I have bought to books on the history of money. The one I have started to read seems to be the book that I would want to write myself which is both fortunate and unfortunate as it goes. It is called (crazy enough) Money, a History edited by Johnathan Williams. While it reads like a text book if you are at all interested in the subject it is proving to be a valuable read.
My research is fueled by my need to know when money became so important. As a species humans became sedentary as a means of easing the struggles of providing for ones own health and well being. As our cultures became more complex we learned to specialize in things. With this specialization came surplus which could be traded for things other people specialized in. The point to note here is that each persons specialization had something to do with survival.
At some point money became everyones specialization, to the point where most of us have nothing to do with our own survival. All we need is money. I am not anti-money or anti-technology, I am just fascinated by this phenomenon.
With that:
Money as a concept emerged in the third millennium BCE in Mesopotamia. At this point in the history of human culture most societies worked with an economic system of 'centralized redistribution' in which all the resources amassed by a society were given to that societies authorities and then redistributed among the public (minus tribute, one can assume). Outside of these agricultural/textile goods, silver (as well as other precious metals) was regarded as a very valuable thing. So valuable in fact that its exact value was determined by the authorities of ones society. These standardized weights were kept in sacred places. A sheqel for instance was not a coin but a standardized amount of silver. Each society had a standard weight of silver used as a monetary standard and early societies used this silver standard as a means of calculating interest on loans, determining fines, and assessing value of other non-silver things. So we can see that as soon as we become a stationary people and amass a surplus we began to assess and compare that surplus to silver. How much we humans love our shiny things...
Most of the silver any given community or society had was owned by kings and temples. That being said, not all transactions were dealt with in silver, in fact most were not. As the aristocracy be it theistic or royal had most of the silver, they were the ones who would deal in silver. While a man might know or count how much his millet he had harvested was worth in silver, that standard was used as a means of calculating barter. I have two bundles of millet which is worth a gram of silver, a gram of silver is worth a goat, therefore: two bundles of millet is equal in . worth to a goat. It is amazing that this early in our evolution as a thinking creature we developed an extraction of a things worth. Why would not two bundles of millet just be equal in worth to a goat?
The first coins emerge in the kingdom of Lydia. With the development of the minting of coins, the necessity of stamping them followed so as to identify where the coin had been made. It is important to note that at this time coins were very valuable; even the smallest coin was much to valuable to use on an everyday basis and there is debate about how much these early coins were circulated. In effect the smallest coin would be worth (picking a denomination at random to prove a point) 500 of our contemporary U.S. dollars.
With the advent of coins we start to see an unusual phenomenon. As coins become more and more popular as a means of commerce, the value of a coin starts to separate itself from the worth of the amount of precious metal from which it was made. We also see coins from the community you are living in be worth more than coins acquired from other societies.
More to come...
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Sunday, August 2, 2009
A Departure: The olafactory sense
I have started real research on the history of money and am excited to share what I am learning soon. For now I am going to expunge some research I was doing some time ago on the olfactory system.
I was attending a lecture with my fiance at Portland State some time ago by a very talented and interesting artist by the name of Daniel Bozhkov. In the lecture he talked about a handful of projects he had worked on, all of them interesting, but when he was talking about a particular project a certain statement he made caught my attention.
The project was called "The scent of America." Daniel was staying at a hotel in Istanbul where Hemingway once stayed during his travels in Europe as a young reporter. In this part of the world, and particularly in Istanbul, there are perfumeries where one can create a unique scent to please your particular taste in such things. This is how Daniel came up with the idea of creating a scent that represented Hemmingway (as a sort of virile American symbol). He came up with three finalists and took them to an annual Hemingway look alike contest in the Key West. There he asked the lookalikes which one smelled the most like Hemingway; there was a clear winner. He then went back to Istanbul and bottled some "Scent of America" cologne.
Now, when he was talking about why he embarked on such an interesting project he talked about the sort of guttural, primal instincts that some smells can invoke. He mentioned specifically that the part of the brain that processes smells is the limbic system which is the "reptilian" part of the brain.
This fascinated me. I began to wonder, what are smells? How do we process smells? Seeing, hearing, touching, and tasting seem to be fairly straight forward senses. Smelling became more and more elusive as I pondered its mechanics. And so I researched. Here is the result of that research:
Daniel called the limbic system the "reptilian" brain. It is also called the paleomammalian brain as it is the oldest part of the brain evolutionarily speaking. In addition to the olfactory sense, the limbic system is also associated with long term memory, the senses of reward and fear, as well as the regulation of happiness.
What is a smell? A smell or odor is a combination of chemicals. There are many chemicals that float about in the air and each odor we experience is comprised of a certain combination of chemicals.
When an odor enters the nose it is met with the olfactory sensors. Olfactory sensors are patches of nerves behind your nose at the top of your nasal passage. Each nerve in your olfactory sensor is encoded by a particular gene (therefore if one were missing a gene or had a damaged gene they would not be able to detect the odor associated with said damaged or missing gene).
The olfactory epithelium is the tissue that comprises the part of the olfactory sensor that is directly involved with detecting and defining smells. There are three types of cells that make up the olfactory epithelium: the olfactory cells combine to form an olfactory nerve, the supporting cells support the integrity of the whole, and basal cells are stem cells that split to form either supporting cells or olfactory cells (the constant division of basal cells results in a completely new epithelium every two to four weeks).
When a odor enters the nose and reaches the olfactory sensor the chemicals that it is comprised of are recognized by the nerve associated with each chemical in the odor. This information is transmitted via the olfactory nerve to the olfactory bulb (located in the limbic system) where it is interpreted and identified.
