bcbrown

Have you tried barkeeper's friend with a nylon scrubbie or steel wool? I've found that to be excellent, if labor-intensive, at returning stainless steel to like-new condition, even when dealing with oily residue that's been baked at 500 degrees.

I'd question that definition of "pristine". The old-growth temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, have only existed for about 10-12,000 years; that's about how long it's been since the entire area was covered by an ice sheet.

> But how much chance is there that the user actually typed Revlon with a capital R? I think practically nil.

Uh.......

You might want to spend a second researching what "Revlon" is before speculating like this. I'm 100% positive that they actually typed Revlon with a capital R, because I know what Revlon is, and it's completely topical and contextual. It's very well known in certain circles, much like Chevron, Howey, and Brandenburg.

A quick search for e.g. "Revlon legal standard" will clear that up.

You can read for enjoyment and you can read for self-improvement; either is fine by me as long as you aren't deceiving yourself. Imbuing a recreational activity with moral heft can devalue both recreation and morality, and I think that's one component of the tension the author of the article is wrestling with.

I was curious how one gamifies the printed page, and it turns out this article isn't so much about books as it is social media. Turns out, if you interview people who are obsessive about social media, you end up interviewing some pretty strange people:

> Internet culture reporter Kelsey Weekman was inspired by bloggers like Emma to “become a book person.” She’d read a few dozen buzzy books between 2017 and 2021. But in 2022, she tore through 390. By mid-May, she’d already made it to 200. She achieves such numbers by reading some six hours daily — before work, on her lunch break, as soon as she clocks out. “I’m a binge reader. Very obsessive, very intense. The same mindset that I used to have towards scrolling on the internet, I’ve replaced with books,” Weekman says.

> I don’t want to lose the experience of reading a book I’d never heard of but found on a stoop, or rereading a book even if it doesn’t count toward an annual goal. I don’t want every book I read to be a mappable point in the fated conception of me and what other things I might like (to buy).

> Perhaps I should try something: read a good, random book and tell no one.

Writing an essay about how you are disenchanted with your habit of using social media for performative reading, and ending by declaring you're going to read a book non-performatively, well, seems seems a little superfluous to the stated goal. You can just skip writing the essay and just read a book.

I don't doubt this person's experience, and perhaps this essay will give other people with similar feelings a useful nudge towards introspection towards the conflict between stated and unstated reasons for reading books, but reading this made me feel sympathethically icky.

And if someone wants a non-gamified source of inspiration for books to read, I cannot recommend highly enough a subscription to a literary review, like the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books.

Trading insults back and forth isn't going to be very conducive to a productive discussion. Why don't you tell me a little about your theory of moral values in cultural expression and consumption and I'll tell you a little about mine?

My instinctual position is that one's character (moral, aesthetic, civil, political, emotional, etec) is strongly influenced by the cultural media one encounters. I think encountering the wide range of human emotions and contexts available in fictional literature makes one more resilient when faced with adversity, and better able to make an informed decision that will lead constructively towards one's desired outcome. I also don't think literature is the only way to be exposed to that range of emotions and contexts.

I think the shift from interacting with a predominantly printed media to an interactive/hypertextual media has been a net negative for society, although I'd struggle to define the exact metric on which it's a net negative. I think the impact on attention span would be one of those negative impacts, but I'm aware of no hard evidence of such an impact, and would ask citations if someone made such a claim in debate. I've witnessed friends and loved ones, through their habits of interaction with online media, end up in a worse place than they would were it not for online media.

I have a handful of friends with whom I exchange books and book recommendations, and I've noticed and been saddened by noticing that most of what I get recommended is somewhat pulpy sci-fi and fantasy, and while I recommend my share of that I also recommend a lot of books with, for lack of a better phrase, more "aesthetic value". Some of the books I've been pushing on people in the past few years, with varying success, include: A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, The Great Gatsby, Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, (v.) by Anastacia-Renee, and Winter Mythologies and Abbots by Pierre Michon. They're all excellent books!

But you're right, I am somewhat of a moral relativist. I think it's very hard to objectively compare different cultural values or cultural habits of media interaction. I think it's easy to fool oneself that one's personal preferences are morally superior to one's personal dislikes, and I'm fairly hesitant to listen to someone propound on that topic without seeing evidence of some fairly rigorous introspection and attempts to overcome those inherent, inevitable biases.

That's some pretentious bullshit. Sneering at others because their cultural tastes don't match yours does nothing but help you feel superior to others for a few moments. And I say this as someone who reads a lot of fiction, subscribes to a literary review, and treasures my library of printed books.

