Millennial Mysteries: Dolphins Die at Cape Cod

Image Source: CNN.

Here's an odd beach towel photo that belies its subject, namely, a disturbing development at Cape Cod. CNN reports: "The number of unexplained dolphin deaths on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, rose Friday, with rescuers tallying the toll at 103. About 160 common dolphins have been found since the animals began stranding themselves in early January, said Michael Booth, a spokesman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the organization leading the rescue the effort."

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Soul at the end of the Twentieth Century

An American singer in the early 1980s.

Soul at the end of the twentieth century: farewell to singer Whitney Houston. Below the jump, a video I have posted before on July 4; it is what some consider to be the best modern popular rendition ever done of the American anthem, Super Bowl XXV during the First Gulf War (1991). To have the world in the palm of your hand, and lose it all. The highest of heights, the lowest of depths: this life weighs so heavily on some of us.

A Recipe for Millennial Immortality

Image Source: Topics in Chinese Medicine.

From the annals of Millennial anxieties and weird politics: The Rantings of a Gothic Atheist had a remarkable post up at the end of January about a law which could come into effect in November 2012 in Oklahoma, USA. The Bill bans the use of human foetuses in food production. Ohh-kay. In fact, the Bill's author refers to the highly politicized debate in the United States on the use of embryonic stem cells in research and industry.

Millennial Horrors: Flu Research Moratorium in Effect

Image Source: WHO via Charcoal Handwriting.

I had already seen reports on this floating around in academic discussions, but recent news on controversial research on the deadly Bird Influenza H5N1 has become mainstream.  Slate notes that scientists have tweaked the virus so that it can jump between mammals. This was done to understand the virus better and prepare a vaccine, but it's not like nature and Bioterrorists needed help with the human contagion aspect of the disease. Ian Lipkin, Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University, stated that, “publishing this information would give people a roadmap to creating Frankenstein viruses.”

Epidemiologists were worried enough by this research that the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity successfully demanded that all research in this direction stop publication for two months so that the scientific community can discuss its hazards. H1N1 broke out into a global pandemic in 2009 that was contained through mass vaccinations, although 14,286 people died. It was the second H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic in history (the virus actually combined several strains, including a Bird and two Swine Flu strains); it was not as lethal as its predecessor: the first H1N1 global pandemic was the 1918 Flu pandemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people, or 3 to 6 per cent of the world population at the time. The 1918 pandemic killed 25 million people in its first 25 weeks. This type of Flu tends to affect healthy, younger adults most severely.

760 Million Year Old Animal Discovered - Origin Species of All Complex Life

Otavia antiqua. Image Source: Gizmodo.

Gizmodo reports on a 760 million year old animal, a sponge that was the original life form from which all other animals evolved:

"Scientists believe that this is the animal from which everything else evolved. The first multicellular being that spawned every living being in this world through billions of mutations, from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to mammals to you. It's an amazing discovery. Its name is Otavia antiqua, and it is the oldest animal ever discovered: 760 million years old. Scientists claim that it used to chill out in calm, nice, shallow waters, chewing on algae and bacteria through its pores and into its little tube body."

Millennial Extremes 8: BASE Jumping in Singapore

Here's a 2012 Happy New Year video from BASE jumpers in Singapore, done against the city's skyline from the Marina Bay Sands Skypark. Hat tip to The Atlantic: "As if leaping from the top of a 55-story resort weren't spectacular enough, this video uses Singapore's futuristic skyline and Marina Bay Sands Skypark as a backdrop. The video was directed by Snow R. Shai of Snowdrum Audio Visual, and the BASE jumpers are Marta Empinotti, James Pouchert, Amanda Vicharelli, Anne Helliwell, Tim Mattson, Brendon Cork and Jeb Corliss."

The Predictioneer

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Image Source: Good Magazine.

One of the alarming trends of the turn of the Millennium is its extreme literal mindedness. The notion that all information on Earth can be pooled and tabulated to yield the ultimate secrets of human existence and the mysteries of the universe is a great fallacy. This assumption shows how the new technology has bewitched us and altered our judgement in the post WWII era. At the same time, however, science and tech are genuinely pushing the boundaries of what we understand at an exponential rate. It is a great time to be alive, to see this incredible revolution in human thought unfold, along with all its unforeseeable ramifications, and the amazing tension-filled overlap it generates between fact and fiction.

Maybe it's all good, just so long as everyone understands that any random accumulation of information does not necessarily constitute 'a fact.' Looking at it from another angle, perhaps there's no worry that extreme literal mindedness will lead to an official bean counters' version of reality, since scientists, computer researchers and logicians are showing a marked taste for mysticism and other esoteric arts.

Perhaps we may count Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, eminent Professor of Politics at New York University and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution among these Millennial figures, who has turned number-crunching into the fine art of discerning oblivion. He has developed a rational choice theory computer model over the past 25 years, which purportedly predicts the future in international relations and politics.  In other words, he believes he is cracking the ultimate mystery: time.

Superbowl Apocalypse

Image Source: Reuters via Daily Mail.

Below the jump, the Chevy Superbowl 2012 Apocalypse ad.