Author Archives: Ben Cotton

Should we care where EF5 tornadoes have gone?

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Anthony W. Lyza, Harold E. Brooks, and Makenzie J. Krocak have an early-access paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society wondering where the EF5s have gone. This paper is an interesting look at the extended “drought” in the strongest category of tornadoes. The title of my post is not questioning the value of their work, but the paper does make me wonder about the value of tornado ratings for the general public.

Ratings for research and forecasting

There’s certainly value for scientific research and forecasting. Because ratings are assigned based on damage, which is what people ultimately care about, there are benefits in being able to use large data sets to find patterns. “Which environments tend to produce more destructive tornadoes?” is an important question to know the answer to. The more warning we can give (at least to some extent) of the possibility of strong tornadoes, the more time people have to take appropriate precautions.

Of course, the EF rating system has flaws. Damage assessment, while greatly improved over the years, still involves subjective decisions. In addition, binning a spectrum always results in some funkiness (that’s the scientific term). The difference between 165 and 166 mph wouldn’t meaningfully change the damage caused by a tornado, but — assuming we could accurately measure tornadoes in order to rate them — would be the difference between and EF3 and EF4 rating. And there’s the question of whether or not six ratings (and the location of the boundaries) is the “best” approach. To wit: there are a variety of different categorizations of the ratings. Are any of them better suited?

Ratings for the public

But even with the value for science, do tornado ratings provide value to the public? As I wrote eight (!!) years ago, “even though the U.S. has avoided major hurricanes, it has not avoided major damage.” Even though, unlike hurricanes, tornado ratings are based on damage, the impact to people’s lives doesn’t necessarily correlate to the rating. If your house is destroyed, does it really matter if the tornado was rated EF4 or EF5? Your house is still destroyed. Even an EF2 or EF3 can render well-built homes unlivable.

Shrug emoji

Like Lyza et al, I have questions, not answers. The public knows about EF ratings, thanks t movies like “Twister” and “Twisters”. That bell can’t be un-rung. There’s a certain degree of American competitiveness involved, too. But maybe it’s time to stop making a big deal of it?

Rights for others are about us, not them

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This is a post about my personal philosophy because I feel like it’s important for us to think about the reasons behind how we view the world.

I sometimes see people express indignation when criminals get civil rights protections or when non-citizens get the rights enumerated in the Constitution. I can understand the reasoning, but it doesn’t fit with my principles for governance. I believe that the rights we give to the others within our society are about us, not them.

Many of the rights are fundamental human rights that should apply to everyone, of course. Let’s consider those a given for now.

The rights that criminals, or suspected criminals, receive are not for them. They’re a protection for us against ourselves. It should be hard for the government to convict someone of a crime, because that protects all of us from malicious prosecution and persecution by hostile governments. And our prisoners should be treated humanely, even the ones who have committed the most heinous of crimes. It’s not because they deserve it. It’s because we want to be a just and merciful society.

Extending rights to non-citizens is a direct reflection of how the Constitution was written. The Constitution does not grant rights so much as list a subset of rights that the government can’t (or can conditionally) curtail. The idea of American governance is that the government derives its authority from the people, and thus only can do what it is permitted to do. The Constitution largely refers to “people”, not “citizens” for a reason.

What it comes down to is that I want my government to reflect the world I want to live in, regardless of how others behave or what they “deserve.”

I still haven’t forgiven Peter Jackson

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It’s been a long week but I wanted to keep on my twice-per-week publication schedule, so I’m publishing a meaningless rant.

Over the holidays, my wife decided she wanted to watch the Lord of the Rings movies again. I hadn’t seen them since they were in theaters. It turns out I still hold a grudge against Peter Jackson. The movies are great as movies, and it’s hard to adapt a dense, six-book series into three movies. Even when the movies are 3+ hours each. But Jackson did my favorite character dirty.

The defining feature of Faramir is that he is not Boromir. Where Boromir is brash and aggressive, Faramir is deliberate and levelheaded. Boromir wanted to take the ring to Gondor to aid in the defense of the city, but Faramir had no such desire. But not if you watch the movies. Faramir is basically a second Boromir. I can’t forgive that; he’s my favorite character in the series.

