Eye Candy/Rev III

Skyglow - Eye Candy to the Max. :)

Yet another gem.  Wish CT had this kind of clarity.

Feedback Loops

Feedback loops, the amplifier of all things related to climate change, is the inconvenient reality "geniuses" like Trump and Pruitt continue to deny at our peril. On numerous occasions, BRT has talked about the feedback loop of the loss of albedo in the arctic as one prime example of same. Now comes a study showing how recursion in Earth's soils is amping GW in ways astounding researchers all over the world.

In a massive new study published Wednesday in the influential journal Nature, no less than 50 authors from around the world document a so-called climate system “feedback” that, they say, could make global warming considerably worse over the coming decades.

That feedback involves the planet’s soils, which are a massive repository of carbon due to the plants and roots that have grown and died in them, in many cases over vast time periods (plants pull in carbon from the air through photosynthesis and use it to fuel their growth). It has long been feared that as warming increases, the microorganisms living in these soils would respond by very naturally upping their rate of respiration, a process that in turn releases carbon dioxide or methane, leading greenhouse gases.

It’s this concern that the new study validates.

Any questions?

The Warm Fuzzies :)

The warm fuzzies apply here. Thanks Jill for turning me onto this gem.

Earth @ Night

For even more detail click NASA's gem seen below.

Isn't science grand? :)

43rd

The US is  43rd on the World Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders while Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark & the Netherlands occupy the top 5 spots. Interesting don't you think?

This Design has "legs". :)

This design has "legs". :) But it's only the beginning. Once cheap and really powerful batteries become available, this Lilium will have plenty of competitors without question.

Example II. Not as slick but it flies without question.

508 Million Years ago & counting :)

An artist illustrates how Tokummia katalepsis may have looked. The creature had two large pincers (maxillipeds) for hunting prey and a hard shell protecting most of its multisegmented body.

508 million years ago, this guy ruled the seas.

Like other Cambrian animals, T. katalepsis looks bizarre by today's standards. The predator had 50 paddle-like legs that likely helped it swim and walk in a tropical sea, and "a pair of very strong claws — some of the strongest claws we have seen in any Cambrian arthropod," said study co-author Jean-Bernard Caron, a senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. These claws likely helped the animal grasp and pierce soft-bodied prey, such as worms, he said.

The family tree  of said predator or just another way to kill time on the net. :)

Shooting the Gap

This unprocessed image shows features in Saturn's atmosphere from closer than ever before. The view was captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft during its first Grand Finale dive past the planet on April 26, 2017. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Cassini yet again ...

As it dove through the gap, Cassini came within about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) of Saturn's cloud tops (where the air pressure is 1 bar -- comparable to the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level) and within about 200 miles (300 kilometers) of the innermost visible edge of the rings.

Why Cassini Matters

Any questions?

Had to add this video showing Cassini's Grand Finale.

Here's a 360 of the GF.

Stop Making Sense

Jonathan Demme's first masterpiece. R.I.P. Copyright rears it's ugly head thanks to Sonny Bono but at least separate songs can be shown in spite of this doofus corrupting the valid 30 year copyright law created by the Founding Fathers. Stellar without question.

Yet another time killer :)

The size of things from the planck scale to whatever ... is a great time killer for sure. Enjoy.

Robert M. Pirsig

Robert Pirsig

Robert Pirsig is a biggie with yours truly as he melded zen with diligence, something artists do all the time as one must work hard learning one's craft with due diligence and concentration and then let go and not think when doing said craft. This wonderful connect is beautifully expressed not only in Persig's work but also with Bill Evan's wonderful linear notes on Kind Of Blue.

There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment.

Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. 

The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see will find something captured that escapes explanation. This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician. 

Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording. 

As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time. Miles Davis presents here frameworks which are exquisite in their simplicity and yet contain all that is necessary to stimulate performance with a sure reference to the primary conception. 

Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a "take." 

Robert M. Pirsig...

The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

And my favorite ...

Quality is the Buddha.

R.I.P.

Early Spring

Even though winter was almost a non-event in CT, early spring still works its magic, albeit very early, thanks to climate change. Enjoy.

Funnies yet again :)

Two losers

Ignore science at your peril.

Free Speech applies to everyone.

Tunnel Flight :)

Hypnotic video showing off the most powerful laser in the world, proving once again science will continue to advance in spite of Trump and the idiots who serve him.

Scientists at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) research center in Germany are hard at work getting the world’s largest X-ray laser, the European XFEL, ready for use. Today, the scientists announced they’ve reached a milestone in its creation by successfully firing electrons through a particle accelerator 2.1 kilometers (1.3 miles) long.

This was one of the last milestones in the European XFEL’s creation, and it remains on track for completion later this year. Once completed, the European XFEL will be able to produce as many as 27,000 X-ray laser flashes in a single second. Because these flashes will be so quick and intense, they’ll allow researchers to generate never-before-seen images of structures and processes on the atomic level.

Any questions?

That's Us/Rev II

Earth yet again.

Texture Mapping to the Max :)

Yours truly loves maps, the older the better but ... they are all inaccurate save for the AuthaGraph World Map

You probably don’t realize it, but virtually every world map you’ve ever seen is wrong. And while the new AuthaGraph World Map may look strange, it is in fact the most accurate map you’ve ever seen.

The world maps we’re all used to operate off of the Mercator projection, a cartographic technique developed by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. This imperfect technique gave us a map that was “right side up,” orderly, and useful for ship navigation — but also one that distorted both the size of many landmasses and the distances between them.

To correct these distortions, Tokyo-based architect and artist Hajime Narukawa created the AuthaGraph map over the course of several years using a complex process that essentially amounts to taking the globe (more accurate than any Mercator map) and flattening it out:

How he did it, texture mapping to the max.

It gets better.

But a new map called AuthaGraph, created by Tokyo-based artist and architect Hajime Narukawa, just won Japan's distinguished Good Design Award for accurately representing the relative sizes of landmasses and bodies of water on Earth. The map is so proportionally accurate that you can fold it up into a three-dimensional globe.

Thanks Chuck, I needed that. :)

He was in the room

Like Tom Paine and the Founding Fathers,  Harry Huxley was in the room, the room that ushered in the digital age as he worked with Alan Turing on hardware, helped to design the Eniac computer and built the first personal computer in 1954 called the G-15.

Dr. Huskey, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, began his digital career in the mid-1940s with the Eniac, a behemoth that was considered the country’s first general-purpose programmable electronic computer. A top-secret federal government project at the University of Pennsylvania, it measured 100 feet long, weighed 30 tons and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes.

He later worked with the pioneering British mathematician Alan M. Turing on a prototype of another early computer, the Automatic Computing Engine; oversaw development of yet another, the SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer); and in 1954 designed the G-15, a 950-pound predecessor to today’s laptops.

It gets better.

The very word “computer” was so novel that Dr. Huskey described the SWAC as “a large-scale electronic computing machine” when he appeared on the radio quiz show “You Bet Your Life” in 1950 and tried to explain it to the host, Groucho Marx.

“Now, doctor, what is this machine for, this robot?” Groucho asked.

“It’s to carry out sequences of computations, to compare figures,” Dr. Huskey patiently explained.

To which Groucho replied, in his signature manner of gigabit-paced repartee: “If you’re going to compare figures, I don’t need an electric brain for that. It’s called an automatic reflex in my case.”

You can't make  this up and ... he was a genius without question.

The Eniac

Harry with his G-15. :)

Help not needed here

BRT has written copiously about AI, the open ended tech that promises to change everything in ways that cannot be predicted, is now coming for your job whether you like it or not.

SITTING IN AN office in San Francisco, Igor Barani calls up some medical scans on his screen. He is the chief executive of Enlitic, one of a host of startups applying deep learning to medicine, starting with the analysis of images such as X-rays and CT scans. It is an obvious use of the technology. Deep learning is renowned for its superhuman prowess at certain forms of image recognition; there are large sets of labelled training data to crunch; and there is tremendous potential to make health care more accurate and efficient.

Dr Barani (who used to be an oncologist) points to some CT scans of a patient’s lungs, taken from three different angles. Red blobs flicker on the screen as Enlitic’s deep-learning system examines and compares them to see if they are blood vessels, harmless imaging artefacts or malignant lung nodules. The system ends up highlighting a particular feature for further investigation. In a test against three expert human radiologists working together, Enlitic’s system was 50% better at classifying malignant tumours and had a false-negative rate (where a cancer is missed) of zero, compared with 7% for the humans. Another of Enlitic’s systems, which examines X-rays to detect wrist fractures, also handily outperformed human experts. The firm’s technology is currently being tested in 40 clinics across Australia.

A computer that dispenses expert radiology advice is just one example of how jobs currently done by highly trained white-collar workers can be automated, thanks to the advance of deep learning and other forms of artificial intelligence. The idea that manual work can be carried out by machines is already familiar; now ever-smarter machines can perform tasks done by information workers, too. What determines vulnerability to automation, experts say, is not so much whether the work concerned is manual or white-collar but whether or not it is routine. 

In reading this, consider what is going to happen to healthcare, the most inefficient system in America save for the Pentagon where 

1. An office visit to a doc to deal with the flu costing $150 is replaced by purchasing a set of $2.00 labs on a chip, via Amazon, to be used at home, as needs warrant.
2. Said chip, with connects to the web and Dr. Watson, delivers blood sample data to Watson for realtime analysis.
3. Dr. Watson, after analyzing the sample, tells the patient what's wrong, prescribes, if necessary, the drug to deal with the condition in question and sets up a time for another visit as needs warrant. Price for said service, $1.00.
4. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” - Peter Drucker .

Yours truly knows a few GPs and they fear AI big time. The ortho guys, dentists or specialists dealing with serious illness like cancer, heart or diabetes, not so much though the push toward patient stem cell in situ organ regeneration is starting to encroach upon those areas as well.

Lawyers are also in the crosshairs as well as many other jobs that are, as per The Economist, routine in nature.

Addendum: A stunning 94 percent of the 9 million new jobs created in the past decade were temp or contract-based gigs.

Tech, like research and money, never sleeps. - Robert E.

That's Us

The Earth & the Moon, courtesy Cassini, the little probe that can. :)

Carl Sagan would be proud.

A man who got it right

General Smedley D. Butler

Here's a quote from a guy who got it right regarding war, racketeering and why this country needs to take a real hard look at itself regarding its place in the world and in terms of its relationship with the MIC.

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

If the country actually did this, the entire way America deals with the world and with itself would change overnight, for the better.

Huxley was right

Huxley was right. LSD, Mescaline and Psilocybin do heighten consciousness but yours truly already knows that from past experience with said bon bons back in the day. :)

Brain scans have revealed the first evidence for what appears to be a heightened state of consciousness in people who took psychedelic drugs in the name of science.

Healthy volunteers who received LSD, ketamine or psilocybin, a compound found in magic mushrooms, were found to have more random brain activity than normal while under the influence, according to a study into the effects of the drugs.

Without question, Aldous Huxley was an amazing man.

Click here to see some of the art he connected with while tripping. 

I'm okay with that :)

What every women should say to bozos intruding upon their private sex lives.

Critical Thiking 101

The Well Informed. 

I can see clearly now.

Getting the facts straight

Fly the Friendly Skies

Ready, Fire, Aim/Rev II

Well, it's seems this Ready, Fire, Aim administration has lived up to it's reputation regarding the Sarin gas attack it says was perpetrated by Assad against his people based on intel questionable at best as described in a 9 page report by Theodore Postol, MIT Emeritus Prof, stating that a four-page report released by the Trump administration yesterday intended to blame the recent chemical attack in Syria on the Syrian government “does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack

This issue of false intel has been a prime driver that got us into Nam, into Iraq and nearly got us into yet another quagmire with the purported Syrian Sarin gas attack in 2013 as gaming intel for political gain has gone on since the beginning of time.

