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Progress of a Flu
Monday, February 9, 2009
Time of exposure: Saturday morning (estimated)
First symptoms: 30 hours (Sunday evening), coughing, dry throat
36 hours, slight headache
More symptoms: 46 hours (Monday morning), headache, weakness, joint pain, more coughing
52 hours (Monday midday), expectoration of green matter, more weakness, point headaches …
53 hours, fever …
72 hours (Tuesday morning), higher fever, less joint pain, more sneezing
84 hours, fever dipped and returned, still sneezing and leaking bodily fluids, eyes hurt …
96 hours, fever lower, neck pain …
120 hours (Thu morninh), neck still hurts, slightly less pain, fever almost gone, tired …
(to be continued)
Ethnopolitical Hinkelvolk
Thursday, February 5, 2009
So there I am, studying along, forgetting half of what I study … and every now and then I come across a thought I try to fix into my mind by illustrating. The above illustration is also part of my attempt to learn more about Pages … Apple’s Powerpoint. The thought:
“…the Kachin must be understood not as a distinct society with a distinct culture but as the product of political relationships to other peoples, …”
This little sentence perfectly encapsulates much of my thought on relationships between people, groups of people, those fancy and fanciful agglomerations we call nations, cultures and so forth. I suppose identity is a concept that lends itself particularly well to a structuralist approach.
But first two caveats, or lies that the diagram tells:
- all the folks in the diagram are actually simplifications that are only visible at a certain distance. Go too far and the Chicken Folk (Hinkelvolk) suddenly look identical to their neighbors, go to close and you have no Hinkelvolk anymore and it’s just different people.
- The arrows are simplifications as well. There are multiple arrows in multiple directions, with split hairs, ends and shafts. Nevertheless.
We are not who we are, we are who we say we are not. Identity hides in the cracks we leave when we say who we are not. The basic problem the totally hypothetical “Hinkelvolk” have is that anything they actually say about themselves (clean, hardworking, honest, moral, upright) leaves out so many of them that in the end it looks like there are no true, honest-to-goodness “Hinkelvolk” around. Practically nobody fits all the adjectives regularly applied to him.
A nation, ethnicity, is a very fuzzy entity. It is solid in the sense a cloud is solid - if you are far away, it looks soft and fluffy and comforting. But jump into it and you will realize that there’s not much there and unless you have a safety net, you’re in for a hard landing. But a cloud can be very well defined by what it is not. It’s not the clear blue sky or the sun, it’s not the fast flying eagle and it’s definitely not the craggy mountain you are going to hit fall on if you don’t look out.
Back to the Hinkelvolk. Get close enough, and it’s just people. People speaking different dialects, playing different roles, doing different things, being obnoxious and nice, and generally being very hard to pin down. Once you’re inside the ethnic cloud it’s just so much fog.
… ok … I have to go to lunch now. I will analyze the wholly hypothetical and invented Hinkelvolk shortly.
Behavior, Types of
Friday, January 23, 2009
I’ve been really absent in my writing recently. Studies, laziness and other things are to blame. But no matter.
I’ve made this pretty little diagram to help me conceptualize human behavior and remember how confusing and complicated studying humans really is. Basically, whenever you observe a human do something, what you are observing is actual behavior (I leave the problems of the observer, observer bias, subjectivity and so on for another post).
Anthropologists mostly say they don’t or shouldn’t care about actual behavior. Its idiosyncratic, unique to each specific time and place and the motivations behind it are varied, complex and partly (or mostly) unconscious.
However, from the observation of a lot of different behaviors it is possible to abstract a “normal behavior” for a certain individual, group, culture, whatnot. Normal behavior can to an extent overlap with what people ’say’ is normal, but not necessarily.
Because that’s where we come to the third level of behavior, which is ideal behavior. The aforementioned ‘what people say’. People say we should do a lot of things. Often ideal behavior is neither normal nor actual behavior. Even more damningly, somebody who would actually behave in an ‘ideal’ manner would be considered a fool at best and a mentally disturbed individual at worst (an interesting example are visions - most people who see things that aren’t there are schizophrenics, but some of them are saints. Who decides?).
And the fourth tier, again mostly a theoretic abstraction, is possible behavior. Obviously what people actually do and what people normally do is always possible. If you do something, that is quite indicative of the fact that you _can_ do it. But ideal behavior is not necessarily even possible behavior. It may be ideal to love everyone, but that may not be biopsychologically possible. It may be ideal have spirit visions, speak to ancestors, see visions and hear gods speaking to you, even though it may be quite impossible to actually do so.
