ChatRoulette, if you haven’t heard, is the newest mainstream outlet for people seeking to indulge their desire to be disgusted by their fellow man (or, somewhat less frequently, woman). The concept is simple: it starts a videochat between you and a random stranger, and when one or the other of you disconnects, it finds you someone else. And what you see can sometimes be pretty bizarre. Or, as Sam Anderson puts it in New York Magazine:
There was a man who wore a deer head and opened every conversation with “What up DOE!?” A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers’ portraits. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who’d give him a topic. One man popped up on people’s screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four.
Sadly, spectacles such as these are in reality few and far between. I can say from experience that the vast majority of ChatRoulette interactions fall into one of two categories: either you find yourself connected to another 18-24 guy, also alone, also staring blankly at his computer monitor; or you see a man masturbating. It’s no exaggeration to say that fully half of all people on ChatRoulette at any given time are pleasuring themselves, and most of the other half are trying to avoid them – to the presumable disappointment of both.
Initially, this saddened me. But then I started thinking about these masturbators, sitting alone in darkened rooms and training webcams on their throbbing members. Where did these people come from? Have they heretofore existed in such great number, and if so, how did they satisfy this fetish before ChatRoulette existed? What sort of joy do they take in making their private activities public? It would seem that there are literally tens of thousands of men out there – accountants, programmers, students, waiters – who have a deep-seated need to sexually connect not just with one person but with as many people as humanly possible. Is it fair to judge them after we provide them with the perfect tool to satisfy their desires?
I wanted answers, and I tried to go right to the source – the masturbators themselves. Sadly, they are disinclined to discuss the deeper psychological motivations behind their actions, and after an hour or so of being rejected by various self-fornicators I logged off of ChatRoulette feeling dispirited and vaguely dirty. But I remain that there are interesting sociological factors at work here, even if the avenue for investigating them is unclear.
Since the establishment of the Flickr Commons two years ago, remarkably little attention has been paid to it – which is odd, given its extraordinary breadth and significance. In January 2008, Flickr announced that the Library of Congress would put 3,500 pictures online without copyright or restriction, and invited other institutions to do the same. Neither Flickr nor the Library of Congress, it should be said, had entirely altruistic reasons for doing this – Flickr wanted the extra traffic, and the Library needed help catagorizing and identifying many of its photographs. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that the response – both from users and from other historical institutions – has been vastly more enthusiastic than anybody counted on.
Today, the Flickr Commons hosts historical photos from no fewer than thirty-three institutions, including The Smithsonian, the U.S. National Archives, the Getty Institute, the State Library of New South Wales (from which the above picture, entitled Soldier’s Goodbye & Bobbie The Cat, was taken), and many more. Flickr hopes to double that number by the end of 2010, and while it’s oddly difficult to gauge how many photos are in the Commons, there are certainly tens of thousands now, and there may soon be hundreds of thousands (this in addition to the four billion user-uploaded photos already on the site). Flickr has, almost on the sly, positioned itself as the single greatest cultural achievement of the internet after Wikipedia.
This is interesting both because the Commons are an incredible historical resource (and, speaking from experience, an absorbing way to spend three hours) and because it’s such an incredibly unlikely place for Flickr – a company that has succeeded almost in spite of their best intentions – to find themselves. The entire history of Flickr is one big accident: it was originally developed as an adjunct to a now-forgotten online role-playing game called Game Neverending, whose users found that swapping photos was a more engaging pastime than the game itself. Presumably luckily for everyone involved, Game Neverending was soon shelved and Flickr’s life began in earnest. But all of its primary innovations, from photo-tagging to groups, have been user-driven.
It wasn’t uncommon even in pre-internet days for companies to evolve far away from their original product. IBM originally sold mechanical adding machines and, later, typewriters. Nintendo was originally founded in 1889 and for most of its existence sold hanafuda, an elaborate style of Japanese playing cards; it was only after the company had narrowly avoided bankruptcy by running cab companies and love hotels that they finally invested in an upright arcade game called Donkey Kong. But the speed with which that evolution takes place is definitely accelerating. Flickr went from a vague afterthought to a colossal cultural institution in seven years. Where’s it going to be in 2015?
