S-P-A-M #5 - All About SPAM

"I reeeally hope this isn't tagged as spam!" 🦊

Jan 10, 2024

Welcome to the (exactly) 50 curious souls 👻 who decided they needed more SPAM in their lives. 😃👋

Actually… 🤔

Let me interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to share with you some things I learnt about this, erm, delicacy, very recently.

So yes, today the 🐇🕳 comes first.

🕳 Random Rabbit Hole

Things I bet most of you didn’t know1 about SPAM®:

The name is a portmanteau for spiced ham.
People in the US islands of Hawaii and Guam are MAD FOR IT!2
- In Hawaii they make Spam Musubi, a type of onigiri, out of it. In Guam they have the “Spam Games”, where locals sample and honour the best original recipes. And in both places it’s served in McDonald’s. 🍔
It’s also very popular in Southeast Asia (esp. the Philippines), where a Spam brand gift pack would be considered an appropriate wedding gift.
The main ingredients are pork shoulder and ham… and pork shoulder is also known as “Boston Butt” (❗)… which has nothing to do with the actual butt, which is ham. 🐖
In 1998, Spam product packaging was donated to the Smithsonian.
Spam is made by Hormel Foods Corp. which was founded by George A. Hormel in 1891. In 1921, George's son Jay returned from service and discovered that an assistant controller had embezzled $1,187,000 (≈ $21M in today’s money) from the company over 10 years! The scandal gave George additional incentive to professionalise his company… which led to the creation of their mantra of “Originate, don't imitate".
Most importantly, “Spam” is a famous sketch in the 25th episode (also named “Spam”) of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in which every dish in a café contains Spam, whether the diner wants it or not.
At one point the group of Vikings start singing about Spam, drowning out all other conversation… THIS is the inspiration behind the name3 for the unwanted mass emails!! 😮🤩

💡 Critical Thinking

More examples

In the previous issue we introduced the Question of Evidence to determine the relative strength of a piece of evidence for a given theory. Here it is again:

"How much more likely am I to encounter this evidence
if my theory is true than if it’s false?"

Let’s look at another example:

Say we’re studying for a big maths4 test and believe that doing lots of small practice tests will increase our chance of getting a high grade on the actual test (theory). And let’s say we’d gotten 60/100 on our first proper mock test.

After doing many small practice tests, we take another full mock test (evidence).

If our score on the second mock test has jumped up a lot, like to 80/100, then we can correctly reason that this is evidence that strongly supports our theory. The Question of Evidence here would be:
How much more likely am I to encounter this evidence (a big improvement in mock test results) if my theory is true (lots of small practice tests help) than if it’s false (lots of small practice tests don’t help)?

If our score had only jumped a little, like to 65, then we’d only be slightly more likely to encounter this evidence if our theory were true, and so we could only say it weakly supports the theory.

If our score barely changed, then the evidence is neutral and would be equally likely to occur regardless of whether our theory was true or false; so it shouldn't affect our pre-existing confidence in the theory.

And of course, if our score went down, then the evidence is contradicting the theory.

🎶🎨 Art & Music

One for the Kenny Loggins, Top Gun and Tom Cruise/Maverick fans.

It’s the last post I made on my now-decrepit calligraphy IG page.

⚠️ Danger Zone ⚠️

I do want to restart it again, but – the risk of ink jars breaking in my suitcase aside – I most likely won’t have time this year with all the travelling I’ll be doing 😶 Which actually brings me to this next point…

❓ Random Question

I’ve been booking a lot of flights and airbnbs recently, and a question popped into my head about what % of people book refundable vs non-refundable.

I myself nearly always book an accommodation as refundable (as the price increase is negligible) but flights always non-refundable (since it’s usually almost double).

There wasn’t much to go on google (and honestly I didn’t care that much), but it seems that – Covid era aside – about 60% of people prefer to book non-refundable accommodation. And I think it’s safe to say that for flights it’s much higher.

What about you? How do you usually book things?

😈 Devil’s Word of the Week

Pig, n. – An animal (Porcus omnivorus) closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it sticks at pig.

Again, a big THANKS to everyone who’s joined in 2024 and a bigger one to those who emailed and started a conversation. 😊 And if you haven’t yet, don’t forget to watch that video on why, like SPAM 😆, you need more pessimism in your life too.

Let me know what you found interesting today, or other things you’d like me to write about… like why pork shoulder is known as Boston butt 🍑😂

S-P-A-M