9/4/03
Ok.. went to the Doc this morning, and he's approved my going to a neurologist to see if there are any other alternatives to surgery. I'm doing reasonably well, so I've got high hopes and reasonable expectations. The insurance company has been hassling me doctor terribly, to the point of him mentioning, "I know it's not your fault, but they've disrupted the whole office with incessant requests and pointless forms." Apparently, they're under the doctor has orders now to put stuff in a file (I imagine circular) and just contend directly a maximum 2 times a week, and ignore the rest.
I wonder how things with my brother went at the courthouse today... I hope everything got sewn up with a minimum of fuss.
While I wait for 11 to roll along...
Digital Librarian: a librarian's choice of the best of the Web - Mucho Scotto-used linkage.
Cincinnati's Abandoned Subway System
I am a sucker for abandoned places, especially tunnels. The adventure possibilities are endless. Morlocks. Gene Hackman - Luthor's lair from the first Superman movie. The Beauty & the Beast TV series. Grant Morrison's Invisibles.
Giant lizard terrorizes Beirut
He's big, he's a carnivore, he's terrorizing the neighborhood’s residents, he's been swimming in people's pools and he's already claimed victims - several cats, a dog and apparently even a horse. In Lebanon, a giant lizard has been roaming the streets of a Beirut suburb for several weeks, eluding all the attempts by the authorities to catch it.
He's Lebanon's own Komodo Dragon, or so say the witnesses who have seen him.
Komodo Dragons are an endangered species and live in Indonesia.
They belong to the family of monitor lizards.
It's believed that the one living just outside Beirut was brought to Lebanon by a German who lived here and eventually set him free.
KOMODO DRAGON
About three months ago, one person sighted him, but his tale was dismissed as that of a crazy person.
But when pets started disappearing, people started paying attention.
It's still possible that the dragon is not a dragon at all, but one of many kinds of monitor lizards, all of which are carnivores.
The civil defense has stationed dozens of personnel all over the area, but it lacks the sophisticated equipment needed to catch the lizard without harming it.
The civil defense is now trying to take a picture of the lizard to prove it is indeed a Komodo Dragon and sent an appeal for help to nature and science TV channels.
Brutal tragedy ends storied tale
The internationally famous research by two Canadian naturalists showing that grizzly bears in the snow-swept Russian wilderness can live peacefully with humans has ended in a brutal tragedy, The Globe and Mail has learned.
The dozens of massive Siberian grizzly bears whose lives were catalogued for the groundbreaking eight-year study have been slaughtered in their nature sanctuary as a message to the Canadian researchers, Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, to abandon the project. Their research has been the subject of a PBS television documentary, a best-selling book and hundreds of news stories across three continents.
The people who killed the bears nailed the gall bladder of a baby grizzly to the research station's kitchen wall as a gruesome taunt.
After searching fruitlessly for two months for the bears' remains, Mr. Russell arrived back in Canada last Friday and broke his silence only after a week's soul-searching.
"The bears were killed so we would go home," he said in an exclusive interview with The Globe from his ranch in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta, adding later, "It is a brutal ending to our research."
The warning was effective. He and Ms. Enns, an eminent painter and photographer, have permanently shut down their isolated research station on the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East.
"It's an immense and immeasurable loss simultaneously to science and to Charlie and Maureen," said Paul Paquet, a Canadian biologist who studies large predators across the world. "It makes me sick to my stomach."
Dr. Paquet said the Kamchatka research, while controversial, had given humans a fresh and startling new understanding of grizzlies, demonstrating the complex emotional relationships among the mysterious creatures.
"He was an interpreter for the bears. He's been their ambassador," Dr. Paquet said.
He compared the explanatory role of Mr. Russell and Ms. Enns to that of Dian Fossey, who taught the world that mountain gorillas in the remote Rwandan highlands were shy vegetarians instead of the ferocious killers humans had thought. Many of her subjects were killed by poachers and eventually, in 1985, she was hacked to death by machete at her research site.
Mr. Russell and Ms. Enns are shattered at the fate of the bears they had spent years documenting, photographing and teaching to live fearlessly with humans.
"Do I have guilt? Only in that I taught these bears to trust humans and it backfired," Mr. Russell said.
The horrifying phase of this remarkable story began in May when Mr. Russell arrived at the cabin in Kamchatka for the eighth year in a row, in time, as he thought, to greet the bears as they came out of hibernation.
The cabin looked perfectly normal from the outside when he arrived by helicopter. And it was immaculately swept. But inside, he found the baby gall bladder in plain view on the wall. He went into denial.
"I just refused to believe that it was happening," he said. "I wanted to believe it was a prank."
