Foxy

Sly Stone hit some lofty heights in the early days of his career. For a while it seemed he could do no wrong. It didn't really last beyond the early 70s. In 2011 he put out an album called I'm Back!, but it didn't really prove he was. That's true in a lot of cases. The downside of achievement is the struggle to equal it. But at least you've achieved.

As to the title of this song, it's still summer, not as hot. Bit better for sleeping.

Up & down

Let me describe a sliver of a dream I had recently, and the effect it had on me. 

There's a balcony or a deck. It's impossibly high up, A sci-fi skyscraper, like out of Metropolis. A cat is out there. It either climbs the guardrail or someone lifts it, that detail is unclear.

And there I shake myself awake. I don't have an irrational fear of heights. I have a very rational belief that you don't mess with heights past a certain point. And while cats are graceful, there are limits. 

Side 3

In short, this is an unprecedented moment in paleoanthropology. For the first time in the history of science, a form has been distinguished by its genes and nothing else. Can it therefore be considered a species?

From The Secret World of Denisovans: The Epic Story of the Ancient Cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals by Silvana Condemi and François Savatier

As that very brief passage points out, Denisovans have been defined by their genes. Actual skeletal remains have been minimal. Genes can sometimes be a blueprint that wasn't actually followed in construction. Therefore, our understanding of Denisovans is very limited, and will be expanded―knock on wood―by further discoveries. Ideas will have to be revised.

Still, they were a very significant find, and a recent one. The finger bone fragment from which they were identified was only found in 2010. Yet the largest portion of the world's population is probably related to them, if distantly.

This is a good book. It has to take some rather arcane biological subjects and make then comprehensible to the lay reader. At the same time, it's respectful to the general public in a way that surprises me for a book published in 2025.

It also has beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations from Benoit Clarys, who seems to be very familiar with this kind of subject.

Am I missing something?

Science can be cool, when it's not dreary, as it frequently has been in recent years. And it's not a bad thing to try and perceive new things. But this "new color", olo? Man, I just don't know. It's a highly saturated blue-green, which seems to look nice. But apparently you can only really see it when a laser is shot into your retina. How often do you think you can make time for that?

It sounds like something that will be semi-remembered as a crazy fad in a few years. But making a new color name out of the middle three letters in "color" is kind of clever.

They are the eggmen

 

If you see a walrus's snout up close you see all these little bristles. Those are to feel along the ocean floor for food like clams and such. They're very good at surviving in the far North. This video was shot off the coast of Svalbard. They're also quite graceful in the water.

Anyway, just wanted you to see that. There was another walrus video I could have shown, but the background music was a little distracting.

Tempting tales

In our souls, we need to know that wild things are out there. "Wild things" is a pretty general term, and can cover all sorts of weirdness.

The legend of Haunchyville is florid and violent, like a half-remembered synopsis of Tod Browning's Freaks. A group of little people are employed by the circus. Their boss is an abusive prick. When they've had enough, they kill him by cutting off his arms and legs. Then they make their own settlement in Wisconsin's Waukesha County. An albino child visits the town and they take him in. He becomes their guardian, a deadly one if needs be.

Stories like this, even warnings like "Here be dragons", individualize the world. They make it possible to believe that more than one kind of place exists.

A writer on his second professional trip to the part of Wisconsin where all this was supposed to have happened found a disappointing sequel:

Returning to the site on a bright and clear early afternoon five years later, I find my old fears confirmed: what was once a tantalizingly wild and undeveloped area—perfect for a colony of vindictive little people!—is now an upscale and bland subdivision. Pre-fab houses dot the bulldozed landscape. Front lawns the size of golf courses stretch on for miles.

The word for this is "Empire". Power expands far from where it was before, and reshapes its new settings in the image of the one it just left.

But empire can't expand forever. Eventually the new logos fall off and the land is in new hands.

Big yellow

Here's something to see. It's a giant public sculpture in Rochester, New York, known as Threshold. The color is what they call safety yellow. Whether it's actually the color most easily registered by the brain, which the article asserts, I don't know. But it is a color that comes up a lot in children's media of all kinds.

On the other hand there are the shadows it casts. Shadows and light, the brightness of the mellow setting up a contrast. A very neat use of negative space, as this was all left-over material.