Let's Be Clear

Anybody complaining about how they "Can't say things anymore" is not actually being prevented from saying those things.

What it means is that now, if they say those things, they're being perceived as the kind of person who says things like that - and they're being chastised for it.

So what they're whining about is what normal people call "being held accountable" - for what they say and what they do - and for who and what their use of the language reveals about them.

Not that long ago:

Things change. Stop being such a whiny-butt pussy about it.

And it's not so much that you're prohibited from saying those things, but we're trying to be marginally better people, and make this world a marginally better place to live, so when you say that kind of hateful ignorant shit, you can expect to get dinged for it. You need some new material.

What is it you find so fuckin' hard about that?

Listen Up, Nerds

Weapons, predatory behavior, and big expensive brains.

Arizona State Univ Center For Human Origins

Jess Thompson, PhD, Yale, is the kind of pro who knows her shit so well she can explain it in a way that makes it understandable to a dope like me. Which is a very good thing, because this kind of presentation is basically a combination progress report and sales pitch.

These efforts have to be funded, so she's showing the people who have ponied up the money so far, that spending more of their money on this stuff is worth it.

I think it is.

Today's Nerd Thing

The first permanent tools - the ones that were more than strictly ad hoc and disposable - probably predate our human ancestors.

"It is a testament to how difficult it is for intelligent life to emerge on a planet of tooth and claw."

Today's Über Nerd

(pay wall)

Nobel in medicine awarded to Svante Pääbo for discoveries on human evolution

The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist whose work on ancient DNA helped change our understanding of human origins.

Pääbo, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led groundbreaking work to sequence the genome of long-extinct Neanderthals from 40,000-year-old bone fragments. It was a “seemingly impossible task,” said Anna Wedell, a member of the Nobel committee.

The work was transformative, showing that Neanderthals mixed with prehistoric humans after they migrated out of Africa, and the vestiges of those interactions live on today in the genomes of present-day people. Pääbo’s efforts laid the foundation of a new field of science that uses ancient DNA as a new stream of information to probe human evolution.

Pääbo, 67, learned he had won the prize in a midmorning phone call from the Nobel committee.

“He was overwhelmed. He was speechless, very happy,” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Assembly. “He was incredibly thrilled about this award.”As a young scientist, Pääbo focused on understanding how adenoviruses interacted with the immune system. But he retained an interest in human origins, and worked on isolating DNA from Egyptian mummies as a side project.

At the time, the ancient DNA field was “kind of a joke,” full of incredible claims that would turn out to be incorrect as scientists tried to recover DNA from dinosaurs, said John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“It was Svante, who came along and made this into a science,” Hawks said.

For decades, Pääbo chipped away at the difficult task of analyzing ancient DNA, devising ways to overcome the technical challenges of working with samples that degrade over time and are easily contaminated. He worked largely on DNA from extinct animals, but always with the goal of bringing the techniques he was developing to modern humans’ extinct, big-brained relatives, Neanderthals.

Once he had developed those methods, he brought together a large consortium of scientists and built the relationships necessary to obtain the ancient bone fragments needed to take on the monumental task of trying to decipher the genome of Neanderthals.

That work disrupted the prevailing view of human origins. Homo sapiens originated in Africa about 300,000 years ago, but they emerged into a world filled with other hominid species — and mixed with them as they migrated.

Pääbo and colleagues showed that Neanderthals, extinct for 30,000 years, live on in our DNA. As modern humans migrated outside of Africa, they mixed with Neanderthals, making up about 1 to 2 percent of the genomes of non-African people today. From a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai Mountains in Russia, he discovered a new species of early hominid, the Denisovans.

This genetic inheritance is relevant for understanding aspects of human health today. A version of a gene that gives people an advantage at high altitude that is common among people living in Tibet today has Denisovan origins. Some genes that influence how present-day people’s immune systems respond to infections are inherited from Neanderthals.

“These are profound things that happened to human biology, and we need to know about it — it is an important part of the inheritance,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. “It’s changed our biology and the history of everybody. We all know we are all mixed.”

