Saint Christopher, by Devil Doll, is a really fun song to swing dance to (Lindy Hop, particularly) and it’s got some really brilliant lyrics if you pay attention to them. In this video, I take a look at them.
Month: January 2024
Distractions During Prayer
A look at distractions during prayer, whether they’re bad, and how to handle them. Also some discussion of how to pray always, and what it means to make your life a prayer.
The Universe Can’t Have Always Existed
One of the stranger things that one comes upon from atheists is the idea that the universe always existed. This is obviously impossible because it’s a simple contradiction in terms because simple observation shows that things happen because of causal linkage. Though it is more common for people to describe this model as “a causal chain that never started”, it would be more accurate to describe this model as “an infinite series that terminated.” I’m referring to the mathematical concept of an infinite series, so I think it might make sense to pause for a moment to explain what little you need to know about the mathematics of infinite series because most people don’t study higher mathematics.
Speaking a little loosely, an infinite series consists of two things:
- A starting value (optional)
- A way to generate the next value from its index in the list, the previous values, or both
One example of an infinite series, N, is: N1=1, Ni+1=Ni+1. That is, the first element in the series is 1 and each successive element is the element before it, plus one.
That’s it. That’s all infinite series are. They can be defined any way you want; you can reference more than one element, such as in the famous Fibonacci sequence where (starting with the third element) each element is the sum of the previous two. You can define them without reference to the previous element, such as a series of numbers where each is the index squared (1, 4, 9, 25, 36…). But in each case, what you have is a rule for how to generate all of the elements. What you don’t have is the elements. Yet.
This gets us to the famous mathematical fact that “infinity is not a number.” Infinity isn’t a thing, it’s rather the concept of, “you never stop.” If you ever stop, it’s not infinity. And as you can see in how we defined the infinite series above, it never stops. That’s what makes it an infinite series.
Now, the moments of time clearly form a series; they are ordered not merely by the passage of time but also by causal connections. If I push a glass off of the table, it falls after I pushed it and not before.
Now, the thing is, the set of all moments leading up to the present moment forms a sequence with a final element. A sequence with a final element, by definition, is a finite sequence. However, by the hypothesis of the world always having existed, this would be a finite sequence with infinitely many elements. That’s a contradiction, and since it is indisputable that the sequence of moments leading up to the present moment has a final element, the number of elements in that set cannot be infinite. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
Uncowed by mere logic and obvious truth, the atheists who hold this kind of thing will then say that there’s no reason you have to stop when counting backwards. It could be infinite in that direction! Whether or not that’s true, it’s irrelevant, because time doesn’t go that way. Time moves forwards, not backwards. God, or the laws of physics, or brute facts, or a drunken elf named Fred, or something clearly already picked a direction for time to flow, and we’re all stuck with it. All manner of things might be true if we lived in a completely different universe than the one we live in, and the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club if tautology club has rules and they’re well ordered. (Mathematically, a well-ordered set is an ordered set which has a first element. Not all ordered sets do. The rational numbers greater than zero under the standard ordering are not well-ordered, for example, because for any hypothetical first element, simply divide it in half an you have a rational number which comes before it.)
Interestingly, it has been a common theme in arguments for God to simply side-step the problem and give arguments which do not rely on the universe having started. The argument from motion (change) and the the argument from contingency and necessity are the two most obvious examples. Plenty of others don’t require it, either. (The Kalam cosmological argument is the obvious exception, of course.) I can see the appeal of simply side-stepping the problem since it’s irrelevant, but I do somewhat wonder at the wisdom of it. It may be falling on the wrong side of answering a fool according to his folly; by allowing people to persist in holding as true something that’s obviously wrong, it has allowed the fools to be wise in their own eyes.
Then again, they’d do that anyway. Most of them are clearly not seriously thinking through their own ideas. But for the few of them who are, I think it’s worth at least pointing out that the universe can’t have existed forever before explaining why it doesn’t matter anyway.
You Can Tell Whether an (Older) Actor Has Died By His Profile Picture
Something I’ve noticed, when looking up the biographies of actors who are in movies or TV shows I’m researching, is that you can instantly tell whether an older actor has died by their profile picture. If their profile picture is often them looking old, they’re still alive. If they look young, they’ve died. This can be really fast, too. I confirmed that Angela Lansbury had died on the day I heard the news by going to her Wikipedia page and seeing that her profile pictures was of her when she was twenty five.
