Birthday

causality

The truth is that monogamy and alcohol consumption are merely correlated and that some third factor, most likely industrialization, is independently driving both the transition to monogamy and the increased alcohol consumption. Correlation without causality doesn’t usually make for very good economic literature, but the authors get full marks for creativity. We have discussed the argument for why industrialization leads to monogamy before here at Dollars and Sex so I won’t go into that other than to say that industrialization shifts wealth generation away from land ownership towards skilled labor increasing the demand for skilled wives (who produce skilled children) and reducing the number of wives in a household. Alcohol consumption also increases following industrialization, perhaps because technological innovation increases the profitability of producing cheap alcohol or because a household’s income needs to increase above the subsistence level before alcohol is consumed in any large quantities.

Taboo-Style Games

For the game “Psychiatrist,” one member of the group volunteers to be the psychiatrist and leaves the room while the remaining revelers decide on an ailment. The ailment isn’t an illness in the traditional sense. For instance, you may decide that you will all act as if you are the person to your right. Then the psychiatrist returns and asks questions until he or she successfully diagnoses the group. This last one risks creating some contrived conversation, but it can be fun. The host of the party pens some outlandish phrases (i.e. “I am loose as a goose” or “It tastes like pickled peppers”) on strips of paper and hides one (or perhaps three, ranging from easy to medium to hard) under each dinner plate. Guests read the phrases to themselves when they sit down to dinner, and then the object is to work them into the conversation as naturally as possible. Try to call out when you think others are using their assigned phrases, and the person able to slip in the most, unnoticed, wins.

cut branches

Putting up a live Christmas tree can be a lot of work. You have to make sure that the tree has plenty of water, sometimes having to crawl beneath the branches while trying not to dislodge any of the breakable ornaments. And then there’s the clean-up. No matter what you do, the tree is going to shed needles destined to become lodged in the bottom of your foot. Now scientists from Canada, reporting in the journal Trees, have figured out why those needles fall off, and they’ve come up with a couple of solutions that could keep needles on longer.

Dream of Europe

One can understand how many Europeans might suffer anxiety and even panic as they seek to preserve Europe’s great cultural traditions, profit from the riches it covets in the non-Western world, and retain the advantages gained over so many centuries of class conflict, colonialism, and internecine war. But if Europe is to protect itself, would it be better for it to turn inward, or should it perhaps remember its fundamental values, which once made it the center of gravity for all the world’s intellectuals?

orânduieli

desideratum

B 612

Heureusement pour la réputation de l'astéroïde B 612 un dictateur turc imposa à son peuple, sous peine de mort, de s'habiller à l'Européenne. L'astronome refit sa démonstration en 1920, dans un habit très élégant. Et cette fois-ci tout le monde fut de son avis. Si je vous ai raconté ces détails sur l'astéroïde B 612 et si je vous ai confié son numéro, c'est à cause des grandes personnes. Les grandes personnes aiment les chiffres. Quand vous leur parlez d'un nouvel ami, elles ne vous questionnent jamais sur l'essentiel. Elles ne vous disent jamais: "Quel est le son de sa voix ? Quels sont les jeux qu'il préfère ? Est-ce qu'il collectionne les papillons ?" Elles vous demandent: "Quel âge a-t-il ? Combien a-t-il de frères ? Combien pèse-t-il ? Combien gagne son père ?" Alors seulement elles croient le connaître.

While Queen

...Alice carefully released the brush, and did her best to get the hair into order. `Come, you look rather better now!' she said, after altering most of the pins. `But really you should have a lady's maid!' `I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!' the Queen said. `Twopence a week, and jam every other day.' Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, `I don't want you to hire me -- and I don't care for jam.' `It's very good jam,' said the Queen. `Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate.' `You couldn't have it if you did want it,' the Queen said. `The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam to-day.' `It must come sometimes to "jam do-day,"' Alice objected. `No, it can't,' said the Queen. `It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know.' `I don't understand you,' said Alice. `It's dreadfully confusing!' `That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: `it always makes one a little giddy at first -- `Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. `I never heard of such a thing!' ` -- but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.' `I'm sure mine only works one way.' Alice remarked.

`I can't remember things before they happen.'

`It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked. `What sort of things do you remember best?' Alice ventured to ask. `Oh, things that happened the week after next,' the Queen replied in a careless tone...

A Morning.

By William Stafford.

From high tide in the night a dead
sea lion explains itself on the wide beach –
folded back arms, drooping petals of feet,
one loud little rifle hole back of the mild
sleeping head. The world tilts back;
the sea returns. When stars pull their wires
tonight those dead eyes will move, and waves
make the deep song. Dunes will come
whispering back. Feathery grass will try
its long dim roots, a new version.

aesthetic imperative

..."Women of Algiers" is also about colour, richly deployed. Throughout the 19th century, oriental themes licensed romantic colourists from Géricault – his "Pasha", on a golden seat in a brilliant crimson robe, is here – to Théodore Chassériau, who was haunted by his visit to Algeria in 1846. His strange, tormented pictures attempt a synthesis between Ingres' classical rigour and Delacroix's vehemence, notably in "Combat of Arab Cavaliers", lit with yellow and red notes for the brightly costumed horsemen, and the theatrical oval panel, "The Death of Cleopatra". Forty years later, Renoir, seeking fresh impetus and greater luminosity to further impressionist experiments, landed at Algiers and in intense, spontaneous, short strokes depicted the over-heated "Arab Fete", a packed musical festival seen against scorched white domes and towers. Within a decade, Henri Evenepoel, young Belgian friend and fellow-traveller of Matisse, made the same journey and painted his own light-drenched crowd scene, "Orange Market at Blidah", whose flattened forms and chromatic daring anticipate fauvism.

Time is not absolute

“we adopt the idea that individuals ‘experience’ time.” A big part of that experience is emotions, and the researchers theorize that the more positive an anticipated emotion, the slower that time will pass.

hereinafter QM

When an observer interacts with this wave function by taking a measurement, the wave function suddenly manifests as a particle with a position and speed to which numbers can be assigned. It ceases to be a quantum-mechanical phenomenon and becomes a “classical” one. This seems to give the observer’s consciousness a privileged position in our description of the world.
The fact that observer A takes measurement M is nothing to do with interaction between A and the universal wave function. They are already, and for ever, interacting — “entangled.” All that happened was that the universe split in two at the instant of observation (as it is always doing, observed or not) and the version of A that we know about was carried off willy-nilly on the branch associated with co-ordinate M. A copy of him, A2, was carried off on a different branch, with a different measurement. So were innumerable other copies. The universal wave function governs them all. Actually, it is them.

• This was the germ of what later became known as the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM.

There is also the small matter of evidence for the existence of these other universes. Are they in fact physically real? Everett, an atheist and a materialist, was as little inclined to metaphysics as his nemesis Bohr, though for different reasons