Glut

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Human brains — and bodies — are not designed to deal with glut.

Throughout most of our human journey in this world, heck, from before we were humans even, had no problems with an excess of anything. It wasn’t even a consideration.

If one of your ancestors before say the eighteenth century and then only if he/she was well off, had to fight with him/herself not to eat an extra cookie, it was not just “because I’ll get fat” but “because I’ll be taking food from the kids, who are still growing.” (Which if you’re a decent human being, makes it easier to resist.)

Now I routinely fight with myself not to overeat at breakfast. (Because I wake up very hungry, and it takes a while for the body to know I’ve eaten.) And if I were to give in, the damage would be to my attempts at weight loss, not to our budget or survival. You see, a bowl of cheerios is cheap. Which by itself is a miracle and a wonder, but never mind.

It wasn’t till this morning that it hit me, we’re now facing the same problem with glut on the informational front. Not just story or entertainment, but information. Of all sorts.

It was while scanning a conversation online, overnight, that I came across people saying “But how could he not have known?” And then it hit me “Well, because it was more than twenty years ago, and finding information was difficult then.”

No, seriously. You people who are younger than me, get off my e-lawn. You have no idea. It used to be really hard to find information. All information. In general.

Small piddly stuff, like people’s address, sure. “I know so and so lives in this small town, but dang it, I can’t find his last letter. Let me hie myself to the library and see if they have a phone book.” (They usually did, at least for towns in the state. But still.) But also “Mom had a recipe for carrot fritters, but I can’t find it. It must have been a known thing, but….” It could start a years’ long dive into historical cook books and chances are good you’d never find it. Now I can find it in ten minutes of poking around at the right area and recipes online.

The most obvious illustration of this, in my career, and it also shows how fast the change was, was my research for the Musketeer Mysteries. I couldn’t find a thing on how police was organized in France at the time. Not a word on line, or any of the books. I went on just keeping it out of the books as much as possible. Now it’s trivially easy to find. The same with a map of Paris at the time. I still have a huge (Wall size. It’s behind a set of bookcases) map of Paris at the time of the Musketeers, for which I paid the Earth in a specialized map store. (It’s a reproduction of course, not antique. Weirdly at the time the gentleman who worked there told me they mostly sold such historical city maps to RPG gamers.) but it stopped being needed halfway through the series. Because there are a ton of them online.

For those born in the new age of glut, the process of finding out info went something like this (and I’ll use research for a historical novel series as the model, because those were my most egregious fishing expeditions):

Have an idea. Go to the public library and come home with 50 books on the general area/time/subject. Read them to refine more closely what you might want to say/work with. Go out and get another 50 books by borrow, beg or buy. Refine still more. Now go and buy (at this level, it was almost always buy) another 50 books. Note some of these will be useful for one line, maybe two.

Now imagine having to do that for everything. I mean, everything. Like, you have some specialized thread you found at the thrift store. It’s very pretty. So you got it for 99c. Now what do you do with it. Just researching what it is, and where it came from even if you had a bobbin with a name, could take years. Now: minutes with an internet connection.

This applies to information on current events as well. Not only can we hit the net and get a lot of (early on very conflicting) information, but we can usually these days — or at least I can — call a friend in a nearby region to the event and talk over what happened. A surprising number of times, I’m no more than two degrees of connection to someone who was there. (The first instance of this for me was 9/11.)

This is not in any way a bad thing. It’s a great counter for the unified front of propaganda. Which is how and why the left is failing these days, because they got used to being the man behind the curtain. Their positions of power in the information/entertainment industrial complex helped them manipulate the country and the world for almost a century. They really got nothing else — the ideas don’t work and their social beliefs are (at best) puerile and increasingly more so — but they could make it seem like everyone else ‘believes this way’ and thereby force the social apes to fall in line, no matter how absurd the development/idea/push.

It’s not working. These days we can see them doing the push in front of G-d and everybody. And even if most of the people tune it off — more on that later — enough of us see it that the front isn’t unified. And for the more ridiculous ideas/pushes such as that no one knows what a woman is, or that Joe Biden is a fully functional human being, it takes a unified front. Now not only are there dissenters, but the dissenters know there are dissenters and that there is a good reason for dissent. Which makes the whole push less effective. (Not completely ineffective, mind.)

But there is a snap-back reaction to the glut of information.

I’ve explained before how I am an information sponge and my normal day resembles an intellectual drunkard’s walk through internet information sources, from the sane to the silly. To an extent I was always like that. Before the internet a lot of my morning was consumed reading six newspapers. (If you’re going to ask why! I just had to. Yes, we subscribed to six. It’s a long story.) But I’m unusual.

And even I find that the glut of information on the net makes it impossible to remember where I got the information/idea. (Ah, for the memory I had at 20.)

During the Obama administration I noticed that their way of hiding terrible things they’d done was “hide a scandal with another scandal.” This is a well known strategy and was used by the fashionable in the courts of Europe. But to dance like that in full light of news/information, over and over again was breathtaking. And while I’m sure some of it was deliberate, I now wonder how much of it was simply that all of a sudden we could watch them much closer, and the information just kept coming.

The other day I was trying to list all the “Trump did this horrible thing” that have been debunked, and could only come up with three, so I asked in a group, and I swear for all of us, hyper connected, hyper political people, it took us hours and then someone would go “Oh, yeah, this.” until the list was something like 25. And I’m sure if I look in that discussion now, there will be others.

But the thing is, it’s too much information. The normal brain will not track or retain all of it, unless it’s immediately related to survival.

If I weren’t hyper-political and connected, or were in an information subgroup that reports “everything bad ever said about Trump” but not the denouement where the report is often completely upside down, all I’d know was that “there have been a lot of bad things said about Trump. What a horrible man.”

And this is the reason why, although partisans were always hard to convince of flaws, that that there are Scott Adams’ two movies (at least. Actually there are at least six at the same time) in people’s heads, and people are so resistant to even admitting there are other movies.

Because there is an information glut. And the human brain deals very poorly with too much of anything, including of a good thing, like food, or info. One way to cope with it is to artificially filter it.

