3QD’s own Ker Than, in LiveScience.com:

The ancient asteroid that slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and purportedly ended the reign of the dinosaurs occurred 300,000 years too early, according to a controversial new analysis of melted rock ejected from the impact site.

The standard theory states that a giant asteroid about 6 miles wide smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula close to the current Mexican town of Chicxulub about 65 million years ago. The impact raised enough dust and debris to blot out the sun for decades or even centuries.

Such a large impact would also have triggered a host of natural disasters, including volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis and global firestorms that fried, starved and suffocated the beasts.

But Markus Harting of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and a small group of scientists thinks the Chicxulub impact happened too early to have been the infamous dinosaur-killer.

More here.

Daniel Edwards’ sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth has sparked controversy in all corners, in the BBC.

A nude sculpture depicting singer Britney Spears giving birth to her son has prompted a flood of emails from both pro-choice and anti-abortionists.

Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston will be unveiled at New York’s Capla Kesting Art gallery in April.

Gallery co-owner David Kesting said they had received 3,000 emails, some from “pro-life” supporters who thought it was degrading to their movement.

He added that other people were “upset” the sculpture was a pro-life monument.

The life-size work, by artist Daniel Edwards, features Spears crouched on all fours on a bear-skin rug as she gives birth.

It will be displayed at the gallery alongside a display case filled with anti-abortion materials.

Also see this (essay with photos) and this.

Do bloggers lean left or right? Does the blogosphere have an ideological tilt? Such questions once engaged mainstream reporters and pundits struggling to understand an upstart online movement. During the post-9/11, pre-Iraq explosion of “warbloggers,” we were told that blogs gave voice to red-state anger and conservative values. Then, during the heyday of Howard Dean’s outsider campaign, we heard that they instead embodied a new progressive populism.

Now, the pointlessness of these questions seems plain. You might as well ask, “Do writers lean left or right?” — or, “Does the world have an ideological tilt?”

more from Salon here.

If you’re like me, the peculiar selectivity of the ’80s revival has been a source of considerable perplexity and annoyance. Overlooking complex cultural touchstones like Crime Story, Kate Bush, Q: The Winged Serpent and Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy in favor of Rubik’s Cube, Reaganomics and The Breakfast Club, the ordained collective memory shrouds the awkward vital perversity of the era in Day-Glo bangles and Cosby sweaters.

Similarly, the official picture of the ’80s art world is flat and cartoonish, an embarrassing bubble of self-indulgence irrevocably linked to junk bonds, cocaine and the gutting of the National Endowment for the Arts. But just as Aerial and the Futureheads have re-ignited Kate Bush’s hipness quotient and PKD is suddenly everybody’s go-to guy for the looming information apocalypse, visual artists of the ’80s — unfairly lumped in (and dismissed) with the ham-fisted neo-expressionists, anal-retentive postmodernists and not-anal-retentive-enough performance artists that populate the awesomely bad ’80s of the imagination — are being rediscovered in all their subtlety and depth.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From National Geographic:

Pampering pets with designer goods isn’t so unusual—and now even your houseflies can get outfitted in style.

An entry in a German science-photo competition, this image shows a fly sporting a set of “designer” lenses crafted and set in place with a cutting-edge laser technique. The glasses fit snuggly on the fly’s 0.08-inch-wide (2-millimeter-wide) head.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Even though we humans write the textbooks and may justifiably be suspected of bias, few doubt that we are the smartest creatures on the planet. Many animals have special cognitive abilities that allow them to excel in their particular habitats, but they do not often solve novel problems. Some of course do, and we call them intelligent, but none are as quick-witted as we are.

What favored the evolution of such distinctive brainpower in humans or, more precisely, in our hominid ancestors? One approach to answering this question is to examine the factors that might have shaped other creatures that show high intelligence and to see whether the same forces might have operated in our forebears. Several birds and nonhuman mammals, for instance, are much better problem solvers than others: elephants, dolphins, parrots, crows. But research into our close relatives, the great apes, is surely likely to be illuminating.

More here.

Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Review of Books:

On the morning of May 30, 1593, twenty-nine-year-old Christopher Marlowe made his way to an appointment he had in Deptford, a small town on the Thames, a few miles downriver from London Bridge. The appointment was for 10 AM at a house that belonged to a widow named Eleanor Bull. There Marlowe met three men with whom he was already well acquainted, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley. The four sat all morning in quiet conversation, had lunch together, and afterward walked for some time in widow Bull’s garden. At about 6 PM they returned inside for supper. Along with the table at which they ate, the room contained a bed, on which Marlowe lay down after dining; the other three continued to sit next to each other on a single bench, their backs to their reclining companion.

