Justice - Stress

First watch this video, a videoclip very well made by Romain-Gravas for the song Stress, by the french electronica duo Justice



the clip might have awakened a lot of strong feelings in you, maybe you couldn't even watch it until the end,
but before you do any judgments and tag this video with violence/sensationalism
watch the following analysis of the video (in French)




you can also watch two very good parodies of the original video, also with criticism hints in them =)

Justesse - No Stress


(No) Stress

favorite songs II

this is a favorite of mine, song and video.. are just... breathtaking

Sparks! music for cold wintery nights

Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow - EPCOT

portrait and photography

had already posted this portrait, but felt like posting again =)

also wanted to leave here some nice websites from photographers or concerning photography
Just take a look


Lara Jade blog

Tendencias Fotograficas

Masters Of Fine Art Photography

traduçao do livro do desassossego (paragrafo)

5.4.1930

Der Teilhaber der Firma, in der ich arbeite, der immer an irgendeinem Körperteil krank ist, wollte aus irgendeiner Laune heraus in einer Pause seiner Krankheit eine Aufnahme von unserem ganzen Büropersonal haben. Und so haben wir uns den vorgestern alle auf Weisung des heiteren Photographen in Reih und Glied an die schmutzigweiße Trennwand gestellt, deren zerbrechliches Holz das Büro der Allgemeinheit von Herrn Vasques' Chefzimmer abteilt. In der Mitte stand Vasques persönlich; auf beiden Flügeln in einer zunächst überlegten, dann unüberlegten Einteilung nach Rang und Würden die übrigen Menschenseelen, die sich hier tagaus tagein zu kleinen Zwecken vereinen, deren letze Absicht nur das Gehimnis der Götter kennt.

link para o fragmento 56 em Português


traduçao de um trecho do fragmento 56 do livro do desassossego
de Fernando Pessoa / Bernardo Soares
infelizmente nao anotei o nome do Tradutor.

Conselhos para cuidar de um antúrio (flor)

Cuidados a ter com Antúrios

Há alguns meses encontrei um antúrio no lixo num vaso bonito redondo de barro.
As flores eram brancas e estavam secas. Arranquei todas as folhas mortas e comecei a tratar dele.
Comprei um adubo e tenho tido em atenção as seguintes regras:

Luz e temperatura:

Esta planta gosta de luz, mas deve-se mantê-la afastada da luz directa do sol. A temperatura deve ser elevada (mín.15º; máx.28º) e constante, pois pode morrer com a descida súbita de temperatura no inverno. (acho que tem origem tropical)

Água e humidade:

No verão deve-se regá-la 3 vezes por semana, mantendo o solo um pouco húmido, se o ambiente for muito seco.
No inverno não regar mais do que uma vez por semana. Deve evitar regá-la à noite, para que a água não se mantenha no vaso durante as noites frias.
Diz-se que o antúrio não se dá bem com águas "duras", de preferência deve-se utilizar água da chuva para a rega.
Com água dura quer se dizer água ricas demasiado ricas em minerais.
Eu tenho bastante azar, porque a minha água da torneira contém imenso calcário.
Penso que seja esta uma das razões pela qual o meu antúrio não floresce.

Adubos:

É necessário adubar a planta de duas em duas semanas, para que a planta volte a ter flores. Adubo líquido, ou adubo natural de compostagem feito em casa, são boas escolhas.


Se as folhas amarelecerem, pode ser devido a terra demasiado seca, regar com mais frequência.
Se as folhas ressequírem e morrerem, pode ser devido ao excesso de frio ou humidade. Colocar a planta num local resguardado onde a temperatura seja mais constante.
Se as folhas novas não crescem nem florescem, adicionar adubo.
Devem-se remover sempre as folhas mortas ou secas.

"As mulheres têm fios desligados"

"As mulheres têm fios desligados"
por António Lobo Antunes



«Há uns tempos a Joana
-Pai, acabei um namoro à homem
Perguntei como era acabar um namoro à homem e vai a miúda
- Disse-lhe o problema não está em ti, está em mim
O que me fez pensar como as mulheres são corajosas e os homens cobardes. Em primeiro lugar só terminam uma relação quando têm outra. Em segundo lugar são incapazes de
-Já não gosto de ti
de
-Não quero mais
chegam com discursos vagos, circulares
-preciso de tempo para pensar
-não é que não te ame, amo-te, mas tenho de ficar sozinho umas semanas
Ou declarações do género de
-Tu mereces melhor do que eu
-Estive a reflectir e acho que não te faço feliz
-Necessito de um mês de solidão para sentir a tua falta
e aos amigos
-Dá-me os parabéns que lá me consegui livrar da chata
-Custou mas foi
-Amandei-lhe aquelas lérias do costume e a gaja engoliu
-Chora um dia ou dois e passa-lhe
e pergunto-me se os homens gostam verdadeiramente das mulheres. Em geral querem uma empregada que lhes resolva o quotidiano e com quem durmam, uma companhia porque têm pavor da solidão, alguém que os ampare nas diarreias, nos colarinhos das camisas e nas gripes, tome conta dos filhos e não os aborreça. Não se apaixonam: entusiasmam-se e nem chegam a conhecer com quem estão. Ignoram o que ela sonha, instalam-se no sofá do dia a dia, incapazes de introduzir o inesperado na rotina, só são ternos quando querem fazer amor e acabado o amor arranjam um pretexto para se levantar
(chichi, sede, fome, a janela de que esqueceram de fechar o estore )
ou fingem que dormem porque não há paciência para abraços e festinhas, pá, e a respiração dela faz-me comichão nas costas, a mania de ficarem agarrados à gente, no ronhónhó, a mania das ternuras, dos beijos, quem é que atura aquilo? Lembro-me de um sujeito que explicava
-O maior prazer que me dá ter relações com a minha mulher é pensar que durante uma semana estou safo
e depois pegam-nos na mão no cinema, encostam-se, colam-se, contam histórias sem interesse nenhum que nunca mais terminam, querem variar de restaurante, querem namoro, diminutivos, palermices e nós ali a aturá-las. O Dinis Machado contava-me de um conhecedor que lhe aclarava as ideias
-As mulheres têm os fios desligados
e um outro elucidou-me que eram como os telefones: avariam-se sem que se entenda a razão, emudecem, não funcionam e o remédio é bater com o aparelho na mesa para que comecem a trabalhar outra vez. Meus Deus, que pena me dão as mulheres. Se informam
-Já não gosto de ti
se informam
-Não quero mais
aí estão eles a alterarem a agressividade com a súplica, ora violentos, ora infantis, a fazerem esperas, a chorarem nos SMS a levantarem a mãozinha e, no instante seguinte, a ameaçarem matar-se, a perseguirem, a insistirem, a fazerem figuras tristes, a escreverem cartas lamentosas e ameaçadoras, a entrarem pelo emprego dentro, a pegarem no braço, a sacudirem, a mandarem flores eles que nunca mandavam flores, a colocarem-se de plantão à porta dado que aquela puta há-de ter outro e vai pagá-las, dispostos a partes-gagas, cenas ridículas, gritos. A miséria da maior parte dos casais, elas a sonharem com o Zorro, Che Guevara ou eu, e eles a sonharem com o decote da vizinha de baixo, de maneira que ao irem para a cama são quatro: os dois que lá se deitam e os outros dois com quem sonham. Sinceramente as minhas filhas preocupam-me: receio que lhes caia na sorte um caramelo que passe à frente delas nas portas, não lhes abra o carro, desapareça logo a seguir por chichi-sede-fome-persiana-mal-descida-e-os-ladrões-percebes, não se levante quando entram, comece a comer primeiro e um belo dia
(para citar noventa por cento dos escritores portugueses)
-O problema não está em ti está em mim a mexerem a faca na mesa ou a atormentarem a argola do guardanapo, cobardes como sempre. Não tenho nada contra os homens até gosto de alguns. Dos meus amigos. De Schubert. De Ovídio. De Horácio, de Virgílio. De Velásquez. De Rui Costa. De Einzenberger. Razoável, a minha colecção. Não tenho nada contra os homens a não ser no que se refere às mulheres. E não me excluo: fui cobarde idiota, desonesto.
Fui
(espero que não muitas vezes)
rasca. Volta e meia surge-me na cabeça uma frase de Conrad em que ele comenta que tudo o que a vida nos pode dar é um certo conhecimento dela que chega tarde de mais. Resta-me esperar que ainda não seja tarde para mim. A partir de certa altura deixa de se jogar às cartas connosco mesmos e de fazer batota com os outros. O problema não está em ti está em mim, que extraordinária treta. Como os elogios que vêm logo depois: és inteligente, és sensível, és boa, és generosa, oxalá encontres etc., que mulher não ouviu bugigangas destas? Uma amiga contou-me que o marido iniciou o discurso habitual
-Mereces melhor que eu
levou como resposta
-Pois mereço. Rua.
Enfim, mais ou menos isto, e estou a ver a cara dele à banda. Nem uma lágrima para amostra. Rua. A mesma lágrima para amostra. Rua. A mesma amiga para uma amiga sua
-O que faço às cartas de amor que me escreveu?
e a amiga sua
-Manda-lhas. Pode ser que lhe façam falta.
Fazem de certeza: é só copiar mudando o nome. Perguntei à minha amiga
-E depois de ele se ir embora?
-Depois chorei um bocado e passou-me.
Ontem jantámos juntos. Fumámos um cigarro no automóvel dela, fui para casa e comecei a escrever isto. Palavra de honra que na janela uma árvore a sorrir-me. Podem não acreditar mas uma árvore a sorrir-me.»

