Neanderthals vs. Cro-Magnons

"The Dilemma: At a cocktail party, a nasty brute spills a drink on you. You’d like to compare his manners to that of a more primitive hominid. But which would be more insulting?

People You Can Impress: Anthropologists—they’re just happy to talk to someone who’s not a fossilized skeletal fragment.

The Quick Trick: Neanderthals are more primitive but stronger. Cro-Magnons are us.

The Explanation: Cognitively speaking, it’s definitely more insulting to call someone a Neanderthal. But if you’re talking musculature, they might just take it as a compliment. Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were discovered first in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1856. They emerged between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, give or take, in the early and middle Paleolithic era, and they used tools, albeit very simple ones. Often they resorted to using rocks (or flakes broken off of rocks by hitting them with other rocks), bones, and sticks. And they used fire, too! Neanderthals were more muscular than the later Homo sapiens, and their skulls were flatter, with broad noses and pronounced ridges on the forehead (which is why, to us, they look rather dim). They were also capable of speech, but recent physiological discoveries indicate that their voices were high pitched and nasal, not the baritone grunts we normally associate with cavemen. Despite their similarities to us, they were not—repeat, not—a step on the way to us. They were a dead-end off shoot of an earlier common ancestor, and they eventually lost out to their smarter, more advanced cousins: Cro-Magnons.

As for Cro-Magnons, they’re pretty much just like us. They take their name from a cave in France where Louis Lartet found them in 1868 (well, he found their skeletons. They had died a while before). Unlike Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons are not a separate species from Homo sapiens. In fact, they’re the earliest known European example of our species—living between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago—and are actually modern in every anatomical respect. They did, however, have somewhat broader faces, a bit more muscle, and a slightly larger brain. So how’d they utilize their larger noggins? Cro-Magnon man used tools, spoke and probably sang, made weapons, lived in huts, wove cloth, wore skins, made jewelry, used burial rituals, made cave paintings, and even came up with a calendar. Specimens have since been found outside Europe, including in the Middle East.

Amazingly, the two species actually overlapped in Europe for a few thousand years. So did they interbreed? While scientists allow that there were probably plenty of random matings and hookups, any long-term interbreeding is unlikely. And while there are many reasons for this, the simplest are that a) they were probably physically repulsive to each other, and b) they couldn’t meaningfully communicate. And also c) beer wasn’t invented yet."

Very interesting...and a very true argument, the one about the beer :-< - source: mentalfloss.com, image: britannica.com -

Fallen

Fallen
Uploaded by mikropikol

Nicely done, and it can also be given a deeper meaning than just the meteorite falling to the ground...

Resonant Chamber

Very artistic...

Sony turns up the heat

More and more Sony ads are being aired on tv here in Europe, especially ones with LittleBigPlanet. This is quite a surprise, considering that Sony had previously been quite reluctant (or so it seemed) to spend big bucks on advertising, as the likes of Microsoft and Nintendo do. Anyway, here are some interesting (and short) ads of LBP:





More ads for Sony mean increased awareness of its products and, thus, increased sales. Seems like they want to turn up the heat in time for Christmas shopping, but that heat could (to be read, "should") have perhaps already been there by December to make for more buyers.

(and yes, I am very excited about LBP, it's actually being shipped to me as we speak...I mean write/read - so I can't wait :D)

Geneve - winter

Quite a winter, huh? :D



I'm looking forward to the winter. Christmas, Santa and snow...lots of snow...

- source: selfdestruct.net -

Tesla Coil Sparks

"Honey... there's some electrical interference..."

or

A Tesla coil is a (resonant) transformer circuit invented by Nikola Tesla. It is able to generate "very high voltage, low current, high frequency alternating current electricity.". (wiki)

Electricity can be awesome!

- source: tesladownunder -

Thirst Snake lyrics

Tiamat released their latest album called "Amanethes" earlier this year (in April), but I still am not able to find lyrics to the bonus track, "Thirst Snake", on the internet.

If you want lyrics to any other song except "Thirst Snake", use Google or just go here.

Perhaps I did not search thoroughly enough, though I believe I did. Anyway, I tried to listen to the song and write down what I understand the words said are. After about six or seven consecutive auditions, I seem to have reached the end of my words-distinguishing abilities.

The lyrics for "Thirst Snake" are (as heard by me):

"Your hands are my cradle, your hair is the heavenly abode
My longing for touching your skin,
There's a heavy load.
I wanna bathe you, my love, in broad heavens of divine light
A precious angel you are of the bodies of celestial might
Your eyes lighting up the skies like the chariots of fire
Let me take you there, tonight,
Take you higher and higher...

Without you it's all denied
Your poison burns like fire
My eyes are closed
And all I see is you
Is you...

Until the daylight spreads its hope
And does once again revive
(And may) the clouds of the night
Let me stay in your path for a while.

Without you it's all denied
Your poison burns like fire
My eyes are closed
And all I see is you
Is you...

