Future anthropologist: “In the early 21st century, there was a superstition against writing your True Email explicitly. You had to write it obliquely, like ‘scott at symbol shireroth dot org’. They believed that if anyone wrote their email out explicitly, it would draw the attention of hostile spirits, and the person would never again know peace.”

Related to the “toxic masculinity” discourse from the other day:

Today I had to go to a committee meeting on doctor burnout. According to a survey, a lot of doctors in one of our departments felt overworked and burnt out, and the committee was supposed to come up with suggestions.

The committee was mostly administrators, mostly female, and although they didn’t use the exact phrase “toxic masculinity”, they talked about “macho culture” a lot. I think their theory was that male doctors had a macho culture where they felt like they didn’t need to take any time for self-care, and they shouldn’t speak up about excessive workload, and they had to look perfect or else they would lose their aura of invincibility. And that having to be this way all the time produced burnout.

So then I, as the doctor representative at the meeting, got up and said that I knew a lot of the doctors in this department, I’d talked to them a lot, and they all said the same thing. They would all love to take some time off for self-care, but there were too many patients and not enough doctors to deal with them, and if any one of them took extra time off, then one of their equally overworked colleagues would have to work even more hours covering for them.

The reason they “weren’t complaining” was that they had already complained to every administrator they could think of, and the administrators had said stuff like “you shouldn’t just complain, you have to be proactive in coming up with a solution” and refused to devote extra resources to the problem.

I said that doctors were really good at complaining about things, and really some of the best complainers-about-things you will ever meet, but that they weren’t going to keep banging their heads against the wall when nobody listened to them and there was no good solution.

The administrators thanked me for my input and went back to talking about macho culture.

K and I learned how to shoot guns today. It was interesting. And by interesting, I mean “loud”.

There was some helpful safety training beforehand. But it missed the most important part, which is that the gun will eject the spent bullet casing in a random direction. Somehow I managed to live in a “gun culture” and watch a bunch of action movies without realizing this was a thing. When you’re firing a gun for the first time and really nervous, and a bullet-shaped thing shoots out of the back of the gun and hits spectators in the face, this is NOT a minor point that you can forget to warn people about, even if it turns out to be nothing and everybody laughs that you were so worried about it.

Otherwise everything went okay. I think if I ever have to write a story involving guns, I can use words like “magazine” without sounding ridiculous to people who know what they’re talking about. I think the friend who brought me was expecting that this was going to be some sort of revelatory experience where I realized that Guns Are Your Friends and so gun control was a vile lie, but I feel like if guns were *really* my friends then the person who held one at a slightly different angle than everyone else would not have had a big security guy run up to him and freak out and yell at him until he changed the angle back.

Also, Ada Palmer (author of Too Like The Lightning) was at the shooting range and I got to get a picture with her!

It’s a good thing some bands sell out, because I can’t make out without a girlfriend, and whenever I have responsibilities, I want out.

Today I learned: Ten-year-old Ayn Rand was best-friends-forever with Vladimir Nabokov’s little sister, and they would meet at Nabokov’s mansion and have adorable ten-year-old-girl political debates with each other.

More Wikipedia:

Pope Benedict IX, born Theophylactus of Tusculum in Rome, was Pope on three occasions between October 1032 and July 1048.

Aged approximately 20 at his first election, he is one of the youngest popes in history. He is the only man to have been Pope on more than one occasion and the only man ever to have sold the papacy.

My latest post was linked from a couple of big blogs and news sources, apparently copying from each other, with the quote/summary:

Slate Star Codex: “The problem is that there’s some weird tribe of fact-immune troglodytes out there, going around refusing vaccines and voting for Brexit, and the rest of us have to figure out what to do about them.“

(example)

That’s the opposite of my argument. I’m using it as a straw man in order to knock it down. I don’t understand how people could quote that and then attribute it to me with no further explanation. This happens every time I try to deal with a controversy responsibly. People take the most inflammatory thing in the post, even if it’s the opposite of what I believe, and try to convince everyone it’s my opinion. I don’t know if this is some sort of passive-aggressive campaign against me, or some sort of terrible law of media dynamics, but it’s so annoying.

What do people think of the “Trump Humiliated By Health Care Failure” and “Health Care Rejection Shows Trump Is Already Lame Duck” and “Paul Ryan: Worst Speaker Of All Time?” discourse?

Most people I trust seem to think the health care bill was crap. Blaming people for writing a crappy health care bill seems fair enough.

But there seems to be more of an element of picking on them for being too weak to pass the bill, as if now they’re losers and we can never respect them again.

Can we just say something like “Elected officials should propose bills that they and their constituents want, give the rest of the country a chance to weigh in, and if the rest of the country says no, that means democracy is working and they should come back with something better”?

Like, this is complicated because I don’t want Republicans to pass a health care bill right now. But if this were actually important legislation, I would want the government to say “Good thing the American people made their voices heard,” roll up their sleeves, and then write a better bill.

Whereas now it seems like the incentive is to never propose anything that doesn’t have a 100% chance of getting passed the first time. And the other incentive is to desperately try to steamroll your legislation over everyone’s opposition and never admit you’re wrong, because if it fails (even for good reason) everyone will make fun of you.

Or am I missing something important here?

Maybe this is completely obvious to everyone else and I’m totally crazy, but a question:

William Blake in one of his letters described the sun as appearing about the size of “a guinea”. From this description I assumed a guinea was about the size of a quarter - and checking Wikipedia, I was right. The sun just objectively appears quarter-sized. If someone asked me to draw the sun exactly the size it appeared on a piece of paper, I would draw a circle about the size of a quarter. And if I heard someone say the sun looked the size of a pinhead, or the sun looked the size of one of those really big Eisenhower dollars, or the sun looked the size of one of those circular coasters you get for drinks at a restaurant, I would assume they were aliens talking about a different sun.

I don’t understand this. We’re obviously not talking about its real size, since that’s hundreds of thousands of miles across. But what does it mean for its apparent size to be the size of a quarter? A quarter has a different apparent size if it’s held right up to your eyes versus seen on a table all the way across the room. A quarter X feet away from me is the same apparent size as an Eisenhower dollar Y feet away from (where Y is further than X). So how is the sun’s apparent size equal to one, but not the other?