I think I'm going to walk around like this today.
One thing that's cool about big cities is that strangers are incredibly indifferent to one another, so I'm pretty sure I could get away with this without any strange looks. If you read this post today you too should join me in silly walking. We'll start a revolution!
Monday, November 26, 2007
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
From Picture to Vector
Harder Bodies Faster Stronger
Some people are either mad creative or they just have too much free time on their hands, then again it does seem like free time breeds mad creativity...anyways check out this choreographed home video of the Daft Punk song "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger":
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Is Denying Denial Still Denial?
NYtimes has an interesting article up about denial.
"recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.
"recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.
In this emerging view, social scientists see denial on a broader spectrum — from benign inattention to passive acknowledgment to full-blown, willful blindness — on the part of couples, social groups and organizations, as well as individuals. Seeing denial in this way, some scientists argue, helps clarify when it is wise to manage a difficult person or personal situation, and when it threatens to become a kind of infectious silent trance that can make hypocrites of otherwise forthright people."
On a tangential denial topic...
I can remember after my sister died a lot of people informing me about the stages of grief, the first being denial, and thinking at the time that denial was a pretty stupid term since I didn't deny what had happened, but it seemed applicable in that I wasn't quite ready to say that I had accepted what had happened. The days following her death felt very surreal and it took me a long time to get through the denial stage and in some ways I guess I felt better in the denial stage because it offered sanctuary from the acceptance stage that almost inevitably follows (as it is incredibly difficult to maintain the mask of denial in the ugly face of reality). When, every morning their missing from the breakfast table, everyday they're not at school with you, every afternoon they don't come home, and every evening they're missing from the dinner table and their seat sits empty and stares blankly back at you.
For me I felt like I wasn't emancipated from this type of grief until I accepted the fact that what had happened happened and now belonged to the past, and not to the forefront of my thoughts. If you don't relegate these traumatic experiences to memory I think it really afflicts your daily activities and the overall outcome of each and every day. You start to feel like every today is the same as yesterday, and the day before, and every tomorrow will be like today, so you sort of have nothing to look forward to because you feel like your future has been taken away. You become a resentful resistentialist, shrewd and even misanthropic, unable to change your ways and not willing to try. Until you realize that sorrow and despair are two very useless emotions...which certainly don't lead to happiness, but instead lead to the cessation of activity, which can be very dangerous indeed. But it took me sometime before I realized this.
As it became clearer and clearer to me that I was not making much progress on the happiness front I attempted to radically change my thinking and engage in more activities--preoccupations to take my mind off my grief. It works, but its a damn slow process. Taking up an interest in the world and trying to figure it out was what helped stimulate me most, but I'm sure its not the same for everybody. But if you can find some hobby, some activity that you find enjoyable or pleasurable that's key, because it's something that you control and something that can never be taken away. That was how I escaped the gravity of grief, but some aren't as lucky and others cannot relate, because for some it is simply biological, while others psychological, but it seems like everyone has to deal with depression to some extent and sharing personal experiences and offering solutions I think is worthwhile. We shouldn't isolate our experience thinking that we alone bear a certain burden, rather we should share it with others and try to provide (silly metaphor alert) road maps from our own bush whacking experience of personal exploration that can help others navigate the rough terrain much better. Anyways that's just my two cents.
Tuesdays With Mary Douglas
I came across this brief, but wonderful interview on youtube with British anthropologist Mary Douglas and thought it was worth sharing with you.
I wrote a little anthro nugget of information, a short paragraph, which sort of elaborates a bit more on what she is talking about (posted below):
This brief, but exceptionally telling interview on youtube with Mary Douglas reveals quite a bit about this distinguished British anthropologist. Associated with the symbolic anthropology approach, Mary Douglas’ work focuses on the meaning that people give to their reality and how this reality can be observed in the behaviors and cultural symbols of that people. In the beginning of the interview she says that she was very interested in cognition and that this interest led her to look at cognition and society, specifically how the mind relates to the culturally constructed reality that it comes into contact with. From her researchDouglas reaches the conclusion that, as she puts it in the interview, “the mind gets a lot of discomfort from seeing things that don’t fit the categories that people are using for thinking about them.” She mentions that this is Durkheimian and Maussian, since it is very structural functional, and in keeping with that approach Douglas in her works such as Purity and Danger argues that these fuzzy in betweens that don’t quite fit into binary social categories of distinction are automatically adopted into taboo and form ‘impure’ moral attitudes in the minds of people, or as she puts it in her book “taboo is a spontaneous device for protecting the distinctive categories of the universe… taboo confronts the ambiguous and shunts it into the category of the sacred”. In the interview she mentions that her interpretation of Leviticus focused too much on cognitive categories and failed to do what she intended: divert the intellectualist approach of the study of religion to a “behavioral intellectualist” approach that focuses on or emphasizes interactions through the use of symbols.
