Music inspired by a Great Basin wildlife refuge: The Malheur Symphony by Chris Thomas, performed by the Central Oregon Symphony. I like the middle movements best, particularly "Thunder" and "Curlew Scherzo."

A possible solution to the Dark Forest Theory is that any species advanced enough to make contact with interstellar life is vastly more likely to have evolved a Cooperate baseline strategy rather than a Defect one. Klingons, maybe; Reapers? Ehn.

Not that anyone should take the Drake equation seriously in any case. Our "I Love Lucy" reruns are not going to summon the fungi from Yugoth.

If anything is listening though: hi! We're ballistic cursorial hunters! Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

The oldest known fossil digestive tracts were recently described in Ediacaran strata in Nye County Nevada.

The largest geologic structures on the planet - do they drive volcanic hot spots and mass extinction-level flood basalts? We don't really know, but definitely maybe.

A fish dying of decompression sickness reveals that the Congo is the world's deepest river.

Oldest fossilized slime mold: 100 million years in Burmese amber.

Pass the Garum - a blog exploring Roman cuisine. Sadly, it's not active, but it's still online with much of interest, some of which I would even consider eating.

Depth perception in cuttlefish:

“Not only did the [team] provide compelling evidence that cuttlefish employ stereopsis, but they demonstrated that cuttlefish can be trained to wear equipment and respond to virtual stimuli.”

Fun toy/timesink: Translate words into every major European language simultaneously.

Today I learned that Uganda under Idi Amin had a space program:

When President Idi Amin came to power in a 1971 coup (at the Space Race climax of the Apollo lunar landings), he shortly thereafter announced an impossibly optimistic human spaceflight program, that never progressed beyond an attempt at astronaut training on an obstacle course made up of used automobile tires.

More weird exo-planets, from NASA:

"Super-Puffs" may sound like a new breakfast cereal. But it's actually the nickname for a unique and rare class of young exoplanets that have the density of cotton candy. Nothing like them exists in our solar system.

I personally favor "Hot Neptunes" for extraterrestrial life, on the theory that they are the likeliest breeding ground for dragons.

"Death"

From the depths of the land I watch
Strange hands stick out
Legs stick out
A head intrudes
Gentlemen
What in blazes
Is this goose before me?
From the depths of the land I watch
I make mouths
Hands stick out
Legs stick out
A head intrudes.

...

I don't get it either, but--for the record--this is not a Prawne family creation.

An update on those Russian foxes:

The Russian Farm-Fox Experiment is the best known experimental study in animal domestication. By subjecting a population of foxes to selection for tameness alone, Dimitry Belyaev generated foxes that possessed a suite of characteristics that mimicked those found across domesticated species. This ‘domestication syndrome’ has been a central focus of research into the biological pathways modified during domestication. Here, we chart the origins of Belyaev’s foxes in eastern Canada and critically assess the appearance of domestication syndrome traits across animal domesticates. Our results suggest that both the conclusions of the Farm-Fox Experiment and the ubiquity of domestication syndrome have been overstated. To understand the process of domestication requires a more comprehensive approach focused on essential adaptations to human-modified environments.

Heaven preserve me from linking to Slate, but this article on the re-printing of John M. Ford's work is news too good not to share.

But I reconnected Ford’s family and editors at Tor, and after a year of delicate back-and-forth spearheaded by Beth Meacham, Tor and the family have reached an agreement that will gradually bring all of his books back into print, plus a new volume of stories, poems, Christmas cards, and other uncollected material. First up, in fall 2020, is the book that introduced me to Ford, The Dragon Waiting. Then, in 2021, Tor will publish—at long last—the unfinished Aspects, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman.

Now if we can see a full re-print of Cordwainer Smith, and if Pamela Dean ever gets that last Secret Country book out....

While the story of how they extracted proteins from dental enamel, then reconstructed the DNA, to link this giant ape to orang-utans is cool, the main takeaway is: there were ten-foot tall giant apes and I have missed them by a mere 1.9 million years. O tempora!

The beehives are still today
Bubbles rise in the wine
Against the sky a skein of geese
Against the wind a traveller strides.

--Xiaoxia Wei

From this charming thread, Sumerian proverbs about dogs.

"The dog understands, 'Take it!' It does not understand 'Put it down!'"

Corpus.

Hieronymous Bosch's butt music from Hell gets interpreted, proves callipygous.

Background, as it were, is here.

Update: Also, Bosch piñatas.

Teach yourself Sakha. Someone is doing the labor of translating a key Russian test into English. It's remarkable how cognate it is with Turkish for something way out in Siberia.

We'll never know for sure what it was like to hear the Homeric epics performed 2,800 years ago, but I can't help but think that this Kurdish singer of tales must come close:



Hat tip: Poemas del Río Wang

An album of Irish music largely composed by artificial intelligence: good luck telling which tunes are AI by ear.

Now if only they'll turn the software onto Serbian brass bands!

War elephants.

The evolution of dogs' expressive eyes

This is a good article about Portland:

Were most people in Portland stunned when Trump was elected? Sure, but they did not malinger, they marched, they marched and marched and kept marching, women’s marches, “Not my President!” marches, marches for LBGTQ rights, for minority rights, an Earth Day march, a May Day march, marches against homelessness and ICE, for police accountability and immigrant rights, so many marches an alt-weekly ran a “Resistance & Rallies” listings category. Marching provided the warm spurt that doing something can bring, and if they did not seem to have much effect on the machinations of government, they at least brought people together. Including, it must be said, unwanted people. While marchers might have been moved to bring donuts and deodorant to the Occupy Wall Street squatters in 2011, these new kids, these anti-fascists with their dark hoodies, did not seem so much about protest as revolution, the news showed them setting cars on fire and smashing storefronts. Or maybe those were other people in hoodies? It was hard to tell, the marches had become confusing. Anyone was potentially frightening now but especially another new faction, these Nazi-lite looking guys carrying flags, throwing punches, maybe deflecting punches but did it matter? Portland was not going to become the next Charlottesville, not when the city’s historical record included the 1988 beating death of an Ethiopian immigrant by a group of thugs calling itself White Aryan Resistance. But why go back that far? There was the 2017 stabbing deaths aboard the light rail of two good Samaritans as they tried to protect two teenage girls—one a Muslim in a hijab, one who was black—from a ranting self-described “white nationalist.” And yes, the killer had a history of mental illness, but still, he’d expressed support for Trump, and anyone who supported Trump was by association a racist and a threat, and there was no room for that kind of hate in Portland, not at public assemblies meant to promote peace, and maybe the authorities needed to do something about these people.

ht: Samizdata 

Apropos of nothing at all: Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtues.



Andrea Mantegna, 1502, housed in the Louvre.

The letter X is made to vex. What did children's alphabet literature do before x-rays and xylophones were going concerns? Xanthippe was apparently a popular choice:



Or:

X is a letter that seldom is used,
But its shape will remind us how sinners abused
Their Saviour and God, when, with brute, cruel force,
They compelled Him to bleed and die on the cross!

And, an entire alphabet mocking the Cubists.

Via Languagehat.

Filthy Italian poetry, naughty Renaissance art and early music theory: worth a watch!

From a Clerk of Oxford:

this series of talks given recently in Oxford (in connection with the Bodleian Library's exhibition Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth) on the subject of the medieval languages which interested and influenced Tolkien. There were lectures on Old and Middle English, Medieval Welsh, Gothic and Old Norse (my contribution)

Late to the party but unabashed.

Parthenogenesis in anacondas

Our failure to accept the Aristotelian idea of substance is at the root of our modern failures of thought. If you deal with every unacceptable conclsion by denying the existence of any rational category, you will lose the ability to think.

Welsh Neanderthals

Excavations at the cave by Amgueddfa Cymru between 1978 and 1995 unearthed a total of 19 teeth, discovered found deep inside the cave. These have been identified by experts at the Natural History Museum, London as belonging to an early form of Neanderthal..

Spring Thing 2019 is here.

I'll be reviewing such IF as catch my eye.

Artificial intelligence generates inspirational memes and posters.

Yet another attempt to answer that eternal question: were the Gracchi worth the hassle?

Ancient Greek punishments teach typing.

Yeah.

The Soviets filmed The Hobbit in 1985. They include some of the songs.

Needless to say, if you watch this you have nobody to blame but yourself. But it's still not as bad as at least two of the three Peter Jackson films.

Fantasy birding: sadly nothing to do with simorghs or war shrikes or the like. Valuable tool for education and public engagement, or yet another death knell for our relationship with the non-human world? I have my suspicions, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

First gold digging ants, now Egyptian shipbuilding: Herodotus vindicated again.

Lambing season!

As an aside, the piebald lambs like this flecket are noticeably friendlier. Another data-point for the domestication/neoteny theory.

Shetland markings. Warning: rabbit hole.

Nordic-related miscellany:

• Dating the Eldgjá eruptions (the largest flood basalt eruptions in historic time) with methods including the Icelandic Book of Settlement and Deeds of the Saxons*
• 3,400-year-old beads in Danish graves were made by the same glassmakers used by King Tut 

 *(Inspired by this collection of aerial images of the Eldgjá flows)