What a load of crap

"Remember me, folks?"

This is an age of wonders. Great discoveries and technological triumphs are being made every day.

Yesterday, major further proof of the Big Bang theory was found.

Elsewhere, researchers are well on their way to developing bionic plants.

And, in Copenhagen, archaeologists discovered a bunch of barrels of shit.

Now, this last discovery strikes somewhat close to home. As some of you know, I am a sometime archaeologist. And, as any archaeologist worth their trowel can tell you, sometimes dung is literally better than gold.

See, when that discipline was in its early days, people were mainly interested in the impressive stuff that ancient peoples produced. Greek statues. The treasures of King Tutankhamen. That kind of thing.

But, as the science evolved (partly in response to the work of my homeboy, Lewis Henry Morgan, archaeologists became more interested in what they could learn from the everyday. Sure, the shiny things were cool and instructive (and still help drive traffic to museums, as well as general interest in the field), but to really learn about how ancient peoples did their various things, and why they did them in the ways that they did, you could often learn a lot more from the everyday. Shoes. Musical instruments. Living spaces.

Moreover, as gossip columnists were learning at probably about the same time, sometimes the most interesting things are the stuff people from the past didn't necessarily intend anyone to find. The discarded. The lost (like this old thing.) The prurient.

To this list add poop. It's valuable stuff to the archaeologist - the amount of information you can glean from it is astounding. You can, obviously, tell what the people who produced it were eating. This can provide insight not only into hunting/gathering and agricultural practices but also trade. You can also tell what diseases they might have had. Since feces contain contain dead cells, you can also get genetic material, which among the wealth of data that can give you, can help you figure out how many people might have inhabited a site, how they were related to each other... very useful! I can tell you, at one of the archaeology field schools I attended in college, a latrine pit in the deserted village was considered one of the major finds.

It;s not just human spoor that's educational. Droppings of even quite ancient animals can reveal a treasure trove of information.

But what's also worth knowing is that fecal matter is useful crap even when it's fresh, or nearly so. It can be used for fuel. Paper can be made from it. It's a medical treatment. (Don't try it at home.) There is even a coffee made from ca-ca. (You can try that at home, but I don't recommend you do, for various reasons.)

Back in the late '90s, the story of a painting by British artist Chris Ofili made the news. "The Holy Virgin Mary" incorporates, among other materials, elephant dung into a portrait of the mother of Jesus. Plenty of people, including then-mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani, were incensed, seeing the use of dung in portraying a religious icon as a grave offense. The thing they weren't getting was that in parts of Africa, elephant dung isn't seen as something noxious, but rather useful - almost sacred.

To close us out in this exercise in looking at poo anew, one of my favorite Zen parables:

A student asked his master, "Master, why does shit smell so bad?"

The master replied, "If you were a fly, it would smell like candy!"

I'm certainly not suggesting that you save your contributions in barrels (though, you know, whatever gets you through the day), only that, next time you go, give a thought to just what you're flushing away.

Making Time for Interesting Times; or, How I Want to be More Like Ayn Rand

Oh yeah - it seems I have a blog.

OK - I didn't forget I had a blog, exactly. I always kept meaning to update it. But you know how it is. Life gets in the way. The boss makes unreasonable demands, like that I do the job I am assigned and paid for. (Sheesh.) Meals must be prepared and laundries must be done, and I have to stop and watch "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" 'cause it's, you know, on.

These are common challenges. But there's also the aspect of me being traditionally bad at long-term planning and focusing on projects that are important to me personally.

Sure, I get tasks done at work, get the bills paid, and so on. But I've always been bad at completing that big creative project I thought of, like, eight years ago... or charting a viable career path and following through with it. Or committing to travel to that interesting place I've always wanted to go to.

And then there's this blog. It's like, what - eight months since the last post? Criminey. And it's a shame, 'cause there have been SO many interesting things since then to write about! (As I move forward, I may go back and dredge up some from the past.)

But, I have recently resolved to be tough with myself and commit to those things which are PERSONALLY important, and carve out time to work on them.

