science – Page 3 – Greg Blee

A Neanderthal Christmas

I spent Stressmas alone, delightfully free of the travel-and-consume imperative that grips my fellow lunatics in the West. Most memorably, i walked the Victoria streets for a couple of hours listening to two fascinating podcasts, courtesy of CBC Radio‘s Ideas program, called Homo (sapiens) neanderthalenis. From which I gleaned the following:

There have been perhaps 20 different species of human over the 400 million or so years since our ancestors learned to walk upright, but none has captured the imagination like the Neanderthals — the textbook ‘cave man.’ They ranged over much of Eurasia (from Portugal to Israel, Germany to the Mediterranean). The oldest find to date is perhaps 350,000 years old, though most specimens are less than 120,000. The fascinating thing about them is that they disappeared rather abruptly, some 25-30,000 years ago — precisely the time that modern man was moving into Eurasia from our African homelands. Continue reading “A Neanderthal Christmas”

Joy is contagious: study

Well fuck me silly! Just as flu season is upon us, the British Medical Journal publishes a study showing that we can also catch happiness from those around us. Check it out on the good old CBC.

Here’s the takeaway, in case you’re too goddam busy to pay attention to this nonsense:

Happiness is contagious, and the more people you know who are full of good cheer, the more likely it is that you’re also happy…

Happiness extended to three degrees of separation, from friends to friends of friends….

Damn, i’ll have to cull my social calendar now.

“The pursuit of happiness is not a solitary goal,” Fowler said. “We are connected, and so is our joy.”

… Each happy friend boosts your own happiness by nine per cent, the researchers suggest. On the other hand, having grumpy friends decreased the chances by about seven per cent.

Am i a nine-percenter or a seven percenter? Yippee!

And on the requisite downer note:

The researchers are also looking at the spread of depression, loneliness and drinking behaviour.

Pinball browsing

After months travelling with my book-sized Asus EEE PC, with it’s micro keyboard and mighty 7-inch screen, i’m finally working on a fast computer with a large screen and a real keyboard again, for a while at least. (Thanks, Robert!)

If you’re not on the Firefox browser wagon yet, i suggest you get with it. It’s free, community-developed, and open source — the way of the future for broad-spectrum apps, in my opinion — and far superior to the Internet Explorer experience. I can hardly believe how cumbersome and nonintuitive IE has become in recent iterations.

Firefox’s spell-checking and form-filling features alone are worth the switch. Download Firefox here for free.

Still better are the hundreds thousands of Firefox add-ons you can get, also free. Most are frivolous, but here are four i’m working with right now that i really like:

Foxmarks Bookmark Sync — This automatically stores all your bookmarks on-line so you can get to them from anywhere, including public computers at whatever divey hostel you’re staying at. And they don’t get lost when your hard drive crashes. Even better, it’ll sync those bookmarks on multiple computers — and who doesn’t use more than one computer these days?
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Mouse Gestures Redox — This one lets you execute common commands (like forward/back, close tab, new tab, etc.) by clicking and “drawing” with the mouse, or just clicking its buttons in order (right-left for “back,” for example). Takes a few minutes to get used to, but greatly speeds up page navigation and reduces moving around the screen to use the toolbar buttons on top.
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Grab and Drag — Ooh la laa! I installed this little beauty yesterday and i love it. It lets you scroll by “grabbing” the page and moving it, just like in Adobe Acrobat PDFs. Even better, by enabling “momentum” you can grab the page and “throw” it so it keeps on scrolling, slow or fast, until you click again. I had to reduce the “time” and “deceleration” parameters to fine-tune it, but it turns every page into a little video game. Perfectly intuitive once you get the hang of it. It’s nice to work with meticulously designed software.
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Adblock Plus — The Internet, and life in general, has for me become an exercise in avoiding advertising, which is the mental equivalent of choking air pollution. Banner ads are endemic on many sites — i won’t even use the Yahoo service anymore. Adblock replaces (many of) the ads with empty boxes of equivalent size. You can still click on the box if you want to see the ad. I used it six months ago and liked it; hopefully it still measures up.

Now if only i could work up the nerve to make the switch to Linux, and get out from under Microsoft’s demanding thumb for good.

Life in the hands of Google

I am woefully bad at making life decisions. I can waffle for months while opportunities come and go without latching onto any one of them.

