Flickr Wednesday

To make up for missing last week, here are three unrelated flickr photos. The first two come courtesy of Bryan.

Uros Petrovic - House and Hills

Serbia. One of the many places B would like to live.

Yo-Yos

B's current obsession. Careful, they can be addictive (scroll to bottom).

Contact

Courtesy of one of Ashuri's strange hikes. One of my favorites from her page.

Welcome Back Bill

A resounding cheer for Bill Moyers - he's back! We're saved!

In his new show, Bill Moyers Journal, premiering this Friday on PBS, Moyers will again bring us his "citizen journalism" and attempt to get us as close to the "verifiable truth" as possible. No matter your political leanings, Moyers ought to be a hero to all Americans for struggling to uphold journalistic standards which have been decaying for two decades in this country.

Check him out on Fresh Air yesterday, excellent interview.

Welcome back, Bill.

Sunday Video

This week, instead of five short clips related to a broad theme, enjoy one feature length documentary. First screened in 2004, Orwell Rolls in His Grave, is like Outfoxed without so much concentration on Murdoch's News Corp. If you're feeling up for 100 minutes of anti-propaganda, please enjoy the film.

TED Update

TED has redesigned their webpage, and now all the links from Get Dirty to TED don't work. Oh well. The new site looks great, and there are a number of new talks to check out this week. Enjoy.

Running After Antelope

I first heard the theory that long distance running may have played a crucial role in human evolution from one of my all time favorite This American Life stories, Running After Antelope by Scott Carrier.

Today I came across an article about a talk given at this year's Harvard Museum of Natural History’s spring lecture series, “Evolution Matters,” by Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman about this very theory. Awfully fascinating stuff, check it out:

Modern humans and their immediate ancestors such as Homo erectus sport several adaptations that make humans, instead of some ferocious, furry, or fleet creature, the animal world’s best distance runners.

“Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom,” Lieberman said.

That evidence belies the long and firmly held belief that humans are the animal world’s biggest wimps and, if not for our big brains and advanced weapons, we’d be forced to subsist on fruits and vegetables, always in danger of being gobbled up by fiercer predators.

The problem with that theory, Lieberman said, is that we began adding meat to our diets around 2.6 million years ago, long before we developed advanced weapons like the bow and arrow, which was developed as recently as 50,000 years ago.

While some of our ancestors’ meat-eating may have been due to scavenging, Lieberman said the appearance about 2 million years ago of physical adaptations that have no impact on walking but that make humans better endurance runners provide evidence that early scavengers became running hunters.

Specifically, we developed long, springy tendons in our legs and feet that function like large elastics, storing energy and releasing it with each running stride, reducing the amount of energy it takes to take another step. There are also several adaptations to help keep our bodies stable as we run, such as the way we counterbalance each step with an arm swing, our large butt muscles that hold our upper bodies upright, and an elastic ligament in our neck to help keep our head steady.

Even the human waist, thinner and more flexible than that of our primate relatives allows us to twist our upper bodies as we run to counterbalance the slightly-off-center forces exerted as we stride with each leg.

Once humans start running, it only takes a bit more energy for us to run faster, Lieberman said. Other animals, on the other hand, expend a lot more energy as they speed up, particularly when they switch from a trot to a gallop, which most animals cannot maintain over long distances.

Though those adaptations make humans and our immediate ancestors better runners, it is our ability to run in the heat that Lieberman said may have made the real difference in our ability to procure game.

Humans, he said, have several adaptations that help us dump the enormous amounts of heat generated by running. These adaptations include our hairlessness, our ability to sweat, and the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, which not only allows us to take bigger breaths, but also helps dump heat.

“We can run in conditions that no other animal can run in,” Lieberman said.

While animals get rid of excess heat by panting, they can’t pant when they gallop, Lieberman said. That means that to run a prey animal into the ground, ancient humans didn’t have to run further than the animal could trot and didn’t have to run faster than the animal could gallop. All they had to do is to run faster, for longer periods of time, than the slowest speed at which the animal started to gallop.

All together, Lieberman said, these adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day when most animals rest. Lieberman said humans likely practiced persistence hunting, chasing a game animal during the heat of the day, making it run faster than it could maintain, tracking and flushing it if it tried to rest, and repeating the process until the animal literally overheated and collapsed.

Most animals would develop hyperthermia — heat stroke in humans — after about 10 to 15 kilometers, he said.

By the end of the process, Lieberman said, even humans with their crude early weapons could have overcome stronger and more dangerous prey. Adding credence to the theory, Lieberman said, is the fact that some aboriginal humans still practice persistence hunting today, and it remains an effective technique. It requires very minimal technology, has a high success rate, and yields a lot of meat.