I read recently that Ayn Rand wrote her early works during her lunch breaks at her receptionist job. (Feel free, Gentle Readers, to weigh in if I'm shaky on the details.) Now, I find Ms. Rand's politics repellent, and her writing didactic and leaden, but the point is, SHE GOT THE SHIT DONE. (To be fair, a little further research indicates she got a lift from amphetamines.) I tend to use my lunch breaks checking up on vital developments on the Internet and making Bigfoot jokes with coworkers.

So, among other things I'm going to work harder to identify those places and times where I can change my habits, and stop just giving lip service to caring about my personal projects. I hope you enjoy the results - I'll be doing my best to make your attention to them worthwhile. Tips on time- and self-management are also welcome from those of you who've got it goin' on.

Meanwhile, I got a welcome kick in the pants today from this guy.

Pawpaw, can you hear me?

One of the things I'm really into is wild food - that is, food that's just out there naturally, without having to go a store or a restaurant or whatever. Why I'm into this is something I'll discuss later, but for now just know that, for some time now, my Holy Grail of foraging has been the pawpaw.

Depending on where (and when) you’re from, the name may be foreign to you. The pawpaw is North America’s largest tree fruit, growing in woods throughout the eastern half of the continent. Pawpaws have never really caught on as supermarket produce in the way that other fruits have – even the more exotic ones. (You can find cherimoya, a tropical relative of the pawpaw, in grocery stores from time to time, though.) Apparently once picked it ripens too quickly to be worthwhile for marketing.

Where it’s abundant, though, it’s a beloved part of the local seasonal cuisine; it’s also given its name to various places and even a dinosaur.

My job requires me to spend a fair amount of time in relative wilderness, which is great for my interest in wild food, among other propensities (like hiking and wildlife viewing.) While I can’t validate spending work time to just go off on a bush shopping trip, wild foods are abundant enough that I just come across them in the normal course of a field day.  I found my first wild blueberries in the woods down here, as well as the odd edible fungus. Now, southeast Georgia is outside what most references call the range of greatest abundance for the pawpaw, but anecdotal reports indicated to me I might just come across it in my fieldwork, and the wetlands seemed the ideal place for something that my Peterson Field Guide tells me inhabits “rich soil; streambanks, woods”.

The pawpaw eluded me for five seasons, however, until I had an encounter this past summer in a completely unexpected place.

I had to check out a large drainage ditch, and parked the truck in a small copse of shrubs and weeds on the side of an unpaved road some distance uphill from the ditch. And there, at the side of the truck, was a scraggly waist-high bush bearing small fruits that pretty well matched the description of pawpaw.

I collected several of the fruits and brought them back. They were green and pretty hard, so I set them on the windowsill, hoping they would ripen up.

After a few days in the sun, they were starting to turn brown, so I cut a couple open to see if they were any good to eat. Disappointment! Inside they were mostly pits, and the small amount of yellowish-white flesh surrounding those was pretty flavorless, like the inside of a banana peel.

Nevertheless, it was a ray of hope, indicating that I may yet find the real thing somewhere in the wilds of the Low Country. The pawpaw remains an elusive but tantalizing wild snack find. (I’ve also since added to the list the potato-like tubers of Sagittaria latifolia. (Among its many names, it’s also known as “katniss”, which you fans of “The Hunger Games” will recognize.)

Why is this such a big deal to me? Well, in college I majored in anthropology, inspired among other things by Daniel Quinn’s novel “Ishmael” and related works. One of the many things I learned – something, in fact, that most of us know intellectually but forget – is that, for most of our history, humans didn’t get our food from farms and the local grocery stores, but straight from the world around us. We evolved into a world that provides everything we need, if we just let it and if we have the knowledge to get it. Our ancestors weren’t ignorant brutes, scrabbling to survive. Instead, they maintained and shared a storehouse of knowledge of how to survive and thrive. This is not to dismiss all the gifts that the modern world gives us, but does provide a valuable counterpoint to the usual rhetoric that life was simply UNBEARABLE until we got CIVILIZED.

This is going to be important to remember in the near future. We hear a lot about how we have to stay ahead of our growing population by learning how to produce more food. What’s rarely pointed out is that our growing population is a direct result of an OVERabundance of food, caused at least in part by the widespread adoption of agriculture. That development has brought many benefits, but a host of problems as well. Modern foraging isn’t just a rewarding activity, but a valuable reminder that there are other ways to live than the way we do now.

