I posit that language acquisition is driven less by intellectualism than daily utility. A recent post over at Greg Laden's Blog got me to wondering why Anglophones remain so stubbornly monolingual when so much of the world speaks a couple different languages fluently. Upon ponderation, I believe that Anglophones don't learn second or third languages because we don't need to, not really anyway. This isn't to say that this attitude is right, nor that I condone it, but from England on outward to the United States of America to Austrailia, English-speakers have been very successful at ensconcing themselves in geographical isolation, cultural imperialism, and economic massiveness underwritten by strategic military stubbornness. These three conditions having combined to make English the predominant formal language in the world despite its sillinesses.
We dumb Americans don't learn French, Spanish, Hindi, or other non-English languages because we have no daily use for them. We may take a few semesters of a foreign European language in high school, but because we don't have a need to use them, nor a community, space, or occasion to trot them out, we largely forget them. And when we go to other countries we have the privilege borne out of economic massiveness that leads us to expect, and even demand, that our hosts speak our language even as we remain entirely ignorant of theirs.
This isn't necessarily a good thing, but maybe this is why it is the way it is.
For the record, I speak and read German fluently enough to also make out written Dutch and Swedish and can stammer out just enough Spanish to keep myself fed and housed. I intend to learn French if I ever find time because I think it sounds funny, and Mandarin if I can.
As I was fumbling contacts into bleary eyes this morning, my stomach untied itself from the knot I had been unaware of and startled me with the ferociousness of its growl. I was hungry. I am often hungry as I tend to skip meals to do more interesting things and frequently go 12 or more hours without any food*. This is a long-tailed habit rooted back 8 years, and it is not likely to change. I don't mind being hungry. I relish it, because it reminds me of the sheer vitality of the human body, its metabolic resilience, and it makes my next meal taste that much sweeter. I sincerely believe that food would not be nearly so appealing if I didn't occasionally let myself get so hungry that the reptilian brain underneath my consciousness begins to wonder how squirrels taste. That being said, this morning's hunger was somehow different. Normally hunger pangs are diffuse, a distant inconvenience upon the sphere of my awareness, but this was sharp and intense and immediate like a rattlesnake uncoiling.
And my hunger made me feel guilty.
I had oatmeal in the pantry and a stove to cook it on. This is a privilege, and it is one that I do not take lightly or for granted. So many people in the world are hungry, even in the West, and we simply don't see them. Sure, we admonish children to finish their peas because a kid in Poor Country X doesn't even have peas, but this nicety conceals an ugly truth: that the kid in Poor Country X really exists, and actually is hungry.
Wrapped up within this is the disgust that the phrase "I'm starving!" evokes from me. It is a terrible hyperbole, and I find it cruel and inappropriate to use when you merely want lunch while someone else in the world may not have lunch, or have had breakfast, dinner, or lunch the day before. Americans claim to be starving at the slightest hint of hunger, but maybe that is just the uniquely privileged perspective that we as a nation have, when we live in a country that has so much food that many are obese even on top of all the food we simply throw out. I suspect that the majority of the people who use this phrase so callously have never really been hungry and I wonder what they would do in a hard situation. So much of our Western society is carried upon the backs of titans treading on toothpick bridges, tenuous and fragile. Entirely dependent upon fossil fuels, yet still incredibly wasteful. The food we, as a country, throw away before even opening the package could probably feed a great many people. Yet somehow, just as the hyperbole of "I'm starving!" or the "Eat your peas because a child in Poor Country X doesn't have them" is part of our culture, food waste is also deeply ingrained upon our national consciousness.
I'm debating whether or not I am too proud to reclaim some of the unspoilt food that gets thrown away. On the one hand, it is there, free to take and perfectly edible, but on the other hand I feel that it is somewhat gross to eat dumpster chicken (if found still cold in an unopened package). I am fairly certain that many of those who are relatively well-fed yet claim to be starving would find it disgusting, but what are your thoughts?
*It should probably be noted that when I do eat, I try to eat 1Mcal+ at a time.
