Things with which Google cannot help you.

Sure, Google seems omniscient, and may even think it's omnipotent, but we all know that's not true. 

It acts like it thinks it is.

For example, while you can ask Google what the weather is like in Borneo, who the leader of Prussia was in 1610, or what the most popular TV show in 1981 was, there are many questions with which Google is completely useless. Here are a few to think about. 

💻 Did the ground beef in the back of my fridge go off yet?

💻 Did I leave my keys in the car?

💻 What was that toddler of mine thinking?

💻 What was the name of the kid who called me Pork Face on the beach when I was seven?

💻 If we had continued the Apollo program until now, who would be on the moon today?

💻 How many leaves are on this maple?

💻 What was that dog of mine thinking?

💻 What's the name of that actor in the movie I forget the title of where he plays the guy?

💻 What'd I come into the kitchen for?

💻 What's the name of that squirrel over there?

💻 What are those guys up to across the street?

💻 What was the password on my iMac G3? I want to get something off it.

💻 Is my dry cleaner pressing my gray pants right this second?

💻 What was that wife of mine thinking?

💻 What was the president -- oh, never mind.

💻 💻 💻 

In case you were wondering:

Borneo, as of this writing: Overcast, light rain.

Head of Prussia, most of 1610: John Sigismund

Most popular TV show, 1981: Dallas 

Fred: Thought Leader.

I got an invitation to a meeting about thought leadership. Of course they would want my ideas. 

Nah, JK, LOL, it was from LinkedIn. They don't care.

"The Value of Thought Leadership in Economic Uncertainty" is the topic, and I'm not saying it's a bad topic. The times are economically uncertain. And as I've written here before, I am convinced that true leadership is more talent than knowledge, but like any raw talent it A) needs honing and practice and B) hasn't alighted on many of the people who believe it has. It can be faked to some extent with intelligence and experience and learned skills, but there’s a reason we talk about “born leaders.”

Worse, though, is that few people devote a lot of thought to anything.

The buzz phrase "thought leadership" annoys me, anyway. According to LinkedIn, where they know these things, there's a big difference between thought leading and regular nonfat leading:

The difference between regular leaders and thought leaders is that thought leaders have a large following while their regular counterparts don't. Your followers help catalyze a movement that spreads your ideas from one person to the next.

So, a thought leader makes money whereas a leader leader just makes success. 

Or, a leader can direct people but a thought leader changes the way they think. Okay, I can dig it. I hate it, but I can dig it.

First of all, the American Revolution may have featured the last great thought leaders, putting the rights of the individual as sovereign. Since then a great many impactful "thought leaders" have sucked. Marx, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Xi, Pol Pot, Jim Jones, those French Revolution guys, all thought leaders, all the worst bastards to ever come out of the bastard machine. 

Second, one may wish to lead thoughts, but few people have either original thoughts or leadership skills. So how is one to be a thought leader in economic uncertainty? I would guess it boils down to the same old inspirational, motivational rah-rah in a barely new package: trouble = opportunity and all that. Sure. Maybe.

I wouldn't want to open a new restaurant at a time when people can barely buy groceries, although some people will find a way to make it work. But everyone knows deep down that if sticking to it and believing in yourself was all it took, this world would have 100 times more Hollywood stars and 1,000 times more billionaires. 

If I were LinkedIn, I'd be glad that Mr. Fred Key turned down this opportunity to share my thoughts on the topic. Like most people who consider themselves realists, whether we are or not, I have a strong cynical streak and an expectation of disaster. But, as the old man once observed, if you're a pessimist, at least you're guaranteed to be right eventually.

Deep thoughts.

From the deep thoughts factory at FredCo.

🧠 According to the Cleveland Clinic, your brain processes 70,000 thoughts per day. This means that by the time you turn 50, you've had approximately 1,278,340,000 thoughts. That seems like a lot, especially if, like me, the bulk of your thoughts are devoted to Is there anything to eat? and I'm tired. But if you had one thought for every dollar spent by the federal government's $1.9 trillion budget this year, you would be more than 74. And that's just the budget, which doesn't include mandatory spending, or entitlements, which was $4.6 trillion in 2020. Think THAT many thoughts and you'll be almost 180.

🐕 Buridan's Ass is the philosophic example of the donkey that starves to death, being unable to choose between two identical and equidistant bales of hay. It is tough to be caught in a dilemma like that, as with a smart or athletic student who can't decide between two great colleges that offer a full ride. Most of us are more familiar in real life with the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't type dilemma, where two or more choices all suck in roughly equal proportion. In real life, the donkey would probably just wander over to one bale and eat. If you tried it with a Golden Retriever, he would eat both meals and go running off to find something to play with or pee on. 

