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Babylon 5. It's one of the most complex artistic creations ever.
Dilbert sometimes misses being funny by being far too true.
There is a nation that refers to itself as Deutsch, and most of them live in a country they call Deutschland. So what do their neighbors call them?
Their English-speaking neighbors call them "Germans", after the barbarians that lived there millenia ago and trashed the Roman Empire. (There are similar words in Italian and Esperanto.) Their French-speaking neighbors call the place "Allemagne", which (I think) refers to the Allemanni, a particular group of those Germans. (There are similar words in Spanish and Portugese.) Their Russian-speaking near-neighbors call them "nemetsii", which also means "barbarians".
Why can't we call them something nice for a change?
(Since writing this, a correspondent has told me that the usual Italian word for "German" is "tedesco". I've also been told that the "des" in "tedesco" is cognate to "Deutsch", both coming from "theodiscus". So, congrats to the Italians!)
Lt. Flinn is not a victim of an unjust military. She was having an affair with the husband of an enlisted woman, which is strictly against regs. (Military regulations exist partly to make it possible for people to get along with each other, and many people find it very difficult to work closely with their spouse's lover.) She was told to break off the affair twice, and lied about it to her commanding officer. She put her sex life ahead of the Air Force's needs, and we're better off without her in the service. (Many people have leapt to her defense, confusing this with various harassment cases. The difference is that her superiors told her to keep her pants on, not to take them off. If anybody was harassing, it was Flinn.)
I frequently see the comment, "If it's called X science, it really isn't a science", or variations on it. This is true often enough to be useful, but the reason is interesting. It's often used to mean that the practicioners are trying to gain credibility, but this isn't the case.
It's a naming thing. Up until sometime this century, we named sciences by putting "ology" after a Greek or Latin root. The "ologies" are therefore rather old, and most of them have either been accepted as science (psychology) or discredited and mostly forgotten (phrenology). Any group who strives for legitimacy will tend to use "ology" (Scientology), because of its greater cachet.
Nowadays, we have a lot of budding sciences that are only a few decades old. Some of them are bad choices for fields of study, some of them are not. By the end of next century, we'll have a good line on that. All of them were founded, not that long ago, by people outside the discipline, and many leaders in the fields are former grad students of the founders. By the end of next century, either a central focus will appear or it won't.
Some of the X Sciences are not good sciences, and the rest are somewhat immature. This is not the same as being non-sciences.
There's a debate going on concerning affirmative action. I haven't decided which side I'm on, but I'm not seeing convincing arguments from the people for affirmative action.
About thirty years ago, in the late 1960s, the United States was explicitly racist to a large extent. Negros (as they were called then) were discriminated against overtly and severely. Something had to be done. One step was called Affirmative Action. It started as a plea to consider only relevant facts about people when making hiring decisions, or college admission decisions, or whatever. For obvious reasons, this didn't work. Part of it developed into a quota system, since that is enforceable. This was a race-based solution for a race-based problem, which seems reasonable. At first, it was nothing but a changing of quotas from 0% to x%, which was a step forward.
The original principle is certainly sound, and always was. It is even put into practice sometimes. The quota implementation, or any other explicitly race-based requirements, are obviously contrary to Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, which many of us hold as the best statement of how race relations should be.
Quotas have numerous bad effects. They encourage an "us versus them" mentality. They are unfair to individuals. They recognize race as a valid reason for making a personnel decision. The ultimate solution to racism does not include quotas. They were useful in 1970, but at some point in the process they have to be dumped.
The question is whether we have made enough progress. Certainly, racial preferences were a good thing in the 1960s, counteracting previous racial preferences. Certainly people have been treated in horrifying ways simply because of racial groupings. This is irrelevant right now, in 1997. The children who were admitted to college because of the initial blows to the color bar are in late middle age now, and the people who are now contending for good jobs or good colleges were mostly not alive in the 1960s. It may be that we still need race-based regulations, but nobody has shown me that.
The other argument for Affirmative Action is that there is still a considerable gap, in income and education, between races. This is only to be expected, and would continue for decades in the absence of any racial discrimination. In the 1960s and earlier, certain people were automatically lower class, on the basis of race. This means that, a generation or so later, they are still disproportionately lower class. There is some indication that the racial difference is at least way down, when social class is taken into account. (This is a very slippery conclusion, of course. If you don't think so, try to come up with questions you'd ask to see how much measurable racial discrimination is going on.)
An alternative approach to race-based considerations would be some sort of class-based considerations. This would catch the poor African-Americans, just as it would catch the poor Asian-Americans and European-Americans. It would not unduly favor those who have made it and their children. It would be difficult to implement, and difficult to administer. It might work better than race-based remedies, and is certainly more compatible with our national ideals.
This is a matter of evolution. We were bound to dislike what's good for us. To summarize, we were going to evolve in an environment with generally sufficient amounts of one sort of food, and limited amounts of some other. Our bodies would work best with lots of the more plentiful food, and we'd evolve craving the less plentiful stuff.
OK, let's backtrack to tens of thousands of years ago, when our species lived in conditions similar to modern hunting and gathering societies. We haven't had time to evolve much since. In modern H&G societies, the men go out and hunt down animals, and usually don't bring anything home. The women go out and hunt down plants, and are generally more successful. The diet of the technologically less advanced is therefore mostly vegetables of some sort, and we evolved to live off them. On the other hand, a small amount of meat was very useful. Since it was useful and scarce, we evolved to desire it, so that we'd get as much as we could. People also went hungry a lot, in pre-historic and most historic times. We evolved to want to eat more than we need when the food is available, so that we could better survive the inevitable times when food is short.
