In poor countries, cellphones have a big anti-poverty effect:

Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. . . . Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

This is exactly the effect I propose that the very first words had: They helped two traders find each other. Having a word for knife made it much easier for the person who had a knife to trade to find someone who wanted a knife. I was in Guatemala when I ran out of contact-lens solution. Not knowing the Spanish term for it, it was extremely hard to find. Once I knew the Spanish term, it was very easy to find. In a Guatemalan market, I heard a man shout “toothpaste” (in Spanish) over and over. He was selling toothpaste.

I think the first words were also the first names; You became identified by the name of what you were good at making (and therefore had to trade, since you made many of them). This information spread, like a cellphone signal, from tower to tower: From one person to another. If you were Mr. X, and someone wanted X, and they said so (“X?”), someone would point them to you. All it took were single words.

Later in the article, Chipchase responds to the author, who wonders if more technology is always better. “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either,” he says. I would go further: Not having cellphones is like not having language.

What’s art? The 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art provides an answer — whatever the work of the eighty-odd artists has in common.

The exhibit included some videos, documentaries (Spike Lee), photographs, drawings, and paintings. Most of the work, however, was everyday stuff — what artist Adam Putnam called “frugal materials” — used in unusual ways. Here are some examples:

• bird excrement (Charles Long)
• automotive paint (Daniel Martinez)
• styrofoam and resin (Jedediah Caesar)
• CDs and styrofoam balls (Jason Rhoades)
• drywall (Lisa Sigal)
• rebar and chain-link fence (Ruben Ochoa)
• printed matter (many)

Collages (e.g., Rita Ackermann) are the school-art-project example of this sort of thing. The goals of the artists seemed to be about 20% beauty, 30% emotional impact, 50% novelty. The Biennial also included old technologies used in new ways: Matt Mullican made drawings while hypnotized and then did similar drawings while not hypnotized. An outpost of Neighborhood Public Radio allowed anyone to be on the air for an hour.

As I’ve said, I believe the tendencies behind art evolved because they generated material-science research. The tendency to make art caused some people to make new things that required control of materials but weren’t obviously useful; enjoyment of art meant that others would trade for what they’d made, allowing artists to spend more time making art. A premium for novelty kept artists on their toes; it pushed them to find new ways of making things. Wandering around the Whitney Biennial, these ideas seemed easy to believe.

From Eyes on the Prize, about an Easter boycott of Nashville stores:

Easter was a most important time to buy. All blacks had to have a full, brand new outfit at Easter, no matter how poor you were, right? You may start three months ahead of time paying for that Easter outfit, and you may be paying for it for three months later.

There is a similar tradition in China: At the start of the new year you buy new clothes. I’ve blogged before about how rituals, ceremonies, and holidays promoted technological development: They increased the demand for high-end items. This helped skilled craftspeople make a living.

Bibloquet appears impossibly difficult, I posted recently. Yet people become very good at it, no doubt through huge amounts of practice. Why?

Now and then I hear about somebody getting very good at a physical skill: A basketball player is very good at free-throw shooting, for example. No doubt the reason is lots of practice. I’m not surprised because explanation is easy: He played a lot of basketball (social, fun to move around), he wanted to be a pro (aspiration). Professional musicians have practiced a lot — sure, music sounds good, it’s their job. Most cases of extreme practice that I know of have plausible common-sense explanations.

Bibloquet skill does not. It leads nowhere, is completely useless (I suspect), isn’t social, and isn’t promoted by the environment (there are no bilboquet rooms, for example). Some people spend a huge amount of time playing video games (also useless, etc.), but video games are complicated. Bibloquet is simple. You can see this in the price. A video game might cost $40, not counting the price of the computer it runs on. My bibloquet probably cost about $1. No computer needed. For that $1 I am going to get a huge amount of enjoyment. Hard to think of something else for $1 that would provide so much pleasure.

As Michel Cabanac has argued many times, our brains use pleasure to guide our actions: What we should do is more pleasant than what we shouldn’t do. Sometimes this system misfires because something man-made resembles what we should be seeking. If your iron level is very low you may suffer from pagophagia — too much ice chewing. Ice chewing brings persons with pagophagia great pleasure. I’m sure that the evolutionary reason is that ice chewing is producing the same sensations as bone crunching. Bone crunching would be a good source of iron because bone marrow is iron-rich. The mechanism that causes pagophagia evolved because it promoted bone crunching. Chewing ice resembles bone crunching. What biologically-useful activity does playing bibloquet resemble?

My guess is that bilboquet is addictive because:

1. Success is sharply defined. You catch the ball (success) or not (failure). Other addictive games have this feature. Tetris: you fit the falling shape into the pile at the bottom. Sudoku: You fill in all the squares correctly.

2. Success is not easy. We like a challenge. Most video games, such as Tetris, get harder and harder.

3. Hand-eye coordination is involved.

At the core of human evolution is occupational specialization and diversification. It started with hobbies. To get diversity of hobbies you need diversity of reward; a wide range of skilled activities must be rewarding. Rather than evolve a separate mechanism for each hobby, this was accomplished with a mechanism that is quite flexible and can operate with lots of different activities. Thus the reward system can be transferred to something completely useless, such as bibloquet. The not-too-easy feature caused hobbyists to become more and more skilled because only by continually challenging themselves could they keep enjoying it. Hand-eye coordination was required because the goal was to get people to make things. Why success had to be sharply defined I’m not so sure. (In art, a similar human activity, success is not sharply defined.) Maybe it serves to focus effort.

