In 2006, Bush’s admin created the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. In the face of severe objections by commercial interests, they banned fishing in about 362,600 square kilometers of the sea. This is an area larger than all the national parks of the States combined.

Ocean fishing has a much larger effect on the seas than was once imagined. Our consumption (and waste) of all food including that from the sea is so high that a conspicuous difference is created in the world’s waters. Needless to say, almost every ecosystem living in the upper 40 meters of water is affected in one way or another by our fishing industry alone. In the non-deep areas of the sea, practices such as bottom-trawling do not even spare life at the sea bed. In the most destructive form of this method, two trawler ships lay out a large net across the sea floor one end being held by each, and then literally sweep the floor clean. Everything that lies in the path of their nets (and that means everything – whether plant, animal or mineral) is captured in the net and pulled out. Of course over 80% of whats collected is junk to the fishermen, and is tossed back into the sea. On the one hand this seems like a good thing, that at least we return the dead plants and fish back to be decomposed, but undoutedly this must greatly imbalance the local ecosystem.

In its latest achievement, the Bush admin created another national monument around some of the American Islands in the Western Pacific Ocean. Covering the Marianas trench, the volcanic arc of the Pacific, and several islands and atolls, a total area of about 500,000 sq. km is now protected. Apparently some of the islands here hold U.S. naval bases and so “unhindered” access will be allowed to their vessels, but without fishing and mineral mining, the local life is bound to excel. Some recent studies have shown that due to increased temperatures and higher carbon density in the waters, the global growth rate of corals has decreased in the past few years. Previously a coral system could revive itself in as short as 10 years, but now at least 4 times that time is expected. So whatever damage has been done in this area as of recent will at least have a chance to recover, no matter how slowly.

The very fact that the area involved is half a million sq. kms. should be reason enough to rejoice. Richard Leakey has expressed concerns over the effectiveness of “national parks” (though he was referring to terrestrial ones). He suggests that isolating already decreased populations to a yet smaller area like in African national parks, creates more competition between its creatures, especially for those that have to re-adjust to slightly modified conditions. This leads to a higher rate of natural extinction than the norm. The concept can be stretched to water national parks also. But in this case, I think the very magnitude of the size concerned lifts most of the dangers that might come with traditional national parks. For reference, consider that the entire island of New Guinea is 786,000 sq. km in total area. Imagine about 3/4ths of that being something like a national park. Certainly this is a positive.

This is not something I’ve said ever before, or I think I’m going to say ever again, but for setting on a true ‘blue’ legacy, thank you Mr. Bush.

There is a BBC article covering the story here and a PEW press release covering the event here. Bush is set to make his public announcement of this on Tuesday evening.

To accomplish their goal, they network with each other in a complex hierarchy. We can compare the workings of this network to that of a corporation. Just like companies have CEOs, executives, managers, and workers to look after their daily operations, the body has various genes working at different levels of control. This hierarchy in the body is called its pleiotropy. The senior genes have the power to shut down, change, suspend, or accelerate operations based on the needs of the body. This system allows the “critical stages” of development as discussed in a previous article.

In corporations, several people work together to accomplish something an individual cannot accomplish by themselves. These genes in our bodies are doing the same thing. By working in a network, the composite bodies of these genes accomplish seemingly magical tasks – such as thought and communication. On a broad scale, all bodies involved in the network affect the workings of all other bodies surrounding them, quite intimately.

The nucleus of all somatic cells in the body contain two pairs of genes – they are diploid. One pair from the father and one from the mother. The only cells in the body that are haploid (one set of genes) are the sex cells. Textbooks teach that the genes that make it to these cells are there by “random selection”. But of course we know that is not how it works. In reality, every gene is fighting for its place on a chromosome. This is called it’s ‘meiotic drive’ – it’s drive to be included in the process of meiosis.

The fight can rise to such dramatic proportions that some genes could even take a position that is damaging to other genes, or even the rest of the cell. In “The Extended Phenotype”, Richard Dawkins calls such genes ‘outlaws’ (not his term originally). It is in the interest of the rest of the genes of the cell to subdue this outlaw. So here, we see a collective effort emerge between genes at other loci to make sure that the outlaw is not selected. But on the other hand, any outlaw that can somehow beat the system is greatly increasing its chances of making it to the next generation, so selection would certainly favour it greatly.