Crónica de António Lobo Antunes publicada na Visão nº 804 de 31 de Julho de 2008

Limerick (exercise)

I had to write a limerick to present in an english class
I researched a little and came up with this:


At the window was a cat wearing a hat
At the window that’s where she sat
But her owner was furious
Because passersby were curious
Since they had never seen such a wonderful hat.

written in
June 2008
M. A.

Writing Exercise in English

Draft
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin an example of persistence

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin was a British chemist in the 20th century. Her extensive work, as a researcher is admirable and inspiring not only for chemists, or researchers but for everyone. She specialized in the determination of molecular structures and made important discoveries about very important biomolecules throughout her life.

Already as an undergraduate student by the end of the 1920’s, Dorothy started dedicating her time to the study of the structure of organic compounds. She had had the idea of using x-rays on her research and finally had success using x-ray diffraction crystallography, a technique in which she was a pioneer. Through this technique she was able to determine the molecular structure of various biomolecules, for which she received several awards. The determination of the structure of insulin was one of her most important and deserved achievements.

Hodgkin’s research with the x-ray crystallography method is remarkable; this technique is a specific x-ray procedure that involves the targeting and beaming of x-ray radiation onto crystals, in order to obtain structural patterns and images through the observation of the diffraction of the radiation beams. The initial problem is that most of the compounds that Dorothy was interested in studying, for example proteins, do not occur naturally as crystals, so she first had to crystallize the proteins and other molecules, a process that can take days, weeks or even months. Only then can the work on the diffraction-based imaging begin, this technique involves the painstaking analysis of various diffraction-produced patterns and the comparison with other structural models, a work that is easily done by computers nowadays.

After the birth of her first child, Dorothy had an infection that left her hands swollen and distorted. Because of this she developed chronic rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 28. However she continued her work and research, which involved the delicate manipulation of the microscopic crystals needed to carry out the x-ray diffraction procedure.
Her persistence on working with this complex method would turn out to be decisive in her research; the constant improvements in this specific x-ray technique, along with her dedication allowed Hodgkin to show the world for the first time the 3-D structure of a various number of important biomolecules. She began by discovering the structure of larger molecules, such as cholesterol, penicillin and the vitamin B12; for the discovery of the last two she was awarded the Nobel Prize of Chemistry. The discovery of these structures contributed in a great deal to other disciplines, such as biology and medicine as well.

Dorothy also discovered the structure of insulin in 1969, which she considered her most important achievement, and in a way it was the most deserved.
Since the beginning of her research in the 1930’s Dorothy had worked and tried to discover the structure of insulin. At the time the x-ray diffraction was not as pure and clear as it is today, the x-ray producing equipment was not as good and did not produce such refined results. So besides insulin being so small and having such a structural complexity, the technology at the time was not advanced enough and made it impossible for Dorothy to achieve her goal. Dorothy had to wait 35 years to see the structure of insulin for the first time, for her it was a very fulfilling moment.

Dorothy’s life and work are an inspiration for anyone, her contribute as a chemist to the world was important. Even for someone who does not know much about chemistry or biology will understand the importance of the comprehension of molecules such as insulin, cholesterol, and penicillin. This knowledge had direct impact on the way we understand diseases such as diabetes, for example.

writing exercise in german

Ich befinde mich wieder auf der dunklen Gasse und verstehe, ich muss wieder zurück. So. Ich finde dieses Haus nicht. Ich verstehe einfach diese Adresse nicht. Nummer 23. Ich hatte sogar zweimal gefragt, welche Nummer es war. Tor 23. Dann geradeaus. Links und rechts mehrere Türen. Große schöne Türe aus Holz. Bei ganz wenig Licht versuche ich die Nummer 9 zu finden, das dritte Mal. Ich fühle mich komisch hier. Es ist so ruhig. Der Boden ist nass von dem Regen. Man hört kein Geräusch außer einem konstanten Rauschen von Autos in der Ferne. Ich sehe eine Bank und möchte mich dort hinsetzen. Muss sicher nass sein, aber egal. Ich setze mich und fange an nachzudenken, was ich tun soll. Also die Tür 2 und 3 sind da. Fehlt also die Tür Nummer 1. Noch komischer, aber egal. Ich muss doch nicht mich auf die Fehler irgendeines Ingenieurs konzentrieren, ich möchte nur die Tür Nummer 9 finden. 4 und 5 sind auch noch zu sehen. Aber die 6 und 7 sind in einem kleineren Seitenhof, sowie 8. Also die Tür 9 müsste auch dort sein, aber nein. Der Architekt wollte es kompliziert machen. Muss unbedingt eine Frau gewesen sein, die dieses Gebäude geplant hat. Ach, ich kann es nicht mehr aushalten hier zu sitzen. Es wird langsam zu kalt, und hier werde ich sicher nichts finden. Los. Gerade aus und rechts. Dann wieder zurück. Dann links. Dann zurück. Dann bis zum anderen Tor. Tür 12, 13, 14, 16. Ha! Tür 15 fehlt auch noch. Hm. Verstehe es echt nicht. Ich bin plötzlich nicht mehr ruhig, sondern sage es auch: „Ich kapiere es nicht. Wo ist sie, verdammt.“ Und dann plötzlich höre ich jemand. „Was suchen Sie denn?“ Na endlich! Dachte schon, niemand wohnt hier. Es ist ein Junge, muss ungefähr 14 sein. Ich antworte so höflich wie möglich und versuche meine Frustration zu verstecken. Er schaut um sich herum und sagt nur „’Tschuldigung, weiß selber auch nicht!“ Wie erwartet. Niemand kennt in so einer Großstadt seine Nachbarn, wieso sollte denn so ein Teenager überhaupt die Tür Nummern auswendig können. Doch, wenn er wie normale Kinder draußen spielen würde, schon! Aber ja... die Jugend von heute verbringt die Zeit meistens vor dem PC, also kann ein Junge, der hier seit 14 Jahren wohnt, gar nicht wissen, wo sich die Türnummer 9 befindet. Typisch. Auch eine Art Zivilisationskrankheit. Obwohl man so viel über die Welt weiß, weiß keiner über seinen Bezirk oder die Nachbarschaft wirklich was. Spreche auch von mir. Ich kenne übrigens in meiner Nähe nur den Hofer und die Apotheke, sonst nicht viel. Aber ich wohne zumindest nicht seit lange hier. Es fängt wieder an zu regnen. Auch typisch. Ich will mich umdrehen und nach Hause gehen, aber es regnet plötzlich so stark, dass ich mich irgendwo unterstellen muss. Ich bleibe neben einem kleinen Tor aus Metall stehen, nur damit ich meinen Regenschirm aufmachen kann. Schließlich sehe ich ganz groß vor mir eine handgemalte Nummer 9 an der Wand. Ich bin erstaunt und nass. Freue mich aber wie ein Kind über diese Entdeckung.