Reich said the prize was a thrilling recognition for a scientist he considers a close friend and collaborator — and for a burgeoning field of science that has transformed science’s view of the human species.

Reich was a key part of the consortium that helped determine that Neanderthals had mixed with humans, and said that when he joined the project, he — like many in the field — expected to find little evidence of mixing between Neanderthals and humans.

“When we saw the first evidence that it had occurred … it was surprising and unexpected, and I thought it was likely to be an error of our analysis — and I spent a lot of time trying to make it go away,” Reich said.

Ultimately, multiple lines of evidence supported the conclusion.

Before Pääbo’s contributions, scientists were limited to studying ancient bones and artifacts to understand human ancestors. His work has established a new field of science, paleogenomics, that uses ancient DNA analysis to probe questions about prehistoric questions.

While Pääbo’s scientific work has been transformative, some wondered whether it would win a Nobel, often considered science’s highest honor, because it wasn’t an obvious fit to the categories. In science, Nobels are awarded to medicine or physiology, physics and chemistry.

Hawks, however, argues that understanding human ancestry and evolution is a direct window into understanding deep questions about health and disease. Ancient DNA opened the window to asking deep questions about ancient humans and their relatives that would otherwise be inaccessible.

“This isn’t just a strange thing about our evolution that we’re learning — it’s relevant to our health,” Hawks said. “It matters because our ancestry is what is affecting our health, and when you uncover the genes that we inherited from these distant ancestors that matter to our health, you’re going to open a new window into understanding human disease.”

And it turns out the guy's a legacy, but I won't hold that against him - looks like he's earned it.

Forty years earlier, Pääbo’s father, Sune Bergström, won a Nobel Prize.

Givin' It Up

35 years ago, a billion Chinese were riding bikes. Now there are almost as many cars in China as there are people in USAmerica Inc.

The age of the ‘car is king’ is over. The sooner we accept that, the better

John Vidal

Accidents and pollution are making road vehicles untenable. With public transport and ride-sharing, their demise can’t come soon enough

In 1989 a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were widely praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people, after all, had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars? asked their hosts, grappling as ever with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution.

“But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.”

He was nearly right. China’s breakneck development has been led by mass car ownership. It now has 300m cars – and what was once the kingdom of bikes is now the land of 20-lane motorways, more than 100,000 petrol stations and scrap metal yards. Beijing, Shanghai and most other cities are choked with traffic, their air is some of the worst in the world, and their hospitals are full of children with asthma and respiratory diseases. China, like every other country, is having to rethink the car.

The worldwide love affair with the car, which promised consumers convenience, status and freedom, is over. The reality from Hotan to Hull and Lagos to Lahore is that the car is now a social and environmental curse, disconnecting people, eroding public space, fracturing local economies, and generating sprawl and urban decay. With UK temperatures hitting highs of 40C this summer, this reality has become impossible to ignore. Instead of the prospect of speed and cheap mobility, consumers now get soaring costs, climate breakdown and air pollution, the devastation of nature, mounting debt, personal danger and ill health, and the most serious energy crisis in 30 years.

Now the World Health Organization is worried. Car accidents are the eighth highest cause of death for people of all ages, and the leading cause among young people aged 5-29 worldwide. At least 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year, with a further 20 to 50 million people sustaining injuries, often at phenomenal personal and financial cost.

Here in the UK, 24,530 people were killed or seriously injured on roads in 2020/21, which costs the country around £36bn a year, or around 20% of the current NHS budget, according to the legal firm Hugh James. In the US it is even worse: government figures show that traffic accidents and their knock-on impacts cost nearly $1tn (£800bn) a year, and that more than 624,000 people died in fatal crashes between 2000 and 2017. That compares with the 535,000 American military personnel estimated to have died in both world wars. In China, 250,000 people a year die in accidents.

