Firebirds turn out to be real. Maybe.

Honestly, I would have guessed that this is about as likely as starfish making musical fiddles out of shells to serenade each other under the water.
The gist of the article is that they claim to have confirmed something fairly common in Aboriginal lore, that some “birds of prey” in Australia take burning twigs from an active fire to another site, attempting and sometimes succeeding in spreading the fire to a new location in order to flush out rodents and other prey.

Survival – The Heels-Down Squat. You May Want This.

Put another way, how enabled, how independent and self-sufficient can you possibly be if you cannot get into a comfortable, non-reclining resting position without the aid of a wooden or steel framework that is designed and built specifically for that purpose? We are handicapping ourselves with what has become an actual medical dependence on chairs, just as though we were dependent on any other medical appliance.

Surprise, surprise… survival on Mars will require generalists and appropriate tech, not specialists and high tech.

None of these general thoughts should come as a surprise. Survival on Earth has almost always implied stepping down from whatever level of technology has failed to a level that still works. It’s one of the most fundamental principles, and a reason that the line between “survivalism” and interest in various forms of primitive technology is so blurred.

National Geographic “Origins”, “Spark of Civilization”, another swing, another miss

I stayed up the other night (despite being very tired) to watch the premier episode of National Geograpic’s new series “Origins”, entitled “Spark of Civilization”, which promised to enlighten us as to the importance and origins of our use of fire as a species, a subject I find fascinating.

EDC and Man as the Tool-Carrying Animal

Speculating about the evolution of thought in early hominids is risky, we all suffer from the “explaining water to a fish” problem in that basic ideas that were once hard-to-grasp inventions to humans and proto-humans are now so inherent in being human that we can barely perceive them at all. Still, it seems fairly certain that tool-use must have gone through some distinct phases: