" Archaeologists have found the oldest image yet of an Andean religious icon. The 4,000-year-old carving of the Staff god - a fanged creature with splayed feet, holding a snake and a staff - is on a bowl made from a seed pod.", reports Nature. You can read the story in german at Spiegel Online.

Its a great found, I agree. There are some deities in andean culture, which you can trace thousands of years back through all the different cultures and times. Most popular was the feline, which is alive still today in many religions of south american indians (of course, its appearance is not need to be caused by cultural exchange). Before this newest finding, the earliest appearance of the staff god, not mentioned in the articles, was the Chavin Culture. A impressive stone, Raimondi Stone, clearly shows the staff god. Chavin, and the mentioned Tiwanaku Culture have been very different. Between them have been a lot of other cultures worshipping the staff god, among them Paracas and Ica. So, it`s interesting, that now they have found proof of a culture before Chavin, also worshipping the staff god. Another deity from Chavin was the so called "Smiling God", which is shown on a huge stone called El Lanzon. But this god probably was only from local importance.

For further reading on the Chavin Culture I recommend this paper from one of the most achknowledged scientist reasearching chavin culture, John Rowe.

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Just read an old interview from the year 97, in which Pattie Maes one of the leading artificial life researchers talked about the impact of personal software agents on the way we view our world: Interviewer: "It occurs to me that in contrast to processes like browsing in a library or on the Web, which expose you to new ideas, systems like Firefly give users data that's very narrow in scope. Will people's horizons be narrowed if they rely on personal agents?" Maes: "This is a very valid concern, but one which can be dealt with through good user interface design. If an agent only gives you what you like or what you ask for, then your view of the world will become more and more narrow. It's important to integrate the agent interface into a direct manipulation interface, or to integrate agent recommendations within an existing system where the user can also browse...."

But existing popular search engines like google dont interact with me. You can tell google a thousand times that the result of the query is quite interesting but you although would like to hear some other point of view . Google will ignore you and so step by step all people get google's opinion.So don't get me wrong, Ithink the web is a great invention but isnt it also narrowing our view? P.S.: the interview with Pattie Maes is available here.

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