This is something I didn't fully understand until I was hired into a position of a formal role model - principal engineer on a new team of fairly junior engineers. My manager had several conversations with me to drill into me that I now had to keep in mind the power of my example in behavior for the team. It's not that I was a bad role model, just that it wasn't always front-of-mind for me.

I think it's easy-ish to get promoted to Senior based on your personality and inclinations that lend themselves to being a "natural" role model; moderate deficiencies can easily be glossed over as long as there's enough compensatory strengths, and you aren't expected to be perfect. But once you start to become a role model - formal or informal - you gain a new job responsibility: consistently demonstrate the culture of professionalism and courtesy the company wishes to inculcate. Because your actions will be emulated, for better or worse.

When you're using shaped charges to turn a large metal sphere into a small metal sphere, just about everything needs a high degree of precision.

HST once gave his press badge on the Muskie campaign train in Florida to a random miscreant he met while out drinking[0], who then the next day went on to terrorize everyone on the train, ordering things at the press bar like a "triple Gin Buck without the Buck", manhandling reporters and the campaign cheerleader girls. At a whistle-stop speech, he stood in the front, heckled Muskie, grabbing his leg and yelling for more gin. He did a lot more than just "go to places and let people talk.". I think a lot of his genius for reporting came from how he involved himself in the lives of those he wrote about, combined with a rare knack for words and dedication to the craft of writing.

[0] Described by HST as "I listened for a moment and recognized the Neal Cassady speed-booze-acid rap - a wild combination of menace, madness, genius, and fragmented coherence that wreaks havoc on the mind of any listener... so I knew we had no choice but to take this man along with us... he had that rare weird electricity about him - that extremely wild & heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving 'normally'."

I love QED! That was recommended to me by the professor who caused me to change majors from EE to physics. I just looked for it on my bookshelves but I must have misplaced it somewhere in the intervening two decades.

I understand what you're saying, and don't disagree that the quantum electrodynamics treatment is a theoretical model that can describe optical phenomena, but I guess I'm a little nonplussed when you compare tidal theory to optical theory.

Newton's theory of tides was incorrect; it does not accurately predict tidal phenomena[0]. Using classical EM field theory with refractive indices and ratios of c is not incorrect; it gives accurate predictions of optical phenomena at the macroscopic scale. It's certainly incomplete, but not inaccurate.

I think the disconnect might be that when studying physics, it gets drilled into you over and over that no model is right or wrong, just applicable or inapplicable to a given situation. For example, here's a passage in Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics:

"In fact, when you stop to think about it, the electric field inside matter must be fantastically complicated, on the microscopic level. If you happen to be very near an electron, the field is gigantic, whereas a short distance away it may be small or point in a totally different direction. Moreover, an instant later, as the atoms move about, the field will have altered entirely. This true microscopic field would be utterly impossible to calculate, nor would it be of much interest if you could. Just as, for macroscopic purposes, we regard water as a continuous field, ignoring its molecular structure, so also we can ignore the microscopic bumps and wrinkles in the electric field inside matter, and concentrate on the macroscopic field. This is defined as the average field over regions large enough to contain many thousands of atoms (so that the uninteresting microscopic fluctuations are smoothed over), and yet small enough to ensure that we do not wash out any significant large-scale variations in the field. Ordinarily, the macroscopic field is what people mean when they speak of "the" field inside matter. (In case the introduction of the macroscopic field sounds suspicious to you, let me point out that you do exactly the same averaging whenever you speak of "the" field inside matter.)"

So I guess I'm saying that the physical intuition and mental models used to work with classical EM field theory are different fom those used to work with quantum theories is just part of what it means to be a physicist.

Anyway, I'm glad you're so excited about physics! If you liked QED, you might be interested in Schroedinger's "What is Life?", where he takes his experience from quantum physics to speculate on how the information-theoretical requirements of genetic inheritance in reproduction implies the existence of some sort of "aperiodic crystal" that encodes genetic information, decades before Crick & Watson discovered DNA. It's written for the layman, although it's not as readable as Feynman (although he's in a class of his own when it comes to scientific explanations).

Also, thanks for your original comment, because it gave me an opportunity to pull out some of my old textbooks and leaf through them for a while.

[0] My mental model of tidal phenomena corresponded to Newton's theory, so I found it fascinating how incomplete and inaccurate it is, prompting a long diversion down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole, to the point that I'm now considering giving a short lecture on tides at my birthday party in a couple weeks.

I'm looking at Griffiths right now, and 9.3 Electromagnetic Waves in Matter states (emphasis in the original): "Since [the dielectric constant] is almost always greater than 1, light travels more slowly through matter - a fact that is well known from optics."

I'm still confused. How is it an inaccurate simplification to state that the speed of light in glass is lower than in a vacuum?