But we may be reaching “peak car”, the point at which the world is so saturated with vehicles – and cities and individuals are so fed up or financially stretched by them – that they are banned or voluntarily given up. As UK petrol hits £2 a litre and it costs £100 to fill up a tank – on top of the thousands of pounds paid out in loans and taxes to own a car in the first place – it is unsurprising that young people especially are eschewing them and taking to other forms of transport.

The auto-magic that has entranced societies for a century has gone. When the cost of living crisis started to bite, Ireland, Italy and others (although not the UK) cut public transport fares by as much as 90% (in Germany). Spain has gone a step further, announcing that train travel on many routes will be free from September to the end of the year. Global car sales, already stuttering before the pandemic, are now declining in China, Russia and Germany. UK new car sales have fallen for five months in a row and the level of UK car ownership has now fallen for two consecutive years – the first successive drops in ownership in more than a century.

From here on, it looks like death by 1,000 breakdowns for the private car. Just as the coach and horse were pushed out by automobiles 120 years ago, so the car is being steadily evicted from world cities by the authorities or by public revulsion. As thousands of jubilee street parties showed, car-free streets are popular, and the surest and best way to save money, improve health and make cities quieter and more livable. A recent report from the Centre for London shows how low-traffic neighbourhoods, introduced widely during the pandemic to encourage walking and cycling, reduce car use and make roads safer. Wales has slashed the default speed limit on residential roads from 30mph to 20mph.

Countries may have little choice but to reduce car use. There is wide agreement that car mileage must be cut by at least 20% by 2030 just to meet climate targets. Milan, Paris, Hamburg, Copenhagen and most European cities are now either banning cars from their centres on a large scale or making it prohibitively expensive to drive in them. They are pushing at an open door. London car ownership is reducing – and recently, 50,000 Berliners asked the city to impose the world’s largest car ban, covering 34 sq miles.

In this urban century, where nearly 70% of people are expected to live in built-up areas within 30 years and the global population is expected to grow by another 3 billion by 2100, the private car makes little economic or social sense. Ride sharing apps, car sharing, e-bikes and scooters are all hastening the car’s demise. City leaders, as well as health, transport and environment groups, are now calling for it to be made easy and affordable for people to leave the car at home or get rid of it – and for cities to be reimagined so that people can access key things like food and health centres on foot or by bike.

It is time for cities to take advantage of lessons learned during the pandemic and the unfolding energy, environment and cost of living crises, and start to design themselves not around the car, but around the bicycle and the pedestrian. But it is also time for those who deify the car, and continue to aggressively assert its place in our social and economic hierarchy – and its untrammelled right to road space – to understand that a page has been turned. The sooner they accept that, the easier the future and their part in it will be.

The car as we know it is fast becoming extinct; it is a relic of a former age. Sitting in a traffic jam in a ton of metal that belches pollution and costs a fortune will surely be seen by future generations as not just stupid, but criminal.

Hereditary Poverty

First, my oldest just got word that he's kind of a big deal, so I have to brag on him a little.

PRESS RELEASE

For more information, contact:

Joey Martelli (703) 476-3420

jmartelli@shapeamerica.org

MSU Denver Student Nationally Honored as Major of the Year in Physical Education

RESTON, VA, March 25, 2022 ---SHAPE America–Society of Health and Physical Educators will honor Nick Roberts of MSU Denver as a Major of the Year during the organization’s 136th National Convention & Expo, April 26-30th, in New Orleans, Louisiana! The award celebrates outstanding undergraduate students in the health, physical education, recreation, and dance professions who are nominated by a faculty advisor or professor. Roberts will be recognized on Tuesday, April 26th during the Opening General Session.

“The outstanding achievements of future professionals like Nick is integral to the future of SHAPE America and our profession.” says SHAPE America President Terri Drain, the Founder and Coordinator of the Health and Physical Education Collaborative.

