Mimsy Were the Borogoves

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.

The first line is on the wall far above the altar at our local church.

In a recent issue of Benedictus—a word I’ll be talking about in this post, as it happens—I ran across the following question about Latin masses, quoted from the Tradivox Catholic Catechism Index vol. 14:

Why is the Mass said in Latin?

1) Because this language comes from Rome, whence we received our faith; 2) because, being a dead language, it does not change in the course of time like living languages, and 3) because thereby the unity and uniformity of the Church, even in her public service, is represented and preserved.

That was written back when most masses were celebrated in Latin. There’s a lot to be said for the unity and precision that comes with presenting the Mass worldwide in a single, unchanging language. In the modern era, the near-complete lack of comprehension of that language is probably an insurmountable obstacle.

This installment, I’m going to decipher the Sanctus. That is, the Holy, Holy, Holy that comes at the start of the Eucharistic Prayer.

Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus

It’s obvious enough from the identical repetition in both versions that sanctus means “holy”. How does it get there, however? Sanctus actually means a whole bunch of things in Latin, and several of them are likely play into the full meaning of the word in the prayer. Consecrated, sacred, divine, and just are all possible meanings along with holy.

This Australian cookbook is deceptively old-fashioned.

Community cookbooks are notorious for not including any indication of when they were printed. I’ve just published a list of cookbooks on the Padgett Sunday Supper Club where I’ve had to guess at the year. This is both to help others who might have the same cookbook and wonder when it was made, and in the hope that someone may remember when the book was published either because they’re in it or an ancestor was in it—or they were part of the organization that published it. If you’re among the latter, please write!

This list should automatically update. Whenever I’ve had to guess what year a book was published, that book should automatically show up in the list.

Many people attempt to use graphic design clues as a guide to a cookbook’s date. I see Glen Powell do this all the time, for example, and while I understand that his extensive experience gives him a better sense than I about the relationship between era and design, I never trust that kind of estimate. Changes in style can take decades to completely spread across North America and the United Kingdom. There were some people still typing their cookbooks well into the seventies and the eighties, and others producing what appear to be quality, modern finished products as early as the thirties.

I have an Australian community cookbook, for example, that looks to me like it was from the fifties, maybe early sixties, and possibly even earlier. The graphic style, the writing style, even the measurements and oven “temperatures”, all scream mid-twentieth century. But it has advertisements from businesses that weren’t in business at their advertised location until 1969. From the advertisements, I’m dating that book between 1969 and 1976.

Reprints can also cause problems with dating. I have a Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook from Culinary Arts Press that lists itself as being from 1936; I am nearly certain it’s a facsimile reprint, but it might not be. Culinary Arts Press is one of those organizations that was often ahead of its time in graphic design—and then kept using a similar design aesthetic well into the fifties. Of course, if it is a reprint, I have no idea when it was reprinted. I can only hope that it’s a facsimile reprint so that the date of 1936 at least can be reasonably applied to the recipes.

In this business, you never really know.

The Legend of Affordable Healthcare in America: If you want single payer, you must believe in magic.

I’ve written a lot about how science is becoming indistinguishable from magic in the minds of so much of the beltway crowd and the anointed—and not in the good science fiction way. Science is not something to be believed in, like religion, or voted on like politics. Science is the scientific method, nothing else. To paraphrase Feynman, if it disagrees with the scientific method it is wrong. That is the only key to science.

Science is not legislating the value of π or calling a council of the wise. That’s religion. Science is acknowledging the ignorance of experts, not their expertise. Every time you hear about science being “settled” or about a “consensus”, what you’re hearing is little more than a cargo cult religion wearing a cheap suit of scientific trappings and buzzwords.

One of the worst places for this substitution of magic for science is in medicine. Without the scientific method, medicine will kill both directly, through action, and indirectly by inaction. Nothing illustrates the cargo cult in medicine as clearly as this meme about health care that I ran across last year on a gaming group. The text specifically called out Americans:

The Legend of Affordable Healthcare: An adventure specifically designed for American D&D players.

To someone who both plays D&D and has done some thinking about health care and health insurance, the accompanying image is both profoundly weird and revelatory. For those not familiar with D&D’s iconography, the image pictured under the text “affordable healthcare” is of a priest—a “cleric” in D&D parlance—using magic to heal a sick or injured character.

Not a doctor. Not a scholar. A wielder of magic. This is neither an appeal to logic nor for better science. This is a religious tract.

