#ian tattersall

[caviarsonoro]

Our Recently Acquired Knowledge

[postambientlux]

• observatories (ian hawgood + craig tattersall) • our recently acquired knowledge • http://iikki.bandcamp.com/.../our-recently-acquired...

[demi-shoggoth]

2023 Reading Log, pt 13

I've been putting off writing this one for a while, because all of these books are... fine? I didn't feel very strongly about them any way, either positively or negatively. Plus, I've been strongly burnt out on writing in general, and it's been hard for me to push myself to even write little 100 word blurbs about books.

61. Strange Japanese Yokai by Kenji Murakami, translated by Zack Davisson. It’s rare that I get the opportunity to read a yokai book originally written in Japanese, seeing as I don’t speak the language, so I jumped on the chance to get a copy of this when I found out it existed. It’s cute, with cartoony artwork and little data file sidebars that remind me of a Scholastic book… except the content is far weirder than what American kids books contain. The theme of the yokai stories here is that a lot of yokai… kind of suck. The stories told about the big hitters, like oni, kappa, kitsune and tanuki, are about them being foolish or having easily exploited weaknesses, and a lot of the other stories are about gross or pathetic yokai more than scary or impressive ones. The book is overall charming, but a very quick read. More of a supplement to other yokai books than a one-stop shop.

62. Mythical Creatures of Maine by Christopher Packard. This is a bit of an odd duck, seeing as it combines multiple monster traditions (fearsome critters, cryptids and Native American lore) under the same set of covers. It’s a pretty typical A-Z monster book, with some good information about obscure fearsome critters and Wabanaki monsters. There are, however, two things about the book I actively dislike, that keep me from strongly recommending it. The art is terrible. The illustrations by Dan Kirchoff are done in a style I can only describe as “fake woodcuts with flat colors” and are ugly (and in some cases, difficult to decipher). The other is that most, but not all of the monsters, get little microfiction epigrams in the character of Burton Marlborough Packard, the author’s great-great grandfather who worked in the Maine lumberwoods. It’s a weird touch, especially since the epigrams are only a sentence or two, and are typically pretty pointless.

63. Mushrooms: A Natural and Cultural History by Nicholas P. Money. There have been a number of books about fungi for the educated lay audience that have been published in the last couple of years. This one doesn’t really stand out from the crowd. The photography is nice, and there’s some coverage of the history of mycology and some of the prominent people in the field. But the book isn’t very well organized, bouncing from one topic to another within the same paragraph, and there are a number of passages that feel more like rants (the chapter on culinary uses for mushrooms, for example).

64. The Lives of Beetles by Arthur V. Evans. This book serves as an introduction to entomology in general, and beetles in particular. It covers core topics like insect body plans, introduces cladistics and covers the evolution, ecology, behavior and conservation of beetles in broad strokes. These strokes feel particularly broad because there are a lot of beetles; much of the book covers groups on the levels of family, which makes it feel a little bit shallow. These are alternated with descriptions of individual species, and this is where the book shines, as it gives good information about both well known species and some pretty obscure ones. The real value of the book, to someone who has been around the entomological block as I have, is in its production values—this book is quite simply gorgeous, and there are lots of nice photos of many different species.

65. Hoax: A History of Deception by Ian Tattersall and Peter Névraumont. This book has an identity crisis. You would think, with a title like that, that the main topic would be about hoaxes and cons. Some of it is. Some of it is about people who believed what they were pushing, even if it wasn’t true (apocalypse prophecies, homeopathy). Some of it is about misconceptions in archaeology, even if nobody was intentionally lying (the Piltdown Man is an actual hoax. Mary Leakey misidentifying rocks as human artifacts isn’t). And the organization is frankly baffling—it’s arranged in chronological order for some part of a topic, regardless of how much of the chapter is actually about when it’s set. For example, a chapter on fixed games is set at 260 BCE, but spends more of its length talking about modern pro wrestling than gladiator matches. The book is a somewhat bizarre reading experience.