The world begins at midnight. As the stroke of midnight is called out from bells, we herald the dawning of a new dusk even as most others melt away to wrap themselves in the comfort of their beds and late night television. At 1a the people stop leaving and the rushing cars become more sparse. The streets empty of people and the ranks of the half-sloshed bar-dwellers dwindle just a little more. Underneath the frowning street lights, we emerge, fresh-faced and laughing, full of energy, piss, and vinegar. At 2a we stand laughing delighted in our odd suits at the ashen-faced last call stragglers as they come creeping out of their dens, just drunk enough to question whether we are real. By 3a the streets are mostly clear, populated only by a lone bicycle wending its tired way home or a tight knot of quietly moving people with shoes in hand. We remain alert, alive, forming circles around fires, computers, in the cracks of the world that most people that don't even notice. 4a rolls around on the dour clock faces and we launch new adventures, setting out into the clean, abandoned parks, reveling in the crisp thunderstorms roiling along the rivers and the sheer scope of the wonder in the world. When the cities are crowded, they seem mundane due to everpresent companionship, but in the night each and every one of us could well be the last person alive, the lone witness to the absolute joy of the moon gliding from clouds to shine down on vociferous arguments and manic productivity. By 5a we begin to wonder whether our wakeful watching through the march of dusk has percolated into the snoring minds of those who comfortably slumber around us. At 6a, the Eastern sky begins to wash away into the first barren hints of the coming day, and we realize that the dread Morning People will soon awaken and disturb our revelry. So we end our projects, dry our war paints and clean our tools, then wend our ways homeward, hissing over dew-drenched asphalts for one last snack before drawing the heavy curtains and rolling ourselves into the brilliance of our dreams. We are night owls, and we are watching.
1) Dinosaurs are cool. 2) Little kids (and adults) think dinosaurs are cool. 3) If we use dinosaurs as a vehicle for communicating science, more children become interested in science at an earlier age, which is a net win for both science and the kids.
The first time I heard about deoxyribonucleic acid, it was from a film within a film, enthusiastically described and explained by an animated firefly that the lead character scientist grudgingly sat through. I was 7 years old at the time, and I had to forfeit a loose but stubborn milk tooth in order to get to go see it at the local AMC theater. I'm fairly certain that my mother quickly regretted taking me to see it at all as the proportion of sentences involving dinosaurs that poured from me in an unstoppable flood increased dramatically. I'd been previously building wooden models of dinosaur skeletons, and I had several inflatable dinosaurs in my room. I knew many of the dinosaur species by name, although I've now forgotten, and I was fascinated by the sheer scale of them. When I was 4 and again at 5, I'd gotten to see a fully articulated Brontosaurus skeleton in the Smithsonian, and even been allowed to revertentially touch a real dinosaur bone that they had on display. When my mother tried to tell or read me bedtime stories, I firmly rejected any story that didn't involve a dinosaur of some kind. In fact, I was so utterly obsessed with dinosaurs that my little brother, who became self-aware just at the peak of my obsession when I got Jurassic Park on VHS and as a game for the Sega Genesis, later developed a crippling phobia of dinosaurs. He was sincerely terrified that a Tyrannosaurus rex was going to come back to life in the middle of the night, sneak between the houses, break into his 2nd story room, and summarily eat him. He was not reassured when I pointed out that the Ozarks had been an ocean at the time such dinosaurs roamed. Come to think of it, he also was not convinced when I showed him the coral, sea shell, and worm trail fossils that the local stream beds were chock-full of.
As an adult, my obsession with dinosaurs is gone because immunology is much more complex and chaotic and therefore much more interesting to me. The evolutionary dynamics of bone morphology are still damn cool, though, and the prospect that we might one day recreate an extinct species through the Dark Arts of our biological sciences is absolutely captivating.
But that's not my point.