Lieberman said he envisions an evolutionary scenario where humans began eating meat as scavengers. Over time, evolution favored scavenging humans who could run faster to the site of a kill and eventually allowed us to evolve into persistence hunters. Evolution likely continued to favor better runners until projectile weapons made running less important relatively recently in our history.

“Endurance running is part of a suite of shifts that made Homo [the genus that includes modern people] human,” Lieberman said.

More Weird Weekends

Just wanted to call to your attention three more AWESOME episodes of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends on youtube. He is seriously brilliant. Watch these shows. Worth your time.

Survivalists Part One:

Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five.

Bible Bashers Part One:

Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five. Part six.

Thai Brides Part One:

Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five. Part six.

Oh! And don't miss Wrestling either. Happy streaming.

Boris Artzybasheff's Neurotica

Carl recently pointed me to the work of Boris Artzybasheff on the International Animated Film Society's ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive on the web. I thought I'd share some of his striking illustrations here. From the website:

Boris Artzybasheff was a master of anthropomorphism. He was able to give life and personality not only to animals and objects, but to ideas.

Below I've posted a few of my favorite "visual depictions of extreme states of mind" taken from Artzybasheff's book "As I See," digitized and archived at the ASIFA-Hollywood website.

Anxiety


So pure, and so relaxing


Hypochondria


Also check out the Machinalia and Diablerie sections of Artzybasheff's book. They're equally amazing.

Sunday Videos

To commemorate the passing of the great writer Kurt Vonnegut, here are two interviews, a panel appearance, a movie, and a Charlie Rose appreciation:

On The Daily Show


On The Infinite Mind in Second Life


With Joyce Carol Oates at the Connecticut Forum


Kurt Vonnegut

Part one of a feature length documentary that explores the man and his ideas. Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five. Part six. Part seven. Part eight.

Charlie Rose Appreciation

Skip Arnold. The appreciating begins at minute 45.

Altered Oceans

Is the future not looking quite bleak enough for you? Are you feeling insufficient despair at the way our species is maniacally destroying the ecosystems that sustain us? Then you need Kenneth R. Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling's five part series for the L.A. Times, Altered Oceans. Get to know the primordial toxins that are reclaiming the seas; learn how eutrophication spawns poisonous algae which is killing our sea-faring mammal cousins; see how plastic debris is clogging the stomachs of water fowl; plug your nose to cover the stench of the red tide of algae on the Florida coast; and consider a more acidic ocean in which shells are too brittle to keep their occupants safe, where the oceans self destruct as the plankton that makes up the bottom of the food chain dissolves in the acidic soup we've created. Finally, once you've consumed all the sobering information contained in this exhaustively researched and well rounded multimedia presentation, you may weep openly over the state of our planet.

One of the co-authors, Ken Weiss, was a guest on Fresh Air yesterday, and his opening anecdote was one of the most alarming accounts of the effect that humans have had on the environment I have heard. I recommend listening to the interview, and here is the same anecdote excerpted from the first L.A. Times article in the series:

MORETON BAY, AUSTRALIA -- The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour.

When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.

"It comes up like little boils," said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars. "At nighttime, you can feel them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked."

As the weed blanketed miles of the bay over the last decade, it stained fishing nets a dark purple and left them coated with a powdery residue. When fishermen tried to shake it off the webbing, their throats constricted and they gasped for air.

After one man bit a fishing line in two, his mouth and tongue swelled so badly that he couldn't eat solid food for a week. Others made an even more painful mistake, neglecting to wash the residue from their hands before relieving themselves over the sides of their boats.

For a time, embarrassment kept them from talking publicly about their condition. When they finally did speak up, authorities dismissed their complaints — until a bucket of the hairy weed made it to the University of Queensland's marine botany lab.

Samples placed in a drying oven gave off fumes so strong that professors and students ran out of the building and into the street, choking and coughing.

Scientist Judith O'Neil put a tiny sample under a microscope and peered at the long black filaments. Consulting a botanical reference, she identified the weed as a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago.

O'Neil, a biological oceanographer, was familiar with these ancient life forms, but had never seen this particular kind before. What was it doing in Moreton Bay? Why was it so toxic? Why was it growing so fast?

The venomous weed, known to scientists as Lyngbya majuscula, has appeared in at least a dozen other places around the globe. It is one of many symptoms of a virulent pox on the world's oceans.

In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

Straight out of a science fiction story: the hairy black toxic weed that ate the ocean and killed humanity. It's gonna get you, your children, and your dog. Watch out, it's coming to a seashore near you!