[tuulikki]

“We humans have rather reductionist minds, and are beguiled by clear, straightforward explanations.”

—Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for our Human Origins

Damn me if that isn’t the root of so many evils

[ospiteepasseggero]

Listen/purchase: frost forms by observatories (Ian Hawgood and Craig Tattersall)

[the-ephemeral-ethereal]

One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.

from The Human Odyssey by Ian Tattersall 

[voyageetentransitetcompagnie]

Écouter / acheter: frost forms de observatories (Ian Hawgood and Craig Tattersall)

[xtruss]

Researchers Found Proof of Neanderthals Reproducing With Other Species

But the hybrid girl raises more questions than she answers.

— By Neel V. Patel | Published August 24, 2018 | Popular Science | Science — Archaeology

About 90,000 years ago, two people boinked inside of a Russian cave and had a child. Nothing totally unusual about that—except that these two people were from two different species. A new genomic analysis by German researchers shows that a early human bone fragment found in Siberia actually belonged to a female teenager born to a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. The findings, reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday, provide the first known evidence of a direct offspring between these groups, a confirmation of scientists’ strong suspicions that the two species had interbred.

“This is an amazing finding, mainly because there were probably never many of these hybrid individuals around,” says Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus for the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Anthropology, who was not involved with the study. “It’s a bit like winning the lottery.”

Neanderthals and Denisovans are two of the closest extinct relatives of modern humans. Populations of both species roamed through Europe and Asia, and after the discovery of Denisovans in 2010 in the Denisova cave located in Siberia’s Altai Mountains, analysis indicated they and Neanderthals had split from a common ancestor about 390,000 years ago. The two species were both on their way out of existence roughly 40,000 years ago. Scientists were almost certain they interbred with each other as well as with Homo sapien, since the remnants of both species’ DNA lingers in modern humans.

The Denisova cave itself has a strange, windy history. Researchers previously found a Neanderthal toe bone estimated to be about 120,000 years old, so the cave probably changed hands rapidly over the years. Researchers have spent quite a bit of time analyzing the genome of the few Denisovan fossils pulled out from the cave, which was also home to the hybrid’s bone.

Researchers hailing from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology managed to get ahold of the bone fragment for genomic analysis, and they learned it likely came out of a an arm or a leg, from a female teenager who died when she was around 13 years old. That might not sound like a whole lot, but it’s plenty of information to pull out from an shard barely an inch long.

But the team wasn’t done. After an initial round of analysis on the fragment’s mitochondrial DNA confirmed the bone belonged to an early human whose mother was a Neanderthal, scientists started probing the nuclear DNA, which is inherited in equal parts from both mother and father.

Shockingly, the bone presented near equal amounts of both Neanderthal DNA and Denisovan DNA. After confirming the analysis hadn’t been compromised by an error of some sort, the team realized the results meant the father was Denisovan. Moreover, the Denisovan father shared genetic material with another Denisovan woman who lived in the cave thousands of years later (whose pinky was found in 2010). Meanwhile, the Neanderthal mother was most closely related to Neanderthals who lived farther west in modern day Croatia, about 20,000 years after the female hybrid died.

The rarity of this discovery can’t be understated, but that excitement is tempered by the discouraging limits of what we can learn from the bone. According to Tattersall, besides the fact that stumbling upon preserved evidence of an interspecies hybrid is extremely rare, the fragment doesn’t illuminate any new insight into the biology or behavior of Neanderthals and Denisovans, separately or in mixed populations. It’s still an astonishing discovery, but it’s difficult to use such a specimen to really piece together some new understanding of either species.

That’s quite a shame. While we know plenty about the physiology and lives of Neanderthals, we know “practically nothing about the Denisovans, who are basically known only from their DNA,” says Tattersall. “We know they interbred with modern humans, too, but we have no idea what happened to them, except that they disappeared,” he says. “Neanderthals bred with modern humans as well, of course, but the consequences for both species were minor, and the Neanderthals became extinct as recognizably who they were.” The new findings don’t tell us anything about what Denisovans looked like, what they ate, their social habits—nada.

