Gaming company stunt flops

The game is called Homefront.

THQ, a Southern California video gaming company, was in San Franscisco to promote its hyperviolent video game, it ended up instead garnering far more publicity for its pollution of San Francisco Bay. The company staged an event in downtown San Francisco that included the release of 10,000 red balloons with an offer from the massive chain, GameStop, allowing gamers to "receive the resistance multi-player pack, featuring an exclusive weapon."

The game is set in a near-future where the United States has been invaded by nuclear-armed troops from North Korea. Beautiful. For the children, you know. Unfortunately, the balloons and the coupons, not so beautiful. Wind and rain combined to push the balloons toward, and then into San Francisco Bay, by the thousands, almost immediately after their release. Unsurprisingly, in an environmentally conscious city like San Francisco, local denizens were not pleased with the free pollution caused by THQ and GameStop.

Read more here.

More Gaian evidence

The Clarion Content is an unabashed support of the Gaia theory. We read several years back about work being done on parasitic worms, the human digestive tract and autoimmune disorders. The basic premise being that when human's used to spend a lot less time and energy sanitizing our food, we were a lot less susceptible to autoimmune disorders.

Naturally, this struck our Gaian heart as a likely candidate for a symbiotic relationship. Research has increasing born this theory out, although it is still highly controversial in the United States. Parasitic worms (likely worms in general) carry connotations far beyond the more common archetypes of natural healing; we are not talking wheat grass shots, yoga or even acupuncture here. We are talking extracting roundworm eggs from the stool of an eleven year-old infected girl, cleaning them and eating them. Or putting hookworm larva on a patient's arm so they burrow through the skin enter the bloodstream and make their way into one's intestines.

Yet the results have been compelling. Many of the Man's pigeons pooh-pooh evidence found on blogs. Read then an amazing tale on CNN backing the theories originally popularized by Dr. Joel Weinstock, chief of gastroenterology at Tufts University Medical School.

Humans lived with worms in our intestines for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Is it really so odd that our bodies and theirs learned to work together?

Monty Burns frog

An expedition coordinated by Conservation International looking for possibly extinct species of frog instead discovered three new species, two toads and a poison-secreting rocket frog. The expedition to Colombia failed to find the species it was hoping to rediscover, the Mesopotamia beaked toad.

According to the BBC, it did find a 3-4cm red-eyed toad, which was discovered at an altitude of over 6,000 feet. It also encountered a new toad that is also tiny, less than 2cm long. It has a bird beak-shaped head that Dr. Robin Moore, the scientist who led the rediscovery project, compared to the snout of Montgomery Burns.

Read the whole story here in the BBC.

Hottest day ever

No joke. The city of Los Angeles California recorded the hottest temperatures in the history of its record keeping yesterday when the mercury hit 113 degrees. Wow. In late September, no less? Insert global warming joke here?

Read how locals reacted in the Los Angeles Times.

Wild Kingdom, in the yard

A beautiful butterfly meets a spider, witness, even in suburbia we live amongst the wild. We just notice it less.








This butterfly was at least triple the spider's size. It took the spider five minutes to drag it across the web. Another ten to fifteen minutes to swathe it, and it was gone from the web by morning.

An Ecological Believe it or not

We ran across an ecological believe it or not out of Oregon this week for our truth trumps fiction every time files. The Associated Press is reporting that residents of Newport, Oregon and surrounding areas have discovered that shrimp bought from some local stores glows in the dark. Yep, you read that right, it glows in the dark.

Local marine biologists at Oregon State University's Sea Grant Extension say say it's due to marine bacteria that are not harmful. It can, however, apparently cause shrimp and other seafood to appear luminescent. Reportedly, the bacteria can grow at refrigerator temperatures, especially on seafood products where salt was added during processing.

Brilliant?

