I was talking with my parents, recently, about children and childhoods. My mother lamented that Halloween was on the wane, and attributed it, in no small part, to helicopter parents who won’t let their children roam the streets unattended. There may be some truth to this, but it struck me that the Baby Boomers’ childhoods were different in no small part because their generation was named for a very real boom in the number of babies. Here’s an interesting graph of the number of births in the US:

The population of the US has been far from constant, though, so let’s put that into context (births per thousand people):

One interesting thing to note is that the baby boom was only a boom relative to what came shortly before and especially what came after it. It was more common to have children in the early 1900s than during the baby boom, but that’s a subject for another day. The other key thing to consider, with regard to the baby boom, was that it lasted for a while. There aren’t hard edges on it, but it’s traditionally dated from 1945 to 1962, which is 17 years long. I think that’s significant in the experience of people like my parents, who were born in the middle of the baby boom.

Childhood, as described by people in their late sixties here in the year of our Lord 2021, was a fun time of independence and play, with children roaming neighborhoods without parental supervision. Part of that, though, was that older kids were expected (and usually did) look out for the younger kids. And I think a big reason why that worked out was that there were plenty of older kids around to do it.

Another thing that contributed to this phenomenon, I suspect, was the housing boom which happened (in America) after World War 2. Part of it was developments like Levittowns, but housing, in general, became much less labor-intensive as large machines and industrial processes replaced human labor with machine labor. The development of trucks (for World War 2) which could carry heavy things really helped with this, with more building materials able to be constructed efficiently then transported cheaply. We don’t tend to think of how trucks improve efficiency by separating things by distance but it’s far less efficient to make something on-site than in a place designed around making it.

There were also effects from the G.I. Bill which made it possible for many returning veterans to take out mortgages, which also helped to spur the market for cheap housing. That is often a cycle, as once a thing becomes cheaper you start getting additional demand from elsewhere. While that will drive prices up in the short term, it will also tend to drive up volume which (absent restricted resources) will tend to drive up economies of scale and to overall lower prices further.

When you put this all together it resulted in a lot of communities which were predominantly made up of people of child-bearing age, rather than the more normal age distribution one gets in stable communities. Baby Boomers who grew up in these communities would have experienced an especially large number of children around.

This will have effects on things like secular Halloween celebrations (Halloween is, after all, the celebration of the coming of All Saint’s Day, i.e. “All Hallows Eve”). When you have a ton of kids who will come out for candy, it becomes fun to stock up on candy and give it out. When you expected between 0 and 3 kids showing up, it takes a lot of the fun out of it. You’re just more likely to turn off your lights and pretend you’re not home.

The fewer kids who go out, the more the children who go out are alone, too. It’s one thing to send one’s children out on their own when the streets are crawling with children. It’s another thing to send them out into the night with no one around. What I’ve discovered is that, in practice, young kids really don’t want to go out alone at night when “alone” means “alone” and not “surrounded by other people, many of whom one knows, just not one’s parents”.

I think the absence of young kids also tends to discourage teenagers. It’s one thing to show up when unescorted children are around; you’re at least partially escorting them yourself by your presence. It’s another thing to be a teenager and the only person within view and be asking for candy from adults.

When you put all of this together, I think that much of how baby boomers experienced childhood differently than later generations was at least as much because they were born during a baby boom—and during a housing boom that often concentrated child-bearing families—as it was because of cultural shifts. Yes, this was before the news did its best to constantly scare parents about letting their children out of their sight, and yes this was when parents tended to have more children so they didn’t worry as much about each individual child because they had spares, and yes this was before designer children and helicopter parents. There are many threads that go together to weave a cloth.

All that said, I think that the boom in babies is an often under-estimated factor in what life was like for baby-boomers.

I don’t know if people still complain about Christmas songs being played early; like most things about “people” I suppose it depends on who one talks to. Anyway, while I’m sympathetic to the idea of “keep the waiting in advent,” it has occurred to me that there is a reason that recently traditional secular Christmas songs are song before Christmas and not after: if you look at them, they are really advent songs. Secular advent songs, of course, but advent songs. (I’m taking the list of Christmas songs from XKCD’s list which I discussed earlier.)

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and Have a Holly Jolly Christmas both have titles (and main lyrics) in the future tense. Santa Claus is Coming To Town is technically in the present progressive tense, but all of the lyrics are anticipatory—primarily warning about present behavior in light of future rewards. Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire is set on Christmas Eve, but that is still, technically speaking, during Advent (unless you’re measuring days from sundown to sundown, in which case I think that the present-tense of the song would have to be taken as anticipatory).

I’ll Be Home for Christmas, though I rarely here it played or sung, is another one clearly set in the future tense and thus an advent song. I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas would most naturally be taken to be about anticipation though it could, technically, be set on Christmas. That is, until you get to the later lyrics where he dreams of a white Christmas with every Christmas card he writes. It would be absurd to suppose the song is about somebody who sends out Christmas cards after Christmas, since their purpose is to wish someone a happy Christmas.

Rocking Around the Christmas Tree is harder to place, temporally. Its subject is a Christmas party, which I’m used to being held prior to Christmas but in 1958 when it was released it might have been the custom to have Christmas parties on Christmas day itself, though I am inclined to doubt it.