I’ve been listening to The Avett Brothers compulsively for the last month or so, and in that time I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about their music that appeals to me so. They’re talented but not extraordinary instrumentalists. They sing reasonably well. As lyricists they hew more to direct-but-plain than elegant-but-complex – more Pete Seeger than Joanna Newsom, if you will – and they’re not above using the cliche to their own advantage.
Yet for all that, their songs are remarkably moving, to a degree that borders on manipulative. Their albums veer from emotional peak to trough with a speed that seems frankly ill-advised, jubilant one moment and sobbing the next but never anything less than unabashedly sentimental. They’re the band that Pitchfork hates to love. And there’s something very impressive about a band that can move from a meditation on family to an exquisite love song to fierce expression of self-loathing with equal skill and faculty.
“Murder In The City” is from their EP The Second Gleam. “January Wedding” is from their brand-new record I And Love And You. “Shame” is from their 2008 album Emotionalism.
It’s true that The Avett Brothers aren’t doing anything markedly different than what country music – or folk music, or alt-country, or any other genre that relies on guitars and fiddles and earnestness – has been doing for the last fifty years: drawing upon a reservoir of common stories, of heartbreak and joy and disillusionment and guilt, and telling those stories in a way that seems at once specific and universal. It’s why Don Williams or Dolly Parton can sell out 80,000 seats in Zimbabwe and have everyone in the stadium singing along.
There’s something very appealing about this kind of naked emotion, because that’s how our emotions feel, to us: they’re keening things, personal and unignorable and absolutely immune to reason. No knowledge of how small our sufferings are can make them seem any less painful to us. And artists like The Avett Brothers tell us that’s okay – that reveling in our joy and drowning in our sorrow isn’t only normal but right. “I hope that I don’t sound to insane when I say / There is darkness all around us / I don’t feel weak but I do need sometimes for her to protect me,” they sing on “January Wedding”, and I, whose life has admittedly been pretty blessed, can sing along and feel the truth. And therein lies the power.
One of the most surprisingly absorbing blogs out there is OkTrends, the official blog of the dating site OkCupid, which is apparently run by a bunch of math geeks. They spend what must be a jaw-dropping amount of time mining their databases for answers to questions like where do people shower the least (hello, Oregon!), what kind of profile picture is most likely to generate male responses (surprisingly, the MySpace shot; unsurprisingly, the cleavage shot), and how to write a successful first message to a prospective date (be literate).
In their most recent blog post, they highlight the apparent dichotomy that though relatively older women (in their 30s and 40s) often score as attractive and have more enlightened attitudes about things like casual sex and STD testing, the vast majority of men prefer to date women younger than themselves.
A man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age. The median 31 year-old guy, for example, sets his allowable match age range from 22 to 35—nine years younger, but only four years older, than himself. This skewed mindset worsens with age; the median 42 year-old will accept a woman up to fifteen years younger, but no more than three years older.
In the comments, a number of people point out the obvious (though debatable) corollary to the OkCupid findings: many older women aren’t interested in dating younger men, especially men in their early-twenties.
The trend that the OkCupid guys are noticing here is actually a much-studied sociological phenomenon called marital hypergamy. It’s most commonly seen in societies with very strong castes in their social system, but it’s observable, to one degree or another, in most modern cultures. Basically, in general, men are willing do marry women of their own social caste or lower, while women are generally only willing to marry in their own social caste or higher. With all the men marrying up and the women marrying down, two lonely strata are created: a large pool of men at the bottom, and a small number of women at the top. Neither of these groups have the luxury of looking outside their social strata for mates.
