"The chimpanzees immediately sorted the crystals out of the piles. Then they carried them in their mouths, turned them in the light and held them up to their eyes..."

"... like old-timey prospectors. When the researchers eventually set up cameras inside the chimp dorms, they saw that Yvan was still gripping one as he prepared to relax in his hay nest... They seemed to also be experiencing 'something beyond curiosity,' Dr. García-Ruiz said. Watching them added heft to one of his more speculative theories: He believes that crystals, as 'the only Euclidean object in nature,' may have helped humans invent geometry and unlock abstract thought."

From "Chimpanzees Are Really Into Crystals/In an attempt to understand our own fascination with the shiny minerals, researchers gave some to chimps" (NYT).

So... is this good science? Seems to me the human interest in crystals has long been considered pseudoscience, but you could scientifically study what draws humans into pseudoscience. But is this study, using chimpanzees, scientific? It seems to me that it's mainly combining the pseudoscientific interest in crystals with the hoped-for fun of hanging around with chimpanzees.

I tried to get Grok to make me an image of a chimpanzee holding a crystal and gazing at it "like old-timey prospectors." But after many tries and no progress — the chimp was almost expressionless and the eyes weren't even looking at the crystal — I lost hope.

Grok: "Want one more refinement round? Just say the word."

Me: "No, just tell me why some humans are goofy about crystals." 

"The idea is that our ancestors evolved to associate the scent of alcohol with ripe, energy-rich fruit."

"In ancestral forests, faint whiffs of fermentation would have been a useful signal of easy calories. A taste for ethanol, at low concentrations, would therefore have given these early primates an evolutionary advantage. If the hypothesis is true, this helps explain our own fondness for the stuff. During years where fermented fruit is abundant, the chimpanzees of Ngogo, in the north of the national park, spend more time travelling to distant areas of their home territories than usual. It is tempting to think that the booze is making them more adventurous. However, Maro believes it is more to do with the sugar providing a burst of energy...."

From "Wild chimpanzees 'would fail human sobriety tests'/Chimps love naturally fermented fruit — so much so, they register alcohol levels that would get a human banned from operating heavy machinery" (London Times).

Goodbye to Jane Goodall.

 

From "Jane Goodall: A Life in Pictures The primatologist gained scientific acclaim for her work with chimpanzees and then later used her fame to champion conservation" (NYT)(free access link, so you can see the pictures).

"Brooker says it reminds him of the orcas who have recently been spotted wearing salmon on their heads like a hat — a behaviour last reported in the '70s."

From "Chimps are sticking grass and sticks in their butts, seemingly as a fashion trend/The new phenomenon appears to be a fresh spin on an old fad of wearing grass in the ear" (CBC).

ADDED: This story made me ask ChatGPT "What is the origin and history of the phrase 'Your ass is grass'?" It couldn't pinpoint the origin, but this part of the answer was amusingly AI:

🔹 Linguistic Features:

• Ass: A longstanding vulgar slang term for a person, especially in a demeaning or aggressive context.

• Grass: Used metaphorically here as something easily cut down, disposable, or unresisting.

"They found that human wounds took more than twice as long to heal as wounds of any of the other mammals."

"Our slow healing may be a result of an evolutionary trade-off we made long ago, when we shed fur in favor of naked, sweaty skin that keeps us cool.... Each hair grows from a hair follicle, which also houses stem cells.... 'When the epidermis is wounded, as in most kinds of scratches and scrapes, it’s really the hair-follicle stem cells that do the repair,' Dr. Fuchs said. Furry animals are covered in follicles, which help quickly close up wounds in mice or monkeys. By comparison, 'human skin has very puny hair follicles,' Dr. Fuchs said. And our ancestors lost many of those follicles, packing their skin with sweat glands instead.... Most furry mammals have them only in certain places, mainly the soles of their paws. But human ancestors went all-in on sweat — modern humans have millions of sweat glands all over our bodies, and they’re about 10 times denser than those of chimpanzees...."

From "Humans’ Wounds Heal Much More Slowly Than Other Mammals’/We naked apes need Band-Aids, but shedding the fur that speeds healing in other mammals may have helped us evolve other abilities" (NYT).

If you had to choose between the power to heal fast or to cool fast, would you not choose the cooling power? It's what evolution chose for us, but not for all those other animals. Why?

