The BBC reports new discoveries in the field of animal research:

The study found African elephants reacted with fear when they detected the scent of garments previously worn by men of the Maasai tribe.

Maasai men are known to demonstrate their virility by spearing elephants… The elephants also responded aggressively to red clothing, which is characteristic of traditional Maasai dress.

However, the elephants showed much milder reaction to clothing previously worn by the Kamba people, agriculturalists who pose little threat.

The psychologists said they had expected to find elephants might be able to distinguish among different human groups according to the level of risk they posed.

They said: “We were not disappointed. In fact, we think that this is the first time that it has been experimentally shown that any animal can categorise a single species of potential predator into subclasses based on such subtle cues.”

It’s interesting that the article is focusing on the Massai as hunters, as Westerners have long held up the Massai as the quintessential “noble savage.” I don’t think the article or the study are playing into that, but it catches my eye to see them being used in the role of “fearsome hunter.”

Another thing I found striking: the elephants will run from any red clothing, but they’ll run farther and faster from red clothing that also carries the odor of Massai men than they will from red clothing that has been worn by members of another African group.

How do the elephants get this knowledge? Is it all experiential, or do they pass it down as they do knowledge about things like where mineral deposits that they need to acquire vitamins are?

And I had no idea that different ethnic groups had detectably different smells. Diet, I assume? And other lifestyle factors. I didn’t realize the divides in lifestyle were still large enough to produce that effect, although it makes sense, particularly in the context of something like one group’s continued tradition of hunting elephants.

Today, I’m going to post a trifecta of neat stuff in three short entries, staggered through the afternoon and evening.

The first thing is an entry about sex & sex work in science fiction, which is smart and interesting, but which is totally eclipsed by the cleverness of this quote/proposal. Thene writes on Aaru Tuesday,

I would like to propose a measure called The Frank Miller Test. It will test how much male sci-fi writers are obsessed with whores; if the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented female people in his story is above 1:1, he fails.

Hear, hear.

*

But it would be unfair not to give you a taste of the smart, interesting entry, too. Thene’s entry looks at sex & sex work in science fiction and fantasy. “There’s a lot of supposedly ’speculative’ fictions where it’s still 1958,” she says.

Summarizing one story that poses an SFnal frontier, she writes, “It’s 1958 again. The men have a quest, and the women are the questers’ prostitutes. (Anonymous homosexual intercourse is suggested as the cash-free alternative). There’s also, of course, this narrative about how ‘vices’ of all kinds are brought by the evil capitalist enterprise to the virgin wilderness.”

She quotes the story to illustrate her point:

There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets. […] There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell sex or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos… [emphasis hers]

And her smart analysis: “Part of me adores that bolded line, and the energy of the passage in general. The other part is saying waitacottonpickingminute, you’re appropriating vaginas to demonstrate your philosophy of technology? You’re using the gender-neutral word ‘worker’ to mean ‘man who pays for sex’? You’re drawing lines between ‘untamed’ rural amazons and prostitutes who are Slaves Of The Patriarchal-Capital-Whatsit? Prostitutes who (as the story goes) ‘corrupt’ those women through violence, enforce their taboos and turn them, vampire-like, into prostitutes themselves? The shit?”

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Ide Cyan at Whileaway)

* * *

UPDATE: Check out this “Shortpacked” cartoon, which Myca pointed out in comments.

From Mind Hacks:

As an aside, once, whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the stressed syllable in any English word - something which is apparently called the ‘fuck test’.

Simply insert the word ‘fucking’ into the word, as if you were using the swear word for emphasis, and the syllable that follows the ‘fucking’ is the stressed syllable.

For example, absolutely -> abso-fucking-lutely. The stressed syllable is the third: i.e. absolutely. It works for every multi-syllable word I’ve found so far.

Bottled water companies sell liquid water in plastic ice trays for you to stick in the freezer and freeze yourself.

I know this is like a sign of the consumer apocalypse, but it’s also absolutely hilarious.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

One of these things is not like the other,
One of these things is not the same…

Can you guess which one?

Oh, I take it back. They’re all hilarious.

