Here and There

The other day, I began a work-in-progress (what, I ask, is not a work-in-progress?), compiling a list of things I like about the country I live in. I got up to 25.

Today, I’m adding to it, beginning with number 26. (Remember, there is no reason for the order of my list. It only denotes the chronology at which things come to me).

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Al Gore
4. Bill Clinton
5. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
6. The Bill of Rights
7. California wine
8. MIT
9. Spike Jonze
10. Charlie Kaufman
11. The New York Times
12. New York City
13. The Flaming Lips
14. The New Yorker
15. Benjamin Franklin
16. Thomas Jefferson
17. Thomas Paine
18. Teddy Roosevelt
19. Woodward and Bernstein (back then, anyway)
20. Wikipedia
21. Star Wars (the original trilogy)
22. Willie Nelson
23. Paul Krugman
24. Thomas Friedman
25. Frank Rich
26. Hendrik Hertzberg < <<
27. Keith Olbermann
28. The Atlantic
29. James Watson
30. The Grand Canyon
31. The Daily Show (who, much to my amusement, recently made its clips available through a proprietary player)
32. Texas barbeque
33. The Internet
34. The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways
35. Seinfeld
36. NPR
37. Frontline
38. Nova
39. PBS in general
40. The Discovery Channel

Thousands of years from now, I’d like to see a first-generation iPod look so good.

Very cool discovery announced today by the journal Nature.

Additionally, readable article in today’s NY Times.

They’re saying this early “human” may have lived in a time after we began walking upright, on two legs, yet still used fore legs (arms) to walk on occasion. Those strong arms also allowed the species to climb and swing through trees. Ape-men (or, in this case, baby girls), indeed.

And this was a relatively complete fossil:

Dr. Alemseged’s team spent much of the last five years extracting the rest of the specimen from the surrounding stone with dentist’s drills and picks. The tedious work exposed the full cranium and jaws, the torso and spinal column, limbs and the left foot.

Also noteworthy is a discovery of a bone that could signify early speech in the baby afarensis:

The presence of a hyoid bone was a surprise. It is a rarely preserved bone in the larynx, or voice box, that supports muscles of the throat and tongue. The bone in the infant appeared to be primitive and more similar to those found in apes than humans, the scientists said, but is the first hyoid found in such an early human-related species and thus important in research about the origins of human speech.

I remember reading in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything how difficult it is for anything to fossilize. That alone makes this discovery important. But especially the bits mentioned above give paleoanthropologists more evidence for theories on the early development of an ancestor species.