Deane Barker

Explanation: Mendacity

Sat, 1 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: a lie or untruth

A “mendacity” can be a single thing someone says, or it can be a quality they possess.

Why I Looked It Up

From The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth:

Even accounting for whatever you believe to be the biases of fact checkers, they was no serious disputing that the volume and audacity of Trump’s mendacity had broken through America’s epistemic guardrails, such as they were.

Explanation: Schloss

Sat, 1 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: a German castle or manor house

This is the German version of a French chateau or an English country home.

Why I Looked It Up

A country home referred to as “the Schloss” was a location and plot point in the novel Reamde.

Then I encountered it again in an article about architecture called “It’s time to stop using “pastiche” as a pejorative term”:

This work of recovery was at the front of my mind when I recently visited the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, housed in the partly rebuilt Berliner Schloss.

Here is the Berliner Schloss, which looks vaguely castle-like – more like a traditional government building – but sits smack dab in the middle of Berlin. The original building dates from 1400s, but was demolished in 2009 and rebuilt, completed in 2020.

Explanation: Cataract

Sat, 1 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: a waterfall; a disorder of the eye

This is from the Greek “kataraktes,” which means “downrush.”

Clearly, most people know “cataract” from the disorder of the mammalian eye. So, how did that get named for a waterfall? Wikipedia has some theories:

As rapidly running water turns white, so the term may have been used metaphorically to describe the similar appearance of mature ocular opacities. In Latin, cataracta had the alternative meaning “portcullis” and the name possibly passed through French to form the English meaning “eye disease” (early 15th century), on the notion of “obstruction”. Early Persian physicians called the term nazul-i-ah, or “descent of the water"—vulgarised into waterfall disease or cataract—believing such blindness to be caused by an outpouring of corrupt humour into the eye.

Why I Looked It Up

I had known of the eye condition.

However, in Sioux Falls, a famous historical building was The Cataract Hotel. This building was considered the center of the city, to the point where the street directions are based on it. Anything north of 9th and Phillips (where the Cataract Hotel once stood) is “north,” anything south of that intersection is south, etc.

The Cataract Hotel burned down multiple times, the last fire in the early 70s. In the mid-70s, the current Wells Fargo Tower was built on the location.

I always thought the name was a little odd, but I never put together the traditional definition of “cataract” with the fact that Sioux Falls is named for a waterfall (that’s generous; the Sioux Falls’ namesake are really a set of terraced rapids, though after a significant rainfall, they can be quite powerful – although, see below for the same namesake on the mighty Nile).

Then, while watching the recent remake of the Agatha Christie novel Death on the Nile, I noted that part of the plot is set at the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, Egypt (in the 1930s). The name of the hotel was printed on the screen, which peaked my interest given the similarty to the name of the Sioux Falls hotel.

In the case of the Egyptian hotel, it was so-named because it sat on the banks of the Nile at the Cataracts of the Nile, which are a series of whitewater rapids, on an otherwise placid river.

Explanation: Homunculus

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is literally a small human being. This was originally thought to actually exist in sperm cells – so every sperm cell contained a tiny human, which…grew, I guess.

From there, the definition spread a little. Today, it’s often used as a representative of the self when discussing the human brain (see example below).

It’s also used as an analogy/metaphor, but inconsistently. Some examples taken from periodicals (some of which mystify me):

A homunculus wouldn’t crush your Beetle, but it could do some serious damage under the hood.
Furthermore, homunculus indicates certain body parts like large lips, hands, feet and genitals, moving Redha to create dances that are not only sensual but also sexual and erotic.
‘Doomed star’ Eta Carinae’s first-ever 3-D nebulae model created Being a “homunculus of print,” however, he concedes that he will spend most of his adult life as an editor and scholar, a professor and poet, and like most writers who live beyond their thirties he will become an elegist,

Why I Looked It Up

From Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness:

As Stephen Jay Gould once observed, “I know [the right answer], yet a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down, shouting at me […]”

Gould’s homunculus is the Automatic System in action.

Explanation: Isomorphic

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: being similar in appearance, even if having different ancestry or makeup

From the Greek “isos,” which means “equal to,” and the Greek “morphe” which means “shape.”

Why I Looked It Up

In a document, I found this sentence:

Our customers can use isomorphic rendering using usually React, Angular or Vue.

I think the author was trying to say that an interface can look the same way, regardless of which rendering architecture is used. (But, honestly, I don’t think the word was used correctly in this instance.)

Explanation: Reductive

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“Reductionism” is the basic idea of “reducing” an argument or problem to a simpler analogy. So, a “reductive argument” would be the reduction of a complex argument down to an easier set of facts.

Sometimes, this is a genuine attempt to make it easier to understand. However, often, this is the same as a “strawman” argument, which is when I purposely and disingenuously simplify someone’s argument into one that’s easier for me to defeat. This was named for the straw dummies swordsmen would practice their fighting skills with – you can always defeat an opponent made of straw.

