Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

On this happy anniversay–the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species–let us contemplate one of evolution’s great works: the origin of giants.

Whales are the biggest animals to ever live. Blue whales can get up to 160 tons–about as heavy as 2000 grown men. They are trailed in the rankings by the fin whale and a few other related species of whales. There are no lobsters in their ranks, no clams, no rodents. All these giants feed in much the same way. They swallow up water and filter it through fronds in their mouths called baleen. Most of the food they eat is tiny stuff, like krill and other small invertebrates. So some scientists have wondered how big whales manage to put enough tiny bits of food in their bodies to get to such huge sizes.

Unfortunately, whales dine out of sight, so scientists have had to tackle those questions with indirect clues. Jeremy Goldbogen, a biologist now at the University of British Columbia, has gathered all the clues he can, from data recorders carried by diving fin whales to video of baleen whales feeding near the ocean surface. To make sense of that data, he has worked with zoologist Robert Shadwick and ad paleontologist Nick Pyenson, also of UBC, as well as Jean Potvin, a physicist whose speciality is parachutes.

Yes. Parachutes. Let me explain.

More here.

From Wired:

At a settlement in what is now southern Germany, the menu turned gruesome 7,000 years ago. Over a period of perhaps a few decades, hundreds of people were butchered and eaten before parts of their bodies were thrown into oval pits, a new study suggests. Cannibalism at the village, now called Herxheim, may have occurred during ceremonies in which people from near and far brought slaves, war prisoners or other dependents for ritual sacrifice, propose anthropologist Bruno Boulestin of the University of Bordeaux 1 in France and his colleagues. A social and political crisis in central Europe at that time triggered various forms of violence, the researchers suspect.

“Human sacrifice at Herxheim is a hypothesis that’s difficult to prove right now, but we have evidence that several hundred people were eaten over a brief period,” Boulestin says. Skeletal markings indicate that human bodies were butchered in the same way as animals. Herxheim offers rare evidence of cannibalism during Europe’s early Neolithic period, when farming first spread, the researchers report in the December Antiquity. Artifacts found at Herxheim come from the Linear Pottery Culture, which flourished in western and central Europe from about 7,500 to 7,000 years ago.

More here.

3QD friend Hadi Ghaemi in The Huffington Post:

Much of the international public and media consider mass protests in Iran to have ended, because images of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators no longer appear on TV screens and front pages, as they did in June and July. But the protest movement is alive and continues to challenge the legitimacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government, and to demand fundamental rights.

At the forefront of this movement are university students. Iranian campuses are scenes of daily protests. Monday, December 7, is the National Student Day in Iran. It commemorates events back in 1953, when few months after a CIA-backed coup restored the monarchy at the expense of overthrowing the democratic government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. On December 7, 1953, military forces put down student protests at Tehran University, killing three student leaders. Ever since, December 7 has been the symbol of standing up to tyrannical rule and dictatorship.

This year, the civil rights movement in Iran is seizing on the historical importance of this day to once more stage protests.

More here.

Apple-Pears

each ninth month of the year
the buds fallen & fruit forming
copper-gold jewels a child’s round cheeks

sah-lay, we call them, the sound of new seasons
two notes plucked from a song played on strings

they came to us: Chinese fruit to a Chinese family
from wartime sailboats, Captain Blueberry
guarding cuttings in his metal chest
my parents planted it like Jack’s magic seed
in time, the fruit came like doubloons

* * *

we explain they are apple-
pears, I explain them like I explain myself:
like one thing, like another
but neither, you must taste it to know it

as I leave for university
the sah-lay skins are yellow and green

mother & I find two ripe small imploded moons
we peel & cut the flesh honied & crisp
the translucence is still
on my tongue when I say goodbye:

mother’s efficient hug, brisk, her
small frame bony under my arms
father’s soft belly & tilted head
embrace, his eyes water

reaching high altitude, I recline
pocket of impossible life amidst thousands
of miles of empty air and light
dwarf nuggets hidden in
my body turn fibrous, dissolve.

by Andy Quan

from Slant
publisher: Nightwood Editions, Madeira Park, B.C., 2001

From Science:

When I was first employed by a government research organization some years ago, my supervisor, although bright, kind, and productive, was so committed that she regularly labored into the wee hours of the morning and on weekends. She rarely took vacations. No one who worked with her could keep up with the pace, certainly not me. Typically, I would leave work at about 6 or 7 each evening after crossing off most of the items on my to-do list. Invariably, when I returned the next morning before 8, my in box was overflowing.

