Falling US dollar

The falling American dollar is like getting a huge raise. In past years when we have visited south, turning Canadian dollars into US dollars meant getting far fewer of them.

By the next time we go down, we may get more of them! For the first time in many decades, the Canadian dollar will soon be worth more.... Meaning there will be some pretty cheap shopping down there!

Running Linux Tonight

Here I am, surfing away in IceWeasel, running in Linux's KDE desktop environment. I have installed no new operating system on the computer, however.

It used to be that running an operating system meant committing all your computer hardware to that operating system. Once you spent those hours installing Windows, OS/2, or Linux, that was that... this was now what your computer ran.But there are a number of ways, now, to get the benefit of more than one operating system.

The way I'm doing it is Knoppix. If KDE is not your flavour, then there is Gnoppix. These are CD images that, when plopped in your CD drive, boot an entire working installation of Linux without touching your hard drive.

You can also install operating systems into "virtual machines." On one computer, I have Windows 2000 Server running inside Vista, using Microsoft's Virtual PC. There are a number of VMWare images of operating systems, that can be installed virtually. And there's also Qemu.

At least with operating systems, you can now have your cake and eat it too!

Happiness

Happiness, for me, comes with moments of peace - those times when you realize things are exactly what they are supposed to be: beautiful.

My faith makes me happy for it is the source, for me, of many such moments. My family makes me happy, because happiness is magnified when you have someone to share it with. And the fragility of happiness makes me happy, because it causes me to realize that each joy is rare enough to be precious.

Enduring happiness comes from realizing, ironically, that happiness itself is fleeting. Moments - including moments of happiness - do pass. But united to God, who is timeless and ageless, we will be able to be bound permanently to every happy moment there has been.

Pierre Trudeau owns a dragon!

Brian Mulroney, perhaps the most unpopular man in Canada even though he has not been Prime Minister for fourteen years, has a bone to pick with Pierre Trudeau, his almost predecessor (there was a forty seven day interval of John Turner.)

It is hard to say what Mulroney is so unpopular for. In his day, he was unpopular for the NAFTA free trade agreement, whose predecessor he brought about with Presidents Reagan and Bush. Nobody is upset about NAFTA today, but he remains unpopular for the GST, a Federal sales tax that replaced an earlier hidden value added tax.

Trudeau was himself deeply unpopular, but his reputation has been healed by time. Mulroney, on the other hand, remains very unpopular. I remember when Mulroney had an episode of ill health a few years ago; rather than hearing sympathy from people, I remember reading a snarky letter to the editor, "I hope they charge GST on his funeral!"

So I suppose it is not surprising to see one unpopular Prime Minister target another. I suspect he resents the fact that history is turning out to be kind to one and not the other.

(In case you are wondering about the topic title, that's a bit of insider Canadian humour.)

Ninety five million year death sentence

In the night sky, in the late Jurassic, no sleeping dinosaur awoke in order to see two asteroids collide. The event was probably not even visible from Earth. But for all the descendants of these dinosaurs (save the ones with wings), this collision was a literally Earth shattering event.

Fragments of this colossal interplanetary collision would slowly be pulled into our area of the solar system. A hundred million years ago, one of them probably struck the moon and made the Tycho crater. And then, sixty five million years ago, one would have struck the Yucatan peninsula in the gulf of Mexico, sending embers across the world and burning down nearly every forest on the planet, and coating the Earth in a thin layer of iridium, as the dust slowly settled from the resulting nuclear winter.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,295842,00.html

The mustard seed

"With faith the size of a mustard seed," Jesus once said, "you can move mountains."

It is only when you examine your faith carefully that you realize that having a faith even that large takes a lot of work. How many times have you been put in situations that you did not feel had any hope of working out? And yet, did they?

This happens to me all the time. When my daughter wiped out my computer, I thought all my music projects, and all my other daughter's drawings and photographs had been wiped out. But plugging away at the problem every night, I figured out a way to use Knoppix to get at the damaged hard drive, and get all of our files off the computer.... although I ended up having to completely reinstall it.

