Carl Zimmer has an article entitled “Fossil Yields Surprise Kin of Crocodiles” in the New York Times:

Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History have discovered a fossil in New Mexico that looks like a six-foot-long, two-legged dinosaur along the lines of a tyrannosaur or a velociraptor. But it is actually an ancient relative of today’s alligators and crocodiles.

The discovery is a striking example of how different animals can evolve the same kind of body over and over again.

For almost 60 years, the 210-million-year-old fossil has been hiding in plain sight. It was lodged in a slab of rock dug up in 1947 in New Mexico by a team led by Edward Colbert, a paleontologist at the museum.

More from the NYT here.  Benjamin Zimmer, Carl’s brother, has an interesting take on the title of Carl’s article and asks why the kin of crocodiles were so surprised? He writes in his blog, Language Log:

It’s a great example of the kind of ambiguous sentence that teachers of introductory syntax classes often present to their students (like the old standby, “I hate visiting relatives”). If this were a diagramming exercise in Syntax 101, the students would have to come up with phrase-structure trees to account for the structural ambiguity:

The ambiguous reading hinges on whether “yields” is understood as a noun or a verb. Once a reader decides to parse “yields” as a plural noun (with “fossil” understood as an attributive modifier), then the garden path has been established. The unusual headlinese of “surprise kin” further encourages the alternate parsing.

A similar ambiguous headline occasionally gets hauled out for the amusement of linguistics classes: “British Push Bottles Up German Rear.” Again, the key to the battling interpretations is whether a single word (in this case “push”) is parsed as a noun or a verb.

More from Benjamin here.  And last, Carl Zimmer also has a review of the Darwin show at the American Museum of Natural History in Discover Magazine:

Mounted on a carrot and a plum, two soldiers armed with swords and trumpets make war on one another. The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers is no ordinary child’s sketch. The artist was a young Francis Darwin, son of the celebrated Charles, and the drawing appears on the back of a manuscript page of his father’s most famous work, On the Origin of Species. Tucked away in a glass case in a corner of the American Museum of Natural History’s new Darwin exhibit, the page is one of only 28 to survive from the original manuscript of what many called “the book that shook the world.” It also succeeds in doing what all the fierce debates cannot. It shows Charles Darwin not as a figurehead in a great fight but as a real human and a devoted father, loath to waste paper, who gave his children discarded manuscript sheets to scribble upon.

Far from being an icon, Darwin was a man who led a dramatic life. He had adventures in exotic lands, fathered 10 children with his wife (and cousin), Emma Wedgwood, and conducted experiments on earthworms, barnacles, and insects (he once lay motionless on his couch to let a wasp drink from his eye).

More here.

Will Knight in New Scientist:

Japanese beer maker Asahi plans to give away 5000 personal bartending bots, each of which can store up to six cans of beer in a refrigerated compartment within its belly. At the push of a button the simple robots will open a can and pour the chilled contents into a glass for a thirsty owner.

To win one of the beer-bots, in a promotion for the company’s new low malt beer, contestants must collect 36 tokens found on the specially marked beers. But the competition, starting in February, is only open to those in Japan.

Some robotics experts see the promotion as a fun way to promote a wider interest in robotics. Others, however, say it is a gimmick that distracts from genuine robot research.

More here.

“Paracelsus was an alchemist, shaman and magician. But he was also the first scientist, a doctor whose influence is still felt today.”

Peter Ackroyd reviews The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science by Philip Ball, in the London Times:

“I am different,” Paracelsus wrote. “Let this not upset you.”

But it did. He was denounced as a fanatic or impostor and reviled as a drunkard. He was forced to wander from city to city in search of work and bread. He was considered coarse and vulgar, but replied characteristically that “I am a rough man born in a rough country, and what seems silk in my eyes may be but homespun to you.” This was the man who, according to his latest biographer, “started a medical revolution and founded a chemical tradition”.

The “rough country” was Switzerland, but he made all Europe his province. The year of his birth, 1493, can plausibly be seen as the beginning of the modern era. It might be described as the birth of the scientific era, but the word would have meant nothing to him. The term “scientist” was not coined until the 1830s. For Paracelsus and his contemporaries, magic, alchemy and astrology were absolutely embedded within natural philosophy and experimental procedure. Newton was an alchemist and numerologist who drew up arcane recipes for the transmutation of gold and dreamed of rebuilding the Temple of Solomon. Paracelsus predates him by 150 years, but the two philosophers shared the same vital mingling of experimental and transcendental, observed and occult.