The whole mess of human behavior thus leaves me rather tongue tied … and of course this diagram ignores the fact that each individual has his own concept of normal and ideal behavior, and different human abilities lead to somewhat different possible behaviors, forcing a researcher of the human to resort to Wittgensteinian fuzzy boundaries to keep concepts and ideas functioning.
But there are conclusions to be drawn from this …
1) Moralizing about how humans should behave is always futile, often self-serving and rarely does anybody any good.
2) Utopia is impossible, because never shall one perfect way of life be found to suit all peoples.
3) Strong ideas of right and wrong are almost always blind to the complex mess of human behavior.
Fun stuff.
Corruption Sapiens
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
We, all of us, humans, are incredibly prone to corruption. As the saying goes, “power corrupts and money corrupts absolutely”. Well, it doesn’t go that way. But it could. Because money, besides all the wonderful things it does for us, also corrupts us … it’s not on purpose, of course. None of use want to be corrupted. And money doesn’t want anything, because it’s just an idea, a collective representamen or memetic complex - pick your jargon. But it still corrupts us.
Because we are a species of monkey that evolved living in packs (well, we call ‘em bands, since our brains were bigger (bendier?). I mean, saying packs makes us sound feral. Bands is almost civilized. Cultured and such). Which meant that … we evolved to be obsessed about status. Having more status meant, in a nutshell, having more nookie. Getting to play more hide the wurst*.
But status in a band was as much about obligations as it was about nubile, young, parasite-infested unhealthy natural females falling for the the Big Men**. Whatever. What it does mean is that if you got status, you had to basically earn it and work for it. You had to be a big hunter, but that didn’t just mean catching stuff, but also sharing. You had to be a big warrior, which usually involved a lot of protecting your folks. I mean, being totally selfish and greedy was usually not the way to get status. Funny thing, but in studies of simple societies which still have pretty informal systems, big men usually sustain their status by giving away as much as possible (obviously not to everybody, but usally to their friends and relatives). Which often leaves them with less than sort of middling-average men (but probably still more than the lower quartile, dunno the data on this one).
So status is inextricably linked to social relations and social obligations. You can’t do what you want with status, and you can’t exchange it for anything at all.
Now enter money. Money is really cool. You can get anything you want for it. And the more money you have, the more of anything at all you can have. Money can be anything, pretty much. It’s a lot like ‘x’ in an equation, only we usually use different symbols … like $ or €. And if you can exchange anything for $ … you can also exchange status for $ and vice versa. And pretty soon the equation status = $$$ takes hold. The obverse also holds, obviously, $$$ = status. Simple ‘rithmetic and such.
Suddenly you have a really interesting situation, where status is no longer linked to social relations and obligations. Status is really just linked, well linked most of all, to your $$$. The more your money bag weighs, the more weight you can put on. But here’s the rub … we humans will do pretty much anything and everything for status. And with obligation-free status around … we are easy prey to greedy, corrupting influences.
By unshackling status from obligations, money has made it much easier to amass status, but it has also made it much easier to misuse status. The same money that makes your Nintendo Wii possible is also the money that makes trillion dollar bailouts and white-collar crime and the global drug trade possible. Ahh, the sweet smell of the sword of ambivalence that is progress!
The shame is that probably loads of people have already written this same little gem. And the tragedy is that it won’t change a thing. But such is the comedy of life.
L.
*yes, you can argue about it, but evolutionary theory does furnish a rather reasonable explanation why males should be more interested in status than females, and studied population do seem to back it up. Of course it might not hold in all cases. Anyway, it’s rather irrelevant for what I’m thinking here, just trying to hint why men want money more than women want it.
**this is a simplification. It’s also argument bait. Don’t fall for it.
How to Think People
Monday, December 1, 2008
I haven’t been posting much recently, and drawing even less. After a two year hiatus I’ve finally begun applying myself to my studies again. Yay me. And in the process found out why I actually like studying - because it’s fun making your brain do mental hoola-hoops.
It’s also fun getting an overview on the way some people (researchers, academics) have been thinking other people (everybody else). I mentioned a bit of this in my last post on living in our heads. And I’d like to illustrate it a wee bit.
Eric the Red.
You probably know this fellow. He is, obviously, the eponymous Viking Seafarer and Raider of Nubile Women. Now, we all know that Eric Cartman is a lying, vicious, manipulative little bastard. At least, if we watch South Park we do.
