Although “the name is not the thing” (Frege) and “the map is not the territory” (Bell), Geoff Cohen thinks ‘real maps’, embodying the simple concept of labelling a country with what its own people call it rather than anglicizing it, make sense, and so do I. He has tried his hand at a Real Map for Europe.

The Kuro5hin Introduction to the Cthulhu Mythos

Rumsfeld, Army leaders in discord: “‘You look at Rumsfeld, and beyond all the rationale, spoken and unspoken, he just dislikes the Army. It’s just palpable. . . . You always have to wonder if when Rumsfeld was a Navy lieutenant junior grade whether an Army officer stole his girlfriend,’ said Ralph Peters, a former Army intelligence officer who writes on national security issues.” Boston Globe

Bruce Sterling: “Having just put those 200 notes in order, I am now in a position to email the lot of them to anybody who wants them (Contact bruces@well.org). Why not decorate your own website with a free ton of Viridian propaganda?” The mechanics of this mailing list sound wonderful, to wit:

Internet mailing lists, such as this Viridian list,

are a form of publishing in which no money changes hands.

Nevertheless, there are two important forms of para-

economics involved. The first is “reputation economics.”

People tend to contribute to Internet exchanges because

there are useful personal benefits in spreading one’s

ideas, establishing one’s public expertise, and making

one’s name known to other interested parties. This

practice has a long and honorable history, and is well

known in the sciences and in academia generally. These

groups were the original source of the Internet and its

publication practices — along with the military.

The second para-economic aspect is “attention

economics.” This one is more problematic, because this is

where the cruelest forms of exploitation take place in the

Internet’s noncommercial world. It is easy to cut-and-

paste huge archives of found text and images, and to bomb

one’s hapless correspondents with them. The time and

attention of recipients suffers badly, since the work of

distribution can be accomplished in seconds, while parsing

all that text, and finally deciding that it is useless,

can take seemingly forever.

Our first formal innovation is an attempt to steal as

little of your attention as we can. We don’t fondly

imagine that every reader will find all posts in this list

to be equally fascinating. We are going to be covering a

lot of ground here, and much of our content will be not

only novel, but frankly weird. Therefore, we will begin

each Viridian Note with a useful set of its key concepts.

With some practice, we hope that you will be able to

reject a Viridian Note, confidently and without a pang,

within two or three seconds.

This effort, however, may not be enough. You may

still find yourself painfully tempted to actually *read*

the Note. We therefore offer a backup safety system, our

unique “Attention Conservation Notice.” This will begin

each Note by explaining to you, in some brief detail, why

you should NOT read it.

This has never been done before in print-based

publishing, but in the text-glutted electronic context, we

feel this practice makes a lot of sense. By saving your

attention, we are offering you a considerable value-added

service, which makes our Viridian list considerably

“cheaper” in attention-terms than the other, more

primitive lists you may be reading. They cynically

imagine that you are reading everything they spew; we,

however, know much better, and we are on your side…

We will follow the useful design edict to “Look at

the Underside First.” We’ll start each Note by explaining

the areas in which its design and intention fails,

rather than act as attention-hucksters, trumpeting the

work’s supposed benefits and demanding that you

concentrate.

With time, we hope to develop a standard set of

“Attention Conservation” disclaimers that will save you

much mental processing time. In future, the following

warnings may see considerable use in this list:

• “Highly speculative;”
• “Beautifully phrased but offers no
  
  evidence to support its claims;”
• “Of interest mostly to
  
  technical specialists,”
• “Written in postmodernese;”
  
• “Infested with subcultural jargon,”
• “Grimly accurate
  
  assessment, can cause feelings of despair,”
• “Contains violent
  
  partisan attacks,”
• “Writer’s original language not
  
  English,”

and so forth. (At least, those disclaimers

would be of huge benefit in most of the lists that we’re

reading right now.)…

Read more about the Viridian movement here.

…(W)e’re green, but there’s something electrical and unnatural about our tinge of green. We’re an art movement that looks like a mailing list, an ad campaign, a design team, an oppo research organization, a laboratory, and, perhaps most of all, we resemble a small feudal theocracy ruled with an iron hand by a Pope- Emperor. We have our own logo — or we will. We have our own font and our own typography. And we have an entire list of favorite Viridian-approved tie-in products: T-shirts, chrome stickers, socks, solar panels, ultrasonic sterilizers, and so on…. We’re going to be spending a lot of time picking bits and pieces out of the background clutter, and assembling them, and placing our stamp of ideological approval upon them. The future is already here. It just hasn’t been assembled as a cultural ensemble.

