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Four o’ Clocks

Being a 90s kid was no joke. If one had a mother with a propensity for drama, as I did, then prime time Television was her oyster. After the daily soaps concluded, it was off to “real” drama. There was 20/20, Unsolved Mysteries, and whatever Barbara Walters was going to indignantly talk about that evening. But Dateline was my crux.

Dateline, for the uninitiated, was an hour long show that took one news event and tried to squeeze it until tears came out. And it usually approached it with two messages: “men are evil and they will kill you”, and “your children aren’t safe and they’ll be abducted”.

Sadly, that unmarked van filled with candy and psychoactive drugs never appeared, but that didn’t stop mother from confining me to my suburban corral: the backyard, enclosed with a privacy fence.

The red box roughly highlights the back yard section. And if the satellite distance reference is accurate, I calculate my pen to have been about 3000 sq ft. Or ~0.07 acres.

As one might imagine, the mind of a child tended to wander in such a limited environment. And as the summers of my stunted social development compounded, I withdrew entirely and accepted the yard as my entire world. I became intimately familiar with every detail of that small space.

And in that space was a small patch of annuals. Specifically, four o’ clocks.

One day, I noticed that the spent flowers, which had dried on the plant, had an pleasant earthly tea scent. Further observation also revealed that the petals crumbled easily, and effused their aroma quickly into water, specifically a mug of water left out on the concrete patio in the hot Texas sun. Furthermore, the resultant tisane tasted delicious. I had stumbled upon something.

But the experiment was cut short when mother, having taken her usual Schindler’s List perch by the full-length backyard windows, witnessed my activities and intervened. The resultant lecture was less a cautionary lesson on knowing with certainty that a plant is edible and more a morality lecture on how my selfish and careless decisions impacted other people (her). I came out of that conversation with no additional scientific knowledge, but instead sobbing and begging for forgiveness – exactly what a Catholic mother wants. The overlord of morality had won again.

Fast forward to today and I was watching Netflix. And as with any Netflix show involving food, that Danish chef guy was there talking about his amazing restaurant and how he forages ingredients. But, for the first time, I noticed a certain flower being used as a garnish. Nasturtium flowers always show up, because they’re pretty and taste peppery. But this looked different. I swear it was a four o’ clock flower. This necessitated a quick internet search.

30 years later and I find out that not only are the flowers edible, but they’re specifically used in infusions: exactly what I was doing.

I get that information is much more accessible today, and that digging through encyclopedias gets tedious and that was a rabbit hole mother didn’t want to explore, but did every childhood mistake have to end with crying?

I guess she was worried that if the psychoactive drug van wasn’t showing up, I’d start randomly sampling plants to find drugs on my own. But as it turns out, my culinary curiosity led to foraging – something Netflix is now telling me is the mark of a genius chef. Who knew?

–Simon

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Consumption and Creation

[Note to self: add this to the Quantitative Philosophy Index when it posts]

My personal life philosophy defines an individual’s value on the activities one engages in when in an autonomous state. More simply: what you do with your personal time quantifies your life’s meaningfulness. I don’t see the level of impact itself to be the defining factor, since so few of us are ever granted the circumstances under which to achieve greatness, but that doesn’t preclude us from seeking a virtuous live, even if the tangible results are comparatively minor.

Setting this premise: after a day of my daughter watching anime and binge-eating, I tried to explain that she was, in some non-so-friendly-terms, being a completely self-indulgent and useless sack of loafing teenage flesh. In the aftermath of that conversation, however, I though it more helpful to create some definitions. Here’s how I break them down:

All voluntary human activities fall into one of four categories:

  1. Active Creation (Cra): activities that require direct engagement and production.
  2. Active Consumption (Coa): activities that involve using someone else’s creation, but still require direct engagement.
  3. Passive Creation (Crp): activities that are either a secondary component of active creation, or prerequisites/maintenance activities to support active creation.
  4. Passive Consumption (Cop): activities that involve using someone else’s creation in a manner that is strictly self-indulgent.

These activities are not equal in value. Cra is the highest, with Coa and Crp secondary, and with Cop the least.

Creation/Consumption vs Active/Passive graph

As an example, washing dishes and doing some reading rank above watching TV all day, but rank below cooking dinner. Coa and Crp ultimately support Cra – without which Cra couldn’t take place, while Cop remains generally nonconstructive outside some mental health benefits. Obviously these baselines require some interpretation. I’d consider reading a classic novel to be Coa but reading a trashy romance novel Cop – one must be honest with themselves.