It gets better.

Where Was CIA’s Pompeo on Syria?

There is a dark mystery behind the White House-released photo showing President Trump and more than a dozen advisers meeting at his estate in Mar-a-Lago after his decision to strike Syria with Tomahawk missiles: Where are CIA Director Mike Pompeo and other top intelligence officials? Robert Parry

The photograph released by the White House of President Trump meeting with his advisers at his estate in Mar-a-Lago on April 6, 2017, regarding his decision to launch missile strikes against Syria.

Something wicked this way comes - Ray Bradbury

Had to add this bon bon.

Read the piece accompanying this pix. A good read for sure.

No. 2300 - Backup for Humanity

Appropriate for No 2300

Carved 390 ft (120 m) into a sandstone mountain in a Norwegian archipelago, the vault keeps the temperature of seeds well below freezing while also limiting humidity. This minimizes metabolic activity, which means that the seed vault will likely be able to preserve seeds for most major crops for thousands of years.

ALREADY HANDY ONCE

Despite remaining a pragmatic backup plan for the worst case global scenarios, the Doomsday Vault has already come in handy just a few years into its existence. In 2015, war-torn Syria was the first country to withdraw seeds from the vault in order to replace those lost in Aleppo due to the ongoing civil conflict.

The wheat, barley, and grass seeds from the Aleppo bank are thought to have important traits resistant to drought, which researchers think could be increasingly important in the face of climate change.

Something to think about... without question.

H2 ... & then some :)

Hydrogen, the most plentiful element in the universe, has now been found on Enceladus, which means there's a real shot that life, as we know it, might exist on that tiny world orbiting Saturn, the most beautiful planet in the solar system.

At Saturn, Energy for Life

The paper from researchers with the Cassini mission, published in the journal Science, indicates hydrogen gas, which could potentially provide a chemical energy source for life, is pouring into the subsurface ocean of Enceladus from hydrothermal activity on the seafloor.

Life as we know it requires three primary ingredients: liquid water; a source of energy for metabolism; and the right chemical ingredients, primarily carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. With this finding, Cassini has shown that Enceladus – a small, icy moon a billion miles farther from the sun than Earth – has nearly all of these ingredients for habitability. Cassini has not yet shown phosphorus and sulfur are present in the ocean, but scientists suspect them to be, since the rocky core of Enceladus is thought to be chemically similar to meteorites that contain the two elements.

This graphic illustrates how scientists on NASA's Cassini mission think water interacts with rock at the bottom of the ocean of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, producing hydrogen gas (H2). 

The Cassini spacecraft detected the hydrogen in the plume of gas and icy material spraying from Enceladus during its deepest and last dive through the plume on Oct. 28, 2015. Cassini also sampled the plume's composition during previous flybys, earlier in the mission. From these observations scientists have determined that nearly 98 percent of the gas in the plume is water vapor, about 1 percent is hydrogen, and the rest is a mixture of other molecules including carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia.

A Quiet Trepidation

A few years ago, yours truly was invited to Watson's coming out party whereby IBM's AI was now open for business. It was impressive without question in terms of how Watson was being used and how it going to be used in the months and years ahead as seen by the demos driven by the software. The highlight of the presentation was a talk by one of the lead programmers discussing the state of the environment as of that day, which started off with the fact the "app" was 11 times smarter then the iteration that won Jeopardy in overwhelming fashion. The last statement that gives one pause was this. "We don't know how it works."

BRT has discussed the implications of this open ended tech many times as this genie is something that extends beyond anything else man has ever created as the tech is just that, open ended where its acceleration of intelligence is becoming exponential and mysterious as the creators of AI are now discovering with quiet trepidation.

Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey. The experimental vehicle, developed by researchers at the chip maker Nvidia, didn’t look different from other autonomous cars, but it was unlike anything demonstrated by Google, Tesla, or General Motors, and it showed the rising power of artificial intelligence. The car didn’t follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it.