Starvation?

The reason I was taking another look at the Viridian site was that an FmH’er [thanks, Miguel] forwarded Viridian Note 00381 to me. Read it and scare yourself. “[Attention Conservation Notice: Nothing new about environmental activists hand-wringing over prospects of mass starvation. Kinda new to wonder if this might go from the unthinkable to a real-life truism in such short order, though.]” At its inception at the threshold of the new century, Sterling conceptualized the Viridian movement as an aesthetic response to impending global catastrophe (“… it’s a severe breach of taste to bake and sweat half to death in your own trash, that’s why. To boil and roast the entire physical world, just so you can pursue your cheap addiction to carbon dioxide…. What a cramp of our style. It’s all very foul and aesthetically regrettable…”) on a rather short timeframe — the little more than a decade until the Kyoto accords were supposed to have made a serious dent in greenhouse gas emissions. Well, we’re a third of the way there and any vestiges of cooperation in keeping the world habitable have been dashed to pieces, largely due to the Bush junta’s explicit anti-environmentalism and its broader dismantling of the fragile framework of multilateral international cooperation and mutual respect as we turned from victim to bully after 9-11-01. This is the fourth year in succession that the world is not producing enough grain to feed itself; the summer heatwave in Europe is devastating crop production figures; its full impact is not even yet know; and it is but a foretaste of things to come as global warming accelerates. “The Viridian Movement is supposed to have an expiration date of 2012. Will we make it that far?” My questions for Sterling and others, then: Is this (and other Viridiana) a wakeup call or a dirge? Upon what does it depend? Can an aesthetic shift make a difference? fast enough to make a difference?

Theodore Dalrymple: “Both Althusser and Cantat illustrate the new moral law for modern man: that moral concern rightly increases as the square of the distance from the person expressing the concern. Only thus can a man be utterly selfish and egotistical on the one hand and a moral exemplar on the other;” reflections on the murder of French actress Marie Trintignant by rockstar boyfriend Bertrand Cantat in a drunken, jealous fit. Although the inimitable Dr. Dalrymple tilts at the windmill of moral hypocrisy, he has a knack for being sanctimonious only about leftist hypocrites (especially when he thinks that extracting the lessons from their hypocrisy will be a major maturing influence on his readers and his students). Dalrymple is, however, full of compassion, making an interesting point in the process:

When I look at the pictures of Cantat after his arrest, head bowed and misery patent for all to see, I am reminded of the many murderers I have met shortly after they have killed their lovers from motives of jealousy. Most of them have also tried, as did Cantat, to kill themselves afterwards (a third of British murders were once followed by suicide). Of course, jealousy is nothing new—where humans, their weakness and wickedness are concerned, there really is nothing new under the sun. Othello is more than sufficient to prove it. But this is not to say that some ways of life favor some human responses, while others do not. When the sexual revolution is lived as if it were possible to do so without consequences, the result is a huge increase in sexual violence…

Perhaps because I work in a prison and not a morgue—that is to say, I see the murderer rather than the murdered, lying bruised and battered on the slab—I feel an anguish for my murderers, at least of the jealous kind. Their suffering is intense, and their efforts to be reunited with their loved ones (religion is dead, but not the belief in a hereafter), so that they can undo what they have done, apologize and fall at their feet, genuinely move me. Cantat devoted his life to anti-art posing as art; he did not know himself as he should have done; but I still say, priez pour lui, as well as for Marie Trintignant of course. The New Criterion [as always, props to walker for keeping me informed of the juiciest of Dr. Dalrymple’s literary exploits]

“Camera technology designed to spot potential terrorists by their facial characteristics at airports failed its first major test, a report from the airport that tested the technology shows.

Last year, two separate face-recognition systems at Boston’s Logan Airport failed 96 times to detect volunteers who played potential terrorists as they passed security checkpoints during a three-month test period, the airport’s analysis says. The systems correctly detected them 153 times.

The airport’s report calls the rate of inaccuracy ‘excessive.’ The report was completed in July 2002 but not made public. The American Civil Liberties Union obtained a copy last month through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Logan is where 10 of the 19 terrorists boarded the flights that were later hijacked Sept. 11, 2001.” USAToday

I read Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby while on vacation, which flirts seriously with the concept; now, suddenly, I’m encountering the term “creative destruction” everywhere. Here’s a Google search on the phrase, which has a long and distinguished lineage, mostly in business management. I’m not sure why the concept has such legs…

“Planet PDF is now offering an assortment of some of the most popular classics — free! Help yourself to them, and feel free to share them with your friends. We’ll be adding new ones each week, so come back soon for new eBooks.” You don’t need to come back every week; what they’re offering already will keep you occupied for a long while. Time to revisit Moby Dick again — on my PDA.