Blue Christmas (which, again, I never hear anyone sing and don’t hear played) clearly talks about Christmas in the future tense in the lyrics (“I’ll have a blue Christmas without you”).

Silver Bells could be set on Christmas or even after it. That said, it’s about Christmas decorations and such which are generally put up before Christmas, so the smart money is on it being an anticipation of Christmas.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas is another one whose very title shows it to be set before Christmas.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year is, like Silver Bells, not explicit, but it seems to be about the (secular) season of preparation for Christmas, placing it before Christmas.

The other songs on the XKCD list (with one exception) aren’t about Christmas at all, or at least not a present Christmas. Winter Wonderland, Let It Snow, Jingle Bell Rock, and Sleigh Ride are all just about winter. (So, for that matter, is Baby It’s Cold Outside, which is increasingly be played as if it’s a Christmas song.) Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is primarily about the time before Christmas, and culminates in Rudolph’s triumph on Christmas Eve, but al of this was in the distant past. Frosty the Snowman is about a magical snowman and has nothing whatever to do with Christmas. (Admittedly, the animated movie Frosty the Snowman is set on Christmas Eve, but that’s still anticipating Christmas.)

The only real exception on the entire list is Little Drummer Boy, which is actually set after Christmas. It seems to be based on the visitation of the Magi, which is traditionally celebrated on Epiphany, which for many years in the western Church has been celebrated in January. Since the song doesn’t reference anything that sets its date, it could be anywhere from the day of Christ’s birth (e.g. when the angels gave the good news to the shepherds) to months after the Magi visited. I suspect that no one pays attention to the lyrics of this song, though, since approximately 20% of them are “pa”, 20% are “rum” and 45% are “pum”.

So, all things considered, I think we have some of the reason why these songs are all played before Christmas, rather than after it—they are, in fact, (secular) advent songs. As Chesterton often noted, the common man often has his heart in the right place, even when it’s there for the wrong reasons in his head.

I’m a bowhunter who hunts in western Pennsylvania, so one of the problems that I face in the late season is keeping warm when it’s cold out. Much of this is pretty easy, and is the same answer as anywhere else—layers. The only difference is that the outer layer is camouflage. That said, this does not apply as much to the feet, since most people out in the cold are doing different things than hunters are. In particular, hunters need to walk to their hunting spot, then they sit or stand still in the cold for hours on end. That last part is particularly important, because they don’t generate as much bodyheat as someone moving does.

Before I get to that, I should mention that it also doesn’t apply as much to the hands, and I’ve found some very good hunting mittens made by Hot Shot Gear. They’re called pop top hunting mittens, and they’re both warm mittens but also allow you to slide your fingers out of the mittens in thin gloves, which is essentially for your string hand. I shoot with a trigger release, so I only need one finger, though a thumb release or traditional finger guard would require more fingers and this allows that. They’re warm and very functional for archery. As a bonus, the index finger has a tab on it that can work with capacitive touchscreens, which is very helpful for texting someone to complain about the deer not coming by.

Anyway, there are two main solutions I’ve been able to find to the problem of keeping one’s feet warm. The first are enormous boots which are both heavy and cumbersome. They’re tiring to walk in and they clomp noisily as one can only really step with one’s full foot in them; the best one can do to not clomp is a mild heel-to-toe motion. On the plus side, they’re warm and waterproof.

The other main solution are thinks like mukluks. Mukluks were designed for seriously cold conditions but they are also lightweight and flexible. The only downside is that they’re not waterproof. In the places where they were developed this isn’t really a problem, since below about 15F (-9.4C) water can be relied upon to be hard and stay hard (that is, to be ice and not melt) and so being waterproof is irrelevant because the only liquid water you will be exposed to is in your water bottle. My understanding of places like North Dakota, Canada, Alaska, etc.—where people really love mukluks—15F is spring weather and people tend to wear tennis shoes and light jackets in it. I may be exaggerating slightly, but they’re concerned with whether the boots are good below -30F, not 15F. (Moreover, if the weather is frequently colder than 15F, a warm day that gets up to there or even into the 20s isn’t going to melt any ice.)

In western Pennsylvania, though, winter frequently oscillates between being a bit below freezing and just above it. Even on fairly cold days it’s not uncommon to find mud in places where the sun hits for a few hours or leaves provide some insulation, unless it’s been well below freezing every day for a few days. We need waterproof footgear, but I really don’t want to pay the penalty of clomping around in massive, inflexible boots. So I got a good idea from this post: making a winter boot out of galoshes and a thick felt bootliner plus insoles. I tried it out and it worked extremely well. The results were light, flexible, comfortable, waterproof, and warm.

I’m a size (men’s US) 11 wide and ordered the boot liner true to size and the overboot sized to 11-13 shoes. The result had plenty of room inside without being too big, and comfortable fit me wearing a thick winter socket plus a second, even thicker winter sock. I absolutely loved their performance and feel.

To give a list of the particulars that I used:

• Overboot: Tingley PVC 10″ Workbrutes (note: at the time of writing they’re cheaper on Amazon)
• Felt liner: Steger Mukluks 9mm Felt Boot Liners
• Insole: Steger Mukluks Wool Felt Insole
• Thick sock: Darn Tough Heavyweight Tactical Sock
• Super Thick Sock: J.B. Felds Icelandic Socks

Something to note about this approach is that the total cost for the parts that weren’t the socks (which you’d have to buy separately with any boot) was $67.46 (not including tax or shipping) which is extremely cheap for a pair of insulated boots. With the socks it came to $113.36 (the Darn Tough socks were expensive, but in my experience Darn Tough socks are worth it, especially because they honor their no-questions-asked lifetime guarantee). For a comfortable way to avoid pain and possibly frostbite, I found it well worth it.