A Profusion of Dragonflies

Anecdotally, the Clarion Content has seen a massive increase in the amount of dragonflies in the Durham County area this Summer. Always, with one eye open for the decline of the keystone species, either in Gaia, or in micro-local ecosystems, this has stood out. Dragonflies are everywhere. They are born and bred in standing water and we had a rainy Winter, but this seems exceptional. It is unclear what their natural predator in our area might be.

Has anyone else noticed this?

We recall reading just a few short years ago about the year of the missing acorns in Northern Virginia which quite literally drove local squirrels stark raving mad.

Things that need to invented, part V

We are reviving our long dormant and long overdue, "Things that need to be invented" column, hopefully heretoforth to once again be published monthly. Your brilliant suggestions are encouraged, read the other folks sweet invention ideas here [scroll down below this post]. We are so confident about the volume of your forthcoming submissions that we are kicking things back off with a triple shot of invent this.

The first thing in this month's column that needs to be invented is a cheaper electric riding lawnmower. Gas powered lawnmowers are so bad for the environment. On top of their deleterious effect on air quality and the noise pollution, they are woefully inefficient and resource wasting. We are going whole hog with the electric and hybrid cars things, why can't somebody get on it for the lawnmower market? They are quieter, way less polluting and way more fuel efficient. We could not find one cheaper than two grand. Surely they can beat that with a little more mass production. Maybe we can get a government tax credit for buying an electric lawnmower?

The next thing we would like to see invented is for Major League baseball to put its entire back catalog of game telecasts on-line. Let us, the fans, be able to look up any game, any time and stream it on-line. We would pay for this. And we are not just talking this year's game, but the historical back catalog. Think how many games diehards would watch? And if this project sounds fanciful, try to remember that just a few short years ago the idea of digitizing your entire music library to something the size of laptop, let alone i-pod, was the stuff of dreams. What an argument resolver! Want to know who was pitching in the pine tire game? Or where the use of middle relievers really started? Stream one Yankees-Royal game, stream an entire A's or White Sox season. MLB you can be America's game again, start here.

And finally in the sub-category of needs to be invented known as their needs to be an app for that... (And nobody on the Clarion Content's staff has an i-phone so please alert us if their already is an app for this...) The Craigslist Missed Connection application! Just walked by that beautiful girl or that cute guy in the coffee shop or bookstore without saying anything and regretting it already? Voilà, an instant Craiglist Missed Connection post. In era where texting and IMing are ubiquitous and conversation subsuming, what could be better than instantaneously being able to anonymously record on-line that you wish you would have talked to thus and such hottie?

Thank you and good night. We will return same time, same place next month. Send us your feedback and your brilliant invention suggestions.

Poem of a Lost Generation

This brilliant poem by Jonathan Reed has received more 13 million views on You Tube.



Thanks to the Morris County New Jersey contributor who sent it our way!

Milgram revisted

State-owned, France 2 channel broadcast a documentary last Wednesday night. This documentary attempted to imitate the famous experiments of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram's experiment, in his view, was a test of the collective culpability, the obedience component of the Shoah, the Holocaust.

The test involved one subject, one examiner and one accomplice. The accomplice played a test subject as well. The actual subject was induced to believe that both they and the accomplice were test subjects. The basic game is that the subject, called "teacher," examines the accomplice called "leaner," on word memorization. After wrong answers the subject/teacher was supposed to shock the accomplice/learner, played by a trained actor. No actual shocks were administered, but subject/teachers were convinced that they were doling out actual electric shocks gradually increasing in voltage for 15 volts to 450 volts, by the end of the "game." Literally convulsing the accomplice/learner. Crucially the subject/teacher was given a 15 volt real demonstration shock just before the start of the "game," so as to understand how it would ostensibly work for the subject/learner. (Wiki does a surprisingly good recap here.)

The French documentary attempted to recreate the scenario. In a non scientific sampling, 82% of participants, in the ludicrously named, fake TV show "The Game of Death" agreed to pull the lever to inflict electric shocks, gradually increasing in voltage, on their "opponents." Again instead of real subjects, they were but actor/opponents/accomplishes, not really being shocked. Interestingly the BBC reports that, "'The Game of Death' has all the trappings of a traditional TV quiz show, with a roaring crowd chanting "punishment" and a glamorous hostess urging the players on." A horrifying self-fulfillingly megalomaniacal set-up.