Imagine if this creepy, feel-good hippy marshmallow fluff excuse for a dinosaur Had instead been a smart, endearingly disheveled scientist dinosaur instead? Even if he was incredibly annoying, Barney was also incredibly popular and he taught an entire generation of American children...something. He did teach stuff, right? Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that the singing purple dinosaur generated huge viewership and made a tremendous impression upon young children as well as some deep product marketing for PBS. Imagine if instead of peddling self-esteem, there had been a relatable dinosaur mascot dishing out some awesome, intelligible science! Consider the depth of the impact that that might have had! Instead of a smarmy self-confident generation of young adults now, we'd have a science-literate generation of young adults who found self-confidence through knowledge and understanding instead of songs and dancing! And that would be incredible! Not just for us as scientists, but for society as a whole because even some basic familiarity with the principles of scientific thinking and research structure can make tremendous impacts upon the operations of very diverse fields.
And yes, Bill Nye the Science Guy was indeed on simultaneously as the blobby excuse for a dinosaur, but he never got the kind of veneration that the dinosaur did, even though he did have a talking rat for an assistant. Dinosaurs are alien enough to children that they hold a distinct appeal, while children already know that rats are bad.
So why couldn't we have a talking dinosaur educating youngsters about science now? I can't think of any reason we cannot, even if cartoons in general have been shifting in favor of robots and monkeys. Maybe if the dinosaur professor had a robot monkey assitant we could grab both demographics in one fell swoop?
The current global recession notwithstanding*, I have some major beef with economics in general. Economics exists to describe, regulate, and predict the markets, yet it inevitably fails to recognize reality and only perpetuates an unfortunately narrow self-interest in the majority of its participants. I posit:
1) The self-regulating "invisible hand" of the markets that supposedly guides consumers en masse to the best possible outcomes is nothing more than a foolish myth.
2) Economics pretends that it is uniquely exempt** from basic thermodynamic principles.
The invisible guiding hand is a convenient white lie that humanizes the volatility of markets, which amplify human indecisiveness and greed, and makes them seem comprehensible. This is pure fluffery at its least ingenious. The invisible hand's actions throughout history have, by and large, only served to increase the wealth of those who could afford to speculate within the markets, those who had money to risk and milk. It is entirely true that the invisible hand will guide consumers to purchase equivalent goods at lower costs and thereby benefit the producer who is able to manufacture those goods at the lowest marginal cost. But the same time this effect will not increase the purchasing parity or real wealth of the consumers themselves unless we insist on qualifying wealth by measurement of cheap plastic tchotkes. The invisible hand excludes benefit to the poor by marginalizing their purchasing to the necessities and using them as labor. The latter effect is especially apparent in third-world sweat shops churning out luxury items for industrialized nations' consumption. This disparity between benefit to the rich and cost to the poor is starkly visible in material trade and manufacturing between wealthy consumer nations and poor producer nations.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) effectively removed all barriers to trade between the United States of America, Canada, and Mexico. Large businesses in the USA and Canada have benefited from the cheaper labor available from Mexico even as their own working classes have suffered. Consumption intensive (defined as consumption relative to income) middle class families have certainly benefited from this with the rise of Walmart-type stores. But at the same time, large agricultural businesses, through chemical-heavy agricultural practices, can produce more corn per acre and do so more cheaply than Mexican farmers, and as such cheap USA grain flooded the North American market and dropped the bottom out of the smaller local markets that Mexican farmers depended upon. This bankrupted Mexican farmers, which in turn benefited large USA and Canadian businesses by providing hungry labor and mass immigration to urban centers (e.g., maquiladoras). Ironically enough, this has greatly increased the benefit to risk ratio of illegal immigration into the USA or Canada, something that the very politicians who championed NAFTA are now bemoaning and demonizing.
The invisible hand also fails to take into account individual greed. For the most part, most people will always hew true to one law and one law only: serve thy immediate needs! It is very difficult, sometimes even nigh impossible, to convince people to care about anything beyond their own immediate surroundings and even then it has to have a benefit to them. This is especially true in the relationship of the economy to the environment, and by proxy, peoples' apathy to caring about anything to do with the environment (or people far away, for that matter).