Things become more interesting however when outlaws appear on sex chromosomes. Any driving gene on an X or Y chromosome, could easily alter sex ratios drastically and hence even lead a population to it’s demise. If a Y-driving gene is successful enough, the next generation will see only males being born (in mammals for example) leaving them no one to mate with. This method has also been tested as a weapon against pests. In labs and simulations, the introduction of an intentional outlaw driving towards a particular sex, destroyed the entire population in as few as four generations.

The workings in nature of one such outlaw have been witnessed in mud-daubing wasps. The females of this species build their own nests, lay a prey in it for their new-borns to feed upon, lay their eggs on the already dead or dying prey, seal the nest, and then begin the cycle again. As opposed to most other wasps, the males here are also present at the laying and in fact, during it, force the female into a strange ritual dubbed ‘holding’. The whole process begins when the female, having already laid the prey in her nest, goes head first into it with her abdomen facing outside. The male, who is outside, then copulates with her in this position. Then the female turns around, pops her head outwards from the nest and faces her abdomen inside it. She feels for the prey with the tip of her abdomen as if about to lay her egg. At this point, the male grabs her head with his forelegs and proceeds to pull her antennae outwards for about half a minute, to prevent the lady from dropping her egg just yet. Then the female again turns around and copulates with the male, only to turn around again and make another attempt to lay her egg. The male does the same thing. This repeats several times until the female finally gets to lay her egg.

It is hypothesized that the male here is trying to influence the sex of the egg. In Hymenoptera, unfertilized eggs usually result in males and fertilized ones in females. So perhaps by not letting the female lay her egg immediately, the male is trying the make sure it has time to fertilize in the oviduct, or perhaps he is trying to overflow her internal tracts with sperm, so the egg has more of a chance of fertilizing. Both of these actions would lead to a greater chance of new born being a female, giving the male more mating opportunities. Of course, the resistance of the female is necessary, not only because more unfertilized eggs mean more males for her, but also because without it, the entire population might perish.

In ways like these, outlaw genes and other interesting types (segregation distorters, other germ-line replicatiors) cause strange behaviours in our world, and make evolution seem even more implausible. But as always, there are breakthroughs and paradigm-shifts in Science that show us the way. “The Extended Phenotype” is a brilliant book, and deals with several such cases, and all in all, gives one a wonderful perspective of genetics. Dawkins had said before that he considers this book to be his best work; I don’t know if he still considers that true, but if you’re looking to do some interesting reading on evolution, there is no better book I could recommend than this.

Terese Hart maintains a blog www.bonoboincongo.com where she posts updates of their project and other interesting happenings (and there are many!). A lot has happened since she went back, and though there is no way I can surmise it here, I have put up some of what I think are the most striking pictures from the past 2-3 weeks. If you enjoy conservation, jungle life, or even simply adventure, check out her blog for sure. And if nothing else, please have a look at the last picture here.

Traveling through the jungles is done mostly on motorbikes along known trails (of which there are no guarantees). But sometimes you have to get creative.

Bust meat hunting is a hot button issue. While the village locals do not do this in epidemics, the demand for bush meat from bigger cities is causing a major problem.

Improvised weapons such as this are now widespread, and allow people to carelessly overhunt.

Some police officers who were questioning the team (who were later arrested and released) being given a tour of a Dell laptop, GPS and other such devices.

The village ‘nurse’ giving kids a quick lesson in math.