Juni 2008
Mariana Agria

Dietrich Schwanitz, Die Welt des Buches und der Schrift

Dietrich Schwanitz: „Bücher - Schrift - Lesen"



"Bevor heute ein Kind liest, sieht es fern. Das schafft ein Problem, denn die Bildung hängt immer noch an den Büchern, oder zumindest an den Texten auf dem Bildschirm, und das heißt an Schrift. Warum ist das so? Warum können nicht auch Bilder Bildung vermitteln? Warum kann man sich nicht durch Fernsehen bilden? Was ist an Schrift so Besonderes? Das Femsehen zeigt mündliche Kommunikation in quasi realen (oder simulierten) Situationen. In ihr ist aber der Sinn des Mitgeteilten mit dem Medium der Kommunikation - Gesten, Stimme, Körpersprache etc. - unauflöslich verflochten. Der Sinn einer Mitteilung ist mit der Form der dramatischen Präsentation verschmolzen. Deshalb ist er unmittelbar einleuchtend - aber nicht referierbar. Das merkt man immer dann, wenn schlichte Menschen oder Kinder besonders lustige Situationen erzählen wollen, die sie gerade erlebt haben. Sie beschwören dann durch ein paar Zitate eine Vision der gerade erlebten Situation hervor („und er dann: ,Ey du' - und sie: .Na, hör mal'. Haben wir gelacht!"). Aber die Zuhörer, die diese Erinnerung nicht teilen, sehen sich ratlos an: Ihnen bleibt die Komik dieser Äußerung verschlossen.

Erst die Schrift löst die Sprache aus der konkreten Situation und verselbständigt sie gegen den unmittelbar gegebenen Kontext (Zusammenhang). Was bei dieser Transformation (Umwandlung) gleichbleibt, ist das, was wir Sinn nennen. [...] Erst Schrift hat die Sprache fixiert, kontrollierbar gemacht und am Regelsystem der Grammatik orientiert. [...] Durch Linearisierung der Abfolge Subjekt - Prädikat - Objekt (der Mann beißt den Hund) mit allen Beifügungen, Nebensätzen und Einschüben kann die logische Ordnung des Gedankeos auf die Sequenz (Abfolge) der Satzteile abgebildet und darüber kontrolliert werden. So etwas muss man trainieren. Das verlangt die Fähigkeit, die Simultanstimulation durch Bilder in ein Nacheinander zu verwandeln. Dabei muss man das Tempo herausnehmen und warten können, bis in einem komplexen Satz endlich das Prädikat daherkommt (.Dein Onkel, der, wie du weißt, ein scharfes Auge hat, hat gestern um 5 Uhr, als er gerade am Marienplatz vorbeifuhr, in der Straßenbahn ..." .Ja, was denn nun?* wirst du rufen. .Wart's ab", sagt die Schrift und fährt fort:.... in der Straßenbahn, die vollbesetzt war, was um diese Zeit nichts Ungewöhnliches ist obwohl das nur für die Werktage gilt..." Inzwischen stehst du kurz vor einem Nervenzusammenbruch und schreist: „Was hat er, wird man's hören, was hat der Onkel, was hat er in der Straßenbahn, ich flehe dich an, sag es mir endlich, was hat er getan?" .... 10 Pfennig gefunden.") Bis diese Information endlich erscheint muss man den Sinnbogen für Anschlüsse präsenthalten, und erst wenn das letzte Wort um die Ecke biegt erschließt sich im Rückblick auf die bisherige Wortprozession der Sinn. [...] Besonders der Ungeübte empfindet diese Spannung als unangenehm. Man hat das Gefühl, dass die Stimulation (Erregung) des Hirns gebremst wird. Das ist seit der Ausbreitung des Fernsehens eine allgemeine Erfahrung geworden, über die Lehrer immer wieder klagen: Die Frustrationstoleranz (Fähigkeit Frustration zu ertragen) der Kinder nimmt ab, sie halten die für die Sinnbildungsprozesse nötige Retardation (Tempodrosselung) nicht mehr aus. Sie wünschen sich deshalb den Unterricht nicht als Lernprozess, sondern als Unterhaltung.

Die Kultusminister sind daraufhin in einen Zustand kollektiver Umnachtung gefallen und haben die Rolle der schriftlichen Arbeiten für die Ermittlung der Zensuren zugunsten mündlicher Mitarbeit laufend reduziert. Zu einem Zeitpunkt an dem die mündliche Kommunikation sowieso auf dem Vormarsch ist, geben sie den Standard der schriftlichen praktisch auf. Damit haben sie die Rolle der Schule gegenüber den Elternhäusern weiter reduziert. Nur noch diejenigen Kinder machen sich das Lesen und Schreiben zur Gewohnheit in deren Familien das sowieso als selbstverständlich gilt: in bildungsbürgerlichen Haushalten. Das sind dann die Milieus, in denen die Eltern den Femsehkonsum der Kinder überwachen, einschränken und dafür sorgen, dass ihre Sprösslinge ihre Phantasiebedürfnisse zuerst aus Büchern befriedigen. Erst wenn das Lesen keine Mühe mehr macht sondern nur Vergnügen, sollte man die Glotze freigeben. Tut man das nicht bleibt das Lesen ein Leben lang etwas Mühseliges. Wer so aufgewachsen ist liest später nicht mehr, als er unbedingt muss, und das auch noch ungern. Auf diese Weise produziert die Schulpolitik zwei Klassen von Menschen: Die einen sind gewohnheitsmäßige Leser, sie absorbieren ständig neue Informationen und sind gewohnt ihre Gedanken durch die Orientierung an der Schrift automatisch besser zu strukturieren. Dadurch erwerben sie eine Wahrnehmung, zu der der mitlaufende Überblick über den Satzbau, die Logik des Gedankens und die einzelnen Satzteile gehört. Zugleich entwickeln sie dabei auch ein Gefühl für den Aufbau verschiedener Texttypen (Bericht Exposition, Analyse, Erzählung, Essay etc.). Dadurch fällt ihnen auch das Schreiben leichter, und sie können ihre mündlichen Aussagen nach dem Modell schriftlicher Texte gliedern.

Die andern lesen nur, wenn sie dazu gezwungen sind, ansonsten sehen sie fern. Die Fernsehbilder laufen aber synchron zum Stimulationsbedarfs des Hirns. Wer daran gewöhnt ist, kann die Innenwahrnehmung nur noch schwer von der äußeren abkoppeln, d.h. er kann sich nicht konzentrieren. Jeder Text, der das Niveau von Comic-Ausrufen wie .Wham" und .Boing" übersteigt wirkt dann wie eine Serie von Schikanen. Die Angehörigen dieser Nichtlesergruppe erleben Bücher als Zumutungen; im Grunde können sie Leute, die gerne lesen, nicht verstehen. Sie misstrauen ihnen. Die Welt der Bücher ist für sie eine Verschwörung, die dem Ziel dient, ihnen ein schlechtes Gewissen zu verschaffen. Auf diese Weise entwickeln sie eine regelrechte Abneigung gegen Bücher, und da sie auch ihre Fachbücher ungern lesen, geraten sie im Beruf bald ins Hintertreffen. Sie entwickeln dann einen Hass auf theorielastige Besserwisser und singen das Hohelied der Praxis. Da sie nicht ahnen, dass durch die Leseabstinenz und Textfeindlichkeit auch der Stil ihrer mündlichen Kommunikation gelitten hat, verstehen sie nicht dass ihre Erfahrungen so wenig Anerkennung finden, und nach und nach interpretieren sie jeden Versuch eines anderen, einen komplexen Gedanken zu entfalten und angemessen auszudrücken, als einen Anschlag auf ihr Selbstwertgefühl. Deswegen meiden sie jeglichen Kontakt zum Milieu der Bücherleser und geraten so langsam ins gesellschaftliche Schattenreich eines neuen Analphabetismus.

