you can judge a book by its cover

I don't know when they came up with that 'you can't judge a book by its cover' expression, but rarely has a cliche been more dated and less true to today. The purpose of cover art is to make sure that you CAN judge a book by its cover art. This has been true for at least the last 60 years, since marketing to the masses really came into its own, after World War II. During that war, American industry was transformed and ramped up to an unprecedented degree in order to produce the huge amounts of armaments needed, first for our European allies who we were selling and 'lend-leasing' our wares to, and then for the US itself and the Allied powers when we joined the war after being attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. After the war, there was a great worry that all this industrial capacity would suddenly not have a use, and this is where consumer culture was born, when the heads of these industries found new ways to make people want things, and to keep wanting things, to keep these machines buzzing and making stuff. And one of the tools to do this was cover art, or more generally adverting of all kinds.
Book art and Record Album art especially were great creative outlets. Pictured is one of my favorite record sleeves, for the album 'Percussion!', with music from Darius Milhaud, Carlos Chavez and Bela Bartok. Its a shame, cd art just can't replace Record art, much too small a canvas. Now with digital music downloads, we won't even have that, I suppose.

the ancient romans thought lions were funny...

"Amazing Animal Videos" aired on the Animal Planet television channel in the years 2001-2002. I'm not surprised it only lasted two seasons -- how many videos can one find of animals doing amazing or funny things, other than maybe dogs. The idea was 'America's funniest home videos', but with Animals instead. Most of us with video cameras aren't that in touch with wildlife, other than dogs. And cats and birds can't be relied upon to be very funny or do much interesting.
The other problem is that if you've got interesting footage of exotic animals doing something, most people who shoot the footage will want money for it. I'm guessing the producers got tapped out of the cheaper footage after only two seasons, and after that it would have been prohibitively expensive to fill the shows with interesting material that they would have to purchase.
I used to work for a company that found stock footage, for ad agencies and the like. There was this one Russian who had the rights to some footage for a show that was the Russian version of 'America's home videos'. Some of this material was really good, and would have worked for the commercial we were working on finding footage for -- like this woman who was playing the piano with her nose. simple, cheaply shot, but cute. Much of the other material was seriously not funny, to most Americans, but must have been funny to Russians I guess. There was some really violent material, like Russian women knocking another woman out with a beer bottle.
And there was this one clip, where someone fed a mule some vodka and got it drunk. The mule then started running after a large horse, trying to mount it, and ended up getting semi-trampled by the horse.

does team player mean lacks initiative?

Andy Turner is a 28 year old lacrosse player who grew up in a tiny town short ride from Niagara Falls, in Ontario, Canada. The town, Beamsville, is part of a greater township with a total population of just over 20,000, in an area settled by those who remained loyal to British king George III, having left the US after the Revolutionary war. Almost 200 years after the loyalists arrived in Ontario, in 1978, Andy Turner was born. Little is known about his life until his 22nd year when he started playing box lacrosse for the Rochester Nighthawks, not that far from home, in Rochester New York. But box lacrosse -- which is typically played on ice hockey rinks in the summer when there isn't ice, unlike field lacrosse, which is played outdoors -- is a bigger sport in Canada than in the US, just as ice hockey is. During the winter months he started to play for the Victoria Shamrocks, all the way on the west coast, in British Columbia. And in 2006, Turner was traded away to the newly formed lacrosse franchise, the Edmonton Rush, of Edmonton Alberta.
Alberta is freakishly prosperous right now, largely due to its having an abundance of oil, and the Edmonton Rush are in many ways a team reflective of the character of Alberta. Their mascot is a yeti on a motorcycle, they have a team monster truck, and provocatively dressed cheerleaders called the 'crush dancers', who have their own website and are probably at least as popular as the team itself.
According to the profile of Mr. Turner on the websites of the Victoria Shamrocks and the Edmonton Rush, Turner's favorite film is "The Ladies Man." This movie spinoff of an SNL skit is by no stretch of the imagination funny for more than a short while, but seems to be a good answer if someone wanted to ingratiate oneself with others, and has no strong opinions of his own. Who could fault Mr. Turner, amongst his own peer group anyway, for liking this film? But especially interesting is what Mr. Turner claims is his favorite food, which is inconsistant on the two websites. On the Victoria Shamrocks website (http://www.victoriashamrocks.ca/players/turner.htm) , he says his favorite meal is 'Pita Pit', a popular Canadian food franchise that specializes in simple healthy fare. For the health conscious British Colombians, this would be a good choice. On the Edmonton Rush website (http://www.edmontonrush.com/roster/turner.php) , however, Turner says his favorite food is 'stadium dogs' -- therefore seeming to align himself more closely with the health food despising Albertans.
Turner is a fine defensive player no doubt -- but perhaps given this need to appease his peers, it is not surprising that he is not an offensive player. And when he must retire in a few years time, will this serve him well when he must make a living as a non-athlete? Given Alberta's prosperity, he probably won't have much trouble finding work should he stay in the area. Perhaps he will work in a ski lodge, or drive the monster trucks they use in the Oil Sands quarries over there.