It isn’t in any way necessary or even likely that a D&D-related affordable health care joke has to involve magic spells. D&D has had non-divine, completely non-magical medicine since at least the advent of its fifth edition, which was well over a decade ago. The skill “Medicine (Wis)” is literally on every character sheet. It’s on the character sheet of warriors and rogues as well as of wizards and priests.

A Wisdom (Medicine) check lets you try to stabilize a dying companion or diagnose an illness.

Veteran’s Day, once Armistice Day, is this coming Tuesday. But the armistice that ended the Great War is not the only thing that happened on November 11 in our history. Among the most barbaric was the 1778 massacre by English troops at Cherry Valley, a village now in Otsego County, New York.

The Cherry Valley massacre is an obscure part of the American Revolution to anyone but the residents of Cherry Valley, who remembered it at least up to the release of The Patriot in 2000.

The English employed Iroquois—in this location, Seneca and Mohawks—in their attempts to quell the American rebellion. The Iroquois were paid to attack under the direct command of British officers as well as to attack independently of English control. In response mostly to those independent raids, Continental soldiers had destroyed several Iroquois towns, hoping to end the many raids that had come from them earlier in the year. All accounts that I’ve seen say that the Continentals destroyed lodgings and provisions—not people. The direct antecedent to the massacre, the destruction of the Iroquois villages of Unadilla and Onaquaga, had by all accounts been empty at the time of the Continental raids.

It’s movie time! A friend of mine has started a new movie channel on YouTube, and it promises to be a standout.

The wheat kernel explained by Vernice Rosenvall in Wheat for Man, 1975.

I was wandering through an antique store in Corning, Arkansas, when I ran across this marvelous manual for what I think is the original Rival Crock•Pot. The pamphlet is sadly not dated, not even with the year-like code that later Crock•Pot manuals would sport on the back cover. However, Rival’s version of the slow cooker was introduced in 1971.

What struck me about this particular printing of the pamphlet, however, is that it contained instructions for a “special Bread 'n Cake Bake pan”.

Our Bread ‘n Cake Bake pan makes a miniature oven of your Crock-Pot! It’s custom designed for marvelous, easy baking of cakes, breads, casseroles or baked potatoes… right in the Crock-Pot… Homemade breads give off that oldtime aroma and have that hearty taste. If you like yeast breads, the “batter” way is the better way. There’s no need to knead… and little waiting for dough to rise.

I of course immediately went to my usual vintage haunts looking for the “Bread ’n Cake Bake” and found one in great shape. It may have been easier nowadays than finding a two-pound coffee can suitable for baking. If you do want to go the full vintage route and use a coffee-style can, you might be able to use a not-quite-one-pound Cafe du Monde can, or a not-quite-two pound beans or tomatoes can.

To top it all off, the very first recipe for homemade bread in the Bread ’n Cake Bake section of this manual was for a graham flour bread. Grandma’s “Dark” Bread incorporates “½ cup whole wheat or graham flour” into the dough. I’ve been experimenting with graham flour this year, so it seemed the perfect place to start.

It was so good, I haven’t made any of the other breads in this section yet.

Graham flour is not readily available today. Most recipes—even this one—suggest using either graham flour or whole wheat flour. However, whole wheat flour is not quite the same thing. Graham flour is literally the whole flour. Whole wheat flour is more of the flour than white flour, but not the whole flour.

And of course I used the piano script from 42 Astounding Scripts to create a MIDI file and then GarageBand to make a slideshow of the Revolution.

One of the most enduring stories about the American Revolution is that of Lord Cornwallis’s surrender to George Washington at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. It was the beginning of the end of the revolution; all that was left were long negotiations for a peace treaty. As the British Army left the field on October 19, their band showed their confusion and dejection at having been beaten by a bunch of wild colonial boys by playing the then-popular song “The World Turned Upside Down (PDF File, 560.9 KB)”.

I thought it would be kind of cool to do the music for “The World Turned Upside Down” using the piano script from 42 Astounding Scripts and Automations for the Macintosh. I didn’t know the song’s lyrics or its melody. All I knew was its title and the story of its use.

It turns out practically no one knows it. “The World Turned Upside Down” may be the most famous song in American history that practically no one knows. I’m not the only person who has noticed this. While I was searching for period sheet music, I ran across Dennis Montgomery’s similar observation on American Revolution.org: