Too Much Work

At Science 2.0, Edzard Ernst offers nine steps to "becoming a charlatan." He's focused on the fairly narrow area of pseudo-medical treatments, since it offers pretty fertile field for the false-wonder worker.

Useful ideas include veiled suggestions that "big pharma" wants your invention/technique/discovery suppressed, as it would cost them billions of dollars. The idea of ruthless corporate goonism trying to stamp out discoveries that would ruin industries has been in enough books and movies that people will take it seriously. Ernst also suggests that the wise faker will invoke some kind of cutting edge science and mysterious concept. This idea has a proven track record, as Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax paper in Social Text can show.

Ultimately, though, Ernst makes the entire process of becoming a charlatan far too complicated. It need not require nine steps but can be effectively done far more efficiently with a wide variety of single steps.

For example, you could claim that you would build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Or that you thought a "C" label on United States State Department documents was an alphabetical key to paragraph order. Sure, wide segments of the population would not believe you, but you don't have to convince everyone. Just one person more than half of the poor retching wretches facing your name and your opponent's name on a Nov. 8 ballot, fifty-five hellish damned days from now.

Perspective

The next time someone tells you that you are too ambitious, tell them at least you didn't try to convince the German government to drain the Mediterranean.

Okay Then

At first glance, this article by Yale literature professor Amy Hungerford would seem kind of counter-productive. A lit prof saying she doesn't read, and advocating more people follow her lead? For this, parents say, we go in debt to the tune of a small midwestern house?

But actually, Dr. Hungerford is not advocating that people quit reading altogether. But they should be more selective and deliberate in their choice of what to read. She says that the volume of novels published in a year -- and the machine of literary celebrity -- combine to offer a distractive level of work that does not reward the time one might put into it.

Stop reading crap just because all of the people trying to shout out how smart they are insist that in order to be smart you have to have read it? Sounds good to me.

Sequentially Amazing

Although watching these dominoes fall is pretty amazing, it's not the wildest thing about this video.



Nor is the wildest thing the way her mind must work in order to envision this kind of massive project and how it will look when it's finished. I'm not even really all that amazed that she spent 25 hours putting it together over eight days.

No, I'm most amazed that she put it together in only 25 hours. I'd still be stacking when I was 80...

Say That to My Face!

Different cultures insult in different ways. Things that would offend one culture are just not that big of a deal for another. Folks who've studied Monty Python know that French people insult invading English k'niggets by saying that their mothers were hamsters and their fathers smelt of elderberries.

The folks at the Just the Flight travel blog have compiled a handy infographic showing some insults you might hear when traveling, as well as the way the phrase sounds in its original non-English language. Many of them are highly entertaining. In Bulgaria, for example, should a local direct the phrase "Grozna ni kato salata" at you, he or she is saying you are as "ugly as a salad." I am not certain how the conversation with a Bulgarian would go after this, because I would probably be laughing instead of being insulted.

I am not sure of the actual insult content of some of the entries. Australians may indeed call someone with red hair a "'ranga," referring to the red-haired great ape the orangutan. But how is it insulting to be called red-headed?

And some provoke some interesting images. "Gå och dra något gammalt över dig," a Swedish person might say to you should you say or do something stupid: "Go and hide under something old." ("That explains all the Swedes under my chair," Bernie Sanders was heard to comment. "No kidding," responded Cher.)

A Russian might say of you, "Hot' kop na gopove teshi," which means, "You could sharpen an axe on the top of his head." The phrase implies a person is stubborn; it is not meant to be taken literally. ("Oops," said Vladimir Putin.)

The Irish seem to have our current political landscape well mapped out with the phrase, "As thick as manure and half as useful." The applicability seems clear. Unfortunately, we are stuck with those fitting that description, as much as we might want to confront the existing crop of candidates with the Somali phrase "Futaada u sheeg."

This Place Smells Like a Frathouse

In the 1960s' Heineken Brewing Company head Freddy Heineken didn't much care for seeing all the trash when he visited Curaçao. Nor did he think it was right that so many people there lacked housing. His solution:

Yes, beer bottles shaped like bricks, which could be mortared together to build housing. Consumer tests showed that buyers didn't care for the square bottles, so the brick-style containers never went on the market. Rumors that the housing departments of major American universities opposed it on the grounds that dormitories would be empty as students constructed their own dwellings are, as far as we know, unfounded.

Pity. Might have cut down on the stone-throwing, too.

Voyaging

It can be schlocky and its central star all too often offers up enough ham to scare Jimmy Dean. Papier-maché rocks and alien monsters with visible costume seams. Spinoff series that don't always age well. A show creator who started to think every story needed to be about his vision rather than about the people saying the lines. A kid driving a starship. Time-travel plots that worked on the narrative engine like sugar in a gas tank. An android whose quest to become human succeeded only in the area of annoyance. And a hundred other things that any real fan can count off at the drop of a red-shirted extra.

But then the little light notes sound and the fanfare and William Shatner starts in with "Space: The final frontier..." as he did fifty years ago tonight, and imagination sets sail for the stars on board a ship named Enterprise and we all boldly go where no one has gone before...