From Science:

For chimpanzees living next to the West African village of Bossou, Guinea, scoring papayas can also mean scoring a mate. That’s one conclusion of a 3-year study that followed Bossou’s adult males as they staged daring raids on crops and then used the plundered foods to woo females. According to the authors, the crops-for-sex strategy has never been recorded outside of Bossou, and it provides further evidence of an evolutionary basis for the seductive power of male bravado.

“We believe the males may be using crop raids as a way to advertise their prowess, especially to the opposite sex,” explains Kimberley Hockings, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Stirling in the U.K. “It’s not just meat that can be used as social currency but any risky or difficult-to-obtain foods.” Bossou is one of six sites in Africa where long-term chimpanzee studies are being carried out, the oldest and most famous being Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, where Jane Goodall first observed cooperative hunting and meat sharing in the early 1970s.

More here.

From MSNBC:

WILLS POINT, Texas – A variety of spider species built on one another’s work to create a sprawling web that blanketed hundreds of yards of trees and shrubs at a North Texas park, according to entomologists who studied the unusual formation.

The web covered 200 yards (meters) along a trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) east of Dallas. The August discovery of the massive web spurred debate among entomologists about its origin and rarity. Mike Quinn, a biologist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, collected spiders from the trees and sent them to Texas A&M. Dean studied 250 specimens and identified 12 families of spiders in the same web. He said the most prevalent type is from the Tetragnathidae family, which typically weave individual orb-shaped webs.

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

It’s too late to climb on the bandwagon now, and it wasn’t much of a bandwagon to start with. If cinephilia is dead, as Susan Sontag some time ago suggested it was, who cares about the simultaneous death of two cinéastes? Still, no reader of signs can resist a coincidence, the image of a meaning that can’t be there. Michelangelo Antonioni (born 1912) and Ingmar Bergman (born 1918) both died on 30 July 2007 – as if time, otherwise indifferent to plot and meaning, had something to say about the cinema.

But time, it turns out, seemed to say one thing and meant another. This was the end of an age, apparently, or would have been if the age represented by these directors had not ended quite a while ago. The whole world of slow-moving angst we associate with their best-known films is scarcely a memory. Panic and fanaticism are our modes, or the modes we think we need to deal with. But then the new coincidence reminds us of old coincidences, and invites us to think about what these echoes mean.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

The bloggers here at Scienceblogs all have other professional lives–professors, doctors, software engineers, and so on. My own line of work as a science writer can make blogging a bit awkward every now and then. Take, for instance, an article I wrote for tomorrow’s New York Times about moray eels. It turns out that they have bizarre jaws hidden in their throats that catapult forward into their mouth to grab prey.

If you read other blogs at Scienceblogs, this may sound like slightly old news. That’s because the paper describing this research came out on Wednesday in the journal Nature, and was promptly described in a couple excellent blog posts–one at Neurophilosophy and one at Pharyngula. The Times’s science section doesn’t come out till Tuesday, so I’ve kept quiet.

One reason I find this story so cool–beyond the obvious weirdness–is that the scientists who discovered the hidden jaws have been thinking carefully about how the jaws evolved. This is par for the course for one of the co-authors, Peter Wainwright, who has been studying the evolution of new traits for a long time now in fish. In fact, I wrote about some of his work long ago in 1997 in Discover–an elegant study of the pufferfish, and how it evolved from much more ordinary animals.

More here.

Seth Lerer in the New York Sun:

This argument, what we might call Pinkerism, sets up a fundamental relationship between language and mind. Its implications have been seen across a gamut of human experiences: from understanding social relationships to developing artificial intelligence. Indeed, some adherents might claim that Mr. Pinker’s work gives us not just a template for humanity, but a program for computer architecture. In short, this is a blueprint for the brain, whether it be organic or virtual.

Mr. Pinker has written so much on this subject, and his work has been the object of so much debate, that one may wonder why we need another 400-plus page book on the matter. “The Stuff of Thought” adds little to the intellectual edifice of Pinkerism. It does, however, furnish that edifice’s rooms with popular examples, political and social implications, and reflections on the ways in which we all use language every day. There are extended chapters on swearing and obscenity, discussions of metaphor and figurative expression in literature and popular culture, and ruminations on the social codes of conversation.

Some of this material is fascinating. I was particularly struck by the discussion of “indirectspeech”: why we often make requests or indicate desire in oblique ways. “Would you like to come up for coffee,” has become an indirect request for sex. “I was wondering if you could pass the guacamole,” has become a polite way of saying, “Pass the guacamole.” Politeness and desire compel us to speak and write in subtle ways, and Mr. Pinker’s sensitivity and knowledge make his account far more substantive than those of other writers on this matter.

