So I’m back at school and despite good intentions, not writting in this blog at all. There’s too much to do, no matter how much I do do it’s not enough, and I’m very tired and ever more angry at my discipline.
I went to Florida and saw many interesting things. I’ll try to tell you about them soon.
I’ve turned off commenting, except if you register, because I was receiving too much spam - sorry.
Personal notes for jogging my memory later:
If Pete Richerson is right, there’s been little genetic cognitive adaptation in the last several hundred thousand years of hominid evolution - just a few minor changes, a general increase in size and an evolution of context -> culture.
If that’s so, one of the main tasks of an evolutionary psychologist is identifying those few, crucial adaptations.
One is likely to be adapting some defense mechanism against bad info on the cultural grapevine (evil teachers (give long spiel here)). Is there evidence of it?
- Dodd & Bradshaw
- Bad info on the TC…
I’ve been working on a model of social interactions recently.I’m trying to see what happens when 1) your friends influence what you believe and 2) what you believe influences how many friends you have.
It’s an analytical / simulation combo, I’ve been trying to work it out algabraicly, on paper, and I’ve built a computer simulation too - I’m hoping each helps me figure out how to solve/interpret the other.
I’ve been struggling with it for a few weeks now, being on the brink of things but making very, very slow progress in the last few critical steps. Tonight, with a momentary insight of my young lady, I made a breakthrough. It rested on the simple (obvious in retrospect) fact that the number of friends I have is the same number as the number of people who have me as a friend. This little fact let me collapse two variables into one and suddenly all the little pieces (that had seemed to so nearly fit together) collapsed into place. It was very exciting.
Sometimes you just need to step away from the frustrating tangle of knots and get a new perspective.
A quick shot of a the analytical portion
The provisional conclusions of the model seem to be, if people are influences with friends:
Fun, fun, fun! This is my first completely solo modelling project. It’s simple and has been hard, but I conceived, designed and solved it myself from scratch. I’m very proud of the little fellow!!
A young lady and I were in a second hand bookshop, across the street from a “Brewing, ‘Bacco and Barber” shop - where if we’d been inclined we could have bought all our beer and wine brewing supplies, local and imported tobaccos and had our hairs cut all at once. This sort of thing only happens in the Aussie outback and we were right out there, outback of Brissy, outback of Bundaberg and even Bowen; out back as far as Cairns, and I’ll admit she wasn’t just a young lady, she was the young lady.
We’d explored a little ways up the pointy bit, as far as Cape Trib and come back to the big smoke to catch a flight home. We were tropics-tired, our endurance sapped by the constant wet heat; we’d not slept much from paranoia about bed-bugs at the grotty backpackers (misplaced in retrospect); we were still crashing from an hours long coffee-tasting session we’d dived into the day before and we were more than ready to have a quiet sit down and read until the plane came, thank you very much.
We’d been kicked out of one (big comercial chain) bookshop already, for reading too long without buying. The heat sapped our indignation as soon as we left the airconditioned shopping center and we’d eventually found ourselves drifting to this little second hand place we’d seen an add for in a small corner of a long-neglected tourist sign. The shop was still there and it was still open, though it was less a shop than a horde.
There are people who throw things away. They clean by removing clutter, tossing the pressently redundant, they don’t feel comfortable until everything but smoothly polished surfaces remain in sight, they like things to be new. I lived with one once in Japan, who threw away my small collection of books because he thought they were old and thus rubish - I have never been closer to doing irreversible damage to another human with my bare hands. This bookshop had never been cursed with such a fellow. Books had been accumulating here for years, maybe generations by the look of the vererable proprietor. They filled the long, deep shop from front to back and floor to roof. Where the long shelves had filled they were stacked on top and piled in corners, each with two little prices pencled in the cover: one to buy and one to exchange. You know, it’s like almost any second-hand bookshop you’ve been in.
There was a small non-fiction section but most of the store was devoted to diversion, much of it the Mills &Boon variety, less the Alistair MacLean variety, an entire section seemingly devoted to the Agatha Christie sort and one long aisle filled on left and right with Sci-Fi and Fantasy.
