In the NYT yesterday (9/30/09), Natalie Angier wrote a piece called “Give Birds a Break. Lock Up the Cat, ” in which she beseeches catowners to keep their cats at home, so they won’t roam the streets and kill birds. 

Ms. Angier, let me tell you. we keep our cat,  Aurora Borealis, at home and never let her out to roam the streets. But she still kills birds. We have a small, enclosed garden with a tree, grass, and bushes, and when a bird happens to sit on a branch, with a jump Aurora grasps the creature between her jaws, and it’s bye, bye, birdie. I am crushed!

Yesterday, I went into the kitchen and there on the floor was the body of a bird. Aurora was sitting beside it, waiting for me to appear. The body gave a light shiver. I moaned. Aurora looked up at my stricken face. It was too much for me: I left the room and 5 minutes later, went back to face the music. Aurora was sitting a few feet from the spot where the bird had lain. But the body was gone. My God! Did she eat it? But she doesn’t eat birds! So where is it? I hunted around the kitchen, under cabinets and in the garden, but no bird. 

I can only surmise that Aurora, hoping for accolades over the bounty she brought, heard moans instead and seeing my stricken face, had taken the body and hidden  it somewhere in the garden, as if in amends.

Happy autumn everyone! Have the leaves started to change for anyone? The death heat of DC has finally receded; I can go outside without contemplating suicide. And I’m listening to Christmas music as I write this, so, clearly, I’m ready for the fall! Mayhem and I have come up with the next few books to read– we know we’re behind on the discussion posts for the two most recent books (completely mea culpa!) but c’est la vie– that doesn’t mean we can’t start reading new books! Pick one up (or all three!) and join us here to discuss!

First up, Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant. Mayhem and I both fell in love with Sarah Dunant when we read Birth of Venus as summer reading for our Women and the Arts class in college. Dunant writes excellent historical fiction– enough history and story to balance all of our needs.

Next up in November we’ll tackle Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier. As a former Vagina Monologue performer, I’m somewhat shocked that I’ve never read this book. (For the uninitiated, this book is referenced in a Vagina Fact before one of the Monologues.)

After that, December-ish, we’re going to read Stiffed: the Betrayal of the American Man by (::swoon::) Susan Faludi. I loved Backlash and I cannot wait to read Stiffed!

I hope that at least one of those piques your interest– so why not request it from the library, or support these amazing female authors and buy it from Amazon and come back to discuss with us. Because who likes reading alone? Nobody.

Happy reading!

The other day, after writing a post about wearing paper,  Chris Bolmeier sent me a hilarious request that I create a paper dress for her.  Then I ran across THIS vest, and was enthralled! Lynda Monk, of Purple Missus, tells us:

It started life as bog-standard inexpensive gift wrap tissue which has then been painted, bonded, sprayed and waxed, several times and in different sequences to end up as a soft fabric with a metallic leather look to it.

There is an array of wonderful textures to see in that post, not to mention Photofest, which is exactly that!

I was so excited by what I saw that I ordered her new book, Stitching the Textured Surface, immediately.

The book is co-written with Carol McFee, who also features breathtaking textures on her site, Textile Tales.

Untitled ~ by Carol McFee

What is it about textures that raises our temperatures and causes us to salivate?

As Natalie Angier wrote, in an article for The New York Times entitled Primal, Acute and Easily Duped: Our Sense of Touch:

Biologically, chronologically, allegorically and delusionally, touch is the mother of all sensory systems. It is an ancient sense in evolution: even the simplest single-celled organisms can feel when something brushes up against them and will respond by nudging closer or pulling away. It is the first sense aroused during a baby’s gestation and the last sense to fade at life’s culmination. Patients in a deep vegetative coma who seem otherwise lost to the world will show skin responsiveness when touched by a nurse.

Like a mother, touch is always hovering somewhere in the perceptual background, often ignored, but indispensable to our sense of safety and sanity. “Touch is so central to what we are, to the feeling of being ourselves, that we almost cannot imagine ourselves without it,” said Chris Dijkerman, a neuropsychologist at the Helmholtz Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “It’s not like vision, where you close your eyes and you don’t see anything. You can’t do that with touch. It’s always there.”

For all its antiquity and constancy, touch is not passive or primitive or stuck in its ways. It is our most active sense, our means of seizing the world and experiencing it, quite literally, first hand. Susan J. Lederman, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Canada, pointed out that while we can perceive something visually or acoustically from a distance and without really trying, if we want to learn about something tactilely, we must make a move. We must rub the fabric, pet the cat, squeeze the Charmin. And with every touchy foray, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle looms large. “Contact is a two-way street, and that’s not true for vision or audition,” Dr. Lederman said. “If you have a soft object and you squeeze it, you change its shape. The physical world reacts back.”

Our longing for touch, then, is not a frivolous matter, but “the mother of all sensory systems.”  Just as our skin luxuriates in being touched, we are eager to stroke, tap, rub, or otherwise explore the myriad of sensual surfaces that deliver complex information, and pleasure, to our neural circuitry. That aspect of “reacting back” means that a sensory conversation is going on between that which touches and that which is being touched.

I always refer to the tingle test, indicating that my “aesthetic barometer” is registering high affinity. When something causes a ripple of tingles in my body, my attention is riveted. My hands become highly sensitized and will touch autonomically. It is verboten to touch artwork, especially when it is on display, and as an artist I certainly understand this intellectually. But in a primal sense, my hands are wont to follow their own volition, dictated by that ancient sense of touch.

