Dreamflesh

A recent story about a rise in mental health hospital admissions “due to the use of cannabis” has found me mulling the whole thing over recently.

Naturally, there are myriad questions. Most stories like this with simplistic causal models – people doing X also have Y, therefore X causes Y – leave me wondering about the actual complexities involved. What else was going on in these people’s lives? Was cannabis really a direct cause? Was it more of a catalyst for something simmering away due to other factors? How many people out there would be driven crazy by their jobs if it weren’t for them being able to wind down with a spliff in the evening?

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A wonderful parable for our times, from the latest Anthropik.com post (‘In Praise of Laziness’), well worth a re-post:

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It’s great to find a band on tour soon after discovering them.

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So, having signed up for the exciting Metageum conference in Malta this November, the question of travel arises. More specifically, how does this sit with my “no air travel unless essential” plan?

First off, why no air travel? Carbon emissions, of course. Jim Bliss, my ex-engineer friend whose head for maths makes me dizzy, on moving to Dublin last year, sat down to work out how much worse it would be if he flew to London rather than taking a coach. Turns out it’s about 31 times worse.

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The ever-clued-up Bob Trubshaw just brought an exciting-looking week-long conference in Malta to my attention:

Metageum 2007: Exploring the Megalithic Mind An inter-disciplinary international conference on approaches to understanding the origins of our megalithic legacy – The Caraffa Stores, Birgu, Island of Malta – 3rd-11th November 2007

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July’s Fortean Times contains a glowing review of Dreamflesh Journal Vol. I:

‘Jam today! Part of the pleasure of forteana is the psychological liberation of stepping outside the bounds of conventional reality. The lively mind likes to cock a snook at the leaden head. What if there were a whole realm of super-extraordinary beliefs half an hour before breakfast? … Intelligent, literate and well-produced, this curious publication reflects the multi-faceted tastes of its editor. One can only hope it survives the narrow razamatazz of the marketplace.’

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Debunking is a delicate process. At least, it should be.

All too often a “myth” (in the modern sense of a false image of something) is debunked in a way that is almost wilfully blind to the baby in the bathwater. Naturally, the encrusted mental habits that this kind of myth embodies, often bonded tightly together with the sticky glue of wishful thinking, need a jolt of force to be loosened up. But it’s often the case that people take this need for a bit of a conceptual shove as a license to instigate some kind of dramatic about-turn.

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Bristol’s Festival of Ideas kicked off today with a short lecture by social philosopher Steve Fuller, which I popped along to. A flaky friend didn’t show, so you, my dear readers, get what would have been my post-lecture pub ramblings.

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Thanks to our insatiable desire for amusing animal videos on the web, the outdatedness of the notion of tool-use as a quality that raises us above “mere” animal status is pretty well-known now.

Betty, the hook-making crow in a lab in Oxford, probably got the ball rolling, easily out-performing the rudimentary tool skills of chimps:

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Currently the most popular story on BBC News is the bizarre and horrific tale of a man who cut off his own penis in a restaurant in London on Sunday. A spokeswoman for Zizzi, the pizza chain whose branch on The Strand was the scene for this spontaneous public castration, said “the man was not thought to have any connection with the restaurant.”

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