Chimps

ed. note-- written during Dan's course, while staying at Sweetwaters-Ol Pejeta ranch which is in the same (large-scale) neighborhood as Mpala
I have a tendency to anthropomorphize most of the animals that I see or study. I empathize with ants, nature's successful communists*, and lizards, who live the life I want to lead when I am 90, but it is particularly easy with mammals, because they really are like humans. According to other mammals, at least, mammalia includes some of the most intelligent species, like dolphins and elephants. Whenever we run across a herd of elephants, a certain train of thought automatically runs through my mind: How many steps away from civilization are these creatures? Do they need any new parts, or can they make do with their trunks and all they need is a bright new idea? If they had already established civilization, would we know about it?
So, I was really excited to see the chimp sanctuary at Ol Pejeta, because in my mind, chimps are basically humans that don't get it yet. They have just about everything we have, anatomically, albeit their pelvis needs some adjustment for permanent bipedalism. They even have tools and all that. Seeing the chimps would be like going back in time and seeing wild humans. And of course, that idea leads to all sorts of crazy fantasies about learning to work with chimps and holding workshops to show them how to farm and how to build houses for themselves and how to manage theater productions.
Unfortunately, given the time constraints and the barrier of a giant electric fence, none of those workshops got off the ground. Also, actually seeing them blew my notion of chimps, or at least these chimps, being receptive proto-people. Apart from the two males who did a team-effort rock siege of our Land Rover, the chimps we saw didn't seem to have much ambition. A few of them were lying on the ground, and would turn over occasionally, and quite a few were picking leaves off of acacias and eating them. One was sitting on the ground hugging itself and rocking back and forth, in typical crazy-person fashion, which gave the impression less of this as a blossoming community of chimp creativity and progress, but more of an outdoor asylum for those animals not fit to be members of society. To be fair, though, if you looked in on a group of people stuck in a cage in the middle of the woods, they would probably be doing just about the same things. And, really, when you think about it, trying to get chimps to be more like humans would probably be bad for humans and chimps.

*from whose example we can conclude that communism would have worked if only everyone was related, and female, and only one member of the nation reproduced

Internet... more like out-ternet. Or something clever.

The line I've been fed about our internet connection here is that when it rains in Turino, Italy, we lose our internet connection. If this is the case, someone over in Turino had better go looking for some Gopherwood and build an ark. But, after a few days of constantly hitting refresh on my inbox to see if the fickle minor deity in charge of turning on the internet for Africa had gotten out of bed yet, it finally worked! And I did a little victory dance in front of a few Masters' students from Leeds that I had never met before. So now I am able to email my funding application, which is due in three hours and I should have done ages ago, and write to you, internet.
So, we sort of finished MAE 436 today, insofar as now the course is over. We still have homework and projects to turn in, though. Funny the way that happens. And you know what that means... 1 more course! And it is going to be wonderful for a whole host of reasons:

1. It is being taught by Kelly Caylor and Trenton something, who I want to be best friends with forever because they are awesome ( I haven't run this by them yet... we'll just let things run their course and we'll be making friendship bracelets for each other in no time)
   
2. Kelly and Trenton have tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of really cool measuring equipment that they're letting us play with! Like a Laikor, which measures the photosynthesis rate of leaves while they are still on the plant. And a tiny laser that measures isotope ratios in the air. And a Unicorn Machine, where you point it at any ungulate and it becomes a unicorned version of that animal!
3. It is called Ecohydrology, which sounds cool
4. It's about plants, which means that we can go over and touch all of the things that we are studying, and they won't run away or burn our retinas like the bloody tin foil reflectors for our solar ovens
   
5. Did I mention how cool Kelly and Trenton are?
   
6. We get to go home afterwards

Anyway, it's Josephine's birthday so I'm going to go watch Monster's Inc projected on a bedsheet and maybe have a Tusker.

Today's blog: A Short Story

Once upon a time there was a tiny tiger with too many teeth. Then one day he lost all of his teeth, and so a bunch of engineers invented screws with laser microtexturing that fit right into the gums and had zirconium teeth coated with enamel so they were very strong and not cytotoxic and they looked just like his old teeth, only better and more expensive. Then he spent a lot too many hours trying to get wire mesh to fit inside of a poorly constructed solar oven. He was very grumpy. But then he finished writing his funding application, and so he expected to be much happier, but surprisingly, he still was pretty grumpy. It was the worst kind of surprise.

This was basically my day, but without the tiger.