Only Mixtures Are Stable?

New week, at least in the frame or measure that the week starts on Monday. I suppose that is a hold over from religionist times – the dark ages – into the industrial revolution and the generality of not working in the home. The podcast this morning, as is usual on mundane day, was an episode of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas”, dealing with the concept/actuality of secularism. It’s a series and the bits today were rather primarily concerned with trying to say that religionism and secularity are not orthogonal. Of course these are not scientists speaking and even if they were they would edit their vocabulary usage to accommodate bogs.

But while motoring back to Castellum SCP, I came to reflect that the reason they aren’t independent is because humans are rule breakers/avoiders/deniers. One of my pet peeves is people who pull up past the safety line at intersections. That’s a breaking of the rules expressed by law, hence somewhat arbitrary and self-serving of the organization at the expense of its members. This violation is widely recommended as a safety trade-off since it permits one abetter density of lines-of-sight. It also makes it difficult for anyone turning left at the intersection to avoid striking the motorcar pulled out.

This is the basic nature of humans, I fear. Breaking rules for their own benefit, rarely for anyone else’s. And the purpose of religion, in addition to “explaining” things people are too lazy to investigate rationally, is to limit this rule breaking for self’s sake. Sadly, the two aspects seem to get intermixed to the detriment of the good.

Simply put, it seems that humans are too self-interested, expect perhaps for that wee bit of biological programming that makes them sacrifice for offspring, a matter hated by almost all organized religions, to permit a rational social organization. Reason is not enough, emotion and endocrine secretions are necessary to bind society.

This all sounds like another monologue about bogs versus nerds, but this is coming from a different direction. Yes, it does lead to the distinction among the bogs and geeks and nerds, but it does not derive from that distinction. What it comes down to is that the large fraction of humans are going to be bogs and any society is going to have to be largely irrational. It’s somewhat of a third law of thermodynamics for humans – you can’t get out of the game. Or otherwise, society has to have all three types of folks to work.

So maybe we can eventually turn all this extrovertism around and get some rationality back?

humans, behavior, religion, rationality

Good Sex?

Yesterday was not the usual. And yes, I seem to have survived the medical procedures, at least thus far. Not sure my mental faculties are all that I should like them to be, but the aftereffects thus far are more the result of medications than procedure.

This leads me to contemplate an article [Link] I found about work from U Arizona. This work indicates that the success of modern homo sapiens is largely the result of miscegenation with other species of humans. And, yes, I know I have commented on this numerous times previously.

Anyway, what makes this cognitively attractive is not that it occurred, such is a matter of blatancy given recent efforts in genome mapping, but rather how it came about. The recorded history of humanity since around 500 BCE is replete with all sorts of proscription of miscegenation. In that paradigm, miscegenation is not reproductive activity between species, but between geographic and ethnic groups. When I was a bairn growing up in the old confederacy pink humans were not supposed to have reproductive relations with other shades of humans, or even with pink humans who were not denizens of the old confederacy.

That taboo is somewhat relaxed these days although not actually eradicated, hence the question of how did those ancient humans have the smarts to reproduce with different humans? Could it be that these attitudes towards miscegenation are an artifact of age and that it has only been since the invention of writing and civilization and such that enough people have lived long enough for these attitudes to emerge?

humans, behavior, anthropology, interreeding

Against Stupidity

Saturn’s day and the early summer has been bashed with a frost. Huzzah. But it is also time to begin ‘hawg’in tabs and so I may as well assay that.

First, courtesy of Michigan State U, [Link] p, li { white-space: pre-wrap; } I find official (academic) confirmation that the science teachers in our public shules are incompetent. This is not news but it is, as said, official confirmation. Courtesy of Every Child Left Behind and teach-to-the-test, science has effectively been dropped from the curriculum in public shules in Amerika. Add to that the increasing number of states that mandate the teaching of superstition, mysticism, and outright inaccuracy as science. But more critically, people with education degrees are not competently knowledgeable to teach science, especially in high shule. And teacher workshops are not going to fix that.

 

Next, while we’re on malfeasance around science, I run across an article [Link] about a corporation that has set itself up to sell names of astronomical entities in defiance – blatant and illegal – of the IAU. And the horrible thing is that here in CORPORATE AMERIKA they will likely get away with it instead of getting the firing party they deserve.