Diet wise, we tend to do that by artificially restricting it. Low carb (never really worked for me, but it worked for Dan, so we were low carb for 20 years, because it was far more important to keep his sugar under control than for me to lose weight. Until it stopped working for him) or vegetarian, or vegan, or paleo or– I always wondered how many of these diets were actually beneficial (they are, to some people. But the human genetics are a mess, okay?) and how many were just a way to make it so you don’t have to fight with all temptation, all the time.

We do the same with information. I — as I said — am in a weird group. So whether it’s someone we love or hate, we usually have this one guy (actually a gal, but–) who does a deep dive and comes up with the contrary view. But for most people? Nope. They already decided what they believe, and why will only consume information that confirms it.

This is true even in non-political fronts. I bet half the people in the comments are going to tell me low carb works for everyone and how very dare I? (It worked great for Dan, so long as he could exercise. It worked for me for about six months. And then I started craving things I simply could not have low carb. Obsessively. Corn chips. Potatoes. etc. etc. etc. I can’t swear I ended up consuming more of the allowable food to compensate, but I think I did, because I started gaining weight. And after that, I simply couldn’t lose. But I could gain. Its stopping to work for Dan, for a bunch of reasons including inability to exercise, and then probably cpap issues meant we had to try “normal food small portions” which is working better for me than for him, but also for him at last. And the weird thing is all the cravings have gone silent. Completely. Heck, even the things I love, like potatoes, I’ll eat a few and I’m done.) Because it’s the way to cope with things one has found, and it’s horrible to be thrown back to formless and disordered glut (of food and info.)

This is also fueling a lot of the “I want to go back to when we were united, and things were simple and–“

To the extent Joe Biden got real votes in 20 (I’d guess about 25% of them were real) it was because people were sick with the wish for normalcy and old white dude who has been around politics forever promised it. A lot of the anger at him, likewise, is not just that he’s a walking cadaver, or that his policies have been uniformly disastrous, but that he couldn’t take us back to circa 1950 when, in our minds, things were so much simpler. (Spoiler voice over: they weren’t. It’s just how we remember them. Partly due to lying movies.)

The frustrating thing with all this is that there is not a single panacea for how to cope with glut. Again, neither bodies nor brains were designed for this. Throughout the history of the world scarcity was the norm. Mostly extreme scarcity at that. Life-threatening scarcity.

So whether for excess food or excess information, we each have to find our way to cope.

I just humbly submit that over restricting on either of those, and never re-examining the evidence or the results can be as lethal as natural extreme scarcity.

Or worse.

*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.
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160 thoughts on “Glut”

  1. This “glut of knowledge” is IMO people “like” experts.

    It’s easier to listen to the “experts” than it is to dig for knowledge for yourself.

    But of course, it’s becoming clear that the “experts” aren’t actually “experts”. 👿

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Two problems. The first is as old as Plato’s Apology of Socrates, experts imagining their expertise is universal, not specific. The second is experts simply lying.

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      1. On the gripping hand, too many ‘experts’ don’t actually know a damned thing. Dumbasses with the proper credentials, smug in their belief that a piece of paper confers competence because it’s what they’ve been taught.

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        2. Recall the end to the Wizard of Oz movie?

          “…they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma.”

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            1. “In this office we will make sure you get all the S.H.I.T. you can handle.”

              I got that memo, oh, yes.

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          2. Not everybody should go to college. Some folks, you send ’em to college and you just wind up with an educated idiot. :-D

            Then they go into politics. :-o

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        5. I put it this way. Specialists learn more and more about less and less, until they end up knowing nothing.

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          1. That’s from Subspace Explorers by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith:

            “Specialists learn more and more about less and less, until eventually they know everything about nothing. Generalists like me learn less and less about more and more, until we wind up knowing nothing about everything.” — Doc Adams

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            1. Thank you for letting me know who I stole it from without knowing. Never read the book.
              Something to look forward to, if I can find it. You need books you haven’t read.

              I are a generalist. Hobbies: Joy, quantum mechanics, poetry, history, geography, paradox, making people think, reflecting God to everyone I meet, gratitude, learning what I don’t know.

              I tell people the paradox is that we can only learn what we don’t know, but we never know what we don’t know, so it is impossible to learn, paradoxically. ..

              Liked by 1 person

  2. I think a lot of dietary guidance is basically food magic. Perform the ritual correctly and you will be rewarded!

    Liked by 5 people

    1. Dietary guidance needs to be highly specific, depending on the individual issues. I like the example of when I was low-energy, pale, out of breath, and fatigued. Diagnosis: Severely low iron, with the dietary admonition to take an iron supplement. I had a friend who, around that time, was low-energy, out of breath, and fatigued. Diagnosis: Life-threatening clotting disorder. Dietary admonition: go as low-iron as possible with the diet.

      I know people for whom low-carb is precisely the requirement. One has a family history of severe obesity and diabetes, and has kept it in check through strict attention to low-carb and fasting. Another one discovered he was actually gluten-intolerant, so he’s since modified his diet with that in mind. But if you throw low-carb at someone whose body is craving those carbs, that’s going to backfire badly.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. The Reader believes that the adaption of the human race to surplus of any kind – food, energy, information may be the fundamental challenge we face as a species. The problem is only 2-3 centuries old for food and energy and less than 50 years for information. You see it everywhere; attempts to create food and energy shortages for ‘Gaia’ and attempts to create information shortages by the management of ‘disinformation’. While the people doing these things believe they are needed or are leveraging them to gain power over other humans, their prevalence leads the Reader to believe that there is something wired in homo sapiens to fear abundance. We will have to overcome that challenge if we want to reach the stars. As an aside the Reader believes that it is a source of wonder that the Founders of this country managed to create the best system in the world for generating surpluses of all kinds. He wonders how they knew.

    Liked by 3 people

  4. “Have an idea. Go to the public library and come home with 50 books on the general area/time/subject. Read them to refine more closely what you might want to say/work with. Go out and get another 50 books by borrow, beg or buy. Refine still more. Now go and buy (at this level, it was almost always buy) another 50 books. Note some of these will be useful for one line, maybe two.”

