Facts of the Day (7/3/26)

1. Songwriter Allee Willis (1947-2019), profiled in the documentary The World According to Allee Willis (2024), co-penned hit songs like Earth, Wind & Fire's "September" (1978) and "Boogie Wonderland" (1979).  Her contribution to the Beverly Hills Cop (1984) soundtrack, "Neutron Dance" by the Pointer Sisters, allowed her to share a Grammy; she won a second for the cast album from the 2015 revival of the stage musical The Color Purple (2005), which she scored alongside Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray.  Perhaps her most-heard composition is "I'll Be There for You," the theme from Friends.

(h/t Akiva Fox and Michael Rankins)

2. David Hume's 1739 problem of induction involves the question of how we can predict things that have not yet happened (e.g., the sun rising tomorrow) on the basis of things that have happened (such as the sun rising on every single morning in recorded human history).

Following on from Hume, Nelson Goodman's Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1955) presents the new riddle of induction, using the terms "grue" and "bleen."  Wiki summarizes thusly:

For some arbitrary future time t, say January 1, 2036, for all green things observed prior to t, such as emeralds and well-watered grass, both the predicates green and grue apply. Likewise for all blue things observed prior to t, such as bluebirds or blue flowers, both the predicates blue and bleen apply. On January 2, 2036, however, emeralds and well-watered grass are bleen, and bluebirds or blue flowers are grue. The predicates grue and bleen are not the kinds of predicates used in everyday life or in science, but they apply in just the same way as the predicates green and blue up until some future time t. From the perspective of observers before time t it is indeterminate which predicates are future projectible.

In other words, when generalizing from observed data, it is impossible to tell which connections we see are actual laws.  For instance, if we are in a room with 50 people who have living mothers, we could potentially generalize "All human beings have a mother" or "All human beings have a living mother."  One of these is an accurate generalization and one is not, but how can we tell which is which?

The problem Goodman poses is fairly similar to the "quus" argument made by our old friend Kripkestein.

3. The Gwangju Uprising began in South Korea on May 18, 1980, and was a protest against that month's Coup d'état of May Seventeenth, which consolidated the power of military dictator Chun Doo-hwan.  (Chun had earlier staged the 1979 South Korean coup d'état, taking advantage of the vacuum opened up by the October 26, 1979, assassination of Park Chung Hee by KCIA director — and Park's former ally — Kim Jae-gyu).  Estimates of the number of protesters, soldiers, and police killed during the ensuing crackdown are in the thousands.

On May 18, 2026, Starbucks Korea launched a promotion called "Tank Day" that gave away tank-shaped tumblers.  Memories are long in that part of the world.  A backlash ensued.

The CEO of Starbucks Korea was soon dismissed and the chain temporarily shuttered nearly all its Korean stores on June 22 for mandatory re-education sessions.  The closure will cost the company some $1.4 million.