Today I flew to Toronto for a speaking gig. I had this awesomely spacious window seat in the exit row. I was looking out the window as we descended into a bank of what the pilot called ‘medium-low cloud’, and spotted this odd, multi-hued circle in the distance. I wondered if it was just a deformity in the window, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t:
It looks like a rainbow’s cousin (here’s another, very similar view). Does anybody know what it’s called?
Yesterday I read a fascinating report about how archaeologists may have found the tomb of King Herod:
On the basis of a study of the architectural elements uncovered at the site, the researchers have been able to determine that the mausoleum, among the remains of which Herod’s sarcophagus was found, was a lavish two-story structure with a concave-conical roof, about 25 meters high — a structure fully appropriate to Herod’s status and taste. The excavations there have also yielded many fragments of two additional sarcophagi, which the researchers estimate to have been members of Herod’s family.
Researchers said Thursday they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus by comparing DNA from a skeleton and hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer’s books.
The findings could put an end to centuries of speculation about the exact resting spot of Copernicus, a priest and astronomer whose theories identified the Sun, not the Earth, as the center of the universe.
A hair from one of his books? That is seriously CSI. If you follow the link, they’ve got a ‘facial forensic reconstruction’ of the man. He looks a little cross-eyed.
Last week we had the good fortune to be invited to the opening night of “Brilliant”, an Electric Company show (there’s a company that deserves a Wikipedia entry) playing at the Belfry. Here’s the blurb:
Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla is an explosive, extradimensional and alarmingly theatrical exploration of one of the most formidable inventing minds of the past one hundred years.
The story, set in turn of the century New York, chronicles the career of Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current, whose work in the field of electricity ushered-in the modern age.
The show was terrific. It’s the second Electric Company show I’ve seen, and they produce what feels like the most contemporary kind of theatre. It’s lively and detailed and a little provocative. The company draws on all the tools at its disposal–dance, song, gorgeous projections, clever staging–to render a satisfying if ephemeral vision of Tesla’s life. The show was exceptionally well-rehearsed, and the performances, staging and technical aspects were all a delight to watch.
In one scene, Tesla and Edison have a kind of singing and dancing duel at the World’s Fair. In another, Tesla walks among human-sized pigeons whose physicality is extraordinarily bird-like. The piece de resistance is a hilarious rendering of what early film looks like–all silent, flickering and performed at about double speed.
Plenty of Telling, Too Little Showing
One side effect of all this on-stage action is that the few ‘regular’ scenes feel banal and talky. This is probably reinforced by the play’s portrait of Tesla as an hermitic automaton. Very little character gets revealed–nobody really undergoes a change, in the classic dramatic sense. Two supporting characters thus feel pretty moot. In truth, I’d be happy to dispense with them, so that we just experience the dream-like story and stage magic for 90 minutes.
I also wanted a clearer explanation of Tesla’s inventions. The play takes pains to tell us just how extraordinary and ingenious the man was, but pretty much fails at showing us what he did. There’s plenty of talk about alternating current and direct current (wondering illustrated, I might add, with Slinkies), but nobody establishes why one is better. There’s passing mention of other inventions, but we’re mostly expected to take Tesla’s genius as a given. I’m not disputing that genius. But I do think it’s the play’s burden to explain it clearly.
All of these are minor criticisms. “Brilliant” has already played in Vancouver (though I gather the Belfry’s is a ‘revamped’ production). But if you get a chance to catch the show, I heartily recommend it.
Alas, the Nerd Bias Reigns Supreme
Incidentally, Tesla’s Wikipedia entry is proof that the online encyclopedia has not beat the nerd bias. I checked a bunch of other Wikipedia entries for towering figures–Ghandi, Mandela, Picasso among others–of the 20th century. Not one of them had an entry as long as Tesla’s.
