Sunday 3 October 1999
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Pic of the day: Autumn skies. ... Lightning and thunder continued through the night. It even invaded my dreams. At one point the wise men warned us that there would be a reboot of reality. We had to wait outside it, and were warned even then to absolutely not think of authors while the reboot happened. One by one we slipped down the small cracks at the edges of reality. These were so narrow that only one could slide through at a time. Outside reality was a shadowed landscape of tunnels and possibly other stuff even further away, but I waited in the tunnels. One poor guy obviously thought of an author, and had lost his mind when reality came back in a slightly altered version. ... The weather changed wildly through the day, from sun to torrents of rain and back. Again and again as sundered clouds raced each other across the sky. I sneaked out and took a brisk walk twice, though one of the times the rain started before I got home. It turns out that the walks are necessary to start the daily coughing routine which lets me clear my lungs (well, technically bronchies) of thick greenish mucus. The color is much lighter now, by the way, and there is less of the stuff. Too bad my camera is really bad at small close-ups, or I could have shown y'all... :)Superwoman's brother called again, this time he needed to attach a modem to the computer to e-mail his contribution to a fellow student. Incredibly, we actually got it to work. Of course, his father will probably be less than pleased that the home office computer has been reconfigured... ... The debate on the diary mailing list shows that there are still enough people out there who believe that the human male is instinctively promiscuous. Or that there would be some biological rationale for such a behavior. I guess the problem resides in the fact that our culture only recognize two alternatives: Monogamy or promiscuity. If we presume that the sexual preferences are at least partly inherited, then we would now (after thousands of years of humans) descend mainly from the males who instinctively chose the optimal strategy. At first sight, it seems to be a great idea for a man to run around and make women pregnant - the more, the merrier. However, there are a few drawbacks to an all out attempt on this. It presupposes that either the children can take care of themselves, or their mother does. But in most of human history, times have been tough. A woman would have a hard time feeding and clothing several children, not to mention teach them all they need to know to make it through life. This means that there is a lot of scope for improvement if the man stays around and helps out. To have kids is one thing - grandchildren is another. You have to make your children grow up successfully too.In primates (humans, apes, monkeys) there is an interesting correlation between male body size and number of mates. Males who tend to stick with one female, are about the same size as the female. Males who gather harems, are markedly larger than the females. This makes sense, since they will continually have to fight other desperate suitors, who must get control of the harem or lose out on offspring completely. Plotting the human size relations against this trend, the alien observer would probably kidnap two or three females for every male when gathering specimens for the interplanetary zoo. Not that I'm hinting at anything for my own part, of course. |