All humorous sci-fi scenarios aside, we're in trouble. These articles (though I haven't had time yet to read them all in full) highlight the ocean's importance to our survival in a way many of us may not have considered before. The black weed of death is only the beginning of what's in store for us. We screwed up and broke the homeowners rule of thumb: be careful what ends up in the swimming pool, and be sure the filter is always working.

Louis Theroux + UFOs = Weird Weekend

A friend added up two recent posts and pointed me to Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, the UFO Episode. Quality in five parts. Part one:



Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five.

The Phelps Peopleaka The God Hates Fags People

"It's this nation. Of these fags. It's this nation of fags. That's what fag troops means," answers ten year old Noah when asked about the meaning of the sign he's holding that reads, "FAG TROOPS." Noah was born into the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, a group led by the shameless and hateful Reverend Fred Phelps. His mother prompts him further: "What if you're not a practicing fag, what are you? What if you support fags, what does that make you?"

"You're a dyke?" Answers Noah, and his mother laughs. Because it's cute. Because it's just so precious when a helpless brainwashed child gets his hateful epithets mixed up.

I really felt for Noah and the other kids at Westboro Baptist Church documented in Louis Theroux's BBC special The Most Hated Family in America. The children are not only taught to hate, they are trained to preach hate without ever learning how to reason for themselves. The reactions they get from the rest of the world - being cursed at day to day and even having things thrown at them from moving vehicles - confuses them, and must end up reinforcing their hate and anger towards the outside world.

I remember being in Boston during the DNC and hearing about the God Hates Fags people secondhand from Bryan and a few of his friends. But seeing it with my own eyes sealed the words "God Hates Fags" in my brain forever. In what the government called "The Free Speech Zone," and the citizens deemed "The Freedom Cage," there was a small platform erected by the Westboro Baptist Church. I clearly recall boys as young as seven or eight standing around this soapbox holding signs with stick figure depictions of men having sex, yelling nonsense about sodomy and Satan alongside their siblings and parents. Naturally, I, and every other person who saw these people, was disgusted. Thanks to boingboing and google vid, you can now marvel at the twisted depths of human nature too:



Part of what is so astonishing to me about this program is how warm and playful the family is with Louis. They tease him about going to hell and reprimand him (almost lovingly) for his sinful ways. Yet they don't reject him outright and are sometimes even likable. This seems to be testament to Louis Theroux's intelligence and talent more than anything. While he manages to portray them as sympathetic and human, the family members (mainly the adults) are obviously shut off from the rest of the world, and come across as dangerously ignorant, even when it comes to the teachings of the bible.

There are so many priceless quotes from this documentary, maybe everyone can post their favorites in the comments. Also, there is more about Theroux's time with the church in his podcast, here.

Flickr Wednesday

A little self-promotion this week. Last weekend we spent Saturday afternoon doing some filming along the rundown Greenpoint waterfront and I brought my powershot. In the end I was quite happy with a few of the pictures.

I wish I had the patience to try an HDR style photo of some of these buildings. The rust on this door would look amazing. One day I'll make an attempt at simple HDR.

I love this corner. Not sure why exactly. The colors and shapes. I can see a fantastic action sequence playing out on these structures; people hanging from the footbridge, climbing to the top of the water tower, explosions and explosions. Too much G.I. Joe and too many movies as a kid I guess.

Sunday Videos on Monday Again

Another Sunday has passed without your promised videos. Apologies.

To make up for it, here are three videos in which Dan Aykroyd talks about the existence of extra-terrestrial lifeforms that keep track of our civilization. I had no idea. I knew about Charlie Sheen and his 911 Conspiracy Theories, but Aykroyd and UFOs? No one told me! They're on the long-ish side, but wtf.

What NASA doesn't want you to see.

You just have to watch the first few minutes of this to get the gist.

Aykroyd Unplugged

This one is featured length. Watch at your own risk.

With Anderson Cooper

It's fun browsing the comments for this one.

And now two more videos about UFOs:

Out of the Blue

This is actually a pretty entertaining documentary.

The Photo Album - A Journey to Mars

This is good old fashion fun, but don't doubt that people wouldn't line up to hear these "NASA staff members" speak.

I hope that tides you over.

Three Thousand Dollar Kitten

How much is a domestic cat that bares resemblance to the majestic tiger worth to you? For some, the answer to that question is a surprising three to four thousand dollars.