This brings me to my second point: economics acts as though it is independent of the physical laws that govern all things and organizations. The economy treats the environment, and the mineral, biological, and human resources contained therein, as infinite. Our entire global economic system is predicated on the assumption that infinite growth is posssible, practical, and inevitable. Barring the development of cost-effective space colonization and mineral extraction, this is only absolute madness! The Earth has a finite mass and a finite chemical composition and as such there is an absolute limit to the volume of materials we can extract and use. We can only move so much, and at that relatively little, amounts of stuff around before we start to poision our own garden. We've been quite tidily moving the carbon in fossil fuels to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the past 2 centuries, which is now incontrovertibly linked to global warming and ocean acidification.
Economics also ignores the very real and deadly costs of waste products. Manufacturing waste, whether steel slag, arsenic extractant for gold, or simple office paper trash, take up space and, because its toxic more often than not, poisons its immediate environment. Waste represents an energy sink, a huge cost that is magicked away from the accounting sheets because it is long-term and distant and will be someone else's problem before we are willing to take responsibility for it. Economics treats waste as just another commodity, pretending that the Earth contains infinite space for landfills, infinite fresh water to pollute, and infinite poor nations to dump toxic waste upon. While this does indeed maximize profits for the already-affluent shareholders, it does nothing to increase the average standard of living for the human race. If anything, it just makes it worse.
If nothing else, we can at least conclude that the invisible hand is not only invisible, but also blind, venal, and utterly unwilling to acknowledge its limitations. Funny how an invisible hand can look so hard at itself preening in the mirror.
*Seriously, who thought it'd be a good idea to sell debt around? That's like selling someone a cookie before the flour has even been ground, and if you sold me a cookie before you so much as even had the ingredients you'd have a very unhappy and possibly angry Toaster on your hands. **Politics, however, does operate independently of thermodynamic principles.
The public has an odd image of scientists are reclusive loners with deep eclectic streaks and megalomaniacal tendencies. Eclecticism aside, it should most vehemently noted that megalomaniacs are, by their very nature, doomed to failure, so as a scientist you shouldn't even try. Yes, it may be tempting to ponder as you blearily load Blue Juice into agarose wells and wonder why you bothered to crawl out of bed. And yes, you may know, in your data-ey heart of hearts that the world would be a better place if it was ruled by a rational scientist*, but the truth is that each and every megalomaniac aspirant begins their path to conquering the world with grand visions of uniting the world as one cohesive and peaceful society. Then they inevitably make 2 mistakes:
1) Try to invade Russia. 2) Fail to take into account that people actually live in the world.
First of all, it should be noted that unless you've found a way to animate snow men as soldiers, you will never successfully conquer a very cold, wintery Northern country (except maybe Canada). The people that live there are used to the staggeringly brutal winters and know how to use it as an advantage against you. To understand that this is true, you only have to look to the historical examples (of which there are relatively few) where one Northern country tried to whup another militarily instead of just economically. In the Winter War of 1942, Finland and Russia fought a nasty border war. The Russians attacked on snow mobiles, and the native Finns who knew the land ambushed them, guerilla-style, on skis. Russia tried to use tanks, but really should have known better: they got stuck in freezing mud. Moscow may be flat, but Karelia and Finland are full of lakes, and what looks like dry ground between lakes is usually actually a swamp. Finland eventually lost this battle because they didn't have the supplies to keep fighting, and they wound up losing a substantial amount of territory in Karelia and also lost the important industrial city of Viipuri (now Vyborg).
Secondly, in almost everywhere on the planet, in every little nook and cranny where you'd least expect to find them, are people. Living there. With histories, and traditions, and individual languages and land rights that make the task of being their benevolent ruler aggravatingly complex and bureaucratic. You're stuck with them. You have to deal with them, regardless of whether or not you want to because, if you're in charge and decide to ignore them and focus elsewhere, you'll have a steaming pile of rebellion dropped right into your fancy oatmeal. And let's face it: rebellions are an expensive pain in the ass. You've got to send soldiers to keep them from taking it out on any vulnerable scapegoats, you've got to rebuild whatever they manage to destroy (never underestimate the sheer raw power of 10,000 angry people with hammers), and then you've got to figure out whatever the hell it was they wanted in the first place. Pain. In. The. Ass. Instead of eating exquisite grapes off the juicy bodies of your servants and having your wine washed in fancy feet, you've got to rule the people.
