My breakfast is minimally processed.
It feels like there's roughly 100 years between groups 3 and 4, and maybe there's no benefit to breaking that gap up any finer, but I kinda wish there was an extra category in between.
Just a category for 50-54 year old technology, perhaps.
The clutter scale makes me feel much better.
I feel like the food scale needs to go higher. Like Sour Patch Kids and fish sticks should be in different levels.
5/7: Yes, thank you! I've had a lot of anxiety about being a perpetual, like, 1.7. (Somewhat decreased because our landlord is selling so we've had to keep stuff relatively clean for showings.) It's fine.
I first saw the clutter scale in this article: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/jon-day/diary
( 8 seems almost unfair. I'm probably at a 3.something, but that article says 3 is normal)
10: Definitely, but it was a problem before the little one came around. At least at this point we can make serious cleaning headway by just putting the shapes in the shape sorter.
The images are a bit weird, though. Like, for the kitchen image 3 there's way more stuff on the floor than the table, while our far-too-large table has been a filing cabinet for years, and we only have had a couple boxes on the floor. Feel like the table would get used first for smaller things. So maybe we're higher than my initial guess. It'd be nice to have higher resolution images. Nick's link has the living room set in color, which helps with parsing what's going on.
Anyway, my wife has even more anxiety about this than I do, and it's a reason we haven't had many visitors over. It goes back to childhood trauma related to her father being a hoarder (and still is, it's an issue we're putting off). I think this'll help relieve her a lot. Again, thank you.
I always feel bad for Bristol, because Glasgow has the Glasgow Coma Scale which is very well known and widely used and pretty much an industry standard for assessing the level of alertness and orientation of people who are, medically speaking, fucked in the head.
Bristol has the Bristol Scale of Stool Firmness.
It's just to bring in the tourists.
And goddamn proud of it. No wobbly stools around here.
The most robustly-skinned reptile in the West Country gets to sit on the Bristol Stool of Scale Firmness.
The images are a bit weird, though. Like, for the kitchen image 3 there's way more stuff on the floor than the table, while our far-too-large table has been a filing cabinet for years, and we only have had a couple boxes on the floor. Feel like the table would get used first for smaller things. So maybe we're higher than my initial guess. It'd be nice to have higher resolution images. Nick's link has the living room set in color, which helps with parsing what's going on.
I agree with the weirdness. Image 2 in the kitchen has trash tucked in corners and clothes on the floor, which is just not how our kitchen accumulates clutter.
I wonder if it's more like they started with an actual hoarder's kitchen, and just photographed as they removed clutter, so the residuals for the low number panels are residuals of a hoarder's mental illness and not the modern way that extra crap accumulates in the absence of mental illness.
The clutter scale seems to escalate really fast! Also they feel out of date due to the prominent role played by piles of newspapers. Piles are only useful if they're short! If your pile is getting that tall then you need two piles!
Yeah, clutter is one thing, but actual trash lying around in weird non-trash non-eating locations is just bizarre.
I think the thing with the clutter scale is that I'm on the high end of people without an actual hoarding disorder. So maybe I shouldn't feel relieved. I suspect my anxiety level is similar.
16: That makes a lot of sense as an explanation! Actual trash doesn't stick around that long for us. It's the "argh, I don't know what to do with this, I'll just put it here for now and maybe it'll sort itself out later" stuff.
The newspapers do feel very dated.
If you have that TV, you're probably a hoarder regardless of anything else.
Supposedly, my dad's brother, before he got married in his 50s, would put down a fresh layer a newspaper over the table at each meal. He'd just keep adding a layer until it got too thick and he would roll it up and take it out.
I don't know whether to admire that or think your uncle was a gerbil.
17. IMO piles are a primitive filing mechanism-- oh, the car registration is in with {possibly tax stuff}, on the left corner of the counter. Unweildy retrieval is OK as long as one knows where to look. This drives me nuts, I prefer drawers, boxes, and active winnowing so definitely obsolete or useless stuff is gone, but the benign view of piles is an extension of putting keys in the same place, can be instantly and frequently visually assessed. If clearing and sorting is a high-anxiety mental state, remembering where stuff went while the cleaner was borderline freaked-out is a challenge, and having it all out to look at is helpful.
I have a relative that lives this way, less than a 4 on these IMO staged images-- they are still helpful, but not snapshots of organic life.
He also had two garbage cans for socks. He'd start with one full of clean socks and put them in the other can after he wore them. When full, he'd take the dirty can to the laundromat and wash them all. This was a full-size garbage can.
Looking at the the NOVA scale, I have questions. I was excited to see the link because I've wondered whether there was a clear definition of, "ultra-processed" but reading that makes me think there mostly isn't (or, to be more charitable, that similar to the idea of "food miles" it captures something but in ways that are significantly misleading in some cases).
