Evolutionary Psychology

One man’s explorations in Evolutionary Psychology contains such gems as :

Why Pigeons Don’t Know They’re Alive

If you were designing a creature, would you give it the ability to over-ride good sensible instincts, when that creature is not intelligent enough to guess the likely outcomes of these over-rides? I think not.

Why Samurai Killed Themselves

Families, not wishing to be harmed by the actions of one rogue family member, would for the sake of their genes demand that the one erring member should kill himself rather than damage the whole family gene pool.

… the attitude to suicide amongst the general peasantry was very different. It was considered a crime. A peasant man was valued for his ability to feed his family. Whereas a noble could be confident that someone would look after his children, and that there was no danger of their starving, a peasant was not in this position. A peasant who killed himself would be significantly harming the chances of his children to grow up properly fed. The nobles relied for their income on the labours of the poor in their area, so they didn’t want their peasants killing themselves off.

Why asking her out is terrifying

Today, … a man can afford to be rejected almost all the time, so long as some women consent. This was not the world our foraging ancestors lived in. Back then, the world was sparsely populated. A man might live in a band of about twenty-five people, of whom perhaps six at most would be women of reproductive age, and most of these would be spoken for. It would be common that the man would only have frequent encounters with one or two potential mates. A wise designer of human instinct would therefore give men a fear of ‘blowing it’ with such rare and precious women. The maxim ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea’ would be even less of a comfort to a man who knows that he might not set eyes on another single woman for months.

[/society] posted at 13:32 #

ESR gets worse

NTK have been doing a good job recently of covering the excesses of (Open Source uberpimp turned political zealot) Eric Raymond.

Their latest reveals him abusing his maintainership of the Jargon File to promote his own NeoCon agenda.

Repeated reading of a second-hand copy of ‘The Hacker’s Dictionary’ (the print edition of the Jargon File) was my introduction to the world of computing, so I have a strong desire to see it properly maintained.

Fortunately, the File is in the public domain, so:

… if someone did want to fork the Jargon File, now would be the time to do it. Raymond’s previous googlejuice at tuxedo.org has been cast to the winds. A new, reformatted and popularly linked-to upstart could quickly seize the top Google slot.

Any takers?

[/technology] posted at 13:31 #

Slammer Worm debrief

Wired’s Slammer Worm debrief is worth checking out for the awesome graphics courtesy of Akamai and Paul Boutin’s ability to evoke an image of a dying internet:

By 12:45 am, huge sections of the Internet began to wink out of existence. Net Access Corporation, one of the Northeast’s largest ISPs, sent out an early SOS: “Nearly half our ports are in delta alarm right now.” Up on the big screen, Maresh could see backbone carrier Level 3’s transcontinental chain of routers trying to find working paths to the rest of the world - and failing. Three hundred thousand cable modems in Portugal went dark, and South Korea fell right off the map: no cell phone or Internet service for 27 million people. Five of the Internet’s 13 root-name servers - hardened systems, all - succumbed to the squall of packets.

[/technology] posted at 13:31 #