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News Briefs 09-12-2004

Satanic Santa, endangered chimps, GM cocaine debunked, poisoned politicians…oh, and a surprise at the end. It’s the TDG News. Thanks to Shadows and Kat for items.

  • A Winding Path– Why a Bay Area microbiologist turned to the New Age art of building labyrinths — by hand, out of dirt.
  • In Britain, churches protest against a “devil Santa” at a York tourist attraction.
  • Does Western Civilisation feel the lack of the old passage rituals of manhood, marriage and others? Maybe pagans have something worth saying on the subject.
  • The US Navy wants shark’s sense for its divers, so that they can spot mines in shallow water.
  • Impulsive behavior may be a relict of our hunter-gatherer past.
  • Science has identified a new subspecies of tiger. Sadly, this does not mean there are more tigers.
  • Anthropologist says early Native Indians killed their witches. Why do witches always get it in the neck?
  • Advances in technology are opening up new possibilities of discovery at the Kincaid Mounds, a southern Illinois archaeological site where a prehistoric culture thrived 1,000 years ago.
  • Doctors say the Ukraine opposition leader Yushchenko was definitely poisoned and they will identify the poison within days.
  • A single strange-voiced whale, whose singing calls don’t match any known species, has been cruising the Pacific for at least 12 years.
  • A whole new kind of “K” Ration: the Army intends to give ketamine to wounded troops. Plus, some bubbles that work better than blood!
  • The true measure of success. Forget GDP, a better metric for prosperity is Gross National Happiness.
  • Pygmy chimpanzees or bonobos – which some scientists call man’s closest relative are being hunted to extinction.
  • Environmentalists have attacked US claims that America is doing as much to curb global warming as any nation that signed the Kyoto deal.
  • How are you reading TDG today? New Scientist says hot laptops may reduce male fertility.
  • How easy is it to genetically modify coca plants? No, you cant do it in your garage…
  • Height and the hummingbird – how they manage to hover at great altitudes and in thin air has long mystified scientists.
  • As my one year old decides 3am is a good time to be wide awake chasing cats and I blearily search for TDG news, I need toast! Sleepless nights make you hungrier, it seems.
  • A large new oil find has been made off the coast of Scotland. Knowing my luck, I will get home just in time for Scotland to be invaded pre-emptively.
  • Australian snakes have evolved to defend themselves against the poisonous cane toad.
  • A Nuclear-powered mission to Neptune could answer questions about planetary formation.
  • Organising genes into an entire ecosystem – less can be more.
  • Here’s a handy crib sheet if you’ve been following the evolution/creationism debate: who are the players and how much funding do they have?

Listen Up, TDGers. Today, thanks to Kat, we’re offering you the chance to avoid eyestrain by listening to a few news stories instead of reading them. So let your ears do the work for a change, and then tell us what you think about this multimedia approach.

  • NPR Interviews archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert about the Kabul Museum’s recently found treasures, including thousands of gold and silver coins documenting the history of Afghanistan’s kings from the 5th century B.C. to modern times. Click “Listen” under title.
  • ‘Hobbit’ Fossil Stirs Controversy. Click ‘Listen’ under title.
  • With his 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, biologist Alfred Kinsey infamously yanked American sex out of the closet, arguably beginning a sexual revolution. Kinsey’s detractors have compared the publication of ‘The Kinsey Report’ to the attacks of 9-11, and labelled Kinseyism ‘fifty years of cultural terrorism.’ NPR interviews the man behind the new movie, ‘Kinsey‘, filmmaker Bill Condon. Click ‘Listen’ under title.
  • An Independent Report Says NASA’s Robotic Plan to Save Hubble Is Too Risky, but NASA administrators disagree. Click “Listen” under title.
  • NPR interviews Cathryn Jakobson Ramin about her recent NYTimes article, In Search of Lost Time, on midlife memory lapses (which actually start in your 20s). For interview, click ‘Listen’ under title. Registration required for the NYTimes article.
  • What does the world-wide amphibian die-off have to do with pregnant women? Click ‘Listen’ under title.
  • Human brains are hard-wired to respond to fearful body language in others. Click ‘Listen’ under title.
  • Increasingly, wild animals are dying from diseases passed to them by humans and domesticated animals, but some scientists still see them only as vectors, not victims. By now you know to click “listen”.