A forest elephant – a target for poachers – in a dreamy scene

CITES is holding the massively controversial one-off ivory stock pile sale these few months. Here is a picture from the sale in Namibia (Oct 2008)

Perhaps the most striking of all these images – an ANR agent taking a bribe of in the form of a Duiker

(ANR = Alliance pour une nouvelle République. Apparently a force equivalent to the FBI in the US)

Context speaks louder than words. The average English speaking adult has a vocabulary of about 40,000 – 60,000 words. The more verbose English speaker can reach about 80,000. But how do we reach these staggering numbers? By no means have any of us looked in a dictionary that many times. Neither do we use thesauruses or wikipedia to learn that many new words. When learning language for the first time, human babies start with about 10 or so words. In a week, they will know hundreds. Of course this is not so clear while actually interacting with a child, but given the limited control they have over their tongue and larynx, several of the words they utter are hidden in their subtle babbles. If you bring in pantomime into the picture, the numbers become even more amazing.

Let’s go into a thought experiment then: let’s consider the world from the point of view of a language.

However they are born (if anyone knows, please tell me), languages are always changing. Any already existing phoneme can undergo a number of morphs. The most common ones occur because of a lack of the tongue’s ability to keep up. If your currently extant ‘noise articulation’ set is very different from a newly imported sound, your tongue will look for a way to minimize that new sound – to save the time and effort of going in another direction. ‘Flapping’ is an example of this. It is often associated with the North American accent, for example, over the phoneme ‘t-h’. Usually, to produce the ‘t’ sound, our tongue lines up with the top of our upper teeth, and waits their until enough air-pressure builds up behind it to cause it to ‘pop’. That pop sound is the sound of the letter ‘t’. As you can imagine, in terms of time invested, this is a taxing consonant to produce. So in saving time and energy, the tongue creates a kind of a pseudo-pronunciation of it. As an example, look at the word ‘impor-t-ant’. The North American accent skips over the first t, roughly pronouncing the word ‘impor-ay-ant’. The ‘ay’ is appended with a soft ‘pop’ similar to a ‘t’. The proper British accent on the other hand, goes through the trouble of actually stressing the ‘t’. But that is probably only because those are the prominent sounds in those accents.

But as you approach the ‘Southern’ accent, this habit of flapping becomes more prominent. So much so, that I think we are almost on the verge of a new sound: a combination of ‘r’ and a soft ‘t’ – ‘rt’ said very fast and harshly. So perhaps if this accent remains isolated for long enough, there will be a new sound in it’s inventory. Words like ’shutter’, ‘butter’, and ‘mutter’ will sound almost unrecognizable. Further, to make the rest of the set fit in with a new dominant sound, other sounds are going to be modified also. Currently, the Irish/Scottish and the Newfie accents lie at a distant tangent from common-English, where our hypothetically morphed-language might live.

Imagine other types of flapping also, over sounds like ‘d-h’. The new sound produced from it might be ‘dt’ pronounced very fast and harshly. If you flip English through enough of it’s common phonemes, you can see how even distant languages of the same family tree are related. Wikipedia lists several other ‘manners of articulation’ also that could all be modified simultaneously to produce new languages on the fly. Check out their wiki articles: Plosive, Nasal stop, Fricative, Affricate, Trill, Approximant.

As I mentioned above, about 50% of modern languages are in an immediate threat of extinction. Of course this is not something to be concerned about in the same way as say, endangered species. But the statistic is surely indicative of something. I believe it shows an unfortunate but unstoppable trend towards a global acculturation reducing cultures and religions on planet Earth to only a handful. I have an upcoming article about what I believe is the unfortunate contribution of the modern atheist to this phenomenon. I’m sure I’ll pick up a lot of lip for it!

Over years, usage, and languages, meanings of words change. Sometimes the change is meaningless, at other times it’s just unfortunate. The following five are examples are of the latter.

I’m sure there are many others, but this is all I could come up with at the moment. If you have any, please add them in the comments.

5. Dik-Dik

The only thing more curious than this animal’s name is it’s face. Antelopes develop slender frames so that they remain quick on their feet in case of attack from predators. They also attempt to maintain a low fat to muscle ratio to make the best out of their vegetarian digestive systems. This creature seems to be idealistic in this sense, but one can’t help but feel that something went horribly wrong in the history it’s family.

There are reasons for it’s oddities though. They are named “dik-dik” after the sound they produce when alarmed. Apparently the specialized shape of their heads allow them to eat leaves off Acacia trees without poking out their humongous eyes.

