'Ancient humans' used toothpicks

By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News  -- 8 October 2013

"Ancient humans" used toothpicks nearly 1.8 million years ago, a study of their teeth has revealed.

A team studied hominid jaws from the Dmanisi Republic of Georgia - the earliest evidence of primitive humans outside Africa.

They also found evidence of gum disease caused by repeated use of what must have been a basic toothpick.

Writing in PNAS, the team says its findings help to explain the diversity found in hominid teeth.
The researchers used a new forensic approach to look at variations on the teeth of hominids thought by some to be early European ancestors.

Teeth can shed light on what the individuals ate and how old they may have been, but until now it was not clear why there was so much diversity in the Georgian hominid mandibles, or jaws.

Ani Margvelashvili, lead author of the study at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, said that scientists dealing with fossil hominid mandibles should pay close attention to tooth wear and the fossil individual's age.

The Dmanisi hominids

• The Georgian hominids lived about 1.77 million years ago and represent an early expansion of human ancestors outside Africa
• They are believed to be the most complete collection of a Homo species from any site older than 300,000 years old
• They had human-like spines and lower limbs that would have been well suited for long distance travel
• The male of the species was much larger than the female
• They also had relatively small brains and primitive upper limbs, traits which they shared with the earlier Homo habilis, and even with the more primitive Australopithecus

"Progressive tooth wear triggers bone remodelling processes that substantially modify the shape of the jaw during an individual's lifetime. These effects are typically underestimated when attributing fossil hominid jaws to different species," she told BBC News. 

"The individual who was using a toothpick was young, as his or her teeth were not worn down. We also discovered a damaged area between the tooth area and the gum. There was a small cylinder-shaped lesion - in this area, if you place a toothpick it goes through."

The researchers analysed four mandibles from one of the biggest collections of well-preserved early human remnants known anywhere in the world.

The Dmanisi site has been valued as an important place to look at how hominids migrated from Africa.

"It's not very often you have one site with four mandibles. It has allowed us to see special features that have not been seen before," explained David Lordkipanidze of the Georgian National Museum.
This included horizontal scratches on a lesion, visible on the root surface of one of the teeth.

"Scientists often describe groups with new characters as different species. Here we show in one group you can see many characteristics. It shows once more how complicated the story of human evolution is," Prof Lordkipanidze, co-author of the work, told BBC News.

A toothpick perfectly fit through a cylinder shaped lesion

 

It is still unclear what species the Dmanisi hominids were. Experts once believed it was Homo erectus who first ventured out of Africa.

But the Dmanisi hominids were not typical of the tall-standing and big-brained H. erectus. Instead, the Dmanisi individuals were short, long-armed, small-brained and thin browed. The fossils are therefore now sometimes referred to as Homo georgicus.

Louise Humphrey from the Natural History Museum, London, said there had been a longstanding interest in the causes and implications of the high degree of variation in their mandibles and crania.
"This paper demonstrates that remodelling of the mandible associated with heavy tooth wear and continuous tooth eruption could contribute to that variation."

Peter Ungar from the University of Arkansas, US, said the study could provide a new way of looking at fossils.

"Tooth pick markings are not uncommon in fossil hominids from this time period, but this clinical, forensic approach is new and potentially useful.

"Analyses of tooth movements due to wear have been more-or-less limited to anatomically modern humans, and this paper introduces the approach to paleoanthropology," Prof Ungar added.

The mandibles that showed the least wear were from younger individuals

B.C. introduces $250,000 fine for releasing Asia’s destructive ‘Frankenfish’

Tristin Hopper | Dec 20, 2012 6:58 PM ET | Last Updated: Dec 20, 2012 7:01 PM ET
More from Tristin Hopper | @TristinHopper

Nick Procaylo / Postmedia News Files Officials with the snakehead fish — also known as the 'frankenfish' — captured from Burnaby's Central Lake pond in Burnaby, B.C. on June 9, 2012. A top-level predator, the snakehead can slither from pond to pond.

 

CLICK TO ENLARGE

 

Releasing a snakehead — the so-called “Frankenfish” capable of walking on land and eating small ducks — now carries a fine of $250,000, according to new invasive species laws drawn up by the Province of B.C.

Previously, states a Thursday press release, B.C.’s “alien species” laws were largely meant to keep out animals that posed an overt threat to British Columbians, “such as tigers.”

The recent changes reflect a ”previous commitment to ban the snakehead fish.” The changes were spurred by a May YouTube video that showed a snakehead fish in a Vancouver-area pond.

Nick Procaylo / Postmedia News Files    While on land, snakehead fish have been known to prey on small mammals. 

 

Native to China and Russia, the meter-long fish is capable of crawling on land, placing no limit on the number of lakes that see their marine life wiped out can by the snakehead’s ravenous appetite.
The snakehead purportedly featured in the video was killed in June after officials drained the Burnaby pond it inhabited.

Wildlife experts suspect the fish may have been placed there as a result of a Buddhist practice of releasing live seafood for good luck.

At the time of the sighting, live snakehead were widely available at Vancouver Asian markets.

Related

• ‘Frankenfish’ caught after weeks-long search of B.C. pond
• Frankenfish: terrorizing the people of B.C.
• Biologists investigating after possible ‘Frankenfish’ sighting in B.C. pond

Wounded veterans leapt for their lives seconds before train hit parade float in Texas, killing four and injuring 16

Juan Carlos Llorca and Terry Wallace, Associated Press | Nov 16, 2012 10:42 AM ET
More from Associated Press

AP Photo / Reporter-Telegram / Tim Fischer) Midland police, fire and sheriffs respond to an accident where a trailer carrying veterans in a parade was struck by a train crossing in Midland, Texas, Nov. 15, 2012. 

 

Wounded U.S. military veterans leapt for their lives just before a freight train struck their parade in rural Texas, killing four people and injuring 16, and federal officials rushed to the scene Friday to piece together why it happened.

About two dozen veterans and their spouses had been sitting on the parade float, set up on the back of a flatbed truck decorated with American flags. Many seemed to panic as the train’s horn blared, said Patricia Howle, who was waiting in her car at a nearby traffic light.

“I was on the phone, and I just started screaming,” she told The Associated Press after Thursday afternoon’s crash. “The truck was on the other side of the train, but I did see the panic on the faces of the people and saw some of them jump off.”

Police said the first truck with veterans safely crossed the tracks, but the second truck’s trailer was still on the crossing as the Union Pacific locomotive approached.

The U.S. marked Veterans Day earlier this week, and the parade was part of an event to honour wounded veterans.

A preliminary investigation indicates the crossing gate and lights were working, said Union Pacific spokesman Tom Lange, though he didn’t know if the train crew saw the float approaching.

AP Photo / Reporter-Telegram / Tim Fischer  Accident debris can be seen next to the semi-trailer truck carrying veterans in a parade that was struck by a train crossing in Midland Texas Nov. 15, 2012 during the annual Hunt for Hero's parade.