This makes a certain amount of sense, I think. So long as a person is alive, what they look like right now (for which what they looked like within the last few years will suffice) is what’s most important. But once they die, it makes sense that what was most characteristically them is what’s most important. But that does raise a question as to what is most characteristically that person. In Angela Lansbury’s case, her picture at twenty five certainly is more beautiful, in the sense of having smoother skin and looking far more fertile, than her at fifty nine (the age she was when Murder, She Wrote first aired). I’m not sure that she looked better (if sex appeal is not the sole criteria of beauty) at twenty five, and I think she was far more recognizable at fifty nine.
There are broader philosophical questions that this raises, of course, which the sort of people who choose profile pictures are probably not interested in, but it is curious to ask what picture is most representative of a person’s whole life. Naively one might answer them at the end of it, however old or young that was, because that is the summation of it. That’s not really true, though. Life has phases, and as we age we leave behind phases. If we lived well, we leave them behind completed, but if we survive long enough we will inevitably leave them behind. And then at some point we’re done with all of our phases and leave this life behind entirely. This is the point of memento mori: to remember that we’re in the prologue to life, not in the real story. It is not a tragedy that we leave phases of our life behind because we were only ever getting them ready for eternity. It would be a tragedy to prepare without end and never truly live with what has been prepared. (What this consummation in eternity of what is merely prepared in time will look like we cannot imagine, of course, since all we can imagine comes from our experience and this is unlike our experience.) But to return to the main subject: perhaps, then, the picture which most represents a person is a picture of them at the height of their powers.
It’s not a very practical question for people who do not select profile pictures for the dead, but it is none the less an interesting question.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Was a Strange Movie
I first saw Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves when I was not yet a teenager and it made a deep impression on me. For some reason I was thinking about the movie recently and I realized that it’s a strange movie.
Part of this is that, these days, I tend to look at movies through the lens of “do I want to show this to my children?” It’s a question that brings a lot of things into focus. Children grow up (relatively) quickly and we only have so much time with them; how one wants to spend it is an important question. Some movies are absolutely worth it. The Errol Flynn movie The Adventures of Robin Hood is an unquestionable yes (already have with the oldest).
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is a modern twist on an ancient tale. To paraphrase Nietzsche: that is to say, it’s a bad twist. The basic premise is that Robin Hood was a spoiled rich kid who got captured in the crusades and was forced to grow up while in prison, escaped, made his way back to England, and then assembled a ragtag band of misfits to overthrow the tyranny which had taken over England. It’s a joyless retelling, where everyone is dirty and unhappy. No one has faith in what they’re doing, they’re just desperate and have no other real options. Maid Marrion is pretty in a technical sense, but completely unappealing, while Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood was heavy and plodding. The two had a sort of anti-chemistry where it made no sense for them to be together.
I know a lot of bad movies get made in Hollywood, including a lot of big budget bad movies. It remains perplexing every time why people would make such obviously bad choices. (I don’t mean all of the bad choices; some things—both good and bad—only become obvious in final cuts, after all of the color-correction and with the music.)
One good thing did come from this movie, though. Because of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Mel Brooks made Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Despite being a Mel Brooks slapstick parody, it’s actually a better Robin Hood movie than Prince of Thieves and even a better adventure movie. Plus, this was the only time that Carry Elwes played Robin Hood, which was a role he was clearly born to play.
Oldie But Goodie: The Onion TV News
(Warning: the following contains some colorful language, though it is moderately appropriate.)
In the year of our Lord 2024 this video is thirteen years old, but it is still so extremely recognizable.
Eugène François Vidocq, Founder of the Sûreté and the First Private Detective
I recently ran into mention of Vidocq, would was the founder of France’s equivalent of Scotland Yard, the Sûreté nationale. I only know what I read in his biography on Wikipedia, but he’s an interesting character. He is possibly the first private detective, though perhaps more likely to be the first documented private detective. Interestingly, his being a detective predated the word detective as a noun by quite a few years—not that it would matter, since Vidocq was French.
He had a strange life, spending much of the first third of his life a scoundrel on the wrong side of the law. He eventually decided to turn his life around and so became an informant to the police. After providing them with a fair amount of help, he became employed by them, the Sûreté being founded with his hiring and him put in charge of it. This was during the time of Emperor Napoleon I, and Vidocq would work (on and off) for several French governments before his death. He also supplemented his income with private detection as well as running a private detective agency, though it doesn’t seem to have gone uniformly well.