    I still do this. I was researching the history of Geisha/Geiko. Most of what I found on-line was about modern Geisha/Geiko and the history felt incomplete. Same with slavery in ancient Rome. Hardly anything on-line. (side bar note: I persuaded the county library to order a book on ancient Rome for their shelves.) I ended up buying several books on Geisha/Geiko so I could finish the research on my time, not the library’s. ((sadly, the story that was going to make use of that information was never finished. It got too complicated too fast and I lack the skills to sort it out. But the research was Fun.))

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      1. Many of the too-many books I buy are old library books. I mean, I enjoy going to library book sales, and most of the books for sale are donations, not old library books. But the ones that are—so many of them I look at and think, this is still a useful book. It’s a unique perspective. And it’s out of print and not available in e-form. It’s exactly the thing that libraries ought to be useful for.

        Pretty much the only reason I go to libraries now is for their sales.

        Liked by 2 people

      2. Libraries do, darn it. And too many don’t do ILL. I want to research the court of the Ming Dynasty and brocade-clad guards to find out how they might really interact with cultivators….

        (Among many, many other things I want to know. Heh!)

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Remarkable just how quickly the far left went from wanting to punch Nazis to supporting the people who want to kill Jews, isn’t it?

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  6. Oh, am I ever with you on the bygone days of writing research. Of course, combing through such stuff was half the fun for me. And it isn’t perfect today by any means. I was trying to recall a specific quotation from The Making of the President 1960 that pertained to recent partisan maneuvers, but my paperback copy of the book disappeared during the last move (possibly left behind to save packing space [smacks head]). Just could not find it on-line, and the libraires I’m in touch with don’t carry anything political that old (classic though it is considered). Maybe it’s fortunate for me that the political landscape has been overtaken by other events.

    There definitely are pitfalls to too much, as there are with too little. The ancients had it right: moderation in all things. (Even including moderation: we do better with an occasional splurge.) If they’d just made it clearer where the line of moderation is …

    Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Seems like the libraries are always throwing out the old books because there’s no space for stuff people don’t check out anymore. But there always seems to be ample space for new “culturally relevant” dreck to be placed out front even though nobody is checking that out either.

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      2. And you haven’t even gotten around to the deliberate purging of oldthink.

        Our local library, about four years ago, did a MAJOR purge and reorg. For a short time the whole SYSTEM (multicounty) had NO biographies of Robert E. Lee. None. No matter what you think of the War as a whole or Lee in particular, that’s a really glaring omission.

        Shortly after finding this lack, I went to a branch and looked at their so-called “History” section. (Dewey Decimal 97x numbers.) The section on the Civil War took up less than half a shelf. The section on the SPANISH-AMERICAN war took up more.

        I put two and two together and figured out that this was part of a massive purge relating to all the OLD histories that didn’t have the very latest jargon and newthink.

        Liked by 2 people

          1. I better have my own books – who knows what’ll disappear tomorrow.

            On paper, or similar read only media, because if the device ever touches the net, the disappearance can happen.

            Liked by 1 person

              1. My wife thinks I have too many books, (12,000), but so many you cannot find now. Probably well over 100 feet of history. Some over 100 years old. Historic history books. An old history book tells you about two times, first the time it writes about, and second about the time it is written.

                Current libraries are no longer useful. We need to organize collections of real books from real times for the coming fall. The problem is that books burn, they will be used more for fuel, than knowledge after the fall.

                My current prophetic novel takes place over 400 years after the fall. One unknown. What caused the fall? Everyone was so busy surviving, they didn’t record what happened. So as they try to rebuild civilization, they don’t know what not to do, to avoid what caused the fall.

                Regarding microfish. They got rid of actual newspapers because they would decay. Now the “plastic” used to record them is dying, and bound (more than 100 year old) newspapers are still readable.

                My wife’s father bought some of the old newspapers when libraries were getting rid of them. We have the August 1914 NY times. Still readable. Interesting to see the march toward doom printed, back when they actually did news.

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                  1. I figured out how to utilize a resource in my home office. Due to old age, I have now shrunk below 6 feet. In my home office I use the 2 foot space below the ceiling. I built around 200 feet of bookcases for paperbacks from wall to wall, with space between. Double loaded, around 2500 books in what is usually wasted space. Paperbacks, so when the earthquake strikes Mordor west, only pelted by light stuff. Anyone over 6 feet must kowtow when they enter. My man cave. What happens when you live in a house for 40 years.

                    Cool books. A physics textbook published in 1910, Einstein not mentioned. Many books on the civil war, some written by participants. Thousands of science fiction books and magazines. Religion, writing, fiction. Maps, atlases, a Rand McNally World atlas published in 1941, showing the status of the war on May 31, 1941. Fun. Need to figure how to trade some duplicates.

                    My wife has promised to light a bonfire if I die first. She is sure we have too many books. She likes to go to the library. Those books have to go home. I look at a book I’ve read, and see inside.

                    Liked by 2 people

    2. Re: “The Making of the President 1960“, if it’s the one by Theodore White Amazon has it in all three print formats; Kindle, paperback and hardcover, plus Audible. I’d include the URL but WP seems to dislike it and goes into “circle the drain” mode.

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  7. “people were sick with the wish for normalcy and old white dude who has
    been around politics forever promised it. A lot of the anger at him,
    likewise, is not just that he’s a walking cadaver, or that his policies
    have been uniformly disastrous, but that he couldn’t take us back to
    circa 1950 when, in our minds, things were so much simpler. (Spoiler
    voice over: they weren’t. It’s just how we remember them. Partly due to
    lying movies.)”

    Heck, I even heard ’60s.

    My response to them was “They are lying.” Biden, and accomplishes were, 100%. Biden has always been a liar. Now? I want to jump up and down and say “Told you so! Liars!” Won’t. Because why? That’ll just make them mad at me. Besides Fox does it sooooo much better.