TimesOnline had a nice obituary dedicated to her, written two days after her death, which I recommend reading. She truly was an exceptional scholar and shining intellect of her time.
I wrote a little anthro nugget of information, a short paragraph, which sort of elaborates a bit more on what she is talking about (posted below):
This brief, but exceptionally telling interview on youtube with Mary Douglas reveals quite a bit about this distinguished British anthropologist. Associated with the symbolic anthropology approach, Mary Douglas’ work focuses on the meaning that people give to their reality and how this reality can be observed in the behaviors and cultural symbols of that people. In the beginning of the interview she says that she was very interested in cognition and that this interest led her to look at cognition and society, specifically how the mind relates to the culturally constructed reality that it comes into contact with. From her research
TimesOnline had a nice obituary dedicated to her, written two days after her death, which I recommend reading. She truly was an exceptional scholar and shining intellect of her time.
Competitively Selfish
Blogger over at Cognitive Daily has an interesting post up, which includes interactive voting tabs that you can click on, looking at reciprocity scenarios or games and what decisions people tend to make under certain conditions. Anyways click here to read more.
Plans For Pakistan
When I come across articles like this one, written by--two very well known foreign policy think tankmen--Fredrick Kagan of AEI and Michael O' Hanlon of the Brookings Institute, I become downright perplexed and seriously wonder what information these guys are reading. I try to consolidate my perplexities by telling myself that perhaps they just forgot a certain crucial prefix, namely -im, before their 'possible' plan...but alas no, it appears that they said what they meant and meant what they said.
From the NYtimes Op-Ed Page:
One possible plan would be a Special Forces operation with the limited goal of preventing Pakistan’s nuclear materials and warheads from getting into the wrong hands. Given the degree to which Pakistani nationalists cherish these assets, it is unlikely the United States would get permission to destroy them. Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place.
These guys clearly have been watching a little too much 24 lately, because the above plan is something that could only happen in a Hollywood script.
As Karl Sagan used to say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"... only in this case it is: "hopelessly dire scenarios require helplessly desperate solutions"... and you can quote me on that.
From the NYtimes Op-Ed Page:
One possible plan would be a Special Forces operation with the limited goal of preventing Pakistan’s nuclear materials and warheads from getting into the wrong hands. Given the degree to which Pakistani nationalists cherish these assets, it is unlikely the United States would get permission to destroy them. Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place.
For the United States, the safest bet would be shipping the material to someplace like New Mexico; but even pro-American Pakistanis would be unlikely to cooperate. More likely, we would have to settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops. It is realistic to think that such a mission might be undertaken within days of a decision to act. The price for rapid action and secrecy, however, would probably be a very small international coalition.
These guys clearly have been watching a little too much 24 lately, because the above plan is something that could only happen in a Hollywood script.
As Karl Sagan used to say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"... only in this case it is: "hopelessly dire scenarios require helplessly desperate solutions"... and you can quote me on that.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
The One Night Stand
It was Friday night and the weekly woes that had been overcome needed to be forgotten. A bar, that sanctuary from stress and thought, was in order. Numbers were dialed, suggestions were offered, conclusions thus made, and plans were ultimately established.The bar was selected and we marched en masse to the protected castle of liquor and beer. “ID please” said the looming tower of a man who guarded the gates, his face long and horslike. I wielded my wallet and produced my ID and was allowed to pass. The poignant smell of beer immediately filled my nostrils; the undecipherable chatter of conversations rattled freely off the walls, while glasses chinked together, and a live band played to an inattentive audience in the dimly lit, cozy and close quartered room—ah this was a bar!
I walked up to the decidedly attractive, rosy-cheeked bartender and pursing my lips firmly together, as if pulling back the bolt on a crossbow, released the word of my desire into her little question mark curled ear: [B]eer.
“What kind?” she replied rather bluntly, clearly failing to recognize that I wasn’t here to pleasure my palate with toothsome beers—I was here to get drunk!
