Born in the wrong century

Why don’t we have elevenses anymore?

You’ve had an excruciating work day. Your boss moved your deadline up, an irate customer yelled at you over an expired coupon, or maybe your desk mate smacked through an egg salad sandwich with his mouth open. Happy hour couldn’t come soon enough.

In the 19th century, you wouldn’t have had to wait. Start drinking before lunch, why don’t you? The tradition of “elevenses” meant it was customary for workers to take a break at, you guessed it, 11 a.m. In most cases, the respite was synonymous with a tug from the ol’ bottle.

This semester, most of my lecture classes are scheduled for mid-day, and I’ve got labs in the morning from 9-11. Eleven o’clock is the perfect time for a break, I’m realizing. I know how a hobbit would celebrate elevenses, but the American tradition is different.

Boozing wasn’t very taboo at first. In our new “alcoholic republic,” people (mostly men) passed the bottle at all waking hours. Employers were actually expected to provide hooch throughout the workday. It made sense that the mid-morning break now common in modern work environments naturally paired with whiskey. Thus, the American definition of elevenses was born.

Hmm. I should float this suggestion by the division chair, or even the chancellor. Except…this is a very bad idea in a commuter culture. Daily alcohol consumption before the drive home sounds like a catastrophe in the making, and it’s a good thing this custom faded away.

But wait! I don’t have a commute! I live across the street from my workplace. Surely nothing could interfere with a daily tipple for me, so maybe we can make an exception for people who live within walking distance of work.

Except then I’d become that “fun” professor who is oddly discursive and talks funny and occasionally falls down in class. So maybe that’s a bad idea.

I guess I’ll stick to 11:00 tea.

I hope the university marketing department is paying attention

The first issue of our student paper, the Morris University Register, has come out, and it includes a full page guide for first year LGBTQIA2S+ students. I have a favorite part.

Don’t hide. Morris is a super gay school, so no one will treat you differently.

Hear that, everyone? UMM is super gay. That’s an excellent reason to come here.

Second favorite comment is “The College Republicans have a history of being purposely inflammatory, especially towards our community. Just ignore them.” That tells you how relevant conservatives are here.

We also have a Queer Devil Worshippers for a Better Future club on campus.

Morris does have some short uplifting slogan on billboards advertising the school, but I have to say…I can never remember what it is. It’s so airy and inoffensive and positive that it’s also utterly forgettable. Now ads that cheerily declared that “Morris is a super gay school!” — those would stand out, and draw in applications from the kind of student we want to encourage, and scare away those we’d rather not see.

Graham-Cassidy is dead

I caught a bit of the Graham-Cassidy-Sanders-Klobuchar town hall meeting last night. The Republicans were smarmy liars.

But it doesn’t matter. The latest attempt to kill Obamacare is dead again, not that that will prevent the Republicans from taking more swipes at it.

It’s kind of like a movie, where Obamacare is John Wick, and endless streams of enemies are rushing at him and he manages to avoid getting fatally shot but still pumps a few bullets into one assassin after another.

Sheesh. That analogy for a health care plan kinda went wildly astray, I think.

She had me at “rivers of maggots”

Christie Wilcox writes about the ecological experiment asking what happens to the environment of a mass die-off, done by dumping 6 tons of dead pigs in a heap in a forest. It’s impressive. The scavengers swoop in and proliferate, and you literally do get heaving, writhing rivers of maggots pouring off the rotting mass.

There is video at the link. I decided not to imbed it since I didn’t know if all of my readers would have finished lunch yet.

When creationism kills people

Or rather, when creationism is a symptom of profound ignorance that is also manifested in health care woo. It seems that Eric Hovind has been peddling “Vitamin B17” — a bit of quackery he inherited from his con artist father, Kent Hovind. He was recently warned by the FDA that he needs to stop selling it.

The name “Vitamin B17” is an example of lying with labels. It’s not a vitamin. It’s better known as amygdalin, or even more infamously, laetrile. It’s a fake cancer cure that does not work and has never worked. Here’s the summary of this compound from NIH:

  • Laetrile is another name for the natural product amygdalin, which is a chemical constituent found in the pits of many fruits and in numerous plants.

  • Hydrogen cyanide is thought to be the main anticancer compound formed from laetrile via in situ release.

  • Laetrile was first used as a cancer treatment in Russia in 1845, and in the United States in the 1920s.

