Humans

By Elle Hunt

CHASTENED by the sight of her newborn baby’s face lit up by the blue light of her phone, Catherine Price set about limiting the time she spent in front of screens. The journalist and her husband stopped mindlessly scrolling on social media and started taking 24-hour “digital sabbaths”.
By cutting down on her screen time, Price found that she had gained hours in her day – but now, she struggled to know how to pass them. What was missing from her life, she realised, was fun. But what was fun, if not bingeing on Netflix and playing games on her phone?
Price has form in turning “personal issues into professional projects”. Her previous book, 2018’s How to Break Up With Your Phone, was the result of her attempts to quell her overuse. With that problem more or less in hand, she decided to investigate what fun was, so that she could fill her life with more of it. The result is The Power of Fun, a practical guide with lessons for all of us, especially as we live through a decidedly not-fun pandemic.
This new book is a kind of spiritual sequel to How to Break Up With Your Phone, providing answers to the question of how to replace an all-encompassing habit.
Price comes up with a definition of the most satisfying type of fun, what she calls “True Fun”: typically a serendipitous experience that brings together “playfulness, connection and flow”, adding a dose of much-needed meaningful engagement to our lives.
It is this confluence of factors, Price argues, that distinguishes the most exhilarating, restorative fun from something fleeting and somewhat superficial, like getting a pedicure or going out to a bar.
That said, less-sophisticated fun isn’t just a frivolous activity that we can simply do without. It, too, can serve as an antidote to stress, making it vital for our physical and psychological well-being.
Price gives examples of True Fun from her own life, such as singing in the car with friends and learning guitar and playing in a group. “There is a reason that our moments of True Fun stand out in our memories: True Fun makes us feel alive,” she writes.
As for how to get more of it, Price found it isn’t as simple as just spending less time on screens, or trying to squeeze more activities into schedules that are already stretched thin. In fact, it often involves doing less: prioritising rest or sleep, for instance. Or it might mean coming up with a plan to ensure that household tasks or childcare are shared evenly to make room for moments of pleasure and serendipity.
Price draws from the science of positive psychology in her quest to have more fun, but rigorous research takes a back seat to her own exploration and the findings of her Fun Squad: a global group of about 1500 people that Price recruited from her newsletter subscribers and invited to share their fun-seeking exploits.
Including less from this somewhat self-selecting group and adding more on new psychological research would have helped to bolster the book’s scientific standing. However, this might have come at the expense of its practical relevance. The strength of The Power of Fun is that it is approachable, anecdotal and inviting. After two years of living through a pandemic, many of us have spent more than enough time trying to force fun into our lives (Zoom quiz anyone?).
“True Fun’ is typically a serendipitous experience that brings together playfulness, connection and flow”
The success of Price’s self-experimentation provides motivation to at least try to seek out more activities that we actually take pleasure in. And her main point, that we should clear space in our lives for the things that truly mean something to us, is a sound one.
Price quotes the author Michael Lewis: “If you get in the habit of life not being fun, you start to not even notice.” Once you have noticed and, more importantly, taken action, there is plenty of fun out there for the taking. Why waste your time on anything else?

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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

