Unexpected Recognition

Sometimes you don’t notice things until you’re made aware of them. Then they’re ubiquitous – but it’s not the world that’s changed, its your perception that’s altered.

I had just finished reading about desirable strains of wild apple and crabapple trees when I went for a walk Saturday. Passing by a local retail complex, I noticed a stand of decorative crabapples that I recalled being covered in pink flowers early in spring, and that were now laden down by a heavy crop of marble-sized red fruits. Out of curiosity, I picked a few and found them to have a crisp texture, clear, pleasant tartness – and bright red flesh all the way through.

I’m reasonably certain that I’ve found some Hopa Ornamental crabapples, a variety that Euell Gibbons praises as being both delicious and commonly planted. They seem to lack the faint bitterness that makes many wilding apples and most crabapples not really desirable for raw eating.

How many times had I passed those trees without recognizing them as edible? Or even noticing them at all?

Read This

A Comment Worth Saving

A very important part of learning to think properly involves grabbing hold of your favorite label-words and taking a good, hard look at what you actually mean by them.

Pretty Standard, Really

Thanks to The Agitator’s Radley Balko, who directed my attention to this particular story.

Take a look at this: Oncologist Defends His Work at a V.A. Hospital.

It would be nice to say that this sort of thing were an uncommon aberration in the medical treatment of veterans. It would be even nicer to say that it’s an aberration in medical treatment in general. Unfortunately, no one even loosely familiar with the practice of medicine in this country could honestly express either of those sentiments. This sort of thing happens pretty constantly.

Physicians don’t want to ruin the careers of other physicians. They know that they will make all sorts of stupid errors themselves, and statistically every doctor kills at least one patient in their career. Not loses one patient. The death will occur directly from physician error.

There is an old saying: “The innocent love justice, while the guilty love mercy”.

Doctors just love mercy. Unfortunately, their unwillingness to censure others means that even physicians who are acting grossly irresponsibly are not confronted or stopped, patients are not told about major ‘errors’ even when they’ve been repeated over and over and clearly are not due simply to chance or a fluke of performance, and it takes a monumental effort to stop doctors from maiming and killing.

Timing is… Everything

My aerial radishes have proven very popular. And prolific – now I wish I hadn’t planted so many seeds in such a small space, as the plants are falling over under the weight of their burden and covering adjoining sections of garden. I originally thought most of the seeds would die, just as most of the other seeds I planted early in the year did, and so was totally unprepared for the eventual abundance.

The key to successful harvest seems to be picking the seedpods before they begin to ripen. At first spicy and juicy like a cross between a succulent green bean and a mustardy jalapeno pepper, the pods turn woody and stringy as they mature.

At least I’ll have plenty of seed to offer the other gardeners for next year – there are at least several hundred pods that have gone past the edibility stage. I’m not sure whether I should refer to them as Rat-Tailed or Aerial radishes, though. Despite the resemblance, people seem put off by eating something called ‘rat’s tails’.

Research

I’ve been doing some research on medical issues for a while. Posts will be slow for a bit.

Man, it’s depressing. And difficult – many of the journals I’d like to access aren’t available. I’m fortunate enough that I live near a university library as it is.

Newfangled Features

I think I’ll try adding tags to my posts. I’m not sure how useful they actually are, as I’ve never bothered with them either in reading or writing, but some people seem to search for information with them, so presumably there’s a net benefit.

What precisely is the difference between post tags and categories? WordPress is awfully slow about establishing a new post tag…

More Successful Foraging!

Passing by the Municipal Building on my way to the library, I happened to notice that the landscaping trees were covered in purple-red berries the size of a large pea.

A little research and judicious taste-testing later, I’ve concluded that they’re juneberries, also known as serviceberries, saskatoon, shadbush, shadberry, and all sorts of species names within Amelanchier. And no one around here seems to realize that they’re edible – and utterly delicious. Like blueberries crossed with black raspberries, with a hint of rose.

Trees and shrubs planted for decorative purposes often don’t have fruit, or they’ve been selected for fruit that looks nice but that wildlife won’t actually eat so that it’ll hang on the bare branches during winter. Even when the fruits are eaten by wildlife, they frequently either aren’t edible for humans or have so little culinary value that only a very hungry person would bother with them. It’s pleasantly surprising to come across a planting of a species that’s so scrumptious.

