Great post. I have been intrigued by the life in Antarctica (especially the people living this life) ever since watching Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World. This place seems to attract a fascinating variety of characters, many of which seem to have sprung from a 19th-century adventure novel (or even from one of the expeditions of the Heroic Age).
For those unfamiliar with this "rental tax": If you own a house in Switzerland, the tax office assumes that you are your own landlord and rent your house to yourself. It estimates the fictitious rent you charge yourself, and you have to pay income tax on it. The Swiss German name for this estimated rent is "Eigenmietwert" ("self-rental value") and this is what will now be abolished.
What makes this strange tax even more absurd: as you are your own landlord, your property interest rate becomes a business expense of your hypothetical rental company. So you can deduct your property interest from this income tax on the fictitious rent you pay yourself.
In effect, it is unattractive to fully repay your mortgage (you just leave enough debt to avoid the income tax), and Switzerland has the highest household debt in the world. By a large margin [0].
It is not that absurd, we have the same in The Netherlands (eigenwoningforfait). And yes, we also have the property interest deduction, we literally call it mortgage interest deduction (hypotheekrenteaftrek, HRA).
They reason this is done is because it allows tax systems to tax main residencies differently from regular real estate tax measures, which is usually in the wealth section of tax policy.
It stems from the 1890s in The Netherlands, I assume it'll be around the same era for Switzerland and Germany.
And for other readers, yes it is as terrible a tax policy as it sounds. It is highly regressive, favoring home owners over renters, and the more expensive your house the bigger the deduction. In The Netherlands the current election cycle has it as one of the subpoints of our housing crisis, and it seems the battle won't even be about if it should be abolished, but rather if the timeline should be 30, 15, or 8 years.
I use it 1-2 times a month for 30 seconds on the 2 knives I use in the kitchen. They pass the paper test. Previously, I used the bottom of a coffee mug.
That being said, thinks like [0] do exist and people seem to buy them.
No need to be ashamed, if it works it works. Whetstones look cooler but they do the same job. I actually bought the same device at a local knife store for my parents and the clerk said it was perfect if you just want to get sharp knives and be done with it. Whetstones or professional sharpening is more useful for pros or knife hobbyists/enthusiasts.
In the comments it reveals this guy is using the sharpener wrong by doing way too many pulls with too much pressure.
The cheap ikea one is fine, it will not wear out your blade. 2-3 pulls at very light pressure, no need to learn how to use a whetstone properly, perfect UX for those who don’t typically sharpen knives.
arte had a very good documentary about Gaudí some time ago, which also analyzed the engineering aspects of his earlier buildings in details. Very interesting, but I was unfortunately only able to find a German version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH4YUeZSsTA
Every winter since I was a kid, I get Keratosis pilaris [0] on my inner upper arms, which is a bit of a nuisance. After the first day of spring sun in a T-Shirt, it disappears completely within days.
Oh, I've always thought it's just a lack of sweating causing your dead skins to grow over the pores, didn't realize that it's actually a mysterious medical condition?
Also, the northern wing of the Louvre and most of today's Place du Louvre and Place du Carrousel were still several residential blocks back then. And the Palais des Tuileries (burned down by the Paris Commune in the 1870ies) was still standing...
> It was the Victorian novel that made the chapter seem natural. Key to the reality effects of nineteenth-century British fiction is its synchronisation of novel time with the natural rhythms of life. As a result, novelistic chapters lose their theatrics, their posturing and posing, even those unstable amalgamations surveyed in Equiano and Goethe, and instead become regular and ‘tacit’, receding into the background.
That may all be true. But many authors of that era (e.g. Dickens and Dostoevsky) published their work mainly in monthly installments. Chapters are then, exactly like TV show episodes, simply a technical necessity.
I read Isaac Asimov’s foundation series a few years ago (side note for anyone who hasn’t read it: it still holds up incredibly well with a small suspension of disbelief and some grace for when it was written).
In the preface to the 4th or 5th book (which were written 30+ years after the “original” trilogy) he discussed how the originals parts of the trilogy were published as a set of short stories in a SciFi publication over 8 years, and later compiled into the books.
I was astonished.
Perhaps everyone else already knew this. But such a clear narrative through line to be written in discrete short stories. Very impressive.
It sounds like this may have been common prior to this era as well.
