Cain and Able - Art Show

Music and More for a Geek Nation

The album Flood by They Might Be Giants has long been one of my favourites. I'm happy to say that now, with Here Comes Science, my kids are fast becoming fans of TMBG as well. I've got Meet the Elements stuck in my head, and my daughter loves I am a Paleontologist. Like TMBGs "friend Danny," she thinks she is one, and might very well be one day.

More than just music, and a really fun DVD, this album underscores one of the best things going on these days: the blossoming of Geek Culture. On the one hand, this movement makes being a geek a lot more fun, but I suspect there may be more to it than that.

My mother doesn't really get it. But then, she's not a geek. My mother was mortified when my daughter proudly proclaimed, "I'm a geek!" She gave me that look, "Did you teach her to say that? That's a terrible thing to teach her! You shouldn't tell your kids that they're geeks." She simply doesn't understand what it means to live in the post Revenge of the Nerds world.

It's more than living in a world were people hang on the word of guys like Steve Jobs, or where Bill Gates is rich and powerful enough to be both revered and hated. It's also a world where geeks make up a big enough a socioeconomic group to justify things like Giant Microbe Plushies, and get a Holywood movie made with grass roots support.

In and of themselves, these things are no more important than the Bohemian Revolution of more than a century ago. It will certainly produce some lasting art and a fat stripe of material culture, mostly plastic and battery powered. But the question remains, will Geek Culture make a lasting impression on human culture as a whole?

If Geek Culture teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that we certainly can have an impact, if we play our cards right. The Geek love of role play is a perfect example. We've built whole cultures out of fandom for everything from Science Fiction to the Middle Ages. Simple customs sprout like weeds in these groups. Geeks make fertile ground for cultural change.

Now some will point to things like the internet, and insist that geeks are already changing the world. To some degree that's true, but let's face it, the changes fomented by the internet have more to do with economy at present than they do with any decided intent to change the way people live. That being said, Geek Culture is still relatively young. It's not too late to wonder, what would a world shaped by Geeks look like?

It's a question worth asking. It's a question we may yet answer with action, rather than just the fleeting words of the electronic ether. And that's what makes this such a great time to be a Geek.

Multipurpose Drool

As any mortified parent who didn't vacuum yesterday can tell you, a drooling baby picks up dust-bunnies like nobodys business. Having had one to many occasions to contemplate this phenomenon, I've concluded that there's an evolutionary adaptation at work here.

First of all, there's camouflage. On a forest floor, that untended baby would be picking up leaves and small twigs, disguising it from predators whilst mommy and daddy are hunting, or gathering or making more siblings or what have you. Pretty hand really.

Next, when mommy and daddy catch their breath and notice the baby is beyond dirty, they are inspired to clean it. This is good for the baby. I'm sure there were parents who weren't moved to clean baby under those circumstances. Those babies probably didn't grow up to make more babies. You see how this evolution thing is working.

Finally, the mortification of the aforementioned parents at finding baby plastered with dirt inspires a few gray hairs, and shaves a few days off the lifespan, thus shortening the amount of time mom and dad will be around to hog up all the good food. This last element is a process that escalates as a child grows older, culminating in some cases in outright parricide. For examples, see the histories of pretty much any royal family, or spend a few minutes trying to talk to a teenager. Be careful, I'm told they bite.

(Neither the author of this blog nor any of his subsidiary contributors bears any responsibility for injuries sustained while trying to discuss the intricacies of baby drool and food supplies with teenagers.)

Something Old, Something New

A few days ago, I took out a really old piece of family furniture to clean it up and see if I could give it a new life. It's a long low cabinet with an odd history. My great grandfather worked as a delivery man for a dry-goods warehouse back around the turn of the century. The turn of the twentieth century that is. He drove a wagon drawn by a team of horses.

The cabinet originally came out of the warehouse where he worked. It stayed in his basement for untold decades, a home for tools, half used cans of paint, and other odds and ends. After that, it made it's way to my dad's garage where it stayed for another few decades. I can distinctly recall the handful of tools, fishing tackle, paint, lawn jarts, car parts and motor oil living there when I was a kid. When my parents sold their old home, it ended up in a storage unit for years, and was nearly let go, but for my saying I wanted it.

When I set it down in my driveway to clean it up, it looked used up. Used hard. One end was stained where a pan of motor oil had spilled over the top of it. The doors were stuck closed or broken. Spray paint marred some of them. Another had a few slugs from a long forgotten pellet gun. The dark reddish-brown finish was covered in a century of grime and dust.