This Blog Post Intentionally Left Blank

Yes, I am fully aware that I haven't updated this nascent blog in - what? 63 years? Something like that. It's just that I've been really busy with work, maintaining domestic bliss, trying to get/stay in shape, and many many other things.

Fear not - I am working on a post about wild food, which is one of my many interests. I may have to mooch some time off my girlfriend's computer at home while the paper-mache for my DragonCon costume dries.

In the meantime, just wanted to weight in with one of my favorite mind-bending things from modern life that cropped up again today. You may have seen it, especially if you've worked for the government: there'll be a page in a document that contains only words to the effect of, "This page intentionally left blank". The irony, of course, being that the page is not blank - it has the words "This page intentionally left blank" printed on it.

I love a good paradox, and this one is classic. It's a perfect example of bureaucratic overthinking resulting in a waste of time and energy. It's reasonable to think a reader would see a blank page and wonder if an error had been made... but if that's the worry, why include the "blank" page at all? It seemed to serve no purpose in the publication I saw today, other than to divide a title page from the Table of Contents, and really, the nature of such pages would seem to be enough to do that pretty clearly. In bringing the reader's attention to the problem, the publisher negates the reality that led to the statement.

Think of all the ink used to print that sentence in document after document. You're all probably aware how expensive modern printer ink - I think it's made from unicorn blood, or something. Think of all the pieces of paper included just as a blank page which isn't. Now imagine what we could do with those resources if we just didn't put the dang page in. Just... IMAGINE...

Or don't. I promise, I will post a proper blog entry soon. In the meantime, in a story seemingly calculated to bring shame to an early middle-aged man who can't even update a blog with regularity, a 17-year old girl has just won a prize for creating a computer algorithm to improve breast cancer protection.

Later.

Nessies are the new Jesus Horses

When I was a kid I went through a period where I was obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster and related mysterious critters. I read every book the library had, watched the relevant episodes of "In Search Of..." as many times as I could (I never saw the attempted revival with Mitch Pileggi, but I can't imagine he had the narrational gravitas of Leonard Nimoy) and as a result new an unusual (and probably socially unhealthy) amount about entities like Champ, the Flatwoods Monster, and assorted globsters. My dense layers of nerdness are represented by the fact that the first "Doctor Who" book I got was the novelization of "Terror of the Zygons" retitled for print as "Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster".

All these years later, the Zygons

are fondly remembered by fans as

classic monsters. The stop-motion

Nessie, not so much.



Although credulity has waned as I've learned more about science and critical thinking, I still love a good monster story. I love that the traditions continues with cryptids like the mapinguari and the ningen. When I'm out in the field surveying Georgia wetlands, I always keep a hopeful eye out for the skunk ape, because you never know...

That's the thing: it's difficult to prove something DOESN'T exist. Negatives in general are hard to prove. Nonetheless, it's telling that there's no hard evidence for any of the classic cryptids. As my wetland mentor Jake Duncan has said of Sasquatch, "if it existed, someone woulda run one of the things over with their pickup." While I don't want to see any Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) mowed down on the highway, that would be a great development for the cryptozoological community. When it comes to proving the existence of a life form, you gotta have a corpse.

The same skepticism that makes me require a body for my beloved monsters is what makes me doubt (at best) the existence of God, or gods. I just can't see any reason to think those stories are true, and many reasons for them NOT to be true. I consider myself an agnostic in theory, atheist in practice: while I admit that, like Nessie, God COULD exist, and I can't prove He, She, It, or They doesn't, it seems highly unlikely, and I would have to doubt that such a being really has an interest or intervenes in our affairs. (This might be a good general topic for discussion in a future blog post.) Furthermore, the widespread belief in such an entity (not to mention widespread beliefs in many things that are unprovable or, worse yet, demostrably false) has many dangerous effects. Therefore, I prefer to live my life assuming there's no God.