What if it were your job to infuse the zoo with Critical Race Theory, radical feminism, and LGBTQ+ instruction and insight?

As noted in the previous post, President Trump signed an executive order that "directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo."

Now, maybe the zoo is thrown in there because it's run by the Smithsonian. But I had to wonder what the zoo might be doing and what it could do if it wanted to lean into the kind of ideology that the Trumpian vision sees as improper, divisive, and anti-American.

So I asked Grok to assume the job of infusing the zoo with Critical Race Theory, radical feminism, and LGBTQ+ instruction and insight. I told it to write some placards to be posted in front of particular animals and displays. If you're one of those people who won't read things written by A.I., you'd better bail out now, because what follows is 100% Grok:

"Reminds me of that 'Chimp Crazy' thing I was watching. People love animals and get inside their fantasy."

Something I texted after receiving the following viral deer video (and agreeing with the guy who began "Nice story, too bad...."):

Nice story, too bad it’s made up of multiple random clips. Also, did dude repair the fence after cutting or just leave it that way for the owner to deal with?

— Jim McCaslin (@JimMcCaslin23) September 2, 2024

And if you're not familiar with "Chimp Crazy," check out the trailer:

People are delusional about wild animals. That reminds me to get back to my rewatching of "Grizzly Man."

The chimpanzee, the raincoat, and the bicycle.

In Kharkiv, Ukraine:

 

"A chimpanzee in caused a brief, heart-warming moment in war-torn Ukraine, when it escaped from a zoo and then was gently coaxed into surrender by its keeper and ridden home on a bicycle.... The zoo workers followed her without success until it began to rain. As the rain fell, Chichi allowed a zookeeper to wrap her in a yellow raincoat, and the two embraced...." (NY Post).

"Many zoos use Prozac and other psychoactive drugs on at least some of their animals to deal with the mental effects of captivity."

"The Los Angeles Zoo has used Celexa, an antidepressant, to control aggression in one of its chimps. Gus, a polar bear at the Central Park Zoo, was given Prozac as part of an attempt to stop him from swimming endless figure-eight laps in his tiny pool. The Toledo Zoo has dosed zebras and wildebeest with the antipsychotic haloperidol to keep them calm and has put an orangutan on Prozac. When a female gorilla named Johari kept fighting off the male she was placed with, the zoo dosed her with Prozac until she allowed him to mate with her."

From "Modern Zoos Are Not Worth the Moral Cost" (NYT).

Netflix seems to believe I'll be interested in the "Offbeat, Cerebral" type of movie, and it is correct.

I watched this 17-minute David Lynch movie last night.

I made that screen capture just as the monkey is saying "Who's going to believe an orangutan?" The monkey, Jack, is being interrogated for whatever it is the title "What Did Jack Do?" refers to. The interrogator is played by David Lynch, and the taunt "Who's going to believe an orangutan?" is aimed at the Lynch character. 

The movie came out in November 2017, so I don't know if the orangutan accusation has anything to do with Trump — who was famously taunted about looking like an orangutan— but maybe some resonance was intended. Lynch has something of a resemblance to Trump....

That ran in the NY Post. Lynch was clarifying his earlier remark, "Trump could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history." Oh! It's sad that Lynch should have had to clarify anything. Clarification isn't his lane. Let's get back to interrogating Jack the monkey. 

I'm going to need to rewatch "What Did Jack Do?," and I'm going to do it more offbeatly, more cerebrally. My hypothesis is that the interrogator (Lynch) is Trump, and We the People are the monkey. What did we do?

"A woman in a gorilla mask riding a bicycle threw the small white object past Elder’s head..."

"... as seen in a video posted on Twitter by Spectrum News reporter Kate Cagle. The woman appeared to be white, Elder is Black, and ape characterizations have been used as a racist trope for centuries. Moments later, the woman took a swing at a man who appeared to be part of Elder’s team. The man was hit by at least one other heckler just before Elder was escorted into the SUV." 

From an L.A. Times report quoted in "‘If Elder Were a Democrat’/Without double standards, would the U.S. media have any standards at all?" (Wall Street Journal). 