According to the official account, an argument began between Ingram Frizer and Marlowe about the bill— the “reckoning,” as it was termed—for the meals they had eaten that day. Their words grew ever more heated. Suddenly Marlowe’s anger must have boiled over, for he jumped up and grabbed Frizer’s dagger from its sheath. Hemmed in by Skeres and Poley and at first unable to move, Frizer was slashed twice on the head before he finally wrested his weapon out of Marlowe’s hands. “And so it befell, in that affray, that the said Ingram, in defense of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of twelve pence, gave the said Christopher then and there a mortal wound over his right eye, of the depth of two inches and of the width of one inch.”

More here.

From The New Yorker:

[Dennett’s] real contribution is an accessible account of what might be called the natural history of religion. (Religion, as he provisionally defines it, involves believing in, and seeking the approval of, a supernatural being.) “There was a time,” he writes, “when there was no religion on this planet, and now there is lots of it. Why?” Why did religion appear in the first place? And why did certain religions spread while others sank into obscurity?

To answer these questions, Dennett says, we must confront two spells. The first is the taboo against asking uncomfortable questions about religion. In his view, religion is simply too important to be spared hard questions. Indeed, he argues, religion is among the most powerful forces on earth and, as religiously inspired warfare and acts of terrorism remind us, it is not always benign. The second spell, in Dennett’s account, is one cast by religion itself. Do we risk dimming religion’s numinous glow by the very act of scientific analysis? Will we, out of what Dennett calls a “pathological excess of curiosity,” rob believers of the deepest and most important part of their lives? Dennett is sensitive to this concern and concedes the danger, but he concludes that the chances of undermining religious sensibility are slight…

More here.

Helen Nugent in the London Times:

Britain and France have experienced long periods of conflict and rivalry but now victory in one area can be claimed: Britons are more intelligent than the French.

A new European league of IQ scores has ranked the British in eighth place, well above the French, who were 19th. According to Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, Britons have an average IQ of 100. The French scored 94. But it is not all good news. Top of the table were the Germans, with an IQ of 107. The British were also beaten by the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.

Professor Lynn, who caused controversy last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, said that populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south. The average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is 1,320cc and in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc.

More here.

Chris Baker in Slate:

Thousands of industry professionals have descended on Silicon Valley to ogle the latest physics engines and graphics cards, hear panel discussions like “C++ on Next-Gen Consoles: Effective Code for New Architectures,” and thrill at being in the same room with the guy who made Marble Madness. But the highlight of the annual Game Developers Conference is an epic battle known as the Game Design Challenge.

The challenge is the brainchild of Eric Zimmerman, the CEO of gameLab and the author of several scholarly books on video games. Each year, Zimmerman asks three pre-eminent designers to build a game around some ridiculously ambitious theme. This year, he tasked them with dreaming up something that could win the Nobel Peace Prize.

More here.

From Space.com:

Tourists and scientists are gathering at spots around the world for a total solar eclipse Wednesday that will sweep northeast from Brazil to Mongolia, blotting out the Sun across swathes of of the world’s poorest lands.

Day will turn briefly to dark twilight in the eclipse’s path as the Moon comes between the Earth and the Sun. [Viewer’s Guide]

As is often the case, the eclipse is shrouded in mystery and misinformation.

The event will occur in highly populated areas, including west Africa, where governments scrambled to educate people about the dangers of looking at the eclipse without proper eye protection.

A total solar eclipse is safe to watch during the darkness of totality. But when Sun is not fully blocked by the Moon, its light can easily damage the eyes, so special protection is required.

More here.  [NASA TV will carry the eclipse live from 5 a.m. to 6:12 a.m. ET on March 29.]

Sarah Ellison in the Wall Street Journal:

The venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica is launching an unusual public war to defend itself against a scientific article that argued it’s scarcely better than a free-for-all Web upstart.

On Dec. 15, the scientific journal Nature ran a two-page “special report” titled “Internet encyclopedias go head to head.” It compared the accuracy of science entries for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Founded in 1768 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Britannica is painstakingly compiled by a collection of scholars and other experts around the world. Wikipedia came to life in California five years ago under a “user-generated” model: That is, anyone who wants to can contribute, or change, an entry.