So it seems that despite all the weirdness, Dik-diks have it all: light frames for agility, large eyes and ears for good vision and hearing, optimized head shapes and a good camouflage of colour and size.

4. Goatsucker

Referring to Nightjars as goatsuckers is a bit like calling vampires humansuckers. It just doesn’t make sense!

Apparently the name comes from the mistaken belief that they suck milk from goats. While I’m sure that is not true, it would be pretty awesome if a bird could do that.

On a related note, to my surprise, I discovered a few days back that there is such a thing as bird milk. “Crop milk” is a protein rich food pigeons and doves produce to feed their young. They don’t have any nipples, but feed it to their chicks by way of regurgitation. Both the parents produce this milk, and it’s different from mammalian milk in many ways.

3. Boobies

…or Booby for singular, are seabirds. Their name might come from the Spanish slang for dunce – bobo. Like Dodos, these birds were hunted by many-a-sailor in the old times. Being seabirds, they probably did not recognize humans as a threat, and hence often landed on the ships waiting to be eaten. According to Wikipedia, among the famous eaters of boobies are Captain Bligh of the Bounty.

Apparently they’re delicious!

2. Great Tits

These classic passerines are common in many parts of the world. It’s scientific name Parus major can be roughly translated to mean “large titmouse” – also the origin of it’s common name. The entire Aviary family Paridae is full of tits. There are Japanese tits, Yellow tits, Somali tits, Varied tits, and various other tits in this family.

I’m sure avid bird watchers have loads of fun pointing out Great Tits to their kids.

1. Titi Monkeys

Tities or Titi Monkeys are new world monkeys from the Amazon. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any information on their curious names (perhaps it’s related to some local language) but they are surely among the more interesting of new world monkeys. Give their wikipedia page a read to see what I mean.

Next time an elementary school kid asks for your help to choose an animal for their class presentation, be sure to recommend the Tities. Oh how I would love to see the reaction on that teacher’s face.

I hope to have accomplised nothing more by this article than SEO.

For those who are not very familiar with linux, wikipedia is a good anchoring point. As the wiki philosophy goes, any person of any qualification may contribute to a singular resource as long as they can backup their claims with credible sources. This is essentially the definition of rational thought. This way, no science/art goes stale by being constantly led in a linear direction. A communal effort always keeps a check on where things are headed, and reprimands the field if needed. This is also the birthplace of new ideas. The human mind produces new ideas by performing various logical operations between older ideas. The more data (relevant or not) you look at, the more new ideas you will produce. This is the process of ‘brainstorming’.

If we restrict a science/art to a laboratory or a corporate office, it will begin to go to stale. There will be little innovation and subsequently lesser yearning for innovation. On the other hand, you have different fingers!…lol no I’m joking. On the other hand, if we allow contributions from a wide variety of sources, the subject remains fresh and dynamic. The same philosophy is used by linux.

I’m not asking you to abandon your operating system and switch to Ubuntu right now. But I think it is important to realize what supporting proprietary software means. The end goal of Microsoft and Apple (love them or hate them) is not to improve computer technology, but to make money. I’m not referring to individuals like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Regardless of their personal intentions, the very nature of their corporate beasts prioritizes money over innovation. Look at the iPhone for example: enormously popular, its ‘terms and services’ gives the rights to any piece of software developed for it directly to Apple, along with permission to further use and distribution as they wish.

This might seem like something trivial, that someone makes a thermometer app that becomes popular, and Apple attaches a 99 cents price tag to it and makes a few thousand dollars of it. That, though objectionable, is not the central problem. The problem is that such a system hinders development. Apple forces all iPhone software to be downloaded only through the iTunes distribution system. Moreover, it has to be “digitally signed” to be installable. What this commercialization does is put money in the front, and development in the backseat. Since the product is commercial, it now comes with a “life-cycle” and various do-s and don’t do-s. Given the forced profit, its developer is now concerned with making money, over actual innovation.

