Today I Learned #2: Gone for a Wiki Walk

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I'm not saying that the languages don't work well or are dysfunctional in some way. My point is that Welsh and Gaelic (plus others) are just sideline players in the world and pointing out that perhaps that is because their long words make them harder to learn, so fewer people do so. That keeps them as merely bit players. For example, Spanish is a pretty easy language to learn and not noted for its use of long words. Short simple expressions make attempts to use it easy for folks without a "language gene". Lo siento. :)

The reputation of Welsh for having lots of long words is largely untrue and based on a few place names, at least one of which was invented for tourism purposes.
There was an achievement in Civ V, "Longest Name Ever", for having a city called Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.
 
The reputation of Welsh for having lots of long words is largely untrue and based on a few place names, at least one of which was invented for tourism purposes.
There was an achievement in Civ V, "Longest Name Ever", for having a city called Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.
Imagination can be more powerful than the truth. :)
 
Imagination can be more powerful than the truth. :)
Which also applies to your earlier statement regarding the significance of languages.
 
I found some old Eaton's catalogs on my hard drive, and while going through them, TIL that petroleum oil (Vaseline?) was....used internally for constipation?

 
This book review is pretty interesting and not boring.

How to Fill A Yawning Gap

Out of My Skull

By James Danckert and John D. Eastwood

(Harvard, 273 pages, $27.95)

Is boredom really all that interesting? Thanks perhaps to the subject’s dreary durability, it has generated a considerable literature over the years. Alberto Moravia wrote an engaging novel called “Boredom,” and psychologists, philosophers and classicists have also had their say.

“Out of My Skull,” the latest work on this strangely alluring topic, has an exciting title, but nothing about the book is wild or crazy. James Danckert and John D. Eastwood, a pair of psychologists in Canada, know an awful lot about the subject (Mr. Eastwood even runs a Boredom Lab at York University), and they examine it methodically. “In our view, being bored is quite fascinating, and maybe, just maybe, it might even be helpful,” they write, echoing predecessors who find boredom salutary. “Boredom is a call to action, a signal to become more engaged. It is a push toward more meaningful and satisfying actions. It forces you to ask a consequential question: What should I do?” A taxonomy of boredom, if it’s to avoid exemplifying what it describes, ought to be simple. So let’s just say that boredom is of two kinds. The first is better known to us as ennui, and the democratization of this once-rarefied feeling is one of civilization’s triumphs. At first the preserve of aristocrats and later taken up by intellectuals, nowadays

it is available to affluent citizens everywhere. Our endless search for palliatives in the face of this affliction underpins the consumer economy. The other kind of boredom is the version that most of us get paid for. Commentators on boredom usually genuflect briefly toward factory workers, nannies and other hardworking members of the hoi polloi whose tasks can be mind-numbing. But such people live with a version of boredom that intellectuals find, well, boring. So the focus is usually on the self-important existential variety.

Such is the case with Messrs. Danckert and Eastwood, although many of their observations apply to both varieties. They note, for example, that there are four prominent factors that lead to boredom: “monotony, lack of purpose, constraint, and poor fit between our skills and the challenge of the moment.”

The fourth—that boredom results from a mismatch between skills and challenge—reflects an important insight. It turns out we get bored if work (for example) is too easy or repetitive, and we get just as bored if, having majored in English, we wander into a graduate-level presentation on particle physics. As proof, the authors cite a study in which two groups of people watched videos. One showed a mime teaching basic English vocabulary with exaggerated slowness. The other, on computer graphics, bristled with impenetrable math and charts. “In both cases,” the authors report, “people could barely endure the ordeal. Boredom levels didn’t differ.”

Messrs. Danckert and Eastwood offer a speculative account of how boredom and technology “collude,” but it’s a plausible one. “Boredom pushes us into the arms of technology so much so that we cherish it and endlessly seek to develop new and better forms of distraction. On the other hand, technology leaves us ultimately unfulfilled, ensuring boredom’s continuance.”

Technology, they suggest, may be changing how we live in ways that swaddle us ever more thickly in ennui by transforming us from “creators of meaning to passive consumers of experience—as containers to be filled rather than agentic sources of meaning.” By substituting distraction for engagement, the authors complain, the internet undermines even our ability to recognize when we’re bored. Regular consumers of pornography, for instance, seem to suffer from “sexual boredom,” as some have called it.

“Boredom is neither good nor bad,” the authors argue; what matters is how we respond to it. The main thing is to do something. They recommend “mindfulness,” whatever that is, and the pursuit of “flow,” which means getting so absorbed in a task that we lose track of time and forget ourselves. But rather than offer practical advice, the authors wax philosophical: “When we are bored, we catch a glimpse of the ultimate futility of our actions in the face of the infinity of time.”

One wonders, more prosaically, if we all made a great mistake by giving up on hobbies. Numismatics, golf and other homely pastimes were once rabbit holes in which we could lose ourselves. Such calming respite, won through engagement, contrasts with our tendency to work on ourselves at the gym or divert ourselves by bingeing on Netflix. FDR’s stamp collection allowed him to escape the burdens of Depression and war. How many of us today could do likewise?

Boredom may not be pleasant, but it can be useful—a goad to action and a reason to ask: What exactly should I be doing instead?