Off the rails

Stephen Cohen makes a lot of sense in terms of how close we are to war with Russia based on a foreign policy that has gone off the rails. This is potentially an existential event, IMHO.

By firing off five dozen Tomahawk missiles at a military airfield, our "America First" president may have plunged us into another Middle East war that his countrymen do not want to fight.

Thus far Bashar Assad seems unintimidated. Brushing off the strikes, he has defiantly gone back to bombing the rebels from the same Shayrat air base that the U.S. missiles hit.

Trump "will not stop here," warned U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on Sunday. "If he needs to do more, he will."

If Trump fails to back up Haley's threat, the hawks now cheering him on will begin deriding him as "Donald Obama."

But if he throbs to the war drums of John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and orders Syria's air force destroyed, we could be at war not only with ISIS and al-Qaida, but with Syria, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. - Patrick Buchanan

JFK, we need you now.

Addendum:

I would note that those who say that the Russian air defense systems did not work don’t know what they are talking about.  Not only did Russia sign an agreement with the US not to interfere with US flight operations, the Russian air defenses in Syria are NOT tasked with the protection of the Syrian Air Space.  That is a task for the Syrian air defenses.  The Russians air defenses in Syria are only here to protect Russian personnel and equipment.  This is why the Russians never targeted Israeli warplanes.  And this is hardly surprising as the Russian task force in Syria never had the mission to shut down the Syrian air space or, even less so, to start a war with the USA or Israel.

However, this might be changing.  Now the Russians have withdrawn from their agreement with the USA and, even more importantly, have have declared that the Syrians urgently need more advanced air defense capabilities.  Currently the Syrians operate very few advanced Russian air defense systems, most of their gear is old.

It gets better

Most people think that crimes against humanity or genocide must be the ultimate crime under international law.  They are wrong.  The ultimate crime is aggression.  This is the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trial on this topic:


To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Any questions as to why this is a rather dangerous situation?

AR ... to be continued

BRT did a piece on AR about 3 months ago showing Machusta's amazing video depicting sensory overload to the max titled I Dunno About This. Where is man going with this tech? Not a clue, something rather disquieting to say the least.

Victor says Strange Beasts gives players a “friend for life.” But as we watch him sitting alone in his apartment swiping in mid-air at images only he can see, we start to feel uneasy.

The twist at the end of the film is one you may not see coming, and it opens up broader questions about the implications of augmented reality and similar technologies. Does technology that enables imaginary relationships keep us from building real ones, or is it just a minor distraction? If it’s a distraction that makes us feel better, then is it really such a bad thing?

Texting is the first disconnect, AR could be the final. Something to think about, don't you think?

War Porn

War Porn or how unpopular presidents become popular through the use of military to shore up bad PR

is seen by the attack on Syria without an investigation to find out who actually committed the atrocity of gassing innocent civilians. This ploy of using war to attain popularity has been used since the beginning of time, a fact disquieting to say the least.

In Federalist 4, John Jay warned of all the personal benefits a leader obtains from starting a new war – which is the reason it was supposed to be difficult for U.S. Presidents to do it:

It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.

Smedley Butler was right, War is a Racket.

Smedley Darlington Butler

• Born: West Chester, Pa., July 30, 1881
• Educated: Haverford School
• Married: Ethel C. Peters, of Philadelphia, June 30, 1905
• Awarded two congressional medals of honor:
• capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914
• capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti, 1917
• Distinguished service medal, 1919
• Major General - United States Marine Corps
• Retired Oct. 1, 1931
• On leave of absence to act as 
• director of Dept. of Safety, Philadelphia, 1932
• Lecturer -- 1930's
• Republican Candidate for Senate, 1932
• Died at Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, June 21, 1940
• For more information about Major General Butler, 
• contact the United States Marine Corps.

Smedley Butler

Gerrymandering - The long running scourge of America

The word "gerrymander" was coined in 1812 after Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry signed into law a salamander-shaped district.