Nicks professors recognize his demonstrated leadership, innovative teaching, and a passion to learn a multitude of pedagogy skills. He has shown academic aptitude and ambition through his work which is creative, thorough, persuasive, timely and always well thought out and composed, He was an active member in our campus physical education club; first as a member, and then in short time he had taken on the responsibilities of our Physical Education Teacher Education Vice President and then president position. Due to COVID he has remained in the president role for 2 academic years. He has successfully navigated the grant procedure to bring in money to the PETE club.

A leader in the club, as well as in the classroom. He has taken on administrative roles with precise details and vision, as well as mentored other club officers and pushed them to give generously of their time. He was instrumental on numerous projects including getting members to our state association convention as well as the national convention, leading several fundraising events and participation in numerous club events.

About SHAPE America

SHAPE America – Society of Health and Physical Educators is the nation’s largest membership organization of health and physical education professionals. Since its founding in 1885, the organization has defined excellence in physical education, and our National Standards for K-12 Physical Education serve as the foundation for well-designed physical education programs across the country. We provide programs, resources and advocacy to support health and physical educators at every level, from preschool to university graduate programs. For more information, visit www.shapeamerica.org

But then, Nick sent me a piece about studies conducted by various Über Nerds, looking at the possibilities that certain hereditary factors may contribute to the cycle of poverty.

This is very interesting, but I can see a problem in that there are plenty of Bell Curve devotees who could glom onto this as "proof that there's something wrong with those people - that they're obviously genetically inferior".

And that's definitely not how I read this piece. It's not about straight genetics - it's about epigenesis - how environmental stresses can change the way genes are expressed or suppressed.

Maybe this is the kinda thing the "conservatives" are afraid will be revealed if people are allowed to view Critical Race Theory as a viable tool in the study of things like economics and culture and our justice system.

Nautilus

Why Poverty Is Like a Disease

Emerging science is putting the lie to American meritocracy

It's a long piece, and some of it gets pretty dense - here's my money quote:

The science of the biological effects of the stresses of poverty is in its early stages. Still, it has presented us with multiple mechanisms through which such effects could happen, and many of these admit an inheritable component. If a pregnant woman, for example, is exposed to the stresses of poverty, her fetus and that fetus’ gametes can both be affected, extending the effects of poverty to at least her grandchildren. And it could go further.

Studies of mice and fruit flies have shown that epigenetic traits similar to the ones Meaney proposed can be passed down, and last for dozens of generations. The effects of things like diet and prenatal parental stress have been observed to be inherited, not just through histone modifications, but also through DNA methylation and non-coding RNAs.7 In one 2014 study, the offspring of a mouse trained to fear a particular smell were observed to also fear that smell, even with no previous exposure to it. The effect lasted for two generations.8 In humans, inheritable effects of stress have been observed through at least three generations from parents who survived mass starvation (Dutch Hunger Winter),9 a fluctuating food supply (the Överkalix cohort)10 and the Holocaust. The effects of early paternal smoking and paternal betel quid chewing have been observed to be transmitted to children in a sex-specific manner, supporting biological epigenetic transmission in humans.11 According to a 2014 survey of the field, “the few human observational studies to date suggest (male line) transgenerational effects exist that cannot easily be attributed to cultural and/or genetic inheritance.”10

Even at this stage, then, we can take a few things away from the science. First, that the stresses of being poor have a biological effect that can last a lifetime. Second, that there is evidence suggesting that these effects may be inheritable, whether it is through impact on the fetus, epigenetic effects, cell subtype effects, or something else.

This science challenges us to re-evaluate a cornerstone of American mythology, and of our social policies for the poor: the bootstrap. The story of the self-made, inspirational individual transcending his or her circumstances by sweat and hard work. A pillar of the framework of meritocracy, where rewards are supposedly justly distributed to those who deserve them most.

What kind of a bootstrap or merit-based game can we be left with if poverty cripples the contestants? Especially if it has intergenerational effects? The uglier converse of the bootstrap hypothesis—that those who fail to transcend their circumstances deserve them—makes even less sense in the face of the grim biology of poverty. When the firing gun goes off, the poor are well behind the start line. Despite my success, I certainly was.

