Read more about the article White Hats & Black Hats

White Hats & Black Hats

The heroes and villains in westerns had reliable looks

In old black & white westerns of the 1920s-40s, the heroes and the outlaws generally followed pretty standard looks. Our heroes would be in white hats, our villains in black hats. This is largely because of Western culture’s semiotic associations that the color white represents good while the color black represents evil. Also, white & black standout more in the colorless mediums of early black & white movies and TV.

The show Westworld carried this forward when visitors to the park chose which color hat they wanted, which informed their experience in the park of being a good guy or bad guy. This distinction of white hat or black hat has become a cultural metaphor more broadly. In the hacking community white hat hackers hack ethically in order to find security flaws and work with companies to improve their defenses, while black hats hack to steal information.

Beyond just how they look, some westerns also had the heroes and villains move in certain directions during pivotal scenes. Because most people are right handed, heroes would walk from left to right across the screen with their gun hand visible to the viewer, keeping their intentions known at all times. Villains would approach from right to left, with their gun hand hidden from the viewer, as if hiding their intentions from the audience.

Our association of the color black with villainy extends beyond tv & movies. A study of 25 seasons of NHL hockey found that players wearing black were penalized more frequently than players in lighter colors. Whether the players in black really were more villainous and committed more penalties or that the referees were biased by black clothes, is unclear.

Exceptions to the rule

There are two notable exceptions to this rule. The first is the Western hero character of Hopalong Cassidy who, in TV & movies, wore all black.

The second exception of course is the Man In Black, Johnny Cash. He sang about his trademark look in the song Man in Black, where he explains that he wears black as a visible symbol of his solidarity with the marginalized people who our society has ignored & abandoned.

Johnny Cash sings about being the man in black.
Read more about the article The Hedonic Treadmill

The Hedonic Treadmill

Knowing when to step off the treadmill and be happy

Hedonism is about finding pleasure and avoiding suffering. It ranges from the wild to the mild, but essentially it is a way of thinking where we want to be happy and should seek out ways of making ourselves happy.

The hedonic treadmill (also called hedonic adaptation) is an idea where each of us has a default level of happiness, and that our happiness will return to this default level despite life changes. If we make more money and start living a fancier lifestyle, what might make us a bit happier at first, soon becomes the new normal and we return to our default happiness level. We get more, we get used to it, and then it takes even more to make us (temporarily) happier again. It’s an arms race where it can constantly take more to feel happier and it can go on forever. Whatever the change, we tend to get used to the new speed of the treadmill.

The good news is that it also works the other way around. If we lose a job or some catastrophic accident befalls us, we can adapt to that as well and (over time) return to our default happiness level. In his TED talk on the science of happiness, Dan Gilbert discusses a study of lottery winners and people recently paralyzed, and that after a year both groups had returned to their pre-incident level of happiness. The treadmill can speed up or slow down but your happiness level will adapt.

Epicurus

Epicurus was a 4th century BCE Greek philosopher who created a school of philosophical thought, known today as Epicureanism. While the word “epicure” means someone with fine taste in food & alcohol, Epicureanism is a much deeper collection of teachings that have little to do with food. Epicurus was a hedonist, in that he felt happiness was good and pain was evil, however he taught that we should enjoy the simple pleasures of life. Happiness can be achieved through friendship and living a simple life. Perhaps it’s best to know when to step off the hedonic treadmill and appreciate what you have rather than running faster for more.

Read more about the article The Hippos of Pablo Escobar

The Hippos of Pablo Escobar

In the Colombian jungle, Escobar’s hippos wander.

During his reign as the head of the Medellín Cartel drug empire, Pablo Escobar’s net worth was in the tens of billions of dollars. As such, Escobar could & did purchase a variety of extravagant items. He also spread the money around the local community. The venn diagram of these types of spending overlap with his personal zoo.

In the 1980s Pablo Escobar built a zoo for himself at his countryside estate Hacienda Napoles. He allowed schoolchildren to see the animals on class trips. After Escobar was killed, and Hacienda Napoles was confiscated by the government, most of the animals were dispersed to other (actual) zoos. All of the animals found new homes except 4 hippos which continued to thrive and today have fruitfully multiplied to over 80 hippos. These wild Colombian hippos are becoming a real problem in the region because they aren’t easily contained to just one area, they eat and poop in large quantities, they don’t have many predators, and any solution to the problem (aside from killing them, which the general public doesn’t want) costs money that the government doesn’t want to spend.

