According to archaeologist Patrick McGovern, the craving for beer might have caused people to decide to start farming. Humans turned from hunting and gathering to agriculture because of "our ancestors’ simple urge for alcoholic beverages." He points to evidence that humans were making beer as far back as 9,000 years ago.
Okay, so I contributed to the James Cameron Self Love Fund and saw AVATAR. Yesterday we went to the 3-D showing (no way I would spend money on the normal view, I can wait for the DVD the way I do with 99% of the movies I see anymore). I’ve had a day to think about it now and I’ve come to some conclusions, which are hardly profound, but I think worth saying. Let me say up front that I wasn’t bored. Visually, this is a stunning achievement. But that’s what everyone is saying. It is, in fact, the best 3-D I’ve ever seen. Often in the past the effect is minimal and the cost in headache high. This was neither. And it fully supported the visuals rather than masking mundane or poor image elements. Pandora, the planet involved, is magnificently realized. Cool stuff. Real gosh wow. The biology is problematic. You have a wide mix of lifeforms analogous to Earth. Some big lumbering critters like hippos or rhinoceri that also have features of a dinosaur, and some small things that are clearly wolves, and one big nasty cat-like thing that’s like a sabertooth tiger. It’s unclear if any of these creatures are mammalian, but it doesn’t matter much. Dinosaur analogs. Most of them apparently four-legged. But the “horses” the natives ride are six-legged, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ thoats. How does that play out in evolutionary terms? Well, maybe that’s a quibble. How then do you evolve humanoids out of this? Well, maybe that’s a quibble, too. This film is not about science on any level, regardless of the few bits of dialogue suggesting there are, you know, scientists, and that there is a studyable cause to any of this. Because the story, basically, is hackneyed, cynical, and cliched. [more . . . ]
A friend mentioned the "yellow pages" to me today, and it occurred to me that I haven't used "The Yellow Pages" for at least five years. I can't remember when I last even saw a copy of the Yellow Pages (until today when I dug out a copy from under a desk). For many years, whenever I've needed a phone number or other information regarding a business, I've used Internet tools. It didn't happen all at once that I stopped relying on Yellow Pages, so I didn't notice any particular date when when it happened. Imagine that the phone companies announced five years ago that there wouldn't be any more Yellow Pages--we might have noticed our discontinued use. But human cognition is often blind to incremental changes. I posted on this topic earlier, using the example of tigers. There are very few tigers living in the wild. Almost all of the tigers of the world are now living in captivity. Very few people were conscious of this change, because it was gradual, but it undeniably happened. If it had happened all at once (with a headline screaming "95% of the wild tigers are gone!") we would have noticed and perhaps reacted. This reminds me of a book by Howard Kurtz (Media Circus), where he suggested that the biggest story of the 20th Century was that millions of African Americans were moving from the rural South to the Urban North, but no one noticed because no one faxed a press release to the news media. In fact, studies show that we are not even able to notice relatively fast moving gradual changes. Because of this human cognitive limitation, important things constantly fall beneath our human attentional radar. Yes, we do notice when an airplane crashes and kills 100 people because headlines are blasted at us and we can perceive the crash site from a single vantage point. But we don't react to drawn out disasters of much greater magnitude. For instance, where are the headlines announcing that 40,000 Americans needlessly die of colon cancer every year because they don't get colonoscopies? That's 110 people who die every day. But they don't die at the same place and there is no crash site to provide dramatic video for news shows. How much else of importance gets entirely ignored because there aren't dramatic photos? Trends are often invisible, whether they are good trends or bad trends. Whether there is a decrease in the standard of living or whether many of us dramatically increase the amounts of corn fructose we eat, many trends are difficult to notice without mathematics and graphs. Most important trends are invisible unless we are vigilant and comfortable with mathematics. Perhaps this should be a word of caution for a society that is heavily afflicted with innumeracy; bad things can happen on our watch yet we might be oblivious. Things like the deterioration of our education system, the increase in xenophobia, the fact that many of us seem to operate burdened with attention deficits, the skyrocketing rate of diabetes, stagnation of wages for several decades, and who knows what else. We face many huge challenges as individuals and as a society. Are we trying to shake a bad personal habit such as overeating? Are we trying to lessen our dependence on oil? Being cognizant of our obliviousness to incremental change can help us by reminding us that we shouldn't be discouraged with tiny sporadic steps of progress when that is all we can muster. It doesn't necessarily take a sprinter to make significant progress. as long as we're going in the right direction. We should keep up our efforts even when it seems like we're not getting much of anywhere, because small steps in the right direction always eventually prevail, even though our progress is often invisible until we've almost arrived.
