Slow and steady wins the race. - Aesop

I will have my Associates in Arts general transfer in December. After that, I'm back to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I'm fond of English, History, Anthropology, and Political Science, so it'll be interesting to see where I narrow it down to. I dropped out of Hotel Administration in Las Vegas after working at the Hard Rock Hotel/Casino.

Great poll. *quality

>> ^Xaielao:
And beyond that, the whole idea of a family as we know it today originated only about 60 years ago, and the entire idea of marriage as we know it today in the US barely more than 100 years old. The human species isn't designed to have one mate for life and for most of our existence such an idea was preposterous in most parts of the world.


I'm sympathetic to what you're saying but this seems to be going a bit far. Monogamy and marriage are both concepts that go back much further than the last 100 years. I think the better point is to show that this isn't the only way humans choose to live. What little anthropological data I've seen on the subject suggests that humans tend to organize into polygamous marriage or at least serial monogamy.

My point is that fighting against people saying that same sex marriage is unnatural by trying to make the case that the traditional monogamous marriage is unnatural is going farther than I think the logic can take you.

I majored in anthropology for a year in university, and you couldn't pay me to watch a Paul Bettany movie about Charles Darwin.

Mmm... I have a new found interest in anthropology.

Yea bet you guys didn't know elephants have prehensile penises! Its true! Ohh all the things you learn from Anthropology classes, that have nothing to do with humans....

>> ^rottenseed:
>> ^rasch187:
"Shave and get drunk because you're already brilliant!"
That's gonna be the title of my autobiography

Are you sure? Are you sure it's not gonna be titled "A long and boring life on the internet"?
(cuz if not I'm takin' it)


Actually, "A long and boring life on the internet; Social anthropology in cyberspace" is the book I'm currently writing while working undercover. My tentative conclusion is 'They're all social misfits and losers'.

ps. be sure not to tell this to any of these social misfits and losers before it's published.

dont feel that way..silly.
i teach "elective" cultural religious history and comparative religions.
more from a metaphysical rather than anthropological point of view.i am willing to bet you could teach me a thing or two,what good is being a teacher if you cant learn?
my classes are in six week blocks,each block i cover something new.my next class is going to be covering "the book of urantia"
http://www.urantia.org/
it has been a monster for me so far,and i waste far too much time on the sift.
i dont subscribe to any religion myself,study religious doctrine long enough and you wont either,but when you take doctrine and dogma away almost all religions have a similar commonality.
my definition from a metaphysical standpoint is:
any belief system that has inherently scripturally based doctrine or dogma that is culturally based.with practices,rituals,rights of holy passage and sacred texts.
which is almost all of the 4500 religions on the planet,but not everyone subscribes to them.
i will definately check that book out,any new information to learn is a good thing.
many thanks my friend.
till next time.
namaste.

In reply to this comment by enoch:
In reply to this comment by Desviada:
>> ^enoch:
what about the deists?
everybody is so worried about the atheist and the theist,but what about the deists?
ya know what?
i dont really care,cuz if you dont chew big red then FUCK YOU!


I care about deists! I also like animism. Both are belief systems that I find attractive and non harmful to society (such as imposing one's morals on others, or fundamentalist-driven wars). I believe quite a few of the USA's founding fathers were deists, and if the lyrics of Pocahontas's song from the Disney movie are any indicator, the Native Americans were animists ;-) I do think both belief systems should get more recognition. The problem is defining religion in the first place. There really is no line between certain religions, philosophies, and belief systems. So, imho, there are actually many more atheists in the world currently, and historically, than people realize.

Honestly, I'd rather have this conversation in a classroom, or drunk, or both.
i was bein a smart ass,and i wanted to use that awesome line from tallidega nights.
there actually is a definition of religion,which i have posted..and it got me nowhere.i think people conflate certain properties much too easily concerning theism and deism.
you are correct about america's forefathers being mainly deists..also freemasons.native americans have an incredible array of belief systems concerning the great spirit.
i loved the video you posted =)

Hmm . . . yeah, I knew you were being a bit of a smartass, but I use any excuse to act pretentious and discuss difficult topics.

I don't actually agree about there being a definition of religion, but yes, I agree that the Native Americans have a variety of amazing belief systems (and not just the ones in North America). This semester I studied the Lakota a bit, and learned of Wakan Tanka (did I spell that correctly), and I've studied the Maya quite a bit. There are so many things we can learn from the cultures we've destroyed/are destroying. So, I don't understand why people are so anti-atheist, when atheists seem to appreciate the "array" as you put it of dying religions, and it is often the fundamentalists of the current era that crush those cultures and their religions. Have you ever read Lame Deer? If you haven't, I think you would love it.

:-)

Edit: ha, I feel like a dumbass after looking more closely at your profile. You teach comparative religions? From an anthropological perspective? And which definition of religion do you ascribe to? Geertz? I'm very curious. Btw, I'll probably post the other videos featuring Albert if I can keep getting them sifted.

