I wanted to choose one and just kept watching them. I finally decided enough was enough and took the next one that isn't too long.
Monday, April 13, 2026
Part of Our Culture
I didn't know who Sabrina Carpenter is, but the recent incident brings up something just a touch puzzling. She heard something she didn't recognise as an Arabic call of celebration and thought it was yodeling. She said she didn't like it. The person was offended, saying "But it's part of my culture," and a lot of her fans were offended as well, and chastised her the next day.
I don't think "It's part of my culture" is quite the blanket excuse that pop fans think, but I do think it is on balance better to be polite. It's better to be polite in the opposite direction, too, however. If I were to go to an Arabic musician's performance and kept interjecting "Hallelujah! ...Glory, glory!...Amen, sister!" throughout the concert I would not be surprised if people found it intrusive and took it amiss. I wouldn't expect the artist and the rest of the audience to understand. I don't applaud during Romanian Orthodox prayers. If I am doing something that I should know will makes others uncomfortable, I should at least have a better reason than "It's part of my culture." There's an arrogance to that.
It is similar to complaints about cultural appropriation, which I identified over a decade ago as more about snobbery than protecting another culture: I know more about Indonesian cuisine than you do. That style is more the province of liberals. Conservatives have different "shoulds."
Donna B and Texan99 discuss Mexican vs Tex-Mex at the link, which was fun.
Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism
David Foster, over at his substack Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism, which includes some early and mid-1900s political history.
Although most assume that an immoral person is one who is ready to defy law and convention to get what they want, I think the inverse is often true. Immorality is frequently motivated by a readiness to conform to law and convention in opposition to our own values.
"Just Look At History"
This is a phrase that now puts me off entirely. It is the equivalent of "It's obvious that..." or "Only a fool would..." When I hear it, I envision hand-waving, condescension, smirking, disdain, or that new thing on reels where guys are drinking from a mug and nodding thoughtfully.
The postmodernists are correct in noting that everyone has unexamined assumptions, especially those who claim to be the most scientific or most orthodox or most knowledgeable. Poking those balloons with a pin often reveals them as the least scientific, orthodox, or knowledgeable. I believe in science, orthodoxy, and knowledge, which is why I am extra suspicious of those who claim it without evidence. "Just look at history" is only a way of saying "I can't prove it but I want to skate by without being challenged by being intimidating."
BTW the postmodernists usually fail by exempting themselves from consideration of unchecked assumptions. When challenged, they happily point to the unexamined assumptions that they have considered but cost them nothing. It is similar to the chronological snobbery that irritated Barfield, or the chronocentrism which Lewis kept identifying. Yes, all ages have their biases - especially this one.
It can be used to "prove" why capitalism never works and why socialism never does; how Trump is a fascist or his opponents are; how women have it easy or women are oppressed. It is a social rather than logical or evidentiary argument, relying on cherry-picked data.
So stop that. Do I have to pull this car over?
Links From 2014
Sentimentality is a leading cause of poverty
Well-Behaved Women I got some pushback for this one.
Development I should add that Lewis did not dislike Restoration Comedy. He was making a different point.
The Magpie on the Gallows Explanation of a painting by Bruegel. Quite a lot in it.
Changes in the Game
The NBA season is over, and the big controversies are teams tanking to get better draft odds, the 65-games-played rule for many awards, and the increased injuries. WRT the latter*, in the 1980s every year an average of six players who made the All-Star game played all 82 games. These days there hasn't been one since 2019. The great increase in decelerating and side-to-side motions is blamed. Eurosteps, crossovers, step-backs, stop-and-pops, and many more put tremendous strain on ankles and calves. Earlier basketball was more straight up and down the court. Fewer games in the season would help but is dead on arrival, because everyone wants the money. Reverting to the ref touching the ball after every made basket would slow the game down and reduce the number of possessions per game. It might help.
Victor Wembanyama has played fewer minutes per game than other top stars and has still been out with occasional injuries - and they bring him back very slowly. He is very tall, very skinny, and is coordinated enough to make those reverses and spin moves that put stress on the legs, so he plays 30 minutes per game instead of 35. Yet he is going to get MVP votes this year, because he is simply is that good. This limiting of minutes is not going to be just an aberration for him. My prediction is this becomes more common in the league. The NBA put in the 65-game rule because when fans buy tickets, they want to see the stars play. They don't want them being held out for "load management," even though they need it to just not be injured. Compare this to starting pitchers in baseball. No one pitches a complete game anymore, because the greater speed puts more stress on the arm, and whole teams try to wear pitchers out by drawing walks and making them throw more pitches. Six innings is a good outing now.
