animal maps

Today's post is just a couple of simple geographic observations I made as a kid that I never really heard anyone else make. I lived within a few hundred yards of Lake Superior between the years when I was five and when I was seven and I have always had a strong interest in maps. As a result, I have seen images of the Great Lakes quite frequently throughout my life. As long as I can remember I have seen some sort of cross between a shark with arms and a genii. I have heard people refer to Lake Superior as a wolf head, but it looks more like a genii/shark hybrid head to me.Just like the animal I have seen in the shape of the Great Lakes, I have always seen an elephant in the shape of the lower forty-eight states of the United States. New England is the trunk, Florida is a front leg, Texas is the back leg, and it is in the process of simultaneously sitting down and raising its trunk.So, what do you think? What do you see in these maps? Am I nuts for seeing what I see? Am I deaf for not ever hearing anyone make that observation before? Am I a nerd to get such a kick out of this?

to cure or not to cure

I have noted before that I have self-diagnosed protanopia color-blindness. Everything I have read or heard about colorblindness to this point has always emphasized that it is completely untreatable as well. I have never really seen (pun not intended but not avoided, either) this as a big deal. Since I have no clue what I am missing and there has been absolutely no possibility of my experiencing that which I have been missing, I haven't put a lot of thought into possible treatments. Apparently, through the wonders of medical science, I may actually have a possibility of experiencing real colors some time in the future.

I heard a story yesterday about a recently published study where researchers from the University of Washington were able to get two color-blind squirrel monkeys to differentiate reds and greens by injecting them with a virus containing the gene that is deficient in color-blind humans and all squirrel monkeys (story here and here). According to the reports the results took several weeks, but the are still able to see colors two years later.

At this point I am not sure how excited I should be. If this actually turns into a treatment, which I cannot imagine that it would not some time in the future, the question I would have is whether it is worth going through a procedure to fix my color-blindness. It probably would not be a horribly invasive procedure, but I would imagine it would at least initially be relatively expensive.

In college we had representatives of a deaf organization visit one of my classes and I was struck by what one of them noted about her condition. This is just a rough summary, but she said that if she had the choice she would still not choose to get her hearing back because being deaf was who she was. Obviously, deafness is far more impactful on a person's life than color-blindness, so that contrast in my mind does make getting my color-blindness addressed seem a bit more trite.

I can imagine a few valid reasons for having the procedure done. First, if I were ever in my life to consider a career change, it would open a lot more doors. Also, it would help to be able to differentiate colors when people use them to describe people or things (e.g. "Do you see that guy in the red jacket?"). Another consideration is that, since I already know what it is like to be color-blind, I think I would like to know what it is like to have normal vision. I am sure that there is some part of being able to see all of the visible spectrum that would add some unexpected value to my quality of life.

All of that said, I cannot imagine spending a large sum of money on something like this unless I could come up with a good rational reason why seeing a few extra colors is worth the expense. I would not hold back because due to some sense of self-identification with being color-blind, but I would hold back due to valuing other things for which I could use the money over the ability to differentiate a few extra colors. I might also have some concern about potential side effects for a procedure that impacts such an important area of the body.

So, some day in the years ahead I will probably get to decide whether I want to change the way I see the world. At that time I will have to determine if it is really worth it. It wouldn't be a surprise if I decided it wasn't.

a mind of violence

Just as a warning, this post is a relatively frank assessment of one specific part of the male mind as I see it. The content, other than possibly being blunt, is merely PG in nature. Also, since my mind is male, I feel that I am far more qualified to write on that than something on the female mind. While I am not explicitly requesting this from anyone, I would love to hear assessments from other people on how they believe the minds of people of their gender work.

A lot is made of the focus of sex in the male brain. Not nearly as much is made of the focus of violence. While it may be true that the male brain is more wired for sex than violence, I am not currently convinced that this is the case. I think the drive for violence is more easily masked and diverted than the drive for sex and that is why many diminish the important of violence in the male mind.

First is the most obvious type of mental violence which makes it the easiest to mask. My experience has been that I imagine out violent scenarios to situations quite frequently, and I believe this is something that is common to most or even all other men. This is something that has always been with me, meaning I did not learn it from watching TV and movies, and I do not believe I am alone in this given the content of most action films and comic books. Given how opposed I am to offensive physical violence, that I continue to experience this should carry some significance. This maskable violent imagery is only the most straightforward element of violence in the male mind, though. Just because I imagine violence doesn't mean that anyone has to know about it, but there are other telltale signs of violence in men's minds.

