A tale of two showers

Warning to friends and family who sometimes come to visit: this entry is not for your eyes. Do not read it.

The house I live in has two showers. Shower number one is a proper shower, standing all by itself in a separate shower room, with its nice semi-circular see-through shower cabin with sliding doors, a shower head that can be adjusted in various ways and that stays put once adjusted, lots of pressure, the right kind of ventilation, and wooden floors that are a joy to walk on. Normally, I start my workday with a short but very pleasant shower in shower number one. It takes me about two seconds to get the temperature and pressure just right (the two are co-dependant: if you increase the pressure, you also have to increase the temperature to achieve the same sensation, in the same way as the wind-chill factor links wind and the sensation of cold), and then I spend somewhere between 3 and 7 minutes, just enjoying the shower and waking up.

There is only one disadvantage to shower number one: it is right next to the guest room. This means (he intones, with the type of voice that is normally used for the trailers of Hollywood horror movies where they try to compensate for the lack of plot by increasing the advertising budget) that when we have guests, I "magnanimously" let them use it, while I am reduced to using shower number two. Shower number two is in fact not really a shower, but a bath with a showerhead attached to the wall at the far end (the end where the taps are), a shower curtain that gets in the way (I hate the way it can cling to your body, and especially if the water on it has already gone cold), poor adjustment facilities (at its very highest, it just about comes level with my neck, which means I have to squat down to rinse my face and head), very little pressure and tiles with a very practical but not exactly sensual anti-slip surface.

Now you might think that I sound like a spoilt and pampered child, but as a parent, I know how important it is for children to express, not suppress, their feelings, and I think this is probably true for adults as well. This is not to say, of course, that you should necessarily act on those feelings. Acknowledging how you feel about something in fact often makes it unnecessary to take any action whatsoever. In my case, I hope that whining publicly about the loss of my lovely, wonderful morning shower will help me accept the situation more easily.

[clock ticking, time passing slowly ...] Nope, not working.

So on to the second line of defense, which is to imagine (but not carry out) the action you might take as a result of those feelings, the idea being that putting these ideas into words will help you see how stupid they are which - again - makes it unnecessary to do anything. In my case, the most logical action would be to kick the guests out.

[clock ticking, time passing slowly, me imagining dragging the guests physically out of the house ...] Yep! That makes me feel a lot better.

There is just one problem with expressing your feelings: it might be good for you on a personal, individual level, but your social life may suffer. Assuming that virtually no-one heeded the warning at the beginning of this blog (a very likely scenario) I can now count on flak/fall-out from ex-readers who used to stay at my place. Which is a shame, because I did enjoy their company, in spite of the shower situation.

I would take a shower to calm my nerves, but I have guests ....

Objective and subjective

I was going to write some more about hair, inspired by a discussion at work as to who had what kind of hair, and the fact that there are personal and cultural differences between the precision with which one might describe hair colors. I am sure whole generations of Dutch, for example, have been severely traumatised (not) by the fact that they themselves may have been of the opinion that their hair was golden brown, strawberry blond, deep chestnut, or a lighter shade of pale, but that according to their passports, they were either blond, brown, red or black, and nothing else. And I had wanted to link that to a discussion of objective and subjective perception.

But before I started writing, I checked out the meaning of objective and subjective, and came to the conclusion that etymology was much more interesting than hair color (or the perception thereof). But I will not bore you with information that you can easily find for yourself in any number of online dictionaries. What I have to offer instead is my only little collection of common English words containing the string "ject", which is derived from the latin "jacere" (to throw). Here they are:

eject, projectile,
reject, rejection, abject, dejected
subject, subjective, object, objective, adjective, conjecture

If we look only at the meanings that first come to mind, the first line of my list contains words that are mostly still used to refer to physical movement, and are therefore closest to the original concept of throwing. The second group segues gently from movement to emotion (not such a strange link, considering that the word emotion is a derivative of the word motion). In the third line the idea of movement has mostly been lost, and we have entered the world of abstraction.

I am sure this is leading somewhere, but I am not quite sure where yet. When it comes to me, I will come back and add it here. For the moment, I am just taking it as a demonstration of how very rich (and therefore also confusing) language can be.