the trouble with trains

There's a lot of terminology to unpack when you talk about trains. Most people think of trains as having a locomotive in front, pulling a bunch of other cars. that is usually the case for heavy rail, pulling things like coal in long trains of cars a mile long.
But to move people, the trains typically used are Multiple Unit trains (MUs). These are cars that have driving controls in many or all of the cars, can have engines in many or all of the cars, and often have different components that pull and power the cars divided up among a few of the cars. This has many advantages. One advantage is that unlike having a locomotive, MUs can have driving controls in cars located in both the front and the back, so that when you hit the end of the line, you can just reverse the train's direction without further ado. Also, movement is more efficient in many ways because many or all the cars can break, and so they break faster, and there are multiple engines in multiple cars that are coordinated to work together to pull the train.
MU's themselves are broken into two categories, EMUs and DMUs. In Europe and Australia Candada and a few other places they use trains that we haven't been able to use here in the US, - Diesel Multiple Units (DMU's), due to regulations that we've got that says the trains have to be heavier than they are to be used on freight lines. DMU's are a little like diesel buses on rails, so there are carbon emissions. On light rail, that is commuter trains, the US has tended to use Electric Multiple Units (EMU's), which use 3rd rails or electric lines. there are no emissions, except at the power plants that create the electricity that powers them. all this extra setup with the electrical rails or wires is expensive and cumbersome, and is only efficient for shorter distances with more frequent trips.
Only in the last couple of years have DMUs started to gain opportunities to be used in the US, because they're finding ways of combining them with EMUs on the same tracks, gaining certain advantages.
DMUs are themselves broken into three categories, by their transmission system -- mechanical, electric and hydraulic. The electric version is a DEMU.

the exploitation continues?

TV and film actor Obba Babatunde was born and raised in Queens, New York, and is known for playing the father in Half and Half, was in Dawsons Creek, the films The Celestine Prophesy and Philadelphia, among others. He got his big break in 1982, playing a record executive modeled on Motown Records founder, Berry Gordy. However he turned down an offer to appear in the film version, which was released last year to great acclaim and is now nominated for a whole slew of Academy Awards.

The reasons why he turned down the role are explained by Babatunde as being some combination of his being upset at being bilked out of any profit sharing of the film and that key changes were made in the tone of the film , taking out the emphasis on how the singers were exploited financially. So he seems to be saying that he and other cast members were crucial in the creation of the story as it was developed, but they signed away their rights to future profits just like the Supremes did, and then had that whole element of the script written out of it in the film version too. Kind of complex an issue. You still got to wonder, he must be kicking himself for not being in this film. But, he's still a pretty successful actor anyway.

Another Babatunde, albeit it is his first name, is Babatunde Olatunji, the Nigerian percussion master whose seminal work Drums of Passion of 1959 was the record that introduced much of the US to World Music.

Babatunde is a Yoruba / Nigerian name. Other musicians of Nigerian ancestry include Seal, Sade, and Shirley Bassey, singer of the memorable theme to the James Bond film Goldfinger.

"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery.
And today? Today is a gift.
That's why we call it the present".
---Babatunde Olatunji

Gibrat finds size regular, rate of growth random

I'm skeptical of many ideas of economics. It always seems like when economists try to predict something about real life, they are wrong because there was some other set of factors they weren't taking account of, and they can only work out why it happened after the fact.

In 1931 Roger Gibrat, a Frenchman, wrote a book which proposed an idea that would later be known as Gibrat's Law. Roughly, the idea is that if you look at the sizes of a set of companies, they will fall into a regular curve pattern, however the rate of growth of these same firms will be random, having no relationship to the size.

That's an oversimplification, but it's probably all you need to know. Gibrat based his theory on an analysis of French manufacturing companies in the early part of the 20th century. But more recent studies have shown, for instance one analyzing data of italian manufacturing companies, that Gibrat's law does NOT hold -- growth WAS related to how big the company was.