What the study does do is suggest interbreeding between past species of human was probably much more common than previously thought. The Denisova cave and its specimens imply that Neanderthals and Denisovans were living side-by-side, and they might have been forming familial units at high frequencies. This wouldn’t be entirely shocking—the Denisovan father of the hybrid teenager, for example, exhibits genetic signs of having Neanderthal ancestors. But this also further complicates the question of why, if interbreeding was possible and perhaps common, Neanderthal and Denisovan populations remained distinct before they died out.

There are likely other Denisovans-Neanderthal hybrid bones waiting to excavated and studied, and most certainly more Denisovan specimens that could give us a better glimpse of what this species’ biology looked like and how they may have behaved—and who else they might have gotten busy with.

[somebaconlover]

Star Wars The Revenge of the Siths (2005)

Directed by George Lucas

Cinematography by David Tattersall

Starring Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, Nathalie Portman, Samuel L Jackson and Ian McDiarmid

"So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause."

[ausetkmt]

The Atlantic: Why the Florida Fantasy Withstands Reality

Five years ago, after Hurricane Irma pummeled Florida’s Gulf Coast, I rode a boat through the canals of Cape Coral, the “Waterfront Wonderland,” America’s fastest-growing city at the time. It was a sunny day with a gentle breeze and just a few puffs of clouds, so as I pointed to the blown-out lanais and piles of storm debris, my guide, a snowbird named Brian Tattersall, kept teasing me for missing the point of a magical afternoon. He said I sounded like his northern friends who always told him he was crazy to live in the Florida hurricane zone.

“Come on. Does this feel crazy?” he asked, as we drifted past some palm trees. Cape Coral is a low-lying, pancake-flat spit of exposed former swampland, honeycombed by an astonishing 400 miles of drainage ditches disguised as real-estate amenities, but to Tattersall it was a low-tax subtropical Venice where he could dock his 29-foot Sea Fox in the canal behind his house. When I asked if Irma would slow down the city’s population boom, he scoffed: “No way.”

Then he paused to reconsider. Irma had swerved away at the last minute, and even that near miss had made a big mess. “Look, if we get 15 feet of storm surge, holy shit, that would take out Cape Coral.”

Then he paused to re-reconsider. He sipped his beer in the sunlight.

“Eh, even then, no way.”

On Wednesday, Hurricane Ian hit Cape Coral, and although the worst storm surge was probably closer to 11 feet, it inundated almost the entire city and ravaged its infrastructure. The municipal water system has been shut down. The power is still out. It’s too early to assess the damage, but the footage from storm-bludgeoned neighborhoods is scary.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Escaping Hurricane Ian

Ian has brought some new attention to the story I wrote for Politico Magazine after my visit to Cape Coral in 2017, “The Boomtown That Shouldn’t Exist.” The subtitle warned: “One big storm could wipe it off the map.” The gist was that Cape Coral was an unsustainable paradise, and that it also represented the future of the Florida dream in an age of rising seas and extreme weather, “the least natural, worst-planned, craziest-growing piece of an unnatural, badly planned, crazy-growing state.” I wrote that it was fair to ask “what the hell 20 million Americans are doing in a flood-prone, storm-battered peninsula that was once the nation’s last unpopulated frontier,” because the bill for decades of Florida lies, greed, and myopia would eventually come due.

Now it has, with Ian expected to displace Irma as Florida’s costliest storm. I’m sad for the victims. I’m angry at the state’s venal and shortsighted politicians. But I’m also worried about the future, because I suspect Brian Tattersall was right. Once the debris gets cleared, people will keep flocking to Cape Coral, and to Florida. And Mother Nature will still bat last.