Nevertheless, as a sometime-anthropologist I maintain a general interest in religion and religious stories. Like Douglas Adams, “I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.” Therefore, it was with mixed horror and amusement that I saw this recent story: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/loch-ness-monster-used-debunk-evolution-state-funded-190816504.html

WOW. Just... wow. I was goggle-eyed, open-mouthed, and shaking for a full twelve seconds after reading that.

Besides just the... nuttiness of using one unprovable to try to prove another unprovable, this is an awful argument for some interesting reasons.

The first is that the textbook apparently tries to argue that dinosaurs may be alive today, and that this fact, if true, would disprove evolution. But it wouldn't: there are lots of animals still existing that predate the dinosaurs, like sharks and cockroaches,

But regardless of that, the truth appears to be that dinosaurs ARE still with us, in the form of birds. We eat dinosaurs and their eggs for meals. We keep dinosaurs as pets. Although the evolutionary history isn't yet completely clear, we know enough to say that at least some dinosaurs didn't go extinct - they just changed form.

"Chirp, I say... chirp."

Another remarkable aspect of the story is that they're apprently trying to use the possibility of Nessie being a survived plesiosaur. There's no question that that's a popular idea, given strength by the famous Surgeon's Photo of Nessie. But the thing is, plesiosaurs weren't dinosaurs. They were prehistoric reptiles, sure, but there were lots of prehistoric reptiles, and the term "dinosaur" applies only to two particular groups of those reptiles.

So, yeah... People can of course believe whatever they like, but this stuff is being taught as science to at least SOME students of at least SOME schools that receive SOME public funding. This does not bode well.

By the way, the title of this post is a reference to a "Saturday Night Live: Weekend Update" piece from a while back.

Bullycrap

Well! Been a while since the last few posts that got this blog rolling. I've been busy with all the many things involved in Being Me. Anyway, I warned you this thing might be inconsistent. I WARNED YOU ALL.

Anyway, sometimes it takes me a while to recognize an angle on a subject that's worth writing about. Case in point: this story which has been getting a lot of notice lately. It was a couple of days before I realized it happened in a suburb of my home city. I'd be happy to see Rochester making international news if it was for one of the many wonderful things about the city, but naturally, this story is sad. Still, it's interesting on a number of levels.

First of all, it hits home because I was bullied and teased when I was young - for being fat, odd, sensitive, physically and socially awkward, liking "Doctor Who", or any combination of those things. Of course, this has happened to many if not most of us. Often bullies are or have been the victims of bullies themselves. So, my own experience with the phenomenon is hardly unique, but there are times I still feel it keenly. (We'll return to this later.)

The story is also remarkable for the way it illustrates how bullying has, to a certain extent, been taken out of the private or semi-private context and into the public or semi-public realm. My bullies tended to confine their antics to the locker room, a corner of the classroom, or even between my school desk and theirs. (The better to avoid getting caught and reprimanded, which sometimes happened when I was in school, but may or may not be less likely now.) This event apparently got so much attention because the video got posted to YouTube. It's escaped the confines of the school bus and can be viewed by anyone (it made its way to THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET), and is on record and available for... well, if not for the ages, exactly, for a while. I've forgotten probably 95% of the abuse and insults piled on me in school - not so easy for those whose torments are preserved by electrons.

The thing that really made me decide to post about the event, though, is the larger issue of making fun. It's been said that all humor happens at someone else's expense. (Mel Brooks put it like this: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.") I don't know if that's true ALL of the time, but goodness knows it's true much of the time. Most of us love a good laugh or a joke... sometimes even when it's directed at us. But where's the line between a joke and abuse? And how far out of the line of fire does a subject have to be for the shot not to be fatal?

For example, those of you who know me know I love "Mystery Science Theater 3000". It takes a common trope - making fun of movies and TV shows, often (but not necessarily) old and generally (but not necessarily) bad - and elevates it to the level of art, both high and low (and often somewhere in between.) Now, a movie can't be hurt by jokes, but the people who made it can. How should we feel knowing that some folks may see the movie they worked so hard on being laughed at on "MST3K" and take it personally. (Fortunately, some of the victims seem to be good-natured about it.)