I found reference to biology and physics in several definitions. For example, from Merriam-Webster:

explanation of complex life-science processes and phenomena in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry

I found this is more than one place, so there’s apparently some special usage of the term in life sciences.

Why I Looked It Up

I had heard the term a couple of times recently. The latest was when the characters in Fringe were talking about something. One of them asked a question to Walter Bishop (who is ridiculously intelligent), and he responded:

Well, that’s a little reductive, but otherwise correct.

Postscript

A few days later, my son used the phrase “reductio ad absurdum” in a political argument. Here’s what Wikipedia says about that:

In logic, reductio ad absurdum (Latin for “reduction to absurdity”), […], is the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradiction.

I can’t decide if this is related, but figured I should note it.

Explanation: Skinflint

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: someone who is very reluctant to spend money

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

literally “kind of person who would skin a flint to save or gain something

This supposedly comes from a 1656 poem called The Legend of Captain Jones. From Word Histories:

This were but petty hardship, Jones was one
Would Skinne a Flint, and eat him when h’had done.

Wikitionary says this:

From the phrase skin a flint (“go to extreme lengths for the sake of gain or economy”), from the brittleness and hardness of flint which makes it almost impossible to remove just its skin without shattering it.

A flint is a rock used to start fires. I’m fuzzy on how someone would “skin” one, I guess.

Why I Looked It Up

From Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness:

A well-known skinflint, [Benjamin] Franklin calculated that thousands of pounds of candle wax could be saved with his idea.

Explanation: Sub Rosa

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: in secret

It’s literally Latin for “under the rose.”

I found a couple reasons why this implies secrecy (from American Heritage):

From the practice of hanging a rose over a meeting as a symbol of confidentiality

And where did this come from? According to Wikipedia:

In Hellenistic and later Roman mythology, roses were associated with secrecy because Cupid gave a rose to Harpocrates (the Hellenistic god of silence) so that he would not reveal the secrets of Venus. Banquet rooms were decorated with rose carvings, reportedly as a reminder that discussions in the rooms should be kept in confidence. This was inherited in later Christian symbolism, where roses were carved on confessionals to signify that the conversations would remain secret.

Why I Looked It Up

In The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth:

His voice, and the sub rosa voices of Princeton faculty who endorsed a letter they disagreed with, were the voices of demoralization.

Explanation: Pastiche

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: a work of art produced by combining elements of other works

I’ve known this word to be used pejoratively, to imply that an artist or creator has nothing new to say and just copied inspiration from elsewhere. But in my reading, it seems to be considered a legitimate form of art.

I went looking for content on the “pejorative-ness” of the word, and I found an article from Building Design, helpfully entitled: It’s time to stop using “pastiche” as a pejorative term. The article itself is a little obtuse, but the teaser line says this:

The word has long been used to unfairly malign architects working in the classical tradition. We need to reclaim the term and celebrate the fact that predecent and tradition are at the heart of most good contemporary architecture.

I found others, but they were less crusading. For some people, calling something “pastiche” is an insult. For others, they embraces it as the reason for their work. The key seems to be whether the creator acknowledges that the work is a pastiche. Being self-aware makes it okay; if someone else points it out, then it’s a problem.

It reminds me of the Everything is a Remix video.

Why I Looked It Up

I’m working on a new conference presentation. I was going over it in my head, and I got to thinking, “This is just a pastiche of other sessions I’ve done.”

Then I started wondering why I thought that – I didn’t even really know that word, did I? So I went looking, and it turns out that I did sort of know the word, and I used it naturally, but I have no idea where I became used to it.

Explanation: TARP

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TARP – the Troubled Asset Relief Program – was the famous “$700 billion bailout” that the U.S. government undertook in 2008 to try and stave off the mortgage crisis. The crisis that led to this program was the basis for the book (and movie) Too Big To Fail.

Did the government lose $700 billion? Was it repaid? Did the government make money?

Well, no one knows, really. The U.S. economy is incredibly complex, and TARP was a huge program that can’t be isolated from everything else going on in the economy back then, so it’s hard to know what really happened in the final analysis.

I spent some time reading articles. I searched for things like:

Most articles said TARP made a profit, so I made my queries progressively more negative to try to turn up contrary stories. Additionally, I did some specialized searching on politically conservative sites to try to find dissenting opinions (there are a few below).

I found common themes, many of which contradict each other:

The $700 billion number was authorized but never fully used; the actual money paid out was only around $400 billion
The TARP money was repaid
Technically, the government made a profit on the outflow and inflow
A lot of the “repayment” was with other government money, so we were just moving losses around
TARP was a smaller part of a larger government rescue program, other parts of which lost money
Inflation ate up a lot of the profit in between payout and payback
Reports of a TARP profit are just mainstream media groupthink, and no one is looking at it critically

Again, those are a fix of facts, opinions, and highly disputed claims.