Alternatively, you could conquer the world and set up a Parliament so that the people you now have to rule would feel like they had some say in things, but then you'd also have to deal with Parliament interfering in your wishes. And if you decide to go even further and let Parliament actually rule and be a figurehead emporer instead, well, let's just say you're setting yourself up for a coup d'etat, and once the whole world is pissed off at you there's no where for you to flee to.
Isn't this sounding like a massive bother? Wouldn't a nice cup of tea and a cookie be better instead? I mean, if you're going to rule something absolutely, start somewhere where you can decide who gets to live there. Like the Moon. If anyone tries to rebel you can politely tell them to go walk it off outside.
*Because if we let an engineer run the world everything would suddenly have 3X as many buttons, 1/2 as many useful functions, and nothing would be properly labeled.
PROBLEM: At conferences and meetings of scientists, it is difficult to differentiate the academic ranks of the various attendees. This greatly complicates politeness and increases the risk of disrespecting a big shot who will then sabotage the entire rest of your career for your unwitting slight.
SOLUTION: Conference attendees shall wear hats, with the fanciness of said hats increasing as their academic rank increases.
SCHEMATIC:
Undergrads = berets of various colors (by lab or school) Grad students, pre quals = Fezs Grad students, post quals = bowlers Post-docs = tri-corner hats, add 1 feather to hat/successive post-doc Profs w/out tenure = princess cone hats, add 1 sequin per publication Profs w/ tenure = princess cone hats w/ gauze streamers, add 1 sequin/publication Departmental chairs = fruit baskets with real fruit Journal editors = appropriate hat + bling Techs = top hats, fancier ribbons indicating greater experience Lab managers = fedoras Core facility staff = cowboy hats Journalists = cat-earred head bands
I am back in Michigan. I have nothing particularly profound or insightful to say regarding my week-long trip back to my Ozarkian whelping grounds, except that it became painfully, perhaps even absurdly, obvious just how pale I have become since moving to Teh North. I am delighted to report that the cliffs of the Meramac River do indeed amplify one mightily, especially when one sneezes whilst floating below them in a kayak. I thought I was being shot at.
This little series, "Notes From The Sprawl", will continue a little while longer until it dries up. I go back to the place that I used to call home, that I fought so hard to get out of, and I see how much has changed. Not for the better, just more of the same. It seems like almost every single fucking one of the wild places I inhabited growing up has been plowed over for more bland tract homes or been walled away behind fanciful shrubbery. The fingers of wilderness that the developers couldn't profit from are being razed anyway, plowed under for more vacuous consumption as new construction techniques are magicked into thin air. I still think it's stupid to try to build houses in a swamp.
But it remains gut-wrenching to behold. The swampy forest with the deep ravines that I used to carry my bike across a fallen tree to get to, where I could ride wherever and however I wanted, every green tree blurring past my handlebars climbable, has been felled, filled in, and paved over. I wonder where the salamanders I used to chase down the streams have gone now that those same streams are heavy and swollen with the mud running off of the clear-cut land while small-minded box homes are put up in their place. The ponds I used to chase tadpoles in have been fenced off and labeled as dangerous. The hollers are being swept away underneath the bluffs being rudely shoved into them by bulldozer armies, replaced by pesticide lawns and asphalt parking lots that ooze malodorously in the summertime heat. Every piece of the wild, every part of the real, is being torn apart or boxed away. The proud old oaks with their gnarled roots hiding years' of birdsong are being pulled down to make way for plastic ficus trees and cheap lawn frappery. The birches, the elms, the hickorys, the careful slow dogwood and the stodgy firs: my friends, our family.
