Alex's Last Words

Excerpts from:
Brainy Parrot Dies, Emotive to the End
September 11, 2007 -- By Benedict Carey, The New York Times

He knew his colors and shapes, he learned more than 100 English words, and with his own brand of one-liners he established himself in television shows, scientific reports and news articles as perhaps the world’s most famous talking bird.

But last week Alex, an African gray parrot, died, apparently of natural causes, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who studied and worked with the parrot for most of his life and published reports of his progress in scientific journals. The parrot was 31.

Scientists have long debated whether any other species can develop the ability to learn human language. Alex’s language facility was, in some ways, more surprising than the feats of primates that have been taught American Sign Language, like Koko the gorilla, trained by Penny Patterson at the Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org in Woodside, Calif., or Washoe the chimpanzee, studied by R. Allen and Beatrice Gardner at the University of Nevada in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1977, when Dr. Pepperberg, then a doctoral student in chemistry at Harvard, bought Alex from a pet store, scientists had little expectation that any bird could learn to communicate with humans, as opposed to just mimicking words and sounds. Research in other birds had been not promising.

But by using novel methods of teaching, Dr. Pepperberg prompted Alex to learn scores of words, which he could put into categories, and to count small numbers of items, as well as recognize colors and shapes.

“The work revolutionized the way we think of bird brains,” said Diana Reiss, a psychologist at Hunter College who works with dolphins and elephants. “That used to be a pejorative, but now we look at those brains — at least Alex’s — with some awe.”

Other scientists, while praising the research, cautioned against characterizing Alex’s abilities as human. The parrot learned to communicate in basic expressions — but he did not show the sort of logic and ability to generalize that children acquire at an early age, they said.

“There’s no evidence of recursive logic, and without that you can’t work with digital numbers or more complex human grammar,” said David Premack, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Pepperberg used an innovative approach to teach Alex. African grays are social birds, and quickly pick up some group dynamics. In experiments, Dr. Pepperberg would employ one trainer to, in effect, compete with Alex for a small reward, like a grape. Alex learned to ask for the grape by observing what the trainer was doing to get it; the researchers then worked with the bird to help shape the pronunciation of the words...

Even up through last week, Alex was working with Dr. Pepperberg on compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, she recalled, Alex looked at her and said: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”

He was found dead in his cage the next morning, Dr. Pepperberg said.

The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono

The Man Who Planted Trees (L'homme qui plantait des arbres)
The Story of Elzéard Bouffier
1953 -- By Jean Giono
Animated adaptation by Frédéric Back in 1987

Rabbit-Proof Fence Has Unintended Consequences

At Australia’s Bunny Fence, Variable Cloudiness Prompts Climate Study
August 14, 2007 -- By Sonal Noticewala, The New York Times

A fence built to prevent rabbits from entering the Australian outback has unintentionally allowed scientists to study the effects of land use on regional climates.

The rabbit-proof fence — or bunny fence — in Western Australia was completed in 1907 and stretches about 2,000 miles. It acts as a boundary separating native vegetation from farmland. Within the fence area, scientists have observed a strange phenomenon: above the native vegetation, the sky is rich in rain-producing clouds. But the sky on the farmland side is clear.


Researchers led by Tom Lyons of Murdoch University in Australia and Udaysankar S. Nair of the University of Alabama in Huntsville have come up with three possible explanations for this difference in cloudiness.

One theory is that the dark native vegetation absorbs and releases more heat into the atmosphere than the light-colored crops. These native plants release heat that combines with water vapor from the lower atmosphere, resulting in cloud formation.

Another hypothesis is that the warmer air on the native scrubland rises, creating a vacuum in the lower atmosphere that is then filled by cooler air from cropland across the fence. As a result, clouds form on the scrubland side.

A third idea is that a high concentration of aerosols — particles suspended in the atmosphere — on the agricultural side results in small water droplets and a decrease in the probability of rainfall. On the native landscape, the concentration of aerosols is lower, translating into larger droplets and more rainfall.

Within the last few decades, about 32 million acres of native vegetation have been converted to croplands west of the bunny fence. On the agricultural side of the fence, rainfall has been reduced by 20 percent since the 1970s.

Dr. Nair speculates that increases in the world’s population will prompt the clearing of more land to increase food production. But he wonders whether, in the long run, “we will reach a point of land clearing that will diminish food production,” because rainfall has decreased.