  • Laetrile has shown little anticancer activity in animal studies and no anticancer activity in human clinical trials.

  • The side effects associated with laetrile toxicity mirror the symptoms of cyanide poisoning, including liver damage, difficulty walking (caused by damaged nerves), fever, coma, and death.

  • Laetrile is not approved for use in the United States.

  • Inappropriate advertisement of laetrile as a cancer treatment has resulted in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigation that culminated in charges and conviction of one distributor.

Hovind has been criticized for selling snake oil before. All that’s happened is that he’s now a little more circumspect about making false claims about curing cancer with apricot pits, but he is still selling these useless products. In fact, that’s about all he sells in the “health” category on his site, with one addition…he’s selling an anti-vaccination book.

In this book you will read the findings of medical doctors and researchers who tell us that vaccinations are not only unsafe, but they actually work against our God given immune system.

It just goes to show that nothing a creationist says can be trusted, and that you shouldn’t be taking advice from any of the Hovinds on either science or health.

Roald Dahl actually was an awful human being

What did we do to our kids? Dahl was a favorite author around our house, and only now am I learning what an unpleasant person he was.

His early writing in the short story form was impacted by the political situation on the world stage. He believed in a world government and he was extremely sympathetic to Hitler, Mussolini, and the entire Nazi cause. His stories were filled with caricatures of greedy Jews. One suggests ” a little pawnbroker in Housditch called Meatbein who, when the wailing started, would rush downstairs to the large safe in which he kept his money, open it and wriggle inside on to the lowest shelf where he lay like a hibernating hedgehog until the all-clear had gone.” In 1951 he visited Germany with Charles Marsh and luxured in Hitler’s former retreat at Berchtesgaden. His dislike of Jews and especially of Zionists was egged on by Marsh’s Israel hatred, later encapsulated in a revolting letter to Marsh where he mocked the head of East London’s B’Nai B’rith Club.

Suddenly, the Oompa Loompas have context, and it’s not good. When you read how he regarded women, you’ll read The Witches with different eyes, too.

Her accompt booke

Rebecca Steele was 13 years old when she started her math workbook in 1702. We still have the book, and it’s amazing!

Manuscript mathematical cipher book written in 1701 and 1702 by Rebecca Steele, a young student in Bristol. Pages exemplifying specific mathematical operations and concepts are embellished with calligraphic designs and command-of-hand drawings, and some lessons are dated. Many processes and operations are described in long word problems, including one (p. 30) where Steele is set the problem of figuring her exact age. She gives her birthdate as 28 May 1689 at 8:12pm and the present date as 17 April 1702 at “about 10 in ye morning.” She is likely the Rebecka Steele who appears in Quaker birth records for the city of Bristol as a daughter of William and Melior Steele, born on 28 May 1689 in Thomas Street.

Browse through it online, and you might be astonished. Thirteen year olds nowadays don’t generally have the ability to produce work like it. It’s a math book, but it mostly seems like an exercise book in calligraphy — I imagine that in the early 18th century much of the practice of teaching had to be taken up with mastering the art of quill and brush and ink, and that even when working on something as basic as multiplication tables, there was all this ancillary effort required required to put it on the page, and that there was a great deal of social reward for doing it artfully.

That got me thinking about the Flynn effect, too. Was Rebecca Steel less intelligent than your typical 21st century 13 year old? I rather doubt it. You ought to be impressed at what she was doing in her work book, even if the math seems trivial. But what she was doing was exercising a collection of important skills that wouldn’t make the grade in the standardized tests of today.

It also says something about the enabling effect of the progression of technology. We can pick up a ballpoint pen or a pencil and make marks on plentifully available perfectly white paper, without having to even think about the tech that makes it all possible. There was a time when writing was a complex skill that required an appreciation of the physical properties of ink, of the shape of your pen nib, of the texture of the paper. I’d be utterly confused if someone handed me a bottle of ink and a goose feather, and if I had to write a short note it would be a blotchy mess, and my hands would be smudged black.

I salute you, Rebecca! I wonder what happened to her?

Hooray for random mail deliveries!

It must be Christmas. Got a pile of packages in the mail all at once today, including some lab stuff (not shown).

I’m looking forward to Twilight of the Gods (maybe this weekend, if I’m a good boy and get my grading done), but does anyone know anything about the Theodora book? I’m always up for learning about Byzantine empresses, but this is one of those things where I didn’t request it, a prescient publisher just thinks I should take a look at it.