[Well said. -egg]

Homo erectus and the paradox of human tools:

Over the weekend, at the Earth Day tweetup at the Science Museum of Minnesota, I heard an interesting fact: Human beings are now the dominant agent of landscape change on this planet, more than any natural process. (That’s right. Suck it, glaciers!)

We tend to think of this kind of thing as a result of modernity. But I think that’s only partly true. Modern technology has given us the tools that enable us to change the landscape of Earth in massive ways we weren’t capable of in the past. But throughout human existence—even before we were technically human—we have made relatively large alterations to the world. It’s not like human beings woke up one day and thought, “Hey, it’s the 20th century, let’s start messing around with stuff!” In reality, what makes our modern impact on the planet different from past—other than scale—is mainly that we’ve developed more self-awareness about our impact on the planet, and have actually started talking about whether we like the side effects those impacts bring.

Case in point: A recent study of ancient African animal species that suggests our ancestors drove a huge proportion of fauna to extinction basically as soon as they were technologically capable of doing so. Here’s how Ann Gibbons described it at Science Now:

After comparing fossils of 78 species of carnivores that lived during five different periods of time between 3.5 million years ago (when large carnivores were at their peak) and 1.5 million years ago, Werdelin found that all but six of 29 species of large carnivores (animals that weighed more than 21.5 kilos) had gone extinct in that time. Moreover, the mass extinction began just before H. erectus appeared in the fossil record 1.9 million years ago. He also found that the community of carnivores alive 2.5 million to 2 million years ago ate a much broader range of food—with species within a community filling a wider range of dietary niches. By 1.5 million years ago, just hypercarnivores that ate only meat, such as lions and leopards, had survived while omnivores that scavenged and ate a wider range of foods, like civets, had disappeared. “Even I was surprised by the dramatic drop,” Werdelin says.

Those omnivores that went extinct were in direct competition for scavenged carcasses with hominins.

This sounds kind of depressing, but I think it should actually make us feel a bit optimistic. Two million years ago, Homo erectus might have killed off 23 species of large carnivores. They had the tools to hunt and the desire to eat. But, even if they’d wanted to, those H. erectus wouldn’t have had the tools necessary to organize other H. erectus’ and better manage their own use of natural resources.

And that brings me to another interesting point that folks from the Science Museum of Minnesota kept making over and over at the Earth Day event. Modern life has created some pretty serious environmental challenges. But, at the same time, it’s also put us in a much better position to deal with those challenges. Humans today are better educated, healthier, wealthier, and better connected with one another than any humans that have ever lived before. Our tools have helped us create some pretty big problems. But our tools are also exactly what we need to solve those problems.

Read the rest of the article at Science Now

Image: Homo erectus tools, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from hmnh’s photostream

[Excellent. -egg]
Logical fallacies poster: A printable logical fallacy poster. (via @mrbadexample)

[Surprise. -egg]
TSA program to turn jumped-up mall cops into mind-readers didn’t work:
Bruce Schneier commented this morning on the General Accounting Office’s assessment of the TSA’s “behavior detection” program, which is like the pick-up artist movement for creepy security agencies. Behavioral detection is a mishmash of pseudoscience, woo-y stuff like neurolinguistic programming, wishful thinking and witch-hunting that holds that you can train squadrons of jumped-up mall-cops to be mind-reading anti-terror ninjas who can look into your eyes and know whether you’re a bad guy.

Bruce’s post was so great that I just emailed him and said, “Hey, rather than trying to summarize what you wrote, can I just republish it?” And he graciously said yes. Here it is:

Interesting data from the U.S. Government Accounting Office:
But congressional auditors have questions about other efficiencies as well, like having 3,000 “behavior detection” officers assigned to question passengers. The officers sidetracked 50,000 passengers in 2010, resulting in the arrests of 300 passengers, the GAO found. None turned out to be terrorists.

Yet in the same year, behavior detection teams apparently let at least 16 individuals allegedly involved in six subsequent terror plots slip through eight different airports. GAO said the individuals moved through protected airports on at least 23 different occasions.

I don’t believe the second paragraph. We haven’t had six terror plots between 2010 and today. And even if we did, how would the auditors know? But I’m sure the first paragraph is correct: the behavioral detection program is 0% effective at preventing terrorism.

The rest of the article is pretty depressing. The TSA refuses to back down on any of its security theater measures. At the same time, its budget is being cut and more people are flying. The result: longer waiting times at security.