Wer selbst ungern liest sollte sich deshalb ernsthaft überlegen, ob es sich nicht lohnt diese Unwilligkeit zu überwinden, sonst bleiben ihm die Fleischtöpfe der Bildung ebenso verschlossen wie der Zugang zu den gehobenen Einkommen. Wer noch keine Lesegewohnheit hat sollte sie vielleicht gesondert trainieren an Stoffen, für die er sich besonders interessiert, und seien es erotische Romane. Er sollte das Training wie eine Art Jogging betrachten, eine Übung, um geistig fit zu werden und zu bleiben.
Das Lesen ist dann etwas,dem man jeden Tag eine bestimmte Zeit widmet, bis es zur Gewohnheit geworden ist."

Was Darwin Wrong?

Was Darwin Wrong?

By David Quammen

Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. It's a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth's living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it's "just" a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is "just" a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory. Continental drift is a theory. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomic theory. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally—taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.

The rest of us generally agree. We plug our televisions into little wall sockets, measure a year by the length of Earth's orbit, and in many other ways live our lives based on the trusted reality of those theories.

Evolutionary theory, though, is a bit different. It's such a dangerously wonderful and far-reaching view of life that some people find it unacceptable, despite the vast body of supporting evidence. As applied to our own species, Homo sapiens, it can seem more threatening still. Many fundamentalist Christians and ultraorthodox Jews take alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis. Their discomfort is paralleled by Islamic creationists such as Harun Yahya, author of a recent volume titled The Evolution Deceit, who points to the six-day creation story in the Koran as literal truth and calls the theory of evolution "nothing but a deception imposed on us by the dominators of the world system." The late Srila Prabhupada, of the Hare Krishna movement, explained that God created "the 8,400,000 species of life from the very beginning," in order to establish multiple tiers of reincarnation for rising souls. Although souls ascend, the species themselves don't change, he insisted, dismissing "Darwin's nonsensical theory."

Other people too, not just scriptural literalists, remain unpersuaded about evolution. According to a Gallup poll drawn from more than a thousand telephone interviews conducted in February 2001, no less than 45 percent of responding U.S. adults agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.

Only 37 percent of the polled Americans were satisfied with allowing room for both God and Darwin—that is, divine initiative to get things started, evolution as the creative means. (This view, according to more than one papal pronouncement, is compatible with Roman Catholic dogma.) Still fewer Americans, only 12 percent, believed that humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god.

The most startling thing about these poll numbers is not that so many Americans reject evolution, but that the statistical breakdown hasn't changed much in two decades. Gallup interviewers posed exactly the same choices in 1982, 1993, 1997, and 1999. The creationist conviction—that God alone, and not evolution, produced humans—has never drawn less than 44 percent. In other words, nearly half the American populace prefers to believe that Charles Darwin was wrong where it mattered most.

Why are there so many antievolutionists? Scriptural literalism can only be part of the answer. The American public certainly includes a large segment of scriptural literalists—but not that large, not 44 percent. Creationist proselytizers and political activists, working hard to interfere with the teaching of evolutionary biology in public schools, are another part. Honest confusion and ignorance, among millions of adult Americans, must be still another. Many people have never taken a biology course that dealt with evolution nor read a book in which the theory was lucidly explained. Sure, we've all heard of Charles Darwin, and of a vague, somber notion about struggle and survival that sometimes goes by the catchall label "Darwinism." But the main sources of information from which most Americans have drawn their awareness of this subject, it seems, are haphazard ones at best: cultural osmosis, newspaper and magazine references, half-baked nature documentaries on the tube, and hearsay.

Evolution is both a beautiful concept and an important one, more crucial nowadays to human welfare, to medical science, and to our understanding of the world than ever before. It's also deeply persuasive—a theory you can take to the bank. The essential points are slightly more complicated than most people assume, but not so complicated that they can't be comprehended by any attentive person. Furthermore, the supporting evidence is abundant, various, ever increasing, solidly interconnected, and easily available in museums, popular books, textbooks, and a mountainous accumulation of peer-reviewed scientific studies. No one needs to, and no one should, accept evolution merely as a matter of faith.

Two big ideas, not just one, are at issue: the evolution of all species, as a historical phenomenon, and natural selection, as the main mechanism causing that phenomenon. The first is a question of what happened. The second is a question of how. The idea that all species are descended from common ancestors had been suggested by other thinkers, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, long before Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. What made Darwin's book so remarkable when it appeared, and so influential in the long run, was that it offered a rational explanation of how evolution must occur. The same insight came independently to Alfred Russel Wallace, a young naturalist doing fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago during the late 1850s. In historical annals, if not in the popular awareness, Wallace and Darwin share the kudos for having discovered natural selection.

The gist of the concept is that small, random, heritable differences among individuals result in different chances of survival and reproduction—success for some, death without offspring for others—and that this natural culling leads to significant changes in shape, size, strength, armament, color, biochemistry, and behavior among the descendants. Excess population growth drives the competitive struggle. Because less successful competitors produce fewer surviving offspring, the useless or negative variations tend to disappear, whereas the useful variations tend to be perpetuated and gradually magnified throughout a population.

So much for one part of the evolutionary process, known as anagenesis, during which a single species is transformed. But there's also a second part, known as speciation. Genetic changes sometimes accumulate within an isolated segment of a species, but not throughout the whole, as that isolated population adapts to its local conditions. Gradually it goes its own way, seizing a new ecological niche. At a certain point it becomes irreversibly distinct—that is, so different that its members can't interbreed with the rest. Two species now exist where formerly there was one. Darwin called that splitting-and-specializing phenomenon the "principle of divergence." It was an important part of his theory, explaining the overall diversity of life as well as the adaptation of individual species.

This thrilling and radical assemblage of concepts came from an unlikely source. Charles Darwin was shy and meticulous, a wealthy landowner with close friends among the Anglican clergy. He had a gentle, unassuming manner, a strong need for privacy, and an extraordinary commitment to intellectual honesty. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had studied halfheartedly toward becoming a clergyman himself, before he discovered his real vocation as a scientist. Later, having established a good but conventional reputation in natural history, he spent 22 years secretly gathering evidence and pondering arguments—both for and against his theory—because he didn't want to flame out in a burst of unpersuasive notoriety. He may have delayed, too, because of his anxiety about announcing a theory that seemed to challenge conventional religious beliefs—in particular, the Christian beliefs of his wife, Emma. Darwin himself quietly renounced Christianity during his middle age, and later described himself as an agnostic. He continued to believe in a distant, impersonal deity of some sort, a greater entity that had set the universe and its laws into motion, but not in a personal God who had chosen humanity as a specially favored species. Darwin avoided flaunting his lack of religious faith, at least partly in deference to Emma. And she prayed for his soul.

In 1859 he finally delivered his revolutionary book. Although it was hefty and substantive at 490 pages, he considered The Origin of Species just a quick-and-dirty "abstract" of the huge volume he had been working on until interrupted by an alarming event. (In fact, he'd wanted to title it An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties Through Natural Selection, but his publisher found that insufficiently catchy.) The alarming event was his receiving a letter and an enclosed manuscript from Alfred Wallace, whom he knew only as a distant pen pal. Wallace's manuscript sketched out the same great idea—evolution by natural selection—that Darwin considered his own. Wallace had scribbled this paper and (unaware of Darwin's own evolutionary thinking, which so far had been kept private) mailed it to him from the Malay Archipelago, along with a request for reaction and help. Darwin was horrified. After two decades of painstaking effort, now he'd be scooped. Or maybe not quite. He forwarded Wallace's paper toward publication, though managing also to assert his own prior claim by releasing two excerpts from his unpublished work. Then he dashed off The Origin, his "abstract" on the subject. Unlike Wallace, who was younger and less meticulous, Darwin recognized the importance of providing an edifice of supporting evidence and logic.