 

“There is going to be a very thorough investigation,” Lange said. “It’s obviously a very tragic incident.” He said the train crew did not sustain any injuries but would be offered counselling.
Two people died at the scene, while two others died at Midland Memorial Hospital, City of Midland spokesman Ryan Stout said. Six people remained hospitalized Friday, including one in critical condition.

AP Photo / Reporter-Telegram / James Durbin  A parade participant reacts after a trailer carrying wounded veterans in a parade was struck by a train in Midland, Texas on Nov. 15, 2012. 

 

“It was a horrible accident to watch happen right in front of me,” said Daniel Quinonez, who was in traffic that had been stopped to allow the parade to pass. “I just saw the people on the semi-truck’s trailer panic, and many started to jump off the trailer. But it was too late for many of them because the train impacted the trailer so fast,” he said.

The events were organized by Show Of Support, a local veterans group. Its president, Terry Johnson, did not immediately return an email for comment and his phone number was unlisted. The phone rang unanswered at the group’s offices.

AP Photo / Reporter-Telegram / Tim Fischer)   Midland police, fire and sheriffs respond to an accident where a trailer carrying wounded veterans in a parade was struck by a train in Midland, Texas on Nov. 15, 2012. 

 

The chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, Deborah Hersman, said Friday on NBC that the train was equipped with a forward-facing camera whose footage could help in the investigation.

“That will give us some video images if it survived the crash, and we can download it, as well as recorders on the train,” Hersman said. “We’re going to be looking at the signals … and making sure that the gates and lights were coming down.”

AP Photo / Reporter-Telegram / James Durbin    Parade participants and public safety officials huddle after a trailer carrying wounded veterans in a parade was struck by a train in Midland, Texas on Nov. 15, 2012. "Show of Support" president and founder Terry Johnson says there are "multiple injuries" after a Union Pacific train slammed into the trailer, killing at least four people and injuring 17 others. 

 

Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta “was deeply saddened by news of the tragic accident involving veterans heroes and their spouses in Midland,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said in a statement.

Terry Wallace reported from Dallas. Associated Press writer James Beltran also contributed to this report from Dallas.

The Chosen Few

Has an emphasis on education been bad for the Jewish population?

Slate

By Steven Weiss|Posted Friday, Nov. 9, 2012, at 10:45 AM ET

Jewish Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz, Albert Einstein, and Elie Wiesel 

 Photos by © Raimond Spekking/CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons; and Erling Mandelmann.

Every year, after the announcement of the latest round of Nobel Prize winners, the inboxes of many journalists are inundated with emails suggesting a crucial matter in need of investigation: why the Jews, only the tiniest fraction of the world's population and only around 1 percent of the total population of the United States and Europe, have received more than 20 percent of Nobel Prizes. While the question can seem silly, it actually speaks to larger issues of educational and economic equality: how Jews have achieved success in the past and whether they'll survive as a people in the future.

Jews, as a whole, have done very well for themselves in the West since World War II: Besides the aforementioned Nobel prizes, American Jews, according to one of the largest studies, are nearly twice as likely to have a college degree as the average American and more than four times as likely to have a graduate degree. This translates into a serious economic advantage: American Jews are roughly 33 percent more likely to be employed in a high-status job category, and Jewish households here report around 25 percent higher income than the average American household.

While examining such a phenomenon would have been unthinkable a few decades ago—when Jews generally tended to be more frightened of raising the kinds of topics anti-Semites like to talk about—the past decade or so has seen a wellspring of effort devoted to tackling what's variously described as Jewish "literacy," "superiority," or any number of other things, including "chosenness."

Advertisement

The core theory usually derives from a mix of two themes that stand out in Jewish history: an emphasis on education and a tendency to be persecuted. For the former, the rabbis of the Talmud and thereafter were fierce advocates of universal primary education, with the best-known example being a Jewish boy indicating his achievement of Jewish adulthood by reading publicly from the Torah at a bar mitzvah. (Universal primary education was boys-only until at least the late 19^th century.) In regard to persecution, a common notion is that Jews weren't allowed to own land throughout much of their history in exile and thus were forced to invest in a form of personal capital that could be of value across geographies. There are other theories, too, some even including a notion of simple genetic superiority, by way of an idea that Jewish communities modified natural selection through upholding scholars as examples of the proper way to be, providing them the choicest wives and expecting them to have many children.

The problem with so many of the theories thus far expounded is that they have gaping holes in logic or evidence so large that let's just say they'd never make it into the Talmud. By far the largest fault with them is the reality that many of these arguments rely on an idea of the Jewish past that we don't have any good reason to think is true; just because the rabbis desired it doesn't mean it was necessarily so. And our overall received notions of a Jewish community that was fiercely observant and often Orthodox also have little evidence to back them up. (And, as Alana Newhouse revealed a couple of years ago, even the images we have of a fiercely pious Jewish shtetl have been largely manipulated.)

Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein started jawing over the issue of the Jews' economic history in the Boston University cafeteria 12 years ago, and the resulting research, conferences, and communication since has produced the first of a two-volume work, The Chosen Few, that tackles these issues in a way no one has before, taking an interdisciplinary approach to this basic question.

By combining a very thorough look at the historical record with new economic and demographic analyses, the authors summarily dismiss a great many of the underlying assumptions that have produced theories around Jewish literacy in the past. Where many tied the Jewish move into professional trades to the European era when Jews were persecuted, Botticini and Eckstein bring forward evidence that the move away from the unlettered world of premodern agriculture actually happened a thousand years earlier, when Jews were largely free to pursue the profession of their choice. And where so many have simply taken as a given universal literacy among Jews, the economists find that a majority of Jews actually weren't willing to invest in Jewish education, with the shocking result that more than two-thirds of the Jewish community disappeared toward the end of the first millennium.

Botticini and Eckstein pore over the Talmud and notice the simple fact that it's overwhelmingly concerned with agriculture, which, in conjunction with archaeological evidence from the first and second century, paints a picture of a Jewish past where literacy was the privilege of an elite few. But these rabbis were also touting a vision of a future Judaism quite different from that which had been at least symbolically dominant for much of Jewish history to that point. Where a focus on the Temple in Jerusalem, with ritual sacrifices and the agricultural economy they required being the standard to that point, these rabbis—broadly speaking, the Pharisees—sought to emphasize Torah reading, prayer, and synagogue. When the sect of Judaism that emphasized the Temple—broadly, the Sadducees—was essentially wiped out by the Romans shortly after the time of Jesus, the Pharisaic leaders, in the form of the sages of the Talmud, were given a mostly free hand to reshape Judaism in their own image. Over the next several hundred years, they and their ideological descendants codified the Talmud and declared a need for universal Jewish education as they did so.

