What do people with at least some money care about?

What do people with money really care about? I assume that most of the people in airports have some extra money to burn; you generally don't see poor folks in airports. I also assume that airport magazine shops know what they can most easily sell to people with some money to burn. It's natural selection in action at airports--the magazines that didn't sell have been weeded out of our airports. What do Americans with money care about? They care about the things that loom large on the covers of the magazines you can see in big airports. At a major airport I recently visited, I took six photos to give an idea of all of the types of magazines on display (click the title of this article to see the gallery of photos). In airport magazine shops, you'll see things such as movie stars, how to make money without much effort, the coolest electronic gadgets, almost naked bodies, romance, status symbols such as luxurious trips, fancy clothes and expensive cars, eating food and talking about dieting, corporate filtered news, how to impress others, and looking young, looking young, looking young . . . But can you really determine what people think a lot about by looking at the magazines they buy? I think so. This is definitely the sort of thing a Martian anthropologist would do to find out what people with at least some money really cared about. What don't they care about? Everything else. You won't see magazine covers featuring starving children or homely people. You won't find magazine covers telling you how to give up your wealth to others in need, how to speak truth to power, and how to hang around criminals, sick people and prostitutes like Jesus supposedly did. [gallery link="file"]

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Most Americans: no concerns with slow internet connections

Apparently, most Americans are OK with the idea that many Americans have slow internet connections:

A majority of Americans believe the government's plan to deliver a high speed internet connection to every citizen by 2020 is either not important or should not be embarked upon.The Pew Internet Project said 52% of survey respondents felt that way while 40% felt the issue was a top priority.

Keep in mind that the $7.2 Billion in stimulus grants dedicated to national broadband are the equivalent of only a few weeks of funding for the American adventures in Afghanistan. Keep in mind that this $7.2 Billion stimulus is far less than 1% of the U.S. in defense spending for 2010.

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Dangerous Intersection is under construction, always

Recently, it occurred to me that we should have a mobile version of Dangerous Intersection, but I learned that the plugins allowing mobile versions required upgrading my WordPress Platform version. My past two attempts to upgrade to 2.9x hadn’t gone well (I twice tried and twice reverted to version 2.7 over the past few months). This week’s upgrade to 3.0 worked without any snags, however. I truly love the WordPress system and the fact that it's open-source software. To take full advantage of the 3.0 features, I also decided to upgrade the design of this website, making use of Solostream’s newest WordPress design theme, called “Prosper.” BTW, I’m extremely happy with Solostream’s products, forums and customer service. In case you’re wondering, this single use version of “Prosper” cost $79, which I consider a great price, given the loads of feature options, most of which require no knowledge of html. There's no way I could have afforded a custom design this sophisticated. Coming soon, I hope, will be a mobile version of Dangerous Intersection. Until I started using an iPhone (my workplace offered them to employees this year), it didn’t occur to me that I would actually spend significant amounts of time reading from a mobile device, especially while waiting in lines or riding mass transit. Well, that’s how the world is moving, it seems. I hope you enjoy the new design of DI, which I worked to make more “open” than my previous designs. You'll notice that it is a two-column site now (more or less). I also took the liberty of reworking the title artwork and moving in some new navigation features. For instance, if you search categories or key words, the results will now show up in three columns, making it easier to scan your results. I’m still making quite a few tweaks, and some of the previously existing features are not yet back in. Thus, you are looking at a design-work-in-progress to go along with the contemplative-work-in-progress. If this website continues to be successful, that is how it should be—one of our main goals should always be to avoid ossification. That is essentially what philosopher Bertrand Russell once told someone who had accused him of having changed his mind on a topic. Russell pointed out that the option to changing is stagnating. Update: We now seem to have the mobile version of Dangerous Intersection working. I've been testing it on an iPhone, while Josh Timmons, who aptly hosts the site and provides technical consultations, indicates that DI also looks good on Android.

