Might I suggest a collaboration? (via 10,000 Birds)
Seems whenever I get somewhere with a chair and clean white walls, I get ordered out.
~ Rudolph Wurlitzer, Nog
Often, people discuss various animals’ responses to humans in terms of intelligence. Big white-tailed bucks are “smart” because they’re so wary of humans, but buffalo are “dumb” because they’re not. This is a flawed way of thinking about animal behavior, because it operates on the assumption that animals evolved with the sole concern of avoiding human predation — the smart ones figured it out, the dumb ones didn’t. In fact, many animals put a much greater emphasis on avoiding predators. It doesn’t necessarily suit an animal’s needs to burn precious calories by running like hell every time a predator appears, especially if the animal encounters a lot of predators that are unable to make successful attempts at killing it.
~ Steven Rinella, American Buffalo
Welcome to the Dark Mountain Project: a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption.
We aim to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world.
(via Two Ravens)
The Brock Review is seeking scholarly essays and creative pieces for an upcoming issue on the theme of “Communicative Lands, Community Landscapes” (Volume 11, Number 2). This issue will focus on the perception, representation and phenomenology of landscapes as communicative devices and as centres of community. Submissions may focus on any historical era and/or geographical region. This issue will be co-edited by Dr. Katharine T. von Stackelberg (Department of Classics, Brock University). Submission deadline: 14th of May, 2010 (via)
This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the Internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity, but more importantly I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet has done.
In fact the propensity of the Internet to diminish our attention is overrated. I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind. And not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny, interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling larger works into minor snippets for sale. Music albums are chopped up and sold as songs; movies become trailers, or even smaller video snips. (I find that many trailers really are better than their movie.) Newspapers become twitter posts. Scientific papers are served up in snippets on Google. I happily swim in this rising ocean of fragments.
~ Kevin Kelly
A more effective — and popular — tactic to fending off the crows may be to employ the help of honeybees. “The bees become very aggressive when they see shiny black objects, because it reminds them of bears or hornets who might attack them. So whenever they see crows, a whole swarm of bees will chase them,” said Atsuo Tanaka, a co-founder of a hive-managing project in Tokyo called The Ginza Honeybee Project. The 300,000 bees Tanaka keeps on rooftops near a tony shopping district have another benefit: honey. The method may not be widely applicable just yet, but it could eventually prove to be one bird-friendly solution to a sticky situation.
~ Audubon Magazine Blog
First cathedrals, then elephants, and now crows. The bees shall inherit the earth.
Over at Necessary Fiction I’ve been sharing contributors’ responses to a question about what news stories or events sparked their imaginations in 2009. The answers so far have been diverse and fascinating, and I hope you’ll pop over for a look.