by pieterh

Conveniently, Africa is also very resource rich, so the combination of an impoverished labor force with extractable mineral and natural resources has been extremely profitable for Northern businesses since the Arabs, and then Portuguese turned this into a global business model.

In modern day Africa the prison walls are carefully maintained by a cartel of foreign trade interests backed up by political and military force, and local business partners who run their fiefdoms with the help of military assistance. The attitude of those outside the prison varies from contempt to pity to mockery. There is rarely, if ever, any discussion of the prison itself, only of the apparently self-inflicted plight of those trapped within. So-called "foreign aid" is largely taken to maintain the walls. Foreign loans are stolen by the prison guards while the debt is assigned to those inside. As for those prisoners, the life ambition of every educated urban African is simple and primordial: escape.

The distinction between so-called economic and political refugees from Africa is bogus, since the economics and politics of Africa form a single inseparable system. A refugee from Africa has escaped in much the same way as an innocent man from a life sentence in Alcatraz, and often at great cost.

Visitors to the prison, also called "tourists", make several choices when visiting. They can remain in luxury VIP quarters, benefiting from those amazing natural resources, while avoiding any real contact with the inmates. This is the "safari" option, recommended to wealthy whites with little empathy for others. Or, they can choose to live in the prison itself, with all the attendant dangers and excitements. The astute observer choosing the second path will realize that his or her status as a natural VIP derives in part from their economic power, in part from their return ticket, and in part from their role as a lifeline to the outside world. It is rarely a matter of personal charisma, nor superior skin color.

Africa is not the only prison of this nature but it is the most successful natural one, benefiting from extraordinary geography which makes the upkeep of the prison walls very cheap. In short, one must either walk across the Sahara, or escape via one of the easily controlled coastal harbor cities.

Other examples of prison areas which do not have the natural wealth of Africa, but which act to effectively contain and isolate poor darker-skinned populations are: the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank and America's black and brown inner cities.

by pieterh

The modern air travel experience has been described as "a bunch of tired, frustrated, and hungry people fighting it out over a handful of power sockets". It is notable how the modern air travel experience resembles a low-grade torture facility. The victims, also called "pax", are stripped of their personal dignity through a series of searches "for their own security". They are removed from contact with the outside world, often for hours. All communications, entertainment, leisure, and comfort are removed from common spaces, so that "VIP Lounges" can sell these back to "business class travelers" at a premium. Some airports have successfully combined the ersatz comforts of a shopping mall with the mechanical business of processing pax, but most rely on shock and awe to keep the pax under control and compliantly close to the gate.

It would be relatively simple to make airports even pleasant places to travel in: free wi-fi and free Internet kiosks; comfortable seats to relax or doze in; SMS alarms for boarding; better design in which walking distances are minimized; pleasant seating areas decorated with plants and separators; more and cheaper food and drink; television areas; areas for children to play; many more power sockets; proper shops with decent choices; sports facilities with swimming pool, roller rink, shooting stand, and ping-pong tables.

Airports are a classic example of planning based on irrational expectations of growth. Just as countries around the world replace older, less shiny airports with new glass and metal behemoths, oil starts to run out and the global air travel industry collapses.

by pieterh

The Internet is probably the largest ever form of (collective) artificial intelligence. In the 1950s, computer scientists believed they could create human-like artificial brains if they put enough transistors together. The mainstream computer science goal of achieving "artificial intelligence" by creating a single powerful mind has not changed much since then. The significant fallacy in this idea is that humans do not think as individuals unless we are anti-social or downright delusional. Of course the route to artificial intelligence is much easier than AI researchers think. It does not require the creation of a tabula rasa artificial mind, simply the augmentation of our existing human minds through technological means. Only in cinema do AI minds operate without human participation.

