[PHOTO] Looking east, Bay and Bloor

Looking east, Bay and Bloor
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

Looking east one December night from the intersection of Bay and Bloor Street West towards the Holt Renfrew, the city was aglow.

[LINK] "Lemur See, Lemur Do: Lower Primates Show Glimmer of Culture"

Are lemurs culture-transmitting primates? So it seems, after Dave Mosher's Wired Science article.)

(This just isn't a post for lemurbouy, who I can attest is most definitely a culture-transmitting primate, a culture-maker par excellence at that! Also, he can use tools.)

Lemurs’ only natural habitat is isolated on the southern tip of Madagascar, a large island off the southeast African coast. They are members of a small group of primates called prosimians, which split off the evolutionary tree about 63 million years ago from simians, a grouping of primates that includes gorillas, chimpanzees, Old World monkeys and humans.

Most cognitive research has zeroed in on simian animals and found them to be highly adept in social learning, tool use and other essentials of human-like culture. Lemurs have been mostly excluded because studies in the 1960s suggested they weren’t very bright.

“Recently, however, we’ve seen tool use in lemurs, and recognition of tool features,” said psychologist Laurie Santos of Yale University, who studies primate cognition but wasn’t involved in Stoinski’s research. “For the most part, researchers just really haven’t looked.”


To test prosimian social learning abilities, Stoinski and her team built a snack-filled tube with two different ways to open it — a hinged door and a sliding door. They trained one lemur to open the hinged door, then had four lemurs watch their comrade repeatedly open it and get snacks inside. They trained the same lemur to use the sliding door to get snacks and exposed four different lemurs to that scene.

Both groups of lemurs emulated the trained animal on their first encounter with the snack-filled tube, and continued to use the same door even though another one existed. One group eventually figured out how to open the other door (by accident), but even so Stoinski said the experiment was one of the first controlled demonstrations of social learning in lemurs.

“This is a means of learning we take for granted as humans,” Stoinski said. “We can’t say this instance is culture — it’s nothing like the equivalent of learning a geisha tea ceremony. But it’s what allows for transmittance of cultural norms.”

Mosher notes that an interesting implication of this research is that it suggests that the ability to learn among primates is ancient indeed.

If more evidence piles up in favor of prosimian social learning, it’s almost a given that the ability first emerged before prosimian and simian primates split about 63 million years ago, Santos said. “It’s the simpler explanation. The more research we do on more distant species of primates, the better window we have to their common ancestor.”

[LINK] "Scattered thoughts about the Dubai project"

Daniel Drezner is in Dubai now, and he's somewhat skeptical about the city-state's prospects.

Ever since I arrived, I've been trying to figure out the best way to explain Dubai. Here's what I've come up with: If Stanley Kubrick had an unlimited budget and was making a movie about Las Vegas glitz, Dubai would be his set.

What do I mean by this? Well, like Kubrick's films, Dubai is underpopulated in an odd way, and the lack of people gives the place a very odd feel. There are shiny hi-tech malls, stores, and skyscrapers galore, but there isn't much else. From a citywide perspective, looking from the top of the Burj Khalifa, one sees all the new skyscrapers, a few blocks of the old part of town, and then... desert.

Even in the shiny parts of the city, there just aren't enough people to fill up the space. Everywhere I looked, there were way too many workers per customer. The Dubai Mall, for example, is truly massive, with every western brand name that still exists and a few (Rainforest Cafe, Benetton) that I thought had gone under. There was an entire wing of racy lingerie stores. I don't honestly if there's sufficient demand to keep these stores afloat, however.

Lest one think this is criticism, it isn't. I'm rooting for Dubai to succeed. If enough people come to the place, I think the Kubrickian oddness will wear off (though, not, perhaps, in the Armani Hotel. The hotel literature informs me that "every detail has been personally chosen by Armani to reflect his passion for stylish comfort and functionality." To your humble blogger, it seems like Mr. Armani has expended considerable sums of money to bring back the tacky wood finish of late 70's American suburbia, combined with the creeping isolation of Kubrick's The Shining). Any country that embraces the service sector with the same vengeance of North America is fine by me.