I do so love having a book stored in my PDA, while we’re on the topic. If I have a free moment to grab to read, wherever I happen to be, it is with me, in my shirt pocket, even when I am inconveniently far from the nearest source of printed reading material or the ‘real’ book I carry around in my bag. However, eBooks will never totally supplant printed books for me. Part of the experience of buying and owning books is their sensuality and their substantiality. If I live long enough to see the death of the book publishing industry in favor of digital distribution, I will still, I venture to say, be an old curmudgeon jealously guarding my room full of filled boookshelves.

“There are folders on your computer that Microsoft has tried hard to keep secret. Within these folders you will find two major things: Microsoft Internet Explorer has not been clearing your browsing history after you have instructed it to do so, and Microsoft’s Outlook Express has not been deleting your e-mail correspondence after you’ve erased them from your Deleted Items bin. (This also includes all incoming and outgoing file attachments.) And believe me, that’s not even the half of it.” fuckMicrosoft.com [via Lockergnome]

“A plan to vaccinate nearly half a million healthcare workers in the US against smallpox in case of a bioterrorist attack has ground to a halt. Only 38,257 people have accepted vaccination, less than a tenth as many as planned.

But the failure may run deeper. In a damning report released last week, the US Institute of Medicine, an independent advisory body, says the problem is not that so few have been vaccinated, but that so much time and money has been spent on the vaccination programme. It argues that this should have been spent on more important defensive measures such as disease surveillance and response plans.” New Scientist

“Eating chocolate can boost the level of heart-protecting antioxidants in the blood, but consuming milk at the same time cancels the potential health benefits, according to a new study.

The researchers speculate that milk may also have the same effect on other antioxidant-rich foods, including fruit and green vegetables.” New Scientist Live longer; eat lots of dark chocolate, avoid milk chocolate, and don’t drink milk with it.

“The youngest children in a school year group have a higher risk of developing mental health problems than the oldest children, according to a new study.

A survey of more than 10,000 British schoolchildren aged five to 15 years old, found that those with birthdays in the last three months of the school year were more prone to psychiatric problems, such as hyperactivity and behavioural difficulties, compared to those born in the earlier in the school year.

‘Our study shows that those born in the first third of the school year have an 8.3 per cent chance of having a psychiatric disorder, whereas the youngest third have a 9.9 per cent chance,’ says psychologist Robert Goodman, who led the research team at King’s College London.

He suggests that the effects may be due to teachers having the same academic and behavioural expectations for all the children in a year group, even though there may be up to 12 months’ difference in their ages.” New Scientist

“A new version of the SoBig computer worm, expected in September, could not just overwhelm networks with infected mail but also lead to a massive increase in spam, according to some experts.

Many believe the SoBig.F computer worm, which infected many thousands of computers earlier in August, was designed to turn machines into ‘zombies’ capable of sending out a flood of spam. Data collected by the UK email-filtering company Message Labs shows that almost half of all computers sending spam have been infected with a computer virus. SoBig.F is programmed to stop working on 10 September and anti-virus companies say another variant may soon follow.” New Scientist

They are more like us than anyone had imagined, say scientists: “They feel pain, suffer and experience stress, affection, excitement and even love ” — Jeremy Rifkin, LA Times [via CommonDreams]

A physicist considers the creative tension between speculation and observation in modern science. What relationship do scientific theories have to ‘reality’? Physics Today

Our cozy world is probably much bigger — and stranger — than we know: “One morning last April, the New York Times op-ed page ran a piece by the Australian physicist Paul Davies warning readers not to be so gullible as to believe there could be more than one universe. The next month, Scientific American published a long article by the physicist Max Tegmark asserting that, to the contrary, parallel universes almost certainly do exist. Around the same time, bookstores received Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?, wherein Martin Gardner dismisses theories of multiple universes as ‘frivolous fantasies.’ If you had seen all this, you may well have asked yourself: Is this really a matter on which I need to form an opinion?” — Jim Holt, Slate

In a teaser for his forthcoming role as a columnist for the New York Press, Paul Krassner reminisces about The Realist.

