orbis quintus

China Mieville gives a Top Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. Ouch. I’ve only read the selected books by Philip K. Dick, Jonathan Swift, Michael Moorcock, Phillip Pullman, Mary Shelley, and Oscar Wilde. Although i’ve read books by Iain M. Banks and H.G. Wells, i haven’t read those particular books. This might turn into a To Do list.

It seems that Teuku Jacob is allowing certain people to examine the remains of Homo floresiensis specimens that he has sequestered from the team of scientists that originally discovered them. Alan Thorne, an archaeologist of the Australian National University and Maciej Henneberg, an anatomist at Adelaide University, have studied the bones on camera for an Australian television show. A German scientist of the Max Planck Institute has also been given fragments of bones in the attempt to extract DNA from them. Jacob’s desire to keep the bones out of the hands of the original team, while delivering them to a handpicked few is extremely suspect. This does not seem to be the open examination that he claims that it is.

I’ve still been listening to Konono No. 1 Congolese in the car nearly nonstop. It wasn’t until i watched this video that i was sure that the electric likembes were those kind of thumb pianos that turn up in import shops. I had divorced all of the sounds from the actual instruments in my head, as these electric likembes sound much like some old Atari video game after awhile, bleeping and blipping all over the place.

Fuck any kind of folk authenticity. Play this blind to most people, and tell them that it’s all done electronically, post-punk avant garde, and they probably will not know the difference that it’s a bunch of people playing live on a bunch of equipment that has been salvaged from the industrialized world’s spillover into their turf.

This is really more of what i expected to hear when i read of Savage Republic and Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects (the second of which i’m trying to track down recordings of again. )

Come on…. John Negroponte? Bush is just pushing this way too far. This is a man who was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, even though he was not a defendant. The man aided and abetted death squads, folks. Does this man really need to be part of our government?

They are Rolling Stones copyists, that i agree with what Unterberger wrote in the AMG entry. However, i’m still bored with the Stones, and Los Mockers seem more good-humored and fun, without all of the silly petulant posturing and the baggage of decades of tabloids. They were the other Uruguay band, friendly rivals of Los Shakers. Here’s a timeline and a few interviews.

Los Mockers “Let Me Try Again” Sweet, and kinda awkward lyrically. Almost perfect teeange plea. Somehow appropriates the Latin guitar sound without turning to Tropicalia (which came later in Brazil anyway.)

Los Mockers “Empty Harem” Think about how weird it is to have a band from Uruguay who moves to Argentina, sings in English, and plays music that an English band has lifted from India.

Los Mockers “It Was Me” I’ve always liked this kind of drunken spin of a guitar in these kinds of bands.

Two Homo sapiens skull fossils, dubbed Omo I and Omo II, that Richard Leakey found in Ethiopia in 1967 are now being dated at 195,000 years old, rather than the previous date of 130,000 years. Genetic studies already pointed to a 200,000 year date. The skulls were previously dated by the decay of the uranium atoms in oyster shells foudn in the same layer. The new, more accurate method is through the decay rate of radioactive atoms of potassium-40 into the gas argon-40 in feldspar mineral crystals found in chunks of pumice in volcanic ash above and below the skulls. This new date of 196,000 years for the emergence of ‘modern’ humans is going to be rewrting a lot of textbooks.

They are still holding onto the 50,000 year date for the great cultural jump of humans, but fairly, that’s only because they have yet to find strong evidence. I’m betting that date is going to fall by the wayside in the next decade as well.

Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May. They do not have direct proof of Martian life, but they believe that Mars’ odd methane content hints of an underground microbial ecosystem, similiar to ones found on Earth in hot springs and caves. It seems that they are calling for a drill-equipped lander in the near future, although the only current plans are for a more robust rover with an advanced mass spectrometer in 2009.