Mary Soderstrom's Blog, page 81
June 19, 2013
The Red Haired Neanderthal
I'm currently messing around in our deep, deep past, trying to get a fix on the roads that humans have traveled for a new non-fiction book to be called
Road through Time.
One of the delightful things is to discover that the red-haired genes I carry--once having redhair myself and having given birth to a red head--may come from Neanderthals.
Seems recent research into comparisons between European genomes and that of Neanderthals show that about 4 per cent of current European descendants have some of the cave men's genes.
That reminds me of what McGill archeologist Michael Bisson told me nearly 15 years ago when I did an article on evolution at the university for the alumni magazine. He suggested then that they probably had lots of body hair and were fair-skinned, traits that would have been useful in Ice Age climates and where the days are short for a much of the year since fair skin allows easier Vitamin D production.
Lee laughed when I told him: needless to say he's not a red head.
The drawing, BTW, is a recreation by National Geographic staff.
June 18, 2013
Lots of People Not Going to Work Means Easy Traffic?
Montreal is becoming famous for its terrible traffic, along with its terrible mayors. But one of the things that is lost in shuffle this week, as Mayor Michael Applebaum was first arrested and then resigned is a general strike in the construction industry.
For the first time in more than 25 years, nearly all construction projects have shut down. The strike began on Monday and the effect was felt immediately--on traffic. Not only are the big trucks delivering materials to the sites off the road, so are the workers. Their absence points up the problems of urban sprawl and housing affordability, although so far no official appears to have noticed.
I was amazed that during the year we were in reconstruction/restoration of our house after a house fire almost all the workers lived off the island of Montreal. They would be here by 7 a.m., but that meant leaving home an hour earlier. Even though they usually returned before the afternoon rush hour, the time they spent on the road had to be immense. The reason they gave was that you could get a lot better housing for the money outside the city. A detatched house with a garden is unthinkable on the island for any family without two good incomes, but might be possible off-island for any ordinary Joe and his stay-at-home or part-time-working wife.
As it turns out, one of the points of contention in the labour dispute is attribution of work. Workers, so their spokespersons said on the radio, can be called at 3:30 a.m. to show up at 7 p.m. and be asked to work until 5 or 6 p.m., or even later. Impossible, inhuman, making us the next thing to slaves, they said.
I don't doubt it. But just working out better work schedules is only a small part of the answer. We need 1) more affordable housing in closer in neighborhoods and 2) a major promotion campaign to sell people on the advantages of living there.
For the first time in more than 25 years, nearly all construction projects have shut down. The strike began on Monday and the effect was felt immediately--on traffic. Not only are the big trucks delivering materials to the sites off the road, so are the workers. Their absence points up the problems of urban sprawl and housing affordability, although so far no official appears to have noticed.
I was amazed that during the year we were in reconstruction/restoration of our house after a house fire almost all the workers lived off the island of Montreal. They would be here by 7 a.m., but that meant leaving home an hour earlier. Even though they usually returned before the afternoon rush hour, the time they spent on the road had to be immense. The reason they gave was that you could get a lot better housing for the money outside the city. A detatched house with a garden is unthinkable on the island for any family without two good incomes, but might be possible off-island for any ordinary Joe and his stay-at-home or part-time-working wife.
As it turns out, one of the points of contention in the labour dispute is attribution of work. Workers, so their spokespersons said on the radio, can be called at 3:30 a.m. to show up at 7 p.m. and be asked to work until 5 or 6 p.m., or even later. Impossible, inhuman, making us the next thing to slaves, they said.I don't doubt it. But just working out better work schedules is only a small part of the answer. We need 1) more affordable housing in closer in neighborhoods and 2) a major promotion campaign to sell people on the advantages of living there.
June 17, 2013
On a Day When Canada's Two Biggest Cities Appear to Have Crooks as Mayor...
A little ditty thata may make you smile: The You Can't Fight City Hall Blues
June 16, 2013
Saturday Photo: Bridal Veil and Honeysuckle
Sounds a little raunchy, doesn't it? But the combination of bridal veil and honeysuckle makes a gorgeous late spring display.June 14, 2013
The Fruit of the US Supreme Court Decision Outlawing Anti-Miscegenation Laws: Pretty Cute!
The US Supreme Court struck down laws that forbade people of different races from marrying each other 50 years ago this month. EVen though the following commercial has had some nasty reactions, the fact that it was made shows that perhaps hearts have changed at least a bit.
June 13, 2013
Why don't people learn to turn the sound down? Once again...
Why don't people learn to turn the sound down? Once again highly amplified music is making the news around here: a nearby elementary school got a fine for refusing to turn down the music while kids were supposedly doing exercises outside.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with kids making noise at noon and during recess. But when the neighbors can't think because the music the kids are moving to is too loud, it's perfectly right to ask to turn it down. And turning it down is only neighborly...
June 12, 2013
No Time to Go to the Country? Read Barney's Version Instead
Just because it's funny, and I'm looking for a way to avoid work.
June 11, 2013
Why Americans Seem So Unconcerned about Megadata and Their Telephone and Email Records
The Pew Institute has just released a poll showing that a good majority of Americans don't have a problem with what the US government has been doing with the logs of their telephone calls and emails.