‘I was publishing what was considered to be the hippest magazine in America, but I was still living with my parents, and I was still a virgin…

In 1964, I assigned Robert Anton Wilson to write a feature article, which he called “Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb.” A few months later, Leary invited me to his research headquarters in Millbrook, where I took my first acid trip. When I told my mother about LSD, she was quite concerned. “It could lead to marijuana,” she said. Mom was right.’

The consummately irreverent Krassner was always one of my counterculture heroes.

“Viagra can leave a trail of ruined lives and shattered hopes, says expert” Independent/UK

“With lateral thinking worthy of the great man himself, British scientists have hit upon a new way of explaining the intricacies of Einstein’s theory of relativity: dancing.” Guardian/UK

“The secret to heart attack chest pain may be on the tip of your tongue.

Although they may seem unlikely bedfellows, Penn State College of Medicine researchers found evidence to suggest that the same type of nerve receptors that register the burning sensation from hot peppers in the mouth may cause the sensation of chest pain from a heart attack.

‘Our study is the first to demonstrate that the ‘hot pepper’ receptor exists on the heart and may be responsible for triggering heart attack chest pain,’ said Hui-Lin Pan, M.D., Ph.D., professor of anesthesiology, Penn State College of Medicine. ‘Until now, the capsaicin, or ‘hot pepper’ receptor, was only known for sensing heat and pain from the skin. Our data suggest that the ‘hot pepper’ receptors could become a new target for treatment of some types of chronic chest pain, such as angina pectoris, that are resistant to other treatments.’ The study, titled ‘Cardiac vanilloid receptor 1-expressing afferent nerves and their role in the cardiogenic sympathetic reflex in rats,’ was published today (Sept. 1) in the Journal of Physiology, accompanied by an editorial article discussing the importance of the study.” Science Daily

“Four out of a group of five seriously sick Brazilian heart-failure patients no longer needed a heart transplant after being treated with their own stem cells, the doctor in charge of the research said Monday.

Such ‘regenerative medicine,’ in which stem cells extracted from patients’ own bone marrow are used to rebuild tissue, may one day become commonplace for patients with damaged or diseased hearts, some doctors believe.” Reuters

“A car that can park itself without the driver having to touch the steering wheel, said by maker Toyota Motor Corp. to be a world first, went on sale in Japan on Monday. Reuters

“Most people accept the idea that stress and depression chip away at the body’s natural ability to fight off disease. But many medical scientists have remained skeptical that the mind can exert such a direct influence over the immune system.

In recent years, however, evidence has accumulated that psychology can indeed affect biology. Studies have found, for example, that people who suffer from depression are at higher risk for heart disease and other illnesses. Other research has shown that wounds take longer to heal in women who care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease than in other women who are not similarly stressed. And people under stress have been found to be more susceptible to colds and flu, and to have more severe symptoms after they fall ill.

Now a new study adds another piece to the puzzle. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are reporting today that the activation of brain regions associated with negative emotions appears to weaken people’s immune response to a flu vaccine.” NY Times

And avoiding negative emotion enhances physical wellbeing? On the surface of it, this may appear pretty self-evident, but negative emotions are a part of psychological health too; it is more a question of what one does with them, of course. Expressed in the right way, certain negative emotions — ummm, rage at the current regime in Washington comes to mind, for one — are quite healthy…

PostClassic, a weblog by Kyle Gann, self-described “composer (since I was 13), music critic (since I was 27), musicologist (since I was 32), and music professor (since I was 39)….”, joins a growing roster of ArtsJournal blogs. About PostClassic: “So classical music is dead, they say. Well, well. This blog will set out to consider that questionable factoid with equanimity, if not downright enthusiasm. After all, classical music has died before, several times, and always manages to grow back…”

Many many thanks to acb for pointing me to this — I hesitate to call it a rant because that might sound like dismissing it for being insane — reflection by John Shirley on our collective mental health. Indeed, he leads off with a candid admission of his own history of mental health difficulties, segueing into a reflection on how easy it is for the ‘sane’ to shrug off the suffering of the mentally ill, to make fun of it, to romanticize it, certainly to lack the empathic, compassionate embrace of it to which he wants to get us with his suggestion that we are all closer to mental illness than we would like to think. Clinicians, of course, know this; that in electing to join the helping profession we must, to the extent that we are going to be helpful to others, encounter ourselves as similarly defective, ‘walking wounded’. But in this brief thoughtful meditation, non-clinician Shirley manages at least to touch upon most of the crucial issues — from neurotoxins and the gutting of social services for the mentally ill to the conditions of modernity such as alienated labor, political oppression, the erosion of social cohesion and community, the deterioration of privacy, information overload, and the devolution of meaning — with which I attempt to grapple daily. (Come to think about it, not surprising from a ‘cyberpunk’ writer…)

