There was a great exchange on Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, an episode of Star Trek, the original series with Shatner, Nimoy, etc. While justifying his racial prejudice, Commissioner Bele, a half-white, half-black humanoid played by Frank Gorshin, sarcastically challenges the Federation's science.

"I once heard that on some of your planets, people believe they are descended from... apes."

Spock might have replied, "We believe that humans and apes share a common ancestor." But being only half-human, he more elegantly said:

"The actual theory is that all lifeforms evolved from the lower levels to the more advanced stages."

Today's announcement, fifteen years in the making, changes neither of those statements, but suggests that our common ancestor resembled man more than ape, and that great apes, currently unsuccessful competitors to humans, have diverged physically from primitive man more than we have. In other words, considering primitive humans to be ape-like Alley Oops isn't quite right.

WSJ: Fossils Shed New Light on Human Origins

After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees.

The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.

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"They are not what one would have predicted," said anthropologist Bernard Wood at George Washington University. Although the differences between humans, apes and chimps today are legion, we all shared a common ancestor six million years or so ago. These fossils suggest that creature-still undiscovered--resembled a chimp much less than researchers have always believed.

In fact, so many traits in chimps and apes today are missing in these early hominids that researchers now question the notion that modern chimps and apes embody vestiges of our primate past, retaining primitive traits once shared by our ancestors. "We all thought the ancestral animal would look more like a chimp," explained Yale University anthropologist Andrew Hill.

Instead, the new finds show that what seems most ancient about nonhuman primates today-such as canine fangs, long limbs with hooked fingers meant for swinging through trees and hands designed for knuckle-walking--may actually be the product of more recent development, the researchers said.

"It is the chimps and gorillas that have been evolving like crazy in terms of limbs and locomotion, not hominids," said Kent State University anthropologist Owen Lovejoy, a senior scientist on the research team. "We took a different tack. We went social."

OK, you and your spouse have one child and bring home over $17,330 per year. According to the US Census Bureau's fifty-year-old formulas, you're above the poverty threshold. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the actual threshold between working poverty and making a living is probably twice what Census cites, varying by where you live.

EPI offers this Basic Family Budget Calculator, and while there are no figures for Parent supporting grown offspring, Single Woman supporting two cats, or Uneuthanized Man living in a shack, you can choose something close, plug in your area and see the variations.

Making ends meet on $21,834 a year

Where in the country can a family of four keep a roof over its head and food on the table for $22,000 a year, before taxes, and still having something left over for health care and transportation? In 2007, EPI took a detailed look at basic costs in different parts of the country and built the Basic Family Budget Calculator, which assembled the costs of basic housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes, and other necessities in different regions of the country. Besides offering detailed data on how much costs vary across rural and urban areas and different geographic regions, the calculator shows that poverty thresholds are too low just about everywhere.

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In examining different family budgets around the country, it is also worth noting that the federal minimum wage -- even after its July increase to $7.25 per hour -- equates to an annual salary of $14,500 per year based on a 2,000-hour work year, which is just barely above the 2008 poverty threshold of $14,051 for a family of two.

Of course, each family has its own unique set of expenses. Just as some may cut costs by sharing housing with relatives, others may face exceptionally steep costs in the form of gasoline and car maintenance for long commutes, or medical care for a special-needs child. While it would be impossible to account for all the variables affecting an individual family's housing, food, and other costs all around the country, the Family Budget Calculator attempts to get at the bare bones expenses. It estimates housing costs based on non-luxury, "privately-owned, decent, and safe rental housing" at the 40th percentile, or that which costs less than 60% of the rentals on the local market. Food cost estimates come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's "low-cost" food plan. Average transportation costs are based on the National Household Travel Survey and consider only travel related to work and other non-social purposes such as essential errands.

I found that in Altoona, two parents and a child would have to make $38,330 per year, while Baltimore would be only marginally more expensive - $39,088 per year. I don't know where EPI's figures come from, and I'm only poor the week before payday, but for me, living in Baltimore has been waaay more expensive than Altoona.

Update: If we move to the nearby planned community of Columbia, MD, EPI says we'll need $53,702 per year to make it. That difference agrees more with my experience, and I do live and work in Federal Hill - an expensive neighborhood probably more comparable to Columbia than to most of Baltimore City.

Critics of the Census Bureau's existing methodology for calculating poverty thresholds note that it is based on an outdated formula that was put in place in the 1960s, and has not evolved with family budgets. Not only have overall costs gone up since then, but the portion of incomes spent on food, housing and other essentials has changed dramatically. This commentary notes that during the 1960s, the typical family spent a third of its budget on food, but today food consumes just one-seventh of its budget on food, with other essentials such as health care consuming much more. If that would seem to suggest that food has gotten cheaper, it also highlights the problem of calculating poverty as a multiple of food costs, under the formula that was established decades ago and is still used today. The Census Bureau acknowledges that because of this longstanding formula, it is no longer possible to say what share of a poverty-level income would go toward specific categories of consumption. Simply adjusting food costs for inflation over the past 40 years, in other words, would not be enough to keep the poverty threshold current.

Roman Polanski. I loved The Fearless Vampire Killers, Rosemary's Baby, Knife in the Water, Macbeth, Chinatown. Tess, not so much.

I was surprised, in turn, that he got away, stayed away for so long and that they caught him. But I'm really surprised by the weak arguments of supposed intelligentsia that he should be set free.

