18.6.04

Stonehenge

Stonehenge Study Tells Pagans And Historians It's Good To Talk More understanding among all sides in the great Stonehenge debate might be made if the world was shown images of how the site is experienced by visitors today rather than only its imagined past, suggests new research sponsored by the ESRC. ... But the project, co-directed by Dr Jenny Blain of Sheffield Hallam University and Dr Robert Wallis of Richmond University, London, admits this would undermine the very potent and almost universal need for Stonehenge to remain 'essentially preserved', shrouded in mystery, and the ancient guardian of a hidden past. ... For many pagans, prehistoric sites are not ruins but living temples or sacred sites. They feel drawn to these places to perform seasonal rituals or to observe astronomical events. Many pagans, including Druids, accept the 'preservation ethos', regarding such things as stone circles, barrows and iron age forts as artefacts of pre-Christian paganism, and therefore sacred. ... The study points out that archaeologists investigating the religious significance of sites rarely consider rituals of the present day, dismissing them as invalid. Some heritage managers speak directly with pagan and other groups, and may even attend festivals, yet this is seldom recorded officially. -- via Witches' Voice

This resembles, in some ways, the dual symbology of Ayers Rock/Uluru in Australia (all my posts today come back to Australia, it seems). For non-Aboriginal Australians, the Rock represents the wild and weird outback, whereas for the local Aborigines Uluru is a physical expression of a mythological system. In the Uluru case, though, it's the people with a secular viewpoint who want to use it (climbing up it), while the religious people want it preserved.

I entirely agree that in the case of Stonehenge (as in so many other cases) archaeologists need to be willing to listen to the modern people linked to the things being studied. Unfortunately, archaeologists tend to have a narrow view of what they're listening for. In my research on NAGPRA, it seemed that the arguments that carried the most weight were those that showed how repatriation can improve the development of archaeological knowledge -- for example, by building trust that enables archaeologists to tap into traditional knowledge. Those sorts of benefits are important, but by themselves they don't make a very strong case. In the Stonehenge case, I'm not sure how much the pagan community could teach archaeologists about what they're interested in qua archaeologists (i.e., how people used Stonehenge thousands of years ago). Modern pagans' knowledge of ancient Stonehenge is based on what other archaeologists have found, and on a reconstructed heritage guided by the religious needs of the present rather than a methodology that would be valid to scientists (not that that makes pagans' views categorically bad -- if I thought that, I'd have to throw away the book of Genesis).

What's needed is for archaeologists to be able to recognize more that artefacts are not just artefacts. They have other uses and meanings. What pagans can tell archaeologists is that "preserve it and study it" is only one of the things that can be done with Stonehenge, and it should not have a monopoly on the site. The beliefs of people 4000 years ago are not the only and essential meaning of the site.

Pagans can also tell archaeologists what becomes of their findings. Scientific knowledge doesn't just sit there, it becomes used by people. Pagans are an important consumer of knowledge about Stonehenge, but archaeologists tend to be less able to understand their needs and practices than those of the general public who see Stonehenge as a mysterious relic. Archaeologists may even be able to act as a sort of liaison between the two groups, as the general public tends to look to archaeologists for information (even as their desire for a site "shrouded in mystery" conflicts with archaeological goals of acquiring knowledge), so they could put information about the site's origins in the context of its continuing existence as a living religious site.
Stentor Danielson, 23:20,

Greenhouse Down Under

Following up on an earlier post, it looks like Australia produces 27 percent more greenhouse gasses per capita than the US, making Oz the world's worst offender. The per capita emissions have gone down, mostly because the rate of land clearing has declined. John Howard says Australia is dealing with climate change "the smart way," which I can only interpret as meaning "smart people have other priorities, such as protecting the mining industry, that are more important than climate change."
Stentor Danielson, 23:04,

