January 2012
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Evolution World Tour: Wadi Hitan, Egypt ||... →
Scientists had long suspected that whales were terrestrial mammals that had eased into the ocean over millions of years, gradually losing their four legs. Modern whales, after all, have vestigial hind leg bones. But little in the fossil record illustrated the transition—until Gingerich began excavating Wadi Hitan’s hundreds of whale fossils, finding legs and knees.
Those skeletons “are the...
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WatchArt+Com’s Kinetic Sculpture (via Wired)
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The State of His Policies || Wall Street Journal →
Meantime, as Mr. Obama begins his fourth year in power it’s a good moment to recount the economic record that he’d rather not talk about. The President inherited a deep recession, but in political terms that should have been a blessing. History shows that the deeper the recession, the sharper the recovery, and Mr. Obama was poised to take credit for the economy’s natural...
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Opportunity arrives at Greeley Haven – 5th Winter... →
NASA’s seemingly indestructible Opportunity rover has arrived at the breathtaking location where she’ll be working through her unfathomable 5th Martian Winter. The Opportunity Mars Exploration Rover has not only endured, but flourished for 8 years of unending “Exploration & Discovery” on the Red Planet despite having an expected lifetime at landing of just 3 months, way back in January...
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Profit vs. Principle: The Neurobiology of... →
Let your better self rest assured: Dearly held values truly are sacred, and not merely cost-benefit analyses masquerading as nobel intent, concludes a new study on the neurobiology of moral decision-making. Such values are conceived differently, and occur in very different parts of the brain, than utilitarian decisions.
“Why do people do what they do?” said neuroscientist Greg Berns of Emory...
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“The light we see from the moon when we look at it at night left its surface just...”
– Dr Griffin
… to the beginning of the universe
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Senate Democrats’ 1,000 Days of Debt and... →
[Today marks] a sad milestone in the history of the United States Senate: the 1,000th day since Senate Democrats last offered a budget plan to the American people. Senate Democrats abandoned their official duty to prioritize Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars and tackle our nation’s most pressing economic challenges — dealing a painful blow to fiscal progress that may be felt for some time.
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Supreme Court Court Rejects Willy-nilly GPS... →
The Supreme Court said Monday that law enforcement authorities might need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move — but the justices did not say that a warrant was needed in all cases.
The convoluted decision in what is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age, rejected the Obama administration’s position that...
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All-news WNEW debuts as competitor to WTOP ||... →
Starting early Monday, one of WNEW’s most prominent voices will be a familiar one to WTOP’s listeners. The station’s morning traffic reporter is Lisa Baden, who called the drive-time grind every weekday for more than a decade on WTOP until early last year, when the station began using its own employees to report traffic (Baden is under contract to a company called Total Traffic).
Having...
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Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to... →
According to stunning archaeological discoveries here in recent years, the earthworks on Mr. Araújo’s land and hundreds like them nearby are much, much older — potentially upending the conventional understanding of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.
The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest:...
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Into the mind of a Neanderthal || New Scientist →
Humour is just one aspect of Neanderthal life we have been plotting for some years in our mission to make sense of their cognitive life. So what was it like to be a Neanderthal? Did they feel the same way we do? Did they fall in love? Have a bad day? Palaeoanthropologists now know a great deal about these ice-age Europeans who flourished between 200,000 and 30,000 years ago. We know, for...
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Undetectable Technology || The Technium →
Schroeder’s explanation is a re-phrasing of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous declaration that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Schroeder’s declares:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are...
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Rejecting the Keystone pipeline is an act of... →
President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his reelection that, through some sort of political...
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Don’t Cry Baby — Etta James...
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Supreme Court Says Congress May Re-Copyright... →
Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
In a 6-2 ruling, the court said that, just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.”
The top court was ruling on a petition by a...
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In Syria, world inaction fuels armed revolt ||... →
Growing indications that a deeply divided international community is either unable or unwilling to intervene to halt the violence in Syria are fueling an armed rebellion that risks plunging the country, and perhaps the region, into a wider war.
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Evidence has mounted for months that the once-peaceful Syrian opposition has been resorting to arms, but the fading hope of outside help is...
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Why did the chicken cross the road?
Plato: For the greater good.
Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained.
Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.
Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!
Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.
Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.
Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.
Oliver North: National Security was at stake.
B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.
Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.
Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the objects "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.
Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.
Aristotle: To actualize its potential.
Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.
Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.
Salvador Dali: The Fish.
Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.
Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.
Epicurus: For fun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.
Johann von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it [censored] wanted to. That's the [censored] reason.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.
The Sphinx: You tell me.
Mr. T.: If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!
Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.
Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
Molly Yard: It was a hen!
Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.
Chaucer: So priketh hem nature in hir corages.
Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.
The Godfather: I didn't want its mother to see it like that.
Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken's wings.
Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.
Othello: Jealousy.
Dr. Johnson: Sir, had you known the Chicken for as long as I have, you would not so readily enquire, but feel rather the Need to resist such a public Display of your own lamentable and incorrigible Ignorance.
Mrs. Thatcher: This chicken's not for turning.
Supreme Soviet: There has never been a chicken in this photograph.
Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One's social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience - although, perhaps, if one must cross a road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.
Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome, filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume to question the actions of one in all respects his superior.
Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o'er.
Whitehead: Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Freud: An die andere Seite zu kommen. (Much laughter.)
Hamlet: That is not the question.
Donne: It crosseth for thee.
Pope: It was mimicking my Lord Hervey.
Constable: To get a better view.
Yeats: She was following the Faeries that sang to her to come away with them from the dull, bucolic comfort of the farmyard to the waters and the wild.
Shelley: 'Tis a metaphor for the pursuits of man: though 'twas deemed an extraordinary occurrence at the time, still it brought little to bear on the great scheme of time and history, and was ultimately fruitless and forgotten.
Tolkien: Chickens are respectable folk, and well thought of. They never go on any adventures or do anything unexpected. One fine spring day, as the chicken wandered contentedly around the farmyard, clucking and pecking and enjoying herself immensely, there appeared a Wizard and thirteen Dwarves who were in need of a chicken to share in their adventure. Reluctantly she joined their party, and with them crossed the road into the great Unknown, muttering about how rude the Dwarves were to take her away on such short notice, without even giving her time to brush her feathers or fetch her hat.
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“Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild...”
– Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski (translated by Claire Cavanagh)
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Evolution World Tour: Mendel's Garden, Czech... →
For seven centuries, the skyline of Brno—the second-largest city in the Czech Republic—has been dominated by Spilberk Castle. Built on the summit of the highest hill in the city, it was one of Europe’s most notorious prisons, and a conspicuous warning to those who would oppose the rule of the Hapsburg dynasty.
Yet, for many, the most impressive site in Brno is a four- acre patch of land near...
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How to Build a Dog || National Geographic →
In a project called CanMap, a collaboration among Cornell University, UCLA, and the National Institutes of Health, researchers gathered DNA from more than 900 dogs representing 80 breeds, as well as from wild canids such as gray wolves and coyotes. They found that body size, hair length, fur type, nose shape, ear positioning, coat color, and the other traits that together define a...
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Milky Way Galaxy Shown to Be Teeming With Planets... →
Just 20 years ago, astronomers had no direct evidence that planets orbited other stars. Now, researchers estimate the Milky Way galaxy contains a huge number of planets, with Earth-sized worlds vastly outnumbering the rest.
“We find that, on average, every star has a planet, and since there are at least 100 billion stars, there are at least 100 billion planets,” said astronomer Kailash Sahu...
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India scores major victory in battle to eradicate... →
On Friday, India is set to reach a major milestone in the global battle against polio, recording a full year without a single new case of the disease in the country that was long its epicenter and its biggest exporter.
It is a massive global public health achievement that has defied the odds and confounded the skeptics, a victory — attained with U.S. financial support and expertise — that...
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Smaller Magnetic Materials Push Boundaries of... →
Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.
The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities...
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Nuclear Disarmament, No Matter the Cost || Weekly... →
The Obama administration states in its just released defense guidance paper that perhaps America’s nuclear “deterrence goals can be achieved with a smaller nuclear force.”
What appears to be a public musing is, in fact, already becoming a diplomatic reality. The administration didn’t wait long after securing Senate ratification of the New START agreement, which limits the U.S. force to 1,550...
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Iranian scientist involved in nuclear program... →
A scientist linked to Iran’s nuclear program was killed in his car by a bomb-wielding assailant on Wednesday, a bold rush-hour attack that experts say points to a further escalation in a covert campaign targeting the country’s atomic officials and institutions.
The precision hit in a northern Tehran neighborhood killed the 32-year-old chemical engineer employed at Iran’s main...