Thank You for Not Littering

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Even the pristine hinterlands aren’t pristine anymore. In the early 1990s, British zoologist Tim Benton took a walk along a mile of shoreline on Ducie Island, a speck of land 4,970 miles east of Australia. Here’s what he found:

  • 268 unidentifiable pieces of plastic
  • 171 glass bottles
  • 74 bottle tops
  • 71 plastic bottles
  • 67 small buoys
  • 66 buoy fragments
  • 46 large buoys
  • 44 pieces of rope
  • 29 segments of plastic pipe
  • 25 shoes
  • 18 jars
  • 14 crates
  • 8 pieces of copper sheeting
  • 7 aerosol cans
  • 7 food and drink cans
  • 6 fluorescent tubes
  • 6 light bulbs
  • 4 jerry cans
  • 3 cigarette lighters
  • 2 pen tops
  • 2 dolls’ heads
  • 2 gloves (a pair)
  • 1 asthma inhaler
  • 1 construction worker’s hat
  • 1 football (punctured)
  • 1 glue syringe
  • 1 truck tire
  • 1 plastic coat hanger
  • 1 plastic foot mat
  • 1 plastic skittle
  • 1 small gas cylinder
  • 1 tea strainer
  • 1 tinned meat pie
  • 1 toy soldier

And “0.5 toy airplane.” That’s 953 items of debris altogether, on an island of 2.5 square miles, in the least populous country in the world.

| Society · Technology

Of Vice and Men

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Villainc.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Depravity Scale is an attempt to reach a scientific definition of evil. What makes a crime “heinous”? If “horrible” or “atrocious” crimes get longer sentences, what counts? The Supreme Court says that sentences must reflect societal attitudes, but right now there’s no legal definition of a “heinous, atrocious, or cruel” act; jurors have to rely on their emotions.

New York forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner put together a list of 26 things that might characterize an act as depraved. Does the criminal maximize the victim’s fear or pain? Does he boast about his act? So far, Welner has found more than 90 percent consensus that 16 of the items indicate depravity. Interestingly, the results seem consistent across states, but not between countries.

“We need consistency, and in particular consistency that reflects the best that forensics has to offer,” Welner says. “From my own vantage point of working within the cases, juries and judges don’t see near as much as they should be seeing when it comes to forensic evidence about what a person’s intent was, what a person actually did, and what a person’s attitude was about what he did. Even from a mental health standpoint, there’s far more effort devoted to the question of who a person is or why that person did something rather than just look at what the person did.”

And Welner has no problem with the concept of evil. “I have no problem with the word being used,” he says. “If you look in the literature, there’s a startling lack of effort to try to flesh out what evil is, and I think it’s our responsibility as behavioral scientists to try to understand it. This issue gets neglected because therapeutic professions like psychiatry inherently must focus on the good in order to be therapeutic. Another reason for this neglect is because to wade in and wrestle with it means to confront it in ourselves, and that’s a painful prospect even for the most stable of us. When I first began exploring this, I never enjoyed it, and I appreciated walking away from it. The more I studied it, the more it affected even my dreams. It’s an unpalatable exercise.”

| Crime · Society

Scene of the Crime

http://www.toronto-crimestoppers.com/pages/posters/AbuseCrimeSceneFeb05.htmlRecognize this hotel room? Then you should call the Toronto police: A 9-year-old girl was sexually abused here two or three years ago.

Even though she’s been airbrushed out of the photo, the room still has a haunted quality. The same girl was apparently photographed in an elevator, near a fountain, even in an arcade.

Stranger still are the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, dollhouse recreations of actual crime scenes. They were created in the 1930s by Frances Glessner Lee, a millionaire heiress who wanted to improve police skills in forensic pathology. Four puzzles are presented here, and the Baltimore medical examiner won’t reveal the solutions — he’s still using them in training seminars.

| Crime · Death · Society

Leggo My Soul-Corroding Ennui

If you work in a spirit-crushing cubicle farm and can’t remember the innocent joys of childhood, here’s a compromise: Get a cube farm playset, including office furniture, a meaningless job title generator (“Domestic Engineering Associate”), and downloadable decorations.

If that’s not highbrow enough for you, theory.org has Lego versions of social theorists Judith Butler, Anthony Giddens, Angela McRobbie, and Michel Foucault. Post-structuralism sold separately.

| Humor · Society

Hang On Sloopy

Apparently Ohio’s official state rock song is “Hang On Sloopy.”