Sure, maybe it's the American Dream to own your own piece and house and fill it with whatever you like; but at the same time, we're doing so en masse and completely losing the authenticity of the red clay earth that holds that land up, losing reality when we truck in manufactured top soil and sod instead. I wonder, perhaps cynically, how many of the people who dwell in these cookie cutter houses have ever actually dug in the earth, gotten the lovely reek of it up to their elbows and ingrained its grit in every tiny whorl of their fingertips. I wonder who among them has ever tried to jump a creek and failed laughing among the startled turtles. I wonder whether any of them have ever looked down and seen the tiny, ancient shells that run through the area's red flint stones like fire through our veins and felt small and insignificant in the sheer scope of what the earth is and has been and will continue to be long after they've ceased to be, and just wondered at the sheer marvel of it all.
We're rushing to trade this*: For this: What are we losing?
Damn near everything that matters.
*Yeah, it's blurry. I apologize, but I was rolling backwards when I took it.
I’m sitting in the Sprawl. Endless tract homes outside, old forests fell to birth new frame-house clones. Green lawns sprinkled with new trees, small trickles of Ozarkian forest running through the places where developers can’t profitably reshape the land. The deep ravines, heavy bluffs, and holler creeks preserve what this land used to hold. This Sprawl is not unique. There are many thousands of other subdivisions just like it scattered in traffic jammed rings growing out from wheezing city cores. The houses, the cars, the flabby pink people, these same exact forms have become ubiquitous elements of the American landscape. I posit that this landscape fosters, exacerbates, and breeds ignorance. Like the soft and flabby bodies that automobile dependency and the “American diet” create, so too does the mind wither away in the suburbs. The American Dream may have directly led to the genesis of this massive Sprawl, this gross misallocation of resources, but it is here, in the Sprawl, that individuals’ dreams come to die.
We’re told that we should aspire to a tract home with a 2-car garage and enough bedrooms to raise our own brood. We’re sold the idea that we need to fill these thin-walled homes, new and insecure in the earth, with the latest LCD TVs, computers, fancy textiles and leather couches. We’re instructed to raise children like we maintain our houses: superficially beautiful and nice, but without depth or lasting permanence. These homes are not built to last. They are cheap opportunism, dry-walled profiteering. Just like the media we consume, the entertainment we float in.
Once we have achieved the perfect suburban house, what’s left? To climb the corporate ladder? To acquire a pool? A perfect vacation? These are small goals, individually oriented. These small goals constrain the empathetic powers of the mind, reduce it to baby steps and the politics of the immediate cul-de-sac. Housing associations enforcing false aesthetics, prime-time TV, faraway libraries; all combine to stifle the intrinsic human urges to curiosity and adventure. What more is there to know when all your immediate needs are immediately met?
This environment implicitly allows the ignorance that politicians and demagogues can prey upon. This is the danger of the uninformed, where grown adults cannot help their children with their homework because they have never, nor have ever even tried, to learn more than was simply required of them. This is most relevant to us, as scientists trying to improve science’s relationship with the public, because we fundamentally cannot convince adults deadened to novelty, wonder, or curiosity, to suddenly wake up and engage us. We can push the spark, but we cannot create it.
This is also entirely relevant to our discussions of gender roles, politics, religion, etc. We rant and rail against how society currently operates, we question how it can even be this way when it is so clearly repressive or illogical, we even offer solutions; yet the truth of the matter is that these discussions take place in a rarified atmosphere. We live in intellectual townships, on or near university campuses, and these places just aren’t like the rest of the country. Our discussions still are useful, they still have meaning, but the simple fact of the matter is that most people will not and cannot care until they perceive a direct benefit to them in the form of an infotainmented soundbyte. It ain’t necessarily the best or right, but it is how things currently work.
