Alcohol is a hell of a drug with a significant cost to society. Heavy alcohol use has a higher direct health cost than most other drugs and alcohol is unique in its ability to cause injuries, particularly motor vehicle accidents. Because of its legal status, alcohol has free reign to cause domestic breakdown and poor job performance.

The problems with prohibition are that:

• it was not implemented consistently: many speakeasies continued to operate and the wealthy could easily access smuggled alcohol
• it was implemented only through regulation: the government did not make an effort to convince people to lower their demand for alcohol both before and after the ban
• no substitutes were available

The last two points get at the crux of the problem: alcohol is both traditional and vital to our culture. Successfully banning alcohol would require widescale cultural change, cultural engineering if you will. Given that many cultures throughout history have practiced intoxication, it seems that humans might have an inherent desire that would be easier to satisfy with a safer alternative drug than suppress completely. David Nutt, the ex British drug czar, is working on an alcohol substitute based on benzodiazepines (eg: Valium).

I believe that reducing alcohol abuse is an important public goal that the government should be willing to use radical means to achieve.

A weaker form of Makerism is the desire to open things up and take things apart – a common desire even in people who have never heard of Make Magazine nor Instructables. The desire to have source code to the programs you use – for them to be open source – is a special case of this. One of the arguments in favor of open source is that it allows you to maintain programs* that have been abandoned by the original producer (“abandonware”).

The other day someone gave me some speakers. The switch that turned them on stopped working after a while. I figured switches are sometimes fixable, so I removed the screws to take a look at the inside. The case was glued shut (I have no idea why it had screws). Given the herculean effort it would take to attempt a fix that might not even work, I plunked down $20 for another set of disposable speakers made in China. The earth wept.

Perhaps the government should legally require all consumer goods to be user-serviceable and repairable. It would be a step in reversing our culture of disposable goods. I would like to see the Maker community lobby for this.

* There’s no such thing as a program that doesn’t need maintenance:

A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges.
A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant.
Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum.
Software rots if not used.
These are great mysteries.

The genders in a relationship define the characteristics of that friendship. Man-man homosocial friendships are typically characterized by activities. Woman-woman homosocial friendships are typically characterized by talking. Both of these friendships have distinct psychological benefits.

It turns out that man-woman heterosocial friendships are much more like woman-woman friendships than man-man friendships. As a result, men who make friends with women benefit disproportionately (because women already have lots of woman friends).

I’m a strongly gynosocial man. I have some good friends that are men, but I have trouble building and maintaining acquaintanceships. I’d like to think I’m gynosocial because I like talking more than doing, but maybe I’m just using chicks for the emotional intimacy?

The military grouping is often said to be consistent throughout history, although with support units it’s hard to be sure apples are compared to apples. I think the numbers have been tending downward in the last 100 years due to area-effect weapons and mobilization (you can control less troops when they’re moving around really fast and you don’t want to keep them too close together). This guy claims that you need 6 people to maintain sentries, which might have something to do with why teams are almost always deployed at least in pairs (eg: one of my favourite video games, Full Spectrum Warrior).

“Support cliques” and “sympathy groups” are so named by Dunbar because of specific ways of measuring them: your support clique is your first line of support in really tough times and your sympathy group is the people who’d be devastated if you died. This table makes it clear that the phrase “urban tribes” was coined by Ethan Watters without much background reading. Watters is talking about post-kinship, post-economic families and needed a snappy name.

Anthropologists are convinced that these group sizes are based on human cognitive limits. I’m not sure I’m ready to give up my dedication to 8ish as a common human grouping (for example, as the maximum size for an ad-hoc meeting) given that 7±2 is the most famous human cognitive limit.

There’s always the chance that we’ll discover some obscure interest or connection in our profile info to build a friendship on (shared interests is the standard foundation of man-on-man friendship). But I think the more likely model is that I’ll have an event that fulfills these three criteria:

1. I invite a lot of people, including acquaintances
2. Is comfortable for attendees that don’t really know anybody
3. Is compelling enough that people attend despite the opportunity cost

Other people don’t seem to be involved in events that fulfill #1 (I don’t get invited to many events unless they need bums-in-seats). Since I’m actively working on this, I suspect #3 is where I’m failing. I’ve tried dinners at restaurants, park barbecues, daytime open houses and evening house parties – these tend to get low response rates from good friends and acquaintances alike, even when there’s free food.

Can you, dear readers, brainstorm event ideas that might fit those criteria? Or are we living in a narcissistic wasteland where nobody risks attending events that might not be fun?

Ali: Do you still want him to marry your mum?
Marcus: Naah. See, I don’t think that’s the right way. When people pair off it’s more insecure because they’ll split up, or go mad or something.
Will: What if we stay together forever?
Marcus: Fine. Great. Prove it. I just don’t think couples are the future.

Marcus: I feel safer than before, because I know more people.
Marcus’ Dad: They won’t be around forever.
Marcus: Some of them will, some of them won’t. You can find people. It’s like those acrobatic displays. Those ones when you stand on top of loads of people in a pyramid. It doesn’t really matter who they are as long as they’re there and you don’t let them go away without finding someone else.

In the second quote Marcus uses a network perspective: the structure of the system is more important than the elements that make it up.