Human vision
is attuned to
graspable objects such as tools.
In this study, the researchers showed a connection between the two visual parts of the
brain--one handles perception, and the other guides how we move our limbs.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Human vision
is attuned to
graspable objects such as tools.
In this study, the researchers showed a connection between the two visual parts of the
brain--one handles perception, and the other guides how we move our limbs.
Michael Lind explains
why the Bush foreign policy "is worse than a crime, it's a mistake".
The hegemonic strategy requires the conversion of America’s temporary Cold War alliance system in Europe and East Asia into permanent American military supremacy within those regions, reinforced by American military domination of the Middle East.
Even if all of this were ethically acceptable, it won't work. [via Electrolite]
We've been here before: how the
put the Ba'ath
Party in power in Iraq, back in the Kennedy administration.
According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite -- killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.
Somehow, this doesn't feel like a farce. [Thanks to the Potsmaster.]
It's not just American diplomats:
here's an
interview with an Australian intelligence analyst who has resigned in
protest against the rush to a war with Iraq.
[via my old friend "Charles Dodgson"]
Speculative cosmology: if there's enough
dark energy, the end of the universe could be neither a Big Crunch nor a
cold dark wilderness. Instead, everything might be
pulled
apart. Caldwell, Kamionkowski, and Weinberg discuss the effects of different
values of w, the ratio between the dark-energy pressure and its
energy density. At w<-1, the universe is pulled apart, first
into separate galaxies, then unbinding solar systems and eventually even
atoms.
The good news is that, while planets would be uncoupled from their stars three months before the end of time, this won't happen for 20 billion years. "Earth Explodes" 30 minutes before the end is an eye-catching entry in the timetable, which runs from the usual beginnings in Planck ear and atoms formed through "Dissociate Atoms" and, 10-19 seconds later, the "Big Rip", but the Sun will have absorbed our planet long before then.
The authors point out that the shorter timetable for the universe addresses the questions of cosmic coincidence: in this model, we're living at the only epoch in which we could be living (give or take a few billion years).
Molly Ivins
reviews
the bidding on US-North Korea relations. There may be things that can't be said in
Texan: the column ends "Oy gevalt."
The Bush Administration has been caught
ordering
the bugging of Security Council phones. The leaked memo is dated 31 January 2003,
and the policy is being attributed to Condoleeza Rice. I can't imagine that this
is going to make Mexico or Pakistan--two of the six main targets of the operation--any
happier with the U.S.
While many diplomats at the UN assume they are being bugged, the memo reveals for the first time the scope and scale of US communications intercepts targeted against the New York-based missions.[Thanks to Jane Carnall for this pointer.]The disclosure comes at a time when diplomats from the countries have been complaining about the outright 'hostility' of US tactics in recent days to persuade then to fall in line, including threats to economic and aid packages.
Paulo Coelho gives
step-by-step
instructions for finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, starting from the
assumption that "the president of the most powerful nation in the world is
responsible for his actions and knows what he is talking about." He then
suggests an alternate plan of action for the weapons inspectors to take in case that
basic assumption proves false.
A newly described fossil from Olduvai
Gorge, OH 65,
suggests a simpler family tree for our ancestors. The fossil is a complete
upper jaw and part of the face. Robert Blumenschine and his team interpret it
as evidence that Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis were the same
species.
The fossil is 1.8 million years old, near the beginnings of genus Homo.
"OH 65 allows us to reshuffle the specimens that belong in the ancestral genus and tie together rudolfensis and habilis," says Professor Blumenschine."It shows that all three specimens are likely to be members of the same species - Homo habilis."
Crucially, OH 65 was found with stone tools and with bones from larger animals that clearly show the marks made by those tools.
Professor Blumenschine says this corroborates the work of other scientists in demonstrating the hominid's capacity both to make tools and to use them in butchering meat for food, even at this early time.
"As we learn more about the paleoecology, we may begin to understand what environmental conditions were selecting for adaptive traits in early Homo, traits like an increasingly large brain, that eventually gave rise to what we are today."
The
Scottish Parliament has passed a land reform bill that not only
expands the right to roam, it will allow
crofters
to buy back some of the land taken from them in the Highland Clearances.
Predictably, some of the 343 people and corporations that own half the land
in Scotland are angry; annoyingly, the NY Times leads with that,
before pointing out that most land isn't affected and that much of what is
belongs to absentee landlords and corporations.
"In one sense, it is revolutionary," said Jim Wallace, deputy first minister of the Scottish Parliament who helped steer the bill through the legislature. "It's a simpler way of giving crofting communities the right to buy land. But the heavens aren't going to fall in."[Sorry about the NY Times link, but I can't seem to reach any Scottish papers on the Web today.]In some cases, the buying and selling of land will be done amicably, as is currently happening with the Dundonnell Estate of the lyricist Sir Tim Rice, who is negotiating the sale of part of his 33,000 acres of Wester Ross land to a group of crofters.
Several other crofting communities, though, are moving ahead with plans to confront their landlords and assert their right to buy. Hugh MacLellan, 42, a crofter who has occupied the same land his family was squeezed into some 200 years ago, is already setting plans in motion to purchase 2,300 acres of the Durness Estate, which is owned by Vibal SE, a corporation licensed in Liechtenstein. Mr. MacLellan, an oyster farmer and owner of a bed and breakfast in northwest Sutherland, hopes to revitalize the village of Laid, which he says has languished through neglect.
The owners, he said, want to hold on to the property for its mineral rights. He hopes to buy it and turn parts into a heritage trail, maybe set up a shellfish processing plant or a wind farm to produce electricity.
A rose-quartz hand ax
may be the earliest
evidence of deliberate burial by our ancestors. The site is 350,000 years old, about
a quarter of a million years older than any similar evidence, and much older than
Homo sapiens. Anthropologists have gradually come to think that
Neanderthals also had symbolic behavior, but the Spanish site Sima de los Huesos
is much older, and the first such claim for H. heidelbergensis.
Thought and beliefs don't leave much physical evidence, and most of the early artifacts are ambiguous at best. Even those who argue that this site is evidence of symbolism aren't making specific claims about ritual or spirituality:
Many experts on the origins of humanity are intrigued and impressed. They are also skeptical and seek more proof. By claiming evidence of a burial ritual, the Spanish researchers may be overreaching, they caution. "The dividing line between reality and paleo-fantasy is very narrow," one English scholar said.Richard Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, however, said the burial was "so unique and outlandish" that it seems all but certain that the ax is evidence of intentional, symbolic behavior.
"That does not imply full-blown modern symbolic capability," Potts said. "I think we need to say it is intentional and purposeful behavior and just leave it at that."
Whatever its meaning, the find is unique in the annals of human evolution, said anthropologist Richard Klein at Stanford University. "It is a very strange circumstance," he said.
Copyright 2003 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
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