Our distant ancestors, before the coming of anything even remotely like modern times, I imagine probably had gatherings in their circle, the trip sharing songs and ideas for amusement. This early playground of ideas was likely very creative, people making up melodies, improvising on them, and as people moved from tribe to tribe, the music would slowly spread through the populance. No doubt many aspects of life were uncomfortable, but the idea of this seems very appealing to me.. to hear something, to adapt it, and to pass the ideas/songs along. This is part of the creative spirit that is part of our species, more so than the modern creations of compensation (although that too probably is partly derived from reciprocity). So, with this as the ideal, played against the desire to be a walking billboard, how are we to think of people who sing popular music casually? Of course, they can't pass it around and modify it as we believe once was common -- the desire for profit, and the high population's push to make everything efficient (and incidentally bad) has led this sharing to be stifled. The ideal, I think, is when people still feel the creative urges that are in all of us, and create. Our creation is, most importantly, for ourself, not the good of society.

A thought on refactoring.. chunks of code have a texture.. when you cut a function apart, if you cut along the grain, you leave few strands between, few parameters that need be passed across the new borders we draw. If you cut against the grain, you leave many strands.. only in software, though, can we go back and re-grain things sometimes.

Again, thanks to Google News, we can see how consistant news stories can be. Look at this and this.