More here.

Padma Rao in Spiegel:

The walls of the country’s temples are decked with acrobatic friezes of copulating couples. Erotic fables tell of the Hindu God of Love flirting outrageously with naked milkmaids bathing in a river. And next to its philosophical considerations about happiness in marriage, the Kama Sutra also offers useful tips for the entire palette of sexual delight. India’s ancient history is studded with unabashed sex.

But what about a female tennis star who wears shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt? Or what happens when an actress so famous her fans dedicate temples to her begins to share her views on condoms and pre-marital sex? Smooching pairs in discotheques? Lovers holding hands on the beach?

By Krishna, no.

In recent months, political opportunists in India, acting in the name of “protecting the innocence of India’s youth” and “Indian morality,” have campaigned a crack-down against sexual liberation in the world’s largest democracy. They have brought the work of parliaments to a halt, they have incited mobs and they have successfully pushed for changes to the laws. In a country that has traditionally been better known for the pleasures of the flesh, enforced virtue is fast spreading.

More here.

From CNN: A man walks past a display of red lanterns, hung as a symbol of good luck, from a tree at Ditan (Temple of Earth) Park in Beijing, on January 23, decorated for a Lunar New Year temple fair. The tradition of temple fairs during the Spring Festival holiday dates back over a thousand years in Northern China and though it was banned by the Communists in the 1950s for promoting feudalistic superstition, the tradition slowly re-emerged in pace with China’s opening economy of the 1980s. Today, visits to the city’s various temple fairs remain one of the most popular ways for Beijingers to spend the weeklong public holiday. [I just liked this picture.]

From Science:

Researchers have discovered that a wide variety of stain-resistant products contain volatile compounds that can escape and break down into perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). This indestructible chemical has been accumulating in humans and wildlife, and it has been shown to harm laboratory animals. In related news, the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday asked major manufacturers of these compounds to cut their use by 95% over the next 4 years.

PFOA is used in the process of manufacturing polymers that can repel stains, keep grease on the inside of fast food wrappers, and improve the properties of polishes, paints, and hair-care products. Environmental scientists and regulators are worried because PFOA and related chemicals don’t break down, and they cause cancer and developmental effects in lab animals. The environmental puzzle is that PFOA itself is not found in consumer products.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Medicine usually progresses in incremental steps. One antidepressant or cholesterol-lowering drug follows another with only marginally improved therapeutic benefit. Vaccines are different. Disease prevention through immunization, whether for polio or mumps, has the potential to transform medical practice, sometimes eliminating illness altogether. Smallpox is now (we hope) confined to heavily protected freezers in Russia and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Vaccine developers appear to be on the verge of another remarkable achievement. Two vaccines that are nearing approval by the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S.–one from Merck, the other from Glaxo­SmithKline–have demonstrated in clinical trials that they can prevent infection from the two types of the human papillomavirus (HPV) that account for up to 70 percent of cervical cancers. That could make a big dent in a disease that is the second most common malignancy affecting women worldwide and that kills more than half of its victims. In the U.S., in excess of 10,000 women contract invasive cervical cancer annually and nearly 4,000 die of the disease.

More here.

Nicholas Lehmann in The New Yorker:

During the war, Murrow never had to play the role of the dispassionate reporter. He was an important player in the Allied war effort, and, under the circumstances, that did not conflict with his journalistic role. Murrow’s special significance was in making Americans see, through his broadcasts about the Blitz, that the European war was not something faraway and irrelevant. When Harry Hopkins, F.D.R.’s right-hand man, came to London for a visit, eleven months before Pearl Harbor, he met with three people on his first day in town: Anthony Eden, Winston Churchill, and Murrow. Churchill was a personal friend as well as a journalistic subject, and Murrow had a wartime affair with Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela Digby Churchill, who later married Averell Harriman.

More here.

Sam Jones in The Guardian:

He may be a 78-year-old who picked up the Nobel prize for literature almost a quarter of a century ago, but, even so, few chroniclers would have foretold that Gabriel García Márquez would lay down his pen. Or has he?

“I’ve stopped writing,” the author told Barcelona’s La Vanguardia in an interview at his home in Mexico. “2005 was the first year in my life that I didn’t write a line.”

