Whys and Wherefores

Prologue: I added this prologue after finishing what follows. I notice this blog rambles more than usual and also ventures off into dorm-room-style philosophy. That tends to happen when still overfull the day after a big meal. I’ll post it anyway but should regain my focus by tomorrow.
 
I’ve owned my current home since 2001, and for the past two decades it has been my wont to host Thanksgiving. Relatives plus a cadre of friends numbering between 12 and 18 would fill my dining room and kitchen on that day. The friends were mostly, like myself, single. The guests know each other but aren’t close friends otherwise in a general way. It always has been an odd and eclectic mix, but everyone always got along. Besides, I have the space to host the meal and I didn’t mind the work since it was just once a year. But times change. Several of my former regulars have found Significant Others along the way and now dine with them. No fewer than three on my old guest list have passed on. Another undergoes physical rehabilitation out-of-state following a freak accident. Another this year scheduled work on Thanksgiving for the overtime pay. Two others have acquired special diets. Too few of the rest remain for the critical mass that makes a party work except in the case of family or the closest of friends. So, I abandoned my usual role of Thanksgiving host – this year anyway. Maybe forever. (A future summer outdoor grill-fest is still possible, but that is at least 7 months away.) I owe thanks to my aunt for having hosted myself and one of my cousins for Thanksgiving this year. It was pleasant and cozy.
 
During my iconoclastic 20s and early 30s I made a point of scheduling parties and get-togethers on non-traditional holidays. (OK, a little hint of this spirit still persists with my occasional equinox or solstice party.) “Why should I blithely accept someone else’s designation of a holiday?” I asked myself. “I’m perfectly capable of choosing my own dates and reasons for celebrations as is each and every one of us.” So we all are, but the trouble with this sort of individualistic – almost existentialist – approach is that it is hard to get people to show up to your party on what seems to them a random date. They may not have the day off from work or may have plans for the next day. In consequence, as a practical matter, I eventually gave in and started hosting traditional Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Christmas parties, simply because more guests showed up for them. But, in principle, I still sympathize with the views of my younger self.

Not in my oven this year

Many of us make compromises with the philosophies of our youth. Adjusting party dates is a pretty minor practical adjustment. I enjoyed discussing a more fundamental self-questioning with one of my former Thanksgiving regulars (he now has a Significant Other and dines elsewhere) a few weeks ago when he stopped at my house while he was bicycling for the exercise. (It is weird to me that a 60-y.o. is a younger friend.) A physicist, he is one of the few people with whom I still talk like a buzzed college student. We both like the youtube channel of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder and so we chatted for a while about some of her vids. Then we veered into metaphysics. A longtime existentialist, he tells me he is having trouble these days being satisfied with the precept that life and the universe itself are inherently meaningless and that the only meaning is what we create for ourselves. He said that was easier to accept when he was younger. Now he finds it unsatisfying, even if true. I suspect he hears mortality knocking – not an unusual response to a 60th birthday. He'd be happier with a better answer to Why. I recalled Nietzsche’s line that people “will accept any how so long as they have a why.” (Nietzsche predicted 20th century secular political fanaticism, by the way, for this reason.) Religious folk do not have this problem, of course, but we all believe or disbelieve what we must.
 
I’ve been an atheist since the 8^th grade. (An episcopal priest, of all people, at my prep school back then correctly pointed out to me some contradictions in my thinking, though he might have expected me to resolve them another way.) I then discovered Objectivism, which served for a while as a secular philosophy since it is coherent and consistent if you accept certain premises; however, those premises, while reasonable, are still arbitrary as I was well aware. By the time I was in college I stopped ignoring this, embraced arbitrariness, and became an existentialist instead. Unlike my physicist friend, I still don’t have a problem with existentialist precepts even though I’m a decade older with mortality a good deal closer. We didn’t resolve anything of course, but it was pleasant just to BS in this late-night-dorm-room kind of way again.
 
So, is there an inherent meaning in anything? I doubt it. But that’s OK. Life is good (for the most part) anyway. And this year I’m thankful for not having to clean up after Thanksgiving.
 
For the musical attachment I almost went with the existential angst of Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues simply because I like Janis, but this number from Hair probably fits the topic better.
 

Original Broadway cast of Hair – Where Do I Go?

My Bad

All of us are offensive some of the time – usually in error but often enough on purpose. Anyone who thinks he or she isn’t is in need of self-reflection. (I am speaking of genuine offense: the strategic taking of offense as a passive aggressive method to backfoot an opponent or gain an advantage is another topic altogether.) Humans are sometimes clumsy, sometimes thoughtless, and sometimes cruel. No exceptions. Society and personal relationships continue to function anyway partly by our willingness to let pass the bulk of the (literal and metaphorical) pokes in the ribs and partly by apologies for the rest – both the giving and the getting of them.

