Helen Keller — inspiration to generations and inspiration for an entire genre of schoolyard humor — and her teacher and friend Anne Sullivan in a clip from 1930 in which they describe the way in which Helen learned how to speak … It’s a fascinating little clip which pays homage to a woman who, even beyond her amazing circumstances, was a radical socialist, suffragist, and supporter of birth control, who was friends with the likes of Mark Twain and who worked tirelessly to champion the rights of both the downtrodden and the physically disabled.
I ordered my AcerAspire One Netbook recently. And I love it! At just under 1kg light, it’s the perfect tool for everywhere browsing, blogging (this post is written on it). One of the first things I did when I received it in the post is install Debian Lenny on it, and it’s the coolest gadget since sliced bread.
But this not what I want to talk about.
I cleared my room out today, which included throwing out the box that my Acer Aspire One shipped in. My green conscious is slowly awaking in me, so I set about to pull all the little leaflets out of heir sleeves and bag, and sort the lot my material into the recycling boxes. That is when it hit me. Just how much stuff is there? As anyone who’s got their wits about them, I don’t read the manual to figure out how to plug it all together and get going, so I never looked any deeper into the box that was necessary to get put all the accessories. So it it never occored to me how much rubbish is in the box. There is a single sheet of licence agreement, wrapped in a LDPE wrapper and given some strength by adding a sheet of cardboard behind it.
I’m delighted by Elaine Morgan’s hypothesis that humans evolved from aquatic apes.
Elaine Morgan is a tenacious proponent of the aquatic ape hypothesis: the idea that humans evolved from primate ancestors who dwelt in watery habitats. Hear her spirited defense of the idea — and her theory on why mainstream science doesn’t take it seriously.
