Posts tagged: Long Reads
Psychologists hypothesise why the return trip ‘home’ seems to go by a lot faster than the outbound journey. It has all to with our expectation of the end of the journey. Here’s what van de Ven thinks is going on: “Often we see that people are too optimistic when they start to travel,” he says. So when they finish the outbound trip, they feel like it took longer than they expected. That feeling of pessimism carries over to when they’re ready to return home. “So you start the return journey, and you think, ‘Wow, this is going to take a long time.’” But just as initial optimism made the trip out feel longer than expected, this pessimism starting back makes the trip home feel shorter. “It’s really all about your expectations — what you think coming in,” says Michael Roy, a psychologist at Elizabethtown College and a co-author with van de Ven on the article describing this effect in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
Using Darwin’s idea and other branches of science, we’re seeing researchers describing works of fiction in a new light.
Carroll and his colleagues then drew on anthropological research to argue why this behavior appeals. In our fraught hunter-gatherer days, when humans roamed about in small bands, people had to sacrifice selfish interests and work together, or they’d perish. In contrast, self-aggrandizing or dominant behavior threatened group survival. Victorian novels, in this view, merely dress up these ancient, evolved preferences in crinolines and top hats.
Interpretation of Hamlet through neuroscience of depression or how the wars in The Illiad and The Odyssey were fundamentally wars for marriages and evolutionary legacy. All these texts can be described using modern science, but scientists who are championing this form of research seem to finding hostility from the field of humanity:
Gottschall says the resistance to Darwinian lit crit among literary scholars reminds him of resistance among religious groups to evolution itself. “There’s the fear that if you were able to explain the arts and their power scientifically, you’d explain them away,” he says. “Humanities are the last bastion of magic.”
Pdf of the article here for non-subscribers.
There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.
I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.
In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.
Scientists debating whether to name an entire geological period due to the human effects on the planet. Calling it ‘Anthropocene’ it could be anything from 5000-10,000 years ago to 1945 onwards.
The “evidence for the prosecution”, as Zalasiewicz puts it, is compelling. Through food production and urbanization, humans have altered more than half of the planet’s ice-free land mass, and are moving as much as an order of magnitude more rock and soil around than are natural processes. Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are expected to make the ocean 0.3–0.4 pH points more acidic by the end of this century. That will dissolve light-coloured carbonate shells and sea-floor rocks for about 1,000 years, leaving a dark band in the sea-floor sediment that will be obvious to future geologists. A similar dark stripe identifies the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum about 55 million years ago, when global temperatures rose by some 6 °C in 20,000 years. A similar temperature jump could happen by 2100, according to some high-emissions scenarios.
If scientists can agree in principle that a new time division is justified, they will have to settle on a geological marker for its start. Some suggest the pollen of cultivated plants, arguing that mankind’s fingerprint can be seen 5,000–10,000 years ago with the beginnings of agriculture. Others support the rise in the levels of greenhouse gases and air pollution in the latter part of the eighteenth century, as industrialization began. A third group would start with the flicker of radioactive isotopes in 1945, marking the invention of nuclear weapons.
Myers delves into how the physiological features of the kidney can be explained in an evolutionary framework. Going from the basic pronephric kidney in the embryo to the metanephric kidney, we see how to it changes over time and how it is synchronous with the development of the reproductive organs.
I think you can see what’s cool about the kidneys — they follow a sequential pattern of development that also happens to reflect the evolutionary history of kidneys. You might be tempted to speculate that it follows a Haeckelian model, where development necessarily follows an evolutionary trajectory because change can only come by addition of new features, but don’t be fooled. There are a couple of reasons why this peculiar pattern of retaining ancient kidney types is maintained.
Discussion over on Reddit over the actual benefit of ass hair. As is the case, the top rated comment answers the long plagued question succinctly, and with, eh, flowery prose. This might the worst/best erotic biological prose you’ll read today. Saved for posterity.