More important, and more difficult, would be to cultivate a larger sense of meaning and belonging. Lack of purpose is one of the authors’ four horsemen of boredom, after all, and they note that boredom and loneliness go together. Perhaps cultivating ties of kinship and community can combat both, or at least make boredom more tolerable. Parents will understand this instantly; child rearing can be quite boring at times but yields massive satisfaction, so we don’t mind so much.

It gives me no pleasure—I swear it!—to report that this new book on boredom is a bit dull. Reasonable, informative, concise—yes. But there is something pedestrian about the whole exercise. Those who can’t quite muster the authors’ enthusiasm for the topic will wish the professors had a grander sense of the absurd and a wickeder wit. On the other hand, surely it’s childish to expect to be entertained at all times. The authors aren’t vaudevillians, and they rightly imply that each of us must own our boredom. If I am left a bit bored by their earnestness, I am probably just as much at fault as they are.

Mr. Akst, a former science columnist for the Journal, writes the weekend news quiz.
 
I found some old Eaton's catalogs on my hard drive, and while going through them, TIL that petroleum oil (Vaseline?) was....used internally for constipation?


Well... I'd guess it got the job done...
 
Today I learned that it's possible to compare two documents in Microsoft Word.

I feel deprived for not already have known this.
 
I was watching a YouTube tutorial on writing, when the YouTuber came out as 'a-sexual, a romantic." I had never before heard of such a creature. :dubious: I'm still wrestling to get my ancient brain around this concept. :hammer2:

Somewhere, Chad & Jeremy are singing: :culture: I don't care what they say, I won't stay, in a world without love.:culture:
:sad:
 
I was watching a YouTube tutorial on writing, when the YouTuber came out as 'a-sexual, a romantic." I had never before heard of such a creature. :dubious:

Asexuality/aromanticity is when you don't feel sexual or romantic attraction to anyone. It sometimes goes hand-in-hand but not always.
 
I was watching a YouTube tutorial on writing, when the YouTuber came out as 'a-sexual, a romantic." I had never before heard of such a creature. :dubious: I'm still wrestling to get my ancient brain around this concept. :hammer2:

Somewhere, Chad & Jeremy are singing: :culture: I don't care what they say, I won't stay, in a world without love.:culture:
:sad:
Peter & Gordon did the original version IIRC. The two duos were almost interchangeable in any case. Great song from the 60s. :D


Link to video.
 
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TIL that Jordan Peterson gave himself brain damage pursuing dodgy Russian detox treatment for his benzodiazepine addiction.

The story goes that he had been taking benzodiazepine as an anti-anxiety medication and developed an addiction. Going cold turkey on this medication can lead to severe complications, including seizures and potentially death, so doctors recommend a very carefully manage program of reduced intake. Peterson rejected this advice, characteristically assuming that he knew better than the entire medical profession, and sought a doctor who would support cold turkey treatment. He eventually found a doctor in Russia who was willing to put him into a medical coma, which is used as a treatment for heroin addiction, but it is very much not recommended treatment for benzo addiction. This lead to Peterson incurring significant neurological damage, leaving him struggle to speak or walk, and taking a heavy course of anti-seizure medication.

And all of this apparently happened months ago. I only came across the above because, after several months of near-silence, he turned up in Serbia, of all place, where he is undergoing some sort of rehab. It makes you realise how ephemeral Peterson's status as a public intellectual was, that if he wasn't saying something unpleasant or provocative, everyone just sort of forget about him.
 
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TIL that Jordan Peterson gave himself brain damage pursuing dodgy Russian detox treatment for his benzodiazepine addiction.

The story goes that he had been taking benzodiazepine as an anti-anxiety medication and developed an addiction. Going cold turkey on this medication can lead to severe complications, including seizures and potentially death, so doctors recommend a very carefully manage program of reduced intake. Peterson rejected this advice, characteristically assuming that he knew better than the entire medical profession, and sought a doctor who would support cold turkey treatment. He eventually found a doctor in Russia who was willing to put him into a medical coma, which is used as a treatment for heroin addiction, but it is very much not recommended treatment for benzo addiction. This lead to Peterson incurring significant neurological damage, leaving him struggle to speak or walk, and taking a heavy course of anti-seizure medication.

And all of this apparently happened months ago. It makes you realise how ephemeral Peterson's status as a public intellectual was, that if he wasn't saying something unpleasant or provocative, everyone just sort of forget about him.

That's sad. I don't think he ever was a exceptional academic, but it did seem his earlier work was at least decent. But the past few years he does seem to have gone way off the rails compared to his earlier work, I kinda hope this might have been a factor in that and we may see him be more nuanced and balanced and calm down his overly devoted followers if he gets back to full health.

I remember hearing about early psychological experiments of putting people to sleep for weeks or months for often dumb and frivolous reasons not related to drug withdrawals, and got me thinking that why not try this for extreme addicts and just let them sleep through withdrawals. Guess I now know why that isn't necessarily a good idea.
 
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And naturally, that article's account of what happened differs significantly from the rest of your post.
I would be interested to know the really significant deviation. The biggest thing I can see is the article says "he went to Russia for medical treatment and ended up with significant neurological damage" and TF says "the medical treatment lead to significant neurological damage". While definitely different, not that great a leap.
 
I was referring more to what his daughter reportedly claimed was going on, rather than implying that the article itself was at fault. Quote: She said Russian doctors are not influenced by pharmaceutical companies to treat the side-effects of one drug with more drugs, and that they “have the guts to medically detox someone from benzodiazepines.”
 
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