Tag Archives: anthropology

A Banner Weekend for Penn State Research

At the AAAS annual meeting last weekend I learned a lot, such as:

  • How our preconceptions of viruses as nasty things may have thwarted our knowledge of the long list of positive interactions humans have with these microbes.
  • How evolution changed us from furry creatures into lean, mean, skin-covered, sweating machines.
  • And how we can now take pictures and make movies of atoms. Actual atoms.
jablonski
Dr. Jablonski addresses media questions at AAAS news briefing.

One thing I did not learn is that I am not a great photographer. I have known that for a long time. In fact, if you couple my lack of photographic skills with my out-of-focus iPhone camera, the pictures of the atom have finer resolutions and were much clearer.

But I tried.

Continue reading A Banner Weekend for Penn State Research

Blocked Content

Yesterday I visited with a friend in Caesaria.  She is a geoarchaeologist who received her Masters from Penn State and is now on the faculty at University of Haifa and usually does underwater archaeology in Caesaria.  We were talking about our time together in the anthropology department when she asked me if I had read “Sex at Dawn,” because she said it relied heavily on the work of Stephen Beckerman, associate professor of anthropology, Penn State.  This is work that she knew I had written about and she thought I’d be interested.  I was.

When I got back to my room at the Israel Naval Academy where I am staying, I turned on my computer and went to Amazon.com with the idea of buying the book.  I chose a book search and typed in “Sex at Dawn.”  To my surprise, the screen went black and read:

Request Blocked


Your request is blocked by the intermediate content-filter. It may be due to one or more reasons listed below:

  • The URL contains a disallowed keyword.
  • The URL is categorized as a bad page.
  • The web page belongs to a disallowed domain.
  • The web page contains improper keywords.
  • The request contains one or more syntax errors.

To solve the problem, you may consult the MIS department in your organization for more details.


When I did a general search on Google I got

405. That’s an error.

The request method XET is inappropriate for the URL /search. That’s all we know.

Now I have to agree that sometimes sex is an error, but all the time?  Really.  Apparently the students at this school do not receive any sex education, can not access any site that uses the word sex and certainly can’t purchase a cultural anthropology book titled “Sex at Dawn” or any other time.  And yes, this is a coed school.