All of this history is widely known and understood, but what Botticini and Eckstein do differently is trace this development alongside the size of the Jewish population and their occupational distribution. The Jewish global population shrunk from at least 5 million to as little as 1 million between the year 70 and 650. It's not surprising that a conquered people, stifled rebellions, and loss of home would lead to population shrinkage, but Botticini and Eckstein argue that "War-related massacres and the general decline in the population accounted for about half of this loss." Where did the remaining 2 million out of 3 million surviving Jews go? According to them, over multiple generations they simply stopped being Jewish: With the notion of Jewish identity now tied directly to literacy by the surviving Pharisaic rabbis of the Talmud, raising one's children as Jews required a substantial investment in Jewish education. To be able to justify that investment, one had to be either or both an especially devoted Jew or someone hoping to find a profession for his children where literacy was an advantage, like trade, crafts, and money lending. For those not especially devoted and having little hope of seeing their children derive economic benefit from a Jewish education, the option to simply leave the Jewish community, the economists argue, was more enticing than the option to remain as its unlettered masses. Two-thirds of the surviving Jewish population, they assert, took that route.

This distinct twist of the population story, which accompanies research showing a shift from nearly 90 percent of the Jewish population engaging in agriculture to nearly 90 percent engaging in professional trades over that same several hundred years, addresses a key problem of previous theories of Jewish literacy: determining what happened to those who wouldn't be scholars.

Botticini and Eckstein bring other evidence of Jewish tradition generating success in trade. An extrajudicial system of rabbinical courts for settling disputes allowed for the development of the kind of trust required for commercial enterprises to grow. A universal language of Hebrew eased international negotiations. And in a devastating critique of the theory that persecution actually pushed this economic shift along, the economists examine the societies in which Jews originally developed this bias toward trades and find Jews faced no particular discrimination that would have made them less successful in agriculture. In fact, they show, Jews were often discriminated against precisely because of their emphasis on trade, such as in their expulsion from England in 1290, which only came after they were repeatedly told to give up the profession of money lending (eventually echoed in Ulysses S. Grant's order to expel the Jews from the territory under his command during the Civil War).

And so the Jewish people have grown into a people of two intertwined legacies: a culture in which the Jewishly literate continue to pass the torch and one in which an emphasis on trades was necessary to continue to do so for all but the most fervently devoted. When a given family stopped being devoted or wealthy enough, it simply faded away.

The astonishing theory presented here has great implications for both the Jewish community and the broader world today. For an American Jewish community in which more than 75 percent of day school students are now Orthodox and the top concern for most Orthodox families in repeated surveys is finding a way to pay for ever-increasing tuition costs, the price of admission to the highly affiliated Jewish community is not just a large amount of ritual observance but also a basic need to join the 1 percent—or nearly so. Frequently, one can hear Orthodox Jews joke that $250,000 a year is "minimum wage" for the community; certainly, this overstates things but only by so much. In the New York area, elementary school often carries a price tag of $15,000-$25,000 in post-tax dollars per year; at the high-school level, some tuition rates are well into the $30,000 range. Outside of the New York area, tuition is generally lower, but so is the average income. And as Botticini and Eckstein predicted for their medieval models, modern American Jews who are fiercely devoted but without high incomes will endure significant financial sacrifice to maintain their Jewish lifestyles: The ultra-Orthodox enclave of Kiryas Joel, N.Y., is the poorest city in the country, and ultra-Orthodox communities broadly are frequently both poor and heavy recipients of government assistance.

And for most of the 80 to 90 percent of families representing the non-Orthodox portion of the Jewish community in America, the cost of Jewish education has simply meant great numbers growing up without the ability to read Hebrew or engage with the Bible and other Jewish texts.

Here we see precisely the same dichotomy that Eckstein and Botticini saw in the early years of post-Temple rabbinic Judaism: The especially devoted and wealthy provide their children with a Jewish education, but many others see too high a price in either or both of time and money and so choose a different path.

And yet, so many of today's unlettered Jews have been able to retain at least some sense of Jewish identity, where their predecessors 1,500 years ago could not. A majority of American Jews today are unaffiliated with the synagogues the Pharisaic rabbis emphasized, and yet 79 percent report feeling "very positive" about being Jewish. In part, Botticini and Eckstein would likely argue, that's because of America's unique tolerance of Jews, which removes the economic disincentive of maintaining an identity as a Jewish minority even when one doesn't have a very strong connection to Judaism.

At the same time, today's unaffiliated Jews no longer face an economic disadvantage relative to those attending Jewish schools: The aim for universal literacy in America broadly, and increasingly in all corners of the world, has led to the same kinds of professional opportunities for many people in the way that Jews used to have largely to themselves. Or, as Eckstein put it in an interview with me, "Almost everybody has become Jewish, because almost everybody is literate."

‘It’s just dried up’: B.C. earthquake pulls plug on centuries-old Haida Gwaii hot springs

  National Post

Tristin Hopper | Nov 2, 2012 12:31 AM ET | Last Updated: Nov 2, 2012 12:46 AM ET
More from Tristin Hopper | @TristinHopper

Margo Pfeiff A series of hot springs on Haida Gwaii — which once bubbled with water as warm as 77 C — has dried up since Saturday’s earthquake.

 

Days after the remote B.C. archipelago of Haida Gwaii emerged virtually unscathed from Canada’s second-strongest earthquake, locals discovered that the shifting earth had mysteriously switched off a centuries-old hot spring considered sacred by the Haida.

“It’s a very culturally significant site — even today Haida people would go down to take advantage of healing properties of the springs,” said Ernie Gladstone, a field unit superintendent for Gwaii Haanas National Park, of which Hot Spring Island is a part.

Parks Canada    Gwaii Haanas superintendent Ernie Gladstone stands in an empty cliff pool after last weekend’s earthquake off the coast of British Columbia.

Earlier this week, scattered reports began drifting in that the familiar cloud of steam over the island (known as Gandll K’in Gwaayaay in the Haida language) had disappeared.

A Parks Canada inspection party set out to investigate and stepped ashore to find that the island’s three main hot spring pools, which once bubbled with water as warm as 77 Celsius, were bone dry. “Not even a small puddle,” said Mr. Gladstone.

Surrounding rocks, once warm to the touch, were cold.

Renowned for their purported healing properties, the waters were mentioned by some of the first European visitors to the region. Boston fur trader Joseph Ingraham sailed into the area in 1791 and reported seeing steam rising from the pools, prompting him to dub the area “Smoke Bay.”

Francis Poole, a copper prospector who became the islands’ first white resident in 1862, later described the spring as “miraculous.” After being told that springs were a “cure for all diseases,” Poole advised his blacksmith, who had fallen ill with rheumatic fever to take a canoe to the sacred island.

A few days later, the blacksmith “reappeared … not only fully restored in bodily health, but quite altered in a moral sense also,” wrote Poole in an 1872 account of his time on the islands.

Parks Canada    Hotsprings Island hotpool after the earthquake along the British Columbia coast. 

 

The area surrounding the hot springs is largely uninhabited, although it is near SGang Gwaay llnagaay, a Haida village of 300 that was abandoned in the 1880s following a devastating smallpox epidemic.

On Tuesday, local lodge owner Tassilo Goetz Hanisch became one of the first to notice that the heated waters were gone.

“Normally, you could hear water bubbling but there was nothing to be heard,” said Mr. Hanisch, who was passing by Hot Spring Island enroute to his home on Kunghit Island. “It’s just dried up, green mud.”