There is another such problem that applies to both Microsoft and Apple. This is of cost. Most people in the first world can (though grudgingly) afford $300 – $600 for Vista, or pay excess of $1500 for a Mac laptop. Those who pirate their copies of OS have the benefit of high speed Internet (also expensive by global standards). The rest of the world – the developing world, cannot afford such prices, let alone the hardware. So in a world without linux, new generations of children in Africa, India and Brazil will have to be introduced to old, painfully bad software. This about insures they will not easily be able to secure a job in the IT industry, or make contributions to its growth. This is another reason the proprietary model is unsustainable. It is very unfriendly to a non-capitalistic market. If we imagine that computers are going to revolutionize humanity forever, and for the better, surely all humans have to be given a fairer chance.

If you’ve been using computers for at least the last 5 years, ask yourself this: why do you look forward to every periodic major release of a software to see new features? Aren’t your needs changing in those few years between the releases? Aren’t developers and artists maturing new ideas into features in that time? Is so, why wait long periods to get them all in one go? This way you’ll hardly use all the new features when they do come out, as most will be hidden behind the more prominent ones, and at least some of the work that had been put in by the developers will go to waste. If your thoughts are fluid, so should be research. The very nature of BIG software disallows this.

Linux is growing right now, yes, but it needs more users. With its current market-share, it is hardly taken seriously by software producers. If you want software/computers of the future to be capable of serving humanity better, for all the reasons listed above, give linux a try. The more attention it receives, more software will be developed for it. It will evolve faster, more humans will be able to add their input to it, and we will move towards a cheaper and more reliable computing model. This will open new technologies to us, which will help us achieve our long term goals on this planet.

I think this is a good time to introduce Ubuntu (Oo-buntu) to new users. It is a distribution of Debian (a distribution of linux) that was released in 2004. Its philosophy is everything written in this article and more. More specifically, it says “I am who I am because of those around me…”. Ubuntu itself comes from a Zulu word loosely translated to “humanity”. Ubuntu has been revolutionary because it makes linux easy for average users. All things required for general usage are automated, and more advanced users can customize every aspect of its functionality to suit themselves. Even the Wikimedia foundation runs off Ubuntu. Sure, your windows or mac might have a cool feature that Ubuntu does not have yet, but all you have to do is suggest it to the very large user community, and if feasible, you will get your wish in the next release (every 6 months).

Ubuntu has also been made ultra-easy to install for inexperienced users and after having used both Vista and Mac, I can’t imagine what a person would find lacking in it. Yeah, for the software you use at work, you would have to go back to your other OS, but again, no specialized software is going to be exported to linux unless there is a user base for it. So create the demand, and contribute to the society. Linux needs designers, artists, managers, testers, and new ideas as much as it needs programmers. So even if you know nothing about computer, explain your problems or ideas to the community, and you will certainly get some output from it. Even if you end up disliking linux, at least you’ll have learned something. Wiki Ubuntu to find out more or just check out their website. Also, if you went through this article with no understanding of the words “development” or “innovation”, give linux a shot, you’ll see what I mean.

Update: I learned only recently that some of the information in this article is outdated, and that plasticity is not what it immediately appeared to be. It is still something awesome, but some experiments have showed that it is not as powerful as it initially seemed. You can read about one of these in Karn Stromswold’s article found here. Original article follows ->

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.
~ Emily Dickinson

For centuries we have tried to search for a homonculus within us, that center within our brains that makes us human. Traditionally, we expect this part to transcend all chemicals, and fall in the realm of infinite.

What makes us human? Several factors interacting in complex ways. But if there was one that played the primary role in making us “us”, it would be ‘Neuroplasticity’.

Plasticity allows our brain to break and reconstruct neural pathways. As we go through different experiences and learn new things, new synaptic connections are formed at the expense of old, unused ones. This process is not just limited to the memory organs of the brain, but even the functional ones. For example, if your visual cortex does not do any “learning” or is not exposed to the correct type of information during a critical period, your anatomically perfect eyes may never develop vision. Most likely in this case, your visual cortex which has so far gone unused would break with it’s quasi-predetermined circuitry, and reform to be used by a neighboring part of the brain.

