Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Lady Gaga…wants nothing more than to stand out there, alone on the stage surrounded by a numberless, raving throng. She wants to bring back the super-fan.

“When I'm writing music, I'm thinking about the clothes I want to wear on stage. It's all about everything altogether — performance art, pop performance art, fashion. For me, it's everything coming together and being a real story that will bring back the super-fan. I want to bring that back. I want the imagery to be so strong that fans will want to eat and taste and lick every part of us.”

That's Gaga in an interview with MTV News a couple of years ago. She's always known in her bones that super-fans are the Holy Grail of Pop Fame, the fame of the true legends: Elvis, the Beatles, Marilyn. There hasn't been someone really worthy of having super-fans for a long time. The diffusion and fracturing of culture has been too profound. No one performer can be big enough, anymore, to command that much attention. Sure, there are instances of super-fandom here and there, amongst a particular demographic or sub-group: the Jonas Brothers, for instance, and the kids who love them. But having real super-fans means cutting across all those distinctions. It means having moments where you hold an entire culture in the palm of your hand. It means you can push the buttons of millions of people, drive them wild and outside of themselves simply by walking on to the stage.

Lady Gaga's latest offering to her fans is a music video for her song “Telephone.” It starts in a women's prison. There's a vicious catfight, some lesbian kissing, and a pair of sunglasses made from burning cigarettes. The story moves on to the choreography of sandwich-making and then a mass murder at a roadside diner. Fabulous stuff.

I was struck, though, by the strange realism of the video, especially in the prison. It is no mistake, I think, that Quentin Tarantino is referenced throughout (Lady Gaga and Beyoncé leave the prison in the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill). Though Tarantino is often criticized for an overuse of irony and a “meta” style, his movies are at their best when a sudden rush of violence, perfectly orchestrated, brings you very much into a real moment. Those moments in Tarantino movies are disturbing, all the more because he so easily manipulates the viewer in and out of them. The ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs is not funny or pleasant or cool. It is scary and wrong and it sticks in your craw, for real.

Last Saturday afternoon, on a Japanese-landscaped hillside at the outskirts of Atlanta, several clusters of people were constructing mathematically inspired sculptures of metal, bamboo and balloons. Nearby, a magician showed a mathematician how to “throw” a knot. Others had their photographs taken in an optical illusion they had built, an “impossible box” that from one perspective made people look simultaneously behind and inside it. Around a goldfish pond, groups did puzzles, origami, juggling and card tricks. A magician, a philosopher and a software engineer argued about Wittgenstein. It was the high point of a four-day conference in honor of Martin Gardner, 95, a public intellectual whose most famous pulpit was “Mathematical Games,” written for Scientific American between 1956 and 1981. Mr. Gardner’s column illuminated the beauty of math and logic in discussions of fractals, origami, optical illusions, puzzles and pseudoscience. It challenged readers to discover how finely math and logic are interwoven through the world.

more from Robert Crease at the WSJ here.

Over the past decade, some of the most glowing stars in the firmament of the art world have been Iranian – from Shirin Neshat, acclaimed since the late 1990s for her films, videos and photographs, to painters such as Farhad Moshiri and Charles Hussein Zenderoudi, whose work has fetched prices upwards of $1 million at recent auctions in Dubai. Buoyed by the West’s growing fascination with all things Middle Eastern and the Gulf’s flowering art market, the future for Iranian artists seems bright. But until recently there was scant global buzz about prior generations of Iranian artists – none of whom, perhaps, seems more significant now than Ardeshir Mohassess, a prominent political caricaturist who many of today’s successes count as a major inspiration. Ardeshir (as he preferred to call himself) rose to fame during the 1960s and 1970s, under the reign of Shah Mohammed-Reza Pahlavi, and was renowned for his deft and bitingly satirical drawings, which meld reportage with the conventions of Qajar portraiture and the flatness and decorativity of Persian miniatures. In his heyday, he was lionised by the Iranian intelligentsia and his work was broadly published. But after moving to New York in 1976, he gradually fell into obscurity.

more from Carol Kino at The National here.

“Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine – good God, how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy – all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry.” Whereas Byron drank soda water to preserve his figure and Shelley wrote a treatise on the natural diet, Keats ate his nectarine, and we taste it 200 years later. Keats was always the man for me. I read his letters in my mid-teens, before I knew much of his poetry. He was warm, earthy, self-mocking, funny and endlessly interested in gossip, weaving a brilliant weft under and over the letters’ darker warp of sickness, death and mental anguish. In the Keats-Shelley house in Rome, you can stand in Keats’s bedroom and see the flowers on the ceiling that he saw when he lay dying. All the furniture was burned, as it had to be by law, because he had died of tuberculosis. He’d foreseen the whole ugly business from the first moment that he coughed up arterial blood, because his medical training forbade self-deception as much as his nature forbade self-pity. “I cannot be deceived in that colour; – that drop of blood is my death-warrant; – I must die.”

more from Helen Dunmore at The Guardian here.

In an 1886 missive to Theo from Antwerp—a personal favorite of mine—van Gogh brilliantly assesses the painterly strengths and weaknesses of Rubens. He writes that he views Rubens as “superficial, hollow, bombastic . . . altogether conventional,” admitting nonetheless that he is a wonderful painter who expresses moods of “gaiety” and “serenity” through his combinations of colors. His portraits are “deep and intimate,” van Gogh writes, and have remained fresh “because of the simplicity of the technique.” Nonetheless, he objects to Rubens’s attempts to portray human sorrow: “Even his most beautiful heads of a weeping Magdalen or Mater Dolorosas always just remind me of the tears of a pretty tart who’s caught the clap, say, or some such petty vexation of human life—as such they’re masterly, but one needn’t look for anything more in them.” So what did van Gogh see as his own strengths and weaknesses? In an early letter to Theo (May 8, 1875), he quotes Renan: “Man is not placed on the earth merely to be happy; nor is he placed here merely to be honest, he is here to accomplish great things through society, to arrive at nobleness, and to outgrow the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on.” This is a vision he lived. But at what cost? In one of his late letters to his brother (July 2, 1889), van Gogh says that he was “infinitely too harsh . . . in claiming that it was better to love painters than paintings.” The reader now has to ask similar questions. Van Gogh becomes less likable and more lovable, more familiar and yet somehow ever stranger. In reading and studying these books, we can at once achieve both ends.

more from Tyler Cowen at Bookforum here.

From The New York Times:

To illustrate what a growing number of literary scholars consider the most exciting area of new research, Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, refers to an episode from the TV series “Friends.” (Follow closely now; this is about the science of English.) Phoebe and Rachel plot to play a joke on Monica and Chandler after they learn the two are secretly dating. The couple discover the prank and try to turn the tables, but Phoebe realizes this turnabout and once again tries to outwit them. As Phoebe tells Rachel, “They don’t know that we know they know we know.” This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are equipped with this capacity and what particular brain functions enable them to do it are questions that have occupied primarily cognitive psychologists.

Now English professors and graduate students are asking them too. They say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read? Ms. Zunshine, whose specialty is 18th-century British literature, became familiar with the work of evolutionary psychologists while she was a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1990s. “I thought this could be the most exciting thing I could ever learn,” she said. At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is a providing a revitalizing lift.

Jonathan Gottschall, who has written extensively about using evolutionary theory to explain fiction, said “it’s a new moment of hope” in an era when everyone is talking about “the death of the humanities.” To Mr. Gottschall a scientific approach can rescue literature departments from the malaise that has embraced them over the last decade and a half. Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and frequently arcane theories that energized departments in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s — Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis — has faded. Since then a new generation of scholars have been casting about for The Next Big Thing.

The brain may be it. Getting to the root of people’s fascination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Gottschall said, is like “mapping wonderland.”

More here.

Ultimate Problems

In the Aztec design God crowds
into the little pea that is rolling
out of the picture.
All the rest extends bleaker
because God has gone away.