This is all fine for abstraction, but let’s quantify. What constitutes a day seized? At what point does one achieve virtue for the day? I’ll assign values:

Cra = 5

Coa = 3

Crp = 3

Cop = 1

This almost works with a Fibonacci sequence. Indeed, Coa and Crp could probably have tier 2 and 3 pointed subsections, but I’ll keep it simpler for the sake of this exercise.

Virtue = Cra + Coa + Crp + Cop

Day’s value = amount of daily virtue.

As for a daily virtue benchmark, here are the highlights from a recent Saturday, which I feel was a notable example of one such virtuous day. I…

Made pizza, made my own cheesey bread, cleaned the kitchen x3, cleaned out the fireplace, started a fire, watched Fallout, took measurements and material inventory for needed house projects.

I’m sure there were more, but these are what I remember. This would come out to:

5+5+3+3+3+3+3+1+3 = 29

It was a busy day, so lets round down to 25 to be more realistic with goals. A virtuous day requires 25 points. For a day off. As for a working day, let’s say 12 – half rounded down.

Now math:

Cra=5,Coa=3,Crp=3,Cop=1

S:=Cra+Coa+Crp+Cop

O = day off

V = day is virtuous

V⟺(O∧S≥25)∨(¬O∧S≥12)

Not having a philosophy background, the concepts of virtue and excellence seem to escape the kid’s comprehension. Maybe this could add context. If not, it’s a good overview and reminder to myself for when I start to feel lazy, now that I’ve thought the concept through. Virtue is universally available. All we have to do is act towards it.

–Simon

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Snow and Suicide

Actually, I find that the snow makes winter less depressing. Snow gives the cold purpose, without which we’re forced to endure damp grass, dormant gardens, and grey skies without purpose. Fortunately, we’re getting lots of snow this year! Yay! Take that, suicide month!

And after an extended weekend of shoveling a Cold Ton, we were left with the material for a proper snow fort, or rather, a quinzhee!

I managed to get the kid outside, in the winter!

–Simon

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Cold Ton, also: Every Snow (Part 8)

In the world of units of standards and measure, there are weight distinctions to make. They’re confusing to the uninitiated, so here’s a quick reference guide in increasing ranks:

Crap Ton < Ass Load < Fuck Ton < Mother Load

Some of these are archaic, others are preferred in different industries, and some are the result of the Metric vs Imperial system.

These shouldn’t be mixed up with other measurements that append a descriptor to simply emphasize an ephemeral state. An example: “cold as balls” and “hot as balls”. Neither make much sense in an etymological sense, but that’s besides the point. You get the message.

So how to measure the weight of snow? I propose “Cold Ton”, but until that becomes standardized I’ll default to the American “Short Ton” of 2000lbs, vs the European “Metric Ton/Long Ton” of 1000kgs.

So when it snowed recently, during a cold as balls weekend, what originally appeared to be a Fuck Ton of snow quickly superseded Mother Load status upon measurement. It warranted such data collection, as it was the most snow I had ever seen.

Working from home, I’m generally not terribly inconvenienced by snow, so long as it doesn’t damage anything or knock out the power. So let’s first look at some nice pictures:

But, I still have to shovel it off the driveway, and even with the help of conscripted labor, it required two days and 16 Ibuprofen. Such a feat required me to measure the final weight of our adversary. Because data and math!

First off, I established a weight/volume baseline, because snow density isn’t a universal constant. Using a measuring cup and a kitchen scale, I determined that one cup (8 fluid ounces) of non-packed snow weighed 1.2 ounces by weight. And with a cubic foot being 957.5 fluid ounces (our snow in question therefore weighed ~9 pounds per cubic foot), and my driveway being 1581 square feet (which equals the same in cubic feet because we got almost exactly one foot of snow), and of course 1 pound being 16 ounces by weight…

We removed 14,191 pounds of snow from the driveway. Which equals about 7.1 Short Tons of snow!

(My proposal: Cold Ton = Ibuprofen / Short Tons. We received 2.25 Cold Tons of snow.)

Here’s what that amount of snow looks like visually. The portion shown in this photo is about half of the total:

Snow is heavy, and I certainly understand now how little of it will kill you if buried in an avalanche. Or why people get heart attacks shoveling it.

–Simon