More here.  My own review of The Stuff of Thought is here.

Over at TPM Cafe, Paul Krugman comments on Johnathan Chait’s The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by CrackpotEconomics:

Jon’s description is correct, but, I think, somewhat incomplete.

First, supply-side quackery is only one of the gambits used to sell tax cuts.

There are other, older versions – notably the claim that government is wasting your money on vast armies of useless bureaucrats. Way back in 1964, in his famous speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Reagan talked about how crazy it was that the federal government employed 2.5 million civilian workers; nobody pointed out that two-thirds of those civilians worked either for the Pentagon or for the post office.

Second, Jon talks at some length about the media, and in particular about the Republican ability to get journalists to harp endlessly on supposed character flaws of Democrats, while their own candidates get a free pass…

From Science:

Mohammed Homman is in no hurry to defend his dissertation. It’s not because the Karolinska Institute doctoral candidate needs more time to write or perform a few more experiments. Nor is it because he needs to be home most days by 5 p.m. to help his wife, Maria Homman, who heads her own research and development lab at Akzo Nobel, care for their two daughters. Homman is taking his time to finish his degree because he’s busy wooing investors, hiring researchers–some of them with their own doctorates–and establishing business partnerships. Finishing his degree just isn’t his highest priority right now.

There’s also the pesky matter of patents. Announcing his results publicly in the form of a dissertation might interfere with the two pending patents his company, Vironova, needs to grow. Homman started the bioinformatics company in 2005 to commercialize technology he developed that automates virus detection using digital images from electron microscopes. Homman, who is 33 years old, is CEO of the company, which has 11 employees and has raised more than $5 million in capital so far. The target in the current fundraising round is $50 million.

How does he get it all done? “I do not get much sleep,” he says cheerfully.

More here.

Joseph O’Neill in The Atlantic Monthly:

Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James.

The general American mystification with cricket is not merely anomalous but a tad perverse — you might even say it’s the stuff of a national blind spot (“a region of understanding in which one’s intuition and judgment always fail,” according to my dictionary). Well, what of it? Why not turn a blind eye to a complicated, time-consuming, weird-looking sport? And don’t we have our own game involving sticks and balls and hot summer days?

A possibly eccentric but, I would suggest, far-reaching response to this line of argument would be as follows: To be deprived of knowledge of cricket is to be deprived, at the very least, of a full appreciation of C. L. R. James’s strange and wonderful Beyond a Boundary, the American publication of which occurred almost a quarter century ago. The original, British publication came in 1963, and ever since, the book has gone down pretty well with the critics. “To say ‘the best cricket book ever written’ is pifflingly inadequate praise,” blurbs the most current U.K. paperback edition, which quotes this further encomium:

Great claims have been made for [Beyond a Boundary]: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true.

Such praise cannot be dismissed as self-serving hyperbole: Derek Walcott has written of “a noble book,” and V. S. Naipaul, in the days before his glorious unpleasantness had fully manifested itself (needless to say, he eventually turned on James), rejoiced at “one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies.”

More here.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new government. But at the time, Israel was pummeling Beirut in response to Hizballah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, so U.S. legislators naively tried — and failed — to get Maliki to condemn Hizballah. And, revealing the extent to which Washington is encased in a bubble when it comes to matters involving Israel in the Middle East, Senators Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin wrote Maliki a letter saying the following: “Your failure to condemn Hezbollah’s aggression and recognize Israel’s right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East.”

To cut bluntly to the chase, there is scarcely a single politician in the Arab world willing to endorse Washington’s definitions of the problems or the solutions when it comes to Israel’s impact on the region — and that even among the autocrats with whom the U.S. prefers to work, much less that rare breed that Maliki represents, i.e. a democratically elected leader. It is the U.S. leadership that is in denial about what is needed to create security in the region.

More here.

Robert Scott Stewart in Metapsychology:

Despite what we have all heard, married folks in America are actually wildly monogamous. In 2004, only 3.9 % of married men and 3.1% of married women engaged in extramarital sex in the past year (62). The figure that is often heard – that more than half of married men, and a quarter of married women will cheat on their spouses over their lifetime – turns out to be both highly problematic and overestimated. These later figures come from Alfred Kinsey’s studies in the 1950’s, and they are based upon badly unrepresentative samples (46). This was exacerbated by later studies by Shere Hite and Cosmopolitan magazine which placed adultery figures as high as 70% for both men and women. It turns out that in the U.S. only about 20% of men and 10% of women have extramarital sex over their lifetimes (50), although, as Druckerman notes, statistical evidence in this area is strangely hard to come by.