Bad hair week

OK, I admit it. I have a hidden agenda. Although of course it is no longer hidden, now that I am telling you all about it. The agenda, or long-term goal, of this blog is to understand life, the universe and everything (and if you don't recognize that quote please check out Douglas Adams' work). And I propose to do so by examining the world around me, and try to reach appropriate generalizations/recognize patterns where I can. The general framework for this examination is the input (perception) - processing (analyzing) - output (conclusion) cycle that I must have mentioned in some earlier entry.

Attentive readers will by now have started wondering how the heck this is supposed to connect with the title of this entry ("bad hair week"). But never fear, there is always a connection. And it is not even a six-degrees-of-separation (or the Kevin-Bacon game) type of connection. It is very simple, and obvious (to me, at least).

All last week, I walked around with phenomenously bad hair. I have no idea how or why this happened, although I am not ruling out a combination of a freak growth event (it suddenly seems to be much longer than it was only a week ago), the change in the weather, and the fact that some days ago, I took a nap right after having washed my hair. But that is not the point. (If it were, I would probably refer to Stanislaw Lem's "The chain of chance", but it's not, and I won't) The point is that it made me look a bit like Boris Johnson (the mayor of London).

And the problem with that is that I really don't want to look like Boris Johnson, because of his reputation of speaking his mind without regard to the consequences. Now I am not saying he is the idiot some journalists make him out to be - I am quite sure the media milk each of his bloopers for what they're worth - but the point is that I do not want to look like him, because of the risk of "guilt by association".

Which brings me back to my no-longer-much-of-a-secret agenda, namely that one bad hair week can be used to demonstrate not just one but two of the ailments that we all suffer from. The first is the way our brain can link up two completely disparate issues such as "Boris Johnson hair" and stupidity, and act as if there were a causal relationship between the two, and the second is how perception can be more important that reality.

Recently, I mentioned this preoccupation of mine to an Englishman, who looked at me for a moment then said that in his opinion, I didn't look like Boris Johnson at all, but that I reminded him of Greg Norman, the Australian golf legend who also goes by the name of "Great White Shark". Obviously, this made me very happy (especially after I checked him out on the Internet).

Last note on this: my wife says it doesn't matter who I look like, I need a haircut.

Devaluation blues

All around me I see signs of the second law of thermodynamics - the one that says that things have a tendency to lose steam, run down, decay - expressed in human society. The examples that spring immediately to mind are schooling, money, words, and food, each of which seem to be worth less with the passing of time. But in fact, each case is very different.

First of all, I think that schooling is on the whole and in the longer run probably not getting worse, as everybody loves to say ("in my time, ..."), but better. Yes, there will be temporary ups and downs (in the order of magnitude of years, decades, and even generations), but collectively we know more now than a hundred years ago, and much more than several thousands of years ago, and schooling has definitely played a part in this. (This is by the way not contrary to the second law of thermodynamics: it acknowledges the existence of local anomalies, all it is concerned with is the the entropy of the system as the whole).

As for money (and the price of houses), its value goes up and down too. Of course, it has gone down now for a very long time, but this, I think, is linked to the fact that our economy is almost completely built on the idea that you have to grow to survive, which in fact is not necessarily true. There is also such a thing as stasis, and it might be good if we were to embrace that idea.

I already mentioned the devaluation of words in a previous entry, although I was talking specifically of curse words. But the same happens to any emotionally charged word, such as those indicating race, ethnic origin, culture, sexual orientation, etc. In the west, we have been obsessed with this long before the term "political correctness" was coined, as is evidenced by the long succession of names for migrant workers in Dutch society over the past fifty or sixty years.

And then we have food (and other consumables), which is suffering from the entropy of over-processing. It is like "overproducing" a record: there comes a point when every attempt at improving something just makes it worse. And I think we reached that point with food quite a while back. Here is my personal things-I-love-to hate list: decaf coffee, low-tar low-nicotine cigarettes, beer without alcohol, cola without sugar, hamburgers without fat, mayonnaise without eggs. (I could go on, but I am beginning to lose my appetite).

Last but not least, life itself is becoming less sacred. The Catholic Church may not yet realize it, but we have come to the point where having humongous families is no longer an option, or at least, not for all of us (I recently read that having large families is becoming a status symbol among rich American suburbanites, but I imagine this is just another local anomaly, which will iron itself out in the end).

The power of words

In the beginning was the Word ... (John 1.1, King James Bible).