The girl quickly found one of the rare Terry Pratchet stories she hadn’t read, hidden in an anthology, and undeterred by her recent eviction for the same crime plopped herself down in the middle of the aisle and got about devouring it. I browsed the selection.
I’ve encountered both sci-fi and fantasy before, in books and games and television; but I’d never been a devoutee and a year and a half of straight academia gives one a slightly different skew on the world, newly focused if weary eyes to see old genres with. Most of the books on the shelves were 20-30 old, and I found myself bouncing from blurb to blurb, surveying the plots that made up this genre and how they sold themselves.
We spent almost an hour in that shop, her reading Terry and me breadth-first searching the fantasy. I like to think I built up a decent sense of the genre and the formulas much of it was built from. They are, in my estimation of prevalence:
1) The Domino Plot:
The great thing about a made up reality is that, since the reader’s accepted you as the sole arbiter of what is and isn’t possible anyway, you can set up a chain of events, cataclysims, revolutions, apocolypses and shatterings of the multiverse as grandiose and impressive as, litereally, you can imagine. Typically this whole string of ever more world-shifting causes and effects is triggered by the actions (often heroic, sometimes self-sacrificing) of a single ordinary individual (sometimes prince, king, mage or other innately special fellow, sometimes just a plain old hobbit sitting around in his english cottage). The whole thing is like a long chain of dominos that the author has painstakingly set up for the joy of watching them tumble.
The hero often gains ever more power and prestige in the process - sometimes this accumulation is spread over several books in the series and reminds me strongly of the motivation that keeps people playing the *very popular and lucrative* computer character-building games (rpgs). Other times the hero retains their innocence and humilty by remains a small and fragile pawn surrounded by powerful forces, but often either learn some special unique insight or lesson along the way or prove their innate goodness by the whole process.
2) The Character Generation Plot
Pick a fantasy race, say an elf. Pick a fantasy “class” or job, say a healer. Write a book about them. Add domino plot as required. Sometimes this can be translated to a different setting, like cyber-punk, alien-invasion or medieval-Europe, each with it’s own set of roles and races to mix and match.
3) The Secret Power Plot
I only saw a few of these plots, but enough to detect a pattern. They seemd to be intended for young ladies and featured a norm seeming girl character, often in some stage of growing into a full woman/mother, with some secret knowledge or power that makes her very special indeed. I haven’t read many of these books, just their blurbs, so can’t tell you much about how they proceed.
I’m sure there are more, but these are the basic plot types I noticed in my quick survey.
Of all the books I saw, the one I chose to buy was by a guy named Gary Gygax - one of the original creators of the “Dungeons and Dragons” table-top game. Now here was a real innovation! The plot formulas are simple, easily reproduced and, apparently, very appealling. Why should a special class of wordy producer rehash the formulas in novels while everyone else just consumes (and maybe adds a little privated detail or two in their daydreams)? Gygax spelled the formulas out and helped readers invent and share their own stories on-the-fly. What’s more, he made it a game that a whole group of people contributed to colaboratively! This seems to me an absolutely amazing innovation, whose potential to bring about wonderful interactions between people we’ve only had a tiny glimpse of.
A Gygax’ fantasy novel, written after he’d developed and published his role-playing system, a step back from the new medium to the simpler one that had spawned it, seemed to me a very, very interesting read.
I bought it. It was called “The Sea of Death”. We went outside, checked out the brewing supplies but didn’t trim our hairs, and drove down to the tropical botanical garders, to laze on the grass and read in the sun.
- An tentative, first blog entr; The monkey.
I’ve arrived back in Melbourne and have finally slipped into the first extended mental break I’ve had in well over a year. Who knew that eventually school got hard?
Now suddenly the holidays have arrived. I’ve forced myself to ignore work and found mysef, unexpectedly, with time to spare on romance, relaxation, visting friends and setting up blogs. It’s been lovely.
A cute girl is persuading me that correspondence is a pleasure, and educating me in blogging styles.
I’ll try to fill this space with interesting words, let me know how I do.