"It's often said that an adult chimpanzee weighing in at 150 pounds is three to seven times stronger than a human being."

What's the story? Not a lot was known until recently about this issue, but a study published this April in the journal Current Anthropology explored the issue at a new level of detail.

Our surplus motor neurons allow us to engage smaller portions of our muscles at any given time. We can engage just a few muscle fibers for delicate tasks like threading a needle, and progressively more for tasks that require more force. Conversely, since chimps have fewer motor neurons, each neuron triggers a higher number of muscle fibers. So using a muscle becomes more of an all-or-nothing proposition for chimps. As a result, chimps often end up using more muscle than they need.

Our finely-tuned motor system makes a wide variety of human tasks possible. Without it we couldn't manipulate small objects, make complex tools or throw accurately. And because we can conserve energy by using muscle gradually, we have more physical endurance—making us great distance runners.
Great apes, with their all-or-nothing muscle usage, are explosive sprinters, climbers and fighters, but not nearly as good at complex motor tasks.

In addition to fine motor control, Walker suspects that humans also may have a neural limit to how much muscle we use at one time. Only under very rare circumstances are these limits bypassed—as in the anecdotal reports of people able to lift cars to free trapped crash victims.

"Add to this the effect of severe electric shock, where people are often thrown violently by their own extreme muscle contraction, and it is clear that we do not contract all our muscle fibers at once," Walker writes. "So there might be a degree of cerebral inhibition in people that prevents them from damaging their muscular system that is not present, or not present to the same degree, in great apes." Source

I hope people are still reading this.

I work in an English-only preschool in Taiwan, which gives me some authority on this subject. Here's the deal, you may think this practice is racist, but you're not seeing the big picture about names. First names like BoHao and JingMing (my Chinese name) aren't pronounced the way you're now thinking them in your head. They're not. Try all you want, and you will never pronounce it correctly unless you're a Chinese speaker and understand what tonality is. When Chinese people emigrate to English speaking countries, they mostly take English names because English speakers will either: a) make a big deal out of trying to learn the exact pronunciation of their Chinese names, which they never will do because they don't understand the rules; or b) butcher the name to such a degree that the person will be embarrassed, annoyed or otherwise put out. Furthermore, people almost always already have an English name, given during high school to use during widespread mandatory English classes, if not earlier (as in my three-year-old students' cases). English naming of Chinese people isn't racist, it makes natural sense. Names are a way of easily referring to an individual--that's why we have them anthropologically speaking. That's why people often insist you call them by their English names.

All that said, a law requiring renaming or an agency outside the family or the individual him/herself generating these names is, of course, racist. I'm not arguing that anything like that is acceptable. I'm saying that you can't just learn how to pronounce Chinese names (or Polish or Serbian for that matter) by reading them or mimicking what you think you're hearing. Many languages have distinctions that speakers of other languages just cannot hear or create with their mouths. People don't just get English names because they want/have to be more Western. They don't. Really. They do it because that's what the want to be called.

So yeah, there's Mad Men. There's also Dexter. Deadwood. The Wire. All FAR superior to trashy Lost.

Hell, I can even say with complete confidence that, as far as writing and season-arching-storylines (and non-moronic characters that actually talk to each other, you know, about STUFF) are concerned, Eureka (sci-fi adventure-comedy) and Bones (anthropological crime-solving-comedy), are also incomparably better than Lost.

In June of '07, I went down to Ecuador to train at an archaeological field school. I was an Anthro minor and intended to pursue a career in Biological Anthropology, specializing in molecular clocking (deducing rates of evolution through DNA base pair variation), and wanted some kind of field experience before finishing undergrad. I just googled archae field schools and picked one. It was run by a university in Florida to which I had no connection whatsoever. It was run by two profs and had two separate classes: one in archaeology (digging) and one in ethnography (meeting people and writing about them). I ended up in the archaeological field school.

Upon arriving, I met the rest of the participants. Many of them knew each other, and I was somewhat of a novelty. The first night, I managed to take the smart but prudish girl back to my room for some "Hey, I just met you, why don't we fool around" action. Little did I know what I was getting into.

She turned out to be crazy. Like top-notch, grade A, never-been-kissed, "I'll give you $100 to take my virginity" crazy. It didn't take me long to make it clear that I was not that in need of cash, and that I was not falling in love. This did not go over well, and for the first two weeks of the six week program, I had to apologize to every fucking person in the camp for subjecting them to the tears of this crazy, immature, raving girl.

However, (this is where it gets interesting) during those first two weeks, I was spending all day in the field away from Crazy, who was studying ethnography in the coastal village where we were camped about 6km away. All day, I was troweling dirt and plotting pits next to one of the hottest and most engaged-to-be-married 20 year old girls I've ever met. At first, her neutrality as a "spoken for" woman was a good haven from the rest of the crowd, who were still kind of up-in-arms about my bagging and bouncing Ms. Crazy. And so, my pit partner and I got along swimmingly, spending the grueling but relieved-from-social-antagonism days talking about this and that. Now, I gotta tell ya, I'm a strapping lad (about 2m ((that's 6'6")) and 115kg ((250 lbs))) and I was very good at the field work. There is very little that impresses women, especially 20 year old engaged-to-be-married women, like being physically excellent at something right in front of them.

