This paean to Taco Bell, from Mark Dery of Salon.com: No matter how sophisticated my palette has grown, nor how politicized it has become, I still feel a nostalgic fondness for Taco Bell tacos, triggered by sense memories of that first bite, when the shell would disintegrate into a heap…
According to this article from Salem-News.com, it makes much more sense to filter your own water and reuse your bottle. What is the downside to buying bottles of water? Around the world, factories are using more than 18 million barrels of oil and up to 130 billion gallons of fresh…
Consider that 60% of the energy expended by a resting baby is consumed by the baby's brain. A resting adult brain uses 25% of its energy. Compare this to the average ape brain, which uses only 8% of the apes energy. In short, having a big brain requires a lot…
When are we likely to share resources? At first glance, some of us might say that we share when we have more of something than other people around us. It’s not that simple, however.
In “Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics in the Law,” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby discuss moral heuristics and the evolution of the legal system. It is a well-written article throughout, though I’d like to focus on one aspect of the article that I found especially interesting. I’d like to focus on their discussion the circumstances under which people are willing to share and when they are not.
Cosmides and Tooby note that the “hunter-gatherer life is not an orgy of indiscriminate sharing, nor is all labor accomplished through collective action.” On the other hand, the hunting of large animals often is a social activity and the meat, whether caught by a few or by a large cooperating group, is often shared throughout the social group. These transfers of meat are “not characterized by direct reciprocation in any obvious way.” Cosmides and Tooby go so far as to suggest that the sharing of meat may be closest to that predicted by Marx’s belief that hunter-gatherers “lived in a state of primitive communism, where all labor was accomplished through collective action and sharing was governed by the decision rule,’ from each according to his ability to each according to his need.'”
The widespread sharing of meat appears to challenge the evolutionary model, which would hold that “selection …
I don’t know anything about bodybuilding, or I didn’t until I watched Raising the Bar 2, a brand-new documentary by Mike Pulcinella (Mike wrote it, shot and edited it). Mike often submits comments to this site, and we have corresponded by e-mail a number of times. A couple weeks ago, Mike asked me whether I’d be interested in watching his new documentary, and I jumped at the chance. Based upon Mike’s many comments to this site, I know him to be a thoughtful guy. I knew that he must’ve found something worthy of his time in this freakish-seeming endeavor of “bodybuilding.”
In this documentary, Mike follows his brother Dave Pulcinella (and Dave’s significant other, Jenn Emig) as Dave trains for and competes in high-level bodybuilding competitions. Before you jump to the conclusion that this is just some guy following his brother around with the camera, take a look at the trailer for “Raising the Bar 2,” available at Mike’s site. As you will see, Mike is a skilled filmmaker and storyteller and he is careful to make sure that this story retains real-life texture. Mike’s edits are crisp and the soundtrack works well. As for the storytelling, this kind of video could only have been accomplished by a filmmaker who had gained the complete trust of the participants. In sum, this documentary is not always a glowing endorsement of Dave.
The documentary was compelling on several levels. First of all, viewers will have an opportunity to see what is …