Month: September 2004

It is indeed ironic that military bases and no-go zones and the like — what one might think of as both highly dangerous locations and emblematic of death — are often refuges for life. Thus, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal here in Denver is a major bald eagle nesting ground and wildlife preserve (despite having been a chemical weapons and pesticide manufacturing plant). And, similarly, the Rocky Flats site, where nuclear weapons were built, is also on tap as a wildlife refuge.

The fact is, if you take explicit and backed-by-lethal-force steps to keep humans out of an area, wildlife will tend to survive and flourish.

Thus, the DMZ between North and South Korea — heavily mined and under constant scrutiny by both sides for decades — is a last refuge for much of the wildlife indigenous to that peninsula. And there are concerns that if the two Koreas begin to make nice to each other, that the rapaciously capitalistic South and the protest-and-die North might simply carve up the territory — literally.

This natural barrier traverses wetlands, rice paddies, prairies, hills, forests and mountains for more than 150 miles. Enclosed by barbed wire and left virtually untouched since it was created in 1953, the zone has become a haven for animals, birds and plants that are seldom seen elsewhere on the peninsula.
Migratory birds, including the endangered black-faced spoonbill and the white-naped and red-crowned cranes, fly in and out, oblivious to land barriers. Rare animals like the Asiatic black bear, the Eurasian lynx, goral antelopes – and maybe even the tiger – make this area their year-round home.
But these days, thousands of South Koreans pass every week through an eastern corridor to a resort in North Korea; on the western side, a new highway and a railroad linking the two sides have been built.
“The DMZ is the last major vestige of Korea’s natural heritage,” said Kim Ke Chung, a professor at the Center for BioDiversity Research at Penn State and chairman of the DMZ Forum, an organization based in the United States that is dedicated to preserving the zone. “It’s probably the only good thing to come out of the Korean War and cold war. So we have to preserve this as a nature reserve.”

(via BoingBoing)

A recent study seems to indicate that Newborns have a similar facial aesthetic to adults.

Babies are born with an eye for beauty. Infants only hours old will choose to stare at an attractive face rather than an unattractive one – and they also prefer to listen to Vivaldi straight, rather than Vivaldi backwards.
According to Alan Slater, a developmental psychologist at the University of Exeter, humans may have a biologically ingrained preference for beauty.

As defined, at least.

He will tell the British Association science festival, which opens in Exeter today, that he presented a photographic choice to almost 100 newborns, on average only 2.5 days old.
The two sets of faces were composites created by computers from a number of volunteers’ faces. They followed the now widely observed psychological consensus that faces with features that are close to the human average in size and shape are generally perceived to be attractive.
It has been noted in the past that, shown two faces, babies a few months old will spend more time looking at the attractive face; and it has also been suggested that humans build up their concept of attractiveness based on an “average” of all the faces they see.
“But we get exactly the same effect with newborn infants,” said Dr Slater – “which is to say that newborn infants will look at the more attractive of two faces.”
[…] “It used to be thought that new-born babies came into the world as a totally blank sheet of paper on which experience will then write,” he said yesterday. “But what we are finding more and more is that babies are born with a number of in-built mechanisms that help them to organise and make sense of their newly-perceived world – and one of these is that they display an attractiveness effect.”

Reading this, I don’t know that it’s as clear-cut as, say, some do. It means that babies have some sort of ability to latch onto caregivers based on appearance (though even that may be very quick to develop, for survival’s sake, even in just a few days), and while the sample set might be small, identifying an “attractive” average would certainly be possible.

I also worry a scosh about conflating the concept of an “average” of faces to being “attractive” (attracting attention) and thus to being “beautiful,” given the connotations thereof.

Still, an interesting study.

(via Cronaca)