First, there simply aren't enough categories. There are a total of 4 of which 1 is, "unprocessed" and another is reserved for ingredients like sugar, salt, or flour. So there are really only two categories of prepared foods ("processed" and "ultra-processed") (and, oddly, "coconut fat" shows up as an example in two of the categories). Sun-dried tomatoes are unprocessed (unless they have added salt, then they are processed), but tomato paste is processed. Roasted nuts with sugar are "processed", granola bars are "ultra-processed", where would you put nut bars?
Apparently if I buy vanilla yogurt from a local dairy that's ultra-processed. I assume fermented foods like sauerkraut are "processed." Juices sweetened with sugar are ultra-processed, those sweetened with white gape juice are . . . unprocessed?
It doesn't seem that helpful (except in very broad strokes).
That's all I know. My mom didn't let us kids go into the house until he got married.
I feel like scoring-based approaches make more sense than a one-dimensional rating scale. I would think very differently of the same-sized pile if it contained rotting food vs. if it didn't.
Yes, the NOVA system seems badly thought through. It starts off well. Group one is "unprocessed or minimally processed" and minimally processed means "natural foods that have been submitted to cleaning, removal of inedible or unwanted parts, fractioning, grinding, drying, fermentation, pasteurization, cooling, freezing, or other processes that may subtract part of the food, but which do not add oils, fats, sugar, salt or other substances". OK, that seems like a good description.
Group 2 is "processed ingredients" like oils, sugars etc.
At group 3 the wheels start to come off. That's "processed foods" - "products manufactured by industry with the use of salt, sugar, oil or
other substances (Group 2) added to natural or minimally processed foods (Group 1) to
preserve or to make them more palatable."
Why is smoked fish (which is fish, plus smoke) "processed" but yogurt, which is milk plus various cultured bacteria, "unprocessed" - and cheese, which is milk plus some slightly different cultured bacteria, "processed"?
Dried meat and fish counts as processed - what's been added there? (Dried fruit, meanwhile, is "minimally processed".)
Vodka and whisky, meanwhile, are classed as ultra-processed. But it's just an unprocessed food (grain) which has been "submitted to fermentation and fractioning" which, by their own rules, counts as "minimal processing" and should put it into group 1.
I feel like 29 is hinting at a useful marriage between the hoarding, processed food scale.
30 last: yeah, they seem to want a scale that runs good to bad and they don't take their own backfitted definitions to seriously.
Unprocessed chickens still have feathers.
I concur about the clutter scales kind of making me feel better, at least in the sense that I don't seem to have that disorder. In a similar vein, some people I knew were passing around a link that was kind of a guide to cleaning your kitchen (maybe whole house?) and step 1 was to get a big new trash bag and walk around filling it with all the actual garbage that was on the counters or tables or just sitting on the floor. I realized then that there were entire terrible dimensions of disorder that I had not experienced.
Question 8: Is it surströmming or hákarl?
An article I bookmarked but can no longer read since I dropped my subscription and refuse to register for any access with them https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/well/mind/clutter-stress-procrastination-psychology.html?action=click&module=Discovery&pgtype=Homepage
Today is our 40th wedding anniversary. Most of my house is somewhere between a 3 and a 5. Living with a hoarder is both exhausting and deadening -- essentially for someone like me it creates a mental overload of unease so you learn to just filter out the visual stimuli while simultaneously maintaining enough awareness of the stuff on the floor so that you don't trip over it. It's actually gotten much worse since the kids all grew up and moved out -- one of them also is very messy, the rest aren't. Three of them did a sort of mini-intervention a few years ago and got rid of a lot of stuff. My wife still complains about it.
She also gets very angry at the word "hoarder" so I have settled on the term "accumulator." it's particularly bothering that retaining a lot of this stuff on the basis that "it might be useful someday" ignores that there are poor people out there for whom it absolutely would be very useful today.
But it's also clear that for my wife, like for her mother, it's not just that floors are intended to be auxiliary cupboards and closets, it's also that tables and counter tops with nothing on them create unease, living room sofa and chairs not covered with stuff signal a barren home with no activity, and in general that mess = life.
I hope you have a room or two to keep your way. Happy anniversary.
37 makes me anxious, but I'm glad you've got such a philosophical take on the situation.
The processed food list seems to weigh added salt heavily in determining where something goes, which probably explains the dried meat/fish categorization. I don't think it's that bad as a list, if one accepts it's trying to make a guide for eating healthily, rather than logic-chopping over what counts as a process.
Even the first page of the food scale which equates white/brown rice and normal/frozen vegetables is sus
Obviously frozen vegetables are colder, but what's the real difference?
