Random Thoughts XIV: Pizza, Pomegranate Juice, and Shreddies

[Narz]

I see no reason why me doing my voting, banking and shopping online deprives me of community. I do not make any meaningful human interactions while doing those things. I get far more meaningful human interaction online than anything I got while voting, banking and shopping in person.

My mind goes to an ancient bazaar, a cornucopia of not only goods but also social interfacing with the community.

Compare that to shopping on Amazon at 2am in your underpants, scrolling halfheartedly thru fake reviews of electric toothbrushes and then buying the 2nd cheapest one instead of bantering with local vendors, learning the latest gossip of your town, imbibing the mood of the village instead of checking your news feed to get a feel of how you're supposed to feel.

Not disparaging online shopping wholesale. I like the variety and not having to drive to a shop and walk around. I think Amazon is an improvement over the 1990s shopping mall.

I think the reason we jumped so readily online in the late 90s, early 2000s is because our communities were already in deep decline and the internet promised to be a more engaging and interactive alternative to TV and radio (which it still is but it's also more addictive precisely because it gives you a little bit more than those mediums but still 1000x less, from a sensory, animal perspective, than an actual 'chat room' of friends).

Voting and banking these days are pretty boring yeah, standing in line of your phone waiting to cash a check or cast a vote vs clicking a button but I imagine said experience a couple hundred years ago was more engaging, you might even decide to change your vote via a conversation in line as you might learn more in half hour of conversation than you did leading up to the election.

Milling around a typical suburb or even city your fellow citizens are fairly useless to you except maybe a select few who you may be able to do business with, become friends with or f***. Why bother talking to the man on the street about politics or how the restaurant nearby is when you can Google it without the risk of the potential awkwardness of an annoying fellow human being (or being the annoying human yourself).

And it's a vicious cycle, the more we avoid each other the more awkward we become.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I think the reason we jumped so readily online in the late 90s, early 2000s is because our communities were already in deep decline

Bowling Alone, the classic diagnosis of this problem, was published in 2000.

But for all that, I'm making do with my CFC buddies.

 

[Narz]

Bowling Alone, the classic diagnosis of this problem, was published in 2000.

But for all that, I'm making do with my CFC buddies.

 

[Sommerswerd]

I so hate communicating by image. I am answering to this:

Spoiler Bits of article :

I see no reason why me doing my voting, banking and shopping online deprives me of community. I do not make any meaningful human interactions while doing those things. I get far more meaningful human interaction online than anything I got while voting, banking and shopping in person.

Work is a whole different thing, and the lack of human contact from work from home is significant.

Yeah, I do. I googled, and precedent was the closest I could find

Skimming the papers referencing that, I came across this:

Sometimes reliance on a computer system rather than human judgment becomes “institutionalized” in the sense that an organization’s management and the legal system can exert strong pressure on individual professionals or employees to do what the computer says.

That could never happen resulting in the world blue screening...

I can see where he is coming from. On some level, all of those hundreds of micro encounters are part of what create a sense of community. Those little meaningless interactions with the nice old lady checking you in at your polling place, or the thousands of little "hello, welcome to Krogers, would you like a bag, thank you very much, have a nice day"s can really add up over the months, years, decades. They seem so small, so mundane, so meaningless... the "Oh I really like your pendant/sweater/shoes" interactions with the cashier, the hundreds of "smiles and is there anything else I can help you with"s at the bank from a friendly, civil voice. Just the basic acknowledgement from one human being to another that you exist... the warm genuine look in a happy person's eyes as they interact with you, cancelling out the disgust, disdain or dismissiveness towards you by someone else earlier in the day.

Of course the major relationships that you have on a regular, ongoing basis are the real pillars of your personal community, but I can see the perspective that the small interactions have meaning that fill in the blanks and gaps... a society going increasingly without those small interactions is certainly missing something. I can imagine that its at least possible that a society/community is not necessarily worse without those micro-contacts/interactions, but at a minimum, its different.

 

[Farm Boy]

A 20 something cashier at the grocery store last week chatted me up more than she needed to, complimented my mustache, and absolutely made my afternoon.

It'd been a while.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Show us your mustache!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I can see where he is coming from. On some level, all of those hundreds of micro encounters are part of what create a sense of community. Those little meaningless interactions with the nice old lady checking you in at your polling place, or the thousands of little "hello, welcome to Krogers, would you like a bag, thank you very much, have a nice day"s can really add up over the months, years, decades. They seem so small, so mundane, so meaningless... the "Oh I really like your pendant/sweater/shoes" interactions with the cashier, the hundreds of "smiles and is there anything else I can help you with"s at the bank from a friendly, civil voice. Just the basic acknowledgement from one human being to another that you exist... the warm genuine look in a happy person's eyes as they interact with you, cancelling out the disgust, disdain or dismissiveness towards you by someone else earlier in the day.

