The Answers To Life's Eternal Verities

Okay, firstly, let me blog the praises for Gorilla Tape. That shit really will stick to anything. It's not the most elegant thing in the world to have every one of my windows in the house surrounded by a ring of black duct tape-looking stuff, but at least the plastic is hung and, so far as I can tell, not going anywhere.

Nextly, commenters Michael and Daniel get to the heart of the matter of the groping dentist, which had escaped me. The real issue is not that there's a dentist out there groping innocent women. That sort of thing just happens sometimes; there are scuzzballs everywhere. The biggest question is, why did these women, upon being groped, continue to return to the dentist in question, up to 6 times in 2 years in once case, then act surprised when he groped them again? I hate to be an anti-feminist, but if someone were making me feel that uncomfortable then I probably, you know, wouldn't go back.

I believe that Tim McCarver is an amazing invention. Like, if we didn't have him, we'd have to task the scientists up with inventing something like him. He is actually negatively informative. Which is hard, right? You think of 'being informative' as a thing which can only be zero or positive, something like pressure in physics. Pressure is the act of getting buffeted by surrounding molecules. In the absence of molecules, zero pressure, but you can't have less than nothing surrounding you.

Likewise, you think of someone as being able to inform you, in which case they are positively informative, or not being able to, in which case they are simply uninformative. However, just like we learn in cutting-edge modern physics that the Higgs field can provide, under just the right circumstances, the kind of negative pressure that could give a gravitational push to begin the expansion of the universe (one of the popular models of inflationary cosmology), it turns out that the mere act of listening to someone talk about a subject can actually make you less knowledgable about the subject. Not because the information he is giving you is actually false. But, rather, because the information is so trite, inane, and uninteresting that parts of your brain actually begin to shut down.

Tim McCarver is like this with baseball. The more I listen to him, the less I know.