The Sûreté became the model for many detective police forces in the world, including Scotland Yard. Also Vidocq published an autobiography, which may have even been partially true, which in turn spawned a fair number of entirely fictional stories based upon him or his life; this may well have influenced Edgar Allen Poe when he created the character of C. Auguste Dupin, and with him the genre of detective fiction.
Twitter Trending Is One of the Worst Ideas Ever
I’ve talked before about how bad social media is (in its current forms) in Social Media is Doomed and talked about some ways to deal with it (in its current forms) in Staying Sane on Social Media. Today I want to talk a little bit about how Twitter Trending is either designed or might as well be designed to amplify the worst aspects of social media. (If you’re not familiar with it, Twitter Trending shows you a realtime-updated list of hot topics that a lot of people are discussing this minute.
Twitter Trending, since it is a snapshot of what is being discussed in high volumes, necessarily captures what people are not taking the time to think about. When people take time to think about a subject, they do not all take the same amount of time to think, and so they will not post at the same time. To post the same time, people must be posting almost immediately upon hearing about the subject. (There is some complex stochastic mathematics I’m oversimplifying, but the conclusion is the same.) To post upon hearing something, one must either be a subject matter expert who can instantly recognize context people will need in order to understand the hot topic, or else one must fool enough to think that one’s immediate, unthinking reaction is worth other people’s time. The latter will naturally predominate among the people posting immediately, for the simple reason that subject matter experts are rare.
So we have a collection of posts, mostly by fools. How to make this work? How about not using a criteria for what to show people which has nothing to do with quality. Most recent, most viewed, and most responded-to would all do well to give the highest likelihood of not getting the best tweets (or are they called xits, now?) without having to laboriously rate all of the tweets for quality then pick the lowest.
Now that we’ve selected what may well be the worst of the worst, and is at best the average of the worst, Twitter Trending now adds one more layer of awful: importance. The very act of showing people these randomly (with respect to quality) selected tweets makes them important. Since they’re likely to be the dumbest comments of fools, this will naturally spark outrage, because it is particularly bad when the worst fools have to offer is elevated within society. Worse still, Twitter Trending presents this, not as a window into the dregs of what humanity has to offer, but as something neutral. Since, among non-psychopaths, the default reason to call someone’s attention to something is because their life will be better for it, Twitter Trending implicitly calls this garbage, good.
Some day Twitter will be able to use AI to show people a curated feed of the worst things ever tweeted, but until then, Twitter Trending is about the closest humanity can currently come.
There is, however, some good news. At least if you use Chrome, or one of its derivatives, like Brave (which is what I use): Twitter Control Panel. It removes a bunch of the worst features of Twitter, as well as doing some other stuff I don’t much care about (mostly changing the rebranding of Twitter to X). It’s still social media, but it helps to limit the worst excesses of present-day social media.
(Note, because internet: so far as I know Twitter Control Panel is not a commercial enterprise and I have no affiliation with whoever it is who makes it.)
Looking Up MST3K Callouts Can Be Interesting
Mystery Science Theater 3000 callouts often involved references to movies, television shows, commercials, and other things in popular culture which the writers expected people to recognize. Since MST3K ran (scripted) from AD 1989 through 1999, and since people tend to assume that most people recognize things they experienced as universal, and since the writers were adults at the time MST3K started, and since people remember things since they were about five years old, this means that the writers tended to reference things from, roughly, 1965 through 1999. That’s not quite accurate, though, since in the 1970s and 1980s re-runs of television shows were quite common. So the references tended to be of things, roughly, 1960-1999. Since I grew up in the 1980s, I get a lot of these references, but there are also plenty I don’t get. And it can be very interesting to look these up.
For example, in Manhunt in Space there was the callout:
“Hazel, will you cook up something for dinner?”
“OK, Mr. B.”
Each was done in a voice that was not the host’s, especially the “OK, Mr. B,” so it was clearly a reference. I threw “Hazel OK Mr. B” into google and discovered that there was a TV show called Hazel which ran from 1961-1966. It was based on a single-panel comic strip of the same name and starred Shirley Booth as the eponymous Hazel. She was a live-in maid for the Baxter family and referred to Mr. Baxter as “Mr. B.” The comic strip upon which it was based was created by a man by the name of Ted Key in 1943. The strip finally ended in 2018. (Key was born in 1912 and died in 2008.)
Looking it up on YouTube, it looks like it was a funny show:
Sometimes Superstition is About Laziness
As I said in Naturalistic Superstition, superstition—whether supernatural or natural—is frequently aimed at trying to achieve control over the world that one does not actually have. It is obvious why someone would do this when they have no control. No one likes to feel helpless. Oddly, though, people will also try to use superstitious means to exert control over the world even when they do have control, but don’t like the kind of control that they have.