In the White Man design, though,
no pea is there.
God is everywhere,
but hard to see.
The Aztecs frown at this.

How do you know he is everywhere?
And how did he get out of the pea?

by William Stafford

Edith Grossman in Guernica:

Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican writer, begins his essay “Translation: Literature and Letters” with the sentence: “When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate.” He states that children translate the unknown into a language that slowly becomes familiar to them, and that all of us are continually engaged in the translation of thoughts into language. Then he develops an even more suggestive notion: no written or spoken text is “original” at all, since language, what ever else it may be, is a translation of the nonverbal world, and each linguistic sign and phrase translates another sign and phrase. And this means, in an absolutely utopian sense, that the most human of phenomena—the acquisition and use of language—is, according to Paz, actually an ongoing, endless process of translation; and by extension, the most creative use of language—that is, literature is also a process of translation: not the transmutation of the text into another language but the transformation and concretization of the content of the writer’s imagination into a literary artifact. As many observers, including John Felstiner and Yves Bonnefoy, have suggested, the translator who struggles to re-create a writer’s words in the words of a foreign language in fact continues the original struggle of the writer to transpose nonverbal realities into language. In short, as they move from the workings of the imagination to the written word, authors engage in a process that is parallel to what translators do as we move from one language to another.

More here. (Note: I just finished the translation of Don Quixote by Ms. Grossman and it is fantastic, with the added bonus of an erudite and brilliant introduction by the great Harold Bloom. I strongly recommend it.)

Peter Dreier in AlterNet:

In their 6,327-word Nation article, Cloward (a professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work at the time ) and Piven (an anti-poverty researcher and activist who joined the Columbia faculty later that year), proposed organizing the poor to demand welfare benefits in order to pressure the federal government to expand the nation's social safety net and establish a guaranteed national income. To put their strategy into practice, Cloward and Piven worked with George Wiley to create the National Welfare Rights Organization, which at its peak in the late 1960s had affiliates in 60 cities and had some success increasing participation in the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children program by organizing protests at welfare offices and pressuring politicians and welfare administrators to change the rules.

Because it focused exclusively on welfare recipients, however, NWRO's narrow constituency base guaranteed that it would remain a marginal force in the nation's politics. In 1970, NWRO organizer Wade Rathke moved to Arkansas to start ACORN, which he hoped would build a broader multi-racial movement for economic justice. In its early days, Cloward (who died in 2001) and Piven served as unofficial advisers to the group. ACORN eventually grew into the nation's largest community organizing group, with chapters in 103 cities in 37 states.

Cloward and Piven soon concluded that a successful anti-poverty movement had to combine grassroots protest with electoral politics. During the Reagan years in the early 1980s, they wrote a widely-read book, Why Americans Don't Vote, which examined deliberate efforts throughout the 20th century to deny the franchise to immigrants, the poor, and African Americans. They also used their contacts among unions, community groups, and social workers to help build a movement to expand voting among the poor. Their idea led to the National Voter Registration Act, usually called the “motor voter” law, which President Clinton signed in 1993, at a White House ceremony at which Piven spoke and received one of the president's pens.

Cloward and Piven were obviously committed to combining scholarship and activism. Not surprisingly, conservatives have been attacking their ideas for decades. But the demonization of the couple by the extreme Right has escalated since Obama's election.

A few weeks after Obama's victory, James Simpson penned an article for the right-wing American Thinker entitled, “Cloward-Piven Government,” describing their “malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government.”

Are Democrats doomed? Can a ‘Big Tent’ be too big? Christian at OkCupid.com uses stats from the dating site to make the case (via The Browser):

Time and again in American politics, Republicans have voted as a unit to frustrate our disorganized Democratic majority. No matter what's on the table, a few Democrats will peel away from the party core; meanwhile, all Republicans will somehow manage to stay on-message.

Thus, they caucus block us.

. . .