    Liked by 3 people

        1. Oh, I could make a list of the unpleasant things that gave me problems in the 1960s. Measles, mumps, a broken arm, school bullies… But beyond about a ten mile radius of my home (if that much), not a care in the world.

          (Then, of course, PUBERTY!!! in the 1970s… Yecch.)

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  8. My first thought on reading the post title was a flashback to the old OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) of a quarter century back, used in countless 3D programming tutorials and a few serious utilities and programs, but that was just the work of my brain free associating until I got into the post proper.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. Sort of OT, but Eric Erickson is claiming the folks assuming Obama is running things are wrong: the Bidens and the Obamas despise one another. His take is that Biden is angry with the Os because they ignored him for Hilary, and is in full, “I’ll show them!” mode. With Jill, Hunter and various siblings pushing that along.

    If so, yep, a crab bucket.

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      1. I kinda figured the same people running Obama were running Biden, but I now think they are either disjunct or only partially overlapping circles of anti-American Leftists.

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        1. Certainly two groups, if only due to Joe’s decades on the take vs. Barry only coming into the cashflow stream much more recently, and thus more heavily weighted to Silicon Valley new money.

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        2. I’d say overlapping circles. with plenty enough conflict within and without those circles (it is one very messy Venn Diagram!)
          Recall the reason they love to say Trump is a Birther is he was lead man for Hillary’s attacks on 0bama over his birth cert. That bit is from Clinton & Co. in the Primaries, not McCain or Romney.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. Obama was/is the 15 Watt fridge bulb… DIM. DIM. DIM….unless you are ill, then that puny fridge bulb turns into a 15 MILLION CANDLEPOWER SEARCHBEAM. I want a cure for… so many.

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    2. Erick Erickson says a lot of things.

      I think the one that sticks most in my mind is his misidentification of the most credible elements of the QAnon conspiracy theories (pedophile hypothesis and satanist hypothesis) as being the most incredible.

      ‘Despise each other’, even if true, is no reason why Obama would not try to manipulate the situation. Jill and Hunter rode on Joe’s coat tails, and are not independently more effective politicians than Joe is. That means that they would not be 100% effective in preventing manipulations by Obama. Even supposing that Obama is grossly incompetent.

      The only way for a single mind to have curated the left boondoggles of the “administration” would have been for Joe to have been consistently in complete possession of his faculties. The office of the president does a lot of things. Those are never wholly invented at the whitehouse, the staff select from outside sources. A 100% there president can curate staff suggestions, and fire people proposing a policy he absolutely does not want. But, even a president 90% puppeted by a single person, that puppeteer does not have complete ability to remove staffers.

      For pushes like aviation electrification, and advanced air mobility, the people behind it had clearly been talking to indsutry or academia some, and also knew that they would be able to pass things through.

      The policies were an uncurated grab bag of left and crony stuff with a myriad of backers.

      In particular, via obamacare, Obama is deeply implicated with the Trans push, and Biden’s trans policy clearly had Obama’s support. (It could be argued that this was an attack on feminist cultism, except that Hillary may also enjoy the prospect of rapey men having access to dressing rooms etc., of other women. )

      Now that Biden’s corpse is smelling so much, the other Democrat politicians want to pretend that they had nothing to do with it, and can still potentially do positive things in the future themselves.

      There was lots of opportunity for Republicans to fight Biden, and many neglected to take it, and favored fighting other foes. Some of those Republicans may now be eager to make the 2020/2021 Biden into a more credible agent, so that doing little effective is a less damning indictment of their own ability.

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      1. Apologies for the deep dive but you hit a peeve point in there:

        Civil aviation electrification has two major barrier issues.

        The first one is the battery tech, which is just barely there for cars and in-town trucks, but is not there yet at the energy density needed for flight applications. There are indications it’s within maybe ten or fifteen years, but not yet.

        Second is the required electrical infrastructure concentration at airports or hoverpads or whatever they will land on and need recharging at. The grid impact of everyone switching it electric cars has been covered, but if you have to cram that many watts into aircraft batteries fairly fast at a very few concentrated points, airports start looking like the way they wire up nuclear power plants, and that electrical infrastructure just is not there and not cheap.

        I think hybrid aviation applications make a lot more sense, with a kerosene powered engines driving generators at the capacity for electric motors to deliver cruise power, and batteries or supercapacitors to plus it up for takeoff and climb, and maybe merge by ops if the engines go out. All the infrastructure to deliver that energy-dense kerosene to a plane is already in place, so any efficiency gain is straight to the bottom line in reduced operating expenses, without a need to rewire the entire country.

        But it’s a religion, and the dirt goddess demands heavy batteries powering everything. Whatchagonnado?

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          1. Yes, but flight duration and time to recharge are both still issues for battery vertical lift.

            They keep talking about using them effectively as flying cars, which I don’t see happening, but even as air taxis they still will need places to land for pickups and dropoffs and other places to land and sit to recharge. And even the towns where TehGoog and Zuckerbook HQ are located don’t want a couple hundred buzzy drone copters flying over every time the execs want to go to lunch, so initially they will serve airports and any existing helipads, and I assume charge at a home base. There are designs that have swappable battery packs to get around charge time, but all the ones close to reality have fixed battery packs.

            I think they are cool, but I wonder if the business case is really there.

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        3. NP. That aligns to my own thinking.

          Electrifying aviation is basically another way of screwing over the federal government’s effectiveness at pushing crud like the electrification of aviation. Cheap transport on the national scale is how you keep bureaucrats caring what central instructs them to do.

          I think there are neat VTOL things with conventional fuel propulsion, but my perhaps unfair expectation was that advanced air mobility would fail. If for no other reason than I doubt the ability of the geniuses to make an industry grow deliberately and on purpose.

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      1. “I don’t know which species is worse. At least you don’t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage!” — Ellen Ripley, ‘Aliens’

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  10. It’s a glut of crap. Most of the non-fiction books readily available should be sub-titled “For Dummies”. Finding anything with depth is getting harder. Video is the slowest most cumbersome way to learn anything. It’s just like the book you read for one or two lines.
    I go to a financial board where people post worthwhile things. However, a lot of them post videos. I am not going to watch an hour long video of information that should have been stated in five minutes. I’ll confess dear hostess if your posts are over long I read the intro and scroll down to your conclusion.