The evidence, as he presented it, mostly fell within four categories: biogeography, paleontology, embryology, and morphology. Biogeography is the study of the geographical distribution of living creatures—that is, which species inhabit which parts of the planet and why. Paleontology investigates extinct life-forms, as revealed in the fossil record. Embryology examines the revealing stages of development (echoing earlier stages of evolutionary history) that embryos pass through before birth or hatching; at a stretch, embryology also concerns the immature forms of animals that metamorphose, such as the larvae of insects. Morphology is the science of anatomical shape and design. Darwin devoted sizable sections of The Origin of Species to these categories.

Biogeography, for instance, offered a great pageant of peculiar facts and patterns. Anyone who considers the biogeographical data, Darwin wrote, must be struck by the mysterious clustering pattern among what he called "closely allied" species—that is, similar creatures sharing roughly the same body plan. Such closely allied species tend to be found on the same continent (several species of zebras in Africa) or within the same group of oceanic islands (dozens of species of honeycreepers in Hawaii, 13 species of Galápagos finch), despite their species-by-species preferences for different habitats, food sources, or conditions of climate. Adjacent areas of South America, Darwin noted, are occupied by two similar species of large, flightless birds (the rheas, Rhea americana and Pterocnemia pennata), not by ostriches as in Africa or emus as in Australia. South America also has agoutis and viscachas (small rodents) in terrestrial habitats, plus coypus and capybaras in the wetlands, not—as Darwin wrote—hares and rabbits in terrestrial habitats or beavers and muskrats in the wetlands. During his own youthful visit to the Galápagos, aboard the survey ship Beagle, Darwin himself had discovered three very similar forms of mockingbird, each on a different island.

Why should "closely allied" species inhabit neighboring patches of habitat? And why should similar habitat on different continents be occupied by species that aren't so closely allied? "We see in these facts some deep organic bond, prevailing throughout space and time," Darwin wrote. "This bond, on my theory, is simply inheritance." Similar species occur nearby in space because they have descended from common ancestors.

Paleontology reveals a similar clustering pattern in the dimension of time. The vertical column of geologic strata, laid down by sedimentary processes over the eons, lightly peppered with fossils, represents a tangible record showing which species lived when. Less ancient layers of rock lie atop more ancient ones (except where geologic forces have tipped or shuffled them), and likewise with the animal and plant fossils that the strata contain. What Darwin noticed about this record is that closely allied species tend to be found adjacent to one another in successive strata. One species endures for millions of years and then makes its last appearance in, say, the middle Eocene epoch; just above, a similar but not identical species replaces it. In North America, for example, a vaguely horselike creature known as Hyracotherium was succeeded by Orohippus, then Epihippus, then Mesohippus, which in turn were succeeded by a variety of horsey American critters. Some of them even galloped across the Bering land bridge into Asia, then onward to Europe and Africa. By five million years ago they had nearly all disappeared, leaving behind Dinohippus, which was succeeded by Equus, the modern genus of horse. Not all these fossil links had been unearthed in Darwin's day, but he captured the essence of the matter anyway. Again, were such sequences just coincidental? No, Darwin argued. Closely allied species succeed one another in time, as well as living nearby in space, because they're related through evolutionary descent.

Embryology too involved patterns that couldn't be explained by coincidence. Why does the embryo of a mammal pass through stages resembling stages of the embryo of a reptile? Why is one of the larval forms of a barnacle, before metamorphosis, so similar to the larval form of a shrimp? Why do the larvae of moths, flies, and beetles resemble one another more than any of them resemble their respective adults? Because, Darwin wrote, "the embryo is the animal in its less modified state" and that state "reveals the structure of its progenitor."

Morphology, his fourth category of evidence, was the "very soul" of natural history, according to Darwin. Even today it's on display in the layout and organization of any zoo. Here are the monkeys, there are the big cats, and in that building are the alligators and crocodiles. Birds in the aviary, fish in the aquarium. Living creatures can be easily sorted into a hierarchy of categories—not just species but genera, families, orders, whole kingdoms—based on which anatomical characters they share and which they don't.

All vertebrate animals have backbones. Among vertebrates, birds have feathers, whereas reptiles have scales. Mammals have fur and mammary glands, not feathers or scales. Among mammals, some have pouches in which they nurse their tiny young. Among these species, the marsupials, some have huge rear legs and strong tails by which they go hopping across miles of arid outback; we call them kangaroos. Bring in modern microscopic and molecular evidence, and you can trace the similarities still further back. All plants and fungi, as well as animals, have nuclei within their cells. All living organisms contain DNA and RNA (except some viruses with RNA only), two related forms of information-coding molecules.

Such a pattern of tiered resemblances—groups of similar species nested within broader groupings, and all descending from a single source—isn't naturally present among other collections of items. You won't find anything equivalent if you try to categorize rocks, or musical instruments, or jewelry. Why not? Because rock types and styles of jewelry don't reflect unbroken descent from common ancestors. Biological diversity does. The number of shared characteristics between any one species and another indicates how recently those two species have diverged from a shared lineage.

That insight gave new meaning to the task of taxonomic classification, which had been founded in its modern form back in 1735 by the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. Linnaeus showed how species could be systematically classified, according to their shared similarities, but he worked from creationist assumptions that offered no material explanation for the nested pattern he found. In the early and middle 19th century, morphologists such as Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in France and Richard Owen in England improved classification with their meticulous studies of internal as well as external anatomies, and tried to make sense of what the ultimate source of these patterned similarities could be. Not even Owen, a contemporary and onetime friend of Darwin's (later in life they had a bitter falling out), took the full step to an evolutionary vision before The Origin of Species was published. Owen made a major contribution, though, by advancing the concept of homologues—that is, superficially different but fundamentally similar versions of a single organ or trait, shared by dissimilar species.

For instance, the five-digit skeletal structure of the vertebrate hand appears not just in humans and apes and raccoons and bears but also, variously modified, in cats and bats and porpoises and lizards and turtles. The paired bones of our lower leg, the tibia and the fibula, are also represented by homologous bones in other mammals and in reptiles, and even in the long-extinct bird-reptile Archaeopteryx. What's the reason behind such varied recurrence of a few basic designs? Darwin, with a nod to Owen's "most interesting work," supplied the answer: common descent, as shaped by natural selection, modifying the inherited basics for different circumstances.

Vestigial characteristics are still another form of morphological evidence, illuminating to contemplate because they show that the living world is full of small, tolerable imperfections. Why do male mammals (including human males) have nipples? Why do some snakes (notably boa constrictors) carry the rudiments of a pelvis and tiny legs buried inside their sleek profiles? Why do certain species of flightless beetle have wings, sealed beneath wing covers that never open? Darwin raised all these questions, and answered them, in The Origin of Species. Vestigial structures stand as remnants of the evolutionary history of a lineage.

Today the same four branches of biological science from which Darwin drew—biogeography, paleontology, embryology, morphology—embrace an ever growing body of supporting data. In addition to those categories we now have others: population genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and, most recently, the whiz-bang field of machine-driven genetic sequencing known as genomics. These new forms of knowledge overlap one another seamlessly and intersect with the older forms, strengthening the whole edifice, contributing further to the certainty that Darwin was right.