Dr. Lyons said he hoped the research would help scientists “understand the relationships between the land surface and atmosphere and to provide ideas for sustainable agricultural practices.”

The bunny fence, as it turns out, failed to prevent rabbits from entering the farmland, but it has successfully blocked kangaroos and emus.

Death Valley, Galaxies and Sailing Stones

I recently found this image of Death Valley on the NASA: Astronomy Picture of the Day website. I liked it so much that it is now part of this site. Futility Closet points out that rocks, like the one in this image, 'sail' extraordinarily well at Racetrack Playa in Death Valley. Nobody has seen them move because it may only occur once every two or three years, but many assume that wind is the culprit.

Gasoline Is Still Less Expensive Than Scorpion Venom!

Excerpt from:
Think Gas Is Expensive? Try Scorpion Venom
May 16, 2007 -- WSJ Energy Roundup Blog

In Energy Roundup’s post yesterday on a national gasoline boycott, some readers noted that Americans complain about paying more than $3 a gallon for gasoline, but will gladly pony up a lot more than that for a latte at Starbucks.

“Tomorrow, I recommend that we boycott Starbucks. They are charging outrageous sums of money for coffee drinks — from about $18 to $36 per gallon,” commented one reader, Jeffrey Brown. “It is kind of funny when you think about it. Americans will gladly pay up to $36 per gallon for water, some flavoring, a little sugar and some milk, but they are outraged over paying $3 for one gallon of gasoline that will transport them and three or four other people for up to 50 miles in safety and comfort."

On a page called "The Price of a Gallon," Cockeyed ranks 47 products from the least-expensive (tap water, $0 per gallon) to the most-expensive (scorpion venom, $38,858,507.46) and everything in between, including Budweiser ($8.88), Red Bull ($30.69), Tabasco sauce ($94.46), Penicillin ($301.49), human blood ($1,514.79) and Chanel No. 5 perfume ($25,600)...

Forest Ethics: Paper Campaign Facts

Here are some slightly dated, but interesting, facts on forests and paper consumption:

Paper Campaign Facts
Forest Ethics

- Old growth forests make up 16% of the virgin tree fiber used each year to make paper products. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999, p21))

- Nearly 80% of the world's original old growth forests have been logged or severely degraded already and in the US we have lost 95% of our old growth forests. (source: Bryant et al., The Last Frontier Forests: Ecosystems and Economies on the Edge (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute 1997; US Forest Service, 1997 Resources Planning Act Assessment, Final Statistics, July 2000))

- 77% of the pulpwood harvested in the US is harvested in the South. (Smith & Sheffield 2000, A Brief Overview of the Forest Resources of the United States, USDA Forest Service, Washington DC and Asheville, NC).

- More than 90% of the printing and writing paper made in the US is from virgin tree fiber. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

- 40% of the world's industrial logging goes into making paper and this is expected to reach 50% in the near future. (Abromovitz, Taking a Stand: Cultivating a New Relationship with the World's Forests (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1998))

- Nearly a ton of new recycled paper can be made from a ton of recycled stock compared to the 2-3.5 tons of trees required to make a ton of virgin paper. This is one of the reasons recycled paper results in lower solid waste byproducts and uses less energy, water and chemicals. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

- Worldwide, the pulp and paper industry is the 5th largest industrial consumer of energy - in the US it is the 2nd largest industrial user of energy. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

- Paper comprises roughly 40% of the municipal solid waste burden in many industrial countries (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

Encyclopedia of Life

Encyclopedia of Life (Press Release)
May 9, 2007 -- EOL

"We intend to make key components of the Encyclopedia available to the general public starting some time in 2008. As a ballpark estimate, we believe that we can produce the full encyclopedia in about 10 years."

A Leap for All Life: World’s Leading Scientists Announce Creation of “Encyclopedia of Life”
Biodiversity, Science Communities Unite Behind Epic Effort To Promote Biodiversity, Document All 1.8 Million Named Species on Planet

Many of the world’s leading scientific institutions today announced the launch of the Encyclopedia of Life, an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens will have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered.

The Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Smithsonian Institution, and Biodiversity Heritage Library joined together to initiate the project, bringing together species and software experts from across the world. The Missouri Botanical Garden has become a full partner, and discussions are taking place this week with leaders of the new Atlas of Living Australia. The Encyclopedia today also announced the initial membership of its Institutional Council, which spans the globe, and whose members will play key roles in realizing this immense project. An international advisory board of distinguished individuals will also help guide the Encyclopedia.