Drezner no longer thinks, as he did in 2008, that Dubai can stand as a model for general economic development in the Middle East, even among the Persian Gulf's microstates, since he thinks there's only room for one entrepôt--"Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Kuwait" will have to come up with some other model.

Thoughts? He asked specifically for people from Dubai to come and comment over at his blog.

[LINK] "Couple says toxic gas leaks caused by project under land"

Carbon capture and storage--artificial carbon sequestration--is the storage of carbon dioxide, usually in below-ground facilities, outside of the atmosphere. It's likely to be one of the most important methods of geoengineering as our 21st century civilization tries to keep the greenhouse effect under control. And a Saskatchewan couple whose farm lies above the largest carbon sequestration facility built so far says that it's leaking.

A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world's largest carbon-capture and storage project says greenhouse gases leaking out are killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface like shaken soda pop.

The gases were supposed to have been injected permanently underground.

Cameron and Jane Kerr own nine quarter-sections of land above the Weyburn oilfield in eastern Saskatchewan. They released a consultant's report Tuesday that links high concentrations of carbon dioxide in their soil to 6,000 tonnes of the gas injected underground every day by energy giant Cenovus in an attempt to enhance oil recovery and fight climate change.

[. . .]

Since 2000, Cenovus has injected about 16 million tonnes of carbon dioxide underground to force more oil from an aging field and safely store greenhouse gases that would otherwise contribute to climate change.

But in 2005, the Kerrs began noticing algae blooms, clots of foam and multicoloured scum in two ponds at the bottom of a gravel quarry on their land. Sometimes, the ponds bubbled. Small animals -- cats, rabbits and goats -- were regularly found dead a few metres away.

The water, said Jane Kerr, came out of the ground carbonated.

"It would fizz and foam."

Cenovus says that there isn't a problem, but an investigation is ongoing. Regardless, here's to hoping that this technology is perfected so that it can be very widely deployed. I'd prefer to limit the amount of deterraforming in the 21st century.

[LINK] "The Real-Life District 9—Class and Sci-Fi in South Africa"

At Science Not Fiction, Malcolm MacIver makes the point that the vicious anti-alien discrimination directed towards the Prawns in the hit film District 9 is actually based on the realities of apartheid.

Eventually the authorities send an expedition up to find out what’s going on and discover a bunch of starving aliens. They are settled in a South African township called District 9, directly below the mother ship (a squatter camp in the township of Soweto, called Chiawelo, was used for the shooting). Besides being confined to the township, they suffer various other kinds of oppression very reminiscent of the ways blacks were treated during the time of apartheid. Interestingly, in this case, South Africans of all colors are united in their hatred and mistreatment of the aliens, derogatively called “Prawns” (not least because they look like supersized bipedal version of king prawns, a delicious crustacean that is often on the menu at nicer restaurants in South Africa).

In the events of the real District 6 in Cape Town, a thriving community of 60,000 people of various races were forcibly relocated over the course of two decades, starting in the late 1960s. The entire district was then bulldozed for subsequent redevelopment that is stalled to this day. The relocation sparked large protests and great bitterness. The District 6 Museum goes through this history as a reminder of a key historical event during the painful times of apartheid.

MacIver also makes an interesting point, wondering if science fiction is a literary genre that can either thrive only in wealthy countries or, a more robust plant, if it can function in any society with even some access to high technology.