Despite the dramatic declaration, the Colombian went on to say there might yet be another book in him – if inspiration proved forthcoming. “With all the practice I’ve got, I’d have no problems writing a new novel,” he said. “But people do notice if you haven’t put your heart into it.”

More here.

Flavin enjoyed what he thought of as the paradox of the commonplace: the everyday industrial hardware itself, and the incidental, uncontrollable spread of the light. He liked the shadows cast by the housings against the wall, the mixing and reflections and variety of effects the light performed as it bounced off walls, as the colours mingled, as it played games with the rods and cones of the viewer’s eyes. But what Flavin did was not Op art, nor Pop art, nor what came to be called minimalism. He didn’t believe in “minimal art” in any case, saying that he always thought “people to whom it was applied were making a simple and constructive change, and mostly in terms of themselves”. Pressed on what he thought of his friend Donald Judd’s seminal essay Specific Objects, which dealt with the very issues and ideas Flavin’s art was seen as exemplifying, he claimed he had never properly read it.

more from The Guardian here.

Sorrentino (who recently received the Lannan Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award) can scarcely have a less objective reader than me. He has captivated me ever since I discovered Steelwork (1970), his novel of sharply etched and chronologically shuffled vignettes of working-class Brooklyn types gradually corrupted by wartime and postwar prosperity. Here skillfully, veraciously captured were Bay Ridge and its sometimes unlovely inhabitants, seen for what they are, neither the victims of circumstance posited by the proletarian novelists and the naturalists, nor the freaks and comic grotesques who populate the works of Bukowski and Algren. In an American literature largely inept in or inattentive to matters of class, this alone would distinguish Sorrentino’s work. As he once put it, in a review of a LeRoi Jones–edited anthology titled The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, “The America these people deal with is an America the middle class doesn’t see and wouldn’t get if it did.” Steelwork offered the sort of intimate specificity of detail vouchsafed only to the native-born, and I recognized and had patronized any number of the bars, candy stores, pool halls, and movie theaters therein. Then I came upon Sorrentino’s great short story “The Moon in Its Flight,” a work that in thirteen pages says all that can possibly be said about callow Roman Catholic boys from Brooklyn and lovely Jewish girls from the Bronx and the unbridgeable cultural distances between them. The protagonist makes the long subway trek back to Bay Ridge after a party where he has been demoralized in the way only an encounter with an alien and superior culture can accomplish (“Who is Conrad Aiken? What is Bronx Science? Who is Berlioz? What is a Stravinsky? How do you play Mah-Jongg? What is schmooz, schlepp, Purim, Moo Goo Gai Pan? Help me”). “When he got off the train in Brooklyn an hour later,” Sorrentino writes, “he saw his friends through the window of the all-night diner, pouring coffee into the great pit of their beer drunks. He despised them as he despised himself and the neighborhood.” I knew the subway stop. I knew the diner and the guys in the diner. I knew that feeling in my bones. The shocks of recognition permanently annealed my connection to this author.

more from Bookforum here.

“The worst word in the language” by Jeremy Clarkson in the Sunday Times (of London):

Wog. Spastic. Queer. Nigger. Dwarf. Cripple. Fatty. Gimp. Paki. Mick. Mong. Poof. Coon. Gyppo. You can’t really use these words any more and yet, strangely, it is perfectly acceptable for those in the travel and hotel industries to pepper their conversation with the word “beverage”.

There are several twee and unnecessary words in the English language. Tasty. Meal. Cuisine. Nourishing. And the biblically awful “gift”. I also have a biological aversion to the use of “home” instead of “house”. So if you were to ask me round to “your home for a nourishing bowl of pasta” I would almost certainly be sick on you.

But the worst word. The worst noise. The screech of Flo-Jo’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re hungover, is “beverage”.

Apparently they used to have “bever” days at Eton when extra beer was brought in for the boys. And this almost certainly comes from some obscure Latin expression that only Boris Johnson would understand.

Therein lies the problem. People who work on planes and in hotels have got it into their heads that the word beverage, with its Eton and Latin overtones, is somehow posh and therefore the right word to use when addressing a customer.

More here.

The New York Times has a transcript of today’s Oprah Winfrey show, on James Frey, which featured James Frey as a guest.