The effort is spurred by a $10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and will ultimately serve as a global beacon for biodiversity and conservation.

“The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” said Dr. James Edwards, currently Executive Secretary of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility who today was officially named Executive Director of the Encyclopedia of Life. “Through collaboration, we all can increase our appreciation of the immense variety of life, the challenges to it, and ways to conserve biodiversity. The Encyclopedia of Life will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level. Even five years ago, we could not create such a resource, but advances in technology for searching, annotating, and visualizing information now permit us, indeed mandate us to build the Encyclopedia of Life.”

Over the next 10 years, the Encyclopedia of Life will create Internet pages for all 1.8 million species currently named. It will expedite the classification of the millions of species yet to be discovered and catalogued as well. The pages, housed at http://www.eol.org, will provide written information and, when available, photographs, video, sound, location maps, and other multimedia information on each species. Built on the scientific integrity of thousands of experts around the globe, the Encyclopedia will be a moderated wiki-style environment, freely available to all users everywhere.

“The Encyclopedia of Life will be a vital tool for scientists, researchers, and educators across the globe, providing easy access to the latest and best information on all known species,” said Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “Technology is allowing science to grasp the immense complexity of life on this planet. Sharing what we know, we can protect Earth's biodiversity and better conserve our natural heritage.”

“For more than 250 years, scientists have catalogued life, and our traditional catalogues have become unwieldy,” said Ralph E. Gomory, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “The Encyclopedia of Life will provide the citizens of the world a ‘macroscope’ of almost unimaginable power to find and create understanding of biodiversity across the globe. It will enable us to map and discover things so numerous or vast they overwhelm our normal vision.”

Scientists began creating individual web pages for species in the 1990s. However, Internet technology needed to mature to allow fast and efficient creation of a comprehensive Encyclopedia. While specific Encyclopedia of Life efforts, including the scanning of key research publications and data, have been underway since January 2006, work has accelerated due to the support provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the recent discussion of the Encyclopedia of Life by renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson at the March 2007 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference.

One of the world’s foremost scientists and environmentalists, Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, “wished” for the establishment of the Encyclopedia of Life during his TED Conference address. Noting that “our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is ever discovered,” Wilson called for a contemporary, dynamic portrait of the living Earth.

“I wish that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life,” Wilson said at TED. “What excites me is that since I first put forward this idea, science has advanced, technology has moved forward. Today, the practicalities of making this encyclopedia real are within reach as never before.”

Ultimately, the Encyclopedia of Life will provide users the opportunity to personalize the learning experience through its “my eol” feature. The site can be made available in all major languages and will connect scientific communities concerned with ants to apples to zebras. As part of its work, the Encyclopedia of Life will collaborate and partner with a wide range of organizations, individuals, and experts to help strengthen the Encyclopedia and its impact on communities throughout the world.

“The solidarity of the U.S. and global communities for the Encyclopedia of Life is tremendously exciting and lifts my confidence that this vast, romantic global effort will succeed,” Edwards said. “We are also encouraged by the declaration in March 2007 by the environment ministers of the G8 nations to foster a global species information system.”

While initial work will emphasize species of animals, plants, and fungi, the design can be extended to encompass microbial life.

To provide depth behind the portal page for each species, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a consortium that holds most of the relevant scientific literature, will scan and digitize tens of millions of pages of the scientific literature that will offer open access to detailed knowledge. In fact, the BHL now has scanning centers operating in London, Boston, and Washington DC, and has scanned the first 1.25 million pages for the Encyclopedia.

“I dream that in a few years wherever a reference to a species occurs on the Internet, there will be a hyperlink to its page in the Encyclopedia of Life,” concluded Edwards.


ABOUT THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE
The Encyclopedia of Life is a collaborative scientific effort led by the Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution, and Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium including the core institutions and also the American Museum of Natural History (New York), Natural History Museum (London), New York Botanical Garden, and Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew). Ultimately, the Encyclopedia of Life will provide an online database for all 1.8 million species now known to live on Earth. When completed, http://www.eol.org will serve as a global biodiversity tool, providing scientists, policymakers, students, and citizens information they need to discover and protect the planet and encourage learning and conservation.