Why does “I’m sorry” matter? The expression rarely fixes whatever the offense was, so what does it accomplish? It is really about respect or the lack of it. Failing to acknowledge that we crossed a line makes it seem as though the other person doesn’t matter. It verges on contempt. That is probably a worse offense than the initial transgression. This is made evident by reactions to politician-style non-apologies, as in “I’m sorry you feel that way.” The listener hears this (correctly) as meaning he is in the wrong for feeling that way. The defensive “I only did it because…” is similarly intended to place the blame on the offended party. Both are likely to deepen any seething resentment in the listener. A simple “I’m sorry” on the other hand, means “I stepped on your toes, but I regret it and don’t disrespect you.” Usually that is enough. Sometimes it isn’t (it depends on how big and damaging the offense was) but even in those cases it is a step in the right direction.

Recurring line in Get Smart: "Sorry about
that, Chief."

The greatest cause of misunderstanding in the realm of apologies is the differing thresholds people have for offense and what they regard as offensive.  After all, just because someone doesn’t like what we say or do is no reason by itself to apologize for it. Saying “It is bad to be a crack addict” does not require an apology to crackheads who are offended by the statement, even if some might think so. There is no way to eliminate these threshold differences completely, but a little empathy can do no harm.

Unsurprisingly there are sex differences in thresholds. As always when discussing such differences, it is important to note that we are talking about the centerlines of bell curves; much of the curves overlap, so many men and women have characteristics opposite to the average. Yet, the average still tells us something. There is a stereotype that men rarely apologize (supposedly from pride) whereas women apologize all the time. Professor Karina Schumann, PhD, at the University of Pittsburgh decided to put this to the test. The results were more nuanced than the stereotypes. She stated them in an APA podcast:
 
“And what I found across numerous studies was that women did apologize more frequently in their daily life… but we also saw a higher frequency of offenses reported. And what that means is when we looked at the proportion of offenses that they were apologizing for, it was identical to men's proportion of offenses that they were apologizing for… And so this made us think, is there a difference in perceptions of severity here where men are less likely to see an offense as occurring… because they just don't see it as bothersome as women see it... And so we tested this in a bunch of follow up studies with more controlled methods where we gave men and women the exact same offenses, and we had them rate how severe they were, and how much an apology was deserved and how likely they were to apologize. And what we saw consistently study after study was that men and women saw the identical offenses differently.”
 
In other words, men on average have a higher threshold than women for what is apology-worthy whether on the giving or the receiving end, leading all too often to regarding one another as either unreasonable or disrespectful. I doubt there is any cure for this, but it helps to be aware of it, and to recognize that there is a perspective from which the other party is neither unreasonable nor disrespectful.
 

Joey Heatherton – I’m Sorry

 

Big Bangs

The first half of the 20^th century hosted an amazingly gifted generation of physicists. Foremost among them was Enrico Fermi, but even a genius runs a risk of observation bias. In 1934 he attempted to create transuranic elements (or at least heavier isotopes) by bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons. Instead he split the atoms, but since he wasn’t looking for fission products he didn’t see them. He was unaware of what he had done though he later berated himself for not having seen what was going on immediately. Not until December 1938 did Hahn, Strassmann, and Meitner in Berlin recognize that uranium was splitting in similar experiments. The delay is sometimes called the 5-year-miracle. Had Fermi noticed and pursued fission in 1934, World War 2 would have been an atomic war – not just by the US at the very end but by all the major players. Horrific as that war was, that would have been worse. It was not the last time the world got lucky with nuclear weapons.
 
During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 we ultimately were saved by the well-justified fears of President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev. (I wrote briefly of my own childhood recollections of that episode, by the way, on my short story site: 22 October.) Throughout the Cold War there was a healthy dread of nuclear war that underlay the public psyche and limited the escalation of confrontations among the major powers. The term “existential threat” gets tossed around lightly these days, but nuclear weapons really did pose a threat to the existence of civilization. We understood that. They still do. I’m not so sure we still understand it. The nuclear club today openly consists of the US, UK, Russia, France, China, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. Israel does not acknowledge possessing nukes though everyone assumes it has them. South Africa dismantled its nuclear weapons in 1989, the only country ever to do so.
 
The end of the Cold War has brought complacency. Only a handful of fringe preppers build fallout shelters anymore. Nuclear weapons are regarded as big sticks no one ever will swing in anger since to do so would be suicide. Don’t be so sure. Only China has a stated no-first-use policy – and no one believes it. All other powers reserve the right to use them if the existence of the state is at stake. The most likely scenario for a nuclear exchange is the field use of a tactical weapon by a nuclear power that is losing a conventional war. The intent would be to “escalate to deescalate” – to scare the other side into negotiating a settlement. It might work, but it just as easily could turn rapidly into mutual escalation instead. More than one war has begun with a miscalculation. A return to a healthy dread will make that a little less likely with nukes.
 