Fire And Water

Wake Up Sydney - Life Is Only Going To Get Thirstier ... Since Sydney was first settled its residents have overexploited and befouled one water supply after another, expanding the city's reach to the point that pressure is now on to flood another massive valley, this time Welcome Reef, on the Shoalhaven River. ... In the next few weeks a specially appointed Government panel will present the Premier, Bob Carr, with advice on how Sydney can reuse and better use its water. The panel's deputy chairman, Clean-Up Australia's founder, Ian Kiernan, says bluntly that calls for a new dam are "bullshit". ... FROM next month, developers will be required to design homes to be 40 per cent more water efficient. They can score points towards obtaining building approval by landscaping with native plants instead of lawn. As landscaping accounts for nearly a third of household water use, there is even a suburb-by-suburb list of best natives to use.

Gotta love that Aussie straight talk. It will be interesting to see how well the city deals with the problem. Given my interests, one of my first thoughts was to wonder what effect water-saving landscaping would have on fire safety. It's something I'll need to look into. Doing research on fire makes it easy to lose sight of the other values people are trying to balance when they make decisions about their property.
Stentor Danielson, 22:55,

17.6.04

Kiosk Time

I'm not a fan of the way Blogger unexpectedly changes the size of the little input box for posts while I'm typing in it. The final stages of the irrational box-widening are especially aggravating for those of us with chronically limited monitor resolutions. So I say: to the Kiosk!
Stentor Danielson, 21:21,

Liberalism Or Rationalization?

It's been a while since I've done any anti-same-sex-marriage argument deconstructing, so I figured I'd take on and article whose title -- "The Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage" -- made it sound like it might have something fresh to offer. The author, Susan Shell, builds her argument on two tired old points -- 1) marriage is about biological procreation, and 2) marriage equality constitutes the illiberal forcing of one group's opinions on another.

She draws an analogy between same-sex marriage and attending your own funeral:

Once one grants that the link between marriage and generation may approach, in its universality and solemn significance, the link between funereal practices and death, the question of gay marriage appears in a new light. It is not that marriages are necessarily devoted to the having and rearing of children, nor that infertility need be an impediment to marriage (as is still the case for some religious groups). This country has never legally insisted that the existence of marriage depends upon “consummation” in a potentially procreative act. It is, rather, that marriage, in all the diversity of its forms, draws on a model of partnership rooted in human generation. But for that fact, marriages would be indistinguishable from partnerships of a variety of kinds. The peculiar intimacy, reciprocity, and relative permanence of marriage reflect a genealogy that is more than merely historical. Seen in this light, the issue of gay marriage can be reduced to the following question: Is the desired union between homosexuals more like a marriage between infertile heterosexuals, unions that draw ultimate psychological and moral sustenance (at least symbolically) from the experience of human generation; or is it more like insistence on attending one’s own funeral — a funeral, one might say, existing in name only?

In attempting to reconcile the historic/cultural fact that marriage does not exclude non-procreative heterosexual couples with the supposed historic/cultural fact that the essence of marriage is procreation, she loses her grasp on the possibility of using the potential for unplanned pregnancy as a dividing line between two types of intimate relationships. If all that's needed for proper marriage is an analogy with, or drawing on of, the procreative model, then there seems little reason to exclude homosexual couples -- particularly those who acquire children.

Shell goes on to recognize that, in fact, the legal and cultural trappings of marriage are not all aimed at promoting proper "generation," by advocating broadly-defined civil unions that couples of any gender or level of sexual intimacy should be able to enter into, in order to form a partner bond:

Most, if not all, of the goals of the gay marriage movement could be satisfied in the absence of gay marriage. Many sorts of individuals, and not just gay couples, might be allowed to form “civil partnerships” dedicated to securing mutual support and other social advantages. If two unmarried, elderly sisters wished to form such a partnership, or two or more friends (regardless of sexual intimacy) wanted to provide mutually for one another “in sickness and in health,” society might furnish them a variety of ways of doing so — from enhanced civil contracts to expanded “defined benefit” insurance plans, to new ways of dealing with inheritance. (Though tempting, this is not the place to tackle the issue of polygamy — except to say that this practice might well be disallowed on policy and even more basic constitutional grounds without prejudice to other forms of civil union.) In short, gay couples and those who are not sexually intimate should be permitted to take legally supported vows of mutual loyalty and support. Such partnerships would differ from marriage in that only marriage automatically entails joint parental responsibility for any children generated by the woman, until and unless the paternity of another man is positively established. As for the having and raising of children — this, too, can be provided for and supported short of marriage. If two siblings need not “marry” in order to adopt a child together, neither need two friends, whether or not they are sexually intimate. Civil unions might be formed in ways that especially address the needs of such children. The cases of gay men who inseminate a willing surrogate mother, or lesbians who naturally conceive and wish to designate their partner as the child’s other parent, can also be legally accommodated short of marriage, strictly understood, on the analogy of adoption by step-parents and/or other relatives. As in all cases of adoption (as opposed to natural parenthood, where the fitness of the parent is assumed until proven otherwise), the primary question is the welfare of the child, not the psychic needs and wants of its would-be parents.

If we can grant same-sex couples so much of marriage, what remains to make the marriage/civil union distinction important? Shell argues that the presumption that the husband is the father of any child the wife bears makes all the difference. That paternity judgement fundamentally makes opposite-sex relationships -- even infertile ones -- a totally distinct species from same-sex relationships. But if we can extend that hypothetical right to opposite-sex couples who will never use it, why not extend it to same-sex couples? It makes a great deal of sense, as I see it, that if a married lesbian gets pregnant, her wife should be prima facie to be the legal parent of the child -- i.e. the person assumed to be responsible for the child's care upbringing -- to exactly the same extent that a married man is prima facie assumed to be the legal father of any child his wife has.

Returning to the same-sex couples versus opposite-sex infertile couples issue, Shell argues:

American citizens should not have the sectarian beliefs of gay-marriage advocates imposed on them unwillingly. If proponents of gay marriage seek certain privileges of marriage, such as legal support for mutual aid and childbearing, there may well be no liberal reason to deny it to them. But if they also seek positive public celebration of homosexuality as such, then that desire must be disappointed. The requirement that homosexual attachments be publicly recognized as no different from, and equally necessary to society as, heterosexual attachments is a fundamentally illiberal demand. ... The deeper phenomenal differences between heterosexual and homosexual relations are hard to specify precisely. Still, these differences seem sufficiently clear to prohibit gay marriage without denying gays equal protection under the laws. Gay relations bear a less direct relation to the generative act in its full psychological and cultural complexity than relations between heterosexual partners, even when age, individual preference, or medical anomaly impede fertility.

It boggles the mind how she can, in one paragraph, argue that it is "fundamentally illiberal" to base our laws on one conception of how similar same- and opposite-sex relationships are, then in the very next paragraph argue that we should base our laws on the fact that it just "seems" (to her) that the two types of relationships are different.

If treating same- and opposite-sex marriages equally is an illiberal forcing of one person's opinions on another, then any definition of marriage is similarly illiberal. The quest for neutrality among opinions in this case is pointless, so we're left to debate the substance. And on the substance, I think that: 1) the institution of marriage provides a useful legal and social framework for establishing a long-term bond between two adults, which enables them to better carry out tasks potentially including child-rearing; and 2) same-sex couples can have as much or as little need for that framework as opposite-sex couples.

I hate to psychoanalyze people, as it too easily turns into ad hominem rather than consideration of their arguments. But after reading Shell's piece, and seeing how she accepts so much of the case that sex and marriage are about more than sperm-meets-egg and is finally reduced to retreating into a vague affirmation that expanding marriage rights just "seems" wrong, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the article is an extended attempt to rationalize a gut feeling.
Stentor Danielson, 20:38,

Getting More Women In Congress

Echidne notes that, while the US has pushed for provisions in the Iraqi and Afghan constitutions requiring 25% female representation in the legislature, our own Congress falls short of that mark. This got me thinking about how one would implement such an affirmative action plan (i.e. one that establishes a degree of representation by fiat, rather than through incentive and outreach) for an elected body, as opposed to the typical use of affirmative action in situations with a centralized hiring/admissions department.

In a proportional representation system, it's easy (This page suggests that just switching to proportional representation, even without any explicit affirmative action requirement, will bost women's representation). Parties already write up their list of candidates, so you simply require them to include a certain proportion of women, distributed through the list with a certain regularity. But what about a geographical constituency system such as we have in the US? I'm not among those progressives who thinks that we should move to an entirely proportional representation system, because I think there are merits to having a legislator with a close connection to your community, and it seems that geographical constituencies make it easier for outsider candidates to get in, and for mavericks who don't toe the party line. (My personal preference would be to leave the House as it is with additional controls on gerrymandering, while shifting the Senate to proportional representation).

One option, paralleling the strategy under proportional representation, would be to require parties' slates of candidates to include a certain proportion of women. There are two problems here. One is that, since coordination between parties is unlikely, we'd get a fair number of opposite-sex races, and thus the gender balance in the resulting legislature would be vulnerable to the electoral choices of voters. It's likely that men would win a disproportionate number of the opposite-sex races, both because of sexism in the electorate, and because parties would tend to fulfil their female quota by running women in the other party's "safe" seats, seats disproportionately held by men. The second issue is that this increases the power of the party. In order to ensure the correct proportion of female candidates, a central party authority would have to select the whole slate. This would hurt outsider candidates, since the people selected would be those who have "paid their dues" and ingratiated themselves to the party leadership (certainly this happens already, but we at least have formal openness). Social scientists have also found that women, non-whites, lower-class people, etc. who have attained power in the modern US tend to be those who have learned to think and act like male white middle-class people. Any system that strengthens the party hierarchy would seem to exacerbate this phenomenon, resulting in a situation in which the distribution of X chromosomes in Congress would be much more diverse than the distribution of perspectives and interests and the distribution of opportunity for aspiring legislators.

Another possibility would be to assign certain districts as "women's districts." The FEC would say "districts 2, 6, and 10 must elect a woman, the others may elect anyone." This would avoid giving the parties additional power, as any woman could throw her hat into the primary or general election ring. The downside would be that it restricts some voters' and candidates' choices more than others', by singling out some people and requiring that they be represented by a certain type of person, while their neighbors in the next district benefit from a geographic accident. We might reduce this unfairness by making a rotating system, in which the "women's districts" would be reallocated every so many terms. There would be problems here with term limits (unless legislators are limited to a single term) -- some politicians would be kicked out of office simply because it was time for someone of a different gender to have the seat.

We might also consider a hybrid geographic-stakeholder style constituency system. A stakeholder constituency system* is one in which defined interest groups are assigned seats for their representatives, as in the case of the New Zealand Parliament, where Maori people may vote for a separate group of designated Maori seats rather than their general proportional representatives. So we might, for example, consolidate our electoral districts into half the number, then within each district elect a male and a female representative. This system would work much less well when there are multiple affirmative action programs going on (gender, race, class, etc.), or when the threshold of representation is less than "proportional to the population" (e.g., if we just wanted to ensure at least 25% female representation, rather than requiring 50-50). The degree of aggregation required would destroy the geographic specificity of the districts, moving us toward a more pure stakeholder system.

*No idea if this is the actual name for this kind of thing.

UPDATE: This appears to be Echidne's source. Interestingly, the article claims that women don't suffer significant bias in elections, so the main issue is getting qualified women to run.
Stentor Danielson, 15:30,

Shell Wakes Up

Oil Chief: My Fears For Planet In an interview in today's Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says we urgently need to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which scientists think contribute to global warming, and store them underground - a technique called carbon sequestration. ... His words follow those of the government's chief science adviser, David King, who said in January that climate change posed a bigger threat to the world than terrorism. "You can't slip a piece of paper between David King and me on this position," said Lord Oxburgh, a respected geologist who replaced the disgraced Philip Watts as chairman of the British arm of the oil giant in March. ... [Greenpeace spokesman Robin] Oakley said a gulf was opening between more progressive oil companies such as Shell, which invests in alternative energy sources including wind and solar power, and ExxonMobil, the biggest and most influential producer, particularly in the US. -- via The Hamster