Cold Turkey, by Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Excerpt from:
Cold Turkey
May 10, 2004 -- By Kurt Vonnegut

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

What Economists Can Learn From Evolutionary Theorists

What Economists Can Learn From Evolutionary Theorists
November 1996 -- By Paul Krugman
(From a talk given to the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy)

To read the real thing in evolution - to read, say, John Maynard Smith's Evolution and the Theory of Games, or William Hamilton's new book of collected papers, Narrow Roads in Gene Land, is a startling experience to someone whose previous idea of evolution comes from magazine articles and popular books. The field does not look at all like the stories. What it does look like, to a remarkable degree, is - dare I say it? - neoclassical economics. And it offers very little comfort to those who want a refuge from the harsh discipline of maximization and equilibrium.[...]

Personally, I consider myself a proud neoclassicist. By this I clearly don't mean that I believe in perfect competition all the way. What I mean is that I prefer, when I can, to make sense of the world using models in which individuals maximize and the interaction of these individuals can be summarized by some concept of equilibrium. The reason I like that kind of model is not that I believe it to be literally true, but that I am intensely aware of the power of maximization-and-equilibrium to organize one's thinking - and I have seen the propensity of those who try to do economics without those organizing devices to produce sheer nonsense when they imagine they are freeing themselves from some confining orthodoxy.

Biological Look At Marmosets And Chimerism

Funky monkeys (Subscription)
March 29, 2007 -- The Economist

Marmosets give birth to their genetic nieces and nephews.

It does not take a biologist to tell that there are two sorts of twins. Twins can be genetically identical or they can be as different as siblings that were born at different times. Most marmosets, though, fall somewhere in between. These small New World monkeys may be cute, but they are chimeras nonetheless. Like the monster from Greek mythology, many marmosets are a mixture of more than one individual. They are, genetically, both themselves and their sibling at the same time.

There are two other odd (and indeed cute) things about marmosets. One is that they are always conceived as twins. The other is that they are unusually caring towards one another. Fathers are particularly and peculiarly doting. Now Corinna Ross and her colleagues at the University of Nebraska have found evidence to suggest the former oddity explains the latter. They have done so by showing that chimerism extends to all sorts of tissues, including marmoset sex cells.

That insight arose when Dr Ross DNA-fingerprinted 12 types of tissue from 39 dead marmosets, in order to work out how frequently cells containing a twin's genome occurred in different parts of the body. Marmosets are not equal mixtures of two genetic individuals. They become chimeras not because their embryos merge but because more often than not their placentas do. They thus share their embryonic blood supplies. That allows them to exchange stem cells, which then develop into more specialised sorts of cell in their new bodies.

Chimeric cells were scattered everywhere, including the sex cells. This means that, in principle, a marmoset can either father (if male) or give birth to (if female) a baby that is its niece or nephew rather than its son or daughter.

To find out if this actually happens, Dr Ross turned her attention to living marmosets. She used hair, blood and saliva samples to identify chimeric animals among the 36 sets of twins in her colony. First, as she reports in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she proved the marmosets made babies from their chimeric sex cells. This happened even when the twins were brother and sister rather than being of the same sex.

That is bizarre, because female mammals have two copies of the X chromosome, and males have one X and one Y. Any chimeric female that passed on her twin brother's genes must have developed eggs from an XY stem cell instead of the normal XX. Conversely, a chimeric male that passed on his twin sister's genes grew sperm from an XX stem cell, rather than XY. Dr Ross found examples of both.

This done, she tried to work out whether chimerism influenced parental care in marmosets. Zoologists think of caring for others as selfish behaviour, which animals only bother with to improve the chances of their genes being passed on to future generations. Creatures therefore help to bring up babies only to the extent that they believe they are related to them. In marmosets, caring means carrying, so Dr Ross recorded the time each baby marmoset was carried by its mother and by its father during the first fortnight of life. Mothers spent less time carrying those of their offspring who were chimeras than they did carrying those that were non-chimeric. Fathers, however, behaved in the opposite way.

Why that happened is not clear. But one possibility is that, in a species in which females routinely mate with several males, chimerism evolved as a way of duping males into looking after offspring that are not their own. Chimerism, in other words, might confuse a male who fathered one twin into thinking he is dad to both.

This could happen because a chimeric twin that grew from an egg which his sperm did not fertilise would nonetheless have some skin cells containing his genes. The scent-producing cells of that skin would give off pheromones signalling his paternity. Thus by mixing two fathers' genes between two infants, a female creates a situation in which both males consider it in their interest to care for both offspring—a double bonus.