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Compelling gossip

I was on a two-hour bus ride today, surrounded by people chattering loudly on their cell phones. From the large man with the goatee (in front of me, to my left), I leaned that he had bacon and eggs this morning at a little restaurant and that it was good. It took him five minutes to describe his meal to the person with whom he was conversing (I do wonder whether that person was really listening to the entire thing). The woman in front of me was getting angry at the person to whom she was talking--she insisted that there was a closer Wal-Mart, and that that person ought to turn her car back immediately and go there, not to the Wal-Mart down the road. A man behind me was making a wide variety of calls, reassuring people that he would be visiting someday, and apparently trading much chit-chat. The woman behind me was discussing various movies with her conversant. Again, there were lots of details, and it seemed as though each of these conversations ended because the people got tired of talking, not because they traded any significant information. All of this chattering was irritating to me, because I have a difficult time filtering out one-sided conversations. Every time the person near me stops talking, an internal warning kicks in and I automatically replay my buffer (as best I can) in order to jump in and respond. It's all automated, and it turns out, time after time, that they are not talking with me at all. My little sub-routine, which works rather well in many situations where someone has paused for the purpose to allow me to respond, is merely an annoyance in these situations. Now multiply this gossipy chatter by hundreds of millions, all across America, and you have an enormous amount of time and energy dedicated to gossip. Whenever you see so much energy going into an activity, red flags should go up: it is likely that such a ubiquitous activity is serving some important biological function. But what could possibly be important about gossiping? Based upon much study, Robin Dunbar has proposed the answer that gossip is verbal grooming. I described his position in some detail here. His bottom line is that even though the content of the gossip seems relatively unimportant, the exchange is critically important. Engaging in gossip is social sonar. It is our way of determining the identities of our allies and foes, not simply by determining who is willing to gossip with us, but through many subtle clues dropped in the course of the gossip. We learn the identities of the people who talk about us and our friends, and bits and pieces about their attitudes toward us. We learn who has resources, social and material, and their willingness to share these resources, and with whom. Gossip is a powerful use of language, but it is often not focused on the truth-content of the words used. In modern times, gossip is likely to be seen as a Gouldian spandrel. But just maybe, as Dunbar suggests, gossip is truly verbal grooming and thus arguably the original impetus for the development of all human languages. As I see it, gossip but one of several non-prototypical uses of language. I suspect that we see another such use in most religions, where language can be critically important, even though ambiguous, untrue or even oxymoronic.

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We are neurons

British Author Matt Ridley recently gave a stimulating and entertaining talk at TED. The central topic was about "mating ideas," but the talk (which was engaging all the way through) took an surprising turn toward the end when Ridley announced that he doesn't care whether some individuals have a somewhat higher IQ than others. Smart individuals don't necessarily make for a smart society--he suggested that Neanderthals were smart individuals, but they didn't last. What do we modern humans have the Neanderthals lacked? We exchange things and ideas (the evidence suggests that the Neanderthals didn't exchange items and didn't have any meaningful division of labor, not even a sexual division of labor). We function together and we are able to create things that nobody on earth knows how to make individually. Who knows how to make a computer mouse? Nobody. The "team" that makes computer mice includes the coffee-grower who provides coffee for the guy who works on an oil rig, who pumps out oil in order to allow a chemist to make plastic for the mouse. But there are 1,000,000 other members of this team. We are prolific exchangers of ideas, and that is what we have over all other species. Each of us functions like a neuron, networking incessantly, enabling the whole to be much greater than the sum of the parts. Smart individuals (despite how interesting they sometimes seem) are often dead ends. What really makes a society fly is when individuals have a propensity to exchange ideas, a built-in drive for mating their ideas, allowing their ideas to go where no smart individual (or even many groups of smart individuals) could have ever anticipated. For an interesting epilogue, consider the work of David Sloan Wilson, who suggests that humans are half-bee (we're not quite there), and that religion serves as the binding force.

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