Here's the Kate Cagle tweet discussed in the quote:

Breaking: A flying egg narrowly missed the back of recall candidate @larryelder's head after it was thrown by an activist wearing a gorilla mask in Venice. A scuffle broke out and the candidate was escorted into an SUV.

Here's the raw (pun intended)
CW: f-bombs@SpecNews1SoCal pic.twitter.com/FeFx3wnuSD

— Kate Cagle (@KateCagle) September 8, 2021

The WSJ piece points us to Kyle Smith's piece in National Review: "Why Isn’t the Attack on Larry Elder the Biggest Story in America?" 

"Facebook users who recently watched a video from a British tabloid featuring Black men saw an automated prompt from the social network that asked if they would like to 'keep seeing videos about Primates'..."

"... causing the company to investigate and disable the artificial intelligence-powered feature that pushed the message.... The video... featured clips of Black men in altercations with white civilians and police officers. It had no connection to monkeys or primates."

The NYT reports. 

News flash: Human beings are primates. Black, white, whatever — we're primates. Notice how the love of science drops out of the picture altogether when there's an accusation of racism to be made. 

Of course, it's wretched of the AI to refer to black people as "primates" when that's not the standard way to refer to all human beings. It's touchy creating AI that can make embarrassing mistakes, and I think the companies have long been on notice that AI does a worse job at facial recognition when the subject is a black person.

Accents, apes.

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"What accounts for the growing number of octogenarians and beyond who are accomplished and still accomplishing?"

Asks Jane Brody in "A Birthday Milestone: Turning 80!" (NYT). 

The article doesn't really answer the question, not any better than you'd answer it on your own: Maintain your physical and mental well being so you can continue accomplishing, and also get yourself into some line of accomplishment that's intrinsically motivating. Brody names some famous people who are still productive in their field after the age of 80 (but fails to mention Bob Dylan, who's about to turn 80).

Here's a little text from the end of the article, about regrets (which is really a different topic!):

Have I any regrets? I regret taking French instead of Spanish in high school and I keep trying to learn the latter, a far more practical language, on my own. I regret that I never learned to speed-read; whether for work or leisure, I read slowly, as if everything in print is a complex scientific text. Although I’d visited all seven continents before I turned 50, I never got to see the orangutans in their native Borneo or the gorillas in Rwanda. But I’m content now to see them up close on public television....

I thought speed-reading was a hoax. And I think it's best to leave the great apes alone. I'm put off by the elaborate fakery of traveling to Borneo/Rwanda in pursuit of an authentic encounter with orangutans/gorillas. 

And is Spanish a "more practical language" than French? French is as practical to French-speaking people as Spanish is to Spanish-speaking people, I would imagine. I think she doesn't mean Spanish is a "more practical language" but that someone living in America will find it more practical to know Spanish than to know French. One reason for slow reading is that people writing in their first language are not taking the trouble to think about what they are writing.

ADDED: My line of accomplishment is blogging, and I find it continually intrinsically motivating. So though I'm only 70, let me offer some different advice about remaining active while aging. You don't have to keep powering along in the career you chose for yourself decades ago. You can discover something within or adjacent to it that is more purely what inspires you and brings you flow. Then retire and do exactly that. I called blogging a line of "accomplishment," but I'm no longer oriented toward accomplishing anything. I live in the day. A day lived now is as good as a day lived anywhere else in the string of days that is your life. What does it matter how close to the end of the line it is? 

ALSO: From the Wikipedia article "Speed Reading," here's a photo captioned "Jimmy Carter and his daughter Amy participate in a speed reading course":

Do you think they are speed reading? The speed-reading craze got started with President Kennedy. Was he really speed-reading? Skim a few articles on the subject and I think you'll quickly get the main idea: People who claim to speed read are skimming. To read, you have to read all the words in order. You don't have to read. You can go way more quickly by skipping a lot of the words. But even skimming the articles on the subject, you should know you're bullshitting if you call that reading and claim to be "speed reading."

AND: Here's an article by Timothy Noah at Slate, "The 1,000-Word Dash/College-educated people who fret they read too slow should relax. Nobody reads much faster than 400 words per minute":

"Unlike so many Hollywood roles, the sexuality at the core of hers wasn’t cute or passive or submissive."