Lacking control over my workload, I felt stressed. My productivity suffered, as did my morale. Other employees became so dispirited and worn out that they left. (These were days when jobs were abundant.) Nonstop work–without sufficient downtime for family, friends, and solitude–violates the natural rhythms of life and nature. My supervisor was a perfectionist: obsessive, competitive, extremely mission-driven, and excessively failure-aversive. These traits made it difficult for her to set healthy boundaries between work and the rest of her life. And those traits affected not just her life but also the lives of all the members of the team.

More here.

Nikil Saval in n + 1:

In nearly every respect, the coup in Honduras was an almost parodic recreation of the old, bad times of military dictatorships in the 60s and 70s, when coups swept nearly every country in Latin America. The story inevitably involved a president who threatened to undermine bourgeois (and thereby US) interests, however modestly, and thus signed away his life and liberty. Deposed President Manuel Zelaya, who in his administration's early stages might have seemed yet another empty elite candidate from his country's Liberal Party, moved slightly left under the pressure of social movements, raising the minimum wage and publicly speaking about badly needed agrarian reforms in his desperately poor country (the third poorest in the Western hemisphere, after Haiti and Nicaragua). Popular desire for more inclusion in the political process led to a non-binding “encuesta,” or poll, regarding the formation of a Constituent Assembly to reform the constitution, which, due to its inconsistencies and enshrinement of the old, wealthy landowning class, Costa Rican president Oscar Arias has called “the worst constitution in the world.”

Zelaya's moves towards greater reforms threatened the country's long-entrenched power elite. His modest fraternizing with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who provided subsidized oil to the country, suggested a hidden hand in the reforms (in fact, the result of national-popular, rather than foreign, pressure). When the coup came, the only surprise was that the US did not have a direct hand in supporting it. The indirect hand, however, like God in his universe, was everywhere visible.

More here.

Farhad Manjoo in Slate:

Nearly a year ago—in the course of cajoling people into joining the ubiquitous social network—I marveled at Facebook's astonishing growth rate: The site had just signed up its 150 millionth member, and about 370,000 people were joining every day. “At this rate,” I wrote, “Facebook will grow to nearly 300 million people by this time next year.” I confess, though, that I didn't think it was possible for the site to keep growing at that rate. Every hot Web site begins to fade at some point, and back then, the tech world was enamored of an upstart that was gaining lots of attention from celebrities and the media—Twitter. Even Facebook seemed scared of the micro-blogging site. In June, it redesigned its user pages to display updates as quickly as Twitter does, a move that prompted a barrage of threats to quit.

Those threats were empty. And so, it seems, was any threat posed by Twitter. Facebook's growth rate has actually accelerated during the past year. In September, it announced that it had reached 300 million members, and this week, it passed 350 million. About 600,000 people around the world now sign up every day. Twitter hasn't released any recent usage numbers, but traffic to its site is flattening. Indeed, it's likely that Twitter has fewer members than the number of people who play the Facebook game FarmVille (69 million!).

More here.

Rebecca Hamilton in The New Republic:

Hilal's name looms large on the list of perpetrators who’ve committed atrocities in Darfur since violence erupted there in 2003. At Khartoum's request, he organized the Janjaweed, predominantly Arab militias that have operated hand-in-glove with the Sudanese government to cleanse Darfur of its non-Arab population. Hilal, who is now almost 50 years old, is among those most responsible for the deaths of more than 200,000 people and the displacement of another 2.7 million. The U.S. government has sanctioned him, and the United Nations has issued a travel ban and asset freeze against him. In mid-2006, Hilal stopped giving English-language media interviews.

This past August, however, he agreed to meet with me–three years and two months since he had last spent time with a Western journalist. Sheikh Musa, as Hilal is known by his Mahamid clan, said that he wanted to correct the “misperceptions” the world has about him.

More here.

