Cultural sensitivities

In hackerdom, it’s deeply ingrained behaviour to look away when somebody else enters their password; it’s automatic and often quite subtle, just a slight turn of the head and a defocussing of the gaze for the necessary few seconds. Conversely, it is expected behaviour by the other: A n00b that I was instructing leaned over my shoulder and watched my actions even while I logged in; I couldn’t have been more disturbed if she’d insisted on following me into the bathroom.

Avoiding going native

Some years ago I listened to professor Hans Rosling talking on Sommar. He described how he figured out that the epidemic disease of konzo is caused by insufficiently processed cassava in the diet. Then, apparently to demonstrate the wisdom of indigenous populations, he mentioned that the local population know very well what causes konzo but poverty often requires balancing between not eating at all and eating potentially dangerous cassava. I was dumbstruck. Why couldn't the patients have mentioned that, as they were piling up in the hospital and the (presumably city-bred) medical staff were scratching their heads at the mysterious disease? Didn't the physicians think to ask, were the patients too intimidated by the experts to voice their own knowledge, or did they just not care, as long as they were taken care of?

I had a bit of the same feeling when I recently saw District 9. The aliens had been on Earth for almost 30 years, long enough for humans to have learnt their language, yet no-one in all that time had asked them why they were here. I first thought this was a major plot hole, but considering Rosling's experience, I wonder if it isn't rather an accurate and scathing assessment of human behaviour—we don't care about the motives of refugees that (literally!) descend upon us, we just do what we, for reasons completely our own, decide to be the appropriate thing to do.

Death in the age of Facebook

The mobile on my nightstand played its chirpy little tune. Picking it up I automatically noted the time: 01:27. My older half-brother S had—unexpectedly and prematurely—died a few hours earlier, please forward the message to Sis and Mom. I decided I could probably wait till morning to call them. While I returned to sleep the search for the members of a scattered family in infrequent contact continued, using Eniro, Hitta and whatever other sites allowed suitable searches for incomplete ID information. S's partner M was travelling abroad and had to be reached. A friend of hers in another city was located who managed to get hold of M on Skype in the early morning.

In the morning I left voice mail messages to call me on my mother's and sister's numbers. As I came in to work I saw S still logged in to his Skype account, where he'd left it going for his final exercise round. More subdued phone calls during the day, there would be a viewing at the hospital the next day. I was unfamiliar with the term, but googling confirmed that it was an opportunity to see the body. When had this procedure been (re-)introduced?

The next morning grim-faced siblings and half-siblings met at the hospital chapel with S's children and M. Raw unconstrained grief from M, we others struggling to keep outward emotions in check in the prescribed Nordic manner, this sometimes necessitating rapid exits to the bathroom, outdoors or just fixed staring away, breathing deeply. (I turned on my clinical mind and observed.) A hospital-issue welfare officer hovered nearby, but soon withdrew as she felt her presence unnecessary.

Eventually we had to leave, making space for others to meet their dead, and all went to S and M's house to find solace in each other and to manage the situation by planning practical details. Work, always a sure way to keep oneself from thinking. Where should the ceremony be, how should it designed? Buddhist or Orthodox ritual? “But none of that God stuff.” Those who had their laptops with them brought up iPhoto and shared their pictures of S.

The next few days we made points of friending each other on Facebook, adding each other to our Skype contact lists, updating our telephone numbers and email addresses to better stay in touch.

Eventually came the funeral, on the time when it had been possible to book a chapel and officiants. A completely secular occasion in a chapel in a silent forest burial ground, restrained and sad; token memories offered by grieving friends and colleagues. For practical reasons the actual interment took place at a different burial ground, now with an Orthodox priest blessing the dead, rapidly reeling off the necessary many words in the cold air, comforting perhaps not so much through any presumed presence of God, but by the familiar ritual, ingrained since childhood, the bedrock of generations behind. We others, brought up in Western Lutheranism, may not have understood what was being said, but still recognised the fundamentals of ritual and the support it gave.

And perhaps it is a modern kind of votive candle that S still is logged in to Skype.

Good show

So I went to the hominid exhibition and on the whole I was quite pleased with it. I was a bit annoyed by all the early hominids being depicted with half-open mouths—it made them look like halfwits (and maybe that was the intention, but still) but they were all nicely done. (The Neandertal woman looked very sweet, reminding me of a friend of mine. :-) The people who had done these reconstructions are obviously very skilled (as a modeller I can attest that making life-like humans is non-trivial) and frankly, the locally produced reconstructions of other animals, such as the Diatryma, rather paled in comparison.

But, what really pleased me was that the texts surrounding the exhibits were very clear and managed to present a lot of information in a very compact space on what had driven the evolution of the different species of hominids and really present the branching bush with multiple, co-existing species. Furthermore, noise-producing exhibits were kept down to a minimum, which however didn't make so much of a difference as it seemed every toddler parent in Stockholm had brought along their kids for me to stumble over. (I've lost my reflexes as my own kids these days are taller than me.) Most kids seemed very happy and excited by all these strange-looking people that now were dead. (“Why did they die, Mommy?” “I don't know, maybe they got sick or something.” This is of course true for the individuals, if not for the species as such, one had better keep track of what is meant—these reconstructions being both based on individuals, but also being representatives of all their contemporaries.)

Excursion to see stuffed people

Next Saturday, 2008-03-01, I intend to go visit the National Museum of Natural History and see their exhibition of reconstructed hominids. Anyone else prehistorically interested is invited to tag along. I will be hanging around the entrance around 11:00. I'm the guy with the embarrassingly shaped crocheted red hat.