The Toyger has been recognized by the International Cat Association since 1993, and this spring the breed will be judged alongside purebreds for the first time at TICA sponsored cat shows. Keep in mind that this is a strictly domestic cat - no exotic genes involved - that was bred from a spotted breed of house cats by a possibly loopy woman who thought that a tiger-looking-cat might raise awareness for the plight of wild tigers. The breed is now highly sought after, and according to National Geographic, the asking price for a toyger kitten is three grand - up to four according to other sources.

Saving the tigers my foot! More like paying mortgages. I certainly don't object to having toygers in the world, I'm sure I'd love one if it wandered in the back door, but I don't believe that anyone is breeding these animals with the hope of protecting real tigers. That's just ridiculous.

The Shit Knife

Here's another self contained excerpt from Wade Davis' lecture The Light at the Edge of the World. This is seriously one of the best anecdotes I've ever heard.

To end this evening on a more optimistic note, I want to return to my own country of Canada and emphasize a rather astonishing thing that has happened. Some of you may not know that in April of 1999, Canada gave back to the indigenous peoples, to about 26,000 Inuit, administrative control of a homeland the size of Western Europe. This is a great moment of restitution for our country, because we have not always been kind to the Inuit. Indeed when the Europeans first met the Inuit, they took them to be savages; the Inuit took the Europeans to be gods. Both were wrong, but one did more to honor the human race. What the British in particular could not understand was that there could be no better measure of genius than the ability to exist in a landscape with a technology limited to what you could carve from bones, stone, slate and small bits of wood that floated up like flotsam from the sea, and were considered as precious as gold.

If there is one motif in the history of the Arctic, it is that when the Europeans mimic the ways of the Inuit, they achieved great feats of exploration. But when they failed to do so, they suffered terrible deaths. The Inuit don’t fear the cold, they take advantage of it. The runners of their sleds were originally made from three Arctic char fish placed into a row and wrapped in caribou hide, and greased with the stomach contents of the caribou.

I recorded a wonderful story from an elder, when I went narwhal hunting at the tip of Baffin Island. During the 1950s, there was an effort to establish Canadian sovereignty over an archipelago that could have gone to a European country, and we forced the Inuit into settlements. This man’s grandfather refused to go, so the family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and weapons, thinking that would force him into the settlements. Did it? No. In the middle of an Arctic night, with a blizzard howling outside, the old man stepped outside of the igloo, pulled down his caribou hide trousers and defecated into his hand. As the feces froze, he shaped it in the form of a knife. He sprayed saliva along the edge to give it a sharp edge, and as his shit knife took form, he butchered a dog with it. He skinned the dog with it, took the skin and made a harness, took the ribcage and made a sled, harnessed up an adjacent dog and disappeared, shit knife in belt, over the ice flows. Talk about getting by with nothing…

If you read this blog and you still haven't watched the Wade Davis TED talk, here is the link again.

TED Prize Winners 2007

Talks by the three TED Prize winners this year are now available for streaming, I recommend watching all three.

First Bill Clinton expresses his wish to build a working health-care system in Rwanda as a model for other developing nations across the globe.

Next James Natchway presents a slide show spanning his career as a war photographer, searing images from the Balkans to El Salvador in our minds.

The last, and my favorite, is a talk by biologist E.O. Wilson who offers an impassioned and eloquent plea to preserve our planet's biodiversity. His primary concern are those myriad species that science is yet to properly study:

Each of these species, even the tiniest... are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is esquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form the ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun to even imagine. We will destroy these ecosystems and the species composing them at the peril of our own existence, and unfortunately we are destroying them with ingenuity and ceaseless energy.

He goes on to call on listeners to help create a complete "Encyclopedia of Life" on the web to help inspire a spirit of global conversation. The tools necessary to catalouge earth's biodiversity are here, we need only to use and perfect them so we might see the value of what we're losing before it's too late.

It's moving stuff, start to finish.

Flickr Wednesday

This weeks featured flickr photographer is one tobesimply, aka the B-Hayzer. I sometimes forget the crisp force of film in a world crowded with digital photography. The pictures below remind me. The first bares the signatures of the Holga camera used to take it: a square shape and distinct vignetting. The second is taken with an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic, I chose the photo for its pleasing composition and subject matter.

The captions and titles are Bryan's.

Rehnquist, In State.

People queue to see deceased Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, lie in State.

Strait Steel.

A new Columbia Heights, being built before my eyes. 14th Street and Park Road NW, Washington, DC.

I'm hoping to see more pics from this user in the near future. Maybe I'll even be in a few.

Zack's Learnarium

Old Man Comedy finally has some content to watch online. This week we posted the third episode of Zack's Learnarium:



Look for the fourth episode sometime next week, and stay tuned for much more. A website is in the works, but it will take time. Until then, please help spread the comedy word, and if you have a youtube account, don't forget to rate our videos. Thanks.