The tragedy of Ian ought to help more Floridians understand the consequences of environmental destruction, perfunctory planning, and climate denial. I’ve been banging my spoon on my high chair about humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with nature in Florida ever since I wrote a book about it in 2006; I even wrote a premature requiem for the state before Irma. But the left-leaning social-media warriors who have used my work to chide Floridians for living in harm’s way, aside from being obnoxious and heartless, have missed half my point.

After all, I’m a Floridian in harm’s way too. The allure of the Sunshine State is not a myth invented by Governor Ron DeSantis. It’s true that our disasters would be less disastrous if more people understood why this unsustainable paradise is unsustainable, but our politics might be less disastrous if more people understood why it still feels like paradise.

I used Cape Coral as my Exhibit A because it’s a microcosm of Florida’s follies: a vulnerable peninsula jutting off the vulnerable peninsula, an extreme example of an unsustainable paradise built with lies on layaway. Maybe it’s unnecessary to rehash the dark side of the Florida dream while Ian is still a present-tense catastrophe, but because this state has a flair for forgetting after storms pass, here’s a quick recap.

In its natural state, most of Florida was such a soggy mush of low-lying marshes that mapmakers couldn’t decide whether to draw it as land or water. The Spaniards who arrived in the 16th century told their king the peninsula was “liable to overflow, and of no use,” and white people mostly stayed away until the U.S. Army chased the Seminole Indians into the Everglades in the 19th century. The soldiers forced to slog through its mosquito-infested bogs described it as a “hideous,” “diabolical,” “repulsive,” “pestilential,” “God-abandoned” hellhole.

The story of Florida in the 20th century is about dreamers and schemers trying to get rid of all that water and drain the swamp. Eventually, they mostly succeeded, transforming a remote wilderness into a sprawling megalopolis, replacing millions of acres of wetlands with strip malls and golf courses and sprawling subdivisions, building the Palmetto and Sawgrass Expressways where palmettos and sawgrass used to be. But their war on nature had brutal environmental costs. They wiped out half the Everglades and discombobulated the other half. They destroyed mangrove swamps and other natural flood protections. They threw nature out of whack, which is why Florida routinely yo-yos between structural droughts and vicious floods, and why so many of its bays and lakes and reefs and aquifers are collapsing.

Read: When escaping a hurricane means risking jail

Cape Coral is Florida on steroids, a comically artificial landscape featuring seven perfectly rectangular man-made islands and eight perfectly square man-made lakes. It was built by two shady brothers who made their fortunes selling scammy anti-baldness tonics, then used their talent for flimflam to sell inaccessible swampland to suckers. They didn’t bother to build sewers or parks or other infrastructure, except all those eco-destructive plumbing canals designed to dry out the floodplain and create waterfront property along their banks. It was just a real-estate play, a quarter acre in middle-class heaven for $20 down and $20 a month, and the suckers bought it, even after the hucksters got busted for fraud.

Environmental destruction is bad, especially for a state whose natural resources are its best selling point, and it’s a shame that the drive to tame nature that carved Cape Coral out of a swamp has been so prevalent in Florida. Fraud is also bad, and also synonymous with a state whose real-estate market has been a punch line for a century. “You can even get stucco,” the land-swindler played by Groucho Marx quipped in Cocoanuts. “Oh, how you can get stuck-oh!”

But it’s important to remember that Cape Coral’s hucksters and suckers were ultimately right. Cape Coral now has 200,000 residents. It’s got no colleges, tourist attractions, or major industries—its top employers are its government, hospital, and supermarkets—but not only is it still one of America’s fastest-growing cities, it’s projected to remain in the top five for decades to come. It’s a triumph of Lies That Came True, which was the title of a 1983 memoir by a Cape Coral pioneer, and could be the state motto.

