Strange Condensation
Today seems to be a day for strangeness in the feeds. First, [Link] there is news that we – Tellus, that is – were barely (!) missed yesterday by a good sized piece of space mass. Its size is being compared to the Tunguska meteorite.
What is the strangeness is that there was nothing I noticed on the feeds prior. S0 the question arises is whether this one crept up on folks and they didn’t know it was coming – not a low probability given our inadequacy f sensors for this purpose – or it was known to be coming so close that the news was suppressed to avoid panic and chaos. And if the latter, who made the suppression decision? On first guess it sounds a lot like the mental processes of a politician. Of course it is fashionable these days for academics to be liberal social engineer aristocrats so there is an ambiguity.
If there was any suppression of the event? After all, “never ascribe to greed that which can be explained by stupidity”, in this case, the stupidity of what we spend public monies on.
Ah, but on a more joyful note – as if not having half of your continent whacked and several millions (at least) discorporated, and the recession really turned into a depression, in several meanings of the word – I find some research by a librarian at the campus of the Boneyard on why geeks are popular but nerds aren’t. [Link] They have some problems with their distinctions between geeks and nerds, which is expected given the difficulties of observation and agreement, but the rationale seems to come down to our present age of prideful ignorance. Evidently if you have to know something to be employed/productive/whatever, then it is better to seem an unsuccessful geek than a blatant nerd. This, of course, raises the question of how many nerds are masquerading as geeks?
And lastly, we have a lovely article [Link] talking about what is described as the “worst science article ever”, in the U. K. Telegraph. Seems that there is some representation of women (female homo sapiens) acquiring shopping behavior from neandertalensis. This is a wonderful validation of our thesis that science journalists are worse than nothing at all and commonly deliberately obnoxious as well as steamroller flat wrong.
As we well recognize, gender differentiation of roles was less pronounced in neandertalensis than in sapiens. Hence shopping behavior would have to be rather fundamental to derive from neandertalensis, even assuming that we (sapiens) were derived from neandertalensis, which the present view is not.
What seems to be commonly recognized is that homo sapiens had some fairly rigid gender differentiation of role back when we were hunter-gatherers and this persisted over a long enough period for evolutionary selection to occur. As a result today, female and male homo sapiens, in the means at least, have shopping behaviors that reflect that role differentiation. But to besmear women by calling them out and not men is one sided, and depraved. After all, both behaviors made rather good sense even in our present society. And well they better since we can’t do much about them.