Sean Carrol in Cosmic Variance:

First, conservation of momentum isn’t just an important physical principle, it played a crucial role in the development of the idea of reductionism, which has dominated physics ever since. Aristotle would have told us that to keep an object moving, you have to keep pushing it. That sounds wrong to anyone who has taken a physics course, but the thing is — it’s completely true! At least, in our real everyday world, where Aristotle and many other people choose to live. Push a cup of coffee across the table, and you’ll notice that when you stop pushing the cup comes to a stop. Galileo comes along and says sure, but we can go further if we instead imagine doing the same experiment in an ideal environment that is completely free of friction and air resistance — and in that case, the cup would keep moving along a straight line. This has the virtue of also being true, but the drawback of not relating directly to the world we experience. But that drawback is worth accepting, because this backward step opens an amazing vista of progress. If we start our thinking in an ideal world without friction, we can assemble all the rules of Newtonian mechanics, and then put the effects of air resistance back in later. That’s the birth of modern physics — appreciating that by simplifying our problems to ideal circumstances, and understanding the rules obeyed by individual components under these circumstances, we can work our way up to the glorious messiness of the world we actually see.

The second cool thing about conservation of momentum is that it was not Galileo who came up with the idea. As with many grand concepts, it’s hard to pin down who really deserves credit, but in the case of momentum the best candidate is Persian philosopher Ibn Sina (often Latinized as Avicenna).

More here.

Suketu Mehta in the New York Times:

Union Carbide and Dow were allowed to get away with it because of the international legal structures that protect multinationals from liability. Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary and pulled out of India. Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there’s an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition request. Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped bail for causing an industrial disaster that killed tens of thousands of Americans. What are the chances he’d be sunning himself in Goa?

The Indian government, fearful of scaring away foreign investors, has not pushed the issue with American authorities. Dow has used a kind of blackmail with the Indians; a 2006 letter from Andrew Liveris, the chief executive, to India’s ambassador to the United States asked for guarantees that Dow would not be held liable for the cleanup, and thanked him for his “efforts to ensure that we have the appropriate investment climate.”

What’s missing in the whole sad story is any sense of a human connection between the faceless people who run the corporation and the victims.

More here.

From The Guardian:

In Mapping New York, a new volume from Black Dog Publishing, the history of the city, its streets, services and social workings, is traced through the maps that have been made of it. Take a look at some of the most revealing and fascinating specimens here:

Here & There—A Horizonless Projection in Manhattan. Berg, 2009 A project by Jack Schulze and Matt Webb concerning “speculative projections” of Manhattan's dense urban space. The city seems to curve vertically away from the observer, skewing relative distances. Major streets are picked out in yellow, notable buildings in gold and parks in green; the labelling seems to float at the forefront of the image at first, but transforms to a standard map as the image flattens out with the gradient.

More here. (Note: All fifteen pictures are a “must see” for New Yorkers and Wannabe New Yorkers!)

From American Scientist:

When A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion was published nearly a decade ago, a lot of people were angered by its claims. The authors, Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, contended that rapists were men with limited social skills or limited mating opportunities who were carrying out a Pleistocene-engineered program that dictated that any attempt at procreation was better than none at all. Scholars, including myself, heaped criticism on the book because almost nowhere in it did Thornhill and Palmer present any empirical data in support of their view. And many people took exception to the assertion that rape might be better considered an act of attempted reproduction than one of violence, as it is widely understood to be.

Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans, a fine new volume edited by Martin N. Muller and Richard W. Wrangham, replaces hand-waving with hypothesis testing and should be much better received. The contributors’ focus is on sexual selection—in the form of observed patterns of sexual coercion in nonhuman primates—and its implications for the evolution of human behavior.

More here.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533 and died (following an attack of kidney stones, like his father) in 1592. His mother was of Marrano descent; her family had been Sephardic Jews, forced into Catholicism. Montaigne himself was always formally obedient to the Church. ‘Otherwise’, he wrote, ‘I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly. Thus I have kept myself intact, without agitation or disturbance of conscience.’ In this respect, he was somewhat the precursor of Evelyn Waugh, who said that, had he not been a Catholic, he would scarcely have been human. Montaigne, however, was a genial man of no officious piety; a dutiful mayor of Bordeaux, unaggressive lord of his modest Périgordin manor, and a courtier without grand ambition. His essays advocated good-humoured acceptance of the vagaries of human life. For all his formal orthodoxy, he was a manifest sceptic: ‘There is’, he observed, ‘no hostility that exceeds Christian hostility.’ In practice, he preferred the Stoic amor fati to religious absolutism and abominated the righteous cruelty of those with undoubting convictions: ‘It is putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.’ Sarah Bakewell takes this to be an allusion to the spate of witch-hunting which accompanied the religious wars, but it is no great stretch to see in it a reference to the ongoing series of autos-da-fé on the other side of the Pyrenees. For those who choose to read him so, Montaigne was a bit of a crypto-Jew.