"My journal, 'La Règle du jeu,' is working in support of Roman Polanski and mobilizing writers and artists through the following petition:

Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.

He risks extradition to the United States for an episode that happened years ago and whose principal plaintiff repeatedly and emphatically declares she has put it behind her and abandoned any wish for legal proceedings.

Seventy-six years old, a survivor of Nazism and of Stalinist persecutions in Poland, Roman Polanski risks spending the rest of his life in jail for deeds which would be beyond the statute-of-limitations in Europe.

We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Pascal Bruckner, Neil Jordan, Isabelle Adjani, Arielle Dombasle, Isabelle Huppert, William Shawcross, Yamina Benguigui, Mike Nichols, Danièle Thompson, Diane von Furstenberg, Claude Lanzmann, Paul Auster

Update: Far longer list here including Woody Allen (heh), Buck Henry, John Landis, David Lynch, Tilda Swinton and a lot of French names.

Have they also written to support Phillip Garrido?

We attended the Solar Decathlon in 2007, and will be going back this year as well. Small, experimental solar homes have been designed and partially assembled at each team's schools, and will be reassembled and completed on the National Mall, near the Smithsonian Institute Castle and the nearby Metro Station, for exhibition and judging. There were some seminars and presentations available in 2007, but we were more interested in the houses.

Practical notes: Lines can get long for popular entries, and are longer on the weekend. A very few food vendors were nearby, and a few portable toilets were available. We walked several blocks to the Old Post Office Pavilion food court, where we were searched before being admitted. So leave your peacemaker and brass knuckles at home.

Press release:

DOE's Solar Decathlon to Highlight Innovation, Future Green Jobs International student competition set for National Mall, Oct. 9-18 2009 (closed Wed, Oct 14th)

WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Department of Energy today announced this year's participants and dates for DOE's 2009 Solar Decathlon, a competition that challenges students to design and develop houses that can provide their own energy from the sunlight - a clean, renewable source of energy. The twenty collegiate teams from the United States, Canada, Spain and Germany will each build a completely self-sufficient solar powered house, showcasing energy-efficient amenities and smart home systems that provide reduced carbon emissions without sacrificing the comfort of modern conveniences.

"The Solar Decathlon highlights President Obama's goal of improving our national security and transforming the economy by using off-the-shelf, clean energy technologies to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil, reduce our carbon emissions, and protect the environment," said U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu. "As part of the building competition, the next generation of green engineers, architects, designers, and professionals gain valuable experience that will help them to lead America toward a clean energy future."

DOE's Solar Decathlon, which takes place October 9-18 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., consists of 10 individual contests that evaluate the teams' skills in architecture, home design, and communications. The homes constructed by the teams must produce enough electricity and hot water from solar panels to perform all the normal functions of a home -- from powering the lights; to cooking, washing clothes and dishes; to powering home electronics; and maintaining a comfortable temperature. This year, a new net-metering contest will evaluate each home's ability to produce its own power. The competition focuses on cutting edge energy efficient and renewable energy innovation while providing a unique green jobs training opportunity for each of the students.

The start of the competition marks the culmination of more than two years of hard work by the student teams. The twenty teams will assemble their homes on the National Mall in early October. Following the Opening Ceremony on October 8, the homes will be open for public tours October 9-13 and 15-18.

This is DOE's fourth Solar Decathlon competition since premiering in 2002 with subsequent competitions in 2005 and 2007. On average, each Solar Decathlon competition has drawn more than 100,000 visitors to the National Mall.

The Solar Decathlon is sponsored by DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, in partnership with its National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which manages the event. For more information, please visit http://www.solardecathlon.org/.

Amy & Juan are off, but Democracy Now has a good range of topics today:

Internal Pressure Forces Honduran Coup Regime to Reverse Civil Liberties Crackdown, But Repression Continues

Fmr. UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter Warns Against "Politically Motivated Hype" on Iran Nuke Program

As Senate Panel Debates Public Option, Groups Take Direct Action to Promote Single Payer

I have read many Energy Depletion pundits who blame the consumption habits of the first world's middle classes for our climate change woes. Julian Darley claimed that there simply weren't enough rich to make a difference, but that the middle class was so numerous and prosperous as to have a great effect on climate. Georges Monbiot, however, goes after the very rich.

Stop blaming the poor. It's the wally yachters who are burning the planet

Population growth is not a problem - it's among those who consume the least. So why isn't anyone targeting the very rich?

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for instance, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world's population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out only 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three percent of the world's population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that about one sixth of the world's population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees (£40) a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning 30,000 rupees or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to the developed nations. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for instance, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together. Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm.

With some darkly amusing examples, Monbiot goes on to point out wasteful habits of the very rich with their boats and heated pools.

James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust. It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven't been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich.

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The Optimum Population Trust glosses over the fact that the world is going through demographic transition: population growth rates are slowing down almost everywhere and the number of people is likely, according to a paper in Nature, to peak this century, probably at about 10 billion. Most of the growth will take place among those who consume almost nothing.

While Monbiot's attack on the rich is amusing (attacking the rich always is), I still think the numbers support the contention that it is the middle class that is driving climate change.

The third world population will probably keep growing towards that ten billion mark unless resource wars, famine, disease or weather disasters intervene. The middle class will probably contract painfully, as we see in teabagger rallies. The rich will contract in numbers but grow in percentage of wealth, which seems unfair, but might actually be better for the planet.