As the days went by, the sinister reality set in. Usually, the bears would come to greet him within a day or two of his arrival, sniffing his scent in the air, nuzzling his footprints and then making contact.
This year, there was nothing. But there were fierce snowstorms and he thought they might be keeping the bears away. He traveled far and wide, looking for any sign of the bears he knew. Grizzlies have carefully defined territories and don't stray far from them. Mr. Russell's observations over the years have also taught him precisely where the bears gather food during the spring and summer.
By the time Ms. Enns arrived in early June, he had almost given up hope. Together, they searched for another few weeks. Finally, with tears in their eyes, they gave up.
Mr. Russell said that all the study bears and then some have been obliterated, a minimum of 20 and possibly as many as 40. He found spent ammunition outside the research station and signs that a helicopter had landed there.
He said the bears, including the young, had likely been shot, skinned and their gall bladders removed. Gall bladders are a pricey folk remedy in Russia and the Far East. He believes that the carcasses were then sunk in the lake or airlifted and dropped in the remote bush, as is the practice among bear poachers in this part of Russia.
Mr. Russell said it is not clear who ordered the bears killed. He suspects a Russian who has connections to the crime world. He said he does not believe he is personally in danger now that he is back in Canada.
"Even though it was a brutal ending, it was a Russian ending," Mr. Russell said.
He said he believes that the ranger program he and Ms. Enns set up and raised money to finance five years ago in order to protect the bears of Kamchatka from poachers had become too successful. Not only was it preventing the killing of bears, but also of salmon, highly profitable for their caviar-like roe.
Mr. Russell's aim has been to explore the heretical idea of whether humans and grizzlies could inhabit the same landscape without coming to violence. It is the ultimate conservation plan for the creatures — and an extremely controversial one in scientific circles — if it could be made to work. It's also replete with irony, given the story's ending.
Their project showed for the first time that grizzlies are predictable in their behavior and that they are not automatically dangerous to humans when they lose their fear of them.
The implications of that finding are huge. For millennia, the thinking has been that bears and humans must not mix. But as humans take over more and more of the wilderness that the animals need, the numbers of bears across the world are falling.
During their summers in Russia, the couple endured deprivation and miserable Siberian weather, and defied death on many occasions to test their radical grizzly theories.
They catalogued their adventures in the book Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka, published last fall by Random House. That, and a PBS special, Walking with Giants: The Grizzlies of Siberia, made Kamchatka grizzlies the most famous bears in the world.
A book of the extraordinarily tender photographs that Ms. Enns took of the study bears — all now slain — was set to be published this fall.
The grizzlies, which once roamed widely and thickly across the North American continent, have been reduced to an estimated 1,000 in the lower 48 United States. Another 40,000 or so live in Canada and Alaska. But the motherlode of the world's remaining grizzly DNA is in eastern Asia, where about 100,000 grizzlies live.
Of all those grizzly populations, the one based in Kamchatka is believed to be among the healthiest and densest in the world. That, and the fact that the Russian bears were unused to humans, drew Mr. Russell and Ms. Enns to set up their station.
Mr. Russell said he is tortured by the mental image of the giant bears happily approaching their killers.
"I can see how easily they were killed. That's my nightmare image," he said, his voice dropping almost to a whisper.
Male chromosome disappearing, scientist says
The human Y-chromosome is disappearing, but millions of males need not fear extinction, a leading Australian scientist says.
Jenny Graves, head of the Comparative Genomics Group at the Australian National University, Canberra, gave a lecture in Dunedin today on sex, genes and chromosomes as a guest of the Royal Society.
"I'd like to be remembered for having put on the table some quite shocking ideas about sex chromosome function and evolution," she said.
Prof Graves is internationally recognized for her work on the origin and evolution of human sex chromosomes, and on platypus and kangaroo genetics.
She points out that the human Y-chromosome once boasted 1438 genes.
Now, just 41 active genes remain, one of which, the SRY gene (sex region Y chromosome), determines whether the human embryo develops as a male or a female.
Active genes have disappeared from the genetically isolated male chromosome at the rate of about five every million years, she said.
At that rate, the Y was likely to vanish altogether in about eight million years, if not earlier.
However, all is not doom and gloom for the embattled male of the species.
The current sex-determining gene once had a different brain control function.
She reassured men that another male sex-determining gene would develop elsewhere, enabling men to survive the Y's demise.
"Evolution will find another way. Don't worry about it," she said.
Males can also find an unlikely source of comfort in the humble vole, a small, fluffy, big-toothed creature that flourishes in holes in the ground in the former Soviet republic Azerbaijan, and Iran.
The vole has no Y-chromosome, but produces a perfectly adequate supply of males from an as yet unidentified gene.
