The City of Samba

Play it on full screen. This is a wonderful video, and the tilt-shift effect makes the Sambódromo parade scenes just magical.

The City of Samba from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

H/T: Nag on the Lake.

Link dumpage for a lazy holiday weekend

First off, via Janeen of SmartDogs [on Facebook], here's the Poop Fairy PSA. Awesome. And from the beautiful Northwest via Rachel Maddow, here's a swell video on the same topic. Martin Luther [with sidekick Lola] sings it:



More Dog Doogity goodness here [and a free sticker!].

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"Corporate personhood": much like a dog turd, it smells nasty, fosters parasites, and needs proper disposal. Consider that one little house on the prairie serves as the headquarters for 2,000 different corporations, some linked to criminals:

[The Reuters article] shows how critical these secrecy jurisdictions are to making corporations a vehicle of crime and other abuse. And, as [Nicholas] Shaxson has shown, secrecy jurisdictions are also a key tool for corporations to avoid paying their fair share and for dictators to loot their countries. These kinds of incorporation services are a key tool to sucking the money out of the legitimate economy.

At a time when SCOTUS is giving corporations –- even flimsy entities like the scraps of paper at 2710 Thomes –- more rights than actual citizens, it pays to understand how easy it is for people to avail themselves of corporate personhood.

The good folks at Move to Amend have the novel idea that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. "End corporate rule. Legalize democracy," is their motto. Good luck [wry face]. Seriously, it would be nice if some vestige of government of the people, by the people and for the people rose up and kicked corporate personhood's fat butt to the curb.

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Poop Week over at the most excellent 10,000 Birds was totally awesome.

"First of all, every birder backpack, rucksack, or other holder of materials should have toilet paper, or, failing that, tissues. Don’t resort to what I had to do once in the vicinity of the East Pond of Jamaica Bay and emerge sockless from the bushes."

Still laughing at that one. Yes, I'm twelve. Check out links to all the posts here.

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You knew possums are resistant to snake venom, right? Turns out their ossum super power has to do with one blood protein:

Since the evolutionary origin of the family, the vWF [von Willebrand Factor] of opossum species that prey on snakes has accumulated more changes than vWF in non-snake-eating species. That's circumstantial evidence for the effect of natural selection continuously acting on vWF over millions of years. Jansa and Voss picked out several specific changes that are unique to snake-eating opossums, and found that they're associated with a region of vWF that is known to bind with one of the toxins in pit viper venom.

Read all about it at Jeremy B. Yoder's terrific Denim and Tweed science blog.

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India's vultures have all but disappeared. Feral dogs have filled the void:

In the decade of major vulture decline, from 1992 to 2003, one estimate showed dog populations increasing by a third, up to nearly 30 million. The escalation of the dog population corresponds perfectly with the disappearance of India’s vultures.

Read about the dogs and the last Indian vultures here.

[Both links above from Ed Yong'd addictive blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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More links, and Pam Kling's you-are-there-as-the-rattlesnake-strikes photos, over at my newish, mostly-birding blog, Crow and Raven.

The Mountain

Terje Sorgjerd, who created last month's awesome video of the Northern Lights, has done it again: another great video, this one filmed on 12,000+ ft stratovolcano Pico del Teide in the Canary Islands. Terje writes:

This was filmed between 4th and 11th April 2011. I had the pleasure of visiting El Teide.
Spain´s highest mountain @(3715m) is one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars and is also the location of Teide Observatories, considered to be one of the world´s best observatories.

The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know El Teide.

Read more here. Oh, and play the vid on full screen — it's beautiful.



H/T: the most excellent Starts With A Bang, who knows a thing or two about the night sky.

Fear not, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane

A couple videos of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and what you can do to help:




Reclaimed land and liquefaction: Californians will feel a chill.

This is one of the most hair-raising videos I think I've ever seen. The sight of the roofs moving in the smoke and dust...



MESSENGER:
Gracious my lord,
I should report that which I say I saw,
But know not how to do it.

MACBETH:
Well, say, sir.

MESSENGER:
As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The Wood began to move.

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PCMag.com has an excellent round up of "many options for online donations, as well as sites that will help you keep tabs on the rescue effort." I recommend California's own International Medical Corps: "The group said it will focus its efforts on earthquake and tsunami affected communities that have not yet been reached. To donate, text MED to 80888."

Our hearts are with Japan.

