Zombies in Austin Tx, Run! [Saturday Morning Awesome, special report]

Hackers warn Austin drivers about zombie attack. No, -- really. Check this link from KXAN.com for more.



Enjoy awesome, harmless dangerous pranks by inspired hackers,

Bp

How to spot a lie

Pretty tempting skill to have, knowing when someone's lying to you. But do we, really, want to know how often we're lied to? I'll leave the conundrum to you.

Here is the first article, which focuses on body language and emotionality.

Here is the second article, which focuses on eye movement.

Enjoy picking up new skills with which to lose friends and influence your worldview,

Bp

[graphic credit in linked article]

Holder recommended for Attorney General

Let me rephrase the title, "The Guy who stated Unequivocally, under oath, that Waterboarding Is Torture, recommended for Attorney General by Senate, who apparently have recently grown a Spine."

For more information, click here.

Enjoy watching a sinking ship beginning to slow the water its taking on,

Bp

[photo credit in linked article]

The Schmidt Pain Index

[reprinted from The Futility Closet]

After he'd been stung by almost everything, entomologist Justin O. Schmidt created the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a four-point scale comparing the overall pain of insect stings:

* 1.0 - Sweat bee: "Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm."
* 1.2 - Fire ant: "Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch."
* 1.8 - Bullhorn acacia ant: "A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek."
* 2.0 - Bald-faced hornet: "Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door."
* 2.0 - Yellowjacket: "Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue."
* 3.0 - Red harvester ant: "Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail."
* 3.0 - Paper wasp: "Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut."
* 4.0 - Pepsis wasp: "Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream)."
* 4.0+ - Bullet ant: "Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel."

His descriptions crack me up. Note -- he rates stings only from the (very stingy) Hymenoptera order of insects -- bees, wasps, ants.

After running into that post, I had to know more about this guy and his obsession with poisonous insects.

Here is a great Discover Magazine article about him and his work. And a teaser quote:

One morning not long ago, an American entomologist named Justin Schmidt was making his way up the winding road to the Monteverde cloud forest in Costa Rica when he spotted Parachartergus fraternus, social wasps known both for the sculptured architecture of their hives and the ferocity with which they defend them. This hive was 10 feet up a tree, and the tree angled out from an eroded bank over a gorge. Schmidt, who specializes in the study of stinging insects, got out a plastic garbage bag and shinnied up to bag the hive.
"There's always a few that get out," he says, so he took the precaution of putting on his beekeeper's veil. Undeterred, the angry wasps charged his face, scootched their hind ends underneath their bodies in midair, and, from a range of four inches, squirted venom through the veil straight into his eyes. "There I was, 10 feet up a tree, holding a bag of live wasps in one hand, basically blinded with pain."

Enjoy not being this guy,

Bp

[first image courtesy of wikimedia commons, 2nd image credit in linked article]

Built Dodge Tough

I'm just sayin'



Enjoy opening up your mind, or somesuch,

Bp

[via artistmike blog]

Little Dudes: Synchiropus spendidus, the Mandarin Goby

And here is the #1 reason I've wanted a saltwater fish tank. The Mandarin Goby. You can check out the wiki on it, but mostly I just had to post this awesome photo.




Enjoy the sometimes flagrant beauty of nature,

Bp

[photo via wiki commons, God love 'em]

GOP trying to strongarm Holder into not prosecuting over torture

From Truthout.org article "Republican Senators Resort to Extortion on Holder Nomination":

Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have asked Eric Holder to make a commitment, before he is even confirmed, that he will not prosecute any Bush Administration officials for their involvement in acts of torture during the last administration.

Click Here for full article.

Look at the slime rising to the surface,

Bp

[photo credit in linked article]

You get a Sunday post after all: Altered Pool

I can't stop laughing at this, I thought I'd share.



Enjoy,

Bp

Saturday Morning Awesome: This adventure brought to you by...

[remember you can click for a bigger version if its hard to read]



Kind regards to Buttersafe and Stumbleupon for bringing this to my, and therefore your, attention.

For the record: I support Sam Adams

I'm probably ruining any chance of certain types of jobs by these "for the record" posts. But, I don't care.