When reviewing articles below, note the dates. There were “clusters” of articles around milestones in TARP – when the disbursement program ended (sometime in 2010), when the last repayments were made (2015, it looks like), whenever Timothy Geitner made a public statement, whenever the government issued reports, etc.

Also note that some of the early articles and opinions were written while TARP was still open – they’re “hot takes” on a program that was still very politically unpopular and hadn’t had time to take effect and judged on its results.

It seems that no one has really talked about TARP much in the last few years.

So, did TARP make money or lose money? I don’t know. My gut tells me it made a profit on paper, but it lost money when you dig deeper into the details of where that money came from.

And none of this answers the real question: regardless of profit or loss, was TARP necessary and helpful? Again, that can be debated forever, but the general theme I picked up is that TARP wasn’t great, but the alternative would have been worse.

Happy reading.

Who Won, Lost Under TARP? (Newsweek, January 2010)

Treasury officials are quick to point out that those three banks have returned all their funds. And AIG, the biggest holder of bailout money, is selling several of its units to pay down its TARP obligations. Treasury officials say they expect the ultimate cost of TARP to the taxpayer to be around $50 billion—far less than the $340 billion originally expected. Roughly $200 billion has already been recovered.

Did the TARP Money Really Get Paid Back? (National Review, August 2010)

If TARP had only done what TARP was supposed to do — prop up the banking system — it still would have been a mess, but a mess for which the banks, not the taxpayers, ultimately would have picked up the tab. With everything that’s rolled up into TARP, we’re going to take a bath.

Did TARP Really Pay Off for Taxpayers? (CBS News, October 2010)

The collective effort succeeded in ending the financial panic, and Treasury never came close to spending the authorized $700 billion. Indeed, TARP’s total cash outlay is likely to be less than $50 billion after the loans are all paid back. The program could even turn a profit overall-not just on the financial bailouts cited by Bloomberg – if the equity investments in auto makers and banks pan out.

Bank Bailout Returns 8.2% Beating Treasury Yields (Bloomberg, October 2010)

The government has earned $25.2 billion on its investment of $309 billion in banks and insurance companies, an 8.2 percent return over two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

TARP Was No Win for the Taxpayers (Wall Street Journal, March 2011)

So the taxpayer-backed GSE guarantee enables the Fed to prop up the market with taxpayer funds, in turn allowing the TARP banks to “repay” their TARP funds. The bailout of the [government sponsored entities] by Treasury thus shifts potential losses from TARP to other programs that have less oversight and public scrutiny. Any evaluation of TARP’s success must take into account the interaction among all government programs designed to prop-up the financial system, and the shifting of costs among these programs.

TARP Uncovered – the Real Cost of the Government Bailout (Huffington Post, May 2011; it’s refuting a NY Times article, but the link is invalid)

Focusing solely on TARP and ignoring the other more costly portions of the government bailout of our biggest banks and corporations ignores the true cost of the government’s (both the Bush and Obama administrations, the Fed and Congress) inept response to this crisis. One of the reasons that TARP did not cost more was because of the government’s other more costly bailout policies, and to ignore them is to dramatically understate the true cost of the bailout.

TARP Prevented Disaster, but Full Exit a Long Way Off (CNBC, May 2011)

There have been stunning turnaround stories: GM stripped itself of legacy problems and engaged in a wildly successful IPO in November. AIG sold off large portions of itself to private buyers and is poised for a “re-IPO” selling government shares into the private market this week. TARP’s big-bank recipients paid back their loans – with interest – and although many small community banks still owe Uncle Sam, the bank bailout as a whole actually earned a profit for the US taxpayer.

TARP Hangers-On (Mercatus, March 2012; this mostly quotes a GAO report (PDF))

The GAO found that nearly half of the banks that have returned their TARP money have done so with money from other taxpayer-funded programs that support banks.

TARP May Have Stopped Disaster, But Voters Don’t Care (Business Insider, October 2015)

This ongoing hostility toward the program continues even as new reports show that, in the end, TARP may not cost taxpayers anything. The Treasury Department reported recently that, in the worst case scenario, the net cost of TARP will be about $50 billion. In the best case scenario, the government may actually make money off its investments.

Overselling TARP: The Myth of the $15 Billion Profit (National Review, January 2015)

Now, while a profit of $15 billion sounds enormous, it only amounts to a nominal annualized return of 0.6 percent. Even Treasury Bills (maturing after three years or longer) would have been a better investment, so this is hardly impressive. […] which would imply that TARP actually netted a loss of nearly $24 billion.

Bailout highly profitable for taxpayers, when you look at the right numbers (Washington Post, January 2015)

The actual taxpayer profit on the bailout is about $350 billion, by my math. That’s right, $350 billion. […]

Tarp was not a bailout, and the government’s profit was huge (American Banker, May 2017; most of this is paywalled, so I can only excerpt from the first paragraph)

Last week, the Treasury Department announced that the final major investment in a bank from the Troubled Asset Relief Program had been repaid and that the government had made a total profit of $30.7 billion on the program. Of course, this story did not appear in any of the major media, and 99% of the media and the public probably still believe the government lost hundreds of billions of dollars on “bailed out” banks.

