People talk about ‘carrying’ the name forward, when there is a single male in the family to preserve the pedigree of a family name. This is largely bogus, because the name line is merely one strand in the exponentially increasing number of routes that extend backwards as a family tree fans out, and it has ever diluted bearing on genetic ancestry.

Partly because of male pedigree beliefs and the one child per family rule, millions of Chinese girls are suspiciously missing. 119 baby boys are born for every 100 girls, something that doesn’t happen naturally or can yet be produced scientifically, at conception. Some girls were abandoned, some aborted and presumably some murdered.

There now aren’t enough prospective brides to go round. There are predicted to be 30 million unmarried young men in China by 2020 and these people are referred to as bare branches. Bare branches, because their genes will never be passed on.

By wanting to preserve the family name, the chances of your genetic lineage dying out increases, if everyone else behaves the same way.

Ironically, to have preserved your lineage in China, the best strategy would have been to have had a girl.

Culture, like religion, is something that people respect, irrationally, and because of this, the Selfish Meme (Family Lineage) has outwitted the Selfish Gene (Genetic Lineage). This is empirical proof, in some small part, that the effects of ideas, memes, can indeed behave like viruses and be damaging to our (genetic) survival.

People have a tendency, possibly through cultural respect, to look for examples of why religion may be a beneficial development for individuals (that reduces stress and makes us live longer, for example). But here we have a very simple concrete example of a cultural idea that is clearly not beneficial to the propagation of the individual’s DNA, being akin to a mind virus.

Since the distinction between culture and religion is not mutually exclusive, we have the possibility that religion too could be an idea that is damaging to an individual’s survival. Perhaps resistance to this notion is itself due to a cultural virus.

I read two things: The Economist and Bikesnobnyc. Everything else, I just look at the pictures. I was pleased, to find an audio interview with the snob - who isn’t.

Cuil, yet another search engine, launched this morning - and then sank this afternoon.

Normally it is disingenuous to criticize people who suffer because of their success (i.e. servers going down from launch overload), but only when they innovate. Innovation means you have created something new, rather than copying, and that there will be unpredictable things that can only be fixed through trial and error.

Because Cuil is an attempt to build a better copy of a search engine, it should be judged on how well it does that, not on the novelty of the idea. People liked Google because it was fast, accurate and reliable, not because they had never seen a search engine.

Cuil is down, meaning that at this moment it is infinitely slow, unreliable and inaccurate. It has been backed with $33 million by people who have put greed before imagination, thinking that a Google beater = dollars, that a Google beater is a search engine and that people who have worked for Google are automatically better. This is the mentality that would back an MBA middle-management type over a visionary entrepreneur, a John Sculley over a Steve Jobs.

Google is threatening Microsoft’s access to dollars, not with desktop apps. or a desktop OS, but by owning an innovative product that became the desktop of the web - search. To get some of Google’s dollars requires developing something new and different that becomes the starting point for people on the web, Facebook is possibly something like that, Cuil is not.

Cuil say that they are pronounced cool. If you have to tell people you are, you’re probably not.

Om has the skinny.

Tom Mullaney in the Chicago Tribune, examines the fact that Starbucks is closing 600 stores and concludes that it is because it has lost its way from an authentic Italian coffee house (as late as 1988), to eventually become a proto fast food chain.

For a long time, Starbucks has effectively been a store selling coffee flavored deserts. A Venti Chocolate Malt Frappuccino with whipped cream, at 760 calories is equivalent to a BigMac AND Fries.

Despite the best intentions of a CEO inspired by a trip to Milan, a Starbucks Latte is a type and size of milk laden drink that is hardly ever drunk in Italy. By combining fat, sugar and caffeine into a beverage that is part of the cultural ritual of an American morning, they had merged the cravings satisfied by both fast food and soda into a liquid package that therefore seemingly didn’t count as calories, and created a business that would naturally become most profitable as fast food in disguise, due to customer demand rather than corporate conspiracy.

In New York, where foot traffic is high, the main ingredient of Starbucks reveals itself by the sickly smell of accumulated fatty milk spills, rather than fresh coffee grounds.

But the reason why Starbucks is shedding premises and staff is simple: a $5 coffee is an easily dispensable luxury in a recession, period.