We Killed the Little Green Men

Remember those probes NASA sent into space in the 70s and 80s, looking for life in outer space? 'Take me to your leader', et al? Well, turns out that they may have found the leader, and have killed him/her/it by mistake. And all his/her/its followers too. Apparently they were looking for life forms supported by water, like most of the ones we have on earth, and forgot to consider that some things may be different in outer space. So by pouring water on Martian soil and heating it, they may have drowned and baked any life that was hanging out on Mars. I can just see one little martian saying to another 'I KNEW there was a good reason we didn't like the neighbours...'. pffft. sizzle.

Shoot me now!

A Guardian story about a 16-year-old German boy who died of alcohol poisoning on Thursday night has me thinking about the wonders of booze and the role it plays in our lives. You can read the story here. There are two things in particular that strike me as interesting:

1. The boy was underage. German law says that wine and beer can be served to anyone above 16, but you need to be 18 to drink hard liquor. The boy in question died after drinking 50 tequila shots.
2. This article, and others on the subject, seem to suggest that stricter regulation is needed, from the government, and from club managements.

Europe is already one of the hardest drinking regions in the world: 11 litres of pure alcohol a year per head, according to TIME magazine. This figure was at a high in the seventies, because of a cultural bent in Europe to drink during the day. It fell after that, only to climb again in the nineties, because of a change in drinking habits. More young people are drinking more in smaller periods of time. And let’s face it, it’s hard not to see why. Alcohol is cheaper than most other forms of public entertainment, it’s a great ‘social lubricant’ as someone described it, and for a generation obsessed with sex, it’s almost a surefire of overcoming social and mental inhibitions. (On a somewhat related note, I was interested to learn how ladies’ nights when drinks are free for women, pay for themselves. A bartender friend once told me that they make a loss on serving free drinks for women. The money comes from the men who flock to the place, drawn by the idea of dozens of drunk, available women.)

In Britain, one of the countries with the worst records for teen drinking, 29% of girls, and 26% of boys from the ages of 15-16 admit to routinely drinking more than 5-6 drinks in one night. And that’s just the ones who remember doing it.

In my midnight meanderings around Vienna (under the influence or not), I’m frequently struck by the responsible drinking habits of most young Europeans. The ones I spend time with, (and I’m willing to admit that they don’t represent a norm) spend hours nursing a single beer or a glass of wine. (This sometimes drives me to distraction: if I have a beer in front of me, the damn thing just demands to be drunk, which usually means that I spend many hours nursing an empty glass.) According to my friends, this is mostly due to the money factor: most of us don’t have much of it. Also sometimes we have to get back home to study for the next day, and being smash drunk doesn’t really help in a situation like that. What I’m trying to say, is that in a couple of months, most people drink maybe three, four times a week, but get seriously, there-are-two-of-me-in-the-mirror, the-floor-feels-like-the-bottom-of-a-tiny-boat-on-a-rolling-sea drunk maybe twice or thrice.

Of course, some might say that’s enough. After all, this unfortunate child (and he was a child) didn’t die because he got drunk repeatedly. It only takes the once. And most nights, you will see at least one ambulance screeching into an alley to cart away someone clutching his sides and depositing his wiener schnitzel on the bored-looking paramedic’s shoes. But the core question for me is, who takes responsibility?

The club? But on the same philosophy that says companies don’t need to take responsibility for the environmental and social damage they cause, because they are profit-making ventures in a capitalist world economy, can we really expect a club to cut back on profits by serving fewer drinks? Why should they do it? In this case, certainly they should have checked whether the boy was over 16, but the same thing happens to hundreds of young people just over eighteen.

The government? In a world where the state is increasingly losing control over people’s private lives (look at abortive attempts to regulate internet access) and our lives are increasingly being lived in a dimension that is outside of state and church control (which I firmly believe and will continue to believe is a good thing), can a government really be expected to take control of a citizen’s drinking habits?

One exception to this rule should of course be drunk driving. People who have been drinking must, and by force, if necessary, be stopped from driving any kind of motor transport. Drunk driving is a risk to people in an essentially public space, which must be governed by the same set of rules which apply to everyone. (In this case the rule being that you must be able to walk in a straight line with one finger pressed against your nose before you can climb behind the wheel of something with the power to kill. Of course, by this logic, most truck drivers in India should have their drivers’ licenses revoked.)