Disclosures regarding my relationship with the Belfry: I just figured I’d take a shot at this. Let’s see…in my final year of university, I did an independent theatre history study course and wrote a history of the Belfry Theatre. So, you know, I’ve always felt a little indebted. I have written a couple short pieces that, years ago, were presented in the studio theatre there (also, indebted). I have friends and colleagues amongst the Belfry’s artistic staff. Our tickets to the show were comped, because Julie and I have done a very little ad hoc consulting for the Belfry. We seriously considered the Belfry as a venue for our wedding…the list goes on and on.
As you no doubt know, there’s been a great deal of online buzz about the Large Hadron Collider, and how they recently flipped the big on switch. My physics career ended at grade 12, so I really had no idea–aside from some PR-powered notions about the origins of the universe–what the LHC was for. Then I watched Brian Cox’s TED talk, and things became much clearer:
Professor Cox makes for an odd but engaging speaker.
I should mention, in passing, that the ‘Large Hadron Collider’ is yet another example of poor naming. It’s what happens, in my experience, when the scientific or engineering term sticks and gets used by the general public. Other recent examples are ‘global warming’ and ‘network neutrality’. The names of things matter. It would be easier to get people to care if ‘network neutrality’ was commonly known as ‘network discrimination’ or even ‘network prejudice’. I can’t think of a better name for the LHC, but I’m pretty sure one exists.
Watch this CG footage from the Discovery Channel, depicting a 500 km-wide asteroid striking the Earth. Note how it peels away the Earth’s crust like you might dig the skin off an apple with your fingernail.
If you don’t watch until the end, here’s the punchline. That’s happened at least six times in Earth’s history. Fingers crossed, eh?
You’ve probably seen these extraordinary photos, but if you haven’t, go check out this Daily Mail article:
Skin painted bright red, heads partially shaved, arrows drawn back in the longbows and aimed square at the aircraft buzzing overhead. The gesture is unmistakable: Stay Away.
Behind the two men stands another figure, possibly a woman, her stance also seemingly defiant. Her skin painted dark, nearly black.
The apparent aggression shown by these people is quite understandable. For they are members of one of Earth’s last uncontacted tribes, who live in the Envira region in the thick rain forest along the Brazilian-Peruvian frontier.
It wrecks my head to think that there are still Stone Age peoples living undisturbed on Earth. I think we’ve got an obligation to future science to put a big fence around these remote spaces and create a preserve for such tribes. Obviously we’ll let them out if they want out, but we shouldn’t let any other humans in.
It’s not the most cogent article in the world, but there are some interesting ideas in this New York Times piece about habits:
Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives…
“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”
My spell check says that ‘innovational’ isn’t a word, but my dictionary gives it a pass. I should make a new habit of using that term.
When walking alone through the medina here in Essaouira, Julie occasionally gets unwanted male attention. It’s low-key and harmless, and comes with the territory. It’s not nearly as bad as she’s experienced in Italy, though.
In both Palermo and Rome, she was constantly harassed by Italian men. She couldn’t sit down to have a coffee without some chotch doggedly attempting to join her. She was followed for a block down the street, and solicited by an aging hound dog who was definitely on the wrong side of seventy. These men really wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The success rate is greater than zero, and the effort involved is worth the occasional success. If they never succeeded, you’d think that they’d eventually give up.
The behaviour has nothing to do with earning female affections, and everything to do with lekking. From Wikipedia: “A lek is a gathering of males, of certain animal species, for the purposes of competitive mating display.”
A premise of that book is that our brains stoppped evolving 10,000 years ago, and that our basic goal in life is simple: reproduction. Presumably the psychological goal of option #2 is to intimidate the other males in the lek, and get to the female first.
But why is this practice particularly common in Italy (I’m sure it’s common in other countries–this is just the worst among those that we’ve visited)? It’s probably cultural.
I wanted to use this photo to illustrate this post, but it was all rights reserved.
I showed it to Julie, and she immediately thought of bronchioles, the tubes in your lungs.