The theory is not dead though, apparently it still is considered relevant when analyzing how cities grow. If you plot city growth on this regular distribution curve, you'll find that the the size is random. Or visa versa. OK, maybe you can tell that I'm not an economist, but it sounds like BS to me.

When radio has bad connotations

Usually one would think of active as a word with good connotations, but also seems over-appropriated by consumer marketing. The more you look into it the less positive this word seems to me. Being active could be good if you're actively engaged in something positive, but you could be actively doing something horrible.

Writing in an active voice is usually considered better than writing in the passive. This text is being written by me. I'm writing this text. The latter is better, so score one for active.

Having an 'active lifestyle' on the other hand could be thought of as a good thing by many people but it has bad overtones for me. Makes me think of an aerobics instructor from the 1980s. The word 'lifestyle' itself, so often associated with the word 'Active', Is also a concept associated with a very insidious and effective system developed by the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s called VALS. Lifestyle types can be ascertained by questionaires, and based on knowledge of how people behave within these lifestyle categories, we are sold everything from toothpaste to politicians. See the BBC documentary series 'The Century of the Self' and your eyes will be opened to the in many ways frightening uses of psychology on PR and marketing.

I filled out the questionaire on the SRI VALS website and found out that I'm an 'Innovator' with an 'Achiever' emphasis. Looks like i'm a highly desirable consumer. Oh, you flatter me!

Innovators (formerly Actualizers)
Innovators are successful, sophisticated, take-charge people with high self-esteem. Because they have such abundant resources, they exhibit all three primary motivations in varying degrees. They are change leaders and are the most receptive to new ideas and technologies. Innovators are very active consumers, and their purchases reflect cultivated tastes for upscale, niche products and services.
Image is important to Innovators, not as evidence of status or power but as an expression of their taste, independence, and personality. Innovators are among the established and emerging leaders in business and government, yet they continue to seek challenges. Their lives are characterized by variety. Their possessions and recreation reflect a cultivated taste for the finer things in life.

An active volcano is a negative idea that marketers can use positively to their advantage. the word would have very bad implications if you were near an active volcano, but positive in that volcanoes may have something to do with the source of life. Actually I may have just made that up, but it makes one think of virility and power and those have positive connotations. Think of how 'Viagra' seems to combine the words for 'Niagra' and 'Volcano' and 'Magma'.

uninspiring Latinate word induces obscure memories

Charlotte: Salutations.
Wilbur: Salu-what?
Charlotte: Salutations.
Wilbur: What are they? And where are you?
Charlotte: Salutations are greetings. It's my fancy way of saying hello.

This pivotal first exchange between the two main characters of Charlotte's Web is well etched into my memory -- I played Farmer Arable when I was about 12 in summer camp. The girl who played Wilbur the Pig will forever be remembered by me not only for her freckles and red hair but most especially for her pigs snout and porcine ways. Charlotte the word-spinning spider was a short spindly dark haired girl in a black leotard. I wore too big overalls and a straw hat.

The flip side of 'salutations' is 'valedictions,' or goodbyes. 'hi' is a salutation, 'bye' is a valediction. But there are other kinds of valediction we use in correspondence, such as Yours Truly, so and so.

The valedictorian is the student who gives the last speech at a high school graduation, usually the best student. The salutatorian is the student who gives the first speech, ordinarily the 2nd best student. My tiny graduating class elected the 2nd worst student as salutatorian, Yours Truly. I only learned the word 'salutatorian' today, but i did give the high school salutatorian speech. The faction behind making me salutatorian was roughly the same one that almost voted to make "Rawhide" (Belushi Brothers version) our processional music, but it didn't win'. 'In My Life' by the Beatles became the processional music -- Nice song but totally maudlin in this context. And totally wrong for the kind of alienation many of us were feeling upon graduation. At least we did succeed in getting 'All Along the Watchtower' (Jimi Hendrix version) as the music at the end, with its opening lyrics 'There must be some kind of way out of here.'

looking at all the Angles between two Germanic kings and a Nigerian town

OFFA of ANGEL was the name of a King of the Angles in the Fifth Century (d. 456), living somewhere in the Germanic lands of Northern Europe. He was mute so his blind dad Wermunde (who couldn't see what Offa was doing either) thought Offa was stupid and tried to get him to marry the daughter of this other king named Freawine, cause he thought at least Freawine would show him a thing or two. But then Freawine was killed in battle by the Viking Atisl. Old blind Wermunde took Feawines two sons in as his own, but a little while latter the sons killed the Viking Atisl in an ambush. This brought dishonor onto Old King Wermunde. Some Saxons came over and taunted the King, and at that moment Offa suddenly remembered how to speak. He challenged the Saxon prince and his champion to a duel. And he killed them both, making him a legend (In fact this is the first English story known to exist).