Articles noting this phenomenon anecdotally appear all the time, and despite the recent hopeful spate of Democratic victories, it's undeniable that the Republicans form an exceptionally effective opposition party. Today, we're going to perform a data-driven investigation of why this might be—and discover some fascinating things about the American electorate along the way. Our data set for this post is 172,853 people.

I should start off by pointing out that the Left/Right political framework we're usually handed is insufficient for a real discussion, because political identity isn't one-dimensional. For example, many Libertarians have Left-leaning ideas about social policy, and Right-leaning ideas about personal property. Where do they fit on a single ideological line?

There are many methods of looking at the political spectrum, but the best way I've come across is to hold social politics and economic politics separate, and measure a person's views on each in terms of permissiveness vs. restrictiveness on a 2-dimensional plane. Like so:

As you can see, I've superimposed some 'party' labels, to add some real-world context. One could quibble with the names I've chosen, but I feel that, in a broad sense, they fit: Democrats have a permissive social outlook and believe in restricting the financial sector (through regulation); Republicans essentially believe the reverse. In their corner, Libertarians would like to end restrictions across the board, and, down in the lower right, we have people who prefer that all aspects of life be guided by some authority: religion, the government, whatever.

Marcus Chown in New Scientist:

HOT water sometimes freezes faster than cold water – but why? This peculiar phenomenon has baffled scientists for generations, but now there is evidence that the effect may depend on random impurities in the water.

Fast-freezing of hot water is known as the Mpemba effect, after a Tanzanian schoolboy called Erasto Mpemba (see “How the Mpemba effect got its name”). Physicists have come up with several possible explanations, including faster evaporation reducing the volume of hot water, a layer of frost insulating the cooler water, and differing concentration of solutes. But the answer has been very hard to pin down because the effect is unreliable – cold water is just as likely to freeze faster.

James Brownridge, who is radiation safety officer for the State University of New York at Binghamton, believes that this randomness is crucial. Over the past 10 years he has carried out hundreds of experiments on the Mpemba effect in his spare time, and has evidence that the effect is based on the shifty phenomenon of supercooling.

“Water hardly ever freezes at 0 °C,” says Brownridge. “It usually supercools, and only begins freezing at a lower temperature.” The freezing point depends on impurities in the water which seed the formation of ice crystals. Typically, water may contain several types of impurity, from dust particles to dissolved salts and bacteria, each of which triggers freezing at a characteristic temperature. The impurity with the highest nucleation temperature determines the temperature at which the water freezes.

Which brings us back to logarithms. We need them because it’s always useful to have tools that can undo one another. Just as every office worker needs both a stapler and a staple remover, every mathematician needs exponential functions and logarithms. They’re “inverses.” This means that if you type a number x into your calculator, and then punch the 10x button followed by the log x button, you’ll get back to the number you started with. Logarithms are compressors. They’re ideal for taking numbers that vary over a wide range and squeezing them together so they become more manageable. For instance, 100 and 100 million differ a million-fold, a gulf that most of us find incomprehensible. But their logarithms differ only fourfold (they are 2 and 8, because 100 = 102 and 100 million = 108). In conversation, we all use a crude version of logarithmic shorthand when we refer to any salary between $100,000 and $999,999 as being “six figures.” That “six” is roughly the logarithm of these salaries, which in fact span the range from 5 to 6. As impressive as all these functions may be, a mathematician’s toolbox can only do so much — which is why I still haven’t assembled my Ikea bookcases.

more from Steven Strogatz at The Opinionater here.

Are direct arguments against religious beliefs likely to dissuade their votaries? The anecdotal evidence seems to suggest not; robust attacks by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it is said, only annoy the faithful and make them dig further in. I am not so sure about this. In my experience, waverers and Sunday-only observers can find forthright challenges to religious pretensions a relief and a liberation. They give them the reason, sometimes the courage, to abandon those shreds of early-acquired religious habit that cling around their ankles and trip them up. Still, Darwin and David Lewis-Williams have a point in thinking, as the former put it, that “direct arguments against [religion] produce hardly any effect on the public, and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science”. In the preface to this book, Lewis-Williams says that he intends to follow Darwin’s strategy, seeking to achieve by flanking manoeuvres what Dawkins and Hitchens attempt by cavalry charge.

more from A C Grayling at The New Statesman here.

