The Whippet #184: The 2024/25 Demilitarised Zone

Hello! And very nearly new year.

Here's a thing I've been thinking about: a boundary is, by definition, the same thing as an interface. Even though they seem like opposites. For eg, the boundary of my body also the place where my body meets the environment. The border between two countries is also the place those countries meet each other (which is why bordertowns in fiction are so compelling, at least to me).

No Man's Land, like the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, is designed to thwart this inherent fact: to create a boundary without an interface. Though of course each boundary still shares an interface with the DMZ.

(Fun bonus: The first sentence of the wikipedia entry on the DMZ reads "The Korean Demilitarized Zone is a heavily militarized strip of land...")

When an adult child establishes a boundary with their estranged parent ("you can spend time with your grandkids, but one of us has to be present"), the parents tend to see it as a show of power/dominance, but it's actually a reaching out: this is a place where I can meet you. [See this discussion from Issendai's deep dive into estranged parents' forums]

I don't want to take this metaphor too far: when an ex says "stop calling me and stop showing up to my workplace unannounced", that is not an attempt at connection and you should stop calling them.

Anyway, I don't have a point, it's just been an interesting thought for me. And the advantage of a newsletter over an article is I don't have to shape this into a fake point with a snappy headline. Onward!

Favourite witness statements about this deer seen wearing a hi-vis jacket

Shopkeeper Joe Rich:
"It's zipped right up. Someone obviously had to tackle this thing and put the jacket on it. At first I thought maybe it got tangled up in it, but on second glance, that's not the case."

Local reporter Andrea Arnold said she would like to learn how that happened.
"I don't need to know the who," she said. "I just want to know how."

Conservation Officer Eamon McArthur says people should not approach wild deer — nor put clothes on them.
"I didn't think I'd have to specify that one," he said. "Usually they're pretty quick."

via CBC

Bad heuristics

I was caught up in enjoying the fun bad-correlation of this that until now I missed the fact that Michael Crichton was really tall. 6'9!!

I saw a great illustration of why you should be really careful when reading about diagnostic accuracy:

I have a simple way to test if any random person who walks in has leukaemia. On average, this test is >99% accurate.

The test is as follows: Just declare the person who walks in to be leukaemia-free.

Since (verrrry) roughly, 1 in 5000 people will have leukaemia at a given moment, the chance of any random person having leukaemia is ~0.02%, so a test that never, ever detects leukaemia will be right 99.8% of the time.

I said you should "be very careful" when being given a statistics fact – really, you should pretty much just go "It's not possible for me to know if that is good or not". I am smart, but you need both specific training in statistics AND knowledge of the field (eg cancer) to do much with statistics facts.

An interesting thing happens when a legal case or criminal investigation gets a lot of attention: the way the case is handled (or mishandled) seems so wild, so haphazard, so counterintuitive to justice, that people think there must be a conspiracy. In fact, the justice system in many countries is wild, haphazard and counterintuitive all the time, but people didn't know that because they've never followed a case closely before. They think something hinky is going on with this particular case that happens to be the only one they've paid attention to. [relevant: Lawyer Ken White talking about the reactions his differently-incomed clients have to their encounters with the US justice system]

Every single time I look deeply into anything, I go in with my bias of "what seems like it would make sense" and "how you imagine things would tend to be in a basically functional system" and I am usually wildly wrong.

This is isn't even a political statement, I mean like, probability (the Monty Hall Problem) and physics and human anatomy.

So yeah, re: interpreting a statistics fact, even if you're statistics-educated, you also have to know what is "normal" in the specific field, and you CANNOT use common sense as a heuristic.

Speaking of things not being in your wheelhouse, the etymology of 'wheelhouse'

Something being in your wheelhouse means it's in your sweet spot for knowledge/experience/skill.

Statistics is outside my wheelhouse; tenuous segues are in my wheelhouse.

I use this word a LOT for some reason, I'm always declaring things to be in or out of my wheelhouse – I guess because I say a lot of Facts and I like to be clear on whether I know what I'm talking about or not? Or maybe just because calling something an 'area of expertise' feels a too intense.

A wheelhouse is a "structure enclosing a large wheel", ie the pilot's cabin on a steamboat:

BUT proto-M*ckey's wheelhouse is not why something is in YOUR wheelhouse.

Baseball commentators started to use the word to mean the area within the arc of a batter's swing that they can hit it most forcefully and skilfully – the batter's sweet spot.

Apparently because it's the area they're in control of, like the bridge of a ship.

(Source, among others. Until I looked it up to write this, I thought it referred to the housing for the big paddle-wheel on a steamboat, and in baseball, almost the literal physical space a wheel moves within, like an invisible wheelhouse for the batter's swing. Seems unfair to be so basically right – steamboat, baseball – and still be wrong.)

Rory McCarthy is now on Bluesky if you want to follow him

Is anyone else a lot weirder about setting New Year's intentions these days?

If you want to have a bleak time, go and look youtube in late 2019, and all the videos about people enthusiastically setting their goals for 2020. (I was learning Spanish in preparation for a trip to Spain.)

In many ways, it shouldn't make a difference. A lot of people's goals were things like "meditate for 10 minutes a day" or they had a theme word for the year like 'Acceptance' which the pandemic + lockdowns certainly gave plenty of opportunities to practice.

And in any case, an intention isn't a vow, and ought to change with circumstances, that's always been the case.

But, but, but... it's still left me weird about it.

The Animal Crossing / Stardew Valley model

(Those are both 'cosy games' where you help develop a charming village or farming community, but there's no real end-point.)

There's a productivity method that involves finding a metaphor to romanticise the day-to-day habits you want to improve. Like you could encourage yourself to go for walks by imagining you're in a Jane Austen novel – 25% of any Jane Austen book consists of characters going on dramatic walks.

The most commonly recommended one is to treat your life like a quest-style game, where you're an adventurer, and you do things like increase your Vitality stat by exercising, or your Intelligence stat by reading books.

So I was thinking about this, looking for a metaphor. And I think Stardew Valley (etc) is it. You and your life are the whole village, not any individual within it. And there are a hundred different improvements you can make to the community: picking up litter off the beach, planting flowers, building a library, donating fossils to the museum, enlarging the coffee shop, decorating the houses, hiring street musicians, etc. But there's no pressure to do them in any particular order, or to do all of them, and there's no Final Boss Fight that it's all in service of, the way there is in a quest-style game.

I find this very peaceful but also positive. It is still about growth and development, which is important to me, but there's no judgement as to which kind of growth is better.

I went to a bronze sculpture workshop last month, and I'm never going to become a bronze sculptor, but now I see the bronze statues around my city differently; I have a much better sense of how difficult different forms would have been to cast, and how they might have gone about it.

Metaphorically, going to that workshop was like building a Level 1 bronze foundry in my village. You don't have to literally take up a whole new hobby to add or upgrade a building. Any experience you have can add a layer of meaning to your life.

So I can have a general intention for the future – to add layers of meaning to my life and upgrades to my village – but I can pick and choose big and small things to improve as I go.

FYI I've made this Unsolicited Advice a standalone article if you want to share it: https://thewhippet.org/unsolicited-advice/the-animal-crossing-stardew-valley-model-for-ny-goals/

Oh and if you're in Melbourne, this was the bronze workshop, no affiliate links or anything.