It should be obvious to any friends or family who check out this site, that I hardly ever write anything new here. Partly, it’s because I’m busy. It’s also because I have other sites where I blog. These are:
CarlThoren.com: Where I occasionally post items related to my professional and public work
Expat American: My newest project. A blog and website to provide new, tips, advice, and information to Americans living overseas. This is where most of my non-DomainWerx blogging will be.
As you can see, my focus is on business building, rather than on writing my personal opinions and experiences. I might write something here on Spaghetti Warrior now and then, if I’ve got something I’ve just got to get off my chest and it doesn’t fit into the professional or expat categories, but that won’t be often, I would guess.
Please subscribe to the other blogs if you’re interested in them.
Okay, don’t get upset. I take all those “studies” with a healthy grain of salt, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a conservatives are smarter study is out there too. And god knows, there are plenty of conservatives who are smarter than me. I know some of them, so I know they’re smarter than me.
Still, I couldn’t help but enjoy this National Geographic article. You will too if you’re a liberal person who has always had the sneaky suspicion that more liberal people tend to be more intelligent.
Kanazawa’s theory is that intelligence—particularly our ability for on-the-spot problem solving and reasoning—arose as an adaptation to deal with the unusual and unexpected, such as a sudden forest fire.
Since disasters like that are rare in daily life, responding to them wouldn’t likely be something our ancestors were hard-wired to “know” how to do. Surviving the fire required both the ability to think up a new behavior, and the willingness to try it out.
Passed down via genetics, those two traits are still the calling cards of an intelligent brain—expressed as a tendency toward adopting nontraditional social values and preferences, Kanazawa says in his new study, published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.
As a result of their iconoclastic ancestry, he suggests, people with higher levels of intelligence are more likely to adopt social values and behaviors that are relatively new to human life—liberalism, atheism, staying up late, and (for men) monogamy, for example.
This tendency toward iconoclasm stems from smart people’s brains being better adapted to dealing with new situations, according to Kanazawa.
But the difference is only 11 IQ points, alas. And there are plenty of reasons to find the study and theory faulty. But you might get a kick out of it — and it’ll help you deal with all the stupid things the tea baggers and our current crop of “conservatives” say and do. They’re just not evolved enough, the poor things. You knew that, didn’t you?
Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.
It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills…
A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.
This all struck a chord with me because I’ve always had the feeling that I’m the kind of person who would thrive in a hunter-gatherer society. I’m a hunter, by nature. I’d be great at patiently tracking animals in the forest and interpreting all the signs of nature. I have amazing focus — for a short time. Then I get interested in something else. And I can sit and stare into space for long periods of time.
I guess these are great qualities to have in a hunter-gatherer society. They’re a constant struggle in a farming-based civilization.
CL and I went over to her parent’s apartment last night for dinner and I found my father-in-law hobbling around, obviously in pain. It turns out he has gout. His right foot is swollen and looks like one hideous bruise. It’s not the first time he’s had it either, and it seems to be an ongoing problem for him.
I was stunned. I think of gout as something that people got in Dickens novels. I didn’t think anyone got gout anymore, yet here was Chen Long’s dad, limping around with gout of all things.
Later, I checked on Wikipedia, and their article on gout says that only about 1% of the people in Western countries get gout anymore. It’s also easy to treat, so no wonder I think of gout as non-existent.
Maybe I’m making an inappropriate leap here, but I think anyone who views China as a wealthy superpower might want to reflect on what it means that an educated man who is better off and better connected than at least 90% of his fellow citizens is nevertheless suffering from a disease like gout. Even with the US’s dysfunctional healthcare system, this would be a fairly cheap and easy disease to treat.
One of the most fascinating insights of both modern science and Buddhism, is that what we call “I” doesn’t really exist. Sure, we always feel like one single, solid individual — but we are far from it. There’s just a part of our brain which makes us feel that way.
And our bodies, which always feel like ours, are actually populous ecosystems all by themselves. We can’t even function well without the other beings that live within us.
My personal example: Over a year ago, I discovered probiotics and started taking them — two pills a day, each pill containing billions of intestinal bacteria. My digestive system improved dramatically. Eating at teahouses in Nepal? No problem. I had almost no difficulties in either China or Nepal. Just a few minor incidents (like in Hongcun, where the water comes from little channels running through the town, in which everyone washes clothes and cleans dishes).
Then a couple months ago, I ran out.
Nothing happened at first, but as time went on, I had more and more difficulties. I started having a hard time digesting the spicy food. Until one night I was really sick and kept getting up to go to the toilet… I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say it was really unpleasant.