Trouble is, i don’t see a decision as saying “yes” to something; i see it as saying “no” to the thousand-and-one alternatives. And i hate the narrowing of possibility. As a guy with no great agenda, who doesn’t see much point to grandiose career and life plans, who prides himself on accepting and enjoying whatever comes along, it’s hard to choose, even when choice is forced upon me.

To wit: my looming return from the summer’s travel. It’s got to come to an end sometime, somewhere. But when? And where? Where to lay up my carcase as the world has its way with me?

Then i hit upon the ancient stratagem of the oracle — that mysterious, evasive entity one consults at turning points in one’s existence. (Wikipedia: An oracle is a person or agency considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic opinion; an infallible authority, usually spiritual in nature.) Of course, some superstitious wretch poking at chicken guts in a stinking cave won’t hold a pop-can of credence in the modern world. No, these days who better to consult than the mighty sage, Google?

So i dashed off a quick list of things that are important to me, tacked on the names (one at a time) of the various towns that have appealed to me in the past four months, and plugged it into Google to see how many hits came up — possibly a meaningful indicator of how involved each particular town is with the items of interest. Here’s my first crack:

Google search of zen + bicycle + poetry + green + [town name]

Results (alphabetically):

halifax ………… 178,000
montreal …….. 860,000
ottawa …………. 321,000
tofino ……………….. 6,080
toronto ………… 203,000
ucluelet ……………. 1,130
vancouver …….. 175,000
victoria ……….1,090,000
winnipeg ………. 118,000

You’d think the larger cities (especially Toronto) would have the most hits on any search, simply because of the greater number of computer users and, presumably, web sites. But the results belie that, which makes me think there may be some validity to the technique. I’m surprised.

Of course, small towns stand no chance against cities in this ranking, so i’ll have to refine the method. But preliminary results look, as the scientists say, promising. So far Victoria is a clear leader, with Montreal running second. Stay tuned as Google messes with my life.

Jelly hell

Not to put a damper on your summer’s day, but i just read the following in the July/August 2008 EcoNews newsletter. It’s a downer, no doubt, but i like Victoria’s Guy Dauncey , who publishes the newsletter, because of his irrepressible optimism. In fact, he’ll be getting a good chunk of my $100 climate change rebate from the BC government.

I highly recommend EcoNews as a monthly read — subscribe using the box on the left of the page. And put pressure on our nice Canadian governments, who are dragging their feet in every way possible even as the citizenry forges ahead with grassroots initiatives.

Something extremely disturbing is happening in the world’s oceans. Thanks to our seemingly endless hunger for seafood, we have killed off 90% of the large predatory fish.

There is a consequence to this, since large predatory fish eat other fish — it’s like removing 90% the police from a community. The result in this case is an explosion of jellyfish, since we have killed 90% the sharks, swordfish, tuna, cod, and leatherback turtles that love to eat them.

Holiday destinations in the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas are being plagued with them, in some places as thick as 100 jellyfish per cubic meter of water.

In the US, they are everywhere from Cape Cod to Hawaii.

In May, a mass of jellyfish forced a Japanese nuclear reactor to close down after they blocked its seawater cooling system.

In Northern Ireland, an invasion of non-native mauve stinger jellyfish in a dense pack 10 miles square by 35 feet deep killed 120,000 salmon in a hatchery overnight.

In Namibia, south-west Africa, once one of the most prolific fishing areas in the world, then plundered by the fishing fleets, the jellyfish have moved in and taken over.

Very few fish eat jellyfish, but jellyfish love to eat young larval fish and eggs, making recovery extremely difficult.

“We’re pushing the oceans back to the dawn of evolution, a half-billion years ago when the oceans were ruled by jellyfish and bacteria,” said Jeremy Jackson, a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who has dubbed what’s happening as “the rise of slime”.

In addition to us removing their predators, jellyfish thrive in warmer waters — and US and Australian climate researchers reported in June that the world’s oceans have warmed 50% faster over the last 40 years than previously thought, due to climate change.

The only good news is that in the 4% of the oceans that have remained free of human impact, the sharks and predatory fish still dominate, keeping order in the marine world.

The solution is for at least 1/3rd of the world’s oceans to be declared global marine protected areas, with no fishing of any kind allowed. We know from experience in New Zealand and elsewhere that this allows the fish to recover — but time is running out, and global leadership is painfully slow.