Shunya's Notes

Seafaring Hominids?

Archaeology seems to be undergoing an explosion of new finds in the past decade or so. More and more, new information is completely scrambling old assumptions about human evolution and early modern human and hominid culture.

The latest amazing find was written up yesterday in the New York Times:

Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.

That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.

Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years, specialists in Stone Age archaeology say. Previous artifact discoveries had shown people reaching Cyprus, a few other Greek islands and possibly Sardinia no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

The oldest established early marine travel anywhere was the sea-crossing migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to Australia, beginning about 60,000 years ago. There is also a suggestive trickle of evidence, notably the skeletons and artifacts on the Indonesian island of Flores, of more ancient hominids making their way by water to new habitats.

This is part of what I love about archaeology: Just when you think you've got it all figured out, new evidence comes to light, which overturns our ideas, and deepens them too. Whether or not it turns out to be the case that Neanderthals were ancient mariners, I, for one, have a strong suspicion that we substantially underestimate what our ancestors were capable of and just what was going on 50K, 100K, or 200K years ago. After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Econ 101 Rap

John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek explain the markets, yo!

The Hubris of Humble Oil

In 1962, Humble Oil and Refining Co., which later merged with Standard Oil to become Exxon, ran the following ad in Life Magazine:

EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER!

The giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet the petroleum energy Humble supplies—if converted into heat—could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second. To meet the nation's growing energy needs for energy, Humble has applied science to nature's resources to become America's Leading Energy Company. Working wonders with oil through research Humble provides energy in many forms—to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals. Stop at a Humble station for new Enco Extra gasoline, and see why the "Happy Motoring" Sign is the World's First Choice!

ExxonMobil today produces about 3% of the global oil; in case you are wondering how many tons of glacier ExxonMobil can potentially melt today, the numbers are 79 million tons each day and 914 tons per second (source). Enjoy while such boasts make sense.

Friday Cartoons

Shilling for Apples

Friday Cartoons

    

Alan de Botton on Success

Here is a breezy talk in which Alain de Botton looks at our ideas of success and failure, the anxiety we feel over our careers, why it's harder now to feel calm than ever before. Is success always earned? Is failure? What role does snobbery and envy play in our lives? What is the flip side of equality, individualism, and meritocracy? Where do our goals and ambitions really come from? And more (via 3QD).

Where the Hell in KGP?

As many readers of this blog know, I went to the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT, KGP) in West Bengal. Years later I visited my alma mater again and wrote about it here. Guess what I found today? Those familiar with Matt Harding's heartwarming dance videos from around the world (Where the Hell is Matt?) will likely relate to what it has inspired the students of IIT KGP to do. (via Pran)

The soundtrack is the same as in Matt's video — a Bengali poem written by Tagore (Praan, or "Stream of Life") and turned into song by composer Garry Schyman and Bangladeshi-American Palbasha Siddique.

The Modern Stop Sign

Imagine the STOP sign didn't exist and a major corporation tried to create one today. Here is what the creative process might look like:

http://view.break.com/542649 - Watch more free videos

On Corporate Art

Corporations are like wild beasts. Both are driven by blind, unthinking appetites. The only authentic instinct of a corporation is to sustain itself; its drive and creativity have one objective: shareholder return. All its talk about serving the community, building dreams, and saving lives is propaganda for its employees and customers. That said, corporations can be downright amusing, especially when they collide with the world of art. I've identified three kinds of art that corporations display in their offices and which never fail to amuse me:

(1) Abstract art: This is all the brain-dead stuff that cannot possibly offend anyone, such as bright geometric patterns, twisted metal, funky designs, etc.

( 2) Faux Rebel art: Former anti-establishment art—long defanged, decontextualized, made chic—is now the art of the "edgy" establishment. For example, a large woodcarving of Ché Guevara’s shaggy face in the board room (yes, I saw one in downtown San Francisco); a copy of a Diego Rivera mural in the lobby, etc.

(3) Motivational art: the most common kind, with framed posters of, say, a lone bald eagle in flight, muscular rowers in a longboat, lean people scaling mountain peaks. "Inspirational" words appear beneath: only those who see the invisible can do the impossible; true leaders don’t strive to be first but are the first to strive; dream more than others think is practical, expect more than others think is possible.

At last, a fitting response to (3) has emerged with Despair, Inc., a company built on selling demotivating art!

"AT DESPAIR, INC., we believe motivational products create unrealistic expectations, raising hopes only to dash them. That's why we created our soul-crushingly depressing Demotivators® designs, so you can skip the delusions that motivational products induce and head straight for the disappointments that follow!"

Check out some of their framed posters and the messages on them. My favorites include:

- Goals: It's best to avoid standing directly between a competitive jerk and his goals.
- Challenges: I expected times like this - but I never thought they'd be so bad, so long, and so frequent.
- Consulting: If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
- Defeat: For every winner, there are dozens of losers. Odds are you're one of them.
- Adversity: That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable.
- Apathy: If we don't take care of the customer, maybe they'll stop bugging us.
- Leaders: Leaders are like eagles. We don't have either of them here.
- Mistakes: It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
- Risks: If you never try anything new, you'll miss out on many of life's great disappointments.
- Teamwork: A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.