Old Testament Quote of the Day

Abraham to Bbraham:"Can you pass the Zebra ham?"

The Whistle of Death

Believed to be the last thing an individual "chosen" to be sacrificed to the Aztec gods heard in pre-columbian times, these reproductions of whistles found in the bony hands of the condemned sound appropriately haunting.

Click the link to hear some samples:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/06/30/pre-columbiansounds.ap/index.html#cnnSTCOther1

Caspian Sea Monster

Imagine a fleet of roaring jet-powered flying ships skimming undiscovered at speed towards the sandy beaches of the eastern US. Upon landing, each 500 ton leviathan spews up to a thousand soldiers and multiple tanks out of its belly which exceeds the length of a football field. Others patrol the coastline and fire barrages of cruise missiles onto the American mainland.

Although it sounds like a cheap plot of an 80s russiophobic movie, these awesome machines really existed.

In the 60s the USSR started to experiment with stubby winged airplane/boat hybrids which could utilize the ground effect generated by the compressed air between a flying object and the terrain it traverses in close proximity.

The design had three distinct advantages:

- since the flying ships lifted only a few feet out of the water they would evade enemy radar

- the ground effect allowed for payloads much greater than a conventional airplane

- they could travel at speeds up to 500mph

The Russians called these low flying contraptions Ekranoplans and they culminated in the above mentioned "Caspian Sea Monster". Today these awe-inspiring machines are rusting away in various dry-docks since their tactical relevancy has since diminished.

Still - I would love to see one of these obscure beasts roar past a flabbergasted audience during the Chicago air and water show...

Captain Future

Growing up in the late 70s and early 80s in Germany, this adaptation of a Japanese anime show rocked my world. The Soundtrack still sends shivers up my spine and the captain's sideburns are priceless.

Captain Future, his metallic robot friend Grag, Otto - a gay looking and shape shifting android in a pink jumpsuit, as well as a professor's brain in a hovering, glass domed, contraption scoot about the galaxy and save all sorts of civilizations from impending doom. This show opened and twisted my mind and made me sit on the edge of my parents' appropriately brown sofa...

Creationist Stegosaur BBQ

Here is a fun little mysterious tidbit from the jungles of Cambodia:

In the 12th century the Khmer, an advanced civilization, finished what must be considered one of the wonders of the world. A vast city of temples, oddly arranged like the constellation Draco (it's major temples representing a map of the constellation's stars). Giant, intricately carved spires jut above the canopy of the surrounding jungle and countless demonic faces adorn the surrounding buildings in all their Hindu glory.

I am talking about Angkor Wat of course. We don't know much about it's builders or why they vanished without much of a cultural record and what must once have been a meeting place for hundreds of thousands of people was reclaimed by the jungle for centuries.

Lately creationist evangelicals have adopted this unlikely place, so liberally adorned with Vishnu and cohorts, as an argument to propagate their beliefs.

Why? On one of the temples there is a small carving of what looks like a Stegosaurus. Odd? Certainly. Conclusive? By no means. Have a look at the pictures and make up your own mind. While the similarities are quite intriguing I still doubt that the Khmer enjoyed Stegosaur steaks a mere 800 years ago during a Sunday BBQ.

You gotta do better to prove the whole seven day thing guys...

The "Unluckification" of Friday the 13th

Ever asked yourself why Friday the 13th is considered unlucky?

This superstition actually goes back about 700 years and involves the much written about and popularized Knights Templar.

The then reigning king of France, Philip the Fair, found himself in financial woes and happened to owe the Templar order a lot of money. In fact, the Templars can be considered the founders of our modern banking system of deposit and withdrawal from multiple locations.

After the heyday of the Crusades, the Templars happily tended their ever growing wealth and owned vast lands in France.

Back to the number 13: Philip suffered the above mentioned cash shortage and mounting debt and was generally jealous and suspicious of the order's considerable influence.

So he decided to hatch a plan to arrest the entire Templar leadership simultaneously across the country and catch them by surprise. On Friday the 13th, 1307 Philip's troops entered all Templar monasteries, pulled everyone out of their beds and filled the royal dungeons with a bunch of bedraggled monks.

The entire theater was justified through colorful claims of idol worship, heresy and homosexual practices. Urinating on a cross and the adoration of a severed head were some of the specifics involved.

As was custom during the middle ages, confessions were obtained through the liberal application of torture and the order's Grandmaster Jacques de Molay was finally burned at the stake in 1314 after what must have been miserable years full of pain and humiliation.

These events left such an impression with the public at large that the date of the Templars' demise has been considered "unlucky" ever since...

Simple Beauty: Charley Harper

Charley Harper (1922-2007) is one of my favorite illustrators. I find it fascinating how he uses deceptively simple two dimensional blocks of color to create a whole which entirely transcends the initial simplicity (if that makes any sense...).