Ontological Priority

TGGP has requested that I expand upon my earlier statements regarding the choice between contradictory assertions.

A useful method for analyzing incompatible ideas is to force the assigned truth value of each to vary, examining the consequences of this on the value of the others. In this way the possibility space of the conflict can be explored. “What happens if I assume this? How does this change?” I often perceive this as turning a complex object in my hands, twisting the pieces of a puzzle, exploring how a shift in perspective or a sliding piece transforms the shape of the structure.

We quickly find that the categories of statements are loosely organized into a hierarchy. (I prefer the concept of a reverse-hierarchy, with the most important things at the bottom rather than the top, but the associations that cause that are merely subjective and you may do as you please.) Altering the truth value of the most fundamental concepts has implications for certain other categories of statements, but not vice-versa.

Let’s say you observe a friend doing something that you believe is utterly and completely uncharacteristic of them, to the point where you can’t bring yourself to believe you saw what you saw.

There are two competing premises here: “Friend did X” and “Friend is incapable of doing X”. They’re clearly incompatible – the see-saw of logic is in full swing. Depending on which statement we accept and which we reject, our conclusions flow in two different directions.

If we’re uncertain about what we saw, and we’re fairly confident in our evaluation of our friend’s character, it’s easy to dismiss our observation. We could have seen incorrectly, after all. If our beliefs about our friend are uncertain or weak, it’s easy to accept what we saw. But taking confidence to be more than it is leads to faith, where any contradictory evidence will be rejected no matter how strong.

What we have to remember is that our beliefs are just a way to anticipate and react to the things we perceive. Both beliefs and perceptions can be in error, but perceptions are closer to the true reality we’re trying to understand and predict.

Changing the valence of our beliefs does not change what really happened. Considering different truth values for the reality makes our beliefs either true or false (or valid or invalid, justifiable or unjustifiable… you get the idea). One category is more fundamental than the other, which is ontologically dependent on the value of the statements in the deeper level of analysis.

That deeper level has ontological priority over the other.

Pan’s Labyrinth, Mirrormask

I’d heard great things about these movies, but each was a disappointment.

Pan’s Labyrinth had hardly any fantasy in it at all – it was too full of the ’serious’ drama of the fight against Franco and Spanish Fascism. The fantastic elements were squeezed into the interstices of the scenes in the adult world. It’s not magical realism, because as far as the adults were concerned none of the fantastic things ever happened. It’s not a story about the realm of the imagination, because too much happens in the child’s perspective that cannot simply have been imagined. It’s some strange, incoherent mixture that isn’t really about the fantasy after all.

The effects were nice, but they don’t make a movie.

Mirrormask was just completely disappointing. Characters did things without clear motivations, were introduced hurriedly and awkwardly, and behave in ways that simply don’t make sense merely for the purpose of creating drama.

The special effects were weak, difficult-to-see, and unimpressive. The city of light and the world of shadows looked pretty identical. I expect a city of light to be bright – or at least noticeably brighter than its gloomy spots; instead, we were presented with a sepia-tinged monotony. The antithesis of the city of light looked barely different.

It wasn’t even clear how real the events of the story were. Were they completely a dream, brought on by fear and anxiety about the mother’s illness? Did the dark princess actually do things in the real world while pretending to be the daughter? What exactly do the events mean? What was the mirrormask, and why was it actually important? This wasn’t explained nearly clearly enough to my tastes.

Gaiman can write fascinating text. Shame he can’t seem to make a movie script worth watching.

Familarity Breeds Comfort

See this, which puts me in mind of another study I read several years ago (for which I have no reference, sadly).

It found that exposing people to certain songs over and over again would cause them to prefer them, even if they didn’t like them originally. It seems that aesthetic preferences ultimately aren’t as important as avoiding the sensation we experience when we’re accustomed to something which is no longer present.

This is part of why radio stations that play popular music often showcase the same few songs over and over. They want people to get used to them so that they’ll like them.