Happy Birthday, Franz

Image Source: Google via Time.

Time reports that today is the birthday of the wonderful Czech Jewish writer, Franz Kafka; Google has commemorated the 130th anniversary of Kafka's birth:

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates a man who didn’t see much to celebrate during his short life. Today, July 3, 2013, would have been the 130th birthday of literary titan and eternal pessimist Franz Kafka.

The Doodle pays homage to The Metamorphosis, one of Kafka’s best-remembered novellas. The dark piece features a traveling salesman who has the unfortunate and unexplained fate of turning into some sort of giant bug — the actual German “ungeheueren ungeziefer” ambiguously translates to “monstrous vermin.” The drawing shows a lighter take on Kafka’s absurdist work, portraying a cockroach coming home from a day at work. The Doodle even includes a nod to the plot by including a small, sepia-toned apple, referring to the apples that the poor salesman’s father threw at him when he found his son transformed into the creepy-crawler.

The Prague native and tormented soul has since been hailed as one of the greatest literary giants, especially for his contributions to existentialism. While his body of work, also including The Trial and The Castle, doesn’t make cozy bedtime reading with its overtones of alienation and grotesqueness, it’s contributed to the timeless collection of literature that forces us to question the human condition. “One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die,” Kafka once wrote in the Blue Octavo Notebooks. Tuberculosis granted his wish at the young age of forty.

Times Outside of History 10: De-Extinctioning at Pleistocene Park

Omission: The Fossil Record (1991) © by Alexis Rockman.

The news was recently full of the discovery of the best-ever preserved woolly mammoth, which raised cloning hopes. CNN:

Researchers from the Northeast Federal University in Yakutsk found the 10,000-year-old female mammoth buried in ice on the Lyakhovsky Islands off the coast of northeast Russia.

Scientists say they poked the frozen creature with a pick and dark liquid blood flowed out.

"The fragments of muscle tissues, which we've found out of the body, have a natural red color of fresh meat. The reason for such preservation is that the lower part of the body was underlying in pure ice," said Semyon Grigoriev, the head of the expedition and of the university's Mammoth Museum, in a statement on the university's website. ...

Grigoriev told The Siberian Times newspaper it was the first time mammoth blood had been discovered and called it "the best preserved mammoth in the history of paleontology."

"We suppose that the mammoth fell into water or got bogged down in a swamp, could not free herself and died. Due to this fact the lower part of the body, including the lower jaw, and tongue tissue, was preserved very well," he said.

Grigoriev called the liquid blood "priceless material" for the university's joint project with South Korean scientists who are hoping to clone a woolly mammoth, which has been extinct for thousands of years.

The controversial Sooam Biotech Research Foundation is headed up by Hwang Woo-suk -- the disgraced former Seoul National University scientist who claimed in 2004 that he had successfully cloned human embryonic stem cells before admitting he had faked his findings.

Typically, researchers contemplating revival of an extinct species do not think about the species but about human motivations. We are 'atoning for past sins,' or 'proving what we can do' if the money is right.

Is seems less challenging, morally speaking, to resurrect relatively recently extinct species, such as the aurochs, the baiji dolphin, the Japanese sea lion, the Caribbean monk seal, the thylacine, the passenger pigeon, or the dodo bird. In 2000, the last Pyrenean ibex died. In 2009, a clone brought the species back from extinction for the seven minutes that it remained alive.

Forty Year Yearbook Outfit

Images Source: MSN.

Yahoo reports that a Dallas teacher who just retired wore the same outfit to every yearbook photo for forty years:

Dale Irby is retiring after 40 years. And so is his yearbook outfit.

For his entire career at Prestonwood Elementary in the Richardson school district in Texas, the physical education teacher wore the same disco-era shirt and dirt-colored sweater each year for his yearbook picture.

At first, Irby told the Dallas Morning News, it was an accident when he wore the same outfit in the yearbook two years in a row.

“I was so embarrassed when I got the school pictures back that second year and realized I had worn the very same thing as the first year,” he said.

Then his wife, Cathy, dared him to make it three.

“After five pictures, it was like: ‘Why stop?’”

Steampunk Swallow and Other Typewriter Sculptures

Image Source: Facebook. All images © Jeremy Mayer.