Measuring the Cost of Bailouts (Annual Review of Financial Economics, 2019; paywalled, quote below is from Wikipedia)

A 2019 study by economist Deborah Lucas published in the Annual Review of Financial Economics estimated “that the total direct cost of the 2008 crisis-related bailouts in the United States” (including TARP and other programs) was about $500 billion, or 3.5% of the United States’s GDP in 2009, and that “the largest direct beneficiaries of the bailouts were the unsecured creditors of financial institutions.”[90] Lucas noted that this cost estimate “stands in sharp contrast to popular accounts that claim there was no cost because the money was repaid, and with claims of costs in the trillions of dollars.”[90]

Explanation: Pax Americana

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“Pax” is Latin for “peace.” It’s been used as a prefix for a lot of things:

Pax Americana (“American Peace”)
Pax Romana (“Roman Peace”)
Pax Brittanica (“British Peace”)

Pax Americana generally refers to peace among the developed nations of the Western Hemisphere – North America and Europe. The idea is that “friends of America” are also friends of each other. This period has (supposedly) lasted since the end of World War II.

The idea can be controversial. From Political Dictionary:

The concept of Pax Americana has its critics, of course. The concept has also been likened to the glorification of US imperialism. At its heart, Pax Americana relies on the idea that US hegemony is behind the long, peaceful period among North American and European states since 1945.

Searching for “the end of pax americana” reveals lots of opinions about whether it still exists or if it ever did.

Why I Looked It Up

I’m watching a BBC documentary on the breakup of Yugoslavia. The final episode is called “Pax Americana” and it discussed the Dayton Peace Accords, where all the former Yugoslav leaders were brought to Dayton, Ohio to negotiate a treaty.

Explanation: Dowager's Hump

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is an excessive forward curvature of the spine in older people, often older women. It’s caused by a combination of genetics, aging, and behavioral factors, such as chronic poor posture.

A “dowager” is a widow who holds property from a deceased husband (a dowry). It’s sometimes used to refer to older women in general, especially those with wealth or aristocratic title.

The connection to the medical condition is that a Dowager’s Hump often manifests in older women, due to the effects of osteoporosis.

Why I Looked It Up

I can’t remember the book, but a character was described as having a “widower’s hump” (the character was male – if she was female, would it have been “widow’s hump”?) Searching that led me to Dowager’s Hump.

Explanation: Soporific

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: something that induces sleep

From the Latin “sopor” which means “deep sleep.”

Why I Looked It Up

From REAMDE:

The inherently soporific nature of software installation has its way with her, and she closed her eyes and then opened them to find it was daytime.

Explanation: Adept (noun)

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: someone who is very skilled at something

Why I Looked It Up

So, this is a weird one, because I absolutely knew the usage and definition of “adept” as a verb. But in I Got Schooled I found this:

[…] there is a belief among certain academics that a subject is less efficiently learned from an adept than from someone who is studying it or has just finished studying it.

This is “adept” as a noun.

This brought me back to my teenage years playing Dungeons and Dragons. There was a character class called a “Cleric,” and the first two levels were:

Acolyte
Adept

An “acolyte” is a religious assistant.

Given the alliteration, I guess I always thought “Adept” had some religious connotation. I always remember those two character levels and thought they were somehow related: than an “adept” was a…pastor, or something?

Nope. No religious connection at all.

(This reminds me of how I thought braintust was pejorative because of a comment my dad used to make.)

Explanation: Éminence Grise

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is someone who influences or controls a public figure behind-the-scenes.

In 17th century France, Cardinal Richelieu was known as “The Red Eminence,” because of his position in the church and his red robes. However, many thought he was heavily influenced by an assistant who who different colored robes. That person was referred to as “The Gray Eminence.”

“Éminence Grise” is a direct French translation of “gray eminence.”

I feel like the “gray” adjective also describes someone operating “from the shadows,” but perhaps that’s just my personal perspective.

Sometimes also called “the power behind the throne.”

Why I Looked It Up

In the book Too Big To Fail:

As head of the financial institutions group, [Ken] Wilson was Goldman’s top adviser to other banks and respected as an éminence grise throughout the industry.

Interestingly, the phrase is not italicized in the original text, which is common for foreign language phrases.

(Note: to get the correct accent over that “e” on an American English keyboard, I had to type ALT+0233. The capital “E” in the title was just copied from another page.)

Explanation: Autoland

Fri, 9 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Yes…ish. Some of them can under some circumstances.

“Autoland” is a feature on some larger airlines. But it has limits:

It has to be enabled and initiated. It doesn’t just do it automatically.
The airport has to be equipped for it. The plane doesn’t really “land itself” – the plane and the airport land it together.
The pilot is supposed to actively prepare and monitor the plane while this happens. In fact, some pilots said the preparation and monitoring to autoland is more work than just landing the plane themselves.

