June 4-5. I just finished a famous book that I hadn't read before: The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel. The idea is, during the last ice age, an orphaned girl from our human subspecies gets adopted by Neanderthals. On one level, it's a wonderful vision of what it might be like to live in a forager-hunter tribe. But on another level, it's not about that at all. We know almost nothing about Neanderthal culture, and Auel chooses to make them patriarchal and authoritarian: women can't even speak to men without bowing down and asking permission first, and the clan has rigid rules which again and again come into conflict with their human instincts. Now, I'm sure this happens sometimes with primitive people, but it's much more typical of civilized people. And when a freethinking young person challenges a dying orthodoxy, we're not seeing eastern Europe in the ice age, but America in the 1960's, or any fundamentalist culture shifting to one that's more free and open. I wonder if the book is popular in Iran right now.
It also reminded me of Harry Potter: an extremely talented orphan joins an exotic community, learns amazing skills, endures terrible hardships, and repeatedly defeats a jealous villain. And last year when I read The Color of Distance, I didn't realize it was Clan of the Cave Bear on another planet.
For a different and equally interesting view of Neanderthals, here's a short article by Stan Gooch on Neanderthals. There's much more in his book Cities of Dreams. Basically he makes a bunch of "two kinds of people" observations, and lines them up so it looks like humans are torn between our Neanderthal and Cro Magnon natures. He also thinks that the big explosion of creativity 35,000 years ago was from the "hybrid vigour" of the crossbreeding. If you think breeding between Neanderthal and Cro Magnon is interesting, wait until we start genetically engineering ourselves.
June 17. Yesterday I saw this reddit comment thread on printers and how they never work right. I live in a house with two printers and I can't get either one to work on either of two operating systems. On my winter tour 18 months ago, everyone I stayed with had a computer, but almost nobody had a working printer. When I want a hardcopy of a google map, I trace it from the screen.
What's going on? I think this is something deeper than incompetence or profiteering, and NiceDay4ASulk is on the right track with the comment that printers are "the bridge between the digital world and the physical world." Maybe this has something to do with entropy: the physical world is like a higher energy state than the virtual world, so it's easy to take a picture of a physical object and put it in a computer, but to go the other way, and turn bits in a computer into a physical object, is extremely difficult.
Some techno-utopians think we're going to have home fabricators, where you can download information and "print" any physical object. But printing text on paper is harder now than it was 20 years ago. As information systems get more complex, and available energy gets lower, we are moving in the opposite direction, copying physical stuff into the digital world, and moving our consciousness there with it.
The problem is that our consciousness is tied to physical bodies that need food and shelter. Where the digital world does not feed us, it starves us, and then starves itself. Or, as I've written before: every sub-world must justify itself in terms of the world that contains it. It would be wonderful if we could use computers to print bacon and glassy metal building blocks, but realistically, if we are using them at all, we will be using them to share information about how to eat cattail roots and build houses out of sand and clay, with our hands.