"It was challenging, confrontational, defiant; she stared into the camera with those remarkable eyes, almost daring us to return her gaze. The parts became increasingly transgressive: in The Night Porter, Rampling has a sadomasochistic relationship with her Nazi torturer; in ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore she has an incestuous affair with her brother; and in Max Mon Amour, she cheats on her diplomat husband with a chimpanzee. 'Ah, the ape – I love it,' she says affectionately.... Rampling says she simply wasn’t interested in Hollywood. 'Let’s use a nice old English expression: it just wasn’t my cup of tea. I wanted to go into the auteur and European world of the semi-darkness.'"

 From "Charlotte Rampling: ‘I am prickly. People who are prickly can’t be hurt any more’ She’s best known for her dark, difficult roles, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. The actor talks about swinging in the 60s, family tragedy – and why she’s still got It" (The Guardian). 

Rampling is 75, and she's still doing movies. She's been in so many things over the years, beginning with the uncredited role of Girl at Disco in "A Hard Day's Night." I haven't seen many of them at all. Avoided "The Night Porter," which was a big deal in its time (1974). I did see "Stardust Memories" (1980):

I looked up "Max Mon Amour," and I've got to say the poster is very nice:

From the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes (where it has a 22% rating): "Impossible to take seriously or as satire, this film is an embarrassment to humanity and our cousins in the jungle"/"A wry mix of King Kong and My Man Godfrey, it's a potent premise that somehow never catches fire."/"On the whole, it works as a witty, black comedy of manners that judiciously avoids the vulgarity inherent in the subject."

The Guardian says "the sexuality at the core of hers wasn’t cute or passive or submissive," but are we to take these movies — which she did not write or direct — as expressive of Rampling's sexual core? She got the roles she got. This seems like a good place to bring up Sharon Stone's new memoir. Here's an article about it in TNR, "Sharon Stone and the Fantasy of Female Domination/At the peak of her fame, she exuded total control on screen. According to her new memoir, a different story played out behind the scenes." 

When did political leaders first start showing their teeth in official photographs?

This is a question that occurred to me as I was looking at Wikipedia's list of Vice Presidents of the United States to try to answer a question I had about former Vice Presidents who run for the presidency.

Most of these VPs are not smiling at all, and it seems that only a hint of a smile seemed consistent with the exercise of political power. They look grumpy to us today, but presumably the idea was to look completely serious. We expect smiles now. The emergence of teeth comes in 1953 with Richard Nixon, a person whose smile made many people uneasy and suspicious, oddly enough.

Here's the list of U.S. Presidents, with their official pictures. The first one to smile showing teeth is JFK. Beginning with Gerald Ford in 1974, all the Presidents are smiling showing teeth, except one — Barack Obama.

The baring of teeth is a serious matter. How and when did it become part of a nice, warm smile? "How Did the 'Smile' Become a Friendly Gesture in Humans?" (Scientific American):

Anthony Stocks, chairman and professor of anthropology at Idaho State University, responds: "The evolution of smiles is opaque and, as with many evolutionary accounts of social behavior, fraught with just-soism. Among human babies, however, the 'tooth-baring' smile is associated less with friendship than with fright--which, one might argue, is related to the tooth-baring threats of baboons. On the other hand, a non-toothy, not-so-broad-but-open-lipped smile is associated with pleasure in human infants. Somehow we seem to have taken the fright-threat sort of smile and extended it to strangers as a presumably friendly smile. Maybe it is not as innocent as it seems. All cultures recognize a variety of mouth gestures as indexes of inner emotional states. As in our own culture, however, smiles come in many varieties, not all of them interpreted as friendly."

Here's "When did humans start to smile?" by Professor Antony Manstead (British Academy):

"There used to be a show on Fox called Man vs. Beast and you should know about it because it was probably the best show of all-time."

"In one of the competitions, a sprinter lost a 100-meter dash against a zebra (yet beat a giraffe!). In another, professional eater Takeru Kobayashi lost a hot dog eating contest against a Kodiak bear that did not even know he was taking part in an eating competition. And then there is my personal favorite: the world-class gymnast who defeated Bam Bam the orangutan in a 'dead hang,' even after Bam Bam clearly tried to play mind games with the gymnast by dropping his pants and urinating during the contest. Feel free to watch if you don’t believe me. Anyway, I wish that show still existed, because Tony vs. the Shark would totally make the cut.... I remember standing in the water just off of Mana Island at Survivor base camp and a shark swam by me for a good 20 minutes. I had no issues with standing in the water as it went back and forth by my feet but I’ll tell you what I didn’t do — reach down and pick it up. I guess Tony thought it was dead...."