🐶 Speaking of dogs, one of the advantages of having them around is that they make you feel productive even when you aren't. Adult dogs sleep up to 14 hours a day. I only want to sleep that long. 

😴 Speaking of sleep, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the reason you don't usually punch and kick people while dreaming is that "Your arm and leg muscles become temporarily paralyzed, which prevents you from acting out your dreams." Isn't that helpful? Last night I dreamed I was with James Bond as one of a bunch of his sidekicks, planning to kidnap a foreign agent by getting him drunk. It devolved into a hunt for the hodag along a city street, all previous plot elements forgotten. If I'd been running and punching and leaping in bed as well as in sleep, someone could have gotten hurt. Or it might have made a video for the 'gram. 

💤🛌 Which brings us to what I was doing between bouts of sleep, which was taking out the dogs. Large dog Tralfaz got it in his head that he had to go out 700 times last night, and of course Izzy (a.k.a. Me2!Me2!) wanted to go as well. I tried to be patient because it could be chemo-related, but I am a tired puppy myself right now. The Harvard Health Letter reports that deep sleep may be when the brain clears toxic waste created in the normal course of cell life. And my brain feels pretty toxic this morning. So that's enough thoughts for now. 

This explains a lot.

I saw this little gem thanks to the Week in Pictures feature from the gang at PowerLine: 

So one article tells us that we have no unconscious thought and the other that we have no conscious thought. Well, that pretty well fixes our wagon, doesn't it? What's left?

I decided to do a deeper dive -- I was thinking about this dilemma, you see, and realized that I might not really be able to think about it or anything else, consciously or unconsciously. I figured I'd better find out if it's true, so I can stop thinking about it. 

The first article comes from the science magazine Nautilus, written by behavioral scientist Nick Chater and published July 26, 2018. Its argument against unconscious thought addresses the origins of the popular idea that we often find solutions after leaving off a problem because our unconscious mind continues to puzzle it out. But Chater says that the neural network is complex and interconnected and doesn't have bandwidth to work on multiple serious puzzles with some on the back burner. Chater writes:

Solving difficult problems, whether mathematical, musical, or of any other kind, is the very antithesis of a routine, specialized problem with a dedicated brain network: On the contrary, thinking about such problems will need to engage most of the brain. So the idea that profound unconscious thought can be “running in the background” as we go about our everyday lives is fanciful indeed. Routine and highly practiced activities aside, the cycle of thought can attend to, and make sense of, only one set of information at a time.

All right, so the idea of this unconscious problem processor is bunk, and the reason that we think it works that way is that what seems like inspiration is just caused by taking a break: 

Breaking out of mental cul-de-sacs is precisely what a break will give us. A clear mind is more likely to succeed than a mind filled with partial solutions and suggestions which have clearly failed. And, by sheer chance, we might even bump into a clue that helps. But probably the most important aspect of setting a problem aside is that, when we return to it, we see it afresh unencumbered by our previous failed attempts. Often, our new perspective will be no more successful than the old, but, now and again, we will chance on the right perspective—the pieces of the mental puzzle will suddenly snap into place.

Okay! No unconscious thinking! If you are thinking unconsciously, knock it off! You're defying science!

But wait -- what about conscious thought? Well, article #2, from Scientific American, was published just a few months later, on December 20, 2018, and is an interview with brain philosopher Peter Carruthers of the University of Maryland. Why does this smartypants think that conscious thought is just an illusion? 

I believe that the whole idea of conscious thought is an error. I came to this conclusion by following out the implications of the two of the main theories of consciousness. The first is what is called the Global Workspace Theory, which is associated with neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Bernard Baars. Their theory states that to be considered conscious a mental state must be among the contents of working memory (the “user interface” of our minds) and thereby be available to other mental functions, such as decision-making and verbalization. Accordingly, conscious states are those that are “globally broadcast,” so to speak. The alternative view, proposed by Michael Graziano, David Rosenthal and others, holds that conscious mental states are simply those that you know of, that you are directly aware of in a way that doesn’t require you to interpret yourself. You do not have to read your own mind to know of them. Now, whichever view you adopt, it turns out that thoughts such as decisions and judgments should not be considered to be conscious. They are not accessible in working memory, nor are we directly aware of them. We merely have what I call “the illusion of immediacy”—the false impression that we know our thoughts directly.

Uh... yeah.

