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cite="mid:009d01d6c28a$038d0fe0$0aa72fa0$@gmail.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Glen,
Rest assured. You will never be mistaken for a wing nut. You just don't spin that easy. Spoken as somebody who has tried to spin you many times.
By the way, our joint exploration of the wing-nut metaphor last Friday was a wonderful example of the intentionality of metaphors. For me, a wing nut is a fastener that can be applied to a machine screw without a tool. "Spinning off wildly" was a feature I never really focused on, hence I never really understood the metaphor until you-guys explained it to me. Yup!
So, if "spinnability" is a feature of wing nuts, then "spinning off wildly" is a bug, right. But for the purposes of the metaphor (as you use it) it is a feature. So the feature/bug relation is another example of the extension-intension relation (aka epiphenomenality).
Ok. Now that I have thoroughly bent your thread, I think I will go eat breakfast.
Snow grains, thunder in Santa Fe. The thunder echoes in the covid-emptied streets. Apocalyse!</pre>
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<p>Nick - <br>
</p>
<p>Love the meta-Haiku! Well done...</p>
<p>The metaphorical mangle continues with your use of "thread" as I
was tangented (in my own mind) into the details of threaded
fasteners, their history, and idiosyncrasies. After doing a full
overhaul/replacement of my solar hot-water system and well-house,
I am very familiar with the details and finickyness of a multitude
of of pipe-threads (each system is order-40-60 years old with a
dozen upgrades/repairs in the interim)... and sing the praises
of teflon tape which helps ameliorate some of their
design/manufacturing shortcomings as well as my own. <br>
</p>
<p>I suspect Glen IS a wingnut but has enough viscosity in his
threads to keep from spinning wildly, and also like an Escher
self-drawing hand, his homuculii all take turns spinning one
another as an ensemble that on average somehow never quite "spins
off the end"... sort of a spin-glass composed of wingnuts?<br>
</p>
<p>A few (many?) years ago, Cody, during a typical WedTech lunch
(many talking over many about several topics of tech-interest)
handed me one of the largest wingnuts I'd ever handled.... it was
not too big to fit into the watch-pocket of my jeans but it was at
least a 3/8" thread with a "wingspan" of 1.5 inch ( to be SAE
rather than ISO oriented) and was hefty enough to feel like I
could give it a good fling across the room with boomerang
like-precision and bean a human-wingnut with it. I looked it
over, admired it and devilishly and handed it back to him asking
if he realized it was a "Left" wingnut rather than a "Right"
one... True to form, his response was the familiar non-committal
"I guess so" or "oh yeah?" (he may correct me here if he remembers
the exchange at all) as he said, "no, it is for you" as he refused
to take it back. I shrugged, thanked him, and slipped it into my
coin/watch pocket in my jeans where I often squirrel away such
oddities until they disappear somewhere (laundry, couch-cushion,
???) in a week or two. I assumed he was making a personal
comment with it, based on some FriAM or WedTech conversation I'd
been blathering on about online (like a wingnut)... A month or
so later, we were across the same table, and I was reminded of the
conversation and reached into my pocket for it and found that a
small "badge" had replaced it. This pewter faux-badge had come to
me in a similar fashion and the wingnut had found it's way into
someone else's pocket. The badge read "Santa Fe Brothel
Inspector".... it was a kind of base and crude topic but it seemed
appropriate to hand it off to Cody unexplained in payback to the
"wingnut". I wonder if he still has it, or even remembers any of
this?<br>
</p>
<p>I have certainly enjoyed the benefit of *real* wingnuts which not
only can (usually) be secured and loosened by hand but are
particularly handy when the threaded male portion has a lot of
threads to traverse... I do love the "momentum" the wings offer
when you give them a whirl, compared to "spinning on/off" a
conventional nut. I often use a conventional nut with a wingnut
following it as a "locker".... the wingnut tightened against the
conventional nut binds well enough to keep the two from loosening
even if they aren't more than hand-tight otherwise. Useful when
the goal isn't to *cinch* something down with the nut(s), just
secure it firmly. <br>
</p>
<p>As a child, my father told me something I took as gospel (as
children often do from their parents even if they doubt them
otherwise). He said that the Japanese used left-hand threads by
convention while "the West" had landed on "right hand" threads
long ago. He may have conflated handedness with the dimensional
