i was blog surfing today and came across a post about a guy who really dug this gal who he hung out with, but never got the impression she liked him for anything more than, you know, the 'F' word (friend).

damn i can so relate. more than once i too found out later that what i thought was a 'being nice to the funny looking guy thing' by someone i had the major hots for, was really a 'how fucking obvious do i have to be before he'll ask me out' thing. (answer: pretty fucking obvious).

maybe its because in the early years i was shot down a number of times and the bruised ego caused me to be gun shy...'well if mary wouldn't go out with me, there's no way this hottie would'. (logical, but it turns out logic has damn little to do with dating)

but on a more basic level i think its because for a million years homo sapien women were forced to hone their interpersonal skills by hangin in close quarters with other women in the tribe, holding down the fort, and raising the kids. so today they can just raise an eyebrow and communicate 'you don't really think i care about how that works do you?' or smile a certain way and every other woman who sees it correctly interprets it as 'damn, that is the ugliest purse i have ever seen!'

whereas for a million years homo sapien men went out for days at a time and threw rocks and sharp sticks to kill things to drag home to show that they were brave and could provide food. we could correctly interpret the arc and trajectory of a stone flying thru the air to within a few feet, or determine how old a subtle rabbit track was, but figure out a raised eyebrow or faux smile? no way. it was more like, 'honey, i'm not sure what that expression on your face means, but here is this nice carcass i've been dragging for days now, this surely proves i'm one mean hunter-gatherer, can we just get it on now?'

so not knowing their language, i just tried to be nice. which, as it turned out, was not a great tactic. looking back, i think i was always too nice because it sure seemed like the bad boy, treat-em-like-shit guys were the ones who got all the girls. i was shy and tentative and romantic and polite and smart. unfortunately i was also geeky and usually broke - which sure didn't help things either. women were strange and beautiful and mysterious and smelled different and used this subtle language that was way beyond my meager comprehension. but the species definitely deserved more trial and observation.

it took me a few years to finally increase my odds a bit. i was still geeky and polite, but i discovered that merely owning a motorcycle, (which i purchased because i had always wanted one - and had wrecked my car and couldn't afford nor really needed at college anyways) gave me a nice influx of bad boy cred. plus there were finally girls who were younger than i was and still legal - a definite bonus. so i did ok. i had to work harder at it than my better looking and wealthier buddies, but then it seems i've to work harder at everything worth getting in my life.

but i still lament the fact that some of the women that i used to dream of and never held out any hope for, actually thought i was decent enough to date and all along it was just me being too shy and body language stupid to recognize it.

posted by bluematrix at 10/27/05 09:33 | link | comments (3)

The carniverous bladderwort plant is the male flea's enemy. It looks just like a female flea, but when he jumps on it, it traps and digests him.

Bugs aren't going to inherit the earth, they already own it - there are 200 million insects for every one human being

We can identify only one bug out of 13.

Your fly is open.

posted by bluematrix at 10/24/05 09:43 | link | comments (1)

Bird flu could kill 1 billion, or it could peter out.

its been a long time since mother nature took steps to check our population explosion the way she does with every other species on the planet. granted we are pretty good at doing that ourselves with wars and murder. but still i'm a little nervous so i did some reading. there are a number of interesting articles listed here.

How scary is bird flu? Is it, as Mike Davis, the author of The Monster at Our Door, puts it, a "viral asteroid on a collision course with humanity"? Or are the it's-not-if-but-when predictions overblown?

H5N1 - or GenZ as the current superstrain is called - really is a monster of a virus. Chickens infected with GenZ don't just die, they melt, leaching blood from every organ. As the name suggests, the flu results from a type of virus in birds that is loosely related to the influenza virus in humans. Despite its similarities, though, avian flu very rarely jumps species and infects humans.

But flu textbooks say humans shouldn't be able to be catch an avian virus such as H5N1 at all - at least not before it has infected an intermediary animal. Moreover, while about 100 people worldwide have contracted GenZ since it first emerged in Hong Kong in 1997, 60 of them have died - a worryingly high mortality rate.

