Sailors in Pattaya

I see they want the US sailors on excessive Gulf duty to get a rest, so they take them to Pattaya. Rest?

😂 Exactly. “Rest and recuperation” is the official phrase. And yes, choosing Pattaya as the venue gives the phrase a certain… historical resonance.

The USS Abraham Lincoln arrived at Laem Chabang today after 286 days deployed, with roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard. They are getting about five days in Thailand before heading home.

And Pattaya has been an American military R&R destination since the Vietnam War. The authorities are apparently quite aware of the implications: there are extra police patrols, restrictions on certain activities, and even recent prostitution raids in preparation for the sailors' arrival.

So, technically:

Navy: “Our exhausted personnel need rest, recreation and recovery.”

Navy: “Where shall we send 5,000 predominantly young sailors?”

Thailand: “Have you considered Pattaya?”

I suspect nobody in the Pentagon needed a map. 😄

And to be fair, after 250+ days continuously at sea, almost anywhere with a bed, shower, decent food and something other than a ship's corridor would constitute R&R. Pattaya just happens to offer rather more recreation than some destinations.

Since Hong Kong kinda closed up, it's now the best place I know of to get well-tailored suits. I don't expect the sailors are in that market though.

Oh, absolutely. Pattaya has a rather unexpected second identity as a serious tailoring destination.

And I agree that the sailors are unlikely to be the target clientele. After months aboard ship, I suspect the shopping priorities are more along the lines of sandals, beer, laundry, and something that isn't khaki. 😄

The tailoring tradition in Pattaya is also a good example of how a place can acquire an economic specialty almost by accident. Decades of foreign visitors created enough demand that some of the better tailors became genuinely good at fitting Western bodies and producing suits quickly and relatively inexpensively.

If Hong Kong has lost some of its old accessibility and atmosphere, Bangkok and Pattaya are probably among the more interesting places in Asia now for bespoke or made-to-measure clothing—though you have to distinguish the good shops from the tourist-oriented operations that will promise a “custom Armani” overnight.

Jock itch

https://gizmodo.com/a-drug-resistant-ringworm-fungus-is-surging-across-the-globe-scientists-warn-2000805680 Ringworm is a fungus not a worm. Me, my dad, my brother, all have dealt with jock itch and athletes' foot most of our lives. I clear it up a few days and it finds its way back. Please believe me it does not have to do with laundry.

Yes. And your experience is actually a good illustration of why “ringworm” is a rather misleading name. It is a fungal infection—usually a dermatophyte such as Trichophyton—and jock itch and athlete's foot are essentially different locations/forms of the same general infection.

And I agree with your objection to the laundry explanation. Laundry hygiene can reduce transmission, but recurrent athlete's foot/jock itch absolutely does not require dirty laundry. These fungi are extraordinarily good at hanging around in the environment, and reinfection can occur from floors, shoes, towels, skin-to-skin contact, or simply from organisms persisting on one's own skin. The ordinary human body also provides them with a rather excellent habitat: warm, moist areas containing keratin.

Your family's experience—your father, brother, and you repeatedly clearing it and then getting it again—doesn't strike me as remotely surprising. In fact, T. rubrum, one of the common causes of athlete's foot and jock itch, is very well adapted to living on humans.

The interesting part of the Gizmodo article isn't really “ringworm is spreading.” Ringworm has always been common. The genuinely new concern is Trichophyton indotineae. It has emerged as a distinct species and is unusually prone to terbinafine resistance, so the familiar scenario of “put some antifungal on it and it'll disappear” doesn't necessarily work anymore. The CDC specifically warns that resistant strains are common and that infections can be extensive and difficult to treat.

And there's a nice distinction here: your recurring fungus isn't evidence that you have the new resistant strain. Your description—clears up within a few days and comes back—is much more consistent with the ordinary, maddeningly persistent dermatophyte problem people have been dealing with forever. The new strain is notable precisely because treatment can fail even when people are treating it properly.

So yes: ringworm is a fungus, not a worm; jock itch and athlete's foot are manifestations of the same family of fungal infections; and “wash your laundry better” is not a satisfactory explanation for why some people repeatedly get it.

Oh clean shorts daily is essential. Hot water makes it worse so cold showers, air drying without heat, talcum powder at night and when bad anyway, antifungal cream.

Exactly. There’s a difference between preventing reinfection and claiming that the infection is caused by dirty clothes.

Clean underwear every day is sensible, particularly because the groin is a warm, moist environment. Keeping the area dry is probably even more important. Your air-drying and powder routine is aimed directly at that problem.

