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It’s not all fart jokes, wacky signs, and Republican-bashing arouind here, y’know. Sometimes I find interesting stuff that smart people might be interested in. So if you know any, tell them they ought to come by and read this post.

Henry Jenkins is a noted academic in the media studies program at MIT and well-known for his interest in videogames and other elements of new media. I skim his blog fairly regularly, though since I long ago forgot how to read and write in academese I don’t always get too far. He’s had a couple of posts recently, though, that caught my eye: last week, in the excitement over the Inauguration and its fortuitious coincidence with Martin Luther King Day, Jenkins wrote this post about finding his own grandfather in a famous photo of King being arrested. His grandfather, it turns out, was the arresting police officer, and it made him think about having to reconcile one’s personal memories of a loved one with their place in history. I especially like his observation about how people throughout the South have had to deal with this cognitive dissonance about loved ones who played unfortunate roles in the racist violence of past years.

Today, Jenkins has a guest post from a graduate student named Colleen Kaman who writes about her childhood fascinations with globes and the maps and pages of National Geographic magazine, and how they shaped her imagined vision of the world around her in a way that turned out quite a bit differently than the real-world changes at the end of the Soviet Era. She talks about the arbitrariness of international boundaries and the fact that what seems so immutable is almost always in flux. She also hits on a key idea about the underlying raison d’etre of the magazine and the National Geographic Society and similar institutions that were so popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries — the Victorian ideals of categorization and cataloguing everything in the world as a way to understand and systematize our understanding…and by extesion to demonstrate the superiority of Western Civilization over the savage world around us. As it happens, her post more or less coincides with the 121st anniversary of the National Geographic Society, so it’s worth reading this before you move on to my next link…

…which is this October 2008 National Geographic article called “Last of the Neanderthals”. Recent scholarship has determined that Neanderthals and “modern humans” co-existed for centuries. While closely related, DNA analysis says that they were distinct species. This article says that as late as 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals lived throughout the Eurasian landmass, though their population dwindled to as few as 15,000 indviduals near the end of that era. Modern humans migrated out of Africa about 45,000 years ago, so there were thousands of years of co-existence and the inevitable collision as modern humans migrated north and east. “Clan Of The Cave Bear” and such notwithstanding, researchers do not believe that there was much interbreeding between the two disparate species, since there is no trace of Neanderthal DNA in modern populations. And despite some miscomprehension on the part of the media, which led to stories in 2007 asserting that redheads were descendants of Neanderthals, what they actually found was that both species of humans had genotypes for fair skin and red hair, NOT that some Cro-Magnon dude was getting it on with a Scottish Neanderthal babe 50,000 years ago.

Science mag Seed has a neat story about a suburb of Minneapolis, MN that stages an annual science fair on their frozen lake instead of the more traditional Minnesota winter pastime of ice fishing. They still build little shacks on the lake, but instead of standing around a hole in the ice, drinking brandy and saying “Jeez, cold enough for ya?”, they get to see exhibits about biology, physics, and even art…while drinking brandy and saying “Jeez, cold enough for ya?” I mean, after all, it is still Minnesota.

Lastly, on a slightly different tack, here’s a post from Patrick McNally at The Daily Undertaker with a letter from an engineer who talks about the issue of “greening” the cremation of human remains. Patrick had earlier posted about a news story about a town in Sweden that uses the heat from its local crematorium to generate electricity, and the engineer wrote to him to explain about using what they call the “combined cycle” to take the waste heat from one combustion system (typically a gas turbine) and use it to run a boiler for a second source of power. It gave me flashbacks to some very unhappy days when I worked for a company that was trying to do something like that, minus the stiffs. **Shudder**