Homo Sapiens reached the modern, industrial area with built-in cravings for more food and more meat, and with built-in abilities to live on reasonable amounts of vegetables and small amounts of meat. In the past century or so, food production has been revolutionized. As a citizen of a developed country, I can use a relatively small amount of my income to buy all sorts of foods, in any reasonable quantity, conveniently. My instinctive reaction is of course to eat large high-fat high-protein meals, since my evolutionary bent is to get fat on the "good stuff" before it goes away.
This was going to happen under any feasible evolution. If meat had been plentiful and vegetables scarce, we'd fatten ourselves on vegies, to our detriment.
When I was in kindergarten, and all through elementary school, I was constantly taught not to boast, not to talk about myself and my accomplishments. I was constantly reassured that other people would know what I can do without "tooting my own horn" or "wearing (something) on my sleeve" or "patting myself on the back". This has, generally, served me well socially.
It's different in business. I got into the real world, and I found that I have to state and restate my abilities and accomplishments, and that I have to overstate them to the verge of dishonesty (I won't go beyond that verge) in order to compete with everybody else. I can't get hired without this, and I can't get a decent raise. If my sterling qualities would be automatically recognized, I assure you the experience section of my resume would look a bit different.
So, if you or a loved one are in school, and being taught to be modest and retiring, do something about it. I'd recommend at least occasional written boasts, written to be fairly honest and believable but otherwise as favorable as possible.
And, if you're making more money than I am, don't tell me that you learned everything you needed to know in kindergarten. (Or, if you have to, tell me which kindergarten, so I can try to get my son into it.)
First, there's an awful lot of people out there taking antidepressants. The ones I have known have certainly needed them. We are rapidly changing a very common and debilitating illness into something easily treatable.
Second, we have a working theory of human cognition, and we do things with it. There is educational software available to the very young that does an excellent job of teaching. I don't know if toddlers are learning more than everybody else, but they sure are learning differently.
Third, communications are far better, and will continue to improve. Politically, an oppressive regime now has the choice between allowing basically free communication or becoming geopolitically irrelevant. Socially, we're turning into a real global village with such things as the Web, not a fake one where you need to own a publisher to make your voice heard. (You're reading this, aren't you?)
Back when I was a kid, there was a lot of hype about science and what it would immediately do. Nowadays, the United States seems to be in an anti-science mood. What I find interesting about this is that many of the failures of the sixties have quietly become successes. We have the rudiments of a hard science of mind. We have much cleaner technology, in most senses of "cleaner". We have incredibly complex machines that work reliably. We have a much wider array of materials to design with. I could go on and on, but why bother? Sometime, the public is going to notice all of this, and it will once again be a great time to be a scientist.
The problem with the G, PG, PG-13, R, X/NC-17 system is that it pushes movies towards the middle. Only a few good movies get produced with a "G" rating, because these are perceived as movies for young children, and therefore the large teen audience tends to avoid them. This is, I think, why E.T. (otherwise a good children's movie) included the word "penisbreath" - to get the PG rating and the teenager. Similarly, a movie like Clockwork Orange would not be produced nowadays, which is an artistic loss. The money will be found in movies of PG to R, which means that it is largely impractical to produce movies with explicit sex and violence, or movies with little reference to sex or violence or vulgar language. The solution is probably to establish minimum ages for movies and enforce them, or to simply describe what potentially objectionable features a movie might have ("sexual innuendo", "graphic violence", "plot stupidity", etc.).
The problem with the excess water in Spring is that nobody wants it. Farmers tile their fields so that water runs away, into the rivers. People build or plant on flood plains and wetlands, so they cannot absorb any of the excess water, and it goes into the rivers. When the rivers start overflowing, people build levees and dykes around them, so that the river can't expand sideways. Eventually, the water has to go somewhere, and in the middle of April 1997 that is, among other things, downtown Grand Forks.
Now, suppose we did fewer of these things. Spring snow melt and rain would soak into farmers' fields, and would tend to dry there. Water would flow into wetlands, which would get wetter, and it would partially dry out, partially flow out slowly. The river would get higher, of course, but as it got higher it would get wider, so a comparatively small increase in height would produce a large increase in volume on the flood plains, and the water would be slowed down. We would not have the raging rivers of the 1993 and 1997 floods.
In short, our current economic and social practices are directly responsible for getting these floods going. It may be that global warming is contributing (it's difficult to say, climate is chaotic in the technical sense), but the tiling of fields and the destruction of wetlands increase flooding very nicely. The frantic struggles to sandbag the river back may save one town, but the next town down the river will therefore have a harder time because of the very success, and eventually the river will be unstoppable and a large area will flood. After this, of course, the towns downstream will have an easier time of it. This makes leveeing something of a competitive sport, with the penalty for failure being a tremendous flood.
If we are to prevent city-smashing floods, we need to give the water somewhere to go. We have to have buffers, such as undrained fields and functioning wetlands, to hold the water and feed it into the rivers slowly. We have to have expansion areas in rivers, where the river can spread out, where the waters can get wide and slow rather than narrow and raging. This does not come free, of course. Farmers will be slower to plant if they keep excess water in the fields. Wetlands are usually prime farmland when drained, and flood plains make lovely home and industry sites when they're not flooded. I think this is worth not having major floods every few years, when towns will engage in weeks of frantic and maybe futile effort, followed by billions of dollars of property damage and perhaps loss of human life.
All contents of these pages Copyright 1997 by David H. Thornley.