Many other smaller pools around the island were similarly extinguished. Hot Spring Island’s heated ground has long spawned “thermal meadows” of unique flora and fauna on the island, all of which is expected to disappear in the coming years.

We don’t know if it’s going to come back. We certainly can hope,

In recent decades, the remote springs have become one of the area’s most treasured tourist attractions. Only 12 visitors would be allowed into the pools at a time to maintain an “intimate experience,” said Mr. Gladstone.

In books and travel blogs, kayakers, sailors and other visitors reported basking in the soothing water while occasionally spotting humpback whales in adjacent Juan Perez Sound.

Even passing commercial fishermen were known to slip ashore for a dip in the pools, although, like any visitor, they would first have to call ahead for permission from the Haida Watchmen, teams of volunteers that monitor cultural sites throughout Gwaii Haanas.

Striking just off the western edge of Haida Gwaii on Saturday, the quake has since been confirmed as the second-strongest ever recorded in Canada.

Coming in at 7.7 on the Richter scale, the tremor was much more powerful than the 7.0 earthquake that levelled much of Haiti in 2010 — yet the island’s largely wood structures were able to ride out the shaking with almost no structural damage.

In coastal communities, residents anticipating a tsunami immediately set out for high ground, although Haida Gwaii beaches were hit by waves no larger than 43 centimetres.

It is not known what shut off the water flow, although it may have been one of the hundreds of aftershocks that rattled the islands well into the week, one of which struck less than one kilometre from the site.

“We don’t know if it’s going to come back. We certainly can hope,” Brent Ward, an earth sciences professor at Simon Fraser University, told Postmedia.

National Post, with files from Postmedia News

Thief who robbed Swedish man after he fell onto subway tracks sentenced to prison, deportation

Associated Press | Oct 23, 2012 8:49 AM ET | Last Updated: Oct 23, 2012 3:10 PM ET
More from Associated Press

YouTube/CCTV Screengrabs from a CCTV video showing a man falling on train tracks in Sweden and then getting robbed by another man on the platform and left on the tracks. The man is then run over by a slow moving train. The man survived.

 

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — A 28-year-old Tunisian who was caught on security camera stealing from a man who had fallen onto the tracks on the Stockholm subway and then leaving him to be hit by a train was sentenced Tuesday to one and a half years in prison for theft.

A Swedish court ordered Nadar Khiari to pay $1,800 in damages to his victim and ruled that he will be deported after serving his sentence. He was not charged with leaving the man on the tracks, since Swedish law does not require people to help.

The September incident stirred outrage in Sweden after the footage was broadcast on TV and went viral around the world.

The video shows the drunk victim falling from a subway platform. Khiari then jumps onto the tracks, steals his belongings and leaves him there. The victim was hit by a train and lost a foot, but survived.
The court wrote that the victim had been “in a particularly vulnerable position, lying intoxicated and injured on the subway track without any opportunity to protect himself, in danger of being killed or being seriously injured. Nadar Khiari must have been fully aware of this.”

Khiari confessed to stealing the man’s cellphone, a silver case and a gold necklace, saying he was unemployed and needed money for food and medicine. He apologized for not alerting subway staff that there was a man on the tracks.

He was also convicted of another theft, committed in August. It was not immediately clear whether he would appeal the ruling.

Lorca earthquake 'caused by groundwater extraction'

BBC News online - 22 October 2012

The relatively modest Magnitude 5.1 quake resulted in extensive damage and nine deaths

Scientists studying the fault beneath the Spanish city of Lorca say that groundwater removal may be implicated in a deadly 2011 earthquake there.

Detailed surface maps from satellite studies allowed them to infer which parts of the ground moved where.

They report in Nature Geoscience that those shifts correlate with locations where water has been drained for years.

The study highlights how human activity such as drainage or borehole drilling can have far-reaching seismic effects.

Pablo Gonzalez of the University of Western Ontario and colleagues used satellite radar data to trace the ground movements of the Lorca event back to their source, finding that the earthquake resulted from slippage on a comparatively shallow fault that borders a large water basin south of the city.
That the slippage happened at a depth of just 3km explains why the fairly mild Magnitude 5.1 quake caused so much damage in the area.

The team went on to study potential reasons for the slippage, finding that the water table in the adjacent Alto Guadalentin basin had dropped by some 250m over the last 50 years as water was drained for irrigation in the region.

Their calculations show that this created stresses on the fault that initially triggered the earthquake and defined its eventual magnitude.

However, the area lies on a seismically active region, and the data suggest only that the water drainage sped up and eventually triggered a process that would have eventually happened anyway.

The BBC's Sarah Rainsford reported on the damage when the quake struck in 2011

Dr Gonzalez stressed the study was specific to the Lorca earthquake, telling the Reuters news agency that "we cannot set up a rule just by studying a single particular case".

"But the evidence that we have collected in this study could be necessary to expand research in other future events that occur near... dams, aquifers and melting glaciers, where you have tectonic faults close to these sources."

In an accompanying Nature Geoscience article, Jean-Philippe Avouac of the California Institute of Technology said: "It does not take much to trigger an earthquake - even strong rainfall can do the job".

"We should remain cautious of human-induced stress perturbations, in particular those related to carbon dioxide sequestration projects”

Jean-Philippe Avouac California Institute of Technology

 

"Numerous examples of seismicity triggered by the impoundment of reservoir lakes, hydrocarbon extraction, quarrying and deep well injections have been documented over the years."

Previous research has suggested that the fluid injection associated with the controversial practice of gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" was linked so specific earthquake events.

If science can pin down exactly how stresses from anthropogenic sources distribute and contribute to seismic events, Prof Avouac suggested, "we might dream of one day being able to tame natural faults with geoengineering".

"For now, we should remain cautious of human-induced stress perturbations, in particular those related to carbon dioxide sequestration projects that might affect very large volumes of [the Earth's] crust."

More on This Story

Related Stories

• Destruction and shock in Spain's earthquake 'hot zone'
  12 MAY 2011, SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT
• Spain shocked by fatal earthquake
  12 MAY 2011, EUROPE
• Thousands flee Spanish quake town
  12 MAY 2011, EUROPE
• Gas extraction 'should continue'
  17 APRIL 2012, SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT

Murderous Mental Instability

Infanticide is a difficult crime to understand.  How it can be that a father or a mother might destroy the life of a child.  Their own child, although child-murder is a spine-chilling crime when committed by anyone, including strangers murdering someone else's child. 

A Quebec cardiologist, Guy Turcotte, whose physician-wife had left him, pleaded temporary insanity when he murdered their children, Olivier and Anne-Sophie Turcotte, ages 5 and 3.  He was acquitted of the capital offences on the basis of his insanity plea. And now, a few years later, is out on unsupervised day-long parole, seemingly quite at peace with himself. 

One can assume that these self-assured people who become psychotic and commit dreadful offences against humanity have compromised personalities, born as psychopathically deranged individuals who cannot find it within themselves to wholly relate to others, to have compassion, to restrain their basest impulses.