That's not all. Intensive chicken farming, combined with fast-rising south-east Asian populations and international jet travel, has created what one epidemiologist calls a "perfect virological storm".

What could this mean for you or me? A few weeks ago, David Nabarro, the UN's influenza coordinator, came up with a global death toll of 150 million. The World Health Organisation quickly offered a rebuttal, saying the correct figure was 2 to 7.4 million. But as the WHO well knows, the only true predictor is what happened in 1918. Then, as now, an avian virus suddenly acquired the ability to latch on to and invade human lung cells. The difference is that the Spanish flu - so-called because Spain was the only country not to censor news of the illness - was also highly infectious between humans. Scientists now estimate that the 1918 pandemic may have killed 40 to 100 million people worldwide. If you take into account the current world population, a direct extrapolation gives you 325 million deaths.

If that's not sufficiently scary, there's more. Epidemiologists estimate the 1918 virus killed 2.5% of those infected. But we know that GenZ kills 70% of the people it infects. In other words, the true worst-case scenario based on 1918 could be 1 billion deaths worldwide. This is what Davis means by the monster at our door and why he believes scientists, and the press, are right to sound the alarm.

Then again, it may never happen. Flu is one of the deadliest pathogens in nature's arsenal, but is also one of the sloppiest. Like all viruses, every time it replicates it makes mistakes, some of which may render it less infective. That is the conundrum of H5N1. It could be a huge threat to the human race or none at all.

posted by bluematrix at 10/20/05 09:03 | link | comments (2)

creativity stirs again. the muse returns perhaps...

I shut my eyes and the world fades
- open, hope stares back at me
a new dawn, always there

i talk to the sky, empty and blue
- quiet, i hear the beat of my heart
a new rhythm, but always there

is there no way out of these thoughts?
- doubting, a beautiful agony
transient, but always there

and just what is our raison d'être these days?
-survival, so easy on one level
but overanalyze it
and it slips thru your fingers like
so many unfinished

posted by bluematrix at 10/17/05 00:07 | link | comments (1)

Not a knife throw from here you can hear the night train passing
That's the sound somebody makes when they're getting away
Leaving next week's hanging jury far behind them
Prisoner only of the choices they've made

Night train

Ice cube in a dark drink shines like starlight
The moon is floating somewhere out at sea
On an island in the blur of noise and color
Alcatraz, St. Helena, Patmos and the Chateau D'If

Night train

And everyone's an island edged with sand
A temporary refuge where somebody else can stand
Till the sea that binds us like the forced tide of a blood oath
Will wear it down - dissolve it - recombine it

Anyone can die here they do it every day
It doesn't take much effort tho it goes against the grain
And the ultimate forgetfulness of violence
Sweeps the landscape like a headlight of a train

Night train

Ice cube in a dark drink shines like star light
Starlight shines like glass shards in dark hair
And the mind's eye tumbles out along the steel track
Fixing every shadow with its stare

Night train

And in the absence of a vision there are nightmares
And in the absence of compassion there is cancer
Whose banner waves over palaces and mean streets
And the rhythm of the night train is a mantra

(bruce cockburn's night train off charity of night. can this guy conjure up images or what? the music is just as good as the lyrics too.)

posted by bluematrix at 10/14/05 01:47 | link | comments (1)

practice.

anyone who studies an instrument, sport or form of art must deal with practice, experiment and training. we learn by doing. there's a big difference between the projects we imagine doing and the ones we do. but we get frustrated by the effort and patience needed to get anywhere.

we think of practice as an activity done in a special context to prepare for the 'real thing'. but if we split practice from the real thing, neither will be very real. so many children have learned to hate the piano or violin - because of exceedingly boring exercises. like when my parents bought me a guitar and some lessons when i was young. besides the fact that they neglected to buy me a tuner and the cheap guitar sounded like crap, the bored guy giving the lessons threw a book of scales at me and said 'learn these'. i think my interest in guitar at that time lasted about a week and a half. ten years later in my last year of college i had a roommate who showed me a couple of chords on his beautiful 12 string and in minutes i was halfway into my first 3-chord neil young song and have been hooked ever since. its just been in the last year or so that have i been teaching myself scales.