Today, a steampunk swallow, and other creations made from typewriter parts by Jeremy Mayer (-Thanks to -J.). You can see Mayer's other amazing artworks and illustrations at his Website here and his tumblr here.

Canada Day, Gangland Style

Prime Minister Chrétien choking a protester in 1996 in what became known as the Shawinigan Handshake, named after Chrétien's home town. Image Source: Ugly Hockey Sweater.

Today is Canada Day. I ran across a dumb video of a parrot singing the national anthem. But the result was just disturbing. I tried to find something happy, but the first thing that came up was former PM Chrétien strangling a protest in a famous encounter from 1996 (above).

The photo recalls recent Canadian news, which lately has been awful.

Large sections of Calgary and other Alberta communities were washed out last week by apocalyptic floods. You can see footage of Calgary's flooded downtown centre below the jump.

In Montreal, the third mayor in less than eight months has been sworn in, due to rampant city corruption. Also in Montreal, the language police have been out in force lately, and linguistic strife has been building since last fall's election of the separatist Parti Québécois led to an intensified effort to stamp out non-French languages (see a related video here). The language police are banning all non-French words from Montreal's restaurant menus, including words such as 'pasta.'

There is another story about a teenager working in a grocery store on the South Shore of the city who was forbidden from talking in English, even to Anglo customers who asked her questions in English on the store floor; she was also prohibited from speaking English to fellow Anglo co-workers while working with them or during work breaks. An Anglo political counter-movement is starting to gain momentum, and some of its proponents are not much better than the people they are criticizing.

An unreleased video of the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, purportedly shows him smoking crack. After Gawker leaked the story, Ford's popularity jumped. The case is getting more convoluted, and now involves a loosely connected murder trial.

News of a video of Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack was recently leaked. His popularity rose after the scandal, which is still unfolding. Image Source: Gawker.

Montreal's interim mayor Michael Applebaum resigned amid corruption allegations in June 2013. Image Source: Sun News.

The Nile Dam and Unintended Consequences

Memento mori Pompeii mosaic (30 BCE - 40 CE). Image Source: Ancient Rome.

In June 2009, economists declared that the Great Recession ended. But to many people, it still does not feel that way. Perhaps that is because the global economy is undergoing a painful transition. The gears are grinding, but there is no sensation of everyone barreling forward. Progress reports coming from tech sectors are deceptive: the virtual economy massively expanded over the past twenty-five years. High tech computing - with hardware's planned obsolescence and non-physical wares like Facebook acquiring value, based on the marketing promises of Big Data - pumped up bubbles around illusions of productivity. Financial speculation in the 1990s and 2000s depended on the exponential expansion of our ability to speculate.

Photo of the Day

Image Source: Hamed Saber from Tehran, Iran via Wikimedia.

Three Parent Babies

Image Source: Guardian.

The Newcastle Herald reports that the UK is on the verge of creating babies with two mothers and one father in rare cases to side-step inherited birth defects:

Britain will become the first country in the world to create babies with the DNA of three people under government plans which could see the procedure offered on the NHS by next year. See your ad here

Parents at high risk of having children with severe disabilities such as muscular dystrophy will be offered the controversial new IVF treatment after it was given the green light by ministers today.

It means the world's first "three-parent baby" could be born in Britain by 2015, if detailed proposals for regulating the procedure pass a public consultation and are approved by Parliament next year.

Up to 10 patients per year are expected to undergo the treatment, which involves replacing a fraction of the mother's damaged DNA with that of a healthy donor.

The process avoids the risk of the mother passing inherited defects, which can lead to a host of rare and debilitating conditions affecting the heart, muscles and brain, on to her children.

The technique is controversial because it involves "germ line" modification of the embryo's DNA, meaning the third party's genetic material would not only be passed on to the child, but also to future generations down the female line.

But ministers will publish draft regulations later this year allowing the therapy to "high-risk" families after a previous public consultation conducted by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority last year revealed overall support.

The technique is aimed at tackling a collection of rare hereditary conditions which are caused by mutated mitochondria – structures which supply power to our cells.

See other reports at the Guardian here and here.

Image Source: Ezquara's Blog.