Babbling Blueberry

Look what these male birds do for their female birds!

Check out this video! These birds have amazing mimicry abilities.  They should call it a
tape recorder bird, but it’s really called a lyrebird.

“Reversed” sense of time

We typically think of the future as being in the front and the past as being behind us. This also is reflected in our language (many verbal languages as far as I know and American Sign Language) and how we gesture. According to some linguists (link here), there is a group of people in the Andes who have a reverse sense of time: the future is behind and the past is in front:

The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits “nayra,” the basic word for “eye,” “front” or “sight,” to mean “past” and recruits “qhipa,” the basic word for “back” or “behind,” to mean “future.” So, for example, the expression “nayra mara” – which translates in meaning to “last year” – can be literally glossed as “front year…”
The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn’t command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or waving over their shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past – by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones – only exactly in reverse.

“These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon,” (University of California, San Diego professor Rafael) Nunez said. “That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn’t have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.

“But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies – the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all – here we have a basic concept that is utterly different,” he said.

A Salon article about famine in Africa and how the US is doing everything wrong and how the timing of what little money is sent makes it impossible to prevent famine and put in long-term solutions because you’re too late to treat the causes of famine. Some quotes:

“the cost of the occupation in Iraq is more than $150 million a day. So five days of war, a work week, would feed more than 12 million people for three years. Instead, over the last few months the Bush administration has reneged on about $100 million that it had promised to food aid charities.”

“The Pentagon recently allocated $300 million to fund a propaganda operation to plant news stories favorable to America in the foreign press. Yet if that money had gone to food and development programs, there would be no need for propaganda programs.”

“When asked why they had not given more food aid in the face of the oncoming crisis, American and European officials in Niger say that food aid should only be a last resort. It is far more effective, they said, to give money for long-term development. Unfortunately, this rhetoric does not reflect reality. Foreign aid from rich nations goes almost entirely to military support or disaster relief. Little attention is paid to the aid programs that would help Africans head off catastrophe.”

“While most of the world gives aid agencies cash that they use to buy food locally, 99 percent of the food aid provided by the U.S. is purchased from American farmers at market prices and is then shipped overseas on U.S.-registered vessels…By general consensus, U.S. food aid is inefficient and overpriced, and can be damaging to the African economy. The Financial Times called the American type of assistance ‘a subsidy programme for rich world farmers’…the U.S. would be able to provide twice as much food for the same money because of the savings on transportation alone”

There’s much more info if you read the full article.