Perhaps more amazingly, in recent decades, the brain has also been observed making recoveries after structural damage. People who suffer from any kind of mental injuries were thought to have completely and permanently lost those abilities. But with the help of MRIs and CAT-scans, researchers noticed that the injured or dead part of the brain can come back to life. It is a tragedy that this information is not yet widespread. Stroke patients who are left paralyzed or are unable to speak after their accident often never try to repeat those lost activities. However, recent cases have shown that often the “broken” part of their brain can recover in full, but since the activity previously assigned to it is no longer performed, it gives up it’s original function and becomes involved in something else.

People who undergo hemispherectomies can make amazing recoveries if their new minds are given the right exercises. It was until the early 1990s considered that the left hemisphere, primarily Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas were solely and exclusively responsible for language. The theory seemed shaky from day one. Not only could we not explain how these functioned (as we can’t yet), but perhaps more importantly, we were unable to recreate any disorders that seemed to emerge from them. But when patients left with only the right hemisphere of their brains defied current theory and produced from single worded to multi-phrased cogent sentences, the theory was just as well out the door.

It is now understood that this ability stays with us for our lifetimes. There are a few known critical periods during which specific functions are favoured. As babies, our mind’s first priority is to develop the key abilities  we use to navigate the world. After the age of two and a half or three, our brain devotes great attention to language learning, as well to sharpening the previously learned skills. After about six, we learn a tremendous amount of things about the world around us…how and why our parents behave, why the sky is blue, and in general how the world works. After about 10 – 12 we turn our attention to sexual maturity and of course the social concerns that come with it.

From this point on, the two sexes begin to differ. But now these changes are very relative, and hardly as crucial. The mind has fully developed, and the rest are the stages of our lives. Missing even one of these critical steps can tremendously change our lives. I personally know of no case where postponing something like language learning has eventually led to “normal” efficacy of that skill, and I can’t imagine it would ever happen. But again, as stated above, some recovery is still possible. It has been observed though that as we get older, neurogenesis occurs in fewer and fewer parts of the brain, being eventually left only in the hippocampus (short-term memory functions). So it is possible to understand why we eventually pass away.

Some recent experiments demonstrate the extreme ways is which our brain can change if subject to abnormal stimulus. One group of researchers cross-connected the audial and visual cortexes of the brain of a Ferret fetus. The experiment’s purpose was to test the permanence of these structures. The experiment’s hypothesis was that they are both very plastic. Indeed this was found to be the case. Visual signal being carried from the retina to the audial cortex produced very similar patterns to what the visual cortex of a normal Ferret would later produce. This implied that the modified audial cortex was now capable of “seeing” and the modified visual cortex was now capable of “hearing”.

One comfort I take from these flurry of discoveries is that they fit in perfectly and beautifully with the modern evolutionary theory. It is very difficult to explain how the brain got to be so complex if all parts evolved by individual selection. But if we understand that these parts are developed as much from their enviornment as from their genes, we see a much more reasonable and explicable world. Understanding neuroplasticity has opened a whole new field of medical care, and has revolutionzed the world of so many. Some have also found applications of it in the so-called Brain-Computer Interface technolgy. But perhaps the greatest reward this discovery holds for us is the secret of how the brain actually works.

On another subject, did you know that Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. I mean, buffaloes from Buffalo that buffaloes from Buffalo buffalo (bully), buffalo other buffaloes from Buffalo. Okay, we all knew that one.

Here’s another one of my favourites: A bicycle cannot stand on its own, it is two tired.

It is not much of a surprise that we are capable of producing an infinite amount of such sentences. It is also not a surprise that we enjoy them so very much. A good chunk of humour comes from the breaking of known patterns. Language is one of those things that is totally rigid in it’s fluidity. Humour arising from sentence structure can take on many forms. It can come through homonymy as in the buffalo buffalo case above, it can come through homophony as in the bicycle case above, it can come through capitonymy, or much lesser so, through polysemes.

Chomsky gave us “colourless green ideas sleep furiously” to show that grammar definitely comes out of the brain, as opposed to the previous belief that it is elucidated by our surroundings. The fancy names mentioned above hardly matter to our brain. Whether we know them or not, we can still enjoy such words. So apparently it is really easy to violate the rules of language, or at least those of a language like English.