How does the character of the scientist differ from that of the humanist? The past century has seen an acceleration in the “scientization” of the humanities. The roots of this trend, as other contributors to this symposium have noted, are entwined with those of modernity itself. And while the tale of this turn has been told broadly before — the story of entire disciplines adopting the name, the method, and the underlying assumptions of modern science — little has been said of the change in the educators themselves. It is not just the method of inquiry and the substance of instruction that distinguishes these new scientists of man from the philosophical humanists who preceded them. The character of these new scholars is shaped by, and in turn shapes, what and how they learn and think and teach. One of the earliest and most perceptive considerations of this shift within the academy appears in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Nietzsche’s exploration of this subject was motivated in large part by his own searing experiences over the preceding two decades. In 1869, at only twenty-four years of age, he was awarded a doctorate in classical philology — a discipline then at the vanguard of the scientization of the humanities. Shortly thereafter he was appointed to a professorship at Basel University where he was a respected and popular teacher of ancient language, philosophy, and literature. But his career prospects were dashed when advance copies of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), were met with universal condemnation in academic circles. His students abandoned him, and for the next six years he taught only sporadically at Basel, during which time he studied natural science and published a collection of essays and a book of aphorisms. In 1879, at the age of thirty-five, he retired from the academy for good because of health problems and spent the rest of his life living off a modest pension and writing the philosophical works for which he is best known today.

more from Shilo Brooks at The New Atlantis here.

You’re at breakfast enjoying a mouthful of milk when it happens: the zygomatic muscles, anchored at each cheekbone, tug the corners of your mouth backwards and up. Orbicular muscles encircling your eyeballs slowly squeeze tight beneath wrinkling skin. A 310-millisecond-long noise explodes from your throat, extending to a frequency of 10,000 Hertz. Five shorter pulses of the “h” sound follow, five times per second, hovering around 6 Hertz, each lasting a fifteenth of a second. Your heart reaches 115 beats per minute. Blood vessels relax. Muscle tone softens. Abdominal muscles clench. The soft tissue lining your upper larynx vibrates 120 times per second as air blasts past. The milk spews forth. You are laughing. Laughter, real laugh-till-you-cry laughter, is one of many human emotional expressions. Arguably, laughing and its tearful counterpart, crying, are the loudest, most intrusive non-linguistic expressions of our species. But for all of that familiarity, they are little-understood behavioral mysteries parading in the light of everyday experience. Though evolutionary biologists have long explored the mammalian origins of emotional expression, human laughs and cries only rarely become subjects of cognitive neuroscience. But that may not stay the case. Laughing and crying, being live demonstrations of emotion and its social expression, provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.

more from Genevieve Wanucha at Seed here.

Christ is indeed that saddest figure in the Gospels, the conscientious, quiet-living brother of the Prodigal Son, who is forgotten and thrust aside in the excitement when the bedraggled young man comes back to a festive welcome from his doting father. In Pullman’s apocrypha, this Gospel parable becomes the reality of family life for Joseph and Mary. Christ takes to following Jesus secretly, listening to his words, writing them down and tidying them up when their message is troubling or a challenge to common sense: yet he cannot bring himself wholly to supersede the message he hears, and traces remain of the wildness of the original. Christ’s record of Jesus’s teaching becomes a strange mixture with a new agenda: as the angel-stranger says to Christ, Jesus ‘is the history, and you are the truth’. It is Christ who invents the Church, an invention that is far from Jesus’s intentions (his ultimate goal is not nearly so clear). Humiliated by his own failure to love a repulsive beggar unconditionally, Christ decides that the only way that the world’s ills can be healed is for his brother to suffer publicly for the people. Whether Christ is capable of seeing that a crucifixion will be the outcome of his betrayal is irrelevant to the treachery. I will not spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that the story is intended to point to Christianity as it exists today, in all its beauty, poetry, and artistic creativity, as well as the side of Christian history that is disfigured by intolerance, arrogance, stupidity and cruelty.

more from Diarmaid MacCulloch at Literary Review here.