He was right about evolution, that is. He wasn't right about everything. Being a restless explainer, Darwin floated a number of theoretical notions during his long working life, some of which were mistaken and illusory. He was wrong about what causes variation within a species. He was wrong about a famous geologic mystery, the parallel shelves along a Scottish valley called Glen Roy. Most notably, his theory of inheritance—which he labeled pangenesis and cherished despite its poor reception among his biologist colleagues—turned out to be dead wrong. Fortunately for Darwin, the correctness of his most famous good idea stood independent of that particular bad idea. Evolution by natural selection represented Darwin at his best—which is to say, scientific observation and careful thinking at its best.

Douglas Futuyma is a highly respected evolutionary biologist, author of textbooks as well as influential research papers. His office, at the University of Michigan, is a long narrow room in the natural sciences building, well stocked with journals and books, including volumes about the conflict between creationism and evolution. I arrived carrying a well-thumbed copy of his own book on that subject, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution. Killing time in the corridor before our appointment, I noticed a blue flyer on a departmental bulletin board, seeming oddly placed there amid the announcements of career opportunities for graduate students. "Creation vs. evolution," it said. "A series of messages challenging popular thought with Biblical truth and scientific evidences." A traveling lecturer from something called the Origins Research Association would deliver these messages at a local Baptist church. Beside the lecturer's photo was a drawing of a dinosaur. "Free pizza following the evening service," said a small line at the bottom. Dinosaurs, biblical truth, and pizza: something for everybody.

In response to my questions about evidence, Dr. Futuyma moved quickly through the traditional categories—paleontology, biogeography—and talked mostly about modern genetics. He pulled out his heavily marked copy of the journal Nature for February 15, 2001, a historic issue, fat with articles reporting and analyzing the results of the Human Genome Project. Beside it he slapped down a more recent issue of Nature, this one devoted to the sequenced genome of the house mouse, Mus musculus. The headline of the lead editorial announced: "HUMAN BIOLOGY BY PROXY." The mouse genome effort, according to Nature's editors, had revealed "about 30,000 genes, with 99% having direct counterparts in humans."

The resemblance between our 30,000 human genes and those 30,000 mousy counterparts, Futuyma explained, represents another form of homology, like the resemblance between a five-fingered hand and a five-toed paw. Such genetic homology is what gives meaning to biomedical research using mice and other animals, including chimpanzees, which (to their sad misfortune) are our closest living relatives.

No aspect of biomedical research seems more urgent today than the study of microbial diseases. And the dynamics of those microbes within human bodies, within human populations, can only be understood in terms of evolution.

Nightmarish illnesses caused by microbes include both the infectious sort (AIDS, Ebola, SARS) that spread directly from person to person and the sort (malaria, West Nile fever) delivered to us by biting insects or other intermediaries. The capacity for quick change among disease-causing microbes is what makes them so dangerous to large numbers of people and so difficult and expensive to treat. They leap from wildlife or domestic animals into humans, adapting to new circumstances as they go. Their inherent variability allows them to find new ways of evading and defeating human immune systems. By natural selection they acquire resistance to drugs that should kill them. They evolve. There's no better or more immediate evidence supporting the Darwinian theory than this process of forced transformation among our inimical germs.

Take the common bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, which lurks in hospitals and causes serious infections, especially among surgery patients. Penicillin, becoming available in 1943, proved almost miraculously effective in fighting staphylococcus infections. Its deployment marked a new phase in the old war between humans and disease microbes, a phase in which humans invent new killer drugs and microbes find new ways to be unkillable. The supreme potency of penicillin didn't last long. The first resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus were reported in 1947. A newer staph-killing drug, methicillin, came into use during the 1960s, but methicillin-resistant strains appeared soon, and by the 1980s those strains were widespread. Vancomycin became the next great weapon against staph, and the first vancomycin-resistant strain emerged in 2002. These antibiotic-resistant strains represent an evolutionary series, not much different in principle from the fossil series tracing horse evolution from Hyracotherium to Equus. They make evolution a very practical problem by adding expense, as well as misery and danger, to the challenge of coping with staph.

The biologist Stephen Palumbi has calculated the cost of treating penicillin-resistant and methicillin-resistant staph infections, just in the United States, at 30 billion dollars a year. "Antibiotics exert a powerful evolutionary force," he wrote last year, "driving infectious bacteria to evolve powerful defenses against all but the most recently invented drugs." As reflected in their DNA, which uses the same genetic code found in humans and horses and hagfish and honeysuckle, bacteria are part of the continuum of life, all shaped and diversified by evolutionary forces.

Even viruses belong to that continuum. Some viruses evolve quickly, some slowly. Among the fastest is HIV, because its method of replicating itself involves a high rate of mutation, and those mutations allow the virus to assume new forms. After just a few years of infection and drug treatment, each HIV patient carries a unique version of the virus. Isolation within one infected person, plus differing conditions and the struggle to survive, forces each version of HIV to evolve independently. It's nothing but a speeded up and microscopic case of what Darwin saw in the Galápagos—except that each human body is an island, and the newly evolved forms aren't so charming as finches or mockingbirds.

Understanding how quickly HIV acquires resistance to antiviral drugs, such as AZT, has been crucial to improving treatment by way of multiple drug cocktails. "This approach has reduced deaths due to HIV by severalfold since 1996," according to Palumbi, "and it has greatly slowed the evolution of this disease within patients."

Insects and weeds acquire resistance to our insecticides and herbicides through the same process. As we humans try to poison them, evolution by natural selection transforms the population of a mosquito or thistle into a new sort of creature, less vulnerable to that particular poison. So we invent another poison, then another. It's a futile effort. Even DDT, with its ferocious and long-lasting effects throughout ecosystems, produced resistant house flies within a decade of its discovery in 1939. By 1990 more than 500 species (including 114 kinds of mosquitoes) had acquired resistance to at least one pesticide. Based on these undesired results, Stephen Palumbi has commented glumly, "humans may be the world's dominant evolutionary force."

Among most forms of living creatures, evolution proceeds slowly—too slowly to be observed by a single scientist within a research lifetime. But science functions by inference, not just by direct observation, and the inferential sorts of evidence such as paleontology and biogeography are no less cogent simply because they're indirect. Still, skeptics of evolutionary theory ask: Can we see evolution in action? Can it be observed in the wild? Can it be measured in the laboratory?

The answer is yes. Peter and Rosemary Grant, two British-born researchers who have spent decades where Charles Darwin spent weeks, have captured a glimpse of evolution with their long-term studies of beak size among Galápagos finches. William R. Rice and George W. Salt achieved something similar in their lab, through an experiment involving 35 generations of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Richard E. Lenski and his colleagues at Michigan State University have done it too, tracking 20,000 generations of evolution in the bacterium Escherichia coli. Such field studies and lab experiments document anagenesis—that is, slow evolutionary change within a single, unsplit lineage. With patience it can be seen, like the movement of a minute hand on a clock.

Speciation, when a lineage splits into two species, is the other major phase of evolutionary change, making possible the divergence between lineages about which Darwin wrote. It's rarer and more elusive even than anagenesis. Many individual mutations must accumulate (in most cases, anyway, with certain exceptions among plants) before two populations become irrevocably separated. The process is spread across thousands of generations, yet it may finish abruptly—like a door going slam!—when the last critical changes occur. Therefore it's much harder to witness. Despite the difficulties, Rice and Salt seem to have recorded a speciation event, or very nearly so, in their extended experiment on fruit flies. From a small stock of mated females they eventually produced two distinct fly populations adapted to different habitat conditions, which the researchers judged "incipient species."

After my visit with Douglas Futuyma in Ann Arbor, I spent two hours at the university museum there with Philip D. Gingerich, a paleontologist well-known for his work on the ancestry of whales. As we talked, Gingerich guided me through an exhibit of ancient cetaceans on the museum's second floor. Amid weird skeletal shapes that seemed almost chimerical (some hanging overhead, some in glass cases) he pointed out significant features and described the progress of thinking about whale evolution. A burly man with a broad open face and the gentle manner of a scoutmaster, Gingerich combines intellectual passion and solid expertise with one other trait that's valuable in a scientist: a willingness to admit when he's wrong.