My research indicated that it is used, but only rarely – mainly when the visibility is so low that the pilot can’t see anything, so the only way to land is via instruments.

Why I Looked It Up

The pilot episode of Fringe had a flight on which some very bad things happened to everyone (it involved skin melting – it was pretty graphic). The plane supposedly landed itself in Boston.

I was curious if this was a real thing, or if they just make it up for the plot, since they had to get the plane on the ground in one piece for the team to investigate it.

While technically possible, the unrealistic thing in Fringe is that the bad things happened during the middle of the flight, and it seems that the plane just continued on by itself and landed. That doesn’t match what I’ve been reading. My research indicates that autoland is actively initiated very late in a plane’s flight (like, right before final approach), rather than the plane just thinking, “Well, there’s the airport…I guess I better land myself.”

Explanation: Heuristic

Thu, 8 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A rule, tool of evaluation, or method of thinking that someone uses to solving a problem or frame an issue. From the Greek “heuriskein” which means “to discover.”

Heuristics can be anything from a simple rule of thumb (“still water is likely to be dangerous to drink”) to a pernicious stereotype (“all Jews are greedy”).

It’s best described, generally, as “a mental tool for understanding.”

Why I Looked It Up

I had an idea of what this meant, but I had always wondered about specifics. It gets used across a broad range of situations.

Explanation: Great Circle Route

Mon, 5 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In geometry, a “great circle” is a flat plane that cuts through the middle of a sphere. Essentially, it becomes the longer line that was be drawn around that sphere.

In aviation navigation, a “great circle route” is the shortest path between two points, and is achieved by finding the great circle that both points are on. This is invariably an arc, not a straight line.

Indeed, “straight” doesn’t mean much when talking about a sphere, because the entire surface is curved – nothing on a sphere is “straight.” When looking on a sphere, the great circle route actually looks fairly straight. It only appears to be a curved line or arc when flatten to a Mercator projection map. (See image on this page.)

The great circle routes are why flights between the U.S. and Europe arc up and over the arctic circle, rather that going directly east or west.

Why I Looked It Up

Great circle routes were a plot point in REAMDE. Terrorists had access to a private jet in Xiamen, China, and were trying to figure out how to get it into North America. From Xiamen, they can’t fly a great circle route to Toronto, because it takes them over China, North Korea, and Siberia. What they can do is plot a great circle route to Calgary, which takes them just off the coast of Asia. They ended up somewhere north of Idaho after having gone over the north pole.

Also, I remember flying from Paris to Los Angeles once. On the in-flight map, I saw that we entered the United States in northern Montana, coming south over Canada.

Explanation: Peter Principle

Mon, 5 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is an axiom of organizations that says a person will be promoted to the point where they become incompetent. Over time, this means that many people will be incompetent at their jobs.

If Bob occupies Position A and is competent at it, he will be promoted to Position B which has more responsibility. If he is also competent at Position B, he will be promoted to Position C, with more responsibility.

However, if Position C proves too much for him, and he is incompetent at Position C, then he will remain there. He has been promoted to a position at which he is no longer competent, and is now stuck, which is suboptimal for both him at the organization.

Ideally, Bob would be demoted back to Position B, where he was last competent, but since individuals and organizations resist demotions in general, he is more likely to remain – permanently and incompetently – in Position C.

The term was coined by researcher Laurence Peter. It was supposed to be satire, but resonated with audiences over time. It was immortalized in a 1969 book of the same name.

Why I Looked It Up

In REAMDE, a character says to another:

Seamus, you are a living example of the Peter Principle.

Explanation: Kudzu

Sun, 4 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is a type of a plant – a climbing vine that tends to cover other objects, including other plants. It’s considered an invasive species, because it’s hard to stop.

However, I’ve heard it mostly as an idiom.

I went looking for this, and found surprisingly little on it. Here is a definition of a kudzu plot:

Any long-form narrative that branches off in many different, meandering directions in a manner that is overly or needlessly complicated, especially when they ultimately fail to be resolved in a meaningful or satisfying way.

Urban Dictionary has some similar examples:

The spread of comment threads from a small number of commenters that are dozens of entries in length and thousands of words long.

[…] Kudzu resistance: A working people’s movement created to protect public services to the state of KY. This movement is like the kudzu, powerful, unwilling to back down or give up and they are everywhere.

[…] kudzu capitalism: A dangerous overgrowth of capitalism and corporate power, to where those with the most money gain a disproportionate amount of influence with politicians and government entities

Here’s an example from a page about the usage of kudzu as a metaphor in Southern literature:

Southern culture is filled with kudzu references. Businesses use kudzu as inspiration for names and slogans (“stay here long enough, and we’ll grow on you too” being the most widely used). Mural artists bring the green vine into their work. The literary potential of kudzu is a no-brainer.

[…] Another popular trope is to liken kudzu’s impressive ability to engulf whole houses, cars and bridges with the hold that the American South can have on certain visitors, given the chance. One cannot truly understand the South until they have stayed for long enough to really “let the place wrap around you.”

