From MSNBC:

A group of dolphins living off the coast of Australia apparently teach their offspring to protect their snouts with sponges while foraging for food in the sea floor. Researchers say it appears to be a cultural behavior passed on from mother to daughter, a first for animals of this type, although such learning has been seen in other species. The dolphins, living in Shark Bay, Western Australia, use conically shaped whole sponges that they tear off the bottom, said Michael Kruetzen, lead author of a report on the dolphins in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

“Cultural evolution, including tool use, is not only found in humans and our closest relatives, the primates, but also in animals that are evolutionally quite distant from us. This convergent evolution is what is so fascinating,” said Kruetzen. Researchers suspect the sponges help the foraging dolphins avoid getting stung by stonefish and other critters that hide in the sandy sea bottom, just as a gardener might wear gloves to protect the hands.

[The photo was taken by Dr. Janet Mann. The dolphin’s name is Dodger and she was taught to sponge by her mother, Demi. Demi’s mom, Half fluke, was also a sponger.]

More here.

And by way of Steven Levitt:

“The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager is an interactive portrait of America’s name choices. Start with a ‘sea’ of nearly 5000 names. Type a letter, and you’ll zoom in to focus on how that initial has been used over the past century. Then type a few more letters, or a name. Each stripe is a timeline of one name, its width reflecting the name’s changing popularity. If a name intrigues you, click on its stripe for a closer look.”

And there you’ll also find some interesting pieces on name-onomics.

“Levitt’s primary thesis is that fashions which originate with the upper classes gradually trickle down the economic ladder. This, naturally, is no revelation — in fashion-based industries like apparel, it’s an explicit, institutionalized process.  .  . Levitt uses data about California parents’ economic status and name choices to propose a list of names that, ‘unlikely as it seems,’ are candidates to become ‘mainstream names’ ten years from now. . .

In fact, of his 24 predictions for ‘unlikely’ names that could possibly hit the mainstream in a decade, 7 were already top-100 names, including 2 of the top 15 (Emma and Grace). Looking boldly out into the future, he predicted the present. Oops. So much for revelations.”

The first installment of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new New York Times Magazine column, “Freakanomics”, looks at what happens to moneys when they monetize exchange.

“The essential idea was to give a monkey a dollar and see what it did with it. . . It took several months of rudimentary repetition to teach the monkeys that these tokens were valuable as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly valuable the next day. Having gained that understanding, a capuchin would then be presented with 12 tokens on a tray and have to decide how many to surrender for, say, Jell-O cubes versus grapes. This first step allowed each capuchin to reveal its preferences and to grasp the concept of budgeting.

Then Chen introduced price shocks and wealth shocks. If, for instance, the price of Jell-O fell (two cubes instead of one per token), would the capuchin buy more Jell-O and fewer grapes? The capuchins responded rationally to tests like this — that is, they responded the way most readers of The Times would respond. In economist-speak, the capuchins adhered to the rules of utility maximization and price theory: when the price of something falls, people tend to buy more of it.

. . .

Once, a capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens, flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them — a combination jailbreak and bank heist — which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced [the researcher Keith] Chen of the monkeys’ true grasp of money. . . What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)”

You can also read their blog here.

With all the recent interest in Felt and Nixon, it’s a good time to mention an excellent web site, WhiteHouseTapes.org, which acts as a clearinghouse for Presidential audio archives. The project, associated with the University of Virginia, has some timely clips of Nixon on Felt. Of the main page’s features, check out the FBI background check on Janet Leigh, and Nixon discussing one Donald Rumsfeld.

Michelle Thaller in the Christian Science Monitor:

For the last few years, mentioning cold fusion around scientists (myself included) has been a little like mentioning Bigfoot or UFO sightings.

After the 1989 announcement of fusion in a bottle, so to speak, and the subsequent retraction, the whole idea of cold fusion seemed a bit beyond the pale. But that’s all about to change.

A very reputable, very careful group of scientists at the University of Los Angeles (Brian Naranjo, Jim Gimzewski, Seth Putterman) has initiated a fusion reaction using a laboratory device that’s not much bigger than a breadbox, and works at roughly room temperature. This time, it looks like the real thing.

More here.

From the AFP:

A previously unknown novel by the author of “The Three Musketeers”, Alexandre Dumas — a 1,000-page adventure story about the start of the Napoleonic empire — hit French bookstores.

“Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine” (The Knight of Sainte-Hermine) first appeared in serial form in a French newspaper and lacked just a few chapters when Dumas died in 1870.

Claude Schopp, the Dumas expert who found the book at France’s National Library, has added a short section to bring the tale to its conclusion.

The novel completes a trilogy of works set in the aftermath of the French revolution, which begins with “Les Compagnons de Jehu” — written in 1857 — and continues with “Les Blancs et Les Bleus,” completed in 1867.

More here.

John Freeman in The Scotsman:

For the past year, however, Rushdie’s professional attentions have been focused on his role as president of PEN/America, which entails not just putting on fancy events but filing legal action. Mention the US government’s attempt to ban literature from countries like Iran to him now and he immediately switches into policy wonk mode.

“PEN has been fighting that particular regulation for a long time,” he says and then explains some of its details. “The US government is just now beginning to plane back on it. The question is whether the damage is already done.”

It seems somewhat ironic that Rushdie should survive a period of life-threatening danger, living in 30 houses in nine years, and wind up in the land of the free only to discover that he must start campaigning for freedom all over again.

If there is resentment, though, he certainly doesn’t show it. Rushdie has lived part-time in New York for more than five years now, and he’s not about to stop. He can at least now freely play table tennis with fellow author Jonathan Safran Foer without first greeting photographers outside.

More here.

Pity (and praise) the poor intern or assistant whose job it is to put The Paris Review author interviews online. Then settle in for the fine experience of what TPR rather dramatically calls “The DNA of Literature,” a vast pdf archive of material stretching from the 1950s to the present, from Algren to Auster. Yet another nice feature of the TPR site – the Audio Index feature which allows you to hear work read by the author.

From Science:

Of all its accomplishments, the West is perhaps most proud of its scientific revolution, which has been unfolding for the past half millennium. Only students of history remain consistently mindful of the pivotal and catalytic role that the Arab world played in the early phases of this revolution. Now, all of us should have a vested interest in advancing science and technology in the Arab community. Science and technology provide the means to feed people, improve their health, and create wealth. They can help to reduce societal tensions and build international bridges for badly needed dialogue and mutual understanding. To usher science and technology more thoroughly into Arab culture and society, however, the West needs to acknowledge the Arab world’s historical contributions, and the Arab world needs to stop dwelling on its golden past by also embracing lessons about science and technology that the West learned long ago.

In medieval Europe, where the Christian dogma that the world unfolded according to a divinely predetermined plan prevailed, there was little space for those willing and eager to understand nature in order to use it for their own benefit. Beginning in the 11th century, the ailing Arab provinces in Spain (Al-Andalus) were falling to European armies, and with them came priceless spoils that changed the world: the epic intellectual achievement of Arab-Islamic scholars since the 8th century. Flourishing libraries in cities like Toledo and Cordoba contained thousands of books on every field of knowledge. Unlike the Moguls, who in the 13th century destroyed Baghdad and its libraries, thereby abruptly ending the golden era of the Arab-Islamic civilization, the Europeans were quick to realize the value of these windfalls of knowledge.

More here.

John Ikenberry responds to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s thoughts about the war on terror and shifts in the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

“I agree with Anne-Marie that the Bush administration has turned its war on terror into a campaign for democracy and freedom. I think it did so for two reasons. 

The first is tactical — it is a legitimation strategy aimed at a very real political crisis.  The Bush administration hoped that its original justifications for going to war against Iraq — disarmament and liberation — would vindicate its risky and controversial decision. The facts on the ground in Iraq — i.e. the ends — would justify the means. Instead, the failure to find WMD or a grateful people in the streets only intensified the domestic and global opposition to Bush’s essentially unilateral and preventive use of force.

. . .

It is doubtful that President Bush would have rolled out the neo-Wilsonian democracy and freedom rhetoric in his inaugural and State of the Union addresses if the war in Iraq had gone better.  It is an effort to provide an explanation — or master narrative — for what he has done when all the other explanations and narratives failed. The emperor’s wardrobe was empty — he needed new clothes.

There is a second — more substantive — reason for the Bush administration’s turn from the war on terrorism to the campaign for democracy and freedom. This has to do with the political-intellectual problem of figuring out how to cope with the threat of extremist violence itself. To its credit, the Bush administration has done the world a favor by dramatizing the threats which might emerge from the dangerous nexus of WMD, tyrannical states, and terrorist groups.  Looking into the future, it seems all too clear that small groups of angry and determined extremists will find it increasingly easy to obtain chemical, biological or nuclear capabilities and unleash them upon the civilized world.   