From a recent article in The New Yorker:

After making allowances for countries that have, or recently have had, an officially imposed atheist ideology, in which there might be some social pressure to deny belief in God, one can venture conservative estimates of the number of unbelievers in the world today. Reviewing a large number of studies among some fifty countries, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, puts the figure at between five hundred million and seven hundred and fifty million. This excludes such highly populated places as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria, for which information is lacking or patchy. Even the low estimate of five hundred million would make unbelief the fourth-largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is also by far the youngest, with no significant presence in the West before the eighteenth century. Who can say what the landscape will look like once unbelief has enjoyed a past as long as Islam’s—let alone as long as Christianity’s? God is assuredly not on the side of the unbelievers, but history may yet be.

I know this isn’t my usual Armchair Activist series, but i figured no one would mind if i just took a moment to remind everyone of Blog Against Sexism Day, which is coming up on March 8th - less than a week. Here’s the text from the post i wrote at BASD’s new host,Taking Place:

The first Blog Against Sexism Day, on March 8th of 2006, was a huge success, especially considering i was still very new to the blogosphere and didn’t really know many other feminist bloggers. The success is due entirely to individuals spreading the word on their blogs, through email, and other word-of-mouth methods. In the end, we had hundreds of participants from North and South America, Africa, Australia, Asia and Europe. The participants and topics discussed were so varied that it was, in my opinion, a perfect sampling of the feminist blogosphere.

I paid attention to the requests from last year. In addition to Blog Against Sexism banners, i’ve also made banners that read Blog For Gender Liberation, Blog For Women’s Liberation, and Blog for Wimmin’s Liberation. I also encourage others to create new banners and let me know if you do, so i can help spread the word about your work. Last year, i also had a lot of requests for reminders that i wasn’t able to do because i didn’t have a system in place. Although there are only a couple weeks before Blog Against Sexism Day, this year i’m ready. So if you’d like a reminder the day or two before, just let me know in the comments section of this post or drop me an email at veganwonder [at] gmail [dot] com.

Although i’m starting a little late getting the word out this year, i’d like to see even more participants than the first year. So help by spreading the word. If you’re interested in participating, all you have to do is write a post on March 8th. However, the day was also started to help spread the word about the numerous feminist and pro-feminist bloggers out there. So i greatly encourage you to add your name to the list of participants. To do so, just leave a comment here with a link to your blog or email me the url of your blog.

For more information about Blog Against Sexism Day or to get a banner for your blog, check out the new official Blog Against Sexism Day page.

Birds over a junkyard in Kosovo, photographed by Reuters photographer Damir Sagolj.

One of the news stories that has really moved me over the past few weeks is the case of Jeffrey Deskovic. Thus far, the Deskovic story has been covered by the local media in depth, but it hasn’t received much national attention. Here’s a brief summary of the case from the Westchester Journal News:

Jeffrey Deskovic walked free for the first time in nearly 16 years yesterday after his conviction was thrown out in the rape and murder of a Peekskill High School classmate.

The 32-year-old was cleared in the death of Angela Correa because another man confessed to the crime after more sophisticated DNA testing linked him to the girl’s death. Authorities would not identify the suspect but said he is serving a life sentence for his conviction in an unrelated Westchester County homicide.

Typically when I think about DNA exoneration, I think about a case where there was no DNA testing available at the time of conviction. This case defies that stereotype. At the time of Deskovic’s conviction there was DNA testing; however, it was not as sophisticated as the current form of DNA analysis. But even the less accurate DNA technology was not the cause of Deskovic’s wrongful conviction. The first DNA analysis taken from semen at the scene excluded Deskovic (and so did the second more sophisticated test). The prosecutors assumed that this DNA came from semen of another high school classmate, who had consensual sex with the victim, but they never bothered to test the classmate’s DNA.

Deskovic was not only convicted based on shoddy investigative work; he also gave a false confession. I know many people are surprised that anyone would confess to a crime that they did not commit, but it happens more than many think. The Innocence Project researchers found that false confessions were given in 35 of the first 130 exoneration’s. Often defendants are deceived or coerced into giving these confessions, and in Deskovic’s case it’s important to remember that he was a teenager. I think the interrogation procedures for young people should be slightly different from those for adults. If teens can’t be interviewed by social researchers without parental permission and can’t consume alcohol, then we need to think about what sorts of protections can be given to teens interrogated by police. I wouldn’t be a fan of forcing police to get parental permission, but I do think that lawyers or other advocates should be more readily available to teens in the interrogation process whether they are charged with a crime of not.

