The man with no language. (via Radiolab, WYNC)
March 21, 2011
This is extraordinary.
Listen to the story about a woman who taught a 27 year old Nicaraguan man how to understand language for the first time. “Something about his eyes caught her attention.” She uses sign to communicate, and he echoes everything she signs – right back at her. “Visual echolalia.” She could see intelligence in his eyes, but realised that he had no language; he didn’t even know he was deaf.
“What have you been doing for 27 years?” she wonders.
Listen for the moment when everything changes. It brings tears to my eyes when i hear what happened.
via Words – Radiolab.
From the people at Radiolab. These 2 men make radio that seems to flow in a kind of liquid conversational story. The narrative is so beautifully woven from multiple voices, without signalling when the voice changes.
can i have a pet quoll?
September 24, 2010
Listening to an episode of background briefing, where they’re talking about how the Eastern quoll was wiped out in the 60s, and the Western quoll is endangered. So is it time to open up ‘captive breeding’ for quolls, and allow suburban dwellers to take in their own pet quoll.. instead of getting another cat?
Greg Miles reckons it’s an “anti-extinction” policy. A ranger from Kakadu, he has seen native animal populations ravaged by all kinds of ferals.
On one hand, the income could really help native animal breeders. On the other, animal rights advocates might say that marsupials shouldn’t have to live in captivity, with humans.
Good program, worth a listen.
Here’s the mp3 file on the abc site.
Sugar gliders sound like bad pets though. They bark, and their bark sounds like a mad car alarm. They will urinate on you as soon as they wake up. But in the US, people are hopping on the sugar glider bandwagon like kids lining up for sugar at a birthday party.
photo credit: pierre pouliquin
Massive improbability of life
February 14, 2010
Apparently life on Earth is very unlikely.
i’m re-reading chunks of Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. In chapter 19, ”The Rise of Life’, he points out that collagen – one of many useful proteins for life – needs 1055 amino acids to be organised in exactly the right sequence.
And collagen organises itself spontaneously. There isn’t someone assembling it each time.
“The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil” (p351). Bryson compares it to a poker machine where you have 1055 slots instead of the usual 3-5, where each wheel has 20 different amino acids to choose from. How long would you have to pull the handle of this one-armed bandit? Forever. The odds against winning are 1 in 10^260*.
Not only that, but as well as amino acids forming themselves into proteins, somehow DNA manages to get in on the act – so that the whole thing can reproduce itself – and then there’s a cell membrane to contain all this activity.
Freakishly unlikely.
Fred Hoyle the astronomer once said that it was as if a wind swept through a junkyard, and a fully formed jumbo jet arose by chance (p352).
No wonder the creationists go mad trying to bring their paternalistic version of god into the equation.
Even the Nobel Laureate scientists like Francis Crick (who sorted out the DNA double helix model) have come up with outlandish theories like aliens “deliberately seeding” the earth with life ingredients such as amino acids via meteors and comets.
So we’re incredibly lucky to be living on earth..
Then why am i feeling so glum?
Better get active. Do the dishes. Find a costume for the Chinese new year dinner party. Get off the couch. Start spontaneously re-assembling myself. etc.
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(* 10^260 means 10 with 260 zeroes, and it’s more than the number of atoms in the known universe. That’s big.)
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Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, Black Swan edn 2004.
Bryson’s book is such a great read. You find out all sorts of things, for example the universe is 13 billion years old, and the earth is around 4 billion years old, and life on earth actually started around the 3.85 billion years ago mark..
..and in 1946 Reginald Sprigg discovered pre-Cambrian fossils in the Flinders Ranges, but nobody paid any attention because.. i don’t know, maybe it was his name.
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photo credit: Steve took it,
macbook at the tip
March 3, 2009
One day i went to drop off some of my ex-boxes, and discovered the Reservoir Tip computer recycling facility. Masses of old rubbishy broken machines, and one smashed up MacBook Pro!!
i thought maybe Tim could use the parts so i surreptitiously grabbed it and drove off. Sure enough, later on that night we took it to pieces, and found the hard drive and the battery were still in working order.
Working enough to find out that somebody had left all their data on the drive. So Tim gets all the data off and then does the decent thing, contacting this person and asking if they need the backup.
Turns out this person, whose identity shall remain secret, had taken the laptop to the shop. The mechanics had said, “Can’t do anything love, it’s broken. Can’t get your data off, but don’t worry we’ll make sure noone else does either.”
What kind of computer shop doesn’t know how to get the information off a working hard drive??
The moral of this story? Don’t trust a computer shop with your data.
And don’t sit on your macbook pro.
Albert on war: sticks & stones
February 25, 2009
Nice one Albert. i get an Einstein quote every day in my iGoogle feeds. This one made me jump. i think Albert spent much of his life regretting his contribution to inventing nucular weapons.
.
“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”.
from desert to oasis
May 29, 2008
Time for some good news. i’ve just been reading Pitchfork Design .. where Sam talks of a new project up near Swan Hill; and her inspiration is this amazing tale of greening the desert in Jordan.
This video is so worth watching, from desert to fruit trees and oasis: “You can solve the problems of the world in a garden,” says Geoff Lawton the permaculture artist behind the project.
.. and read up on Sam’s projects too, she’s doing amazing work rebuilding the gardens in schools around Victoria. go Sam!
gazillions of gigalitres
February 21, 2008
Just before new year, i was listening to the heaviest rain i’d heard in melbourne for years. Such a delicious sound. i revelled in the delights of pounding water.
But of course, most of that water was going down many drains into the bay, because we don’t have a huge embedded system to catch, keep and recycle storm water.
The smart guys at the top of town want to throw billions of dollars at private companies, to build a desalination plant which is going to use coal-fired electricity, add pollution and greenhouse gases, and line the pockets of those private investors for years to come
.. when research shows you’re so much better off catching what falls out of the sky.
(um, evidence, michael? Well, Bob Brown and the Greens say so. Average households receive 8 times the water they consume, apparently.)
Here’s Bob talking to a rally against desalination.
Bill Mollison once said that all the solutions are there already. It’s just the political will, and getting past the stakeholders.
One of my dreams for ’08 is that the people of Victoria will demand intelligently innovative, sensible and truly sustainable solutions to the water crises, and that we’ll be rewarded with the best new system in the world.
And i reckon that means we collect and recycle storm water.
Oh look, here’s a bunch of sane and clear-thinking locals investigating the whole DeSal/PPP setup (or maybe they’re commie free radicals?). Apparently we pay for the desalinated water even if it turns out we don’t need it.
(The weirdest thing .. the herald sun editorial agreed with me.)
grey skies are wonderful
January 7, 2007
The melb’n city skyline is invisible again, but this time it’s great news: a light shower is passing through, bringing the cool change after five days of side-splitting heat. (Like pigs roasting on a spit, we were!)
Half an hour ago we had bright blue skies and the muggy remnants of yesterday’s tropical torment. Now there’s a veil of mist across the city, and the delightful chill of rain on trees. You know that delicious fragrance, when the rain hits greenery?
mmmmm! oh that was a light shower, fifteen seconds of intense rain, a few sporadic drops and it’s clearing again.
Okay, enough weather report, back to study. mic x.