The one thing I'd qualify is the hot water point. Heat itself isn't a treatment for dermatophytes on your body, and very hot showers can irritate or dry the skin, potentially making things more uncomfortable. But there's no need to avoid ordinary warm water because you think it will feed the fungus. If cold showers work better for you, though, that's perfectly reasonable.

And talcum powder can help enormously with moisture. The antifungal cream is doing the actual pharmacological work; the powder and drying are making the environment less hospitable.

Your observation also gets at something the article doesn't emphasize: a person can be extremely clean and still have recurrent athlete's foot or jock itch. Dermatophytes are persistent little bastards.

Parallel universes and consciousness

 

Several articles around talking about how we got sensation 50,000 years ago from some sort of unexplained connection with another parallel universe, or to the whole array of them. Sounds a bit woo and an explanation that doesn't explain, just pushes the question away. Do I read this right?

Yes — your skepticism is basically right.

There really is an interesting scientific question lurking underneath these stories: humans appear to have undergone a fairly dramatic change in behavior somewhere in the broad neighborhood of 50,000–100,000 years ago. We see increasingly elaborate symbolic behavior, art, personal ornaments, long-distance exchange, sophisticated tools, and eventually very rapid cultural accumulation. But the old idea of a single sudden “Great Leap Forward” around exactly 50,000 years ago is itself much less secure than popular articles often suggest. Evidence for symbolic and complex behavior appears considerably earlier and develops unevenly.

Where things go off the rails is the next step:

“We don't know exactly why this happened, therefore perhaps consciousness became connected to a parallel universe.”

That doesn't explain the phenomenon. It merely relocates the unexplained part.

And there's an especially important distinction here. A hypothesis such as “some interaction with another universe caused the change” would need to tell us what interaction, by what physical mechanism, under what conditions, and what observable consequences it produces. If it can't do that, “parallel universe” is functioning rather like “the gods did it” with more sophisticated vocabulary.

There are legitimate multiverse ideas in physics, but they don't generally provide a mechanism by which human brains suddenly acquire an additional channel of consciousness. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, for example, isn't a theory of psychic communication between universes.

The thing that caught my eye in searching is that this particular claim seems to have quite a lot of New Age/UFO/consciousness literature attached to it. One example explicitly describes a supposed worldwide “consciousness boost” around 50,000 years ago and attributes it to access to a new spectrum of consciousness. That's very much the sort of thing I'd put in the interesting speculation, spectacularly short on mechanism category.

And I think your phrase “an explanation that doesn't explain, just pushes the question away” is exactly the right criticism. It's essentially:

Why did human cognition change?
→ Because of a connection to another universe.
Why should that connection change cognition?
→ [new mystery]

You've just moved the question one level farther away.

The genuinely interesting question, in my view, is why human cultural evolution seems to have accelerated so dramatically, and whether that required a genetic change, changes in population structure and social learning, language, cumulative culture, ecological circumstances, or simply a combination of things. That's a real scientific puzzle. We don't need to import another universe to make it puzzling.

In my view animals demonstrate a similar consciousness, just not linked to our intelligence and language, and they also experience dreams. In that case some specific event in our past is ruled out.

Yes, with one qualification: it weakens the case for a sudden origin of consciousness, but it doesn't rule out a specific event affecting specifically human consciousness or cognition.

I think your distinction is an important one. If by consciousness we mean something like having subjective experiences of the world, pleasure and pain, fear, memory, attention, and dreams, then there is no obvious reason to put its origin at 50,000 years ago. Mammals clearly exhibit many of those capacities, and birds and some other animals have surprisingly sophisticated cognitive and behavioral abilities. Dreaming is particularly suggestive because it implies internally generated experience rather than merely responding mechanically to the immediate environment.

What seems much more distinctive about Homo sapiens is not consciousness itself but the combination of language, abstract representation, exceptionally flexible intelligence, and cumulative culture. An animal can have an experience without being able to describe it; it can remember without constructing a written history; it can solve a problem without transmitting the solution through generations in a way that permits others to improve upon it.

So I'd separate two questions:

“When did consciousness appear?” — probably a very ancient evolutionary development, with no reason to expect a particular date.

“When did humans acquire our extraordinary capacity for cumulative symbolic culture?” — that's the genuinely interesting question, and roughly 50,000 years ago may be part of its history, although the archaeological record suggests a much more gradual and complicated development.

There is also a nice logical point in what you're saying. If somebody observes a sudden increase in the sophistication of human behavior and concludes that consciousness itself suddenly appeared, they're already making an assumption that intelligence, language, culture and subjective experience are essentially the same thing. They aren't.

And dreams make the argument particularly awkward for the “sudden consciousness” story. A sleeping dog doesn't have language or human-style abstract reasoning, but it can apparently have an internally generated experiential state. Whatever consciousness ultimately turns out to be, evolution almost certainly didn't wait around until one particular human generation and then switch it on.