I don’t know if that’s the best song that ever came out of Ohio, but the resolution that proposed it is priceless:

If fans of jazz, country-and-western, classical, Hawaiian and polka music think those styles also should be recognized by the state, then by golly, they can push their own resolution just like we’re doing.

Washington has better taste — it chose “Louie Louie.”

| Entertainment · Society

Group Hug

“I once was waiting for an elevator and when the doors opened, there was a baby there on the floor of the elevator in the car seat. Instead of taking the baby out, I instead waited for the doors to close and take the baby to another floor.”

Group Hug lists 167,394 anonymous confessions.

| Society

Invisible Pink Unicorn

http://www.invisiblepinkunicorn.comWho says atheists don’t have a sense of humor? The Invisible Pink Unicorn (“blessed be her holy hooves”) was “revealed to” the Usenet newsgroup alt.atheism in 1990.

Since then, she’s acquired all the trappings of a real deity: gospels (“according to St. Sascha”), revelations (to “St. Bryce the Long-Winded”), relics (the Holy Sock of Bob), scripture, and historic artworks.

Because she’s invisible, it’s impossible to prove she does not exist. “The Invisible Pink Unicorn is a being of great spiritual power,” say the faithful. “We know this because she is capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorn is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that she is pink; we logically know that she is invisible because we can’t see her.”

Followers debate her attributes, but it’s generally agreed that she prefers pineapple and ham pizza to pepperoni and mushroom, which is said to be eaten only by followers of the Purple Oyster of Doom. The IPU also “raptures” socks from laundry as a sign of favor.

Is this harmless fun or awful blasphemy? It’s getting hard to care. As the French writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote, “If there is a God, atheism must seem to him as less of an insult than religion.”

| Humor · Religion · Society

The Glass Bead Game

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hermann_Hesse_1925_Photo_Gret_Widmann.jpegIf there’s a master’s cup for science-fiction visionaries, it might actually belong to Hermann Hesse. In a late novel, the German author seemed to imagine the World Wide Web, and its kaleidoscopic hyperlinks, fifty years before it existed.

Das Glasperlenspiel, which won the Nobel Prize in 1946, centers on “the Glass Bead Game,” in which players combine the symbols of world cultures into new and insightful combinations. Here’s his description of the game — see if this doesn’t sound like the Web:

“The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.”

Hesse never quite explains how the game is played, which has set a lot of modern designers working on playable variants. The most popular is Charles Cameron’s HipBone Game (here’s an example of a board game, but Cameron’s working on a web-based version). This bears watching: The web is constantly evolving, and perhaps Hesse’s vision is still ahead of us.

| Society · Technology

A Girl’s Best Fiend

http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtmlThe Greeks believed diamonds were tears of the gods. The Romans thought they were splinters of fallen stars. Today, “Diamonds are a con, pure and simple.”

So says Cecil Adams, and as usual, he’s right. Over the last 60 years South Africa’s De Beers diamond cartel has manipulated emotions, markets and social conventions to make a fortune out of thin air. And you may well be one of their victims.

De Beers didn’t invent the diamond engagement ring — that goes back to 1477 — but it was their 1938 marketing campaign that established it in the popular consciousness as the final symbol of true love.

The company’s PR agency, N.W. Ayer, created a new form of advertising, with no brand name, just the idea of “the eternal emotional value surrounding the diamond.” They planted romantic stories in movies and magazines; they paid fashion designers to promote the trend; they even got the English royal family to promote it.

Meanwhile, the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever” discouraged women from selling diamonds or from buying them secondhand from other women. With no secondary market, the cartel controlled the price, which explains why it varies widely, unlike gold’s. De Beers focused on controlling supply, too, limiting production, cutting off competition and buying up surplus gems.

It worked. Worldwide diamond sales rose from $100,000 in 1932 to $2.1 billion in 1979, all on the strength of a manufactured emotional impulse. Japan even adopted them as a Western status symbol — today it’s the second largest market for retail diamonds.

It’s De Beers that tells you to spend two months’ salary on an engagement ring, and it’s probably De Beers who’s selling it to you. “The value of diamonds rests on a number of assiduously cultivated myths,” write David Pallister, Sarah Stewart and Ian Lepper in the book South Africa Inc. “One is that diamonds are special.”

| Society