An example I used of naturalistic superstition is the attribution to vitamins of powers that they don’t actually have. Vitamins are miracle cures for vitamin deficiency diseases, but they (or at least the known vitamins) are building blocks for processes that go on in the body, not regulatory hormones. Once we have enough, further intake of them doesn’t do anything. (Unlike, for example, anabolic steroids.) Take vitamin C for example. If you don’t have enough, your body doesn’t have all of the building blocks it needs for your immune system to function well, and you get sick easily. Once you get enough vitamin C, that part of your immune system can be built to full capacity and it will function as well as it can. However, there are other things that go into one’s immune system, one of the big ones being getting enough sleep. But getting enough sleep is hard, while taking extra vitamin C is easy. By putting enough superstitious weight onto the power of vitamin C to boost their immune system a person can fool himself into believing that he’s compensating for a chronic lack of sleep. The person does have the control that he wants. The problem is that he doesn’t want it that way. So they he invents another way to (pretend to) have that control so that he can feel like he’s exercising control without the hard work of actually doing it.
Another common place I’ve seen this is organic food. Organic food may be more dense in micro-nutrients than conventionally grown food is. (I suspect it depends greatly on the particular organic farm vs. the particular conventional farm.) But if we suppose, for the sake of argument, that organic food is more micro-nutrient dense than conventional food, and is therefore healthier, the difference may be measurable, but it is not huge. Moreover, while there may be a difference in micro-nutrient content, what no one disputes is that there is no significant difference in macro-nutrient content. That is, organic cane sugar may or may not have more zinc, copper, iron, and manganese than conventional cane sugar. (Neither, in any event, has a ton of them.) What it most certainly does not have, and what no one suggests that it has, is less sugar. If you are eating a fixed amount of cane sugar, it may well be a little healthier to make it organic cane sugar. But that pales in comparison to the health benefits of eating less sugar (unless you already only eat very little sugar except for special occasions, which by definition are rare). But sugar tastes very, very good, so eating less sugar is hard.
So when you make lemonade you use organic cane sugar instead of conventional cane sugar, or coconut sugar instead of cane sugar, or use honey instead of coconut sugar, or use honey with pollen in it instead of filtered honey. There are natural explanations you can put forward for why those are better than the alternative sugar, and that’s not identical with the supernatural explanation for why using holy water to make your lemonade will protect you from all of the sugar in it, but in both cases you’re using some means you have no reason to suppose will achieve the effect you want in order to avoid achieving the effect by means you know are reliable—in this case, not drinking the lemonade.
Once you start looking for this pattern, you’ll notice it’s all over the place. People frequently prefer easy means that don’t actually work to difficult means that do—when the effect is uncertain or won’t happen for a while. People are a lot less superstitious about what prevents one from slipping on ice while they’re walking on ice. People are almost never superstitious about what will slake their thirst when they’re thirsty. I’ve never yet heard of a man who was superstitious about what will keep his hands from getting burned while he’s taking a pan out of the oven.
But when there’s any plausibility that the easier means will work—well, human beings are often lazy.
Naturalistic Superstition
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there are four species of superstition:
- improper worship of the true God (indebitus veri Dei cultus);
- idolatry;
- divination;
- vain observances, which include magic and occult arts.
What most, or possibly all, of these have is the desire to control things beyond one’s power. Creating idols, for example, is the attempt to localize God (or some minor power) into a place where one can interact with it on one’s own terms, so one can convince it to do what one wants through worship. (Interestingly; this is the purpose of the golden calf—it is not supposed to be a strange god. Once it is cast the people said, “This is your God1, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt.” The whole point is that they want to be able to worship it directly, rather than having to wait for Moses to come back down from the mountain.)
I will not waste your time, dear reader, pointing out how divination and vain observances are attempts to go beyond one’s power.
The exact same thing—the vain attempt to go beyond one’s own power—can be done in entirely naturalistic ways. From my observations, it behaves in exactly the same ways superstition. But we don’t have a word for it.
I suspect that we’ve all seen this sort of thing. Vitamins and other supplements are a very common form of it. Vitamins are real, of course, as are all manner of nutrients. But people attribute all sorts of powers to these things which they have no reason to believe that the things have, and with no curiosity whatever to find out what their real powers are.
