video

People suck, and that's my contention. We're a virus with shoes.

—comedian Bill Hicks

I actually like quite a lot of people, but there's much to recommend Hicks' notion that people are viruses with shoes. It's a fact that well over 40% of the human DNA chain is viral in origin, as Michael Specter writes in a fascinating New Yorker article, "Darwin's Surprise":

Fifth-Century Greek philosopher Democritus, the putative founder of modern science and atomic theory, who laughed constantly and lived more than one hundred years, once had occasion to ponder our sense of smell. It was, he theorized, the result of our nose reading the shape of airborne particles. Democritus called these particles “atoms,” and he thought sweet atoms were “round and of a good size,” while sour ones were “bulky, jagged, and many angled.”

This “shapist” theory of smell, or olfaction, continues to this day. It boils down to the essential concept of tiny pieces of things being “read” by receptors in our nose. Democritus called these piece “atoms,” but he had no sense of atomic theory in the modern sense, which asserts that these pieces are, in fact, molecules. But that's just a theory, and the truth is that no one really knows how our sense of smell works. The shapist theory has many inconsistencies and demonstrated limitations. Molecules with the same shape produce different smells; inversely, two molecules with completely different shapes can produce the same smell (sandalwood).

The first time you kiss somebody, you may well be caught up in romance and various libidinal tides, but your brain and olfactory system are hard at work, gathering information to decide whether to take it to the "next level." At least that's how the assembled sex-starved panelists and journalists at this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago saw the process.

"You're not just kissing," said one scientist suggestively, "you are likely absorbing information about your partner's immune system, looking for a good match should you two procreate."

Climate change is causing the sea to rise far faster than expected, potentially a meter or more by 2100. Perhaps that doesn't seem so dire to you. Perhaps you read that sentence and think: "Pity; there go some beaches and beach-front real estate." Maybe you think: "You know, I've always liked the ocean more than New York City anyway..."

Most petty crime is dull, in both motivation and execution. But I have always wished I could be a great outlaw. Consider the outlaw, and the merits of his or her avocation: the perpetration of grand, spectacular, and/or marvelous crime. A widespread and enduring fascination with outlaws, hucksters, escapists, charlatans, and rogues of various ilk has always harkened to embrace the heroic combination of focus, ingenuity, bravery, determination, and intelligence needed to rise to a level of criminal infamy.

Birds, who once were dinosaurs, could take over the world (again) if they wanted to. And not just in the movies, a la Hitchcock's 1963 terror, The Birds. (If you haven't seen the movie, check out this well-edited one-and-a-half-minute version of it.)

When Edward Lorenz gave a talk in 1972 entitled "Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?," he distilled the main essence of his thoughts on predictability, interdependence and "chaos theory" in one pithy question.

Lorenz, who died earlier this month, was a mathemetician and a meteorologist who, in the early 1960s, discovered that weather simulation models he was developing were exhibiting chaotic, non-predictive behavior, despite a fixed set of variables and no apparent equipment malfunction. Two identical weather simulation machines, side-by-side, given the same variables to process. Wildly different results. How?

Mention blimps or dirigibles to people and you'll normally get a bemused reaction: Oh, what an oddball topic! They rarely react as if airships or airship technology exists outside the distant past or whimsical present. But a new class of modern airships -- part plane, part dirigible -- might change that.

In the 1930s and 40s, passengers routinely flew via airship from Berlin to Rio De Janiero, crossing the span in just under three days. But following the spectacular Hindenburg disaster (a disaster some believe was the result of sabotage), and with the advent of jet engine technology, the popularity of airship travel plummeted.

A few years ago, a friend showed me a book called Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. He handed it to me and asked if I noticed anything unusual about the book itself. I didn't; it looked and felt like a high-end art book, with impressively white paper stock and some weight to it.