12 January 2022

Josie Ford
Boozing hamsters
Feedback has a soft spot for hamsters, whose hoarding and nesting behaviours are similar to our own. Our feeling of oneness only increases with an article in The Atlantic forwarded to us by Peter Hamer: “You have no idea how hard it is to get a hamster drunk”.
Hamsters have a high tolerance for strong alcohol, we read, scoring low on a special scale of falling over sideways no matter how much they imbibe. We wonder how the statistics are skewed if you’re just going round and round on a wheel at the time, but nevertheless we add hamsters to our pile, accumulated over aeons, of animals that science says can take their booze.
This list includes bonobos, chimpanzees and bats, which is just as well, because getting entangled with an inebriated bat is a thought that doesn’t bear much thinking about. It most definitely doesn’t include cows, horses, rampaging elephants and the cedar waxwing bird. Their frequent collisions with fences and glass windows in the Los Angeles area were shown in 2012 to be down to the fruit of the Brazilian pepper tree fermenting in their internal food storage pouches.Advertisement
Don’t try that at home. This being Dry January, we burrow deeper into our extensive piling system and root out a 1995 paper from the journal Physiology & Behavior that we were saving for bedding material. Entitled “Tomato juice, chocolate drink, and other fluids suppress volitional drinking of alcohol in the female Syrian golden hamster”, it provides a way to get your hamster off the wheel and onto the wagon: ply it with calorie-rich hot chocolate. We rarely say no to that, either.
What’s in a name?
“I know it’s a bit early to get up this year, but nominative determinism won’t go away just because you’re having a lie-in,” writes Mike Egan from County Meath in Ireland, ignoring the squeaking of our treadmill. We have only ever expressed that as a hope, Mike, not an expectation.
Elizabeth Economy is a senior adviser at the US Department of Commerce, he writes. Others point out that Mark Rocket is the chief executive of Kea Aerospace based in New Zealand, and duck lover Alan Gosling was named last week as the first person known to have contracted bird flu in the UK. Vegetation of the Peak District is a book passably reviewed by Nature on publication in 1913 that remarkably appears still to be in print, authored by C. E. Moss. Our sincere thanks to all as ever.
Big in Basingstoke
A tweet from Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council sent in by Gwynneth Page indicates that we may have followers in that jewel of northern Hampshire. “Our street cleansing team have been sweeping leaves from the borough’s streets as part of our annual leaf clearance schedule,” they announced on 5 January. “Since October, the team have collected 560 tonnes of leaves – the equivalent to 112 adult elephants!”
Gwynneth confesses difficulty in visualising a pile of leaves equal to an elephant in weight. Us too, but we reckon that, spread out thinly, the whole lot would cover an area about the size of Basingstoke.
Pitch perfect
How much is that in football pitches? Courtesy, in a convoluted way, of an exchange of letters about measurement standards in the Financial Times drawn to our attention by Michael Zehse, we find ourselves consulting the The FA Guide to Pitch and Goalpost Dimensions for a steer.
If that sounds like fun, it is, revealing a line-up of recommended football pitch sizes ranging from 40 by 30 yards for the little ‘uns to 110 by 70 yards for the fully sized. Pre-revolutionary units still reign supreme in this corner of Merrie Olde England. We make that a full factor 6.4 range in football pitch sizes, which is a satisfyingly variable measurement standard. Just don’t complain about shifting the goalposts, they can be anything from 12 to 24 feet apart.
Ashes to ashes…
Congratulations to “Huntingdon in Bloom” – the Cambridgeshire town has received an Outstanding commendation in the Green Solutions category of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Community Awards 2021. Our thanks to Ralph Platten for pointing out that “of particular note is the recycling of heat generated by the UK’s first electric crematorium to warm a glasshouse that will be used to propagate and grow plants for the town’s flowerbeds, containers and community projects”. Charming.
Elementary, again
“And finally” is a phrase that strikes fear into the hearts of UK TV news viewers, indicating the imminent arrival of Whimsy. So, and finally, Dave Hawke from Devizes, UK, wins some form of kudos, not just for rocking one of the few English place names not stressed on its first syllable (Penzance; Carlisle; the -hamptons; feel free to go on your own mental journey), but for a late-breaking reply to our call for elementary names (11 December 2021).
He introduces us to the Um siblings, Ray D, Barry, (H)erbi, Ceri, Reni, Ruby and Moly B. D., “lastly not to forget Uncle Nick Hall”. Thank you, Dave, although if you’re looking for Pseudo Names, it is Private Eye you’re after. But frankly it’s Dry January, and we’ll do anything for laughs.
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A concoction of vilca seeds and fermented alcohol may have provided a mild hallucinogenic experience, enabling Wari leaders in South America to bond with their people

