Eliot Kristan's Blog

C and I spent this sunny sunday (well, about an hour an half) today at Franklin Park Zoo in Dorchester. Bangos and pygmy falcons and tree kangaroos oh my!

We stopped at 7-11 and the Taco Bell/KFC hybrid joint for a kryponite-flavored slurpy, 2 taco patty pockets and a jumbo helping of steak fries for energy following our Saturday night of intensive and semi-delusional scrabble playing and we were off to the zoo!

Here are some photos from the zoo:

C looking much like our cat Munchkin.

Me on the lookout for tigers (I had all these Jurassic Park-type paranoias starting in the Tiger Tales sector).

The King of the Jungle as seen through 2 inches of reinforced plexiglass.

Ah, warthogs on a lazy Sunday.

Pygmy Falcon – The smallest bird of prey (about the saze of a parakeet).

The Ring-Tailed Lemur exhibit was closed, but we snapped this pic for Art (I wonder what the zoo did with the Lemurs when they closed the exhibit…).

C and I pose with the Kaola.

The alpha male of the gorillas.

Neworn gorilla. The gorillas was definitely the #1 motivating factor for bringing us to the zoo.

Here’s the last gorilla we saw before leaving the tropical sanctuary at the zoo. Shortly after C snapped this photo, she yelled out to the gorilla, “Hi there monkeyface!” I was a bit miffed as I thought it was somewhat disrespectful to our close evolutionary relatives and ordered her to call him by his name if she was going to shout out to him. In retrospect, I think that she had to yell out in that manner in order to mark the absurdity of the situation: Standing among shouting human munchkins and pseudo nature buffs (and of course some people that were probably thinking the same thing as we were), thinking that we could connect to these particular caged animals because of our similarities rather than a necessary and carefully grown relationship. Reminded me of the Grizzly Man.

Me after getting a cup of Banana Split-flavored Dippin’ Dots Ice Cream – the Ice Cream of the Future. The best part of it was the woman who served it to me – she had this big smile and she sang along with the radio as she scooped. The ice cream was aiight.

Currently Reading:

Linked: The New Science of Networks

Information, disease, knowledge and just about everything else is disseminated through a complex series of networks made up of interconnected hubs, argues University of Notre Dame physics professor Barabasi. These networks are replicated in every facet of human life: “There is a path between any two neurons in our brain, between any two companies in the world, between any two chemicals in our body. Nothing is excluded from this highly interconnected web of life.” In accessible prose, Barabasi guides readers through the mathematical foundation of these networks. He shows how they operate on the Power Law, the notion that “a few large events carry most of the action.” The Web, for example, is “dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, or hubs… such as Yahoo! or Amazon.com.” Barabasi notes that “the fittest node will inevitably grow to become the biggest hub.” The elegance and efficiency of these structures also makes them easy to infiltrate and sabotage; Barabasi looks at modern society’s vulnerability to terrorism, and at the networks formed by terrorist groups themselves. The book also gives readers a historical overview on the study of networks, which goes back to 18th-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and includes the well-known “six degrees phenomenon” developed in 1967 by sociology professor Stanley Milgram. The book may remind readers of Steven Johnson’s Emergence and with its emphasis on the mathematical underpinnings of social behavior Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (which Barabasi discusses); those who haven’t yet had their fill of this new subgenre should be interested in Barabasi’s lively and ambitious account.