Guest Post: Looking for Moderns in All the Wrong Places

By: | February 21, 2013

Techo_de_Altamira_(replica)-Museo_Arqueológico_Nacional

 

When the British Museum puts together an exhibition of more than 100 pieces of prehistoric art from all over Europe, stretching back nearly 40,000 years, you want to go. And so I did, making the rounds of this spectacular show the day after its opening on February 7. You’ve got until May 26 to see it yourself, and it’s as good an excuse as any to visit London and maybe even catch a glimpse of William and Kate while you’re there.

But I had mixed feelings about the exhibition, not least because of its title: “Ice Age art: Arrival of the modern mind.” What does this mean? Was the human mind already modern on its arrival in Europe, or did it only get modern after its arrival on the continent, borne by anatomically modern Homo sapiens immigrating from Africa?  Indeed, the title immediately evoked what most human origins researchers today would consider a retrograde, Eurocentric view of human evolution.

Continue reading →

Review — Dene: A Journey

By: | February 20, 2013

moosehead

I have to admit, that very first episode of Survivor, oh so many years ago, held a certain wow factor for me. I was amazed they were allowed to do such a thing, back when it appeared as if they were truly going to leave a group of people to their own devices on a desert island. But as the voting procedures and lame challenges proliferated, all appeal quickly faded, and I’ve never enjoyed another episode of reality television. Until now.

In the deep recesses of the Aboriginal People’s Television Network website, a new series from my neck of the woods (Arctic Canada) is streaming its episodes in full. Dene: A Journey brings out the best a reality show has to offer. Each week features a young indigenous adult who lives an urban lifestyle, disconnected from their traditional culture. They are sent out on the land with elders to learn particular skills they’ve always meant to pick up but somehow never had the chance to experience. Continue reading →

Guest Post: How big is that gray area?

By: | February 19, 2013

speedometerMy 16-year-old son has started to drive. He holds a learner’s permit, which means he can’t drive without me sitting in the passenger seat. Me, narrating, reminding, commenting, coaching, evaluating, and reinforcing. We haven’t done much highway driving yet, so I haven’t directly addressed the idea of breaking the law — which almost everybody on the highway does.

Around town, he’ll ask me: “What’s the speed limit here?” I’ll say, “Probably 30 mph” or 40 or 25 or whatever the size of the road seems to allow.  (And yes, I take pride in the fact that I usually guess right. I’m glad I can still be an expert at something for my almost grown son.) Yesterday, he slowed way down when he realized he was driving in a school zone. I said nothing, as if it’s a given that he’d follow the letter of the law.

But what about the highway? Will I say, “The speed limit is 55 mph here, but most people drive 60-65.” How will I frame that gray area between stated rule and common practice for my son? As a cringe-worthy “everybody does it” excuse or as a rationalization, based on what I believe to be true — that it’s safest to drive at the speed of others around you.

While we’re exploring gray areas, my son, let me point out that there are plenty of examples of rules and regulations put in place with the best intentions and then blithely ignored. Continue reading →

The Sad Fate of Libertas Schultze-Boysen

By: | February 18, 2013

UntitledIn the first week of September 1942, 29-year-old Libertas Schultze-Boysen waited desperately for word of her husband Harro, an official in the Reich Aviation Ministry in Berlin. The couple had passionately espoused a cause that few Germans of the age dared even to discuss. With a small group of friends, Libertas and Harro organized a resistance group known as the Red Orchestra, and in 1941 Harro passed intelligence to a Soviet embassy official concerning Hitler’s plans to invade the Soviet Union—information that the Soviets sadly failed to act upon, at great cost to human life.

Libertas was the daughter of one of Berlin’s most famous couturiers, Otto Ludwig Haas-Heye, who also served as the head of the Arts and Crafts School in Berlin. She grew up in a world of beauty and elegance, far from the horrors that the Nazi regime began to visit upon its Jewish citizens and upon all political opponents. But the young German activist felt a deep need to do something about it. Continue reading →

TGIPF: Alligator Awesome

By: | February 15, 2013

Alligator breadWe now return to our occasionally-scheduled Thank God It’s Penis Friday.

The alligator harvest at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge happened every September, so in the fall of 2007, Diane Kelly packed her bags. She wasn’t hunting, but she still had to put her scalpels and knife blades and the rest of her dissection kit in her checked bags. Explaining to TSA that she was going to figure out how the alligator penis worked wouldn’t fly. Continue reading →

Valentine’s Day Tips from the Animal Kingdom

By: | February 14, 2013

heartI’m not a big fan of Valentine’s day, but I love the ads. They are so utterly, transparently awful that they cross the line from crassly offensive into entertaining. Business Insider just did a brilliant roundup of the worst offenders of all time.

They have a certain evolutionary-psychology simplicity to them — if you present a female with this resource, she will mate with you willingly — and it reminded me of a tour I took last year of the Natural History Museum in London. The NHM celebrated the occasion with a “Turn me on/Turn me off” tour of romance in the animal kingdom, one of which I covered for New Scientist.

If you’re struggling with the crass cynical exploitation fest this Valentine’s Day, let the animal kingdom give you some cheap alternatives. Continue reading →

Bad Wind Made Better

By: | February 13, 2013

Ff

Last year, I published a series critical of modern wind farms. They dealt with a number of pretty dirty land deals in southern Mexico related to new wind farms. Although they were on the cover of a major national newspaper, they didn’t get the attention I thought they deserved (as with most of my stories, oddly enough). It was a sad story in an overlooked corner of the continent.

But one sliver of that attention especially bothered me – those who used it as an argument that wind power is just as bad as coal and gas. That’s why a few weeks ago at a placebo conference (yes, it’s a real conference – not just a bunch of fake scientists and a fake audience) my head snapped around at a lecture on the health effect of wind power. Apparently, there is an idea out there that wind turbines can make you sick. The idea goes that people exposed to very low sound waves, called “infrasound” (say 40 decibels at five hertz for the nerds out there) might experience sleep disturbance, headaches, dizziness, tinnitus, ear pressure or pain, nausea, concentration problems, irritability, anger, panic episodes, fatigue, loss of motivation. Continue reading →