“Whateva’s cheapest” I averred back to her.
She turned away from me and gripped the Moosehead stout with about the same lewd avidity as a hooker who grips a paying customer’s cock, professional and uninterested, and turned back to me and thrusted the golden gleaming glass of beer in front of me in exchange for a single sheet of paper which had colorful patterns and a handful of tens written on it. I raised the glass of beer in reverence to my lips and opened my mouth to let the golden stream slide joyously down my throat. “Ahhh” I murmured in utter satisfaction, followed by a burp and a hiccup. After some time passed my shoes came into view at the bottom of my glass, which meant another beer was in order, so I ordered another, and another, and another…until pretty soon my speech was becoming noticeably slurred, my footsteps uneasy, and the girls surrounding me unbearably attractive.
The ones closest to me were so tightly encircled with their backs to me that they may as well have been a horde of wilder beasts protecting a calf. And to make matters even worse I also noticed that they were speaking Quebecois…
“Bonzhur” I said in my thick vulgar Americanized accent, thus expressing the extent of words I knew in French “can I buy you gals a round of drinks?” They giggled at first, then exchanged more French words and giggles amongst themselves, and then the female closest to me finally addressed my inquiry and simply said “Oui.” I bought us a round and commenced in the standard ‘what to say amongst strangers’ conversation procedures, occasionally making jokes (which were either lost in translation or me+beer=not funny, since most did not produce laughter), but despite our linguistic shortcomings both they and I were too drunk to care what was being said. I knew, however, that I was going to start needing to strategically aim my words and actions if I wanted to ‘get-to-know’ one of these girls better. The girl in the rear of the group had let down her guard and was quickly flanked by some other stranger, who quickly started chatting her up. I had to advance quickly or else lose to the other guys who were hovering around trying to divide and conquer. At that moment the girl nearest me was shoved even closer as a guy butted between her and her friend to get a beer, a clever move, since he then capitalized on his preciously conquered territory by asking the girl he had just divided from the girl nearest me if she wanted a drink.
“What’s your name by the way” I inquired since the small talk had worn off.
“Celine” she responded in a beautiful feminine French accent.
Then I think I asked her if her last name was Dion (a tale to tell my friends), which in retrospect probably wasn’t as witty as it had seemed at the time, and she tried to teach me simple French phrases which I disastrously failed at, but she found laugh inspiring. Meanwhile I was keeping a trained eye on her friends who were still preoccupied with other boys, so I decided to ask Celine if she was hungry and wanted to get some ‘poutine’ (the key to every drunken Canadian girl’s heart). She said oui and so we departed.
The night was cold but the beer warmed our bodies and dulled our senses, so it was bearable. As we walked, stumbled, giggled, and gurgled, down the cracked and uneven sidewalk littered with fallen leaves which made a crisp crackle when trodden on, I knew that I had her, that she was mine to be had…she was my concubine, my pet, mon possession. I marveled at her long and savagely wild blonde hair, her soft ivory skin, and her eyes, those beautiful green eyes which twinkled with a curious innocence.
We inhaled the cup of poutine in our crazed hunger, scorching our tongues in the process. What a pair of kids we must have appeared to be. Shameful adults stripped of their social mannerisms and strictly adhered to behaviors of sobriety by the despotic and inescapable rule of beer. After we finished our artery clogging meal we departed once again, but this time it was her turn to move, to choose our next destination, and decide how the night would end. Would she let the lewd avidity of my bishop conquer the chastity of her queen, or would she send some pawn out, some excuse of having to wake up early in the morning, to block my bishop’s rapacious advance. She asked if I wanted to come back to her place. Her squares were left open, her Queen was checked, my bishop advancing. We climbed the stairs to her first floor apartment our thoughts muddled by beer and our bodies flooded with youthful aphrodisia. She fumbled around for her keys, opened the door to her apartment, and our lips soon met. Her lips were warm and wet and our slippery tongues rolled over one another, hers on top of mine, mine on top of hers, always unable to pin the other. Vraiment un adversaire formidable!
She pulled me towards her and slowly retreated backwards leading my steps, in this labial dance, towards her shadowy bed. The bishop got his queen.