Awhile ago, I would have maintained that an essay of this sort is itself romanticizing and trivializing the mentally ill; that likening the suffering of the chronically psychotic or neuropsychiatrically damaged patients I treat to the suggested pervasive mental illness of our entire society is comparing apples and oranges. But we know alot more than we did even five years ago about the transduction of stressful experience into brain changes and we undestand that ‘reactive’ conditions such as depression, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress conditions, perhaps attention deficit problems, begin to look much less like isolated episodes and more like entrained and ingrained chronic conditions, little different from the bipolar or schizophrenic psychoses. So there may be more identity to the two categories than one would like to admit. And, too, there is the perspective of evolutionary psychology which elucidates how adaptive traits become pathological under conditions of modernity. Shirley highlights, for example, our evolutionary ill-preparedness for the number of interactions we must needs have in modern life, a point that has always struck me as profound. He ends with his truest, simplest point, suggesting that by truly taking care of the psychiatrically ill we would be taking care of ourselves… and vice versa.

Naomi Klein argues that

“(t)he spectre of terrorism – real and exaggerated – has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.” Guardian/UK

For those who are old enough to remember the Cold War, it is clear that the WoT® functions in precisely the same way, demonizing opponents with little rhyme or reason as a pretext for whatever the geopolitical aspiration of the moment was.

Klein is actually optimistic in a funny way:

“Many have argued that the War on Terror is the US government’s thinly veiled excuse for constructing a classic empire, in the model of Rome or Britain. Two years into the crusade, it’s clear this is a mistake: the Bush gang doesn’t have the stick-to-it-ness to successfully occupy one country, let alone a dozen. Bush and the gang do, however, have the hustle of good marketers, and they know how to contract out. What Bush has created in the WoT is less a ‘doctrine’ for world domination than an easy-to-assemble toolkit for any mini-empire looking to get rid of the opposition and expand its power.”

But the utility of the doctrine should not be judged by the ineptitude of its current practitioners any more than McCarthy’s downfall took the legs out from under the doctrinaire if more subtle anti-Communism that continued to dominate American foreign policy for four further decades and still seems like a gospel to the less sophisticated of the American masses. Klein’s argument in likening the WoT® to a marketing campaign resonates with my own practice of branding it as a trade name; it was clear from the outset that it was crying out for that little ®. True, our proxies of all political stripes can use the brand in the manner of a franchise to justify their own petty repressions (and Klein gives us plenty of persuasive examples), that is no more the ultimate significance of the WoT® brand than the profits of some small Mexican or Indonesian entrepreneur opening a Golden Arches franchise are the measure of corporate McDonald’s globalized reach (as Klein should know). A pandemic brand is no more than a particularly efficient tool of late-capitalism for psychic colonization and rape. The neo-con junta — inept or not, an unopposed superpower of unassailable military might unparalleled in world history — is branding an imperial reign, make no bones about it.

Several weeks ago, I mused about the time-traveller spam I’d been receiving. So, it seems, has a writer at Wired. Recall that the coordinates he gives for those wishing to meet with him to provide him with needed parts are in Woburn, Massachusetts, within several miles of me. The time traveller has been tracked down to that town, in fact. If the story is to be believed, he is a former commercial spammer against whom the Commmonwealth of Massachusetts in 2001 took its first ever antispam legal action and whom they are in fact still watching to monitor his compliance with his settlement agreement with the state. His time travel spam, rife with persecutory overtones of being under surveillance, began shortly thereafter.

Just now I’m glad my family and I drove instead of flying on our just-completed vacation travels.

Latest double-think from the airheads in Washington, a pretext for a giveaway to their friends in Detroit. They won’t enforce pollution controls on auto manufacturers because they don’t believe that the exhaust emissions fall under the strictures of the Clean Air Act. Seattle Times

Taliban Finds New Strength in Pakistan LA Times

and Al Qaeda Behind the Najaf Bombing: Report Nouvel Observateur [in French; translation here via Truthout]. Was Iraq War Worth It? Nearly half in CBS poll say no.

