You shall kill only the killers

How prescient was PKD - even though the specifics are off. There is no Penfield Mood Organ, there's just entertainment on demand, mind and body pornography. There's no Mercerism, there's just the global mind fusion that is the internet. There are no androids, but we feel the need to separate ourselves into classes and castes, between those who feel and those who do not (which is easy enough; this side of the TV feels, the other side does not: see third world, global south, etc).

We've even got Buster Friendly. 24/7/365 news, TV, media, sports. Britney Spears and Anna Nicole. It's cave drawings gone digital. Large breasts symbolize fertility. It's everything humans have ever been - and we think we're different.

Maybe that's the delusion he is really trying to uncover. These are universal themes, not exposed by technology. Instead, we use technology to exploit these desires. We haven't used the internet to evolve, to interact more potently. We've used it in the same ways we used any form of communication and networking. It's just a new plane.

Take internet gaming, for instance. It's similar to any sport. Work together with others against a common enemy to reach some goal. The goal doesn't even matter. The goal can be symbolic. If sports prepare us for war, this is a valuable evolutionary trait. We don't need to go to war to be prepared for it. We can use symbols and artificial constructs - which entertain.

And in that sense, the two are no different - biologically and socially speaking.

So it's not as if this is a huge revolution. At its roots, it is the same thing we've done since we came out of the weeds. We replaced the real with the symbolic. Now we just run on treadmills.

Okay, so - do we feel any longer? Or are we all androids, unsympathetic, the real meaning in our lives destroyed? I think the symbolic has so fully replaced the real, but it doesn't matter. We don't see through our own eyes, we see through others. We're reaching a new global medium. Average. An emotional middle-state.

Check this out. "We Feel Fine", a data-driven collection of feeling statements drawn from the internet. It's interesting enough in its own right. But what makes it so fascinating is that anyone can plug in and really feel those emotions. Just like in "Androids", we program for ourselves the emotions we want - from inspiration to depression - and there it is, on the screen, in our mind.

It's as if a billion monkeys were typing - not on typewriters, but on blogs. And this is what they came up with. Was this always here, but unexpressed? Now we just have the power to explore the feelings of millions of individuals, not just Shakespeare or Yeats or Goethe, but nearly everyone.

Strange that we all think our experiences are unique. It's that dichotomy - we live our own lives, but we are part of the collective, unyielding experience. Perhaps that's the 'mystery of faith' in the religion I was born into. That every day we are all crucified. Only through the experience of one can we understand the experience of all. In believing, we choose to fuse with that entity or idea.

Just some thoughts. Ramblings. I haven't posted in a while, so I suppose my glass is overflowing right now.

Here:
I think the only thing allowing me to ramble like this is my complete lack of audience.

Character Study

In a back hall of the social sciences building is a room with thirteen boxes. Three feet in length, a foot in width, a foot in height. Some are wooden and look like lovingly constructed but useless woodshop projects. Others are black, made from the same mottled plastic of instrument cases.

There's a warm drowsiness to the room, and I always leave beating chalky dust stripes out of my coat.

I have class here twice a week, but I visit about two times a week on my own, with a key borrowed from the main office. I pull out my box, flip up the hinges--the same tired type as my father's toolbox--and carefully move the drawer to reach the bones I need.

Each student in my class has a human skeleton, and we unpack them gently onto pads of dingy yellow foam when we enter. We line up the long bones parallel to one another, and array the bones of the hands and feet in starbursts. We never take the whole skeleton out at once. It's appendage by appendage we learn.

The person in my box only has only one foot, his left, and he's missing one of the bones of his ankle. Today I held up his tarsals and wrote detailed descriptions in my notebook, to be copied to notecards and committed to memory:

Talus
-Look for the rounded, smooth, saddle shaped bit. This is dorsal.
-Medially, there is an apostrophe whose tail points proximally.
-The triangle protruding from the saddle is lateral.

