Bridge the Globe

Dinosaurs - Just Like Mammals?

I loved Jurassic Park.  It made me want my own little pet dinosaur to run around and play fetch with.  Plus, everyone would be totally jealous.  They'd say, "Hey, is that a pet dinosaur?"  And I'd be like, "You bet it is!  I found his DNA in a piece of amber from Brazil!"  And they'd be all like, "That is sooo cool!"

Maybe I missed the point of that movie.

In any case, while it's highly unlikely I'll ever have an actual pet dinosaur, it's fascinating to think about how all sorts of these various-sized lizard things filled almost the same ecological niches that mammals do today.  At least one of them even burrowed with their kids, like some cold-blooded reptile-badger thing.  From an article on Nature.com:

David Varricchio of Montana State University in Bozeman and his colleagues found the jumbled remains of two juveniles and an adult together in what looks to be the remains of a custom-built hole in southern Montana.

The discovery provides the first evidence that dinosaurs could burrow, and the best evidence yet for long-term parental care in dinosaurs, says team member Anthony Martin, an expert in animal traces at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

T-Rex = Lion.  Brontosaurus = Elephant.  Triceratops = Rhino.  And Oryctodromeus cubicularis = Badger.

Totally cool.

Now if I could just find the right piece of amber...

Git 'Er Done!

I didn't really enjoy my time in Alabama, but it had more to do with the woman I worked for than anything about the place itself.  So when deadly tornadoes killed eight students in Enterprise a few weeks ago, it hit pretty close to home.

But I was upset to learn that emergency responders in the area couldn't communicate with one another because cell phone traffic overwhelmed the network they use for day-to-day communication.  From CNN:

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (AP)  -- In the chaos after a tornado killed nine people in Enterprise, Alabama, emergency workers had trouble talking to one another because they tried to use their cell phones instead of the state's $18 million emergency communications upgrade, officials say.

"People were frustrated, but all they had to do was turn on their radios," state Homeland Security Director Jim Walker told The Associated Press in a recent interview.

They shouldn't have to, bud.

Here's a thought - let's take that $18 million, multiply it by all the states needing an upgrade to their emergency communications systems, and figure out a way to give priority to the cell phones used by first-responders.  Even better, let's figure out how to do that AND make portable cell towers than can replace those damaged by hurricanes, tornadoes, or other disasters.

Why reinvent the wheel?  Firefighters, police, Red Cross, and just about everyone in America who might be needed in the aftermath of a disaster already have cell phones.  If Steve Jobs can make Cingular change their network for the iPhone, I'm pretty sure Uncle Sam can make Verizon, Sprint, et al. figure out how to provide service to emergency first responders.

This is America people - now git 'er done!

I don't understand how my TV works - but should I?

Arthur C. Clarke, an English physicist and world famous science fiction writer, once opined, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."  I'm pretty sure that if you tried to show an episode of Gunsmoke to a 15th century surf he'd go screaming into the wilderness about sorcery and witchcraft.  I have no idea how my TV works, but because I grew up with it I never really thought about it - it's just a part of my life.

But is that a good thing?

The Creating Passionate Users blog points out that the ease and simplicity of point-and-shoot cameras takes away the very elements of photography that could lead to a passion for the art.

But what if you could use your point-and-shoot as a way to learn more about photography? It would be so helpful if you could put the camera into a kind of "teach me" mode, where it explained what it adjusted and why it did it. That would make a great bridge to help you feel more confident moving into a (more expensive) digital SLR and avoiding what most first-time SLR owners do--keep it in program/automatic mode.

Why stop with cameras?  Video game makers use this method to give new users an in-game tutorial.  Instead of reading a dry and boring user manual - which, lets be honest, hardly anyone really does anyway - you can pop in the game and get started right away.  The game explains new tools and options and they become available, and since it's built in to the game it's just part of the fun.

But the point is that over-automation takes away some of the fun, but more importantly makes it far more difficult to fix things when they break.  I know how to change my oil, and I know enough about my car that I don't worry (too much!) about getting ripped off by a mechanic.

Obviously we can't know everything about everything, but where should we draw the line?  I don't need to know how my TV takes digital signals from a copper wire and turns them into the West Wing, but should we accept a world where we depend on highly trained specialists for nearly everything we come into contact with?

There's something to be said for self sufficiency.  Maybe I only believe that because independence is part of the American ethos, especially out West, but there's also something in my soul that longs for a sort of rustic simplicity.  When I went out on a 150' schooner a few years ago I remember looking up at the full moon and thinking, "An ancient Egyptian could look at me and know - I'm sailing."  That's not true with a car, certainly not a plane, with computers, the internet, or my TV - those would look like magic.

