Since the 1960s scientists have known that chimpanzees are able to make and use toolsâ€â€Âbehavior once thought to be an exclusively human trait. Now National Geographic-funded researcher Jill Pruetz has observed toolmaking behavior that further blurs the line between the apes and humans: chimps in Senegal sharpening sticks into crude spears and thrusting them into…
Category: anthropology
Mobile phones are the new garden fences?
Whatever its moral status, there is certainly some evidence to suggest that gossip is a deep-seated human instinct: evolutionary psychologists have compared the evolution of gossip in humans with the practice of ‘social grooming’ among chimps – where the animals spend hours grooming each other’s fur, even when they are perfectly clean, as a form…
It’s been REAL he says…
our mentors in the lost art of pumpkin-carving, Dave n Sarah, have left their j-o-bs to travel around the world in 365 days. yep, sucks to be them ; ) Dave left the following words of wisdom for his colleagues at RealNetworks after 7 1/2 years working down on Elliott [taken from his blog, davethegrinch.net]:…
Birthday Tomorrow: James Frazer
from our friend Gerald’s blog : http://reykr.livejournal.com/ When I was a boy, in the 1940s, I sometimes read the Sears-Roebuck catalogs, for fun and information. Among the books that were shown for sale in those catalogs was an abridgement, I think in one-volume, of Frazer’s classic work “The Golden Bough.” I don’t think that book…
Speaking of Orwell…
Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past.  George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
Orwell Was Right
[from bloomberg.com] Almost 70 years after George Orwell created the all-seeing dictator Big Brother in the novel “1984,” Britons are being watched as never before. About 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world’s largest DNA database. Prime Minister Tony Blair said all Britons should carry…
humanity : doomed to run before it walks
Rumor has it NASA wants to build a colony on the moon. Is this another example of our culture getting ahead of itself? Do we always do this? Most of us still are unable to RTFM on things that have been around for decades much less something that’s not been yet attempted. We’re cloning living,…
Symmetry
“There are thousands of other striking instances of animal asymmetry. The akita dog in Japan with a tail that curls one way on males, the other way on females, the tendency of dolphins to swim counterclockwise around tanks, the asymmetric sex organ of the male bedbug, a fungus called laboulbeniales that grows only on the…
John Henry hear this
In the continuing quest to see if humans can outpace their electronic creations, the humans have lost another, perhaps decisive, round. A six-game chess match between Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, the world champion, and Deep Fritz, a souped-up version of commercially available chess software made by Chessbase, ended today in victory for the computer, which…
Growing up with Newsweek
Newsweek loves to feature articles about Autism. People love to buy Newsweek and read articles about Autism. If the following cliche’ is true [about Autism] then most of the world is Autistic only they don’t know it yet: Work is play and play is work Sound like anyone in YOUR neighborhood? When was the last…
I’LL be a monkey’s uncle [part II]
How to become a human. = c
Give yourself a present [PART I]
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. Joseph Campbell
i’ll be a monkey’s uncle
To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot. – Joseph Conrad One of the reasons it is unclear whether or not animals may properly be said to be conscious is…
Kansas gives birth to METEORITE!!!
Oct. 17, 2006  Scientists were excited when they pulled a 154-pound meteorite from deep below a Kansas wheat field, but what got them most electrified was the way they unearthed it. The team Monday uncovered the find 4 feet under a meteorite-strewn field using new ground-penetrating radar technology that someday might be used on…
[Van] Damme Yankees and their tactics!!!
Pretend Jean-Claude is wondering: “is this really the future of advertising? is this how Tom Sawyer got his pals to paint the fence for him? how long will it hold out? how long will it be before people are like — hey, wait a minute…i just spent three hours making an ad for Mentos and…
buttwhack.net : genius has limits, idiocy doesn’t.
buttwhack.net has *officially* launched. please stop by and register if you’d like to contribute to the idiocy that has no limits: buttwhack.net – c
Coffee makes us yes men?
Australian researchers say a caffeine hit improves our ability to process information and increases the extent to which we listen to and take on board a persuasive message. They tested this by quizzing people about their attitudes to voluntary euthanasia and abortion before and after either the equivalent of about two cups of coffee or…
Happy 100th Birthday, Albert!!!
Today in the NYT is a fascinating interview with the father of LSD: Albert Hoffman, who turned 100 this week. Albert’s work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. However, it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have…
They was just misunderstood…
Them boys in “Deliverance“, yep, they was just misunderstood is all… These folks here understood ’em, tho! YeeeeeeHAAAAAA!!! – c
Wikipedia survives research test
The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows. The British journal Nature examined a range of scientific entries on both works of reference and found few differences in accuracy. Wikipedia is produced by volunteers, who add entries and edit any page. But it has been…