ETA: Satellite before/after shots at the NY Times here.

Super Cool Vid o' the Day

As it happens, the day this went up on YouTube was December 3, 2007. But still: super cool.






[H/T: Will My Dog Hate Me?]

From Cosmic Quandaries with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson

Hat tip to the most excellent Southern Fried Science, where you can watch the entire Cosmic Quandaries panel discussion as well as the following excerpt:




As the man says, "You can't be a scientist if you're uncomfortable with ignorance, because we live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe."

Arc kicks, karate chops, and thirty cops

Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith do the bonding and the kung fu fighting this summer in The Karate Kid, from Columbia Pictures.

Last week Dwayne Betts was filling in for my fave author/blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates over at The Atlantic, and shared this poem for Father's Day:

ENTER THE DRAGON
by John Murillo
Los Angeles, California, 1976

For me, the movie starts with a black man
Leaping into an orbit of badges, tiny moons

Catching the sheen of his perfect black afro.
Arc kicks, karate chops, and thirty cops

On their backs. It starts with the swagger,
The cool lean into the leather front seat

Of the black and white he takes off in.
Deep hallelujahs of moviegoers drown

Out the wah wah guitar. Salt & butter
High-fives, Right on, brother! and Daddy

Glowing so bright he can light the screen
All by himself. This is how it goes down.

Friday night and my father drives us
Home from the late show, two heroes

Cadillacking across King Boulevard.
In the cars dark cab, we jab and clutch,

Jim Kelly and Bruce Lee with popcorn
Breath, and almost miss the lights flashing

In the cracked side mirror. I know whats
Under the seat, but when the uniforms

Approach from the rear quarter panel,
When the fat one leans so far into my father's

Window I can smell his long day's work,
When my father this John Henry of a man,

Hides his hammer, doesn't buck, tucks away
His baritone, license and registration shaking as if

Showing a bathroom pass to a grade school
Principal, I learn the difference between cinema

And city, between the moviehouse cheers
Of old men and the silence that gets us home.

Commenter Michael offers a link to the scene.

And the most excellent Nag posts a rather impressive screen test. Yowza. Just... wow.

Cute sheltie + small, cheerful human = classic zoomies vid

What a sweet dog. Sheltie must be thinking, "This has gotta be the slowest carbon-based organism I have ever tried to play with in. my. life."

"Nature by Numbers"

Here is a terrific little video from Cristóbal Vila of the graphic and animation studio Etérea. You can visit the most excellent website for more about the math, and to grab some gorgeous stills and screen captures of the work in progress. H/T to Boing Boing — I don't usually repost BB stuff, since so many internautas go there, but I liked this video too much not to share. [It's bigger and even beautiful-er on Vimeo.]

Monday's big box o' links

Musher Sebastian Schnuelle [first in the 2009 Yukon Quest, 2nd in the 2009 Iditarod] rocks the earflaps-up look at the Iditarod restart in Wasilla. ADN photo by Bill Roth.

The official Iditarod site is awful, and not just because of a certain inescapable quitter. So ditch the official site, race addicts, and click on this link for awesome Iditarod coverage courtesy of the Anchorage Daily News. Feature stories, a blog, tweets, interactive maps: ADN wins it in a walk. I'm cheering for DeeDee Jonrowe [and her mom] and Colleen Robertia:

Several dogs in Robertia's Rogues Gallery Kennel — mostly "runts, rejects, retirees or rescues," she said — were rescued from the Kenai Animal Shelter and Alaska's Extended Life Animal Sanctuary in Nikiski. Others weren't wanted or needed by area mushers.

"I think they ended up taking two or three dogs from us," Tim Colbath, founder of the sanctuary, said of the Robertias.

"I hope she can finish it. To be able to take the time and knowledge to go through the rescues and get them to work together like that is just phenomenal." [Source: ADN.]

Penny, Colleen's lead dog, weighs a whopping 29 pounds — all of it heart. [That's Penny, top left, from the ADN.] Go, Colleen and Penny!

