It’s that time of week again when I have to prune tabs, and some of them even make it into blots. Notably, the first [Link] relates some work at Nagoya U on how Tellus was hit by a radiation burst sometime about 774-775 CE. The burst is evidenced by increases in radioactive carbon.
What makes this rather attention gathering is that apparently no note of this was made and it had no notable effect on human attention. Take that statement with a great dollop of uncertainty. I rolled my Aerion chair (with the lumbar bar) back to the reference bookcase behind my computer station and consulted a couple of those historical time line tomes. No, not the FaceScroll time line, a real time line done by educated (my assessment) folks. The years 774-775 were in the high middle ages, back when Europe was sorta coming back together, Charles the Big and all that, and the time lines, two of them, don’t mention anything of sufficient intellectual mass happening in either year.
Now the only thing that folks might see with visual sensors (eyes) could be exceptional auroras or any mutational effect. But no note made of in these top level summaries. I suspect Norman Cantor would know but I have no contact with him. Anyway, perhaps this blast had some effect of restoring sanity (?) in the dark ages?
The second piece comes out of Wired and its primary characteristic s just how poorly such things are discussed in Wired. [Link] The article supposedly deals with some wresearch on human social interaction but the citing is so bad it seems questionable. Hmmmm, my Wired subscription is up for renewal. Should I save a few bucks?
Anyway, the only blatantly good part was a quote,
“In particular, we find that the reported average closeness to all friends decreases as the number of one’s friends increases,”
which sez that your affection for friends is a personal constant or conserved quantity. This means that the more friends (not the FaceScroll type, the kind you see face-to-face and share physical space with) you have, the less you care about each one.
This also expounds an interesting difference between extroverts and introverts. Since extroverts have considerably more friends than introverts, in the mean, this means that either extroverts have a lot more affection than introverts or they are a lot more shallow than introverts. Somehow the latter makes more sense, given that extroverts tend to be bogs.
Lets us think about that as we rush off to the mouse maze group grope that is evangelical christianist services, especially here in the Old Confederacy.