And speaking of science that won’t get taught in whack job states that mandate mysticism and superstition instruction, I see [Link] indications that the development of the hand axe 1.7 MYA generated evolutionary selection that led to the hand and wrists of modern humans. I shan’t comment about the effect hand axes would have in improving science education if used properly.

In a related matter, [Link] boffins have determined that Australopithecus Sediba was pigeon toed and could not run. This rather reminds me of some overweight girls I knew in UG shule. They all belonged to the same sorority which evidently specialized in chubby girls. They did however, have much more attractive skeletons than Australopithecus Sediba.

FD SCP is off playing mother/grandmother so I am lacking adult supervision again this morning. Since it is Saturn’s day that means I get to play with the clothes washing appliances. Not as much fun as the plasma cannon but good sources of imagination if one stares through the windows long enough.

science, academia, teachers, humans, stupidity

Morning Noddings

Once more to Freya’s day. Last night was foretold by the weather beavers to be one of sound and fury; I slept through it. Once more they seem to have fallen into the trap of projecting too strongly and damaging their trustability. At least in by yard there are no trees down nor houses demolished nor corpses littering the sward.

I recognize that these are all things to be thankful for but are they gifts or just events? I lean towards the latter since we have developed scant – and no effective – technology to modify weather. We do modify it by our presence but that is neither technology nor gift, just human perversion and pollution.

Eck, Eck! An Agnewism! Orders of magnitude worse than last nights weather.

I suppose something not happening can be considered a gift from deity other than it fails miserable under test and logic. The best it can be is amusing that someone can cast the deity as insecure. Although the idea of that is rather frightening, taking us back to the nasty old days of multiple deities acting with all the human weaknesses and perversions magnified.

Still, it was comforting this morning to sleep in a bit with the gentle sound of rain. Why do we have such emotional engagement with weather that shouts of instinct?  Whence commeth such?

weather, religion, humans, behavior

Humans Subtracted

Huzzah! Another week out survived and back to gym this morning. And happily absent of the usual density of educationalists, even the regulars who come when shule is desessioned. So the only mar in the effort was the presence of a single, vaguely threatening educationalist with hand weights straddling the indoor track. Still enough to evoke a bit of extra pulse so that it took me longer to reach the desired antecedent pace. But at least I could reach it. When the educationalist weight bouncers – the ones who are loud and criminal in the speed they drive their vehicles – are present that regression is often impossible so dense is the aura of harassment.

The podcast episode today was one of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas”, this one dealing with imagination. Overall it was a rather dragging piece since almost all of the creativity was idealized as coming from the “artistic”, mostly theater people. Since my taste for theater is more along the lines of Bullwinkle and Wile Coyote, modern theater almost always leaves me somewhere between underwhelmed and retching. One of the longest decades of my life was an evening a college girlfriend subjected me to an Ionesco play. All I can recall today is its resemblance to a sinus headache.

Not that I can say much of anything good about today’s television  or movies. John Carter was a travesty of the novel, for which I rationalize the movie’s failure, and the comedy Big Bang Theory that is a travesty of physics and physicists. Although it does have its good moments, but they are not as endurable in repetition as the humor of the Moose and Coyote. Also, I can rationalize that if they portrayed physics and physicists accurately there would be no audience – humor lies in exaggeration and insult, no matter what the social engineering liberals may bemoan.

On which note of human nature, I did find something useful in the discussion in the podcast. The tiny nuggets of pony, as it were. The point was made, with altogether too much attention paid that poetic whack Blake, that we all see reality differently, couched in the context of what we know and even if uneducated have years of sensory knowledge to shape us. Still, I was disappointed in their skirting of the individuality, and non-communicability. of knowledge. To the thinking nerd, individuality is the norm, collectivity is the strange.

But what struck me in this is another dimension of the difference between bog and nerd. The metaphor of this is imagining some process. The example given was a human planning the route to execute a task/chore list. I recognized this immediately since FD SCP and I have to discuss this every time we sally forth to run errands.

This is also an amazing complete characterization of the reality of bogs. Much of that reality is defined by what they do and have to do with being done to them entering only rarely and usually via other people. And that is their view of the structure of reality, somewhat akin to seeing the surfaces in the room around one without seeing what lies below and behind, at greater and lower levels.

It is not that nerds do not see this level, although they do usually see it less well or vividly than bogs, but that they see other levels as well. In a sense, it is akin to being color blind although that is a very strained metaphor. Bogs see their reality of human interactions almost exclusively while nerds also see some aspect of what is there when the humans are subtracted.

