Ryanware

I’m currently listening to The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a fascinating book. I love it.

In the book he mentions some studies that suggest that the more social an animal, the bigger its brains are. I’m sure I’m greatly oversimplifying, but basically the size of our neocortex is directly related to how many people with which we can maintain a stable social relationship. This number is about 148.2. You may have heard of Rule of 150. Many social groups and even colonies have used 150 or numbers close to it for years because they recognize that when a group of people gets bigger than 150 you end up with groups within the group and it gets really difficult to maintain cohesion. If you’d like to verify these facts, read the book as I don’t intend to put references here.

Anyway, as I listened to that portion of the book I couldn’t help but wonder that with all our social networks (facebook, myspace, linkedin, twitter, friendfeed, etc.) if the human race will evolve huge heads a few thousand or million years in the future. Or maybe even next week! I have 380 or so friends on Facebook alone. If I tried to have a stable social relationship with all of them, I would fail, but what if my neocortex grew and I succeeded? I’d have a huge head and look funny. Forget about balance, especially if I had to wear a motorcycle helmet. It’d be hard to even find a motorcycle helmet that big. That would be tragic (about the big head, not about the motorcycle helmet).

I like our heads the size they are. If you do too and want your great great great great great great great great grand children to have good sized heads I suggest you cut back on your facebook friends.

P.S. I’m glad we’re on this end of the evolutionary scale. Nevermind the fact that I don’t believe in that whole evolution thing.

Why? Because then you’d have cheesecake! All the time!

If, that is, you had a beech tree.

Not recommended if you don’t like cheesecake, or beech trees (you tree racist!).

Discworld, “a comedic fantasy book series by the British author Terry Pratchett,” are the weirdest books I’ve ever read (listened to, actually). There’s something like 36 books and I’ve listened to two of them thus far. Beyond random and weird, they’re completely hilarious. Maybe it’s just my wacky sense of humor.

Here’s an example from the second book, The Light Fantastic:

It was a still night, tinted with the promise of dawn. A crescent moon was just setting. Ankh-Morpork, largest city in the lands around the Circle Sea, slept.
   That statement is not really true.
   On the one hand, those parts of the city which normally concerned themselves with, for example, selling vegetables, shoeing horses, carving exquisite small jade ornaments, changing money and making tables, on the whole, slept. Unless they had insomnia. Or had to get up to go to the lavatory. On the other hand, many of the less law-abiding citizens were wide awake and, for instance, climbing through windows that didn’t belong to them, slitting throats, mugging one another, listening to loud music in smoky cellars and generally having a lot more fun. But most of the animals were asleep, except for the rats. And the bats, too, of course. As far as the insects were concerned . . .
   The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh some legislation was passed in attempt to put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a notable hero that “all men spoke of his prowess” any bard who valued his life would add hastily “except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him.” Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like “his mighty steed was fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,” and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.
   Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb “The pen is mightier than the sword,” and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase “only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.”
   So. Approximately sixty-seven, maybe sixty-eight percent of the city slept.

This is how I think, people. Not all the time, of course. Perhaps only sixty-seven percent of my life is spent thinking this way. Maybe.

I love Independence Day. No, not the movie. Today, the 4th of July. I figured today would be a good day to listen to a portion of John Adam’s biography by David McCullough. I didn’t listen to any specific part of it. I listened to the abridged version years ago and for the past few months have been listening to the 30 hour unabridged version, while also trying to listen to podcasts and other audiobooks.

I have no profound thoughts from listening to it today, though I did gain an heightened sense of appreciation for what is enjoyed here in the United States of America. I highly suggest everyone either read or listen* to the John Adam’s biography. I also suggest reading at least the first and last parts of our Declaration of Independence.

* You can get the abridged version for $7.49. And no, I don’t get any affiliate benefits of any kind from anyone buying anything linked in this post.