On a related note, my favorite scene is “the scouring of the Shire.” As much as I wish we could have seen that, I understand cutting it from the movies. I can forgive Peter Jackson for that choice. I’m apparently never going to forgive him for what he did to Faramir.

What is art?

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So much of the discussion about generative AI has had to do with art, whether visual or text. Art is a key part of our humanity; giving it over to a machine seems to deprive the art of its human element. But what is art?

Jim Grey wrote that “art is having something to say and successfully saying it.” He wrote that (paraphrased) art comes from intent, not luck. Making a great photograph by accident being creative, not artistic. But I don’t think they’re separate.

I’ve had conversations with people where I’ve essentially told them “I’m just making something for work” undervalues their creativity. Art for hire is still art.

Last summer, Ted Chiang had an article titled “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” in The New Yorker. He wrote “Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.” I’ve resisted using ChatGPT and friends for many reasons, but one of those is because I am a writer. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of my family tradition.

I write prolifically not just to share my ideas, but my expression of those ideas. If I had ChattyG write my ideas, the result would be meaningless to me. Much of what I write is crap (this post included, perhaps), some is damn good. The choices and effort I put into writing make the work mine and help me hone my craft. Constraints force choices, which make the words mine. Nobody makes exactly the same choices I do.

So yeah, I think Jim is right: art is having something to say and saying it. I don’t know that it matters if I say it successfully or not, though. Not all art is good, but that doesn’t make it less art.

Keeping in touch with everyone you ever met

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In my post last week on my shift in social media habits, I wrote in a comment “the idea that we can keep some semblance of connection to everyone we’ve ever met is a pretty recent phenomenon. I wonder if it will last.” My friend Chris O’Donnell (who may or may not be the actor), wrote in reply

I’ve been questioning if keeping in touch with everyone you’ve ever met is actually a good thing. Also, I downloaded my friend list on Facebook (actually screen scrapped it as requesting it from FB only got me 10 names). Then I put it in a spreadsheet and went through all 258 names and rated then as yes or no on “would it really bother me if I never spoke to them again?”

Only 78 people passed the test. I’m considering if I could just check in with them via text or email occasionally.

I’ve been thinking about that. I am, as America sang, “one poor correspondent…but that doesn’t mean you ain’t been on my mind.” I’m the sort where once you become one of My People, you’re My People forever. I might go years without an interaction, but when I do, it’s like no time has passed. Just Friday I texted a friend that I hadn’t talked to in months because a USC basketball player’s surname was the same as her given name.

For the entirety of human history, people came and went from our lives, and only a few that went maintained some kind of connection. In the last two decades, that has changed. Not only has social media allowed us to stay in touch, but we even take our phone numbers with us. Your phone number used to indicate where you live, now it indicates where you lived when you got your first cell phone.

There’s an unprecedented permanence in casual relationships. I think I fall on the side of liking it. It allows me to remain at least passively connected to people I cared about without having to make the choice that “yeah, their presence in my life is actually done now.” Perhaps that’s a personality flaw of mine. Time will tell whether or not this is good for society, but in the short term, I think we need all of the connections we can get.

A shift in my social media habits

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Amazingly, it’s been slightly less than a month since Mark Zuckerberg decided that hate speech is good and facts are bad. As you may recall, that decision led me to create a Bluesky account. It also led me to dramatically reduce my Facebook and Instagram use, although the latter was pretty sporadic to begin with. In that time I’ve noticed a definite shift in how I use social media.

For one, I’m just on it a lot less. It doesn’t take long for me to get caught up on Bluesky and Mastodon. I follow almost no one on Pixelfed so far, so that’s quick, too. This leaves me with a lot of time to do other things. For example, I successfully completed the “read every day in January” challenge on The Story Graph for the first time this year. There were a few days where I’d just do a couple of pages or a few minutes of an audio book in order to check the box, but most days I read for an hour or so. I’m also writing more, as evidenced by the number of posts on this blog lately.