Selah. Enough pandering.

humans, behavior, nerds, reality, imagination

Daylight Savings Browser

Reason has prevailed! I brought up Chrome and reminded myself of how the blog editor doesn’t check spelling and how Sterci the Ubernote implementation is, and then I did the intelligent, rational thing.

I replaced FireFox 20 with FireFox 19. Now everything works the way I want it to. I may have to null out any FireFox updates but for now that is a scant price to pay. Actually, I will use my other deskbox – the one running Xubuntu – that I don’t use for saving articles and generating blots and such as a testing environment and once there is a version of FF that works – in my metrics – I will update.

My thanks to this blog [Link] for the how-to. Now that I have Ubernote back I can preserve the information elsewhere as insurance.

And while my wrath against Mozilla is not damped yet, I can begin to expend attention span elsewhere with some voluntary control so I note this cartoon: [Link]

I also have to admit that I do not wear an analog display watch. I am rather fond of digitals. In fact, my primary watch is an ORF watch made by FreeStyle – who until this instant thought they were making cool watches for younglings -  that has the time – in 24 hour format, naturally, so I can tell night from day – the DOW, and the date so that, as I keep telling my colleagues, I can know WHEN I am. It also has a light so I can check when abed without turning over and trying to find the bedside clock, whose alarm has been used once since I retired. And then never got to sound before I squelched it.

I have noted that many GEN Y do not wear watches, and consider those of us who do troglodytic. This comes close to being an actual vacuum, especially when their cellular telephones are removed from their possession. Nobody ever made me remove my watch when I went in a SKIF.

Still, the cartoon does adequately illustrate the passing of a metaphor.

humans, behavior, stupidity, Mozilla, browser

By Mother or Father?

I fear that the climate change that is denied so vehemently by repulsians has rendered our weather rather like that of Ft. Leavenworth Kansas, lovely in spring and falll but horrible the other fifty weeks of the year. I fear I have blinked and missed spring. The weather beavers are foretelling too much warmth for the coming week and I am disenchanted.

On which notes, of extinguishing troglodytes, namely repulsians by party, and disenchantment, I note an article [Link] in Scientific American of the discovery (unearthing) of the skull of what has been dubbed Sahelanthropus tchadensis which is close, if not the, divergence of humans from the great clans of apes. This makes us almost good on Bishop Soapy Sam Wilberforce’s question of Thomas Huxley on ‘whether he is descended from apes on his mother’s or his father’s side,’ hence raising the question of whether religionist denialists like Wilberforce are even diverged at all? One is tempted, upon seeing Wilberforce’s portrait, to find this hypothesis reasonable and even accurate.

In fact, the skull, above, looks rather mournful, perhaps indicating some response to Wilberforce? Are the apes really of the mind that humans are an improvement? Or just redneck cousins? The latter also seems reasonable.

On a similar note, I note a foretelling by Gartner [Link] of gloom and doom for the PC industry. I find it rather at odds with my earlier observation that predicted a five percentum decrease in PCs over about five years; this is of over seven percentum in one year. Based on my experience with Gartner, I decline to hold my breath. Simply put, Gartner is a one pony circus and this is not it. They enjoy their popularity with the Fortune corporate oligarchs mostly through cruelty and arrogance, qualities exalted by oligarchs up until the arrival of revengeful democrats with ropes and muskets.

The fact is, that this is not about market or sales, but about the latest wrinkle in the electronic revolution started by Marconi and Edison and Tesla, and before that Maxwell and Faraday. It is about the oil and the water unmixing, of those who do no creative work becoming a distinct phase from those who do. I saw a UPS truck the other day. It was quite cold and the driver was attired in the dog poo brown shorts of that feudality. I gave thought to the idea that the delivery recording device long carried by these folk is the parent of the tablet.

The tablet, and to a lesser – very lesser – extent the smart (sic) cellular telephone, is a mediocre instrument of entertainment and an abysmal device of work except if that work is limited to the kinds of clerical activities that it is used by the Brown folk. Indeed, this is the division that is occurring. Those who use, exclusively, the tablet, are drones stuffing themselves on mental junk food or petty clerks who have to be paid minimum wage for work better and happier done by robots. So the division of the market does not signify any disaster for the purveyors of medicore PCs – too many, IMHO – but a division of humanity into the thinks and the not-thinks.