I've developed something of a habit of riffing on TV and movies myself... sometimes inappropriately, I'll admit. However, I was moved to think about it when my girlfriend commented on a few examples, such as when I comment on how many of the "Real Housewives..." look and act like drag queens, or react in mock-horror at a particularly flamboyant hairdo. Is making fun of someone OK if they're not present to be the victim of it? Is it more acceptable if, like reality TV stars and people who post ridiculous Internet videos of themselves, they have put themselves in the public eye? What about when the subject isn't on TV, but in the "real" world (whatever that is.) Is it OK to make fun of someone behind their back, even if they'll never find out about it?

If you think I'm being overly sensitive about this, well, I'm not going to stop enjoying "MST3K" or doing my own riffing soon. But I want to know when what I do "all in fun" crosses the line. I don't like bullies or bullying - very much because of my own experiences but because I hate to see power being abused in general. (It's one reason I have been and remain a devoted "Doctor Who" fan: as one astute commentator has noted (scroll down to Part 4), among the many inspring things the Doctor does is stand up to bullies. If I'm going to be consistent in what I take a stand against, I have to identify it accurately, right?

I also wanted to discuss the larger question of how we respond to bullying. Even those of us who don't approve of it might suggest (constructively or not) that folks need to toughen up - find humor in, or at least accept, or foibles, and be more assertive in letting people know that we won't accept their abuse. However, there are limits to how tough one can get. I do think my own experiences helped thicken my skin somewhat, but I still have my issues (with body image, among other things), and sometimes a comment can hit us in an unexpected way and really smart. (They made fun of the women for having a son who committed suicide, for cryin' out loud!)

I'll also agree with those who say that bullies need to be called out and stood up to, by the community in general if not by authorities. (We do run the risk of repressing free expression if we squash talk we don't like.) (I finally saw "The Avengers" yesterday. There's a wonderful moment where the godlike supervillain commands a group to kneel before him. One old man refuses, insisting he will "never kneel to men like you." "There are no men like me," the villain answers. "There are ALWAYS men like you." I've gotten somwhat better at asserting myself to people who give me crap; I hope when opportunities arise to stand up for others, I have and will do so.)

However, there are also reports that the school bus bullies are being bullied. I hope the jerks learn their lesson, but is it OK to respond to jerkiness with jerkiness. (I know I've been guilty of that too.)

I do approve of one last interesting aspect of this. Lots of generous folks have ponied up dough to send to the bullied bus monitor -  not 'cause anyone made them, but 'cause they could. This kind of restorative justice is certainly not new, but I'd venture modern interconnectedness has made it easier than ever before. I hope Karen Klein uses it wisely to do some nice things for herself and others, and heals.

Your comments and discussion, as always, are invited...

The Human Egosystem: Personal Fauna and Flora

Fascinating news in this, possibly the most germ-phobic period in human history (and also news with some themes in common to my last post): scientists in the Human Microbiome Project have managed to catalog a representative sample of the microorganisms that live on and in the human body.

Each of us is our own mini-biosphere, carrying around an array of tiny life forms that not only depend on us for survival, but also often help us survive. For instance, some of the bacteria in our guts help us digest our food.

It's startling to think of yourself as kind of a mini-planet hosting a population of life forms, instead of (as some of us sometimes do) a mini-planet hosting one too many stored portions of cheesecake.

Compare this to the metaphor of the human mind being itself a kind of Universe, bounded and private yet also shared, through our many kinds of communication. Long before it was applied to amusing pictures on the Internet, Richard Dawkins coined the word meme to describe ideas which can be shared between memebers of a culture, as well as between cultures, and which may mutate in the sharing. He suggested the meme may have taken over for the gene as the primary driver of human evolution (since memes can be shared much faster than genes, and often better survive mutation.)

Every time two humans touch, they share their personal worlds. A kiss or a handshake can be an emigration, for better or worse. A sneeze can send countless tiny astronauts into the void, possibly to take up residence in some other human world. And when ideas are shared between humans, they can change Universes: the interior mental Universe as well as the real physical one.

We started sending radio waves into space long before we started sending artifacts and organisms. A memetic sneeze, flying out into the Universe. Someday, humans (or some other creature) may colonize alien worlds. We may have already sent viable bacteria into space on one of our probes. We've only seen a tiny portion of all the changes we can wreak.