We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Stone walls are "newer" in New England than the early enclosures, which were made of wood. Split logs, like ol' Abe used to make, but not post-and-rail. They were the criss-cross leany sort which rested the rails on tilted posts. And to keep animals out of the cottage garden, they used paling fences.
But in post-glacial New England, where the fields seem to grow stones over the winter, you had to put the loose rocks somewhere, so why not make a wall?
It is hard to walk through any woodland south of Maine without stumbling across an 18th century wall, and sometimes you find an old apple tree in the corner, or an old apple-tree trunk. No doubt planted by the farmer for home-made cider, which was the only kind of booze the average Yankee farmer could afford.
This hilly, rocky woodland, as can easily be seen by the size and species of the trees in the photo, was pasture until about 40-50 years ago: it is a young beech and oak woodland, typical of acidic lowlands in New England, and well-past the point at which it is appealing to grouse and woodcock. Good for the wild turkeys, though.
The booming deer population, alas, vacuum-cleans the undergrowth, making it inhospitable for lots of small critters and birds: either we eat those deer or we return wolves and mountain lions to New England. (I'd vote for all of the above.)
These woods are dotted with low-lying vernal - and autumnal - pools, which are excellent for the toads, tree frogs, salamanders, Box Turtles, etc. "Wetlands," as some term them. I call them swamps, and I love them: they are a cradle of life.
'Toon on temporary loan from our friend TigerHawk (who we hope doesn't mind the loan. We borrow good stuff sometimes, but never without attribution. If anybody is bothered by that, they can let us know). Image is tippy due to the Lake Superior boat ride posted earlier today, or maybe Tigers' having one extry glass of his fine single malt Scotch:
Howard Zinn, on the big screen. America-hating commie propagandists are so 1930s 1960s. Even Pete Seeger admitted (this year!) that he made a mistake by loving and defending Stalin all these years. Zinn, I suspect, still a Stalinist?
I read the New York Sun daily, online. However, the full dead tree version is delivered over most of the NY metropolitan area. Their sports department is way above average - and they are not Marxists.
This planet has had plenty of catastrophic encounters with asteroids over the years, even in recent times.
Wikipedia notes, in the thorough entry on Impact Events:
An impact event is commonly seen as a scenario that would bring about the end of civilization. In 2000, Discover Magazine published a list of 20 likely end of the world scenarios with impact event listed as the number one most likely to occur. Until the 1980s this idea was not taken seriously, but all that changed after the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater which was further reinforced by witness to the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 event. Since then there has been more interest from the scientific community and greater public awareness of the possibility of impact events.
...people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin. (Reuters)
We were puzzled by the report about accelerating evolution in humans. Didn't seem to make sense because one would think that the power of selection would diminish as mankind controls and creates his own environment.
But it turns out that one of the authors of the suddenly-famous study is on our blogroll - paleo-anthropologist John Hawks. In a blog entry, Why Human Evolution Accelerated, he begins to explain the theory. It's all about population size. Simple math. A quote:
...the ecological changes documented in human history and the archaeological record create an exceptional situation. Humans faced new selective pressures during the last 40,000 years, related to disease, agricultural diets, sedentism, city life, greater lifespan, and many other ecological changes. This created a need for selection.
Larger population sizes allowed the rapid response to selection -- more new adaptive mutations. Together, the the two patterns of historical change have placed humans far from an equilibrium. In that case, we expect that the pace of genetic change due to positive selection should recently have been radically higher than at other times in human evolution.
While a good society should certainly never want to go to war, it must always be prepared to do so. But a society will not fight for what it believes, if all it believes is that it should never have to fight.
Taking another look at the data, Holland in a piece titled The Marketing of Global Warming in On Line Opinion finds data cherry-picking all over the place.
Here's the now-discredited scary hockey stick (no longer defended by anyone due to erroneous stat analysis, plus the Southern Hemisphere is, of course, entirely different):
Related: The Sky is Falling. And I see that the Pope, a far more scholarly sort than the pompous, thesaurus-addicted Al Gore, is a skeptic, but where's that Pope link I had earlier? Got to find it...OK Here it is.
Anatomists have found that in most areas of the cortex, for every fiber carrying information up the hierarchy, there are as many as ten fibers carrying processed information back down the hierarchy...
Ten times as many going "down" than "up"? I find it fascinating that there are such identifiable anatomical structures which correlate with what we know well: perception is not "input." It's our brain and mind's interaction with the input not just in the cortex where we expect processing and interpretation to take place, but also back down to the sensory level itself.
So sensation itself is not passive reception: it is shaped by the cortex. Another quote:
[Y]our understanding of reality is a far cry from reality itself. Your understanding of reality is constructed in large part according to your expectations and beliefs, which are based on all your past experiences which are held in the cortex as predictive memory. This is worth repeating: Many of your perceptions—what you see, hear, feel, and think is real—are profoundly shaped and influenced by your beliefs and expectations.
I think it's a big leap from the micro-anatomy of basic sensory perception to the theme of construction of reality, but it's always a good topic. The piece is further quoted and linked here.
Photo: A stained cortical neuron in a sea of dendrites
Thanks, Lawrence, for linking our Darwin and Religion piece, which was a response to your mini-essay. When we get linked by Insty or Powerline, we usually graciously thank them via email, but these are deeper waters in which to swim. Thanks to a good blog pal on our beloved upper West Side of Manhattan, where I spent many good years, long ago. Chasing girls and talking politics and drinking beer and listening to the music at the West End. "Hey, Jude." Flip side, "Revolution." Am I old? Naw, not yet. A touch of grey.
This planet has had plenty of catastrophic encounters with asteroids over the years, even in recent times.
...people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin. (Reuters)
Quoted by Dr. X:
