Ladies and gents:
PetTube:
(Video removed)
EDIT: nope, it offers embed codes but apparantly doesn’t allow embedding other than through some skeezy affiliates programme. Sod that noise.
Natural World
Sheer indulgence
Cuttlefish.
Twenty years ago today…
One of those moments where you knew the world you grew up in had changed. Those two-three years between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Gulf War were incredible, when it seemed the whole world would be set free. I grew up in the eighties with regular nightmares about nuclear war and all of a sudden not only was the Cold War finished, but the worst oppressive regime in the world had actually freed the symbol of the resistance against it and was negotiating how to end itself. things looked so great and then it all turned to shit again, with South Africa today being the best evidence for the idea that having equal rights is a necessary, but not a complete condition for creating an equal society.
Rivers in Time – Peter D. Ward
Rivers in Time
Peter D. Ward
315 pages including index
published in 2000
Rivers of Time is a new edition of The End of Evolution, a book originally published in 1994, roughly around the same time as E. O. Wilson’s Diversity of Life, with which it overlaps to some point. Like that book, Rivers of Time mixes exploration of the Earth’s evolutionary past with concern for the
present, focussing on the historical three mega extinctions as well as the one currently under way. Unlike E. O. Wilson’s book however, this is not a call to arms. Ward is much more resigned to the great extinction than Wilson is.
Partially this may be because in Ward’s view, this great extinction has already happened, with the disappearance of the megafauna of Europe, North America, Australia and many parts of Asia and Africa during the last 15,000-20,000 years, coinciding with the rise of modern humanity. The extinctions still taking place now are just the aftermath of this. I’m not sure how much I agree with this, but at the very least it puts the current destruction of ecosystems in place like Brazil or Borneo into a new perspective, when you realise the same thing had already happened in Europe thousands of years ago.
The Diversity of Life – E. O. Wilson
The Diversity of Life
E. O. Wilson
424 pages
published in 1992
The Diversity of Life is the first E. O. Wilson book I’ve ever read and I finished it impressed. Writing science books aimed at a lay audience is not an easy job to do, having to explain difficult concepts to an audience of whom you can’t assume they have the background to understand them immediately. And you need to do this without boring your audience or telling too many lies-to-children. E. O. Wilson manages to do this with a concept as big and fuzzy as biological diversity, is a tribute to his writing.
Wilson is a biologist, who first rode to a certain amount of fame and infamity in the seventies, for popularising the concept of sociobiology. As a biologist he spent a large part of his career studying social insects, especially ants, from the study of which he also derived some of his ideas about sociobiology. For his research he spent quite some time in developing countries, seeing the ongoing destruction of wild habitats up close, so it’s no wonder that he became a passionate environmentalist.
Charley
Now that’s a cat that reminds me of myself, as I don’t have the world’s best motoric skills either, if nothing on the level of Charley.