81 posts
Carpetbomb
carpetbomb
As an asthmatic with bad allergies I personally generally loathe rugs and carpets of all kinds because they are filthy things that are just waiting to make me sneeze and wheeze even more (also I share my pets' hatred of the vacuum, because it is loud and throws dust everywhere) but now I am considering getting an area rug for the living room because poor dog has arthritis and luxating patellas and I think it might be better for her than the hardwood. But my extra moment of angry-old-lady is this: what the fuck is the deal with everything being "distressed"? It's a *rug*, for fucks sake, it will be distressed soon enough if it's on my floor. It just looks like they were running out of ink in the printer. And you can't really set search results to exclude things with that term.
More Posts from Pastpossum
Wait but tell me more, what kind of math does our godforsaken measuring system make sense for? I'm horribly curious!
oh dear oh boy okay, I’ve tried to explain this to people and had them just get more annoyed, so I’ll give it a shot, but no promises that it will make any sense. Disclaimer also that I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I’ve just done a lot of baking, and ages ago I read something by Plato explaining why the musical scale is how it is, and I’m extrapolating from the two
(wow this turned out way longer than I meant it to because IT’S MIDNIGHT)
the metric system is a base 10 system, like most modern human math, so it is easy to use in the way people tend to do math these days - ie, by sitting down with either a piece of paper or a calculator and doing sums. It’s a good system for a lot of things, especially scientific applications where you need to be VERY precise and don’t want to waste time converting units, and need to do shit like calculus. It’s a highly rational way of doing it…if you are literate.
if you aren’t literate, or are less literate, it’s not a sensible way to construct a measuring system at all. If you measure something and come up with 367.45 cm, that’s nothing. You’re going to forget it, and you can’t easily divide it by anything, there’s no way to go from here
But consider the English Foot. We’ve all been working with a base 12 system without realizing it, and without really utilizing it for what it’s best for, which is easy mental division. This is where people get mad at me, they say math all gets terrible and ugly when you do it in feet, you end up trying to figure out how many sixteenths of an inch 0.135 is, or you end up with repeating decimals, and it all sucks super bad. To this I say yes, it does, because you’re thinking like a modern algebra student, and not like a medieval bricklayer.
The base 12 system of the traditional English foot is fantastic for mental math, because 12 is a highly divisible number. It’s easily divisible into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths by most people in their heads. The inch is then typically divided into 1/16ths, which *super* suck to deal with on a calculator, but are really quite friendly if you just keep them as fractions like God and the Magna Carta intended. This is the kind of math most artisans need to do. You want supports placed evenly along a wall, to divide a piece of fabric in half, or to double a recipe. Nobody 1.7x’s a recipe. Metric would be great for that, but why would you do that? It wouldn’t be worth the math involved.
And listen, I also use a lot of metric baking recipes. Everything is in grams, you can measure everything the same way, and it’s super accurate. They’re great if you have a digital scale, but before the age of digital scales? Unfathomable. You (a medieval peasant) have a cup you’ve decided is The Cup, and sometimes you put in a half or a third or a quarter of that cup. THAT makes sense. Also, it’s a lot easier to double something that calls for 1 cup of flour than it is when it calls for 136 grams of flour, and this is for me, a person who learned math in the typical modern way and always has a calculator in their pocket. I would have the sourdough recipe I make every week memorized if it wasn’t in fucking grams. I DO have my pie crust recipe memorized. For every cup of flour you put in a third of a cup shortening, one tablespoon of butter, and start with 3 tablespoons of water (and a dash of salt). A double crust pie takes about 3 cups of flour, so that’s one cup shortening. Easy! A third of a cup of shortening in grams is 68.3333333. That’s nothing! That’s garbage!
“Wouldn’t it be more accurate to measure 68.3333333 grams, though?” Sure, but the amount of wet indigence you need to put in any baked thing changes with the fucking weather! That’s why this recipe says “start with 3 tbs water.” There’s no need to be more accurate, and in fact it would make things more difficult.