Between Oxburgh's statement and Oakley's broader perspective, I'm considering revising my list of "most evil oil companies" -- the ones I avoid buying from unless my car is about to die. Currently the list includes ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and Shell. I do wish this news had gotten out a few weeks ago, though. That way I could have hit the Shell station right next to the on-ramp of the Garden State Parkway, rather than driving halfway across town to go to Hess (which, along with BP-Amoco and Citgo, is on my "least evil oil companies" list -- the ones I'll go out of my way to patronize).

It remains to be seen how much action will accompany this rhetorical recognition of the problems of climate change. It's also important to remember that climate change is not the only significant environmental impact of the oil industry. Certainly oil companies are in a good position to invest in alternative fuels, but the main impetus for a reduction in oil use has to come from the makers of vehicles and from consumers (the government, of course, can play a role in boosting the right choices by those actors).

Environmental degradation around drilling sites has been extensive, particularly in the third world (Shell's operations in Nigeria are notorious). Oil companies build roads and pipelines through wilderness areas. Carelessness and the use of old, porly functioning equipment lead to large oil spills into surrounding land and waterways. If it's not cost-effective to pump natural gas, they burn it off in thousand-degree flares that run 24-7. The social impacts can be immense as well. Oil concessions are handed out without regard to the interests or consent of the local people, and the military often acts as hired goons for the oil company. The environmental destruction and pollution affects people indirectly by disrupting the ecosystem services they depend on, and directly by harming their health.

BP recently earned praise for designing a well in west Africa that preserved the biodiversity of the surrounding area. I'd like to see more oil companies addressing that sort of impact, in addition to climate change.
Stentor Danielson, 11:19,

16.6.04

The Anti-Cult

Rivka presents some good evidence that the fastest way to deprive a word of meaning is to use it as an insult. In this case, we see the word "cult" being applied to Unitarian Universalism. It's understandable that people with a strong commitment to a revealed-truth religion would have issues with UUism, but to call it a cult? There have been a thousand definitions of "cult" proposed (in response to this exact sort of sloppy derogatory use), but as I see it the word "cult" evokes elements like extreme dogmatism, subordination of the individual to the collective, and disengagement from the wider world (which is percieved as irredeemable by human action). In the links Rivka provides, UUs are criticized for their lack of these cultic features. UUs are too committed to the fallibility of the human intellect and value diversity, and are thus unwilling to acknowledge the eternal truth of Jesus. UUs place final authority in their own conscience, rather than accepting the authority of the writers, translators, and interpreters of the Bible. UUs are interested in progressive social causes and have adopted the moral views of the secular culture (such as acceptance of homosexuality).

But in a certain way I think the word "cult" in its more restrictive sense captures some of what some other Christians think about UUism. There's a sense that the anti-cultic manifestations of UUism are established through an underlying cultishness. It seems that the only way someone could resist faith in Jesus is that they're in the grip of some other ideology, some ideology deeper and more controlling than Christianity. UUs have been brainwashed into believing they can think freely, as it were. Jesus proclaimed freedom from hell, which is a powerfully liberating message -- provided that you believe in hell. Psychologically, UUs are already liberated. But if you believe that they remain spiritually bound, they seem doubly trapped -- headed for hell for their lack of faith, and unable to even see the need for salvation.
Stentor Danielson, 18:39,

Kerrysylvania

Over at George W. Bush's blog, they've got a Journeys with John feature that tries to put some local color into their criticisms of Kerry. Under "Pennsylvania," I see they're trying to play both the Pat Toomey card and the Arlen Specter card -- complaining on the one hand that Kerry wants to raise spending and taxes, and on the other that he wouldn't direct enough pork to PA.
Stentor Danielson, 11:11,