Finally, after rejecting Deskovic in 1994, the Innocence Project decided to take up his case. They convinced the district attorney to retest the DNA, using the more sophisticated analysis, and entered it into the FBI’s CODIS system, which is a data bank of DNA for convicted criminals. Once the DNA was retested, not only was it inconsistent with Deskovic, but it matched a convicted felon in the CODIS system. The police interviewed the man whose DNA matched, and from what I can glean, they got a confession (his identity has not been revealed). At that point, the local DA decided to vacate Deskovic’s conviction.

This is such a tragic case for the Correa family and the Deskovic family, because nobody has gotten justice. As for Deskovic, he’s frustrated, and I can’t say I blame him. In an interview with the local media Deskovic elaborated on his frustration:

Deskovic then walked outside and spoke to the media for nearly two hours, seemingly offering all the things he wanted to say when reporters were ignoring his pleas from prison.

“I’m not standing here before you because the system worked. I’m standing here in front of you despite the system,” he said.

He expressed resentment at police who forced him to falsely confess, a prosecutor who did not drop the case when DNA results suggested he should, jurors who ignored the forensic evidence and the judge who could have set aside the verdict but didn’t. And he remained frustrated by the years of failure at the appellate level that ended only after the Innocence Project took on his case.

“I hit a wall and became very depressed,” he said.

He was asked if he was angry.

“The people I considered to be friends all left me. Prison is isolating. My family has become strangers to me,” he said, adding that he lost the chance to marry a woman he loved. “I don’t need to answer. Just answer yourself. Would any of you be angry?”

In a later interview with the Journal News, Deskovic described his first week of freedom.

After a whirlwind week of visiting relatives, talking to reporters and spending time at The Innocence Project, whose lawyers and students had won his release, Deskovic knows his life is starting over. It’s daunting for him, and he complains that the state does not do enough once the wrongfully convicted are freed.

“I didn’t even get the $40 they give parolees when they get out,” he said. “I definitely don’t want to be on parole. I’m done. I’m clear. I’m free. But there are no follow-up services to help me reintegrate.”

Deskovic hasn’t had much time for fun stuff — no movies or nights on the town — or the inclination to spend the little money he has. As a Muslim, he is fasting each day until sundown for the holy month of Ramadan.

He visited the grave of his grandmother, Betty, who died while he was in prison, and before leaving Assumption Cemetery he stopped at Correa’s grave after being reminded that she was buried there as well.

“I would not have felt right leaving the cemetery without seeing her, knowing she was a short distance from my grandmother,” he said. “It would have been an expression of disrespect to her memory.”

Last weekend, he reconnected by phone with boyhood friend Martin Burrett and plans to visit him in Indiana in the coming months.

“That was a blast from the past. We were best friends,” Deskovic said, adding that he struggled a bit through the conversation. “The feeling is, I’m very much frozen in time while others have moved forward. It’s like talking to a stranger with a familiar name.”

Just to get around, he has to be dependent on the good will of others, which he suspects, and uncomfortably fears, will dry up when he is out of the limelight.

He certainly has a good point about a social support system for exonerated criminals, not that the one we have for parolees is good, but the fact that he couldn’t even get the $40 is really pathetic.

While I’m highlighting the Deskovic case , it is important to note that he is just one of several people to be freed thanks to the Innocence Project. You can view all of the 183 people exonerated by the Innocence Project here. Unfortunately, the project doesn’t have enough money or people to do thorough investigations for all of the people who request their help. They are also not the only group trying to challenge wrongful convictions. The Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University has helped with several exoneration’s. These organizations are able to take on a limited number of cases, and they tend to focus on only the most serious cases–usually rapes and murders, which makes me wonder about wrongful convictions for less serious times.

The Innocence Project highlights several causes of wrongful convictions–mistaken identity, official misconduct, false confessions, bad lawyering, junk science, snitches, and serology. They don’t go into detail about how race and class intersect to exacerbate these problems (a quick view of the photos reveals quite a few black men falsely convicted of rapes), but some of that information can be found in the links below.

Jeffrey Deskovic spent half of his life in prison. I certainly don’t blame him at all for being angry and bewildered. I just hope he’s able to get the amount of social support that will allow him to get an education and live the life that he should have been living all along, and I also hope we are able to fix the problems in the criminal justice system that lead to these sorts of cases.