There are a hundred proposals for modifying the draft to reduce or eliminate tanking. Some are saying eliminate it altogether. The best law firms and hospitals don't draft the top graduates every year. Especially if you have a salary cap, teams can make their offers to the players they want. If they have terrible coaches or cities that aren't fun, how is that different from some artists wanting to be in NYC while others want to live more quietly, or Elon Musk moving to Texas? There is an argument that the only shot the worst teams have at getting great players is he draft. But Washington and Sacramento have had top draft picks for years and are still terrible year-in, year-out. Other things are their real problems. No one wanted to play in Oklahoma City either, but Sam Presti is magical and gets players. Brad Stevens of the Celtics is another.
Some of the many proposals are quite odd, and I won't even get started on them. Most of them seem to accomplish something that would improve the situation by reducing the incentive for tanking. All of them still offer some incentive for losing in some situations, and when that happens, teams will tank.Various lotteries dilute but do not eliminate the problem, and the best outcomes are usually for good teams who have their best player out for the year dropping to the bottom to get a prime draft pick. The Indiana Pacers went to the finals last year but lost Tyrese Haliburton for this season and will have a top pick this draft. The all-time example of this was the San Antonio Spurs already having David Robinson but getting Tim Duncan in the next draft because Robinson was out injured. It was the beginning of their dynasty.
As for the awards, I can see points in both directions, but I lean to eliminating the 65-game rule. Some of the voters object because they want to be trusted to make a decision whether a guy playing 63 games was actually more valuable than one playing 70. The league does not want to give up the hammer to make sure players aren't being rested "for no good reason." As if "We want him healthy for the playoffs" isn't a good enough reason.
*Lattest? Latest? Is that where the word latest comes from? Cool. OED has latest=last as archaic and poetic, and also mentions lattermost. I should have use "last" in this context.
Sunday, April 12, 2026
Wax Beans
I didn't know they are the same as butter beans. Butter beans sound wonderful, and duck.ai images look bright and appetising. I am not fooled. These were one of the horrors of my childhood, worse even than their close relative the green bean. They were a school cafeteria staple, but I haven't seen them in years. Of course, I haven't looked for them either. They might be in those cans I always walk past with a shudder.
Maybe they're fine if they haven't been soaked in water and stored on a shelf for two months. Fresh vegetables are better...
But I am not going to find out. They were called wax beans for good reason.
P.F. Chang's
There used to be one in NH. I always called it P K Chang's, and when I looked it up had minor trouble. It now comes frozen, and I still refer to it inaccurately, shaking my head why I can't remember it. I bought some this week for the first time, looking at the package and wondering while I cooked it. It occurred to me that I confuse it with C K Yang, the Olympic decathlete from Taiwan and UCLA. It's as good an explanation as any.
Instant Coffee
The Creation of Instant Coffee at Works in Progress. I drink instant for the convenience and cheapness, but I admit I am intrigued by the idea of the new offerings. I may give them a try one of these days.
When I was in Beius, Romania in 1998 I went one morning to the small grocery to find some instant coffee. Unsurprisingly, I could not find it in the store, which had a bizarre array of products arranged in no discernible pattern. I stood in line and asked at the counter for Cafea Pudra (powder)...Cafea Repede (instant, fast). Blank looks. I tried to mime spooning it and pouring over. I was holding up the line, half of which was impatient, the other half intrigued. Someone in the back asked "Cafea Nes?" I turned back, excited. "Da! Da! Cafea Nes! Multumesc!" Relief and jollity prevailed. But they didn't have any. Maybe tomorrow.
They say Cafea Instanta now.
Saturday, April 11, 2026
Not For Sale
Daniel Piper is a Serious Literary Author, after all
Today a brand contacted me and asked if I would consider writing a sponsored diary entry. I was shocked and appalled. As a Serious Literary Author, I am against the concept of advertising. I told them in no uncertain terms that my writing is not for sale.
Afterwards I felt so sullied by the exchange that I was compelled to wash my hands with Aesop Resurrection Aromatique Hand Wash, which, with its gently aromatic formulation containing oils of orange, rosemary and lavender, leaves the hands smooth, purified and refreshed without drying them out.
Thursday, April 09, 2026
Brain Donation and Autism
Brain Donation is Needed to Study Autism. I registered to be an organ donor, assuming that if anyone would have a need for it, they should go for it. But somehow this feels different. My body going into the ground without my pancreas or spleen seems fine. But without my brain in my head? That creeps me out. It's irrational, I know. Still, I am considering it, because as someone who has some combo of OCD/Aspie/Anxiety symptoms with a high IQ, there might be useful things to look at. In reality, researchers would probably look at something else completely unremarkable about me and I would just look wrong under the ground.