Open air testing of nuclear weapons between 1945 and 1974 was reckless in any number of ways. Fallout proved to be more of a problem than anticipated, and some of the particles traveled far. Iodine 131, for instance, has a half-life of 8 days. This isn’t very long, but it was long enough for the isotope to be deposited on grass hundreds of miles from the Nevada test site, be eaten by cows, concentrated in milk, and then absorbed by the thyroid of milk drinkers. Other radionuclides are less metabolically active but are dangerous for longer, e.g. strontium 90 and cesium 137, which have half-lives of 30 years. On a global scale the level of exposure from testing was relatively minor, but cancer risks from radiation exposure are cumulative, so they did count for something. For populations nearby the test sites they counted a lot, especially when there were accidents. The 1954 Castle Bravo thermonuclear test at Bikini, for example, at 15 megatons was triple the anticipated yield. In consequence, a wide area in the Pacific was unexpectedly contaminated by fallout including a Japanese fishing boat, the crew of which received lethal doses.

Blast effect of a low yield (16 kiloton) fission bomb on 
a wood frame house at 1100 meters. "Annie" test 1953.

Yet, the tests did serve one unintended useful purpose. They were absolutely terrifying. Maybe setting one off now and then on the surface would worth the health risks if only to remind ourselves still to be terrified of them. After all, using a single nuke in anger would do more harm than all of the tests combined. The tests would remind us to think twice about playing chicken with the devices or with those who wield them.

 

Marianne Faithfull – What Have They Done to the Rain

A Little Knowledge

From the time I graduated HS until about 15 years ago it was my habit each year to buy and read an almanac full of obscure facts about the world: national GDPs, petroleum production, demographics, and so on. Some of the info actually stuck. Pocket World in Figures published by The Economist was a frequent pick, but I also often opted for others. I just liked knowing random trivia and being known for knowing random trivia. I don’t bother to do that anymore because all of that information is just taps away on the screen of any smart phone. Besides, data from a printed almanac are bound to be at least a year out of date. So, if someone at the dinner table wonders aloud what country mines the most bauxite (I have strange guests at my dinner table who are apt to wonder aloud about odd things) the almanac-reader will find that he impresses no one by immediately responding, “Australia produces 102.4 million metric tonnes annually.” Instead he surely will be smugly corrected by someone else who quickly taps his phone and says, “The latest figures are 104.8 million tonnes.” People are as proud of their phone’s knowledge as of their own. I don’t know why. It is a human quirk.

Nonetheless, just for my own personal entertainment, I still buy books that offer weird information, such as What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe Houghton, Et Tu Brute: The Deaths of the Roman Emperors by Jason Novak, and Who Knew? Things You Didn’t Know about Things You Know Well by David Hoffman. I keep them scattered here and there: the bed stand, the coffee table, the powder room, etc. Sometimes the moment is best served by reading material that comes in snippets.

 
Thanksgiving is coming up, and perhaps the reader would like a few samples of factoids from Hoffman’s book that can be used to divert attention from whatever political argument is poisoning the meal:
 
Chocolate chip cookies are not as old as one might think. Ruth Wakefield at Toll House Restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, improvised them when she ran out of powdered cocoa. She broke up solid chocolate into bits instead. The chocolate chip cookies were a hit, so she included the recipe for the first time in her 1938 cookbook.
 
If you factor options such as syrups, size, blends, and so on, there are 87,000 possible drink combinations on a standard Starbuck’s menu.
 
The word “nerd” is a coinage of Dr. Seuss from his book If I Ran to the Zoo.
 
Before becoming a noted chef, Julia Child worked intelligence for the OSS in India and China.
 
Socialite Josephine Cochrane invented and patented the mechanical dishwasher in 1886 because her servants kept breaking her dishes. The machines became a hit with restaurants and hotels in the 1890s. Her company was eventually bought out by KitchenAid.
 
Bond author Ian Fleming in the early 1950s commuted from Kent to London. The bus he took was 007.
 
Paul Simon’s first version of Mrs Robinson was titled Mrs Roosevelt and was about Eleanor. He reworked the song when director Mike Nichols called on him for the soundtrack of the upcoming movie The Graduate.
 
Houseflies hum in the key of F.
 
Irish coffee dates to 1945. Joe Sheridan at the restaurant at Foynes Airport had closed the kitchen but decided to keep the counter open when he heard that a transatlantic flight had turned back to Ireland because of bad weather. He served the tired passengers mugs of coffee with whipped cream, sugar, and whiskey. Asked what it was, he called it Irish coffee. It caught on.
 
Lincoln Logs were invented by John Lloyd Wright, son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
 
The arrangement of stars on the 50 star US flag was designed by Robert Heft for a high school class project. His teacher gave him a B-. Congress chose his design.
 
That should get you started. Be prepared for the taps on phone screens as your fellow diners check to see if you are peddling disinformation from whatever news source they prefer to hate.
 

 

Peggy Lee – I Don't Know Enough about You