What do you think should be done for someone wrongly convicted like Deskovic? What do you think is a just compensation? What do you think should be done to prevent these types of wrongful convictions? How common do you think they are?

Additional Links

Maine Activist Claudia Whitman Takes on Deskovic Case

Westchester DA Press Release For Deskovic Exoneration

Paul Craig Roberts on the Causes of Wrongful Convictions (PDF file)

The Wrongful Conviction Reading Room

The Race Effect in Wrongful Convictions (PDF file)

Arrr! That’s right, it be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, possibly the silliest idea ever. But admit it: You’re dyin’ t’ drink some grog and tell someone t’ go walk the plank. This silliness be about pop culture pirates, ye see, not the bloody an’ brutal pirates that still sail the seas t’day.

Pop culture pirates, it be true, are surely the gimpiest people ever. Eye patches, hook hands, peg legs, and those terribly awkward hats. Why that be, I’ve no idea. Anyone?

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade

A new study indicates that the number of confidants Americans have has decreased over the past 20 years. This finding marks one of several studies that indicate that Americans’ social networks are decreasing. The primary proponent of this theory is political scientist, Robert Putnam, whose book Bowling Alone, describes the general decline in civic engagement. In this study sociologists Lynn Smith-Lovin, Miller McPherson, and Matthew Brashears were focused specifically on friends and confidants. Here is a quote from the abstract of their study:

The number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled. The mean network size decreases by about a third (one confidant), from 2.94 in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. The modal respondent now reports having no confidant; the modal respondent in 1985 had three confidants. Both kin and non-kin confidants were lost in the past two decades, but the greater decrease of non-kin ties leads to more confidant networks centered on spouses and parents, with fewer contacts through voluntary associations and neighborhoods. Most people have densely interconnected confidants similar to them.

The study also found that:

• The trend toward social isolation mirrors other class divides: Non-whites and people with less education tend to have smaller networks than white Americans and the highly educated.

• Racial diversity among people’s networks has increased. The percentage of people who count at least one person of another race in their close network has gone up from about 9 percent to more than 15 percent.

• The percentage of people who talk only to family members about important matters increased from about 57 percent to about 80 percent, while the number of people who depend totally on their spouse has increased from about 5 percent to about 9 percent.

Our families and communities are undergoing some dramatic changes, as people become more and more isolated. What do you think has lead to these changes? What do you think can be done to reverse these trends (assuming you think this is negative), or is this just a product of our contemporary postmodern lives? Do you think your own experience is reflected in these trends?

Here is the link to the summary of the study. and here is a link to the authors findings. (PDF)

(Curtsy: Majikthise)

It saddens me that - apart from a few lucky areas with local producers - the drug LSD has ceased to exist. The one time the war on drugs actually succeeds in wiping a drug out, why must it be a drug I like? (They could have wiped out Meth instead. That would have been just fine with me).

Yes, some folks (me included) have very frightening or unpleasant experiences with LSD. But LSD, at best, creates an absolute conviction in the user that they’ve moved beyond the mind’s ever-present limitations of thought and perception, and that’s a stunning and worthwhile experience. The better LSD trips I had are probably the closest I’ll ever come to life-altering religious ecstasy.

(Admittedly, trying to talk about the experiences to folks who have never had them tends to make LSD users sound like our brains are made of slugs and we’ve had salt poured in our ears, but the near-impossibility of describing the experience is part of what makes it valuable.)

I don’t feel a strong desire to drop acid again. But I find it difficult to comprehend that my generation may have been the last generation (give or take) ever to have our minds blown into fractal patterns and endless connection-generating by LSD. That seems very unfair to the post-LSD generations - as if my generation had used up all the endless summer afternoons with perfect babbling brooks, or something, and no generation will ever get that feeling again.

* * *

Actually, what it reminds me of - and this analogy will probably get me in trouble - is September 11th, listening to the newscasters say that the World Trade Center was gone. Gone? Gone? How can it be gone?

I wasn’t reacting to the death toll - I was reacting to the idea that part of the skyline was gone. I used to spend my lunch breaks at the top of the WTC, looking over Manhattan while munching on a brown-bag sandwich. Surely the newscasters must be wrong. They must mean the buildings have been damaged. The towers are too big to ever be gone.

It wasn’t until later in the broadcasts - when they had footage of the buildings seemingly turning into powder and disintegrating, over and over - that I finally believed something that big and solid, could actually be gone.