From Berlin comes another story of a woman who felt that having babies would compromise her relationship with her husband.  She chose to kill no fewer than five babies to which she had given serial birth, fearing her husband would leave their family if she had any more children.  Can anyone possibly be that ignorant of contraception techniques?

How is it possible that a young woman in her twenties could be so devoid of feeling that she would feel compelled to murder her babies rather than confront her husband, explaining to him that conception is never immaculate? 

At age 28, after a six-year investigation by German police, the unnamed woman (to protect the identities of her still-living children, 8 and 10) made a "comprehensive confession".

Her pregnancies must have been difficult to detect physically for she gave birth in secret, at home or out in the surrounding woods.  "She had the impression her husband would leave her if she had any more children, and that's why she didn't tell anyone she was pregnant, including her husband", explained Ulrike Stahlmann-Liebelt, chief prosecutor in Flensburg, northern Germany.

Although it is unclear how the woman managed to keep news of her pregnancy private, her husband claims not to have known anything about the pregnancies.  The first dead infant was discovered in a paper-sorting station, 15 kilometres from the family's home in Husum.  The second in a parking lot off a regional highway, a year later, in 2007.

DNA confirmed the bodies were related.  Thereafter the woman hid the three later dead infants in boxes in the basement of the building where the family resided.  The police investigation included hundreds of DNA tests from local women after authorities concluded where the parents were likely to have come from, on Germany's north sea coast.

Fully realizing that the DNA sample would divulge her to be the mother of the two initial dead babies themselves linked by forensics, the woman surrendered herself to authorities, confessed, and is now in custody awaiting a formal indictment.

A Humane Consciousness

He was trained as a lifeguard, and he took his job seriously.  He was also exposed to the rules relating to the company that had hired him to stand guard in a very specific Florida beach area.  If someone was in trouble outside that authorized area, it would be of no concern to the company that hired him, and was to be of no concern to him, either. 

But it just didn't work out that way.

Tomas Lopez took his job seriously enough to respond to an anguished appeal for help in rescuing a swimmer who had entered the ocean in what was identified as an 'unprotected' area, an area of the beach where no lifeguards were on duty.  At 21 years of age, mature and adult enough to know his own mind, Tomas Lopez didn't hesitate when he was approached.


"It was a long run, but someone needed my help.  I wasn't going to say no", he explained.  The man in need of rescue had already been plucked from the water by others by the time Mr. Lopez appeared on the scene.  He assessed the condition of the semi-conscious man and with the assistance of an off-duty nurse, offered their resuscitating services until the arrival of paramedics.

Immediately following the event, he was asked by his employer to fill out an incident report.  And then he was fired from his position.  Mr. Lopez appears to be a forgiving kind of individual.  Although he said he "couldn't believe what was happening", he also said "They didn't tell me in a bad way.  It was more like they were sorry, but rules are rules."

Just as well Mr. Lopez doesn't personally subscribe to that ethos.  "What he did was his own decision.  He knew the company rules and did what he thought he needed to do", his company supervisor had the good grace to admit. 

The company for which she works, and for which Mr. Lopez also briefly worked, has their own idea of humanitarian scruples.

Theirs are enormously wanting; his represent a humane consciousness they appear in dire need of adopting.

Insanely Deranged

Norway's poster boy for lunacy and mass murder in the name of saving civilization from the marauding hordes of religious fanatics has his country's psychiatric experts somewhat puzzled.  That he is certifiably insane most would agree, but not all.  The Norwegian psychiatric community appears to be split in their diagnoses, from concluding that he is a paranoid schizophrenic to other mental derangement measurements. 

As, for example, narcissistic personality disorder, autism-spectrum disorder, Tourette's syndrome and paranoid psychosis.  Why not, for the sake of conformity, simply accept them all?

Norway has a compassionate conscience on full display.  Slaughter 77 innocent Norwegians in the name of delusional championing of tradition being overtaken by an alien culture with a sinister intent, and you are logically assumed to be mad.  And mad certainly does describe the fantasies that have occupied the mind of Anders Breivik.  Although he denies, denies, denies that totally unwarranted and certainly unwanted designation.

For he is actually a knight in shining armour - at the very least a self-designed uniform to distinguish his reasoned mission to save European Christendom from its own near-sighted indifference to an organized, fanatic take-over by Muslim crusaders for Sharia and the long-lost-to-be-recaptured Caliphate.  And to bring the attention of Europeans and their politicians to the horrific reality of that gradual assimilation of European culture, history, heritage, religion into Islam's great, gaping maw, the solution is to slaughter young Norwegians.

Well, the gruesomely deliberate and well-orchestrated computer game modelled on the man's favourite sword-and-sorcery-themed World of Warcraft that patiently taught him to aim without wincing, murder without compassion, continue with no glances back, did gain him the attention he craved, although the notoriety his dreadful acts garnered him also highlighted not his vision and his noble sacrifice on behalf of the culture he loved, but his total mind-derangement.

"You do not believe that such things can happen.  I still don't quite believe it."  Breivik's mother

But happen they did.  Her son became hopelessly mired in a maelstrom of emotions gone awry, conclusions bearing little resemblance to reality, solutions that would forever ensure him a place in the history of his country as a monstrous anomaly within a nation of reasoned, sane and deliberate-minded people.  "To send a political activist to a mental hospital is more sadistic and evil than to kill him!  It is a fate worse than death", he declared.

And that, in fact, is the fate that awaits him, irrespective of how the court will finally rule.  History will identify him as a madman.  His incarceration for a life sentence will be subject to renewal after 21 years.  Nothing will obliterate from the nation's memory the horrors this man visited upon them.  And since, according to the experts who closely examined his sagging mind, should the man ever by some slender chance be freed back into society he would most certainly plan and stage another atrocity.

Anders Behring Breivik confessed to a bombing and shooting massacre last summer that left 77 dead in Norway
Photo by Solum, Stian Lysberg/AFP/GettyImages

So the rational solution appears to be that he will remain forevermore within Oslo's Ila Prison.  Either the prison itself as one found to be sane while suffering a multitude of emotional and intelligent excesses causing him to become quite berserk, or within a newly-planned and yet-to-be-built wing of that prison.

For it appears that Norway's Health Directorate has hatched a solution of sorts to his incarceration; the building of a new psychiatric wing within the prison, purpose-built to house this infamous son of Norway.  There he will stay for posterity should he be found insane.

He will be kept in isolation for fear he may attack other prisoners, and they must be protected from him, while he must be protected from the possibility that other prisoners might consider attacking him.  That ruling is expected to be announced toward the end of August.  In anticipation of the designation, and the man's future within the specially-built psychiatric unit, compassionate plans to ensure that he is not too lonely and depressed at his plight have been considered.

Authorities have expressed concern that it is inhumane to restrict Breivik to solitary confinement ad infinitum.  Prison officials are considering introducing "friends" to him to alleviate his lonely future.  Those hired for that purpose will be assigned to play indoor hockey and chess with Anders Behring Breivik. 