We, as men, as fathers, as brothers, as uncles, as cousins, are failing. We are failing grotesquely to teach the males younger than us how to be men. As a result, we are complicit in the creation of an entire generation of idiot men-children pursuing their immediate gratification at the expense of anything meaningful or lasting. Culturally, we have enshrined this new lowest common denominator in TV and film with popular anti-heroes, who get by, succeed, and get the girl in spite of being pathetic, rudderless, and immature.
Too often we frame the discussion of feminism, inequality, and/or women's rights solely in terms of what women can do to empower themselves and hold solidly against a casually oppressive patriarchy. While this is good for women, it leads to long-term conflict and frustration on both sides. Men cast women as whiny castrators despite well-documented gender-based disparities in income. Women cast men as stupid and base, and unfortunately this is becoming more and more true with each passing year. We have allowed the lowest common denominator in what we expect of men to sink to new depths.
A real man is responsible, considerate, and, above all, respectful everywhere that respect is due. This doesn't just mean respecting one's grandparents, it means respecting the janitor, respecting the receptionist, and, most importantly, the strangers with whom they share the world every day, including the cute women regardless of whatever they may choose to wear. But these values are no longer being transmitted to boys as they grow up. Instead of seeking to become men and assume the responsibilities of adult life, young adult males are living in a protracted adolescence and have been for quite some time. A second generation of man-children is now coming up through college. This environment of greatly lowered expectations for decent behavior from men doesn't just perpetuate gender-based inequalities and an unsafe world for women, but it also exacerbates it by placing the immediate gratification of a man before the autonomy of anyone else, especially women.
Our society views all women's personal interests and goals as secondary to those of men. We are astounded with the exceptions of stay-at-home fathers, we castigate ambitious women as power-hungry harpies. That our popular media, news media, literature, and schooling all reinforce this ad infinitum is deeply flawed, and in it our failure is evident. We cannot hope to correct gender-based wrongs by focusing solely upon how women can help themselves; we must also ask how men can change themselves and redefine the shallow, but unfortunately prevalent, prescribed notions of macho and masculinity*. To do otherwise, to not teach young boys how to be real men, guarantees failure.
*If you're a male wondering how you can change to help, here's what Toaster does: He just tries to not be an asshole. And when he slips and is an asshole anyway, he apologizes. This generally works quite well.
Pro-feminist metaphor for daughters assuming own adult identity despite their fathers' inherent protectiveness and also about how fathers' dreams for their daughters are inherently subsumed by their daughters' own identities. From Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968).
Once upon a time ago I think I posted something about vampires. This was a mistake only in that I did not respond to posting about vampires by also posting about zombies in proportion to the coolness that I find in each. Therefore there should have been at least 37 zombie posts to balance out that 1 vampire post. However, now I am deciding that I will assign each post now extra points for Hindsight so there should be about 3 posts total dealing with zombies until I forget about it. At the rate I post, you can expect the next post in about 4 months (I will, however, try to do better with posting more regularly).
Before I start, let's have levity with this parody of Kelly's YouTube "Shoes" meme by the Living Dead Girlz (I want to know if they do birthdays):
1) Zombies are much cooler than vampires. Sure, vampires have fancy castles and tight vinyl bodysuits. And more recently they have annoying tween franchises and sexy HBO shows (warning: annoying Flash on both those last links). However, vampires are less fascinating than zombies because vampiresareus, just with fangs and sun intolerance. Vampires still have families (covens?), vampires still have political struggles and human desires. Vampires also have very specific weaknesses (sun, wooden stakes, silver) just as humans have very specific weaknesses (water, bullets, piano flurries). Therefore, I posit that vampires represent a cerebral extrapolation of the human condition whereas zombies represent a base reduction of the animal instinct extant and inherent in human culture.
Zombies are walking hunger. And they're not just walking hunger, but they are exclusively hunger. Animals need water, food, sleep, and shelter from the elements. Zombies don't need food, and they do not even pursue water, sleep, or shelter unless there happens to be food (us!) inside. And zombies are terrifying, in part, because they consume and are motivated solely by the pursuit to consume human flesh. In effect, the zombies are not just consuming human flesh (cannibals can do so as well) but, because they themselves were once human, they are consuming humanity itself.
