Sometimes it is a good idea to browse through my TOC emails

… because I find stuff like this:

Hunter–gatherers and other primates as prey, predators, and competitors of snakes:

Relationships between primates and snakes are of widespread interest from anthropological, psychological, and evolutionary perspectives, but surprisingly, little is known about the dangers that serpents have posed to people with prehistoric lifestyles and nonhuman primates. Here, we report ethnographic observations of 120 Philippine Agta Negritos when they were still preliterate hunter–gatherers, among whom 26% of adult males had survived predation attempts by reticulated pythons. Six fatal attacks occurred between 1934 and 1973. Agta ate pythons as well as deer, wild pigs, and monkeys, which are also eaten by pythons, and therefore, the two species were reciprocally prey, predators, and potential competitors. Natural history data document snake predation on tree shrews and 26 species of nonhuman primates as well as many species of primates approaching, mobbing, killing, and sometimes eating snakes. These findings, interpreted within the context of snake and primate phylogenies, corroborate the hypothesis that complex ecological interactions have long characterized our shared evolutionary history.

Hating snakes is deeply ingrained in our evolutionary past. I feel validated.

The literature of the 21st century is science fiction?

Recently I’ve been engaged in a little reading project – reading post-Hiroshima End of the World science fiction side by side with the best mainstream literature of the 1950’s. What I see is that 1950’s sci-fi at the time ignored the last 100 years of development in literature, while the mainstream literature of the time ignored the last 100 years of technological development. Very slowly, this has changed over the last 60 years, and we’ve reached the point where things are getting really exciting…

Guardian columnist Damien Walter on “Why Science Fiction is the Literature of Change: Continue reading “The literature of the 21st century is science fiction?”

John Philip Sousa: recordings will kill music

From Ars Technica, here’s composer John Phillip Sousa coming out against the Gramophone in 1906:

“From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,” he wrote. “And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.”

His piece concluded, “Do they not realize that if the accredited composers who have come into vogue by reason of merit and labor are refused a just reward for their efforts a condition is almost sure to arise where all incentive to further creative work is lacking and compositions will no longer flow from their pens or where they will be compelled to refrain from publishing their compositions at all and control them in manuscript? What, then, of the playing and talking machines?”

First Post-apocalyptic sci-fi for 2012

I picked up Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife for Christmas, and can’t wait to start reading it. (Alas, I must first make a little room on my stack.)

Here’s what Paul de Filippo has to say about the book that io9 called this year’s weirdest post-apocalyptic novel:

With his new book, Blueprints of the Afterlife, Boudinot takes this finely wrought but perhaps thematically underpowered mimetic-absurdist vehicle and drops in a rocket-powered speculative engine. If Misconception took off from “So Little Time,” Blueprints launches hypersonically from “Written by Machines.”

The bulk of the novel unfolds about a century from now, in a postapocalyptic future barely emerging from an interregnum called the Age of Fucked Up Shit. We will witness at several removes, in the form of interview transcripts with one Luke Piper, the birth of FUS, an enigmatic era whose full meaning and dimensions Boudinot sternly and bravely refuses to fully resolve. With its leitmotif of “superposition,” the physics riff most familiar from the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, this novel pinwheels out multivalent explanations for almost everything, demanding that the reader navigate his or her own best-determined path of causality through the sly and shifting narrative.

But do not take that to mean that Blueprints of the Afterlife is an impenetrable nest of hypertext. Far from it. Its linear propulsion, studded with bravura set pieces, is compulsively readable in the manner of any consumer-friendly epic fantasy novel, overstuffed with unforgettable freakish characters (in the Age of FUS, freakish is the new normal); laugh-out-loud or cringe-worthy incidents; and rafts of genuinely innovative scientific, spiritual, and philosophical speculations delivered in sleek and colorful prose.

On days like this I wish I was a mathematician

Titles of the references on the Hawaiian earring Wikipedia page, clearly designed to make math actually seem fun:

“The big fundamental group, big Hawaiian earrings, and the big free groups”

“Anomalous behavior of the Hawaiian earring group”

“The fundamental groups of one-dimensional wild spaces and the Hawaiian earring”

“The singular homology of the Hawaiian earring”

“The topological Hawaiian earring group does not embed in the inverse limit of free groups”