One thing I need to note is that this approach gives no “support” of any kind. I hate “support” in shoes because it mostly means some sort of uncomfortable rigid thing that prevents the foot from bending naturally and makes a natural gait extremely difficult. That said, I spent a year or two wearing vibram five-fingers, so I developed strong feet whose arch comes from the muscles and tendons in the foot, as it’s supposed to, and not from resting on top of something that pushes the middle of the foot up. If you haven’t developed the muscles and tendons in your foot to be able to walk naturally, you will probably not find this approach nearly as comfortable. If you haven’t, I recommend trying to do so. (If you can get them to fit your foot, or make do with ones that are too large as I had to, vibram five fingers are a great way to do this. Just take it slowly. You don’t want to walk through a large box store your first time out—concrete is very tiring to walk on naturally. After a few weeks, your feet will be strong enough that it’s not tiring anymore, but you have to walk a little before you can walk a lot. Once you’ve done this, though, walking is a lot more pleasurable to do, and it pays dividends for hunting where you can more easily use the ball-first walking style that allows you to feel if you’re stepping on a branch and pick your foot up, so you don’t announce to everything with ears in the forest that you’re coming.)

There’s an XKCD that a lot of people have seen which plots most-played Christmas songs by decade of release:

The conclusion it presents, “every year, American culture embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmases of Baby Boomers’ childhoods,” is true in a sense, but mostly wrong.

The biggest problem with it is that it’s using radio songs. There are several problems with this; they are largely technologically constrained to not have been recorded prior to the 1940s because sound recording was awful back then. Having done a fair amount of swing dancing, if you ever heard a recording made from the 1930s or worse the 1920s it’s barely listenable. You simply need to get a modern band to play those songs now in order for them to not hurt your ears. On the flip side, there just haven’t been any good popular christmas songs composed since the 1960s because of cultural shifts, but that’s a different story that I’ll get to later. The really big issue, though, is that the radio doesn’t play the really popular Christmas carols, they only play things recorded by popular recording artists. Even where popular recording artists record traditional carols, the radio will play versions by all sorts of different people, so a song which gets a lot of play time will not get it all on the same recording. To have this sort of concentration, we need the songs to still be in copyright so there’s only one or a very few versions of it available for the radio to play.

To really see the point, consider the popular Christmas carols—the ones that people actually sing—and when they were composed:

Jingle Bells: 1857
Heark! The Herald Angel Sings: 1739 (current musical arrangement: 1840)
Joy To the World: 1719 (current musical arrangement: 1848)
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen: traditional; at least the 16th century
O Holy Night: 1847 in french; English version by a guy who died in 1893, so before then
Silent Night: 1818 in German, English translation in 1859
O Come, All Ye Faithful: 1751
What Child Is This: 1871
Away in a Manger: 1897
The First Noel: 1833
We Three Kings: 1857

So yeah, the first problem is that if you consider stuff that can’t really have been done prior to when the baby boomers were born, you won’t find it. In a sense we’re done; the only thing which is trying to recreate the boomers’ childhood was a thing that barely pre-existed the baby boomers (commercial radio in the modern format).

Christmas songs after the 1960s tended to be either novelty songs or songs that really aren’t family friendly. As people got less religious and more sex-obsessed and so sang about having sex on Christmas with various degrees of veiling their meaning. That’s not actually going to be very interesting when it’s competing with songs about having sex five times a day, so it’s not shocking that these haven’t been popular. (In short: religious people won’t like them and irreligious people can get better).

There’s another aspect, which is that there was a short time period, as popular culture was becoming hardcore secular, where the newly secular people could enjoy the religion of their parents without participating. That’s the sort of thing that only lasts a decade or two; after that the energy just goes out of it.

Here in 2021 I think that the secular energy for Christmas is fading fast; one of the more popular things for adults to do is to agree with other adults to not exchange Christmas presents because it’s just a pain in the neck. No one really likes getting together with family to eat dry turkey and too many store-bought pies—that’s why they only do it when it’s an obligation they can’t get out of—and the concept of universal good will just doesn’t make any secular sense and has been long-since abandoned.

The grain of truth to the XKCD is that there is an attempt to LARP the most recent sincere Christmas celebration anyone can remember, which happens to be the baby boomers’ childhood Christmases. That’s mostly a coincidence, though, and in any event it includes many things which pre-dated the baby boomers. Twas the Night Before Christmas was first published in 1823 and the general depiction of Santa Claus as dressed in red and white originated at the latest with Puck magazine in the early 1900s and was set in popular imagination by the 1930s with widespread soft drink advertising campaigns (most notably Coca Cola).

So yes, the baby boomers were influential. The world did exist before them, though, and they don’t explain most of it.

