The Penguin Bar

Scientists have identified a previously unknown type of ancient human through analysis of DNA from a finger bone unearthed in a Siberian cave.

The extinct “hominin” (human like creature) lived in Central Asia between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago.

An international team has sequenced genetic material from the fossil showing that it is distinct from that of Neanderthals and modern humans.

Details of the find, dubbed “X-woman”, have been published in Nature journal.

via BBC News – DNA identifies new ancient human dubbed ‘X-woman’.

For the record, House Republican leader John Boehner, GOP Chairman Michael Steele and the organizers of the Tea Party rally condemned the slurs. Steele suggested the movement and the party should not be linked with “idiots out there saying stupid things.”

Stupid things? Try Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, shouting “baby killer” when Rep. Bart Stupak, an anti-abortion Democrat from Michigan, was outlining his conviction that the bill would not result in federal funding of the procedure – and right after unruly House members had been admonished to stop yelling during the debate. Neugebauer claimed Monday that his exact words were “it's a baby killer,” and were directed at the measure, not at Stupak – which would make his outburst less stupid only by slight degree.

Stupid things? How about the House Republicans who cheered two hecklers who were ushered out of the public gallery by Capitol Police on Sunday. Or the GOP lawmakers who kept going to the House balcony during the debate to wave clenched fists and handwritten signs at the crowd and helped ensure it remained whipped into a frenzy.

Stupid things? How about the steady stream of rhetorical excesses during the debate. They warned of the death of freedom, of a coming era of totalitarianism, of a “fiscal Frankenstein.”

via GOP fans flames of health care reform hatred.

“One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse,” warns anthropologist Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Many “civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.” Now, Harvard’s Niall Ferguson, one of the world’s leading financial historians, echoes Diamond’s warning: “Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice.” Yes, America is on the edge. Dismiss his warning at your peril. Everything you learned, everything you believe and everything driving our political leaders is based on a misleading, outdated theory of history. The American Empire is at the edge of a dangerous precipice, at risk of a sudden, rapid collapse.

via collapse-of-the-american-empire-swift-silent-certain: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance.

In May, 2002, Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, learned he had contracted HIV. The news, of course, was devastating, but Mitchell believed that he had one thing going for him: On his own initiative, in anticipation of his first year in college, he had purchased his own health insurance.

Shortly after his diagnosis, however, his insurance company, Fortis, revoked his policy. Mitchell was told that without further treatment his HIV would become full-blown AIDS within a year or two and he would most likely die within two years after that.

So he hired an attorney — not because he wanted to sue anyone; on the contrary, the shy African-American teenager expected his insurance was canceled by mistake and would be reinstated once he set the company straight.

via Insurer targeted HIV patients to drop coverage | Reuters.

Our so-called leaders are bad enough, but it gets almost worse at the level of the American public, who of course also bear the burden of choosing these abysmal presidents, on top of their own crimes. These latter include utter negligence in maintaining the gift of American democracy, complete laziness in the most basic of civic duties, mass corruption of social, political and personal values, and a reliance upon every form of cheap magic or distraction to avoid basic personal and civic responsibilities.

And, always, it’s about having everything. At once. For nothing. The same idiots who have been seduced by cigarette-money-sized tax cuts for themselves, used to justify a massive slashing of the burden once carried by the rich, are now bitching as government services implode. The New York Times is reporting that citizens of Arizona – one of the most regressive states in the union – are now unhappy because their highway rest stops have been eliminated due to the state’s fiscal crisis. I just want to grab these people and shake them by the shoulders, politely suggesting to them that next time they have to pull over in the desert sands between Tucson and Phoenix and squat by the side of the road, they might want to give a thought or two to all the money they pissed away in another desert, this one in Mesopotamia. Likewise, people are now also starting to whine about schools closing and prisoners being released from jail, also because of budget slashing. And I just want to ask those bright folks whether they still think all those tax cuts for the already outrageously wealthy plutocracy were such a good idea in retrospect, after all.

via The Regressive Antidote – To Hell In A Handbasket.

Dusan Writer on Second Life and where it is going. Read the whole article, it is well worth it! A snippet:

With the ability to connect prims to reality, to create a flow of data in and out to both physical location and other information spaces, we can start to picture how the atomic, real-time, and expressive rendering of Second Life can actually start to capture more than the forms of content that we typically think of as a “3D world”.

In Farmville, you’re learning how to feed an algorithm, to play a game with rules and mechanics and requirements.

In Second Life, you’ve been toying with a multi-dimensional information space created on the fly in real time, that has shown itself to be a powerful entry into story, emotion, insight, collaboration, creation, and prototyping.

In other words, you’ve been using tools that will, with luck, be extended to include the capture of forms of knowledge and wisdom which are beyond the reach of all of the type of content that simply, well, stares back.

As we work or play in Second Life, we are contributing to a larger project: the creation of wisdom and of the new narratives that articulate that wisdom. This is a form of artificial intelligence that shifts us past formulas and social graphs into something that has more profound implications than the fact that someone busted a hole in the back wall: in this case, there’s the potential to blow the roof off.

via Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Path Finders: On the Road to Meaning in Virtual Worlds.

Oxygen isotopes in clamshells may provide the most detailed record yet of global climate change, according to a team of scientists who studied a haul of ancient Icelandic molluscs.

Most measures of palaeoclimate provide data on only average annual temperatures, says William Patterson, an isotope chemist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and lead author of the study1. But molluscs grow continually, and the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells vary with the temperature of the water in which they live. The colder the water, the higher the proportion of the heavy oxygen isotope, oxygen-18.

via Shellfish could supplant tree-ring climate data : Nature News.

Very old artworks provide a fascinating glimpse of ancient life, but not without limitations: They typically portray the lifestyles of the rich and famous (rulers, royals, generals, and priests), abandoning the masses to the mists of history.

That’s why the recent discovery of a 1,300-year-old mural at Calakmul, Mexico, is so significant. It is the only known pre-Columbian artwork depicting ordinary Maya engaged in everyday activities, rather than serving the wealthy.

Archaeologists first unearthed the pyramid bearing the painted exterior walls in 2004 and are still in the process of restoring it. The murals show Maya of both sexes preparing and dispensing food, or carrying baskets, sacks, and large vessels. (Previously discovered images mainly show men.) The women wear face paint, and both sexes sport broad-brimmed hats, earrings, necklaces, and pendants. Hieroglyphic captions identify some people by their trades: salt person, tobacco person, and maize-gruel person, for example.

via Ancient Mural Portrays Ordinary Mayans | LiveScience.

The wealthy countries repeatedly find new ways to screw Africa. They're purchasing the fishing rights and denying locals the rights to fish the sea or selling more guns or owning profitable enterprises that ought to be owned locally. In this case, buying fertile land and denying it to locals is sick. The local governments aren't much better for allowing it but the countries to the north appear to have forgotten about their disastrous colonial legacy.

This is another example of the new wave of colonialism that is blocking Africa from making progress. Even worse, part of what is driving the effort is fuel. How many more examples like this do we need to see before people stop using food growing land to generate fuel? Instead of encouraging this, it's time to tax the hell out of these plans that are taking food away from people.

via AMERICAblog News: Rich buying farm land and water rights in Africa while locals go hungry.

Econned is the story of how our financial system has become a mass ruse, allowing Wall Street and the largest banks to become predatory, treating their clients as lambs to be fleeced and fatted calves to be slaughtered. It is the story of how a very small group of people gained complete control over the American, and much of the global economy, driving it into the ground, then walking away with trillions of more dollars, while the economy remains on life-support.

via Archein: Econned.