When I awoke I could see the light of the rising sun elegantly tip-toeing across the room, slowly making its way towards the bed, then crawling up the covers and over us, until it illuminated the entire apartment. I turned and looked at my sleeping beauty, my reine conquise, and thought how funny it was that two complete strangers could be so blindly led by lust’s commanding hand to find themselves together the next morning in the same bed. How succinctly odd it feels to be a guest in a stranger’s bed! If only I could tip toe as quietly across the apartment as that sunlight, I thought to myself. I could make my escape without the slightest disturbance, without waking her up. I lay still, trapped like a soldier on a land mine, fearful to move, and stared listlessly up at the cream colored ceiling. The cold stranger sleeping next to me tugged on the blanket and rolled herself up into a warm cocoon. Her golden hair formed flowing streams in the wrinkled crevasses of her covers. Her breathing was quiet and heavy. I made my move. I slipped off the side of the bed. My feet made contact with the cold hardwood floor first and then I dragged the rest of my body slowly across the bed in the same fashion that one peels a band aid off of a healed wound. I found a scrap of paper and a purple inked pen and scribbled out the following note:
Celine,
last night was phenomenal. I didn’t want to wake you because you looked so peaceful and beautiful in your heavy sleep (and I don’t think I could have even if I tried because you ensconced yourself in your thick blanket!). I have to run to work, needless to say bathe and shave, so I can’t stay. Thank you for sharing your lovely bed with this unflattering stranger…perhaps we can do it again sometime. ; - )
Anyways enjoy the rest of your sleep!
Cordialement,
Adam
I laid the note on her pillow where my head had formerly been and then quickly turned and let myself out. The walk home felt shameful since one can always tell who had followed lust’s temptatious calling into the trap of spending the night at someone else’s place by the disgruntled, disheveled, and disconcerted look on the hung-over faces of fellow early morning passerbyers. Sometimes there’s even mutual nods of recognition and smirks when your eyes meet, a voiceless exchange that basically says “yeah…me too.”
After about twenty more minutes of walking I finally reached the front steps of my apartment building. The elevator courteously carried me up to my floor. I keyed myself in, slipped underneath the blanket of my bed, and murmured c’est la vie before permitting gravity to close the heavy curtains of my eyelids and sleep, that mysterious spell, take the reigns of my thought.
Fast asleep and dreaming, I slept through the day, and awoke to the setting evening sun. I watched as the amber sunlight slowly seeped away, a receding tide on a sloped shoreline, taking with it all of the colors of the room. After a couple of minutes had passed by I decided it was time to get up and face the night.
My pieces had been moved back to their original squares and the game...was about to begin againe.
“What kind?” she replied rather bluntly, clearly failing to recognize that I wasn’t here to pleasure my palate with toothsome beers—I was here to get drunk!
“Whateva’s cheapest” I averred back to her.
She turned away from me and gripped the Moosehead stout with about the same lewd avidity as a hooker who grips a paying customer’s cock, professional and uninterested, and turned back to me and thrusted the golden gleaming glass of beer in front of me in exchange for a single sheet of paper which had colorful patterns and a handful of tens written on it. I raised the glass of beer in reverence to my lips and opened my mouth to let the golden stream slide joyously down my throat. “Ahhh” I murmured in utter satisfaction, followed by a burp and a hiccup. After some time passed my shoes came into view at the bottom of my glass, which meant another beer was in order, so I ordered another, and another, and another…until pretty soon my speech was becoming noticeably slurred, my footsteps uneasy, and the girls surrounding me unbearably attractive.
The ones closest to me were so tightly encircled with their backs to me that they may as well have been a horde of wilder beasts protecting a calf. And to make matters even worse I also noticed that they were speaking Quebecois…
“Bonzhur” I said in my thick vulgar Americanized accent, thus expressing the extent of words I knew in French “can I buy you gals a round of drinks?” They giggled at first, then exchanged more French words and giggles amongst themselves, and then the female closest to me finally addressed my inquiry and simply said “Oui.” I bought us a round and commenced in the standard ‘what to say amongst strangers’ conversation procedures, occasionally making jokes (which were either lost in translation or me+beer=not funny, since most did not produce laughter), but despite our linguistic shortcomings both they and I were too drunk to care what was being said. I knew, however, that I was going to start needing to strategically aim my words and actions if I wanted to ‘get-to-know’ one of these girls better. The girl in the rear of the group had let down her guard and was quickly flanked by some other stranger, who quickly started chatting her up. I had to advance quickly or else lose to the other guys who were hovering around trying to divide and conquer. At that moment the girl nearest me was shoved even closer as a guy butted between her and her friend to get a beer, a clever move, since he then capitalized on his preciously conquered territory by asking the girl he had just divided from the girl nearest me if she wanted a drink.
