- Two items about reality;
- Then items about toxic masculinity and Trump, Elon Musk stifling news, and brief items.
Let’s begin by noting a couple interesting things about reality, one from a hundred years ago, one new.
AlterNet, via The Conversation, 22 Nov 2024: It’s been 100 years since we learned the Milky Way is not the only galaxy
Of course, most people don’t actually understand what a galaxy actually is — since references in pop science fiction (mostly movies) confuse galaxy with nebula or star or solar system — but this item notes a significant point in the understanding by scientists of humanity’s place in the actual universe.
On Sunday November 23 1924, 100 years ago this month, readers perusing page six of the New York Times would have found an intriguing article, amid several large adverts for fur coats. The headline read: Finds Spiral Nebulae are Stellar Systems: “Dr Hubbell Confirms View That They Are ‘Island Universes’; Similar to Our Own”.
The American astronomer at the centre of the article, Dr Edwin Powell Hubble, was probably bemused by the misspelling of his name. But the story detailed a groundbreaking discovery: Hubble had found that two spiral-shaped nebulae, objects made up of gas and stars, which were previously thought to reside within our Milky Way galaxy, were located outside it.
This was one in a long series of what Carl Sagan called a series of “demotions” (see here) from humanity’s presumption that it lay at the center of creation. Not only was Earth not the center; not only was the sun not the center; not only was our galaxy (only vaguely understood 100 years ago) not the center. There were in fact other galaxies.
These objects were actually the Andromeda and Messier 33 galaxies, the closest large galaxies to our Milky Way. Today, up to several trillion galaxies are estimated to fill the Universe, based on observations of tens of millions of galaxies.
The essay goes on with a history of how stellar distances were measured, and size of our own galaxy was measured. These are stages in the history of science that have changed humanity’s perspective from the ancient tribal dwellers who knew the world only to the horizon… to what we understand now about the vastness of the universe, and our tiny place in it.
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A new shape! What is a shape? That’s what topology is about.
Scientific American, Elise Cutts, 19 Nov 2024: Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All over Nature, subtitled “Mathematicians have found a new kind of shape with connections to nature and art”
This is the kind of thing I’m fascinated by because it reveals the limitation of human “common sense.” Systematic investigation (i.e. science) keeps discovering new things.
Although soft cells hadn’t been categorized by mathematicians before—no one had noticed or named them in an academic paper—they abound in art and nature, from the architecture of Zaha Hadid, “Queen of the Curve,” to the forms of zebra stripes. Krisztina Regős, Domokos’s graduate student, found the first natural 3D soft cell tucked away in the chambers of the nautilus shell, an object that’s become iconic for showcasing the convergence of math and biology. “They were in front of our eyes the whole time,” Regős says. This connection to such a famous shape led Domokos to fear that his group would be scooped. He swore his collaborators to secrecy until their discovery was ready to be published. (It came out in September.) At the end of his lesson over pizza, he even took the paper menu, folded it up and pocketed it. Just to be safe.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that soft cells exist, says mathematician Joseph O’Rourke of Smith College, who wasn’t involved in the study. But to think to ask such a question, “to even imagine that you can tile space with no vertices,” he says, is original. “I found that quite surprising and very clever.”
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And here’s what mundane reality is about.
Robert Reich, 26 Nov 24: Trump’s testosterone-poisoned picks, subtitled “Toxic masculinity is all about male dominance and female subservience. It is closely allied to fascism.”
(Needless to say, “toxic masculinity” is all about base human nature and the retreat from the empathetic, civilized instincts it will take for a worldwide species to long endure.)
Reich lists a number of “dots” (bullet-pointed items), concerning Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr, Elon Musk, Trump himself and that infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, Hulk Hogan at the RNC, antipathy toward transgender people, JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and others.
What’s the connection?
Disdain of women, a belief that they exist for male pleasure and reproduction, and fear of non-standard forms of gender identity and sexual orientation.