People go from the fact that vitamins are miracle cures for vitamin deficiency diseases to holding that the vitamins have unlimited powers to confer their effects. They ignore that the vitamins work by doing something, and that the body does not need an unlimited amount of that thing. For example, vitamin C is used by the body in the process of making collagen (it’s just one of many things, but it’s noticeable here for our body not being able to make it). If you have no vitamin C, you stop being able to make collagen, and the parts of your body that need to make new collagen start to greatly suffer from not being able to make it. But contained in this is the natural limit to the effects of vitamin C: once your body has made all of the collagen it wants to make, more vitamin C does no good. (I’m oversimplifying, of course, because vitamin C is used elsewhere in the body, too, but to the best of human knowledge it’s the same story all over—once you have enough, your body can do what it needs to and more does nothing.) It’s like building a house. If you don’t have enough wood, you will build a rickety and drafty house. If you have twice as much wood as you need, you will have a well built house and a big pile of wood. If you have three times as much wood as you need, you will have an equally well built house and a pile of wood that’s twice as big.
Taking large amounts of vitamins as if their effect scales with their dose is directly analogous to superstition, especially to the improper worship of God (such as holding that if one says a prayer in a particular way it will automatically be granted exactly the way you ask for it). Then we come to other ways which are more analogous to divination and vain observances: attributing vague positive benefits to things.
Example of this sort of thing are saying that garlic is “anti-cancer” or that 5G makes chickens lay fewer eggs. Cancer isn’t even one thing, and there’s no reason to suppose that a somewhat improved packetization scheme for data in the radio transmissions used to transmit data to and from cellular phones could have any effect whatever on the way that chickens lay eggs. (I suspect that the fear of 5G was actually about millimeter-wave cell bands, but those are deployed in very few places because they’re so high frequency that they penetrate approximately nothing; on millimeter-wave bands standing in front of your cell phone is enough to have no reception. So far as I’m aware they’ve only been deployed in a few cities and in a few sports stadiums. Most phones don’t even bother incurring the expense of supporting millimeter-wave radio.)
The world is a strange place, we know very little about it, and all sorts of things have effects that we do not know that they have. The problem is not the supposition that effects we do not understand are occurring. The problem is the wild mismatch of certainty to evidence. This is selectively believing in our ignorance; it is believing in it only where one wants to. Is it possible that despite us having no idea how, garlic can cure all forms of cancer? Yes. But there’s just as much reason to believe that garlic causes cancer, or that garlic causes cancer if you take more than twice as much garlic as you eat olive oil, or that garlic causes strokes if you eat more of it than you eat oregano. Lots of things are possible. When one has moved from possible to probable or certain only out of the desire to achieve the effect, this is the naturalistic analog to superstition.
And I really wish we had a word for it.
1. Technically the Greek is plural and many English translations render it as “These are your gods,” but I suspect the translations which take this to be a plural of respect are the more likely to be correct. (An example of the plural of respect is a king saying “we” instead of “I”.) The Jews were certainly not monotheistic at this point, but it makes no sense for them to attribute the bringing them out of Egypt to multiple gods, and still less sense to call one calf multiple gods. No matter how you take it with respect to “theoi”, you certainly have the problem of the plural being used to refer to one thing in the calf.
I Can Believe It’s Not Butter
Margarine, which was originally named oleomargarine, was developed in the second half of the nineteenth century by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès. Butter was in short supply and Napoleon offered a prize for anyone who could create a butter substitute. Hippolyte’s “oleomargarine” was made with beef tallow and skimmed milk (and a somewhat involved process) but produced something very similar to butter that was cheaper and more readily available, helping to lessen the impact of the butter shortage.
As time wore on, processes became more advanced and cheap vegetable oils (for a long time, partially hydrogenated, produce trans fats) were used to make margarine instead of animal fats. This was especially exacerbated by the various shortages of the second World War. However, once butter became widely available again, the attraction of margarine waned.
Then Science came to the rescue with the utterly incorrect and now-discredited but then-widely-believed hypothesis that cholesterol causes heart disease . Butter has plenty of cholesterol, but margarines made from plant oils don’t. Talk about a marketing win for margarine!
The only problem was that it didn’t taste nearly as good as butter. Then in 1979 the J.H. Filbert company came to the rescue with a margarine that actually tasted like butter and one of the greatest product names that ever named a product. Here’s the ad I remember seeing as a child when this was new:
I think it’s a great pity that more products aren’t named this way. Imagine how well Hydrox might have sold if, instead of something that sounding like a villain that G.I. Joe defeated on a regular basis they had been called “I Can’t Believe They’re Not Oreos.”
Chris Lansdown 