Relevant History

The Titanic as symbol

Edward Tenner has a piece in The Atlantic about the Titanic's continued importance in Ireland as "an icon of the vanished glories of Belfast shipbuilding at its peak." This makes sense: when I was in Cambridge, I saw someone wearing a t-shirt that said,

The Titanic: Built by 15,000 Irishmen. Sunk by one Englishman.

As someone said, the past isn't a different country. It isn't even past.

"Humans got their smarts only because we got friendlier first"

Recently I've been spending doing some work with the Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford. There's a certain amount of overlap between what they're working in and my interest in helping people become more mindful of the future consequences of decisions they face in the present. In any event, it's made me more likely to notice articles about peace, and so I was struck by an article that had reported on some fascinating work on sociability and evolution. As it explains, in 1959, Russian geneticist Dimitri Belyaev

began breeding 130 silver foxes in a kind of Mendelian experiment. He put one group under severe selection pressure using a simple method: those foxes that approached an experimenter lived to breed for another generation; those that snarled at humans or showed aggression toward them were turned into fur coats. The other group, a control, was bred randomly with regard to how they behaved toward humans.

After only forty generations, the selected foxes began to display changes you (and Darwin, too) might think would take millions of years to evolve. As expected, they became incredibly friendly toward humans. Whenever they saw people, they barked, wagged their tails, sniffed the people, and licked their faces. But even stranger were the physical changes, which occurred at a higher frequency than in the control group. The ears of the selected foxes became floppy. Their tails turned curly. Their coats lost their camouflage and became spotty, with a star pattern appearing on the forehead. Their skulls became smaller. In short, they looked and behaved remarkably like their close relative the domestic dog.

Now came the big test. If dogs had acquired social skills in the process of domestication, then perhaps the selected silver foxes acquired those skills, too. And they did. Domesticated silver foxes could read human body language as well as any dog. The control lineage could not.

The skill of silver foxes at reading human social cues is a crucial piece of the puzzle. People (including the authors) had supposed that the unusual social skills found in dogs had probably evolved because smarter dogs had been more likely to survive and reproduce during domestication. But Belyaev's foxes weren't bred to be smarter than the average fox, just friendlier. It seems that the selected foxes are more skilled at reading human cues as a by-product of a loss of fear of humans, which was replaced by an intense interest in interacting with us....

[S]omething similar may have happened in human evolution. Instead of getting a jump start with the most intelligent hominids surviving to produce the next generation, as is often suggested, it may have been the more sociable hominids — because they were better at solving problems together — who achieved a higher level of fitness and allowed selection to favor more sophisticated problem-solving over time. Humans got their smarts only because we got friendlier first.

Trying to save a 300 year-old oak

For the last few months, there's been a lot of construction work just over our back fence. The pipes that carry water from the Sierras to San Francisco run right behind our house, and those pipes are being replaced. So we get to see earth movers and gigantic, 6 foot-diameter pipes from our back window.

A few houses down the block, there's a 300 year-old oak tree that the pipes run under. On Friday, we heard-- three houses were given notices at 4:45 pm-- that the tree would be taken down Monday morning. Fortunately, a couple of the neighbors went into high gear, made lots of phone calls, and so this morning there were news trucks and people from the county planning commission saying, "Maybe you should just hang on a bit."

The SFPUC claims that there's an arborist's report that says the tree can't be saved, but they haven't released the report (or an executive summary, or anything else). As someone who works in a field that combines both expertise and a certain potential softness in conclusions, this strikes me as notable. And the fact that there was such short notice seems suspicious.

Anyway, early this morning we joined a bunch of other neighbors at the tree, to make clear that we want a better accounting of why they think the tree has to come down.

The kids were interviewed by the local TV and radio stations, and I think they found it an interesting experience.

It looks like we've bought a couple days' respite while the SFPUC and county work on a deal. And it's not like there aren't tons of other places they can keep digging in the meantime....

Happiness in China: Pretty much the same as everywhere

The Los Angeles Times as a piece on the growth of studies of happiness in China.

"It even sounds a little weird in Chinese to ask, 'Are you happy?' but now there is so much talk about happiness, it's almost become a cliché," said Christopher K. Hsee, a Chinese-born University of Chicago professor who is credited with bringing happiness studies to China.

Why is the Chinese government suddenly jumping on the happiness bandwagon? Cynics might argue that officials are looking for an alternate measure of success for that inevitable point when economic growth plateaus. But Hsee believes the concept of happiness is a natural corollary of the Communist Party's propaganda about creating a "harmonious society."

It turns out that, like everywhere else in the world, rising incomes and standards of living don't necessarily lead to increased happiness. China.com.cn, for example,

polled 1,350 people and discovered that only 6% listed themselves as "very happy," as opposed to 48% who were distinctly "not happy." (The rest were "so-so" or "unsure." ) A news story reporting the unhappy results in the English-language China Daily was promptly zapped from the Internet.

The results of another poll must have been even more alarming to the powers that be. Gallup last month ranked China 92nd out of 124 countries in a poll in which people assessed their own "well-being." Only 12% of Chinese described themselves as "thriving." That put China roughly on par with Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, countries where the discontent bubbled up in the form of popular uprisings. Denmark led the pack with 72% of people reporting that they were thriving, while the United States came in at No. 12, with 59%.

[To the tune of The Fray, "Happiness," from the album The Fray (a 3-star song, imo).]

Annals of overdone, wonderful product design: Milspec iPad case

This milspec iPad case would be tempting if I had an iPad.

It's like something Anderson Cooper would read his field notes from.

My favorite detail is that "The interior... [is] quilted and colored like the padded interior walls of heavy transport aircraft." That puts it over the top.

[To the tune of Dredg, "Zebraskin," from the album Catch Without Arms (a 2-star song, imo).]

A gentle plea for a few fewer swoopy, iconoclastic Frank Gehry buildings

This is wonderful:

An Iowa-based philanthropist and architecture aficionado has offered a $300 million reward to any city anywhere in the world that dares to hire someone other than Frank Gehry to design its gleaming new art museum.

"Don't get me wrong, I like iconoclastic, swoopy structures that look like bashed-in sardine cans as much as the next guy," says the philanthropist, who wishes to remain nameless for fear of enraging close friends in the art world. "I like Czech dance halls that look like a 747 plowed right into the façade as much as anybody. I bow to no man in my admiration for an architect who can design an art museum that looks like a intergalactic recycling center. I just thought it would be nice to give the second-most-famous architect in the world a shot at a payday. Whoever he is. I know I've got his name here somewhere."

Go read the rest of it. I don't want to ruin it for you.