April 2, 2024
The dark forest hypothesis is the conjecture that many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but they are both silent and hostile, maintaining their undetectability for fear of being destroyed by another hostile and undetected civilization. It is one of many possible explanations of the Fermi paradox, which contrasts the lack of contact with alien life with the potential for such contact. The hypothesis derives its name from Chinese author Liu Cixin’s 2008 novel ‘The Dark Forest,’ although the concept predates the novel. A similar hypothesis, under the name ‘deadly probes,’ was described by astronomer and author David Brin in his 1983 summary of the arguments for and against the Fermi paradox.
The ‘dark forest’ hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat and thus destroy any nascent life that makes itself known. As a result, the electromagnetic spectrum would be relatively quiet, without evidence of any intelligent alien life. Continue reading →
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March 21, 2024
Catturd (b. 1964) is the online identity of right-wing American Twitter shitposter and Internet troll Phillip Buchanan. The account is known for its scatological humor, as well as spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation. Buchanan lives in Wewahitchka, Florida, on a ‘ranch in the middle of nowhere.’
He is thrice-divorced. He married his first wife, whom he met at a gym when she was 19 and he was in his early twenties, in 1986. The marriage was annulled in 1988. By 1991, Buchanan had married and divorced another woman. His third marriage happened a few years later, while he was working at a post office. They parted in 1998 and divorced in 2002. Buchanan claims to have served in the US Army. In the 90s, he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and later fronted a band in Tallahassee, Florida.
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March 19, 2024
In literary and historical analysis, presentism is a term for the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. The practice of presentism is regarded by some as a common fallacy when writing about the past.
The debate surrounding presentism in historical analysis is ongoing, with some arguing that completely divorcing moral judgments from historical inquiry may lead to a relativistic approach that fails to acknowledge the universal nature of certain moral principles. Balancing historical context with ethical considerations remains a challenge for historians and philosophers alike. Continue reading →
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March 12, 2024
‘The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry’ is a 1973 book by Harold Bloom, literary critic and Sterling Professor of humanities at Yale. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new ‘revisionary’ or antithetical approach to literary criticism. Bloom’s central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintain with precursor poets.
He argues that ‘the poet in a poet’ is inspired to write by reading another poet’s poetry and will tend to produce work that is in danger of being derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak. Because poets historically emphasize an original poetic vision in order to guarantee their survival into posterity, the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets. Thus Bloom attempts to work out the process by which the small minority of ‘strong’ poets manage to create original work in spite of the pressure of influence. Continue reading →
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March 11, 2024
The Sloot Digital Coding System is an alleged data sharing technique that its inventor claimed could store a complete digital movie file in 8 kilobytes of data — violating Shannon’s source coding theorem (which establishes the statistical limits to data compression) by many orders of magnitude. The alleged technique was developed in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (1945-1999), a Dutch electronics engineer.
In 1999, just days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack. The source code was never recovered, and the technique and claim have never been reproduced or verified. Continue reading →
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March 3, 2024
ussy is an English-language suffix derived from the word pussy used to create novel portmanteau terms, usually referring to hole-shaped objects. The suffix has existed within LGBT slang in the form ‘bussy’ (boy pussy) since the early 2000s, but was popularized in the late 2010s and early 2020s on social media platforms including TikTok. It was named the American Dialect Society’s word of the year for 2022.
‘Bussy’ and ‘mussy’ (man pussy) first appearing on the internet between 1999 and 2004. An April 2017 Tumblr post popularized the suffix with the term ‘thrussy’ (from throat), and it was further spread as part of the ‘one thicc bih’ Internet meme that began to spread about a month later. A 2018 study of ussy usage on Twitter as part of the meme identified 1,338 ‘pussy blends’ used in tweets from June to August 2017. Continue reading →
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February 29, 2024
The Liz Truss Lettuce was a 2022 media stunt featuring a livestream of an iceberg lettuce to satirize the brief tenure of British Prime Minister Liz Truss, symbolically competing with her to see which would “last” longer. The lettuce was declared “victorious” when Truss resigned after just 45 days.