I have always been fascinated with that line. It shows just how important words are to us. Of course, the heavens and the earth were created first, but even in the very first lines of the Genesis, it seemed worth noting what God called things: first God made light, then he divided the light from the darkness (a bit categorical, black-and-white thinking if you ask me) and then - drum roll, abated breath - he called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And a bit later he takes the trouble to call the dry land "Earth", the gathering together of the water "seas", etc. etc.

A more scientific-minded person might phrase things differently, and might maintain that the word was the beginning of civilization. A recent study (the details of which, unfortunately, I have forgotten) reported a correlation between increasing size of our brain and the increasing use of language, and suggested that it might be a case of positive reinforcement (the use of language being both cause and result of the increased brain capacity).

This was a study over many eons. I have not yet heard of any such correlation within an individual human life-span, so I am going to assume that my bigger-than-average head is not related to my preoccupation with words. (My wife, BTW, is always very happy to point out to me that there is no one-on-one correlation between the size of the skull and the size of the brain, nor even between the size of the brain and intelligence, and I am afraid I am going to have to concede her that. But I digress. Back to the power of words).

When I was a child, we used to say "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me", as a sort of magic incantation against psychological pressure. It never helped me much, though: I have always been more worried about and hurt by words than by acts. Of course, maybe this is just me: maybe I am like the proverbial oversensitive princess who tosses and turns all night because of the pea under the many mattresses. But the mere fact that there is a saying indicates to me that I am not alone in this. Wars have probably been waged over a few words.

Of course, there is also the positive side, as I have mentioned in an earlier entry. Expressing thoughts in words can help clarify and even accept things. (A different, but related power is that of the blogger: say the wrong thing to a blogger, and he or she will hang you out to dry. They might not name names, but everyone will know. And saying the right thing to a blogger is not much better, because nine times out of ten they will pass it off as their own idea: I have caught myself doing this several times already. But I digress again). They may be very imperfect tools - communication problems all around, and it can take a long time to say even relatively simple things clearly - but they are definitely worth having all the same.

Final note: the power of words is not everlasting. The other day my daughter told me - using a phrasing that was more a request for confirmation than a statement of fact - that she had a five-year-old friend who claimed she was now old enough to use curse words. I confirmed that swear words should be used with care, not so much because they are "baaad" words (to quote George Carlin's "Seven words you cannot use on T.V.") but because a lot of people are hurt and/or insulted when you use them, and because they lose their power if you use them too much, in which case they won't be there when you need them.

Of course, the problem is compounded by the fact that only some people feel the effects of this devaluation (usually the ones who cause it in the first place), while others continue to be insulted and hurt every time they are used. This second group may in fact develop the emotional equivalent of an allergy for four-letter words, and become ever less tolerant of swear words.

More on this polarization mechanism later.

Minority languages: do we need them?

This afternoon, as usual in a country where people are more apt to talk about languages than about the weather, I got into a discussion about minority languages, and specifically the current measures to promote of Catalan, which many non-Catalan Spaniards feel go to far. This is in part due to the link between language and identity, which is so strong that reaffirming Catalan is in effect a way of rejecting the rest of Spain. And the rest of Spain feels it this way, which of course makes it difficult to think about the issue objectively.

I am not devoid of emotion on the issue either: up till now I have always argued that people should be free to use whatever language they want. To me, it has always been a question of the pendulum swinging back: over the past two centuries, during the creation and consolidation of nation-states across Europe national, uniform languages were imposed by the central governments (of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Great Britain, to name a few), to the detriment of minority languages. Now, along with changing views regarding the nation-state and the rise of the ideas self-determination and subsidiarity, it is swinging back, and languages that survived the slaughter (Frisian, Welsh, Gaelic, Catalan and Basque) are not only tolerated but welcomed - by those that either already speak these languages, or have a good motive to keep them alive.

But I have had this discussion several times without really seeing anyone change their positions, which means I should probably think things through even further. (Which is what I am doing now.)

The decision of the central governments to impose a single, official language was of course completely logical from their point of view. Having a single language makes communication so much easier and quicker, much in the same way that roads can dramatically improve mobility and trade, and that legislation can make all the difference in the world to the stability and efficiency of a society. You might even summarize the whole Roman Empire (and the European Union, for that matter) as roads, legislation and language (yes, alright, the Romans also brought wine, and it was also safe to walk the streets at night ...).

