24 hours? More like 5 hours with 4 hour breaks in between... or maybe, if I'm lucky, 4 hours with 5 hour breaks in between.
The Summer Solstice 24-hr race in Albion Hills, Ontario is this weekend. Once again I'll be riding with a Clydesdale team. Unlike last year, I do not plan to push it too hard - I will be doing more leisurely 1 hr plus lap times. We probably will not win 1st this year, but if there are only 3 teams registered, like last year, we will probably podium!
With an 80% chance of rain for Saturday, we are probably going to be having a wet and wild time. Oh, how I love getting pumped up for a ride when I'm tired, wet, and muddy!
After that, I will be focusing on weight training. Hopefully, if I pay attention and actually do scheduled workouts, I will break the 220 lbs plateau I've been at for the past 6 months. It is appealingly mindless to just do sets of 10 with the standard exercises.
A mix of commentary, satire, and creative writing, often exploring philosophical and sociopolitical themes with a humorous and critical lens.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Nunavut
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Spent
Spin-off ideas from Geoffrey Miller’s new book…
This book is based in evolutionary psychology, or evolutionary sexual selection psychology. Socializing is beneficial for our survival as human animals, but better for the high status individuals than for the low status ones. So we vie to be high status and have high status offspring – males and females alike, similarly, but differently… Through their real and perceived effects, general traits are amplified over generations through differential mating and survival success. Beauty, health, and fertility are clear and easy to accept examples – it is easy to imagine handsome, healthy, vigorous pre-historic men having more kids than ugly, sickly, infertile men. It is also easy to imagine healthier, more fertile women having more kids. It is only slightly more difficult to image prehistoric men and women who were nicer, more conscientious, more intelligent, more social, and more risk taking had more kids.
In tight, social, tribal communities like the societies humans evolved in, it is easy to be accurately evaluated by everyone in your community. It is not necessary to advertise your qualities in any other way except the way you interact and live your life, and possibly through ornamentation and possessions. The qualities themselves result in more alliances, more friends, and more lovers. Emphasizing and advertising these traits through ornamentation results in more friends and lovers, unless, of course, everyone else is advertising just as much as you… Then you up the ante and result in an arms race – where everyone is striving to seem better than average, or where those that seem better win more friends and lovers. And all of this is done more or less unconsciously through our likings, preferences, urges, wants, and needs and is monitored through our self-esteem, or sense of social worth.
How do you increase your sense of social worth (self-esteem) in a world with virtually no face-to-face interaction with the 10,000 people we see or pass by every day? Through ornamentation and possessions? Can I sell you on the idea that this thing (whatever it may be) will make you stand-out of the crowd as distinctively intelligent, fun, risk taking, or conscientious? Yes, I can. Will you feel better and have a higher self esteem? Yes, probably, but only for a little while because your social status will not really be raised among those who know you – at least not for very long. Those who do not know you do not interact with you enough to affirm your status sense, so you lose confidence in the boost. Unless, of course, the product actually changes the way in which you interact with the people you know, it has no effect on your social worth.
This book is based in evolutionary psychology, or evolutionary sexual selection psychology. Socializing is beneficial for our survival as human animals, but better for the high status individuals than for the low status ones. So we vie to be high status and have high status offspring – males and females alike, similarly, but differently… Through their real and perceived effects, general traits are amplified over generations through differential mating and survival success. Beauty, health, and fertility are clear and easy to accept examples – it is easy to imagine handsome, healthy, vigorous pre-historic men having more kids than ugly, sickly, infertile men. It is also easy to imagine healthier, more fertile women having more kids. It is only slightly more difficult to image prehistoric men and women who were nicer, more conscientious, more intelligent, more social, and more risk taking had more kids.
In tight, social, tribal communities like the societies humans evolved in, it is easy to be accurately evaluated by everyone in your community. It is not necessary to advertise your qualities in any other way except the way you interact and live your life, and possibly through ornamentation and possessions. The qualities themselves result in more alliances, more friends, and more lovers. Emphasizing and advertising these traits through ornamentation results in more friends and lovers, unless, of course, everyone else is advertising just as much as you… Then you up the ante and result in an arms race – where everyone is striving to seem better than average, or where those that seem better win more friends and lovers. And all of this is done more or less unconsciously through our likings, preferences, urges, wants, and needs and is monitored through our self-esteem, or sense of social worth.
How do you increase your sense of social worth (self-esteem) in a world with virtually no face-to-face interaction with the 10,000 people we see or pass by every day? Through ornamentation and possessions? Can I sell you on the idea that this thing (whatever it may be) will make you stand-out of the crowd as distinctively intelligent, fun, risk taking, or conscientious? Yes, I can. Will you feel better and have a higher self esteem? Yes, probably, but only for a little while because your social status will not really be raised among those who know you – at least not for very long. Those who do not know you do not interact with you enough to affirm your status sense, so you lose confidence in the boost. Unless, of course, the product actually changes the way in which you interact with the people you know, it has no effect on your social worth.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
"Of Modern Poetry," Wallace Stevens
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
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