From Discover:

A curious thing happens to white-faced capuchin monkeys when they anoint their bodies with mud and plant matter, a natural insect repellent: With their heads and faces slathered in goop, these highly social primates lose their ability to recognize each other. Previously friendly monkeys can become fighting foes. This abrupt change in behavior hints at the importance of facial expressions for recognition, University of Washington evolutionary biologist Sharlene Santana says, and could help to explain why primate faces are so wildly divergent: Some species, like white-faced capuchins, have monotone hair and skin color; others, like the northern owl monkey, sport a dramatic mix of fur and flesh tones.

Biologists have long seen primates’ facial expressions during social interactions as clues that factors like group size drove the stark differences in their facial evolution. But there was little direct evidence to support the theories, so Santana decided to study a large number of monkey species, in a wide variety of social group sizes and environments, to see how their faces had evolved. Santana found that the complexity of a species’ facial color patterns is tightly linked to certain social systems. Species that live in larger groups tend to have plainer faces than those living in smaller groups. Primates in large social groups most likely benefit from plain faces that allow for a greater range of expressions, she explains.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

For more than 500 years, the whereabouts of King Richard III of England, who was killed in the one of the last battles of the War of the Roses, were unknown. A skeleton was dug up in a parking lot in Leicester late last year, and last month, archeologists confirmed the centuries-old corpse belonged to the king. Death wasn’t the end for Richard, as experts study his remains and historians argue where they should finally be put to rest. It wasn’t over for these historical figures either, as told in great detail by Bess Lovejoy in “Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses,” out March 12. These men’s unfortunate corpses were hacked, stolen, transported across oceans and even stuffed into a trunk and used as a chair.

Napoleon Bonaparte

After the former French emperor died in exile 1821 in Great Britain, 20 years would pass before his body returned to its home country. What happened next is the result of an autopsy that took one too many liberties. The doctor had allegedly removed the emperor’s genitals, and they joined some of Napoleon’s other belongings in a collection that was later auctioned in London in 1916. In 1927, the organ went on display at the Museum of French Art in New York City. It changed several collectors’ hands until the 1970s, when it was purchased by an American urologist, who kept it in a suitcase underneath his bed until he died in 2007 and his daughter inherited it.

Abraham Lincoln

After his assassination, the 16th president was embalmed and placed in an elaborate marble tomb in Springfield, Illinois. On election night, 1876, a group of counterfeiters attempted to steal the corpse, planning to hold it for ransom to force the release of famous engraver Benjamin Boyd, who had been pinched for forging $50 bills. Their scheme was interrupted by the Secret Service, which coincidentally Lincoln had created the day he was shot. The late president’s coffin was moved underneath the tomb, resurfacing once more in 1901, when workers sealed it in a steel cage and block of concrete. According to a young boy who, along with a small group of Illinois officials, snuck a peek at the politician one last time, Lincoln was perfectly preserved.

More here.

Johanna Sjöstedt interviews Nancy Bauer in Eurozine:

At the heart of the thought of American philosopher Nancy Bauer is the troubled relationship between philosophy and feminism. Put differently, Bauer is interested in exploring the possibilities for a genuinely philosophical feminism, while at the same time aiming at paving the way for a feminist critique of the philosophical tradition that is transformative, rather than dismissive, of the intellectual discipline as such. Instead of simply arguing in favour of feminist philosophy, where the issue of the value of feminism for philosophy and vice versa is settled in advance, Bauer works on the borders of feminism and philosophy, where difficulties in bringing the two enterprises together abound, but great intellectual rewards await in the case of success. In Bauer's work, this ambition manifests itself in a way of doing philosophy that ties the abstractions of philosophy to concerns of everyday life, where French writer, philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir serves as a great source of inspiration. Writing about the philosophy of Beauvoir and its connections to the thought of Descartes, Hegel, and Sartre, Bauer received her PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1997.

