cked the entries. The Hubbard organization pioneered the art of clustertrolling, LONG before the web made the practice easy.
I can tell from blog stats when an item gets noticed. None of the Aberree items caught any specific readers or linkers.
Conclusion: Hubbardism no longer has the power to threaten or ruin its enemies. One estimate indicates current membership is 50k, not the millions we are led to believe.
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Modern sidenote: This story about the Theranos fraud shows an uncanny resemblance to Hubbard. Elizabeth Holmes was supposedly developing an automatic blood-testing machine, but didn't take any of the necessary steps to make it work. The setup seemed like a classic pump-and-dump stock fraud. But when the shit started to fly, Holmes removed the entrepreneur mask and told her employees that she was starting a religion. Anyone who didn't want to spread the gospel could get the fuck out. Most employees got the fuck out.
Hubbard's religion began with a much simpler machine, Volney Mathison's modified lie detector. Hubbard built a complex tyrannical religion around the machine. My experiments showed that the circuit was more active than passive; it was sending a current through the body which had an effect on heart rate and brain, perhaps through the vagus nerve. I don't know if Hubbard understood this, but he certainly understood that the machine was a useful tool for controlling people.
If Holmes was planning to use a blood-testing machine to start a religion, maybe her machine was also meant to be active instead of passive. The needle could inject a little RFID tag before taking the blood, like a mosquito injecting a virus.
Happy Metrology Day!
I'll call this my annual Metrology Day item. I'm too busy to run up a really proper animation.
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Another excellent piece by the NON-NEWS departments of BBC. A well-researched article on shrinkflation.
They miss two important points.
On toilet paper, the width of the roll has been shrinking along with the total length of the paper. I was accidentally able to document this. Width makes a difference. When the paper is narrower, you need to pull more squares to get the same effect. Each roll is necessarily used up faster. Double benefit to the seller. Less material per roll, more rolls per month.
On food pleasure, they get the non-linear nature of perception right, but miss on the math needed to sum up the pleasure.
Chandon, who also studies the pleasure of eating, thinks that there's a way to downsize some products, like chocolate, that doesn't irritate so many people but doesn't fool them either. That's because the enjoyment we get from food doesn't grow in lockstep with amount consumed.
“The first bite of a chocolate mousse is usually the most pleasurable,” he says. “After that it decreases. The last bite, honestly, it's the one you regret. We all know that. The thing we fail to realise – and it's super-important – is that the pleasure of this entire chocolate mousse you're eating is not the sum of the pleasure of each bite. It is the average.”
Exactly right on the curve, but the result is NOT the average. Graphically:
Each curve represents the pleasure of eating, with the x-axis representing 20 spoonfuls.
Each bite gives you a delta of pleasure, indicated by the little arrow roughly between Bite 2 and Bite 3. The real pleasure goes up fast at the start, peaks in the middle, and goes down fast. (I've shown it as a sine for easy math, but it's probably more like a rounded trapezoid.)
The lower curve indicates the linear pattern that we assume if we don't understand perception.
Figuring the sum of the deltas on each curve:
# Figure sum of deltas on the top curve:
for spoon in range(total):
rads = float(spoon) * math.pi / float(total)
newY = math.sin(rads)
sum = sum + (newY-oldY)
oldY = newY
# Figure sum of deltas on the bottom curve:
for spoon in range(total):
newY = float(spoon) / float(total-1)
sum = sum + (newY-oldY)
oldY = newY
The results: Total pleasure on the sin version is 0.15, and total on the linear (as you'd expect) is 1.
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Later editorial qui