Ultimately, the Clarion Content, having read Eric Hoffer's True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, fears for our collective humanity. Careful with your demagogues, because who knows what we are capable of, six species epochs have gone before us.

Zebra runs amok in the ATL

This is where and how circus zebra's live

"Zebra runs amok in the ATL"
We are by no means f*ing with you, dear readers, that was indeed the headline out of Atlanta this afternoon. Our pop culture editor, a radical Gaian, is always telling the rest of the staff that the zoo is animal jail. They think of it as the clink, the pokey, the cell block. In his view, the circus is an even lower form of routine, more akin to a chain gang. Today one of the zebras made a break from the Man. In its case, the man was Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

The story is thus. The circus was in Atlanta. The zebra got loose from his handler and made a break for it. Cue wild goose chase scene now! And, bingo. The Atlanta Constitution Journal quotes Daniel Nance, "All of a sudden, a freaking zebra comes running down the street like a car. Five or six police cars were in hot pursuit. And a bunch of officers on foot."

For real. The boundaries of possible and real events are unimaginably large, and the number of events verges on the infinite, ergo things can and do happen.

The ATL-CJ continues, "Prapik Jani saw the animal jogging along Baker Street a half mile away next to Centennial Olympic Park. Jani...looked outside and saw an African creature running down the pavement. "It was wild," Jani said. "I thought I was seeing things."

Jani said there were "a bunch" of police on bicycles chasing after the zebra."

Reportedly the zebra was cornered in the parking area by the Richard B. Russell Federal Building, which is near the CNN Center and NBA Atlanta Hawks' Philips Arena.

Circus trainers were walking with the zebra when it started to charge again, dragging one of the trainers momentarily before it took off, in another bid for freedom, running across the railroad tracks and through a gate. One of the trainers was holding on to the zebra as it ran through the gate, but subsequently bounced loose as the zebra headed first for a nearby underground tunnel, and then up the block to a freeway entrance ramp. According to the Constitution Journal, "[he] was finally captured on the interstate near the Grady curve. According to witnesses, he was galloping between lanes of traffic on the Downtown Connector before his capture."

When a creature yearns to be free, say what, say what, anything can happen.

Read the Atlanta Constitution Journal's whole account here.

Food Rules

Michael Pollan author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food announced on his website recently that he has a new book forthcoming. It will be called Food Rules. Pollan in his own words explains the premise,

"The idea for this book came from a doctor—a couple of them, as a matter of fact. They had read In Defense of Food, which ended with a handful of tips for eating well: simple ways to navigate the treacherous landscape of modern food and the often-confusing science of nutrition. “What I would love is a pamphlet I could hand to my patients with some rules for eating wisely,” they would say. “I don’t have time for the big nutrition lecture and, anyway, they really don’t need to know what an antioxidant is in order to eat wisely.” Another doctor, a transplant cardiologist, wrote to say “you can’t imagine what I see on the insides of people these days wrecked by eating food products instead of food.” So rather than leaving his heart patients with yet another prescription or lecture on cholesterol, he gives them a simple recipe for roasting a chicken, and getting three wholesome meals out of it – a very different way of thinking about health.

Make no mistake: our health care crisis is in large part a crisis of the American diet-- roughly three quarters of the two-trillion plus we spend on health care in this country goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which can be prevented by a change in lifestyle, especially diet. And a healthy diet is a whole lot simpler than the food industry and many nutritional scientists –what I call the Nutritional Industrial Complex—would have us believe. After spending several years trying to answer the supposedly incredibly complicated question of how we should eat in order to be maximally healthy, I discovered the answer was shockingly simple: eat real food, not too much of it, and more plants than meat. Or, put another way, get off the modern western diet, with its abundance of processed food, refine grains and sugars, and its sore lack of vegetables, whole grains and fruit.