I took the doors off and set them aside. Then, with a bucket of soapy water and brush, I started scrubbing, inside and out. A few hours later, the rich grain of oak peered out from beneath the grime. The golden color of the wood looked happy to see the sun. The few stains and scars that remain are only smile lines.

A little polish and repair work took only a short time more. Now the open shelves are home to a colorful collection of children's toys and books. The television and a couple of houseplants sit on top. Sometimes recycling is a feel good exercise.

Will legalizing pot help the economy?

Well duh.

It's remarkable that it's taken a recession of this magnitude to bring marijuana back to the table, but the Governator is finally talking about it. Beyond the legalization, regulation and taxation of the drug itself, there are the numerous applications for the plant fiber. The industry as a whole will more than offset any job-losses in the drug enforcement field. The fiber from the plant will be an ecologically sound boon to paper, clothing and other industries, which will give something of a loss of profit for the cotton industry, which may be the only reason we're having this discussion now, rather than 20 or 30 years ago.

Really Old Fashioned Values.

I'd like to make a call for a return to some old traditional values. Really old. Two items from Reuter's last month have stuck in my mind, so now I'm sticking them in yours.

First is a report about research at the Max Planck Institute. In short, they've figured out that Bonobos will trade sex for tasty food. In fact, the bulk of research shows that for Bonobos, sex will lubricate just about any transaction.* All humorous analogies about male expectations regarding the value of dinner and movie aside, it's interesting to note this behaviour in our closest biological cousins.

Especially in light of a story that showed up two days later. It seems that a group representing prostitutes in Nevada, where prostitution is legal, suggested that a tax on their services might help the state with budget shortfalls. But a slim majority of state lawmakers turned them down for fear of further lagitamizing an industry they'd rather do away with.

For a group that tout's itself as favoring "traditional" values, their behaviour looks a lot more like self denial to me. The oldest profession in the world is not about to go away, just because we want to pretend that our fully opposable thumbs and penchant for hair loss somehow absolves us of our own biology. If the bonobos cared to give humanity a mesage at all, I think it would be a rather simple one. Make love, not war.

*If anyone would like to throw some rotting vegatables for that comment, I'll gladdly exchange an equal amount fresh fruit for any amount of affection that might be legal in this state or yours.

Darwin's 200th Birthday Dinner: Transitional Species a la carte!

I usually try to steer clear of the Evolution vs. Creation debate. OK, I try to stay out of it on this blog. But the 200th Birthday of Charles Darwin seems to have generated at lease as much creationish flak as evolutionist jubilation. One argument that truly baffles me is the assertion that no transitional species are in evidence to support the idea of evolution.

I'm not sure what rock one would have to live under to suffer that affliction, er idea, but no matter. The power of Google shall set you free! Would you like those transitional species fossilized, or served live?

For species of the fossilized kind, we'll start with whales. There are a number of very good fossils representing a transition from land to sea for this magnificent mammal. Ranging from kutchicetus and ambulocetus to the more whale-like dorudon. Actually, there are a number of extinct species in the cetacean family that represent significant transition as you can see in this illustration by Carl Zimmer.

There are some wonderful articles available online about cetacean evolution at Wikipedia and Darwinia. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. A great deal of doubt about evolution centers on human evolution and the supposed lack of fossils. Again, I'm flummoxed. Ahem. And also, cough. Lots of fossils.

Anyway, I could go on, but maybe you like your transitional species alive and kicking. Or swimming, as the case may be. Now for me personally, lobe-finned-fishes are enough, and lung-fish plenty more.

But you may want some more visually persuasive examples. Consider for a moment the playful otter. Moreover, consider the otter together with the seal, the sea-lion, and the walrus, coo coo c'choo. Lets not forget those magnificent manatees, or hip hippos. Remember our friends the whales? Evolution isn't just a thing of the past. It's a thing of right now.

Just like the biosphere itself, evolutionary science is changing all the time. With each new fossil find, or scientific discovery we learn more, and the edges of the map recede. New ideas like punctuated equilibrium shed light on some of the puzzles left in the fossil record. But at this stage in the game, the fossil record looks a lot like the Colosseum. Bits of it may be missing, but it's form and purpose are easy to discern.

Lanugo Dreams

Deep Magic of lanugo dreams written in patterns of soft hair.
They remember to me the tides of the womb, and the sea that was mother.
Still they long to rest at her shores.

