#12 - Branson & Bezo Are Bozos (Anniversary Edition)
Nothing about the billionaire's herein. Just wanted to mention they contribute nothing of use.
This edition of Ephemera Punchcard represents a year of monthly newsletters. Ain’t that sumthin?
Begrudging Acceptance
We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.
- Joseph Campbell, Sukhavati - A Mythic Journey
I’ve been thinking about this quote a good bit lately. I’m drawn to the idea now in much the same way I was drawn to a Buddhist ethos in my teenage years, the Tao as an adult, and a dozen other similar concepts besides.
I always have a hard time squaring this idea with the need to act against injustice, exploitation, and hate. There is something in reacting to anxiety, fear, and depression by turning the problem inward and giving my “joyful participation” that rubs me the wrong way. It feels a bit too much like giving up—which, maybe it is—and accepting that what was made wrong, what is reified everyday, cannot be made right except on the level of the individual by choosing to react to it differently.
This guy puts it pretty well in very few words:
Don’t get me wrong, therapy can be a great thing for a great many people. In the absence of systems of oppression, we would still need therapy. Living under systems of oppression, however, often makes therapy into a salve which treats the symptoms while we ignore the wasting illness.
The trouble for me is that, despite agreeing with—and attempting to bring into practice—this kind of reframing to love the world as it is in the face of all that is rot and wrong, I often want to feel this sentiment but am far more certain that revolution is the way.
I know I’m describing cognitive dissonance, and not even very well, but I wonder how others square such ideas and bring that dissonance into accord.
Who Goes There?
In geology, an ‘unconformity’ is where two masses of rock (or other strata) indicate sediment was deposited in a non-continuous way. In other words, it is where there is a gap in time in the geological record. In still other words, we look at and date the rocks and for some weird reason we find 350 million year old rock sitting right on top of 450 millions year old rock with nothing in the middle. There’s just 100 million years of the record missing. You can pretty clearly see this with the naked eye:
Unconformities can be caused by long term changes in the way sediment accumulates or sudden uplifts which are subsequently covered by younger sediments.
The greatest of these has a deeply clever name: the “Great Unconformity”is a gap of 100 million to 1 billion years in the geologic record. It can be seen in various places around the world, like the Grand Canyon in the American West and Siccar Point in Scotland (see above). There is no widely accepted explanation for the Great Unconformity, though geoscientists generally agree it is likely the result of a combination of large scale events.
Novel rock dating techniques led at least one researcher to the conclusion that the breakup of the ancient supercontinent of Rodinia (which preceded Pangea by about 1B years) lifted quickly—in geologic time—leading to the erasure of hundreds of millions of years from the rock record. The evidence is based on helium atoms in zircon crystals…and at this point I’m already very lost. Geology has always been a bit of a mystery to me.
(Awesome little side note: As a kid, I was taught about Pangea in school. What I do not recall hearing, even once, is that the Earth has a supercontinent cycle and Pangea is only the name of the most recent supercontinent. The cycle is about 500 million years long, during which the continents merge and split apart over and over.)
So we have a massive gap in the rock record, and while we don’t generally agree on what caused it, there is some consensus that it was probably several major events, all of which are perfectly plausible. So what?
Our narratives, and our science, are often only as good as what we are actively looking for. In the 1990s, dinosaurs were giant lizards. Today we “know” they are giant birds. Why the change? To be reductive to a disgusting degree, the fossil record doesn’t preserve evidence of feathers well and in the very recent past we paired evolutionary evidence with very rare evidence of feathered dinosaurs to discover that dinos were birdies. What else might we be misguided about?
I really love the idea that we could be living on top of an ancient and completely unknown civilization. Not simply Atlantis-disappeared-into-the-sea or the very real native inhabitants we knowingly displaced in the Western hemisphere (and of course worldwide, but your author is American, so…), but a globe spanning civilization about which we know absolutely nothing. This trope, and the idea of an ancient Earth from which humanity or it’s predecessor came, are the source of many fun and ridiculous stories.
James Davis Nicoll, writing for Tor.com last year, riffed on a number of ways “a hypothetical civilization ten thousand years in our future might not know about us if our grand finale included catastrophic climate change and a global thermonuclear war.” Among his “strategies” for hiding a lost civilization are:
Cognitive/Cultural Bias and/or Bigotry: Significantly unfamiliar technologies are often misattributed or missed altogether. Think, for example, of the European assumption that the Americas were complete wilderness rather than land under altogether unknown management by Pre-Columbian peoples. (Note: I am not a fan of that phrase, but it’s clear despite the gross bias of defining Indigenous peoples in relation to Europeans)
Geological Scale and Time: On a long enough timeline, geology can erase millennia. Most of our cities are quite close to the shore, but water levels and shorelines are ever changing, especially as supercontinents form and break up.