And this is what I do, for about six hours every week. I pull some man's feet and hands and ribs out of a box and I describe them to myself using a kindergarten picture book vocabulary. "Saddle, Triangle, Tail". The base of the middle finger looks, I tell myself, like a cow whose larger horn points toward the index finger.

Trying to figure out the sides of the bones, I hold his radius against my own, with my palms facing up. If the rest of his body was attached we would be dancing a strange folk dance, entwined.

Like having a capable but quiet lab partner, I hum to myself while I work and watch carefully, learning by example.

Biological Anthropology and Its Love of Fantasy

No, this blog post isn't going to be a blazing condemnation of biological anthro, exposing it as some sort of head in the clouds discipline. I love bio anthro, I love everything about it. For those of you who don't know, biological (or physical anthropology) is the sub-discipline of anthropology that focuses on the human skeleton. It encompasses the search for human remains, both modern and ancient to help elucidate things about our past. It works to piece together the fascinating history of human evolution, studies living apes and monkeys to learn more about ourselves, examines archaeological assemblages of human skeletal material to learn all sorts of interesting things about diet and nutrition and what people did while they were alive, it even helps identify and reconstruct the death of modern murder victims.

It's amazing what you can learn from a few bones.

But the more I learn about bio anthro and the more time I spend with the wonderful, geeky people who study it, the more I--a true nerd in my own right--see connections with our modern sci-fi fantasy world.

Let's begin with two big deals from the fields of anthropology and fantasy.

J.R.R. Tolkien and Louis Leakey.

I'm sure you all know about Tolkien, but what of Leakey? Louis Leakey was your typical British intellectual. He galloped off to Africa and didn't look back, spending a great deal of his life searching for the hominid skeleton that would make him famous. Incidentally, it was his wife, Mary, who did a lot of the work and eventually found their specimen-- the lovely robust australopithecine Australopithecus boisei, who Mary referred to as "Dear Boy"-- one day while Louis was sick in their tent. The find would throw them into the spotlight, National Geographic would follow them about for most of their lives and their children would go on to continue the Leakey family anthro legacy.

And here he is, Louis Leakey, with another great scientist who we all love and know, Jane Goodall. Leakey, in fact, was the one who gave Jane her first assignment to study chimps, a work that would continue her entire life and make her a household name.

















To the right of course, is Tolkien, the hobbit master himself, and as you are sure to admit, Leakey's doppleganger.

So here we have two bigwigs of the fields, now let's jump to the subjects of their work and see how similar they really are.

I'm going to start with one of my new favorite hominoids, Oreopithecus bambolii, a Miocene ape that doing the bipedal thing long before we humans or any one of our genus hopped onto the scene. Found in near Tuscany, this specimen is helping raise questions about how we think about bipedalism and what, if anything, it had to do with making us "human." Plus, scientists have given it an adorable nickname thanks to its food-y genus (that really means ape from the hills) "Cookie Monster".

The reconstruction of little Oreo looks a lot like another ugly-cute biped from the fantasy world:



















Jumping to a different realm in fantasy geekdom we have close ancestor of ours, Homo erectus.
The picture here is a reconstruction of a very well know nearly complete skeleton (nearly complete skeletons are almost never found) of a teenage H. erectus boy (awkard word combiniation intended) know as Turkana boy. I think he kind of looks like Voldemort might have if he went the peacenik route, quietly contemplating Mudblood/Pureblood relations rather than trying to scare the shit out of everybody.



























And of course we have the most obvious example, Homo floresiensis, the much publicized "hobbit people". These tiny hominids lived on an island in the South Pacific, hunted tiny elephants, and (one assumes) smoked good pipe weed with Gandalf the Grey.

(Interestingly, these are the first two images to pop up when you search "hobbit" under google images)





















I have, however, saved my favorite comparison for last. This reconstruction is of a prehistoric man found in Washington state a little over ten years ago, known as Kennewick Man. Being about 9,000 years old, his remains have been claimed by Native American groups as a ancestor. Much commotion was made however when it was discovered his face bore striking resemblance to a certain captain of the USS Enterprise.