Something To Watch For, Which I Learned From Stage Magic But Which Is Extremely Relevant To Detecting

Something to watch for, which I learned from stage magic but which is extremely relevant to detecting scams as well:

The magician or scammer will *tell you* how he is going to prove his honesty.

The magician rifles through the deck until you say "stop", then he says, "Are you sure? I'll keep going if you want." and asks "Now, you agree that you could have stopped anywhere you wanted, so there's absolutely no way I could know which card you got" and because it's a magic show and you aren't paying close attention you didn't notice he didn't deal a card from where you stopped, he dealt the bottom card of the deck.

The magician doesn't ask you, "What would it take for you to believe this" because you might say, "I'd need you to use a sealed deck" or "I'd have to personally shuffle the deck" or some other proof that would make the trick impossible.

Magicians say "You agree that if I did *this*, it would mean *that*, right?" and you say yes, and it feels like you are the one who got to verify things, but of course the magician is lying and the proof is nothing of the kind.

Scammers do the same thing. A really concrete example is phone scammers pretending to be working for the government will say, "Look, I see you're skeptical if I'm who I say I am, I'm going to hang up and call back, and you'll see on the caller ID it says, 'FBI' and that tells you that I'm really working for the government."

Now, caller ID can be spoofed pretty easily, so it doesn't prove anything at all.

But it *feels* to you like you demanded proof and the scammer was willing to give you the proof.

But you didn't tell the scammer what out would take to prove it to you, the scammer told you what the proof would be.

This is actually like a really basic thing to look for if you want to start decoding magic tricks and scams.

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I'm sorry, professor, I consider publishing your course a day late, having a mandatory live zoom meeting during business hours to stay enrolled for an asynchronous class, and requiring students to use a $60 ***pdf*** that you wrote as their textbook to be exceptionally unprofessional and since I've still got 14 days to get a refund I'm totally not paying $150 to take your class.

Also, for all the newbie professors out there: a syllabus is not just a greeting and a list of assignments. If you haven't given your students AT LEAST your office hours, your late work policy, and your preferred method of being contacted, then you have not given your students a syllabus it's just sparkling announcements.

But really. Sir. SIR. You teach Speech 100. This is one of the most basic classes with like, 20 of the most widely available accepted textbooks and you want me to pay sixty dollars for a pdf of a book that you rewrite every semester so that there are no previous editions?

Buddy this is interpersonal communication, not introductory rhetoric. Why is one of your *four* total assignments about Socrates?

Maybe it's the fact that I've taken Spch 100 interpersonal communication three times already, maybe it's the fact that I grew up with somebody who taught Spch 100 interpersonal communication from 1981 to 2018, but buddy what the fuck are you doing?

"Some of our lectures will only be available for 24 hours so it is up to you to stay on top of it."

Friend, you are teaching an asynchronous online 100-level class at a community college during a pandemic. Get off your high horse, a third of your students are probably parents. There is no reason whatsoever to limit access to course materials to 24 hours unless you are doing it to be a controlling asshole.

Also YOU published your class a day and a half late! You don't get to publish your class late with an incomplete syllabus and tell students to "stay on top of it." Especially not since that means that people have two fewer days to buy your PDF textbook and only one full day to prepare for your mandatory 1pm on a Tuesday zoom meeting!

Why do you require me to have access to a printer for an online class? Oh yeah it's because you expect me to print out and draw on sections of your $60 ebook.

SIR. No thank you.

Kids, new students: this is a level of bullshit and disorganization from a professor that you do not have to put up with. This is a neatly ordered series of red flags that say "this professor is going to be absolutely unbearable."

Also *any* humanities class where your whole grade is 4 assignments should get serious side-eye. You should be able to pass most 100 level humanities classes by just turning in weekly assignments. 4 assignments means that by the time you figure out how the professor grades you're probably close to halfway through the class. Look for classes that require weekly participation as a major chunk of the grade because that way, even if you fuck up a project in a major way, just showing up can save your ass.