Read more about the article The Curb Cut Effect

The Curb Cut Effect

When a solution intended to help one group helps multiple groups.

Curb cuts go by different names, but around the world they are the small inclined ramps in the sidewalk that provide easy access to the street. Without curb cuts, people in wheelchairs have to either rely on strangers to help lift them up/down between the sidewalk & the street, or they have to wheel along until they find a driveway (which could mean traveling in the street with moving cars). For some, the simple act of crossing the street can be fraught with difficulties.

The first program to install curb cuts was in Kalamazoo, Michigan in the 1940s. Jack Fisher was an entrepreneur, a disabled WWII veteran, and a Harvard educated lawyer who worked to get hundreds of fellow disabled veterans access to medical & financial assistance. It was because of his time with his clients that, in 1945, he worked with the city to get curb cuts and rails installed around the downtown, which gave a wide variety of people easier access to the businesses of Kalamazoo. The intention of the curb cuts was to enable the disabled (veteran or otherwise), but the program had unintended benefits.

The Curb Cut Effect

The curb cut effect is when something intended to help one group ends up helping multiple groups. The curb cuts were designed for the physically disabled in Kalamazoo but turned out to also benefit the elderly, they help delivery people rolling shipments to and from trucks, people pushing babies in strollers, runners, people dragging suitcases, etc.

We can see the curb cut effect again with television closed captioning. What was designed to assist the hearing impaired unintentionally benefited others. Now viewers in loud spaces can read what’s being said on tv, viewers who are new to a language can follow along more easily, shows & movies with strong accents are easier to understand, etc.

The curb cut effect can be found all over. The flexible straw was designed by Joseph Friedman to help his daughter drink from a glass, but now they also help people with mobility restrictions. Gender neutral bathrooms may be for the safety & comfort of trans & non-binary users, but they also shorten the wait time for women while also providing men with more baby changing stations than men’s rooms usually do. Optical character recognition (OCR) was designed to digitize text and help the visually impaired read books, but now the technology also allows everyone’s phones to look at text in other languages and translate it on the fly.

A rising tide lifts all ships

The curb cut effect shows that helping one group can spill over into helping others. If nothing else it is good to help others get fair access to the things most people already have. With the curb cut effect, an investment to help one group can reap a greater return on investment.

Despite this, intentionally spending resources to help just one group is often resisted by society — it can be seen as playing favorites, or creating dependencies on government handouts, and/or that helping just one group is to act at the exclusion of helping others. Most of this opposition comes from political conservatives who tend to have less interest in fairness or helping minorities. American conservatives are more likely to think of financial assistance intended to help the disadvantaged as creating a “welfare state”, despite (paradoxically) that they themselves are the number one recipient of government handouts. What the curb cut effect demonstrates is that, if helping others isn’t reason enough for charity & goodwill, at least you might also be helped in the process.

Read more about the article Carats, Karats, Carets, & Carrots

Carats, Karats, Carets, & Carrots

A crash-course on Carats (measures gems & pearls), Karats (measures gold purity), Carets (a symbol), and Carrots (popular with humans & rabbits)

Carat

The carat is a unit of measurement for the mass of gemstones and pearls. Each carat is equal to 200mg of mass. So the more carats, the larger the stone / pearl (basically the more it weighs). The word carat comes from the Italian “carato”, which comes from the Arabic “qirat” which means “fruit of the carob tree” and also “weight of 4 grains”, which also comes from the Greek “keration” for both the carob bean and a small weight.

Karat

Karat with a “k” is a measurement of gold purity. It comes from the same root word as Carat with a “c”, from the Greek “keration”. Gold products are frequently alloys, different blends of gold and one or more other metals. The karat measuring system is a 24 part system and tells you what the ratio is of gold to other metals. So 1 karat gold is 1 part gold mixed with 23 parts other metal(s). Pure gold is 24 karat and contains no other metals.