A twenty-first century science

A twenty-first century science (Subscription)
February 1, 2007 -- By Duncan J. Watts, Nature

If handled appropriately, data about Internet-based communication and interactivity could revolutionize our understanding of collective human behaviour.

Few would deny that many of the major problems currently facing humanity are social and economic in nature. From the apparent wave of religious fundamentalism sweeping the Islamic world (and parts of the Western world), to collective economic security, global warming and the great epidemics of our times, powerful yet mysterious social forces come into play.

But few readers of Nature would consider social science to be the science of the twenty-first century. Although economics, sociology, political science and anthropology have produced a plethora of findings regarding human social behaviour, they have been much less successful than the physical and life sciences in producing a coherent theoretical framework that can account for their discoveries. This is not because social scientists are less clever than their peers in other fields, but because social phenomena are among the hardest scientific problems to solve.

Social phenomena involve the interactions of large (but still finite) numbers of heterogeneous entities, the behaviours of which unfold over time and manifest themselves on multiple scales. It is hard to understand, for example, why even a single organization behaves the way it does without considering (a) the individuals who work in it; (b) the other organizations with which it competes, cooperates and compares itself to; (c) the institutional and regulatory structure within which it operates; and (d) the interactions between all these components. To draw an analogy with physics, one must solve the equivalent of quantum mechanics, general relativity and the multi-body problem at the same time — even string theorists don't have it that bad! Fortunately, recent developments in network science auger some hope for the future.

For the past 50 years or so, sociologists have thought deeply about the importance of interactions between people, institutions and markets in determining collective social behaviour. They have even built a language — network analysis — to describe these interactions in quantitative terms. But the objects of analysis, such as friendship ties, are hard to observe, especially for large numbers of people over extended periods of time. As a result, network data have historically comprised one-time snapshots, often for quite small groups. And most studies have relied on self-reports from participants, which suffer from cognitive biases, errors of perception and framing ambiguities.

The striking proliferation over the past decade of Internet-based communication and interactivity, however, is beginning to lift these constraints. For the first time, we can begin to observe the real-time interactions of millions of people at a resolution that is sensitive to effects at the level of the individual. Meanwhile, ever-faster computers permit us to simulate large networks of social interactions. The result has been tremendous interest in social networks: thousands of papers and a growing number of books have been published in less than a decade, leading some to herald the arrival of a 'science of networks'.

This label, unsurprisingly, has attracted its share of critics, and with some justification. Some of the ideas are not as new as sometimes advertised; many of the popular models are too simplistic to stand up to scrutiny; and even the more sober-looking empirical studies tend to use data that happen to be available, rather than obtained with a specific research question in mind. As a result, despite the avalanche of publications and breathless headlines, it is probably true that little has been learned about real social processes.

Nevertheless, the near future looks promising, especially if a few fundamental features of social networks can be emphasized. First, social networks are not static structures, but evolve in time as a consequence of the social and organizational environments in which they are embedded. Second, they are not unitary, but multiplex, meaning that people maintain a portfolio of types of ties — formal, informal, strong, weak, sexual, business and friendship — each of which serves different functions. And finally, network structure must be understood within the larger framework of collective social dynamics. People do not just interact: their interactions have consequences for the choices they, and others, make.

Studies that combine all these features are currently beyond the state of the art, but two of my group's recent projects indicate tentative progress. The first used the anonymized e-mail logs of a university community of around 40,000 people to track daily network evolution over a year as a function of existing network structure, shared activities (such as classes) and individual attributes. Dynamic data of this type may shed light on the relative roles of structural constraints and individual preferences in determining, for example, observed homogeneity of friendship circles.

The second was a Web-based experiment in which 14,000 participants were asked to listen to, rate and download songs by unknown bands. Some participants made their decisions independently, and others could see how many times the songs had been downloaded previously. Experiments of this kind measure not only the influence that individuals have over each others' decisions, but also the consequences of these individual-level effects on macro properties, such as the predictability of 'hit' products.

Clearly, the leap from these still simplistic studies to the 'big questions' of social science remains formidable. In this regard, cooperation between academic researchers and the large Internet companies who currently dominate data collection may be extremely productive. Although such collaborations will encounter challenges, including privacy and intellectual-property issues, the questions are too difficult to be left to intuition, or even experience, alone. We must start asking how the technological revolution of the Internet can lead to a revolution in social science as well.