Nothing will be the end of the world, except for the actual end of the world. I so often fail to realize it.

Back? Well, we'll see

Hello.

Funny that my last post should be a throwaway number about Harry Potter, and that my next post, many months later should be a dry science rebuttal. There have been a lot of things keeping me offline - an incredibly hectic work schedule; a long vacation we took out east to Quebec and the Maritimes; and then finally, an awful computer crash (my elder daughter came over to our house while we were away, attempted to install World of Warcraft, and completely ruined our Windows installation beyond all repair.)

But a simpler truth is that I simply ran out of things to say. The first year I blogged, there were a lot of changes in my life, particularly the loss of a family member. The next year, I turned forty. The year after that I became a grandfather. Those were fundamental shadows and light on the texture of my life, and I had to record what I was thinking about that somewhere.

Knock on wood, but there is just not that much new going on with us at the moment. I put a lot more effort into my music this year, but since music is itself a form of expression, it didn't inspire me to blog, but kind of drained what energy I have for it.

The result is, I did not blog. And I was fine with that, actually.

So I finally understand disappearing bloggers. I've seen a few sail off into the sunset, including some of my favourite reads. Now I get how easy it is to do - one day, you decide you just don't feel like posting any more, and so you don't. And you don't the next day... or the day after that.

The other day, for the first time, I actually felt moved to post something, a response to a science paper where I felt I knew enough about the subject matter to effectively rebut it. And I realized I really only had one outlet where I could just write an essay, and toss it online - my blog.

So... we will see. Will I feel like posting again this week? Maybe - and I hope so. I've certainly missed interacting with some of the people I've known online, I do know that much.

We'll see if I can get the posting bug back.

Last stand of the hairy, dumb Neanderthal

I read an award winning paper, recently, that I want to take issue with.

http://xchar.home.att.net/n2a/medhyp.htm

Judith Rich Harris makes the case that humans are hairless because stone age members of Homo Sapiens wanted hairless babies. It is an intriguing hypothesis, but sadly, she constructs it on the edifice of the once traditional view that Neanderthals were hairless savages.

I think it is not particularly difficult to falsify her claims about Neanderthals, in fact, without going to a whole lot of trouble.

She points out, using a passage of Robinson Crusoe, that man has to go to a lot of trouble with animal hides to replace a feature that he has lost. While this is true, what she does not point out is that a lot of this is trouble we know that Neanderthals themselves went to. Neanderthal tooth wear pattern strongly suggests they used their teeth to soften hides, because their tooth wear pattern is almost exactly the same as those of pre-twentieth century Inuit. We know from the Mousterian toolkit that certain forms of Levallois flakes (scrapers) were used to clean hides.

Leaving aside that unclothed people of the modern variety have lived in the cold, such as Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego, Harris speculates that Neanderthal hairiness was needed because of all the generations they faced in the ice age without using needles; she writes, “The evidence strongly suggests that Neanderthals did not invent or use the needle and that they could not sew.”

But you don't need needles to make clothes. Look at how a deerskin shirt laces up! No – what you do need is an awl. And Neanderthals did make those. And borers, which can also punch holes.

She writes, “If I am correct in proposing that hairlessness is a characteristic only of our species of primate, then it would have arisen no longer ago than 200,000 years.”

And yet how then to explain the fact that, from the neck down, the hominid line from Homo Ergaster on down is almost completely modern? I don't mean a little bit modern, but very near completely. Human hairlessness is not a casual adaptation – hairlessness enables the most efficient heat dissipation system heretofore seen among mammals. We have more ability to sweat than any other mammal, and sweat dries fast enough due to hairlessness in such a way as to grant us a tremendous ability to dissipate heat. (Zihlman and Cohn, 1988)

It defies imagination to accept that Homo Ergaster seems to have adapted our 'built for endurance' physiology, and yet – simply so this author can get her paper right – lacks this one critical adaptation necessary for the well known prowess man has for endurance! And indeed, the evidence shows that the early Homo line did not lack the sweat wicking benefits hairlessness provides. Rogers, Iltis, and Wooding show that consistent dark pigmentation in modern African populations can be traced, at minimum, to about 1.2 million years ago – strong selection forces kept this gene uniform.