I recently read up on the Tuskegee Experiment, and it was really weird. (If you’re not familiar, it was an experiment run from 1932 to 1972 to study the effects of untreated syphilis on African Americans in which they pretended to treat 600 poor, male, African American share croppers for decades, resulting in over 100 of them dying from an entirely treatable disease.) What’s weird about it was not that it was cruel. Human beings are very frequently cruel. What’s weird about it was that it was both cruel and scientifically pointless. It’s not surprising when people do unethical things for some sort of benefit they could not get otherwise. It is very surprising when people do unethical things for no possible benefit to themselves or anyone else.

So I looked a little further, and like so many things that don’t make sense, it was the way it was because of a strange set of historical events which changed it repeatedly until it kept going because it was already going, but wasn’t something anyone would ever have started on purpose. Even more curiously, it was kept up for forty years in large part because no one would ever do another study like it again (since it was utterly pointless).

Let me explain.

(Note: I’m just using the Wikipedia page on the Tusgekee study as my source for this; take it with a grain of salt but it’s good enough for my purpose here.)

The Tuskegee experiment was motivated by a 1928 retrospective study in Oslo, Norway, called the “Oslo Study of Untreated Syphilis.” It looked at several hundred white males in various stages of untreated syphilis and documented their symptoms. This is medically important in a disease which can present differently over time (syphilis takes a long time to kill you, if it does)—if a doctor is looking at a patient and only is aware of the symptoms at one stage of the disease while the patient is at a different stage, the doctor could easily mis-diagnose the patient as not having the disease.

So, doctors had this very useful information for treating white patients, but is it also applicable to black patients? Perhaps they present differently (i.e. have different symptoms, or at least different severity of symptoms). There are some diseases more prevalent in white people than in black people, and vice versa; there isn’t really a good reason to assume that the two populations are identical. To do a good job treating black people who have the disease, doctors really would benefit from evidence that they present the same way as the white patients in the Oslo study do. (There are issues with lumping all people of European descent together as one homogeneous “white” population, just as there are with lumping all people of African descent together as “black”, though in the latter case most black Americans in the 1920s came from a small region of Africa so it wasn’t quite as bad.)

So far, this is fairly reasonable given the state of medical science in the 1920s. Now it starts to get a little iffy: the researchers at the US Public Health Service at Tusgekee decided to conduct a prospective study in order to complement the retrospective study from Oslo. This is not at all, ethically, the same thing, since not treating people and finding out the symptoms they had before you treated them are very different. Their reasoning was that the study participants, being poor share croppers, were unlikely to ever get treatment otherwise; thus it was a trade of six months of not treating them (during which time they would not have gotten treated otherwise), and after which they would give the participants treatment. Not great, but in a slow-moving disease, this could be defensible if informed consent was obtained (it wasn’t).

Something else to consider, here, is that the treatments of the time were mostly ineffective. They consisted of things like arsenic-based treatments like arsphenamine and mercury-based ointments. Penicillin, the actually effective treatment for syphilis, would only be discovered in 1928 and the technology to refine the compound into a medicine was only developed in 1940. (The first proof that it could cure a disease was an eye disease in 1930 in a laboratory setting.) So part of what needs to be considered was that in 1928, the treatments that they were temporarily withholding weren’t actually all that effective, anyway.

Somehow or other this became six months to one year, which was still in the realm of defensible if informed consent had been obtained (which, again, it hadn’t). However, this is where things really start going off the rails. Before the conclusion of the study when they were planning to administer the standard treatments they lost their funding and could not afford to treat the patients. At this point Taliaferro Clark, head of the USPHS, decided to extend the study without treatment (which involved pretending to treat the participants). He resigned before the study was actually extended, however. It’s a bit unclear (just from the Wikipedia page) who took over extending the study; various people contributed.

With the advent of penicillin as a safe and reliable treatment for syphilis, the entire study became pointless. Unlike the arsenical and mercurial treatments, if you suspected syphilis you might as well give penicillin and see if it gets better. Nevertheless, the study continued because it would never be possible to get this data again. It would never be possible because there was absolutely no point in getting the data and it was horribly unethical to get it, but for some reason that was beside the point. The fact that something was going on that could never be restarted made the people involved feel like they needed to keep it going, since once lost, it was lost forever. True, it had no apparent value, but I suspect they figured that perhaps one day someone would find the value in it that they couldn’t see right now.

In the baptismal vows a catechumen makes (or their parent makes for them at infant baptism), there are the questions: “Do you reject Satan? And all his empty promises?”

It’s interesting how good an example the Tuskegee study was of an empty promise.

…who’s never had his picture on a bubblegum card? This is the question posed by Lucy van Pelt in A Charlie Brown Christmas. And before anyone jumps down my throat about it being too early for Christmas stuff, A Charlie Brown Christmas is clearly an advent movie, not a Christmas movie. It is set during the time when people are getting ready for Christmas (hence rehearsing a Christmas play, rather than performing it), and it was first aired on December 9, in the year of our Lord 1965.

So go ahead and jump down my throat for it being too early for advent stuff—to be fair, it is still ordinary time—but be warned that I have sharp teeth and strong jaws.

Anyway, back to the question Lucy poses: how can you say someone is great who’s never had his picture on a bubblegum card? This joke was funny back in 1965, but I think that it’s gained in humor, over the years, because bubblegum cards are no longer something children collect. I believe that they’re technically still made, or at least trading cards are. The Topps company still exists and still makes baseball cards, though I’ve no idea who buys them. I collected baseball cards for about a year, back in the 1980s, and rapidly lost interest. So far as I knew no one else collected them back then, and in the intervening three decades I’ve never heard of anyone collecting them. (There are still trading cards that are popular such as Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon, but these are not relevant because they do not feature the pictures of real people.)

