Big Brother 15 Is Filled With Terrible People

For those of you who don't watch Big Brother, and this is the first season I've been following for years, you may be wondering just what kind of behavior has been causing it to garner so much controversy this season and cost two contestants their jobs as well as a potential third.

This video was made on July 17 and doesn't cover the last two weeks. But it should provide a starter's guide as to just what everyone, including host Julie Chen, is angry about. It also shows that it isn't just limited to the three previously-mentioned contestants but is instead pervasive throughout the house.

Warning: very very nasty hateful words ahead. Viewer discretion strongly advised.

Hunting For Peace (And Also Gathering)

When images of war become particularly graphic and heartbreaking, it is inevitable that someone, somewhere, will begin to decry not just the perpetrators of the imagery in question, but in fact humanity itself. They will cry out to anyone who will listen, demanding to know what supreme deity would allow such madness to take place among their people, or alternatively, how we as a species could possibly stand by and let such madness to continue. Bonus points if they acknowledge any violence on the other side of the conflict as well. But inevitably, no matter how many times this cycle repeats itself, no matter how many calls for peace, in the end every cycle is met with a grudging or even jaded acknowledgement that violence is just what humanity does. It's nature. It's evolution. It may even be cited as a potential reason why aliens haven't shown up to say hi yet.

Douglas Fry and Patrick Soderberg of Abo Akademi University in Finland beg to differ. As they theorize in a study (behind a paywall) they got published in Science magazine, humanity, while certainly not peaceful by nature, does not have warlike tendencies hardwired into it. Instead, that aspect of humanity came about as a side effect of the trappings of civilization. There was a lack of evidence of war that they noticed in archaeological studies of the hunter-gatherer era, so that gave them the idea to check 21 hunter-gatherer tribes that have survived to the present day. As far as they were concerned, 20 of them did not express warlike tendencies; the outlier is the Tiwi people, living on the Tiwi islands off Australia's northern coast. For the rest, instances of violence were limited to person-on-person violence or revenge killings in response to a previous killing, neither of which they considered to be war. Among the contributing factors was small groups and low population density, which would cause a group to be more likely to run than fight. Only 15% of lethal events happened across societal lines (mostly from the Tiwi).

Now, I like the effort here, I like the message. But I disagree with it. We will leave aside the rebuttal that other studies (there are other studies) have in fact shown more warlike tendencies among hunter-gatherers and focus on what we have before us.

First, and this has been addressed in existing peer critiques, but Fry and Soderberg focused only on the oldest-existing records for each tribe they examined. Specifically, they selected their tribes for study from something called the Ethnographic Atlas, created in the 1960's, and picked the tribes listed purely as hunter-gatherers around that time. To examine them, they used data running back to, in some cases, the 17th century. This runs into a lesser version of the same problem that forced them to examine modern tribes in the first place instead of pre-civilization tribes: lack of information. As historical records reach further into the past, they get more and more murky, and more and more of our information about the past is based on glorified guesswork that we then have to go revise when new information is discovered. Maybe those old hunter-gatherer tribes were warlike. It's been tens of thousands of years. That's plenty of time for evidence to vanish.

My other problems aren't in the gathering but rather in the bookkeeping. 'Only' 15% isn't a very good number to be saying 'only about. One tribe out of the 21 did in fact express warlike tendencies. I don't think that can be ignored or dismissed, as the Los Angeles Times writeup tries to do at one point by rerunning the numbers after the Tiwi are removed. Wars get all the press in the news, but look around. Look at a map. Take any two random neighbors. Odds are, those neighbors aren't at war. They may not be best of friends, but they're not at war. Australia and Indonesia aren't at war. Jamaica isn't at war with Cuba. Italy isn't at war with Switzerland. Russia isn't at war with Mongolia. Ecuador isn't at war with Peru. Namibia is not at war with Zambia. And so on and so forth. And the vast majority of nations don't have civil wars going on either. I don't have a statistic for it so I can only estimate, but 1 out of 21 doesn't seem, to my ear, like it's that out of whack with the global numbers. If the studied tribes were getting proportional attention to nation-states, the Tiwi would dominate headlines. You'd hear about Tiwi this, Tiwi that all the time in the news, day in day out, and not hear all that much about the other 20.