Needless to say, the loss of life at the WTC makes that by far the more important loss. Nonetheless, in much the same way I found it hard to comprehend that the WTC could just be gone, I’m finding it hard to beleive that LSD is gone.

I had never heard of Body Integrity Identity Disorder, or BIID, until I read about it Blueheron’s livejournal.

So what is BIID? From an article in the Atlantic Monthly:

Folks with BIID are folks who want to have healthy limbs chopped off so that their external self can match their internal, idealized self. Some of these folks actually go through with it, cutting of one or more limbs. Although people with BIDD are rare, the condition - at least anecdotally - appears to be becoming more common.

The Atlantic author brings up an interesting question: Does the existence of a diagnosis and treatment (in this case, amputating a limb or limbs) for a condition increase the prevalence of the condition in society?

So the existence of sex reassignment surgery - and of an increasingly active and visible transsexual community - may be increasing the number of people who genuinely and sincerely need to have their sex changed. And a similar dynamic, ten or twenty years from now, may lead to a huge increase in the numbers of people who go to doctors and ask for a limb or two (or four) to be removed.

As blueheron points out, for those of us who are supportive of sex-change operations for transsexuals, it can be hard to find a reason to oppose amputations for folks with BIID:

That’s pretty much where I stand. The Atlantic article quotes a young woman who plans to have both of her arms cut off. That horrifies me, and yet - assuming she is sane - I cannot see a justifiable reason to not allow her to control her own body. Subjectively, I am horrified by the idea of someone choosing to be crippled; but I realize other people are just as horrified by the idea of someone choosing to change sex. My horror is my own problem, not the problem of someone with BIID.

Objectively I don’t think a life lived without arms is any less important, or potentially any less fulfilling, than a life with arms. So if someone feels they need to have a doctor remove their arms to obtain happiness, on what grounds could I disagree?

Most folks have some “word peeves” - some common use of language that irritates them to no end. What I can’t abide is the word “literally” used to mean “figuratively,” as in “I was literally beside myself in anger.”

What I didn’t realize until recently is that this language atrocity is nothing new; I’m just one of a long line of folks who have been annoyed by “misuse” of literally for generations (literally!). From dictionary.com:

So although I will continue to be annoyed by hearing “literally” used as an intensifier, I cannot claim it’s proof that the English language is being degraded. The language isn’t degrading; it came out of the box this way.

Remember the movie Forty Days and Forty Nights? I didn’t see it, but the premise was that there was something extraordinary about voluntarily going six weeks without having sex. I thought that was completely nuts, but apparently that’s normal thinking among some Americans. It’s certainly the norm on some TV shows I watch, like Friends and Sex and the City and Buffy and Scrubs and - and, well, virtually all of them except for Smallville. Feeling incredibly deprived if you’re not having frequent sex is normal.

So I was reading (via Eve Tushnet) this interview with David Biano, a once-gay writer who has recently decided that he can’t have sex with men anymore, because it contradicts “traditional Jewish observance.” He plans on starting a family with some nice (and apparently yet-to-be-met) Jewish woman, but despite that isn’t signing up with the “ex-gay” movement, thank goodness.

Anyhow, this exchange between Biano and his interviewer struck me:

Q: But what makes you think that this fundamental, core piece of who you are, regardless of how it got there, can be put away and sort of just ignored or not acted on? It’s not like you’re deciding not to eat Big Macs because you know that they’re bad for you. This is something much more central to who we are… This is sex.

A: And I believe that American culture and the gay community have overly glorified sex to the point that it’s expected to be the most important piece of our lives. And historically that never happened before the last couple hundred years. And I don’t accept that it’s natural for us or that it’s what God wants for us. I think it is Western culture that is out of whack, not me.

Although I’m not religious, I think Biano is on to something here. But then again, I’m pretty weird about sex. I mean, I like it. A good orgasm with another human being is astounding; the only experience I’ve had that rivals orgasm with another person for pure intensity is trippits (inhaling nitrous oxide while tripping on LSD).

I love trippits. But y’know, if I never have a trippit again, that’ll be okay by me. (It’s been years since my last one). It’s not the end of the world. It’s not even a big deal. There are better things in life than seeking intense momentary pleasure.

