The Surma, a pastoral people, originate from the remote plateaus of southwestern Ethiopia, near the border of Sudan. Both males and females of the Surma tribes shave their heads as a mark of beauty. The women wear lip plates; their lower lips are pierced and stretched as ever-larger plates are inserted over time. The larger the plate, the more appealing the woman, and indicates the number of cattle required for her dowry. This plate is worth 75 head of cattle.

IMAX theaters in several Southern cities have decided not to show a film on volcanoes out of concern that its references to evolution might offend those with fundamental religious beliefs.

"We've got to pick a film that's going to sell in our area. If it's not going to sell, we're not going to take it," said Lisa Buzzelli, director of an IMAX theater in Charleston that is not showing the movie. "Many people here believe in creationism, not evolution."

The film, "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," makes a connection between human DNA and microbes inside undersea volcanoes.

In this expanded interview transcript, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses birth, death, and the potential offered by non-biological thinking processes.
By: Lucas Conley

Fast Company: First off, without death, CEOs will never give up their jobs. There won't be any succession plans.

Ray Kurzweil: I don't think we need to kill people off to provide opportunity for new leadership and creativity. The marketplace of ideas and technologies is going to expand -- it has been for years. Look at the computer industry. 60 years ago it was a handful of research projects, and now it's a trillion-dollar industry.

FC: But biotech? Who's to say how quickly it will advance?

Kurzweil: A lot of people say you can't really tell the future, and there are certain things that are hard to predict. What will Google's stock be three years from now? That's hard to predict. But if you ask me what it will cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2010 or the cost to move a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2015, those things turn out to be remarkably predictable.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
By Jared Diamond
Copyright 2004

Classic English and French composers influenced by their language.

Would Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance or Debussy's Clair de Lune have sounded the same if the composers had been born in different countries? Probably not, according to researchers who have found that the melodies composers write are influenced by the language they speak.

The team's analysis shows that fluctuations in pitch in music written by classic French composers vary much less than in British music. The difference mirrors the patterns of pitch found in the corresponding languages.

Musicologists and linguists have tried to connect cultures' speech with their music in the past but have only had luck with tonal languages, such as Chinese, which assign meaning to words based on their pitch.

Being fashion-conscious is not confined to humans, research has shown.

Animals copy one another when making choices about places to live, where to eat and acquiring a mate.

Such behaviour allows the rapid transmission of non-genetic traits, giving rise to a form of "cultural evolution".

Researchers reviewed the evidence for animal fashion in the edition of the journal Science that appears today.

The team, led by Etienne Danchin, from the CNRS research institution in Paris, wrote: "Psychologists, economists and advertising moguls have long known that human decision-making is strongly influenced by the behaviour of others.

"A rapidly accumulating body of evidence suggests that the same is true in animals ... Public information can lead to cultural evolution, which we suggest may then affect biological evolution."

There are substantial differences between nations in reported subjective well-being (SWB). Although surveys of subjective well-being face methodological challenges, the existing data suggest that the measures have a degree of validity and that the between-nation differences are substantive. People in wealthy nations tend to report greater SWB than people in poor nations. The causal factors relating wealth to well-being, however, are not yet understood. The wealth of nations strongly correlates with human rights, equality between people, the fulfillment of basic biological needs, and individualism. Because of the high intercorrelations between these predictor variables and wealth, their separate effects on SWB have not yet been isolated. Another variable that correlates with higher SWB in nations is political stability and a related variable, interpersonal trust.

Individualism is a cultural variable that correlates across nations with both higher reported SWB and also with higher suicide rates. Possible reasons that individualism leads to these divergent outcomes are discussed. Individualists believe that happiness is more important than do collectivists, who emphasize other values such as "harmony" and "respect." Furthermore, reports of SWB are highest in those nations where it is thought to be important. Interestingly, when making life satisfaction judgments, individualists are more likely to weight their moods and emotions, and are less likely than collectivists to consult norms about how appropriate it is to be satisfied. Furthermore, people in Latin cultures prize pleasant affect and denigrate unpleasant affect, whereas people in Confucian cultures in the Pacific Rim appear to place less emphasis on pleasant affect and are more accepting of unpleasant emotions.

The major approaches to the psychological understanding of the differences in SWB between societies are the innate needs approach, the theory of goal striving, models of emotion socialization, and genetic explanations. Policy implications of the national differences in SWB are discussed briefly.

Bill Cosby went off on another tirade against the black community Thursday, telling a room full of activists that black children are running around not knowing how to read or write and "going nowhere."

He also had harsh words for struggling black men, telling them: "Stop beating up your women because you can't find a job."

Cosby made headlines in May when he upbraided some poor blacks for their grammar and accused them of squandering opportunities the civil rights movement gave them. He shot back Thursday, saying his detractors were trying in vain to hide the black community's "dirty laundry."

The cell phone may be bringing us into a new renaissance, but it may end up differently than what we're expecting. Instead of becoming more empowered as individuals, we may give up on the notion of individuality altogether.

The Renaissance -- the great big one they taught us about in school -- is known for a lot of great inventions: perspective painting, the printing press, ships that could circumnavigate the earth, modern banking and even the sonnet. What we tend to forget about the 15th and 16th centuries, though, is that this was also when we invented the "individual."

Sure, we knew that people existed in their individual bodies for a long time. Even cavemen knew that hitting the guy over there meant hitting someone else. But people were so highly identified with their tribes, clans or fiefdoms, that they didn't really think of themselves as individuals. Anyone who was a true individual was pretty much an outcast -- either banished, mutant, a leper or, at best, a shaman, whose individuality was as much a curse as a blessing.

No, the real individual, as he or she is known today, was born as a 'he' during the renaissance. The mad genius Dr. Faustus is often cited as the first full-fledged individual character in drama; he's the scientist who has reached the height of knowledge and capability and must make a deal with the devil in order to reach to even higher levels of power.

The Pentagon's New Map
By Thomas P. M. Barnett
Copyright 2004

The U.S. is struggling with an information war as well as a shooting war in Iraq. Many civilians think troops are behind insurgent violence.

Hussein Ramadan sells synthetic flowers in Baghdad. He doesn't trust the United States.

"These car bombs are mostly done by Americans," he said. "When they are searching you at a checkpoint, one is putting an explosive device in the car. Then they will chase the car, and as soon as he goes into a populated area, it will blow up. This is what has happened, not in all cases but some."

Iraq is awhirl in rumors.

Amid fires in the night and mortar rounds pounding city and village, this nation, where so much is uncertain, feeds on the half-truths and conspiracies that U.S. forces are struggling to contain in what has become an information war. The gossip on the street and the grisly images flickering across Arab television are doing as much to undermine American authority as well-armed insurgents staging ambushes on desert highways.

Reality is pliable and truth is altered to serve agendas in a society where stories, myths and superstitions have shaped public discourse for centuries.

The events and aftermath of September 11, 2001, have underscored the need for the nation to strengthen and enhance American knowledge of international relations, world regions, and foreign languages. Homeland security and effective United States engagement abroad depend upon an increased number of Americans who have received such training and are willing to serve their nation.'

Confucius' teachings remain enormously influential in China and beyond, yet little is known in the West about the man himself beyond his famous sayings, or analects.

Now the Musée Guimet in Paris, renowned for its fine collection of Asian art, has set out to bridge this gap between East and West by devoting an exhibition to this central pillar of Asian thought.

"Chinese novel," I said. "That must be rather curious. "Not as curious as one might be tempted to think," replied Goethe. "These people think and feel much as we do, and one soon realizes that one is like them."
-Goethe's conversations with Eckermann, January 31, 1827