And there's also the fact to consider that revenge killings (counted in the approximately one-third of killings involving one group against another, though with the paywall in place I don't know the exact proportion) were not counted as warlike. In and of themselves, they may not be war, but they can very quickly start them. Countless wars over the course of history have begun that way; blood feuds that have metastasized into large-scale conflicts. The process is very simple. A person from Tribe A commits an act against Tribe B that Tribe B feels is punishable by death. They therefore kill the member of Tribe A. The rest of Tribe A, not sharing Tribe B's view, decides that someone from Tribe B, possibly the tribe member that performed the execution, needs to die in revenge. So they do that. But in Tribe B's mind, this second killing is unwarranted. After they killed the offending member of Tribe A, the matter in their minds was over. Now they have a killing that must be met with revenge. A cycle of killing thus begins, as Tribe A and Tribe B do not agree on which are original killings and which are revenge killings meant to even things up, and if someone along the way does any extracurricular killing along the way, the feud can easily escalate and become a war. This is essentially how the Hatfield/McCoy feud played out, with the original act of outrage being a dispute over the ownership of a pig. (Wikipedia cites an earlier spark, a McCoy fighting for the Union in the Civil War, but this was locally regarded as bringing it upon yourself. Because Appalachia.)

For a more modern example, simply type 'israel palestine revenge' into Google, scroll down the results, and note how often each side is vowing revenge against the other. Through the first 20 results for me, the sides seeking revenge are: Palestine, Israel, Israel, Israel, Israel, Palestine, Israel, Palestine, Palestine, Palestine, Israel, Palestine, Israel, Palestine, Israel, and the remainder is either 'neither' or, much more commonly, 'both'.

The Hatfield/McCoy feud remains a 'feud' in the vernacular sense because there simply weren't the numbers to bring it up to the status of war. Clans and tribes worldwide, civilized or not, engage in blood-feud practices to this day. Fry and Soderberg note that small populations limit warlike tendencies, but they said it was because the hunter-gatherers were more likely to just run. Even if they didn't run, the populations are small enough that we wouldn't call it war anyway. Fry and Soderberg don't. We'd call it a feud or vendetta or some other word. We imagine wars to be conducted on a wide scale, encompassing many, many people. We don't imagine them as endless revenge cycles becoming indiscriminate killings between smaller clans, even though the behavior patterns can be very much the same.

It seems like a very... government-like description of the situation, missing the forest for the trees and getting lost in semantics. The presence of the Tiwi shows that a hunter-gatherer tribe can be warlike even by Fry and Soderberg's definition. A less restrictive definition will show that, while war may not be the common word, the seeds to lead there, at least to the extent the size of the group permits, are very much present.

I would love for them to be right. I would love to be able to come here and say that we as a species can be naturally peaceful, even if the actions required to be that way involve something as unrealistic and drastic as tearing down civilization and going back to hunter-gatherer ways.

But I don't think they have it right.

Video Games Warp The Mind After All

Here is the game in question.



And in real life, what is currently estimated as $136 million in jewels was stolen from Cannes, 34 miles away. Again. Some more.

Your lesson for today: when in Cannes, maybe just stick to snazzy clothes.

Welcome To Cooperstown

Today, the Hall of Fame inducts Jacob Ruppert, best known as the man who bought Babe Ruth from the Red Sox, and who built Yankee Stadium to house him. The Hall inducts Frank O'Day, an umpire who kept his integrity in an era when it was embarrassingly easy to bribe and pressure the ump to favor the home team; O'Day was the umpire who ruled Fred Merkle out in 1908. The Hall inducts Deacon White, who recorded the first hit in professional baseball history- it was a double- and who caught 458 games barehanded, and without chest protector or facemask. His 2,067 hits should be coupled with the fact that, in 1871, his first year as a pro, his Cleveland Forest Citys team only played 29 games, and in his last season, 1890, his Buffalo Bisons played 122 (seasons didn't crest the 100-game mark until 1884, by which time White had switched to third base). These days, White would almost certainly have gotten over 3,000.

Let's not worry about who isn't getting inducted. Let's not even say their names. No person is bigger than the game. Let's celebrate those who are.

I Was Told There Would Be No Map

I'm going to give you a map. On that map, draw an outline of the Midwest.