The Nature report, published in the journal’s news section, said there was not much difference between the two. For every four errors in Wikipedia, Britannica had three. “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,” the study concluded.

More here.

Momus in Wired News:

From time to time I find myself invited to brainstorm for people. This usually involves coming up with new ways my hosts might “add value to their revenue chain” or “leverage their brand.” To be perfectly honest, I’m not very good at it. I’ll explain why in a moment. First, though, here’s a little history of brainstorming.

Brainstorming is a creative problem-solving strategy launched in 1953 in a book called Applied Imagination by Alex F. Osborn, an advertising executive. The basic idea is that when judgment is suspended, a bold and copious flow of original ideas can be produced. It’s very much a team effort — rather than getting bogged down in the judgments, personal criticisms and ego clashes that accompany the ownership of, and investment in, certain ideas, the team acts collectively.

When you’re brainstorming, ideas belong to no one and come from anywhere. Anything goes.

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

I am extremely pleased and proud to announce that my longtime mentor and dearest friend Laura Claridge has won the 2006 Lukas Prize jointly awarded by Harvard and Columbia Universities. Laura is the author of several scholarly books, as well as highly critically acclaimed biographies of Tamara De Lempicka and Norman Rockwell. Here is the announcement by Lawrence Van Gelder in the New York Times:

Laura Claridge’s ‘Emily Post and the Rise of Practical Feminism,’ to be published by Random House, has won the $30,000 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award in the 2006 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards for exceptional nonfiction. Announced yesterday by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation, the accolades included the $10,000 Mark Lynton History Prize to Megan Marshall for ‘The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism’ (Houghton Mifflin) and the $10,000 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize to Nate Blakeslee for ‘Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town’ (Public Affairs Press). Mr. Lukas, a journalist and author who won two Pulitzer Prizes, died in 1997. The awards ceremony will be held on May 9 at Harvard University.

More about the Lukas Prize here.  Congratulations, Laura, from all your fans here at 3QD!  And I’ll be at Harvard on May 9th, for sure.

The decline of the Hapsburg Empire was long, and slow, and confusing, and it produced in the empire’s subjects that combination of desperation and indolence that results from staring down into a disaster one is powerless to avert. The years of secure prosperity were over, though many were prosperous still. Political and economic institutions—corrupted, and, it turned out, irreplaceable—careened out of control. In this late period of decline it began to seem possible, even if the idea was deplored, that collectivity had been a dream, that nothing existed but the individual, and so the people living in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire did what people do in such circumstances: They sought meaning and solace in life stories, in the successes of the illustrious and the tragedies of those understood to be ordinary. Perhaps this accounts in part for the fact that Stefan Zweig, born in 1881, became, in the period from 1910 until his suicide in 1942, one of Austria’s most popular writers by penning more than twenty biographical studies (on Erasmus, Balzac, Marie Antoinette, Magellan, Freud, Casanova, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Mary Stuart, among others) and a number of fine, strange novellas, in which the characters very often tell the stories of their lives. Neither was Zweig’s popularity limited to the territories of the imploding empire. Translated during his lifetime into twenty-nine languages, his books were also best sellers in all the neighboring and chaotically restructuring European states.

more from Bookforum here.

In openDemocracy, Ehsan Masood looks at the spread of English language scientific terms and what it may mean for linguistic and cultural diversity.

The issue of language depletion or (at the extreme) language loss is far from abstract. Unesco’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing, for example, tells us that half of the world’s approximately 7,000 spoken languages are endangered to varying degrees. 5,000 of the total number of languages are spoken by groups comprising fewer than 100,000 people; 1,500 have fewer than 1,000 (mostly elderly) speakers.

Should that be a problem for science? There are, after all, many who argue that science is a universal way of understanding the world – and that the answers to questions such as “what is a gene?”, “why is our climate changing?”, and “is the universe expanding?” will not be any different if the person trying to answer the question speaks Swahili rather than English or French as a first language.

It may be true that the search for answers to asking some of life’s big questions can in principle be conducted through the medium of any language. But there are many ways in which the existence of multiple languages (each one intrinsically rich and world-encompassing on its own terms) makes this search – and an exploration of its practical, social and scientific subsets – more enlightening.

Emmanuel over at A Fistful of Euros has some insights into the protests in France and its tormented oscillations between command and consenus as ways of running a society.

