Baobab: Africa's face

How do you communicate to Western world readers the uncivilized, nature-controlled land that is Africa. If your story includes an African setting, you must get that untamed, mysterious feel across or you lose credibility.

Here are a few books you can read that will drench you in the scents and colors of Africa:

• In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall (or any writing by Jane Goodall)
• Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey (about the discovery of Lucy, but filled with the smells of the habitat)
• Letters from the Field 1925-1975 by Margaret Mead (many on Africa, and some on other world locations in which she researched)
• The Forest People by Colin Turnbull (about the BaMbuti Pygmies and their environ)
• The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen (about the African Cradle of Mankind)
• The Land’s Wild Music by Mark Tredinnick (translates the visual pictures of Africa to the other senses)
• The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior by Tepilit Ole Saitoti (the African habitat of the Maasai)
• Bunyoro: An African Kingdom by John Beattie (case study based in Uganda)

Here’s a list of descriptions, in part drawn from these books:

• Flat, dry, and monotonous, a seemingly limitless scrub waste without landmarks or water or other relief
• because of the time and the approaching rain
• followed small antelope trails instead of the larger buffalo trails
• Oxbow lake
• Narrow rocky defile
• Beneath the jutting stone ledge, she sat hunched into a ball, knees tight against her chest, her damp clothes about her.
• Olduvai appeared like a dark rift
• Along its length, cottonwoods had sprung up; young trees little more than twice a man’s height.
• Thick grass had carpeted the narrow strip
• distant harsh mountains composed of granite, covered with thorny shrubs and acacia trees
• mountains, thrusting spires of naked rock into the heavens so high that you would believe the very sky was pierced
• thickly scented spruce branches clutched at his clothes, slapped against his chest and shredded his hand
• thick forest that carpeted the uplands
• dust was everywhere—on leaves, branches, even on my teeth and lips
• Easing over humps and trenches, potholes and stone rivers, bashing through the trees where a track is blocked, the bucking climbs up steep eroded banks
• the cloud mist lifted, gradually came the dull patches of red glowing far beyond the cliffs. Two active volcanoes
• mouth of a thick sulfurous stream
• watch the river to see the coiling of its muscular currents, catch the shimmering of waves that caught the sunlight like scales
• swallowed up by the jungle
• dry creek bed
• bounded on three sides by basalt outcrops and partially screened by brush
• followed the ridge down toward a patch of grass
• back to a rotting log that some long-forgotten flood had deposited crossways on the spit
• Cracks like hardweed through a broken sidewalk
• Gordian knot of …
• he saw  its fields, steppes, villages and towns, all bleached white by the moon and bright stars.
• the gallery forests of river red gum, various grasses, that lined the channels. Maybe a low-lying area where runoff from high ground collected after rain. Sometimes dense stands of mulga (acacia) woodland would grow there, where water was easiest to find in a desert.

Johanson: Pounder: 9:32 PMJohanson: 9:33 PM Pounder: :-|9:34 PM Johanson: 9:35 PM Pounder: Johanson: :ODOH!9:38 PM Pounder: PHAIL!I WIN!9:39 PMJohanson: WHATEVS!!!!!Pounder: PHAIL!Johanson: NOT!!!!!!!!Pounder: EVS?Johanson: Yeah9:41 PM Pounder: No, that’s a fail

Pounder: I was watching a NASA video earlier11:05 PMAnd the commander, in his orange suit, had a FREAK’N huge butt!I mean, it stuck out from his body what looked like half a footSomeone better slap a wide load sign on that thing, I mean REALLYJohanson: Right?11:07 PM Pounder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUzfkOWxjX8Skip to about 3:30The astronaut closest to the camera11:09 PM Johanson: HOLY….!Pounder: I NO RITE?!Johanson: I’m lol’ing right nowPounder: That might not actually be his butt, but STILLJohanson: I know11:10 PMPounder: It just hangs out there like it’s saying “HEY WORLD! LOOK AT ME!”

—————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Pounder: B.J. Upton has a homer and a triple so far10:51 PM Johanson: Yeah?Pounder: YeahJohanson: Obama has a country in poverty so farPounder: BURN!!!!!Johanson: BURN!We’re so hard on that guyYou know these chats are monitored by the government?10:52 PM They probably don’t watch us but they could.If they wanted to.And we would have no idea.Hi, Mr. Government official!Pounder: Dude, there’s probably HUNDREDS of chats between teenage boys burning the president

This post needs a little bit of set-up. Johanson had just come home from a party, after jamming with some kids. Pounder happened to be engaged in a very fierce playing of Boxed In on his iPod Touch.

Johanson: I have a new favorite instrument That I’m SO gonna buy one of11:44 PMWanna know what it is?11:47 PMPounder: Sure, why not Johanson: Bass guitar Pounder: Cool! My cousin plays one Level 38 Johanson: He’s a level 38 bass guitarist!?11:48 PM Didn’t know there were levels… 11:49 PM Pounder: … You suck (inhale vigorously)Johanson: 11:52 PM Pounder: Dangit!11:53 PM brbJohanson: Dude, I’m pretty sure Flea would be, like, a level 142 bass guitarist.

