Author: Crowhill Report

If you buy a piece of property and discover a fence on it, you should figure out why it’s there before you tear it down. That’s Chesterton’s version of the precautionary principle. When you change things without knowing all the details, you might cause more trouble than you expected.

This is one of the recurring political / social principles that Pigweed and I often mention on our podcast.

We all struggle between two competing needs — the need to explore and investigate and find new things, and the need to protect (or at least not ruin) what we already have. It’s a hard balance to strike, because you can’t know all the consequences. E.g., is it a good idea to wrap all our food in plastic? It’s cheap, and it dramatically reduces food waste, but is there a downside?

I was just listening to a story about people digging for lead, not knowing there was a lot of Uranium mixed in with the lead. Of course many of them died.

You can’t possibly see all the ways things can go wrong, but you should at least try.

Mark Shea likes to put it this way (or he used to, anyway), Step 1: “What could it hurt?” Step 2: “How could we have known?”

Along those lines, Are we harming children’s speech development by wearing masks?

‘They Can Have Rogan Or Young, Not Both’: Neil Young Issues Spotify An Ultimatum, Threatens Pulling His Music

I can do without Cinnamon Girl and Heart of Gold. “I hope Neil Young will remember: A southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”

Update: Spotify made the right choice and removed Neil Young’s songs.

Is THIS Why The Media Are Out To Get Joe Rogan?

His summary: Mainstream media is annoyed by the success of someone who won’t toe the line.

Americans write dates in this format: MM, DD, YYYY.

Brits write them this way: DD, MM, YYYY.

Sometimes you see dates in this format: YYYY, MM, DD.

From a programming / sorting perspective, the American format is the worst of the three, and I’ve seen people criticize it as being illogical. The British format goes from the smallest increment to the biggest, and the last format goes from the biggest to the smallest, but the American format goes middle, smallest, biggest.

The criticism is clearly just from that point of view, but these things don’t usually happen by accident. For some reason, MM, DD, YYYY caught on. Why?

Perhaps human brains don’t sort information the way a computer does. For example, perhaps our minds would rather know a general estimate, then a specific, then a “big picture.”

Someone might say “but don’t the Brits have brains too?” Of course they do, but I think their current date format is a new thing. If you do an image search for old British newspapers, you see the MM, DD, YYYY format.

The larger point is that accommodating computers might change the way we think in ways we don’t expect. That’s not necessarily a bad or scary thing, but it is something to keep in mind.

I don’t often post on sports, but this weekend I watched all four NFL playoff games. Every one of them was great. Three of the four were decided by a field goal in the last few seconds. The fourth was tied up by a field goal in the last few seconds and went into overtime.

After an epic back and forth battle between the Bills and the Chiefs — where each team was scoring on most of their drives, and a record 25 points were scored in the last two minutes! — the overtime rules didn’t seem fair.

Here’s how it works. The team that gets the ball first in overtime is decided by a coin toss, and if that team scores a touchdown on their first posession, that’s it. They win.

It didn’t seem right for this super-charged, offense-dominated game.

When I was a kid I’m pretty sure overtime was an additional 15 minutes of play, and whoever scored the most in those 15 minutes won. That would have seemed more reasonable.