about it, and this is a failed attempt to work it out. But in any case, through this meta-analysis I have succeeded in posting it. 😕
Information overload crowds out independent thinking, through distraction and flooding.
This is, of course, used to move our attention away from things some don’t want us to see.
But I sometimes wonder about thoughts that are lost when social media scrolling pulls my brain on to the new thing.
Perhaps if Mastodon were delivered in audio form, read slowly, and with suitable contemplative pauses between toots.
I feel like there’s an analogy for Kessler Syndrome in how LLMs pollute (the night sky of) our discourse.
‘Down under’ doesn’t seem like a good* way of referring to places in the southern hemisphere. Does it persist because (esp) Australians use it themselves?
* as in kind, neutral, fair
Proposal: rotate all maps 90°. Because the earth’s rotation would then be vertical, up and down (and top and bottom) in map terms would no longer define a ‘right way up’.
Maps of the solar system rotated also, laid out like a bicycle wheel.
There’s a thread about smells at the moment, and I’m fine with that, most people have a working sense of smell, after all, but it reminds me that the secondary loss of smell memory — being unable to remember what something smells like — is just as significant as the anosmia.
I was just reminded of this famous opening paragraph, of which most of us can only quote the first twelve words:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
It’s the end of this sentence (for it is a beautifully constructed single sentence) that makes this a great opening. The first twelve words are almost meaningless without it.
Looking forward to tomorrow, when a statistically normal number of bad things will happen, and some people will blame the day. And no one will notice the statistically normal number of good things that happen, nor ascribe them to the day.
There’s something visually really satisfying about that satellite image of the Strait of Hormuz that is in all the news reports.
Jody Hughes