Mimsy Were the Borogoves

If you’re a regular reader, you’ve probably recognized that a lot of my posts are just me barfing up thoughts that I need to get out so that I can stop thinking about them. One such thought that has been bothering me for a long time is how much of modern science tends to look less like science than like trying to explain away inconvenient science. One of the strangest examples of this is explaining away the beginning of the universe—or even denying that there was a beginning to the universe.

It’s something I definitely want to get out of the way and stop thinking about because the entire concept of a beginning to the universe or not is eerie to me.

Listening to the Space Show’s December 5, 2025 discussion with science author Brian Clegg helped me focus just enough to finally get some of my thoughts on paper, so to speak. So much of modern cosmological theory resembles the old joke about turtles all the way down. And from an outsider’s perspective, it’s not because more turtles make better theories, but that the theorists are trying to avoid anything that looks like the description of the beginning of the universe that appears in Genesis.

An early version of the turtles tale was related by linguist John Robert Ross in the preface to his 1967 doctoral thesis, about the psychologist William James:

Available in print and as a free download (PDF File, 10.5 MB).

The very first refrigerator cookbook I covered in this series when I decided to start scanning and releasing them was the 1928 Frigidaire Recipes. That was only a year after the seminal General Electric book—and refrigerator—that started the home refrigeration revolution. Both were elegant hardcovers filled with elegant illustrations of the good life that comes from owning your own home refrigerator.

Both understood that what they were offering was not just another way to store food but a completely change in how food would be referred to and how we would interact with it. They recognized they were offering a completely change in lifestyle.

Your Frigidaire: Recipes and Other Helpful Information (PDF File, 10.5 MB) isn’t just from the same company as that 1928 book, it’s the same author. Verna L. Miller is listed as the director responsible for collecting and compiling the “facts which have accumulated during years of study and research by the Frigidaire Department of Home Economics.”

The article on the left is about sharks not getting cancer. This is Omni, after all.

As I go through old Omni magazines, I am struck by George Eliot’s dictum that history is adept at changing costume while remaining the same.¹

One of those “changes in costume” is how political correctness doesn’t just shape a conversation, it shapes policy. And like most forms of censorship, it shapes policy out of dangerous ignorance.

In today’s world of men beating up women and calling it “sports” there’s an argument about “who does it hurt” on one side and “now it’s turned deadly” on the other. But political correctness hasn’t just turned deadly today. Political correctness has always been deadly and often, just as it is today, it’s been deadly to the people it was supposed to help.

Political correctness will always be deadly, because it is specifically a form of speech control that denies reality. It reaches into scientific research and denies effective research. It bars some data from the scientific conversation—and these are, by their nature, usually going to be the most relevant data.

I recently ran across a darkly humorous news item in the November 1981 Omni:²

Gay Diseases

Two mysterious diseases are claiming the lives of homosexual men in several American cities and are baffling epidemiologists at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta.

“We’re calling it an outbreak of decreased resistance,” says CDC investigator James Curran, “and it’s very, very serious.”

…

CDC field-workers in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are hunting for a reason. Since the diseases are not believed to be infectious and most of the victims don’t know one another, epidemiologists suspect something in the gay lifestyle causes these ailments.

“Inhalant anesthetics, such as butyl nitrate, are one possibility, since many gays use them [to enhance sexual pleasure],” Curran says, “but so far we really don’t know.”

“Since the diseases are not believed to be infectious” partly due to it “claiming the lives of homosexual men [who] don’t know one another” scientists were looking to non-infectious modes of transmission. They were looking at things in “the gay life-style” rather than behavior. Things like “inhalant anesthetics”.

My dad remembers his parents renting freezer space in the local grocery store. They lived on a working farm and had to drive about five miles into town to access that rented space. Having that refrigeration space allowed them to store purchases and excess food. But it didn’t allow them to forego the daily trip to the market, because their refrigerated food was at the market.

With the 1927 introduction of General Electric’s monitor-top all-in-one system home refrigeration changed drastically, just as home computers would exactly fifty years later with the introduction of all-in-one home computers from companies like Radio Shack.

The story of home refrigeration happened slowly… and then quickly. It took place over hundreds and even thousands of years, depending on how deep you go. Here’s how Oscar Anderson, in Refrigeration in America, described the life of farmers in pre-refrigeration America:

I’ve managed to acquire a few caches of early OMNI magazines, and recently read the February, March, and April 1980 issues. With a likely three-month lead time to publication, the essays and editorials in these issues would have been written in November or so through January. That is, at the very end of the seventies and the height of seventies malaise. President Carter was still president. While the Iranian hostage crisis was weighing on his presidency, there was as yet no obvious alternative to Carter in the Republican Party.

