words

Words: Patrilocal and Matrilocal

Patrilocal
1. Describing a custom of marriage by which the married couple settles in the husband’s home or community.
2. The tendency of females to leave their natal group and reside (or mate) with males of a different group.

Similarly …

Matrilocal
1. Describing a custom of marriage by which the married couple settles in the wife’s home or community.
2. The tendency of males to leave their natal group and reside (or mate) with females of a different group.

First used in 1906, the words are from the fields of anthropology, sociology, ethnography and zoology.

For example, zoologically, chimpanzees are patrilocal, whereas many monkey species are matrilocal. Both modes are still found amongst different hunter-gatherer and similar tribes. Human societies are more predominantly patrilocal (although even in more undeveloped societies this is not universal), and is suggested as one of the foundations of the patriarchy and the ownership of women as chattels.

The western world has largely abandoned both modes, although has yet to shake off patriarchy etc.

quotes

Quotes

Welcome to this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes!

Everyone says he is crazy – which maybe he is – but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.
[Fran Lebowitz]

Faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
[Arthur C Clarke]

Prohibition … goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes … A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
[Abraham Lincoln]

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
[HL Mencken]

The convention mis-called “modesty” has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone’s whim – anyone’s diseased caprice.
[Mark Twain]

Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.
[Jon Stewart]

Capitalism is pretty horrible, but the various attempts at improving on it have either led to totalitarianism or gradually eroded back into capitalism. Or, in the case of modern China, both.
[David Mitchell; “There are good reasons for ignoring the news“; Guardian; 26/03/2018]

The way the news reaches us these days, with so much of it either “fake” or “breaking”, is worse than ignorance. It’s a decontextualised screech that monetises its ability to catch our attention, but takes no responsibility for advancing our understanding or avoiding disproportionate damage to our peace of mind.
[David Mitchell; “There are good reasons for ignoring the news“; Guardian; 26/03/2018]

[The news is] up-to-the-minute micro-snippets of information about events, the real significance of which will only become evident in many weeks’, months’ or years’ time; it’s like trying to assemble a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Satan’s face by being given one piece every hour, each one accompanied by a bone-rattling fanfare.
Under capitalism, current affairs are presented like this because it makes economic sense. The media generate money by getting our attention and we grant it most reliably not in response to the accurate, illuminating and proportionate, but to the loud, sensational and frightening. That’s a problem we can only solve by ignoring it.
[David Mitchell; “There are good reasons for ignoring the news“; Guardian; 26/03/2018]

De-criminalization is not the same thing as endorsement. There is no law against sticking wooden spoons up your ass. That doesn’t mean the state sanctions the use of wooden spoons for that purpose.
[@Grimesweeper on Twitter; 11/04/2018]

I stop and do nothing. Nothing happens. I am thinking about nothing. I listen to the passing of time. This is time, familiar and intimate. We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years that hurls us towards life then drags us towards nothingness … We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time . Its solemn music nurtures us, opens the world to us, troubles us, frightens and lulls us. The universe unfolds into the future, dragged by time, and exists according to the order of time.
[Carlo Rovelli; “Time is Elastic“; Guardian; 14/04/2018]

There’s this common misconception that other people have all got their shizz together and we’re failing and flailing. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Life isn’t linear, we’re all kinda making it up as we’re going along because there is no handbook, there is no ‘right’ way and fundamentally, we’re all so different. It’s a shame we feel the pressure to get it ‘right’, when there is no right nor wrong, it’s how we perceive we’ve done based on a prior expectation we held of how we feel we should have done. And that awful comparison game we sometimes play based on what we see on social media, or the bits of people’s lives that they allow us to see. Life is a process of trial and error, there are obstacles aplenty, we cohabit with other people who are trying to find their way too which makes it even more difficult to feel as though we know what we’re doing.
[Blurt Foundation]

We cannot judge … the character of men with perfect accuracy, from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversation, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real character.
[Maria Edgeworth (Anglo-Irish novelist; 1767-1849)]

beliefs, personal

Simple Formula for Living

I happened on this somewhere on the intertubes the other day. Though undoubtedly not easy – each one of us will find different parts hard – one could do a lot worse than follow these precepts.