The stuff your kids get into - am I right?

Proud of you, Nicky.

On Losing The Bugs

I'm a gadget freak. I especially love tech that marries two or more disparate things to synthesize something new.

What I don't particularly like is when the nerds (god love 'em) start thinking we can actually come up with some new technology in literally a few decades that can replace what Mother Earth has given us over literally millions of millennia.

So while I'm not willing to dismiss all of this as wishful thinking - I actually wish the nerds every success - I won't stop thinking we'd best be addressing the problems of over-population and fouling the nest more directly - and very rapidly.

Wired:

What Will Replace Insects When They're Gone?

The collapse of the insect population could unravel ecosystems. Scientists wonder if robots and drones could stop the gap.

WHAT, THOUGH, IF we don’t act quickly enough? If the fall of insects’ tiny empires causes whole ecosystems to unravel, toppling previously solid certainties about the way our world functions, what then?

It’s easy to foresee how diminishing supplies of certain foods and crashing wildlife populations will heap cascading suffering on the poor and vulnerable, given the lopsided nature of societies, and perhaps even stoke embers of resentment and nationalism as foundational resources become scarcer. It’s also reasonable to anticipate that we will reflexively grasp for a technological fix to the mess we’ve created.

Expectation is already being ladled upon projects, still in their infancy, to create genetically modified pollinators resistant to disease and chemicals or to fashion machines topped with tiny cannons that fire pollen at plants and therefore address some of the causes of the climate collapse. Other scientists have turned their ingenuity to replicating the form and function of winged insects—​researchers at Harvard University have devised diminutive robots that can swim before exploding out of the water into flight, using soft artificial muscles to harmlessly bounce off walls and other obstacles. Counterparts in the Netherlands have taken inspiration from the humble fruit fly, re-​creating the motion of their rapid wing beats in a robot with wings made of mylar, the material used in space blankets. The Delft University of Technology’s DelFly can hover, flip 360 degrees around pitch and roll axes, and accelerate to the speed of a human sprint within a few seconds.

Matej Karásek, a researcher working on the project, says he’s long been fascinated by the agility and spatial awareness of insects, even before he started working on the DelFly. “Whenever I walk outdoors and I see an insect I think ‘how are they able to do this?’ ” he says. Karásek’s robots aren’t an exact substitute for a fly or bee—​for one thing they have a 33-​centimeter (13-​inch) wingspan, making them 55 times the size of a fruit fly—​and the conundrum of carrying large pollen payloads without losing maneuverability means they aren’t quite ready to hum alongside the real thing. But there is confidence that day will arrive, drawn from the certainty many of us have that technology will eventually solve all of society’s intractable ills.

Perhaps the answer will be an army of larger hexacopter-​like drones, such as the fleet operated by US company Dropcopter, which autonomously pollinated an orchard of apples in New York for the first time in 2018. Or maybe the answer is a sophisticated robotic arm, which, using cameras, wheels, and artificial intelligence, can locate and hand-​pollinate plants without getting tired or bored like human workers. The US Department of Agriculture is funding one such effort, which, according to one of its leading experts, Manoj Karkee of Washington State University, promises to be a “genuine replacement for the natural pollination process” and is even “expected to be as effective or even more effective than natural pollinators like bees.”

Entomologists are instinctively disdainful of any suggestion that pollinating insects could somehow be matched by technology, even on a basic logistical level. Biologist Dave Goulson points out that bees are rather adept at pollinating flowers, given they’ve been honing their skills for around 120 million years, and that, besides, there are around 80 million honeybee hives in the world, each stuffed with tens of thousands of bees feeding and breeding for free. “What would the cost be of replacing them with robots?” Goulson asks. “It is remarkable hubris to think that we can improve on that.” To be fair to those devoted to appropriating the characteristics of insects for our use, there is widespread awe at the evolutionary brilliance of flies and bees and scant joy at the crisis that has brought us to the point where the meanderings of academic curiosity are being seized upon as possible salvation from our degenerate ways. When we consider technological solutions, we should perhaps spend less time judging the supply and more time judging the reasons why there’s demand in the first place.