standard differences between metric and english units... and as I
grew up I encountered occasional left-hand-threads occurring for
various reasons such as turnbuckles and
counter-precession-spin-off threading in high speed machining,
airplane propellors and even heavy-duty pickup (rear) axle lugs (I
spent a huge amount of time on my first 3/4 ton pickup
*tightening* the lug nuts on the left-hand side of my rear-axle
before someone got me down off the lug-wrench I was jumping on and
explained my misunderstanding). As of today I find no evidence
of his attribution to "the Japanese"... or perhaps when he
explained it all I conflated his explaining handedness with metric
vs english fastener standards (though we owned an early VW pickup
which surely had metric fasteners as well?)... <br>
</p>
<p>Finally, the punchline of my subject-line refers to Dave Egger's
first novel: "<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview29">We
Shall Know our Velocity</a>" which triggered in ME "We Shall
Know our Chirality" when I read it... I highly recommend his
work as well as a contemplation on the implications of our
"chirality", whether it be our politics (wing nuttery) or that of
our DNA... it DOES seem that if DNA evolved/emerged/exapted from
RNA into a chiral-double strand more than once or a few times,
that we might have an entirely distinct set of organic life as we
know it which is genetically independent, in spite of being
entirely protein-chemistry compatible? Or does gene-fragment
exchange happen in single-strands?</p>
<p>I wish I had the focus to compose a Haiku to respond to Nick's
throwdown...</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:009d01d6c28a$038d0fe0$0aa72fa0$@gmail.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:ThompNickSon2@gmail.com">ThompNickSon2@gmail.com</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/">https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/</a>
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com"><friam-bounces@redfish.com></a> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2020 11:19 AM
To: FriAM <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:friam@redfish.com"><friam@redfish.com></a>
Subject: [FRIAM] The next Heterodox University faculty member
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.quantumthom.com/LetterToFerrisCommunity.pdf">http://www.quantumthom.com/LetterToFerrisCommunity.pdf</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://fsutorch.com/2020/11/18/science-professor-denies-science/">https://fsutorch.com/2020/11/18/science-professor-denies-science/</a>
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">The account’s other tweets in regard to COVID-19 say things such as:
“Guess what the covid stunt has failed. You won’t get your leftist new world order.”
“Covid19 is another jewish revolution.”
“F— this evil wizard,” in reference to a video of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“Stand up for yourselves people, and stop falling for this corona virus hoax!”
“I’d say covid-19 is fake. An evil medical system just killed a bunch of old people.”
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
>From the Amazon page for his book:
"Thomas Brennan is a professor of physics at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, where he's taught physics and astronomy since 2014. He completed his PhD thesis on the topic of sonoluminescence in 2009 at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He also received a BA in Physics from the University of Chicago and an MS in Physics from UCLA. His research interests include both experimental and mathematical physics as well as astronomy."
I continue to marvel at how someone seemingly intelligent can fly off the bolt [⛧] so easily. As one who regularly expresses my opinions about non-professional things, I consistently wonder how/when it will or has already come back to bite me, not to assert that I'm seemingly intelligent or anything. It also questions the coherence of the "public intellectual", best exhibited by people like Chomsky, or Pinker, or Tyson. We need them ... but they put themselves at great risk. So thanks to all those people who manage to speak outside their competence, but do so without flying off the bolt.
[⛧] Yes, I'm aware that "wingnut" is often understood as a nut who sits on the wing of a political spectrum. But I prefer to think of it as someone who's easily "spun up", spun on, or spun off. This fits nicely with the old saying that there's a fine line between genius and crazy, it's only a difference in chirality. That batsh¡t old man who spends his lifetime in his basement working on his time machine exhibits the same dedication as the non-batsh¡t microbiologist who spends his lifetime in the cancer lab. They're both easily spun up, wingnuts on a different spectrum.
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