BenDrankin
2025/06/15
I have not posted recently, so it only seems fair to my readers that I give some kind of explanation. There are many things that might derail your in life in your thirties, and I suppose that you can already guess a likely culprit. But the truth is that I have been caught in the great paradox of American consumerism.
Earlier this year I decided I needed to buy a novelty T-shirt that would allow me to show my love of this land called America. I had already seen the shirt I wanted in a store window and thought it wouldn’t be too hard to find it online.
Unfortunately, Google was offering me possibilities.
At first I wanted the authentic, original design, but then I was overwhelmed by the sheer potential of the choice before me. I had to make an aesthetic judgement and no matter how many designs I looked at, none of them seemed to be as grand as the design I remembered seeing in a store window.
That last one was never really in contention, to be honest. And the following is only a variation of another:
This one gives me the creeps:
I appreciate the following one because it references actual Bejamin Franklin lore:
I don’t even think this one is Ben Franklin at all:
This one at least seems to come with a celebrity endorsement:
And then I discovered this:
The only way out of this hell might be to buy them all.
Because of the Present Crisis
2025/03/08
There is piece in the March 3rd New Yorker The End of Children that discusses the pervasive global phenomenon of declining birthrates. Particular attention is given to South Korea, which is presented as the future we are all converging towards. Not just sparse of children, but actively intolerant of children when they are around.
The whole subject is fraught, for very good reasons. One paragraph contained the following sentences which aroused particular scorn from some.
For most of human history, having children was something the majority of people simply did without thinking too much about it. Now it is one competing alternative among many.
I think this is a good example of how an otherwise careful writer can suddenly commit an infelicity. I don’t think they actually mean to say that child bearing was done casually or thoughtlessly, or that the dangers of childbirth weren’t real and weighed on the minds of those involved. The more generous interpretation is that we weren’t so preoccupied with the meta-game of reproduction.
But I think even that is wrong. There is nothing unprecedented with a preoccupation with the question of our species reproducing. Take the following from Lucy Woodling’s review of Lower Than The Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity in the LRB.
St Jerome lambasted the young widow Furia, seemingly apoplectic at the thought she might remarry: she had, after all, already encountered ‘the miseries of marriage’, which he described as ‘unwholesome food’. ‘Perhaps you are afraid that your noble race will die out,’ he wrote, ‘and your father will not have a brat to crawl about his shoulders and smear his neck with filth.’ The family values of fourth-century Christianity were not all they might have been.
If you have spent any time with the New Testament you may remember the apostle Paul calling upon the unmarried to remain so.
Now about virgins: I have no command from the Lord, but I give a judgment as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you pledged to a woman? Do not seek to be released. Are you free from such a commitment? Do not look for a wife. (1 Corinthians 7:25-27)
If the past 2000 years still feels a little recent, remember that in Exodus, Pharaoh became concerned that the Israelite slaves had become a little too numerous under Egyptian subjugation and decides to thin them out by slaughtering newborns. And if you want to look beyond the Bible, the general abundance of fertility gods and fertility cults suggest that we have always been a little nutty about the reproduction of our species.
What's The Time, Mr Wolf?
2025/01/22
I have only ever set my watch to the closest minute, never feeling the need to get those pesky seconds correct. The clock on my phone doesn’t even give seconds, so, without a watch, I’m not even losing any degree of accuracy. You don’t have to manually set a smart phone’s time, and I’ve always assumed that modern smartphone time was accurate.
My current wristwatch is the popular Casio W800HG, which promises a ten year battery life, a light up display, and water resistance up to 100m. Amazon reviewer “onwa” (verified purchase) reports that, on average, time on the watch drifts by a little more than a second each week. Is that good?
For most of my day to day activity this degree of accuracy is perfectly good. In my work, we deal with time to the tenth of a millisecond when looking at latency of an internet connection, so by this standard it would very poor. Looking back into history, for George Harrison – inventor of the first marine chronometer – and generations of seafarers, that difference is worth 0.25 degrees of longitude. A degree of longitude is the equivalent of sixty nautical miles at the equator, so after a months sailing you might be out by quite some distance in your tracking, and possibly out of pocket. Losing a degree of longitude would have put John Harrison you out of the running for even third place prize set in the Longitude Act (1714) by the British government.
Latitude, by Dava Sobel, is the story of the creation of accurate clocks. That is to say accurate in all possible conditions. A maritime chronometer, as they became known, needs to be accurate when exposed to changing temperatures, pressures, movement, and even variation in gravity itself that such a device can expect to be exposed to when sailing the globe. While latitude could be easily computed with a sextant and the sun at noon, longitude is far more difficult. There were essentially two candidate strategies. The first was to develop a more sophisticated system of astronomical observations. The second was to build the reliable maritime chronometer. The first option appealed to those who enjoyed astronomy (and there were many indeed in the 17th and 18th centuries), the second would be far simpler and appeal to the sailors who would use them.
John Harrison was the “Lone Genius” horologist who rose to the challenge. Most of Sobel’s books is devoted to his life, his clocks, his genius, and most of all his difficulty claiming the longitude prize, even as his clocks won over the sailors who navigated by them. In part, this was due to Harrison’s own perfectionism, and partly this was due to Big Astronomy’s certainty that clocks could not be the right solution when the stars were surely the most reliable guides.
Longitude seems to believe that the reader will be hooked on the injustices Harrison suffered in trying to claim the prize that was rightfully his. Who doesn’t enjoy a frustrated genius? But Longitude is at it’s best when it manages to get away from this tired narrative arc. I like personalities as much as the next man or woman, but the petty squabbles just read as tiresome. There is so much richer material here. The chapter devoted to describing the world before ready access to latitude alone is captivating. Then there are actual challenges involved in making a reliable chronometer, which I will generously assume involves so much of interest – history, science, and culture – that Sobel is simply preventing it taking over the book completely. Then there is the subsequent popularization of reliable pocketwatches as craftsmen developed the means to start producing them, if not in mass, at least in serious numbers. This discussion, which comes at the end, begs the question of how we get from there, to here, and the clock on my smart phone.
The state of the art in timekeeping is the atomic clock, which uses the quivering, shivering idiosyncrasies of physics at the molecular level to keep track of the seconds. International Atomic Time is kept by over 450 of these clocks distributed across 80 national laboratories. My phone plays its own version of What’s The Time, Mr Wolf with these atomic clocks, getting sporadic updates to maintain its own pizoelectric crystal. But while an atomic clock can be accurate to 10^-16 seconds, time.gov tells me that my phone is 1.889s out. In nautical terms, that could be a shipwreck.