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babe. I know we’re all going thru a lot rn but I just wanna give u the heads up that sesame streets future is in jeopardy. hbo has chosen not to renew it for new episodes (a series that has been going since 1969) and the residents of 123 Sesame Street no longer have a home :(

2 months ago
Cora Harrington
@lingerie_addict

Having a thread about a stone age girl going viral and having a thread about the fashion industry going viral makes me want to do a thread connecting both of these subjects to talk about one of my favorite prehistoric articles of clothing: the Lendbreen Tunic.

img desc: Norwegian historian and researcher shown alongside the Lendbreen Tunic. Tunic is long, brown, and plain.
Cora Harrington
@lingerie_addict
Starting off with the technicalities, the Lendbreen Tunic is actually from the Iron Age, not the Stone Age. As far as I know, we don’t have any Stone Age clothing still in existence. The oldest garment we have is from the Bronze Age and is called the Tarkhan Dress.

img desc: Photo of the Tarkhan Dress. It looks like a linen tunic with some threadbare areas and pleats.

tweet: The Lendbreen Tunic was found chilling in a crumpled up ball in the Norwegian mountains because the earth is melting, and the ice going away revealed it. It's roughly 1700 years old, is made of wool, and has what we would think of as a very basic construction.

img desc: Deceptively important ball of dirty wool in some rocks

Tweet:
So let's set the stage. While clothing today is the cheapest it's ever been in human history (this is a fact, not a debate), for the longest time, clothes were one of the most expensive things you could own.

Part of what makes clothing so cheap today is that a lot of the initial work - such as planting, harvesting, processing, and weaving the fibers - can be done automatically. While the actual sewing still takes human hands, the spinning and weaving part does not.

People collecting clothing is a very recent thing in human history. If you own multiple outfits, you are more "clothes rich" than most human beings in the past ever were. It's like spices. They're ubiquitous now, but were once a sign of wealth and prestige.
The Lendbreen Tunic is made of undyed wool in a twill weave, no fastenings, and is clearly well-worn. But here’s why I chose this garment specifically. Because textile historians recreated it using the technology of the time, which is *fascinating.*

They started with an old Norwegian breed of sheep, and pulled the wool naturally rather than shearing, which would have changed the fiber qualities. In total, they gathered 2.5kg or roughly 5.5 pounds of wool.

Then they had to spin all this wool into thread. And no spinning wheels! The technology of the time was a drop spindle. They gathered 10 expert hand spinners and asked them to time themselves. It took 11 hours to spin 50 grams (about 1.75 oz). For all that wool, that's 544 hours.

(At this point, the researchers did turn to technology and used machine spinning because that's a lot of time and expense.)

Then all that thread had to be woven into cloth. They got an expert hand weaver (no shuttles!) and used a vertical loom. Working at peak capacity, she could weave 2-3 cm per hour (a maximum of around 1.2"). That worked out to 160 hours of just weaving.

Then, of course, it had to be sewn but that took a lot less time. What was interesting though is that the makers used 3 different stitches, which indicates expertise, deliberateness, and care.

So what is the total of all that hand labor?

760 hours.

760 hours to weave a plain tunic with no embellishments or fanciness at all. Just up a straight up t-shape. At the time this garment was made, the value of that labor was 380,000 NOK.

In US dollars, that's almost $38,000.

(Yes, I know the currency conversion isn't exact.)
That is an ASTONISHING amount of labor. For exactly 1 item of clothing. It is mind-boggling. I'm over here feeling like my head will explode if I think too hard about it. We have no real point of comparison for that type of work today (except maybe, haute couture, sorta kinda).

For me, the Lendbreen Tunic shows just how expensive and time consuming clothing was. And that's what I love about this topic. It's not just clothes. It's history and economics and math and technology and humanity. We're the only animals that wear clothing. It's a story of us.

But I do wonder how the person who lost it felt. I'd have been pissed as hell.

Sources:

https://t.co/r3sjz7YWZT

https://t.co/3hdDxBvGAw

https://t.co/prCBj5snUX

@lingerie_addict has a really cool thread on ancient fashion over on twitter.

Those source links are here

cambridge.org

Youtube

ucl.ac.uk

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