Important If True 14: Your Worst Nightmare

[RubixsQube]

This podcast is great. The joy at Nick's reveal about the story, urban legend or not, was so profoundly good.

 

I have two notes, although perhaps I should just write this in:

 

1) I have always been really fascinated by eruv after seeing the boundaries around the orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Los Angeles. There's a single house here in Tucson with eruv wire (Chris referred to it as string, but I'm fairly certain it's always wire) around it, I assume so that the family living there can take tools out to do gardening, or play, on the sabbath. The more that I looked into it, the more traditions I discovered that seemed like Orthodox Jewish Bible-workarounds (I do not mean this dismissively, similar to how Chris didn't want to call them "loopholes."). For instance, Tefillin, those black leather boxes worn by observant Jewish men which contain parchments inscribed with the Torah as "a memorial between your eyes" (Exodus 13:9). Or the practice of selling Chametz over Passover, since you are not allowed to own any food with leavening. I have a friend who teaches at a large, very well-to-do orthodox Jewish high school that also owns quite a few restaurants and bakeries around the country, and each year, during Passover, because he is a Gentile, he suddenly finds himself owning millions of dollars worth of food in restaurants for one week. 

 

I apologize if I'm being too overly simplistic in describing this, and I would hope someone who is a practicing Jew could help expound on this all. It's super fascinating. 

 

 

2) Perhaps this is too pedantic, but is there any way that when you discuss science results on the podcast, you discuss the actual scientists who performed the experiments, and their affiliation? Too often, people just say "scientists discovered", lumping all scientists together. This is the final link in a long chain of oversimplification (ironic that I do the same thing in this very same post, above!) that goes:

 

1) Scientist performs the research, cites statistical significance, perhaps gives a few tentative ramifications of the results

2) School / Hospital / Research Lab publishes press release about study, only discussing importance of ramifications

3) Media reports on press release, trumping up importance of ramifications, which were likely only barely significant

4) People post about media reports and articles about ramifications, ignoring who performed the study, what the study actually was, and the significance

 

repeat repeat repeat

 

This is how we get so many articles about "miracle cancer cures," when in actuality it's like, some medical researchers found that in very highly specific cases they were able to use some really intense combination of factors to provide a slightly statistically significant decrease in cancer cell growth. 

 

Now, I know that the podcast is called "Important If True", and you guys are mostly just having a fun time, so I don't expect you to go into detail into significance and statistics and repeatability or whatever, but it'd be great if you at least gave credit to the scientists and their institutions of study.

 

Ugh, pedantry over

[agorman]

I also had been told the poop story about two years ago. I was losing my mind when I heard them talk about it, but makes sense it's a bit of an urban legend

[cooljammer00]

I was also familiar with said poop story, but could not remember where I had heard it.

 

Also that wire Orthodox Jews use to signify a "house" is everywhere in NYC, and it's totally a loophole. Same as Orthodox Jews hiring someone not of the Jewish faith to turn their electrical appliances on/off, or having on elevator in their building that operates automatically on Friday nights so they aren't "operating machinery".

[marginalgloss]

Really enjoyed the discussion of what it means to be 'very nineties' here. My memories of that decade are pretty vague - I entered it at 3/4 and left it at 13/14 - but looking back at it now, it feels like ten years of cultural trash with a light scum of quality trash.

 

That seems wildly harsh, I know. Of course there was a lot of good stuff created back then, but having lived through it, I feel like my memories of the trash are overwhelming. Perhaps that's just what you get exposed to as a kid at that age. I mean, I went to the exhibition at the Millennium Dome twice. And at the time I thought it was really good! I had a Game Gear; I thought that was good too! Basically I was an idiot.

 

Most of the really good 'very nineties' stuff I've only discovered in retrospect. David Bowie released a pair of albums back then called Outside and Earthling that I think make for a concentrated example of cultural tropes specific to that decade. This is to say they now sound super nineties - mostly in a good way. I don't think anyone would file them among his best work, but now it feels like they’ve aged in a way that's both really interesting and occasionally cringeworthy. At the time I guess Bowie was trying to absorb second-hand influences from other musical trends of the time, like drum 'n bass and industrial; and so we get a vaguely post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk-horror vibe - a lot of the 'wake up sheeple!' thing mentioned on the podcast - plus bizarre in-character monologues inspired by Twin Peaks, hanging over Brian Eno soundscapes - all the good stuff.

 

There's also a song on Earthling which mimics exactly the garbled sound a CD player would make when you hold down the 'rewind' button while the disc is spinning. Only nineties kids will remember that.

[brendonsmall]

Related to Second Livestock, I caught this samsung ad the other day for the first time at a movie theatre. It's an ostrich flying in VR. The still I caught is weird, because it shows the Ostrich just using a VR headset as normal, even though they don't really seem to have forward facing eyes.

 

 

Also found a verge article posing questions about what exactly the Ostrich sees given its eye configuration. https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15108328/samsung-ostrich-gear-vr-headset-commercial-galaxy-s8

 

 

Perhaps this is just samsung creating a buzz so we all go buy gear vr headsets. If so: hoisted.

Edited June 10, 2017 by brendonsmall
possible hoisting

[osmosisch]

On 8-6-2017 at 3:53 PM, marginalgloss said:

David Bowie released a pair of albums back then called Outside and Earthling that I think make for a concentrated example of cultural tropes specific to that decade.  [... ] I don't think anyone would file them among his best work

Outside is my favourite Bowie album by quite some distance. I think it's because I became music-aware partially on its strength.