Now, over much of the 20th century we have seen a lot of development in the social sciences. And for a long time a lot of researchers and the major literature ignored the fact that Eric Cartman is not an isolated case. It gets worse. It’s not just that some people lie. It’s that all people lie. And people don’t lie just to other people, but to themselves as well. This might well be adaptive - it’s easier to fool somebody if you believe your own deception.
But basically, it amounted to a situation where what people said and did and believed were often considered to be the same thing. And that is why we got the questionnaire, and the census, and public statistics. And that’s why statistics kept getting things reliably wrong.
So if you ever want to think people, you have to make sure to remember to wash your hands regularly, relax, have a cup of tea, and please remember that what we think, what we say and what we do are different things. Not just sometimes, but all of the times.
Now I’m off to do something good for the environment … or at least my wallet. (caveat lector)
We Live in Our Heads*
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Okay, this is probably nothing new. But I was studying some cultural ecology texts and I was struck by something. But I guess I’ll have to tell it as a story, a fairy tale if you will.
Once upon a time there was a tribe of Indians in the Amazon Rainforest, we shall call them the M. And there was a group of theorists, we shall call them the T. The Ts were interested in the Ms because they were exotic, because they lived a simpler life, and the Ts thought they could understand themselves better, if they got to understand the Ts. So they studied the Ms.
Now, the Ms lived spread out in the jungle, with less than one M per square kilometre on average. They were slash-and-burn horticulturalists, clearing gardens of maize and stuff on average every four to five years. The Ts were perplexed why there were so few Ms around, until one of the Ts came up with an explanation. The Ms were restricted by the quality of the soil, which was very poor in the Rainforest, and that was why there were so few of them. The soil was too poor, so it could not feed many Ms.
The Ts congratulated themselves on understanding how soil, and thereby the amount of food produced, explained how many people could live somewhere and how complex their societies could become. But then some Ts went out and actually measured things, and they found out that the Ms spent only about half their working time in their gardens and that they easily produced more than twice the Daily Recommended Minimum amount of calories. Now, the Ts were perplexed, because the Ms had lots of food. Why weren’t there more of them?
They pondered and pondered, and then a T had a bright idea. It’s not just about calories, it’s about the kind of food you eat as well. You can’t just live off potatoes and maize, you get scurvy and all kinds of topsy turvy! You need proteins as well, and obviously that must limit their numbers. The Ts were happy again and congratulated one another again.
But then another T went to look at the Ms, and found out that they liked to spend their free time - when they weren’t gardening - hunting and fishing. And they easily fished and hunted about twice the RDM amount of meat. Now the Ts were sore perplexed. The Ms were having quite an easy time, producing enough food and leaving themselves time over and above what they needed. Why weren’t there more Ms? Why didn’t they have bigger villages?
Well, finally the Ts decided to ask the Ms. And they were quite surprised when the Ms explained things to them. They liked gardening on good soil that was easy to work with, and they liked gathering good firewood that was easy to find. They didn’t like having to work very hard, because then it felt like they weren’t getting the quality of life they were used to.
So there weren’t few Ms because the environment physically limited them. There were few Ms because they were used to a certain quantity of meat and certain kinds of work, and they certainly perceived scarcity, even if they weren’t starving.
Which just goes to show that the Ts had forgotten something important - it’s not just what’s actually in the world that matters, but how we perceive it, what we’re used to. And nobody likes live worse than they have to.
Which brings us to an extended moral for this story:
Men won’t go to war because they’re lacking something, but because they feel they lack something (Men who lack everything can never go to war, because they’re too poor for it!).
*note: we also live elsewhere, depending on what kind of feelings we’re talking about, but that’s a different issue.
Spam and Cars
Saturday, November 22, 2008
I’ve been busy recently, trying to get back into the whole study and academe scene. It gets easier over time, but still, I’m rustier than I was. It’s interesting how brain processes you don’t use for a while lose quality and power. Just like muscles. The human body is really a fascinating homeostatic system, always scrounging resources to maintain itself at minimum expenditure. Which is just a fancy way of saying “Use it or lose it.”
But I have noticed two things that really irk me and deserve a post.
- A huge upsurge in comment spammers advertising anal lube, anal sex and teens in anal pain. Look, if you are a spammer, you are basically criminal scum of the earth. And pretty unintelligent scum if you think anal sex should be painful. Some day, once direct neural interface hardware is developed some bright vigilante hacker is going to write a back-tracking virus which will infect spammers brains, turning them into spam and catfood. There, bit of futurology.