Twitter always felt like the most natural platform for me, since it favors short shitposts. My brain makes so many of those. For some reason (perhaps because my network was mostly people I knew through my professional work), I never felt as comfortable doing that on Mastodon. But on Bluesky, it’s like the good old days.

Surprisingly to me, I’ve cross-posted a lot more than I thought I would, thanks to Openvibe. I’m normally opposed to cross-posting, but since Mastodon and Bluesky are largely the same format, I guess my aversion is lessened. Some stuff still goes to one or the other, but I really expected myself to always direct posts to a single choice. I’m still learning about myself at the age of 41.

I haven’t completely abandoned Facebook (and you are not invited to argue why I should), but I only check it briefly every few days. Years ago, I had gotten my usage to near zero, but then Twitter went to hell and Facebook had the largest share of my People™. Surprisingly, simply removing the app shortcut from my home screen has kept me from opening it out of boredom. Now when I go to Facebook, it’s because I’m actively choosing to check in.

Partially as a side effect of the smaller networks on the platforms I use and partly because of intentional choices, I find myself doomscrolling less. I’m following a lot fewer journalists and Online Political Opinion Havers than I did in the old days. I have enough ways of finding out what new terrors appear every day that I not need to immerse myself in it. That seems to have helped my mental state quite a bit (duh, right?).

By the way, did you know I have a weekly-ish newsletter? Subscribe if you’d like. If you have one, let me know and I’ll subscribe to yours.

Other writing: January 2025

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What have I been writing when I haven’t been writing here?

Duck Alignment Academy

GUAC

Kusari

Would Teenage Ben in 2024 be a Christian Nationalist?

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My friend Renee recently wrote how if her 20-year-old self were here today, she’d be a Christian Nationalist. It got me thinking about the political and religious beliefs of Past Ben. In high school, I was very conservative. My U.S. history teacher gave us a political spectrum quiz at one point and I was to the right of Reagan. The highlight of my school breaks was being able to catch Rush Limbaugh on the radio.

It’s an understatement to say I’m not like that now. I can’t pinpoint when I moved left. It was a gradual process throughout my early 20s in particular, but even now into my early 40s. Past Ben would certainly have blamed this on liberal indoctrination in college, but I couldn’t begin to tell you the political beliefs of most of my professors. The one professor where I did know his political views was, in fact, a socialist. He told us so at one point, but I wouldn’t say there was a particularly socialist bent to the class. I don’t really remember much of anything about it, other than his imitation of his Irish grandfather saying “It’ll be Tammany Hall or no hall at all.”

So I don’t think Professor Hogan had much to do with it. But after reading Renee’s post and thinking about Past Ben, I recalled what might have been the first step in being more self-reflective about my politics. I remember at one point in high school (I think) that I drew a bunch of sketches of politicians in a grid. They weren’t particularly accurate renderings — I was going for clownishness, not realism. Each of them were labeled with some prominent Democratic politician of the time. They had speech bubbles saying some silly thing or another. But at the end was Rush Limbaugh, and his speech bubble said “I am the truth!”

That gave me pause. I’m not sure if Limbaugh ever said that specifically, but it was certainly plausible to me. I thought “wait. That’s a statement only Jesus can make, and Rush Limbaugh is not Jesus.” Nothing changed for me that day, I think, but it opened the door for more critical thought.

As most kids who have any interest in politics do, I followed my parents. Or at least my dad. Mom has always been quieter about her politics. It wasn’t until I was an adult on my own that I started to examine my views in terms of “based on what I value, here are the positions and candidates I support” instead of “well I’m a conservative, so of course I’m in favor of such and such.”