15.6.04

Sustainable Australia

Coal Remains King In Solar Age A national energy strategy unveiled by the Prime Minister offers $700 million in incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but will slash $1.5 billion from fuel tax and continue heavy reliance on coal and other fossil fuels. Declaring the Federal Government was responding to the threat of global warming "the smart way", John Howard insisted the country was right to exploit its fossil fuels to secure economic prosperity. ... The Greens leader, Bob Brown, said Mr Howard was spending $32 on polluting energy for every dollar spent on renewable energy. "It's absolutely retrograde, it's backward. We're not even paddling water here," he said. Mr Howard said it was not in the national interest "to lock up and leave undeveloped our natural resources. As an efficient global supplier, we need to be positioned to meet growing demand while also moving to a low-emissions future."

This is a pretty typical center-right environmental package -- a few showy token bits of high-tech sustainability coupled with broad boosts for old "dirty" industries and practices. I kind of like Howard's justification for it, though -- basically "it's there, so we might as well use it up before we move on to the next thing."

If Australia's worried about its international economic standing, a major national push toward sustainable technologies seems to be a good idea. It's a small enough country that it would be able to experiment more readily, having less infrastructural inertia to overcome than a bigger nation like the US. There would be the knock-off effect of helping to stem the country's brain drain by creating incentives for domestic scientific development. And rather than simply running out its resource endowment advantage and waiting to cross the sustainability bridge when it gets there, Australia could position itself to be at the forefront of the inevitable global shift away from fossil fuels, well able to export its model for a tidy profit.
Stentor Danielson, 23:10,

Flag Follies

Hatch Resumes Push For His Amendment Against Flag-Burning The stage is being set for an election-year battle over Sen. Orrin Hatch's latest effort to amend the Constitution to outlaw flag burning. While passage of the amendment remains unlikely, Hatch is moving quickly to move the amendment through the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, preparing it for a fight before the full Senate. The measure was originally scheduled for committee consideration Thursday [June 3], but Hatch postponed it until next week. ... Hatch said that if the amendment is approved by Congress "the nationwide debate over state ratification will be one of the greatest public discussions in American history."

They're considering weakening the First Amendment to deal with an incredibly rare act that harms nobody besides a few over-sensitive patriots. If this is going to be "one of the greatest public discussions in American history," then we have an incredibly lame history of civic discourse.

UPDATE: It looks like New Zealand is dealing with this issue as well. The linked story makes the interesting claim that outlawing flag-burning makes the act more powerful, as the flag-burner has to engage in civil disobedience as well as offending people's sensibilities. Perhaps that explains why some on the far left seem to secretly hope that the government cracks down on their protests and subversive writings -- it makes it seem like they're taking a more radical stand against the system. I, on the other hand, would like my acts of expression to stay nice and legal even at the price of non-radicalness. About the only thing that could make me want to burn a flag is if they made it illegal to do so. The USA should earn my respect, not demand it from me.
Stentor Danielson, 22:47,

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

John Kerry is not being overshadowed by Bill Clinton's book. But he is being overshadowed by all the commentators talking about how he's going to be overshadowed by Bill Clinton's book.
Stentor Danielson, 22:18,

14.6.04

René Descats and Jürgen Dogermas

I don't post them often, since -- as a total non-expert -- I don't have much to add. But I'm fascinated by stories like this one about animal intelligence:

German Pet's Vocabulary Stuns Scientists In the first experiment, the researchers put 10 of Rico's toys in one room and Rico [a border collie] and his owner in another. The investigators then instructed the owner to order Rico to fetch two randomly selected items. As Rico ran into the other room and began searching for the items, he could not have picked up any hints from his owner because the owner was out of sight. In 40 tests, Rico got it right 37 times, demonstrating he had a vocabulary comparable to dolphins, apes, sea lions and parrots that have undergone extensive training. ... "This tells us he can do simple logic," Fischer said in a telephone interview. "It's like he's saying to himself, 'I know the others have names, so this new word cannot refer to my familiar toys. It must refer to this new thing.' Or it goes the other way around, and he's thinking, 'I've never seen this one before, so this must be it.' He's actually thinking."