. . .

What this means is that troubled and undeveloped parts of the world that previously could be ignored or engaged for humanitarian purposes are now potential havens, catalysts, or launching sites for transnational violence. National security increasingly requires a ‘one world’ vision in which the slogan must be: No country or region left behind.”

Sean Carrol at Preposterous Universe:

Brad DeLong (after artfully denying that he would ever read Wonkette) points to an enlightening list at Human Events Online — the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. As voted on by leading conservative thinkers!

• The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
• Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
• Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong
• The Kinsey Report, Alfred Kinsey
• Democracy and Education, John Dewey
• Das Kapital, Karl Marx
• The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
• The Course of Positive Philosophy, August Comte
• Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
• General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes

I love it. Mein Kampf snuggling right up there with The Feminine Mystique and The General Theory. (Because it’s Keynes, you know, who is responsible for our huge budget deficit. Those damned liberals, always running budget deficits.)

But the list of runners-up is where it really gets good…

More here.

Salman Rushdie in the Toronto Star:

“Not believing in God is no excuse for being virulently anti-religious or naïvely pro-science,” says Dylan Evans, a professor of robotics at the University of West England in Bristol.

Evans has written an article for the Guardian of London deriding the old-fashioned, “19th-century” atheism of such prominent thinkers as Richard Dawkins and Jonathan Miller, instead proposing a new, modern atheism which “values religion, treats science as simply a means to an end and finds the meaning of life in art.”

Indeed, he says, religion itself is to be understood as “a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality and which only a child would reject for being false.”

Evans’ position fits well with that of the American philosopher of science Michael Ruse, whose new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle, lays much of the blame for the growth of creationism in America — and for the increasingly strident attempts by the religious right to have evolutionary theory kicked off the curriculum and replaced by the new dogma of “intelligent design” — at the door of the scientists who have tried to compete with, and even supplant, religion.

More here.

Milton Esterow in Art News:

Some counterfeiters try to enter the “soul and mind of the artist.” Some delight in the chemistry of baking paint and creating wormholes. Some start with real pictures and then “restore” them until they look as if they’re by a different artist. From ancient vases to conceptual art—if someone made it, someone else has tried to bamboozle the world with a copy:

In Italy,” Salvatore Casillo, who founded the University of Salerno’s Museum of Fakes, recently commented, “if you’re a good enough counterfeiter, you eventually get your own show.”

Casillo was right. Several good-enough counterfeiters have recently had their own shows.

Icilio Federico Joni, who was known as the prince of Sienese fakers and specialized in Renaissance paintings until he died in 1946, got his own show last year. He was the star of “Authentic Fakes” at the Santa Maria della Scala museum in Siena, where he is considered something of a folk hero.

More here.

From the BBC:

Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has won the inaugural Booker International Prize, beating British authors Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing and Ian McEwan.

The writer, who has lived in France since 1990, will receive £60,000 at a ceremony in Edinburgh on 27 June.

Professor John Carey, chair of the judging panel, called Mr Kadare “a universal writer in the tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer”.

Mr Kadare said he was “deeply honoured” to win the prize.

“I am a writer from the Balkan Fringe, a part of Europe which has long been notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness,” he said.

More here.

From The New York Times:

IN 1915 Virginia Woolf predicted it would take women another six generations to come into their own. We should be approaching the finish line if Woolf’s math was as good as her English. A little over a century before her, another Englishwoman, Mary Wollstonecraft, declared in her revolutionary book of 1792, ”The Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” that not only had the time come to begin the long slog to selfdom, freedom, empowerment — or whatever current feminist term serves — but that she would be the first of what she called, using the language of taxonomy, ”a new genus.” It took the renegade second child (of seven) — and first daughter — of Edward John Wollstonecraft, a drinker, and the unhappy Elizabeth Dickson, to take this virtually unimaginable plunge into uncharted waters. And she took this leap while displaying the full measure of female unpredictablity, while the world watched, astounded, dismayed and outraged. This Mary was quite contrary, and her reputation over time, unsurprisingly, has suffered from this complexity. Surely we women have a gene — in addition to those saucy, but ill-mannered, hormones — for theatrics, so frequently do they puncture our inner lives and decorate our outer ones in operatic robes. But occasionally high drama is the most efficient way to break through the status quo, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s radical mission called for extreme measures.