The work of Beauvoir is also the main topic of our conversation, ranging from questions about what philosophy is, also touching upon the relationship between philosophy and politics, to subjects of critique and the importance of scepticism for feminism. A central concern which nonetheless to some degree remains implicit is the sceptical legacy of seventeenth century French rationalist René Descartes. What is the image of philosophy proposed by scepticism and what are its implications for the prospect of a feminist philosophy? Descartes is generally acknowledged to be the founder of modern philosophy. In his work, the authority of reason is relocated from the great schools of scholasticism to the individual mind. Human subjectivity thus becomes the foundation of modern thought. The emphasis of the cogito as the touchstone of philosophical authority is also fundamental in the radical doubt that characterizes the thought of Descartes. Through his intervention, philosophy turns into an enterprise marked by scepticism, where the notion of the origin of thought becomes entwined with the image of a philosopher starting out from a position of metaphysical loneliness and isolation. Yet, the sceptical doubt of Descartes remains purely theoretical, in effect separating the realm where the doubting takes place from everyday life. For the latter dimension of human existence, Descartes adopts an entirely different guiding principle, rather asserting that he will “follow even the most doubtful of opinions […] with no less constancy than if they had been quite certain.”

Nancy Folbre in the NYT's Economix:

President Hugo Chávez is dead, but the debate over “Chavismo” lives on. His economic policies were aimed at improving the living standards of the poorest citizens of Venezuela, and those are the terms on which his ultimate success is likely to be judged.

Measured in terms of tangible improvements in human development, his achievements are significant. The bigger question is whether they can be politically and economically sustained.

A loud critic of United States policies and leader of a broader Latin American renunciation of neoliberal policies, Mr. Chávez has never been popular in the United States.

Strong aversion to both his political values and his personal style has often led to dismissive assessments of Venezuela’s economic record since he became president in 1999. But as Mark Weisbrot and Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research have carefully documented, the Venezuelan economy experienced significant growth after 2003, when the Chávez government successfully gained control over the national petroleum industry, and fared surprisingly well even after oil prices collapsed in 2008.

Oil revenues were used to finance large public investments in health, education, housing, pensions and food subsidies to the poor. World Bankindicators show a sharp decline in poverty from slightly more than 60 percent in 2003 to slightly more than 30 percent in 2011.

Many projects or “misiones” that Mr. Chávez put into place proved so popular that even Henrique Capriles, his opponent in the last election, promisedvoters he would maintain and augment them.

While some critics of Mr. Chávez suggest that his policies have not had much impact on other Latin American countries, others contend that they are not that different from those carried out by other social democratic governments in the region, like Brazil’s. The influential Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, past president of Brazil, has lauded Mr. Chávez’s contribution to regional initiatives.

The impact that Mr. Chávez had on other left-leaning governments in the region, especially in Bolivia and Ecuador, certainly represents part of his political legacy.

Economists have not yet developed very good tools for assessing the impact of specific development policies, partly because these are intrinsically difficult to measure.

Blindly is a book that combines those two types of writing that Ernesto Sàbato called diurnal and nocturnal. In the former a writer, even when he is inventing, expresses a world with which he is in agreement. He declares his own values, his mode of being. In the latter the writer has to reckon with something that suddenly emerges from within himself and which he did not know he possessed: feelings, disquieting drives (even horrible truths, so says Sàbato) that astound us, appall us, confront us with a face we did not know we had. It is writing that tells us what we could be, what we fear and hope to be, what by sheer chance we have not been. Such writing places us face to face with the Medusa of life, who at that moment cannot be sent to the hairdresser’s to get her serpent head done and so be rendered presentable. It is the writing wherein the writer’s Double speaks, and though the writer may well prefer his Double to speak of different things, he cannot do otherwise than pass him the microphone.

more from Claudio Magris at Threepenny Review here.