OkCupid in particular has what I would imagine to be a relatively homogeneous middle-class user base – that is, relatively few people on it are very rich or very poor. Given that, in the United States, there are few ways other than money to recognize social status, I think it’s clear that the hypergamy is broadly manifesting itself in dating ages.
I first learned about marital hypergamy in my Introduction to Sociology class my freshman year at NYU, and it was responsible for perhaps the most profound epiphany of my college years. The epiphany was this: hypergamy is completely applicable to the social structure of most American high schools.
Consider! High schools are organized into extremely strict social strata with a number of observable trends. Freshman and sophomore girls very often date junior or senior boys. But the reverse is uncommon – freshman or sophomore boys hardly ever date junior or senior girls. Older girls tend to date other seniors, college students, or the recently-graduated. And at the bottom are a large pool of younger males who can’t find anyone to date them, except junior high students, which even at that age strikes everyone else as a little creepy.
For a few moments after this all hit me I was struck dumb, but then I raised my hand and, when called on, excitedly related my theory to the professor. Unfortunately, my three-hundred-person intro class was taught by an aging, somewhat-deaf man named Gerald Marwell – quite the luminary in his field, and very knowledgeable, but unused to sudden interruptions from excited students. “No, young man,” he said, “you’ve misunderstood me. I was talking about early-twentieth century Japan. You see…” And he turned back around to the board and continued with his lecture.
The observation has nevertheless stuck with me, and I’m almost absurdly pleased that OkCupid has given me the opportunity to brag about it in a public forum.
The big news this week is, of course, the rollout of Google Buzz – the not-quite-Twitter, not-quite-Facebook tool that Google hopes will replace both. This isn’t an area in which Google has had a great deal of success – Orkut, their only other social-networking service, has caught on in India and Brazil but virtually nowhere else – and since Google has gobbled up large sections of the email, online video, and advertising sectors, it makes sense that they’d turn their gaze to social networking next.
The debut was not, as they say, an unqualified success. Many users were unprepared for the rather cavalier way that Google bandied about the email addresses of their friends and family. Others wondered why service existed in the first place. It generates entirely too many emails, especially for a service so closely tied to Gmail. And it doesn’t seem to offer much, at this point, that Twitter or Facebook doesn’t already.
I’ve been using Buzz for two days now, and at this point Google’s decision to marry it so tightly to Gmail seems a misstep. By and large, most people don’t use email to keep in touch with their friends and family; they use it for more pedestrian communication. So when I started up Buzz, sure, it imported my friend’s emails – but I also found that I was automatically following three people who had recently inquired about a room I was subletting, and the admissions officer at a large New England university. (Worse, these people were following me!) By contrast, on Twitter I follow people like Nathan Fillion and the FakeAPStylebook – with whom I have never, and sadly will never, exchange any sort of correspondence.
So though I won’t deny that Buzz is kinda fun, it’s tough to imagine it totally replacing Twitter or Facebook. However – they say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I don’t think that’s quite true; generally, things get invented accidentally, and a good use for them is found later. The inventor of the Slinky, Clay Watson, was busily engaged in developing a spring that would help stabilize the payload of ships; it wasn’t until he knocked one of his working models off the workbench and watched as it skittered away that its potential as a toy occurred to him. Likewise, the inventors of Twitter never dreamed it would be used to coordinate protests in Iran. And it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if a use for Buzz develops that isn’t immediately clear, and in eighteen months we can’t imagine how we ever lived without it.
I stumbled upon this article in Archaeology magazine about the ethics and science of cloning a Neanderthal, and at first I dismissed the idea – both because it’s not going to happen, and because it’s a terrible idea. I’m not even sure quite what the point would be. True, we do have lots of questions about Neanderthal speech, culture, and mental capacities – but how many of those questions would really be answered by recreating a single individual? We know that Neanderthals had rituals. We know they learned from one another. We know they used tools. Bereft of cultural context, a single clone wouldn’t tell us anything; it would be merely a squat Billy Pilgrim.