Humans

12 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Anadenanthera colubrina, a tree species common to nearly all regions of South AmericanMatt Lavin/Flickr
Get high, make friends. Members of the Wari society, who lived in the Peruvian Andes more than 1000 years ago, may have mixed hallucinogenic seeds into their beer. Such a mind-bending drink might have offered a way for society leaders to create bonds with ordinary people.
“Being able to provide that experience would create heightened social status among Wari leaders,” says Matthew Biwer at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The Wari culture flourished in what is now Peru between around AD 550 and 1000. Biwer calls them “the first example of an expansionary state in the Andes”, preceding the later Inca Empire. “There is no written record,” says Biwer, so we don’t know what they called themselves. But they left behind distinctive artefacts and structures including canals.Advertisement
Since 2015, Biwer and his team have been excavating a Wari site called Quilcapampa. He calls it “a waystation along a road” and says it was only occupied for a generation, between about AD 800 and 850.
In the centre of the site, the team found a pit filled with about a million seeds of Schinus molle: a kind of fruit known as molle, or sometimes Peruvian pepper. The molle fruits were used to make a fermented alcoholic drink, a bit like beer, known as chicha.

A few steps away, in a garbage pit, the team found seeds from vilca trees (Anadenanthera colubrina). Vilca seeds contain hallucinogenic substances and have been widely used in Andean cultures. “I haven’t tried vilca myself,” says Biwer, but ethnographic accounts often describe it causing “a sensation of flying”.
If you eat vilca seeds, your stomach enzymes deactivate the active compounds within them – so the seeds are more normally ground up and taken up the nose as snuff, producing a strong effect. However, chicha suppresses those stomach enzymes, so the combination of the two would allow “a very mild and controlled hallucinogenic effect”, says Biwer.
As the Wari state expanded throughout the Andes, its leaders needed ways to impress local people and create bonds with them. They often did so by holding feasts, says Biwer. Providing a hallucinogenic experience would have been an added selling point – especially as vilca doesn’t grow in the Quilcapampa area and must have been imported.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.177
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The characters used to write the Vai script, which was invented in Liberia in 1833, have become visually simpler over time, reflecting the evolutionary pressures acting on writing

Humans

11 January 2022

By Colin Barras
A character representing the syllable “bi” in Vai scriptKelly et al
The symbols we use to write words evolve to become visually simpler over time, and an analysis of a writing system from West Africa shows that they can do so over just a few generations.
The script used to write the Vai language was invented in Liberia in 1833 and is still in use today. Those who devised it may have had some awareness of the Latin and Arabic alphabets, but the Vai script isn’t modelled on either. Its characters denote … More

Cut marks on animal bones suggest ancient hominins butchered them for their meat, and that they were first on the scene instead of having to scavenge from carnivores like big cats

Humans

11 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Notches on a bone left by human butchering activityJennifer A. Parkinson, Thomas W. Plummer, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop
Ancient humans were regularly butchering animals for meat 2 million years ago. This has long been suspected, but the idea has been bolstered by a systematic study of cut marks on animal bones.
The find cements the view that ancient humans had become active hunters by this time, contrasting with earlier hominins that ate mostly plants.
The new evidence comes from Kanjera South, an archaeological site near Lake Victoria in Kenya. Kanjera South has been excavated on and off since 1995. It … More

By Colin Barras
Ancient Egyptians had a wide range of medical knowledgeAndrAfter virtually unwrapping the mummified body of a young girl who died 2000 years ago, archaeologists have found something unique: an ancient Egyptian bandaged wound.
The ancient Egyptians were no strangers to linen bandages, which they first used to wrap their dead more than 6000 years ago, about a thousand years before the first pharaohs rose to power. But until now, Egyptologists haven’t found bandages that were used to dress the wounds of living ancient Egyptians.
As part of a study … More

By Francesca Steele

Jessica searches every corner of Colombia for the source of the noiseNeon
Film
Memoria
Apichatpong WeerasethakulAdvertisement