The rarity of science fiction has led me to wonder whether sci-fi is a privileged genre that can only thrive in wealthy countries. Or is it more basic than that? Most people here lack access—or even exposure—to technology, particularly in rural areas. Indeed, they often struggle to rise above the level of subsistence (many of the residents Chiawelo, where District 9 was filmed, were too poor to get transportation and a ticket to see the film). And yet I’m writing this in one of the more remote parts of the country, a small village near Coffee Bay in the Eastern Cape, via an Internet connection through their excellent cellular phone network. The gap between rich and poor in this part of Africa is larger than nearly anywhere else. There is a good technical infrastructure, but outside of the cell network, it is mostly confined to the wealthier areas of the country. The “digital divide” that people in developed countries worry about is therefore significantly worse here. Crossing it may also be part of the solution, of course, and perhaps then sci-fi can become a playground for South Africans to explore their fears and hopes regarding emerging technology as it is elsewhere.

Where "South Africa" is written "world" might also be profitably read, since, in this as in other ways, complex South Africa is the world in microcosm.

[LINK] "Orcus and Vanth"

Astronomy has advanced amazingly, with probes resolving lakeshores on Titan and the atmospheres of gas giants orbiting other stars. It still has far to go, though, as the Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla noted in a recent post about the plutoid Kuiper Belt Object 90842 Orcus and its very close-orbiting moon Vanth ("officially (90482) Orcus I Vanth"). Or are Orcus and Vanth co-planets?

An orbit of only 9000 kilometers is a really really close orbit. Still, Hubble is capable of resolving Orcus and Vanth as two separate (pointlike) objects. What they learned from looking at Orcus and Vanth with Hubble is that the two bodies have very different surfaces. Neither one shows the gray color and strong evidence of water ice that some other Kuiper belt bodies (like Haumea and Charon) do. There's some evidence for some water ice on Orcus, but Vanth looks like more like typical Kuiper belt bodies, reddish in color. It's not the color of Vanth that's odd; it's the fact that Vanth and Orcus have such different colors. In fact, Vanth and Orcus are less similar in color than any other binary pair yet observed in the Kuiper belt.

This dissimilarity in color has various implications for the origin of the Vanth-Orcus system but I'm more interested in what it means about the differences in physical properties between the two. It very likely means that the two have very different albedo, and albedo translates in a very direct way into size.

Size estimates are performed using thermal infrared data, which they got from Spitzer. Unfortunately, Spitzer has lower resolution than Hubble's visible cameras, so it can't resolve Orcus and Vanth separately; all it can see is a single point of light that's composed of light reflected from both Orcus and Vanth. So, for starters, Brown and his coauthors estimated the size that Orcus-Vanth would be if they were, in fact, one object. This comes out to be 940 ± 70 kilometers and 0.28 ± 0.04 for the albedo. That diameter, taken with the relatively well-known mass, produces a density estimate of 1.45 ± 0.3 grams per cubic centimeter, comfortably above the density of ice, meaning it's a mix of rock and ice.

So how big is Vanth relative to Orcus? The usual assumption is that Kuiper belt objects and their satellites have the same albedo, an assumption that's usually been borne out in observations of Kuiper belt binaries. If Vanth and Orcus do have the same albedo, then the fact that Vanth is 2.54 magnitudes fainter than Orcus would imply that Orcus' diameter would be about 900 kilometers, and Vanth would be 3.2 times smaller, 280 kilometers (which is just a bit bigger than Saturn's moon Phoebe).

But I just told you that the Hubble data suggests very different albedo for Vanth and Orcus. The paper says: what if Vanth's albedo is half that of Orcus? Then Orcus would be 820 kilometers in diameter, and Vanth 640 kilometers in diameter, and Vanth would be a "moon" with a whopping 50% the mass of its primary, and would be bigger than the very interesting-looking moons Mimas, Enceladus, and Miranda! This would be even more a binary system, a mutually orbiting dumbell planetoid, than Pluto and Charon are. And it makes me wonder if the story could be even crazier -- if there are reasonable choices for albedo for the two bodies that would actually result in the "moon," Vanth, being larger than its "primary," Orcus.

Go, read.