For the record, I could give two shits about Sam Adams having consensual sex with an adult who is younger than he is. My first serious lover was nearly 10 years older than I was, and our first date was on my 18th birthday too -- I understand Sam.

Although it is messy and "looks bad," I could also give two shits about him lying about it. *insert collective gasp here*

The sanctimonious nature of the discussion about this in local media takes my breath away. OF COURSE he lied about it, he is a member of a very oppressed and beaten-down minority that is vilified and hated for doing exactly what he was accused of doing -- having sex with a man. OF COURSE his knee-jerk reaction was to try and cover it up. He knew what was coming down the pike if he didn't.

It was the wrong decision. Have you ever made wrong decisions? He's now got to have the guts to stand up and admit this, and keep going to work. There's a character builder for you. He survives that emotional shitstorm, and he'll be a stronger man for it. I want strong, tempered men in politics instead of these fake, showboating blowhards we tend to get.

People who are naive enough to think that politicians don't lie on a daily basis stupefy me. Hell, there are weeks when I lie on a daily basis -- just to get out of uncomfortable social circumstances. Yes, I work hard not to have to live that way, but shit happens.

Don't let the sanctimonious, know-it-all nature of the current herd mentality tell you how to think. Make up your own mind about Sam Adams, and when you do, think about throwing the first stone.

Here is Dan Savage giving his words on the issue:



Enjoy changing the way fear-based politics works by not buying in,

Bp

Shift Happens video, revised 2008 edition

A meditation on the exponential increase in novelty our world is presenting us. Some very interesting statistics here for your contemplation. [sorry about the "music" -- sometimes we have to make sacrifices to learn]



Enjoy even attempting to keep up to date,

Bp

[via my Mom]

Hammer quote from Abraham Maslow

"When the only tool you own is a hammer,
every problem begins to resemble a nail."


Abraham Maslow


[via Emory University]

Teaching creativity is as important as teaching literacy

This is a video of Sir Ken Robinson's presentation at the excellent TED Talks series, in which he makes the case that we are educating creativity out of people. His basic premise is that public education needs to prioritize creativity as much as it prioritizes left-brain endeavors. He makes an eloquent and compelling argument.

It is very much worth your time.

YGTLTO: Vice Presidential Handlers Lure Cheney into Traveling Crate

Simply Genius. I'll let The Onion speak for itself:

WASHINGTON—A team of nine specially trained handlers have successfully lured outgoing vice president Dick Cheney into a reinforced steel traveling crate in order to transport him back to his permanent enclosure in Casper, WY, official sources reported Monday. "He's a smart one. Once he sees the crate, he gets pretty nippy, but we've learned a few tricks over the years," chief VP wrangler Ted Irving breathlessly said while applying pressure to a deep gash on his forearm. "If we break a rabbit's legs and throw it in there, he will eventually go in to finish it off. Doesn't work with dead rabbits, though. Cheney only eats what he kills." Irving said that the latest vice presidential relocation went much more smoothly than September's diplomatic trip to Georgia, which was delayed for several hours after Cheney mauled three secret service agents and escaped inside the White House walls.

Enjoy the truth stated in creative ways,

Bp

Never, ever, talk to the police without a lawyer

You do know you never, ever, talk to the police without a lawyer present, right? You don't -- ever. Once you watch the two gentlemen in the videos below give their presentations, you won't question it.

We have a bit of a C.S.I. marathon going on in our house right now. At one point, T. started deconstructing the show, and talking about the messages implicit in it (this type of rough treatment is standard procedure for most media that makes it into our house). For instance, people are assumed guilty until proven innocent, over and over again. Confessions are also par for the course. And if someone "lawyers up" and refuses to talk, it's almost always a sign that they have been cornered and are about to be exposed as guilty. In the real world, all it means is that you have your head screwed on straight.


The Lawyer explains:


The Cop corroborates:


Enjoy being gently reminded of your rights and proper conduct in a stressful situation,

Bp

[via Brasscheck TV]

Victory gardens, the white house lawn, and eattheview.org

A young friend of mine turned me on to the video below. It is a quick overview of a man who supports converting some of the white house lawn into a vegetable garden putting his money where his mouth is. He puts a victory garden on his own front lawn. The video has some good quotes and information, for instance at one point in time (WWII) over 20 million Americans had victory gardens and produced 40% of America's fresh food.