Johanson: I’ve been wearing these socks for, like, two weeks They smell awful11:03 PM Pounder: lol …Johanson: Like… I’ll smell somethin’, it’ll be sick smelling, and I’ll know it’s my socks.Pounder: That’s pretty badJohanson: These aren’t even my socksThey’re my dads

Next up was Don Johanson, was is perhaps best known for his part in the discovery of “Lucy,” or, to get all Latin and scientific-like, some fossilized bones from a female of the hominid species  Australopithecus afarensis. Though Johanson has nothing to do with the traveling exhibit, I’ll mention that Lucy will be coming to a few select museums in our fair country before too long.  It will be quite a privilege to see her remains, rather than the casts that are normally on display.  Even Ethiopia rarely lets her out of her box, out of concerns for both security and the fragile state of her 3 to 4 million year-old bones.  (Inset lame osteoporosis joke here).  Johanson is the founder of the Institute for Human Origins, which was originally located at Berkeley, but his since been moved to Arizona State University.

Despite his considerable credentials and experience, it is hard not to escape the feeling that Johanson is one lucky guy.  The tectonic movements under the Great Rift Valley in Africa helps to push long-buried fossils to the surface in our time.  The erosion of the topsoil leaves fossils at our near the surface.  It is a great place to look, but it is also a big place to look.  Johanson relates that it was really on a hunch that they re-visited the site where Lucy was ultimately found.  They had been there before and it was the end of a long day, but it was the right time on the right day.  As Johanson was taking notes and completing paperwork, Tom Gray, has grad student coaxed him away for another look around.   Something caught the corner of Johanson’s eye, something glimmering nearby.  It was a fossil, immediately recognizable to Johanson as something belonging to a hominid.   And now Johanson is perhaps the most famous paleoanthropologist of all time.  And Tom Gray?  Who’s that?

Johanson’s presentation was brief, logical and gave the impression of being well rehearsed.  He had clearly been asked to give this talk countless times before in countless universities and venues all over the world.  Today, he would give it right at home in Tempe, in front of an audience no doubt more familiar with his work than others.  You know that intangible quality that a room for of people has when you’re there that some body refer to as a “vibe?”   I could watch this on video or listen to it on tape and it would seem the same as any other that day, but the vibe was not there for him.  Maybe it is mid-morning and time for a coffee break. Maybe it was sinking in that Professor  Hawking was too sick to make his presentation in person (stupid $125 ticket for a session without the person I most wanted to see!) Maybe too many people there had seen and heard it all before.  I cannot say, but I will say that I was largely unaffected by the vibe.  Let’s face it, Lucy is Cool!

Johanson began with a brief note about Darwin and Human Origins.  It seems that some of the resistance to Darwin’s ideas were due to something I had not previously considered–Eurocentrism.  Even after Evolution, even that to and of humans began to catch on, Darwin & Huxley faced considerable push-back at the notion that most of our ancestors lived in Africa. The horror!  It seemed to Darwin that homology would dictate that similar creatures would share a common, recent (in evolutionary terms) ancestor.  If the critters that look the most like us are from Africa, we must be, too. So far, the fossil record seems to bear that out.

It is not just the fossils, but the behavior of the closest living relatives that intrigued Darwin when he wrote Descent of Man. The Great Apes might have smaller brains, but they show remarkably similar activities and individuals and groups.  They all make rudimentary tools, they teach their young how to perform complex tasks rather than relying on instinct alone and they show affection not only to one another, but for other species as well.

In Johanson’s view and in friendly bold letters “There is no question of common ancestry!” Johanson emphasizes common ancestory.  This does not mean that we descended from any of the Great Apes currently occupying our planet, but rather that we and the apes have an extinct relative in common. Darwin knew evolution was a tree, not a straight line.  There are many branches, most of which suffer nature’s pruning and die off.  Blessedly, we have not died off–yet!  And fortunately for science, the Hadar valley has given us a rich collection of evidence for our heritage, yielding 400 specimens so far.  Political issues, war, famine and other problems have made further recovery difficult, but no doubt there is still much to discover.

Johanson switches gears and talks a little more about Lucy.  He dates her remains at about 3.2 Million years, and based on her proportions, guesses that she stood about 3.5 feet tall. Her brain was about 400cc, and the sciatic curve in his spine shows clear signs of bipedalism.  She shows signs of being a link (not THE missing link, there is no such thing!) with long ape-like arms but short legs that appear to be effective in for standing upright. Johanson states that for the time being, Lucy is the data point for hominid fossils.  Everything that has been found afterward has been compared to her.  No doubt a more complete specimen is out there waiting to be found. I wonder who will find him? Will it be deliberate or will a local simply stumble upon him?  Clearly there is much to learn and discover.  What an awesome privilege to live in such an age of discovery.  I hope we are not so put-off by the notion of primitive ancestry or so driven to look for something more exotic, like space aliens to lose sight of our past.

Kenneth R. Miller, a noted author, biologist, professor (and Christian) thinks God wants us to discover His creation, past & present, as the Bible testifies that God can be known but His Work as well as his Word. I tend to agree.  The first two sessions were enormously informative and there was much more to come.  Next up–Brian Greene, the wacky String Theory Guy.  Eleven or more dimensions? A completely interconnected universe?  The mind boggles!

En la red a millones de gif animados interesante, hacerlos ya se está convirtiendo hasta en una especie de arte.

Pero este en particular es hipnotizante, lo estoy publicando aquí en contra de mi voluntad, mis ojos me obligan a hacerlo.

via Only Dead Fish

Hoy stereogum anuncia la el nuevo delito de Scarlett Johanson. Como dicen en indiespot, después de atreverse a destrozar a Tom Waits, la femme fatale de Allen se lanza ahora con una de Jeff Buckley. No diré nada sobre la versión salvo que es tan mala como las que hizo de Waits. Y para demostrar que Jeff Buckely es versionable desde el respeto y la admiración, desde el talento y el la emotividad, dejo ese video de The Silverfish, un tipo que cuelga en youtube versiones bien hechas. Es una pena que su banda no suene tan bien. Pero eso, toma nota, rubia.