> Today, [young people] like to spend time with the smartphone; they even take it to bed when they go to sleep.
Recently my parents (in their mid-60ies) were visiting us. At some point I realized that both of them had been quietly sitting at our dinner table for over on hour, eyes glued on their smartphones. They are massively addicted. I have noticed that they get nervous as soon as the smartphone is out of reach, or even in silent mode. They mostly talk to friends via Whatsapp and are in constant fear that they miss out on something or that these friends (which also seem to spend most of their days on Whatsapp) will be offended if they don't reply within 5 minutes to the latest Whatsapp trivia. It is quite a struggle to even get them to turn off their phones when we are having dinner. The Whatsapp messages just keep coming in. My wife recently learned that her mother mostly spends her evenings with posting photos of her life on social media, and broke off contact with her brothers for a few days because they failed to quickly and enthusiastically react to some photos she posted on a family Whatsapp group.
But I guess for Anna Possi, our parents are "young people" and could be her grandchildren...
I feel like she's comparing the young people she sees today with the young people she saw 20/30/40/50 years ago. Not today's young people with today's older people. As you point out - people in their 50's/60's tend to be addicted to their phones too and in my experience have even less etiquette when in public or company.
And it's probably notable bc youth is marked by the energy and spirit you have that becomes hard to maintain as your body grows old and weary. Old people swapped reading and knitting and cards and yapping for smartphones, while the youth swapped dancing and singing and meeting new people for smartphones.
I agree with you, the infection hit quite a lot of older people very hard as well. I have problem getting some 40somethings to meet in person, even in professional contexts, they are just so soaked in a WhatsApp maelström of utterly irrelevant messages that they are conditioned to answer NOW!
That said, the core of the message should not be judgments between the young and the old, but the problem that we have introduced digital fentanyl into our pockets.
You're right, as is your parent comment, in saying that this isn't something only the young suffer from. In fact it's everywhere; the people with the worst smartphone addictions near me personally are an 11 year old and a 70 year old...
That said the message, when taken as a general progression between how life was then and how it is now, stands.
The same thing happened with TV in the 80s/90s. It will eventually fix itself, Gen Alfa will grow tired of smartphones when they will be in their thirties, I'm pretty sure.
(that doesn't mean that there should not be active campaigning to point out the risks of smartphone addiction)
TV use was higher in the 2000s than it was in the 1980s/1990s. TV viewing hours steadily rose from 1949 until finally peaking in 2010.[1]
But when TV finally peaked in 2010, did overall screen time go down? No. It kept going up.[2] Obviously, this is when the masses went all-in on smartphones, social media, and the internet.
Screen usage basically never went down. It has only gone up.
So I only see anyone getting tired of smartphones and actually using them less if they've found something more addictive to replace them.
You have a good point I overlooked, thanks for the correction. I actually missed the "TV was just displaced" angle, which makes sense both statistically and anecdotally, if I think about family and friends.
TV also had a social aspect that internet does not have by construction: You had the same program on only a few TV channels and this was funneling people to talk about similar things or have discussions about the previous day show.
These things rarely happen organically anymore unless "forced" in one way or the other...
A friend of mine's kid (maybe 10 years ago) started crying when he watched regular TV for the first time. He literally thought the TV was broken when the commercials came on with the volume cranked up.
It's the same now with fb and these other old format social media sites. People just stop doing it. With that said I literally think fb will be with us for another 50 years as the people who are still on there are great marks and they won't be leaving until they 'age out'.
It seems we (America) are in some kind of “middle”, or at least a phase change in a larger wave of the addiction cycle, with different stages affecting different generations and countries based on arrival of what can be described as the addiction dealers, “Big American social media”. It reminds me of the effects of the crack epidemic rippling through different generations differently from the late 70s to this very day still.