Why I Looked It Up

From the book I Got Schooled:

Without […] freedom from some of the work rules that have grown up around the profession of teaching like kudzu…

Explanation: Cairn

Fri, 2 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: a man-made pile of stones, meant to de-mark or memorialize something

Often, the stones were a burial mound, containing a body and intended to keep it away from predators or scavengers.

Why I Looked It Up

From REAMDE:

The place was marked by a simple cairn.

I remember I went geocaching once, and a couple of caches were located in or around small cairns. That’s how you would know you found the cache, because the stack of rocks stuck out from everything else. It was one of those things that made you think, “A human had to have put that there.”

I also traveled to Vancouver around the time of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. The mascot for the games was man-shaped pile of rocks – I remember seeing it several times in the airport.

From an NPR article:

Attentive fans of the Winter Olympics may have noticed that the official logo of the 2010 games is a pile of rocks. It’s a stylized version of an inukshuk, the stone cairns built by the Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic.

Explanation: Jefferson Bible

Fri, 2 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is a editing of the Bible by Thomas Jefferson. It extracted all of the “life advice” of Jesus Christ from the traditional Bible, but excluded any mention of the supernatural or divine. It essentially distilled the Bible down to secular teachings about morality and behavior.

He described this to John Adams:

In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to them. […] There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.

Effectively, Jefferson was saying that divine aspects of Jesus’s life have been corrupted by organized religion, but the validity of Jesus’s moral code remained true.

The resulting work was formally titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually From the Gospels.

Why I Looked It Up

In an article entitled Why You’re Christian, David Perrell writes about “cafeteria Christianity”:

This a-la-carte philosophy isn’t new. It’s what Thomas Jefferson did two centuries ago when he wrote the Jefferson Bible. Specifically, he reduced the Bible into a self-help book by removing all the miracles but keeping the sound life advice. The problem is that you can’t pick and choose theology without becoming a slave to intellectual fashions or destroying the integrity of those ideas in the first place.

Explanation: Chthonic

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition: related to the underworld, the afterlife, or the occult

From the Greek word “khthon” means “beneath the Earth.”

This is likely the root of “Cthulhu.” From Wikipedia:

Invented by Lovecraft in 1928, the name Cthulhu was probably chosen to echo the word chthonic (Ancient Greek “of the earth”), as apparently suggested by Lovecraft himself at the end of his 1923 tale “The Rats in the Walls”.

The “cht” prefix is unique. I went to a Scrabble word chooser, and it only had two words starting with that prefix – this word, and the derivative “chthonian.” It had nothing for “cthu.”

An English word list from the University of Michigan only had “chthonian.” It also had nothing for “cthu.”

Why I Looked It Up

From the novel REAMDE when two characters are discussing the origins of magic items in on online role-playing game:

There is nearly always a chthonic link.

Explanation: Kinmen Island

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Like most countries in that region of the world, Taiwan is actually a chain of 168 islands.

The biggest island – and the one most people think of when they think of “Taiwan” – is called Formosa, and it comprises 99% of the total land area of the chain. The largest city, Taipei, is located here, as is almost all the population.

Formosa is about 100 miles off the coast of mainland China, across the Taiwan Strait.

However, Kinmen Island is much, much closer – it literally sits in the opening of Xiamen Bay outside the city of Xiamen. It’s just six miles off the coast of China.

When discussing the defense of Taiwan, it’s disputed whether or not an invasion of Kinmen would be considered an invasion of Taiwan itself. Some politicians have said they would not move to defend Kinmen. In particular, during the 1960 presidential debates, Kennedy stated that the islands were indefensible and should be abandoned. Nixon disagreed, saying he would protect them as part of Taiwan proper.

Why I Looked It Up

In the novel, REAMDE, several characters flee from Xiamen across the bay to Kinmen. I was shocked that Taiwan was so close to China, until I realized that Kinmen is an outlying island, and Formosa is considerably further away.

Explanation: Sapphism

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is a allusion/euphemistic for “lesbianism.” Though, weirdly, the reference is circular.

Sappho was a female Greek poet in the 6th century BC. She was born and lived at least part of her life on the Greek island of Lesbos.

She may or may not have been homosexual, though most scholars believe she was. She wrote about love between women, but there is some disagreement whether it can be interpreted as platonic or erotic love.

For example, Wikipedia explains in an article about Sappho’s most famous work Ode to Aphrodite:

The speaker is identified in the poem as Sappho, in one of only four surviving works where Sappho names herself. The sex of Sappho’s beloved is established from only a single word, the feminine εθελοισα in line 24. […]

As near as I can tell, here is stanza from the poem (I find the female reference in line 21 of the entire poem, not line 24 as stated above)

‘See, if now she flies, she soon must follow;
Yes, if spurning gifts, she soon must offer;
Yes, if loving not, she soon must love thee,
Howso unwilling…'

However, regardless of whether or not Sappho was actually gay, she has become a symbol of female homosexuality.