[WINFREY:] I feel about “A Million Little Pieces” that, although some of the facts have been questioned, and people have a right to question, because we live in a country that lets you do that, that the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me and I know that it resonates with millions of other people. And I rely on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work.

I regret that phone call. I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter. And I am deeply sorry about that, because that is not what I believe. I called in because I love the message of this book and–at the time, and every day I was reading e-mail after e-mail from so many people who have been inspired by it. And I have to say that I allowed that to cloud my judgment. And so to everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth, you are absolutely right.

This whole upsetting controversy has left me with a lot of questions for James Frey, who is here today. . .

WINFREY: So we are live in Chicago, and we need to get right to it. James Frey is here.
And I have to say it is–it is difficult for me to talk to you, because I really feel duped. I feel duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers. And I think, you know, it’s such a gift to have millions of people to read your work, and that bothers me greatly. And so now as I sit here today, I–I don’t know what is truth and I don’t know what isn’t. So first of all, I wanted to start with–with The Smoking Gun report titled “The Man Who Conned Oprah.” And I want to know, were they right?

Mr. FREY: I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate, absolutely. I think they did a good job detailing some of the discrepancies between some of the actual facts of the events…

Her website is set to have clips, but does not as of yet.

I posted earlier about The Valve’s online seminar on Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees. Now, Cosma Shalizi’s piece is up and it’s definitely worth a read.

One thing Moretti does not do, anywhere, is construct models linking individual behavior to aggregate patterns. Economists and sociologists already make such models, and anthropologists are starting to do so. It may be premature here, but ultimately it will be vital. If different social groups have different beliefs, is that because those beliefs express their relations to the mode of production, or is it because they tend to talk more with in the group than across group boundaries? Adaptationist theories of culture tend to go for the first choice, but we don’t really know whether the latter could account for the specific patterns of cultural difference and change that we see.

How Not to Learn from the Natural Sciences

What I said above about not mindlessly imitating biology deserves some amplification.

Evolution ought to have a bad name in the study of literary history. Reading Rene Wellek’s “The Concept of Evolution in Literary History” (or his article for the Dictionary of the History of Ideas) is actually quite depressing. (It brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s line “they deserved to fail, because they were all so stupid”.) The many post-Darwinian ventures in this direction went, essentially, nowhere, at least as far as understanding literature better goes. It surely didn’t help that their understandings of biological evolution were often very bad, generally some kind of Spencerian or even Lamarckian belief in tendencies of progressive development — perhaps inspiring, but hopelessly un-explanatory. (This has vitiated far too much evolutionary theorizing about social processes; cf. Toulmin’s chapter 5.) As for the more recent wave, since the 1980s, the people who seem to think that literature exists because humanity craves dramatizations of Daly and Wilson’s Sex, Evolution and Behavior drive me up the wall. (Their idea makes no sense even if you are very sympathetic to evolutionary psychology, which I am.)

Which said, this is not at all what Moretti is proposing, and I don’t see the harm in trying to make this all fit together as another instance of a general pattern, alongside biological evolution, because they have similar causally-relevant features, and so similar mechanisms are at work. . .

Excerpt from The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography by Luke Eric Lassiter:

We might sum up collaborative ethnography as an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it—from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and, especially, through the writing process. Collaborative ethnography invites commentary from our consultants and seeks to make that commentary overtly part of the ethnographic text as it develops. In turn, this negotiation is reintegrated back into the fieldwork process itself. Importantly, the process yields texts that are co-conceived or cowritten with local communities of collaborators and consider multiple audiences outside the confines of academic discourse, including local constituencies. These texts can—and often do—include multiple authors; but not exclusively so. Collaborative ethnography, then, is both a theoretical and a methodological approach for doing and writing ethnography.

More here.

An exchange between Alan Wolfe and Franklin Foer in Slate:

To get to the important question first: Did I mind that Bernard-Henri Lévy chose not to make his conversations with me into a mise-en-scène? No; given what you say about him, how could I? I have no way of knowing whether he would have treated me with kindness à la Fukuyama or with rolled-up fists à la Kristol. Besides, I am not enough of a celebrity, and compared to Sharon Stone, my looks are—how shall I put it?—just not very outré.