Vampires feed off of humans, zombies feed on humanity.
Zombies are pointless. They have no desires except for consuming human flesh. They have no organization (excepting Land of the Dead). They have no communication and we are left to infer from this that they have no emotion. They are the shells of humans devoid of everything that we feel makes us different from animals and therefore they hold a mirror to ourselves and our civilization, and this is largely the source of their accompanying terror. We envision ourselves as being purposeful, as being sentient and rationally separate from our base needs. We envision our civilization as being a progression from the animal state and an improvement thereupon. But zombies show us just how fragile those sentiments are and expose the deeply uncomfortable truth about just how tenuous our society is from day to day.
Furthermore, zombies are practically indestructible. In all the zombie lore, the only way to destroy a zombie is to crush its brain (tasteful Flash). Vampires can recover from such injuries if they are returned to the coffin of their original grave, but they'll also curdle if left out in the sun. Vampires are almost as fragile as humans, but zombies are much tougher. Humans do a lot to forget about or hedge their bets against their own corporal fragility. We wear seat belts and helmets and use oven mitts, etc. Zombies need none of it and perhaps this is viscerally felt by us humans as not just the consumption of humanity, but the willing abandonment thereof. And if that is so easy (just get bitten!), then what point is there to humanity?
Humankind is much more terrified by an black abyss than by a dark forest.
I was originally intending to discuss zombie biology but have gotten sidetracked. This post is already long, so I will wait for another post. I will try to get it up sooner than 3 months from now.
Organisms get sick. Sometimes they die. And most are filled with mushy networks of organs and other various liquids and goos.
But the general, non-biologically-inclined, public seems hellbent on ignoring the most basic aspects of their own constitutions. In general, people wait until something is wrong and then go to a doctor and treat them like a plumber for a quick fix, like some lug nuts and a prescription can cure anything. It seems to me that it would be much wiser to go ahead and learn about the workings of one's own body in the first place so that the states of health, disease, and the various shades between can be better recognized and dealt with.
But maybe that's unreasonable, that'd require comprehensive and well-funded science education, as well as curiosity and a willingness to learn.
Or at least to be less squeamish. I've found that people in general really hate it when they're reminded that the meat on their plate came from a living animal, as if it reminds them on their own animal-ness somehow, or their responsibility in the death of another living organism despite their vaunted culture and whatnot.
So basically, I was at a joint lab lunch today with a bunch of animal researchers and microbiologists. Didn't happen today, because the restaurant was kind of empty and our table was kind of isolated. But to hear these more experienced scientists recount the disgust with which non-scientist people greet their work-related discussions kind of bothers me. I could understand a table of non-scientists getting up and walking away if we were gleefully debating the best ways to exsanguinate a mouse or to homogenize a tissue as though they were activities we look forward to as if they were cookies. However, in general, scientists discuss their research in respectful tones, and obfuscate their topics with jargon. But as soon as some soccer mom hears about taking fecal samples or sections of the anthrum for histology, she suddenly loses her appetite. Is it really so disgusting to be reminded that living things poop?
I guess that is one of the "greatest" talents of the human animal: Self-delusion.
Collectively, we dupe ourselves into believing that we are beyond biology simply by grace of being human. Somehow, being human means trying really hard to ignore poop, pee, sweat, smegma, snot, puke, spit, and any of the various fluids produced by our genitalia. And we take it even further with our obsessions over clothing and shaving and hair styles.
A dog simply doesn't care if its hair is fashionably stylized so long as its not uncomfortable. Most bodily secretions provide very useful information to most animals. But we hide all of ours away to the point where we have deluded ourselves to the point where we think we are completely separate and above nature. How convenient it is to forget that the food on our plate, be it flesh or vegetable, was grown out in a field somewhere, nourished by the sun and soil! I guess that doesn't much matter though, when >50% of our body mass came from high fructose corn syrup...
Immunologist, hacker, musician.
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