Author Archives: Scott Bowles

Fare Thee Well…Weirdly

This is the entirety of the most intriguing site on the internet, www.micromorts.rip. I didn’t even know .rip was an option, cuz I’d have been all under that.

Micromorts

💀 We are all going to die 💀

chastely Dying! It is what humans do. We do, however, attempt to delay this end for as long as possible. We continue to make horrible decisions around risk and death.

We can use micromorts to help track how risky an activity is and compare it to other activities. This will help us understand what is dangerous and what isn’t.

From wikipedia:

“A micromort (from micro- and mortality) is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death. The micromort concept was introduced by Ronald A. Howard who pioneered the modern practice of decision analysis.”

For instance, living one day at age 20 is 1 micromort, running a marathon is 7 micromorts, and riding a motorcycle for 60 miles is 10 micromorts. We can easily see that riding a motorcycle is more dangerous than running a marathon.

The following is a collection of activities and the micromorts of each activity. You can than compare, understand risks and then make decisions.

ActivityMicromorts
Mountaineering Ascent to Mt. Everest37932
Mountaineering in the Himalayas12000
Being infected by COVID1910000
Being infected by the Spanish flu3000
Mountaineerin Ascent to Matterhorn2840
Living in US during covid19 pandemic (July 2020)500
Getting out of bed (age 90)463
Base Jumping (per jump)430
First day of being born430
Giving birth (caesarean)170
Giving Birth170
Scuba diving (Trained) per year164
Giving birth (Vaginal)120
Getting out of bed (age 75)105
Giving Birth80
Night in Hospital75
Living in NYC during Covid19 (March 15 to May 9)50
Giving Birth50
Using Heroin30
serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan throughout 201025
Playing American Football20
Getting out of bed (under age 1)15
Ecstasy (MDMA)13
Going for a swim (Drowning)12
General Anesthetic (Emergency Operation)10
Riding a motorcycle (60 miles)10
Skydiving (per jump) (genera)10
SKydiving (US) (per jump)8
Skydiving (UK) (per jump)8
Hang gliding8
Running a Marathon7
Living in Maryland during Covid19 Pandemic (March 15 to May 9)7
Getting out of bed (age 45)6
Scuba diving (Trained) per dive5
Rock Climbing (per climb)3
Living 2 months with a smoker1
Walking 20 miles per day (Accident)1
Traveling 230 miles per day by. car. (accident)1
Traveling 1000 miles per day by plane(accident)1
Traveling 1000 miles per day by. train (accident)1
Eating 1000 bananas1
Spending 1 hour in a coal mine1
Eating 40 tsp of peanut butter1
Eating 100 char broiled steak1
One day alive at age 201
Skiing (per day)0.7
Horseback Riding0.5
Kangaroo Encounter0.1

L.A.’s Hottest Wheels

I’m not much of a grocery store shopper, maybe because I’ve cooked a total of 10 meals in my life. Maybe.

But I’ve discovered something that’s shot to the top of my shopping list whenever I go to Ralph’s, Food 4 Less or any other grocery store in the San Fernando Valley: a shopping cart.

They used to be easy to find in the Valley. A couple of them used to live at the end of my block. I once commandeered a cart to bring home motorcycle gear walking from the shop.

But a pandemic, recession and rising homeless population have made shopping carts harder to find than an honest plumber.

Two weeks ago, I found an abandoned cart in an empty parking space of my Ralph’s (the outdoor corral and entire store were empty). Last week, I found a cart but left my wallet in the car. When I tried to walk the cart to my car, the front wheels locked when I passed the security sensor. Yesterday required a five-minute search-and-shop scour.

I asked the store manager what happened.

“It’s the homeless,” she sighed. ”They’re even asking for them when people are packing their cars.”

She said the store had begun alerting customers to not feel rushed into unpacking. ”That cart is theirs as long as there’s something in it.”

But once the cart is empty, she said, clerks have to rush to fetch them.

Even with the store mandate, ”We can’t keep up,” she confided, unaware that the customer was an old newspaperman. So, being one, I researched the problem when I got home. Jesus.

According to the Food Marketing Institute, 2 million grocery carts are stolen every year, costing individual stores $8,000-$10,000 annually. Supermarketnews.com estimates a cart is stolen every 90 seconds. And those studies were pre-pandemic, in the age of human contact and heavy metals.

Now, a lifted cart is serious larceny. I Googled the cost of roll cages, and they routinely run from $200 to $500 – without an anti-theft system.


The solution is obvious and impossible: a return to the days when a clerk would help you load the car. Those went the way of the full-service gas station, and corporate Darwinism all but guarantees their permanent extinction.

And L.A. is its own nation-state: If it is happening here, it is likely headed to the other 49 – if it’s not already there.

Covid has proved a seismic shaking of the tree. All assumptions of everyday life are on the table, from the jobs we’re willing to work to the people we’re willing to talk to. I guess shopping carts shouldn’t be a surprise casualty.

Still, I had big plans for my 11th meal.

Chomsky Was Right!

Evidentialism factslap: The word ”huh” is nearly universal.

“Huh” is a humble word, often a near-involuntary linguistic response, but behind this simple interrogatory palindrome is an extraordinary truth — it’s also universal. According to research conducted in 2013 by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, a version of the word can be found in nearly every language on Earth. Researchers analyzed 31 languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, Icelandic, and Indigenous tongues. What they found was that every one included a word similar in both sound and function to the English “huh.” For example, in Mandarin it’s “a?”, Spanish “e?”, Lao “a?”, and in Dutch “he?” No matter the language, the word includes a relaxed tongue, rising pitch, and if there’s a sound before the vowel, it’s an “h” or a glottal stop (a consonant sound made by closing the glottis, the space between the vocal folds). Although there is some variation in pronunciation, the word shows staggeringly little difference among languages compared to what might be expected.

This raises the question: Is “huh” even a word at all? Perhaps it’s an innate interjection like a scream or a sneeze, or a non-lexical conversational sound like “ummm” or “aaaah.” Yet the researchers noted several factors that point to “huh” being a full-fledged word. For one, it’s learned (as opposed to animal sounds like grunts), and children don’t use the word until they’ve started speaking. And even languages without an “h” sound still create a close approximation of the word “huh.” The researchers chock this linguistic similarity up to “convergent cultural evolution.” In the animal kingdom, convergent evolution occurs when two animals develop the same traits due to their similar environment (for example, how sharks and dolphins have a similar streamlined look). In a linguistic sense, convergent evolution occurs when pressures in human conversation — like a lack of information that necessitates a need for clarification — create a universal requirement for a word that is quick and easy to pronounce. In time, all languages naturally arrived at the more or less the same response to this need: “Huh?”