The lesson for me is that if I want to produce a task that will measure how well my brain is working and be so much fun it’s addictive, it should involve hand-eye coordination. (It will be easier to make the many measurements my omega-3 research requires if I have such a task.) This is consistent with what I’ve observed so far: None of the tasks I’ve used have been addictively fun. The balance task had a fairly sharp and difficult measure of success (staying balanced for more than a few seconds) and was physical but didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. The digit-span task had a sharp measure of success (perfect recall) and could be made more and more difficult but didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. Three other tasks I’ve used had less sharply-defined success and didn’t involve hand-eye coordination.

Addendum. A Japanese website. In Japan bilboquet is kendama. Thanks to Pearl Alexander.

Therefore it must be wrong. This was the reaction of several prominent anthropologists when Chuck Millikan, a California policeman, wrote to them to ask what they thought of the aquatic ape hypothesis, according to Elaine Morgan. Millikan was “a compulsive letter-writer,” said Morgan. He had been impressed by her ideas and wrote her to ask when her next book was coming out. There won’t be a next one, Morgan had replied, I’ve said all I have to say. Millikan’s response to this was to write prominent anthropologists asking them what they thought of her theory. When he sent Morgan their replies, she saw they had no good reasons for ignoring her. Emboldening and irritated, she wrote another book.

Let me invent a verb: to elaine morgan something is to have a big effect on something you shouldn’t have been able to influence. Elaine Morgan elaine morganed the study of evolution. She was far outside anthropology; she shouldn’t have been able to successfully promote a radical new view of evolution, but she did. Chuck Millikan elaine morganed Elaine Morgan; he shouldn’t have been able to persuade her to start writing again, but he did.

A excellent BBC documentary about the aquatic ape theory (part 1 of 6).

Someone named Scylla waterboarded himself and provided a detailed account of what happened. “Old” self-experimentation, you could say, was doctors doing dangerous things to themselves for a short time to prove some idea that they already believed (e.g., a dentist using laughing gas as an anesthetic); “new” self-experimentation is me doing something perfectly safe for a long time to solve a problem that I have no clue how to solve. What Scylla did is between the two. Short duration, not completely safe, done to find out if waterboarding is torture or not. Scylla had no strong opinion about this when he started.

Before he got to using saran wrap it wasn’t particularly bad. Here’s what happened with saran wrap:

The idea is that you wrap saran wrap around the mouth in several layers, and poke a hole in the mouth area, and then waterboard away. . . . So far I would categorize waterboarding as simply unpleasant rather than torture, but I’ve come this far so I might as well go on. . . It took me ten minutes to recover my senses once I tried this. I was shuddering in a corner, convinced I narrowly escaped killing myself.

Here’s what happened:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vacuum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You [b]know[/b] you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye. . .
I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger. And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex.

This shows something non-obvious: We are hard-wired to avoid drowning and like all good safety systems, the system kicks in well before damage occurs.

For such a system to evolve, humans must have spent a lot of time in water deep enough to drown in. We don’t now, of course. The sheer fact of Scylla’s post — the fact that waterboarding is torture isn’t obvious — shows this.

All this — Scylla’s initial ignorance, what he experienced and concluded — is consistent with the aquatic ape theory of human evolution and inconsistent with alternatives to that theory (e.g., the savannah theory), which assume no long aquatic phase. Belief that the aquatic ape theory was probably true was one reason I started omega-3 self-experimentation, which led to the discovery of very clear experimental effects.

This interests me not only because of what it says about human evolution — to me, it’s substantial new evidence for the aquatic ape theory — but also for what it says about science. Scylla has no scientific credentials (I assume). His report wasn’t peer-reviewed. It wasn’t quantitative. It wasn’t long. It was closer to an anecdote than a conventional experiment (where you compare two conditions). He wasn’t trying to test any theory. Yet it provided helpful new info on a major scientific question (human evolution), which is very hard to do.

Sure, you know that in Japan, New Year’s is the big winter holiday. But did you know that osechi, a kind of fancy bento box, is a holiday tradition? Here are some examples:

The cost, even to an American living in the Bay Area, is . . . surprising:

Just about every major department store and supermarket in Japan now stocks osechi ryori cuisine in December. Most stores offer osechi either as individual dishes or as sets, and many pass out elaborate catalogs to make the selection as easy as pulling out your wallet, which better be stuffed if you plan on ordering osechi as a set. . . . Price is determined by contents and the reputation of the wholesaler or restaurant which put it together. For example, a relatively unknown shop may whip up three 20 square centimeter boxes for ¥22,000 [= $200], whereas Kicho, a famous restaurant in Kyoto offers three circles of the same size for a hefty ¥196,000 [= $1800]. The rest of the sets, ranging anywhere from one to four tiers cost between ¥30,000 to ¥50,000 on average and most Isetan customers buy their ready-made osechi in this price range.

Osechi is another example of how holidays create a market for expensive difficult-to-make things. The Stone-Age predecessors of holidays helped support skilled artists, artisans, and craftsmen, the technological pioneers of the time.

Addendum: Bento boxes inspired the design of the IBM Thinkpad.