So I decided to take the doctors up on the challenge. I set out to collect and formulate some straightforward, memorable, everyday rules for eating, a set of personal policies that would, taken together or even separately, nudge people onto a healthier and happier path. I solicited rules from doctors, scientist, chefs, and readers, and then wrote a bunch myself, trying to boil down into everyday language what we really know about healthy eating. And while most of the rules are backed by science, they are not framed in the vocabulary of science but rather culture—a source of wisdom about eating that turns out to have as much, if not more, to teach us than nutritional science does.

Pollan says that his is a simple and unconventional diet book. It consists of sixty-four basic rules, each with a paragraph of explanation. It sounds like a powerful tool to the Clarion Content.

Check out Pollan's website here.

Africa splitting

And no, we don't mean that figuratively, Africa is literally splitting in two according to geologists from the University of Rochester. A thirty-five mile long gash opened up in Ethiopia as recently as 2007, it is twenty feet wide in places. Scientists say the process mimics rifts that open on the bottom of the ocean floor. Fox News reported, "the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began 'unzipping' the rift in both directions.

The African and Arabian tectonic plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia. They have been spreading apart in a process that moves at a speed of less than 1 inch per year, over the past 30 million years. This rifting process formed the 186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea.

Read more here.

Australian Fossil Field

In the northern Australian state of Queensland, near the town of Eromanga, an area that once used to be a vast inland sea, is yielding a bumper crop fossils. According to the BBC, Australian scientists discovered a nearly complete fossil of a new species of dinosaur, a large plant-eating sauropod.

The scientists have nicknamed the fossil Zac. Zac, like other sauropods, had a very long neck, a small head and blunt teeth, and a long tail to counter-balance the weight of the neck. The remains are estimated to be 97 million years old. According to the Australian scientists the area, now a sheep farm, will yield many more fascinating fossil finds in the coming years.

Read more here.

New Ocean Current path

Research led by oceanographers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Duke University have added to the complicated model of the North Atlantic Ocean currents. This new evaluation may have substantial impact on scientists' understanding of climate change.

Using field observations and computer models, their study shows that much of the southward flow of cold water from the Labrador Sea moves not along the deep western boundary current, but along a previously unknown path in the interior of the North Atlantic.

The study by Amy Bower, a senior scientist in the WHOI Department of Physical Oceanography, and Susan Lozier, a professor of physical oceanography at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, was published in the May 14 issue of the research journal Nature.

The bearing this study has on climate change analysis is as follows according to Dr. Lozier, "This finding means it is going to be more difficult to measure climate signals in the deep ocean. We thought we could just measure them in the Deep Western Boundary Current, but we really can't." The cold southward-flowing water is thought to influence and perhaps moderate human-caused climate change.

Read more here at Terra Daily.com.

Crop Circles

Special thanks to one of our Ohio readers for sending this nugget our way. In the best explanation we have read yet for crop circles, from our 'truth is always able to outflank fiction' files, here is a delightful note originally discovered in the BBC News.

Dateline Tasmania: According to the BBC, "Retired Tasmanian poppy farmer Lyndley Chopping also said he had seen strange behaviour from wallabies in his fields." Wallabies are marsupial cousins of the kangaroo that live on the island state. The wallabies have been sneaking into the farmers fields and apparently grazing on opium poppies. Medicinal growing of opium is a farming industry in Tasmania.

Lara Giddings, the attorney general of Tasmania, said, "...one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles. Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

So aliens and/or smacked out wallabies, nice.

Nature outflanks

The Clarion Content's editor-in-chief's Gaian perspective inherently assumes that nature outflanks human civilization, a holistic planet cannot be destroyed by one species. It can be made uninhabitable for one species or another, by one species or another, but its rebalancing is innate, at least until the sun goes out. But enough of the big perspective, writ small, here are two instances where nature (in the form of individuals outflanked humankind).



