We need some new old sayings...

And here's your chance to say 'em. Rules of Thumb is a new website that solicits, lists and allows comments on folk wisdom.

Most of them are unadulterated hogwash. An example:

A curdly sky never leaves the ground dry.

Say what??

Check out the entries on farming.

I think this is all part of the anti-technology backlash that fuels agrarian agriculture and seeks to re-establish experiential wisdom over technological discovery.

Good luck with that.

Really growing up...

Regardless of your politics, this is a commencement address worth pondering:

There is a verse from the Bible that is sometimes read or recited during rites of passage like this. Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things.”

I bring this up because there’s often an assumption on days like today that growing up is purely a function of age; that becoming an adult is an inevitable progression that can be measured by a series of milestones – college graduation or your first job or the first time you throw a party that actually has food too.

And yet, maturity does not come from any one occasion – it emerges as a quality of character. Because the fact is, I know a whole lot of thirty and forty and fifty year olds who have not yet put away childish things – who continually struggle to rise above the selfish or the petty or the small.

We see this reflected in our country today.

We see it in a politics that’s become more concerned about who’s up and who’s down than who’s working to solve the real challenges facing our generation; a politics where debates over war and peace are reduced to 60-second soundbites and 30-second attack ads.

We see it in a media culture that sensationalizes the trivial and trivializes the profound – in a 24-hour news network bonanza that never fails to keep us posted on how many days Paris Hilton will spend in jail but often fails to update us on the continuing genocide in Darfur or the recovery effort in New Orleans or the poverty that plagues too many American streets.

And as we’re fed this steady diet of cynicism, it’s easy to start buying into it and put off hard decisions. We become tempted to turn inward, suspicious that change is really possible, doubtful that one person really can make a difference.

That’s where the true test of growing up occurs. That’s where you come in... [More]

I cannot remember any of the commencement speeches or speakers I have listened to as a parent, graduate or attendee. Precisely because I hadn't truly grown up, I suspect.

Violence is still in a bear market...

In a refreshingly encouraging and wonderfully reasoned essay, Steven Pinker points out that violence is, and has been, decreasing.

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

This seems counterintuitive, but that could be because we're looking at it backwards.

The decline of killing and cruelty poses several challenges to our ability to make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so wrong about something so important? Partly, it's because of a cognitive illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it's the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history. But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen. [More of a great essay]

The logic is compelling and the case well-made. Pinker clearly offers an alternative to the cries of outrage that too often are raised to spur us to agreement or action against dimly seen foes, for motives less than clear. The "violence epidemic" has been used like the "meth epidemic" to curtail our freedoms and shrivel our spirits. The pervasive belief that trends are headed the wrong way fosters bad decisions about what choices individuals should be allowed. Such fears also facilitate the conversion of America to a land where freedom was mistakenly exchanged for a false sense of security.

A few actual facts couldn't hurt this debate.

The erosion of compassion...

I read his book (mayhaps I'll upload a review anon), but this piece by Daniel Gilbert was wonderfully insightful. I too automatically give to panhandlers (do we still use that term?) as often as not, simply because I can and I'm tired of feeling bad when I don't, but his analysis is helpful.

Most passers-by did what they were named for, but my wife and I stopped. The man looked up. “Please,” he sobbed. “I just want to go home.” My hand needed no guidance from my brain as it reached into my wallet and extracted $10. “Thank you,” he said as I handed him the money. “Thank you so much.” My wife and I mumbled some embarrassed words and walked on.

We hadn’t gone a block when she tugged my sleeve. “Maybe we should have gotten him into a cab,” she said. “He could barely stand up. He might need help. We should go back to see.” My wife is the patron saint of lost kittens and there is no arguing, so we went back to see. And what we saw was our horribly crippled friend walking briskly and happily up 68th Street, opening the door to a late-model car, getting in and driving away after what was apparently a short day of theatrical work.

I know two things now that I didn’t know then.

First, I now know that my hand did what human hands were designed to do. Research suggests that we are hard-wired with a strong and intuitive moral impulse — an urge to help others that is every bit as basic as the selfish urges that get all the press. Infants as young as 18 months will spontaneously comfort those who appear distressed and help those who are having difficulty retrieving or balancing objects. Chimpanzees will do the same, though not so reliably, which has led scientists to speculate about the precise point in our evolutionary history at which we became the “hypercooperative” species that out-nices the rest.

The second thing I know now that I didn’t know then is that this was the most damaging crime I had ever experienced. Like most residents of large cities, I’d been a victim before — of burglary once, of vandalism several times. But this was different. The burglars and vandals had taken advantage of my forgetfulness (“Why didn’t I double lock the door?”) and taught me to be better. [More]

We in the farm community - whether we admit it or not - are relying on the compassion of other citizens for our subsidies. Many of us feel that transaction keenly and work hard to develop a "case study" of need sufficient for our compensation.

We'd better hope nobody sees us walking away.

There is a reason humans are the dominant species...

I am uncomfortable with emotional manipulation by means of photographs and pictures, whether it is Thomas Kinkade or cuddly baby animals . I was surprised then at my response to this series of photographs showing a man with no use of his hands and malformed feet repairing bicycle tires in Viet Nam.



Something in this matter-of-fact series of photos that captures for me the indomitable spirit of humankind. The guy was doing what he could do - and that turns out to be more than any of us would have imagined.

There may be thoughtful lessons to be gathered from his example, but my take-away is to err on the side of the possible when it comes to dealing with people.

Merry Christmas, all.

[via Metafilter]

Imagine what they could do with the scent of beer...

It seems humans - or at least college students - can follow a scent trail.

By studying blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a chocolate-scented trail, scientists found evidence of a human smelling ability that experts thought was impossible. [More]

Meanwhile we can't smell ourselves, since our brains respond to changes in stimuli - not constants. (Thank goodness!)

In fact, there are a lot of smell myths. But my favorite "olfact" is this one:

And symmetrical men smell better.

Borrowing sweaty undershirts from a variety of men, Thornhill offered the shirts to the noses of women, asking for their impressions of the scents. Hands down, the women found the scent of a symmetrical man to be more attractive and desirable, especially if the woman was menstruating. [More]

I'm not smelly, I'm lopsided.

What a relief