Don’t Shave I have recently made one of the biggest mistakes in my life, and I offer my story to you, that you may learn from my error. It all started, as many things do, with me having trouble shitting. No, I was not constipated. This was not a regularity problem but a matter of technique. It seems my ass-hair had grown to such a length that tiny balls of shit were constantly getting tied up in the matted jungle between my ass-cheeks. It led to much frustration, with me knowing that I still had something to drop, but unable to shake the tenacious turd loose from its butt hair dwelling place. Eventually I would have to do one of two things: either reach down with some paper and try to pinch off the lingering loaf (which required careful precision to avoid smearing the creature all over my rear, especially since I had no way of seeing what I was doing) or just go for broke, start wiping, and hope that I could remove all the leftover fecal matter before the toilet paper reached its ‘Can’t-Be-Flushed’ threshold. As I was contemplating this problem, I had what seemed at the time to be a brilliant idea. “Hey, this is my butt and my butt-hair, right? So why don’t I just eliminate all the hair all together, and then my crap will flow out like beer from a keg!” I said to myself. It is a statement that will go down in history with a lot of other regretted statements, things like “How many Indians could there be?” said by General Custer. “Looks like a good day for a drive!” by JFK, or “There! America On-Line now has complete Usenet access!” by some idiot system tech. Such was my anal shaving idea. I performed the operation that night, with a cheap disposable razor and a towel to sit on. Starting from the bottom, and shaving from the crack to the cheeks, I began the arduous process of ridding my ass of hair. Occasionally, I would have to clean the razor of accumulated hair and miscellaneous slime, which I did by wiping it on the towel. Slowly, my twin mounds and the between-ravine began to resemble the hairless cheeks of a newborn baby. Finally, I wiped the razor one last time, and surveyed my work. The towel was covered with a pile of hair. My ass was smooth as ivory. I smiled; satisfied, thinking my troubles were over. Little did I know? I now have a great respect for anal-hair. Like everything in this world God created, it has its mighty purpose in existence. It was only after I had removed it that I started to learn how much I had been taking it for granted. For one, it provides friction. I learned this the next day, when I walked out into the sun heading for class. After climbing two flights of stairs and starting to sweat, I started to notice something unpleasant. The sweat was accumulating in my crack, and was causing the unpleasant sensation of my two ass-cheeks sliding past each other with every step. I thought about going to the bathroom and wiping it off, but had to get to class. Eventually, I thought, it would dry. Unfortunately, it did dry, but only after mingling with the microscopic shit- molecules lingering around my brown starfish. When I stood up after class, my cheeks were stuck together with a slimy sticky shit/sweat combination. As I made my way back to my dorm, it started to itch. And I mean it itch! Felt like a swarm of ants was making its way up and down my crack. Fighting to keep from jamming my hand down there and scratching away, I rushed back to the dorm. Unfortunately again, this exertion caused me to sweat, and when I finally reached my room, my cheeks were sliding back and forth against each other like a pair of horny cane-toads. I quickly dropped my pants, and attempted to dry my ass off by sticking it in front of a fan and spreading my cheeks. As I pulled the two mounds of flesh apart, a horrible stench burst free and filled the room. Every dog within a 4-block radius started to howl. I had it worst of all, as the ripe aroma of festering shit/sweat went into the fan and blew back into my face. I fought to keep from heaving. And as I sat there, fighting vomit, my ass cheeks spread and dripping, with the concentrated aroma of my body odor mixed with the tangy smell of my own shit blowing right into my face, I had only one thought: “It will be like this until the hair grows back. Weeks.” Later on, trying to deal as best I could, wiping my ass at every opportunity, I discovered another wonderful use for ass-hair, ventilation. I attempted to launch a fart, only to have it get stuck between my ass-cheeks. Apparently, with no hair, the two pink twins can get vacuum-sealed together, and the result was a frustrating fart that slid up and down between my cheeks like a lost gerbil. As if that wasn’t enough, I am now enduring further torture. As anyone who has ever shaved anything knows, when hair is first growing back in, it comes in as stubble. Imagine your ass having the texture of a Brillo pad. Well, that’s what I am dealing with now. It is a hellish torture, and there are many times when I just look out the window and contemplate why I shouldn’t just jump out and get it all over with in one fleshy splat, rather than endure this constant agony. All I can say is friends - don’t shave your ass hair! The end…