Just around the time that Offa of Angel was alive, the Angles began migrating to England from mainland Europe, across the North Sea (or German Sea, as it was known from Roman histories). The Roman Empire was in its death throes due to barbarian invasions from Germanic peoples, and the last Roman Emperor would die 20 years after Offa, in 476. In this time, the darkest of the dark ages, the Germanic peoples were on the move. Just as the Angles were arriving and made a kingdom from whatever lands they grabbed, pushing aside Celtic peoples and other Germanic peoples, the Vikings were beginning to do a whole lot more invading and pillaging for three hundred more years to come.

Also named Offa was the greatest King of the Angles, who lived two hundred years after the mainland Offa (died in 796). The Angle's new homeland in England was known as Mercia, and he's known to history as OFFA of MERCIA. Offa consolidated many of the Kingdoms of southern England, including those of the Saxons. he erected a huge dyke as a defense against the Welsh, and Offa's Dyke is still a prominent feature on the border to the East of Wales that was the west border of Mercia.

Offa of Mercia was powerful, but the most powerful king of the time was Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor.

When you give a daughter to another king, you give him the potential to inherit the throne. Charlemagne asked if he'd give him his daughter for Charlemagne's son. Offa said sure but only if you give one of your daughters to MY son. Charlemagne was so offended that he barred merchants sailing from England from landing in France, for a time.

Offa copied Charlemagne's currency to show that he was as important a king. He even copied gold dinars used in Iberia, which had been ruled by the Muslims since 711, emulating the Arabic script but with errors and upside down. This led some hopeful people to speculate that Offa had converted to Islam, since the phrase in Arabic was of praise to God.

Three hundred years later at the dawn of the first milennium AD, a town called OFFA was first settled in what is now Southwestern Nigeria, by Yoruba Muslims.

Nigeria itself is half Muslim, but also half Christian. A former colony of Great Britain, populous Nigeria now has the largest Anglican church in the world.

A Nationalist In a time before the word got ugly

Titu Maiorescu was a Romanian Intellectual and later politician. He was for a literary critic and instrumental in the development of Romanian literature. He formed the Junimea Society together with four others, who were the scions of the boyar class.

One thing about the boyars -- the were the most powerful class and their power was based on being landowners of agricultural land, and toil of the 90% of Romania that lived as peasants. But in the mid nineteenth century, many of these becan to espouse liberal ideas, and the feeling in the air of cultural revolution. Peasant revolts had happened though, and they none of these elites wanted actual ignorant Romanian peasants to revolt.

Titu clashed with the Borgeiosie of his time, he was himself was considered a conservative. Yet he railed against many of the ignorances of the period that were common. He espoused European model as that was where most of the learning had come, but wanted to use this to get to the real Romanian novel and character. He railed against the fanciful versions of Dacian origins and the anti-semitism that was prevalent in much of the political class. He joined the Conserative party in the late 19th century and became the Prime Minister of Romania from 1912 to 1914. He resisted going to war with Germany in WWI, and then resisted the Germans when they came to occupy Bucharest.

He lost power for opposing the War, and he died in 1917 of a heart attack> Had he lived to 1919 and survived the end of the war, he would have been surprised to find out that Romania gained territory from Hungary for finally siding against the Germans --The woodlands and beautiful towns of Transylvania.

With his death, in the grim shadow of a war that left unimaginable destruction and impossible grievances, his positive brand of nationalism would vanish from Europe forever. The land exchanges and penalties inflicted by the victorious powers on the losers would set the stage for a more sinister kind of nationalism, and for the confilcts of the Second World War to come.

A lovely place I've never seen

I love cross country skiing, even though I've not yet done it. How do I know that? I just do. I hope to try it soon. Here's a place, Burton Creet State Park, adjacent to lake Tahoe, that would be ideal for cross country skiing -- it's got 6 miles of unpaved roads. And it's completely beautiful over there.