I want you, [x2]
I don't wanna let you go away.
{Repeat x 2}

Oh,
I want you, [x2]
I don't wanna let you go away

From me...
Never gonna let you go..."

I must say, the line in which he says "(And may) the clouds of the night" makes me mad, I think I've listened to it about 15 times now and I still can't make out what's between the parentheses (It's at 3:17 - give it a go for yourself). I keep hearing something like "Nemey" or "Eney" ...

If you notice any mistakes, or want to add something, feel free to do so either by email or by comment.

Street Art

"Street Art in East Village, New York City":


How cool is that?

- source: NickGray -

Water (animation)

Here's a viral animation (for water):



Pretty interesting :D ...

Boomerang returns, even in space

Seems like the laws by which boomerangs work are obeyed even in space:

"In an unprecedented experiment, a Japanese astronaut has thrown a boomerang in space and confirmed it flies back, much like on Earth.

Astronaut Takao Doi "threw a boomerang and saw it come back" during his free time on March 18 at the International Space Station (ISS), a spokeswoman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.

Mr Doi threw the boomerang after a request from compatriot Yasuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion.

"I was very surprised and moved to see that it flew the same way it does on Earth," the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted the 53-year-old astronaut as telling his wife in a chat from space.

The space agency said a videotape of the experiment would likely be released later.

Doi travelled on US shuttle Endeavour on the March 11 blast-off and successfully delivered the first piece of a Japanese laboratory to the ISS."

Nice!

- source : abc-

Free hugs

I remembered when I first saw this video, and thought that it deserves its own post here. Enjoy!



It makes me smile every time...

I definitely am in the mood for some free hugs right now.

Earth Hour 2008

Earth Hour 2007 was an event initiated in Sydney with the goal of a 5% reduction in energy consumption in the area.

2,2 million people turned their lights out for an hour then, the energy saved being the equivalent of taking off the road 48,000 cars in that time.

This year, we're all invited to join in on Earth Hour. Accordingly, we are all invited to turn off our lights for a full hour - 20:00 to 21:00 - on the 29th of March.

According to Wikipedia (which never lies): "As of 18 March, over 9000 businesses and 136,000 individuals had indicated their intention to participate at earthhour.org.", as opposed to the "68,506 individuals and 2,270 businesses (that) registered their intention to participate on the Earth Hour website." last year (2007).

So, it's up to you whether or not you participate in the event this year... but, if you won't do it for the energy savings, do it for the bunnies! (what do you mean, "what bunnies"? The bunnies that are counting on you to turn off the lights so they can do their...business...you know, as in hunt other critters?)

The Monty Hall problem

Why? Because an unintuitive answer always gives birth to controversy, and controversy leads to the use of reason. Simply put, because our brains need the exercise.

So, we have this probability-related problem loosely based on a TV-show (Let's make a deal -
the problem's name comes from that of the host - the dude from image2) that sounds like this:

"A thoroughly honest game-show host has placed a car behind one of three doors. There is a goat behind each of the other doors. You have no prior knowledge that allows you to distinguish among the doors. "First you point toward a door," he says. "Then I'll open one of the other doors to reveal a goat. After I've shown you the goat, you make your final choice whether to stick with your initial choice of doors, or to switch to the remaining door. You win whatever is behind the door." You begin by pointing to door number 1. The host shows you that door number 3 has a goat." The question is: do your chances to win the car change if you switch?

In one word, yes.

Although apparently absurd, your chances to win the car the moment you are left with two rooms and the option to change by choosing either door are not 50%.

Let me explain: the two options you have as a strategy are 1. do not switch and 2. switch. Being two complementary choices (there is no other one available: you either switch to the other room or stick with your original one), the sum of the possibilities of them gaining you the car is 100%. You are obviously going to think that their respective chances are equal, 50% and 50%. "After all, you only have two choices."

Well, no, not really.

Let's try and see what our chances to win are if we choose to stick with our choice.

The car lies behind one and only one of three identical doors. If we want to stick with our choice, then in order to win the car we must correctly guess the right door from the start. That means we have 1/3, or 33%, chance to win the car. Thus there is a 66% chance of winning by switching.

Think of it this way: you've got three doors. The possibility of guessing the right one is 1/3, while the other two doors have 2/3, together. Since the host eliminates one of the other doors, the 2/3 chances are redistributed to the remaining one, because this basically means: "you either choose one door, and have a 33% chance of winning, or choose the other two, and have 66%"(because, of the two left, he tells you which one COULD have the car by eliminating the other).

There is another, more clear way of proving that, if you switch, you have a 66% chance of winning. The probability of an event is equal to the ratio between the number of cases in which the event does occur and the total number of events. There are three cases, as shown in the following image (again, Wikipedia ftw!) - click for bigger picture - :


There are 3 cases that prove that switching results in a 66% win, while sticking with the original choice only gets us the car on 33% of the time.