Folks who organize their lives around arranging their next drug trip, or making sure they have a steady supply of drugs, are seen as ludicrous or pathetic. But folks who organize their lives around arranging their next sexual encounter, or securing a steady supply of sexual encounters, are seen as normal. What’s the difference?

There’s a sort of fascism of desire in American society. In much the same way lesbians and gays are told they’re not normal, people who don’t want to have sex all the time - who don’t think sex is a “fundamental, core piece of who you are” - are understood to be weirdos, deviants, freakishly far from the norm. If someone goes to clubs five nights a week hoping to find a sex partner for the night, that’s normal; if someone completely throws over their friends and their goals in order to be more attractive to a steady sex partner, that’s normal; if someone sends letters to strangers who want to get married and said so in a classified ad, that’ s normal; but if someone doesn’t feel any particular need for sex, get them to a psychiatrist!

Not that I’ve got anything against people who want to have sex a lot. Hell, go for it. Have fun.(Although please don’t pretend that you’re being a rebel; nothing in the world is more mainstream and conventional than being interested in sex). I’ve also think personal ads are a good idea (some close friends have vastly improved their lives using the personals), and I’ve got nothing against heavy drug use, or going to clubs five nights a week. I still think that anti-gay groups like the Republican party are, for all their excuses, little more than exercises in legitimizing hatred.

But speaking for myself, I’ll be perfectly happy if I never have sex again. It’s simply not a vital issue in my life. Why should that be weird?

Update: Read as well this excellent post by Blueheron - he’s a much more conventional and ordinary thinker than I am on sexuality (I just said that to get his goat), but he and I think in very similar ways about the value - and devaluation - of deep friendships. “It’s very odd and deeply sad that partnerships (being defined here as close and lasting relationships based on serious friendship and shared common interests) have become so marginal in our society.”

Had an interesting conversation the other night - along the same lines as this post from David’s Journal. David, talking about an episode of ER in which a character lost a limb, asks that set of questions….Would you rather lose an arm than a leg, and so forth. Here’s a sample of some of David’s more male-centric questions:

Would you rather lose both arms or your penis?
That would be a really tough choice, and I’m sure I’d have big problems with depression no matter which I picked. But in the end I’d have to say a fond goodbye to my penis. […]

If you are heterosexual, would you rather have sex with a dog of the opposite sex or a human of your same sex?
Every guy I’ve ever asked this picks the dog. Every woman always picks the person. I’m no exception.

And here’s one I just thought of, that’s actually got me a little stumped:
If you are male, would you rather lose a finger or one of your testicles?
I keep going back and forth.

Reading stuff like this - especially David’s comment that "every guy I’ve ever asked" says the same - makes me feel very alienated from, well, guyhood. I’m sorry, but both arms vs penis is not a tough choice, and neither is finger vs testicle; I’d miss my penis and all (not so much the testicle), but they are outta here! And who on earth would pick the dog? Ewwww….

But anyhow, Bean - who had watched the same episode of ER - brought up an interesting question. How many years of memory would it take, for their loss to feel as great as the loss of a limb? That is, is losing a year of memory as bad as losing a limb? How about ten years of memory? If you had a choice between permanently losing all memory of the first twelve years of your life (although not losing skills gained, like walking or tying shoes), or losing your choice of limb, which would you take?

Halley took an extreme positions - she’d rather lose a limb than a single year of early memories. Her memories, after all, are part of who she is now; losing those memories irrevocably loses who she is. Losing a limb would change her future, but she’d still be herself, just herself with an injury. In her view, those memories are who she is; when asked about what if she lost all her memories in some Gilligan’s-Island-esque accident with a falling coconut, Halley said that the person who’d proceed from that point forward would be someone other than herself.

I took the opposite view - my memories helped mold who I’ve become, but now that I’ve been molded, I can lose memory without changing the essence of who I am. (My decision was made easier by the fact that I have almost no memories from before I was twelve). I’d definitely lose the memories up through my mid-twenties (I’m almost 34 now) before giving up a limb. Blueheron felt the same way.

We also discussed giving up memories of recent years versus memories of early years. The idea of losing recent memories - including more recent friendships and relationships - frightens me (we knew someone this happened to; she had a accident involving head trauma, and when she woke up she had lost a year’s worth of memories, and didn’t know her current friends, why she no longer hung out with her previous friend group, or that she and her boyfriend had broken up months ago). Although I think I’d still be myself without my recent memories, I think I’d be a sad and confused version of myself who would have trouble adjusting. Not unlike what I’d be like if I lost a limb, I suspect.