This was a childish question when Lucy asked it, but it was also an ephemeral question, which she would have had no way of knowing back then. This works with the theme of the show, though; it’s all about how people were caught up in the ephemeral world and had no idea of what really matters. The way that Lucy’s question works with this theme has only become better with age.

Fun fact: if Lucy was 11 when A Charlie Brown Christmas aired she would be 67 now (in the year of our Lord 2021).

Having recently watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail with my eleven year old son, I was reminded of how extremely uneven Monty Python was. They had quite a few absolutely brilliant sketches. They had some mediocre sketches. They had a fair number of really bad sketches. This extends to their movies, too, which are basically just loose collections of skits with a common theme. (In the case of Holy Grail, their theme was “medievalish”.)

Despite this extraordinary unevenness, Monty Python movies and sketches are held up as some of the heights of comedy. There’s a lesson, here, for writers: overall quality is good, but when it comes to being memorable, the heights you reach are more important than the average.

There is an asterisk on that, which is that it probably matters significantly what your competition is. Mitchell and Webb, for example, had a similar number of brilliant sketches, but they had far fewer really bad sketches (their snooker commentator sketches are the only ones that come to mind) and not many bad sketches either. Overall, their quality was higher, though the peaks were no higher. Had they been competing at the same time, Monty Python probably would have fared worse.

(Of course, there are other things that make the two not directly comparable. All comedy is a product of its time, and Monty Python especially so. The 1970s, in its post-world-war-2 context was a time when people hungered for different more than they hungered for quality, and many of Monty Python’s sketches reflect that. While Monty Python wouldn’t fare nearly as well against Mitchell and Webb in the 2010s, Mitchell and Webb wouldn’t fare nearly as well against Monty Python in the 1970s—the audience just would not have been in the mood for most of it.)

For those trying to get more protein into their diet, whey powder (or any protein powder) can be a great way to do it. The downside to whey powder, though is how to actually eat the stuff—it’s not exactly appetizing to eat the dry powder with a spoon. The common solution is to dissolve it into a liquid. Water is probably the most common, which is why whey powders often have a lot of sugar and flavoring in them. I strongly prefer to get plain whey powder which has only the protein and no added sugars or artificial flavors.

I have made protein shakes using some milk, a little heavy cream, whey powder, and vanilla. They work, and if served very cold can be a little like a milkshake, as long as you generally eat so little sugar that your taste buds have reset their idea of sweet so that plain milk tastes sweet to you. The problem, though, is that it’s very easy to make a lot of air bubbles in the shake during the mixing, which produces an unpleasant texture. You can get around this by mixing with a stick blender in a tall container so that the surface can’t get down to the blades, but this is a lot of work and leaves you with a stick blender to clean when you’re done with it.

Enter Greek yogurt. Greek yogurt is an unsweetened yogurt which is strained after fermentation so it’s higher in protein than normal yogurt and has very little in the way of even natural milk sugars. (Normal grocery-store yogurt has so much sugar added that it’s very nearly got the same amount of sugar per unit volume as ice cream.) You can mix whey powder into Greek yogurt at a ratio of about 1 scoop of whey powder to 1 cup of Greek yogurt. You can mix it with a spoon. As my wife described it when she was telling me about the recipe, “at first it looks like there’s no way this is going to work, then it does”. After about 30-60 seconds of mixing, the whey powder dissolves into the yogurt and you get a very thick, creamy result. I like to add about a teaspoon and a half of vanilla per cup of yogurt because the flavor complements very well. I’ve also taken to adding about 1 tablespoon of heavy cream per scoop of whey powder both for flavor and texture.

One tip I’ve found is that it tastes better when very cold, so I put the bowl with the whey powder in it into the freezer for a few minutes before adding the yogurt, so I’m adding all cold ingredients. If you want to do something kind of like making homemade frozen yogurt, put the mixed yogurt/whey back into the freezer. Take out and stir every 60 seconds or so. Keep this up until it’s the consistency you want. It will freeze against the sides of the bowl, so make sure to scrape them clean and mix the result into the middle. This would be very labor-intensive to make true fro-yo, but even getting a quarter of the way there can be pleasant.

NOTE: this also works best if you’ve avoided sugar enough that your taste buds have reset to the point where you can eat unsweetened Greek yogurt. (The whey powder makes the acidity a little more mild, but not much more mild.) If that’s not true, then you’re probably not as concerned with avoiding sugar anyway, and so you can add as much sweetener as needed to make this taste the way you want it. When it comes to flavors, sweet tends to cover over bitterness and sourness (that is, alkali and acidity), hence milk chocolate and lemonade.

Anyway, this has a lot of protein and is easier with less cleanup than protein shakes, so I mention it in case it helps anyone else, too.

A friend of mine was talking about how self-driving car technology is almost ready for general use and gave as evidence that this is likely to be the case that Waymo is already operating an autonomous ride-sharing service in Phoenix, Arizona, and has recently expanded to San Francisco.

So I looked into this.