“What’s your name by the way” I inquired since the small talk had worn off.
“Celine” she responded in a beautiful feminine French accent.
Then I think I asked her if her last name was Dion (a tale to tell my friends), which in retrospect probably wasn’t as witty as it had seemed at the time, and she tried to teach me simple French phrases which I disastrously failed at, but she found laugh inspiring. Meanwhile I was keeping a trained eye on her friends who were still preoccupied with other boys, so I decided to ask Celine if she was hungry and wanted to get some ‘poutine’ (the key to every drunken Canadian girl’s heart). She said oui and so we departed.
The night was cold but the beer warmed our bodies and dulled our senses, so it was bearable. As we walked, stumbled, giggled, and gurgled, down the cracked and uneven sidewalk littered with fallen leaves which made a crisp crackle when trodden on, I knew that I had her, that she was mine to be had…she was my concubine, my pet, mon possession. I marveled at her long and savagely wild blonde hair, her soft ivory skin, and her eyes, those beautiful green eyes which twinkled with a curious innocence.
We inhaled the cup of poutine in our crazed hunger, scorching our tongues in the process. What a pair of kids we must have appeared to be. Shameful adults stripped of their social mannerisms and strictly adhered to behaviors of sobriety by the despotic and inescapable rule of beer. After we finished our artery clogging meal we departed once again, but this time it was her turn to move, to choose our next destination, and decide how the night would end. Would she let the lewd avidity of my bishop conquer the chastity of her queen, or would she send some pawn out, some excuse of having to wake up early in the morning, to block my bishop’s rapacious advance. She asked if I wanted to come back to her place. Her squares were left open, her Queen was checked, my bishop advancing. We climbed the stairs to her first floor apartment our thoughts muddled by beer and our bodies flooded with youthful aphrodisia. She fumbled around for her keys, opened the door to her apartment, and our lips soon met. Her lips were warm and wet and our slippery tongues rolled over one another, hers on top of mine, mine on top of hers, always unable to pin the other. Vraiment un adversaire formidable!
She pulled me towards her and slowly retreated backwards leading my steps, in this labial dance, towards her shadowy bed. The bishop got his queen.
When I awoke I could see the light of the rising sun elegantly tip-toeing across the room, slowly making its way towards the bed, then crawling up the covers and over us, until it illuminated the entire apartment. I turned and looked at my sleeping beauty, my reine conquise, and thought how funny it was that two complete strangers could be so blindly led by lust’s commanding hand to find themselves together the next morning in the same bed. How succinctly odd it feels to be a guest in a stranger’s bed! If only I could tip toe as quietly across the apartment as that sunlight, I thought to myself. I could make my escape without the slightest disturbance, without waking her up. I lay still, trapped like a soldier on a land mine, fearful to move, and stared listlessly up at the cream colored ceiling. The cold stranger sleeping next to me tugged on the blanket and rolled herself up into a warm cocoon. Her golden hair formed flowing streams in the wrinkled crevasses of her covers. Her breathing was quiet and heavy. I made my move. I slipped off the side of the bed. My feet made contact with the cold hardwood floor first and then I dragged the rest of my body slowly across the bed in the same fashion that one peels a band aid off of a healed wound. I found a scrap of paper and a purple inked pen and scribbled out the following note:
Celine,
last night was phenomenal. I didn’t want to wake you because you looked so peaceful and beautiful in your heavy sleep (and I don’t think I could have even if I tried because you ensconced yourself in your thick blanket!). I have to run to work, needless to say bathe and shave, so I can’t stay. Thank you for sharing your lovely bed with this unflattering stranger…perhaps we can do it again sometime. ; - )
Anyways enjoy the rest of your sleep!
Cordialement,
Adam
I laid the note on her pillow where my head had formerly been and then quickly turned and let myself out. The walk home felt shameful since one can always tell who had followed lust’s temptatious calling into the trap of spending the night at someone else’s place by the disgruntled, disheveled, and disconcerted look on the hung-over faces of fellow early morning passerbyers. Sometimes there’s even mutual nods of recognition and smirks when your eyes meet, a voiceless exchange that basically says “yeah…me too.”
