In 1930, in the Highlands of New Guinea, a group of Australian brothers looking for gold stumbled across thousands of Stone Age people who had no concept of the outside world.

They happened to bring a movie camera.   And that's probably all I need to say.

On a science site, we can make anything about science, including religious holidays.    Of course, there are some things that we can never know, because they involve the subjective nature of people and a history that's necessarily muddled.    We can't get people to agree on what happened during the Bush presidency despite millions of monkeys writing about it on the internet so deciphering what happened and why some 2,000 years ago is a special sort of impossible.(1)

Every once in a while people ask me about various features or functionality so, since it's a Saturday on a holiday weekend and there won't be as many people reading as usual (who want good science and not rubbish from me) I figure this is a good time.

1) The comment tracker in the upper right is my default way to know what is going on.   Why?  Because I have a lot of people on my friend list so if one of you has commented on an article, the comment tracker tells me; that basically means the community has already done the work telling me what is worth talking about.

I'm not usually much for video - text allows me to do three other things at the same time whereas video occupies two of my senses and annoys me when I am playing guitar.    And I would like to ban all use of "X Whisperer" after the name of every person who thinks they have something clever to say.

  But when someone I have never heard of (which means nothing, I am no microbiology expert) on a site I have never heard of(ditto regarding pop science) does something terrific in an interesting, elegant fashion,  I am willing to kill 18 minutes of my life not being ADD, or whatever they call people like me who usually have to do multiple things at once.  


So thanks Bonnie Bassler ... and you too Ted.com.