I’m enjoying the Message to Obama Flickr Pool (HT TGAW).

I added this photo:

Support Science

More about the pool.

     We living creatures are the mud that gets to sit up and look around at all the other mud. And then we lay back down again. Lucky us; lucky mud.
     – Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Credit: Vidiot

Eleven is an unbalanced number, a prime number we cannot count to on our hands; yet, there is a fractal-like nature to 11, a number whose first digit represents the second digit to the power of 10. The same holds true for single digit numbers multiplied by 11, such as 22, 33, 44… 99. We use a base-10 number system because we have 10 digits on our hands, a society using base-11 would need one extra digit on one hand. They would be asymmetrical beings.

Kurt Vonnegut Credit: mike dialect

Such a society, as implausible as it sounds, would fit perfectly in Kurt Vonnegut’s SF universe. In his book Galapagos human survivors of an apocalypse stranded on the island evolve flippers and become aquatic, in Slapstick mutant siblings become super-geniuses through incest (hi ho), in Timequake a temporal hiccup forces everyone to relive the last decade over again exactly as it happened before, in The Sirens of Titan all of human history is the result of alien race’s manipulations to produce a replacement part for a stranded robot, and in Slaughterhouse-Five a WWII soldier becomes unstuck in time, traveling back and forth to points throughout his life, including a point where he is an exhibit in an alien zoo. Vonnegut indisputably wrote science fiction, but took issue with being categorized as such. Still, he praised the genre for bridging the gap between C.P. Snow’s two cultures:

But listen–about the editors and anthologists and publishers who keep the science-fiction field separate and alive: they are uniformly brilliant and sensitive and well-informed. They are among the precious few Americans in whose minds C.P. Snow’s two cultures sweetly intertwine. They publish so much bad stuff because good stuff is hard to find, and because they feel it is their duty to encourage any writer, no matter how frightful, who has guts enough to include technology in the human equation. Good for them. They want buxom images of the new reality.

Born on 11/11/1922 or 19221111, I’d like to suggest “Powers of Eleven Day” to celebrate Kurt Vonnegut’s legacy. This coincides perfectly with the fact that 11/11 is also Veterans Day, as Kurt Vonnegut was a WWII veteran who survived the Bombing of Dresden as a POW, and the fact that Veterans Day takes place on the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I, which occured at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

Fun facts about 11:

Centered Decagonal Numbers

M-Theory

Undecagon

11-cell hendecachoron

From School House Rock The Good Eleven by Bob Dorough:

 
Powers of eleven (via quadibloc)
   2                                          121
   3                                         1331
   4                                        14641
   5                                       161051
   6                                      1771561
   7                                     19487171
   8                                    214358881
   9                                   2357947691
  10                                 2 5937424601
  11                                28 5311670611
  12                               313 8428376721
  13                              3452 2712143931
  14                             37974 9833583241
  15                            417724 8169415651
  16                           4594972 9863572161
  17                          50544702 8499293771
  18                         555991731 3492231481
  19                        6115909044 8414546291
  20                      6 7274999493 2560009201
  21                     74 0024994425 8160101211
  22                    814 0274938683 9761113321
  23                   8954 3024325523 7372246531
  24                  98497 3267580761 1094711841
  25                1083470 5943388372 2041830251
  26               11918176 5377272094 2460132761
  27              131099941 9149993036 7061460371
  28             1442099361 0649923403 7676064081
  29           1 5863092971 7149157441 4436704891
  30          17 4494022688 8640731855 8803753801
  31         191 9434249577 5048050414 6841291811
  32        2111 3776745352 5528554561 5254209921
  33       23225 1544198878 0814100176 7796309131
  34      255476 6986187658 8955101944 5759400441
  35     2810243 6848064247 8506121390 3353404851
  36    30912680 5328706726 3567335293 6887453361
  37   340039485 8615773989 9240688230 5761986971
  38  3740434344 4773513889 1647570536 3381856681

The atomic physicist Ernest Rutherford famously said that, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” A glimpse at this cold, sterile hallway, which connects more dynamic museum displays, really lends strong argument for Rutherford view.

Sandpipers, Woodcock, Snipe

Check out the complete flickr set here

“Where did you meet Ms. Antaran?”

“In a chatroom.”

“May I ask what kind of chatroom?”

“It was…” Mr. Langbacher twiddled his thumbs uncomfortably and sniffed loudly. “It was a dating… It was a chatroom for meeting single women overseas.”

The detective scribbled the words ‘Mail Order Bride‘ on his notepad and nodded thoughtfully, “And she came to visit you?”

“Yes,” Mr. Langbacher nodded. “About a week after we started talking.”

“A week?” the detective raised an eyebrow. “She was able to obtain a visa in a week?”

“I–ummmm…” Langbacher frowned at this. “She didn’t say anything about a visa. We we’re just so happy to…” he sobbed once, “I don’t understand why…

The detective frowned and pushed back from his desk at this, “I understand that getting stood up at the altar is a crushing experience, but you are also the victim of a felony–”

“My life savings–”

“–and my job is to bring the perpetrators to justice. So any information you can give me about Ms. Antaran would be helpful. Do you have any idea how she came to possess your bank account numbers?”

“She…” Langbacher shrugged slightly, “It was part of our marriage plans. She gave me the information for her accounts.”

The detective nodded, looking at the absurd figure listed on Ms. Diante Antaran’s overseas bank account statement, “Mr. Langbacher, did you ever see Ms. Antaran eat?”