While it is recognized that each nerve in the olfactory sensor is associated with certain airborn chemicals there is debate in the scientific community how the information triggered in the olfactory sensor is transmitted to the olfactory bulb. Some believe that the combination of nerves that have identified a chemical is transmitted; that is to say, the areas of the olfactory sensors that are triggered by a certain odor is sent to the olfactory bulb. Others think that the nerves that are triggred by an odor are translated into self generating electrochemical activity (a sort od morse code if you will) and transmited along the olfactiry nerve thusly. Still others argue that it is a combinmation of the two, of course.
Side note: smelling salts irritate the olfactory sensors evoking a reation that helps arouse consciousness.
And that is an elementary explanation of how we smell and what smells are. I will leave you with some interesting definitions:
Phantosmia: an olfactory hallucination; smelling a non-existent odor (the most common phantosmia are urine, feces, rotting flesh, and smoke)
Parosmia: a distorted sense of smell; misinterpreting one smell for another (the most common parsosmia are the same as phantosmia). Parosmia can be caused by a sever cold or some other damage to the olfactory system
Anosmia: lack of the sense of smell. Anosmia can be total or specific. It can be the result of genetics (as mentioned above) or the result of trauma/damage to the olfactory system as with parosmia.
Hyperosmia: hightened or extremely sensitive olfaction
Hyposmia: lessened or dulled sense of olfaction
I was attending a lecture with my fiance at Portland State some time ago by a very talented and interesting artist by the name of Daniel Bozhkov. In the lecture he talked about a handful of projects he had worked on, all of them interesting, but when he was talking about a particular project a certain statement he made caught my attention.
The project was called "The scent of America." Daniel was staying at a hotel in Istanbul where Hemingway once stayed during his travels in Europe as a young reporter. In this part of the world, and particularly in Istanbul, there are perfumeries where one can create a unique scent to please your particular taste in such things. This is how Daniel came up with the idea of creating a scent that represented Hemmingway (as a sort of virile American symbol). He came up with three finalists and took them to an annual Hemingway look alike contest in the Key West. There he asked the lookalikes which one smelled the most like Hemingway; there was a clear winner. He then went back to Istanbul and bottled some "Scent of America" cologne.
Now, when he was talking about why he embarked on such an interesting project he talked about the sort of guttural, primal instincts that some smells can invoke. He mentioned specifically that the part of the brain that processes smells is the limbic system which is the "reptilian" part of the brain.
This fascinated me. I began to wonder, what are smells? How do we process smells? Seeing, hearing, touching, and tasting seem to be fairly straight forward senses. Smelling became more and more elusive as I pondered its mechanics. And so I researched. Here is the result of that research:
Daniel called the limbic system the "reptilian" brain. It is also called the paleomammalian brain as it is the oldest part of the brain evolutionarily speaking. In addition to the olfactory sense, the limbic system is also associated with long term memory, the senses of reward and fear, as well as the regulation of happiness.
What is a smell? A smell or odor is a combination of chemicals. There are many chemicals that float about in the air and each odor we experience is comprised of a certain combination of chemicals.
When an odor enters the nose it is met with the olfactory sensors. Olfactory sensors are patches of nerves behind your nose at the top of your nasal passage. Each nerve in your olfactory sensor is encoded by a particular gene (therefore if one were missing a gene or had a damaged gene they would not be able to detect the odor associated with said damaged or missing gene).
The olfactory epithelium is the tissue that comprises the part of the olfactory sensor that is directly involved with detecting and defining smells. There are three types of cells that make up the olfactory epithelium: the olfactory cells combine to form an olfactory nerve, the supporting cells support the integrity of the whole, and basal cells are stem cells that split to form either supporting cells or olfactory cells (the constant division of basal cells results in a completely new epithelium every two to four weeks).
When a odor enters the nose and reaches the olfactory sensor the chemicals that it is comprised of are recognized by the nerve associated with each chemical in the odor. This information is transmitted via the olfactory nerve to the olfactory bulb (located in the limbic system) where it is interpreted and identified.
While it is recognized that each nerve in the olfactory sensor is associated with certain airborn chemicals there is debate in the scientific community how the information triggered in the olfactory sensor is transmitted to the olfactory bulb. Some believe that the combination of nerves that have identified a chemical is transmitted; that is to say, the areas of the olfactory sensors that are triggered by a certain odor is sent to the olfactory bulb. Others think that the nerves that are triggred by an odor are translated into self generating electrochemical activity (a sort od morse code if you will) and transmited along the olfactiry nerve thusly. Still others argue that it is a combinmation of the two, of course.
Side note: smelling salts irritate the olfactory sensors evoking a reation that helps arouse consciousness.
And that is an elementary explanation of how we smell and what smells are. I will leave you with some interesting definitions:
Phantosmia: an olfactory hallucination; smelling a non-existent odor (the most common phantosmia are urine, feces, rotting flesh, and smoke)
Parosmia: a distorted sense of smell; misinterpreting one smell for another (the most common parsosmia are the same as phantosmia). Parosmia can be caused by a sever cold or some other damage to the olfactory system
Anosmia: lack of the sense of smell. Anosmia can be total or specific. It can be the result of genetics (as mentioned above) or the result of trauma/damage to the olfactory system as with parosmia.
Hyperosmia: hightened or extremely sensitive olfaction
Hyposmia: lessened or dulled sense of olfaction
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