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    1. sure. But you can find boards and such. And yes, I hate video as info, too. I usually put it on 3x the speed.
      Um… on my posts. I know they’re long, but truly, you often need the middle or they make no sense.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Videos are nice when doing something physical that makes reading awkward, like exercise, folding laundry, sorting mail, etc. Otherwise, I prefer reading.

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          1. It all depends on the subject. “How-to” videos for such things as exactly how to take apart that smartphone and replace the battery, with descriptive and informational narration, are IMHO far more usable than text with a few photos. The same for anything best learned “hands-on” directly from someone who knows how to do it, from setting up a radial-arm saw correctly to disassembling, repairing and reassembling a complicated mechanical assembly such as a firearm.

            For “academic” subjects (math, history, economics, etc.) written material is best, but not for such things as noted above.

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    2. Her posts are not “long”.

      You have been conditioned by modern media to have an ADHD attention span. It is wrecking written discourse.

      She posts well reasoned essays that often dig -way- in. Those do not fit in 500 words, or 1000.

      Could she be more Laconic? Sure. Not her usual style.

      Skipping the middle is like ordering a nice sandwich and eating only the bun.

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  11. “Modern times and the info is easy…”

    Back in the day, you had to drive and dig for the information. Drive to the library(s) and bookstores. Dig thru the stacks and the racks of weird quarterly periodicals.

    There was the Internet, but that was limited to a few universities and corporations. We suffered with BBS and a few pay services like CompuServe. AOL until the ’90s. However there was a assortment of text files with hidden gems since much of the ‘net was part of the counterculture of the day. Info wants to be free folks.

    It was still possible to get a very rough idea of the elephant back then if you constantly read and filtered.

    The biggest surprise with more information available now has been just how many shenanigans have been covered up or not well known. Also the very large number of people involved in the coverups and misdirections.

    Liked by 3 people

  12. It was also easier to cover things up when everyone over the age of six didn’t have a cellphone with video, photo, and automatic upload capabilities.

    They weren’t worried Joe would get COVID back in 2020, they didn’t want a replay of the video of Hillary being tossed into a van like a side of beef.

    They didn’t have their censorship apparatus in place yet to get that wiped off the face of the internet. Only known throne sniffers were allowed to witness his campaign events.

    They have kept Joe’s condition under wraps for a very long time considering how much video of him falling, tripping, sniffing, groping, spazzing and gaffing there is. You had to look in non-traditional places to find it, which is why we knew but it was a shock to the LIVs.

    911 opened a lot of eyes.

    Perhaps this will too.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Watching a very angry public have it’s will blatantly and continuously thwarted by their own governments, here and abroad has been very eye opening. We can all feel the explosion coming on a gut level. My guess-and I could be wrong-is that The Great Awakening is very real even if QAnon was a psyop.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Spraking of abroad, I saw a quick comment earlier today about a supposed broad-based coalition of right-wing groups in Europe, spearheaded by Alternative for Germany (AfD). No idea what’s involved, how strong of a coalition it might be, the actual groups involved, or if it’s even real. But – assuming the item was accurate – it shows evidence of the European right getting better organized in response to what their own governments (including Brussels) have been trying to shovel down their throats..

        Like

        1. And the EU is charging Musk with violating its handy-dandy brand-spanking new law against, “disinformation,” online.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Europe is already fallen to dictatorship. They just haven’t put on the jackboots yet.

            Soon.

            Like

            1. On the other hand, a backlash is definitely forming. Last time the fascists were the backlash. But after several decades of nominally representative governments, we might see a better outcome this time

              Liked by 1 person

  13. On the food and diet stuff, I am assured by itinerant time travelers that we will learn the gut microbiome is so complex and reactive that a strategy that might work initially will inevitably be adapted to by the gut and stop working, so the trick eventually will be a sequence, to drive kind of a gut microbiome crop rotation.

    Also, the Cubs won’t win a World Series for another hundred years.

    Liked by 2 people

  14. It’s not so much that there’s a glut, but that to the untrained (not the “expert,” untrained) eye, a lot of the information sounds so very real.

    Especially online these days. There is a massive ratio of bad-to-good information out there, especially on anything that can be used to prove or defend against Marxist attacks of one kind or another. Or anything that proves how The Patriarchy destroyed Proper Female Leadership. Or a lot of other things that are getting…well, just plain creepy.

    It’s like the 2020 elections-a lot of people that I knew were saying that “there’s something wrong, we need to investigate,” and the holy anointed Experts said that “investigating is a racist, sexist, bigoted concept.” When Wikipedia pages are being edited in real time to make it clear that math and accounting concepts are not applicable to elections, you’ve got a problem.

    Liked by 2 people

  15. Yeah. Research is wild now.

    For the fanfic thing I needed a doll, but not one that was in a local regional style. Something like five minutes of Wikipedia diving in dolls came up with the clay body, a gaelic voodoo doll. It was perfect. A basic clue was now both something very sinister, and a direct reason to go ask the local curse disposal expert if they’ve seen anything else like this. (They had, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to get them in contact with the main characters. Problem solved!)

    On the other hand for the w(n)ip I was researching cult indoctrination, child soldiers and why people stay in bad situations. And 90% of everything related to most of that has been some variation of “Trump! Orange Man Bad! Trump! Orange Man Bad!” because the newsies went all in on the idea that Trump is a crazy cult leader and the tech oligarchs followed right along. The only way I’m going to get much of anything useful on the subject is if I go researching things the old way. Because all the online data is so much a servant of The Message, it can’t be trusted.

    Liked by 1 person

  16. This is off-topic, but too good not to share. Do you know what it feels like to get nerd-sniped by a plot bunny?

    Well, now you do.

