Stumbled onto this utterly stunning gallery of work by Shiny Binary, very digital it is … and apparently he’s quite self taught, a physicist by education. This kind of digital hyperwork isn’t really my cup of tea, I prefer pens and papers myself, but I do wish I knew how to make stuff like this.
As a student of anthropology I’m in a strange position. I’m not altogether thrilled by different cultures, by unusual customs, by the exotic. Often I find it silly and foolish. That’s not to say I’m (that) ethnocentric. I find numerous customs of my own culture silly and foolish (to say the least). I share the views and goals of the Enlightenment, to an extent, in that I believe that reason and debate can lead to … a better life and world, progress, to use a dirty word … whereas clinging to tradition and appealing to authority are forces of obscurantism and obfuscation, resulting in conflict and worse lives for the majority of people.
This is unusual, because the stereotypical anthropologist would be thrilled by diversity and loudly expound cultural relativism and how every unique culture should be preserved. I disagree. Cultural relativism shouldn’t be an excuse to suspend moral judgement … I often and happily judge things, often my views may be skewed, but I reserve the right to judge. Where I agree with cultural relativism is that a position of cultural power and superiority, lets call it hegemony, doesn’t somehow confer the right to intervene in other cultures (well, except in exceptional cases like genocide and naked agression). I wouldn’t call for the wholesale eradication of minority cultures. I wouldn’t fight for global monocultures or oligocultures on the basis of some kind of arguments of economic efficiency. Likewise, the development of sophisticated computer systems is making arguments for monetary union less pressing, more a question of political and bureaucratic control, than a question of efficiency.
In a funny way, agricultural analogies sneak back into culture. Just as planting only one kind of crop in a large field makes it more susceptible to pests, so making cultures incredibly homogenous may make them more susceptible to different pests - bad ideas, bad memes, external conflict, stagnation - and weaker in the long run. In this sense European goals, attempts to weld together a single European culture through monetary union, bureaucratic hypercontrol, economic, banking, transport and logistics unions, and so forth, is quite wrong headed. I get the feeling that the EU has a confused view, where it considers culture as something seen in museums and interesting folk dances, a kind of Germanic volkskunde approach, where culture and economy are two different and isolated systems.
This is silly and foolish. It makes little sense to talk of economic basis and cultural superstructures. Economics and politics are defining elements of culture, and if we exclude them from the area of reasoned, rational political debate, we are essentially excluding a vast element of our lives from any kind of … well … popular control. We have an EU that is working hard to create a monoculture in the most important area, people’s well being and people’s political cultures. I wonder if creating a hyperbureaucratic culture of control, timidity and corporativity is conductive to human flourishing, to evolution and change. I think it is not. My contacts with bureaucracies are fortunately limited, but even my limited contact has made me consider them mechanistic and profoundly inhuman. Something I would gladly give over to machine overlords - I’d prefer a robotic bureaucrat to a human acting like a robotic bureaucrat any day.
And where does that leave our monoculture? Well, look at potatoes and Ireland, I say. Making everything too similar to everything else is just as bad as preserving differences for their own sake*.
Sometimes a potato is just a potato. Sometimes it isn’t.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tractors_in_Potato_Field.jpg
*something many traditionalists and ethnologists apparently wish to do. Down with my language, I say, let them speak Inglish!
That’s right. Two million two hundred thousand percent. The current annual inflation rate in Zimbabwe. That’s around 6,000.00% per day. That’s not even an economy anymore, it’s a joke. Why even bother calculating inflation in such a situation? It’s obvious sand-in-yer-eyes to hide the nonexistence of anything resembling … ahem … a functioning economy. Yet another glorious day for Africa statehood and politics.
Lamarck died in Paris on December 18, 1829.[26] When he died, his family were so poor they had to apply to the Academie for financial assistance. Lamarck’s books and the contents of his home were sold at auction, and he was buried in a temporary lime-pit.
from le Wiki. I’ve read so many stories like this … it makes me wonder if trying to discover new things is even worth it! 
… ah, to forsake the comforts of the good life in exchange for knowledge, facts … and a theory that a century later becomes synonimous with silliness and just plain being-wrongness. Poor JB Lamarck.
He was still wrong. Wrong and poor.
This is the one.
I’m getting my sheepish business cards done here! 
At www.moo.com. I’ll let you know how I find their service!