[R]egardless of whether the CPE [Contrat première embauche, the propose reform] is good idea, economically speaking, it is fair to say that Villepin’s governing method has done a great deal to heighten the crisis.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the French parliament is inherently weak: when the government really wants a law to be passed, it always gets its way. This is due in no small part to the fact that the French constitution gives the government various procedural tools to discipline rebel MPs. The most famous and effective of them is the so-called 49.3 (named after the third paragraph of the 49th article of the constitution), which confronts MPs with a stark choice: either let the bill be adopted without a vote or vote to overthrow the government.

Theoretically, that could mean that painful reforms would be easier to implement in France than in other countries. And such procedural tools are of course quite handy when you’re trying to pass a budget without a parliamentary majority. Practically, however, it often creates a perverse set of incentives: why bother trying to build support for your bill if you are 99% sure that the law will be adopted no matter what? The problem, of course, is that snubbing the trade unions and the political parties is a sure-fire way to trigger a direct confrontation between the government and the famed French street.

Tim Cornwell in The Scotsman:

The artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who devoted decades of his life to a living work of art, his garden at Little Sparta, has died.

The “concrete poet”, whose work often featured inscriptions sculpted on walls or floors, died peacefully at the age of 80 in an Edinburgh nursing home after a long illness.

The director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Richard Calvocoressi, yesterday called him “the most original artist to have worked in Scotland in the last 50 years”.

Little Sparta, the garden that Finlay carved out of six acres on the edge of the Pentlands, he said, “is known all over the world and will remain his lasting monument”.

The director of the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh, Professor Stephen Blackmore, said: “Scotland has lost a unique and inspirational gardener and a truly brilliant man.”

More here.  [Thanks to Alta L. Price.]

It has been a few months since the last Crooked Timber seminar. The new one on Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, which includes a response by Mooney, is well worth a read.

Political conflict over scientific issues has probably never been as sharp as at present. Issues like global warming and stem-cell research, that came to prominence in the 1990s are being fiercely debated. At the same time, questions that had, apparently, been resolved long ago, like evolution or the US ban on agricultural use of DDT, are being refought. A striking feature of these debates is that, in nearly all cases (the one big exception being GM foods) the fight lines up the political Right, and particularly the US Republican Party on one side, and the majority of scientists and scientific organisations on the other. Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War on Science is, therefore, a timely contribution to the debate, and we are happy to host a seminar to discuss it, and thank Chris for agreeing to take part.

In addition to contributions from five members of CT, we’re very pleased to have two guests participating in the debate. Tim Lambert has been an active participant in the blogospheric version of some of the debates discussed by Chris. Tim, like the CT participants, broadly endorses Chris’s argument, though with some disagreement on analytical points and questions of emphasis and presentation. To broaden the debate, Steve Fuller was invited to take part in the seminar, and kindly agreed, knowing that he would be very much in the minority.

Also in Sign and Sight, Hans Magnus Enzensberger on radical losers (translated from the origin in Der Spiegel).

In a chaotic, unfathomable process, the cohorts of the inferior, the defeated, the victims separate out. The loser may accept his fate and resign himself; the victim may demand satisfaction; the defeated may begin preparing for the next round. But the radical loser isolates himself, becomes invisible, guards his delusion, saves his energy, and waits for his hour to come.

Those who content themselves with the objective, material criteria, the indices of the economists and the devastating findings of the empiricists, will understand nothing of the true drama of the radical loser. What others think of him – be they rivals or brothers, experts or neighbours, schoolmates, bosses, friends or foes – is not sufficient motivation. The radical loser himself must take an active part, he must tell himself: I am a loser and nothing but a loser. As long as he is not convinced of this, life may treat him badly, he may be poor and powerless, he may know misery and defeat, but he will not become a radical loser until he adopts the judgement of those who consider themselves winners as his own.

Since before the attack on the World Trade Center, political scientists, sociologists and psychologists have been searching in vain for a reliable pattern. Neither poverty nor the experience of political repression alone seem to provide a satisfactory explanation for why young people actively seek out death in a grand bloody finale and aim to take as many people with them as possible. Is there a phenotype that displays the same characteristics down the ages and across all classes and cultures?

No one pays any mind to the radical loser if they do not have to. And the feeling is mutual. As long as he is alone – and he is very much alone – he does not strike out. He appears unobtrusive, silent: a sleeper.