On January 1, 1980, Carter seemed more vulnerable from an opponent in his own party—Ted Kennedy—than from any Republican. President Reagan wouldn’t even start showing his strength in the Republican primaries until March. Like President Trump in 2016, candidacy would be treated as a joke until it wasn’t.

Emblematic of the era is a cartoon in the February issue showing a maitre’d controlling entry to a gas station. Under rationing and price controls, being able to both afford gas and have time to access it was becoming a class marker. That America was entering a period of decline was a widely spoken mantra in the beltway, and would continue to be until President Reagan’s new policies started taking effect in 1981 and 1982.

Most people in publishing and politics thought higher prices and higher unemployment—stagflation—was America’s inevitable future. They had no idea everything would change in just over one year when gasoline price controls would be rescinded and gasoline prices—along with prices for everything that relies on gasoline—would drop.

Tying into this seventies malaise was another surprise for me: a Thomas Szasz-like rant about the psychiatric industry that opened February’s “Continuum”¹—and seeing by the signature at the end that it was in fact written by Szasz! Everybody wrote for Omni. As I recall from reading one or two of his books, Szasz had a lot of very good points—obscured by a near-complete rejection of potential physical causes for mental issues.

“Google is pushing a new stricter default for the Referrer-Policy header under the veil of privacy. Not only have they implemented this default in Chrome, they are also lobbying for everyone to configure it in their web servers… This article is a plea not to blindly follow suit by nailing shut the referrer header in every possible case, because that may do more harm than good.”

‘…it is an act of carpet-bombing the entire Internet with a measure that protects visitors only in a very limited set of situations, while in many other situations it only harms everyone in the long run. First the smaller websites because this new default increases their isolation, then the visitors who get jailed into a limited ecosystem of mainstream websites because the smaller websites die off or are hampered in their means to improve upon their content.

“I do not like this trend of the Web transitioning from what used to be a forum open to everyone, towards a collection of walled gardens, gated communities where everyone is utterly paranoid and sour, and expects to be exploited in every possible way if they don't sell their soul to a big tech company.”

This is just a quick update on why “engagement algorithms” really mean farming anger: that is, what the financial stakes are that encourage artificially inflating engagement. Or at least, it started as a quick update. It quickly went off into the fields of effective advertising, and the ancient debate over eyeballs vs. sales.

Several social media sites reward people for delivering eyeballs—that is, for drawing in viewers and readers. Just as Facebook has discovered, one of the easiest ways to get eyeballs and to keep eyeballs is to encourage rage and hatred. The common term for this is “rage baiting”. It’s become such a common practice that it’s already progressed, language-wise, to a single-word contraction, “ragebaiting”.

This is what Facebook’s algorithm is designed to encourage, and this example (from X, not Facebook) is the first concrete example I’ve been blessed to find describing how much money is involved. I couldn’t find anything like this when I wrote Facebook is designed to kill relationships.

The wages of ragebait.

When you look at these numbers, remember that they are basically affiliate payments. When affiliates are linked directly to sales, such payments run from a fraction of a percent to, at the very high end, four percent, which would mean multiplying by anywhere from twenty-five up to two hundred to get the actual gross profits involved. But social media posts aren’t generally tied directly to sales, only indirectly as delivering eyeballs of potential sales.

Much as the purpose of television shows on broadcast television was to draw in viewers to watch television ads, the purpose of posts on social media is to draw in readers to watch Internet ads. Very few of the viewers or the readers actually convert into buyers. So you’d have to multiply again by two and probably much more for the actual figures involved on X’s side of the ledger.

Also available in print.

This is the second of four addendums I’ve queued up to my three-parter revisiting the refrigerator revolution. That series was originally meant to cover 1928, 1942, and 1947; the latter just barely predated the modern near-universality of home refrigerator ownership. But as I delve deeper into the origins of the home refrigerator/freezer era, it is becoming almost literally the bottomless pit of fascinating fridge finds!

There is always something more interesting just around the corner. While wandering an antique mall over the 2024 Thanksgiving holiday, I ran across this 1927 General Electric refrigerator manual (PDF File, 22.3 MB). It looked interesting, but (a) it was unpriced, and (b) it was missing at least one page. It also wasn’t the first printing, which meant I’d need to do some research anyway before buying it.