I know this, and yet I've never seen Lake Tahoe. It's just a twist of fate that my life should be in some way intwined with this State Park. Perhaps only in pictures, but as I write this, it's undetermined whether i'll go there or not. Quantum physics, the uncertainty principle -- some things just haven't been decided yet.

Where Earthmen Live

I hit the random button on Wikipedia, resolving to write about what came up, which turned out to be the Gannett Glacier, part of the highest mountain in Wyoming. As the article states, the glacier has been massively melting over the decades because of global warming.

I don't have a lot to say about global warming, but I will say that looking at that picture of the glacier, it made me think about places where mankind was not meant to live, even if we find a way to visit. We can invent contraptions to allow us to stay for a while on Antarctica, or the Moon, but when you get down to it, we need some basic resources to make life sustainable. we're not ever going to live on Mars, unless we invent some way to generate an atmosphere -- no, i don't think so.

Once we burn through this earth, we're not going to be able to go anywhere else. But on the bright side, when this particular glacier melts away completely, it will be easier to scale the peak.

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even hypothetically, physicists don't teach us what to with our lives

You can't order chaos. It's chaos that creates order.
but what can we do with that knowledge to guide our behavior? for man craves power over his world's land and animals.
Promethius stole fire from the gods, known to us today as technology. Promethius couldn't give man immortality, but he gave them the power to understand the mortality of man and the laws of physics.
Art is to Technology like Memory is to Consciousness.
insert illustration of Promethius here.

passive vs. actively creating something

The film director Luis Bunuel made reference in his Autobiography "My Last Sigh" his having heard this statement -- that anyone who does not create from tradition is a plagarist. Although he didn't really know what it meant, it rang true for him, for nothing can truly ever be original, how ever much so it may seem to the creator at the time he makes it.

Men Collect

I'm sure I'm not the first to observe that most men collect things. Could be guns, cars, trophies, or whatever. Most of the people I know would collect books, dvds or cd's, and probably a few other things in addition. We here in the US know we live in a society preoccupied with the 'consumption' of goods, which means we buy stuff, get tired of it and then are persuaded to buy some more stuff. Collecting is different then just buying, but the difference is subtle. Women don't collect, they buy things according to fashion, and then put it in the closet. They wouldn't keep out of fashion things on display. But men like to have their dvds out there where they can see them, look at them with pride.

In the last few years I've become more aware of my collections, and it's changed the way I collect. I used to have lots of cds for instance. I especially liked to collect 20th century atonal music with styley sleeves. I still have those and I'm proud of them, but when I started to think too much about this phenomenon I stopped adding to the collection. But it probably wasn't because I didn't listen to the music anymore, though that might be part of it. The real reason is that collecting them made me feel like I had more creative potential. Each musical discovery represented a library of sounds that I could refer to to create a sound collage, which i was going to make into a video of some kind, something that sounded and looked utterly new! After making a few videos like this, I discovered there wasn't really a good time and place for anyone to appreciate it. And for me at least, being creative depends on an audience.

It wasn't long after that I found something new to collect. Electronic devices that record video, sound, and make light. While I may not have made a lot with it at this point, getting the stuff together makes me feel like I could. And that's what collecting is all about.

Does Multiculturalism create Racism?

Here's an article I find really interesting. It's written by Steve Sailer of the American Conservative, the rag started by Pat Buchanan. I think Buchanan is definitely a bigot, but this guy I can't dismiss so easily.

In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.
—Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam

In a column headlined “Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity,” Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of “civic engagement,” a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities:

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. ‘They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,’ said Prof Putnam. ‘The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.’

Lloyd noted, “Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ‘the most diverse human habitation in human history.’”

Sailer goes on to talk about the cultural differences that seem to dictate whether a country had institutions -- public or private -- that worked or not, and the negative side of individualism.

As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south of the border raised questions. Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement, but only about one in three Argentineans followed that custom. Another third straddled the stripes, apparently convinced that the idiots driving between the lines were unleashing vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the maricón lanes altogether and drove wherever they wanted.

The next year, I was sitting on an Acapulco beach with some college friends, trying to shoo away peddlers. When we tried to brush off one especially persistent drug dealer by claiming we had no cash, he whipped out his credit-card machine, which was impressively enterprising for the 1970s. That set me thinking about why we Americans were luxuriating on the Mexicans’ beach instead of vice-versa. Clearly, the individual entrepreneurs pestering us were at least as hardworking and ambitious as we were. Mexico’s economic shortcoming had to be its corrupt and feckless large organizations. Mexicans didn’t seem to team up well beyond family-scale.