So do we really want to take a step backwards, and allow people to wall themselves off again? I am not sure. But I don't think that will happen anyway. I think that we are already moving towards a near future in which a large portion of the population of most countries will speak at least two and often three languages: their "own" language, that of the country they live in, and possibly also an "international" language. You can already see it happening now, and I see no reason to try to stop it. The only problem left now is which language to choose as the international vernacular.

Within the institutions, this is very much a hot potato, because for many many years, the main working language was French. But ever since the Swedes and Fins joined (1995), English has been winning ground, which is a thorn in the side of the Francophones. A friend of mine has the solution, however: he says we should just kick the British out of the European Union. That way, the issue would cease to be political, and we could simply let the majority decide (and at the moment, the majority is in favor of English). Much as I love this idea, it will not be necessary, I think: I can already see that Francophones are increasingly willing to speak English. And - with apologies to my English-speaking colleagues - on the whole, they are doing a better job than the Anglophones who for decades now have been mangling French out of recognition.

Eenie meenie minie moe ...

catch the blogger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go.

Mild case of blogger fatigue, I'm afraid. Very different from writer's block. Although come to think of it, I am not sure exactly what writer's block really is. I've always thought that it was staring at the blank page, pen in hand (or keyboard at hand), and waiting in vain for inspiration to strike. That doesn't happen to me much. But I do suffer, from time to time, from other types of writing disorders.

Such as for example chronic rewrite syndrome, which is when you keep rewriting something, but it just won't come out write (little writer's joke there, ha ha). In my case, this happens quite a lot because I work out what I want to write as I work, and sometimes, I am just not ready. Thing is, I rarely know when I am ready, and even when I have my doubts I often just wade into the quagmire of my own messy mind anyway, in the hope that writing things down will make things clearer. And overall, it does. Lately, in fact, I am feeling so confident about my success rate (measured as the ratio between the unfinished drafts + deleted entries vs. the published ones) that I even went as far as to suggest this to someone the other day, in the context of a discussion about double-binds and how frustrating they can be.

Another problem I have is when everything I write that I like so much that I can't bear to weed it out. I read somewhere in a book on writing that you should be extremely wary of "the best paragraph", because often, you leave it in because it is so well-written, even if it belongs in a completely different piece. I try to apply this now, but I have to admit it hurts.

And then of course you have writer's bloat, which is when the piece is longer than it need be. That (in my own humble opinion) is only a minor problem for me (I can't go on about it any more, for fear of being branded a liar).

But back to blogger fatigue, which is when you get tired of your own blog. I have been working on it quite intensely for the past few months, and it hit me the other day that I really didn't feel like writing. (Not for lack of material, BTW: I have enough ideas for ten blogs, just not enough time to make them all readable). But today I found the cure. It is called blogging.

The forest and the trees

My wife and I are very different in many ways. Some differences are cultural: she is Spanish, I am Dutch; some are gender-related: I am more technical, more into sports and physical stuff (except dancing - tough guys don't dance), and have better spatial skills, she is much better with time; she is better at multitasking, while I - according to her - can barely walk and chew gum at the same time. But quite a lot of our differences are personal. She buys in bulk (and runs the risk of having to throw away stuff), I buy the minimum (and run the risk of having to go back to the store for more). She is too quick to judge, I am too slow. She likes the noise and bustle of the city, I prefer the countryside. She doesn't mind a certain degree of chaos, I am more into on order. She likes experimenting with new recipes and food, I stick to what I know and like.

And we differ immensely in our ability to recognize movie stars. She will recognize virtually any actor she has seen before, regardless of their appearance (including disguises), and usually be able to pinpoint the movie we last saw that actor in. I don't. I might get lucky and recognize the actor's voice if it is distinctive enough (the other day I picked out John Hurt by his voice), but if all I have is the visuals, I might very well sit out the whole movie without recognizing the actor. This is very close to another difference between us: she is much quicker to pick up on the links between words in different languages than I am.

True to form, I have turned these two small observations into the abstract generalization that she sees the similarities, while I see the differences. Interesting, but hardly worth spending too much time on, you might think, were it not for the fact that I think that this basic difference in how we perceive things (input) has important impact on how we interpret things (processing) which in turn has an important impact on our behavior (output). What exactly happens depends on the context. In the case of cognition, for example, this difference in perception mode can result in either seeing the big picture (the forest) or the details (the trees). If we add emotions, we have glasses that are either half full or half empty. And in the case of social behavior (one of my favorite subjects), it results in either competition or cooperation.

