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Sunday, May 04, 2003
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Flemming Funch writes: I work for several different companies. They're mostly pleasant to work with, but they don't have much awareness of each other, so each will tend towards expecting me to work for them 24 hours per day. Oh, they'll wait a few minutes if I have another call, but they're never going to understand what else I'm doing. Most people who call on the phone will expect me to answer and to actually be available to talk with them when I do. Most people who send me an e-mail will expect I have time to read it and answer it. Most people who come by will expect I have time to talk with them. My family expects that I'm always there, to have dinner, fix a boo-boo, or clean up in the garage. Maybe I'm particularly bad at setting boundaries. But I doubt it is just me. I'm living at least a dozen lives. But yet I haven't been granted any more hours in the day. I'm being torn in many directions. My time is sliced up, juggling many different priorities and commitments, either at the same time, or in successive time slices. ... The world looks deceptively like it used to. The sun comes up in the morning, and you put clothes on, and eat, and gravity works like it always did. Yet, this is only a small portion of the world you live in now. You live many parallel lives. They need to learn to co-exist peacefully, if they don't already. Many independently moving pieces can very well exist in harmony, and a new kind of order can emerge. (05/04/03)
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Richard Effland writes: In parallel with this growing realization of primate social complexity came isolated suggestions that primate groups as such might originally have provided a selective pressure for the evolution of cognition as an adaptation to social complexity. Most influentially, Humphrey argued that primate and human intelligence is an adaptation to social problem-solving, well suited to forward planning in social interaction but less suited to nonsocial domains. A decade later, the book Machiavellia Intelligence'' brought these strands together and juxtaposed them with some of the most striking evidence of primate social complexity then available, arguing that this was an idea that deserved serious attention. The title of the book was inspired by de Waal's' explicit comparison between the chimpanzee social strategies he described and some of the advice offered four centuries earlier by Niccolo Machiavelli. Giving somewhat cynical recommendations to an aspiring prince, Machiavelli was prescient in his realization that an individual's success is often most effectively promoted by seemingly altruistic, honest, and prosocial behavior: "[It] is useful, for example, to appear merciful, trustworthy, humane, blameless, religious - and to be so - yet to be in such measure prepared in mind that if you need to be not so, you can and do change to the contrary." (05/04/03) | |
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Nature -- One simple equation can generate a vast diversity of natural shapes, a Belgian biologist has discovered. The Superformula, as its creator Johan Gielis has christened it, produces everything from simple triangles and pentagons, to stars, spirals and petals. ... The Superformula is a modified version of the equation for a circle1. Changing one term in the formula varies the proportions of the shape - moving from a round circle to a long and skinny ellipse. Changing another varies the axes of symmetry - shifting from a circle to triangle, square, pentagon and so on. Varying both proportion and symmetry together produces shapes with any number of sides, regular and irregular. It can also produce three-dimensional structures, and non-biological shapes such as snowflakes and crystals. "It's a new way of describing nature," says Gielis. (05/04/03) | |
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GreenBiz.com -- A Swedish firm has invented a new type of material that is half chalk, half plastic. The mixture makes lightweight packaging with an extra twist: When burned, it neutralizes the acid fumes generated by waste incinerators. “It’s beautiful,” said Per Gustafsson, managing director of Ecolean. The firm’s chalk packaging, developed from scratch in 1996, weighs on average half as much as the paper/plastic mix used in milk and juice cartons. Better still, the chalk -- a natural mineral -- can neutralize acidic soil or the fumes from incinerators when burned as waste. Because the chalk is quarried, it also reduces the amount of energy needed to create a yogurt pot or butter tub compared with an all-plastic one, explains Gustafsson. (05/04/03) | |
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Christian Science Monitor -- Sophisticated software and hardware are giving wildlife trackers an almost instant overview of plant and animal patterns. Ultimately, this will offer scientists a more profound understanding of how nature interacts. By bringing increasingly powerful software and hardware into the field, researchers can simplify the data-gathering and speed up its delivery and analysis. (05/04/03) | |
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New York Times: Obituraries -- Guy Mountfort, a British ornithologist, nature writer and advertising executive who helped to found the World Wildlife Fund, died on April 23 in Bournemouth on the southern coast of England. He was 97. In 1961, Mr. Mountfort created the World Wildlife Fund with three other distinguished British naturalists: Sir Julian Huxley, the zoologist; Peter Scott, a broadcaster and founder of Britain's Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust; and Max Nicholson, head of Britain's Nature Conservancy. The fund, based in Switzerland, had the goal of preserving endangered species and their habitats. With Mr. Mountfort as its first treasurer, it rapidly became one of the leading conservation groups in the world, raising large sums for its operations thanks in part to the efforts of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and Prince Bernard of the Netherlands, who both gave it their support from the beginning. In 1986 the organization changed its name to the World Wide Fund for Nature to reflect its broadening conservationist agenda, though its American and Canadian branches kept the old name. To end the confusion this caused, the organization changed its name again in 2001, becoming simply W.W.F. Mr. Mountfort's main personal contribution to the group's conservation campaign began in 1972, when he started a drive to halt the decline in the world's tiger population. The operation resulted in the creation of 17 tiger reserves across India, Nepal and Bangladesh. The preserves are credited with reversing the decline in the tiger population of Asia, which before World War II had been estimated at more than 100,000. In India alone, the number of Bengali tigers rose over 10 years from under 2,500 to more than 5,000, where it remains today. (05/04/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- The average fuel economy of the nation's cars and trucks fell to its lowest level in 22 years in the 2002 model year, the Environmental Protection Agency reported today. The technological and engineering leaps of the last two decades have been poured into everything but fuel economy, according to the agency's statistics. Since 1981, the average vehicle has 93 percent more horsepower and is 29 percent faster in going from 0 to 60 miles an hour. It is also 24 percent heavier, reflecting surging sales of sport utility vehicles. But over the same period, fuel economy has stagnated, contributing heavily to the nation's rising oil consumption. Cars and light trucks — S.U.V.'s, pickups and minivans — account for about 40 percent of the nation's oil consumption and a fifth of its carbon dioxide emissions, which many scientists see as the leading contributor to global warming. (05/04/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- Despite a rich history and aura of majesty, the Tiber River is a muddy, meandering mess: sickly in its complexion, sickening in its aromas, and strewn with unusual marine life, from mopeds and mattresses to dense schools of beer bottles. Yet, on a recent afternoon, something more traditional and less expected floated into view: it was a bona fide boat, packed with people. It was also a signal that Romans might actually be reconnecting with the Tiber, a sign of hope that a disregarded river was again on the rise. With ample fanfare and inevitable hitches, Roman officials on Sunday inaugurated water taxi service along the Tiber, which had not really been navigated for more than a century, the officials said. They said they wanted to give tourists a new take on the Eternal City and commuters a new alternative to noisy, traffic-choked streets. ... So that the experience would be more heady than horrific, they fished for all the trash they could find, hauling in a catch of 38 tons. (05/04/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- Federal prosecutors charged a Tehachapi, Calif., man today with killing an endangered California condor. The man, Britton Cole Lewis, 29, faces up to six months in prison and a $15,000 fine if convicted of shooting the bird. ... The condor, known as Adult Condor 8, was one of the few hatched in the wild. She was captured in 1986, the last female of the species caught for a program to save the giant birds from extinction. She hatched a dozen eggs in captivity before she was freed in April 2000, one of the first of the original wild birds to be released. (05/04/03) | |
7:09:00 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
6/3/2003; 5:44:42 AM.
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