Like 20-year-old Renee, I’d like to think that Teenage Ben would find Trump repellent and unqualified to be president, no matter what he thought of the policies. But I’d probably have found Elon Musk hilarious in a douchey edgelord sort of way. Would I have been a Christian Nationalist if I were a teenager today? It’s hard to say. I can’t remember ever having a desire to explicitly make my religion the dominant one. I had no desire to talk about my beliefs to anyone who wasn’t interested in them. Whatever else I may have wanted to promote politically, I believed that the promises of equality and freedom that the US was notionally founded on. So maybe I would have avoided that path. I’m glad I don’t have the opportunity to find out.

Listening to vinyl

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When my grandmother entered a memory care facility a few years ago, I drove down to clean out the condo she lived in for the past three decades. One room was basically a dumping ground for things she brought with her from New York and then never touched again. In that room was an old stereo with AM/FM radio, an 8-track deck, and a turntable. I brought that, along with her records, back home with me.

To my dismay, I couldn’t get the system to make music happen. After a little bit of tinkering, I decided to junk it and just buy a working turntable. (I settled on the AudioTechnica AT-LP60X, in case you’re wondering.) Pretty quickly, I started listening to a lot of records. Which meant I also started hitting up flea markets to expand my catalog.

As my friend Lyz wrote,

I am not an audiophile, so I never really understood the recent rise of record player popularity. Day to day I’m perfectly happy to stream music through the tiny Bluetooth speakers that float around our house. It wasn’t until recently when I started seeing the value of slowing down and appreciating the warm, physical sound of a record. The discourse around this thread of thinking tends to be that we’re all running around living this fast-paced life, so we’re losing some of what is so beautiful about life. Mindfulness and other slowing down practices are bringing us back to enjoying the present, and this is right where the record player comes in. You slow down, pull out this giant piece of media from a beautiful sleeve, and hear the scratchy of the edge of a record before settling in. It turns hitting play on your phone into a ritual, one that I really like.

I also have come to appreciate the album itself as an art form, not merely a collection of songs. A well-crafted album can take the listener on a journey.

I also discovered another, more practical benefit: listening to a vinyl record is a great time box. When I was writing Program Management for Open Source Projects, I would put a record on and write until the side ended. Having to get up to flip or replace the record gave me a good mental break and also got me moving.

America has always been aspirational

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A few nights after the election, I was at a basketball game. At the conclusion of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” my buddy said “still the best country in the world.” “For a few more months, at least,” I quipped. I’m not convinced that America is the “best” country, if for no other reason than I don’t know what “best” means.

What I am convinced of is that America has never been what we claim it to be. America is not great, it is an aspiration.

From the very beginning, we have failed to live up to the story we tell about ourselves. Virginia’s House of Burgesses sat for the first time in the same year that the African slave trade began. Thomas Jefferson, while perhaps one of the greatest philosophers on human rights, did not act on his philosophy.

As our ancestors forced Africans from their home and sold them into slavery an ocean away, they also pushed out the indigenous people by force and treaty after treaty that would be broken to be replaced by another treaty that would also be broken. Centuries before Adolf Hitler gave it that name, it’s hardly a stretch to say that the British and Americans pursued a policy of lebensraum.

As late as 1840, the “antislavery” north still had 1,000 enslaved people. And while the Civil War may have ended legal slavery, that wasn’t the goal. Lincoln was more concerned with preserving the union than freeing an enslaved people. For almost a century more, segregation was legal, voter suppression was rampant, and racism ruled policy. The effects of these policies is still visible today.

The target of our racism has shifted over the years. For a time, southern Europeans were the lesser “other”. Then east Asian. The U.S. built concentration camps for the Japanese in World War II, but had no similar facilities for Germans or Italians. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of these, in one of the all-time worst decisions to come from that body.

We tell ourselves that America is a land where anyone can go from rags to riches. While some do achieve that level of class mobility, it’s not true for everyone. As far back as 1770, 1% of Bostonians owned 44% of the wealth. Wealth disparity has only continued to grow in my lifetime. The educational outcomes of school districts remain best correlated with the income of the districts residents.

We have done much of what we accused the bad guys of. Sometimes to a lesser degree, sometimes not. So as the worst person to occupy the White House returns today, I will remind myself that the work never ends. The poem “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes captures the sentiment far more eloquently than I could.