Have you lost your sense of humor? This man knows where to find it. ABC

“Scientists should not be so scared of racism that they ignore facts”: “‘This restraint has become a massive and
unjustifiable taboo today that is both foolish and
destructive…There is an unspoken rule that says that race and science make a
deadly combination, and that the effect of “scientific racism” is always
malevolent. In his comprehensive, must-read book, The Meaning of
Race, Kenan Malik provides a detailed description of how social
Darwinism, eugenics, positivism, slavery and colonialism all used real
and pseudo-scientific theory to justify white superiority and, at times,
class superiority, too.” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in the Independent.

All Creatures Great and Smart. ” Research reveals animals’ brains to
be bioengineering marvels

Nearly every important recent brain
discovery comes from the study of simpler
nervous systems in animals. But it seems
those animal brain circuits aren’t so simple
after all.

Roaches, for example, listen with their
knees.

Snakes can remember what they see.

And homing pigeons, with a brain the size
of a pecan, can sniff their way home with
such efficiency that scientists hope to copy
it in futuristic route- finding devices.

These creatures were among dozens of
species represented at the recent annual
meeting of the Society for Neuroscience,
an international research showcase that
reflected growing appreciation of the
bioengineering marvels in nature.

San Francisco Chronicle

Tillmans wins Turner Prize One of the most important modern art awards
in Britain — the Turner Prize — has been won
by the German photographer, Wolfgang
Tillmans.

It’s the first time a photographer has won the
prestigious award, which is worth
thirty-thousand dollars and honours the best
young artist working in Britain.

Tillmans, whose work includes naked bodies
and household rubbish, said he wanted to shift
the perspective about what was beautiful and
acceptable in society.

However, it’s possible that we’ve been there, done that already:

Outside the ceremony, demonstrators dressed
in clown and carnival costume protested that
the prize no longer represented genuine art.
Last year’s winner showed an un-made bed,
while the previous winner used elephant dung
on a painting of the Christian saint, the Virgin
Mary. BBC

Happy Birthday, Emmett Grogan, Digger and author.

Art and Revolution. “We emphasize politics and direct action in our work. We see activism as crucial
to meaningful arts expression. We believe that our politics suffer without creative
vision in the same way that our art suffers without political or social relevance.”

You can find out who links to any website by entering the AltaVista search phrase “link:http://%5BURL%5D”. Doing this for “link:http://world.std.com/~emg/blogger.html”, one of the ways to get to Follow Me Here…, came up with wood s lot, a Canadian blog with exceedingly small print and lots of interesting blinks; there’s a remarkable overlap with items I point to in FMH…