I think you don't tell people that for the wake. It's one thing to think "They sent his spinal column and his kidneys up to Mary Hitchcock for a study." Quite another to look at the face and go "They cut his brain out of that. They filled it up with styrofoam or something for the viewing."
Making a Marriage
Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly… both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.
—J.R.R. Tolkien, in a letter to his son.
The Global IQ Debate
Tove K at Wood From Eden on Substack has a guest post from a Nigerian psychologist about African IQ scores and what they mean The Global IQ Debate: A Modest Contribution from a Resident African. She includes her own introduction. She is an interesting person herself, and I have read posts of hers before. But this guest post is a point of view I have not heard before. One would think that a Nigerian might feel defensive and dismiss the idea that the majority of sub-Saharan Africans have IQs less than 85, but he thinks that is about right. He sees a particular strength in rote memory among the population, especially those who pursue education, combined with a significant rarity of what we would call abstract reasoning or information processing. He tries to define exactly what he means by that quite carefully.
Fascinating stuff.
His essay is fairly long, but it was all new enough and provoking enough to be worth the effort. I would rather let it speak for itself than try and interpret at this point. A sample, halfway in:
So, back to the point I have only so far made passing references to: if Africa has a real IQ disadvantage, I don't think it is much in the cognitive dimension. Nigerians, as you probably know, are a notoriously successful immigrant group - even after we take selection bias into account (although some data have shown that second generation diasporic Nigerians, and immigrants from third world in general, tend to regress eventually to their country of origin means). But I think when the environment is optimal and held constant, and the incentive structures are robust, I don't think there'll be significant difference in pure average academic performance between children of African and European (or of Asian) descent. I think if there's indeed a dysgenic factor, it must lie in some other property of the 'mind' (which I'm using to mean 'emergent brain function'). And one such property is what I would call 'Information processing', not of facts and factoids printed and presented in textbooks but of the raw unstructured reality. The kind of ongoing information processing that gives rise to how a people conceive of reality, what they think this reality, as conceptualized by them, demands of them in order to maximize its impartial offerings, and how they believe this reality should be interrogated and organized.
This is by far the most fundamental sense in which I think the poor countries of this world are different from the rich ones.
Tuesday, April 07, 2026
Which Goods Are Overemphasised?
People overreact to gas prices, ground beef, eggs...
What else? Tolls? Fast food? Soda? What are the things that turn people against whoever the current president is? A bit of mutton is so dear these days.
More importantly, what do we not notice that actually costs us more?
Have fun.
Reporting Housework
Women report doing more housework when being interviewed by a woman. Men are not affected by the gender of the interviewer.
When studying time spent on housework, most evaluations rely on retrospective questionnaire responses rather than on diary-based data. There remains, however, discussion about how reliable such retrospective time-use data are. For example, Kan (2008) finds systematic differences between questionnaire and diary data on housework hours which vary by gender and other characteristics of the respondents.
Yeah, I'll bet that's true. Diary versus questionnaire "finds systematic differences" in just about everything. Not that the diary can't be shaded as well, but we tend to put on the shine more for questionnaires. Are women feeling guilty in front of other women, claiming more dusting than they really do? If we go back and look at previous studies, can we tell? Wanting to measure something accurately and objectively doesn't mean you are succeeding.
There is no standard definition for what constitutes housework. Does gardening count? When does beautifying shift over into hobby? Do driving errands count? Parent-teacher conferences? It is one of those elastic categories that easily lends itself to taking resentful positions for what is included. I imagine the items that spring to mind first do indeed fall to females more often, likely unfairly: laundry, cleaning, cooking, dishes. Gratitude, or lack thereof, figures prominently in folks' feelings about the matter.
Monday, April 06, 2026
Back to Links from 2014
Frozen Revisited. I watched "Frozen" for a second time with the granddaughters and was irritated by the lack of foreshadowing that Hans was going to turn into the villain.
Frozen Re-Explained Six months later, I ran across an article that explained the lack of foreshadowing to me. However, support for my idea was still rather half-hearted.
Risk Assessment of Sex Offenders
Two PC Spirits A competition between Indigenous Culture and the combined weight of Anthro professors, alt-religion, and gay people. At the time the answer was only partly in. The conflict has now been resolved by the latter coalition insisting that the Indigenous Peoples did too have two-spirit gender- switching people which was very modern of them. That the various tribes insist this was not so is simply ignored. The Indians lose again.
