It’s incredible how different we all are . . .

Here's how photographer Timothy Allen sums up his two year trip to the far corners of the world in order to capture images for the BBC series Human Planet:

It's incredible how different we all are, but yet we share roughly the same hopes and dreams for life. We're essentially looking for a roof over our head, looking to find a mate in life and feeding ourselves and looking after our offspring, and that's about it, really.

Allen's quote brings to mind Donald Brown's work on the incredible sameness of all human animals. But, as Allen points out, our cultures are also dramatically different from one another. Now please do yourself the supreme favor of clicking on this link to view a sampling of Allen's exquisite photography for Human Planet. His slide show includes some of the most memorable photos I've ever seen. You can read through the live chat that the show's team had earlier tonight, and please do consider a visit to Allen's own site. And here's a bit of video from the series, a segment dealing with the "last free people on the planet."

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How to build a raft and save the Queen when you have a tiny brain

What if the waters are rising and you've got to save the Queen, but you and your buddies have no cell phones, you don't have anything resembling human spoken language, and your brain is really tiny? How tiny? Less than 300,000 neurons (for comparison, a mouse's brain is 50 times bigger--it has 16 million neurons). So how do you save the Queen with your incredibly tiny brain? You work elegantly as a collective, like the ants you are. Check out this incredible footage. I felt chills when I saw the workers helping their Amazonian Queen off the raft near the end. Un-be-liev-able, except you can see it with your own eyes.

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BBC documentary on Nietzsche: Human All Too Human

If you're looking for a thoughtful and balanced introductory documentary on the life and writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, here's a good one. This video was produced by the BBC for television in 1999 and it's entitled Human All Too Human. You'll find a lot of information carefully packed into one…

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