Interestingly, pure 24 karat gold is fairly soft and not very resilient for jewelry or coins. Silver, copper, and zinc have been popular metals to pair with gold. These other metals strengthen the gold to make it harder. This is not true of lead, which was sometimes used to make fake gold coins. This is where the idea of biting a gold coin comes from. Most real gold coins were hardened alloys and would not leave a tooth mark when bit, but fake gold coins used lead which would be soft and leave a mark.

Caret

A caret is this ^ , which is a typographical mark used by proofreaders to show where something needs to be inserted into an area of text. Caret comes from Latin for “there is lacking” or “it lacks.”

Carrot

Finally, the carrot we are most familiar with is the vegetable, which originated in Persia. Its name also comes from Greek but from “karōtón” meaning horn, since the vegetable has a slightly horn-like shape. Carrots are a healthy vegetable full of beta-Carotene which is a red-orange colored organic pigment. When we eat beta-Carotene it synthesizes into Vitamin A which is good for you (… in moderation). Due to its color, storing extremely excessive amounts of beta-Carotene (eating way too many carrots) has the side-effect of turning a person’s skin orange through stored deposits in the skin cells.

Under normal circumstances however, beta-Carotene is converted into Vitamin A and can give us healthy skin, a better immune system, and good vision. This last part about better vision is the foundation of the myth that British WWII pilots were such good shots because they ate their carrots. In reality, they secretly had on-board radar and didn’t want the Germans to know about it, so they started a propaganda campaign saying their ace shooing was all due to carrots (which the British had an abundance of).

Read more about the article Marlene Dietrich & Queen

Marlene Dietrich & Queen

One of the most iconic photos of Queen was inspired by a photograph of Marlene Dietrich

For their second album, Queen II, Queen wanted to explore the theme of duality. This was visually explored through black and white imagery and even labeling the two sides of the album Side White and Side Black. They went to photographer Mick Rock (who had worked with David Bowie, Lou Reed, and others in the mid ‘70s glam rock scene) to photograph the album cover.

Rock had recently been shown a 1932 photograph of Marlene Dietrich from the film Shanghai Express. Dietrich was lit with a technique known as “butterfly lighting” where one of the lights is positioned in-front and above the subject, casting shadows down from the subject’s brow, cheeks, and nose (the shadow below the nose produces a butterfly looking image, hence the name). This was a technique frequently used with Dietrich to accentuate her facial features, especially in her collaborations with director Josef von Sternberg.

When Rock showed this photograph to the band, Freddy Mercury loved the idea that they could recreate it for the album cover.

“I don’t know if it was the shot itself or the idea that [Freddie] could be like Marlene Dietrich—probably a combination of the two,”

Mick Rock

This Dietrich inspired pose was used again in the music video for Queen’s greatest masterpiece Bohemian Rhapsody. The video for Bohemian Rhapsody, at over 1 billion views on YouTube, extends Marlene Dietrich’s influence even further, despite some viewers not even knowing it.

Read more about the article Oil’s Origins

Oil’s Origins

Oil doesn’t come from dinosaurs, it comes from plankton.

When people hear “fossil fuels” they sometimes think that oil (petroleum) came from dinosaur fossils. This isn’t out of left field. At the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-34 Sinclair Oil sponsored an exhibit that taught people that oil was formed during the time of the dinosaurs. Reinforcing this idea there’s also the logo & mascot for Sinclair Oil, Dino the dinosaur. Sinclair again pushed this connection of dinosaurs & oil at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 even though the science had become pretty clear that oil wasn’t made from dinosaurs. So what makes oil? Plankton.

What are plankton?

Plankton are water dwelling life forms that (more or less) drift with the current. The name “plankton” actually comes from the Greek for “wanderer” or “drifter” which makes them sound like edgy antiheroes in a pulp novel. There are lots of different kinds and sizes of plankton, and they fill all sorts of ecological roles ranging from being food for larger organisms to producing 50% of the Earth’s oxygen. Bacterial plankton formed in the oceans 3 billion years ago and were basically the only form of life until 600 million years ago. That’s an enormous amount of time. So as plankton over that time died, most fell to the bottom of the sea floor and began the process of becoming oil.