That's the question being posed to you at this site, which is conducting a survey on what people consider to be the makeup of the region. As it turns out, people have very different ideas on what the Midwest looks like. As Bill Rankin could already tell you; earlier this year he overlaid 100 maps of the 'Midwest' constructed by various organizations that he found on Google and found not a single place that was unanimously declared Midwestern. He took two of the maps he found and displayed them as showing mutually-exclusive Midwests; about the only thing they agreed on was that Wisconsin and Illinois were NOT Midwestern. Newfoundland showed up in someone's Midwest. New York showed up. Idaho showed up. Alberta showed up. New Mexico showed up. The Florida Panhandle showed up. South Carolina did not show up, but Georgia and North Carolina did.

I am now intensely curious as to who out there is going 'well, what's wrong with that?' to anything I just said.

You Were Getting Very Shocky

Last month saw the release of a videogame called Remember Me. You play a woman named Nilin as she traipses around "Neo-Paris" in the year 2084, by which time, according to the game, social media has spread to people's memory banks, and pretty much everybody has a little thingie attached to the back of their heads where they can access them all. They have the ability to digitize memories, and so people trade them amongst each other, buy nice ones, and have bad ones removed, all by a large corporation that then stores and tracks all those memories.

What could possibly go wrong.

Well, let's go over it. Nilin has a move where she can put her palm up to someone's little memory thingie and overload their brain with so many memories that they experience a blowout. She, and really quite a few people in the game, have the ability to steal someone's memories. Or she can do one better and 'remix' a memory, altering details in a memory so that someone remembers something completely differently to the point where someone can be left remembering how they killed a loved one who is in fact perfectly healthy. People can get addicted to memory rejiggering and apparently if you do that, you end up becoming a subhuman zombielike person. As you do. And there's always the option of just planting voices in a dude's head.

This is set in 2084. But here, in 2013, a team led by Susumu Tonagawa at MIT has managed to implant a false memory in a mouse.The purpose for this is to try and figure out why people, unassisted by anything that might make them a videogame character, develop false memories of their own. The report in Science magazine will run you $20 to read, but here's what was going on. There's a process called optogenetics that basically means fiddling around with the makeup of individual brain cells. They took a protein called channelrhodopsin, which triggers in response to blue light, and set it so that the mice produced it in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that registers memories. The mice were put in what we'll call Chamber 1 and left to run around and get themselves a memory of it. The next day, the mice were put in Chamber 2, and given an electric shock under blue light, activating memories of Chamber 1 while adding the memory of the shock. The day after that, they were put back in Chamber 1 to see if the shock would be (falsely) associated with Chamber 1. It was, as the mice froze up in fear of Chamber 1.

Tonagawa called it 'incepting'. Okay, fine, Inception is a good pop-culture analogy too, but I've already brought up overloading a guy's brain with false memories until it blows out, and I'd like to keep going with that. Needless to say, scientists immediately started worrying about the potential applications and ethical concerns even though we're still only at making mice scared of a particular place for no good reason.

Scientists are our bestest friends and have never done any bad thing and I remember promising to give them my money and my pants. Susumu Tonagawa is and has always been a living god.

Random News Generator- American Samoa

American Samoa, in case you've forgotten or weren't clued in by the name, is an American territory. Sends someone to Congress and everything, albeit in a nonvoting role. As such, it is dependent on Congressional action to get itself funded and budgeted. Which lately has become a problem, because when Congress opted to let the sequester happen- the across-the-board budget cuts- that meant American Samoa had its budget cut along with everybody else. On Tuesday, the Samoan government submitted a budget of $456 million, down close to $40 million and 8% from last year. Some of the cuts were able to come from phasing out earthquake and tsunami recovery residual expenditures from 2009, but then it had to start getting painful.

The LBJ Medical Center in Pago Pago, the only full-fledged hospital in American Samoa, and which regularly relies on donations and subsidies, will be getting $6 million in local and Congressional subsidies to beef up the $44 million budget it'll have to work with, but it's not enough to keep six managerial positions from being eliminated. Two elementary schools are merging with an eye on merging others as well (at the same time that teachers are beginning to be required to have bachelor's degrees). A government plane has been converted to commercial ownership by Inter Island Air. Because it's expensive to import food from mainland regions, citizens turn to low-cost fast food, which in turn has triggered a staggering 75% obesity rate, which in turn has caused Samoa Air, based in Apia in the other Samoa but which serves American Samoa, to start charging passengers by the pound.

Samoans could use some pounds. Because they're not getting the dollars.