Quote of the Day:


The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.



William Gibson

  1. Listen-ing
    Hey, great idea. Just one problem. It’s not very efficient for those of us who read and don’t have the patience to hear several minutes of excited blather from clueless journalists and pundits who feel the need to market their story to their most ‘head in the sand’ fans. Simply put, some of these are like listening to elementary school explainations–long, drawn out, with movie-style dramatics, and little meat. At least most of this is old news.

    The proprietary RM/WM formats only add to the disappointment. Aside from the Open Source complications (you can run Helix and Realplayer with most other OSs–but not WM) there are well-known spyware-type issues with both formats, which frankly, seems to me to be a little counter to Daily Grail’s typical stance.

    Just a thought from…a…concerned…citizen…

    1. Listening
      >>Hey, great idea. Just one problem. It’s not very efficient…

      Actually, I had a quite a good time listening to those audios while reading other articles at the same time. 🙂

      If you’re willing to have a go with only one audio, I recommend the one on Kinsey — the man and the movie.

      When a friend recently invited me to go see a movie with her, I readily agreed. When she told me we were going to see ‘Kinsey’, my immediate reaction (which I tried to politely hide) bordered on dread because I thought it was bound to be dead boring. Boy, was I in for a SHOCK! Liam Neeson is outstanding as Kinsey. The movie is top-shelf in every way, and I highly recommend it.

  2. evolution of snakes
    As a resident of the very dry and tree-stripped Brisbane Valley for many years I became all too familiar with many Australian snakes.
    So I feel I am qualified to tell you that the Sydney Uni scientists who are citing evolution for the small heads of snakes they are seeing are simply indulging in a bit of science-speak.
    To say that the snakes have evolved so as not to eat cane toads only makes the situation more ridiculous.
    Because of the encroachment of civilisation (?) and the severe drought, many species of snakes in Oz are mating with categories other than their own.
    I have seen snakes that no one could identify, and the general attitude of country people now is that all snakes are poisonous, where previously tree snakes were non-poisonous.
    Snakes never had a problem with cane toads, neither do crows, eagles or magpies.
    Birds learned very early if they found roak-kill toads to only eat the parts that are non poisonous.
    I don’t know of any snakes that would eat a cane toad except for a carpet python.
    The birds at risk are owls, frog-mouths.
    The reason for the small heads on snakes I believe would be inter-breeding, and not evolution which does not work so quickly, and does not work in that way.

    shadows

  3. devil santa
    I am always surprised at the reaction of the clergy to anything other than what they personally approve of.
    If people don’t like this sort of stuff, surely they are free to stay away from it.

    shadows

    1. Pagan Santa
      Hi Shadows,

      The original Santa isn’t exactly a paragon of Christianity either, is he? If any thing, the devil-santa is bringing Christianity into a pagan holiday, albeit the part of Christianity they don’t talk about much. Santa is a remembrance of Northern shamen who used to feed magic mushrooms to reindeer, then drink the reindeer urine to get high because the deer’s kidneys filtered out the toxic parts and left the hallucinogens. (Honest! Go check it). Only later did commercialisation get ahold of the remnant and revive it in a new form. The tree, giving presents, feasting, even the date…all pagan. There is nothing Christian about Yule except what the Christians tacked on as an afterthought.

      Regards, C

      PS: did you hear about the dyslexic devil-worshipper who sold his soul to Santa?

      1. yes its true
        Hi Cernig,
        Yes I know about the real Santa and the 25th was picked as Jesus’ birthday because it was already a pagan celebratory day, can’t remember which.
        A lot of Christianity was based on pagan beliefs because they didn’t want to upset the people whom they wanted to become Christians.