the western idea of practice is to acquire a skill. it is very much related to our work ethic which tells us to struggle or be bored now in return for a future reward. the eastern idea of practice is to create the person who realizes practice is not only necessary to art, but is art. the whole 'wipe on, wipe off' thing.

you don't have to practice boring exercises, but you have to practice something. try transforming the boring 8 tone scale by playing it in different order or a different rhythm. if you want to be a writer you have to write - if you aren't ready to release the novel inside you yet, practice on something smaller, like blogging. in any art you can take the most basic and simple technique and shift it around and personalize it until it becomes something engaging to you.

and we also have to a have a time to just mess around, without fear of criticism, without our inner censor telling us how much our fledgling attempts sucks. we have to be able to try things and throw them away. Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away, like a frog laying several million eggs at one sitting where only a few become tadpoles and a only few of those become frogs.

so to create, we need both technique, which we gain from practice, and freedom from technique, which is where true creative works come from. to this end we practice until our skills become unconscious. (read more in 'Free Play' by stephen nachmanovitch)

posted by bluematrix at 10/11/05 09:15 | link | comments (2)

you can't blame your parents anymore...

i've been reading about the 3 laws of behavioral genetics and how they may be the most important discovery in the history of psychology. its funny how most psychologists have not come to grips with them yet, even though the empirical body of evidence supporting them has been unusually robust (a nice list of references can be found in stephen pinkers the blank slate-the modern denial of human nature, 2002). and most intellectuals don't understand them, even though they are not hard to grasp. this is because they run so counterintuitive to what most people believe. they are:

The first law: all human behavioral traits are heritable.
The second law: the effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
The third law: a large portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

the first law (most studies defined a 'behavioral trait' as a stable property of a person that can be measured by standardized pyschological testing) can be demonstrated using identical twins separated at birth. they share all the genes and none of the environment, so any correlation must be in the genes. studies show even those twins raised on different continents may both use the same hair gel, smoke the same brand of cigarette, share a same nervous habit, etc. another way to study it is to use identical twins reared together who share all the genes and some of the environment, and compare them to fraternal twins reared together who share half their genes and most of their environment. it all comes out the same. identical twins reared apart are highly similar and identical twins reared reared together are substantially more similar than fraternal twins reared together.

the second law, family effects are smaller than gene effects, directly contradicts some big boys in psychology (like skinner and his black box) who say environment is everything. most people feel how our parents treated us and what kind of home we grew up in is crucial in shaping who we are. but we must take into account there are 2 very different kinds of environments that shape us. there is the shared environment; our parents, our home life, our neighborhood, etc. and there is the nonshared environments which is everything else that impinges on one sibling but not the other. things like the presence of other siblings, peers, and unique experiences like falling off a bicycle or getting sick. the research shows the effects of the shared environment are usually small and often zero. this is hard to believe but is demonstrated again and again.

the third law says that neither genes nor families account for most of the variations of who we are. this is shown by identical twins who are reared together who share both their genes and their family environments are far from identical in their intellects and personalities. there must be causes that are neither genetic or common to the family that make them different and more generally make all of us who we are.

if you summarize the 3 laws you find, shockingly, the evidence points to Genes - 45%, Shared environment - 5%, and Unique environment - 50%.

- children are NOT blank canvas' with upbringing and education allowing their essential nature to blossom or wither, nor lumps of putty to be formed by parents molding hands.

- there are NO studies that document that the first 3 years are a critical period for cognitive or language development (though studies have shown depriving an animal of stimulation by sewing an eye shut or keeping it in a barren cage may hurt brain growth).

for most of human existence the parents main job was keeping their children alive. and while children do need a certain amount of nurturing, it doesn't really matter from a personality standpoint who does the nurturing.

however this does not mean that it doesn't matter how parents treat their children. parents select the environment for their children and thus select the peer group. and while they may not hold their futures in their hands, they hold their todays, and have the power to make their todays miserable. but happiness is not an indicator of intelligence or personality.

posted by bluematrix at 10/05/05 08:45 | link | comments (3)