But sentences are always more fun than words. Limericks, some poetry, and those dreaded lists the Internet bemoaning the English language all try to make us laugh. Some can leave us captivated for hours. And nothing does this better than garden path sentences. These are those sentences that intentionally try to fool our parsers by usually laying out deceptive function words or words out of context. It always seems like they lack a ‘that’ or a ‘of’, but they don’t, and figuring out how they make sense is the fun part.

Probably the most common one is ‘The horse raced past the barn fell.’ We initially try to parse it as being about a horse that is racing past a barn. But when we reach the ‘fell’, we notice that not only does that word not fall in a verb phrase like it should, but it does not complete any traces either. We have been deceived. Then you read it over and convince yourself that all that’s needed to make sense of the sentence is punctuation. Then you read it over again, and in a flash realize that no commas or periods or connecting words are required. What is actually being said is: The horse (that was) raced past the barn…fell. Fun indeed!

Here are some other good ones, see if you can figure them out if you haven’t done them before.

Throw the cow over the fence some hay.
The cotton clothing is made from grows in Mississippi.
The old man the boat.
They told the boy that the girl met the story.
The tycoon sold the offshore oil tracts for a lot of money wanted to kill JR.

This final one I discovered last night, and not have yet been able to figure out. Help?

The daughter of king’s son admires himself.

EDIT ~ 10 minutes after initial post

k I just figured it out! I’ve striked out the answer so that it’s not easy to read and you can avoid it if you want to figue it out on your own.

The himself is used as a third person masculine reflexive pronoun. The third person is key. The himself refers to the king’s son. You can think of it in the same way someone asks you “How are you?” and you respond “Not so bad, yourself?” That ‘yourself‘ is a third person reflexive, just like the himself in the sentence. This usage probably comes from middle- or olde-English. The usage is now barely alive. Enough to help us generate sneaky gardenpaths I suppose.

A world that is looking to combat poverty while reducing it’s natural-resource consumption is in an disagreeable state – at least so without the right technologies. None of the new clean technologies we have yet promise a large output for a small input. It’d be the greatest thing in the world if they did, but they don’t yet. And Coal energy is not at all sustainable for many many reasons. Hydroelectric and natural gas power have similar problems. While yielding decent amounts of energy, they cannot support the massive demand for it we have created and further foresee. At least not without ripping the nutrients out of every body of flowing water on Earth anyway. And of course small chemical plants are out of the question.

We fear nuclear weapons not because they are sloppy, but precisely because they are powerful. So if we applied the same technology to our energy concerns, would be result not be positive? Reprocessing can potentially recover large amounts of uranium and plutonium from spent-fuels. Our current technology does not allow for too much, but we can’t advance the study if so many keep objecting to further research. Many also consider spent-fuel storage to be another big problem, but this is exactly where the misunderstanding lies. The space we use for waste storage is not any more than that taken up by the waste produced by our current unclean technologies.

Another common concern is the high cost of operation. This is where subjectivity prevails. Building a nuclear power plant, maintaining safety standards, disposing of nuclear waste, all cost a lot of money. This would mean that governments that implement this system would have to lay out heavy subsidies. Many would of course be opposed to this, but considering what is on the line, I don’t think this is the worst option. The right side of the equation gives us large outputs of power, with no air/carbon pollution.

The only noticeable effects occur in governmental offices where large capital costs incur, and in research labs where loads of work needs to be done. The public enjoys a clean environment and high reliability. One beautiful scenario that comes to mind is of central African countries sharing a powergrid and splitting the costs to fulfil their hunger for energy. Of course thousands of these scenarios would be repeated around the world.

Now is one of those times in history, from when our decisions and choices will affect our long-term future. It is not immediately clear if nuclear energy is indeed the answer, but let’s not block it’s progress before we get conclusive results on it. Wind, solar, and other green techs are very fanciful, but it might be a while before we can get them to suit our exact needs. So while researching to feed our current needs, why don’t we shift over to a cleaner, more productive technology?