And yet in hairy chimpanzees, no similar pressures appear to have ever existed. This is not a coincidence. The pressure on humans to stay dark came from the fact that their skin was exposed to the sun.

Harris never touches on the apparent evidence of Neanderthal self-decoration – they made necklaces, and used ocher and manganese dioxide – substances which, at that time, had no non-decorative purposes. We know they were not using these paints to paint on cave walls, which seems to be the exclusive preserve of our own species. This strongly suggests they were only painting themselves. "Black pigments, mostly manganese dioxides, and to a lesser extent fragments of ochre, come from at least seventy layers excavated at forty Neandertal sites in Europe." (D'Errico, 2003)

There's a very clear picture emerging – not only were Neanderthals probably hairless (since if they were decorating their skin, they had bare skin to decorate), but we can even infer something about skin colour: they were pale (since they were drawing on themselves with dark manganese.)

The Neanderthal genome project notes, “Approximately 99% of the Homo sapiens genome is identical to the chimpanzee genome, our closest living relative. It is estimated that the Neandertal shares 96% of the 1% difference with Homo Sapiens. The Neandertal shares the remaining 4% of the difference with the chimpanzee.” (454 Life Sciences, see http://www.imakenews.com/cure/e_article000649656.cfm?x=b11,0,w)

At 99.96% - and knowing some morphological features of a Neanderthal are chimp-like (prognathus mid-face, brow ridges, receding forehead), and that the rest are human like, I think it is fair to guess that if Neanderthals share 96% of the specific adaptations we have made, that the heat dissipation of modern humans is one of them – the evidence for clothing and self decorating are far too strong to ignore.

The author at one point makes the completely speculative, wild, and unsupported claim that Neanderthals disappeared as a result of Homo Sapiens eating them because they were hairy. No evidence from the Middle or Upper Paleolithic has ever surfaced that this is so – we know what both species ate; examining the hearths of each species tells us a great deal about diet, and the cave paintings of Cro-Magnon man tell us even more. Ibex, auroch, shellfish are associated with the “last stand” Neanderthals of Gibraltar. Modern humans ate just about anything – but never, never have Neanderthals shown up in their hearths or campsites, and the only butchered Neanderthal remains ever recovered are associated with Mousterian assemblages (meaning their own kind did it.)

So if modern man does not show any evidence of having butchered and processed Neanderthals at their campsites, the reason is fairly obvious - they never in fact did so.

Sadly, the author trots out the tired notions about Sapiens intellectual superiority, largely unsupported by the fossil record. She refers to “better brains and a better toolkit.” The alleged superiority of Sapiens tools is in many ways undemonstrated – Levallois blades no more than a micron thick at the blade can't actually be improved on, not even with surgical steel. Then there's the fact that at the same time Sapiens were developing the Aurignacian toolkit, Neanderthals were developing the nearly equal Chatelperronian toolkit. And there are technologies Neanderthals developed that moderns did not develop until the Neolithic, such as developing an anaerobically manufactured tar to haft spear points in the Harz mountains, 70,000 years ago. (Koller/Baumer/Mania, 2001)

While it is true there is an aesthetic superiority to Aurignacian tools – nobody should mistake this for a functional superiority. For other than the advent of needles, there wasn't one.

As for the superiority of modern brains, Neanderthals had larger ones, and there is some evidence that a modern gene for regulating brain size comes from them. (Lahn/Evans/Mekel-Bobrov/Vallender/Hudson, 2006)