So here I am at the McPherson Public Library buzzing on coffee from the Main St. Deli. Now seems like an appropriate time to post Marlon Brando reading “The Hollow Men.” Enjoy if you dare.
Author: J.E. (Page 3 of 6)
From BBC News:
Female Chimps Can Become Killers
Scientists in Scotland have discovered that female chimpanzees can be just as violent as their male counterparts.
The St Andrews University psychologists found examples of female chimps killing the offspring of incoming mothers, previously regarded as a male trait.
The Fife team has been studying chimps in the Budongo Forest, Uganda.
The researchers said only three previous instances of lethal aggression in wild female chimps had been documented in the past 50 years.
The belief was that male and females differed greatly in nature but the psychologists found that if the chimps’ resources come under threat, the females could become just as aggressive as males. Continue reading
Best stuff I’ve ever posted (outside of Charlie the Unicorn of course). DO NOT miss this work by 22-year-old director Lasse Gjertsen.
For the next few Mondays I’m going to try to post a science related. Today I’ve expurgated Salon’s review of Daniel H. Wilson’s “Where’s My Jetpack”. You can also read the complete review but if you are not a Salon subscriber you may have to watch an advert.
Staring out of my window in Manhattan’s East Village the other day, it struck me suddenly that the street scene below did not differ in any significant way from how it would have looked in 1967. Maybe even 1947. Oh, the design of automobiles has changed a bit, but combustion-engine-propelled ground-level vehicles are still how we get around, as opposed to flying cars or teleportation. Pedestrians trudge along sidewalks rather than swooshing along high-speed moving travelator. 21st century New York looks distressingly nonfuturistic. For a former science science fiction fanatic like me, this is brutally disappointing. Continue reading
I’m bored with Quotation Monday. In honor of the last installment of this series tradition I present the venerable and oh so quotable Oscar Wilde:
Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
Do you guys know how much crap I have to watch to find something decent to post every Friday? YouTube is especially rife with bad stop motion animation. Today I present some of the good stuff. Both of these are pretty simple yet clever and well executed.
I recieved this email from a dear freind of mine and rather than forward it I’ve decided to post it.
Everyone needs some odd little cause to support, and this one’s mine.
The National Marrow Donor Program, maintains a database of a whole slew of volunteer marrow donors. As you probably know, finding a match for marrow donation is much trickier than finding a match for blood donation; also, as you probably know, marrow transplants can be lifesavers.
Joining the program is simple. The mail-in kit available online just involves swabbing the insides of your cheeks – they can get all the information they need from that. No blood necessary. If your marrow is a match for someone in need, you can choose to go through the donation process. You can read more about the donation process on the website.
Usually, it costs a significant amount to join the marrow donor program – upwards of $50 – which doesn’t exactly draw in volunteers. Here’s the cool thing, though… for the next two weeks, the NMDP will waive the testing costs for new members. You can get more information on their website. They’ll even mail you the kit – you don’t have to go out of your way to join.
If you’re not interested in joining up, please pass this information along to your friends instead. Sorry for the unsolicited solicitation to join, but this is pretty important to me.
Kate
If I had no fiscal responsibility I would have bought an airplane ticket to London to see this show at Kinetica last month.  But I do. So I didn’t.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to watch this video about a dozen more times.
From the studio of Ned Gannon.
Click on the image for a close up of an exploding dragon.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.
An followup to last week’s Jan Svankmajer short with concurrent themes.
Brilliant work from Jan Svankmajer.
This is long (over seven minutes) but stay with it. He is a master. I highly recommend his movies.
From a January 1, 2007 New York Times op-ed, Folly’s Antidote. This is Schlesinger’s last published word on history before his death on February 28.
Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity — the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Three decades ago, we suffered defeat in an unwinnable war against tribalism, the most fanatic of political emotions, fighting against a country about which we knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests. Vietnam was hopeless enough, but to repeat the same arrogant folly 30 years later in Iraq is unforgivable….
A nation informed by a vivid understanding of the ironies of history is, I believe, best equipped to manage the tragic temptations of military power. Let us not bully our way through life, but let a growing sensitivity to history temper and civilize our use of power….
The great strength of history in a free society is its capacity for self-correction. This is the endless excitement of historical writing — the search to reconstruct what went before, a quest illuminated by those ever-changing prisms that continually place old questions in a new light.
History is a doomed enterprise that we happily pursue because of the thrill of the hunt, because exploring the past is such fun, because of the intellectual challenges involved, because a nation needs to know its own history. Or so we historians insist. Because in the end, a nation’s history must be both the guide and the domain not so much of its historians as its citizens.
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