Frozen vegetables probably have more nutrients.
Also, you burn calories as they melt when you eat them.
I was really hoping that everyone here would contribute lots of new, interesting bizarro scales. Dig deep.
I know lots of not very bizarro scales.
I was very tempted to get a t-shirt that says "It's Not Hoarding If It's Guitars." Speaking of that kind of scale, I don't know if it's worth a post, but I greatly enjoyed the story of how Jimmy Page got his black guitar back -- there's an unexpected twist in the middle that I found especially engaging. The thing no one will ever know, I guess, is who applied the fool-the-experts refinish. I bet it was the widow.
We have only one guitar that no one can play. Except it's a ukulele. We have two violins that one of us can play, but no one ever does.
Also, just in:
An email to Twitter returned an automated reply with a poop emoji. Irwin declined further comment and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
BRB. I need to update my OOO message.
Anyway, checking the validity of scales is interesting work if you can get it. Plus, it often requires specialized software and trying to see how many statistical packages you can get people to buy for you is fun.
I think our flat is quite cluttered, but we are about a 1 on all of those examples. There's a child's desk that has a load of clutter on it for when we move between working (if both of us are at home) in the bedroom or the living room so the desk stores whichever computer and paper work isn't in use. Bookshelves and cupboards are pretty cluttered, but other than that ...
Scale of Intensity
Don Paterson
1) Not felt. Smoke still rises vertically. In sensitive individuals, deja vu, mild amnesia. Sea like a mirror.
2) Detected by persons at rest or favourably placed, i.e. in upper floors, hammocks, cathedrals, etc. Leaves rustle.
3) Light sleepers wake. Glasses chink. Hairpins, paperclips display slight magnetic properties. Irritability. Vibration like passing of light trucks.
4) Small bells ring. Small increase in surface tension and viscosity of certain liquids. Domestic violence. Furniture overturned.
5) Heavy sleepers wake. Public demonstrations. Large flags fly. Vibration like passing of heavy trucks.
6) Large bells ring. Bookburning. Aurora visible in daylight hours. Unprovoked assaults on strangers. Glassware broken. Loose tiles fly from roof.
7) Weak chimneys broken off at roofline. Waves on small ponds, water turbid with mud. Unprovoked assaults on neighbors. Large static charges built up on windows, mirrors, television screens.
8) Perceptible increase in weight of stationary objects: books, cups, pens heavy to lift. Fall of stucco and some masonry. Systemic rape of women and young girls. Sand craters. Cracks in wet ground.
9) Small trees uprooted. Bathwater drains in reverse vortex. Wholesale slaughter of religious and ethnic minorities. Conspicuous cracks in ground. Damage to reservoirs and underground pipelines.
10) Large trees uprooted. Measurable tide in puddles, teacups, etc. Torture and rape of small children. Irreparable damage to foundations. Rails bend. Sand shifts horizontally on beaches.
11) Standing impossible. Widespread self-mutilation. Corposant visible on pylons, lampposts, metal railings. Most bridges destroyed.
12) Damage total. Movement of hour hand perceptible. Large rock masses displaced. Sea white.
54: Bravo!
Suggested additions --
9) Ftaghn.
10) Cthulhu ftaghn.
11) Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
12) Iä! Iä!
If you ever suddenly decide to clean out the fridge of someone with hoarding tendencies, protect yourself by taking pictures of the expiration dates of the things you are throwing away.
In college, one of my roommates got so angry that we all had to go clean out the fridge. When someone pulled out the bottom drawer, the smell unleashed was so bad that one guy vomited.
56: Those mostly aren't expiration dates, they are just "best by" dates.
||
Recommended compass app for Android?
|>
I just use Google maps, but it's for shit. I use a magnetic compass if I'm where it matters.
I just discovered that one of my neighbors is running a piano tuning business out of his house. I've never even seen anyone bring in a piano even though I'm 100 feet from his door.
It won't really matter, but I could something less shit than Maps.
I've been experimenting with Avenza Maps, but you have to import the map of where you are.
30: I think this is the scale that classifies boiled potatoes as "ultraprocessed" if you put salt in the water.
And it's no help finding a piano tuner.
@30 I think that the NOVA classification system should be thought of as follows:
1. Unhealthy people stereotypically eat certain foods.
2. Their unhealthiness is causally attributed to eating these foods.
3. In a form of dimensionality reduction, characteristics of these foods are identified as unhealthy, in that eating foods with these characteristics causes a person to be unhealthy.
So, instead of "consuming large quantities of sodium nitrate over many years increases your risk of a particular form of colon cancer when you have a certain genetic predisposition and environmental exposure" you get "processed meats are unhealthy."
