Brothers and Sisters

Mapping the end of incest and dawn of individualism
Nov 2019 phys.org

Apparently the Romans had to learn not to have incest in order to advance their civilization. Thanks Jesus.

Historians and scholars still don't know why Europe shifted between 1300 - 1500 AD, but they did. They were under the influence of the Catholic Church.

They think maybe: "Kin-based institutions reward conformity, tradition, nepotism, and obedience to authority, traits that help protect assets—such as farms—from outsiders. But once familial barriers crumble, the team predicted that individualistic traits like independence, creativity, cooperation, and fairness with strangers would increase."

So in conclusion - the willingness to trust strangers correlates to whether or not your family structure is the kind where your cousins mate. If it is, you're less likely to trust strangers, because you tend to find yourself surrounded by your own blood.

Now whether this means Europe needed to start trusting strangers because they were getting mixed up faster than a bag of microwave popcorn, or they facilitated this dynamism because of their beliefs, either way the association paints an interesting picture of the physics of sociology.

Post Script
Facial deformity in royal dynasty was linked to inbreeding, scientists confirm
Dec 2019, phys.org

Palmar Sweating and Mass Hysteria

During a recent political crisis [this was written in 1967], when there was a temporary increase in the likelihood of nuclear war, all experiments into palmar sweating at a research institute had to be abandoned because the base level of the response had become so abnormal that the tests would have been meaningless.  (p188)
-The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris, 1967
(a book about the human animal by a zoologist)

Okay To Be Redhead

In the largest genetic study of hair colour to date (350,000), a team at Edinburgh University has discovered eight previously-unknown genetic differences between redheads and non-redheads.

The only reason I  mention this is to add a phrase that really strikes me lately -- the redheaded stepchild.

I had been hearing it here and there, but within this past year, it was in the headline of a news article in a local newspaper, I believe it was like 'New Jersey being treated like a red-headed stepchild.'

The fact that such a phrase was being used in a (relatively) reputable news source seemed borderline outrageous to me. I am not necessarily a proponent of political correctness, unless of course you're simply referring to common courtesy. But in today's world I thought it was strange that anyone would use, in a derogatory way, a term that is derived from the way someone looks.

But then I realized two things: 1. The current President of the United States is a redhead (no?), and of the two political affiliations that would be most likely to have a problem with such derogatory phrases, the typically offended would also likely be unified in their dislike for the President, and therefore more willing to give this one a pass. And 2. This term seems to be more related to probability than anything else, because of the simple fact that redheads are rare.

Redheads are rare, and if neither you nor your husband, nor any of your other kids have red hair, well it sure looks like you've been shagging the mailman. Hence the two terms - redhead and stepchild - have a lot in common.

Lastly, it sure seems like this term, in its instantiation at turn-of-the-century America, would typically have been delivered with a curl of the lip (contemptuously), at least by the father of said stepchild, specifically because the Irish were heavily discriminated against AND they tended more to have red hair. AND they tended more to be mailmen.jk

Post Script:
The full phrase that puts this in perspective is "As welcome as a red-headed stepchild." It's not so much that the -child is unwelcome, just what they represent, which is adultery, and with someone of a lower class. And so really it's the mother of the child that is, or was, the target of disrepute. Nowadays, according to the way we typically hear it, the child is the target.

Notes:
Gene study unravels redheads mystery
Dec 2018, BBC

Off the Grid

Brooklyn's social housing microgrid rewrites relationships with utility companies
Aug 2017, The Guardian

"Microgrids offer something that rooftop solar alone cannot: the ability to leave the grid entirely."

Until the shit goes down.

I am totally into the sentiment here, and I hope this triggers copycats all across the city, and every city. But there is no such thing as an island in the middle of a city; unless of course you're an actual island. After the power went out during Superstorm Sandy, there was not a single hot (powered) outlet in the city that didn't have something plugged into it. There is no way that a community like this, with its off-the-grid resilience, would be spared during an emergency of like proportions. They would be inundated by others trying to charge their phones, and their phone chargers, and their phone charger chargers.

If you want to be able to maintain power in such an emergency where everyone around you does not have it, you're gonna need a lil military to go with that power grid. A security defense system that keeps people out, and maybe even a way to protect the people who live there as they go out into the rest of the city, because people will be pretty pissed that you get power and they don't. This is all part of the glaring hole in prepper mentality - you may be able to prepare for you and your family, but you can't prepare for others. When the shit really goes down, the most dangerous thing you will face is not food shortages but other people.

Public-Private Partnerships and Bandwidth-as-Currency

Investment in fiber optics is down, wireless is up. It leaves unused fiber laying around. By being able to deliver to specific customers on-demand, as opposed to a large-investment, wide-area of customers, PPP's can use up this unused fiber, and then run your life with it. (but not really; but then again; see below.)

Red Death

NASA Langley Research Center - Multimedia Repository

Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?
KLINT FINLEY 01.11.13
clipped:

"Seattle is one of several cities left behind by the major broadband providers, but it happens to have excess fiber capacity. But according to The Seattle Times, few residents have been able to take advantage of it, though Spectrum Networks does offer service in the South Lake Union neighborhood."

"The problem, Ansboury explains, is that the most expensive part of a fiber deployment is the what’s called the “last mile” service — bringing fiber from the big “backbone” connections to the customers’ homes and office buildings. Gibabit Squared will lease fiber capacity from the city and build much of the last mile infrastructure itself."

-Mark Ansboury, president and co-founder of GigaBit Squared, broadband provider company\

[The topic of bandwidth is next mentioned in the article, where we are looking at the potential for wireless to equal fiber. It is so very difficult not to remember Charles Stross, in his posthumanist scifi Accelerando (2005), where he places a lot of value on bandwidth in the future, and ever offers a solution to the Fermi paradox, claiming that the apparent lack of intelligent life in the universe is an illusion created by a shortage of bandwidth. Anyway, back to reality.]

...the secret to getting and maintaining these speeds is keeping the user count low, according to GigaOM

...the issue with both CTC and DARPA’s project is how many simultaneous users it can support
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/google-fiber-shaming-exercise/all/

It's hard to see the future without wireless communication dominating all other forms. The problem with the future of bandwidth will not be what -  the medium of transmission - but who and when is using it and at how much. It's a time-management issue mixed with some user-prioritization. We can imagine myriad package deals of data use, similar to peak times and multi-tiered data plans already in play. But now imagine that you need data to live, more than money, in fact, and the better job you have, the better your data package. The president can have maximum access of the total bandwidth if he wants, whenever he wants. Children under 6 years old get much less.

With so many new ways to create disparities within society, what laws will we be fighting for and against?

Zoning Laws in the Metaverse
JUNE 25, 2012
Decision-making, Public Oversight, and Privatization
AUGUST 4, 2012

What Culture Does

"We must needs live in and with the help of some culture (even a syncretic or sliding-scale one, i.e. one taken seriously to a varying extent, according to context). No social gathering, no meal, no establishment or perpetuation of a human relationship, is conceivable without some idiom to set the scene, limit expectations, and establish rights and duties” (p207)

Do we create our culture today with any more conscious effort than societies on the cusp of culture?

Ernest Gellner
Plough, Sword and Book
U. of Chicago Press
1988