And speaking of manufacturers of poo PCs, I note [Link] that the latest chairwarmer of Hewlet-Packard has resigned over some accounting fumble. This is the problem with too many corporations. They are run by legume enumerators whose only metric is portraits of discorporated caucasian politicians. HP was once the paradigm of the technological corporation. Now they are the paradigm of stupidity and incompetence. I cradle my HP-35 and weep. More evidence that the apes are running the country.

humans, evolution, stupidity, corporations, society

Breeding Neurosis

Boundary of week out. Gym completed for the week. Maybe. And today was sleep in day. Which was semi-successful given the joys of sinus ache and tooth discomfort. So I can spend some time whacking articles.

Before I begin that, I should comment that I use the OLD Scribefire as a blog editor. The new one just flat doesn’t work. It won’t spell check – and I really need that feature – and it won’t post – which makes writing a blot rather a masturbation. There are a few blog editors out there, but most of them don’t work very well. The official KDE blog editor, Blogilo, also won’t post or spell check, and no one in the  Ubuntu/Kubuntu community seems to care to fix it. But what really fries me is that the spell check in FireFox isn’t a learning engine. Oh, you can add words to it’s vocabulary, which is a good thing given my proclivities, but when I misspell a word, it manages to offer me lots of inaccurate choices.

For example, I misspelled gym as gyn, and of the six or so offerings, none was gym. Hunh? Who composed that algorithm?

Anyway, bitchin’ over. On to the real poo.

I ran across a nice article [Link] about some work by bone diggers from Washington U and the Chinese Academy of Science on some 0.1 MY old homo sapiens bones. Seems one of the skulls shows indication of a deformity that can be rather conclusively associated with inbreeding. Now I am not going to make any snide comments about Chinese precursors. I have lots of respect for them. They are humans and have the same strengths and weakness of all humans. OK, maybe more strengths. And fewer weaknesses. Other than being as incapable as we are of dealing with too many people in a rational fashion.

A lot is made of our “incest taboo”, but it had to come from somewhere. After all, taboo isn’t a genetic thing normally, it’s social. And it is almost planet wide. And yes, the ancient Egyptian tyrants practiced inbreeding but they were pretty careful to exercise alternating generation of inbreeding and outbreeding. And even then they had plenty of problems.

Anyway, the bottom line is that humans – homo saps – all over Tellus had to mate with close kin and have whacked children, but not too many, or too badly whacked, and learn that you needed effective birth control to copulate with kin. So the inclination to enjoy some slap and tickle with siblings isn’t uncommon. And that is what is the poo today.

We have effective birth control. And safe abortion techniques. But we are perverse in our avoidance of incest. It’s a social no-no and often a legal chasm. Lots of abortion laws have a special clause for incest. In many ways it’s the only reason for abortion agreed by all.

So the question arises as to why we are this way? We understand – well, at least the geeks and nerds do – the risks and pitfalls of genetic defects of this type. But we still react like neuronegs to the very idea. Why? And we need a better answer than “Because” or “It’s filthy”. Or we’re never going to be an adult species.

humans, behavior, incest, genetics, society

Dairy Disaster

Today is Mars day although how that got transformed into Tiu’s day is a bit hokey, at least to my view. Not as bad day at gym. The educationalists were sparse and relatively restrained, so all I had to deal with were putzes and clods. Tuesday is science podcast day, which means rather a potpourri of SCIENCE journal, NPR podcasts, and the Guardian science podcast. Nothing, sadly, was very memorable. SCIENCE has been going down hill of late and is in danger of losing its number one position in the genre. But the NPR podcasts were almost as bad except for an interview with Kathy Reichs, the forensic anthropologist.

As far as being science that bit was a dismal failure but FD SCP rather dotes on the television program so there was enough connection to raise the attention level from bored to dull. Not much science, but a lot on the perversions of authoring.

Speaking of perversions, I ran across an article [Link] about some work at the campus of the Boneyard that indicates that the students there are getting insufficient dairy in their diets. Evidently this can lead to something called metabolic syndrome, which seems a strange name because of its generality and aspecificity. I’m trying to get my mind around this whole thing.