by pieterh

by pieterh

It is a curious thing about people, how they pay so much attention to the "what" of their appearance, but rarely if ever ask the "why". If one is not ignorant, one understands that appearances are based on genetics, and genes always answer a "why", if one can uncover it. There are no accidents in evolution, only the careful hand of natural and sexual selection. So the detection and uncovering of interesting "why"s can be great fun to the curious mind. Hair is interesting stuff, a very human thing, yet barely understood. Baldness, the basis for a large industry in useless products and techniques, has a "why", as explained above. As to why men fight baldness, the answer lies in game theory. An older male either goes for female company on the basis of looks, or on the basis of power. Power lies in the networks of other males he controls, and control comes from wisdom and to some degree, the respect that age brings. The "mid-life crisis" is, for many men, the realization that they need to start relying on their wits instead of their youthful charm. Clearly, men who feel insecure about their strength of mind will hope to avert the onset of age, while confident, strong men will embrace age and the cosmetic changes it brings.

by pieterh

by pieterh

See baldness for a discussion of the interest in asking "why" when studying the human animal. Like baldness, the male beard does not appear to exist for the benefit of women, who are often ambivalent or even hostile to beards. Women do not grow beards. Thus, beards are related to the male environment. The main effect of a beard is to disguise the face. But a facial disguise that takes time to grow cannot work on people who know us anyhow, thus it is intended for strangers. Ironically, for strangers who cannot recognize us anyhow. What does make sense is that a group of men, all bearded, will in fact look similar. A beard is thus most probably a form of uniform, designed to make a man look like his fellow bearded men. Once more, we ask "why?" and the only answer that emerges is the prevalence of male-on-male violence in human societies, and the genetic imperative to, if one must engage in life-threatening fights, reduce the odds of personal risk by looking as much like one's brothers in arms as possible. The variation in bearding in different human groups may be due to different levels of violence, or more likely, due to founder effects that exaggerate original small differences between individuals. The simplest alternative to beards, used in human groups where bearding is negligible, is "war paint".

A corollary to this thesis is that wearing a beard is a sign, not of a violent temperament, but of a peaceful one. The beard is a statement: "I seek no confrontation". It was the Romans who expressed bare-faced violence, while the barbarians were probably trying to make love, not war.

by pieterh

A concentration of beautiful women in any one place is a consequence of social inequality in the surrounding regions. A man drives his car down a country lane and slows down for a hitch-hiker. She is a young woman, unattractive and clumsy. He accelerates and drives on. Beauty gets women favours from men, makes them physically and socially mobile, takes them away from the barren countryside to the cities, to power, money, and pretty things.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone is a critic. A beautiful landscape is one that suits our ancestral human needs for space, protection, control. A beautiful car is one that carries us rapidly, safely, and with style - for cars are like the peacock's feathers, more a demonstration of the ability to waste, than utilitarian tools. A beautiful cathedral likewise is one that shows a pure elegance of waste. And a beautiful woman is, in every society, one with specific age and lifestyle indicators that correlate to "fertile, young, and available" (in the male eye) and "younger and more fertile than me" (in the adult female eye). Insofar as both these indicators and the eye for them are constant in all human groups, the criteria for human beauty can be considered universal.

by pieterh

Beer yeast is closely related to bread yeast, indeed bread yeasts are a narrower family, suggesting that beer came before bread. This would put beer back to before the invention of agriculture, making it an integral part of human society for perhaps a million years. Certainly that explains how proto-human females would accept male partners who did not wash, shave, or play the sax. Making beer from grain is simple enough. One allows the grains to sprout, then one roasts and crushes them, and adds this to the beer pot, with water. One waits a few days, one drinks. It is very important to keep the yeast colony alive and healthy over generations. Otherwise the only way to get fermentation started is to chew up the grain and spit it back into the beer pot. Next time you sneer at a Bud Light, reflect that it's less disgusting than grandmother spit.

