EclecticLip

Male humpback whales — like Sir Mix-A-Lot — like voluptuous females.  Or at least, what passes for voluptuousness in the cetacean world.

For their part, female humpbacks may prefer their males to be exotic foreigners — or again, what passes for foreign among creatures who migrate far enough each year to half-circumnavigate the globe.
There was a famous case in the mid-nineties (in nerd herds, at least) of some Indian Ocean male humpbacks getting lost and veering into the Pacific Ocean.  Their songs were different from those of the males in the local Pacific Ocean population — but within two years, almost all the Pacific Ocean-male humpbacks had changed their songs to be more like the Indian Ocean males’!

And to complete a humpback hat trick, here’s a link to a website about a wild albino humpback named Migaloo. 

A story I’d seen in the Globe and Mail fell by the wayside when I’d first marked it for follow-up.  I rediscovered it when periodically ploughing up old links, searching for overlooked or under-regarded treasure.

(a) the Green Revolution has not, by and large, provided sustainably higher yields than organic agriculture

(b) organic farming can feed the world.

(All but one of the seven links above point to different datasets — and that odd-one-out, from Grist, has additional data cited in one of the first comments.)

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This story, that Venus looks a lot more interesting in infrared and ultraviolet — both outside the human visible spectrum — reminded me of the futility of anthropocentrism.
After all, flowers such as this, look different under ultraviolet light (invisible to us, visible to insects).

As another example, elephants can hear frequencies far lower than we can hear — in fact, that’s how they communicate over long distances!  I suppose that also means they can hear the workings of our digestive system.  It’s probably fortunate for us that our internal workings only rarely come into our own audible range…

I found Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation a bit uneven — I thought some of her inferences overreached a bit, and some things she got wrong.

For instance, on p261 she argued the Socratic dialectic was a form of initiation; which argument I’d politely term ‘overly generous’.  On p264, she said Plato was profoundly affected by his experience attending Socrates’ trial. Unfortunately, this is impossible; he wasn’t old enough (30 years old) to attend.  There were several other examples, but these stuck out most vividly, perhaps because of my prior readings and studies on classical Greece.
Still, despite its limitations, it was an extraordinarily worthwhile read.  She wrote about the Mohists — whom I’d read about previously, but for years, forgotten.  They were followers of the 4th-century-BC polymath Mozi (a sort of Chinese Leonardo da Vinci).  He appears to’ve had a proto-utilitarian philosophy, and perceptively argued that preferential love to one’s family, clan, or country, would degenerate into egotism.

Since his philosophies upended the wisdom of the day, he devoted a portion of his efforts to the study of logic and dialectic, to defend his arguments.  In this regard, he was effectively a Chinese Socrates.  Sadly, while Socrates had the immensely-influential Plato to propagate his ideas, Mozi’s successors were clobbered into obscurity by the Chinese Legalists.

Even if he wasn’t well regarded in his era and area, Mozi shows that it’s NOT ONLY in the Western philosophical tradition that logic and dialectic were studied.  And knowing that fact should help inoculate against the thought of Western exceptionalism (itself a form of cultural egotism, somewhat similar to what was noted above).