From: Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2001-02-04T09:18:15+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:10324] Re: ANN: Slide show available

matz@zetabits.com (Yukihiro Matsumoto) wrote:
>
>Hi,
>
>In message "[ruby-talk:10292] Re: ANN: Slide show available"
>     on 01/02/03, "Ben Tilly" <ben_tilly@hotmail.com> writes:
>
>|I have asthma and do not like to be near smoke.  While
>|I drink I have little interest in the ins and outs of
>|beer.  Those two facts put together make Perl Mongers
>|meeting places unpleasant, and make the mailing lists
>|uninteresting to me.
>|
>|C'est la vie.
>
>Well, same thing happens to me, although I don't have asthma.  I don't
>smoke, I don't drink alcohol (for religious reason).  And I hate smoke
>and heavily drunk people.

I can't imagine why...

>How about having a smoke-less party when I visit you.

Much preferable. :-)

>By the way, I was surprised to see so many people smoking in public in
>France.  It's worse than Japan, which I had believed the worst country.

What I have heard is that it is pretty bad everywhere
except the US and Canada.  And even there people smoked
pretty heavily until recently.  Today if it isn't a bar,
it probably isn't full of people smoking.

>Some people there were astonished when they knew my real age.  I was
>appeared like a child from westerners' view.

Indeed.  That is due to something called neoteny.

<digression>

Neoteny consists of retaining juvenile characteristics
into adulthood.  Compared to the great apes all humans
show a great deal of neoteny.  Different races different
amounts.  The various Oriental races have more of a
tendancy that way than Caucasians do, with the result
that Caucasions look old to Orientals and conversely
Orientals look much younger than they are to Caucasians.

Virtually all domestic animals likewise show neoteny.
For instance dogs are biologically immature wolves.
Indeed the closer a particular breed of dog comes to
actually growing up, the more aggressive it is.  Because
of this there is a strong link between the physical
appearance of a breed of dogs and their temperment.

For much (much) more on this, Stephen J. Gould has an
interesting book on this topic called "Ontogeny and
Phylogeny".

</digression>

Cheers,
Ben
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