There's a lot more to the Carruthers interview, but in a nutshell, the way he finds that consciousness works, or doesn't, is associations of sensory aspects and memory. Our awareness of our own thoughts is the illusion, the results of mental processes below the level of what we consider thought -- or, should I say, below the level of conscious thought. 

Now, I encourage you if you're interested to read both pieces in case my summaries are worse than I think they are. I think it's clear that Nater and Carruthers might have some nasty words to exchange if they ran into each other at a brain convention, but maybe not -- maybe there's more ground to agree than not. Maybe they'd agree that we actually have no thoughts at all. 

And, as I said in the title today, that would explain a lot. 

Since I'm not thinking, consciously or unconsciously, I'm going to give up thinking about this. You're welcome to post your thoughts in comments... if you have any. 

On the passing scene.

I said to myself, "Self!" I said, "That's an old Emeril Lagasse gag." "It predates him," Self replied. "In any event," I said, "I hate to do a Random Thoughts type column, but I have all these little bits that don't cohere into a solid blog post." "Hey, Thomas Sowell did them frequently for years before his retirement," Self said. "If it's good enough for him, it's good enough for you." I agreed.

Item 1: Via Instapundit -- have we reached peak 2020?

One can hope, but we still have a presidential election to decide, and the mobs are still running the streets in some cities (except by the mayor of Chicago's house, because shut up, peons).

Obviously we need Batman now more than ever.

Item 2: I wish we could box up some water and send it to California, because this has been an unusually wet summer here. Foggy mornings and rain. Usually by mid-August the grass stops growing for a while because it gets scorched, but that never happened this year.

This morning's dampness featured the visit of a stink bug on the kitchen window. The brown marmorated stink bug is yet another damn invader from Asia, like the Chinese Death Virus, first spotted in the United States in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1996. Hmm... Isn't that around where our friend Stiiv lives? I'm sure it's a coincidence.

I wrote our little stink bug friend a haiku.

Stink bug under glass
Kindly leave my country now
Take the 'rona too

Item 3: While we have no wildfires here, we did get one wild, fiery sunrise this week.

That looks like Wrath-of-God stuff.

Item 4: The Indianapolis 500 runs today, weather permitting, before a 25% capacity crowd. Certain persons in the house here are very excited. I'm not a big racing fan, but I'll watch; I watched it a couple of years ago and enjoyed it. I hope they don't do any politically correct bows to the current crisis in the run-up to the race. A sport where people burn fossil fuels while speeding around in circles is never going to get the approval of the PC crowd, no matter whose rings they kiss.

Item 5: Autumn is knocking at the doors, and I'm not just saying that because of the Halloween candy in the supermarket. Saw a big Canadian goose V in the sky this morning. It was not heading south, though; actually, it was heading east. Maybe these were Canadian geese with poor sense of direction.

Also, the chestnuts are on the way:

But the dahlias haven't given up yet.

Item 6: My favorite online gags of recent note:

And with that, I hope you have a lovely Sunday, and keep your sense of humor whatever happens next. Good luck, Karen Doe; I hope Higgins comes home soon.

Art speaks to us.

Friday thoughts.

Just some pics and observations for a Friday.

----

1) I remembered seeing this headline last year:

"Marines Quietly Lower Combat Training Requirements To Help Female Officers" (HotAir, 2/20/18)

And now I've see the new Marine tent!

Just a joke, guys, let's not play rough now....


2) You know what this fella needs? He needs to put some mulch around the base of his tree. That's what this guy needs.

Nah, that's not enough mulch. It's not up to the lower branches. Better get some more.


3) I think I've finally found my spirit animal:

I will draw the inner strength of this magnificent beast as I nap meditate on its power.


4) I was visiting a pal and we were in turn visited by a late-summer evening stick bug.

When I saw the way the picture came out on my phone, I realized that this was no ordinary stick bug. This is a noir stick bug.

He was probably working a case. I didn't want to get in his way. No one likes to get slapped around by a stick bug.

My name is Phil. Phil Phasmatodea. I'm a private eye. And a stick bug.

All he needs is a tiny little fedora.

----

That's about all I have today. Hope you're coming up on a fabulous weekend, the last of the summer here in the northern hemisphere. As I type this it's 48 here in the scenic Hudson Valley, a crisp morning that smells like Christmas. Here we go....

Great things and small.

I was thinking about this whole Hollywood scandal with that Weinstein guy. Not that I know any inside information. There are newborn antelope in Africa who are better connected than I am. But I remembered the first time I'd heard of Harvey Weinstein was in connection to one of his Miramax films that he was defending despite its vile subject matter and the childish means it told its story. He was acting like a poor innocent lover of art who couldn't dream of why people should be offended, all the while doing everything to gin up as much fury as he could.