Halley, surprisingly to me, was blasé about losing recent memories; she felt that her life hasn’t changed much recently, so losing the last five years of memory wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

The conversation then lost focus and wandered in other directions. Blueheron told us about a science-fiction story he had read, in which literature had come to a standstill because people had gained the ability to wipe out their memories, and as a result people simply reread one book - their favorite - over and over again, wiping out the memory of it between each reading. (I can’t decide which book I’d choose - possibly Doomsday Book by Connie Willis - one of many Willis works that refutes Charles Murtaugh, by the way). A few chronic rereaders in the room, me included, objected that you’d lose much of the pleasure of rereading if you didn’t have memories of past readings.

Although I didn’t bring it up, I was reminded of my favorite Kim Stanley Robinson story, the novella Green Mars (not to be confused with his novel of the same name). In the novella, humans have life-extending technology enabling people to live for 800 years or more - but the human brain, it turns out, is only capable holding approximately two hundred years of memory. So although someone may be 500 years old, they can only recall back to around their 300th year - all memory before that point is missing. But there are some people, like Green Mars’ protagonist, who due to a genetic chance have normal memories of their entire lives. In the novella, the protagonist spends time with an ex-lover of his who has, of course, totally forgotten him and their relationship. I’ve reread Green Mars a dozen times, and I always find its depiction of memory fascinating and sad.

UPDATE: I just noticed Blueheron has posted about the same conversation in his journal.

UPDATE II: David has responded to this post.

UPDATE III: Just got this in email, from my friend Tishie.

The comments by bean about that choice were spurred, I believe, by an IM conversation between us. My prof and I made a measure of that for a specific purpose. In our pilot study, we asked people to imagine that they were missing one of their legs. Then we asked them to imagine that they were missing the memories from birth until a certain age, and asked them to indicate the age at which the two things would seem equal in severity. The mean age was 14. So, in college students at BSU, losing a leg is equivalent to losing the memories from birth to age 14. Just thought you might find that interesting.

Wandered in on my partners Sarah and Charles, who were discussing time travel in Connie Willis novels (Connie Willis, for those who have missed out, is the best science fiction novelist currently writing). In Doomsday Book, her best novel, Willis presents a world in which time travel is possible, but the universe - through some unknown mechanism - refuses to allow time travel that would cause paradoxes. And although people can travel from the present to the past and return, they can’t take anything from the past into the future.

In To Say Nothing of the Dog (the very funny sequel to grim-as-an-Idaho-bagel Doomsday Book), Willis develops her time-travel rules further: it turns out that objects can be brought forward in time, just as long as they were about to be lost to history forever, anyway. Kittens who were about to drown; priceless works of art moments away from being destroyed by fire; that sort of thing.

So it turns out that history can be altered; we can subtract, for example, a cat with no problem. But only so long as no one is in a position to ever notice the cat’s absence.

Sarah argued that Willis’ view of time travel was at the least deistic, and probably theistic. The universe isn’t random or arbitrary in what objects it allows to jump forward in time; it will allow such jumps only if it doesn’t cause a problem in human perceptions. This suggests a human-biased watchmaker, doesn’t it? The system decides what time travel is legitimate based on what humans would notice. (That other creatures - for instance, fish that might have found nourishment in an unfortunate cat’s corpse - not to mention the cat itself - have their life-paths altered doesn’t bother whatever’s in charge of time-travel).

Charles came up with an interesting counter-argument, pointing out that Sarah’s case was a bit like arguing that the laws of physics prove that the universe was designed for human life; because if any of those physical laws were even slightly different, human life as we know it could not exist. The problem with that argument is that if the laws of physics worked some other way, then whatever existed under those laws might say the exact same thing.

Looked at this way, Willis’ time travel isn’t necessarily deistic It isn’t that time travel adjusts itself around human perceptions of what is or isn’t an important alteration in the universe’s timeline. Rather, our perceptions of what is and isn’t a significant change are created by the time-travel changes the universe permits. If time-travel made it possible to change who our grandmother was or who won World War Two, then we wouldn’t perceive those things as significant changes; it would seem perfectly normal for the identity of our ancestors to change from moment to moment, just as it’s normal for the sun’s light to increase and then grow dim throughout the day.