For too long, too much of the Florida economy has been an ecological Ponzi scheme that depends on bringing in 1,000 new residents a day, including the mortgage brokers and drywall installers and landscapers whose livelihoods depend on bringing 1,000 more new residents the next day. There’s no culture of long-term planning or investing, no ethic of limits or responsibility or risk management. Florida has always been about now, mine, more.

That’s all bad, too, and this week, Mother Nature registered an objection. But that doesn’t mean we’ll learn our lesson.

One thing I’ve learned in my years of whining about Florida’s unsustainable trajectory in the climate era is that most Floridians don’t care. Some certainly do, including some ordinary citizens who get radicalized when their sparkling estuary gets overrun by foul-smelling guacamole glop or they can’t breathe at the beach. But most don’t, especially if they’re new to Florida, especially if they’re newly retired to Florida. They’re here to enjoy the warm weather in a state with no income tax, not to build a better tomorrow for future generations.

I’m looking out my window right now at another beautiful sunny day in South Florida. I never really understood until I moved here that winter was optional. Some people don’t care for the heat and humidity, especially now that climate change is ratcheting up the heat, and it’s no fun to be in the path of a deadly hurricane. Usually, though, we’re not. Usually, it’s just nice. It’s certainly way nicer than Boston or Brooklyn, or Michigan or Minnesota, in the winter.

Read: Brokering the American dream

That’s why people keep coming, and it’s interesting to see where they’re going. America’s fastest-growing metro over the past decade was not Cape Coral but the Villages, the ultra-Republican retirement community in Central Florida. In 2016, nine of the 20 fastest-growing metros were in Florida, and eight of them voted for Donald Trump. That trend explains why Florida, long considered the ultimate swing state, is now a Republican state.

The day after DeSantis was first sworn into Congress in 2013, he voted against federal aid for the victims of Superstorm Sandy. Now he’s pushing for federal aid for the victims of Ian, which is a very Florida form of hypocrisy. And DeSantis has risen to national prominence behind a very Florida form of now-mine-more messaging, proclaiming this the “free state” of Florida, where you don’t have to worry about public-health scolds telling you to wear a mask or get a vaccine, or pointy-headed planners telling you where to build your house or when to water your lawn. He’s selling irresponsibility as a virtue. Worrying about consequences is for losers.

Yes, sometimes the bill comes due. But it’s not clear to what extent the people of Florida, other than the storm’s immediate victims, will have to pay it. My insurer went bankrupt last month, one of six to go under in Florida this year, and the state took over my policy, as it surely did for thousands of Floridians who will now file claims. But the Republican leaders who have assumed for the past quarter century that the feds will bail us out after the Big One were probably right. We’ve gotten too big to fail.

I want to be clear: This is all bad, and Florida doesn’t have to be like this. I ended my Cape Coral story with a trip to Babcock Ranch, a new solar-powered, smart-growth, flood-protected community a half-hour inland that was conceived as Florida’s sustainable city of the future. I checked in with the developer, Syd Kitson, after Babcock took a direct hit from Ian, and he had good news: “The power and internet never went off, no flooding and minimal damage,” Kitson wrote. “It’s everything you and I talked about several years ago.”

But the way things ought to be is not always the way things are. Sunshine, low taxes, and freedom from consequences can be a compelling vision, especially for the old and cold, and it’s working for Florida’s Republicans just as it worked for Cape Coral’s developers. The next wave of newcomers won’t let concerns about boil-water orders or insurance crises deter them. The Florida growth machine has outlasted a lot of killer storms, and it will outlast this one too. We ignored what was coming, and we’ll forget what came.

It would be nice if Cape Coral and the rest of the Gulf Coast could, to borrow a phrase from national Democrats, build back better. But nothing will stop it from building back.

