Fart Proudly (c. 1781) | Hacker News Reader

Fart Proudly (c. 1781)

en.wikipedia.org

93 pointslopespm28 comments

Persian poet Saadi[1] (1210-1291) has a poem in his Golestan[2] that addresses a similar concern:

    شکم زندان باد است ای خردمند
    ندارد هیچ عاقل باد در بند

    چو باد اندر شکم پیچد فرو هل
    که باد اندر شکم بار است بر دل

Roughly translates to:

    Bowel is a prison for wind
    Not a wise man beholds wind

    Wind blows in your bowel let it loose
    Wind in bowel, it weighs on thou

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saadi_Shirazi

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulistan_(book)

> Comrades, you must all analyse your own responsibility. If you have to shit, shit! If you have to fart, fart! You will feel much better for it.

-- Mao Zedong (1959)

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-work...

I've been listening to his autobiography recently.

Fascinating man.

In case you're interested: https://es.player.fm/series/the-autobiography-of-benjamin-fr...

I’d love to have a modern politician so capable and willing to write satire.

Also, the more I find out about Benjamin Franklin, the more I realize that Charlie Munger is his modern-day clone.

In 1781 Franklin was not an elected official but already appointed ambassador to France. It is a lot easier to write satire if you don’t depend on the masses for their votes and have to stay on their good side.

Also, a look at classic literature will show that the degree to which scatological humor is accepted, varies with time. Chaucer, whose work was massively respected in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, made jokes about farting and ass-licking that seem appalling to readers today. And I think a lot of HN readers already know about Mozart’s work Leck mich im Arsch.

Wit is sorely missed in our modern (Anglosphere) political culture.

Finally an HN post in one of my areas of expertise!

See also this other letter of his:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advice_to_a_Friend_on_Choosing...

> Franklin believed that the various academic societies in Europe were increasingly pretentious and concerned with the impractical.

Oh wow I wonder what he would think of it now. People spend their whole lives studying the tiniest most minuscule thing that is published in some obscure journal and forgotten like the ark at the end of Raiders. Maybe I’m just too bitter about academia in this point in my career but it seems like we’ve run out of things to study and/or have too many people doing it. The creepy professor/grad student pyramid scheme couldn’t go on forever.

> Maybe I’m just too bitter about academia in this point in my career but it seems like we’ve run out of things to study and/or have too many people doing it.

We have certainly not run out of things to study, but I think we've hit the limit on what can effectively be communicated through traditional science journals [1], and we need to address the reproducibility crisis through open source science and reconsider the incentive structures around academia [2]. We need to oppose initiatives from people like Bill Gates who wish to privatize science through his various non-profits, as knowledge works better as as commons (we were unable to deal with the pandemic partly because Bill Gates prevented Oxford from open sourcing their work on COVID [3]). We need software that can compose scientific models [4], and organizations that can facilitate greater coordination among scientists. Science will become all the more important in an increasingly uncertain world, but are we up to the task?

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-s...

[1] https://numfocus.org/open-source-science-initiative-ossci

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...

[3] https://www.algebraicjulia.org/

Uncontrollable farting undoubtedly contributes to global warming and the fact that we just had the warmest July ever suggests people don't take the impact of relaxed social mores seriously.

So by all means, keep farting liberally, but we must invest in fart-capture technologies, or FCT (shameless plug - we are pioneering this with AI). Inaction will have consequences such as mass migration to more liveable areas.

> "Franklin responded with an essay suggesting that research and practical reasoning be undertaken into methods of improving the odor of human flatulence"

Japan has been leading the way in this sector, for at least ten years. Typical ad blurb:

> 'New dietary supplement from Japan will make your farts smell “like a flower garden”'

Like many writings from the time, the original does not seem to have been scanned or photographed yet. Only transcribed.

Factual fact: If you live long time at optimal sustenance level, you will discover that farting is an anomaly and something is wrong.

You do it carefully because the fart may be wet and you will soil you sleeping bag under condition where cleaning is impossible.

There's a common joke (at least it was in my high school) that Thoreau's "lives of quiet desperation" were mainly about digestive distress from the bean-based diet at Walden.

Depends on who's farting, if you don't like someone or it's a stranger (you're not kinda attracted to) everything about them is an assault to the senses.

My grandmother read this to the family at the dinner table once. People today are such prudes.

Throughout his adult life, Ben Franklin was dead-serious about the important things, but evidently he didn't take himself too seriously. This particular essay, he composed in response to a call for scientific papers from the Royal Academy of Brussels while he was the US Ambassador to France. Quoting from the essay's introduction:

> I have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year...Permit me then humbly to propose one of that sort for your consideration, and through you, if you approve it, for the serious Enquiry of learned Physicians, Chemists, &c. of this enlightened Age. It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind. That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it. That all well-bred people therefore, to avoid giving such offence, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.

I'm reminded of Musk's antics. I wonder what Ben Franklin, were he alive today, would post on Twitter -- I mean, X.

You would probably not be aware of what Franklin would be posting, given that he would almost certainly be doing it with at least 5 alts.

Benny F for TPOT!

This is thoughtful, funny, and non offensive. Musk posts political memes made by children with the intent of offending and provoking the media.

Franklin had multiple fake personas for writing in newspapers, including LARPing as an old women named Silence Dogood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence_Dogood

he'd 100% have an anonymous alt account for shitposting

Or he'd shitpost on main. He has the same brilliant autist with puerile sense of humor vibe as you see in Mozart and others.

Given the Franklin published his own newspaper, it would be more likely that he would today be running his own site or a mastodon/fedi instance.

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