I don’t have hard data to substantiate it and my theory is based on anecdotal conversations but it seems, e.g., where there is some recovery going on amidst something like American millennials, who have both dealt with their own addiction and were the first generation that is also dealing with the neglect of addicted parents, they are also to some degree recovering (“reparenting” themselves), to some degree probably also spurred on by realizations shot the deleterious effects of phones and SM that come from exhaustion and different life stages. On the other hand, other generations of Americans, like those now elderly parents of millennials, not only are still, but increasing number of them are entering the earlier stages of “phone addiction” (which encompasses many different things), with the most tragic part being that they are in the latter quarter of their life and are unlikely to even realize, let alone recover from the addiction.
I also see this cycle and these stages emerging in other western societies in particular. My theory is that it is a particular effect or amplifier of the underlying culture to some degree, i.e., adoption, degree, impacts. It seems particularly pernicious in America because the underlying culture (if you can call it that, after decades of it being poisoned and corrupted by corporations and the government) was and is fertile ground for the societal rot caused by social media and its amplifier, smart phones, to have taken hold and spread like the virus it is.
It was even all described as “viral”, and yet we still engaged in it as if unfamiliar and investigated viruses spreading in an uncontrolled manner are a perfectly acceptable thing that should not even give anyone pause, especially if money can be made, regardless of whether it is something like HIV, with a very long lead-time, a delayed ETA for the reaper.
What happens now that we are in some kind of middle stage of the “smartphone“/Social Media civilization wildfire, with the first to have been affected looking over the devastation it has left in their wake, Shell shocked by the neglect and destruction, as the inferno is still raging on off in the distance as it consumes their parents and new generations, and even toppling whole countries through the “Color Revolution” playbook?
English has ae in Maelstrom but the contemporary word in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian is Malstrøm/Malström. I wonder when it lost it's ae, I see Mahlströmn from 1698, reading the etymology it says dutch but I wonder if they just wrote it down first. Everything about the sea is always filled with mythology.
I think social media needs a less poetic word though.
I would say that the ae comes from Dutch, it was the way the open a sound used to be spelled before it became aa (maalstroom). You can still see it in place names (Aerdenhout which is pronounced Aardenhout).
It never had the ae in swedish and danish. Its from male/mala, to grind or to mill. English somehow changed it to ae, maybe through dutch where its maalstroom.
The OED agrees about the Dutch idea, giving the etymology as:
"early modern Dutch maelstrom (now maalstroom) whirlpool < malen to grind, to whirl round (compare meal n.1) + stroom stream n"
and also thinks Dutch is the origin, with Swedish/Danish etc taking it from Dutch too:
"The use of maelstrom as a proper name (also in French) seems to come from Dutch maps, e.g. that in Mercator's Atlas (1595). There is little doubt that the word is native to Dutch (compare synonymous German regional (Low German) Maling). It is true that it is found in all the modern Scandinavian languages as a common noun, but in them it is purely literary, and likely to have been adopted from Dutch."
Yes, it seems to be everywhere. Like an epidemic. When I pick up my daughter from school, I have to wait outside the entrance for about 10 minutes with other adult parents. Nine out of ten parents just stare at their smartphones and don't even look at me. In the past, people would have started a conversation out of boredom and gotten to know each other. We are really losing so much.
In the context of the above posts, which is young people eschewing dancing in favor of using smartphones, old is an adult that is expected to behave at or near peak maturity compared to a younger person whose is just coming into their own (presumably 20s).
My parents were like that, in a different way. They couldn’t sit in a room without a tv on, even if they had visitors and everyone was talking and not paying attention to the TV. Living room TV was on at least 16 hours a day, just about every day, I bet. So weird. Also had TVs in every bedroom, including rarely-used spare bedrooms. Like they had six TVs in their house at peak. WTF.
(Actually, my in-laws also do the TV thing, or else a laptop playing YouTube trash… plus phones)
Weeds on the lawn: just use a lawnmower each week, the grass will usually handle being cut on a weekly basis much better than any weed.
Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2 days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.
Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0], which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water. Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of 10cm completely underground. The joke in my family is that it could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it: "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."
You can also use just heat. Like a long propane torch or one of the newer electric infrared ones. It doesn't need a lot of heat, a short burn (like a bit less than a second) is perfectly sufficient to make them wilt within a few days.
Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere, with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll despair and do nothing.
Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works wonders.
Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public contracts (pre-germination).
Thank you for making my morning coffee, consumed while looking down on downtown San Francisco, presently chock full of "AI" weeds, substantially more entertaining.
I've burned them before. It's pretty effective if you understand the true goal. Despite the name you do *not* want to actually burn the weed! Burning the weed is no better than cutting off the part you burned--which obviously doesn't work very well. The objective is to give as much as possible of the weed a light singe--it takes a bit of experience to even see anything. The weed spends all it's energy healing the damage and dies.
Unless you mow your grass too low. Always assume the old rule of "your grass reaches just as far underground as it reaches up in the air" still holds.
Also if you mow your grass drastically shorter or you let it grow for a long time before mowing, do not fail to fertilize it from above right or soon after, start aggressively plucking the leaves of weeds (or other selective methods of fighting them) for a few weeks and (optimally, but highly recommended) verticulate it no sooner than 1 week after cutting. Also time it well to grant your lawn at least 3 weeks of ideal growing weather and climate (It won't die because of a week or two of awful weather, but you'll have A LOT more work fighting weeds ahead of yourself).
I don't understand. What we call "weeds" are plants that evolved to grow quickly and spread quickly. Many gave segmented stems/leaves to resist core damage from cuts and pulls.
I will hate the ground elder as long as I live (but did manage to eradicate it from our garden thru hard work, only to see it spring back up in our neighbor's yard, it's their problem (for) now).
> Fever is used by organisms as diverse as fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals (see for reference Basu and Srivastava, 2003). Since fever is metabolically expensive, it must provide substantial advantage to the host. Surprisingly little is known about immunological effects mediated by fever, a lack of understanding that might be attributable in part to the common ignorance in clinical practice with respect to benefits fever might provide. Post-operative infections can be prolong survival: patients developing empyema after lung cancer
surgery have improved 5-year survival (50% (n = 18) vs 22%
(n = 411)) (Ruckdeschel et al, 1972). In this light, it seems
unfortunate that fever is usually suppressed in hospital routine.
> The phenomenon of spontaneous regression and remission from cancer has been observed by many physicians and was described in hundreds of publications. However, suggestive clues on cause or trigger are sparse and not substantiated by much experimental evidence. [...] At least in a larger fraction of cases a hefty feverish infection is linked with spontaneous regression in time and is investigated as putative trigger.
> Professor Busch in 1868 introduced the infection of cancer patients by purpose as a novel strategy to treat cancer. He achieved a dramatic regression with his first patient using live Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria, the pathogen leading to erysipelas, published in the German Journal ‘Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift’ (Busch, 1868). Beginning in 1891, this strategy was exploited by Coley, who had some reading knowledge of German (Hall, 1998). Coley systematically applied Streptococcus pyogenes extracts – later called ‘Coley’s toxin’ – to cancer patients and achieved a remarkable rate of regressions. A retrospective compilation of cases considered inoperable at the time of treatment between 1891 and 1936, which was conducted by Wiemann and Starnes (1994, Table 2), determined a remission rate of 64% (108/170) and a 5-year survival rate of larger than 44%. Coley used to inject his extract once or twice a week over a period ranging from a few weeks to several months. His method became quite famous and was tested on hundreds of patients by him and contemporary physicians, but overshadowed by the development of X-ray treatment which was regarded to be much more powerful and of broader applicability.
> Since cancer is usually a slowly progressing disease with
occasionally long periods of dormancy, putative beneficial fever
effects should also precipitate as preventive efficacy. This can
indeed be found. In a cohort of 603 melanoma patients compared
to 627 population controls, an inverse correlation was found
between melanoma risk and number of recorded infections on the
one hand and between melanoma risk and fever height on the
other hand, leading to a combined reduction of melanoma risk of
about 40% for people with a history of three or more infections
with high fever above 38.51C (Koelmel et al, 1999). Mastrangelo
et al (1998) report a striking inverse correlation between the
number of infections and mortality from tumours in Italy in the
period 1890 –1960: every 2% reduction in the number of infectious diseases was followed by a 2% increase in tumours about 10 years
later.