The video, in turn, led me to the Eat The View homepage. This is the web base of operations for folks who are encouraging the incoming administration to do something productive with a section of the White House Lawn. There are some great links, including a history of the lawn and past presidents' relationship to gardens, vegetables, and food. This isn't the first time a scheme like this has been hatched. There is also, of course, a petition to sign as well.



If you are enthused with the Victory Garden idea, here are a few more links:

Maybe Victory Gardens can save the U.S. again

San Francisco's Victory Garden

The Victory Garden wiki entry

Enjoy being that much more self sufficient, and cutting down waste, and producing tasty food that only a home garden can provide,

Bp

[via the lovely Fionna]

Tasmanian Marsupial Wolf

One of the cooler animals I've encountered lately on the intartubes. The Tasmanian Marsupial Wolf is also known as a Thylacine. I prefer the longer, prosaic name, as Thylacine sounds like blood pressure medication to me.

I found this awesome site from the Australian National Museum all about the Marsupial Wolf. It has actual photographs (pretty damned rare) of the now-extinct animal, as well as pages and pages of information.

Enjoy learning about some of our relations that are no longer with us,

Bp

Saturday Morning Awesome -- Stevie Wonder "You Haven't Done Nothin'

You don't hear much outspokenly political music on the radio nowadays, not on popular radio, anyway. This song was all over the charts in its day, Stevie wrote it for Nixon. I think it's entirely appropriate to play for the departing Dubya. If you really want to bring it home, here are the lyrics. This Current.com post has a few other blatantly political songs, and many of them much newer than Stevie's masterwork below. But, you probably don't have to listen to all of them, as I expect I'll be poaching that post for a while and posting samples here.

Thanks to my Ex-Pat Uncle Ted for suggesting I look up this song. Perfect post for the Saturday Morning Awesome.



Enjoy the power of good music to bring home a point,

Bp

A rundown of the farewell speech

I couldn't bring myself to watch this speech. It's historic, but I just couldn't do it. I would have been spitting broken glass by the end. So, here is William Rivers Pitt, writing for Truthout.org to give you the blow by blow. Click the teaser quote for the jump:

Of course, of course, of course, it was a ridiculous speech. Preposterous. The worst one of all, and boy howdy, that is saying something. This, after all, was the man who gave us "Bring it on" and "Mission Accomplished," and who once was unable to think of any mistakes he might have made. Each of these was a legitimate phenomenon in every respect, to be sure, but the spectacle on Thursday night bent the definition of "absurd" into bold new shapes.

Enjoy basking in his gone-ness,

Bp

High voltage line inspector -- via helicopter

I dig this guy's Wilfred Brimley voice, the video quality on this short clip is great, and the subject matter is interesting. But in the end, it makes me want to heave. It's not the heights, it's the voltage. I've been hit so many times in the course of my career I couldn't count them all, and it just makes your gut churn. Even a little jolt. Just watching the arcs come off of this guys test stick made me queasy.

High Voltage Cable Inspection
by monnotman

Enjoy not doing this guy's job, as much as he digs it,

Bp

[via Butternutjelly]

Michael Pollan live at the Schnitz

The Wife and I saw Michael Pollan speak at The Schnitz last night, and really enjoyed it.

As I was trying to describe the talk to T. when we got home, it was almost Pollan's attitude more than the information that I appreciated the most. He's of course very well read about his subject matter (for those of you who haven't heard of him, the subject matter is food, and all the myriad implications around our decisions about food), but he doesn't present at all as someone defeated by the enormity of some of the problems he's exposing. He very much conveyed the sense that any of the problems lined out during the talk were not too large to deal with, they were conceptually graspable, and very much available for positive change.

His positivism wasn't pie-in-the-sky, either. He was realistic in his assessment about, for instance, the strength of the agri business lobby in Washington and its effect on the policy decisions of the Obama administration. But then turned around and gave examples of public movements and outcry creating the political will to get large tasks done.

Here is a video in which Pollan covers some of the same subject matter as he did last night at the Authors@Google series of lectures. Maybe you have the time to sit down with him for a bit, I think it's worth it.