Of course, one of the pieces of evidence we have for supercontinents is plant life on far flung coasts with similar traits which have only diverged for a couple hundred million years. Given that this evidence remains, we might expect to see evidence of civilizations as well. The salient difference here is that plants have continued to live and evolve over than time, whereas a dead civilization is…dead.
The Silurian Hypothesis (Schmidt & Frank) examines whether it would be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record, and comes to the conclusion that the “fingerprint of the Anthropocene…will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record”.
This is not to say that the Great Unconformity is covering up evidence of a lost civilization, as fun as that story is. There is absolutely no evidence of that. But then it is possible that, in the geological record at least, we might not be able to tell the difference between an “industrial cause [and] an otherwise naturally occurring climate event” (Schmidt & Frank).
A little something to think about when it seems we’ll continue to ignore our decimation of the Earth’s climate. Maybe we’ll make one hell of a myth or science fiction story for a succeeding civilization some 500 million years hence.
WTF BBC?
One of the truly unjust aspects of human-driven climate change is that those who stand to be most impacted are those who have contributed the least to the release of greenhouse gases, while those who have contributed the most will likely experience it the least harshly.
The BBC probably should have spent a moment or two considering that before posting to Bitesize a list of potential positive outcomes stemming from rising global temperatures.
The list of climate catastrophe upsides has since been taken down (it’s preserved by the Wayback Machine), but it included the following changes to look forward to as a planet:
warmer temperatures and increased CO2 levels, leading to more vigorous plant growth
some animals and plants could benefit and flourish in a changing climate
new shipping routes, such as the Northwest passage, would become available
more resources, such as oil, becoming available in places such as Alaska and Siberia when the ice melts
energy consumption decreasing due to a warmer climate
longer growing season leading to a higher yields in current farming areas
frozen regions, such as Canada and Siberia, could be able to grow crops
new tourist destinations becoming available
…as well as some UK-specific favorable outcomes:
higher year-round temperatures and longer growing seasons could mean that new crops such as oranges, grapes and peaches flourish in the UK
higher yields of many outdoor crops such as cereals, potatoes and sugar beet due to a longer growing season and higher temperatures
warmer temperatures would reduce winter heating costs
accidents on the roads in winter could be less likely to occur
warmer temperatures could lead to healthier outdoor lifestyles
some plant and animal species would thrive and be able to grow and survive further north and at higher altitudes
growth in the UK tourist industry, particularly seaside resorts, with warmer, drier summers
Gizmodo points out that this is hardly the first time the BBC has couched climate denialism in “bothsidesism.” If we assume good faith, maybe they are really trying to air all sides equally. In reality, however, they are one of the most trusted news sources on the planet and that good faith, equal time argument is a poor excuse. Platforming oil industry and reactionary conservative talking points does incredible harm, they absolutely know better, and they should be called out mercilessly every time.
No, Nikolaj
I started my graduate education program earlier this month, and I’m thrilled to say the coursework was interesting from the jump.
While I’ve long been a big fan of etymology, both folk and that which is based in strong evidence, I’ve never taken it on myself to learn all that much about linguistics. Nor have a been a very diligent language learner. I studied and spoke French decently as a young man, and can barely conjugate a verb now. I have a passing familiarity and comfort with Spanish, but I come to the edge of my understanding very quickly. Time for all of this to change.
Phonemes are distinct sounds in a language. English has ~42 of them, and no two languages share the exact same phonemes. I feel like this term is pretty familiar to folks, but it seems like one of those concepts that most—myself included—understand only partially.
Phonemes aren’t the same as letters, because letters can stand in for different sounds. Take the g in ‘giraffe’ vs the first g in ‘garage.’ Same letter, very different sounds. (Note that the 2nd g in ‘garage’ is the same sound as the only g in ‘giraffe’)
Phonemes are functional sounds. If you change a sound in a word, and the word changes meaning, the replaced sound is a phoneme in that language.
But what about sounds that one can express differently. I can say the word ‘pop’ with soft ps or I can say pop so that it blows out your speakers when played back. In both cases, I’m clearly saying the same word, so the different p sounds aren’t phonemes. They’re allophones.
Allophones are variations on a sound which don’t change the function of the sound. Hard p or soft p, the word is still ‘pop.’
Allophones in one language may be phonemes in another based on whether similar sounds are grouped tightly or loosely together