- Steve Sailer, Fragmented Future

Fermicutes vs. Bacteroidetes

Lest you be mislead by the sound of the name, if you've got a lot of Fermicutes nowadays you'll probably be fat and squishy, not firm and cute.

ALTHOUGH most people prefer not to think about it, human guts are full of bacteria. And a good thing, too. These intestinal bugs help digestion, and also stop their disease-causing counterparts from invading. In return, their human hosts provide them with a warm place to live and a share of their meals. It is a symbiotic relationship that has worked well for millions of years.

Now it is working rather too well. A group of researchers led by Jeffrey Gordon, of the Washington University School of Medicine, in St Louis, has found that some types of microbes are a lot better than others at providing usable food to their hosts. In the past, when food was scarce, those who harboured such microbes would have been blessed. These days, paradoxically, they are cursed, for the extra food seems to contribute to obesity. Worse still, these once-benign microbes have even subtler effects, regulating the functioning of human genes and inducing the bodies of their hosts to lay down more fat than would otherwise be the case.

Dr Gordon's research is outlined in a paper published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and two others published last month in Nature. In the Nature papers, he and his team reported that obese people have a different mix of gut microbes from that found in lean people—a mix that is more efficient at unlocking energy from the food they consume. Although individuals can harbour up to a thousand different types of microbes, more than 90% of these belong to one or other of two groups, called Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes. The researchers sequenced bacterial DNA from faecal samples taken from volunteers and discovered that those who were obese had a higher proportion of Firmicutes than lean people did.

- The Economist, Greedy Guts?

In the developed world, where we have more food than we could ever need or want, the result is there are a lot of fat people. But in some places in the world, and thousands of years ago when food wasn't so plentiful, having these kind of gut bacteria would've been really useful because the fermicutes are actually more efficient at using the food they get, it would seem.

If we have a set of nuclear disasters and epidemics, turning the survivors into roaving bands of starving cannibals and rat-eaters, the people with more fermicutes, the former fatties, will be a lot better off.!

Race is What

No one is any one thing, even if they appear to be in one category or another. And since so many are so very mixed up, which genes from Africa and Europe and Asia, who is to say who is what. You could have two people with equal percentages of European and African genes, and one can look totally white and the other very dark, and each have features totally different from each other.

It seems to me where you grow up -- the food and environment -- seem to have a major effect on appearance, beyond anything genetic. So really this race idea is pretty out-of-date; our language we use every day simply hasn't caught up with the facts as revealed by science, or even common sense. Besides if you go back far enough everyone's from Africa. To accept that you can't believe in creationism, but then ignorance and racism have always been closely linked.

It will not be easy for humans to give up racial and other prejudices, I suspect. Since we evolved making use of these shorthand techniques for identifying others as friend or foe, enemies of the tribe etc., some of this may be wired into our brains, as it was for a long time very useful -- we had to make quick judgments and couldn't be thinking through everything every time we met a new person outside the tribe.

And then the cultural differences are usually quite significant between peoples, and we tend to forget what is 'race' and what is culture. To use an example, now that many Anglo folks listen to hip-hop and talking like they're from the street, could their other prejudices be likewise broken down? Maybe a little, depending on other social circumstances, but then also maybe not much. Because culture is adopted and changed into one's own, and it's easy to forget where it came from.

debauchery

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

-Edmond De Goncourt

True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself; hence it remains the favourite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.

-Albert Camus

The Amazigh Berbers

One of the bad things about modern society is how things have the tendency to be homogenized into just a few languages and cultures, in a similar way that exotic plants and animals vanish when their landscape is replaced with roads or crops. The mechanisms may be different but I suppose it's technology itself that enables this type of thing to happen. You can't fight technological progress -- but maybe technology can also save what we've been losing -- for instance, the interesting culture of the Berbers.

Millions of Berbers (or more correctly the Amazigh culture of the Imazighen people who speak Tamzight) live in North Africa and their culture and languages have been under threat from the Arab governments of Morocco, Algeria and Libya.

They make really amazing music and were in fact the people who ruled Spain and North Africa back in the middle ages, where they had a cultured and tolerant society until some barbarians kicked them out.

Here's a good article on Berber music and history, including an interview with Moh Alileche -- i've got one of his albums, it's really good. And he's a really nice guy.

I learned about his album by searching for music on iTunes. And good old wikipedia and the web provides the history. That's not the same as these folks having the freedom and money to educate their kids in their language and way of living, but at least it's something.