One plus Two
Read a sci-fi recommended by my friend David: "Evolution", by Stephen Baxter. Interesting read, mostly disjointed chapters following various primates from 65 million years ago (the dinosaur-killing comet) to the end of life on earth one-half billion years from now. Interesting points/theories:- Prior to the speciation of Homo Sapiens, all the primate main "characters" were the one ancestor of us all. I guess that's true, before we were a species, there was one earlier primate ancestor that we all wound up descended from.
- The mental tool/agent that was the seed of self-awareness was a module that modeled the behavior (mind) of others -- needed to survive in complicated primate dominance heirarchies.
- The origin of religion: when the 1st slightly mutant and psychotic Homo Sapiens broke out of having a compartmentalized mind and started putting 1 and 2 together (and forming sentences) around 60,000 years ago (not a bad number), the 1st thing she did was set herself up as a shaman. She used her new-found mental abilities to confound and dominate others -- shades of the power of lying in TOOCITBOTBM (blogged earlier).
Got two new cd's recently:
- "The Love Below/Speakerboxx" by Outkast, for my birthday. The non-rap cd has good tunes, some unbelievably banal vulgarity, and the oh-so-catchy dance tune "Hey-ya". My wife and I were driving back from Cornell after dropping our middle daughter off and heard it on the radio 3 times in the 11 hour drive. When I got home my oldest daughter had sent me the link to "Hey-ya Charlie Brown". I tried to fwd it to someone the next day, it was gone from the .edu server where I got it -- probably swamped by a storm of downloads. No link, I'm sure you can find it.
- "Get Away from Me", by Nellie McKay, from my youngest daughter for Father's Day. She liked Nellie the best of the acts she saw at Bonaroo. 2 cds, kind of all over the place, very creative. Not sure what kind of staying power the tunes have tho.
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