The next day, I found an Acidopholus formula at an expensive grocery store in a mall that caters to Westerners. Only a billion or two acidophulus bacteria in every dose, but it did the job. A day later, I was all well and my stomach felt solid and good again.
Now I know that I am not really “I.” My stomach taught me. “I” am one part “Carl” and at least a billion other parts bacteria. If those bacteria are not happy, or aren’t the right kinds of bacteria, then “I” am one miserable creature.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Aristotle and The Buddha, it’s that happiness is an activity, a continual process.
It’s like health. You don’t just become fit and then never have to work at it again. No, you have to eat right every day, always try to get enough sleep, and continually avoid whatever might cause you harm.
Happiness operates the same way; it requires daily effort. Our mistake is imagining that it’s a stable place where we’ll live permanently — if only we pay off our debts, find a partner, take a vacation, get a new job, or otherwise alter whatever bedevils us. But it doesn’t work that way.
I’m purposely avoiding the issue of what happiness is, in order to make this point. I just see this as a common mistake in myself and others.
In response to a post by Leo Babuta on his blog Zen Habits, I wrote this reply which sums up my thoughts on the healthiness of Chinese eating habits:
I’m living in China now, and I can say that it’s very similar here. Most people are thin. But the interesting thing is that the Chinese love to eat fatty meat — and they cook with a lot of oil. They hate to exercise. Plus, they eat all the time. But most of them are slim, all the same.
I think several things work together to keep people slim here: 1) People eat an ENORMOUS amount of fruit and vegetables, of all kinds. I’m pretty sure that I eat more vegetables in one meal, of a wide variety, than my fellow Americans do in several days. And it’s normal to eat many kinds of seasonal fruit throughout the day. Nuts are a favorite snack. 2) Though they eat fatty meat, the quantity is small. It’s more like flavoring. 3) The oil is vegetable oil high in the good cholesterol. 4) Since fat makes you feel full, you tend to eat less. 5) Portion control: small bowls, and everyone shares the main dishes and takes small bites with their chopsticks. The way “foreigners” spoon out a serving into their bowl, or onto their plate, is seen as very gauche, rude, and selfish. 6) Because of the way they eat, they eat slowly, which is good for digestion and leads to feeling full before eating too much. 7) Though few people exercise, they do walk much more than most Americans do.
When I lived in the States, I did yoga twice a week, ate healthy food (at least I thought so) and walked about an hour and a half a day — but I still had trouble with my weight. Here, I eat like the Chinese do (mostly), and rarely do any exercise except walking. Yet I’m definitely thinner (and healthier, too: I almost never get colds now).
Xinjiang (the “x” is pronounced “sh”) is China’s large, western-most province. It’s a muslim area, and like Tibet, it’s populated by a non-Han Chinese people who would like more autonomy from the central government.
But I don’t want to get into that. I just want to tell you about the food. For Westerners, Xinjiang food is one of the most accessible and liked kinds of Chinese cuisine. It’s flour based, with lots of bread and pasta, uses tomato sauce, and has a lot of meat in it. It’s vaguely Arabic, with maybe some Indian & Pakastani influences (the bread is even called naan). Han Chinese consider it an exotic cuisine for the very same reasons Westerners find it so familiar.
Last night, CL and I went to a Xinjiang restaurant that’s across the street from the new US embassy. I didn’t have my camera, so I can only show you the take-out (I really need to work on my food photography skills!).
Going clockwise from the lower left, the photo shows naan bread, Da Pan Ji, cabbage with pepper, and a pasta dish that is very Italian tasting. Da Pan Ji simply means Big Plate of Chicken, and is one of the classic Xinjiang dishes. It’s kind of what the name says, but it also comes with potatoes, vegetables, and fat noodles. The cabbage dish was very spicy-hot and loaded with an incredible number of Sichuan peppers. I loved it.
The photo also shows what real Chinese take-out looks like, in case you ever wondered. And no, they don’t have fortune cookies… in fact, Chinese people have never heard of them. That’s because fortune cookies were invented by the Japanese, in San Francisco.
On the heels of its successful rainmaking venture earlier in the week, the Beijing Weather Modification Command Center has shot an additional “500 cigarette-size sticks of silver iodide” from “28 weather rocket-launch bases” into the clouds over the past few days to help create this week’s snowfall, the most the city has seen in a number of years. The artificially induced precipitation is intended to quell the region’s ongoing drought, but also led to the closure of 12 highways around the capital.
I thought I’d see a lot of snow this winter, but it turns out that Beijing winters are dry and sunny. The past couple days has brought the only snow I’ve seen — and it was created artificially. Still, we really need the water here. Northern China is going through a serious drought.