Beer is of course not the only form of alcohol. We have been fermenting and distilling every possible form of starch, for ever. Alcohol is such a fundamental social enabler and safety valve that societies can be classed into those that depend on significant volumes of alcohol, and those that are collectively crazy. Modern industrial production has created a widespread alcoholism problem.

by pieterh

Bitchtorrent allows two peers to trade torrents of information, based on mutual valuation of the quality of, and specific content of, torrents. The source of a torrent, its freshness, and its relevance are combined into a self-ranked score. The peer will then upload fragments of the torrent in exchange for fragments of another torrent of equally ranked score. A common honesty enforcement strategy is "full box / empty box", in which each peer responds to a fragment they receive with a fragment they estimate to be of equal value.

As a protocol, Bitchtorrent can be implemented in any human language, and Bitchtorrent implementations are compatible between all cultures, suggesting that the Bitchtorrent package is implemented automatically, at boot time.

In general, female human brains (including those of many homosexual men) implement Bitchtorrent from the onset of puberty, or earlier, while male brains do not have Bitchtorrent capability. In contrast, all females understand Woofing from a very early age, and dominant females speak Woofing when talking to men.

Bitchtorrent traffic acts as a status indicator in human society. That is, female social status is based on their Bitchtorrent upload ratio and the quality of their peer network, as well as on the size of the car their husband bought them.

Bitchtorrent is a competitive protocol, meaning that peers gain more value as they learn to use the protocol better. Principally, peers learn to bluff up the value of the information they hold ("it's a secret!"), bluff down the value of that held by the other ("oh, yes, I knew that"), and rapidly detect cheats while avoiding the "cheat" label oneself. We can safely assume that this competitive aspect has driven the evolution of Bitchtorrent since the first female hominid explained to another where she had found those amazingly pretty stones, over a million years ago.

Bitchtorrent is also a persistent peering protocol, meaning that once a peering relationship has been established, it continues indefinitely until explicitly broken by one of the parties through public pronouncement ("I'm never speaking to her again!"). When two peers are separated for a time, and then reconnect, they synchronize their torrents, a process that can take many hours, even days.

Females thus build different Bitchtorrent networks depending on their age and the importance of the information they can share. From one to ten years, with close relatives including both parents, and for practice with any other females of close age. During the intensity of puberty, with sisters, and close friends. From adulthood, as skill and discrimination improves, with anyone.

For several reasons, but mainly because they speak Woofing to their offspring, parents with a male brain (usually but not all nor only fathers) do not usually manage to peer properly with their female offspring. It can happen in the case of sole fathers who spend the time to learn fluent Bitchtorrent.

by pieterh

There is a small seabird that nests in colonies off the Galapagos islands. The bird prefers larger eggs with a bluish tinge and small black dots, which signify a strong mineral-rich shell and a healthy chick inside. When offered an egg that is ten times too large, and coloured deep blue with large black dots, the unfortunate bird will abandon its real eggs for the fake one. This effect is called "super-stimulus" by psychologists and it affects many, perhaps most species. Examples of super-stimulae in humans include cookies, hamburgers, porn, vodka, and silicon breasts.

A typical example of blue-egging would be a programmer who responds to the question, "when will my new web site be ready?" with "I just need to re-install Linux and optimise my network drivers first". One of the key features of a successful high-technology team is their ability to resist super-stimulae, for example by repeating the incantation, "All Technology Is Crap".

by pieterh

Bluetoothing is an essential part of female social behavior, and has mostly escaped the attention of psychologists because these mainly either are, or think like, men. The bluetoothing pattern is analogous with the synchronization of two mobile agendas using a wireless protocol: exchange of credentials, negotiation, data transmission, confirmation, and sign off. The proximity presence of males disrupts a bluetoothing session, which will nonetheless resume almost perfectly as soon as the male moves out of wireless range. It is easy to more profoundly disrupt a bluetoothing session by smiling and nodding then interjecting plausible but irrelevant questions such as "so, what color was the dog?" and "did she say what her cousin's name was?" The female pair will eventually resume their data stream but at some cost.