In his long career Charley illustrated everything from biology books to the Ford Times or the occasional tourism poster. His modernist genius is timeless and he manages to capture nature in a geometric yet incredibly animated fashion. I have a wonderful book on order
(Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life (Illustrated ed.), AMMO Books, ISBN 978-0978607654 $200) which depicts the highlights of his career in large scale and I can only recommend to anybody to have a look at it and get lost in what he calls minimal realism - capturing the essence of subjects with the fewest possible visual elements.

Going tribal

After a long week and lots of travel combined with "blogger's block" this truly exciting story caught my attention.

I was first made aware of it by my office receptionist, an anthropologist by trade (another talent wasted - thankfully she's young and might go back to school).

Here is a synopsis of the story for anyone who did not yet hear about it:

A Brazilian protection agency published the pictures which were made during a fly-by to prove the fact that there are still tribes in the rain forest who have generally no contact to civilization and can be considered previously unknown. The amazing pictures show brightly painted people of which some take pot shots at the passing plane with their bows and arrows. The tribe appears to live in primitive long houses arranged in a straight line and surrounded by a narrow band of cultivated fields and plantations. Thankfully the Brazilian government did not disclose the exact location of the encounter and only indicated that it took place in proximity to the Peruvian border.

Unfortunately these last truly pristine people are in grave danger of encroaching logging and mining operations and any contact with the outside world would inevitably end in tragedy.

While they tend to be immune against many tropical diseases, a common western virus might easily wipe out an entire tribe. Their bodies are simply not adapted to non-indigenous pathogens.

At any rate, this story is a painful reminder to me of how our recent "progress" and ability to easily reach even the most remote places in the world has utterly destroyed bio and cultural diversity. A mere century ago explorers reported sightings of giant animals such as 40 foot anacondas in the Amazon or 30 foot crocodiles in Australia. Vanishing habitats have an adverse impact on the last of these, once dominant, predators and their offspring adapted by trading size for survivability. The same applies to our over-fished oceans.

In the end most cultures will be more and more homogenized and strive for the same material goals so successfully propagated by our global marketing machine. The beat of an excotic drum or moanful tune of a bone flute will inevitably be replaced by Jay-Z on a ghetto blaster. Bows and arrows give away to AK-47s. In another 100 years even these once proud and fiercely independent people will be "packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes" (to quote The Police - Synchronicity 2).

Sad.

Elvis re-enters the building

It was all over the news today that a group of scientists succeeded in inserting genes from an extinct Tasmanian Tiger (a marsupial fox/wolf - like animal with a striped ass) into a mouse where the DNA continued to thrive and function.
I remember clearly when Jurassic Park was released, with its one minute of CG generated reptilian bliss, and renowned experts in the field dismissed any chance that we could really bring back T-Rex and company. We are admittedly quite a ways off from resurrecting prehistoric monsters and the Tasmanian Tiger's DNA was extracted from a specimen suspended in formaldehyde, which tends to be somewhat gentle on soft tissue material, yet if we project advancements in genetics another 15 years into the future the idea might not be so far fetched after all.
I can see the potential for rich megalomaniacs to go through some sort of re-birthing procedure or the zoos of this world competing for the most outrageous creature (Sea World - can you please take a stab at Liopleurodon and feed Shamu to it?)

A possibility comes to mind: frozen Mammoth carcasses are found on the Siberian tundra with a certain regularity. It is quite possible that any recovered tissue might have usable genetic material which could then be inserted into an elephantine egg or embryo. Which raises another question. What happens if a hypothetical clone produces some sort of prehistoric pathogen which might prove fatal to our present fauna or flora or even ourselves?

Death by Dino fart...

In conclusion a few specimens who must remain dead or can never be cloned:

for intolerance reasons

for aesthetic reasons







no explanation necessary....

Last flight of the little prince

Until the year 2004 the disappearance of the hailed french author Antoine de Saint Exupery, who blessed literature with "The little prince", was one of the many unsolved mysteries of World War 2.

On July 31st 1944 Saint Exupery set out on a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean in his twin engine P-38 Lightning, never to return. For years speculation about a possible suicide circulated among historians. There was no record of Axis activity in the near airspace and Antoine was an accomplished pilot who had set long distance records and used his passion of aviation as inspiration for his literary success.

Then in 1998 a French fisherman found his bracelet on a beach and finally in 2004 the wreckage of his plane was found not too far off the coast, roughly 90 yards below the sea. The mystery concerning the cause for the crash remained however.

Eventually a German aviation expert set out to interview surviving Luftwaffe pilots for possible clues regarding the incident. He did not have to search for long. The Messerschmidt 109 ace Horst Rippert came forward with a confession that he shot down Saint Exupery's Lightning while on a lone patrol along the southern French coast. His account of the engagement describes the author flying carelessly at 6,000 feet (a low and vulnerable altitude at the time) and apparently oblivious to the enemy in pursuit. Rippert made a dive on the Lightning and shot off a wing when, according to his account, Saint Exupery just spiraled down into the sea.

