The Remains

Conditions: Bloody Freezing

Old Stuff Actually Even Older

Turns out that the ancient cave paintings in European caves may well be even older than previously thought

Stone Age artists were painting red disks, handprints, clublike symbols and geometric patterns on European cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported on Thursday, after completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility that Neanderthals were the artists.

A more likely situation, the researchers said, is that the art — 50 samples from 11 caves in northwestern Spain — was created by anatomically modern humans fairly soon after their arrival in Europe.

The findings seem to put an exclamation point to a run of recent
discoveries: direct evidence from fossils that Homo sapiens populations were living in England 41,500 to 44,200 years ago and in Italy 43,000 to 45,000 years ago, and that they were making flutes in German caves about 42,000 years ago.

- nytimes.com/2012/06/15/science/

40,000 years is a significant amount of time, remember that ancient Egypt civilisation is said to have kicked off around about 4,000 years ago. There seems to be a big juicy gap between early humans being "smart" and starting their earliest known cities. Now, what could potentially fit into that gap?

Film review: Margin call

It's easy to think of the people who run the big finance and stock broking companies responsible for the stock market crash of recent times are all very very greedy and stupid individuals, uncaring about anyone other than themselves. And to a certain extent, this film endorses that. However what it also does is give huge focus to how and why they make the decisions they do, showing the mixture of fear and aggression that drives these people. This film focuses on one certain company where a junior analyst has just found out that the computer system that essentially runs the company's trading is operating on bad data - that the assumptions made about these mortgage packages are actually wrong and that the entire systems is wobbling, about to collapse. What follows is a serious of meetings over the course of a night as the senior management get involved and figure out what they are going to do.

Sounds pretty boring, right? But because they have a terrific cast, and really great dialog, this film is actually a pretty good thriller. The various characters fit themselves into the crisis, and we get a great exploration of what drives these people, and the financial world they've created, that influences us all.

And the revelations are not flattering at all. In fact, I left the theater pretty mad at this world that had been shown to me. The petty, stupid, greedy assholes crawling over each other, and they way they live, and they way they justify it to themselves and each other, in a continuous renewal of faith in the absurd. How anyone thought this system was sustainable is beyond me, I guess an example of a shared delusion that no-one ever wanted to question. This is actually a quite powerful film, very light on character development, but strong on showing the dynamic of these companies, and explaining quite well how it all happened. And how it will all inevitably happen again. Four exit packages out of five.


- Peace out