How To Get Out of a Psych Hospital
Being at War
I turn 73 in a couple of weeks and grew up in an era of many Americans knowing directly what it was like to be in a war in other places. Europeans and others, however, would frequently mention that Americans had no knowledge of what it was like to live through a war and held that as a serious talking point that we had no idea of the horrors of it. European writers would bemoan warlike Americans just not understanding the danger. When we visited there we would be solemnly informed of the battles that took place, and people who had been in them or lived through bombings would be trotted out as prizes to lecture the stupid Americans.
I have a brother-in-law in his late 80s who remembers being able to distinguish which side's bombers were coming in the Paris suburb he grew up in late in the war. My best friend in the 80s was the son of a man who had been in the Hitler Youth, was drafted at 17 and sent to the Russian Front, was immediately captured and sent to Siberia. One could still meet such people then.
It is entirely fair that they had a point in saying Americans just didn't get how bad this could be. Most of us hadn't the least clue.
European writers and even people on the street still talk that way. I grant that there is something different about looking at the river running through your town and knowing "This was the boundary between the Nazis and the Allies during the war," with buildings and even damage still visible. But it is entirely a pose at this point. There are many more Americans than Western Europeans especially who know what war looks like up close now. One could say that this is our own damn fault, but it is still a core fact. Scandinavians, Spaniards, Austrians, and Belgians are now the ones who know nothing directly. Terrorism they sometimes know.
They don't know what it is like to be fired on and have armies of occupation patrolling the streets, whether on their side or the other guy's, so they imagine that what they do have is almost the same thing.
It is not only the American military. American missionaries and businessmen have also seen war around the globe. Portugal sent out both 500 years ago but nowadays, not so much. America has a lot of immigrants who have seen war elsewhere. Fewer illusions.
Better Moon Shot Choice
"Space Oddity" was hurriedly released in June of 1969 to be in advance of the moon shot, but it barely registered in the UK despite good reviews, and not at all in America. With re-releases it picked up steam and was a hit in 1970 and quickly became an early 70s standard. So I missed it in my Top 100 lists for 1969, but Texan99 was on it anyway.
It's definitely a better choice because it's an astronaut, not just the moon. The moon is actually mentioned. I put this out as a better choice.
Sunday, April 05, 2026
The Wrong Lesson
David Foster links to an excellent summary essay by Richard Fulmer about groups putting energy into economic activity rather than political activity. Politics is necessarily redistributive, creating no new wealth. The continuing misunderstanding by socialists and much of the left that the amount of wealth is somehow just present, and equity can only come from taking it from A to give to B. Economic thinking casts a wider net on getting wealth, including direct creation of something that was not there minutes before.
Those who had to rely on markets and education were, in a grim irony, forced into the more productive path. Markets reward productivity. Politics rewards coalition-building, favor-trading, and the ability to extract value from others.
Politicians, especially on the left believe "Only we can save you. Elect us and we will get you your fair share. There is no other path." Unions will insist "We got you the weekend and the forty-hour week." That is less than half true. They could not have done this if there were not new wealth to draw from. They were not useless, and the service they provide must be achieved somehow. But they did not create a penny of it. You can't export the practice to places that aren't producing wealth - there is nothing to share.
Great Answer
We might be doing education all wrong, but this is not why. An adding machine - or children two grades ahead - have always been able to do the math better than the student. Lots of people can write better than a ninth grader. What has that got to do with anything?
Replication
Attempts at replication of social science papers showed that half could not be replicated with statistical significance, and re-analysis showed that 2% of the studies even came to the opposite conclusion! Some of the difficulty maybe downstream of the fact that less than 30% of the 600 papers gave enough detail that replication could even be attempted.
Finally, SCORE checked papers’ replicability — the most onerous of the three tasks. Researchers endeavoured to repeat entire experiments, gathering and analysing the data from scratch. Of the 164 studies that they focused on, they were able to replicate only 49% with statistical significance1. That figure is roughly in line with the results of other attempts to replicate scientific findings.Gurwinder concludes from the 7-year long project published in Nature it’s now wiser to assume a social science study is flawed until there’s reason to believe otherwise. Similar problems persist in biomedical studies.
The Natural Progression
My wife invited a woman from knitting group to come to one of our Easter services. She called yesterday to see if the woman was coming and to which service, 9 or 11? "I can't come because of Easter" of course turned out to mean that preparations for the feast after the celebration prevented going to the celebration. This has definitely happened with Christmas as well. I don't think this is simply North American, It is a natural tendency of humankind.
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