The first is a story about a wolverine. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has been tracking wolverines in an effort to discover more about their habits. According to WCS researchers when a male wolverine ranged into Colorado earlier in the week it was the first time a wolverine had been sighted in Colorado since 1919. Wolverines reportedly need massive territories, with individuals staking out as much as 500 square miles of space per creature. The fellow they were following walked over 500 miles in just the months of April and May this year.

The wolverine was once native to the mountains and surrounding areas of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and California. Public records indicate that populations were largely wiped out by the 1930s, according to the WCS. Their recovery has been intermittent since.

Read the whole story here from Live Science.




The other story of nature reappearing, from humankind's perspective, took place clear across the country, in Collier County Florida at the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. Volunteers there were treated to a rare daytime sighting of a Florida Panther. The female in question probably weighed 100 pounds according to scientists. The two volunteers hunkered down and were able to capture about forty-five seconds of video footage of the cat. A relative of the cougar, there are only estimated to be about 100 Florida Panthers roaming the the low tides, palm forests and wild swamps of the state.

Read the whole article and see the footage here.

Bats recognize each others voices

The study was conducted with greater mouse eared bats like this one.

The Clarion Content has always been fascinated by animal communication. Our Gaian perspective implies almost axiomatically that animals can communicate with each other (and us, if we are open to it) in very sophisticated ways.

A recent study at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel, verified that individual bats recognize each other's voices. They have also analyzed how it works. The lead scientist, Yossi Yovel explained to the BBC, "If you think of this in comparison with humans, it's like being able to recognize a person just by listening to the same one-syllable yell in different voices. The bats learned the voice by listening to hundreds of very short yells."

Read more here from the BBC News.

Bring on the goats

Google's newest subcontractors

In a move typical of Google's adaptability and demonstrative of their commitment to responsible environmental behavior, the company has ditched gas guzzling, CO2 emitting lawnmowers for goats at their Mountain View, California headquarters.

In California, the high rate of brush fires makes it a legal requirement that landowners remove excess brush from their land. Google has hired a company called California Grazing, 200 goats and a border collie to do what they do best: eat brush.

According to Google's own blog the goats and a herder spend roughly a week with Google, eating the grass and fertilizing at the same time. The goats are herded with the help of Jen, a border collie. And best of it costs them about the same as mowing.

Tremors

The were rumblings southeast of Los Angeles, Sunday and Monday, at a place called the Salton Sea. The California government's official website crows, "The Sea teems with fish. That is why some scientists have called the Salton Sea “California’s crown jewel of avian biodiversity” and perhaps the most productive fishery in the world." Impressive stuff, not everyone agrees.

The Los Angeles Times reported that approximately 150 miles from Los Angeles, and 110 miles northeast of San Diego, "in a 48-hour period starting Saturday morning, 42 quakes shook [an area] just south of Bombay Beach on the Salton Sea. The quakes ranged in magnitude from 0.5 to 3.3, with three larger than 3.0 hitting the area Saturday afternoon."

They talked to a UC San Diego geophysicist who said the area is dangerously interconnected with the legendary San Andreas fault. They report, "These quakes appear to be taking place at the hazy intersection of several recently mapped faults crossing beneath the Salton Sea and the the San Andreas fault."

They even-handedly offer both sides of the story. The UC San Diego guy with two first names, Graham Kent, is quoted offering the darker scenario, "The worry for scientists comes from a case in 1987, when a magnitude-6.2 earthquake on one of the crossing faults appeared to trigger a 6.6 quake 12 hours later on the Superstition Hills fault to the south. The San Andreas fault is north of these crossing faults and the geometry is similar." For the opposite side, to offer some reassurance, since honestly nobody can say for sure either way, they give the reader Kate Hutton, a seismologist at Caltech. She says, "The last time a swarm of this type occurred in the area was 2001, so they are not especially unusual. Every time you have a swarm of earthquakes, it does raise the chances of having a larger quake, but it doesn't raise it a huge number."

Just an fyi.

Fingers crossed, prayers said, geological long-run inevitability understood.

Read the whole story here.