        I love the dyslexic devil-worshipper.
        Did you know that in Japan one year in a big store, they had Santa nailed to a cross.

        Here’s a Jewish joke, which does not mean I am anti-semite,I am partly Jewish and I love Jewish and Irish jokes.

        This Hassadic Rabbi was giving a lecture on what was good about sex and what was forbidden.
        One of his flock asked him which was the best position for sex according to the Hassidic tradition.
        The Rabbi replied….
        Any position is OK as long as it is not done standing up. Sex standing up could lead to dancing.

        shadows.

  4. ketamine to wounded soldiers
    Well they did it in Vietnam didn’t they, uppers on the way to a sortie and downers on the way back.
    And the returning soldiers were so confused and so drug-dependent that they could never get their lives back.
    Imagine soldiers returning from action after being bombarded with the various drug combinations the government decides they need to survive the oil wars; that is before the water wars and the food wars begin.
    No wonder there is so much scientific investigation into this sort of thing.
    Breaks my heart.

    shadows

  5. evolution
    I don’t know if anyone who posts here has read Stephen Jay Gould, but he was a scientist who did not believe in Darwin’s form of evolution and he convinced me.
    He always stated that there has never been found any fossils of creatures during evolution itself.Every fossil is of a complete species.
    Gould in his many books incurred the wrath of John Dawkins and Paul Davies both Darwinians,but I quite see his point.
    He was proved right with Lucy, the supposed ancestor of humans which was eventually proven to be a species of its own.The missing link between humans and apes has not been found, and until scientists can prove to me that one species evolved from another I stay with Gould.
    That does not make me a Creationist but I would like to know how animals appeared fully developed in the fossil record but the inbetween species never did.

    shadows

    1. Fossil Records
      Can you imagine how many T.Rex once roamed the planet? Yet we have maybe twenty T.Rex fossils, plus a few assorted fragments, that survive and have been found to date. Same for every single other fossil type. Its incredibly rare for a corpse to be fossilised. The odds are astronomical. It isn’t all that surprising if few intermediaries have been found, although I would say some have, such as the recent feathered dinos.

      In any case, Dawkinds and others have shown with computer modelling that a case for ‘quantum-leap’ evolution can be made. Truly radical mutations that happen to survive simply because they have the fantastic fortune to fight perfectly into a survivable eco-niche. In such cases, transition to a new species (by the scientific measure that they cannot cross breed with the original parent-species to produce viable offspring) is very fast…as little as 40 years. The rabbits of Guinard Island in Scotland, which for 40 years wasd contaminated after anthrax experiments during WW2 are a case in point.

      Regards, C

      PS: I admit to a personal bias. I was taught logic by an old university buddy of Dawkins, and have heard Dawkins lecture to a small seminar-sized group. I’m a fan. He may be the smartest man I ever met.

      1. I see your point
        Hi Cernig,
        Yes Dawkins is very smart, but I when I like a theory I tend to just go with it.
        I can see your point about not enough fossils being found yet, but surely there would be at least one intermediary one somewhere.

        The lone whale is very intriguing.I loved that story, and will send it to my sons.
        Who is he calling out to?
        Does any whale ever answer?
        Apparently not.
        How can you be one of a species?

        All these questions and more will be answered in Cernig’s next news edition.

        shadows

      2. Dawkins
        Cernig wrote:

        > have heard Dawkins lecture to a small seminar-sized group. I’m a
        > fan. He may be the smartest man I ever met.

        He may be the smartest man on the planet, but I’m not a fan. I’ve watched a number of panel discussions with Dawkins, and everytime I have witnessed a total lack of respect for any other person’s viewpoint. This is perhaps the most important trait I look for in a person, so them’s the breaks.