Wills—with his boxy spectacles, his Midwestern locutions (“not a one”)—declines to be the great man of letters in the kingly manner of, say, Edmund Wilson, Robert Penn Warren or even the Harvard-tooled heart-lander John Updike. It’s not a question of modesty. Wills is supremely self-assured. He has written two memoirs, the second of them a catalogue of his encounters with presidents, activists, mentors, professional American football players, the opera singer Beverly Sills, each evoked with uninflected precision. In conversation too Wills inclines toward the taxonomic, for instance when he recalls the “Integralist Catholic Church-State Caesaro-Papists” who formed a small renegade faction at National Review, the conservative journal-cum-hothouse where he got his start as a 23-year-old prodigy in the 1950s. All these years later, Wills’s indifference to his cultural standing seems the hard-headed calculation of a combatant wary of the perils of growing soft. Argument is his nutriment and has been since his teens, when he was an accomplished schoolboy debater at the Jesuit high school he attended in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. For Wills to argue is not to quarrel, accuse, or even opine. It is to state a hypothesis and then work through it with Euclidian rigour and arcane examples. “People tell me I should read Hilary Mantel’s novels,” he says, “but I’m not interested in the writer’s imagination of history. I want to see the evidence!”

more from Sam Tanenhaus at Prospect Magazine here.

Lily Bui over at CitizenSci:

Science takes time, and data analysis on this scale would certainly not happen overnight. Some say that the Human Genome Project left us realizing there is still so much more to learn. Will the Brain Activity Map and projects like it encounter the same challenges upon completion, whenever that may be?

The tricky part is that scientists have yet to find a way to record the activity of more than a small number of neurons simultaneously without invasive physical probes. New technology enables us to provide the right kinds of images to “map” the brain, but the volume of images that come through would be so overwhelming that it would take an insurmountable amount of time to process the data. Even today’s leading technology, from neuro-nanotech to optobiology to synthetic biology sensors, is limited when it comes to such a large undertaking.

Here’s where projects like EyeWire come in.

EyeWire is an online community of “citizen neuroscientists” who map the retinal connectome (neurons in the retina) by playing an online game. Because the feat of mapping the human brain solo (or even as a small team) would be infinitely large, EyeWire has made use of crowdsourcing strategies to collect data.

“Researchers have calculated that with today’s technology it would take one person 100,000 years to map one cubic millimeter of the brain without the aid of artificial intelligence,” says Amy Robinson, who works on the EyeWire team. (Just to give you a scale, an entire human brain is roughly 1,000,000 cubic millimeters.) “It takes a researcher at our lab…upwards of 50 hours to map an entire cell, depending on its size…and there are over 80 billion neurons in the brain.”

Of all the visual engines pulling the long freight train of Western art, alone, inscrutable, regal is Piero della Francesca. With Giotto, Velázquez, Goya, Cézanne, and several others, Piero—as he’s always referred to, like a familiar—is perhaps the Western painter most universally loved by artists. The towering majesty, poignant silences, mystic geometries, and stately, breathtaking color in his scenes of saints in conversation, contemplation, or simply standing are spellbinding sources of awe, magnificence, and an almost immortal optical poetry. Piero gives us the astounding power and plaintiveness of early Italian Renaissance art, shakes us to our moral core, bringing the intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and soulful closer together than any artist who ever lived. I want to say Piero is perfect. He worked and lived in what’s now called Tuscany between 1411 (probably) and 1492, and was renowned in his own lifetime, sought after by princes and potentates. The best way to see his work is to travel what’s called the “Piero della Francesca Trail,” visiting his hometown of Borgo San Sepolcro, Urbino, Monterchi, Rimini, and the tremendous fresco cycle in Arezzo known as The Legend of the True Cross.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

From The Telegraph:

From The New York Times:

Maria Konnikova’s “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes” may not make you a master detective, as the publisher notes, but it will teach you how to “observe, not merely see,” a prerequisite to thinking like the great man. As Holmes himself says in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” his work centers on “those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province.” If deduction and synthesis are a challenge, learning to observe may be even harder. Ms. Konnikova, a science writer based in New York, distinguishes between the Watson system (the natural tendency to believe what we see and hear) and the Holmes system. Teaching the Holmes system is the object of this book.