“The word lootocracy was originally coined to describe the corrupt cartels that have ruled and plundered countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and some of the former Soviet Republics. But with an amazingly small amount of national debate, George Bush is installing a more global and sophisticated version — one where those on top can do whatever they choose without the slightest constraints. ” — Paul Rogat Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time CommonDreams [via Adam] As Craig comments, “Finally, compassionate conservatism explained.”

“…Consumers — many of whom have complained for years about climbing ticket prices and Ticketmaster service charges — may be less eager for the next phase of Ticketmaster’s Internet evolution.

Late this year the company plans to begin auctioning the best seats to concerts through ticketmaster.com.

With no official price ceiling on such tickets, Ticketmaster will be able to compete with brokers and scalpers for the highest price a market will bear.” NY Times

“Marijuana went on sale Monday at Dutch pharmacies to help bring relief to thousands of patients suffering from cancer, AIDS or multiple sclerosis.

Around 7,000 patients will be eligible for prescription marijuana, sold in containers of .16 ounces at most pharmacies. Labeled ‘Cannabis’ and tested by the Ministry of Health, the drug will be covered by health insurance for the first time under a new law that went into effect in March.” AP

“You have to hand it to the Bush generation of neo-conservatives. They are nothing if not optimistic. Even in the rubble of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, they saw reason for hope.

The White House apparently believed that the atrocity would prove to be a tipping point that would persuade nations like India and Pakistan to send their divisions to help police Iraq, without no more of all that earlier talk about shared authority.

Colin Powell was dispatched to the UN once more to sell this dubious idea only to find that those nations that were reluctant to send their soldiers to a dangerous and volatile place to serve in a US-led occupation force before, still felt that way, only more strongly.

This stand has been portrayed by some in Washington as the typical manoeuvring of a morally bankrupt international community aimed at extracting political gain from a tragedy. Washington’s critics, according to this view of the world, will stop at nothing to clip America’s wings.

In truth, most UN members would happily put their troops under the command of an American general in the event of a justified war. No other military comes close in efficiency or technology, apart from residual concerns from the latest war that the friendly fire issue has clearly not been entirely solved.” Guardian/UK

“General Wesley Clark, the former Nato commander in Bosnia, and a probable presidential contender, has accused White House officials of trying to get him sacked as a CNN military analyst because they feared he would criticise the Iraq war.” Telegraph/UK

“It used to be that the pre-wedding ritual for men was the bachelor party, while the women’s equivalent was the bridal shower. Well, the times they have been a-changing for many years now, and women can have just as much silly, no-holds-barred fun as the men nowadays, according to a Penn State researcher.

Dr. Beth Montemurro, assistant professor of sociology at Penn State’s Abington Campus, has interviewed more than 50 women and personally attended many bachelorette parties in an attempt to determine what significance that bachelorette parties — especially those containing sexually charged themes — have for them.

In her study titled, ‘Sex Symbols: The Bachelorette Party as a Window to Change in Women’s Sexual Expression,’ published in a recent issue of the journal, Sexuality and Culture, Montemurro said the rise of bachelorette parties over the years signifies a shift in how women and their sexuality are viewed in society.” EurekAlert!

Do we need men?

The Y-chromosome – the ultimate symbol of machismo – is in a bad way. But…, apart from breeding, what real use is the male to the human race? Guardian/UK

“Commonly made claims about changes in family and other intimate relations are not supported by actual research, according to a new working paper sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council.

In a review of existing written works on the subject, Val Gillies, a senior research fellow at South Bank University, argues that there are two dominant accounts of present-day personal relations, each reflecting a particular ideological stance.

Today’s theorists tend to emphasise either family breakdown and moral decline, or transformation and democratisation. The more negative account of family change appeals to traditionalist, conservative interpretations, while liberals favour the more positive version.

A third perspective, claiming that there has been little substantial change in the way people relate to one another, is rarely heard, despite research evidence suggesting that individuals continue to place great importance on personal ties and obligations.” EurekAlert!

“‘Thousands of languages have come and gone, and we’ve studied that process for years,’ said Brigham Young University archaeologist Stephen D. Houston, the study’s Maya specialist. ‘But throughout history, maybe 100 writing systems have ever existed. We should know more about why they disappear.'” Washington Post

Increasingly, Americans Won’t and Don’t: “Labor Day in the United States should be one of the gastronomic high points of the year. By the time it comes around, most parts of the country are entering their fourth full month of frost-free weather, which means that there is an unparalleled bounty of fresh, local ingredients available. Yet, when it comes to bringing these ingredients together into a meal, be it on Labor day or any other day, Americans are increasingly saying ‘the less labor, the better’.” Utne Reader