After about twenty more minutes of walking I finally reached the front steps of my apartment building. The elevator courteously carried me up to my floor. I keyed myself in, slipped underneath the blanket of my bed, and murmured c’est la vie before permitting gravity to close the heavy curtains of my eyelids and sleep, that mysterious spell, take the reigns of my thought.
Fast asleep and dreaming, I slept through the day, and awoke to the setting evening sun. I watched as the amber sunlight slowly seeped away, a receding tide on a sloped shoreline, taking with it all of the colors of the room. After a couple of minutes had passed by I decided it was time to get up and face the night.
My pieces had been moved back to their original squares and the game...was about to begin againe.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Students Attend Class in Cave
This made me laugh today. I thought perhaps they were taking Plato's Cave analogy a little too literally...Are they let out of the cave and into the light when they graduate?
"A general view shows the Dongzhong (literally meaning "in cave") primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China's Guizhou province, November 14, 2007. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hanger-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shift. "
"A general view shows the Dongzhong (literally meaning "in cave") primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China's Guizhou province, November 14, 2007. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hanger-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shift. "
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Questioning Relativism
It's awful stories like this that make me seriously question, as an anthropologist, whether cultural relativism is something that should restrain us from interventionism.
"A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail, a newspaper reported on Thursday.
"A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail, a newspaper reported on Thursday.
The 19-year-old woman -- whose six armed attackers have been sentenced to jail terms -- was initially ordered to undergo 90 lashes for "being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape
But in a new verdict issued after Saudi Arabia's Higher Judicial Council ordered a retrial, the court in the eastern town of Al-Qatif more than doubled the number of lashes to 200."
While our values are undeniably relative to our cultural heritage, I do not think that that realization in and of itself discredits the universal validity or social applicability of those values' aims. Simply because individual rights is considered to be a Western value, to me, does not mean that it is something corrupt and only applicable to Western cultures...the west just happened to have the right historical context to be one of the first 'cultures' to uncover, outline, and legalize the realization that equality and individual rights is something worth while and worth pursuing, something that protects all humans from the intra-species hatred, injustice, and inequality, that has been the common theme throughout the history of mankind.
This is what the human rights movement is trying to and hopefully will change. And all this talk of cultural relatives, as if they only apply to the cultures in which they are found, is detrimental to the progressive movement of universal human rights.
But thats just my opinion. And I'm pretty sure it would be shunned by the majority in the anthropology community.
*Update: Just noticed that Cosmic Variance has a post on this same story, but adds another story showing that gays seem to have the same lashing fate in Saudi Arabia too.
About 50 people picketed Saudi Arabia’s embassy in London on Oct. 19 in protest against the nation’s reported floggings and executions of gay men.
On Oct. 2, two Saudi men convicted of sodomy in the city of Al Bahah received the first of their 7,000 lashes in punishment, the Okaz daily newspaper reported. The whippings took place in public, the report said.
But I am not just trying to single out Saudi Arabia here. These are just two particular examples of a more common human behavior of targeted group hatred towards other group differences which, unfortunately, seems to be universal.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
The Swarm Mentality
I just noticed that Carl Zimmer has a very interesting article (found here) in the NYtimes Science section on the study of swarms, schools, gaggles, and flocks.Snip-bit:
By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.
Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals
One of my favorite spectacles of nature, which I witnessed once while in England, is the majestically mesmerizing sight of starlings in flock. (I usually use them as a metaphor when trying to explain/convince people that individual parts, collectively, can create extroadinarily complex looking wholes)
Here's a video on youtube of starlings in flight (which, as Dave Barry would say, would be a great name for a rock band). Enjoy:
United (with Xenophobia) We Stand
Tartarize has a good post up on his blog commenting on (what I thought was) a very interesting article recently published in SciMag: The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War.
I highly recommend reading the article, however if you are pressed for time/don't have a subscription Tartarize has a pretty good--more laymen's argot/pragmatic--translation of what the article is basically saying:
"promoting a sort of tribalism and intergroup warfare, rejection, fear, and non-cooperation between the groups, the intragroup altruism becomes much more likely to be returned to the benefit of everybody (within the group). If you can isolate your group with respect to other groups, you both need to work together in order to succeed in these conflicts and can work together due to the much greater assurance that your gesture will be reciprocated...[sic]From a state of nature, where the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short to a more peaceful altruistic world--the best path is via a small warring group where everyday is the day after 9/11. Where everybody is xenophobic and altruistic. Where you love your neighbor as yourself, but take slaves "of the strangers that do sojourn among you."