more from Frederic Raphael at Literary Review here.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species contains only one illustration, and a rather dull one at that – a simple image of the tree-like branching relations between hypothetical species, with the present at the top (not all branches reach the top), and common ancestors deep in the past. In fact, the drawing does not look much like a tree – it is more like some kind of spindly weed. Although it might not seem impressive, this figure was a revolutionary way of representing life, summing up Darwin’s central idea of evolution by natural selection. This image was not the first that Darwin chose to represent his hypothesis. Shortly after his return from the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin drew a coral-like diagram and wrote “I think” alongside it. In his notebooks he later mused that “The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life”. Over the decades, however, the “tree” image and terminology gradually predominated. They were given particular and literal force by Ernst Haeckel, who at the end of the nineteenth century drew a sturdy oak-like tree with the names of organisms scattered around its branches. Down at the bottom were the monera (single-celled organisms without a nucleus), while at the very top – literally the pinnacle of evolution – were humans. We now know that Haeckel’s representation was wrong in so many ways. Not only are humans not at the top of the tree – we are no more or less “evolved” than the monera Haeckel put down at the bottom – if the tree of life were to be drawn to scale, in terms of either the number of organisms, or species, or the duration of their existence on the planet, then monera would take up almost all the space. Life on earth began 4 billion years ago, a mere 500 million years after the planet formed. If you represent our common history as lasting sixty seconds, life is mainly composed of monera, before proliferating in the last seven seconds, following the massive diversification of animal life that occurred with the “Cambrian Explosion” around 542 million years ago. On this scale, the appearance of our species 100,000 years ago is subliminal.

more from Matthew Cobb at the TLS here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:

Some of my readers will likely know that 'Mastodon' is a band formed in Atlanta in 1999, representing the 'new wave' of American heavy metal. I have not myself heard this band, but I gather from certain signs, read directly off of the attire of the youth –with whom, I remind you, I am in daily contact– that this is a band, and indeed a movement, not entirely to be ignored.

I would imagine it is a rather smaller fraction of my readers who will know that the Mastodon is an elephantoid mammal that first appeared in the Oligocene Period, some 30-35 million years ago. As such the Mastodon, whose name means 'breast tooth' in Greek, is something entirely distinct from the woolly mammoth, which appeared only around 150,000 years ago, during a relatively recent Eurasian glaciation.

Before I arrive at my real point, let me stress that it is the last of my intentions to seek to condemn heavy metal. As I understand it, this genre emerges out of the auspicious combination of late '60s psychedelic blues with the multifarious strains of creatively anachronistic neopaganism that became visible in the following decade, but that all, likely, have their roots in 19th-century romanticism, in Waterhouse's fairies, in Wagner's recycling of the Niebelungenlied, and so on. A distinguished genealogy, to be sure.

More here.

Via Glenn Greenwald:

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber:

Ten types of commenter, of which the last are the rarest.

1. The commenter who has not read the post properly, decides they know what it says anyway, and fires off a series of disgusted observations.

2. Commenter who applies the most uncharitable possible interpretation to the post, and goes straight into rant mode.

3. The commenter who takes the opportunity to make some sarcastic remarks highlighting his (99% of cases are male) own superior scholarship/intelligence and damning the CT author. “If only Chris has read the second treatise of Heinrich von Pumpkin in the original German, he’d be aware ….”

4. The commenter who uses every comment as a peg on which to hang his (yes, “his”) own obsessions about, e.g. analytical philosophy, populism, Palestine, etc

5. The commenter who simply wants to make nasty personal remarks about the CT author, often about female members of the collective, often using an alias.

More here.

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

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December 10, 2009, NOTE: The voting round is over.

Hello,

The period for nominating entrees for the 3QD Politics Prize is over.

To see a full list of the nominees and then vote, go here.

To see details of the prize, go here.

Good luck to all! The voting round closes on Wednesday, December 9, 2009, at 11:59 pm NYC time.