Around the end of week two, I started to notice that my pit partner and I were getting all electric and stuff around each other, making eyes and whispering sweet nothings as we toiled away in our dirt hole. Things got spicier and spicier, especially when I found out that the fiance was a wannabe prize fighter who couldn't hold a job, had cheated on her, and held his crotch rocket in about as much esteem as his wife-to-be (also, he bought her a $20k ring and made her mother make the payments on it). As I clearly could not give a flying cockroach's penis about this douche, I let myself really fall for this girl.

At the end of week three, we had four days off to travel wherever we chose. As I tend to be a loner if I don't find a very, very like-minded crony, I was planning to head south to Cuenca for a long weekend of solo traveling. But, as luck/fate/coincidence would have it, I met the soon-to-be-married lady and her traveling group at the bus stop just outside the village, also planning to go to Cuenca. Their group was minus a strong leader and without much Spanish, so I hooked up with them, "and it has made all the difference."

In Cuena, the girl and I fell in love. We didn't touch each other that weekend, but luck/fate/coincidence left us alone together too many times for there not to have been meaning in it. We talked by glowing midnight fountains, got lost on a house party dancefloor, drank too much shitty beer, and stared at the stars from the rooftop we had to crawl out a hotel window to sit on. Neither of us mentioned it out loud, but only used strong suggestion and innuendo. We both knew what was happening, but weren't sure if it was going to work. As I have failed to mention, but the astute reader might already suspect, my former liason Ms. Crazy considered herself to be Soon-to-Be-Married's best friend in Ecuador. She was right there in Cuenca with us the whole time, in complete denial of what was right in her face.

We returned from Cuenca on a Sunday, and I spent Monday and Tuesday white knuckled and sweating as I worked right next to a woman I could have ripped the perfect breast concealing oversized sweatshirt off and really gotten dirty. As she was engaged and about as virtuous as they come these days, no one suspected a thing. We were headed right straight towards Affair City on our pheromone and hormone fueled freight train, and no one else even had a whiff of it.

To this day, not one of the 20 or so other students has any idea that on that Tuesday after Cuenca, as we sat on the porch of my cabin--me playing guitar and her studying for the GRE--this girl and I began one of the world's greatest love affairs. That night, we finally put into words the feelings and fears, and each one assured the other that it would be safe as long as no one knew. At a peak moment in the conversation, I must have asked something like "Well, what's next, then?" The words she answered still echo in my mind whenever I have trouble sleeping. Sultry, slow and with head tilted, she said, "You wanna test the waters?" and glided across the porch and into my lightless room. I sat thinking Oh my god. She just fucking went into my cabin. Holy fuck, I'm gonna. Fuck. Shit. Wow. Wait a sec, she's in my cabin. STFU and get in there! She had to open the door to check if I was coming before the dazzle faded from my mind. I pushed her back into the darkness.

That was nearly two years ago now, and as I write, I am putting this princess to bed in our apartment in Taipei. We carried on an illicit affair, with trysts on 1 a.m. beaches, in shower stalls and in my Pacific breeze filled cabin for a month in Ecuador, and it has lasted to this day, across four continents and literally around the world. I have never written this story down before, and I just thank AC for giving me the forum.

The number of people who have jobs, how much they make on average, the change in prices over time, how much the government taxes or spends; these are all objective, scientific measurements that occur independent of capitalism, socialism, or any other political, economic, or cultural system.

"Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services."

"The social sciences comprise academic disciplines concerned with the study of the social life of human groups and individuals including anthropology, communication studies, economics, human geography, history, political science, psychology and sociology."

"science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research."

If you wish to re-define English words, then that is your prerogative, but it serves no purpose in this thread.

some family values are instinctive. i.e. "no incest"
getting rid of religion won't get rid of family unit priorities (values). To say family values have no reason at all just because it is a term that has been hijacked by the religious right flies in the face of social anthropology.

As for ABORTION:
There definitely ARE non-religious arguments against abortion. I agree that true, worth life is developed over time.
I personally advocate aborting "fertilized eggs" up to 25 years of age. That's really how long it takes to determine whether or not an "egg" is going to turn out to be a productive member of "society" or not.
also... fertilized eggs are much harder to scramble, and make terrible omelets.

As for HOMOSEXUALITY:
in a rational world there would BE no homosexuals because homosexuality has not been proven to exist. There are simply people who really really believe that they are homosexual. And then there are lesbians, who have simply figured out that boys are gross, which IS rational.

The skulls are interesting from an archeological and anthropological perspective. But no real scientists would make the claims these people do about the abilities this would give one without real evidence.
My vote also says this doesn't belong in the science channel.