Weird. I bounced off Foundation immediately because it felt like a series of short stories instead of a novel (and also I couldn't take psychohistory the least bit seriously). I'm kind of kicking myself for not predicting that it actually did start that way.
New information that challenges one's context can often appear weird at first. Its a common reaction.
Regarding psychohistory: It's worth considering the era in which the books where written. The 1st half of the 20th century saw massive innovations in economic theory, physics, and information theory. It was not a big leap to predict that in 500 years time, humans would further advance macro economics. Personally I felt the books did a great job setting limits in the capabilities of the theory, and using its inherit flaws to drive interesting plot lines.
Didn’t Verne also serialize his stories? This has been going on for a long long time but for sure Clark and Asimov have books that were serials in periodicals.
Edit: looked it up. Dickens and Dumas preceded Jules Verne in serials being turned into novels.
But Asimov’s short stories weren’t a serialized novel from the start. They were individual short stories that he later combined with small changes to form novels. It’s different from what Dickens, Dumas, and Verne did.
Another even more modern example is The Martian. Weir published it chapter by chapter on his website, even updating previous chapters based on (mostly technical) feedback from his readers. Once completed, his readers encouraged him to publish an eBook, it took off on Amazon, and the rest is history.
I reread it last year and I needed to give it a lot of grace, mostly from it's treatment of women. To Asimov's credit, there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. There's a single female character who has no agency, every other character is white and male. I understand it's a product of it's time, and avoid judgment. However, the lack of women feels weird and makes it hard to enjoy.
To be fair, the later books in the series which were written in the 70s are much better in this regard.
Female characters are not exactly exceptional in classical literature. And that statement includes fairly sexist works. Even Odyssey has multiple female characters - you do not get older then that. Shakespeare has them and that is as English language classic as it gets. Women are literally all around classics.
I dont buy it. You have to cherry pick among classics hard to come with the "much of it does not have female characters" conclusion.
Much of it do have women in it. As I go through them in my head, almost everything has some women in it, at least existing in larger world. Except "Old Man and the Sea" one character against the world kind of things. Hemingway has women in other books tho.
The ideas in it are fascinating (if also dated). The characters, though, are insanely 1 dimensional. It's very obviously a 1 micron thin story layered over the scaffold of ideas. After looking at it that way, I could get through the series without groaning or laughing a lot.
One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks, and even if you watch them without ads, you get narratively unnecessary cliff hangers just before a break, complete with dramatic music and a closeup of some dramatic gesture, trivially resolved in the next 5 seconds after the break.
You're constantly yanked out of the narrative in service of ads even if you never see them, which has disfigured the medium.
That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's.
There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads.
It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Stranger Things on Netflix, or Andor on Disney+, or White Lotus on HBO, or Severance on Apple TV+, or even something like Alien: Earth currently on FX/Hulu.
You might want to find better places for watching TV...
This is mostly an issue for content produced to still be on regular tv and streaming, like on Paramount. Star Trek Discovery and Strange New Worlds, for example, are not as dramatic as described above but you can always spot where the adbreak would have been. Cut to black and a re-establishing shot at the least. These are modern shows like you describe but still the TV medium has some influence.
One thing I do notice more and appreciate from streaming (sense8 in particular) is that shows are more varied in their runtime. Episodes being 40 minutes to 75 in length just depending on the needs of the plot, not even finale related or anything
I agree with your feeling that those mini cliff-hangers break the immersion, especially when watching without ad-breaks, although I can mostly deal with it. I agree with some of the other replies though, that it is more prevalent in older shows.
I find that laugh-tracks are the aspect of older shows which I find harder to ignore. Still worth bearing with for some old shows though, especially as I gradually stop hearing them.
Modern tv shows are more often than not released in a single go on a streaming service, intended to be binged in a single go. Often the episodes form a single narrative and a single episode cannot stand alone. The MOTD format is all but dead.
Do you have an example of a modern show that has the dramatic-music-and-cliffhanger ad-break?
>One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks,
If it is on a broadcast tv network, it's not really worth watching. Sure, there are the one or two exceptional shows, but with so much premium content, why would you want to watch that?
I assume you mean it's not really worth watching if it's currently on broadcast TV?
Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees.
Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top of my head, I think these are/were all worth watching:
Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Community, Schitt's Creek, The Office, The X-Files, various Star Trek series, Cheers
That list could be easily improved on, but I assume it's missing your point anyway if you were only talking about current broadcast network TV (if it exists :) )
> As far as I can tell, the divide is pretty straightforward:
> Cable: nudity
> Broadcast: everything else
This is almost entirely wrong; non-premium cable (which is and was always the vast majority of cable) had and observed essentially the same structure and content rules as broadcast, with ad breaks and no swearing or nudity. Premium cable where each channel or later small branded group of channels is a separate surcharge on top of the broad package tended to have no ad breaks and looser content rules.
24 was Fox, if I'm not mistaken, and its format is very much the same as all broadcast shows.
Breaking Bad isn't the same format. No obvious commercial breaks, no saccharine Hays-Code-like bullshit.
Others mentioned The Shield, which is FX, and I tend to think of FX shows as not being of the broadcast mold. Monk was USA, I think, which as a network was borderline, but seems like a few of their original programming shows were not-horrible. Then someone said Deadliest Catch, but that's just cheap reality tv sludge and I feel dirty having typed out its title. Even the worst 1980s NBC sitcom was better than reality tv shows.
It's come to my attention that you're all, every last one of you, watching tv wrong.
I did not learn writing formally, and I do not publish what I write. But I do write a lot, mostly fiction to express the things that happen to myself in a controlled environment.
I tried not writing in chapters, but I find that the chapters helped me compartmentalize different times and places and specific subjects. It may be that I'm simply used to chapters from reading other books, but no matter what the book I find that some sort of compartmentalization is beneficial and often necessary.
If you eschew chapters, it can have a pretty distinctive effect on your prose. Prominent examples that come to mind are Finnegan’s Wake, The Waves, and On The Road, and all make for an intense read. The absence of pause gives you no place to put it down, you are ensnared within the inescapable flow.
Seems to fit stream of consciousness stuff better.
Although this does remind me of sitting on a plane as a kid with finnegan’s wake, and an older American leans over and reassures me that I’ll be able to move on to “chapter books” soon. To this day I remain unsure if he was being ironic or if he thought I was reading “Spot The Dog”.
> Although this does remind me of sitting on a plane as a kid with finnegan’s wake, and an older American leans over and reassures me that I’ll be able to move on to “chapter books” soon. To this day I remain unsure if he was being ironic or if he thought I was reading “Spot The Dog”.
This scene is pitch-perfect. A two sentence Wes Anderson film novelization.
I've definitely experimented with different forms of compartmentalization, none of them to my satisfaction. I'm certain that a skilled writer could do something, but I couldn't.
Most writers kinda skip chapters. Instead, on early drafts, they focus on scenes, which might be 1:1 with a chapter, but are often 2:1 or even 3:1 with a chapter. The relationship between paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, is one way of thinking about and manipulating pace in a story.
Text size is also contingent on the basic technologies of the time. Ancient texts by the length and cost of parchment, and anything before the printing press by how easy it is to copy.
Maybe its only now that we are less constrained by technology that we have to really focus on our mental faculties as the limiting factor for writing.
I think it is simply because the writer needs to take a pause afteer writing some amount. And the reader also prefers to take pause. Having chapters aligns the interests of both readers and the writer.
Nah, as a writer who talks to other writers with wildly different processes, I don't think that's how it works for anyone. Time spent writing is almost unrelated to visible time markers in the text. It's not a big deal to stop writing in the middle of a scene or stop one and start another in the same session (assuming we're writing linearly at all). Scene and chapter boundaries are something we specifically think about in their own right to optimize the reading experience.
True. Personally when I write I do like to always start the next chapter or whatever is the "unit" or "task". But then stop. The units for the writer are probnably not the same as for the reader. But they serve the same purpose, taking a break, letting you think a bit about what was done and what will be done next.
There is a rhythm. We live one day at a time. We tell one story at a time. We post one HN post at a time. :-)
This. A less confusing way to ask the question with the 1/3 answer would be:
What is the probability that a family with 2 children has exactly 2 daughters *if you know that the family does not have 2 boys*?
The reasons why the original problem is so confusing is the same reason why the Monty Hall is so confusing: people have different understandings of the question, and don't realize it in discussions. As I have written a few years ago [0]:
Because most people don't talk formal probabilities, your explanations will be so vague that the other person will not realize your different understanding. You will discuss forever, you will both be right, and you will part ways with the strange feeling that maybe the other person was right, when all along you were talking about different problems. This is why this problem is so notorious.