TSA Behavioral Detection Statistics

Imploding iceberg in Antarctica:

I love this video of an iceberg collapsing in on itself in Wilhelmina Bay, Antarctica. (Word of warning, the people filming this loved the experience even more than I loved watching it, so much so that you may want to turn your speakers down.)

There are two kinds of icebergs, tabular and non-tabular. The tabular ones are what they sound like, big flat sheets of ice. Non-tabular are different—irregular shapes that become even more irregular as bits and pieces of them melt. Judging by the arched shape this iceberg had taken on, it probably falls into the non-tabular category. Implosion happens when melting weakens key structural support within that shape and bits of the iceberg begin to crash in on itself, accelerating the breakup. Both tabular and non-tabular icebergs and catastrophically fail like this, though.

Another fun iceberg fact: There are six size categories we sort icebergs by. Four of them have pretty predictable names: “Small”, “Medium”, “Large”, and “Very Large”. But below “small” are two size categories with a little more whimsy.

Icebergs with a hight of less than 3.3 feet and a length less than 16 feet are called “Growlers”.

If the height shorter than 16 feet and the length shorter than 49 feet, then the iceberg is called, adorably, “a Bergy Bit”. Yes, that is a technical term.

Via Pourmecoffee

Video Link

Kids narrate the lives of wild animals for “Planet Earth” promo (cutest. video. ever.):

[Video link]
Director Joe Sabia, who co-curates the Boing Boing in-flight television channel with me on Virgin America Airlines, has created this adorable spot for BBC America’s natural history series Planet Earth (also available on DVD). In the promo, a series of 4-7yo children take the place of series narrator David Attenborough—or, as he is known here, “Dabud Abunburble.” You may well die of cute. Kids: Do not feel bad. I have been known to struggle over the pronunciation of Attenbooger’s name, and the placing-on of headphones, too.

[Thoughts about the potential of games as art via the author of Braid. -egg]

The Most Dangerous Gamer – Magazine – The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/

(via Instapaper)

“Printing” pharmaceuticals with a 3D printer:

A Nature Chemistry paper by researchers from the University of Glasgow describes a process for “printing” pharmaceutical compounds from various feedstocks, and supposes a future in which we have diagnosis/medication manufacturies at home. The process uses an off-the-shelf 3D printer technology to assemble pre-filled “vessels” in ways that create the desired chemical reaction in order to produce medicines. It’s a scaled-down version of the industrial process used to manufacture drugs in bulk, and the paper’s principal, Prof Lee Cronin, calls it “reactionware.” From the BBC:

“We can fabricate these reactionware vessels using a 3D printer in a relatively short time. Even the most complicated vessels we’ve built have only take a few hours.

“By making the vessel itself part of the reaction process, the distinction between the reactor and the reaction becomes very hazy. It’s a new way for chemists to think, and it gives us very specific control over reactions because we can continually refine the design of our vessels as required.

“For example, our initial reactionware designs allowed us to synthesize three previously unreported compounds and dictate the outcome of a fourth reaction solely by altering the chemical composition of the reactor.”

…Prof Cronin added: “3D printers are becoming increasingly common and affordable. It’s entirely possible that, in the future, we could see chemical engineering technology which is prohibitively expensive today filter down to laboratories and small commercial enterprises.

“Even more importantly, we could use 3D printers to revolutionise access to health care in the developing world, allowing diagnosis and treatment to happen in a much more efficient and economical way than is possible now.

“We could even see 3D printers reach into homes and become fabricators of domestic items, including medications. Perhaps with the introduction of carefully-controlled software ‘apps’, similar to the ones available from Apple, we could see consumers have access to a personal drug designer they could use at home to create the medication they need.”

‘DIY drugstores’ in development by Glasgow University researchers

[Too awesome. -egg]
Lacy, laser-cut seaweed sheets:

This “designer nori” laser-cut seaweed was created by the Japanese ad agency I&SBBDO for a client whose sushi-wrapper business flagged in the post-tsunami economic trough. Jeannie Huang writes,

Each pattern is meant to symbolize good fortune, happiness, and longevity, etc. and the result is a delicate, unexpected reinvention of the classic Japanese food with a modern twist. The patterns are crisp, and when incorporated into the rolls, they create a sharp contrast between the dark seaweed and the white grains of rice within. They’ve entered (and won) a number of ad/design contests for this phenomenal work.

Designer Nori: Delicate Laser Cut Seaweed Patterns

UMINO SEAWEED SHOP | SHOWCASE | I&S BBDO [warning: autoplays music]

(via Make)