In her wonderful, and deeply sobering, new book, Lyndall Gordon, the distinguished biographer of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Henry James, tackles this formidable woman with grace, clarity and much new research. Despite occasional slips into strangely purple prose (when she reproaches her lover, ”retorts — great sprays of indignant eloquence — would fountain from her opening throat”), Gordon relates Wollstonecraft’s story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personified.

More here.

From The New York Times:

When the genetically altered fruit fly was released into the observation chamber, it did what these breeders par excellence tend to do. It pursued a waiting virgin female. It gently tapped the girl with its leg, played her a song (using wings as instruments) and, only then, dared to lick her – all part of standard fruit fly seduction. The observing scientist looked with disbelief at the show, for the suitor in this case was not a male, but a female that researchers had artificially endowed with a single male-type gene. That one gene, the researchers are announcing today in the journal Cell, is apparently by itself enough to create patterns of sexual behavior – a kind of master sexual gene that normally exists in two distinct male and female variants.

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that females given the male variant of the gene acted exactly like males in courtship, madly pursuing other females. Males that were artificially given the female version of the gene became more passive and turned their sexual attention to other males.

“We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies’ sexual orientation and behavior,” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Barry Dickson, senior scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. “It’s very surprising. “What it tells us is that instinctive behaviors can be specified by genetic programs, just like the morphologic development of an organ or a nose.”

More here.

We don’t often live up to the claim that we cover ‘gossip’ here at 3Quarks but the Chappelle situation has intrigued me, especially since he must be one of a handful of the funniest people on the planet at the moment. After his $50 million dollar deal with Comedy Central for another run of The Chappelle Show he cut out for Africa leaving the third season in the lurch. Rumors were plentiful. He was at a mental institution. He was smoking crack. Etc. Simon Robinson of Time caught up with him in South Africa and chatted.

The first thing Chappelle wants is to dispel rumors—that he’s got a drug problem, that he’s checked into a mental institution in Durban—that have been flying around the U.S. for the past week. He says he is staying with a friend, Salim, and not in a mental institution, as has been widely reported in America. Chappelle says he is in South Africa to find “a quiet place” for a while. “Let me tell you the things I can do here which I can’t at home: think, eat, sleep, laugh. I’m an introspective dude. I enjoy my own thoughts sometimes. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking here.”

From MSNBC:

The battle over teaching evolution is raging in communities across the country, but the headlines rarely focus on the “quiet” impact of this controversy. Science is becoming a political “hot potato” for some students — transforming what should be a dynamic, fascinating topic into a total turn-off. And some students are choosing silence over losing a prom date. “Children are very much worried about their place in the world. Some students only ask me about evolution privately, after class,” said Wes McCoy, PhD, who teaches Genetics, Biology and Astronomy at North Cobb High School in Kennessaw, Ga. 

More here.

Noted super-special-theorists Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio weigh in on the EU debate. Typically, Baudrillard mumbles an immense amount of nothing and Virilio sounds slightly more cogent.

“Baudrillard views the “No” vote as a new form of confrontation proper to our own hegemonic era. “This confrontation is not a class struggle, nor an international liberation movement, but an irreducible antagonism,” he explains. “It’s a confrontation that isn’t even political anymore but metaphysical and symbolic.”

“For Virilio, the referendum attests to a shift from a democracy based upon opinions to one based upon moods. This new democracy “does not require the free choice and decisive statement of a sovereign people,” writes Virilio, “but rather passive consent, an amicable solution for a population that is exposed to all possible brainwashing by the excesses of the public opinion polls, and that reacts only by reflex to the respective choices.”

more here.

Calling the site Project Gutenberg is just about right. As the internet becomes, more and more, the collection spot for the hodge podge of accumulated human civilization we might as well start putting all the old books in there too. Really, it is a fairly remarkable idea.

There has also been a fair amount of debate recently about Google’s proposal to put millions of university titles online.

The idea is to make millions of important but previously inaccessible texts available to researchers everywhere, with a few clicks of a computer mouse.

The plan has its supporters. The head of Oxford University’s library service said the project could turn out to almost as important as the invention of the printing press. . .

But from the start Google’s recent plan met opposition. . . .

Other opposition has come from France, where there are fears that the Google project will enhance the dominance of the English language and of Anglo-Saxon ways of thinking.