“IN THIS town, there are a lot of people who have hallucinations,” a doctor tells Jessica (Tilda Swinton) at the beginning of Memoria. Then, in a neat encapsulation of the mix of the mystical and the medicinal that runs throughout this strange and heady film, she prescribes the tranquilliser Xanax while advising her patient not to take it in case it inhibits her ability to savour the beauty of the world.
Jessica is a British botanist in Colombia who wakes one night to a heavy thumping noise that is loud enough to set off car alarms. When it becomes apparent that no one else heard it, it sends her on a downwards spiral into anxiety. She can find no obvious source and continues to hear the noise regularly, while no one else can. Jessica travels from city to jungle to try to work out what it all means, getting caught up in deep and sometimes disturbing questions about the nature of reality.
The film-maker himself, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, had exploding head syndrome – a rare sleep disorder in which people are woken by the sensation of an (imagined) loud noise. Yet while his experience of this strange and unexplained condition was part of the inspiration for the story, Memoria is defiantly unempirical, more interested in how something might feel than what might have caused it.
As she investigates the strange noise, Jessica meets and befriends Agnes, an anthropologist who is examining a newly unearthed thousand-year-old skeleton of a young girl with a hole in her skull: probably “a ritual” to release evil spirits, the scientist reasons.
She also meets a sound engineer called Hernàn, who tries to replicate the sound inside her head with a catalogue of absurd cinema sound effects like “stomach hit wearing hoodie”, while Jessica explains that it is more like “a ball of concrete hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater” and “a rumble from the core of the Earth”.
Hernàn puts the sound that comes closest to music with his band, and Jessica listens to it with headphones on and a wry smile. The audience cannot hear the music and it is a typically oblique move from Weerasethakul, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010 for the equally enthralling Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
Memoria is Weerasethakul’s first film set outside his home nation of Thailand, and it is essentially a meditation on interconnectedness. What does the past mean to modern life? Do we carry the memory of it, and of each other, with us somehow? And when things get weird, what should we pathologise and fix and when should we just try to understand ourselves better?
“What should we pathologise and fix and when should we just try to understand ourselves better?”
In doing this, Memoria isn’t didactic. Weerasethakul is asking questions, not answering them, and he seems to be aware of how lofty and pretentious it may all appear. Jessica laughs when she hears that Hernàn’s band is called The Depth of Delusion Ensemble, welcome levity that creates an unusual tone, feeling at once preternatural and realistic.
Memoria pushes people away before pulling them close. Swinton appears frail, nervy but curious. She talks carefully, urgently to Hernàn (whom later she discovers no one else has heard of), to her sister, to Agnes, but the camera always stays far away and static, shots so long, calm and still that the film envelops you instead of talking at you like most do.
It is a considered exercise in empathy and patience, a commitment between the camera and its audience as much as between people and generations. In its second half, Jessica visits an anthropological dig at Bogotá and there she meets a different Hernàn, a man who claims to remember everything. “I try to limit what I see,” he says, “experiences are harmful.”
As Jessica and the new Hernàn commune over coffee and pastoral meditations on life and death, memory becomes a fluid thing, a shared thing, as if we are all part of some collective experience. It is surreal and moving.
An abrupt change of direction in the finale feels like quite a U-turn and won’t be to everybody’s tastes, but overall Memoria is measured and deeply felt. This is slow cinema to see on a big screen and get lost in.