For while he must most certainly be disciplined for the carnage he committed, he must not suffer mental anguish unduly.

It's a Puzzler

Royal-watchers and their fascination with heirloom celebrity status who outrank and outperform their counterparts in the media, popular entertainment, music, dance, theatre, Hollywood through the mystique surrounding royalty, inheritance and class distinctions present a mystery.  No talent is required; birthright is a necessity. 

Popular legends help enormously and popular acclaim in support of a dynastic rule with a public willing and eager to ascribe exceptionality to the otherwise-banal.

A young woman from a financially privileged background whose sister has married into the British royal household suddenly is described as one of the "most influential people in the world", by Time magazine.  Just because a respected and popular news journal makes that pronouncement doesn't, of course, guarantee the statement has real meaning in the real world. 

But it does describe popular fascination with something, some mysterious element attracting mass popularity and appeal.

That something just happens to be a young woman - 28-year-old Philippa Middleton, popularly known as "Pippa", which doubtless helps - whose social exploits seem anything but celebrational, but which have led to her being doted upon as a social leader of elite young international celebrities; people who worship their imaginary lifestyles and lead the public to do likewise.

Her sister Catherine, now Duchess of Cambridge, married to the British heir to the throne, Prince William, gained her own wildly fond popular appeal.  Tinged, however, with respect, since she is now part of the royal institution and she will undoubtedly become the mother of a royal figure who may one day sit on the throne.  For whatever that is worth.

But Philippa, Kate's sister, single, and much sought-out by the cavalier and worldly youth of aristocratic and/or wealthy European elite, has herself become famous as she flaunts her own connections.  What she wears, how she portrays herself, has become influential in how others wish to display and comport themselves. 

She has received enough advantage to allow her a $600,000 publishing fee for a book on that vital topic: party planning. There is now ongoing a six-figure bidding altercation for a 'major' television interview, her first. 

The fickle public will doubtless soon become bored with this hollow manifestation of social prestige; utterly meaningless, but obviously a measure of notoriety beyond any connection to values having been attributed to the empty lifestyle of someone revelling in her fortuitous public appeal.

Suspected of Guilt

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. One of the values of Islam is that piety trumps everything, certainly of absolute value, not to be compared with the mindless consuming of goods. There is no reason to suppose - since we like to believe that all of humankind is born equal and presumably equally endowed with brains, although free will is somewhat stunted in Islamic societies - that Indonesians are any less capable of making informed choices than any other society.

Yes, we understand that because there is a certain amount of behaviour-herding-and-channelling in Islam, that crowds tend to become rather hysterical when they are encouraged to believe that some source - generally un-Islamic, like the infidel West - has blundered horribly by being critical of Islam, its Prophet, or that rumours circulate that some idiot threatens to burn the Holy Koran, it invariably results in a rampage of frightening proportions and intent, all screaming "death to the infidels!".

But come now ... the prospect of obtaining an advanced technological gadget for half-price convincing Indonesians that they must gather in huge numbers to be among the first one-thousand customers to acquire a $540-valued cellphone for $270, being so compelling that they rampage in an inchoate rage when they suspect that something may have gone awry to their expectations?

When Research in Motion's public relations arm in Indonesia had the brilliant idea of concentrating the minds of their valued customers in Jakarta by advertising half-price BlackBerry 9790 models at a shopping centre in that city, they must have felt that this was a truly intelligent marketing gambit geared to increasing their loyal customer base. Which, evidently already has cult status there.

It appears that over 5000 people gathered restively outside the Pacific Place mall in the early hours of November 25. And since the prospect was for only one thousand fortunate souls to be able to take advantage of the half-price sale, obviously there would be four times that number sick to their hearts with disappointment. As the day began to dawn and heat built up, some nerves must have snapped.

Rumours began to spread that all those coveted thousand cellphones had already been distributed. The enraged crowd flung themselves against the barricades, swarmed mindlessly, resentfully, furiously through the shopping centre, in the process crushing over twenty people. Pointing an official finger of blame at the country director for RIM in Indonesia, authorities have named him a suspect in a crime scene.

That crime scene, of course, was the promotion that made thousands of Indonesian hopefuls go utterly berserk, leading to the deaths of twenty people. Not only he, but a number of others, including the mall's own head of security named as 'suspects' in what will ultimately be characterized as a crime earning criminal charges of "negligence causing other people to suffer injuries."

In Indonesia this crime is punishable by a maximum of five years in prison. "At this stage they are banned from leaving the country, as per the legal process in Indonesia", explained the South Jakarta police chief of detectives. "They have not been detained, but have to report to police regularly."

Sigh, is it worth the trouble to attempt to expand a market in a country where RIM was forced to introduce blocks in a futile effort to prevent their cellphones being used to download pornography?

Misadventure

Not that long after Barack Obama became President of the United States he was faced with a situation that seemed to highlight the uneasy divisions between black and white in his country. A well-known academic who just happened to be black, entered his home at night, by means certainly devious if they had been employed by anyone other than the homeowner.

Professor Henry Louis Gates
and Sgt. James Crowley

Henry Gates, a professor at Harvard University, had just returned to Cambridge after an international trip, to discover his front door was jammed shut. He attempted to force it open. Someone witnessed this, calling police to report a burglary in progress. Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley responded, did not believe Professor Gates' explanation that this was his own home, and charged him with disorderly conduct.

In the ensuing public melee when the incident was reported, President Obama became involved, implying that the incident was an example of racial profiling, and a national debate resulted over whether this represented a legitimate charge. Eventually the charge against Professor Gates was dropped, both he and the arresting officer who was chagrined and insulted that he might be thought of as a racist, were invited to have an informal chat with President Obama over a shared beer.

The incident was an unfortunate one. Many people find themselves locked out of their homes. And they seek means by which they can effect entry that may include trying to open a basement window to slide into the house, or breaking a window to unlock a door, or accessing a ladder from a neighbour to climb to an open second-story window. This incident occurred at night in an otherwise-quiet neighbourhood; it could have happened anywhere, to anyone.

It was embarrassing, all the more so as it gained national attention. In the end, however, the public discussion settled down, and both the arresting officer and the taken-aback professor marked it as a life experience, one they might far preferred to have missed. It might have had far more serious consequences, improbable as that might seem, for the relatively simple and innocent act of attempting ingress to a home of one's own.

It certainly turned out extremely ill for one man, whose home was in Windsor, Ontario, when he found himself locked out of his house. Forty-nine-year-old Reeve Cuerrier, attempted to clamber through a second storey window next to a porch in the backyard of his home. He managed to get his feet and his torso through the window, and must have thought he was 'home-free', and had succeeded in his initiative.

What happened next certainly proved him wrong, and proved also that we never know what comes next. The window slammed down on his chest. And the impact somehow took his life. The man was trapped, incredibly, fatally, within the frame of the window. A call was placed to police when someone in a nearby building looked out on the scene. But when police arrived the man was dead.

And the cause was listed as misadventure, awaiting a post-mortem.