Since the late 1970s Gingerich has collected fossil specimens of early whales from remote digs in Egypt and Pakistan. Working with Pakistani colleagues, he discovered Pakicetus, a terrestrial mammal dating from 50 million years ago, whose ear bones reflect its membership in the whale lineage but whose skull looks almost doglike. A former student of Gingerich's, Hans Thewissen, found a slightly more recent form with webbed feet, legs suitable for either walking or swimming, and a long toothy snout. Thewissen called it Ambulocetus natans, or the "walking-and-swimming whale." Gingerich and his team turned up several more, including Rodhocetus balochistanensis, which was fully a sea creature, its legs more like flippers, its nostrils shifted backward on the snout, halfway to the blowhole position on a modern whale. The sequence of known forms was becoming more and more complete. And all along, Gingerich told me, he leaned toward believing that whales had descended from a group of carnivorous Eocene mammals known as mesonychids, with cheek teeth useful for chewing meat and bone. Just a bit more evidence, he thought, would confirm that relationship. By the end of the 1990s most paleontologists agreed.

Meanwhile, molecular biologists had explored the same question and arrived at a different answer. No, the match to those Eocene carnivores might be close, but not close enough. DNA hybridization and other tests suggested that whales had descended from artiodactyls (that is, even-toed herbivores, such as antelopes and hippos), not from meat-eating mesonychids.

In the year 2000 Gingerich chose a new field site in Pakistan, where one of his students found a single piece of fossil that changed the prevailing view in paleontology. It was half of a pulley-shaped anklebone, known as an astragalus, belonging to another new species of whale.

A Pakistani colleague found the fragment's other half. When Gingerich fitted the two pieces together, he had a moment of humbling recognition: The molecular biologists were right. Here was an anklebone, from a four-legged whale dating back 47 million years, that closely resembled the homologus anklebone in an artiodactyls. Suddenly he realized how closely whales are related to antelopes.

This is how science is supposed to work. Ideas come and go, but the fittest survive. Downstairs in his office Phil Gingerich opened a specimen drawer, showing me some of the actual fossils from which the display skeletons upstairs were modeled. He put a small lump of petrified bone, no longer than a lug nut, into my hand. It was the famous astragalus, from the species he had eventually named Artiocetus clavis. It felt solid and heavy as truth.

Seeing me to the door, Gingerich volunteered something personal: "I grew up in a conservative church in the Midwest and was not taught anything about evolution. The subject was clearly skirted. That helps me understand the people who are skeptical about it. Because I come from that tradition myself." He shares the same skeptical instinct. Tell him that there's an ancestral connection between land animals and whales, and his reaction is: Fine, maybe. But show me the intermediate stages. Like Charles Darwin, the onetime divinity student, who joined that round-the –world voyage aboard the Beagle instead of becoming a country parson, and whose grand view of life on Earth was shaped by attention to small facts, Phil Gingerich is a reverant empiricist. He's not satisfied until he sees solid data. That's what excites his so much about pulling shale fossils out of the ground. In 30 years he has seen enough to be satisfied. For him, Gingerich said, it's "a spiritual experience."

"The evidence is there," he added. "It's buried in the rocks of ages."

Helping the homeless

I had never thought I would gain the courage.
Back home I could have felt more at ease to do something like this.
But no, I did it here, far from home, in a foreign country.
I am relieved for it was easy... I had expected problems between the homeless, or with the staff.
But all happened smoothly and I felt sad and happy afterwards.

Well, one can imagine why...
I was very tired afterwards, physically and mentally. The work consisted in serving dinner for the homeless, and cleaning the room afterwards.
There were around 100 homeless I think.
Some were very old, others very young. Most of them were so thankful for this warm meal, that they looked at me with tremendous gratitude in their eyes.

After eating and repeating, some wanted more chicken or cake, or even coffee.
I served as allowed 2 plates of chicken, no more than that.
But then I realized, there was enough food and there would be tons of leftovers.

When I started to serve coffee I no longer cared. "Who wants more? Ok, you want 2 cups. Fine. And you? You already have 2!! Are you sure you want one more??? Very well here you go, but I must advise you it is rather unhealthy that much coffee!"

If only I had got my hands on the last pieces of cake... there were for sure more than 40 pieces left, and the staff argued that those could not be served, because then every one would want more cake, and there were only 40 pieces left - not enough for all.
I felt sad. Denying a little bit more cake to those people, was really sad.
After they went home I even ate one piece, still feeling guilty, that I was eating it, and not some other nice old man that had asked me so gently for it.

I barely had contact with them, I exchanged few words with some, but did not really get to know any of them.
Vienna is a small city, I am sure I will be meeting some of those men and women on the streets again.

UNHCR - the Un refugee Agency

measure your happiness + vineyards in vienna

instead of IQ tests, spend some time on this research from the University of Pennsylvannia
www.authentichappiness.org


and here are some funny pictures I took of Vienna, which I don't remember if I posted before or not!

here it goes!!!

Salvador, BH, Brazil, 24 December

Salvador da Baía

Medecins Sans Frontieres

The Médecins Sans Frontières also known as Doctors Without Borders is one of the noblest and most active non-governmental organizations that exist today.
Transition sentence: The Doctors Without Borders (MSF) was established in the early 70’s after the merging of two already existing Organizations: "Emergency Medical and Surgical Intervention Group" and the "French Medical Relief".

Reasons:
a. The MSF are lifesavers that have worked several times in countries at war, even when under fire.
b. Their intervention in emergencies is very fast, and they also make long-term missions in countries in need of help.
c. The MSF are also active in the western countries appealing for action and denouncing genocides and abuses, for example.

a: Arguments: The MSF intervene whenever it is necessary, no matter where they have to take action, or who is in need of help. The most admiring interventions are those when exposed to hostile fire in war zones.
Example: They’re efforts in Sudan for more than 25 years now, set a good example. The MSF have witnessed the civil war, civilian massacres but they continued their voluntary work even after several arrests of volunteers
b: Arguments: The MSF are capable of fast interventions just when the situation can be most critical. They help victims of natural disasters by providing clean water and medical aid.
Example: They create refugee camps like those in Thailand, after the immigration of millions of Cambodians to the country, and the MSF stay as long as necessary, just until the country’s healthcare system is reconstructed and capable of handling the victims.
c: Arguments: The MSF not only want to provide with essential care for the wounded or the famine, it is also important to emphasize the victim’s rights and awake the world’s awareness to ongoing critical situations in several countries, if possible.
Example: The MSF has been responsible for the denunciation of the abuse of international aid in Ethiopia after a famine crisis during the 80’s. After this the MSF were expelled and were prevented from continuing their aid.


Information taken out of Wikipedia
Official Website www.msf.org

Kicking the Cat!

Interview made by Stewart Brand to Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead - originally published in the CoEvolutionary Quarterly, June 1976, Issue no. 10, pp. 32-44.
This is only a fragment, the rest of the interview can be found at - For God's Sake Margaret! -

Bateson: ...Well, it [the camera] should be off the tripod.

Mead: So you run around.

B: Yes.

M: And therefore you've introduced a variation into it that is unnecessary.

B: I therefore got the information out that I thought was relevant at the time.

M: That's right. And therefore what do you see later?

B: If you put the damn thing on a tripod, you don't get any relevance.

M: No, you get what happened.

B: It isn't what happened.

M: I don't want people leaping around thinking that a profile at this moment would be beautiful.

B: I wouldn't want beautiful.

M: Well, what's the leaping around for?

B: To get what's happening.

M: What you think is happening.

B: If Stewart reached behind his back to scratch himself, I would like to be over there at that moment.

M: If you were over there at that moment you wouldn't see him kicking the cat under the table. So that just doesn't hold as an argument.

B: Of the things that happen the camera is only going to record one percent anyway.

M: That's right.

pareceu-me interessante..

"Hoje em dia parece, para as pessoas de esquerda, que o fascismo, o sectarismo, os ódios são aceitáveis desde que sejam anti-americanos - já não é o pior que podia acontecer."
[...]