It is true that Waymo is operating a driverless ride-sharing service, called Waymo One, in Phoenix Arizona, and has been doing so since 2018 (with a several month pause due to COVID-19, back in 2020). However, this is slightly misleading. According to Waymo One’s FAQ, “Our Waymo One fully autonomous ride-hailing service operates within parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert.”

Here’s a map of Phoenix, Arizona, which Wikipedia linked to, and I’ve circled Chandler, Tempe, Mesa, and Gilbert. (Approximately; there might be a bit of these places outside of the purple circle—I’m not familiar with Arizona geography and couldn’t find similar interactive maps for Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler.)

Waymo chose Phoenix because (being in the desert and pretty far south) it’s basically a place with no weather. So in this best-case scenario for the Waymo self-driving car, three years into running their autonomous service they’re still not running in most of the Phoenix metro area. Heck, they’re still not even running in Phoenix (proper).

At this rate… I’m not even sure that there is a rate of expansion. Extrapolating their progress in the last 3 years, it might be another 100 years before they offer rides in all of the Phoenix metro area.

But they’ve expanded to San Francisco!

Yeah, they have. Except that in San Francisco the Waymo One cars have an “autonomous specialists riding in the driver’s seat.” Also, the ride-sharing program is only open to people in the “trusted tester program,” which is “a confidential research program within Waymo One, where select riders will have access to our service and can share their experiences directly with our team to help shape the future of autonomous driving”. (I’m quoting from their FAQ.)

So “expanded to San Francisco” means that they are now running some number of tests, using safety drivers, and with passengers who have signed NDAs and can’t tell anyone how badly it’s going.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that self-driving cars are impossible. I doubt that Waymo’s hyper-detailed maps approach is really the way forward, but as the saying goes, of all things the future is the hardest to predict.

I think it’s important to be realistic, though. There is no reason to believe that self-driving cars are just a few years away from being a standard option on cars at the dealership.

Recently, whoever it is that makes the show Blue’s Clues hired the original actor to deliver a message to fans. It’s quite curious:

I was too old to watch Blue’s Clues and my children didn’t come along until after Steve (the character in this message) left, and they’ve never watched Blue’s Clues anyway, so I don’t have an emotional attachment to the show, or to the character. I think I randomly found an episode of Blue’s Clues once, for a few seconds, while flipping to the channel I actually wanted to watch. That’s enough to make me aware of the show and so to recognize the actor, though (like me) he’s now much older.

From what very little I know of Blue’s Clues, it was always a highly parasocial show. The host would talk to the viewer as if they were there, so this is in keeping the format of the original show. I have my doubts that this is a good idea in a children’s show, but it is downright creepy in something aimed at adults.

Parasocial relationships supplanting real relationships is, I think, one of the great dangers of the modern world. There’s also a great temptation to it on the part of creators because there are so many lonely people who will cling to the feeling of having another person with them even though they know that it’s just a recording of someone who doesn’t even know that they exist. Even worse, many creators feel a parasocial relationship to the people they don’t know and don’t interact with except as a view/like/star/thumbs up/etc. statistic, which encourages them to participate in that parasocial relationship, inviting their viewers further into it. They will talk about highly private moments in their life, saying (I think, truthfully) that they want to bring their friends, that is, their viewers, along with them. As I mentioned in The Fundamental Principle of Science, the problem isn’t the liars, but the sincere but deluded people that an environment selects for. They sell the lie all the better for believing it themselves.

After all, the actor on Blue’s Clues left after a few years.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s there was a painter by the name of Bob Ross who ran a delightful television show on PBS called The Joy of Painting. Bob Ross used an extremely fast wet-on-wet technique of oil painting in which he would paint a beautiful landscape painting in realtime during his half-hour show. He would talk to the audience in one of the most calm voices a human being has ever been given, and talk about how we’re making whatever world we want and that there are no mistakes here, just happy little accidents.

What I discovered recently was that not only did Bob Ross not invent the quick painting technique he used, he didn’t even invent the happy little accidents. Now, to be clear, this was not something that Bob Ross tried to hide. In fact, he credited his mentor. He mentioned that he got the technique from Bill Alexander in the first episode of the first least, and he dedicated the first episode of the second season to Bill Alexander:

Bill Alexander didn’t invent the concept of painting wet-on-wet with oil paint; that dates back hundreds of years. What Bill Alexander did was to create the technique of making landscapes using wet-on-wet techniques involving large brushes and a strong pallet knife so as to be able to paint a landscape in half an hour.

But Bill Alexander didn’t just invent the technique. He also taught it on his own PBS show. It was called The Magic of Oil Painting and ran from 1974 to 1982. (The Joy of Painting started in 1983, so Bob Ross was continuing what his teacher did, he wasn’t competing with him.)

It’s interesting to watch an episode of Bill Alexander’s show, as you can see that Bob Ross did copy quite a lot of it:

Bill Alexander was born Wilhem Alexander in 1915, in Germany. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in World War 2 but was captured by the Allies and, after painting portraits of officers’ wives, made his way to the United States where he took up residence after the war was over.

He had the same positive attitude, looking at mistakes as things you just roll with and learn how to use. He was not as soft-spoken, and his German accent makes things sound more harsh than they were, which brings us to an interesting point: it is very rare that an innovator becomes famous for his innovations.