Still, a less abusive association with insects will have to include some new ideas. If we are to intensively farm smaller areas in order to surrender space to the wilds, the advance of vertical farming, with year-​round crops stacked in warehouses and shipping containers using LED lighting and hydroponics instead of soils and pesticides will potentially work well teamed with robotic pollinators if the original insect version demurs from the task.

Western societies may also have to grapple with the counterintuitive concept of eating insects as a way of saving them. The vast tracts of land we’ve turned into biodiversity deserts are in many cases not even directly feeding people—​a third of all viable cropland is used to produce feed for livestock, which themselves take up a quarter of the planet’s ice-​free habitat. Mealworms and crickets, both excellent sources of protein that can multiply to enormous numbers in tight spaces, are a less destructive alternative to traditional Western diets and would help ease agricultural-​driven pressures that blight insects, such as climate change, chemical use, and land degradation. “There are far fewer environmental problems when you eat insects. They are also delicious,” says Arnold van Huis, a Dutch entomologist who has dined on 20 species of insects, his favorites being roasted termites and locusts, deep-fried and served with chili.

One day, perhaps robot bees could help prop up our food supply, and a revolution in the way we eat could help slow the accelerating ruination of the world’s glorious archive of life. But our measures of success in averting the insect crisis should be set a little higher than that. After all, we aren’t going to witness the last insect blink out, as we will with the final northern white rhinoceros or Bengal tiger. Whatever further cruelties we inflict, there will always be insects somewhere, crawling on a windowsill plant box in Chicago, nibbling at the edge of a rice paddy in Vietnam, scurrying away from flames licking at gum trees in Australia.

The tragedy will be how impoverished we will become, environmentally, spiritually, morally. Bumblebees, it has been discovered, can be taught to play football, will give up sleep to care for their hive’s young, and can remember good and bad experiences, hinting at a form of consciousness. The violin beetle is remarkably shaped, as the name suggests, like a violin, and side-​on is almost invisibly flat. The monarch butterfly is beautiful and can taste nectar through its feet. We won’t lose every single thing, but that is of scant consolation when such marvels are being ripped away. “The future is a very simplified global biota,” says entomologist David Wagner. “We will have bugs, but we will lose the big gaudy things. Our children will have a diminished world. That’s what we are giving them.”

A penurious existence, one where the marrow of life has been sucked from the bones of our surroundings, of a becalmed countryside save for the machines eking food from the remaining soils, may be one of the better scenarios facing us if the crashing of insects’ tiny empires isn’t heeded. The latest research shows that the loss of bees is already starting to limit the supply of key food crops, such as apples, blueberries, and cherries. Insect-​eating birds are now declining not only in the featureless fields of France but even in remote parts of the Amazon rainforest. Many insect populations around the world are falling by 1 to 2 percent a year, Wagner and colleagues confirmed recently, a trend he describes as “frightening.” It can, and almost certainly will, get worse. This catastrophe will plunge to some sort of nadir, although we do not appear to be close to that point yet. We’re still on the downward slope, to somewhere.

Why Are We Naked?

TED explainer - Why we have hair in random places

Seeing Things

para ● doh ● lee ● uh 

Pareidolia is the tendency for perception of a visual stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer.

Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, or lunar pareidolia like the Man in the Moon or the Moon Rabbit. The concept of pareidolia may extend to include hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing voices (mainly indistinct) or music, in random noise such as that produced by air conditioners or fans.

Pareidolia was at one time considered a symptom of psychosis, but it is now seen as a normal human tendency. Scientists have taught computers to use visual clues to "see" faces and other images.

The Point

Jon Stewart makes the point that the spirit of the thing matters - not just the letter.

If what you're trying to do is make the whole thing better, then you have to work at fixing the mechanism itself.

We continue to have problems in a larger sense because too many people get hung up on the symbols instead of addressing their concerns to the ideals those symbols are supposed to stand for.

This seems particularly important on a day like the 4th of July.

Are We Being Selected Out?

Here's to all the savvy survivalists out there making sure they stock up and get ready for the COVID-19 pandemic while enjoying a nice buffet down at the Wood Grill, and the freebie samples at CostCo, and the communal bowls of pretzels at their local bar - all the stuff that everybody touches &/or sprinkles with their Respiratory Droplets with every cough and sneeze.

I just watched a cool video on human evolution, and I gotta say: we're here because of pure dumb luck - smart's got nuthin' to do with it.

hat tip = Facebook friend Linda M-M

Todays' Tweet

Nature always tells us straight up: Adapt or die.

THE WEATHER IS CHANGING. WE MUST CHANGE TOO.pic.twitter.com/qQ1vsoHCwS

— Tomthunkit™ (@TomthunkitsMind) January 23, 2020

The Coming Age Of Payback

As we worry about the Rise Of The Machines and Climate Change and the currently occurring Extinction Event, let's not ignore the ability of Earth's Plant Life to engineer and facilitate our demise.

From BBC:

The more genes in your genome, the more highly evolved you are as a species.

We have a scorecard that shows humans lagging rather badly:

Homo Sapiens: 26,000 genes

Rice: 45,000 genes

A few things I really like thinking about because of this:

1. There are 650 species of carnivorous plants that we know of
2. A plant keeps its head below ground and displays its sexual organs to the outside world
3. If we associate intelligence with the ability to earn the right to survive, we may be in for some very rude surprises

Today's Tweet

We get to pick and choose which of our animal behaviors to emphasize and which to sublimate. So it occurs to me that we are in charge of our own evolutionary arc.

Maybe we should be taking a bit more care with it.

CROSSING GUARD: This very responsible turkey halted traffic on a two-lane road in New Hampshire until the entire flock was able to cross. https://t.co/JdDi1aoEni pic.twitter.com/3I6WcPBrZp

— ABC News (@ABC) March 18, 2019

So Simple

It still makes my head hurt

Today's GIF

Dead Leaf Butterfly - cuz Evolution, bitches.

Not Your Grandma's Needlework

I may have found myself a new hobby.

 

A Critter

I think I just found a bug to add to my list of favorites. It's definitely another amazing thing that makes the world amazing.

Hemeroplanes Triptolemus:

In its larval form, the Hemeroplanes triptolemus is capable of expanding its anterior body segments to give it the appearance of a snake, complete with eye patches. This snake mimicry extends even to the point where it will harmlessly strike at potential predators.[2][3]

Worth Considering

The more we convince ourselves that it's a big scary world; that we live in a country falling into lawlessness and chaos; that the system is corrupt; that there's danger at every turn -- the more we allow ourselves to be spooked (for good reason or otherwise), the more likely we are to be stampeded into the arms of whoever is running as the Daddy-State-Law-n-Order candidate.  Sound familiar?

I'm not saying everything's peachy - don't gimme that False Dichotomy bullshit - I am going to say that when things aren't as good as they should be, there's change in the air and politicians can smell it, and they'll pimp that up in order to get the crowd moving so they can shift power from one thing or person to some other thing or person. This is about power because it's always about power.

So at the risk of putting myself up for Mr Wishy-Washy: some things are OK but not nearly as good as they oughta be, while some things are pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as some politicians (and their surrogates and their fans) need us to believe they are. 

The real point is that we've been here before.

So let's try a little harder not fuck it up this time.

Today's Stoopid

Limbaugh's really starting to flame out and spiral in - he's on the down-slope of the bell curve - so the topics of discussion (as well as the level of the discussion itself) have to get weirder and farther out in order to keep his audience of diehard dead-enders tuned in.

“Don’t doubt me on this. A lot of people think that all of us used to be gorillas, and they’re looking for the missing link out there. The evolution crowd. They think we were originally apes... If we were the original apes, then how come Harambe is still an ape, and how come he didn’t become one of us?”