Link Banana

Because I didn’t know slugs could be so colorful.

(via kottke.org)

National Geographic has dug up a 1955 story by Heinrich Harrer — author of Seven Years In Tibet, and played by Brad Pitt in the eponymous movie — about his time in Tibet. It’s a rather fascinating read, and a great way to see how much the world has changed since then.

(via brijit)

Also of note: A similarly resurrected story. This one’s from 2002.

National Geographic’s got some interesting pictures of fascinating animals found in the Antarctic. Just go look at them.

(via Boing Boing)

Calvin Trillian does some reporting on Kolkata’s (Calcutta’s) person-powered rickshaws, and the government’s never-ceasing efforts to abolish them.

While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw wallahs come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.

(via Passport)

It’s also probably worth noting that Robert Kaplan takes a similar (but slightly bleaker and more coherent) tour through Kolkatta in The Atlantic.

Virginia Morrell’s article about how animals can learn and create was much more interesting than I expected. But then the last time I read National Geographic was when I was forced to in the sixth grade.

But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin’s evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.

(via brijit)