The future of humanity, and other stories

Michael sketches the future of humanity, which is neither epic nor tragic.

Paul also wants to discuss the future of humanity by separating the quants from the poets. I suspect we need both.

Brad talks tax (again). Having previously described why Christians willingly pay taxes, this time he asks if it is ever justified for Christians to engage in tax avoidance (or even evasion): part one; part two; part three.

Carl shares how the human body is like a lake, or what medicine needs to learn from ecology: "We know now that there are a hundred trillion microbes in a human body. You carry more microbes in you this moment than all the people who ever lived. Those microbes are growing all the time. [...] The microbes in your body at this moment outnumber your cells by ten to one. And they come in a huge diversity of species — somewhere in the thousands, although no one has a precise count yet. By some estimates there are twenty million microbial genes in your body: about a thousand times more than the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. So the Human Genome Project was, at best, a nice start. If we really want to understand all the genes in the human body, we have a long way to go."

UK journalists posing as representatives of arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin expose corporate greenwashing in an undercover sting at well-known environmental charity Conservation International. A useful rule of thumb: the larger the company, the more sceptical to be regarding corporate claims to ecological credentials.

Jason links to an article answering the ever-pressing question: When did girls start wearing pink?

Link love

Peter Singer: Why we must ration health care. H/T Milan.

Bryan offers some lessons from NZ's ETS.

Die-hard contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham on everything you need to know about global warming in five minutes.

Cartographic conflict: a potted history of WWII.

Ben rants about men's groups.

Paul Krugman asks "who cooked the planet?"

If only gay sex caused global warming, or, why do we pay more attention to some threats than to others?

Marriage and surnames

Whether a wife takes her husband's surname or keeps the one she grew up with is a cause of some stress in more than a few relationships, particularly where one party assumes the answer is obvious. Every option seems to have problems. The traditional move (wife taking the husband's surname) systematically distances wives from their parents. To reverse the precedence (husband takes wife's surname) merely inverts the direction of the sexism (though this is probably to be preferred, all things considered). The modern tendency (both spouses keep their original surname) can imply that the birth family is more important than the new marriage, and runs into further problems if and when children are born. Double-barreled surnames seem like a good solution, but my hunch is that this just postpones the issue for a generation; what happens when two people who already have double-barreled surnames marry? Taking an entirely new surname is possible, though loses the connection to both families of origin and has overtones of voluntarism (I create my own identity in an act of will). Merging two surnames to generate a new one will only work very occasionally.

So here is my solution. During the wedding service, perhaps just after signing the register and before the new couple are presented to the congregation and walk out, the minister or celebrant performs a ceremonial coin toss. No best of three. No appeals to a third umpire. No one knows beforehand who they will walk out as. It gets decided once and for all by the coin and the couple and both families live with it. Neither family is unfairly discriminated against. Any children can have the same surname as both parents. A perfect solution?
I don't usually include photos of people without getting their permission first. This time I didn't and I apologise to M&J in advance if this is a problem.