- Drivers. Again. Slovenian drivers, to be exact. Which part of the directional indicator do you guys not understand? If I put on my directional light on a highway it means, “I will change lanes.” It does not mean, “Go ahead, step on the gas pedal, change lanes, overtaking me slowly and nearly causing me to tail-end a truck.” Seriously, I get the feeling there’s a whole population of criminals on our roads, trying to live out their petty frustrations. Bet it’s just because beating their wives (or husbands, let’s be emancipated) is frowned upon by the neighbors nowadays. Remember the bit about futurology and neural interfaces? That won’t work in Slovenia, because most folks wouldn’t understand that. But here’s a little revelation I’ve had: Jesus hates aggressive criminal drivers, and if you drive like that, you’re going to go to hell. Oh yeah, mortal sin. Evil driving. And no, that’s not a damned compliment.
Projekt Boardgame 1
Sunday, November 2, 2008
I’m a big fan of boardgames in general and good boardgames in particular. I’m also fascinated by tinkering with rules and such-like. And for years now I’ve been talking on an on about making my own boardgame.
Now, talking about making a boardgame is no big deal. It’s quite easy. Every now and again, just mention, “Oh, I could make a really good boardgame. I’d just need to draw a map. And come up with some rules. And some figures. It would be really cool.”
The problems come later, when you start wondering about the whys and the hows. A lot of boardgames already exist. And you don’t want to make a Monopoly or a Risk clone (as an aside, when I was little and lived in Africa, buying boardgames was nearly impossible. So I actually made a copy of Monopoly, because I wanted to play it, but couldn’t buy it there. Seriously, I even made all the cards and everything. I only got the question mark cards a bit wrong.)
But just last week G and I thrashed out the rules for our (mine, all mine) very own boardgame. It’s working name is ‘Warlords’ (same as it has been for the last 3 years) and its based on a very fun night based on D&D and strategic wargaming we had about 3 years ago. So I’ll write it up now and again.
Yes, I bet this bores everyone to tears, but maybe it’ll be a document for me to remember how I started a project to make a boardgame (and possibly didn’t make in the end!).
Results of Self-Employment Experiment
Friday, October 31, 2008
I’ve tried being self-employed for the past half year. And I can officially term the experiment complete. My findings - absolutely partial and idiosyncratic, of course.
PROS
- You get to manage all your time (which means you get to decide how often you feel depressed about having nothing interesting to do).
that was it for pros.
CONS
- You are lonely - if you decide to try going it like me, as an independent designer, illustrator, etc., you do not meet people. You work behind a computer screen. And I miss people. I really, really miss people. I spend all of every working day, from 9:00 to 17:00 missing people.
- You are bored - you don’t really get to work on interesting projects from home, and projects you do work on tend to be dull, repetitive and lonely. And being alone is really, really boring.
- Everybody tries to shaft you - seriously, nearly everybody you work for, tends to delay paying you as long as possible and tries to pay you as little as possible, which becomes downright depressing.
- You are not independent - indeed, you are utterly dependent on your clients. They call at 6 p.m., you’d better say ‘yes ma’am, thank you ma’am’. And then you have to take what they give you.
- I hate my room - yes, my room is also my office. And that means I never get out of my house. I never get out of my office. I sleep in my office. I can’t look at it anymore. It makes me sick.
- You have to be your own secretary - so much for creativity, instead, why don’t you rather shuffle numbers and so forth.
- You have to shamelessly advertise yourself - all the time. Because every project will end too soon.
- The amount of work fluctuates - sometimes you have too much, in between you have too little.
- No job security or sick leave - I get sick, I get no money. Nice.
- No education - nobody pays you to learn new stuff, nobody invests in you. If you do it on your own time, fine.
- You’re the first place companies save money - economic downturn? Oh, squeeze the designer.
A lot of cons, huh? I could have added more, but basically … a lot of it comes down to personality types. I’m not a hermit kind of guy. I don’t like being alone. It doesn’t motivate me, or uplift me. And you know, working alone like this makes life seem really pointless. I’ve caught myself in the beginning stages of a depression and I’ve had to take some radical actions … including going home to work at my parents’ house, just so I see people during the day!
CONCLUSION
Interesting experiment. I’ve learned a lot about things - mostly about myself. And now enough has been enough. I’m closing shop, shutting down and heading off. And, if you ask me, good riddance. I’ve got less money than when I started, I’m less satisfied with myself and I’ve achieved less than before. Obviously, I’m not cut out for the hermitage.
Oh, and if anybody I’m working for, or have worked for, is reading this? Pay up already.