A few fave photos from the ADN:
The dangerous Mr. Mackey
Team Jonrowe
OMG, this is begging for a caption
Karen Ramstead's gorgeous Siberians

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Have an elderly Rottweiler? Dr. David J. Waters [pdf] really wants to meet you. Actually, he wants to meet your Rottie. Dr. Waters is traveling from coast to coast in order to see as many geriatric Rottweilers as he can:

The complete itinerary of the tour includes: March 11, Harrisburg, Pa.; March 12, Holliston, Mass.; March 13, Philadelphia; March 15, Keysville, Va.; March 16, Columbia, Tenn.; March 19, Cambridge, Wis.; March 20, Riverside, Iowa; March 21, Alma, Kan.; March 23, Red Oak, Texas; March 24, Castle Rock, Colo.; March 27, Colorado Springs, Colo.; March 28, Tijeras, N.M.; March 29, Waddell, Ariz.; March 30, San Diego; April 1, Pacific Palisades, Calif.; and April 3, Seattle.

Waters leads a research team that studies aging and cancer in pet dogs. The research includes the study of exceptionally long-lived Rottweilers - individuals that have lived to at least 13 years, which is equivalent to a human living to 100.

"These exceptional dogs have lived at least 30 percent longer than average for their breed," Waters said. "They have dodged cancer and other life-threatening diseases of aging. We believe studying them can shed light on what it takes to live well."

Over the years, Waters and his team have tracked the lives of more than 140 long-lived Rottweilers. Today, however, their database is down to just 15, hence the tour to meet these exceptionally aged canines.

"From questionnaires completed by owners and veterinarians, my team has validated dates of birth and collected a mountain of information about these dogs, including medical history, diet and dietary supplement usage, and parents' longevity," said Waters, who is also associate director of Purdue's Center on Aging and the Life Course and professor in the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences.

At each stop, he will perform a physical examination, collect DNA samples, and record measurements such as height and chest and belly circumference. He will observe each dog in its home environment and query owners on what makes their dog exceptional.

Read more here, from Jennifer Viegas at Discover News: Oldest Rottweilers Inspire 'The Old Grey Muzzle Tour'.

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Keep. your dog. on a damn. leash. [H/T: DeltaBluez Stockdogs.] Heather points out that a little training wouldn't hurt, either. Speaking as one who has owned sheep: most people who say their unleashed dog has a reliable recall are either delusional or lying.

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Videos:
Canadian dude needs some viral help for a worthy cause. You got it, dude.
I love Local Commercials salutes Butt Drugs of Corydon, Indiana.
OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Rube Goldberg Machine version. Yes, 20 billion people have seen it already, but maybe you missed it. I'm here to help.
A journey through Asia. Moving and beautiful.

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What an 8.8 [and the ensuing tsunami] can do, from The Big Picture.

• Conception, Chile, shifted 10 feet to the west.
• Santiago, Chile’s capital, was displaced about 11 inches to the west-southwest.
• Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, moved about 1 inch to the west.

Sure am glad a 7.5 is the most we can expect in these parts! [See A Faults (pdf).] Oh, yeah, nothing to worry about here.

Seriously folks, those of us along the southern [strike-slip fault] San Andreas will never experience the kind of subduction zone thrust-faulting they have in Chile [and in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest]. San Andreas — big-ass quakes. Subduction zones — frikkin' humongous quakes.

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Last, but not least — if you plan to be in the San Diego area in late March, you might want to attend Safer Pet Vaccination and Health Care: An Educational Seminar and Benefit. You'll spend the day with pet vaccination experts Drs. W. Jean Dodds and Ronald D. Schultz, and proceeds will go to the Rabies Challenge Fund. The seminar/benefit will be held at the Del Mar Hilton [across from the Del Mar Fairgrounds and Racetrack] on Sunday, March 28, 2010.

"If you think it's a socialist plot... drop out of the federal employees' health benefit program."

Like the good people at Obsidian Wings, I'm impressed to hear a senator say this stuff. Sen. Durbin Destroys Republican Arguments on Malpractice Reform:



And in related health care summit news, an ObWi commenter links to right-wing media coverage.

Pringle of Scotland - Life Behind The Scenes

If this video had a rating, it might be PG-13. Also: manky means "extremely gross." But you knew that.

BIRD by Andrew Zuckerman

Andrew Zuckerman's website is here, and the book of photographs he created from the sessions above is here. H/T: Kitsune Noir.

[Update: we [Bobby at KN and I, and Lord knows how many others] were free to embed the video yesterday, but today the embed option no longer exists. Still worth watching — just click on the depressing message above to visit Vimeo.]

You'll cry, you'll cheer

I did, anyway. More on the team's activities here.

The story of my life

[H/T: Balko]

ETA: Link, if the gif above is on coffee break.