The parents? 51% of parents in Britain say they do not know where their children are going at night. Many parents do not know what their children are seeing on the internet, who their real friends may be. This is not, contrary to what some interesting elements have suggested, due to a breakdown in traditional family roles (read women going to work) but due to a paradigm shift in the way our societies and our lives are structured. In an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, the tight cores around which our lives used to be organized are disintegrating and radiating outwards.

Peer pressure is something we all live with. Those looks of incredulity when someone says they don’t drink, those invitations to ‘have one more, on me.’ But the only person who can decide when to put the glass down, is the one with the drink in his hand. Not the alcohol company, not the club, not the government, not the parents, not the girlfriend, not the social worker.

In the end, what was that young man thinking around his 10^th shot of tequila? (After that, we may safely assume that he wasn’t thinking of anything much at all.) Was he thinking that this was a cool way to spend an evening, that his recklessness would make him popular and more accepted? Or was he thinking that he wanted to stop, and didn’t know how?

(picture courtesy www.plig.net)

That Surreal Sunday

In the wilderness of regular weekends and assignments, hysterical giggles and stale beer in smoky pubs ( don't get me wrong, I quite enjoy those too), sometimes comes a sunday so luminous that it merits a blog post all to itself. And while it wasn't exactly a religious revelation, it was completely surreal. It all began on saturday night, around 11.55 pm. We (S and I) were lounging around in our hostel room in Budapest waiting for the rest to come back and take us out. We had already played two games of foozball (well, that's how it sounds anyway!) and I had been soundly beaten at both, and now we were eating day old yoghurt with plastic spoons. The phone rang. 'We're too far. You guys come out and join us. Take the left near the synagogue onto ustica ter, a right on palvas verne, and the small underground pub on your right.' We stared at each other, got our jackets and went for a walk instead, looking for a pub that was located in our own dimension. We found one called 'Mylord' which should have been a warning, but we went in anyway. And yeah, not exactly on our dimension. So we spent Sunday evening in a gay bar, being treated very well by very nice gentlemen who were clearly wondering what it was we were doing there.


Sunday morning we decided we owed ourselves a treat, and ran off to the famous Hungarian baths. 2000 years ago a wily old hermit set up a clinic treating people with the medicinal waters of the Danube, and was awarded a sainthood for his pains. So on Sunday morning we lined up to be anointed.
May I please say here that four hours lying in dense, mineral-laden water, heated to just the perfect temperature, staring up at deep blue tiles, surrounded by 1920s decadence, and glass roofs, is not a shabby way to spend a Sunday? Not to mention the saunas, the freezing water pool, the massage jets...and all for the princely sum of 10 euros? (I only hope they weren't saving the money by skimping on the cleaning..)
The plan is that you loll in the baths for about twenty minutes, jump out into the freezing water, run into the sauna, sweat all your toxins out, jump in the swimming pool, roll back into the baths, stagger into the freezing water, run into the sauna, wheeze for a bit, and then sink gratefully into the water jets........by the end of it, i was singing ABBA songs with a silly grin on my face.....and yeah, I did get to see rather more raddled old white European flesh than I strictly would have wanted, but hey, that was nothing a little counselling won't cure....
How to get there: From the city centre, cross the bridge connecting the Central Market and the Rock Cathedral. The Gellert Spa is at the foot of the hills. It costs about 7800 florints per person.
Where to Stay: The Domino Hostel in the city center is a great place to stay if you're a penniless student. If you're not, I don't know what you should do. I am a penniless student.

That Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Valley

A concept formulated by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist. Mori tested people's emotional responses to a wide variety of robots, from non-humanoid to completely humanoid. He found that the human tendency to empathize with machines increases as the robot becomes more human. But at a certain point, when the robot becomes too human, the emotional sympathy abruptly ceases, and revulsion takes its place. People began to notice not the charmingly human characteristics of the robot but the creepy zombielike differences.
—John Seabrook, "It came from Hollywood," The New Yorker, December 1, 2003

Why a valley?

Because if you graph people's emotional reactions to a robot, they will generally increase (become more positive) as the machine's similarity to a human being increases. However, at the point where the robot is nearly lifelike, a certain creepiness or even downright revulsion takes over and the emotional response collapses. If the robot could be made 100% human-like, then the emotional response would, of course, return to the favorable range. That emotional crash at the not-quite-human stage is the uncanny valley.