P.S. A simple way to test the result is experimentally, with three playing cards. Just take three playing cards, one of which is an ace, for example, shuffle them, and take a pick. If you correctly guess the ace, then sticking with your choice would win you the car, so there's one "point" for it. If you do not, then switching to the other card would win, thus one "point" for switching. You'll definitely notice the difference and if you calculate the chances, they should come close to 66%. The more tries, the more accurate the chances.

P.S.2. I've tried the experimental way. After thirty cases, I had 18 for switching and 12 for "sticking". That is a 60%-40% ratio. After sixty cases and two hours of school, the chances got 63,33%-36,66%. Perhaps if I would continue, they would get closer to 66%-33%. Anyway, this confirmed the theory.

- article used: The Monty Hall problem -

"The Lady, or the Tiger?"

I present to you a famous short story written by Frank R. Stockton in 1882, that poses an interesting question on human nature.

You can read it HERE. It is very short, for the lazy ones among us.

Although the full story is very short, for those who don't want to read it, here is the summary (thx, Mr. Wikipedia - you rule!):

"The "semi-barbaric King" of an ancient land utilized an unusual form of administering justice for offenders in his kingdom. The offender would be placed in an arena where his only way out would be to go through one of two doors. Behind one door was a beautiful woman hand-picked by the king and behind the other was a ravenous tiger. The offender was then asked to pick one of the doors. If he picked the door with the woman behind it, then he was declared innocent and as a reward he was required to marry the woman, regardless of previous marital status. If he picked the door with the tiger behind it, though, then he was deemed guilty and the tiger would rip him to pieces.

One day the king found that his daughter, the princess, had taken a lover far beneath her station. The king could not allow this and so he threw the suitor in prison and set a date for his trial in the arena. On the day of his trial the suitor looked to the princess for some indication of which door to pick. The princess, did, in fact, know which door concealed the woman and which one the tiger, but was faced with a conundrum. If she indicated the door with the tiger, then the man she loved would be killed on the spot; however, if she indicated the door with the lady, her lover would be forced to marry another woman and even though he would be alive she would never be with him again. Finally she does indicate a door, which the suitor then opens."

Now, what do you think lay behind the door he chose? Once again, the full story is here.

The "Afghan Girl"

Some of you may already know this photo:

It was made famous in 1985 by journalist Steve McCurry when it featured on the cover of that June's National Geographic edition.

The picture, taken in Pakistan in a refugee camp, shows a girl that originated from Afghanistan which orphaned by the Soviet bombings, was forced (along with her siblings) to cross the border into Pakistan.

The identity of the approximately 13-year-old girl was unknown at the time, the girl usually being referred to simply as the "Afghan girl".

Quickly becoming a symbol of both the Afghan conflict and the condition of refugees worldwide, the green-eyed "Afghan girl" remained unknown for almost fifteen years, despite efforts to find her, up to 2002, when a team of journalists at the National Geographic finally traced her back to a remote place in her native country.
Although a lot of women claimed to be her when inquired by the reporters, Sharbat Gula was identified, with help from biometric technology that compared her iris pattern to that of the "Afghan girl", as the girl in the photograph.

The woman had returned to her home country and had three girls, which she hoped would receive the education she never got.

Here is a comparison photo of the 13-year-old Sharbat Gula and her older self (in her early thirties, she was born ca. 1972 and the picture was taken in 2002):

Here is a link to the whole article that appeared in National Geographic in June, 1985.

Just let me say that that look from the original photo (the top of the post) is easily one of the most impressive looks I've ever seen.

"We are all phantoms."

"And you thought there was a lot of empty space in the solar system.
Well, there's even more nothing inside an atom.
A hydrogen atom is only about a ten millionth of a millimeter in diameter, but the proton in the middle is a hundred thousand times smaller, and the electron whizzing around the outside is a thousand times smaller than THAT. The rest of the atom is empty.
I tried to picture it, and I couldn't. So I put together this page - and I still can't picture it."

This is a site that shows you the contents of an atom in the form of a proton and an electron.
It is made especially to show the distance between the proton and the electron.

He takes the size of an electron as one pixel and builds the proton (and the distance between the two) at the correct ratio (1000x1000 pixels). The distance between the two components adds up to about eleven miles, "making this possibly the biggest page you've ever seen (I personally have seen one that was set up to be even bigger, though its exact size did not seem to represent anything specific).".

"I recommend trying to scroll from here to the right a screen at a time, just to see how long it takes the little thumb in the scrollbar to move visibly. True masochists can try to scroll through the whole eleven miles - but the scenery along the way is pretty bleak." - try it, it goes to show that very much space is, well, wasted.

"I used to think that things like rocks and buildings and my own skeleton were fairly solid. But they're made up of atoms, and atoms, as you can see here, contain so little actual material that they can barely be said to exist.

We are all phantoms."