Contact Info

My email is sam.hollandATbluebottle.com, for interested parties.

Check out newness at samuelholland.net…

~~~S

 

I beat the pETA game

Yeah, I just spent 40 minutes or so beating Super Chick Sisters, the pETA videogame. Its actually decent, in a flash side-scroller kinda way. And stuff like debeaking is pretty nasty… I mean, they’re sentient beings, they feel pain and suffer. I think any arguements to the contrary – at least with birds with central nervous systems – are looking for a way to be complacent. That said, I’ll prolly still be eating meat occasionally, as I believe its a healthy thing to do on occasion for my particular body… I’m not so sure about anti-Mario subplot in SPC, though. I mean, cmon, those are evil turtles. Mario’s thrown into a turtle eat man world, and he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do to survive. That, and Yoshi’s totally a bottom. He’ll let Mario ride him forever. Now back to my thesis.

 

Helping paranoid schitzophrenics

This is pretty classic…

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/in_the_know_is_the_government 

 

Comics Bonanza

Tom the dancing bug is amazing today. I want to see more Giant underground fungus and pledges that there will not be food re-use at resturants…

Also, The K chronicles demonstrates that there are actually enough black hockey players to form an all-time all-star team! Amazing!

 

A Fun Game

Day of the BobTeds

Its simple fun.

 

Boughs of Holly

“People saying let’s be jolly /

Deck the halls with boughs of holly”

So its the holiday season again. I’m currently working at a job which requires me to be subjected to a constant barrage of Christmasy music. Namely, the same 8 or 9 songs, interspersed with rare and welcome exceptions such as the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping”. No Run DMC though. As my dad said, “It’s “The Little Drummer Boy Variations”.” (I think the appeal of that song must come in some part from the musician being the main character of the story. Allmusic has 995 occurences of songs named “Little Drummer Boy”, with its titular variations (“Cajun Little Drummer Boy”, “Funky Little Drummer boy”, “Surfin’ Little Drummer Boy”, etc.) pushing it over a thousand. It’s been recorded by everyone from Apocalyptica to Stevie Wonder. A rum pa pum pum, indeed.) It all seems a bit forced, especially when you are being forced to imbibe holiday cheer for the benefit of your employer’s revenue statements. But classifying holiday cheer as nothing more than an instrument of capitalist present-giving misses the whole picture.

The holidays take place in the dark of winter. Celebrations around the Winter Solistice have been going on for millenia. At first this seems a bit counterintuitive. I mean, its the coldest, shortest night of the year. People with no knowledge of planetary motion could conceivably have thought that there was a chance that spring would never come again, that it was no guaranteed phenomenon. Especially not when there were occasional events such as volcanoes or meteor strikes which would lead to winter lasting for years on end. To compensate for this, there would be festivals in the dark, a pushing against the forces of darkness that surrounded them. They would serve a dual purpose. In some cultures, they would be sacrificial celebrations, ensuring through some magical process that there would be a coming spring, that the winter solistice would indeed be the nadir of frost and snow. And for all cultures, they would give people something to look forward to, something to do when the harvest had been taken in and the ground was too hard for planting. Its a beautiful thing, really. (Note that this is mostly a reguritation of Joesph Cambell or something. Don’t take it as original just cause I’m not sure where it came from.)

When someone presses you to have holiday cheer, it is in some part a reenactment of this. And in some part it may be a pushing against SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, which wikipedia claims has an approximately 9% incidence in the Northren US (and a 1% incidence in Florida, where it takes a truly light-addicted soul to have problems with their winters. Its the summer thats the killer).  But perhaps the culture as a whole knows on some level that it takes some concious effort to fight off the winter blues, and that encouraging people to be happy stridently enough will eventually lead to more people being happy as a whole. Positive reinforcement…

Spread that holiday cheer.

PS. Christmas is totally a pagan holiday.

 

Yeah Kucinich

“First of all, as president, I’m going to let the rest of the world know that the days of America trying to be a nation above nations is over. We have to quit trying to dominate other countries, and we have to step out of our isolation and into the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people. I think the world is ready for an American president who puts the sword down, so that nations won’t have to spend a tremendous amount of their resources trying to prepare for war.”

 

From Grist.

 

Brian Wilson Rap

 A quick note -

Brian Wilson Rap

From his lost 1991 album Sweet Insanity… its, uh, priceless.

Props to WFMU.

 

Blankets

If you haven’t yet read Craig Thompson’s Blankets, be like me and pick up a copy from your local library. Its really quite excellent. The images and words will take you to places you want to be; its a slightly low-fi masterpiece, to analogize with the music world. Its the story of relationships – to a brother, to a girl, to Christ. Heck, it would even be worth shelling out 30 dollars for – its a lot better than most comics out there. A whole lot better. I want to recommend Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Abandon the Old in Tokyo, though I can’t quite say that its brillant – some of you out there might enjoy it, however. Not really for me, I guess.

Really, though, read Blankets.

 

Critique of Future Human Evolution.

What follows is a critque of John Glad’s e-book, Future Human Evolution, available at http://www.whatwemaybe.org. In short, this guy does not use proper footnotes, and has a problematic valuation of high-IQ as a determining trait in terms of genetic evolution, thinking that unlimited IQ would result in unlimited happiness. If put into practice, his kind of policy would not be condusive to global human success.