Enjoy learning and being inspired about the important things,

Bp

George the Ginormous Lobster set free

I'll let CNN speak for itself:

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A giant lobster named George escaped a dinner-table fate and was released Saturday into the Atlantic Ocean after a New York seafood restaurant granted him his freedom, according to a statement from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

The lobster, which PETA said was 140 years old and weighed 20 pounds, had been confined to a tank at City Crab and Seafood restaurant in Manhattan when two customers alerted the animal group.

The PETA statement did not say how the extraordinary age estimate was determined, but restaurant manager Keith Valenti told CNN that lobsters can grow a pound every seven to 10 years, and he put George's weight at 18 to 20 pounds.

"I've been here for 12 years, and that's the biggest lobster I've ever seen," Valenti said.

He said the lobster had been "sitting in the restaurant's tank and acting as a sort of mascot," but when PETA got involved and requested the release, it "seemed like the right thing to do."

Enjoy knowing one of the big bugs is now crawling around on the ocean floor again,

Bp

[via Estu, photo credit in linked article]

Health care costs, Canada (and the World) Vs. U.S.

Here is a telling illustration with some text from the Health Insurance 2008 web page.

As health costs shoot into the stratosphere, the U.S. has turned to Canada for a steady supply of low-cost drugs and medical care. Overall, medical tourism -- in which U.S. citizens travel to other countries simply for cheap care -- doubled over the course of one year (from 2006-2007).
The Key Issue? Cost.

The key issue was cost. And the perfect illustration is a comparison with Canada. Our neighbors to the north have been able to spend the same amount of money administering free, universal coverage to its 27 million citizens as the single region of New England in the U.S. (which has a meager population of 2.5 million).

Obviously, costs have gone haywire. Have the added costs provided more quality in health care? Or are these costs simply attributable to mismanagement and inefficiencies. Expect this issue to come up more during this year's election coverage.

For grins, here is another illustration from the UC Atlas of Global Inequality:




Enjoy seeing at least part of the situation laid out clearly,

Bp

[via Uncle Ted]

Beyond Awesome: Galloway eats Sky News for lunch over Israeli aggression

First off -- Sky News is the Murdoch owned news agency in Britian, meaning Sky news = Fox news. Secondly, the last few seconds of this video are even more amazing than the beginning is. This guy so soundly kicks the propaganda surrounding Israel in the teeth, he kicks the propagandist and the whole network as well. It's amazing they ever let him on television at all.

That he does all of this with a Scottish accent just puts this video right out of the park.



Oh, and did you see that he's a MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT. How awesome is that!?

We have some of that caliber on this side of the pond -- Marcy Kaptur, for instance (who I would still kiss, right on the lips, given any opportunity). But, they're few and far between.

Enjoy the truth, even if you have to go over seas to find it,

Bp

[via my faithful Canukistani operative "Yuri," from Martini Lahoud's blog]

Saturday Morning Awesome -- Feist on Sesame Street

That song was made for S Street, it was bound to happen.



Enjoy the awesomeness,

Bp

Spinner shark parties near a surfer

In our house, animal behaviors that are hard to see as anything but the animal having a good time are entitled "fucking-about behavior." Now although I know this spinning vertical leap that the Spinner shark performs is supposed to be directly related to feeding on schooling fish -- it seriously looks like fucking-about behavior to me. [For the geekier set, here is a more extensive link with Spinner shark info]

Maybe it's both. "Woohoo, I just scored tons of grub! Time to dance!"

Anyway, the video below captures a dandy spin so I thought I'd share it. The proximity to the surfer is probably of interest to some as well.


Surfing with Spinner Sharks - Watch more free videos

Enjoy watching animals perform behaviors that are hard not to anthropomorphize,

Bp

Ps: Note, when my good friend Sharky, the author of The Chum Slick blog, says "Shark Party" he means something entirely different than fucking-about behavior.

Nicolas Cage movies, memories

Does anyone remember the last good Nicolas Cage movie? I keep trying to remember, but am not coming up with anything.

This looks like it will suck rocks too -- Knowing:



Enjoy being forewarned,

Bp

Save a squirrel by eating one

I was pleasantly surprised by the sentiment of this programme in Britian -- making popular the eating of an invasive species to help preserve a native one. Yank grey squirrels are reaping havoc with the cute native red squirrels on the Isle, and the brits are doing something about it. Eating them.

