“Hot Wheels” Helena acquired her nickname because, despite being an Advanced Driver who can cadence-brake, control-gear, and turn into skids with the best of them, she used to get about in an ancient Mini Metro Rover 100—and get me about in it when she was my Genome Campus car-sharing partner. She’s ruined the (weak) joke now by […]
Read MoreOnce we would bond by grooming each other to remove parasites. Now we log into each others’ blogs to delete spam posts.
Read MoreYesterday I had an excellent evening of argument. I spent it contending that, since our emergence, we human beings have been, for plausible biological reasons, fundamentally aggressive and suspicious of visibly different members of our own species. In reply it was argued that our behaviour towards others has been characterised by altruistic tendencies and trade. […]
Read MoreAll English comprehensive school desks must by law be engraved, somewhere on their surfaces, with stylized representations of human primary or secondary sexual organs. Why is it whenever some new prehistoric cave art is uncovered it’s always men with spears pursuing unfortunate savannah ungulates? Why do they never find badly-drawn pictures of genitals or breasts […]
Read MoreMy longstanding disdain for white people with dreadlocks is well known, and even extends to the otherwise charming and helpful young man in the local music shop who insists on addressing me as though we are lost siblings*. Even in Upside-Down World, if Hak is to believed, they have Pasty-farians: “[O]ne of Sydney’s more annoying […]
Read More“Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.” P. J. O’Rourke (1994), All The Trouble In The World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty I’ve written here before that I believe humans are naturally disposed to discriminate […]
Read MoreA PooterGeeker wrote to ask how she could take part in the Genographic Project. The answer is here, though some of us “in the business” might get a little bit sniffy at the idea of a human sample group that is not only partly self-selecting, but includes people who’ve paid to be experimental subjects. Of […]
Read MoreMaoi reads the New York Times [free registration, rhubarb, rhubarb] and sends us more strangeness (to Western eyes) from the East. (And we’re going to Mars.)
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