I know I sound like a New Age hippie, but this sort of thing kind of blows my mind. It’s amazing and profound that we humans can recognize these recurring micro and macro patterns in nature.
The folks at Penguin sent me a review copy of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa. It’s a provocative primer on the newish science of evolutionary psychology, and a direct attack on the central notions of more traditional sociology. I gather that evolutionary psychology is fairly hot at the moment, given all the attention that Steven Pinker has been generating lately (here’s a dry but informative interview with Pinker on evolutionary psychology).
The book’s premise is pretty straight-forward. We have one goal in life: reproduction. It’s all about sex. The authors look at many aspects of human culture–from dating to war–through this lens.
I was immediately hooked when I read a section in the introduction about stereotypes:
But we suggest that you cannot dismiss an observation by calling it a stereotype, as if that suddenly makes it untrue and thus unworthy of discussion and explanation. In fact, the opposite is the case. Many stereotypes are empirical generalizations with a statistical basis and thus on average tend to be true.“
They point out that stereotypes have a bad name because they are, in many cases, unkind or offensive to a particular group. “Women are shorter than men” and “women are fatter than men” are both accurate empirical generalizations, but the second becomes a stereotype because no one wants to be regarded as fat. I, too, have always felt that stereotypes have an unnecessarily bad name.
Blondes, Breasts and Suicide Bombers
After an introduction to evolutionary psychology and what’s wrong with traditional sociology, Miller and Kanazawa spend the rest of the book rigorously applying their approach to the practicalities of our lives. These were just a few of the more controversial ideas that have stuck with me:
There’s only one human culture. We think of cultures are highly divergent, but in fact they are far more the same than different.
Men prefer large breasts and blonde hair because (compared to small breasts and dark hair), they change dramatically with age. Therefore, it’s easier to identify the youngest and therefore most fecund potential mates.
In every culture around the world, women prefer to mate with older men, and men prefer to mate with younger women. This is because older men will, in general, be better providers for their offspring, and younger women are healthier, more reliable baby-makers.
Attaining high political office is just a means to have access to a large pool of potential mates. See also President Clinton.
So controversial, I’ll quote it (based on research described in this book, apparently): “The sex gap in earnings and the so-called glass ceiling are caused not by employer discrimination or any other external factors, but by the sex differences in internal preferences, values, desires, dispositions and temperaments…more careful statistical comparisons of men and women who are equally motivated to earn money show that women now earn 98 cents for every dollar men make, and sex has no statistically significant effect on workers’ earnings.”
Most suicide bombers are young, single Muslim men because they are ‘losers’ in the evolutionary game. This is particularly true because Muslim societies are somewhat polygynous, and some men don’t get a chance to pass on their genes. On the other hand, they can look forward to 72 guaranteed mates in the afterlife.
In her 1998 book, Judith Rich Harris “methodically demolishes the universally held assumption that how parents raise their children is a major determining factor in how they turn out…widely condemned by politicians and the media alike, it is in fact corroborated by behaviour genetic research.”
Smart Guys and Plenty of Studies
In terms of approach, this book belongs on the same shelf with Stumbling on Happiness, The Tipping Point and Freakonomics. You know, books where smart guys do some original thinking, cite a bunch of studies and present it to us Normal Humans in terms we can understand.
Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters feels more scientific than these other books. Miller and Kanazawa present their work carefully, with plenty of skepticism and disclaimers. There’s even a section at the end of the book called “Stump the Evolutionary Psychologists”, for phenomenon (such as homosexuality) which their approach can’t satisfactorily explain. Because of this more academic approach, their theories should be more compelling than Galdwell’s or Levy’s.
However, Miller and Kanazawa aren’t particularly strong writers, and have little interest in the storytelling that makes boks like The Tipping Point so readable. The authors never use a contraction, and often repeat themselves, to the point of irritating the reader. The book is certainly readable–it’s not overly dry or academic–but it lacks the lyricism that, to my mind, makes these other books such mainstream successes.