Now, there exists an extensive null space from which the particular assortment of identified characteristics can be drawn. This is not going to affect how predictive a set of characteristics are, because any given set of characteristics is, at best, weakly associated with the actual causal drivers of health, which are almost immeasurably far more complex...
So in the absence of obvious benefits or detriments, the particular characteristics identified and the assertion that these characteristics are present in certain foods is going to depend primarily on the relationship between those identified characteristics and other ideological frameworks. Mutually reinforcing frameworks will be preferred to contradictory frameworks. For example, an environmentalist framework concerned with the nuclear power is going to be mutually reinforcing with a healthy food framework concerned with irradiation of produce. As healthy food framework, a paleo diet may be mutually reinforcing with a scepticism of modern culture, but not with veganism.
Basically, this is the modern version of eating according to the four humors.
24 and 35: I struggle with filing systems and am better if things are out, so I definitely understand piles.
I am copying a Julia Child technique and bought pegboard for my kitchen wall. I'm hoping to hang the non-stick skillets, graters, and some other stuff that I'm always hunting for in drawers, including my instant read thermometer. I got a magnet for the knives so that I can purge the ones we never use and get rid of the block that takes up space on our counter.
I truly do not understand the architecture of modern kitchens. The storage spaces don't seem designed to facilitate cooking or eating. I get that people want to hang out in them when they entertain now, but the layouts are terrible.
We can eat in our cabinets just fine.
Re: clutter, we're maybe at a 3 on that scale on a bad day. I grudgingly admit we don't have a problem in the clinical sense. I still find the level of clutter we have annoying, though, or maybe just the amount of stuff and the fact that there's no place to put it.
If all the paperwork on our dining room table was in a big, sturdy, organized filing cabinet and the pots and pans we literally never use were somewhere other than the kitchen, they would probably still bug me when I thought of them, because do we really need health insurance statements that say right on them "this is not a bill"? The kid's random bit of optional worksheets from three months ago? Magazines from the local NPR branch that I'm sure no one in the house reads or asked for? I'm already a bit dubious of Cassandane's claim to reading The Week, since I've literally never seen her doing it, but I've asked her and she's said she does so I have to take her word for it. As for kitchen stuff, I've put a few things I'm sure we've literally never used in the basement with a dated note on them in hopes of saying "I told you so" when we seriously discuss clutter. But I can't do that too much because the basement's cluttered too. But if all that paperwork was in a filing cabinet and more kitchen tools were in the basement, at least I wouldn't have to think about them so often.
Sorry. I just established that the problem isn't her in a clinical sense. Maybe it's me, or maybe it's a totally rational reaction to the circumstances. I need to get out of the house more.
I think I plugged this before, but How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis is a very short, kind book about housecleaning/organization/etc. from the perspective of functioning for real lives.
It's absolutely fine and OK not to be obsessively tidy. You are not "drowning" if you feel you don't have enough time to be more tidy. These are drowning symptoms, they're even on Slate: https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/rescuing-drowning-children-how-to-know-when-someone-is-in-trouble-in-the-water.html
12:
Quick Bristol stool firmness scale fact:
It's a seven point scale that goes from nuts to soup!
Cyrus, man, I worry about you every time I read your comments. They always give the impression that no one, including you, particularly cares about your happiness. I know there are intangible problems in relationships that are difficult if not impossible to solve, but if I thought getting rid of some random pots in the kitchen would move the needle for my spouse at all, they would be out the door in 24 hours.
Out of curiosity, why do you not buy a filing cabinet and file the papers? (Or at the very least, quietly switch the insurance plan over to electronic documents only?) I have crammed a ton of documents into a single under-desk unit of this sort. I definitely need to purge the contents at this point, but as long as new stuff fits, it's a low priority. (The highest priority currently is our cluttered yard, which is full of some materials for the junk hauler and far, far more biomass that the torrential rains earlier this year caused to appear. California weeds are next level. Because this work makes me filthy, gross and tired, I've been putting it off, but it's generally understood to be my responsibility that I'm shirking.)
Dining room tables not used for eating do seem to attract clutter in pretty much every household I've seen without an obsessive tidier.
Ah "they would be out the door" is the pots not the spouse. I got real confused for a second there.
But agree with the general sentiment that that sounds difficult and that your spouse should be willing to meet you somewhere here.
Ha -- I should just have said "wife" to avoid the ambiguity.
Do I really sound that bad? I didn't realize. Thanks for the concern and the reality check.
As for the specific question, we have a filing cabinet a little bigger than that one, but it's stuffed. We've thought about a bigger one but I'm not sure where we'd put it.
I'll try to remember to say more later. Camping now, so not a good time for commenting.