> The reasons why the original problem is so confusing is the same reason why the Monty Hall is so confusing: people have different understandings of the question, and don't realize it in discussions.
I think this is true of the "children" question, but I actually disagree that this is what makes the Monty Hall question so confusing.
For one thing, I vaguely recall this being asked directly, and even after people agree on all the definitions explicitly, they still consider the answer wrong. (See e.g. some mathematicians like Erdos refusing to believe the correct answer without actually running simulations on computers... by that point you clearly have a real definition.)
For another, when I personally talk to people about Monty Hall, even after I explain the correct answer, and explain all the nuances, people tend to still have a hard time accepting the correct solution and claim to find it counterintuitive (as did I!).
The typical Monty Hall formulation has similar ambiguity because it’s not clear whether or not the host knows the right door. Just like in this question, it’s not clear if the “narrator” knows the first child is a girl.
(Also, this problem has an additional layer of ambiguity where “birth order is irrelevant,” but MF and FM are treated as distinct items in the probability set. Is the order irrelevant to the probability, or is it impossible to distinguish the age of the two children? It would be clearer to simply say “each birth is an independent event.” One of the comments on the blog explains this better than I can.)
> The reasons why the original problem is so confusing is the same reason why the Monty Hall is so confusing: people have different understandings of the question, and don't realize it in discussions.
Almost everybody understands the same problem, AND STILL GET DIFFERENT ANSWERS. If they don't understand it, they make pedantic arguments about Monty's motivations. All of which make the puzzle impossible to answer.
What they don't understand is probability. Probability is a measure of the information you lack about what causes a certain result to occur. That includes the physical details (where the prize is, what the genders are) but also the choices made for hidden reasons.
In the Monty Hall Problem, to reduce complexity, label the doors C (the contestant's original door), R (the door to its right, wrapping around if necessary), and L (the door to its left). What leads up to the game state at the time the decision to switch is made are (A) Where the prize was placed and (B) How Monty Hall chooses a door to open if the prize is behind C.
The naive answer is based on only (A). The two unopened doors (C and R, or C and L) started with the same probability. So they must now have the same probability, 1/2, right? No, wrong, because we need to take (B) into account. If the prize is behind R then the host had to open L. If the prize is behind L then the host had to open R. But if the prize is behind C then the host had to choose. Since we don't know how, we have to assume there was a 50% chance that he would choose R, and 50% for L. Once we see him open, say, R? This 50:50 reduces the probability that the prize is behind C, so switching becomes twice as likely to win.
The Two Child Problem works exactly the same way. What leads up to the point where we are asked for a probability is (A) the gender makeup of the family and (B) how the information came to us if there is a boy and a girl.
The naive answer is based on only (A). A mixed family is twice as likely as either two-of-a-kind family. So the probability of two-of-a-kind is 1/3, right? Wrong, unless we know WITH CERTAINTY that we could not have learned about the other gender. If we do not have that certainty, then just like with Monty Hall we have to assume that half of the time in a mixed we would have learned the other gender. This makes a mixed family half as likely as (A) alone would suggest; in other words, the same as two-of-a-kind.The answer is 1/2.
Joseph Bertrand pointed out, in 1889, why we need to take (B) into account. Martin Gardner, who originated the Two Child Problem, repeated it in 1959. In the same article where he introduced the predecessor to Monty Hall (called the Three Prisoners Problem), and explained why (B) is important. It should be embarrassing to anyone who thinks that the "Tuesday" variation's answer is 13/27. Because it was first mentioned at a puzzle convention named in honor of Martin Gardner and forgot his warning. Adding irrelevant information can't change the answer, and if you take (B) into account the answer doesn't change.
Exactly. As the first reply to the first comment explains “The problem is that we don't know p(you're told at least one is a girl | they aren't both girls).”
It’s funny that the same commenter who writes that “to get the right answer you must be careful about conditional probabilities” finds that doing so is “splitting hairs about something boring and irritating.”
Wikipedia has a map [0] which shows the extent of the ancient lake (Lago Valino) the Romans drained (the waterfall is in the upper left corner). This lake had a surface area of around 90 km², which is roughly half the size of present-day Lago Maggiore.