Wonderful news from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The Danforth Foundation has made a huge financial contribution to create a specialized Center on Religion & Politics. Former U.S. Senator John Danforth was instrumental in making this possible. The following is from the Center's press release, which was issued last month:
$30 million endowment gift from Danforth Foundation funds creation of center
Washington, D.C., Dec. 16, 2009 — Washington University in St. Louis is establishing a scholarly and educational center that will focus on the role of religion in politics in the United States, according to Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton.
“The establishment of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics reflects the legacy of Jack Danforth and his belief in the importance of a civil discourse that treats differences with respect,” Wrighton said in making the announcement Dec. 16 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
“The center will serve as an ideologically neutral place that will foster rigorous, unbiased scholarship and encourage conversations between diverse and even conflicting points of view,” Wrighton said.
“Knowing that religious values and beliefs can either encourage or undermine civility, the center and its educational programs and scholarly research can provide a bridge between religious and political communities and will inform new kinds of academic explorations focusing on the relationships between the two. We think that’s a worthy goal.”
The creation of the center, which includes the recruitment of five new faculty members with endowed professorships, is being made possible by a $30 million endowment gift from the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation. It is believed to be the largest gift of its kind made to a university to fund such an academic center.
The center opens January 2010 and will convene public conferences and lectures to address local, state and national issues related to religion and politics and also will offer an educational program in religion and politics, including an interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in religion and public life.
The new faculty appointments will be in the area of American religion and politics and will complement the work of scholars already on the Washington University faculty in the departments of history, anthropology, literatures and religious studies. The new faculty members will hold joint appointments between the new center and existing academic departments.
The center will attract visiting scholars to St. Louis and create opportunities for interaction with Washington University faculty, students and members of the St. Louis community. It also plans to publish and disseminate proceedings of conferences and results of studies by faculty, visiting scholars and students of the center.
“Historically, the responsibility for this kind of dialogue has most often been left to universities with religious connections,” said Danforth. “But great non-sectarian institutions like Washington University combine rigorous academic standards with traditions of civil conversation, and that’s why this is the perfect place for such a center. Few issues are more critical to the well being of a democracy than how religious beliefs — or the denial of such beliefs — co-exist with civic virtue and of how the ‘truths’ of the one are made compatible with the toleration and good will required by the other.”
The Columbia Missourian (based in Columbia, Missouri), provides additional context:John Danforth, 73, of St. Louis, has often been at odds with others in the GOP because of his concerns about the influence of the Christian right. In newspaper columns, speeches and in a book, he has argued that Christian conservatives have focused on divisive issues that polarize Americans.
Washington University Chancellor Mark Wrighton said the center in St. Louis will reflect Danforth's belief "in civil discourse that treats differences with respect."
"The center will serve as an ideologically neutral place that will foster rigorous, unbiased scholarship and encourage conversations between diverse and even conflicting points of view," Wrighton said.
This is a wonderful development. Washington University is a first-rate center of scholarship, and there might not be a more important topic in these times. Here is yet more information on the new Center, from Washington University's website. I very much like the motto for the Center: "Common ground for civil dialogue."
Alternate history is a subset of science fiction. Stories and novels of this sort have been written for a long time, but in the last three decades or so the form has come into its own. Many of them are playful What-Ifs that look at how things might have gone had a detail or two gone differently. They are then excuses for adventure or thriller plots that quite often have little real poignance, not least because often the point of departure for the changed history is quite unlikely.
The best ones, however, play with changes that actually might have happened given just a nudge in one direction or the other, and the unfolding drama gives a glimpse of worlds that could easily have come about, often forbidding, thoroughly cautionary. We tend to assume, unconsciously at least, that things work out for the best, even when there is evidence to the contrary. An understandable approach to life given the limit power any of possess to effect events, change the course of history, or otherwise fight perceived inevitabilities. But unlike in fiction, it is rarely up to one person to fight evil or correct wrongs. It is a communal responsibility and the only tool we possess collectively is the wisdom accrued over time from which we might draw clues what to do.
Word War II provides a wellspring of speculation on what might have been done differently if. It seems occasionally that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Seen purely from a military standpoint, perhaps so. For all its formidable abilities, Nazi Germany was ultimately limited by available resources, something certain generals tried to address on multiple occasions but ultimately failed to successfully repair. But politically? The world at the time offered faint comfort to those who thought the democracies could win in a toe-to-toe fight with the tyrants.
Allow me, then, to recommend a trilogy of novels that represent the better aspects of alternate history and effectively restore the chilling uncertainties of those times.
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