Simple Formula for Living

Live beneath your means.
Return everything you borrow.
Stop blaming other people.
Admit it when you make mistake.
Give clothes not worn to charity.
Do something nice and try not to get caught.
Listen more; talk less.
Every day take a 30 minute walk.
Strive for excellence, not perfection.
Be on time. Don’t make excuses.
Don’t argue. Get organized.
Be kind to unkind people.
Let someone cut ahead of you in line.
Take time to be alone.
Cultivate good manners.
Be humble.
Realise and accept that life isn’t fair.
Know when to keep your mouth shut.
Go an entire day without criticising anyone.
Learn from the past. Plan for the future.
Live in the present.
Don’t sweat the small stuff.
It’s all small stuff.

amusements

Ten Things

Something different for this month’s Ten Things …

Ten Fish which are also Surnames:

  1. Roach
  2. Rudd
  3. Pike
  4. Salmon
  5. Herring
  6. Sturgeon (pictured right)
  7. Pollock
  8. Parr
  9. Whiting
  10. Grayling
environment, food+drink

How to Use Less Plastic

We all know that plastic is not very biodegradable, and thus an environmental nightmare, as well as being over-used in many instances. Equally we all know how convenient it can be.

The other day I can across Less Plastic, and their poster of 9 Tips for Living with Less Plastic. Although it’s a couple of years old, I share them here with comments on how well I think we do.

  1. Bring your own shopping bag. Already do this and have done for some years.
  2. Carry a reusable water bottle. As we don’t carry water, we can’t do this. Although we could stop buying mineral water in plastic bottles for use at home.
  3. Bring your own cup. We almost never have take-out coffee etc., so not much point in this.
  4. Pack your lunch in reusable containers. Again we don’t carry packed lunch, so this isn’t appropriate.
  5. Say no to disposable straws and cutlery. Yep, always do if we can.
  6. Skip the plastic produce bags. Difficult if the supermarket offers no alternative to having 29 onions floating loose in your trolley – they can provide paper bags for bread so why not for other produce? Would they like us taking our own paper bags? And then there’s the question of what to use in the freezer.
  7. Slow down and dine in. We seldom eat out; maybe once or twice a month, on average.
  8. Store leftovers in glass jars. Yes, could do this although I’m ot sure about finding a good variety of different sized jars with out buying then specially. And anyway we have lots of plastic boxes and wouldn’t it be greener to use them to destruction first?
  9. Share these tips with your friends. That’s just what I’m doing!

So how well do you do?

environment, history, links, medical, science, sexuality

Monthly Interesting Links

As regular readers will realise, I read a lot of articles in consumer science, consumer history and the more general media over the course of a month – articles which look as if they will interest me. (I don’t generally read politics, business etc.). What I post here are only those items which I think may be of more general interest to you, my readers, being mindful that the humanities people amongst you might want a bit of “soft” science; and the scientists a bit of humanities. So I do try to mostly avoid difficult science and academically dense Eng.Lit. or history – ‘cos you don’t all want to struggle with/be interested in that, though some may. And I obviously don’t expect everyone to read everything, but just to pick the items which interest you most; if you find one or two each month then that’s good.

So, having restated my aims for this series, let’s get down to business – because there is a lot to cover this month.

Science, Technology & Natural World

We start off with something which surprised me: the engineers building Crossrail had to take the curvature of the Earth into account, because of the length of the line and the precision with which some of the tunnels had to be threaded through between existing structures.

Staying on an engineering theme, scientists have developed a method of making wood as strong as steel, and thus potentially useable as a high strength building material.

Changing themes, what really is biodiversity and why is it so important?

The curious history of horses’ hooves, and how five digits became just one.

Following the attack on a pair of Russians in Salisbury, several of the scientific media have been asking what nerve agents are and how they work. This is Scientific American‘s view.

Health & Medicine

A strange, six inch long, “mummy” was found in Chile some years ago, and many people decided it was an alien – hardly surprising given its appearance. However, following DNA testing it has finally been confirmed that it was a very deformed, female, human infant.