Unlike Phillip Carter (from whose post I got this story), I'm more of a cat person than a dog person. (Unfortunately, between my landlord's paranoia and the rarity of my trips home, I'm more of an aspiring cat person than a real one*.) So I wonder whether cats could match dogs on the intelligence score.

It seems like the stereotypical cat-dog difference could be an issue here. Dogs are "man's best friend" because they're pack animals. They come to see humans as their pack leaders, who they're eager to please and to learn from. So dogs have a built-in incentive to do their best at whatever test we create for them. Since the test is being designed by humans to look for signs of "intelligence" as humans understand it, it's bound to be an anthropocentric test. Consider a detail like the use of spoken language for giving Rico instructions, as opposed to something -- a code of head-nodding or a bee-like dance, perhaps -- that he could "speak" back to us directly (a la the use of sign language with apes). Being a dog, Rico is predisposed to make the effort to think like a person. Cats, it seems, would be less likely to care about helping us with our tests. We'd have to put more effort into learning Cat rather than relying on teaching them Human.

Some of Carter's other links refer to the phenomenon of dogs coming to resemble their owners (tragically, in the case of the dogs at Abu Ghraib). That dogs would do this is easy to understand -- being pack animals, they have an inbuilt capacity for socialization. Cats, on the other hand, are naturally solitary. This raises two questions:

1. How much of cats' famed aloofness is learned, how much is imputed, and how much is natural? We know that humans often become what others expect them to be. And of course we tend to see what we expect. So it seems possible that cats could be more doglike, but their owners have unconsciously trained them to act more like "proper" cats. The reverse may hold true with dogs -- that their individuality is often stifled because their owners emphasize their sociability, effectively brainwashing them.

2. Initially, I thought that cats' lesser sociability might be a factor suggesting that they would be less intelligent than dogs. As solitary animals, they would have developed less need, opportunity, and capacity for learning from, and communicating with, each other. But of course, that need not be the only type of intelligence. Dogs, like humans, exhibit a basically discursive form of intelligence, of the type described by late modern and postmodern thinkers like Habermas. Cats, on the other hand, may posess a more monologic form of intelligence, resembling early modern or classic Enlightenment ideas about the solitary mind introspecting and interacting with an objective environment. In other words, Descartes wanted to be a cat.

*I'm also an aspiring rabbit person, although I've thus far heard nothing to indicate that rabbits are particularly intelligent. A Google search turns up some stuff, but it's mostly anecdotal, and I'm wary of people's tendency to anthropomorphize things that are important in their lives (like a pet).
Stentor Danielson, 00:32,

13.6.04

Urinal Reform

Flash No-Flush Urinals Spark A Lav Affair Woollahra, Waverley, Manly and Randwick councils are considering swapping the water now used in public urinals for small new-age cubes that promise to stop the smell, keep the urinals clean and save 70,000 to 100,000 litres of water for each urinal every year. Made from bacteria, the blocks are said to keep urinals cleaner and less smelly. ... Desert Ecosystems, the South Australian company that makes them, claims "a blend of naturally occurring microbes ... removes the cause of urinal odours without the use of water" and reduces stains on urinals. ... The water bill for the toilets is $6000 a year, he [Manly water cycle management officer Paul Smith] said, compared with about $400 a year for the microbe blocks. "We haven't had any negative reaction or any reaction at all, to be honest," he said. ... Cr Excell admitted it would be harder to save water in women's toilets, although it might be possible to dedicate some toilets to "number ones, and some to number twos".

Aussies are good at getting little environmental details right. They're on the verge of eliminating plastic grocery bags, and now they're working on non-flushing urinals. As for the toilets and the problem of "number twos," while I was down there I saw a state-of-the-art composting outhouse at FitzRoy Falls National Park, so perhaps that technology can be adapted for wider use.
Stentor Danielson, 15:04,