The prank started on October 14th when British tabloid newspaper the ‘Daily Star’ began a livestream of an iceberg lettuce next to a framed photograph of Truss, who was appointed prime minister the previous month. This act followed an opinion piece in ‘The Economist’ that compared the expected brevity of her premiership to the shelf life of a head of lettuce. With the October 2022 United Kingdom government crisis occurring weeks into her tenure, many political commentators opined that Truss’s resignation was imminent. She announced her resignation on October 20th, before the lettuce had wilted. Continue reading →
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February 28, 2024
The mango cult was the worship of mangoes in China after Mao gave a box of mangoes, given to him by the Pakistani Foreign Minister, to workers at Tsinghua University in 1968. Instead of being eaten, the mangoes were preserved in formaldehyde, or sealed in wax for veneration.
One dentist from Fulin, Dr. Han Guangdi, saw the mango and said it was nothing special and looked just like sweet potato. He was put on trial for malicious slander, found guilty, paraded publicly throughout the town, and then executed with one shot to the head. Mangoes are now common in China, and are seen as a common consumer good. Continue reading →
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February 22, 2024
FYIFV (Fuck You, I’m Fully Vested) is a piece of early Microsoft jargon that has become an urban legend: the claim that employees whose stock options were fully vested (that is, could be exercised) would occasionally wear T-shirts or buttons with the initials FYIFV to indicate they were sufficiently financially independent to give their honest opinions and leave any time they wished.
In internal usage at Microsoft, it was meant metaphorically to describe intransigent co-workers. In press usage and popular culture, it was used to imply a predatory business culture reaching even to the programmers. Despite many third hand reports of Microsoft employees wearing FYIFV buttons or shirts, there is only one report of an actual FYIFV T-shirt, worn on the wearer’s last day at the company. Continue reading →
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February 13, 2024
In urban planning, Brusselization is ‘the indiscriminate and careless introduction of modern high-rise buildings into gentrified neighborhoods’ and has become a byword for ‘haphazard urban development and redevelopment.’
The notion applies to anywhere whose development follows the pattern of the uncontrolled development of Brussels in the 1960s and 1970s, that resulted from a lack of zoning regulations and the city authorities’ laissez-faire approach to city planning. Continue reading →
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January 18, 2024
Crosswordese is the group of words frequently found in U.S. crossword puzzles but seldom found in everyday conversation. The words are usually short, three to five letters, with letter combinations which crossword constructors find useful in the creation of crossword puzzles, such as words that start and/or end with vowels, abbreviations consisting entirely of consonants, unusual combinations of letters, and words consisting almost entirely of frequently used letters. Such words are needed in almost every puzzle to some extent. Too much crosswordese in a crossword puzzle is frowned upon by cruciverbalists (people skillful in creating or solving crossword puzzles) and crossword enthusiasts.
The popularity of individual words and names of crosswordese, and the way they are clued, changes over time. For instance, ITO was occasionally clued in the 1980s and 1990s in reference to dancer Michio Itō and actor Robert Ito; then boomed in the late 1990s and 2000s with the rise of judge Lance Ito; and has since fallen somewhat, and when it appears today, the clue typically references figure skater Midori Ito or uses the partial phrase ‘I to’ (as in [‘How was ___ know?’]).
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January 11, 2024
According to a false conspiracy theory, medbeds (an abbreviation of ‘medical bed’ or ‘meditation bed’) are secret beds that can miraculously heal humans and extend life. The plausibility of such devices is pseudoscience. Medbed conspiracy theories often involve claims that the devices are utilized by members of a ‘deep state’ and billionaires and that the former President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, is still alive, lying on a medbed.
Belief in these devices is popular among QAnon influencers such as Michael Protzman, Romana Didulo, and YamatoQ. Various companies sell devices or access to beds that supposedly heal ailments via imaginary technologies while also including fine print on their websites disclaiming that no diagnoses, treatment, or cures are provided.
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