Thoughts on Companionship

After finally finishing a letter to a friend today, I was in a somewhat contemplative mood. After a little while, I came up with this:

The ultimate marriage, at least in spirit, ought to be one long, open-ended conversation: from first sight to last.

With that thought, someone I knew is forgiven - for motives if not for means.

Bees get the Short End of the Stick

from Reuters:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Kids throwing rocks stirred up more trouble than they bargained for when they dislodged a swarm of bees from an enormous hive built in the wall of a Southern California apartment building, authorities said on Friday. An estimated 120,000 bees held residents of the apartment building and nearby homes hostage in Santa Ana, California after the children pelted their 500 pound (227 kg) hive with rocks on Thursday, Santa Ana Fire Captain Steve Horner said. Several people, including firefighters, news reporters and a TV cameraman, reported being stung and at least two people were taken to a hospital with multiple stings, Horner said. Firefighters cordoned off a four-block area to allow the bees to calm down and return to their hive. An exterminator later fogged the hive and vacuumed out 40,000 dead bees, then set a trap for returning worker bees, of which about 80,000 were captured, Horner said. The quarter-ton honeycomb, which may have accumulated inside the apartment wall for years, was so big it was threatening the structural integrity of the two-story building, Horner said.

Reading articles like this makes me want to run out onto the street with my STUPID stamp and foam bat and go nuts. Two things bother me about the way this situation was handled:

First, out of all the all the things we might have learned from a quarter ton nest that was home to 120 000 bees, the sole tidbits of scientific knowledge gained are that there were, in fact, 120 000 bees and that the nest did indeed weigh 500 lbs. I mean, honestly folks, bees are pretty interesting to begin with, being hive creatures and all. A nest of 500 bees gives facinating insight into their behaviour - how they interact, how they can tell strangers, how they cool the nest, etc... I don't think anybody knows how such a large hive would work. Certainly you can't say a 120 000 bee hive would function the same as a 500 bee hive. Take a human example - do people organize a 500 person town the same way they do a 120 000 person city? From an engineering perspective alone, the cooling mechanisms/behaviours employed by the bees would have to be fundamentally different. Were the bees all one hive with one queen, or were they several queens? If so, were the several queens related or not? Did they have an aggressive monopoly on neighbouring resources, or did they share and venture far afield? How far within the hive does any one bee travel - do they live in one spot, or is the whole thing a unified community? So many questions unanswered, and I'm sure that a bee specialist would have far more.

Second, how do you condone killing so many bees? If we have approximately 100 billion neurons in our human brains , and a bee has fewer than 0.01% of the neurons that a person does, 120 000 bees must have - collectively - the equivalent neurons of 12 people (or slightly less). Now I realize that this hardly makes for an argument on its own - 10 cats don't have the rights of 1 person - but consider that bees are a hive insect. We really don't have any idea how complex the behaviour of such an entity is. The article quotes the fire chief as saying that the hive must have been there "for years", and yet the first indication that anyone had that 120 000 bees were living in close proximity was when children threw rocks at it! It's a shame that, while the bees were happy (and inoffensive enough) to live with people, people couldn't extend the favour in return.

Excerpts from "Holy War"

... By the time of Thomas Aquinas ... the Devil was becoming a new force in the Christian imagination and gaining a power he never had in the Bible. He was becoming a monster of enormous power who was also a distorted human being. Often he had animal characteristics or monstrous genitals, aspects of humanity that the Church was teaching Christians to reject. One could say that one of the great problems of ethical monotheism as expressed by Christianity is that it encourages an unhealthy projection. Because it is axiomatic that there is no evil in God, this makes it difficult for Christians to accept what is either evil or what they are told is evil in themselves. They tend to reject this "evil" and, once they have rejected it, it becomes inhuman and monstrous with threatening power. The Devil is the greatest of these projections and is unique in its horror to Christianity... (p. 230-231)

... We in the west were particularly horrified to hear America called the "Great Satan". Not surprisingly we thought of the Christian Satan, a figure of monstrous evil. But actually in Islam, as in Judaism, Satan is not a terrifying and omnipotent monster; he is the tempter, who tries to lure Adam away from true belief. In rather the same way America was seen to have encouraged the Shah to try and tempt the Iranians away from Islam into secular, Western modes of thought. In popular Shiism, Shaitan is a poor trivial creature who asks Allah for gifts man has and is easily fobbed off with frivolous, secular trumpery. It was a triviality that was similar to the casinos, bars and boutiques of the Shah's Westernized Teheran. In other words, when they called America "The Great Satan", Iranians were not saying that America was monstrously evil but, using the Islamic figure of Satan, they were saying something less threatening and more precise. Indeed the depictions of America as the Great Satan showed a politician like Carter or Reagan as an outsize rabbit dressed in an Uncle Sam costume. It was funny rather than terrifying. Later, of course, under Khomeini, the hatred of the United States became exaggerated and frightening but it would be wrong to think that this fanatical loathing was inherent in the ideology of the revolution... (p. 332-333)

Recently Read

Stephen Baxter - Evolution
Karen Armstrong - Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on the Modern World
Lynne Truss - Eats, Shoots and Leaves

Well, back from a 'productive' vacation, if holidays could ever be described that way. I certainly managed to get my reading done.

Stephen Baxter's latest sci-fi novel kept me occupied for the flight out. It was pretty good, although Baxter has a way of looking at things across a depressingly vast timescale. I then got caught up in a book, "Holy War" by Karen Armstrong, that my father had just finished and left lying around. The title is fairly explanatory. A couple of things of note about the book: Armstrong is incredibly intelligent, insightful, and objective; additionally it was published originally in 1988 - well before 9/11. I would strongly recommend reading this book. Finally, on my way back to Edmonton, I had a backpack full of books to read, and yet I found myself in the bookstore at the Victoria airport. "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" caught my eye, and after sampling a page or two I decided I had to read it. The full title is "Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation", and is a book true to my heart. Truss has a wit that does not end. If the following quote describes you, consider reading this book.

Part of one's despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except we see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else - yet we see it all the time.