Why there should be such a dramatic difference between reality and perception is interesting. Part of it clearly has to do with the fact that some segments within our society who receive a disproportionate amount of media coverage – such as sports and movie stars, famous politicians and, one wants to add, but probably shouldn’t, evangelical ministers like Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard — do commit adultery in numbers much higher than the norm.

More here.

Janet Malcolm in the New York Review of Books:

How many of us have—among other self-immolations—badmouthed someone in an email, only to make the fatal mis-click that sends the email to the very person we have betrayed? And what can we do to repair the damage? Anything?

“The email era has made necessary a special type of apology,” Shipley and Schwalbe write,

the kind you have to make when you are the bonehead who fired off a ridiculously intemperate email or who accidentally sent an email to the person you were covertly trashing. In situations like these, our first inclination is to apologize via the medium that got us into so much trouble in the first place. Resist this inclination.

Instead, go see the person or telephone him, for “the graver the email sin, the more the email apology trivializes it.” “Just because we have email we shouldn’t use it for everything,” Shipley and Schwalbe write, introducing a notion that younger readers may find too radical to take seriously.

More here.

Howard Zinn in the Utne Reader:

I was recently invited to participate in a symposium on the Boston Massacre. I said I would speak, but only if I could also speak about other massacres in American history.

The Boston Massacre, which took place on March 5, 1770, when British troops killed five colonists, is a much-remembered–indeed, overremembered–event. Even the word massacre is a bit of an exaggeration; Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says the word denotes “wholesale slaughter.”

Still, there is no denying the ugliness of a militia firing into a crowd, using as its rationale the traditional claim of trigger-happy police–that the crowd was “unruly” (as it undoubtedly was). John Adams, who was a defense lawyer for the nine accused British soldiers and secured acquittals for seven of them, described the crowd as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattos, Irish teagues, and outlandish jack tarrs.”

Adams could hardly have expressed more clearly the fact that the race and class of the victims made their lives less precious. This was one of many instances in which the Founding Fathers registered their desire to keep revolutionary fervor under the control of the more prosperous classes.

Ten thousand Bostonians (out of a total population of 16,000) marched in the funeral procession for the massacre victims. And the British, hoping not to provoke more anger, pulled their troops out of Boston. Undoubtedly, the incident helped build sentiment for independence.

Still, I wanted to discuss other massacres because concentrating attention on the Boston Massacre would be a painless exercise in patriotic fervor.

More here.

Masks and Madness
for 9/11

She leaned on her brother’s lego towers,
Being at that age when everything becomes
An aid to the miracle of mobility. Hers was
To sow disassembly on the industrious fields
Of a sibling’s imagination. Innocently.

Far out in the world, men learn
The miracle of walking planes on leashes,
Testicles burning with artificial fire,
Striding into gangling towers
Innocent as placard-carrying activists.

Far out in another world, Hitler and Mao
Compare notes, ruing the slow evolution
Of human imagination. “I’d have built airports,
Not Auschwitz; sent Israel to Canaan
On Economy,” Hitler says, in a rare interview.

Mao nods absentmindedly, he spends his days
Building Boeings from the pages of the red
Book. In New York, men settled for suicide,
Hurtled down burning towers, voices willed
To answering machines that reproduce

Every nuance of terror, and leak the smells
Of burning words, burning goodbyes, burning
Skins, burning everything. The journey
Of a thousand stories ends with one step
Into dust, into ash, into the salt from many eyes,

Civilisation toppling at the sound of God’s name.
And as for you who wear masks and madness, and chant
God’s name in vain: Pack all the fear you can, into
The aisles of a million jets, and watch them explode
Prematurely with a heroism that is not yours — and never will be.

(Originally appeared in The Vocabula Review)

Tolu Ogunlesi’s blog is here.

Pallab Ghosh at the BBC:

A team of astronomers from the US and the UK has obtained some of the clearest pictures of space ever taken.

They were acquired using a new “adaptive optics” system which sharpens pictures taken from the Mount Palomar Observatory in California.

The images are twice as sharp as those from Hubble Space Telescope.

The new system, dubbed “Lucky”, is the result of work by a team from Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

More here.

Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:

If a car measures up to my mundane criteria, I don’t much care about make or model … and I reserve the sole veto power after a test drive.) So when I came across this Time magazine compilation, I browsed through it with some interest only because it is the “worst cars of all time” list.  That made it a more engrossing read than the fawning, over the top showroom jargon of sensuality, grace, power, elegance and status enhancing qualities associated with the “best” automobiles. The “worst” list is perhaps also more interesting and its colorful language more convincing because nobody is trying to sell us anything. In fact its whole point is to alert us to automotive follies, past and present, foreign and domestic. Here for example is the withering put down of the Renault Dauphine, the worst car of 1956.