Babies breath music carried on an ocean breeze.
Gentle waves of sighs on my senses.

For Daniel. For David. And for Arcadia.

Commonality

It's odd how I'm reminded that I still have a lot in common with my Judeo-Christian roots.

A few days ago I picked up a fossil in the yard. No big deal. It's a bit of striated material that might be part of a plant, or maybe even a sea creature like a crinoid. It may be something else entirely. They're pretty common around here. I'm always picking up little pieces like that. This one was bit enough and complete enough to make it into the house to be rinsed off an placed in a curio cabinet next to the megaladon teeth and the trilobites. Treasured like a relic of some long dead saint, revered for being traces of the creatures that shaped the world where our ancestors evolved.

Just because it's the new oddity in the collection, I've looked at it several times over the last few days. tracing the rows of parallel lines like footsteps traced in a meditative maze inlaid on some cathedral floor. I am entranced by the incense of curiosity and the ancient.

And then we come to this morning's coffee. nursed slowly after my shower; I didn't sleep well. I have a big mug filled with creamy coffee that I'd half drained before getting into the shower. I stood in the kitchen taking long slow sips, allowing the incense of java sooth me, with my lip and nose ensconced in the mug.

The mug is one of clear glass, and so I can see that creamy sacred beverage quite well. The bottom of my mug is filled with a fine haze of black coffee-bean powder that has settled out of the coffee while I was in the shower. And as I tip the cup's contents up to my lip, and away, up to my lip and away, the black dust streams away from the bottom of the cup in a series of lines, just like the lines in my fossil. But they're moving. I've stopped drinking now and I'm just moving the coffee, back and forth, watch the lines move as they evoke in my mind an ancient sea. My movement continues in genuflection to this mirage, imagining delicate life forming in ancient tides.

At that point, my wife wanders into the room and asks the perfectly reasonable question, "What on EARTH are you doing?" I tried to explain, and of course failed miserably, then tried to show her, with coffee that was by then hopelessly mixed up. The vision was gone. I shrugged. "I just had the evolutionists' version of finding an image of Jesus in my toast."

Rube Goldberg Culture

A Rube Goldberg Machine is defined as a device that is over-engineered to complete a simple task in too many steps. So as not to emulate, I'll get right to the point.

Our lives our filled with labor saving devices. We use them at home. We use them at work, and even at the grocery store. We use them to get to and from work and the grocery store. In fact, we use so many labor saving devices, we're headed for an energy crisis trying to power all of these labor saving devices. Then, we go to a gym to hop on a treadmill to work off the flab we've built up whilst saving all that labor. In all likelihood, that treadmill is also plugged in and using energy in order to make us work harder and beep at us when we've officially worked off enough flab for the day.

So we have a Rube Goldberg Culture. Too many steps to achieve a simple set of goals. I could go on, but I've got to go hop on the treadmill. Remember that term now; Rube Goldberg Culture.

Biotech Fusion

I remember a futurist once predicting that human-made artificially intelligent robots, not humans, would be the "Earthlings" to colonize the universe beyond our solar system, and outlive our own sun. Now enter biotechnology, ala cyberpunk: the Digital Tattoo Interface, shown off at the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition hints at a different outcome. By the time "Earthlings" leave this solar system, there may not be a difference.

It's a sub dermal GUI that works with your Bluetooth. The simple fact that this little piece of technology is powered by the user's own body instead of some sort of battery makes it attractive from an environmental standpoint. Even better, any risks associated with it are of direct consequence to the user, rather than to comparatively abstract future generations.

Of course, beyond the medical implications of being able to monitor things like your blood sugar or vitals, or the impending blood clot and cancer questions, there is a cultural slippery slope. Ad space, skins, pop-ups, and spam will take on whole new meanings when we're wearing the internet, as will nudity. "Ahem. Excuse me, but, you've left your personal skin up..." And for the incurable couch potatoes, the inevitable implant of view screens on our bellies will turn us all into Teletubbies, and give new meaning to the phrase "staring at your navel."

Science: It works, dummies.

I'm glad to hear that scientists are actually discussing the problem of getting scientific ideas across to the public. But this article also underscores how much I miss people like Carl Sagan, and dare I say it, even C. Everett Koop.