Swiss researchers have found that sleep improves memory. They just don’t know how much, or exactly how, or exactly when, or exactly why. I mean, that’s the gist of what I got from this article:
If you’ve said you’re going to ’sleep on it’ in regards to a difficult decision, you know it became a cliche’ for a reason - it often works. Swiss scientists have discovered that sleep can have lasting consequences on brain function by stimulating new brain connections that strengthen the learning processes and directly influence our actions.
and also …
Therefore, a role of sleep in strengthening learning-related changes in the adult human brain helps fine-tune the pathways in the nervous system that govern our actions when we are awake. However, the specific period of sleep and how long sleep should last to benefit cognition is still unknown.
… this is precisely the kind of article that I find a bit silly and quite uninteresting. The title starts out sounding like they’ve actually discovered something basic, but the article pans out into just a bit of blather about how a group of psychologists have ‘discovered’ that there actually is a connection somewhere that everybody has already been convinced a connection exists. Then you expect the article to at least provide some new details, but no. The only thing they mention is that ‘now we know that we can use brain imaging to study neuron formation after sleep’. Well, yes. You knew you could do that already.
Basically this is a non-article in my opinion. It tells nothing new, it opens no new pathways of research … I mean, sleep … I’m pretty sure that everybody has experienced differences in mental clarity depending on whether you had a full night’s sleep or not, and probably everybody has also noticed that you remember things better if you slept well than if you spent the night baying at the moon.
So remember boys and girls … status reports may be fun, but they may well not be news.
This article in Scientific American goes a long way to convincing me to take a trip: Long Trip: Magic Mushrooms’ Transcendent Effect Lingers. It’s this kind of article that makes you wonder if it’s utterly wise to go all repressive and crack down on individual choice and liberties:
“Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives,” comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who led the research. “It’s one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It’s another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There’s something about the saliency of these experiences that’s stunning.”
That’s folks looking back after trying Mushrooms and Peyote relatives … sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Bet Castaneda would have something to say on the topic. But he’s dead. Oh, well …
Is happiness out of a mushroom any less valid than happiness out of a pill? Why is prozac okay, even for kids, but psychadelic drugs aren’t? Why is alcohol ok? Hell, why must somebody even go around legislating what people do in their own time with their own minds?
Oh, right, I forgot. Somebody wants to get money and taxes out of people. That’s why they mustn’t find happiness in nonmaterial things, they have to buy it in shops. Right, silly me.
I’ve stumbled across a fascinating artist called Scott Wade who paints in dust. On car windows. And he really paints, well, maybe the term should be anti-paints, as the technique requires that he removes layers of dust to create detailed works of art, reproductions and so forth.
I think it’s a wonderful statement on the impermanence of art commenting on the impermanence of the human condition. Works that last only so long, before disappearing with the rain. Check out his gallery.
One of the things that made me decide to study anthropology was the story of humanity. Of humanity’s evolution and journey from just another ape, to ape that, through fortune, luck and a pinch of salt became the biggest darned monkey on this planet. The virus of Gaia, the swarm of Earth, the wannabe rulers of Evolution.*
This article on the Migration History of Humans brings it right back, so I’m sharing it with you. It’s a nice intro into the glimpses we have of how it all begane. The first successful trek out of Afrika, the settlement of the coast of the Indian ocean, the discovery of Australia - back when it really was a discovery for Homo sapiens - the Conquest of Europe and the Fall of the Neanderthals, the New World and so forth …
Come one, come all, come read the wondrous story of Wo-Man and He-Man … :). Here’s a little sampler:
Genetic literacy will let a term like “Asian” or “Chinese” be replaced by more subtle classifications based on the differences in ancestral genetic makeup found in recent genome-wide scans, such as the distinction between China’s southern and northern Han groups. “There is no race,” Quintana-Murci says. “What we see [from the standpoint of genetics] is geographical gradients. There are no sharp differences between Europeans and Asians. From Ireland to Japan, there is no sharp boundary where something has changed completely.”
On a related note, it’s one week to the exam on the history of Anthropology, which is not much, considering I’m only just falling back into the study study study routine, but it’ll have to do. Time to get somewhere with this darned MiSSusc.
*because Creation isn’t true.
I walked a bit to see the sea, oh sea. I rode an iron pony on wheels of rubber to sea, to sea, oh, shining sea. And the many-headed snake of tourism did tour and wind and wend and woul towards the sea, oh sea. Chug-chug slow it slithed and slided, the sea, ah, we monoxide for the. Burn, burn little fossil, that we may see the sea, your olden home, the sea.
Yea, I went to the seaside this weekend. And it was good. And sea urchins speared not my feet and the sunshine did not mar my sensitive epidermis. I should clamber about and find a photo or something …
P.S. - the yeasts did not become intelligent and failed to develop countermeasures to my flushing them down the toilet.