Notable aspects of bluetoothing: it requires some level of prior friendship between the females; the duration of a bluetoothing session depends on the time since a previous synchronization (thus, amount of data to exchange); the pattern rarely involves more than two females; it is a strict peer-to-peer communications model; disclosure is not automatic but depends on the relative social valuation of the data being exchanged, and the other party.

Lastly, it is interesting to compare the female bluetoothing model of communication with the male "broadcasting" model of one-to-many announcement, and as usual with aspects of the human species, to ask "why?" On Venus, the women are chatting to each other, while on Mars they are giving orders.

by pieterh

Before seventeen, a girl must leave home if she wants free choice of male companions. If by thirty she is still choosing male companions instead of raising a family, she is putting the genetic line at risk. Thus, a human female only has a dozen years of her life when she is truly free.

by pieterh

It has been argued that since the women of remote tribes do not cover their breasts, their sexual symbolism is purely cultural. This ignores the truth that for a symbol to be symbolic, it must in fact be visible. The proper scientific method would be to show a remote tribesman the pictures of a naked porn star before and after breast augmentation surgery, and ask which he preferred. The journals of anthropology do not show any such experiments, to my knowledge.

Also, it is quite possible that the women of remote tribes shown in old copies of National Geographic would seize the chance to cover their breasts if they had the convenience of cheap fabric.

Breast development is tied to hormones and good health in a way that cannot be faked. The unfakeability of physical indicators in any species is key to their survival through the critical process of sexual selection. The size and shape of breasts is severely impacted by suckling, and thus in the ancestral society that shaped us, proud firm breasts are an almost unfakeable indicator of maidenhood. Put it another way: a woman with nice breasts is more likely to be fertile and healthy, and much less likely to have kids and a large protective husband.

This matters specifically to humans because of the peculiarities of our reproductive model: we bond for life, and invest decades as a parental pair in our young.

Men find female breasts attractive because they are youth and fertility indicators, in the same way as they find long hair, smooth skin, clear eyes, healthy teeth, and an hourglass figure to be attractive.

by pieterh

Most individuals who undertake significant projects undergo burnout, though few would formalize their symptoms as such. The stages of burnout, from start to finish, are expressed by clear emotional states as follows:

1. Naive enthusiasm, in which the individual undertakes a project of heroic impossibility. This phase can last for a year or so.
2. Brave optimism, in which the individual works on the project, understaffed and undercompensated. This phase can last for a few months to several years depending on how successful the project is. Note that project success often just makes the burnout deeper.
3. Cynical abandonment, in which the individual suddenly and without warning abandons his project. At the least, the individual "drops off the radar" with no explanation. In the worse cases the individual tries actively to destroy the project so that no-one else can take it over.
4. Active disinterest, in which the very mention of the project raises urges to vomit and break things. This usually lasts about the same as the period of brave optimism.
5. Cautious reawakening, in which the individual tries to re-engage, hopefully with some new knowledge of wtf happened.

Rules for avoiding burnout:

• Don't work alone on killer projects.
• Delegate so you are replaceable.
• Take breaks when you feel you need them, don't be a hero.
• Don't work with or for exploitative b*!*!*!ds.

by pieterh

The global economy is, in January 2009, Bush-whacked. Two incompetent wars and a series of financial bubbles gave the friends of the political elite opportunity to empty the treasury, separate the US middle classes from their savings, and load much of the world with the resulting debt.

by pieterh

by pieterh

by pieterh

The car has of course ruined the old cities of Europe and allowed other regions to construct cities that look more like industrial vomit than human habitations. One of the joys of the post-carbon age will be the vanishing of the car from our old streets, as they once more become connectors, and not dividers. Cars are admired by many governments because they are a very effective way of converting hydrocarbons into tax revenues, despite their effects on health and quality of life.

by pieterh