An Automotive X-Prize Hopeful

A German automaker out of Munich is scheduled to release a production model entry for the Automotive X-Prize in 2009. The company boasts their 2-cylinder turbodiesel model, lightweight and aerodynamic, will attain an impressive 130 to 150 mpg. The car looks to be a mixed bag of ingenuity, and small sacrifices to economy. Instead of side opening doors the front of the car, windshield, steering column and all, tilt upward allowing driver and passenger to step into the tight cockpit "like stepping into a bathtub." The base model LS and a somewhat more powerful 3-cylinder GT model will debut in Europe, with plans to hit the US market the following year. The reviews anticipating this car are mixed, but then, nobody thought much of the Beetle at first either. With a price-tag under $20K and fuel economy of 150mpg, pocketbooks might be making all the decisions about this one.

Common Ancestors

At least once a day, I receive in my email one of those endlessly forwarded editions of one witticisms. They seem make their way from inbox to inbox like the common cold goes through an elementary school. I rarely take the time to read them anymore, and as a rule, I forward them only very selectively, when I have something to say about them. And though in some ways it will seem like a tired subject, I received one yesterday that I’m compelled to respond to, if only because it’s an idea I hear a little too often. What I read, partway through an otherwise innocuous list of queries about life, was this:

> If people evolved from apes, why are there still apes?

I can answer this one!

Because we didn't evolve from apes. We evolved from a common ancestor with apes, and subsequently filled differing, though overlapping ecological niches, both through a process of geographical isolation, and a process called punctuated evolution. Since humans have only been around for a few million years, it can hardly be said that that apes will survive our taking over of those ecological niches. We're competing directly with them for habitat, to say nothing of hunting them for meat or amusement, and we're winning on both counts. Neanderthals also evolved from those same common ancestors, and lived in competition with Homo Erectus (our ancestors), and Homo Sapiens (us). Neanderthals could probably offer you some insight into living in competition with Home Sapiens, but of course, they're extinct. In fact, at one time there may have been as many as five closely-related species of human in direct competition with each other. We are all that remain.

The process of evolution is neither as simple, nor as linear as the popular conception depicts. But if you take the time to study and understand it more fully, it's complexity is matched only by it's beauty.

Not in my Backyard!

Torture is in the news a lot these days, and the news items often include such high ranking officials as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. If it weren't downright scary, it would be laughable to hear a supreme court justice reference a fictional television show when discussing the constitutional merits of torture. But then, discussing should we be discussing the constitutionality of torture at all? I don't think the point of a governing document is to look for loopholes that allow us to do questionable things. I think we would be much better served if Justice Scalia were to stick to imagining one of his own nine children as the terror suspect to be interrogated. It's so much easier to ignore the torture of other people's kids.

In fact, it's becoming easier to ignore other people's children all the time. It might take a village to raise a child, but that village no longer includes some shopkeepers in England. First tested in Wales the Mosquito emits an annoying, high-frequency sound that for the most part, only younger people can hear. The device has proved successful at disbursing gangs of hoodlum teenagers from harassing people in front of shops with the device installed, so they can, I suppose, go harass people in front of shops that don't have such a device. Ironically, the shop owner where the device was tested had planned to install a system that would broadcast classical music in front of his store, a tactic also known to disperse teenage gangs, while also introducing them to the likes of Bach and Mozart. However, the shopkeeper had never gotten around to it, and in fact, did nothing until the maker of the Mosquito gave him a device in order to test it. So by doing nothing, he's found a way to continue ignoring these teens, now with technology on his side.

I wonder where those hoodlum teenagers are now? Perhaps they're busy becoming terror suspects.

Tow Truck Drivers and Three Legged Dogs

It's snowed a lot here recently, and lucky me, the heater in my car broke. So I took it in to my mechanic this morning. He's a really friendly guy, and we joked around about the weather and all the automotive trouble thereto appertaining. He commented that "When people make that phone call to the wrecker or the shop, the car is no longer their problem," and told a story about a really beat wrecker driver who shoveled people's cars out of snowbanks while they stood and watched. We concluded that it was a question of empathy.

So on the way home, I saw a lady and her kids walking their three legged dog. Now there's empathy for you. The dog had clearly been in some sort of accident, I'm guessing with a car, and had to have one of his hind legs surgically removed at the hip. That must have been a considerable expense, to say nothing of all the extra care that dog must have needed through all that. Empathy, and lots of it. It’s odd that we can have so much empathy for our dogs, but fellow human beings are little harder for us to empathize with. It’s so much easier to see a person’s flaws if they don’t have fur and big eyes to compensate for them.

To put it another way, it's easy to see the good side of someone going out of their way to help an injured dog, but a lot more telling to see how someone treats a waitress who's having a really bad day.