Ok.. went to the Doc this morning, and he's approved my going to a neurologist to see if there are any other alternatives to surgery. I'm doing reasonably well, so I've got high hopes and reasonable expectations. The insurance company has been hassling me doctor terribly, to the point of him mentioning, "I know it's not your fault, but they've disrupted the whole office with incessant requests and pointless forms." Apparently, they're under the doctor has orders now to put stuff in a file (I imagine circular) and just contend directly a maximum 2 times a week, and ignore the rest.
I wonder how things with my brother went at the courthouse today... I hope everything got sewn up with a minimum of fuss.
While I wait for 11 to roll along...
Digital Librarian: a librarian's choice of the best of the Web - Mucho Scotto-used linkage.
Cincinnati's Abandoned Subway System
I am a sucker for abandoned places, especially tunnels. The adventure possibilities are endless. Morlocks. Gene Hackman - Luthor's lair from the first Superman movie. The Beauty & the Beast TV series. Grant Morrison's Invisibles.
Giant lizard terrorizes Beirut
He's big, he's a carnivore, he's terrorizing the neighborhood’s residents, he's been swimming in people's pools and he's already claimed victims - several cats, a dog and apparently even a horse.
He's Lebanon's own Komodo Dragon, or so say the witnesses who have seen him.
Komodo Dragons are an endangered species and live in Indonesia.
They belong to the family of monitor lizards.
It's believed that the one living just outside Beirut was brought to Lebanon by a German who lived here and eventually set him free.
KOMODO DRAGON
- World's largest lizard
- Measures up to 3.1m
- Weighs up to 126kg
- Numbers estimated at 1,000 to 5,000
- Indigenous in Indonesia
- Nicknamed 'buaya darat' or land crocodile
About three months ago, one person sighted him, but his tale was dismissed as that of a crazy person.
But when pets started disappearing, people started paying attention.
It's still possible that the dragon is not a dragon at all, but one of many kinds of monitor lizards, all of which are carnivores.
The civil defense has stationed dozens of personnel all over the area, but it lacks the sophisticated equipment needed to catch the lizard without harming it.
The civil defense is now trying to take a picture of the lizard to prove it is indeed a Komodo Dragon and sent an appeal for help to nature and science TV channels.
Brutal tragedy ends storied tale
The internationally famous research by two Canadian naturalists showing that grizzly bears in the snow-swept Russian wilderness can live peacefully with humans has ended in a brutal tragedy, The Globe and Mail has learned.
The dozens of massive Siberian grizzly bears whose lives were catalogued for the groundbreaking eight-year study have been slaughtered in their nature sanctuary as a message to the Canadian researchers, Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, to abandon the project. Their research has been the subject of a PBS television documentary, a best-selling book and hundreds of news stories across three continents.
After searching fruitlessly for two months for the bears' remains, Mr. Russell arrived back in Canada last Friday and broke his silence only after a week's soul-searching.
"The bears were killed so we would go home," he said in an exclusive interview with The Globe from his ranch in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta, adding later, "It is a brutal ending to our research."
The warning was effective. He and Ms. Enns, an eminent painter and photographer, have permanently shut down their isolated research station on the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East.
"It's an immense and immeasurable loss simultaneously to science and to Charlie and Maureen," said Paul Paquet, a Canadian biologist who studies large predators across the world. "It makes me sick to my stomach."
Dr. Paquet said the Kamchatka research, while controversial, had given humans a fresh and startling new understanding of grizzlies, demonstrating the complex emotional relationships among the mysterious creatures.
"He was an interpreter for the bears. He's been their ambassador," Dr. Paquet said.
He compared the explanatory role of Mr. Russell and Ms. Enns to that of Dian Fossey, who taught the world that mountain gorillas in the remote Rwandan highlands were shy vegetarians instead of the ferocious killers humans had thought. Many of her subjects were killed by poachers and eventually, in 1985, she was hacked to death by machete at her research site.
Mr. Russell and Ms. Enns are shattered at the fate of the bears they had spent years documenting, photographing and teaching to live fearlessly with humans.
"Do I have guilt? Only in that I taught these bears to trust humans and it backfired," Mr. Russell said.
The horrifying phase of this remarkable story began in May when Mr. Russell arrived at the cabin in Kamchatka for the eighth year in a row, in time, as he thought, to greet the bears as they came out of hibernation.
The cabin looked perfectly normal from the outside when he arrived by helicopter. And it was immaculately swept. But inside, he found the baby gall bladder in plain view on the wall. He went into denial.
"I just refused to believe that it was happening," he said. "I wanted to believe it was a prank."