However, the plan to incubate a Neanderthal baby inside a human mother is eerily similar to the premise of Mark Canter’s little-remembered novel Ember From The Sun, in which an Alaskan scientist finds a pregnant Neanderthal frozen in a glacier and transplants her embryo into a modern-day human. When the Neanderthal baby is born, she is basically a super-human: she can put together jigsaw puzzles that have been spray-painted black; she’s an incredible baseball player; and eventually she has to save her frozen ancestors from destruction by some kind of evil gold-mining company.
Ember From The Sun was a book that I loved as a kid – I probably read it eight or ten times – but when I revisited it a year or two ago I found, to my dismay, that it’s actually pretty bad. Ember’s character is reasonably well-developed, but the characters around her act in awkward and obviously plot-dictated ways. The writing is insipid. Ember is superior to the humans around her in basically every way, and Canter’s answer to the uncomfortable question this raises – how, exactly, did the weak humans manage to wipe out the other species? – is that the Neanderthals had psychic powers that prevented them from waging war. (Seriously. If I remember correctly, Ember can actually remember things that happened to her frozen biological mother.)
I’ve had this experience before, where I’ve returned to a cherished childhood work of art – Terry Pratchett’s entire bibliography, Pippi Longstockings, the movie Sphere - only to discover that it doesn’t hold up to my recollection. Who among us hasn’t felt that sinking feeling upon realizing, after having excitedly recommended a beloved childhood movie, that everyone else watching is laughing at you inside? (My good friend Julia never quite lived down the time she insisted to me that The Goofy Movie was a towering cinematic achievement.)
My response to this, naturally, is to treat any opinion I formed before the age of twenty as deeply suspect. I may not be working in film right now, but it was during my time at NYU that I remember first thinking seriously, and critically, about the media I consume. And I like to think that, while I may like bad things now, at least I can explain why I like them, and acknowledge their flaws. Thinking critically is a learned skill, and part of the reason that I keep this blog is to practice.
But – sometimes, I am afraid. Afraid that I still haven’t learned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Afraid that I’ll look back at this blog and say, Really? I recommended THAT? What was I thinking? Maybe that won’t happen. Or maybe that would be a good thing – maybe my taste should be something that evolves with me as I age. But I hope not. I’d like to have as few Ember From The Sun’s in my life as possible.
Never would have thought that Qatar would lead the pack. Now I would like to see energy per capita for renewable and non-renewable sources.
And I thought, that would be really interesting! The closest I was able to find was this graph of the renewable power capacities for various countries in 2008. It comes from the Renewables Global Status Report, which is put out by the Renewable Energy Policy Network (link will open in a PDF).
(Note: I have no idea why the graph excludes large hydrpower – I wasn’t able to find an explanation for that in the report. The only I have is that since large-scale dams have such a negative environmental impact, groups like the REPN don’t like to promote their expansion. But it still seems pretty strange.)
Obviously, the numbers on this graph are unprocessed, and it doesn’t tell us too much about the adjusted per capita capacity of any of these top countries. So I grabbed some population statistics from Wolfram Alpha, brought all the data into Excel, and came out with this:
This isn’t the most sophisticated graph, but my experience with statistics is limited and all I really wanted was a visual representation of what the last graph was already telling us. And as we can see, though Spain and Germany trail in total renewable energy capacity, they are actually providing proportionally more renewable energy for their comparatively modest populations. China and India, on the other hand, are burdened with such massive populations that they’re actually underperforming on a per-capita basis, while Japan and the United States are somewhere in the middle.
Regardless of how we’re doing relative to other countries, the United States continues to rely on nonrenewable energy sources for the vast majority of our power – of the 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy we used last year, only 7.3% were generated by renewable sources. The Renewables Global Status Report does contain glimmers of hope, though, noting that “a signifi- cant milestone was reached in 2008 when added power capacity from renewables in both the United States and the European Union exceeded added power capacity from conventional power (including gas, coal, oil, and nuclear). That is, renewables represented more than 50 percent of total added capacity.” So, I guess we’re working on it.
Like most American indie-rock fans, my knowledge of “Buckie” was derived entirely from Ted Leo’s song “A Bottle of Buckie”, and was limited to knowing that a) it’s some kind of Scottish drink and b) it sounds like a romantic thing to look back having drunk with your significant other.
I was surprised, then, to stumble across an article in the international version of the New York Timesabout the scourge of Scotland that is, apparently, Buckfast Tonic Wine – a highly caffeinated sweet-wine drink that has been increasingly identified as a contributing factor (if not a cause) of many crimes.
In a survey last year of 172 prisoners at a young offenders’ institution, 43 percent of the 117 people who drank alcohol before committing their crimes said they had drunk Buckfast. In a study of litter in a typical housing project, 35 percent of the items identified were Buckfast bottles. And the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC program that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle was used as a weapon in 114 of them).
The report suggests that modern Scotland (and Ted Leo, apparently) has a distressingly low standard when it comes to alcoholic drinks. Buckie is 15% alcohol-by-volume – more than double that of Sparks, the now-banned US alcoholic energy drink, though the two have comparable caffeine levels. The taste of Buckie is described in the article as being like “a thick sweet wine – sherry, perhaps – fortified with cola.” I had Sparks once and it was unspeakably foul. I can only imagine what this stuff must taste like – battery acid, perhaps, or a container of yogurt that has been allowed to fester months past its expiration date.
(At this point in writing it occurs to me that I might very well be from the nation that gave the world Jäger bombs, and that I should perhaps revise my remarks about Scotland’s collective palate. However, while I couldn’t find specific information on the history of Jäger bombs, I think it’s safe to assume that the combination became popular first in Germany and then spread out from there. Also, the Wikipedia article on Jägermeister contains this line: “Contrary to an urban legend, it does not contain deer or elk blood.” Good?)
Second, I hope that articles likethis one help lay to rest the idea – articulated in print in innumerableplaces, and supported anecdotally by a number of conversations I’ve been involved in – that Europe as a whole has a somehow more enlightened attitude toward drinking than the United States does. Binge drinking is a problem everywhere. Alcoholism is a problem everywhere. And articles like this are why I find the letting-kids-drink-earlier argument for solving underage binge drinking thoroughly unconvincing.
Qatar’s status as an extreme outlier is mostly due to a high prevalence of energy-intensive refining processes, such as water desalination and natural gas processing. 80% of their population also lives in the capital city of Doha, which doesn’t exactly look like the most energy-efficient city in the world, either:
The more important lesson to take away from the above graph, though, is indeed about the United States. Our energy use relative to other developed countries should firmly lay to rest the idea that we use a reasonable amount of energy given our lifestyles. Our standard of living is very comparable to, say, France or Japan – they also have houses full of refrigerators and televisions and air conditioners and the like – but our energy expenditures are vastly higher. Some of that is undoubtedly due to industry, but a lot of it – more than we’d like to admit – is due to our own wasteful natures.
Of course, reinforcing that is the obvious fact – visually illustrated above – that the vast majority of the world’s population lives on a tiny fraction of the energy that we do.
(Graph is from The Economist. Photo is from Flickr user Tophee, used under Creative Commons.)
While researching the last post, I found out something very odd about the Purple Heart:
During World War II, nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the estimated casualties resulting from the planned Allied invasion of Japan. To the present date, all the American military casualties of the sixty-five years following the end of World War II — including the Korean and Vietnam Wars — have not exceeded that number. In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock. There are so many in surplus that combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan and United States are able to keep Purple Hearts on-hand for immediate award to wounded soldiers on the field.
Call me nostalgic, but I think there’s something very powerful about a soldier wounded today being given a medal manufactured sixty-five years ago, in the midst of the last armed conflict that America truly believed in. Don’t get me wrong: I know there’s a lot of World War II romanticism out there, and that a lot of it is misplaced. But it’s powerful all the same.