The demonym for the island of Lesbos is “Lesbian” (demonym: someone from America is an “American”; someone from Lesbos is a “Lesbian”). Thus, Sappho – as the most famous person from Lesbos and a symbol of female homosexuality – is unwittingly responsible for “lesbian” having the modern meaning that it does.

Therefore, the definition of Sapphism is circular: Sappho implies “lesbian” but “lesbian” only carries the meaning it does because of Sappho.

Why I Looked It Up

I had some idea that it referred to lesbianism, but didn’t know the details.

In REAMDE:

[The woman] was struggling with her weight, and was dressed and coifed in a way that, seen on the streets of Seattle, would have been incontrovertible prove of Sapphism.

Also, there’s a subreddit called /r/SapphoAndHerFriend which is devoted to evidence of “gay erasure” in modern culture. The title likely refers to two things:

The idea that a close female friend of Sappho was indeed just a friend
The fact that some historians deny or doubt Sappho was gay in the first place

Explanation: Ley Lines

Sat, 27 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

These are supposed “lines of energy” that connect some great monuments and important locations of the world. To be clear, it’s mythology – they’re not a scientific fact.

From How Stuff Works:

And maybe if ley lines were nothing more than that – imaginary lines that seemingly connect two important things – we would have an easier time simply accepting them. But at some point, some other interested parties hijacked the simple ideas and robustly embellished the story. Some claim that ley lines carry a powerful magnetic field, while others say they hold a psychic power. Still others are pretty darn sure that the lines are somehow associated with UFO landings – or that there are healing properties found in the “vortex” of ley lines

Why I Looked It Up

In the novel REAMDE, there’s an online RPG that uses teleportation between what they call “ley lines,” though it doesn’t seem that they’re connected to any monuments or anything.

Also, I remember an episode of The Librarians were ley lines were a plot point.

Explanation: Cap And Trade

Sat, 27 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is an economic model used to reduce carbon emissions.

A government sets a “cap” on the total amount of emissions to be allowed, and they sell “permits” or “certificates” or “credits” which allow organizations to emit a certain amount against that cap. The goal is to slowly reduce the cap every year.

For example, if a government deems that only 10,000 tons of carbon can be emitted by organizations under their authority, they might sell 10,000 credits at an annual auction. If your company emitted 100 tons of carbon a year, you would need to buy 100 of these at auction. If you emitted more than 100 tons of carbon, you would be subject to a severe penalty or tax.

The “trade” part is because a secondary market exists for the credits. If you purchased 100 credits, but only emitted 80 tons of carbon, then you still have 20 credits, which you can sell.

Another organization might realize they’re going to go over what they purchased for, so they’ll buy your extra credits at whatever price you agree on (in reality, the sale is rarely private – there are public markets and exchanges for the credits).

In some auctions, you don’t even have to be a carbon emitter to buy credits. Anyone can buy them as an investment. You might buy some credits, use none of them, and bet the market for them will increase so you can sell them to needy emitters before the next auction.

This secondary market sets a market price for emissions, essentially. Emitters are incentivized to reduce emissions, so they have to spend less, and the value of the credits will adjust based on economic conditions. If you produce less, you either buy less, or sell the leftover. If you change your business model to become cleaner, you also save money. If everyone emits more, then everyone needs more credits, so the price goes up.

Governments might also issue credits as incentives for certain business practices. For example, Tesla gets free credits because they only manufacture electric vehicles (they get these mostly from the State of California). They make hundreds of millions of dollars every year by selling those certificates on the secondary market. And this revenue is not tied to any expense – it’s essentially pure profit.

A large cap-and-trade pact is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative which involves 10 northeastern states. It was established in 2009.

California has its own market, managed by the California Air Resources Board.

A cap-and-trade law from the 1990s (pushed by George Bush Sr.) that targeted sulfur dioxide emissions is often cited as ending the threat of acid rain.

There are those that believe cap-and-trade is just another form of taxation, albeit one that can be shared. The auction of credits required emitters to purchase credits, and that money goes to the government. The difference between this and a tax, is that the “tax” burden can be passed around to other companies.

Additionally, the establishment of a “cap” at all is essentially the government setting a limit on energy and rationing it.

Why I Looked It Up

I had always wondered about this. I thought it was related to carbon offsets, but they’re really two different things.

Postscript

Added on October 1, 2022

In the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, I found a discussion of the establishment of cap-and-trade under the Clean Air Act of 1990:

[…] much of corporate America was willing to accept the system on the gound that the ability to trade emissions rights would drive down the cost. […] Because pollution reduction can be turned into cash, strong incentives are created for environmentally beneficial behavior.

[…] As compared with a command-and-control system, the trading mechanism is estimated to have saved $357 million annually in its first five years.

Weirdly, there were no footnotes supporting any of this.

