[ruby-talk:10337] Re: ANN: Slide show available

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ben Tilly [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2001 04:18 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: [ruby-talk:10324] Re: ANN: Slide show available
> 
> 
> [e-mail] (Yukihiro Matsumoto) wrote:
> >
> >Hi,
> >
> >In message "[ruby-talk:10292] Re: ANN: Slide show available"
> >     on 01/02/03, "Ben Tilly" <[e-mail]> 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.
The best part (IMO a bit excessive) of California's anti 
smoking laws is that the non-smoking zone extend about 12 feet 
(meters-yards? sorry I am a not smoker) of any public building
and you will have a hard time of meeting publicly drunk people
if you are able to ignore the abundance of homeless people.
> 
> >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>
<really off topic>
Hm the juvenile characteristics you quote include 
large body size and small teeth.  I believe that
you won't have trouble finding anthropologists who 
will be rather skeptical if neoteny is particularly
relevant for human evolution and some of Gould's 
more material claims have been proven wrong.
</really off topic>

Christoph