    Like

      1. There’s also Doc Smith and his allotropic iron as an energy source. Apparently he mistook a minima for a maxima.

        Like

        1. Unfortunately we seem to be rapidly approaching the point where Doc Smith is a more accurate reference than most current college courses… 🤢

          Like

    2. You actually can’t extract energy via fission from any element lighter than silver. (Unstable isotopes will still decay, but that’s a different process.)

      Hence the magical powers of silver, of course.

      Liked by 1 person

  17. Yes… there is a huge glut of information and a lot of it is “bad” as well. I hate to get into it but there is the whole “AI” thing and it drives me crazy. AI isn’t real it’s just a bunch of computer algorithms with a program that’s sucked up a bunch of the internet and spits out what it thinks you want to know. Is it right? Very seldom and even when you get something that is right of a sort from an AI source it’s still somehow tainted and not quite all there.

    I looked up ‘leg cramps’ and found that tonic water (quinine in there) may help if you drink some at bedtime. I had to skip through a bunch of crap from AI sources and other sites that were medical bunk but I did get some real information that I was able to confirm – none of it from AI, think old books and references. I have tried to turn off any/all AI functions and keep having them come back because all the programmers, internet managers, search managers etc. think the consumer MUST HAVE and so keep shoving it down your throat like it or not.

    I used to love the library and bookstores but today, they are all trying to be hip, relevant, and socially ‘with it’ and thus have given up on quality. I often find myself going back to old reference texts, old books I’ve got here and there and digging into the on-line archives of old manuals, publications and the like as modern sources are really poor.

    We’ve got a glut alright but some of it is poisoned in both food and information. Sigh… I now have to actually do more work with information to sort the crap from the real and keep the tainted pieces from my results.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. A lot of the information has always been bad.

      We can just tell, now. It’s Gell-Mann for sources.

      A lot of my research is finding the sources that I would’ve gotten Way Back When, but faster… and then tracking down their source…and theirs… and frequently it’s exactly backwards.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The explosion of good info has been on whatever trend it’s on.

        The explosion of bad and/or trivial/shallow info is on a much steeper trajectory…

        [The following has a STEM focus for me:] Used to hit the library, and…OK…these seven books talk about the subject; these five all repeat the same shallow stuff; this one has depth in this direction, and this one has depth in another. Check out the two good ones, and maybe one other that also covers a related/needed topic. Passing through the card catalog and then the stacks used to work like that for me. Periodicals required a little more work.

        Now? Seems like >95% of all web sources repeat the SAME (sometimes down to the SAME text and/or SAME graphics) shallow stuff. Useful meat is rare (ha).

        And the presentation of junk is forced; 15-20 years ago, carefully crafted search expressions usually yielded useful search results; nowadays, you get what some person and/or algorithm has determined that you SHOULD get…

        It’s why I have entire hard drives full of pdfs and jpgs and bmps and txts of stuff. “Why do you need all that?” “BECAUSE I CAN’T FRIGGING FIND IT ANY MORE.”

        I used to joke about “I’ve organized the internet.” “You have?” “Well, I’m asymptotically organizing the useful bits (to me), anyway…”

        Like

        1. The explosion of bad and/or trivial/shallow info is on a much steeper trajectory…

          Based on what?

          Seriously, there’s a whole hobby around “bleeding red ink over egregious errors in textbooks.” My biology textbook in high school taught that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny as a fact, for example. (hint, no, the “gill slits” aren’t)

          If you didn’t run into “these two books go into depth, but have diametrically opposed statements, often with the same claimed source,” you were very fortunate.

          And the presentation of junk is forced; 15-20 years ago, carefully crafted search expressions usually yielded useful search results; nowadays, you get what some person and/or algorithm has determined that you SHOULD get…

          That is a websearch issue, largely brought on by the websites that scraped-and-reposted other websites with search engine optimization techniques. It has nothing to do with low quality information showing up more.

          Bouncing around through several searches usually has better results; Yandex works for finding blog posts, for example. Bing use to be best for reverse-image search, but has been getting a lot of dumb results lately.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Based on what?

            Based on 30+ years of experience in my field, in both libraries and online. I’m referring to that specifically. Extending it to other areas might not map 1:1, but it doesn’t seem to be zero, either.

            If you didn’t run into “these two books go into depth, but have diametrically opposed statements, often with the same claimed source,” you were very fortunate.

            It was rare, because electrical engineering generally has somewhat less uncertainty than biology . E.g., what part of a current flow contributes to what piece of an electric field is much less ambiguous than the gill slit question, though both are under the STEM umbrella.

            That is a websearch issue, largely brought on by the websites that scraped-and-reposted other websites with search engine optimization techniques. It has nothing to do with low quality information showing up more.

            Again, in my field (which is not all that narrow), the increase of bad/shallow info (glut) which I am talking about is NOT a web search issue, it is from PEOPLE promulgating bad/shallow info…often (usually?) out of laziness, hurry, carelessness, etc. I didn’t mention it, but in the area I’m talking about, I’ve attempted to correct for web search/scrape contamination. In the specific topics I’ve noticed this in, I’ve looked at a LOT of web sites, books, journal articles, ad nauseum. Not wanting to write an article about it, but there are enough data to support the assertion, in the areas that I work in.

            Like

            1. As it happens, I was an AT in the Navy, so I’m not exactly unfamiliar with the stuff you’d be researching, especially since I always got stuck tutoring folks for exams.

              That you are now actively conflating BAD information with “shallow” or repeated information answers the initial question about your claim that bad information was increasing.

              Basic common sense should tell you that most people are going to be looking for basic information. Most of the good sources will repeat it, for that matter.

              Like

              1. That you are now actively conflating BAD information with “shallow” or repeated information answers the initial question about your claim that bad information was increasing.

                I’ve seen what I’ve seen, over a long period of time. I could certainly state it better. Not wanting to get so specific that I leave identifying info.

                Maybe we should just leave it here, and agree to disagree.

                Like

                1. Why on earth would I “agree to disagree” with an assertion someone went out of their way to make to me, when they then moved off of it in favor of there being too many basic sources, did not understand the example of an egregious error nearly on par with listing Piltdown man as a discovered hominid species, and keeps trying to appeal to experience?