From Page 21:

“What are the consequences for the gene pool of selecting out young women of ability to pursue education and careers, thus reducing their fertility (in 20% of U.S. couples, delayed fertility turns out to be cancelled fertility) while remunerating young women of lesser ability on the basis of how many children they bear, even denying them abortions when they themselves request them?”

This guy really needs some footnotes. He states that “girls in countries with developed welfare programs can choose to escape school by becoming pregnant if they find themselves unable to cope with an academic program.” At which point I wrote a long paragraph denouncing this guy – until in the course of my research I came across the article “Teenage mothers see pregnancy as a career move”. (link). Maybe this is true to some extent in a country like GB, where welfare is much more pervasive than in the US. The thing is, this study was published today. His website was last updated November 3rd. And nowhere does he have any bibliography. When he’s arguing something as controversial as human genetics, he really needs them.

As to his arguements regarding the removal of various genetic disorders (such as MS) from the gene pool, I’m all for it – for things such as morbid obesity, cystic fibrosis, MS, etc. The “internet documents” he quotes on page 29 which see this as a measure of human diversity seem to me to be a bit off the mark. There is indeed a tricky desicion making process which needs to be undergone when determining which characteristics to not see as favorable, but honestly – things like MS have no redeeming value, even if people who have the disease can say that their life “has been richer” due to their disease (pg. 29). There are obstacles aplenty to make life richer for those involved in it, even without dehabilitating illnesses and the toll they take on people and families.

Homosexuality I actually see as a positive trait in the numbers it currently crops up at. I think it confers a genetic advantage for there to be fluxations in the population’s sexual identities, even if some of this results in reduced numbers of people having children (which, incidentally, is not a problem in this day and age).

The hertiability of radicalism (rated as 65% determined by genetics) is quite interesting (see pg. 30). See also (here) for an abstract of an actual article.

From what I can see of his position, some people with desirable genetic traits (males, obstensibly, due to their being easier to reproduce) should be encouraged to reproduce, and genes should be altered that code for traits such as intelligence and compassion. Even in small numbers these would be have a positive effect on the populace. I don’t know if this would turn into a Gattaca type situation – could the genes for genius be coded? And if they could, would there end up being some sort of genetically-enhaced club, or would people tend to keep it secret among themselves? Part of me thinks that laws would be enacted to combat this; perhaps it would become a covert thing, however, socities forming of those whose genes were altered. Open discussion of genetic alteration would become a new, strong taboo in open society.

He also uses the phrase “serious music” on pg. 44, as a discriminator of what separates us from the beasts.

On another note, I would love to see what evidence he has for the Dr. Moreau-echoing comment on pg. 75 that “it is already possible to begin modifying animals to enhance their intelligence to allow them to perform tasks currently performed by people, or even to create animal-human hybrids.” Really? Already possible? What has he been reading? It’s certainly conceivable – at some point in the future tense.

Later on (around p 77), he begins to argue that it is ultimately selfish to allow low-IQ people to reproduce, considering the amount of potential descendants they may have over the millenia. But consider what has happened to monocultures of corn, for instance, or potatoes – while these were seen as favorable traits, there is definite strength that comes with having a wide base. A person who isn’t all that smart may still be very well-suited for more menial tasks, and while Mr. Glad claims that this is dooming people to lives of subservience, some people may actually enjoy it. And what about traits such as irritability? Could that also be deemed “not suitable for reproduction?” Isn’t there a place for good-natured people whose intelligence may be somewhat lower than their peers? It may be that it is actually evolutionarily beneficial for there to be a wide spread of intelligence. I’m not entirely sure that increased intelligence actually leads to increased quality of life, or that what the human race needs is a massive amount of hyperintelligent people.

A little while later, p. 78, he begins to talk about the benefits of the tendency in the third world towards favoring sons. He claims that this will be eugenic over time, as low-IQ families will reduce the population of females, leading to a) less childrearing and b) more competition for the available females, a situation in which high-IQ males will tend to win out. While this may in some ways reduce the amount of children, I’m not sure that it will skew towards a high-IQ – males don’t necessarily win mates based purely on intelligence. And having a large amount of sexually dissatisfied, low-IQ males running around is not really a good idea if you do not want to encourage warfare.

Glad’s support for abortion as population control is a bit misguided. I will qualify this by saying that my personal spiritual beliefs see abortion as the shutting off of a potential soul to the world, and as a very sad thing. I see it as killing a sentient being, as thus as something not to be propagated. However, it seems to me that rather than encouraging abortion, making birth control more widely available (especially in chemical form) and researching better approaches would be a more sensible option than pushing for more abortion. There is too much opposition for abortion at the moment – it is inefficient to try to push for it.

I tend to support positive eugenics – the idea that healthy genes, if they can be found, should be propagated. But Glad has a set of dangerous assumptions as to what will be positive for the development of humanity, and his clinging to the concept of high-IQ as the greatest good is cheif among them.

On a side note, check out here for a link to the World War I IQ testing questions. I got a 14 out of 20 – mostly messing up on things that were time-period specific. Does this mean they would put me in the officer’s corps? Its interesting how many of the questions just seemed to be general knowledge-related, although perhaps this kind of peripheral knowledge would be seen as useful on the field of battle. Apparently the S.A.T. was developed from an army intelligence test (see here) – I did well on that one, so I guess I’d be a grade A or B if I went into the army, too. At least if I went in during World War I.