This is a pattern that ones sees the world over, and throughout history. The peculiarities and genius needed to come up with an idea that no one has had before—or at least no one in one’s culture has had before—is rarely compatible with that common touch which really helps to make it intelligible to the public at large. It is extremely common, then, that the innovator’s invention is made famous by someone who is just strange enough to understand the new idea but not strange enough to have come up with it on his own, but his not being strange enough to come up with the idea is what makes him able to communicate it to people who aren’t at all strange.

I recently saw a discussion online about lab-grown meat (cultured muscle cells in a growth medium), in which someone was describing the potential problems with it—which boil down to it probably has a different nutrient profile and the assumption that it is equivalent to meat from a living animal is completely unjustified. Animals are phenomenally, astonishingly complex and respond in a myriad of ways to their environment. Meat grown from cells cultured in a lab would be grown under radically different conditions from meat on an actual animal, so we know that it will be different. There will be different quantities of micro-nutrients and probably of macro-nutrients, too. (Protein is a catch-all term; there are actually nine essential amino acids which we have to get from our diet, and different proteins have very different quantities of the 26 amino acids which make up proteins.) He complained that people (scientists) often regard the human body as if it was something simple, like a car, with food being a simple fuel, like gasoline, where you just put in gasoline into the car and it goes, instead of the astonishingly complex thing that it is with significant second- and third-order effects from the complexities of the food that we eat.

It struck me as funny that this overly simplistic model of cars doesn’t even work for cars. You will not get the same gas mileage from low, medium, and high octane fuels, despite them having the same energy. (The octane rating refers to the average length of the hydrocarbon chains; high octane gasoline has longer average hydrocarbon chains.) You also will not get the same acceleration from the different fuels; an engine designed for high octane gasoline will produce less power with low-octane gasoline; the reverse can be true as well. (The reason for high-octane gasoline is that it can tolerate higher compression ratios than low-octane gasoline can and so more powerful engines can take advantage of this to produce more power. In an engine with a lower compression ratio, it doesn’t matter that the higher octane gasoline can tolerate more compression because it won’t get it.)

And heaven help you if you put diesel fuel into your gasoline engine, despite it also being a long-chain liquid hydrocarbon with only slightly more energy per gallon than gasoline.

In other words, “a calorie is a calorie” doesn’t even work with cars and the fuels you can buy at the gas station.

It should be noted that there is a domain where “a calorie is a calorie,” assuming that one limits this to the sensible macronutrients such as glucose, protein, and plant and animal fats. In very minor cases does it work to consume large quantities of ethanol, despite it technically containing calories that we can extract. In no cases does it work to drink gasoline or diesel fuel despite them having plenty of calories in them. Those (I hope, obvious) caveats aside, a calorie is a calorie when you are trying to fuel hard labor.

Suppose you have a person who you want to swim for eight hours a day. Swimming can consume around 900 Calories per hours (depending very much on body size, etc), so that will take 7,200 Calories per day in addition to base metabolic needs. If we assume that the base caloric requirement is 2,000 Calories per day, then the swimmer will be consuming 9,200 Calories per day. That is, if we feed the swimmer fewer than 9,200 Calories, the swimmer will be in a Caloric deficit and will eventually starve to death. (More realistically, their ability to do work will go down and we won’t get the full 8 hours a day of swimming out of them.) When it comes to “will this person have enough energy to do the work we want them to do,” it is indeed true that “a calorie is a calorie.” They may or may not be productive of overall health, but when it comes to the question of energy balance for work performed, this is pretty accurate. This doesn’t come up much in life (unless you’re running a sports team or prison chain gang), but this is the context where it’s true.

Curls and other exercises that primarily work the biceps (brachii) have something of a bad reputation; they’re frequently regarded as being non-functional exercises for insecure gym bros whose only purpose is to look good in the mirror when flexing. I’m not sure why this is the case, though, because bicep curls (with a curl bar or with dumb bells) are actually quite functional.

So, when in normal life does one pick up something a bit below one’s hips and bring it up to one’s shoulder? One does exactly that thing when picking up a child who is old enough to walk. Admittedly, sometimes one has to bend over a little because their armpits are closer to knee height than to waist height, but it becomes a bicep curl once you stand up.

The most common way to pick up a child who can walk is when they stand in front of you and lift their arms up to indicate that they want to be picked up, in which case you tend to use two hands, one under each armpit. Sometimes you’re already holding something, though, and so you need to pick then up with only one arm. This is when the bicep curls really come in handy, since all of the child’s weight is being lifted like a dumb bell. (Pro tip: have the child lift it’s leg so you’re picking them up by their femur while they hold onto your upper arm with both of their arms. If you try to do it under just one armpit it will probably hurt them unless they’re very little or can pull down with that arm hard enough that their latissimus dorsii flexes hard enough to bear the weight.)

Fun fact: little children enjoy when you do reps of bicep curls with them, though in my experience they tend to max out at around 5 reps before they want you to just hold them like normal.

(I probably should append “part 2” or “part 3” or something to the title, but I don’t recall what the number should be and I don’t think anyone will really care if I don’t look it up.)

