Africa: Rare Analyses and Knowledge-base: 06/01/2010

Friday, June 25, 2010

Knowledge-base Tool Kit: Social Bargaining positions

Image caption: Cartoon inspired by artwork of Scott Adams, United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

In the existing interconnected global social complex, there are two main types of business entities: 1) Owners and/or overseers of profit-driven concerns that supply commodities of various forms, and 2) suppliers of labor. The former group ranges from financiers to the management of manufacturing, service and retail concerns, while the latter essentially comprises of the wage-worker. The global social setup is of course complex enough to obscure the obviousness of its interconnected business relations in all its facets to an ordinary observer, beyond that observer's own immediate role in society and relations directly linked to that, e.g. employer-employee social relations....so, where does that leave an ordinary wage-worker?

KhoiSan: As the "Oldest" Surviving "Tribes"

The reader may recall having heard the claim that the KhoiSan are the "oldest living human populations" at some point or another. The saying may well have taken the character of something of a religious faith within some circles. When the whereabouts of the source for this "understanding" is inquired, common references have been to the National Geographic human genome project web-page and Semino et al.'s (2001) study regarding the "deepest clades" for instance. The former bases this on rather flimsy material that KhoiSan male gene pools comprises of deep root clades like hg A, while the latter has every now and then fallen victim to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what is being related in the authors' findings within the contexts that they were made. Fact is the KhoiSan are no more representative of the oldest anatomical modern human beings any more than other living populations.

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Blog Entries Currently Undergoing Major Modification!

Watch this space for notices on popular blog entries that are undergoing major modification and/or an update. This is to remove any impression that these entries No Longer Exist!

Due to external priorities, it's difficult to provide specific time-frames for the finalization of these works-in-progress, but, rest assured, they will be finalized at some point, and notice will be provided accordingly in the "Development" page of the blog.

Blogs currently being reworked are as follows:

— Getting to Know Ancient Egyptian Art - Part 1

— Watch this space!

Conserving Net Neutrality and Internet Freedom

With ever-increasing war on Net neutrality and Internet freedom, all persons who value a free Internet will have to pitch in and put up a relentless fight, rather than outsourcing the responsibility merely to a caring few!

The Internet is the one place that has resisted falling victim to complete subordination to and the tight clutches of arbitrary human-made political boundaries and establishment censorship. Ruling and corporate oligarchies world over are increasingly compelled to recognize the social power of the Internet, and what this means for the prospect of their continued consolidation of power; take for instance, the role that a free Internet has already played, and can continue to play in the foreseeable future, in mobilizing people to take action in a critical mass—whether it be in the service of taking fights to the streets for economic and social justice, the exercise of petitioning so-called local/state representatives, harnessing the collective power of individuals' wallets at the national or transnational stage, or in the service of building platforms which open up channels for proven grassroots leaders to make significant inroads into legislative and/or executive administrative posts.

What used to be an exclusive monopoly of the rich few, i.e. having their voices amplified in and by mass media, is no more, thanks in no small measure to the explosion of the Internet; now the average person too can have a voice almost as loud and powerful! It's then easy to see why the ruling establishment and their corporate allies are working hard to end Internet neutrality and freedom; dictatorships around the world, or perhaps better known as the "establishment" or the "ruling class" to many—whether it be plutocracies masquerading as "democracies" or self-described "socialists", are now scrambling to muzzle the average folk on the web! Whether this ambition will come to pass or not will depend on the activeness of every average individual who values and utilizes the Internet as a vehicle for social relations that is free from authoritarian censorship, whether such censorship comes from alleged capitalist, socialist or totalitarian regimes!

PS: Speaking of Internet freedom and its safeguard, there are resourceful Internet concerns out there, whose mission is to do just that, and it would be tragic to let them quietly go into oblivion. A good example of this is the fittingly-called "Internet Archive Wayback Machine"—and no, said Internet concern has no links [financial or otherwise] to this site or its authorship; however, insofar as it has proven to be a resourceful asset (e.g. in preserving web pages that have become lost, withdrawn or stripped off their original features), it is worth supporting.

ATI in Retrospective

Stephen Hawking

1942-2018

Well, time appears to have stopped ticking for Mr. Hawking, but what of "time" itself?

one can get rid of the problem of time having a beginning, in a similar way in which we got rid of the edge of the world. Suppose the beginning of the universe was like the South Pole of the earth, with degrees of latitude playing the role of time. The universe would start as a point at the South Pole. As one moves north, the circles of constant latitude, representing the size of the universe, would expand. To ask what happened before the beginning of the universe would become a meaningless question, because there is nothing south of the South Pole.
...

in the imaginary time direction, space-time is finite in extent, but doesn't have any boundary or edge. The predictions of the no boundary proposal seem to agree with observation. The no boundary hypothesis also predicts that the universe will eventually collapse again. However, the contracting phase, will not have the opposite arrow of time, to the expanding phase. So we will keep on getting older, and we won't return to our youth. Because time is not going to go backwards, I think I better stop now.

It (time) could very well go on ticking indefinitely in the bigger scheme of things beyond our own "big-bang" triggered clock, rendering our puny individual life spans almost next to nothingness, if not quite nothing, only because we will have technically existed before our exit.

It is safe to say that Mr. Hawking has been viewed by many as having been "intellectually gifted", but "intelligence" which humans generally take for granted, even as members of the species lay it to waste, is not a sure guaranteer of an evolutionary fitness with an extraordinary lifespan advantage:

It is likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes. It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value. Bacteria, and other single cell organisms, will live on, if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions

Who really knows; perhaps, it comes down to the matter of how "intelligence" is managed that will ultimately determine the longevity of its evolutionary value. If the current state of affairs in the world of humanity is any indicator to go by, as subliminally suggested in the final line of the quote above, then this longevity does not look promising.

Quotes recalled from earlier blog entries, headed by the following:

Africa: Rare Analyses and Knowledge-base

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Friday, June 25, 2010

Knowledge-base Tool Kit: Social Bargaining positions

Saturday, June 19, 2010

KhoiSan: As the "Oldest" Surviving "Tribes"

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