Stone

Go inside a stone.
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star charts
on the inner walls.

by Charles Simic

From The Guardian:

Nothing has had more influence on western literature in the past thousand years than Christianity. Open any book, throw a rock, and you'll hit a Christian idea somewhere on the page. And yet, for a tradition so pervasive, few great writers have been renowned Christians praised by the church. Instead, the relationship between western writers and orthodox religion has been characterised by conflict. Writers are generally independent thinkers who dislike having their thoughts roped by doctrine. The church has always felt more comfortable with conservative Old Testament prohibitions, “don't do this” and “don't do that”. These prohibitions offer a clear hierarchy for judgment. The central commandment of Jesus was “Love one another” – it's not an idea that leverages power for religious brokers. To wield social power a church needs to divide society into good and evil, and to have these divisions recognised as gospel. Jesus was not interested in wielding power. He was a radical, not a conservative. His empathy and compassion, his unwillingness to judge others, his belief in the power of love and forgiveness and his friendship with a prostitute were the kinds of things that attracted writers to his philosophy and, ironically, they put many writers into conflict with the church.

Even writers whose work was distinctly moral and didactic in the Christian manner could be condemned by the church. Dante's Divine Comedy was a religious allegory about man's journey towards Godliness and salvation, yet he was branded a heretic because he questioned the pope's pursuit of secular power. George Eliot, who started her career translating theological texts, was damned for having a relationship with a married man. Samuel Law Wilson, a rambling, late-19th century literary critic, wrote of Eliot's affair: “It was a revolt against the acknowledged canons of Christian morality, a violation of the traditional sanctities of life, a trifling with an institution sacramental in its sacredness, an infringement of social order.” Dante and Eliot highlight two traditional conflicts between the church and the writer: some authors questioned the church's behaviour, others liked to have sex with whomever they pleased. As a consequence, literature and Christianity have made strange bedfellows.

More here.

From Science:

Birds do it, monkeys do it, humans do it-learning from the individuals around you is a crucial skill if you want to survive in a group. Scientists have thought that the ability to learn from others evolved in step with communal living. Now a study demonstrates an exception: A solitary reptile is an adept social learner. From the time young red-footed tortoises (Geochelone carbonaria) hatch in their native South American rainforests, they are alone. They grow up without parents or siblings, and adults rarely cross paths. If a head-bobbing display determines that a stranger is of the opposite sex, the two will mate perfunctorily-otherwise they just ignore each other. In a species so uninterested in social interactions, it's hard to see how the ability to learn from others could have evolved, says Anna Wilkinson, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna. But one day she scattered dandelions, a favorite snack, near a female tortoise named Wilhelmina, who began to eat. A second tortoise ignored a clump that had fallen near him and followed Wilhelmina to her clump instead. This made Wilkinson wonder whether the second tortoise had “learned that the dandelions were there” by observing where Wilhelmina was eating.

So Wilkinson set out to test whether tortoises learned a navigation task better by watching other tortoises or on their own. She set up a v-shaped wire fence and placed a bowl containing a few tidbits of strawberry and mushroom inside the fence at the point of the “V”. Then she set Wilhelmina outside the tip of the “V”, with the treats on the other side of the fence. In 12 trials, Wilhelmina tried to force her way through the barrier but never tried to walk around. The same was true of three other control tortoises Wilkinson and her colleagues tested. “In later trials, they would … go up the arm [of the “V”] and go to sleep,” says Wilkinson. She then slowly and patiently trained Wilhelmina to navigate the fence-it took more than 150 trials. But when she tested four tortoises after letting them watch Wilhelmina complete the maneuver, two succeeded on their first try, one made it after watching the demonstration a second time, and the fourth tortoise had to watch Wilhelmina nine times, Wilkinson and her colleagues will report online tomorrow in Biology Letters.

More here.