Fiona Putting together cross-cultural information on the sorts of fishing that men and women did is interesting. Oceanic women were much more involved in fishing than I had realised. The typical pattern is for women to fish along the reef or by line/net in the lagoon. Spear-fishing, deep-sea diving, offshore fishing and other beyond-the-reef activities seem … Read more
Presentation Zen, my favourite blog on the art of presentation, links to the site for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", the film derived from Gore's "travelling slideshow" on climate change and global warming. The trailer itself is (as with all cinema trailers) isn't sparing with the drama, but the presentations and visuals linked therein are … Read more
Monday and Tuesday I attended Social Intelligence: from Brains to Culture at the Royal Society. Lots of interesting talks around the theme of social intelligence, but one tangental note popped up in a neuroanatomy talk by Vittorio Gallese (he of the mirror neurons or “monkey-see-monkey-do cells”). I always love crazy paranormal “phenomena” being debunked, and … Read more
Via Savage Minds, who have reproduced the article from the Dominion. Gavin Menzies (author of a book called 1421: The Year China Discovered The World–which I have not read) claims all sorts of interesting selective stuff about Chinese exploration of the Pacific (transcript of a speech, here) and most mindbogglingly, that the Maori were not … Read more
Doolittle, W.F. (1999) Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree. Science, 284, 2124-2128. [link] Interesting review discussing recent findings which question a strict tree model for the universal tree of life. Lateral gene transfer is non-trivial, especial in archaeal and bacterial genomes. Doesn't dismiss the usefulness of molecular phylogenetics as a tool, but questions it as … Read more
A nifty set of philosophical and moral thought experiments from the Beeb.
Geoffrey Miller writes in SEED Magazine about Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them … Read more
Via Anthropology.net, Dance, Monkeys, Dance, a wonderful little clip on being a human. Monkey. The dedication is to Carl Sagan, Douglas Adams, and you. By Ernest Cline.
A terrible sign of laziness, but the two things I want to blog about require brain power and I just can't get that together this afternoon. From Language Log, Reliable Sources on (Language) Classification. A USB flash-stick that balloons up with the amount of data stored on it. From the ever-awesome John Hawks, the unintended … Read more