Of course the major relationships that you have on a regular, ongoing basis are the real pillars of your personal community, but I can see the perspective that the small interactions have meaning that fill in the blanks and gaps... a society going increasingly without those small interactions is certainly missing something. I can imagine that its at least possible that a society/community is not necessarily worse without those micro-contacts/interactions, but at a minimum, its different.

I don't socialize much with the people in the building here, partly because most of them don't stay beyond a year. The guy across the hall is the only one I've talked to much, since we tend to run into each other in the hallway, to or from the laundry room, he lets me know when the Canada Post driver has come, and one day he knocked on the door and asked, "Is this your cat?"

No, it wasn't. Maddy was snoozing in the apartment. The cat at my door was a fluffy orange tabby who took himself for a walk, trying to find his former human and it turns out I'm not his former human. So I had to do a bit of detective work to figure out where the cat really belonged, and ended up giving him a ride on my walker (couldn't carry him and use my canes; he was not a light cat). He was friendly, though, and tried to come into the apartment.

And then Maddy woke up and said NO. NO MORE CATS WHO AREN'T ME. GTFO NOW!

 

[Farm Boy]

Show us your mustache!

Skuzzy version activated. Not going to shave or wax it up today.

 

[The_J]

I'm thinking about making a poll to see if couches or dolphins are sexier, but I am actually not that interested in American politics .

 

[Farm Boy]

Tucker Carlson might say Vaporean...

 

[Kyriakos]

Was reading on babylonian math, and here is an interesting and revealing example of how it was:

This babylonian calculation for a root of a second degree equation, was the inscribed case of (obviously they used other symbols) x^2-x=870. The babylonian writer gives the result to be 30, which is one of the two roots.
How they went about it is explained in the tablet; we follow instructions to divide 1 by 2 ("1" here stands for the coefficient of x; they didn't incorporate the negative), then multiply the result by itself (=>1/4), then add that to 870. From arithmetic calculations they knew that (870 +1/4) was the square of (29 +1/2). The final step was to add 1/2 (from step one) to that, and arrive at 30.
Thus the formula of the babylonians can be written as -b/2+1/2(sqr b^2-4c), which only works as long as the coefficient of x^2 is 1, and won't produce non-positive roots, moreover it will only produce the arithmetically larger of the non-negative roots (eg if you try it for x^2-3x+2, you won't ever get x=1 as root).

 

[warpus]

If every square is a rectangle and it's hip to be square, and e=mc squared, if you get a hip replacement does that make you mc rect angle

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

This is the weirdest thing I've read in a while

Capitol Hill mystery soda machine - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[r16]

seattle . Rainy capitol of Grunge and like Boeing with many attendant foreign dignitaries .

 

[EgonSpengler]

This is the weirdest thing I've read in a while

Capitol Hill mystery soda machine - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

I'm reminded of the Bristol Zoo 'phantom parking attendant', which was likely an urban myth. According to the story, a man worked the parking lot of the Bristol Zoo for nearly 20 years collected small fees from visitors and directed them to open spaces. Zoo employees thought he worked for the local council; the town assumed he was a zoo employee. Everyone said he was super-friendly and when he suddenly disappeared one day, regular visitors asked after him, thinking perhaps he'd retired or something. The thinking now is that the story was never true, or that it was an 'April Fool's' prank gone awry, or may have arisen from a misunderstanding on hearing that people did sometimes serve as unofficial attendants decades ago. In 2021, The Sun quoted someone from the local Downs Committee: “There is truth behind the myth of Bristol’s phantom zoo parking attendant. For almost thirty years, from 1958 until the mid-1980s, and quite likely for 30 years before that, people were able to make their living as parking attendants, collecting ‘voluntary’ donations from motorists parking on rough ground outside the zoo. It is unlikely that anyone made a fortune, and from 1958 onwards attendants were authorised either by the Downs Committee or, from 1983, the zoo (probably – that is when confusion may have arisen)."

It was a bummer to learn it's probably not true. I liked that story.

 

[warpus]

Shouldn't the opposite of a contractor be called a protractor?

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

always funny when the site starts predicting the future

 

[Narz]

Some guy I was chatting with on FB was promoting grounding which I thought was hippie BS but it turns out to have been studied a bit with some promise

The effects of grounding (earthing) on inflammation, the immune response, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases

Multi-disciplinary research has revealed that electrically conductive contact of the human body with the surface of the Earth (grounding or earthing) produces intriguing effects on physiology and health. Such effects relate to inflammation, immune responses, ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[The_J]

always funny when the site starts predicting the future

View attachment 698003

I swear to you, we will never forbid you to wear a mini-skirt while posting here on CFC.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

I swear to you, we will never forbid you to wear a mini-skirt while posting here on CFC.

It's not the miniskirt it's the timestamp

though I appreciate the permission to wear one