When I was an undergraduate and ate in dorm cafeteria, there was very little dairy outside of milk and the occasional macaroni and cheese. I did not partake of milk since I lack any of the cattle herders’ mutations that permit adults to secrete lactase. Absent such one gets all manner of digestive problems ranging from painful intestinal gaseousness to diarrhea. I will admit that there were those who drank a great deal of milk, even some whose only reason for staying in dorm was the availability of milk in cafeteria. But I was rather disturbed at the total absence of consideration of the majority of humans on Tellus being unable to digest raw milk.

Of course, the price of milk has gone up greatly now and I do not know if people still drink to such extremes. Evidently not if the article is credible.

I actually got a bit more dairy in graduate shule than in undergraduate. Illinois was close enough to Wisconsin for cheese to be realtively inexpensive so I could splurge on a cheese sandwich once a week or so. I think components were used in the cosmetically damaged Banquet television dinners I had for supper almost every evening. And once I got to the campus of the Tennessee, I had lots of cheese courtesy of fast food “restaurants”.

Still, I find this whole bit rather whacked and specious. But then a lot of things in academia are.

humans, health, diet, dairy, rot

Miscegenation and Corporate Stupidity

Ice Cream day, the end of week out, and the christianists will be observing ersatz-sabbath. And I have to ritually get rid of a whole bunch of tabs to make room for new. So some get sent to the quantum foam and some get immortalized in my tawdry prose.

The first of which is an article [Link] on a study of Yahoo email done at Stanford U. This has to do with Huntington’s theory of ‘clash of civilizations’ as the next big thing after ideology. The work, summarized by this graphic

is supposed to be supportive of Huntington’s hypothesis (?) that the world has divided itself into these ‘blocs’. But what I find rather more asking is whether the whole thing of ideologies has collapsed? Here in Amerika we like to smugly advance that ‘democracy’ has triumphed and all other forms of government are defunct. And that may be moderately accurate if one is very sloppy about what makes a democracy. I fear that a theocratic ‘democracy’ is most often a theocratic dictatorship or oligarchy. It might also be, it seems, that this is a symptom of a new dark age where societies cannot afford the luxury of ideology. Certainly here in Amerika, observation would tend to support that theory.

Discussion is left as an exercise for the student.

On a happier, if more mundane note, it seems that the Ubuntu Gnome subdistro has become ‘official’. [Link] After Shuttleworth showing off his warm dictator side recently, this may be an indication that there is still some humanity in the bowels of Canonical. Or it could simply be a case that so many have jumped distro for something other than main line Ubuntu’s precession of MegaHard’s debacle with Metro (or whatever it is called this week,) that they had to expand the domain to keep from looking like a failed state. From my perspective Ubuntu is getting increasingly strange and I have to wonder how much longer I can continue to patch it to make something workable? That very idea – workability – seems to have been purged from Canonical in something effectively similar to the efforts of Stalin.

Along which lines, a recent studt from U Southampton [Link] indicates that the neandertals may have used more of their brains for visual processing – europe is the new (?) dark continent – and hence had less processing capacity for social matters. And lost out to sapiens thereby. So maybe we should be characterized as social instead of wise? Certainly makes sense given the predominance of extroverts and bogs among us. And their lack of rationality?

I shall refrain from saying anything complete about miscegenation and sapiens’ inferior eyesight.

Meanwhile, my confidence in students and the campus of the Boneyard has been restored. [Link] Seems that 0.8 of the students sampled want to keep Chief Illiniwek as the schule ‘mascot’. This effecively tells the university administration, socially correct pitshetsh, the NCAA, and some overly stuffy and capitalistic Amerind groups to go stick a depinned grenade in their underwear.

Of, I do adore proper disrespect for absolute FALSE authority. Not that this is likely to make much difference but it does indicate a continuing opportunity to make life difficult for tyranny and autarky. Students at their best!

In another example of Canonical stupidity, Gooey has pulled AdBlockPlus from its app store. [Link] COuld this have something to do with Gooey’s avarice? After all, if one can suppress the ads in trial freebies, why pay for the ads to be removed? And then Gooey doesn’t get its cut? Frankly I find this a bit denialist and even moronic, after all, if we can ignore bad advertisements on television why can’t we on a MUCH smaller screen? However, it does us good as a species for Gooey to display its absence of competency.

And on that I cease, finding no better point to do so than a megacorp making fool of itself by its actions. Go forth and consume ice cream – or yogurt if you lack any of the cattle herders’ mutations – and think rationally. Most of the species locally will not.

humans, behavior, corporations, computers, war