Each of the above have immense impacts on how we behave, both as individuals and as groups. Which I why it would be nice to know the root cause of all this. Unfortunately, even though I have been mulling over this subject for years, I am still not much closer to an answer. I have no doubt that it is somehow related to innate sensitivity or receptiveness, and it is obvious that people vary in their receptiveness to certain stimuli (sound, images, words, etc.), but that's about as far as it goes. But I have found out that, although you cannot really see trees and forest at the same time, you can learn to switch from one view to the other. Specialists can learn to see the big picture. I saw this myself while doing my Ph.D., of which a large part focussed on taxonomy (or grouping things): after five years of seeing only the details and the differences, from one day to the next, I was suddenly able to see the similarities.

And this in turn feeds the hope that pessimists can learn to be more optimistic, and those who only see competition all around can learn to appreciate cooperation as well.

What a tangled web we weave (even when we're not trying to deceive)

It will be obvious from my previous posts that I assume that everything that we do and say, and even our anatomy, can in some way be explained in terms of survival. Analyzing things that way helps me figure out where and why things go wrong, and can even help me accept things more easily, because it allow me to view problems much more rationally. Basically, I see two main categories of problems: (1) opposing interests, and (2) stimulus-response type problems.

Opposing interests
Can exist between individuals, between groups, between individuals and groups they do not belong to, and between individuals and the group they belong to, up to and including the species as a whole: what is good for the species is not always good for the individual (again with thanks to Richard Dawkins, writer of The Selfish Gene, for the basic idea). These types of problems - though definitely not easy to solve – are so easy to understand that I will not spend any more time on them, other than to note that the human race seems to be becoming more aware that on the whole, cooperation can be more beneficial than competition, and that we all depend on each other to some degree.

Stimulus-response type problems include
• Problems at input
• Faulty processing or analysis, and
• Inappropriate responses

Almost all of the input runs through the nervous system, but the processing and output can either be done by the limbic system (emotions) or the nervous system (thought), or - usually - both at the same time.

The most common input problem is related to receptiveness or sensitivity, which differs from one person to the next. This can be physical, with oversensitivity to certain stimuli (warmth, pain, allergens) on one end of the scale, and the inability to perceive these stimuli on the other. Or it can be emotional, whereby very sensitive people will have the problem that most input hits too hard (which may cause them to overreact – “I’m only shouting because you are!!!!” – even though you had only raised your voice slightly), while less sensitive people will be slow to react to anything, as in the staple complaint in marriage counselling sessions: “He/she never listens”.

Response problems can include no reaction or overreaction - a problem of fine-tuning, you could say - and of course the problem of timing: there is always a lag time between a change in circumstances and the response to that change, examples of which are all around, at every imaginable level. At the level of the species, changing circumstances may require increased resistence to certain pathological agents, or increased tolerance for temperature differences, but genes take time to change. Within human societies, there is always a delay between changing mores and legislation. Corporate life nowadays is all about flexibility and adaptability, but of course, many companies fall by the wayside. And individuals may also be slow to change (e.g. because of laziness, inability to solve the dilemmas, fear of the unknown/uncertain, etc.).

All of these are quite interesting, and I will probably get back to them, but the problems I am most interested in are those in the processing stage, and especially in the case of thought/analysis, because that is where I think we stand the best chance of improving things. To give just a very few examples, we have faulty analysis at work at the level of western civilisation as a whole (just think of the current third-world aid mess), at the level of nations (witness many governments’ misguided attempts to repress drug and alcohol use), at group level (whole classes who seem to believe that all their problems are the fault of one of the other classes), but of course especially at the level of the individual, which is the basic unit of thought and therefore ultimately responsible for everything.

So basically, it is all my fault.

But what is it I am doing wrong, then? Well, for one, the whole stimulus-response system is based on making assumptions. You cannot process input in a vacuum any more than you can literally pull yourself up by your own bootstraps: you have to compare your observations with “template patterns”, take the best possible fit, and see if you can’t find a better fit as you go along. If you are very smart, this will not take to long. If , however, you are not so smart, but very determined (like me), you whittle away for years and years, until things start making sense. In any case, I’m off the hook again, because we all do this to greater or lesser degrees. We use assumptions. They may be the mother of all fuck-ups, but – like the opposite sex - you might not be able to live with them, but you can’t live without them either. The only good thing you can say about templates is that – again like relationships - the more you work on them, the better they get. And if they don’t, you may need to jettison them altogether.