Later, when Rippert learned of the Allied effort to search for the author, he was mortified in a cruel twist of fate - "The little Prince" was the favorite book of his youth...

Separated at birth...

The main difference: Dr. Bunsen accidentally blows stuff up...

Twisted Minds: Vlad Tepes (1431-1476)

According to an account of German settlers the city of Brasov in Romania became one of the many victims of Vlad Dracul the Third, ruler of Transylvania. His favorite method of punishing unruly townsfolk happened to be death at the stake - thus his given surname: Tepes - The Impaler. It has been written that he enjoyed a good impaling so much so that he preferred to dine among the hundreds of writhing victims and bleeding corpses.

Given away to the Turks as a hostage by his father, he developed a fervent distaste for anything oriental (for more on the Ottomans read the earlier article about the siege of Vienna).

When the Turks besieged his castle his wife decided to throw herself from the highest tower, rather than to be captured, which understandably deepened Vlad's ongoing irritation...

In return he proceeded to fight back after several years of imprisonment and, to mix it up a bit, sent home sacks full of Turkish noses as proof of his exploits in combat.

All this unpleasantness afforded Vlad a good bit of respect. So much so that according to another anecdote he placed a golden cup in the middle of the town square of one of his villages overnight only to find it untouched in the morning. Nobody had dared to take it.

Many years later an author named Bram Stroker came upon a book about the Wallachian princes and must have been quite enarmored with our friend Vlad's antics since he decided to make him a quite prominent vampire protagonist of world literature: Dracula.

(Vlad's actual surname was Dracul - The Serpent/Dragon - a title inherited from his father who was a member of the "Order of the Dragon")

A retrospective on personality in sports

At work today I was met with blank stares by the 20 somethings when mentioning the tennis greats of the 70s and 80s. I lamented about the demise of personality in sports, implying that watching the Tiger Woods' and Roger Federers of this world fills me with the comfortably numb embrace of disinterest.

What happened?

When did the world turn into a robotic factory of parentally driven poster boys and girls? When did wearing a Nike branded baseball cap backwards become the ultimate expression of rebellion?

Children - meet the boys:

John McEnroe: When was the last time that any person with a rudimentary interest in medicine could take an exact blood pressure reading just by looking at a guy's face? Who still dares to make any referee their bitch?

Ivan Lendl: A magician who inexplicably made not having a personality his personality. One could suspend this guy's balls half an inch above the spinning blade of a lawnmower and his facial expression would remain suitably relaxed.

Jimmy Connors: Choleric should be renamed to connorleric.

Carl Lewis: If the Olympic committee allowed feather boas, his would have been 20 feet long and pink.

Bjorn Borg; Sweat bands, training suits two sizes too small and all that hair - timeless

Jackie Stewart: Plaid golf hat and matching pants while dominating Formula 1 - enough said.

Nikki Lauda: What purpose do ears serve anyways?

Muhammad Ali: Would handily defeat any opponent through a tidal wave of smack talking alone.

Now that i have gotten that off my chest I will skip ESPN with a content sigh and go back to watching reality TV.

The land that should not be there...

In 1513 the Turkish admiral Piri Reis compiled from hitherto unknown sources a map that singlehandedly upends several established "facts" concerning world exploration. This visually pleasing piece of cartography was drawn on the skin of a gazelle and has been authenticated by many renowned scientific institutes.

So what is the big deal?

1. The map shows detailed depictions of the coastlines of western Africa and Eastern South America. Both were officially not known at the time.
Gavin Menzies, a retired commander of a submarine in the Royal Navy, offers an intriguing theory in his book 1421 - The Year China Discovered the World.
The author builds a convincing case out of circumstantial evidence (such as Chinese way markers in Africa, the rudder of a giant junk in the Sacramento river and genetically Chinese poultry in South America, etc.), that a Chinese armada of giant ships as much as 130 yards long set out in 1421 to circumnavigate the earth. Gavin speculates that a small number of ships actually succeeded and on the way discovered every continent, including Antarctica.
He even presents evidence that the Chinese established settlements which can be traced back through, once more, the use of modern genetics.

2. The map contains an even bigger enigma. Piri Reis presents a very detailed depiction of the coastline of Antarctica - the actual landmass under the polar icecap...
According to science the last time the coastline of Antarctica was exposed lies 6000 years in the past. Who would have had the means to travel to and accurately measure the end of the world in the late stone age?

Some of these questions might never be solved and it is probably good that way. What would the world be without one or the other great mystery?

Flying Giraffe

I stumbled upon this pic a while ago. Quetzalcoatlus, a giant Pterosaur, was as big as a giraffe with a wingspan of 13-15 yards.