Pedestrian Events

A taxi cab with three people inside revved its engine, went up and over a grassy hill, smashed through a few tress while airborne, then crashed spectacularly into a parked BMW.

Much of what we choose to do as we go about pursuing our daily lives, is built upon trust. Trust that is in the familiar. We trust that the elevator we walk into will deliver us to the floor we've punched in, without stalling between floors, and leaving us in deep trouble. We trust that the traffic lights we're obeying as pedestrians will also be obeyed by the motorists eager to gun it and get going in their busy days. We trust that the food we eat is free of bacterial contamination and won't make us ill.

And we trust that when we enter a taxi cab the driver is able to follow our instructions and deliver us safely to our destination. Sometimes incidents occur that inform us that in that particular instance our trust has been misplaced. Something extraordinary occurs, something quite out of the ordinary, something that no one could conceivably predict. On the other hand, perhaps it is predictable. In the sense that someone with a medical condition should not be driving a cab?

In Ottawa yesterday what is being termed by the paramedics who responded to the emergency 911 call as a "unique accident", might have taken the lives of two innocent people - three if one includes the taxi driver, but, thanks to marvellous good luck, did not. Two individuals hailed a cab. No sooner did the driver begin the journey with his fares than he experienced a seizure.

That seizure caused him to press his foot on the gas pedal, and the vehicle accelerated without a vestige of control. It went on a peculiar trajectory, actually leaving flat ground, becoming momentarily slightly airborne, crashing through a stand of trees to land upon a BMW parked in a driveway. The impact had flipped the BMW onto its roof and the taxi happened to land right-side up, on top of the overturned BMW.

"I've been doing this for 21 years now, and this was one call where I just had to do a double take", paramedic superintendent Paul Morneau said. "This is definitely one of those calls that is extremely interesting." Somewhat like that old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times", but without the grim consequences.

But landing the cab on top of the BMW didn't quite end the adventure. The driver, still in the throes of his seizure, kept his foot clamped down hard on the gas pedal as a result of which the tires spun continually, and became more and more sizzling hot, sending plumes of smoke out over the area. It was that smoke that alerted people, thinking there was a fire, sending off additional 911 calls.

Adding insult to injury to the owner of the BMW, he rushed out of the house he happened to be visiting in, and as he approached the scene, the left front tire of the taxi exploded, sending bits of tire, plastic and metal flying into his face. He suffered superficial injuries, remarkable in itself. And the injuries suffered by the other three were also slight; the driver and the passengers came out of the ordeal quite well.

The taxi driver was the only one taken to hospital. Presumably for stabilization of his medical condition for which he had a prescription. Some drive that was. Makes you think perhaps a little more carefully - for all of 60 seconds - about entrusting your life to ordinary, everyday, pedestrian events.

Sometimes, in fact, you're safer on foot.

Driver Beware

"What a great day outside. Time for some 3 wheelin' and possibly some fishin' today. Who says Mondays suck!!! LOL" Steven Leon, Gatineau

It wasn't a great day. It was a disaster of a day. Particularly but not exclusively for Mr. Leon, 40, of Gatineau who was a backseat passenger in a Nissan Pathfinder being driven by a 25-year-old woman acquaintance who has not yet been named. Her boyfriend, also not named, was seated at the front of the SUV, on the passenger side. He escaped this highly unusual and pretty dreadful accident fairly unscathed.

They were driving on Highway 148, close to Luskville, Quebec. Which is very close to that wonderful National Capital Commission-preserved greenspace, and wildlife preserve, Gatineau Park. Where there happens to be plenty of wildlife. Where, often enough, deer run out into traffic, causing grief to themselves and occasionally to unsuspecting drivers.

In this instance it was a black bear. There are, of course, black bears in Gatineau Park. And the two young men in the Pontiac Sunfire were likely driving much too fast. It was ten o'clock at night, and they were driving in the vicinity of a large forested area. They hit the 300-pound black bear at full speed - whatever that happened to be has not yet been determined.

Their velocity and the impact sent the poor beast flying - literally, virtually flying. The bear was flung through the windshield of the SUV on the driver's side, and exited the back window, where the passenger was seated. Both the SUV driver and the passenger, Mr. Leon, were killed instantly by the double impact.

Intensive Neonatal Treatment Requirements

Hard to believe, but perhaps not. Most children have had it drummed into their dense little heads that they are not to exit the bathroom until they've cleansed their hands from the sticky little bits that may be clinging to them after having ineptly wiped their smelly bottoms. At least in civilized households.

Perhaps it represents a psychological backlash that as adults they steadfastly refuse to do as they were told, as children.

Bad enough when you witness a co-worker exiting the shared bathroom facilities in an office tower without so much as a sprinkle on their hands, despite their having spent more than ample time in front of the mirror to ensure that they look presentable, after exiting the cubicle.

And we're such a polite society; although the sight of that stupidity makes us cringe, we seldom say anything to admonish such uncivilized, unhygienic behaviour, though we make mental notes.

But when it comes to health professionals ignoring the very basics of viral and bacterial communication through neglecting to wash their hands, going heedlessly from patient to patient, despite their education, despite their knowledge, despite intelligence and despite that it is widely recognized as a failing among health professionals, it's enough to make one tear out one's hair in despair.

Wait: there's a solution. Some bright light in Italy thought up a working solution. And that is? Why, to pay dividends. In the way of a bonus, a hefty one, amounting annually to 3,000 euros ($3,900) to those in the nursing profession who agree to conscientiously wash their hands between patients. This, it should be noted, is in a hospital ward that houses the most health-vulnerable of patients, the premature-baby-unit.

The 70 nurses who work at the Mangiagalli clinic are monitored on closed-circuit televisions, ensuring that they wash their hands, using the correct technique, spending the required time that it takes scrubbing, between patients. As a result, these reward-conscious (notably not profession-conscious) nurses have 'earned' their annual awards. As evidenced by the 30% drop in hospital-spread disease.

By controlling the level of bacteria on their hands before approaching a baby or a newborn requiring very special nursing attention, they successfully lowered the number of babies who died or who became seriously ill as a result of their previous neglect. These were babies who were already seriously ill, or whose health status was compromised by prematurity, or who were immunodepressed.

Would it not occur to a health professional that it would be incumbent upon them to practise high standards of hygiene, commensurate with the demands of their healing profession? "Intensive neonatal treatment is one of the areas with the highest risk of infection", the head of neonatology at the clinic reported in an interview with the daily Corriere della Sera, explaining the drop in the spread of disease.

Impressive accounting of irresponsibility solved by paying supposedly responsible professionals to be professional.

A Tree, A Thing Of Beauty

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree. Poem by Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

Oh dear, so she said, that celebrated poet of yore. So too says boastful Nature, but some feel, think and see differently; their aesthetic sense is other than that of nature lovers. And if we're looking for fools, look no further than those whose acclaim for a ten-storey branchless metal tree sculpture created by internationally renowned New York artist Roxy Paine has cost Canadian taxpayers $1-million dollars. That piece of fabulous 'art' is named One Hundred Foot Line.