I've talked about this regarding Nutria on this blog in the past (the state of Louisiana had the idea first). And, I think Starlings would make a great source of wild bird cat food, and intend to try it out.

It just makes sense, if an animal becomes popular to eat, or for fur, or medicine it tends to disappear pretty quickly. Why not use that to our advantage, instead of always to our disadvantage. It's a perfect win/win to develop markets and tastes for products derived from invasive species of all sorts.

I think there needs to be hunting of grey squirrels on Vancouver island too, and quickly. Apparently there is much the same situation going on up there but they aren't even allowed to hunt them in any regulated manner -- which makes no sense to me.

Here's to tasty invasive game vittles,

Bp

Insane people jumping off cliffs for sport -- Base jumping in Norway

So Patrick Gracewood sent me this video. It's amazing enough to me that folks would jump off cliffs and then parachute for sport. But these wingsuits are prompting even crazier actions. Now, instead of trying to get away from the mountainside so they can parachute safely, they are buzzing it for a while first before they open the chute.

Here is video documenting this craziness.



Enjoy insanity vicariously through video,

Bp

Slime Molds solve mazes

Some organisms lend themselves well to horror movie plots. Slime Molds are among them. In the manga movie Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a mutated slime mold ravages towns and cities. Biologists tend to like slime molds because they are hard to classify, and there are vibrant arguments still happening about where they fit in the tree of life.

In a very straightforward experiment, Japanese scientists have shown how a slime mold will negotiate a maze in an efficient, or intelligent, manner to maximize their access to food. Here is a quote from the above article:

Reporting in the journal Nature, Toshiyuki Nakagaki from the Bio-Mimetic Control Research Centre in Nagoya showed that a slime mould negotiated the shortest route between two exits in a maze, avoiding three longer paths.

"This remarkable process of cellular computation implies that cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence," Dr Nakagaki said.

Enjoy continued surprises from the more rudimentary forms of life on this planet,

Bp

[via Marianna, photo credit in linked article]

How Californians see America, a chart

I have to say, this seems about right in my experience:



Enjoy internet veracity,

Bp

[via Uncle Ted]

Renovate the Old Economy, Don't Rebuild it

Some smart words from Tom Davenport at Business Week. I'll let him speak for himself:

You hear a lot of talk about rebuilding the U.S. economy, and it obviously needs some help. But I wonder if we ought to make some changes as we rebuild. The old structure doesn't seem that desirable anymore. When we rebuild, how about some renovations at the same time?

For example, the old U.S. economy wasn't very environmentally sustainable. The good news about our current predicament is that the U.S. generally emits substantially less carbon into the atmosphere when it's in recession. So maybe we shouldn't come out of it until we figure out how to stop this pattern.

Our old economy was based heavily on consumption by—of course—consumers. Economists are saying that consumer spending is all that has saved our economic bacon over the past couple of decades, and now we've cut

back. The good news about this is that consumers have been spending their way into severe hock, so stopping that overspending is positive. Consumers have even resisted spending their economic stimulus checks. We need to save more to pay off our credit balances, finance our retirements, and send our kids to college. The bad news, of course, if that consumers don't spend we don't reinvigorate economic growth. So how can we stoke a consumer-driven economy and save at the same time?

We can't. It's no accident that China and Japan, for example, have been both producer-driven economies and nations of savers. We have to slowly shift back to being a producer-driven economy. It will be difficult and painful, but we have to spend less and produce more goods and services that other economies around the world want to buy. We also need to replace these other economies as investors in our own economy.

This probably means that the U.S. government needs to identify some key industries that it will nurture as the potential big exporters of the future. There used to be many objections to this sort of "industrial policy," but perhaps now that much of our financial system has been nationalized, such interventions will seem relatively mild. We're already investing in the automobile industry, for example, although I'm not sure that's our best bet for future exports. Tom Friedman is probably correct in saying (in Hot, Flat, and Crowded) that environmental technologies would be one of the best possible industrial policy investments for the U.S.