On celebrity worship, you get BHL right, even if you run the risk of treating Lévy the way Lévy treats Los Angeles. (Bernard-Henri attracted to Hollywood types? I never would have imagined it.) And it is not just celebrities. Russell Means? Refugee from Wounded Knee and one-time friend of Marlon Brando he may be, but now he is a pathetic anti-Semite. “I am happy and proud to meet him,” Lévy writes. Clearly BHL lives not only in Paris but in the 1960s, and the latter is actually more damaging to one’s critical sensibilities than the former.

More here.

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad writes in Prospect:

Kumarila claims that something that is called an “I” exists, established by the fact that an I is constantly present in thinking. Sankara, however, argues that this only shows that there is subjectivity —the presence of consciousness—not that there is an object named “I.” The apparent existence of an objective self is an illusion, created by the logic of the grammatical use of “I” in language.

Strange names, certainly. Strange thoughts? Anybody who has read philosophy in the west will not think so—provided that Kumarila (7th century) is replaced with Descartes (17th) and Sankara (8th) with Kant (18th). The point is not the polemical one about whether it was Indians or Europeans who had these thoughts first (the ancient Greeks and early Islamic thinkers are also in the running). The point is not that the Indians deserve study because they thought like Europeans. The point is simply that, for many reasons, the Indian thinkers are unknown to contemporary western philosophy, and are likely to remain so. The same is true of Chinese thinkers.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Memory enhancement, IQ boosters and drugs designed to attack genetic weaknesses may increase competition in the future and create a playing field that is far from equal, scientists at the World Economic Forum said Wednesday. But alongside such ethically complex issues, other forms of human enhancement — organ replacement, drug therapy and genetic mapping — could make the difference between life and death as well. Within a decade, many common illnesses such as cancer are likely to be pinpointed according to their genetic variables, and some others that have been difficult to crack — such as autism and bipolar disorder — might be better understood, Collins said. Also on the horizon is technology that will allow people to know their genetic makeup for about $1,000, he said.

Outside the big questions of whether humans should be enhanced and at whose and what cost is the perhaps bigger question of whether enhancement brings happiness, says Richard Matthieu, co-director of the Schechen Buddhist Monastery in Nepal and a molecular geneticist who also serves as an interpreter for the Dalai Lama. Most recently he’s looked at how the brain changes when people meditate.

“Happiness can be enhanced but isn’t just about genomes,” he said. “It’s about the mind, which I think is vastly underestimated and underused.”

More here.

“Understanding how liberals and conservatives differ, from conception on…”

Eric O’Donnell in Harvard Magazine:

How did Franklin Delano Roosevelt ’04, born in 1882 to a privileged, aristocratic life in New York’s Hudson River Valley, become a liberal reformer? Historians have proposed several possibilities. It may have been the example of his father, who stood alone as one of the only Democrats in the Roosevelt family at the time. Perhaps it was the influence of his headmaster at Groton, who preached the gospel of social responsibility. Some say it was his struggle with polio, which gave him knowledge of suffering. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ’38, Jf ’43, believes that one of the most powerful forces was FDR’s admiration for his larger-than-life fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. 1880. “FDR was a Democrat, whereas Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican, but TR was a progressive Republican,” Schlesinger says. “He believed in government, he believed in public action to open up careers and to expand opportunities for the not-so-well-off. I think FDR imbibed that from TR.”

But the forces at work were unpredictable. “TR’s own sons, for example, did not assume the progressive Republicanism of their father,” Schlesinger says. What caused them to adopt different politics? After a pause, Schlesinger proposes an answer: “A mysterious chemistry, if you will.”

At Harvard and elsewhere, researchers in political science, sociology, psychology, and even genetics are attempting to assay this mysterious chemistry.

More here.

About ten days ago I had posted an article here from The Economist about the Chinese admiral Zheng He, and a map of the world that he supposedly produced 70 years before Columbus set sail which showed the Americas. Well, it seems that the map is probably fake.

Stefan Lovgren in National Geographic:

A recently unveiled map purporting to show that a Chinese explorer discovered America in 1418 has been met with skepticism from cartographers and historians alike.

The map depicts all of the continents, including Australia, North America, and Antarctica, in rough outline.

An inscription identifies the map as a copy made in 1763 of an original drawn in 1418.

Antiquities collector Liu Gang, who unveiled the map in Beijing last week, says it proves that Chinese seafarer Zheng He discovered America more than 70 years before Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World.

But experts have dismissed the map as a fake.

More here.