Let’s make oil

Lots can happen during hundreds of millions of years. The plankton that fell to the bottom of the oceans continued to accumulate as well as other sediment. The plankton would decompose releasing most of their chemicals but the hydrogen & carbon would remain. This continuous process of plankton and other sediment falling to the ocean floor meant that the former material would be pushed further down and compacted under intense pressure over millions of years, generating heat. It was this pressure and heat that “cooked” all of those plankton into oil.

While it is certainly possible that some dinosaurs may have found themselves a part of this oil making process, it’s just very unlikely they made up much oil – they usually weren’t in the right places and there weren’t enough dinosaurs (not enough raw material to cook with). Instead of being made from some of the Earth’s largest creatures, oil was made from massive amounts of some of the smallest.

Read more about the article 8 months of Oysters

8 months of Oysters

Historically it has been safer to eat oysters in the colder months

There is an old adage that you should only eat oysters in months that have the letter “R” in their names. This adage is specifically for the names of months in English and French, and also specifically for the northern hemisphere where these would be the cooler months, September through April.

The reason is simple: before refrigeration oysters would spoil in transit during the warmer summer months (months without an “R” in their names). So, unless you lived near the water with the oysters, there was a greater chance that by the time the oysters got shipped to you they would have spoiled.

Read more about the article Bond … James Bond, ornithologist

Bond … James Bond, ornithologist

James Bond’s name was taken from a Philadelphia ornithologist

Ian Fleming was living in Jamaica while writing what would become his first James Bond novel, 1953’s Casino Royal. What he needed was a good solid name for his protagonist, a name that very “flat and quiet”. Fleming was an avid bird watcher and had a copy of Birds of the West Indies by Philadelphia ornithologist James Bond, which he felt would be the perfect name. Fleming later said that:

“I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, and ‘James Bond’ was much better than something more interesting, like ‘Peregrine Carruthers.’ Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure — an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department.”

The real life James Bond was a celebrated expert in birds of the Caribbean and worked for decades at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He was unaware of his name’s new found fame until the 007 books became popular in the United States. Bond and his wife paid Fleming an unannounced visit in 1964 while in Jamaica, and presumably things went well because Fleming gave a first edition of You Only Live Twice dedicated to Bond, “To the real James Bond, from the thief of his identity”. In 2008 this dedicated copy sold at auction for $84,000.

Added info: in 2002’s Die Another Day, Bond’s Birds of the West Indies appears in the film being held by, well, Bond, but with the real life author’s name obscured. Pierce Brosnan’s Bond later identifies himself as an ornithologist.

Read more about the article Blue Raspberry

Blue Raspberry

At the confluence of food safety and marketing, blue raspberry was born.

In the natural world, no raspberry looks or tastes anywhere close to “blue raspberry.” The “raspberry” flavor of blue raspberry was created as a combination of banana, cherry, and pineapple. As for its shade of electric blue, most raspberries are red but there are some blue-ish raspberries. The white bark raspberry, native to western North America, is a very dark (nearly black) shade of blue. So why do we have the flavor and color of blue raspberry?

Red Number 2

In the 1950s there was a growing movement in the U.S. to ensure the safety of food and food additives. People had increasing doubts over the safety of Red No 2 (a food dye that, at the time, was made from coal tar). Food companies could capitalize off of this concern if another color was used.

It was during this time that the Gold Medal company of Cincinnati introduced a new flavor of blue raspberry cotton candy. Its popularity took off when Icee introduced their blue raspberry flavored frozen drink in the early 1970s. The competition between blue raspberry and red flavored candies/drinks was taken to a new level in 1976 when Red No 2 was banned in the United States because it was potentially carcinogenic. Simply put, at the time, Blue No 1 was safer than Red No 2.

Marketing

To mimic real life, food companies then and now use the color red for lots of flavors: cherry, apple, cinnamon, watermelon, cranberry, etc. It’s a crowded space. However, there are not many foods that are naturally blue, which as a marketing opportunity was very attractive. Blue was a way to set raspberry apart from the other flavors. This is similar to why pink lemonade exists: lemonade isn’t pink, but pink is a bright color that stands out from the crowd. Blue raspberry had the color all to itself for a long time which was marketing gold.