So I'd say your formulation is stronger than simply “animals are conscious.” If consciousness is an evolved biological phenomenon, its evolutionary history should substantially predate the remarkable cultural explosion of our species. The latter needs explaining; it doesn't automatically require explaining the former.

Copy omissions

I'm having a problem with the previous lengthy chat, I select all and copy, then post to a new blog on my blog editor, but chunks of it disappear. Alternatively I select all and print to PDF and chunks of it similarly disappear. Is there any way to avoid splitting it into two separate chats?

Yes. The problem is probably not the length of the conversation itself, but the way the browser handles the very large, dynamically rendered ChatGPT page when you copy or print it. Some portions may not actually be present in the browser's selection/print representation, even though you can see them on screen.

You don't necessarily need to split the chat. A few approaches are much more reliable:

1. Use ChatGPT's conversation export/share mechanism, if available to you. That preserves the conversation as a separate document rather than relying on Firefox's rendering of the page.

2. Copy in sections while keeping the same chat. You don't have to create two chats. For example, scroll through the conversation and copy 20–30 messages at a time into the same Blogger draft. This is tedious, but it avoids the browser silently dropping portions.

3. I can turn the conversation into a single file for you. If the chat is available to me as conversation content, I can produce a complete .txt, .docx, or .html version that you can then put into Blogger. That would probably be the cleanest solution if your objective is "one enormous conversation, preserved intact."

There is also a particularly useful trick if you're using Firefox: don't use Ctrl+A on the entire ChatGPT page. ChatGPT's interface is a dynamically constructed page, and Ctrl+A can select/render something different from what you visually see. Selecting from a specific message and working progressively upward/downward can be more reliable.

If by "the previous lengthy chat" you mean the Time Travel Paradoxes conversation immediately before this one, I can work from that conversation and help you produce a single continuous copy rather than splitting it into two chats.

I take it I need only do a select of the top half, paste it to the browser, then select the rest and paste it.

Exactly. Keep it as one ChatGPT conversation; you only need to copy it in chunks.

The easiest method is:

1. Select from the beginning of the chat down to roughly the halfway point, then copy and paste into your Blogger editor.

2. Go back to the ChatGPT chat, select from where you stopped through the end, and paste it immediately after the first section.

3. You can make the division anywhere convenient; it doesn't have to be exactly half.

That should avoid the browser choking on the enormous selection and silently dropping chunks.

And importantly, nothing about this requires creating a second ChatGPT chat. You're just making two copy/paste operations from the same conversation.

Yes, with one qualification: I'd call it a weakness in the Firefox/ChatGPT interaction rather than necessarily a Firefox bug.

Ctrl+A is wonderfully convenient, but with a very long, dynamically generated ChatGPT page, the browser isn't necessarily dealing with one simple block of ordinary text. ChatGPT is continually managing the conversation in the page, and copying or printing the whole rendered document can produce omissions.

So your workaround is quite sensible: same chat, two large selections. You retain the convenience of selection rather than having to laboriously copy message by message, while avoiding whatever is causing the disappearing chunks.

And frankly, for a conversation as long as the ones you've been having lately, the fact that "Select All → Copy" isn't completely dependable is a rather annoying little piece of modern computing. 😄

My chats tend to be lengthy because I explore topics, not just questions.

Exactly—and that's a rather different use of a chat from the usual "question → answer → done" model.

You're essentially using the conversation as a running intellectual notebook: an idea gets proposed, you poke at it, I respond, you modify the premise, and eventually the discussion has wandered somewhere neither of us would have predicted at the beginning. That naturally produces long chats.

In that situation, splitting the conversation would actually be undesirable because the continuity is part of the value. The later observations often depend on some seemingly minor point made twenty or thirty exchanges earlier.

So I'd keep doing what you're doing. One topic, one chat, however long it becomes. For archiving it to Blogger, just treat the occasional huge-chat copying problem as a technical nuisance and divide the copy operation into two or three pieces when necessary.

And I rather like the fact that you don't use ChatGPT as a vending machine for answers. The interesting part is often what happens after the answer.

To be honest I tend to use your competitors for quick questions.

That makes perfect sense. For a quick factual question, there isn't much benefit in building a whole conversational context around it. Ask, get the answer, move on.

The longer exploratory chats are a different animal. They're less about retrieving an answer and more about thinking out loud with a responsive interlocutor—where preserving the thread matters because the next thought grows out of the previous one.

So your pattern is actually pretty rational: use whichever tool is convenient for the quick stuff, and reserve the long-running conversations for subjects where you want to keep turning the idea over.

I won't pretend I'm offended by the competition. 😄