                  That is how actually false information gets going.

                  Like

    2. For leg cramps, I’ve found that a calcium supplement helps, because sometimes (and certainly in my case), it’s because there’s not enough calcium in your bloodstream and it starts getting grabbed from the muscles.

      Yeah, yeah, “vitamins just pass through your blood anyway,” but my legs don’t cramp in my sleep as much, so that’s worth it.

      Like

  18. I think my recent comment just got spam-binned, though I really can’t tell why. Let me try again; apologies if this posts twice. I just wanted to share this cool plot bunny:

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Okay, that posted, so there’s no need to rescue my previous comment from the spam bin. It was basically, “Do you know what it feels like to get nerd-sniped by a plot bunny? (Image of discussion about nuclear fae). Well, now you do.”

      Liked by 3 people

        1. Yep, I posted the “don’t fish it out of the spam bin” comment too late to avoid getting a double-post. Oh well, it happens from time to time.

          Liked by 1 person

  19. My favorite research story is from college, 1989 to be exact, trying to dredge up anything I could about some war torn hole on the back end of nowhere, and finding no source other than magazines that wasn’t older than I am. Good times. Took weeks even with the rudimentary computerized library search and share system the school had with several others locally.

    A few years and two majors later I found in a random FTP site files associated with something called the world wide web. I totally dismissed it as pointless. Little did I know…

    Like

  20. Back in 1970 or so, I think… I was with friends in a local bar next to the college campus. The NBC news program was on the TV and one guy wondered what that music was from. I, being a nice young smart ass chimed in: “Oh, that’s the second movement (scherzo) of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Which the response was, No way! Quick trip to the campus library, get an LP copy of said music, listen to it in one of the library booths and I’ve got a free beer! Now that’s research!

    Internet version: https://www.networknewsmusic.com/huntley-brinkley-report-theme/

    Like

  22. Oh, lord – the bits of trivia that I looked for, in service to my own books, that I was able to find almost instantly through an internet search … whole out-of-print 19th century books of memoirs and commentary. Catalogs of professional kitchen equipment. The street view of a certain neighborhood in Brisbane, Australia. The fact that the British public school Charterhouse has a sailing/rowing athletic program. The street in Paris where the popular bars catering to the tourist trade are. The whole archive of documents, maps and memoirs of wartime Singapore and Australia. Mapping out a carriage journey from Waterloo Station to Belgrave square… not to mention being able to fact-check my memory of song titles, lyrics, years of movie release, titles of books, and TV schedules for the late 1960s …

    A bounty, a veritable bounty, which would have been nearly impossible for me to locate, pre-internet

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I can go and actually read what the Venerable Bede wrote about “Ester.”

      Which completely upended centuries of “reliable” sources that said he reported a goddess by that name. He said that the sun rises in the east and guessed there may have been a personification by that name.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. But of course.

        ‘Easter’ is the precise analogue of ‘wester’; but applied metaphorically to springtime, rather than literally to the diurnal motion of the sun. It was only natural for the English to apply the word to the great Christian festival of Pascha, which occurs at that time of year.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. And it’s lovely poetry– which was a Big Thing in their language– it’s the rising of the light of the world. (And, in modern terms, it’s the rising of the Son.)

          Like

  23. In my opinion, looking for good information today is like picking through horse apples for corn kernels. There’s too much crap, and not enough truth.

    Like

    1. That’s the way information has always been.

      Difference is, now, you can tell what’s feces from what’s corn, instead of being handed a bag and told it’s corn, no matter how bad it stinks.

      Liked by 2 people

  24. Been watching the presser. Wanted to laugh because it was exactly as expected, but not so bad to have him definitely removed. But, as a human and a Christian …

    Do not go gentle into that good night,
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Like

        1. Yeah, it may be literally true that former Vice President Manson is finding his assigned task more difficult than his cultists expected.

          Fortunately, the ravens beating the dragon’s drums have woken the true President from his sleep beneath Mount Apple.

          Or maybe I need to stop tripping on literary silliness. XD

          Liked by 2 people

      2. He’s a loyal and patriotic citizen of the Deep State of America. As FICUS his primary job is to fight and defeat the enemies of his nation, of which Deplorable America is the greatest and most existential.

        They see us as a defeated, occupied, but still unrepentant nation of worse-than-nazis, and are determined to impose a 21st century version of the Morgenthau Plan, only this time without flinching due to humanitarian concerns.

        Like

  26. <old man voice> Listen up, you young’uns! In the mid 70’s–yes I’m old. Deal–I wanted to know what was playing on the radio from 1969-1970. I knew where it was–Billboard Magazine’s weekly top 40 lists. I got in my 60 Chevy and drove (not to the Levy, to the downtown library where I paid a couple of bucks for parking–an hourly wage for me then).

    The gorgeous young librarian squinted at me severely. She was not going to let me have 104 forty-page, tabloid-sized magazines to plunk down on a table. She had her minion shuttle to the periodical section in the basement and bring me 6 at a time. Why were they in the basement? Because paper is fragile, and you can’t just let anybody get their unsupervised hands on it. <end old man voice>

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Yes, but in fairness, tabloid newsprint is significantly more fragile than the paper in library editions of books…or at least it used to be so.

        Like

      2. Periodicals other than relatively recent were on microfiche at the university library when I was attending back in the Stone Age, so I had to learn how the cranky microfiche reader machine worked, and then find the right microfiche, often misfiled by the last knowledge seeker, and then find the right images, and then copy what I found by hand, as there was no print function.

        Then dodge the pterosaurs on my way back to my car.

        Like

  27. I’m curious about the “at least six” movies currently playing — I’m familiar with “Conservative” and “Leftist”, and figure “Libertarian” is one as well. Were there specific movies you had in mind, or is it based on a hunch?

    (Even if I can’t think of what other movies might be there, the notion that there are six of them, rather than just two, makes a lot of sense to me!)

    Like

      1. I’m seeing a new version that both worries and annoys me: “The Right is becoming pagan, the post-Chritian culture is going pagan, everything is going pagan, why don’t you people rise up in your righteous wrath?”