From the Entertainment Weekly recap of Episode 3 of the new season — Season 40 — of "Survivor."

Here's Tony and the shark:



And here's "Man vs. Beast/Gymnast vs Orangutan":



And here's Kobayashi vs. the Kodiak bear and the man vs. giraffe/zebra.

As the recapper notes, only the human being understands that this is a competition, so it's only a test of whether the nonhuman beast is in the mood to perform the activity. This is the same problem that must be addressed at rodeos and bullfights: how to stimulate the animal to look as though it's participating in a man-versus-beast sport. In the case of catching a shark, the creature is stimulated by the threat of death. For him, it's literally an episode of survivor.

Have you thought much about how American speech and writing will evolve in the next 100 years?

I'm reading the comments to my post "Trump's 6-page letter is — and he intended this — one of the prominent documents in the annals of American history." In the post, I talk about the way Trump addresses his letter to the people of the future, 100 years from now. The commenter, Freder Frederson, writes:

The letter is the ranting of an unstable old man. One hundred years from now the question will be "[What] kind of people elected this raving lunatic president?"

I don't think he's even tried to imagine how the American written language will evolve over the course of the next 100 years — with all the intense and manipulative usage raging in politics and in social and mainstream media.

I suspect that my use of the word "evolve" will set off Trump haters to characterize him as lagging  evolutionarily. He's an ape, an orange ape, an orangutan!

But I think Trump is more of an example of what lies ahead. His language is an early manifestation of evolutionary change. And he's an especially influential user of the language. Look around. More and more Americans are talking like him, including his critics!

The people 100 years from now will probably speak and write much more like him than the people of today. And if that is where we're going, they are likely to read Trump's letter as a quite ordinary expression of a President's position and to read the criticism of his letter (if it survives to be read at all) as trivial banter.

IN THE COMMENTS: Unknown said:

I am reminded of L. Sprague de Camp's "Language For Time Travellers", partially excerpted here.

For some reason that reminded me of my all-time favorite "Star Trek" thing:



That's from the episode "Omega Glory," where there are characters reciting the Preamble to the Constitution, but you can't make out the words make out the words, because they "said them so badly":

CLOUD: When you would not say the holy words, of the Ee'd Plebnista, I doubted you.
KIRK: I did not recognize those words, you said them so badly, Without meaning.
ELDER: No! No! Only the eyes of a chief may see the Ee'd Plebnista.

Visiting the dying chimpanzee.

"Isn’t it beautiful?"

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of "The Beatles" — the white album — Roger Friedman reprints what Prudence Farrow wrote about the song "Dear Prudence." (Here's Farrow's memoir, "Dear Prudence," which Friedman says is free on Kindle, but you have to pay $10 if you don't pay for Kindle Unlimited.) I'll just give you one paragraph.

My mother [the actress, Maureen O'Sullivan] bought what became widely known as “The White Album” as soon as it was released in the fall of 1968. She introduced it to me in a most odd way. During a family gathering at her apartment, we were playing Killer, a whodunit game. The “killer” kills by winking at you, then you wait fifteen seconds before announcing you have been killed. My mother went around the room, showing the album while playing it on the record player. I listened to “Dear Prudence” with great apprehension. As each line finished, I wiped my brow with relief. As the song ended, I felt immense gratitude that it was not as I had feared. Just then, my mother came over to me, and leaning in, she gently said, “Isn’t it beautiful?” I looked up at her, and she winked.

Here's Maureen O'Sullivan talking to David Letterman in 1986. She talks about Groucho Marx, who tested jokes on her until she said "I really hate funny men. I will never laugh... So don't tell me any more jokes... I like humor to come out of something else — but no gags." She — who played Jane in the Tarzan movies — then proceeds to tell us about Cheetah — a "horrible creature" and "a homosexual."



ADDED: I'm adding my "animal cruelty" tag. O'Sullivan and Letterman and the audience laugh and laugh over what is the mistreatment of the chimpanzee used in the Tarzan movies.