Okay that turned into a tangent about how to make pie crust, a thing I think everyone should learn because pie crust is delicious, but i hope you get the idea. TLDR sometimes you just want to divide things in thirds and have it not suck ass. The eldritch sigil of measurement conversions is a little less threatening if you realize every step up or down is a factor of thirds or fourths
fuck oh no another half remembered piece of pop science coming at you - the largest number a typical human can hold in their head *without language* is 3. You don’t need numbers to count to three, you don’t need to count to be aware of three, you can just see three things and say “that’s three.” Don’t believe me? That’s the whole basis of Roman numerals. The numbers 1-3 are representational, after that they get more symbolic, and you never end up with more than three of the same symbol in a row. After III comes IV, not IIII, and it’s just that III is much easier on the brain. For the same reason, a lot of English conversions are in factors of 4. There are 4 cups in a quart, and 4 quarts in a gallon, so you’re only dealing with measurements that are easy to hold in your head without counting. You never have to count out 4 cups if you convert. You either need 3 cups or 1 quart. Does that make sense? Anyone who has done Big Cooking should know that if you have to count cups beyond 3 or 4 it becomes very easy to lose track.
Now i’m not saying it’s all logical. It would be great if every step was a factor of 4, but they had to get fancy and throw pints in there. Pints aren’t too bad, that’s a factor of two, but I’ll be the first to admit that it makes no sense for one tablespoon to equal three teaspoons instead of four. But because this is a system that evolved over time instead of being constructed intentionally, you have to cut it some slack. I’m sorry to anyone who decided to read this, I should be in bed, but I actually care a lot about this and I swear it’s not just stockholm syndrome from Being American
Being on tumblr is like being a raccoon. I dig through the garbage for shiny things I like. Sometimes I find good things to share with my friends. Sometimes I find something horrifying, and also share it with my friends.
Sunday morning I had a very detailed and vivid dream that I quit my job, essentially with no notice. I even remember the wording of the letter: "Please accept my resignation immediately". I don't remember what in my dream triggered it. But I spent all day today feeling really weird about working, because wtf am I doing? I quit! Why am I doing this? Also my days of the week are messed up and today could not be Monday and had to be at least Tuesday because clearly we've already had one work day already this week, when I quit. So confusing.
Pennies
So for some reason that I never asked about after I was grown, my parents did not want me to have Barbie dolls when I was a kid. There are so many good ideological reasons they might not have but it could also just have been the money. Anyway, my mother gave me an old doll that she had when she was a kid and told me she was called Penny. Penny had originally had clothes and maybe other things but no longer did and was, to my tiny advertising-addled mind, entirely unsatisfactory.
As an adult, I got curious about Penny and looked stuff up online and discovered that this was her.
So apparently, age-appropriate dolls did still provide opportunities to buy and buy and buy things and present a life that is about having things. But for some reason, Barbie, who now seems entirely inappropriate for little kids, took off, probably *because* of seeming so adult.
Eventually my parents were no match for the aggressive constant marketing and I begged and begged and my father's mother, naturally, bought me Barbies so I could get properly started with decades of body issues and consumerism and try to fit in with my friends and what I believed we were supposed to be. I didn't even really understand how the hell to play with dolls and they didn't interest me that much but I *had* them and eventually had a fair number. And I feel weirdly sad and guilty about rejecting Penny (although in fact I do still have her and all my childhood dolls).
[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:
My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word “the” used in phrases like: “the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or “the bigger they come, the harder they fall”. This “the” is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English “þā”, pronounced “tha” which means either “when” or “then”. Back in early Middle English the structure “if - then” had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said “þā whatever, þā whatever”, meaning “when such-and- such, then such-and-such”. “þā” sounds almost the same as “the” and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. “the more, the merrier” literally means “when more, then merrier” or “if more, then merrier’; same as centuries ago.
end ID]
this is so cool