The first step is to question everything. Citing the psychologist Daniel Gilbert, Ms. Konnikova points out that for our brains to process something, we must initially, momentarily, believe it. If you hear the term “pink elephant,” you picture a pink elephant for a split second before you “effortfully engage in disbelieving” it. More complicated subjects are far more difficult than pink elephants, of course. Consider the statement “There are no poisonous snakes in Maine.” It sounds plausible, and most of us would just let it go. (In fact, it is true.) This tendency, she tells us, is reinforced by what psychologists call the correspondence bias, by which we generally assume that what a person says is what he believes. “Holmes’s trick is to treat every thought, every experience and every perception the way he would a pink elephant,” Ms. Konnikova writes. “In other words, begin with a healthy dose of skepticism instead of the credulity that is your mind’s natural state of being.” This requires mindfulness — constant presence of mind, “the attentiveness and hereness that is so essential for real active observation of the world.” If we want to think like Sherlock Holmes, “we must want, actively, to think like him.” And practice, practice, practice.

More here.

Lyric

Osman Samiuddin in All Out Cricket:

One November night in Sharjah, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene came together to do what they had been doing for what now seems like forever. It was a warm, oily evening, the air heavy and lubricated. The pair had joined forces at 53 for 3, chasing 201 for the win. The pitch was a grubby orangey-brown, where batsmen were regularly through their strokes too early. Pakistan were 2-1 up in the series and playing in a recrudescent stadium, but this was still pretty routine firefighting for the Sri Lankan pair.

Neither batsman was comfortable to begin with because you couldn’t really be on that surface. But once they got past the first 20 minutes, the familiarity of the task took over. Boundaries were bonuses – only three came in 17 overs from the 18th onwards – so, like good traffic cops, they simply kept the flow moving along. Single here, double there, single here, double there, nice and steady. By the 38th over, they had put on 102 and were looking as settled as two old buddies watching the game on an old, much-shared couch.

Sri Lanka now needed just 46 with 74 balls still to come (the required run-rate wasn’t high, but the nature of the pitch made it a little steeper). The crowd, largely Pathan, were still pretty cheery but attention from the match had slipped, and was focused on the occasion itself; Pakistan were, after all, returning after many years to a venue where they had created love and magic and darkness.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]

Michael P. Lynch in the New York Times:

“To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle ”— that, Wittgenstein once said, was the aim of his philosophy. While it is perhaps unclear whether anyone — philosopher or fly — should be flattered by this comparison, his overall point is clear enough, as Paul Horwich notes in his recent piece, “Was Wittgenstein Right?” When we get curious about philosophical problems we are drawn into puzzles by the promise of sweet enlightenment, only to find ourselves caught in frustration (and banging our heads against the same wall over and over again). What we need, Wittgenstein thinks, is liberation — liberation from the prison of pseudo-problems we have brought upon ourselves; liberation from traditional philosophy.

Horwich’s analysis is penetrating and important. Doubtless some will quarrel with it as a reading of Wittgenstein; but I will not — not only because I think it is largely right, but because I’m more interested in whether it is true. Not surprisingly, I have my doubts.

According to HW (Horwich’s Wittgenstein), we get trapped in our glass cages because we philosophers fetishize science’s success in giving reductive explanations. A reductive explanation of X is one that tells us the underlying essence of X – that says what all and only X’s have in common. As HW points out, the concepts philosophers are interested in seem highly resistant to this sort of analysis. And this is something we could appreciate if we just paid attention to the role such concepts really play in our thought and language. Once we do so, we’ll see that traditional philosophical answers to its traditional questions are “mistakes of perverse overgeneralization.”

More here. [Photo of Wittgenstein from Wikipedia.]