Explanation: Carbon Offsets

Sat, 27 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is an expense that an organization can incur to “offset” their carbon emissions. If a company outputs 100 tons of CO2 each year, they can give money to organizations that theoretically enable the removal of that same amount of C02, thus “making up for their sins,” in some sense.

Carbon offsetting can be voluntary or required by regulations.

It’s not an exact science, because how can you determine if an organization effectively removes carbon from the air?

Wikipedia lists these types of projects as examples of carbon offsetting:

Renewable energy
Methane collection and combustion
Energy efficiency
Destruction of industrial pollutants

The problem is that these are all wildly indirect. It’s easy to measure how much CO2 an organization outputs, but how do you measure how much an organization or project negates? Also, how do you verify that this is additional removal, meaning removal that would not have otherwise taken place if the offset had not been purchased?

Some organizations object to the idea that organizations can just “pay to pollute,” essentially.

Greenpeace:

[..] carbon offsetting transport falls very short. Paying lip service to action, and piecemeal measures are not an option. It’s time for strong words to be matched with strong action.

The Institute for Applied Ecology:

Overall, our results suggest that 85% of the projects covered in this analysis and 73% of the potential 2013-2020 Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) supply have a low likelihood that emission reductions are additional and are not over-estimated.

Several organizations offer carbon offset purchasing. For instance, at Carbonfund.org you can purchase an offset for a married couple for $600, or they have a calculator for your small business to determine what your output is. To be clear, voluntarily “purchasing” an offset from an organization like this is just a charitable donation to an organization that will distribute the money to other organization who claim to help the environment.

What business are looking for is to be able to announce that they are “carbon neutral,” which means they have purchased the same amount of carbon offsets as they output in CO2. They are essentially purchasing the right to make a claim that they care about the environment.

The costs of carbon offsets vary, and there’s an extensive secondary market where you can purchase a carbon offset from someone who purchased it but doesn’t “use” it by outputting the CO2.

Ecosystem Marketplace did a survey on the average costs in the voluntary carbon offset market, and found these prices:

Renewable energy projects cost $1.40 to offset 1 ton of CO2 output
Forestry and land use projects: $4.30
Waste disposal: $2.50

To put it in perspective, one semi truck operating 120,000 miles a year outputs 223 tons of CO2, meaning the cost of offset it would be anywhere from $300 to $1,000. Walmart currently operates 6,121 such trucks (Walmart Trucking Fleet Fact Sheet (PDF)). To voluntarily offset their entire fleet would cost between $1.8 million to $6.1 million.

Why I Looked It Up

I had just always wondered. Specifically, I had wondered what “carbon neutral” meant. I thought it meant the organization wasn’t actually outputting anything, but now I know it just means they’re paying money to claim that their output is negated through other means.

Postscript

An article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Companies Are Buying Large Numbers of Carbon Offsets That Don’t Cut Emissions covers the controversy I discussed above. It discusses 300,000 credits that Delta Airlines bought from an Indian wind farm that was steadily profitable and stable.

Transactions like this undercut the basic concept behind carbon offsets – that they should fund green projects that wouldn’t be possible without the additional cash they bring. Now that renewable energy can stand on its own financially, some investors, researchers and government regulators say companies buying these credits are just transferring cash to other established companies. They say the old U.N. program, which spawned thousands of similar projects and makes up a large chunk of the market for offsets, is draining money from newer initiatives that need it more, such as experiments in capturing carbon directly from the air.

Explanation: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This was the 1939 agreement between Hitler (Germany) and Stalin (Russia) where they agreed to non-aggression and to divide Poland between them. (It was named for the Foreign Ministers of both countries.)

The areas of Poland that were invaded ended up with Russia after the war, and are now in Belarus and Ukraine.

Germany would renege on the agremeent in 1941 when it invaded Russia.

Why I Looked It Up

On an episode of The Orville, when Captain Mercer sees that the Krill and Moclans have formed an alliance, he remarks:

It’s like Molotov-Ribbentrop all over again.

Explanation: Bank Holding Company

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is a company that owns banks, but doesn’t necessarily do banking itself.

There are a lot of laws and regulation around banking. A bank holding company – a “bancorp” – operates under different rules than banks, which can make it easier for them to borrow money.

Why I Looked It Up

I was reading Too Big To Fail about the 2008 financial crisis. Several investment banks converted to bank holding companies as they ran out of money and needed to borrow from the Federal Reserve.

Wikipedia notes:

As a result of the global financial crisis of 2008, many traditional investment banks and finance corporations such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, American Express, CIT Group and GMAC (now Ally Financial)[4] converted to bank holding companies in order to gain access to the Federal Reserve’s credit facilities.

The next day, the New York Times noted it was:

[…] a blunt acknowledgment that their model if finance and investing had become too risky

Weirdly, I used to have a client literally called “The Bancorp.” To my knowledge, they were not a bank holding company? They dealt in prepaid credit cards, but I have learned that many credit card issuers are owned by other banks (they have to be “underwritten” by one), so perhaps this might have been true behind-the-scenes.