As the days went by, the sinister reality set in. Usually, the bears would come to greet him within a day or two of his arrival, sniffing his scent in the air, nuzzling his footprints and then making contact.
This year, there was nothing. But there were fierce snowstorms and he thought they might be keeping the bears away. He traveled far and wide, looking for any sign of the bears he knew. Grizzlies have carefully defined territories and don't stray far from them. Mr. Russell's observations over the years have also taught him precisely where the bears gather food during the spring and summer.
By the time Ms. Enns arrived in early June, he had almost given up hope. Together, they searched for another few weeks. Finally, with tears in their eyes, they gave up.
Mr. Russell said that all the study bears and then some have been obliterated, a minimum of 20 and possibly as many as 40. He found spent ammunition outside the research station and signs that a helicopter had landed there.
He said the bears, including the young, had likely been shot, skinned and their gall bladders removed. Gall bladders are a pricey folk remedy in Russia and the Far East. He believes that the carcasses were then sunk in the lake or airlifted and dropped in the remote bush, as is the practice among bear poachers in this part of Russia.
Mr. Russell said it is not clear who ordered the bears killed. He suspects a Russian who has connections to the crime world. He said he does not believe he is personally in danger now that he is back in Canada.
"Even though it was a brutal ending, it was a Russian ending," Mr. Russell said.
He said he believes that the ranger program he and Ms. Enns set up and raised money to finance five years ago in order to protect the bears of Kamchatka from poachers had become too successful. Not only was it preventing the killing of bears, but also of salmon, highly profitable for their caviar-like roe.
Mr. Russell's aim has been to explore the heretical idea of whether humans and grizzlies could inhabit the same landscape without coming to violence. It is the ultimate conservation plan for the creatures — and an extremely controversial one in scientific circles — if it could be made to work. It's also replete with irony, given the story's ending.
Their project showed for the first time that grizzlies are predictable in their behavior and that they are not automatically dangerous to humans when they lose their fear of them.
The implications of that finding are huge. For millennia, the thinking has been that bears and humans must not mix. But as humans take over more and more of the wilderness that the animals need, the numbers of bears across the world are falling.
During their summers in Russia, the couple endured deprivation and miserable Siberian weather, and defied death on many occasions to test their radical grizzly theories.
They catalogued their adventures in the book Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka, published last fall by Random House. That, and a PBS special, Walking with Giants: The Grizzlies of Siberia, made Kamchatka grizzlies the most famous bears in the world.
A book of the extraordinarily tender photographs that Ms. Enns took of the study bears — all now slain — was set to be published this fall.
The grizzlies, which once roamed widely and thickly across the North American continent, have been reduced to an estimated 1,000 in the lower 48 United States. Another 40,000 or so live in Canada and Alaska. But the motherlode of the world's remaining grizzly DNA is in eastern Asia, where about 100,000 grizzlies live.
Of all those grizzly populations, the one based in Kamchatka is believed to be among the healthiest and densest in the world. That, and the fact that the Russian bears were unused to humans, drew Mr. Russell and Ms. Enns to set up their station.
Mr. Russell said he is tortured by the mental image of the giant bears happily approaching their killers.
"I can see how easily they were killed. That's my nightmare image," he said, his voice dropping almost to a whisper.
Male chromosome disappearing, scientist says
The human Y-chromosome is disappearing, but millions of males need not fear extinction, a leading Australian scientist says.
Jenny Graves, head of the Comparative Genomics Group at the Australian National University, Canberra, gave a lecture in Dunedin today on sex, genes and chromosomes as a guest of the Royal Society.
"I'd like to be remembered for having put on the table some quite shocking ideas about sex chromosome function and evolution," she said.
Prof Graves is internationally recognized for her work on the origin and evolution of human sex chromosomes, and on platypus and kangaroo genetics.
She points out that the human Y-chromosome once boasted 1438 genes.
Now, just 41 active genes remain, one of which, the SRY gene (sex region Y chromosome), determines whether the human embryo develops as a male or a female.
Active genes have disappeared from the genetically isolated male chromosome at the rate of about five every million years, she said.
At that rate, the Y was likely to vanish altogether in about eight million years, if not earlier.
However, all is not doom and gloom for the embattled male of the species.
The current sex-determining gene once had a different brain control function.
She reassured men that another male sex-determining gene would develop elsewhere, enabling men to survive the Y's demise.
"Evolution will find another way. Don't worry about it," she said.
Males can also find an unlikely source of comfort in the humble vole, a small, fluffy, big-toothed creature that flourishes in holes in the ground in the former Soviet republic Azerbaijan, and Iran.
The vole has no Y-chromosome, but produces a perfectly adequate supply of males from an as yet unidentified gene.
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3:38:00 PM
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