"Ich will auch so viele Hunde"

Or, as we might say here in SoCal, "Duuuude...! I totally want that many dogs, too."

H/T to the irrepressible Roughly [oops!] Ruffly Speaking for this great vid of fit, happy, gorgeous, purpose-bred dogs in beautiful condition and, oh yes, beautifully trained. [Lovely encounter with a loose dog at 1:37.] If this gentleman [a sled dog racer from Germany] can handle sixteen dogs so effortlessly, managing one or two should be a piece of cake for the rest of us, right? Right...?

Enjoy:

Crying Time

The time sink that is YouTube — hours of my life I'll never get back. What the hell, it's vacation.

Ray Charles and Buck Owens sing Buck's Crying Time [Thanks, Mexico Bob]:



Another classic:



Next should be one of YouTube's ten gazillion versions of La Llorona, but no — here is Lila Downs singing about a woman leaving her lover for another man. The lover protests, the woman cries, the end. A great little song, very well sung:

A little something to warm the heart

erry Christmas — and to all a wonderful Nochebuena!

And what would a blog post — even a Christmas Eve blog post — be without links and hat tips? The holidays are all about linkage, people! The beautiful M comes from typographer and illustrator Jessica Hische's Daily Drop Cap, and a big H/T for the video to El País journalist Rosa Jiménez Cano.

Best wishes to all for the happiest of holidays!

Bird sounds

"Out of the mockingbird's throat, the musical shuttle" [Photo by larry wfu on Flickr.]

Remember Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs? One of the finest things the Onion has ever produced, if you ask me. Turns out Aves may be another group to keep an eye on.

If you watched the terrific video on parrot intelligence [H/T Heckled by Parrots, via Pet Connection], you probably caught a glimpse of a scientist in a lab. He was on screen for just a few seconds, at 5:44 in the vid. That's Erich Jarvis. Here's his Duke U. faculty page. From the NOVA site:

Erich Jarvis is a neurobiologist at Duke University Medical Center. He heads a team of researchers in the field of vocal communication. The Jarvis Lab's research of songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds sheds light on how the brain is able to learn the behavior of sound. Jarvis's work on bird brains may have applications to the treatment speech problems in humans, such as stuttering. In October 2005, Dr. Jarvis won the National Institutes of Health's Director's Pioneer Award, which provides $500,000 per year for five years to researchers pursuing innovative approaches to biomedical research.

This summer Jarvis gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union:

Vocal learners mimic sounds they hear, and then modify them to create new sounds. This may not be as much mindless parroting as we used to think—and here Jarvis singled out Irene Pepperberg in the audience, whose experiments with Alex the African Grey Parrot showed that he understood the semantics of a question like “How many total?” well enough to count and reciprocally communicate to Irene that two beads and four beads made “six.”

As for how vocal learning happens, Jarvis and colleagues reported in a staggering series of publications that while all birds use parts of the brain stem to produce songs, those with learned songs also use parts of the forebrain. Birds that learn their songs may even have more than one pathway controlling their learning. One pathway may promote variability in songs while another pathway produces more consistency, or stereotyping. The proper balance between the two pathways allows for vocal learning.
[...]
Jarvis basically threw out the window the received wisdom that humans’ large brain size and extensive brain folding are the explanation for our complex language. When he and colleagues described in 2005 how bird song and human speech actually make use of the same three forebrain regions, it made a splash. People reportedly called Webster’s and asked them to remove the term “bird brain” from the dictionary. [Source: Round Robin — The Cornell Blog of Ornithology.]

You can read more about the evolution of avian brain structure for vocal learning here, at the Jarvis Lab website.

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Also on the topic of bird communication: in a thoughtful [as in, both gracious and brainy] exchange of blog posts, David Sibley and Nathan Pieplow engage in a "very interesting and, I think, important discussion about a sea change that may be occurring in how birders listen to bird sounds." [That quote is from Pieplow's blog.] Sibley writes:

I learned bird songs decades ago through countless hours of field experience, supplemented by listening to a few recordings, reading detailed descriptions, and talking to other birders. It was a subjective, holistic approach to bird songs that led to a sort of gestalt style of identification – after you hear a sound often enough the identification just becomes second-nature.

Now, it still takes countless hours, but birders have a wealth of technological aids, allowing them to study and compare bird sounds with an ease and immediacy that was never possible before. In the modern world of ipods, sonagrams, and websites like xeno-canto, birders can examine the bird sounds directly, objectively, and in great detail. This may lead (as Nathan Pieplow admits) to a slightly greater emphasis on differences in pattern rather than the more subjective and hard-to-describe differences in tone.

Given how suggestible we are, and how tiny things can influence our perception, the detail-oriented objective approach to bird sound identification is probably better and more accurate.

And Pieplow replies:

[Sibley] learned sounds in the field; I learned them on the floor of my bedroom in South Dakota when I was in high school, playing the Peterson Birding By Ear tapes over and over again. Those tapes (which remain the best resource I’ve ever seen for people who want to learn bird sounds on their own) didn’t take a holistic, all-at-once approach; instead they took an analytic approach, grouping similar sounds together and then pointing out key field marks or “handles” — here a distinctive tone quality, there a distinctive rhythm — to distinguish sounds within the groups.

I’ve used this same basic approach to sound identification ever since: recognize a pattern, then focus on a piece of it. The pattern gets you to the right group; the pieces narrow the identification to species. Tone quality is part of this analysis, but not the most important part.

In fact, in some ways I think I place a pretty low priority on tone quality. For several years now, I have been convinced that tone quality is the slipperiest attribute of sound: the hardest to analyze perceptually, the hardest to describe. And I think tone quality is responsible for most of the disconnect between most descriptions of sounds and the sounds themselves. I de-emphasize it precisely because it is so difficult to categorize. Other attributes of sound are much easier to describe and compare, so those are the ones I focus on.

For the most part, I’m just doing what works for me, but I hope it works for other people as well. I really do believe in the objective, analytic approach.

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So who makes those field recordings of bird songs? Remarkable people like William Belton:

An internationally recognized ornithologist, Mr. Belton was almost single-handedly responsible for the current body of knowledge of the bird life of Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost Brazilian state. His field recordings and specimens from the region are today in the collections of major research institutions. His two-volume study of the birds of the area is widely considered seminal.
[...]
Each [of Belton's recordings] was often the product of hours of standing stock-still in the wild at dawn, with swarms of biting insects for company. But the rewards were considerable: over the years, Mr. Belton captured many bird songs that had never before been documented.
[...]
The bird names alone read like found poetry. Mr. Belton recorded, among others, the variable screech-owl and the southern screamer; the freckle-breasted thornbird, the sooty-fronted spinetail and the rufous-browed peppershrike; the cattle tyrant, the masked yellowthroat and the piratic flycatcher; the squirrel cuckoo, the laughing falcon, the pectoral sandpiper and the gilded sapphire.

William Belton died in October at the age of 95. As a woman of a certain age, I love that Mr. Belton's ornithological career [of more than 30 years!] began following his retirement.

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A high school student asks Erich Jarvis, "African grey parrots can learn to speak, and they can be taught to tell color, and even to express themselves. And from what I observed on NOVA scienceNOW, some birds are capable of creating simple tools. But what about the other kinds of birds that are incapable of doing things like this? For example, a crow can make tools to obtain food but a pigeon can't. Why? Why is the parrot smarter than the finch? Is it brain size, the way they use their brains, or does the parrot have something the finch doesn't?"

An excerpt from Jarvis's answer:

[A]n argument can be made that having a brain means that you have intelligent behavior, regardless of whether you are a bird, mammal, reptile, or otherwise. But this is not the way many people think. There is something inherent in our human psyche that wants to make nonhumans "lower" in intelligence, and for us to form a scale of intelligence such that some species would be considered not intelligent.
[...]
In fact, it is very difficult or almost impossible to make such a scale. Yes, a crow can make tools, and as far as I know, this has not been observed in pigeons. But pigeons have incredible visual memories and abilities, including the ability to learn how to distinguish different styles of impressionistic paintings. Chickadees, which are a type of songbird, can store over 3,000 seeds in the forest, and during the winter they remember where they put them and retrieve most of them. A parrot so far as I know has not been observed to do this, yet a number of parrot species can imitate some human speech.

Different species have different behavioral capacities that vary in sophistication, Jarvis continues. However, brain size is not the main driving factor behind these complex behaviors. Instead, neural connectivity appears to be the driving force.

And bird brains, as it turns out, are firing on all cylinders.

And the band played Waltzing Matilda

"Bob Dylan told an interviewer in 1984, "I never heard a singer as good as Liam ever. He was just the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my life. Still is, probably."" Liam Clancy, 1935 - 2009.