Musician Taylor Muhl has a large birthmark on her torso, but it turns out that it isn’t a birthmark but that she’s a chimera, having absorbed a twin sister in utero in the very early days of gestation.

Influenza is relatively common, and benign, in may non-primate species which provide a natural reservoir for the virus. And there are many other such viruses out in the wild which are a concern as (like Ebola, Zika, SARS) they could mutate and jump to humans.

On a similar theme, researchers are coming to realise that there is a genetic component to our susceptibility to many diseases and that disease prevalence partly depends on the genetic mutations we carry.

Sexuality

From consent advice to sex toys and masturbation hacks, YouTube has taken over sex education.

Language

While on sex, the Whores of Yore website has a history of Cunt, the word.

History, Archaeology & Anthropology

Researchers have analysed a huge number of DNA samples to discover that Homo sapiens interbred with Denisovans on multiple occasions, as we did with the Neanderthals.

Why did Oxford and Cambridge have a monopoly on UK university education for several hundred years, when universities proliferated across the rest of Europe?

Long before the height of the slave trade and the British Empire, black Africans lived freely in Tudor England.

In 1600 Giordano Bruno burned at the stake as a heretic and it looks likely that this was for believing in the existence of planets outside our solar system.

The oldest message in a bottle has been found on a beach in Western Australia.

London

Mudlarking: the pursuit of archaeological treasures hiding in the mud of the River Thames foreshore. Warning: you need a licence!

John Joseph Merlin, a wizard in Georgian London.

Lifestyle & Personal Development

Brad Warner, one of our two favourite Zen Masters, on waking up happy.

So just how many beak-ups does one have to have before one finds “the one”? Search me!

The exorcists are coming, and it doesn’t look good.

We’re living through a crisis of touch where lots of basic human contact like hugging is no longer acceptable – and it is having a serious effect on our mental health.

OK guys, this is for you: 100 easy ways to make women’s lives better. Basically: be considerate!

Finally, following on from the above two items, an article I found rather nauseating about the supposed crisis in modern masculinity. Gawdelpus all!

More next month! Meanwhile, be good!

current affairs, ramblings

It’s not Cricket, or is it?

So, a couple of Aussies have been banned for tampering with the match ball.

This should not be a surprise, except that they were using an artificial aid to do so – which, however tempting, is frankly stupid as well as cheating. And they got caught.

Ball doctoring goes on in cricket at all levels, it is very easy and it isn’t new.

Some dust on the hand can easily rough up one side of the ball, as can boot studs or a fingernail, while shining the other side with hair gel to help the ball swing. Shining the ball on the trousers/shirt/handkerchief is legal. Using hair gel, dust, fingernails or studs isn’t.

It is also very easy to lift the seam with just a thumbnail and some sleight of hand while (allegedly) removing dirt from the seam. Removing the dirt is legal but lifting the seam isn’t.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I was never more than a jobbing club third XI cricketer, and yet I was shown some of the techniques on more than one occasion. I never doctored a ball during a match – I wasn’t good enough that it would have made any useful difference anyway – nor did I ever spot it happening when I was umpiring, but I did use it to prolong the useful life of practice balls.

food+drink, medical

Eating and Diets

Here’s an interesting article, originally from New York Magazine, by a couple of specialists on nutrition which explodes many of the myths around diets etc. In their preamble they say:

It’s beyond strange that so many humans are clueless about how they should feed themselves. Every wild species on the planet knows how to do it; presumably ours did, too, before our oversized brains found new ways to complicate things. Now, we’re the only species that can be baffled about the “right” way to eat.

Really, we know how we should eat, but that understanding is continually undermined by hyperbolic headlines, internet echo chambers, and predatory profiteers all too happy to peddle purposefully addictive junk food and nutrition-limiting fad diets. Eating well remains difficult not because it’s complicated but because the choices are hard even when they’re clear.

With that in mind, we offered friends, readers, and anyone else we encountered one simple request: Ask us anything at all about diet and nutrition and we will give you an answer that is grounded in real scientific consensus, with no “healthy-ish” chit-chat, nary a mention of “wellness”, and no goal other than to cut through all the noise and help everyone see how simple it is to eat well.

The article itself is a long read, but very illuminating.