It resembles, say awe-struck admirers, a tree, an exclamation mark, representing an exquisite work of art, rivalling those of nature. It is described as a fabrication of a tapered metal tree. It will be installed in Ottawa, through a serendipitous collaboration between the National Gallery of Canada and the National Capital Commission, at Nepean Point, where currently stands a more traditional work of art, a bronze statue of Samuel de Champlain.

This new piece of drek - um, sorry - art - a massive steel structure that looks well, like a massive steel structure is our latest hallowed acquisition to prove that Canadians know art when they see it. Actually the structure is somewhat structureless. Actually like a piece of steel. A very tall piece of steel. In no conceivable way resembling a work of art. At least not art as thought of by ordinary art-loving connoisseurs.

But it is to be installed by Labour Day. One must consider the labour, the time, the expense of installing this misbegotten artwork in a massive concrete and metal slab. Roughly $200,000 to get the job done right. This fabulous sculpture will stand75 meters from that of Champlain, which has stood on its solitary point for 95 years.

Poor Samuel, he will be upstaged, after all this time. It is inevitable, for tastes change and those who swoon over this latest piece of artwork are extravagant in their praise: "It will bring excitement to the area", "It's quite magical", "They complement each other." Ah the excitement, the wealth of commemorative and artistic sculptures that enrich the landscape of this city.

Its base will be 1.6 meters wide, and the thing itself will thrust toward the blameless sky at a height of 30.5 meters. One hundred feet of steel. Whose presence might accomplish something practical were it to be used in the construction, say, of a building, comfortably hidden as a part of the infrastructure around which cladding would be placed, to hide its hideous presence. But installed there, it would at least be useful.

We would not be forced to see the bloody thing. And seeing it, wince at the very indecency of shelling out !One Million Dollars! for the grotesquerie masquerading as art. With luck, it will keel over under high winds some day, when no one is around to witness nature's opinion of its presence. If a 100-ft tall desecration of a facsimile of a tree falls at Nepean Point, an area where few venture, will anyone know, or hear, or care?

Or perhaps a lightning strike, attracted to its noble, electricity-grabbing presence will take it into another, more interesting shape than that which it was designed to irritate us with, enhancing its dubious appearance. "Each tree is a new story, a compelling entity told with that language", claims the artist himself, in an excruciatingly pretentious description of his brilliant conception.

This is one of a series that the artist has brilliantly conceived and is overlooking the manufacture and placement of, called the "Dendroid" series. Dendroid: tree-shaped (from the Greek dendron, meaning ‘tree’). Obviously meant for an audience of Androids, Androids: (an automaton that is created from biological materials and resembles a human.) Also called humanoid.

Which only goes to prove when first you practise to deceive, just go ahead and do it, because if you're brazen enough and loud enough and enthusiastic enough you can convince people of whatever truth you're handing out at any given time, including what in particular constitutes art. This artist is clearly a talented visionary. One of a few world-class sculptors the art world goes ga-ga over.

And we, that great amorphous, Philistine mass who are deliciously happy to pay for their divine creations. Through our tax dollars for their elaborately-conceived and felicitously placed fictive fixations.

The Mother Of Parliaments

Egad, who would ever have believed that Great Britain, that staid and regulated, officiously entitled leader of the Commonwealth (good grief, creator of that vast body; a wealth of uncommonly-odd nations linked by a heritage of empire-outreach), would be so shabbily incapable of investing itself with the fundamentals of enabling its great electorate to take part in that most elemental of democratic activities.

What's this? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Brits ignominiously, unceremoniously (odd, for a country so given to ceremony) turned away from inadequately-numbered, poorly staffed and insufficiently balloted voting booths. Isn't this the kind of thing that happens in third-world countries aspiring to lift themselves out of authoritarian rule into quasi-democracy?

This is something we've seen, say, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. It's a failing that is known to occur with regularity and deliberately in countries of the world where control is the order of the day not freedom of access. And where other democratic countries send out electoral overseers to ensure compliance with democratic ideals.

But yes, Britain's recent election which saw a peculiar outcome of a minority government in the offing, which still hasn't been established, failed its voting populace.

The voting public that listened avidly to first-time televised political debates. Which left them still debating their choices and lack thereof. And despite the fact that there existed a great number of people who were undecided, they were still determined to cast their vote. For whomever they wished. Determined, but unable. Due to circumstances truly beyond their control.

But not beyond the control of the electoral commission which - although it has had ample and historical traditions in the methodology of mounting an election process and furnishing the means by which people are enabled to make their choices count - dismally failed.

Pity, that.

Profit versus Prudence

As though proof were required of the stultifying, stupefying, brain misfiring effects of lumping oneself before a television screen.

Isn't it common knowledge? Of the kind studiously ignored by those disinterested in such messages? In the first place they generally emanate from that segment of any given population for whom television viewing holds no interest. A state of being that often enough results from having witnessed first-hand the drivel and just plain garbage that represents the main fare of television-watchers.

But here we have !Aha! the world's largest manufacturer of televisions, stating right up front that using their product - 3-D television - may result in very serious physical manifestations of ill health. Sleep deprivation or alcohol intake, they warn, may ensure that your 3-D television experience will result in more than bargained for.

Take, for example, epileptic seizures, or strokes. Fairly costly in terms of well-being for the unadulterated pleasure of viewing a new television experience.

Samsung Electronics Corporation is a highly successful company. It wishes to remain so. The Korean-based company is simply being prudent in placing those warnings at the disposal of consumers. Forewarned is forearmed, although people generally tend to shrug off inconvenient barriers placed in the way of pleasure-seeking.

The company, taking a message of blow-back from what has happened to the Toyota Motor Manufacturing Company which attempted to tamp down criticism of its products' malfunctions, intends to undergo no such chastening and costly contretemps itself. And has taken the initiative to protect itself by posting the warning that users should immediately stop viewing 3-D images should they experience altered vision, dizziness, nausea or convulsions.

Eager to obtain a new 55-inch 3-D TV? Go right ahead. The company plans to sell over two million of their products this year of 2010. Pregnant women and the elderly, however, should plan to live their lives happily without this new television marvel. But if they do proceed regardless, they should plan to see their doctors immediately they experience untoward symptoms.

As well, according to the Australian website of Samsung Electronics Co.: "Children and teenagers may be more susceptible to health issues associated with viewing in 3-D and should be closely supervised when viewing these images." Imagine how vulnerable and agonizingly conflicted companies like Sony Corp. and Panasonic Corp., joining Samsung in the manufacture of these television sets must be.

On the one hand, in producing these new televisions - very expensive they are with this new technology - they aim to clean up big time. On the other hand, there is the undesirable prospect of being sued by disgruntled consumers discovering the extremely deleterious effects of using this new viewing technology selling at between $2,500 to $5,500.

But they're hamstrung, aren't they? Given that more and more movies, blockbuster, hugely advertised films with all the bells and whistles, are going to be produced in the future. Think of the box office success that Avatar proved to be.

Think of how miserable you'd feel about it all, putting on those enabling 3-D glasses and coming down with a splitting headache.