What a jerk, I thought, and if I could see that from a million miles off, couldn't everybody?

I know that plenty of well-known gropers, creeps, and men who otherwise can't behave themselves get a pass in life because they are rich, because they can buy favors, because they can buy loyalty, because they can buy people's silence. Often they can just terrify people with the slightest hint of what horrible things they and their army of lawyers can do to them, to their reputations and careers. And sometimes they get away with things because they're on the "right side," they think the "right way" and support the "right causes." In other words, they may be well known as disgusting pigs, but they're allowed to get away with little things because they're right on the big things.

Yes, I realize I'm calling the subjugation, humiliation, and even rape of women a "little thing," but I didn't make this situation or define its terms.

And maybe it's exactly backward. Really, where did we get the idea that some schmuck who cheats at penny poker is a good ally when things are really serious?

I don't have to get biblical on you to make the case, but I will, specifically Luke 16:10: "If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won't be honest with greater responsibilities." Would you trust a guy who cheats at gin rummy even for funsies to do your taxes? to manage your money? Probably not, because in real life we know a cheater is a cheater. It's just a game is a meaningless excuse, because to a lot of big-time cheaters everything is a game. Their funsies is your ruined existence.

We love stories about the petty crook or awful sinner who comes through in the big stuff. Off the top of my head I give you wastrel Sydney Carton from Dickens, thief and murder-solver Bernard Rhodenbarr from Lawrence Block, Dustin Hoffman's petty schnook from 1992's Hero, and every bad-boy antihero scalawag out there. But the reason these characters are interesting is that they're unexpected.

In the last fifty years we've turned it all on its head. In the 1970s you were surprised when a movie cop was not corrupt. Now our pop culture heroes are all antiheroes; there's a strong wellspring of goodness lurking in every low-down punk, while every angel of charity is an evil creep. But that's not how it works in real life.

I know people who have really turned their lives back to front, inside out, to be good and upstanding, and I've also known people who never had to because they've always been kind and brave and decent. I love and respect them both. But I have also known human sphincters who never wanted to become good, never cared; always thought that genuine goodness was stupid at best, weakness at worst. People like them will always prefer the darkness, because the light burns them.

So what does this have to do with Harvey Weinstein? After all, the people who wanted large things from him (campaign support for national and international causes) got what they wanted, didn't they? He didn't stab them in the back, right?

Look at it this way: People who are rotten in small things -- especially when they are not really small -- will be rotten clean through. You know that some of Weinstein's friends are familiar with this principle; they would be among those objecting to the foreign policy position on friendly dictators that says "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." And yet it didn't matter when Harvey was their son of a bitch.

Those who were using Weinstein for his money while he was using all kinds of women for his base desires were offering him cover as sure as if they were giving the police phony alibis on his behalf. The Harvey Weinsteins of the world are contagious, and you're better off staying away from them entirely.

Even if it means you wind up with all the fame, wealth, and prominence of a newborn antelope.

Disqus among yourselves.

Question for the audience:

I don't get a lot of comments on this site, but there's usually a good amount of traffic -- and thank you very much! -- and it's been suggested to me that adding Disqus for comments would help.

Disqus is a neat platform; I use it for commenting on sites like Instapundit and the Great Lileks's place. Login once and you appear with your username and icon all over the place. Apparently the Google-supplied comments feature on this site (Blogger is a Google subsidiary, as are we all) is irritating or otherwise not too useful.

Google doesn't make it easy to switch, but I hear it can be done. The things I want to know is do you, the blog-reading public, support the move to Disqus comments. You may chat about it yourselves in comments, although I guess if you could do that it wouldn't be such an issue. You could also write me at frederick_key [care of] yahoo.com to weigh in on that or other issues of the day.

And if you don't wish to discuss this problem, perhaps one of the other topics will spur your conversation:

1) Would Carole King's Tapestry have been as big an album if she sounded like Brad Roberts of the Crash Test Dummies?

2) Oprah + Weight Watchers: Match made in heaven or sign of the apocalypse?

3) New England Patriots. Dallas Cowboys. New York Yankees. Philadelphia Flyers. Which is a greater force for badness in the world?

4) Dungeons & Dragons: Would it be just as good without the dungeons, and maybe more dragons?

5) Speaking of dragons: Today begins the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Rooster. The other animals are bunnies, monkeys, dogs, etc. etc. ... and dragons. Why is there only one fictional animal in Chinese astrology? Did they really truly believe in dragons the way they believed in tigers, snakes, and pigs? Should we ask them to replace it with something real, like the Tasmanian Devil? Wouldn't that be great?