The most ineffective bit of French engineering since the Maginot Line, the Renault Dauphine was originally to be named the Corvette, tres ironie. It was, in fact, a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting. Its most salient feature was its slowness, a rate of acceleration you could measure with a calendar. It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment. The fact that the ultra-cheap, super-sketchy Dauphine sold over 2 million copies around the world is an index of how desperately people wanted cars. Any cars.

More here.

Also for this 9/11, Seamus Heaney’s reading and commentary on “Horace and the Thunder” (approximately 16 minutes and 15 seconds into the audio file of the reading). From the transcript:

After that day [9/11/2001], a poem which I had cherished for different reasons took on new strengths and new strangeness – Horace, a poem by Quintus Horatius Flaccus, a Latin poet, of the Augustan age. If anybody’s interested, it’s in Carminum Liber Primus. That’s the first Book of Odes, Number 34. Horace, in this poem, gets a shock. He says, I’m a pretty cool kind of guy. I’m not really gospel greedy. I go with the crowd. But, something happened that really put the wind up me. Oops! And the terms of the poem…it’s really about poetry’s covenant with the irrational, I thought first of all. It’s about thunder in the clear, blue sky. Shock, Jupiter, the thunder god, ba-boom. But some of the terms used were so resonant in a new world of the twenty first century. He talked about (Latin), god certainly has power, he said. (Latin) He can change the highest for the lowest. He can (Latin)…He can bring the unknown forward. And this moment of great danger, great grief, great dread, promised a re-tilting of the world in all kinds of ways. Both the hammer coming down, and, something else, perhaps we’re being shown new…..It required what the poet, W.B. Yeats, said that was required of every kind of mature intellect; it required us to ‘hold in a single thought reality and justice.’ Beautiful to formulate; extremely difficult to manage. But, the danger and menace of this was in the poem for me. So this is called ‘Horace and the Thunder’. Three stanzas of Horace, one stanza of Heaney, but I’ll not tell you which is which. [laughter]

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now,
He galloped his thunder-cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underneath, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest things

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked esteemed. Hooked-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing off
Crests for sport, letting them drop wherever.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid,
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Smoke furl and boiling ashes darken day.

The most outlandish claim about Qin Shi Huangdi – that he declared war on death itself – has now been proved true, so long after his demise. Sima Qian wrote in great detail about the subterranean mausoleum, recounting how the emperor’s tomb, with its rivers of mercury and its jewel-encrusted ceiling, was protected by great underground ramparts. According to the historian, the fortifications, built way below the water table, were sealed watertight, and the tomb candles, made from whale oil, were designed to burn for eternity. He even described elaborate booby traps: artisans constructed crossbows that would be triggered mechanically, firing a volley of arrows at any unsuspecting grave-robber.

In recent years, geological surveys have proved his seemingly fanciful descriptions to be accurate. The subterranean chambers, protected by huge protective walls, really exist. Even more astonishing is the revelation that the subsoil of the tomb mound contains unnaturally high quantities of mercury, concentrated in a series of apparent channels – indicating that the silvery streams representing the Yangtze and the Yellow River are still flowing around a gold coffin.

more from The New Statesman here.

The pathos of The Savage Detectives lies in that single contrast—the pathos of the ardent young poets who cavort like satyrs and nymphs in the sacred wood of high poetry and, then again, have to drag their way around the hardscrabble streets of Mexico City, and sometimes die all too soon, as Rubén Darío did at age 49, and Roberto Bolaño did at age 50, in both cases of liver failure.

But I don’t mean to bring my drum-banging on Bolaño’s behalf to a gloomy thud of a conclusion. The Savage Detectives sings a love song to the grandeur of Latin American literature and to the passions it inspires, and there is no reason to suppose that, in spite of every prediction, these particular grandeurs and passions have reached their appointed end. Bolaño’s friend Carmen Boullosa in The Nation and Francisco Goldman in the New York Review of Books have both insisted lately that Bolaño wrote a further novel, not yet translated into English, that is stronger, or at least more prodigious, even, than The Savage Detectives.

more from Slate here.

If this makes him sound like some Nabokovian pervert obsessed with young Lolitas flashing their thighs, it is worth remembering that Willem de Kooning was just as taken with these twirling, gesticulating nymphs in their parades of ritualised motion. And that is precisely what these sacrificial lambs – prizes for returning warriors, the artist calls them – have become in Hume’s latest paintings, displayed in American Tan, at London’s White Cube MAson’s YArd.

Balletic, athletic, slender limbs outflung, cartwheeling, jack-knifing, landing in splits, these are bodies put through extraordinary contortions. Caught in freeze-frame, they scarcely look like nubile teenagers at all. They are, in short, ideal subject matter for this painter of radically denatured images.

more from The Observer Review here.