Davis on the Coca Leaf

In another extended excerpt from his lecture, The Light at the Edge of the World, Wade Davis describes the history of coca eradication in Latin America and talks about leading the first scientific studies of the plant in the 1970's. The research reinforced what indigenous societies had known for millennia: the plant has no toxic or addictive qualities and is well suited for living at high-altitudes where vitamins can be hard to come by. The results of the study, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have been a liability to the DEA and other such western agencies ever since, perhaps one reason the public is ignorant of these issues. Coca eradication efforts, which fail to differentiate the indigenous plant with the infamous narcotic derived from it, continue today. In the excerpt to follow, Davis aptly points out our government's hypocrisy and misconstruing of facts when in dealing with the coca plant.

Efforts to eradicate the coca fields have been underway for fifty years. However, I must make you realize that the whole idea of coca eradication came originally from a group of physicians in Lima, whose concern for the fate of the highland Indians was matched in intensity only by their ignorance of Andean life. They looked up in the mountains, and they saw malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of literacy— and they had to find a culprit. Because issues of economy, land distribution and the hierarchy of Peru cut too close to the foundations of their own bourgeois world, they had to settle on another culprit, and they chose coca.

The eradication of coca initially had nothing to do with pharmacology, but everything to do with the cultural identity of those who revered the plant. Even at the time of our grant, astonishingly little was known about coca. Nobody knew how many species yielded the drug, nobody knew where the point of origin was of this most important of cultivated plants, nobody had ever done nutritional study of the plant, even though it was something consumed every day by millions of South American Indians.

. . . Coca was the great plant of pre-Columbian America. The Inca, unable to cultivate it at the imperial capital of Cusco because of the elevation, replicated it in gold and silver leaf in fields that colored the horizon. At the time of the Inca, you could not approach any holy shrine if you did not have the leaf in your mouth. If you had the leaf in your mouth at the time of your demise, your route to the afterworld was assured. There was no gesture or moment in the Andes that was not mediated by an exchange of this sacred plant. In many places in the Andes, distances were not measured in terms of miles or kilometers, but in terms of coca chews. When men and women met on the trail, they did not shake hands, they exchanged leaves.

Of course, one thing we did was the first nutritional study of coca, and what we discovered horrified our backers at the U.S. government. We found a small amount of cocaine in it, roughly half to one percent dry weight, analogous to the amount of caffeine in a coffee bean. No one notices the irony, at every drug abuse conference, when DEA agents bolt for the coffee pot at 10:00 in the morning. But to compare coca to cocaine is like comparing the luscious fruit of a peach with the prussic acid found in a peach pit. In addition to the small amount of cocaine that is absorbed benignly through the mucous membrane of the mouth, a mild and valid stimulant in a harsh and unforgiving landscape, coca is chock full of vitamins. And coca has more calcium than any plant ever studied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which made it perfect for a culture that traditionally lacked a milk product, especially for young mothers. It also turned out that coca has enzymes that enhance the body’s ability to digest carbohydrates at high elevation, which made it perfect for the traditional potato diet of the Andes.

In one elegant scientific essay, we put in the stark profile the draconian efforts that are still underway to eradicate the traditional fields, with herbicides that pollute the headwaters of the Amazon. We showed that this plant had been used with no evidence of toxicity, let alone addiction, for over four thousand years by the pre-Columbian peoples of the Amazon and the Andes.

There will be more from this lecture in the coming week.

Monday Videos

This week your Sunday Videos come a day late with a classic (and lazy) "animals are neat" theme. Enjoy.

Giant Jellyfish

Holy crap. It's like something from one of my nightmares, and yet this diver reaches out to touch it! Another giant sea creature featured in my dreams is the manta ray.

A Crow & A Kitten

Unlikely and undeniably adorable. It may be a calculated move by Moses to get that cat on the his side, crows are notoriously intelligent.

Manakin Moonwalk

This clip has already been featured pretty much everywhere videos are featured on the web. If you haven't yet seen the male Manakin court his mate, prepare to be impressed.

Mantis Shrimp

Mantis shrimp have the fastest measured feeding strike of any known animal, and are now being studied by engineers and designers who hope to imitate the efficiency and utility of nature's design. Learn more about these surprisingly awesome critters from one of this week's new TED Talks with biologist Sheila Patek.

Microcosmos

This is the opening sequence of the film Microcosmos, produced by Jacques Perrin, the man behind Winged Migration. It's worth netflixing if only for the images of snails making love set to opera.