Strongly agree. I was involved with several CS lectures in the past ~10 years that did not require a final exam, and we always did a 1:1 session between student and tutor in which the tutor asked the student detailed questions about their past exercise sheet solutions. Over the years, I estimate that I conducted about 100 of such 1:1s. It was always obvious when the students did not write the code themselves. They couldn't really explain their design process, they didn't encounter the edge cases themselves during testing, and you couldn't discuss possible improvements with them.
> Most of what schools teach is either useless or toxic
You must have a pretty broad definition of useless / toxic if you think that reading, writing and basic math, but also geometry, calculus, linear algebra, probability theory, foreign languages, a broad overview of history, and basic competency in physics / electronics fall under these categories.
Sure, I learned a lot in school that turned out to be pretty useless for me (chemistry, basically anything I learned in PE, french), but I did not know that at the time and I am still grateful that I was being exposed to these topics. Some of my classmates developed successful careers from these early exposures.
I was generalising of course, but that was my experience. My god daughter came out of school barely able to read or write. Others I know just remember being bullied by teachers.
Out of that list you mention there (from my personal experience), we were never taught calculus, linear algebra or probability theory. The maths was very basic and uninspiring. The foreign language teaching was next to useless. (I learnt more in six months learning German after high school than six years of French in high school.) The science teaching was okay. The history teaching was appalling (I do like history but we were taught it in such a dull fashion, and from only one or two angles.)
It would have been useful for me to learn basic cookery, how to open a bank account and so on. Sewing and clothing repair would also have been handy. We did do some carpentry and I.T. (which is obsolete, but was a useful foundation). I do use some of what I learnt in Geography class.
Against this, they tried to instill some horrible habits in us. Like they would punish all of us when one person did something wrong (and they didn't know who). I saw that across multiple schools, and I still resent it. There was also the notion that we should obey teachers without question and accept everything they say (and they were frequently wrong). In my last school, you either went straight into university or the military but at that point in life neither was an option.
According to the German Wikipedia, he had a small electrical company which went bankrupt during the Great Depression. His original plan was to "only" paddle to Cyprus to work in a copper mine.
> Exactly a year after the attack, I left Saumlaki in a new boat, crossed to the Kei islands, and then faced the longest lap of island-hopping to New Guinea.
Indeed, looking at the map of his route, the longest distance he had to actually travel on open sea seems to be around 120 km from the Kei islands to Papua New Guinea [0], which is (at least for me) completely counter-intuitive for a Kayak voyage from Ulm to Australia.
Physics is a "Real Science". It deals with reality. Math is a structural science. It deals with the structure of thinking. These structures do not have to exist. They can exist, but they don't have to. That's a fundamental difference. The translation of mathematical concepts to reality is highly critical, I would say. You cannot just translate it directly, because this leads to such strange questions like "what would happen if we take the law of gravitation by old Newton and let r^2 go to zero?". Well, you can't! Because Heisenberg is standing down there.
Math is a purely logical tool. None of it "exists." That makes no sense. Some of it can be used to model reality. We call such math "physics." And I think physics is significantly closer to math than to reality. It's just a collection of math that models some measurements on some scales with some precision. We have no idea how close we are to actual reality.
I do not understand the framing of "translating math concepts directly into reality." It's backwards. You must have first chosen some math to model reality. If you get "bad" numbers it has nothing to do with translating math to reality. It has to do with how you translated reality into math.
I think maybe I didn’t really explain myself properly. I didn’t mean that math is real in the sense that atoms are real. Perhaps “true” would be a better word. We know these things are true to us, but are they universally true? If that’s even a thing? Hope that makes more sense.
Mathematics is a philosophy that focuses on the study of logic. It's a bit of an exaggeration to conflate mathematics with 'truth' in an absolute, universal sense.
Mathematical 'truths' are themselves only true in the sense that they can be derived from axioms.
The fact that mathematics can be used to understand the world around us is nothing short of a mystery (or a miracle).
reply