Most wars are civil, and most violence is domestic. I’ve had enough and more conversations about how bad domestic violence is and ‘what to do’. The latter phase, in Sri Lanka at least, is more of an impotent shrug than an actual question. But something can be done, as this article about Maryland shows.

A friend sent me a link to this school for an ancient Sri Lankan martial art – Angampora. I’d heard of it but lost track. It looks like they have an established school in Nugegoda, and a decent website. It seems very interesting. The practice was banned under the British, but it survived. Today a few people preserve and teach it (to the worthy), swearing by the Lord Buddha and Ravana to use their power for good.

Governments are almost uniformly disliked, because they suck. Their main selling point is that they suck significantly less than no government, or really bad government, but that’s a hard sell.

If I had a blogger idol it would be Han Han – Chinese super-blogger, race car driver, and all around dreamy guy. My friend is down from Beijing and he says China is a land of paradoxes. It’s both more free and restricted than you would imagine. I think Han Han is the riddle within the enigma. He’s recently written three essays, On Revolution, On Democracy, and On Freedom. They’re quite interesting.

Recently a foreigner was killed in Tangalle, with a local government leader being a suspect. This is highly unusual (for a foreigner to be killed), but thuggery does persist. In Unawatuna, a friend of mine was accosted by someone flashing a government ID, essentially asking for his girlfriend. Some other friends were leaving a party and ended up getting thrashed into the Mount Lavinia gutter. Not to mention semi-regular fights at nightclubs like Karma.

I’ve been reading a book by Robert Bellah which defines religion as something of a virtual reality machine, enabling us to connect to and create alternate realities. In that sense, it’s a symbol system. A tree or a pyramid or Stonehenge is like a rudimentary printf statement for God. All as ahead of their time as Babbage’s Difference Engine was ahead of the computer, but I think the concept is sound.

I started this book, Religion In Human Evolution, which has a lot of ideas per page. Here’s one, that history is older than texts, thus older than 5,000 years and mixed with evolutionary biology. This I believe most sincerely to be true, but it’s still a rejection of an established view. Indeed, the time before text is often called pre-history, and many people are happy to let it dwell in mystery or myth.

I got a book in the mail today, ‘Religion In Human Evolution’. I should say a tome, it’s pretty hefty. The cover had a word I didn’t understand on it, but an interesting one. Axial, as in Axial Age. The subheading of the book is ‘From The Paleolithic To The Axial Age’. So what does axial mean? Age of the axe?

Kurt Cobain sang “It’s OK to eat fish, cause they don’t have any feelings.” Indeed, most people don’t empathize with fish at all – I don’t really – despite the fact that we are evolutionary relatives. Pescetarianism is an acceptable form of vegetarianism, and in Sri Lanka dried fish is basically a vegetable. The artist Ted Sabarese has explored our relationship with fish by photographing people with fish that look like them. Interesting results.

As a bit of a data geek, I found this hilarious. This graph from Businessweek shows examples where correlation (two trends that look similar) is not causation (trend A did not cause trend B). I’ve included the funniest one above, but there’s more.