The Ice Cream Machine Is Broken
February 22, 2011 - 5:19 pm
Irradiated by LabRat
Irradiated by LabRat
Mea Culpa. I just didn’t have it in me to write much of anything yesterday, and I just spent about forty-five minutes writing something that sounded promising but I had more and more problems with as I went along. It still has potential as a post concept, but its analogies were blowing up and it’s just generally not ready for primetime yet.
Lately I’ve had many thoughts, all of which refuse to gel into anything I can put a structural backbone on. It’s getting very, very frustrating.
February 22nd, 2011 at 5:25 pm
No problem, we’ll be around.
February 22nd, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Don’t worry about it, LabRat. One of your posts gives enough food for thought for a long, long time. So we’ll peruse the archives and be quite satisfied until you’re ready to post something new again.
February 22nd, 2011 at 8:16 pm
How long until we can part it out?
February 22nd, 2011 at 8:54 pm
What Christina said.
Jim
February 22nd, 2011 at 9:07 pm
Or you could just take Stingray around to the local cyclist hangouts, that should be good for a post or 2!
February 23rd, 2011 at 11:26 am
Have you read Cannibals and Kings, by the dude what wrote Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches? If so, what did you think of it?
February 23rd, 2011 at 11:37 am
I did, unfortunately it was ages ago- I still remember getting funny looks from my co-workers since it was my lunch break material at the time.
I really like his ideas on the “natural” progress of human organization into various societal levels- his big-man theory of how chiefdoms arise out of relatively egalitarian societies that are starting to get larger doesn’t seem to have been knocked down by any later evidence.
As to cannibalism, I really wish he’d been able to write it after the succession of discoveries suggesting that it may have actually been common practice for neanderthals and H. erectus, which means that sapiens making a taboo out of it might actually be the more significant thing than it existiing at all.
February 23rd, 2011 at 12:34 pm
Not an evolved taboo, IMO … just unneeded if you have sufficient domestic livestock or hunting opportunities.
When game and easily raised livestock get scarce ( PNG highlands, Pacific Islands, late period Anasazi ), the pot comes out of the closet.
The neolithic information revolution, as well as livestock domestication, made cannibalism unnecessary. The taboos were cultural, in my opinion.
February 23rd, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Inbuilt evolved maybe not, but still a very broad taboo that we only see eliminated when the protein is VERY scarce.
It’s always difficult to tell when your only evidence is that old, but in the case of erectus and Neanderthal it looks like they treated younger (more fatty and tender) individuals from camps of strangers like any other game- if you’re going to fight with your neighbors, may as well eat the meat, in other words. These butchered bones mixed in with normal game, so less of the “protein starvation” factor in play.
February 24th, 2011 at 1:06 am
On a completely unrelated note:
I feel sorry for the first person to reply to Says Uncle’s post … well, I almost feel sorry for him.
http://www.saysuncle.com/2011/02/23/getting-back-at-tsa/#comments
February 24th, 2011 at 12:21 pm
I think Neanerthals were a lot closer to the starvation edge than modern humans.
They did not have the full neolithic tool set. For some reason they ( and earlier hominids ) could not develop it.
Injuries on old male adult large bones show rodeo style fractures. They used firehardened spears and engaged in melee with game. No effective missiles.
Every hunt was a risk.
February 24th, 2011 at 2:36 pm
True, but they also seem to have been much more carnivorous in general than H. sap., so many more hunts with larger takes. All in all none of it is exactly contradictory; they had more reason to see cannibalism as a normal option period.
What interests me is the idea that seeing other members of your species as special even if they are not of your tribe, to the point that eating the meat after killing one is something you’re pushed to do rather than just a good idea in general, may have been an innovation rather than what we think of as normal.
February 24th, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Don’t worry about it. Blog when the words flow. When they don’t, don’t.
February 24th, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Might also be related to inability to innovate tools.
It’s been speculated that Neanderthals did not have good enough speech to properly pass on information to the next generation.
Which would explain the neolithic information revolution ( an incredible tool set developed by modern man ), and might also explain objectifying non-family/clan members.