All are deeply embedded in Trumpism.
And in neofascism.
Seen through this prism, Trump’s appointment of many men charged with sexual harassment, men who believe women should not be in combat and should be mothers, and men who oppose abortion and believe women should be forced to have babies even if they don’t want them, forms a coherent neofascist belief system.
The basic tenet is male dominance and female subservience.
I was reviewing my notes on that Prothero book (here) and wondered if his thesis will survive the new Trump regime. (That is, conservatives fight change as it inevitably happens, meaning that liberals actually win the cultural wars. Because you can’t undo inevitable change.) I’m guessing it will, though what with this worldwide trend toward authoritarianism, perhaps we can’t be sure. *Eventually*… but maybe only after a painful two steps back.
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The first thing authoritarians do, we’ve read, is take control of the press.
Slate, Alex Kirshner, 26 Nov 24: Elon Musk Just Turned Twitter Into the Internet’s Dead End, subtitled “He says he wants to stop ‘lazy linking.’ The truth is, he wants to keep you trapped on X forever.”
(Why should he care about, or think he needs to control, “lazy thinking”??)
What’s happening is that Musk is making it more difficult to share actual news on X, his platform, formerly Twitter.
He has made X a platform where it is more or less impossible to find ordinary, informative news without fighting through a deluge of viral engagement bait, unattributed or unverified headlines designed to get reposts, and outright falsehoods meant to gin up engagement. He is one of the biggest enemies of the accurate exchange of information that the internet has ever seen.
… Musk is the richest man in the world and is now closer to literally owning the U.S. government than any private citizen has ever been, but news eludes him as the one thing he doesn’t own.
… Musk confirmed this week that X limits the reach of posts with links in them. That Musk was doing that was already obvious, especially when the links were to places he didn’t like. But in a repost and exchange with tech financier Paul Graham on Sunday, Musk admitted that his platform throttles posts with links in them. “Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking,” Musk told Graham. In those few words, Musk shared a lot about his view of the internet.
At the same time, this is a ploy to keep people on his site by making it more difficult to click away.
Musk deprioritized posts with links because he doesn’t want people clicking away from X. They already weren’t clicking, but the fiction that they might click has had a magnetic pull on journalists and garden-variety influencers who see the platform as one spoke in a wheel of content distribution. These are the power users who probably shouldn’t be posting much on X but have become addicted to its dopamine supply. Will more of them leave for bluer pastures now that the man in charge has made explicit that he crushes the reach of links? If they do leave, will their followers leave with them? Why wouldn’t they?
Here’s the notion that Musk has wrecked Twitter/X to the extent that millions of people are flocking to other platforms, like BlueSky. As I’ve seen many of my Facebook friends doing.
Also — I’ve noticed that a few of my Fb friends will post an item with a headline and photo and a comment, but then put the link to the source in the comments. I thought it was because it made their posts cleaner. Maybe something else is going on.
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I should stop spending so much time paying attention to people like these. There will always be, as Prothero said, bigots and morons.
- The Atlantic, Benjamin Mazer, 14 Nov 2024: The Sanewashing of RFK Jr., subtitled “Let’s call a crank a crank.”
- Right Wing Watch, Kyle, 18 Nov 2024: The Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders Is Suddenly Concerned About False Trump Prophecies
- Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 20 Nov 2024: Texas is about to push Bible lessons in public elementary schools, subtitled “The new state-sanctioned Bluebonnet Learning curriculum would push Christian mythology on millions of kids”
- Salon, Kelly McClure, 25 Nov 2024: Kirk Cameron wants to protect children from being taught morality by “gay dinosaurs and trans ducks”, subtitled “Cameron has created a new Christian children’s show in an effort to shield kids from ‘woke’ entertainment”
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Most mornings I reread, polish, and copy-edit my post from the evening before. If this comment is still here, I have not yet done so for this post.