Then again, I REALLY like indoor plumbing.

A white Catholic... terrorist?

I guess it's a pretty smart move, but according to a Washington Post story "there are clear signs that al-Qaeda cells and affiliates are intentionally recruiting supporters from nontraditional backgrounds as a way to avoid detection, according to European intelligence officials and analysts."

The demographics of those being arrested are so diverse that many European counterterrorism officials and analysts say they have given up trying to predict what sorts of people are most likely to become terrorists. Age, sex, ethnicity, education and economic status have become more and more irrelevant.

"It's very difficult to make a profile of terrorists," Tjibbe Joustra, the Dutch national coordinator for counterterrorism, said in an interview. "To have a profile that you can recognize, so that you can predict, 'This guy is going to be radical, perhaps he will cross the line into terrorism' -- that, I think, is impossible."

'There is no standard jihadi terrorist'
European authorities said the trait patterns of those arrested on terrorism charges are constantly shifting. In the Netherlands, officials said they are seeing an increase in the number of young teenagers and people of Turkish descent, two groups that used to be low on their radar. Among the key players in the Hofstad group, a cell of Islamic radicals that targeted Dutch politicians and cultural figures, was Jason Walters, the teenage son of a U.S. soldier.

In neighboring Belgium, people are still perplexed over what drove Muriel Degauque, 38, a blond, white Catholic, to convert to Islam and travel to Iraq to blow herself up in November 2005. Nizar Trabelsi, convicted two years earlier of plotting to bomb a NATO base in Belgium, had been a European soccer star before going to Afghanistan to attend al-Qaeda training camps.

In Britain, three of the suspects arrested in last summer's alleged transatlantic airline hijacking plot were religious converts who grew up in north London's affluent suburbs. One was the well-to-do English son of a Conservative Party activist; he worked in a bar and loved the movie "Team America."

Wait a minute, I loved Team America!

On a serious note, the very next line acknowledges that the vast majority of those convicted or accused of terrorist attacks consist of radical Islamic men - but "born and raised in Europe... from lower or middle-class backgrounds."

Until reading this article I've pretty much thought it was more than just stupid to have airport security search a 90 year old granny while ignoring the hostile Arab with an "I Hate America" hat.  In fact, I still think that's pretty absurd, but this article makes me wonder about the real root causes of terrorism.

Why does a white Catholic woman do something so against human nature?  I suppose that's a longer question for another day, but it's one I've been thinking about quite a bit lately.  Is there something inherent in capitalism and Democracy that creates an emptiness in the human soul that terrorist groups take advantage of?  Are these Westerners a symptom of our society, or of something unique to just them?

That guy sucks - or does he?

This explains so much.  A group of researchers in the UK studied how positive female attention affects how we view other people.  They observed that "quail and finches tend to mate with males that look like the males they have seen other females paired with."  Apparently, so do people.  From an article in the New Scientist:

Ben Jones at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and colleagues, showed 28 men and 28 women pairs of male faces and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The photos had already been rated by 40 women as of about equal attractiveness.

The researchers then showed the same faces alongside a third photo of a female face in profile, positioned so she was looking at one of them, and smiling – or not. The viewers were asked to grade the faces again.

Women found the men who were being smiled at suddenly more attractive, while men who apparently elicited no such smiling approval were pronounced less attractive.

Men, meanwhile, behaved in a strikingly different manner. They rated men who had been smiled at as less attractive. ”Within-sex competition promotes negative attitudes towards men who are the target of positive social interest from women,” the researchers conclude.

It would be interesting to see if this still holds true for gays and lesbians.  Do gay men like guys that women smile at?  If they did, would it indicate a genetic basis for homosexuality, or a social basis for this "smile" test?

On a personal note, it's always been easier for me to like the guy friends of my guy friends - and much harder to like the guy friends of my girl friends.  (That's two words, not "girlfriend," though I guess that's pretty accurate, too.)  It doesn't make it right, and as people we're blessed with the ability to change, but now that I know this I can take it into account when meeting new people.

But dude, sometimes that guy is just a total douchebag.

Weirdly Compelling

From NYTimes tech columnist David Pogue's blog, here's a a bizarrely compelling series of photographs of people walking through a subway turnstile.  The photographer clearly took these pictures with the subject's knowledge, and I'm frankly surprised at the boldness.  This would be a cool series of pictures outside of an elevator or revolving door, too, but I don't know where you'd find a lobby that'd let you take pictures of everyone going in and out of their building.