BRT has railed against gerrymandering since the beginning of time as this corrupt practice enables political trolls to remain in power FOREVER by manipulating the configuration of voting districts by the party in power every time the census rolls around every 10 years but there's hope, thanks to tech and smart people who know how to use said tech to finally end this long running scourge in America.

The problem is that there is no such thing as a perfect map — every map will have some partisan effect. So how much is too much? In 2004, in a ruling that rejected nearly every available test for partisan gerrymandering, the Supreme Court called this an “unanswerable question.” Meanwhile, as the court wrestles with this issue, maps are growing increasingly biased, many experts say.

Even so, the current moment is perhaps the most auspicious one in decades for reining in partisan gerrymandering. New quantitative approaches — measures of how biased a map is, and algorithms that can create millions of alternative maps — could help set a concrete standard for how much gerrymandering is too much.

Last November, some of these new approaches helped convince a United States district court to invalidate the Wisconsin state assembly district map — the first time in more than 30 years that any federal court has struck down a map for being unconstitutionally partisan. That case is now bound for the Supreme Court.

“Will the Supreme Court say, ‘Here is a fairness standard that we’re willing to stand by?’” Cho said. “If it does, that’s a big statement by the court.”

So far, political and social scientists and lawyers have been leading the charge to bring quantitative measures of gerrymandering into the legal realm. But mathematicians may soon enter the fray. A workshop being held this summer at Tufts University on the “Geometry of Redistricting” will, among other things, train mathematicians to serve as expert witnesses in gerrymandering cases. The workshop has drawn more than 1,000 applicants.

“We have just been floored at the response that we’ve gotten,” said Moon Duchin, a mathematician at Tufts who is one of the workshop’s organizers.

This is how it's done.

It's about time, don't you think?

Reminiscences & Other Lies

The Mark Twain Library's wonderful Reminiscences & Other Lies video is a must see as Gavin Wilson is astounding in showing just how relevant Twain continues to be in 2017. Enjoy.

Dining Out

Dining on each other was not uncommon, something yours truly did not know about until now.

Next time you eat Chinese, for example, you might discuss how, during the Yuan dynasty, royalty and upper-class citizens did so, too. So frequently did high society dine on fellow citizens that the various methods of preparing human flesh — including baking, roasting, broiling, smoke-drying and sun-drying — filled 13 pages of one book Schutt consulted. (Children were considered the tastiest, followed by women and last, men.) In fact, so-called epicurean cannibalism — that is, eating your fellow men/women/children because they taste good and not just because there’s nothing else in the house — was still widespread in China into the late 1960s during the Cultural Revolution.

“Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History” is full of such surprising news. Early in its pages we learn that almost everybody does it: not just in China, or the Donner party, or the New Guinea highlanders whose practice of eating the brains of dead relatives spread the deadly neurological disease kuru (though there’s plenty on these examples, too, in the book). Europeans, we read, “routinely consumed human blood, bones, skin, guts and body parts” for hundreds of years. Cannibalism, in fact, is not that unusual. It happens not only when people are starving or overcrowded. And it’s not restricted to humans.

It gets better.

Here’s some food for thought. How many calories would you get from consuming one whole human body? More than 125,000, according to a new study on human cannibalism that will either make you queasy or have you reaching for some fava beans and a nice chianti.

I knew about spiders, frogs, Komodo Dragons and some birds but didn't realize the natural world is an equal opportunity enabler of cannibalism as well. 

But over the decades, evidence has been gathering for an alternative view. Cannibalism, it turns out, occurs in hundreds of species, perhaps thousands. The behavior varies in frequency between major animal groups — nonexistent in some, common in others. It varies from species to species and even within the same species, depending on local environmental conditions.

As important, the behavior serves a variety of functions, depending on the cannibal, and some of these have nothing to do with stress or captive conditions. There are even instances in which an individual being cannibalized receives a benefit.

Sounds logical to me as long as I am not on the menu. :)