No seu livro o argumento principal é o de que a Esquerda perdeu a capacidade de imaginar outros inimigos que não a América. O que é que o leva a dizer isto?
"Bem, tudo aquilo a que assisti e assisto. Onde estão as manifestações contra o genocídio no Darfur? Onde estão as manifestações a favor da luta das mulheres no Irão? Também não ouvimos falar dos regimes africanos que espezinham os direitos humanos, nem da China que deveria ser um pesadelo para a Esquerda: suprime os sindicatos livres num estado de partido único, ao mesmo tempo que as empresas têm rédia livre para explorar a força de trabalho - também neste caso ninguém protesta. Só se protesta, na Europa, só fazem ferver o sangue e bater o coração, os crimes que, directa ou indirectamente, podem lhe ser imputados ao Ocidente, tudo o resto se perde. É um sinal de perda de princípios universais, se alguém afirma defender os direitos da Mulher tem de os defender em Lisboa, em Teerão e em Pequim. Na Política têm de se defender valores universais, quando isso falha tornamo-nos irrelevantes."


Curta transcrição livre de uma entrevista feita por Carlos Vaz Marques na TSF a Nick Cohen
dia 12.02.2008
podcast disponível em www.tsf.pt

mud experience

soundz & videoz

retrato de Mónica, um conto de Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

RETRATO DE MÓNICA

Mónica é uma pessoa tão extraordinária que consegue simultaneamente: ser boa mãe de família, ser chiquíssima, ser dirigente da «Liga Internacional das Mulheres Inúteis», ajudar o marido nos negócios, fazer ginástica todas as manhãs, ser pontual, ter imensos amigos, dar muitos jantares, ir a muitos jantares, não fumar, não envelhecer, gostar de toda a gente, gostar dela, dizer bem de toda a gente, toda a gente dizer bem dela, coleccionar colheres do séc. XVII, jogar golfe, deitar-se tarde, levantar-se cedo, comer iogurte, fazer ioga, gostar de pintura abstracta, ser sócia de todas as sociedades musicais, estar sempre divertida, ser um belo exemplo de virtudes, ter muito sucesso e ser muito séria.

Tenho conhecido na vida muitas pessoas parecidas com a Mónica. Mas são só a sua caricatura. Esquecem-se sempre ou do ioga ou da pintura abstracta.

Por trás de tudo isto há um trabalho severo e sem tréguas e uma disciplina rigorosa e constante. Pode-se dizer que Mónica trabalha de sol a sol.

De facto, para conquistar todo o sucesso e todos os gloriosos bens que possui, Mónica teve que renunciar a três coisas: à poesia, ao amor e à santidade.

A poesia é oferecida a cada pessoa só uma vez e o efeito da negação é irreversível. O amor é oferecido raramente e aquele que o nega algumas vezes depois não o encontra mais. Mas a santidade é oferecida a cada pessoa de novo cada dia, e por isso aqueles que renunciam à santidade são obrigados a repetir a negação todos os dias.

Isto obriga Mónica a observar uma disciplina severa. Como se diz no circo, «qualquer distracção pode causar a morte do artista». Mónica nunca tem uma distracção. Todos os seus vestidos são bem escolhidos e todos os seus amigos são úteis. Como um instrumento de precisão, ela mede o grau de utilidade de todas as situações e de todas as pessoas. E como um cavalo bem ensinado, ela salta sem tocar os obstáculos e limpa todos os percursos. Por isso tudo lhe corre bem, até os desgostos.

Os jantares de Mónica também correm sempre muito bem. Cada lugar é um emprego de capital. A comida é óptima e na conversa toda a gente está sempre de acordo, porque Mónica nunca convida pessoas que possam ter opiniões inoportunas. Ela põe a sua inteligência ao serviço da estupidez. Ou, mais exactamente: a sua inteligência é feita da estupidez dos outros. Esta é a forma de inteligência que garante o domínio. Por isso o reino de Mónica é sólido e grande.

Ela é íntima de mandarins e de banqueiros e é também íntima de manicuras, caixeiros e cabeleireiros. Quando ela chega a um cabeleireiro ou a uma loja, fala sempre com a voz num tom mais elevado para que todos compreendam que ela chegou. E precipitam-se manicuras e caixeiros. A chegada de Mónica é, em toda a parte, sempre um sucesso. Quando ela está na praia, o próprio Sol se enerva.

O marido de Mónica é um pobre diabo que Mónica transformou num homem importantíssimo. Deste marido maçador Mónica tem tirado o máximo rendimento. Ela ajuda-o, aconselha-o, governa-o. Quando ele é nomeado administrador de mais alguma coisa, é Mónica que é nomeada. Eles não são o homem e a mulher. Não são o casamento. São, antes, dois sócios trabalhando para o triunfo da mesma firma. O contrato que os une é indissolúvel, pois o divórcio arruína as situações mundanas. O mundo dos negócios é bem-pensante.

É por isso que Mónica, tendo renunciado à santidade, se dedica com grande dinamismo a obras de caridade. Ela faz casacos de tricot para as crianças que os seus amigos condenam à fome. Às vezes, quando os casacos estão prontos, as crianças já morreram de fome. Mas a vida continua. E o sucesso de Mónica também. Ela todos os anos parece mais nova. A miséria, a humilhação, a ruína não roçam sequer a fímbria dos seus vestidos. Entre ela e os humilhados e ofendidos não há nada de comum.

E por isso Mónica está nas melhores relações com o Príncipe deste Mundo. Ela é sua partidária fiel, cantora das suas virtudes, admiradora de seus silêncios e de seus discursos. Admiradora da sua obra, que está ao serviço dela, admiradora do seu espírito, que ela serve.

Pode-se dizer que em cada edifício construído neste tempo houve sempre uma pedra trazida por Mónica.

Há vários meses que não vejo Mónica. Ultimamente contaram-me que em certa festa ela estivera muito tempo conversando com o Príncipe deste Mundo. Falavam os dois com grande intimidade. Nisto não há evidentemente, nenhum mal. Toda a gente sabe que Mónica é seriíssima toda a gente sabe que o Príncipe deste Mundo é um homem austero e casto.

Não é o desejo do amor que os une. O que os une e justamente uma vontade sem amor.

E é natural que ele mostre publicamente a sua gratidão por Mónica. Todos sabemos que ela é o seu maior apoio; mais firme fundamento do seu poder.


Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
Contos Exemplares
Porto, Figueirinhas, 1996 (29ª ed.)

Jihlava part II

I wanted to write a diary of the film festival in Jihlava, but since I have not... I
posted some pictures of my favourite place inside the auditorium, which consists of individual screens and external Hard Disks with dvd's. It was called "EAST SILVER Doc Market" and contained mostly Documentaries.
You could seat in front of a screen and choose what to watch. This system was the most confortable and personal. It was definitely my favourite part of the festival. I spent an entire day there, watched over 8 films in one day. Was hugely productive and a lot of fun =)
Here the List of Films I watched at the doc market:

"WOMEN AT THE WHEEL" - FANG YU 2006
"HOW MANKIND LIVES"
"BEIJING BUBBLES: PUNK AND ROCK IN CHINA'S CAPITAL" - SUSANNE MESSMER 2006
"THE SIXTH SIDE OF THE PENTAGON" - CHRIS MARKER 1968
"731: TWO VERSIONS OF HELL" - JAMES T. HONG 2006
"EMBASSY" - CHRIS MARKER 1973
"JUNKOPIA" - JOHN CHAPMAN, CHRIS MARKER, FRANK SIMEONE 1981
"2084" - CHRIS MARKER 1984
"SUNLESS" - CHRIS MARKER 1983
"GHOSTS OF CITÉ SOLEIL" - ASGER LETH 2006
"9 STAR HOTEL" - IDO HAAR 2006
"SHANGHAI SHANGHAI" - ZHENCHEN LIU 2006