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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

5 January 2022

Josie Ford
Nailed it
Gazing into the alternative reality featured on the other pages of this magazine, we have mixed feelings. That’s a generally valid statement, but it applies especially to the metaverse that The Company Formerly Known As Facebook and others are building.
Or it does until we realise it gives our influencer franchise a (glittery) golden opportunity to mention Metaverse Nails™ (patent pending), “the only product in the WORLD that allows you to adorn your digital and physical self with customisable holograms”. “Glam wearable tech” is very much our bag – see our tote? It’s totes virtual – although our community service order still stands after going too far with Gucci’s virtual clothing line in lockdown (3 October 2020). Collectible fashion accessories that interact with a 3D social app to trigger a dazzling range of interactive hologram nail stickers that can be snapped and shared in real time to social networks seem a safer bet.
As was reported last year, TCFKAF might have agreed: shortly after its metamorphosis in October, it briefly suspended the Instagram account, @metaverse, of the driving force behind Metaverse Nails™ (patent pending), Thea-Mai Baumann, for “pretending to be someone else”. Far be it for us to question motivations, but if being someone else isn’t the point of the metaverse, we aren’t sure what is.Advertisement
Flipping the bird
Feedback is relieved to be informed by our man in a hide with a pair of binoculars, Jeff Hecht, that birds are real. For those who hadn’t realised there was any doubt, we urge you to marinate – but not for too long – in the social media conspiracy theory that birds used to be real, but were replaced by US government spy drones. The walls of the metaverse being decidedly porous, this has seen billboards pop up in major US cities and a demonstration outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco demanding that the company change its logo.
For a while, we had a similar, special theory of avian unreality concerning the implausible, yet undoubtedly ornamental, pelicans of St James’s Park in the heart of London’s government district. We gave it up on the basis we couldn’t work out who ordered the poop. Now, as The New York Times revealed last month, the general theory of unreality has been revealed as a prank dreamed up to demonstrate the absurdity of conspiracy theories.
This is all pretty, well, meta. We are left pondering the truth value of the statement “this conspiracy theory is false”. While we do so, we offer up the fact that, although birds might exist, fish, reptiles, worms, wasps, jellyfish and a host of other things don’t. That isn’t a conspiracy, it is phylogenetics.
Look on the buttered side
Andy Bebington intervenes from Croydon, London, with a philosophical solution to the long-standing scientific puzzle in our Twisteddoodles cartoon on 4 December 2021: why toast always lands butter-side down. It is because we buttered the wrong side. We await explanation of how attaching buttered toast to the back of a falling cat retrocausually flips right side to wrong side. It is probably something to do with quantum theory; it usually is.
How low can you go?
Did monkeys really sail the oceans on floating rafts of vegetation? we asked in our super soaraway holiday edition (18/25 December 2021, p 50), answering the question with a firm “yeah but no but yeah”. Brian Horton of the floating raft of vegetation that is Tasmania takes exception, not to that, but to our description of a riverine floating island that “covered an area about the size of two Olympic swimming pools”.
“Surely everyone knows that area is measured in football pitches and swimming pools are only for volume,” he fumes. “Please ensure that the appropriate units are used in New Scientist articles to maintain standards.”
We hear you, Brian, while countering with Malcolm Drury of Ottawa’s clipping from a CBC News website article on oil sands tailing ponds in Alberta with a storage capacity “the equivalent volume of more than 560,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, which would stretch from Edmonton to Melbourne, Australia, and back if placed end-to-end”. Measurement standards are clearly slipping – to lower and lower dimensions.
In their element again
Many thanks to those of you who responded to our appeal for elemental names from across the world (11 December 2021). Sergio Frosini from Genoa, Italy, wins the prize of a gram of unobtanium in a virtual tote bag with his list of actors Franca Rame (copper) and Turi Ferro (iron), journalist Tito Stagno (tin) and horror film director Dario Argento (silver).
Sergio further enriches us by informing us that Stagno’s principal claim to fame is as the first person in the world to announce the Apollo 11 mission’s touchdown on the moon – a full 56 seconds before it happened. Miring ourselves briefly in the nether regions of the Italian-speaking web convinces us that those most liable to bring up this striking instance of retrocausality have well-defined views of the moon landing. Having seen the grainy footage ourselves, we are prepared to accept it was cock-up, not conspiracy. Which is a pretty good guiding principle for life, come to think of it.
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