        This seems to be coming from abortion abolitionist, but I’m not completely sure.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Oh, dear Lord, yes.
          I am pro-life from the rational side. (I mean religious too, but rationally, if we consider that defining human down is bad for a society based on individual rights.) but the “anti-abort-uber-alas” is falling for crazy propaganda and going NUTS.

          Like

  28. Yes, but some people just ignore obvious information, provided in an easy to digest fashion, because they feel like it (or have some other reason).

    The reason we keep running out of meat at work? The expensive ingredients?

    Because people were just chunking random large amounts of pepperoni and ham on the meat pizzas. When there is a poster with instructions and pictures staring at them.

    They were using more pepperoni on the meat pizza than on the pepperoni pizza.

    Meanwhile, scanting the cheese or going crazy with it, and scanting the sauce or drowning the crust.

    There are measuring cups and ladies and a picture. Argh.

    Liked by 1 person

          1. The problem is that they roll. Usually under something where something with teeth and a bad disposition lives.

            Like

    2. Because people were just chunking random large amounts of pepperoni and ham on the meat pizzas. When there is a poster with instructions and pictures staring at them.

      They were using more pepperoni on the meat pizza than on the pepperoni pizza.

      Meanwhile, scanting the cheese or going crazy with it, and scanting the sauce or drowning the crust.

      Do you allow customization, in any form? Light vs Extra vs None? And do you allow half and half pizzas?

      Do your instruction posters show what those terms mean too? And how are those orders flagged as different?

      Point being, the more options you have, the more thought required, both in the order and the prep. One size fits all is always faster. “Any color you want as long as it’s black.”

      Like

          1. Honestly, I think part of this is our public education. It’s creating people that can’t read instructions. So you do pictographs. I know this is going to sound retarded, but I LITERALLY don’t GET pictographs.
            I can read an instruction list, but the little drawings are null program for me.
            As more and more instructions go to that, I have to get one of the guys to read it, and type in words for me.
            Now I don’t know how many people are “picture retarded” out there (that really is the level I function at) but I bet there are a few.

            Like

              1. Raises hand.

                I can deal with the picture gram instructions as long as they include the written step to go with them. Otherwise? Not so much.

                Been guilty of making pictures for instructions too. But always with the written instructions. As in: “Click tree icon to …” then show a picture of the screen shot with “tree icon” circled, or labeled text with red arrow pointing to icon wanted (usually both). Tell what to find. Show what it is, and where it is at.

                Liked by 1 person

    4. The franchised chain you-bake pizza place I frequent weighs the more expensive stuff, every time. They have cheat sheets with the numbers on their side of the counter where you get to watch them make your order if you’re there, and they are very specific, not ungenerous, but toppings get weighed every time. I imagine that’s from both the franchisee training and the fact that the owner or family is usually ringing up orders.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. Individual packets run into a lot of the “options” issues I started out with. At best, you have set an upper bound on what you will waste; the downside is that when people order Light or Heavy, they won’t get it, because is light half a packet and Heavy 1.5? or do you specify based on Light = 1 packet, Normal is 2, heavy is 3. Easiest to eliminate the choice. Or, again, robots controlled by a webapp that dispense bulk ingredients in pre-defined amounts.

          The business case for robots is based on that.

          Like

      2. “franchised chain you-bake pizza place I frequent weighs the more expensive stuff, every time.”

        Papa Murphy’s locally does the same. “Add” and “extra” has a quantity attached based on the size of pizza getting. Even the cheese to top the pizza at the end has a weight attached to how much goes on. All explicitly posted on the production line.

        Like

        1. Which I freakin’ love.

          If I figure out what kind of pizza order I like?

          I can get that, again. At any of their chains. Not, “guess who might be working that day, and hope.”

          Like

          1. Tell me about it. We don’t get Papa Murphy’s much. We go to Gillcrest Center Putters (matters because local and they are training up the great-grands as the next set of owners). We get the same exact pizza every single time. It does not come out of the oven the same.

            Light sauce (this they get the same)
            1/2 “Birdy” (Canadian Bacon, Pepperoni, Beef), hold beef add sausage, ADD pepperoni, lots of pepperoni. (need to just order it: CB, double pepperoni, sausage, because guess what they sometimes get right and sometimes skimp on?)

            1/2 double pepperoni, sausage, olives

            6 slices of tomatoes on the side. (NOT a side of tomatoes, sigh it is wasteful). Papa Murphy’s doesn’t do sliced tomatoes so not comparison there.

            Liked by 1 person

  29. If I weren’t hyper-political and connected, or were in an information subgroup that reports “everything bad ever said about Trump” but not the denouement where the report is often completely upside down, all I’d know was that “there have been a lot of bad things said about Trump. What a horrible man.”

    You have just defined my wife. And you’ve met my wife. sigh I love my wife dearly but I wish she’d be more than just superficial about politics. Trying to get her to see that Biden is a senile old man who’s a) not in charge of anything and b) an actual danger to the country is impossible.

    Like

  30. There is a glut of information. Wasting my time reading things I’m already aware of and agree with takes away time that might be spent actually learning something.

    This is why I’m SO tired of the PJMedia echo chamber. The same things are said over and over (and over and over) again. It’s preaching to the choir and it’s useless. I rarely read anything there, any longer.

    And would people PLEASE stop talking about how the debate is/was/will be some great turning point for people’s trust in the media! It’s been said, a zillion times, so there is no need to say it again. It’s also wrong. Maybe a half-dozen NY Times readers will care. The rest will remain comfortably Murray-Gellman-ed. If there were any CNN viewers, the same could be said of them.

    Repeating oneself does NOT change anyone’s mind because anyone who doesn’t already agree with you is not reading it. They’re reading something else.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Oh, don’t worry, I’ve already seen people saying that “Agenda 47 is just a rebrand of Project 2025.” These people have already decided that the Heritage Foundation will 100% no foolin’ be in charge if Trump were to be elected. Because it’s their worst fear, so it must be true.

      Liked by 1 person

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