This has prompted a flurry of comment here, some of it shocked. How could they? Spying is spying. Their privacy is being threatened. And what kind of data is being collected about Canadians here and South of the Border?
The answer, I think, lies not only in a certain partisan bias--the Pew Poll shows that a lot more Democrats now think it's okay than did when the Republicans were in control. But Americans, particularly those who have been vocal protesters, know that there's always been a lot of internal spying going on. While nobody got shipped to Made-in-the-USA Gulags during the Cold War, many were pulled over the coals in various witch hunts for Communists.
A long time ago I learned not to send messages of whatever sort that I wouldn't want to be intercepted. Not that I've ever been anything other than a straight-arrow citizen, but my opinions haven't always followed the usual line. Back when I was editor of the Daily Cal, the student newspaper at UC Berkeley, it was common knowledge that the FBI had files on student activists. A few years later, a cousin of a cousin apparently had a problem getting a high level security clearance because of her tenuous connection to me even though I'd never met her. (She got it eventually, but it took a while.0
And then just a little while ago The New York Review of Books published a interesting review of Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld. In it Adam Hochschild notes that being a junior reporter covering student unrest at Berkeley was "enough to gain a notation in my own FBI files, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act years ago, that 'acting as a representative of the press,' I had been in contact with the march organizers. Although I was a very small fish indeed, my FBI and CIA files from the 1960s run to more than one hundred pages."
Makes me wonder if I should do a little Freedom of Information search myself. And if thata Act will be one of the next to fall.
This has prompted a flurry of comment here, some of it shocked. How could they? Spying is spying. Their privacy is being threatened. And what kind of data is being collected about Canadians here and South of the Border?
The answer, I think, lies not only in a certain partisan bias--the Pew Poll shows that a lot more Democrats now think it's okay than did when the Republicans were in control. But Americans, particularly those who have been vocal protesters, know that there's always been a lot of internal spying going on. While nobody got shipped to Made-in-the-USA Gulags during the Cold War, many were pulled over the coals in various witch hunts for Communists.
A long time ago I learned not to send messages of whatever sort that I wouldn't want to be intercepted. Not that I've ever been anything other than a straight-arrow citizen, but my opinions haven't always followed the usual line. Back when I was editor of the Daily Cal, the student newspaper at UC Berkeley, it was common knowledge that the FBI had files on student activists. A few years later, a cousin of a cousin apparently had a problem getting a high level security clearance because of her tenuous connection to me even though I'd never met her. (She got it eventually, but it took a while.0And then just a little while ago The New York Review of Books published a interesting review of Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld. In it Adam Hochschild notes that being a junior reporter covering student unrest at Berkeley was "enough to gain a notation in my own FBI files, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act years ago, that 'acting as a representative of the press,' I had been in contact with the march organizers. Although I was a very small fish indeed, my FBI and CIA files from the 1960s run to more than one hundred pages."
Makes me wonder if I should do a little Freedom of Information search myself. And if thata Act will be one of the next to fall.
June 10, 2013
The Incredible Human Journey, But Not in the US
Traveling rather far afield as I continue the ground work a new non-fiction book to be called
Road through Time
, I came upon this marvelous BBC series on human migration:
The Incredible Human Journey
. It's not new--apparently it aired first in 2009 in the UK and the following year on CBC, but I had never heard of it.
So Sunday I spent five hours watching Alice Roberts, an attractive medical doctor and anthropologist, as she went around the world, following our ancestors on their treks out of Africa. Lots of information I was only vaguely aware of, and while a little is out of date since the field is advancing so quickly (DNA evidence of Neandrothal breeding with modern humans has recently been announced, contrary to what the series says) it is defintely worth watching.
As I read the list of countries where the series has screened (the version I watched had Portuguese subtitles) the absence of the US was striking. Could it be that the series' premises are too hot for a country where more than have the people don't believe in evolution?
So Sunday I spent five hours watching Alice Roberts, an attractive medical doctor and anthropologist, as she went around the world, following our ancestors on their treks out of Africa. Lots of information I was only vaguely aware of, and while a little is out of date since the field is advancing so quickly (DNA evidence of Neandrothal breeding with modern humans has recently been announced, contrary to what the series says) it is defintely worth watching.
As I read the list of countries where the series has screened (the version I watched had Portuguese subtitles) the absence of the US was striking. Could it be that the series' premises are too hot for a country where more than have the people don't believe in evolution?
June 8, 2013
Saturday Photo: Japense Maples and Russian Olives
The air right now is heavy with the smell of Russian olives. Not olives, but certainly a native of the Russians steppes, these hardy trees are considered a nuisance in many places where they've been introduced.
But here, the winters are so severe that they don't run wild, and lend lovely dusty green folliage to the city scape all summer, and in the early summer, a heady, orange-like perfume.
Japanese maples are another exotic, but one much more picky about their surroundings. I've tried to grow them but never had any luck.
These two trees, though, share a tiny front yard on the Plateau. Each time I pass I stop to admire the play of colour and form. Whoever planted them had an eye for pleasing combinations as well as a green thumb to make them thrive.