The advice to eat carbohydrates and as little fat as possible in order to lose weight is very strange advice. I’ve talked about this before, and for people who have the dysfunction of insulin resistance (or worse) it’s downright insane advice. (I don’t use the term as hyperbole, but rather than a person who recommends people who have trouble processing carbohydrates, or worse, outright diabetics, eat primarily carbohydrates for energy is not meaningfully connected to reality. It is possible to be insane only when some subjects come up, rather than completely insane, i.e. insane about all subjects, such as the man who thinks he’s a poached egg and tries to sit, motionless, in an egg cup all day.)

(Before I proceed, I should note that there are a few caveats to what I’m saying, here, which primarily apply to athletes. If you need to maintain maximal athletic performance for competition while losing weight, you are in a specialized situation and specialized strategies will apply.)

The argument for eating primarily carbohydrates for energy when losing weight mostly come down to the observation that carbohydrates are less energy-dense than fats are. Carbs contain 4 calories per gram while fat contains 9 calories per gram. So carbs fill you up more than fat does, so you won’t be as hungry and want to eat more for the same calories!

First, this is a stupid satiety model which is entirely ignorant of how human satiety works. Anyone who has ever been to a large meal such as Christmas dinner is familiar with eating the main course until feeling complete stuffed and unable to eat another bite, then suddenly having plenty of room for desert a few minutes later, knows this. This sort of ignorance is entirely inexcusable; it would be like giving people gardening advice without knowing the plants need sunlight.

The second problem is that, even if one ignores the bad satiety model, it’s not even the right inputs. Stomach expansion is a matter of volume, not mass. Looking it up, olive oil has a density of .92 grams per cubic centimetre, while granulated sugar has a density of 1.59 grams per cubic centimetre. Thus 1 cubic centimetre of olive oil will have 8.2 Calories, while 1 cubic centimetre of granulated sugar will have 6.36 Calories. If you eat the same number of calories in olive oil and granulated sugar, the sugar will only take up 30.2% more space. (Granulated sugar, by the way, is not as dense as sugar can get, since the granules are not tightly packed.) It’s more space, but not by a lot.

A bigger problem is that it’s extremely doable to add bulk to food while adding minimal calories. 100g of butter plus 100g of baby spinach will have only a few more calories than 100g of butter (and mostly in protein, curiously), but will take up way more room in the stomach than 103g of sugar will.

The general defense of telling people to eat carbs not fat is that most people can’t handle the complexity of actual food-volume calculations. In an abstract way, this is true, but again a person is straight-up delusional if they think the average person can’t handle, “eat a certain number of calories and try to make them take up as much room in your stomach as possible.”

And then we come up to the issue of satiety-over-time. If you want to make your stomach full on few calories without concern for how long this lasts, just drink a glass of water.

The moment that we care about satiety over time, though, the fact that the human stomach takes many more hours to process fats than it does to process carbohydrates becomes relevant, even on a garbage model of satiety like pure-stomach-pressure.

When one takes a moment to consider all of the false assumptions required to make the carbs-not-fat recommendation work, it’s really quite astonishing that anyone ever had the temerity to propose it in public.

A few years ago I read an article about how awesome the Sweden was because it’s such a high trust society that all sorts of things are easy and convenient and efficient. He gave as an example that there were not turnstiles on the entrance to a train, there was merely a place where you’re supposed to scan your ticket but it didn’t get in the way of the flow people. He gave other examples of how much better life was because citizens were just trusted to do the right thing without any enforcement, and wondered how we can get people in the United States to be more trusting. I thought it very telling that he never once asked how to get people in the United States to be more trustworthy.

What I find especially interesting about this is that it’s an inversion from, approximately, ever serious classical view of virtue and its effects that you can find in any culture, at any time. Trust is a choice that other people make, and therefore you cannot control it. Trustworthiness, however, is entirely within your control, and therefore is the only thing to worry about. A man should strive, always, to be trustworthy. At the same time, he should never demand that people trust him, for how can anyone but him know that he is trustworthy? Thus the trustworthy man should always be willing to give guarantees, to give proofs of what he says, and in general to require as little trust from others as possible. To not require trust from others in no way diminishes his trustworthiness, so he is in no way the loser. A trustworthy man may accept when other decline to take his collateral, or to look up his proofs, because they trust him. A trustworthy man would not demand it, though.

This is especially true when the trustworthy man is dealing with a stranger. Since the trustworthy man goes to the trouble of being worthy of trust, he knows what signs there are that he is trustworthy, and therefore knows that the stranger has not seen any evidence of his trustworthiness.

This modern obsession with being trusted without first being trustworthy is indicative, I think, of how utterly childish moderns tend to be. It arises from wanting benefits without having put in the work. It wants benefits without putting in the work because it fails to consider things from anyone else’s perspective. It doesn’t really take the existence of the rest of the world seriously. This is excusable in a child because they simply don’t know enough about the world to take it seriously, in the sense of being able to consider how it works in their absence. An adult, however, should know that there are real consequences if the people who ride a train do not pay for tickets to ride it.

Perhaps the great problem of our time is that so few people grow up, not even late.

The one good thing to say about that is that people who have not grown up when they should have still have the ability to grow up. It’s not as good as doing it when they should have, of course, but they do still have the ability. Which means that the trick is figuring out how to help them actually do it.

(Curiously, though it does not bear on the main point, a Swedish friend said that not checking the validity of your ticket is only in Stockholm, the rest of Sweden verifies your ticket.)