Diverted violence is generally related to a focus or interest in warfare and the elements of warfare and dystopian survival. My observation has been that even many of the most pacifist men have interests of which the appeal is largely due to the similarity to some element of warfare. This can take the form of sports, video games, and business, among other things. For example, football is just a proxy for the actions on a battlefield. It is less obvious than gladiatorial fights were, but all of the symbolic stuff is there. Violence in video games is almost redundant, but even most games that are not violent involve vanquishing a foe. Games that do not involve this are usually designed as crossover games to appeal to women. Finally, the business world is almost entirely structured to be a battle zone. The strong and those supported by the strong (meaning government-supported entities) survive largely by ripping the competition to shreds (I just got a violent mental visualization about that).

Dystopian survival mentality is sort of related to warfare mentality in that my male mind is wired to accept that every once in a while society will destroy itself through warfare and a group of people will have to survive the wilds after it is gone. This is not without some truth. At any given point in time through history there are regions of the world where this is reality. I am not an outdoor sportsman and I do not even own a gun, but I can say that they have some appeal because they would come with the knowledge that I could hunt and fish to provide for my family and shoot to protect my family if society disintegrated.

Since God made most men this way I do not think there is anything naturally evil or wrong about the violence drive as I have described it in the same way that there is nothing naturally evil about the sex drive. The wrongness occurs when the drive for violence goes unchecked and manifests itself destructively. Where that point is where the drive is unchecked is for God to know. I just have to be sure not to reach that point.

what it's worth

A few months ago something that was popular with a lot of my Facebook friends was making a point that they would not use Facebook if they had to pay for the service. That's fine. It's their prerogative. It doesn't make much sense to me, though.

I am intrigued by how people value different products and services they buy and use. I have heard of studies (too lazy to look them up right now) that establish that people really have almost no means of independently valuing things, so most people use cues from the less rational areas of the brain to value them. That is why people can value two identical pieces of clothing very differently because they have different labels and why people really thought that hugely inflated house prices from a few years ago were reasonable. People used social cues to value things because the rational cues are lacking.

Going back to Facebook, I think that I would pay for the service so long as the people with whom I cared about keeping in touch also continued to use the service. My position on this should carry some weight because I definitely can be a bit stingy. Facebook certainly has a value to me, and actually much more than some of the other services that I already pay money for. For example, we still get the Kansas City Star on weekends, but I read Facebook much more than I read the Star (I know, I know, I can get news online for free for now, but that's an issue for another post).

My impression is that there are a lot of people who will spend $200 on a cell phone and $100 a month on a data plan to connect to Facebook, among other websites, but they expect that those sites will provide their services for free with minimal advertising and put up a stink at a mere unsubstantiated hint that things could go that way. For now I do not think that Facebook and most other websites can afford the loss of goodwill to make their services paid. Maybe that can last forever and maybe it cannot. Time will tell.

magnetism and stupidity

This summer I have been watching Warehouse 13 and old episodes of Sliders. Of the two Warehouse 13 is easily the more well-written but both have some serious plot-development and believability issues, even for science fiction. The problem is that I know that without some of those plot issues there really wouldn't be good storyline to follow. So, do I gripe about it or accept it for what it is? I am still working out what standard to use for what is sloppy storytelling and what is just me nitpicking.

As one example that I have seen repeated many times in TV and the movies, including the usually very well-written Lost last season, the last episode of Warehouse 13 had a scene where a character was wearing a magnetic coat and metallic objects slowly inched their way toward her before flying at her. Anyone who has played around with magnets for more than five minutes knows, though, that the region of space between where an object will not move toward a magnet and where it will move very quickly is small. Metallic objects do not visibly inch toward magnets. They either stay still or they move very quickly.

The magnet thing is just something that irritates my geeky side. I know that most people would not care. Something that is a bit less geeky that gets at me, though, is when characters behave in unrealistically stupid ways just to move the plot along. In Sliders the concept is that the main characters move from dimension to dimension seeing alternate worlds. No matter how many times they run into situations that are far different than they appear on the surface throughout the series at least one character will make serious assumptions based on the face value of a situation and do something stupid as a result in each episode. Somehow the characters have forgotten everything they learned in their experiences in the previous umpteen dimensions that they visited.

Since I generally life science fiction I should probably just buck it up to some extent. If I can accept the premise of a show that is about jumping dimensions or about collecting artifacts that have almost magical behavior, then I probably should not get too bothered if the magnets in that story don't behave like I expect them to.