[todaytrendsupdate]

YOR vs HAM Dream11 Winning Team Prediction - English Test County Championship Match 91

YOR vs HAM Dream11 Winning Team Prediction – English Test County Championship Match 91

YOR vs HAM English Test County Championship Match 91 Captain and Vice-Captain Choices: Captain – Keith Barker, Jonathan Tattersall Vice-Captain – Adam Lyth, Liam Dawson Suggested Playing XI No.1 for YOR vs HAM Dream11 Team: Keeper – Jonathan Tattersall Batsmen – James Vince, Adam Lyth (VC), Nick Gubbins All-rounders – Liam Dawson, Ian Holland, Keith Barker (C), Jordan Thompson Bowlers…

[carolap53]

How Are We Made in God’s Image? That humans are made in the image of God is one of the most important Biblical revelations for Christians — and it is also one that has been viciously attacked by those outside the faith. It’s true that the endless murders, rapes, assaults, genocides and other forms of violence and cruelty in our world seem to taunt us: How could humans be created in the image of God when we commit such evil acts? How do we explain wars and abuse if we share the same characteristics as God himself? Some people even claim that while we may be more sophisticated and advanced than the rest of the animal kingdom, our ultimate value is no greater than that of any creature, since we’ve all evolved naturalistically and without any divine imprint.

Imago Dei means “the image of God.” Ultimately, this phrase refers to two things: the characteristics of the human spirit and our ability to know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil.

Our human spirit provides evidence that God’s traits — his love, justice and freedom — are alive in us. Human nature is utterly without peer on earth. As Dr. Ian Tattersall says, “Homo sapiens is not simply an improved version of its ancestors — it’s a new concept.” At the most basic level of this nature is our self-realization, grounded in our self-consciousness, our ability to reason, and our emotions, such as anger and love. Our consciousness enables us to see that we have inherent value apart from our utility or function.

Another quality we share with God is the moral ability to recognize good and evil, which God exemplified through Adam and Eve. We can therefore act freely in a morally good or evil way. We can choose either to reflect the moral image of God or to reject it, but either way, the ability to make the choice reveals our underlying similarity to our Creator.

It cannot be overstated just how different humans are from the rest of creation. The vast chasms separating consciousness from unconsciousness and morality from amorality speak to the strong evidence that we are indeed made in the image of God.

Lee Strobel

[nevinslibrary]

Totally Random Non-Fiction Tuesday

As the author said near the end of the book, "When it comes to Homo Sapiens, it seems nothing is simple". And that is even sort of an understatement when it comes to this book.

Basically this book is a history of what came before us Homo Sapien Sapiens on Earth (well, as far as human like people at least). He started with our predecessors in the trees and then just went chronogloically up through time from there. I also thought that he did really well explaining how the ‘missing link’ sort of thinking, that we came from one type, who came from another type, etc. etc. had been debunked and was now thought to be wrong.

I also liked the Neanderthal stuff in there too. I wish we knew more about how we and the Neanderthals interacted. (And I hope that people keep looking/finding that stuff).

Honestly, this was a very Tardis like book. When you look at it, it’s not exactly humongous dimensions, but, like some of the Astronomy books that I’ve read, it was definitely bigger (or denser) on the inside than the outside.

You may like this book If you Liked: Paleofantasy by M. Zuk, Neanderthal Man by Svante Paabo, or The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton

Masters of the Planet by Ian Tattersall

[facesofcinema]

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)

[stillsmybeatingheart]

[rottenmaneditions]

OUT NOW!!

The Humble Seaman 120 5x5 [RTE/LP003] 

Craig Tattersall & Bill Seaman project!

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Written & Recorded by Craig Tattersall & Bill Seaman 

Art Cover Design, Photographs & Analog Printed by Meneh Peh 

Darkroom Work by Craig Tattersall 

Mastered by Ian Hawgood

·DIGITAL 

·STANDARD LP (100 copies) 

 ·COLLECTOR EDITION "NEGATIVE JACKET"[Analog Printed/ Limited Edition (15 copies) ] 

 · "120 5x5 ARTWORKS" [Analog Printed (25)] 

Get your copy at: 

https://rottenmaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/120-5x5