The best way to build up some trust within a group larger than your family is by forming a group, go around murdering other people, enslaving them and insuring xenophobia. This, oddly, leads to altruism. You keep people out and help people in, and can succeed in tough times and help in good times, and your entire group will be the better for it."
Though this trend is sad and unfortunate, if you look at it amorally it appears, undoubtedly, to be the very mechanism in history that has slowly united us together into everlarger groups.
Which is why I'm (perhaps a little naively) optimistic about the future. I feel that as our enemies turn into frenemies, and our frenemies into friends, we have been slowly inching towards the end of war. Globalisation (with its economic incentive for peace) has forced us to reconcile our differences and we are slowly realizing that working together is undeniably the most optimum pursuit for everybody.
Which leads us to my subscription to the utopian dream of One. I would argue (somewhat confidently) that our historical directional arrow appears to be pointing this way. Whether or not, in the end, it will be a mutually respecting consensus of states who give fair and equal concern and respect to their citizens or a hegemonic ruling of one state over the rest, or worse the failure of either resulting in the extinction of our species and even planet via nuclear weapons, I have no clue, but I can only hope for the former, and end with the annoyingly true adage: "only time will tell."
I highly recommend reading the article, however if you are pressed for time/don't have a subscription Tartarize has a pretty good--more laymen's argot/pragmatic--translation of what the article is basically saying:
"promoting a sort of tribalism and intergroup warfare, rejection, fear, and non-cooperation between the groups, the intragroup altruism becomes much more likely to be returned to the benefit of everybody (within the group). If you can isolate your group with respect to other groups, you both need to work together in order to succeed in these conflicts and can work together due to the much greater assurance that your gesture will be reciprocated...[sic]From a state of nature, where the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short to a more peaceful altruistic world--the best path is via a small warring group where everyday is the day after 9/11. Where everybody is xenophobic and altruistic. Where you love your neighbor as yourself, but take slaves "of the strangers that do sojourn among you."
The best way to build up some trust within a group larger than your family is by forming a group, go around murdering other people, enslaving them and insuring xenophobia. This, oddly, leads to altruism. You keep people out and help people in, and can succeed in tough times and help in good times, and your entire group will be the better for it."
Though this trend is sad and unfortunate, if you look at it amorally it appears, undoubtedly, to be the very mechanism in history that has slowly united us together into everlarger groups.
Which is why I'm (perhaps a little naively) optimistic about the future. I feel that as our enemies turn into frenemies, and our frenemies into friends, we have been slowly inching towards the end of war. Globalisation (with its economic incentive for peace) has forced us to reconcile our differences and we are slowly realizing that working together is undeniably the most optimum pursuit for everybody.
Which leads us to my subscription to the utopian dream of One. I would argue (somewhat confidently) that our historical directional arrow appears to be pointing this way. Whether or not, in the end, it will be a mutually respecting consensus of states who give fair and equal concern and respect to their citizens or a hegemonic ruling of one state over the rest, or worse the failure of either resulting in the extinction of our species and even planet via nuclear weapons, I have no clue, but I can only hope for the former, and end with the annoyingly true adage: "only time will tell."
Monday, November 12, 2007
Literary Device That Donates Rice!
So I recently came across this cool site which generates a word and then offers four associative/defining words that relate to the original and you have to guess (unless of course you know, in which case you select) which one is correct. According to the website for each word you get right 10 grains of rice will be donated to the U.N.
I managed to reach Vocab level 40 with a donation of 300 grains of rice. I'm not sure what the highest level is, but getting to 40 was rather challenging, and this is coming from me, Mr. word cognoscenti. ; - )
Anyways post your highest scores in the comment's section below. (Not that we should only play to earn the title of Dr. word cognoscenti, forgetting of course the greater cause: charity). I'm going to play a little more after I work on my paper for a while, so I'll see if I can beat my own record.
I managed to reach Vocab level 40 with a donation of 300 grains of rice. I'm not sure what the highest level is, but getting to 40 was rather challenging, and this is coming from me, Mr. word cognoscenti. ; - )Anyways post your highest scores in the comment's section below. (Not that we should only play to earn the title of Dr. word cognoscenti, forgetting of course the greater cause: charity). I'm going to play a little more after I work on my paper for a while, so I'll see if I can beat my own record.
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