6) What's the best shampoo to use when you're going bald? Does it matter or is it okay to just keep scrubbin' the ol' scalperoo with Lava Soap?

7) If a girl decides she doesn't want to be badass but just be a nice little girl, will she have to beat up everybody so she can do what she wants? Or can she only do what she wants if she wants what she's supposed to want?

8) Black hole vs. Galactus eating contest -- who will you pick to win? Who would Stephen Hawking pick, hmm?

9) Why dogs are better than cats. Sorry, that's not a question, just a statement.

10) But enough about me; what do you think is awesome about me?

Select among these and let me know what you decide. Show all work.

Tired of summer?

I passed a scummy pond that had become as green as a crayon, what with stagnant water, little rain, and the stink of rank, August days. Going out of the house at dawn these days has been like walking into a humidor that stores old meat. Then I thought about what's coming.

Dreary gray skies, an endless scrim of snow and mud, darkness and rain and ice. Yippie!

An optimistic chap would think of the advantages of each season. Spring's refreshing rain! Summer's balm of warmth! Fall's wild, colorful parade! Winter's crystal, bracing breeze! But I tend to see the year as a round of sogginess, burns, humidity, slipperiness, freezing, and misery. Yes, something to hate at all times of the year. What an ungrateful slob I can be.

I do understand people who have retired to the south saying that they miss the change of seasons. When you grow up within a temperate zone, your eyes come to hunger for the next season. A friend of mine who spent a couple of years in Quito said, "You can get tired of the perfect weather." Enough of this dull green sward, this blinding sun! Bring on short days and mounds of snow!

I think the great Lileks once wrote that in Minnesota, seasons hang on just long enough to overstay their welcome, and there's something useful in that. If the seasons must change, it's better that we are happy greet them.

Seems like there was a time we felt that way about the seasons of our lives, too, but maybe that's just wishful thinking of the past. After all, St. Paul might have noted that when he became a man he put away childish things, but perhaps he thought of that because he saw men not putting away childish things. It'd be like thinking you could hold on to spring forever. If it doesn't ripen to summer, it will choke to death.

This comes from a guy who likes cartoons and PBJ, so take it with whatever grains of salt you wish.

More thoughts from the Guinea Pig.

Came back for more, eh? Didn't get enough last time?

I enjoy the pet store. All of you safely behind glass---quite calming.

If you're going to hang about, would you mind putting some vodka in my water bottle? Spasibo.

These wood shavings are adequate, but I prefer giant sequoia. Ring for the boy.

Sure, pick me up. It's piddle time.

Don't bother me while Property Brothers is on.

In fact, don't bother me while anything I watch is on. Like CNN.

Your kind would never appreciate me. What kind are you, you ask? Human.

Before you consider the purchase of a so-called pocket pet, you should get his home set up. I recommend the Habitrail Malibu Dream House.

You know why we're called pocket pets? Guess where our favorite place to poop is?

By the way, the noun pet comes from a back formation of petty, as in small, like petit. It just means we're smaller than you. It does not mean you should stroke, muss, rub, or otherwise attempt to show affection in your typical ham-handed way. The verb form came later and should not be taken seriously.

Did you enjoy the new Transformers film? You would.

Were you aware that Mozart was composing at the age of five? And how old are you now?

They say people and their pets tend to look more alike over time. As much as it would benefit you, please, for the love of God, do not purchase me.

Gerbil? You called me a gerbil? Go over to the grooming aisle, select some powerful soap, and wash your filthy mouth out NOW.

From the heart of hell I nibble at thee!

Thoughts from the Guinea Pig.

No, I'm not looking at you today. You disappoint me. No.

My hands are not pink because I washed so many dishes. Guinea pigs do not wash dishes.

I suppose I am rather cute, but that is a relative thing. Compared to you, the tarantula a few cages down is cute.

Guinea pigs are nearsighted. Would you mind taking a few steps back from the glass?

What do you mean, hamster? I'm not a dad-blasted hamster. Hamsters are the scum of the earth. I eat hamsters for lunch, I'll have you know.

So no, I do not hamsterdance and I will never hamsterdance.

Elizabeth I had guinea pigs. Elizabeth II has dogs. And they wonder about the decline of the aristocracy.

The main problem with being in the pet store is not the other pets, let's just say that.

Yes, I only live four to five years, but if I have to be around people all that time it will feel considerably longer.

Why the name guinea "pig"? Well, perhaps I am related to your mother somehow.

You may be able to afford me, but you shall never be able to fulfill me.