Moonwalkers

I caught this little YouTube clip on digg.com, and it's the only Michael Jackson related news story that's made any sense to me this past week. It showcases the supreme courting talents of the Red-capped Manakin, as well as its rather amazing moonwalking skills.



"If Michael Jackson's moonwalk can be found in the jungles of Central America, then who knows what we might find next?" Indeed. How about a bird that can not only perfectly mimic the sound of other forest creatures, but of human-made machines as well? I give you the reclusive Australian Lyrebird, which I actually encountered in the wilds of the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Alas, I did not hear him imitate a camera, car alarm, or chainsaw as he does here. The below clip is comes from near the end of episode 6 -- Signals and Songs -- of David Attenborough's superb series, The Life of Birds.



Last night I drove to Santa Monica to celebrate Independence Day with D*Nice and Julia. We watched a fireworks display at Palisades Charter High (see photo below) then returned to their abode to view the waxing gibbous moon through my Bushnell Voyager telescope, taking special note of Mare Tranquillitatis -- the Sea of Tranquility -- site of mankind's first real moonwalk.



"We humans have set foot on another world in a place called the Sea of Tranquility, an astonishing achievement for creatures such as we, whose earliest footsteps three and one-half million years old are preserved in the volcanic ash of east Africa. We have walked far.

These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. It has the sound of epic myth, but it is simply a description of the evolution of the cosmos as revealed by science in our time. And we, we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we have begun at last to wonder about our origins -- star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth, and perhaps throughout the cosmos.

Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. We speak for earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring." -- Carl Sagan, COSMOS