Of course, not everybody has the same processing skills. I’m not talking about intelligence in the old-fashioned sense of the world (math, logic, linguistics): I am thinking more specifically about the difficulty to test theories. It would be perfectly understandable if living with your family has led you to reach the conclusion that all siblings are scum, but what distinguishes the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, is the ability to process new input. Seeing other families in action should probably help you conclude that in fact, you were overgeneralising: only your siblings are scum.

This can go a lot further, of course. Some people never really grow out of the comic book perspective, where people can fly, karate-chop through concrete pylons, and burst into flames (oh, allright, you might actually make a case for spontaneous combustion, but that is after death, not before it). In fact – but now I digress even further – I suspect this might be a pre-requiste for becoming a conservative politician. (Hey, that was a good one: in a few short paragraphs, I have succeeded in shifting the blame from myself to conservative politicians.)

But probably the most common processing problem is the fact that it is often difficult to separate thoughts from emotions. And I have no doubt that we should do try to do this: the two systems were designed to do different things, which is why your brain may tell you to do something completely different from your gut (note I do not say "heart" - this is because "using your heart" is not really about emotions at all, it is a metaphor for wisdom, or taking all sides into account, which in fact is a rational, not emotional activity).

More about this in a next entry!

Everybody's a doctor

One of the advantages of a cross-cultural marriage and/or moving around a lot is that if gives you the chance to put your own culture into perspective. The basic attitude of people in the Netherlands (my country of birth) regarding health issues - from how to give birth, to when to use of over-the-counter drugs for headaches and the flu - is non-interventionist. I had never really given this much thought, however, until I started going to Spain (my wife's home base) regularly, where attitudes are at the other end of the spectrum, their view being that you should medicate as soon as you have the slightest symptom of anything. In the beginning, I suspected that Spaniards had difficulty distinguishing medicine from candy, that's how bad things seemed to me. 

But then I found out that the average level of knowledge of medical issues is indeed higher than in the Netherlands.  Truck drivers, secretaries, housewives and waiters alike have a much more extensive knowledge of the human anatomy and of the symptoms and treatments of common ailments such as arthritis, gout, the flu, etc. I am not sure which is cause and which is effect, but Spaniards are also perfectly happy to disagree with their doctor's diagnosis and the prescribed treatment. They have no compunction whatsoever in experimenting with medication, with or without help from their pharmacist, who is not free of this cavalier attitude. Everyone gleefully varies dosages, combines drugs and even - and here is where I draw the line - diagnose other people's ailments, and insist in treating them, using their own prescription drugs (which may or may not still be within their "best by" date). In Spain, everybody's a doctor. But interestingly enough, although average use of medicines is much higher in Spain than in the Netherlands, I have not heard of any significant differences in the rates of problems related to the use of medicines.  

So where does that leave my non-interventionist attitude? Well, it helped me come to the conclusions that (1) it is probably a good idea to know you own body, and have patients be more actively involved in the process of getting better. In that sense, Spaniards are way ahead of the Dutch. (2) It may not be necessary to stick so very strictly to dosage indicators (but personally, I am not taking any chances) and (3) Over-the counter medicines should only be used to combat symptoms if these symptoms stand in the way of getting better, as a way to break through vicious circles. If however the symptoms are your body's way to tell you to slow down, you should listen.

The above has also prompted me to rethink our attitudes towards illness and the job. At the moment, to many people, it still seems like a matter of honor to continue working, even though you are sick, even though we know that this may only prolong the illness, and possibly lower our productivity. More importantly, if the illness is contagious, there is a good chance of lowering the productivity of our colleagues as well. But for the species as a whole, exposure to infectious diseases is not a bad thing, as long as the strains are not so virulent as to wipe out the whole human race. Of course I realize that future of mankind means doodly squat to someone who risks losing their own life, or that of loved ones, and I fully understand the Mexican government's decision to impose a stay-at-home period, as a way of combating the swine flu. But the jury is still out on the decision to keep with a mild flu at home (such as was the case with my children this week), to avoid them contaminating/infecting others. It reminds me of the obsession with cleanliness: for a long time, people did their utmost to avoid all bacteria and virusses, and to do the same for their children. Now, the pendulum has swung back a bit: people are less worried, and realise that a limited amount of contact is nature's way of giving vaccinations.