Newsweek Covers: October 16, 2006

See also: Newsweek September, 2006 & Time April 2, 2007

Frilled Shark (Chlamydoselachus anguineus)

This video shows rare footage of a frilled shark in shallow water after it was captured.

R.I.P. Harriet the Tortoise

On June 23rd 2006 "Harriet the tortoise, one of the world's oldest known living creatures, died in Australia aged about 175." Here is the article from BBC News:

Senior vet Dr John Hangar told Australia's ABC that Harriet, a Giant Galapagos tortoise, had died of heart failure after a short illness. "She had a very fairly acute heart attack and thankfully passed away quietly overnight," Dr Hangar said.

Last year staff at Australia Zoo, where Harriet had lived for 17 years, held a party to celebrate her 175th birthday. Some people believe that Harriet was studied by British naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin took several young Giant Galapagos tortoises back to London after his epic voyage on board HMS Beagle.

DNA testing has suggested the giant creature was born around 1830, a few years before Darwin visited the Galapagos archipelago in 1835. However, Harriet belonged to a sub-species of tortoise only found on an island that Darwin never visited.

At the time of her 175th birthday party, Harriet weighed 150kg (23 stone) and was roughly the size of a dinner table. She was the star attraction at the Australia Zoo on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. Her keepers put her longevity down to a stress-free life.

The Origin of Tree-Sitters

On June 18th 2006, Henry Fountain wrote a New York Times article entitled, 'Rising Above the Environmental Debate'. Here is a brief history of tree-sitting:

When and where did tree-sitting originate? It began, by most accounts, in a grove of old-growth Douglas firs in the Willamette National Forest in western Oregon in the spring of 1985. Members of two environmental groups, Earth First and the Cathedral Forest Action Group, were trying to block logging in the forest and were frustrated that their tactics, including blockades and sit-ins on cartons of explosives used to blast roads, were not having much effect.

Mikal Jakubal, one of the protesters, recalled that at a campfire meeting one night, the subject of putting people in the trees came up. No logger, the thinking went, would cut down a tree with a person in it. But an old-growth fir, which has no branches for the first 50 or 60 feet, is not an easy tree to climb. Mr. Jakubal, who now lives in Redway, Calif., was a rock climber who had climbed El Capitan in Yosemite the year before. "I said, 'Well, I could get up in one of those old-growth trees no problem.' " Two mornings later, on May 20, Mr. Jakubal climbed the tree, hammering nails into the trunk every few feet to hang his climbing gear. When he got about 60 feet up, he spread out a portaledge — a platform used by rock climbers — and set up shop.

Since his climb, hundreds of people have taken up residence high in trees, usually to protest clear-cutting. The most famous tree-sitter, Julia Butterfly Hill, lived 180 feet up in a California redwood for 738 days, coming down in 1999 after a lumber company agreed to spare her tree, which she named Luna, and others in a three-acre tract. Tree-sitting was seen by some as a nonviolent alternative to "monkeywrenching," or environmental sabotage like tree spiking and vandalizing of equipment. "People thought if you were going to break the law, you should do it in a way that puts your own body on the line," Mr. Hirt said. The tactic was useful in getting news coverage. "Tree-sitting had a real interesting social order," he said. "There were the people who would climb the trees, and a whole support crew on the ground, including people who brought media people to the tree."

Loggers responded by trying to scare sitters — felling trees near them or occasionally cutting part of the way through an occupied tree. When that didn't work the companies opted for "extraction," most often accomplished by sending a crew up the tree.

Mr. Jakubal came down on his own, at the end of the first day. Loggers had cut down all the trees around him and he wanted to inspect the damage. "It was my first direct action," he said. "I was very naïve. The police were waiting in the bushes."

Mr. Jakubal was arrested, and the tree was cut down the next morning.

Bush Diagnosed With ATDD

I found this August 20, 2003 article by The Onion entertaining.

Pointing to massive war-time tax cuts, physicians from the Congressional Budget Office diagnosed President Bush with attention-to-deficit disorder Tuesday. "The president exhibits all the symptoms of ATDD: impulsiveness, restlessness, inability to focus on mounting U.S. debt likely to reach $400 billion by the year's end," Dr. Terrence Spellman said. "Failing to address his affliction could lead to serious long-term fiscal health problems for future generations of Americans." To treat the president's ATDD, Spellman prescribed Ritalin and an introductory course in high-school economics.