        I’m also unconvinced by Darwinian evolution, although I have to admit mainly on intuition (probably one of my only ‘talents’ I trust). And not because I’m a creationist, and not because I’m and ID fan either. Charles Muses wrote in the 1970s about a number of species, which push the natural selection/mutation theory to its limits. The angler fish for instance…how many different (and radical) mutations were required to hit upon that perfect one (and why don’t we have all this superfluous anatomy if that many mutations were necessary…obviously some would survive despite the credo of natural selection).

        Muses didn’t really have an answer, he just presented all of these things as ‘anomalistic’. He did though, propose some sort of ‘conscious evolution’ which sounds a bit like an advanced Lamarckian theory. Can we go back to Dawkins’ selfish gene, cross it with Jeremy Narby’s conscious DNA, and come up with a possibility? Intelligent genes, with attitude. Gawd help us.
        😉

        Peace and Respect
        Greg
        ——————————————-
        You monkeys only think you’re running things

        1. Qualification
          I should qualify that, seeing as Douglas Adams counted him as his best friend, there must be something to Dawkins that I haven’t seen yet.
          😉

          Peace and Respect
          Greg
          ——————————————-
          You monkeys only think you’re running things

          1. Dawkins
            Actually Greg, the reason I never liked Dawkins was the way he treated Stephen Jay Gould when he was alive.
            I wondered if there was some anti-semitism there but don’t know enough about it, but I do know that it was a personal and nasty attack on Gould’s refusal to accept that evolution involved natural selection.

            Here are some quotes from Ancient Traces by Michael Baigent……
            Professor Gould summarises the situation;”In any local area, a species does not rise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors;it appears all at once and ‘fully formed'”.

            Even at the beginning Darwin knew that he faced profound problems.The developement of complex organs for example strained his theory to the limit.

            Professor Gould asked “Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?”
            Or perhaps half an eye.
            In the back of Darwin’s mind the same question had arisen.In 1860 he confessed to a colleague that,”The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder”.

            Here is the final quote from the chapter.
            An Act of Faith

            Darwin’s theory was a child of its times.Victorian man had an innate feeling of superiority over the rest of the world and Darwin appeared to have given scientific sanction to this belief.
            Once the later scientists had added the discoveries of genetics to the theory they felt that it had then become unassailable.Despite this it remains far closer to religious faith than scientific fact.It may satisfy some scientists personally, it may give meaning to their lives but it cannot account for the data.
            A war rages over the area:some experts make an almost ideological committment to it-like Oxford’s Proffessor Dawkins who is the modern equivalent of a seventeenth-century fundamentalist preacher in his fervent demand for adherence to an orthodoxy.
            Under pressure, not only from the creationists, science is trying to present a united front.It is as though scientists fear that to abandon Darwin is to fall into the hands of the creationists.This is nonsense and a measure of how weak many feel their scientific explanations really are.
            In the end Darwin’s theory of evolution is a myth;like all myths it seeks to satisfy the need for understanding the origin of humanity.To that extent it might work, but that does not prove it is true.

            Gould states in another section that just as suddenly the species appear, it is just as sudden that they disappear.

            From the many books I have read on the subject I came to the conclusion that although I don’t believe in the Bible creation theory, there is more to the presence of life on earth than we have yet touched on.

            shadows

  6. the lone whale
    Normally, I make silly jokes here. Harmless stuff, forgive me.

    OK, this brings us to questions about “20,000 Leagues under the Sea”,
    and it is tempting.

    On the other hand, here we have an individual that we know, this animal. The US Navy knows this “person”. They know the voices of ships, and individual submarines, and many things they dont tell us, because its not interesting.

    I would like to talk to this lonely stranger.

    Does he (she?) know that he (she) is alone? What does it mean to be “alone” if you don’t know the company of others ?

    1. lone ranger of the ocean
      Hi earthling,

      I was really interested by this one too. Is it a mutant, maybe has a wounded voicebox, just a free thinking whale? I would love to know. It may even be one of those evolutionary intermediaries Shadows is looking for.

      Regards, C

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