Another attribute of the consumer-driven economy we've built is that we have generally taken the proceeds of our productivity in—you guessed it—increased consumption. This is unlike our European cousins, who have cashed in productivity for leisure. Americans work some of the longest hours in the world, and we don't even have enough time to watch the cool flat-screen TVs we've bought. My guess is that we'd all be happier and more relaxed if we started trading increased productivity for increased time on the beach.

There are many other aspects of our new economic house that need to be renovated, but that would take a book, not a blog post. There need to be more regulation, greater investment in human capital, increased transparency and understandability, better health care at a lower price to the society, and so forth. None of these transitions will be easy. I don't envy the members of the new Council of Economic Advisers!

Provided by Harvard Business—Where Leaders Get Their Edge

Enjoy hearing some sane words from the center once and a while,

Bp

[via Uncle Ted, image courtesy of wiki commons]

Algae farming and biofuel production

I'm cleaning out old emails. Way way back, I received this video about farming algae for biofuels. The presentation is by Glen Kertz of Valcent products. He makes some huge claims, which to me are encouraging. Not because they're necessarily feasible, but because if he's even 100% off in his estimates, it still looks to be a good deal.

One of the claims is that using 1/10th of the land in New Mexico, the U.S. could fulfill all its energy needs with just algae production.

Kertz states that an acre of corn produces 18 gallons of oil per year, palm produces 700 - 800 gallons, algae up to 20,000 gallons per acre per year. And, that's not using a vertical grow greenhouse system, which Valcent calls a High Density Vertical Bioreactor.

Here is an embed of the above video, I'll let Kertz speak for himself:



Enjoy keeping abreast of developments that could help diversify our energy sources,

Bp

Saturday Morning Awesome -- Mouse Agility Course

The Saturday Morning Awesome can easily skate that edge of reality between "awesome" and "totally random." This video almost went too far into the "totally random" category, but the Olympiad theme in the background pulled it squarely back into "awesome."

Rhetoric and semantics be damned, you say, on to the video:



Enjoy your Saturday Morning Awesome randomness,

Bp

[via Butternutjelly]

Word of the day: Balanoculture

I received an email a few months back from an uncle who was trying out making some Acorn meal. I thought, "man, these guys are as weird as I am."

Reading Oak: The Frame of Civilization by William Bryant Logan prompted Tom's experiment. Although I haven't read the oak book yet, Logan wrote another book that I found quite a great read, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth.

As for the word of the day, here is the body of my uncle's email, quoting the book:

I just finished re-reading an excellent book - Oak: the frame of civilization. Here's a review of the section that got me going.

Chapter Three, "Balanoculture," (defined as societies whose diet staple is the oak acorn) discusses evidence the oak tree's earliest contribution to civilization was to feed people. Recent research suggests not all early humans were big game hunters who eventually converted to farming. Some of our human ancestors were balanophagists. As an example, the archaeological site at Catal Huyuk, a settlement 8,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent (modern-day Turkey), offers clues its residents ground and ate acorns as their diet staple. Once its tannin is leached out, the acorn is highly nutritious and surprisingly filling. (Logan personally sought out Korean acorn jelly and thought it even an appetite suppressant--Slim*Fast(TM) buyers might soon be trekking to their neighborhood Korean food stores.) The crucial fact for theories about what our ancient ancestors ate is acorns are much easier to harvest and store, for calories spent, than chasing animals.

Interestingly, California is home to some of the finest remnants of balanoculture. As an example, if one travels two and a half hours northeast of, say, the Bay Area, one crosses Highway 49 to reach the town of Volcano, where the Indian Grinding Rock State Historical Park preserves a legacy of those early Californians, the Miwoks: some 1,185 mortar holes, the largest collection of bedrock mortars anywhere in North America. Miwoks used pestles in these mortars to grind acorns and did so for five thousand years until early in the twentieth century.

As an aside, here are the quotes that make up the signature text of all of Uncle Tom's emails. I'm so pleased to come from a sane family.

"Nature is the art of God" - Dante

"No amount of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted" - Aesop

"Technology is of no use to us if it is used without respect for the earth and its processes" - Aldo Leopold

Enjoy the wisdom of relatives,

Bp

The kind of thing that makes me want to teach science to kids

Enjoy the refreshing perspective of children,

Bp

[image via eatliver.com -- no credit available]