Rainbow High Five Wedding

Last weekend two of my friends got married.  It was the least traditional wedding I have ever been to, and also one of the most fun.  It was held in a state park, with the couple taking their vows by the edge of a lake.  It was a beautiful setting, and completely appropriate to who they were.  Neither the bride or the groom was wearing anything like traditional wedding attire.  They were both, in fact, wearing cargo pants.  This was somewhat disconcerting to me, but again, it was appropriate to who they were.

About an hour after the vows, when we had finished eating the barbecue and were hanging around talking, there was a brief rain shower.  When it was over, there was a very nice rainbow over the lake.  Very few people can say that there was an actual rainbow at their wedding.

Everything was completely unrehearsed.  The groom did not know what finger the rings were supposed to go on.  After the vows, when the priest said 'you know what time it is' they looked at each other for a split second and then gave each other a high five.  Everyone cheered.  This, too, was their personality.

They met at martial arts class, and we were their primary circle of friends.  Between a third and a half of the wedding guests were from the dojo.

The tables were decorated with rubber ducks.  Some of the ducks were ninja ducks, and some of them were dressed in 1920's style attire.  I kept several of them.

My friend and I did not recognize the clerical garb of the preacher.  He was wearing some kind of holy symbol that looked like a grid carved from a single piece of wood.  Being totally fearless in matters like this, we went up to him and asked, "What kind of priest are you?"  It turned out that he was a Lutheran, and he was wearing a Jerusalem cross

There was no wedding cake.  Instead, there was a ten-square-foot brownie, covered with slices of banana, strawberry, and topping.  It was absolutely the best wedding 'cake' I have ever eaten.

Some of the other guests had never been to a wedding before.  Those of us who had been to weddings had to tell them that all of this was not normal.

Good Advice

How to like people on purpose

Choking Hazards

This article says that, each year in the USA, about 10,000 children are treated in emergency rooms for choking on food, and about 100 children die from choking on food.

 

This makes me wonder several things:

 

Are human infants uniquely vulnerable to choking?  Do we observe these kinds of problems in wild animals?

 

Did infants in earlier human societies have the same risk of choking?  Is this choking a problem related to modern diets and processed foods, or has it always been like this?

 

If choking has always been such a problem, why has natural selection not resulted in infants who are less likely to choke?

 

If it is only a recent problem, what has changed?  Could we solve the problem by feeding our children food that is closer to what a paleolithic child would have eaten?

 

It seems hard for me to imagine that modern diets would be such a larger choking hazard than paleo diets.  I know that children spent a lot more time nursing in early human societies, they still ate solid food, presumably the same nuts, berries, fruit, and meat that the rest of the tribe was eating.

 

Now that I write all this, I think I read somewhere that the shape of the human throat, which gives it the ability to make the wide range of sounds needed for speech, also makes it more likely to choke on food.  But still, choking can be reduced by changes in eating behavior and food choice, and those changes should be instinct by now.  Maybe the deaths from choking are so small, as a percentage, that there is not much selection pressure, compared to other things like diseases and famine that have haunted humans for most of our history.

 

Hihowareya

I am glad I am not the only one annoyed by the habit of people greeting you by asking questions they do not care to know the answer to.  Those of us who actually care about honesty in language face a neverending battle.

 

Sometimes I will greet someone with my customary "Good morning" or "Good afternoon" only to get a reply of "Fine thanks, and you?"  It is obvious that the person is completely clueless, running on habit rather than engaging with reality, but these encounters still leave me somewhat disoriented.

Legal Permanence

The last email from change.org contains the following. They are complaining about the libertarian position on business rights. Paul believes that it is not fair to force someone to associate with people he or she does not want to, just because that person is operating a business.

According to Paul, the market's free hand would eventually have forced most businesses to serve black people.

But Paul is badly in need of a history lesson. Even after Jim Crow laws were reversed, those businesses that actually served blacks were still subject to threats and outright violence - often sanctioned by local and state governments. The market would never have eliminated slavery, and it's not going to eliminate racism, either.

But, by their own description of the history, profit-seeking businesses wanted to serve all people equally, and were prevented from doing so by the power of the state. They make the Libertarian case themselves, obviously without realizing it. The government is the main problem.

Actually, they are partially right. Much of the business community wanted this legislation passed, because it gave them 'cover' for doing what they wanted to do anyway: serve all customers.

The Civil Rights Act is an example of a bit of legislation that was needed in its time, but is no longer necessary in its current form. We may need some version of it, but not the version we have now. It should be changed to fit modern times.

It is a mistake to make all laws permanent. This means that the legal code just keeps growing in size and complexity, slowly choking the country. I believe that all laws should be limited, say to ten years, so that it automatically expires unless renewed. That way, most of Congress's time would be spent arguing whether or not to renew old laws, and how to change them, so the total complexity of our laws would not grow as quickly.

School Observations

Working with these groups has radically changed my opinion on the merit of private school.

The private school kids, be them sixth, seventh, or eighth grade, are a pleasure to work with.  They are attentive and polite, they really by gosh do encourage each other, they make truly insightful comments while climbing or during processing, they make references to Winston Churchill and physical laws.

The public school kids, on the other hand, have to be constantly told to pay attention; are full of such witticisms as "this is gay" and "hahaha, you fell"; trying to facilitate discussion with them is like pulling teeth; and an alarming number of the evaluation we ask them to fill out fail to display an adequate grasp of the concepts of sentence, subject, and predicate--much less provide any specific or helpful comments about what could be improved.

 

This is from an excellent post from a friend of mine.  Go read the whole thing. 

Human Ingenuity

This is facinating and horrifying.  There are dozens of professionals in Japan who manufacture situations to put people at fault in divorce proceedings:

But Rika was the victim, not of a straightforward womaniser, but something more chilling: a meticulously planned professional sting operation.

Everyone involved in that wild evening — from the young "friend" who invited her, to the guests in the restaurant — was an actor, an employee of an agency that specialises in sexual entrapment. The chance meeting with "Kaori" weeks before, the dinner invitation and the act of seduction were commissioned and paid for by someone Rika has never met — the lover of her husband, a woman who yearns for the failure of Rika's marriage.

In many ways, Japan is a glimpse at the future.  As advancing technology makes it easier and easier to meet people's basic needs, more and more economic activity will be focused on these kinds of social games.