“I–I’m sorry?”

“Eat. Did you ever see her actually swallow food.”

“I… We…” Langbacher squinted his eyes, remembering. “We went to several dinners… I remember her playing with her food, but the plate was always full when the wait staff came to clear the table.”

The Detective squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to appear thoughtful. In fact, he was being thoughtful. He was trying to find a thoughtful way to explain to Led Langbacher what an incredible dunce he was.

“Mr. Langbacher, I’m afraid you’ve been the victim of a pretty common scam. Ms. Antaran, the woman you hoped to marry, never existed. She was an AI, probably one of those fourth-gen Real Dolls with hacked chatbot software. In fact, I am certain the robot is certainly being disassembled in a warehouse as we speak.” The detective sighed heavily, “These crimes are very difficult to solve.”

“But… you mean…” Mr. Langbacher’s eyes were welling up with tears. “Lacy wasn’t really daughter to the late treasurer of Freedonia?”

The detective grimaced and slouched in his chair.

The title of this article might mislead some readers. While Bonobos and chimpanzees share a 94% genetic similarity to us, we need to remember that they are merely the closest relatives on the evolutionary tree that survives today. If both these species were to go extinct, which appears increasingly likely, the title of this article would become, “Are we more like orang utans or gorillas?” As close a resemblance these many primates bare to us, there were other species in the past that that were even more human-like, like Neanderthals and Homo erectus. The later, despite the close relationship, would have probably killed and eaten you upon first introductions.

Homo Erectus (the Velociraptor of Human Ancestry)

We humans share a common ancestor with all chimpanzees that existed five to eight million years ago, bonobos and common chimpanzees diverged less than one-million years ago, soon after they became separated by the formation of the Congo river. Bonobos are technically a type of chimpanzee, but, for the purposes of this article, the world “chimpanzee” refers to the common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes.

Both chimpanzees and bonobos use tools, from stones to crack nuts to sticks to fish termites out of mounds. The two species also have the capacity for language, with case studies of chimpanzees exhibiting a sign-language vocabulary of over one-hundred words, as well as bonobos making up new words. Both have expressive faces, which we humans can easily read and understand what’s being communicated, and both exhibit signs of empathy toward one another and to other species.

While both species use tools, chimpanzees use spears, which they sharpen with their teeth, to hunt other primates. Chimpanzees are the only other primate observed hunting in groups, sometimes going on border patrols where they actively seek out neighboring groups of chimpanzees and kill them. Chimpanzees also practice infanticide and cannibalism, both males and females killing and eating chimpanzee offspring that is not their’s. This is a symptom of the chimpanzee’s highly-patriarchal (male-dominated) society, where male domestic violence toward females is commonplace as a means of bullying them into submission.

Bonobos Credit: collisionality

Bonobos, have a much more peaceful society. They are mostly frugivorous, supplementing their diets with occasional invertebrates, like termites, or small mammals like flying squirrels. Physically, bonobos are “more elegant, longer-legged, and smaller-headed than chimpanzees.” Their body proportions resemble that of Australopithecus, a close ancestor to humans long extinct. This means that Bonobos also more closely resemble us physically, walking upright 25% of the time, exhibiting broader shoulders than chimpanzees and the females having more pronounced breasts.

In contrast to chimpanzees, bonobos have a matriarchal (female-dominated) society, where females are given the highest respect, and which is highly sexualized. While chimpanzees resolve conflicts through violence, bonobos resolve them through sex, both heterosexual and homosexual. When bonobos discover a wealth of food, they immediately diffuse any tension over who gets how much with an orgy. It’s no wonder bonobos are often called the “Make-love-not-war chimp.”

Because bonobos split off from chimpanzees millions of years after humans split off from our common ancestor with pans troglodyte, it would be inaccurate to say we got our behaviors from bonobos, and it would also be inaccurate to say we got our behaviors from chimps, as we have no idea what chimpanzee culture was like five million years ago, and culture, as we see in human history and the divergent histories of bonobos and chimpanzees, evolves very rapidly.

What we can ask from this exercise in comparing our evolutionary cousins is which cultural strategy works best? Both chimpanzees and bonobos are successful cultures, except in the face of human exploitation, and we can all refer to examples of domestic violence, murder, war, peace, free-love, and cooperation in human society. Each strategy works within certain social environments, so perhaps the real question is, which society would you rather live in?

Further Reading:

• Between the time of my writing this and its publication today, wild bonobos were observed hunting and eating the young of other primate species. Adjust your paradigms accordingly.
• Check out some amazing photos of bonobos here by Frans de Waal.

Bonobo Conservation Initiative

• The Bonobo conservation Initiative offers means for ordinary people to contribute to the preservation of this endearing species.
• An older, more thorough Scientific American article exploring the differences between bonobos and chimpanzees.
• A New Yorker article wonders if bonobos are really the peace-loving hippies we make them out to be?

I’ve been struggling for some profound insights concerning this display. I discovered at this display that I prefer dioramas that depict the animal’s natural habitat to just displaying the animal in a glass box. I’ve previously covered the fact that the African continent is big enough to put USA, India, Argentina, Western Europe, and China in with ease.

There really isn’t any way to capture the remarkable biodiversity and diversity of ecosystems Africa encapsulates. Think of America, with our costal planes, moutains, deserts, rolling planes, tropical zones, swamplands, marshlands, and other environments… and then multiply that by by three. That’s Africa.

Akeley Hall of African Mammals

See the complete flickr set here.