Now I know, if I should commit such a faux pas, that I can say “Mother made me do it.”

P.S. Chris, now you know where to go for that dress!

We Americans tend to think of the pursuit of happiness as our hallmark, but a case can be made for stress as our most distinctive national attainment. Natalie Angier writes of the ”vicious stress loop” endemic to our way of life. Stress is good to a point, when it moves us to respond to its objective sources and disable them. It is thus a key element in restoring the equilibrium necessary for that fabled pursuit of happinesss.

But we tend to get sidetracked before the “disabling” can happen. Angier:

In humans the brain can think too much, extracting phantom threats from every staff meeting or high school dance, and over time the constant hyperactivation of the stress response can unbalance the entire feedback loop. Reactions that are desirable in limited, targeted quantities become hazardous in promiscuous excess. You need a spike in blood pressure if you’re going to run, to speedily deliver oxygen to your muscles. But chronically elevated blood pressure is a source of multiple medical miseries.

Why should the stressed brain be prone to habit formation? Perhaps to help shunt as many behaviors as possible over to automatic pilot, the better to focus on the crisis at hand. Yet habits can become ruts, and as the novelist Ellen Glasgow observed, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

It’s still August. Time to relax, rewind and remodel the brain.

Excellent advice. William James said much the same thing way back when, in ”Gospel of Relaxation.” But beware the zeal of pursuing relaxation too vigorously, that too can stress you out.  ”I fear that some of my fair hearers may may be making an undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will.” Better to let it go, paradoxically enough. “The way to do it is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not.”

So, what’s the key to mens sana in corpore sano? It really is pretty basic: exercise, eat right, and chill.  Relax… but not so hard.

If all the other rats will bear that in mind too, we’ll enjoy the race.

What to wear on a geology field trip

{In Part I, we dipped into the School Is Hell archives and saw how a student’s phys. ed. class left him hanging and how a science book caused one curious kid to avoid science like the plague. All is not lost, however. We also saw a father teach his son with “lovely, interesting discussions.” In Part II, we will go on a geology field trip to learn how rocks can be not just rocks.}

Physical Education, Part II

When my daughter was in second grade, I used to pick her up at school. On those rides home, I could tell how the day went before she uttered a word. One day, I knew something was up. After we had driven a while, finally, she said, “I hate sports!” When I dug deeper, I discovered she had experienced an incident much like M. had. Now, I’m not a violent person (the soon to be violent man said). I’ve never thrown a punch. But I wanted to flatten that gym teacher. Though inside, I was seething, I didn’t show it. And instead of spouting some stock parental advice for my daughter like, “It’s important to do what your teacher says,” or “She’s trying to teach important things,” or “You need to respect your teacher,” or “Life is tough and this is good training,” I said, “You don’t hate sports, you hate gym class.” After further thought, I amended that a bit. “Actually, you don’t hate gym class, either. You just hate this gym class. Your teacher isn’t very good. She shouldn’t do those things. I’m sorry you had to go through that. If it happens again, she will hear from me.”

This was particularly galling to me because I loved sports as a kid. You couldn’t get me off the baseball diamond or the football field or the basketball court to eat dinner, let alone to do homework. I didn’t want my daughter to miss that, or at least not miss the chance to find out whether she wanted that in her life or not. So I told her, “You know, I didn’t usually like gym class much, either, but I played sports all the time. Sports and gym class are not the same thing.”

She was dumbfounded. She had a hard time separating the two. Already, she had learned something that’s hard to unlearn.

Describing an experience quite different from M.’s or my daughter’s phys. ed. class, J., a Korean student, wrote about her former geology class. In the beginning of her paper, things didn’t sound promising. The class was mostly lecture, some of it review, and as a result, it was “boring,” just the names of the rocks. J. liked lab somewhat better because she got to see the various rock samples they had read about in the text; still, though some of the rocks were “pretty,” they were nothing special, “just rocks.” When the geology class later went on a field trip to look at rock formations, however, that’s when the J.’s thinking changed. In one place there were “huge and shiny rocks.” The geology professor explained how giant glaciers had rubbed against them over thousands of years, grinding them down and polishing the surfaces, like a huge rock polishing machine. J. said that as she touched the cold, smooth, glassy surfaces, she imagined the massive glacier that once stood in that spot towering above her.

In another location, the professor asked the students what they noticed. They didn’t see what he was asking them until he pointed out a fault line. J. wrote, “We didn’t know what was so special about this until he had mentioned it.” One side of the hill had either risen or fallen at some point, and the sedimentary rock layers no longer lined up. She could see how if you somehow lifted one side of that hill up a few feet, all the layers would line up perfectly again, like fitting a puzzle together.

Of course, they had discussed fault lines in class. She’d seen the diagrams in the textbook. But when the professor called this one to everyone’s attention, it was different. Like with Feynman’s imaginary T-rex, the concept of a fault line and the science of plate tectonics had been “translated into some reality,” no longer “divorced from ordinary human processes.” Now, she could see the rocks and what they were doing.

“I was chilled,” J. wrote.

"Translated into some reality"

The effect was lasting, too. She saw things differently. “I appreciate rocks more than before,” she said. More than that, for her, the class had been one Pauschs’ head fakes: “They are NOT just rocks to me anymore,” she said. Because of that field trip, she said that with everything (not just rocks), “I give more attention trying to figure out what caused what.”

It must have been quite a field trip. A friend of hers also became fascinated with rocks because of it and started to display some in her house which caused her perplexed boyfriend to ask, “Why do rocks roll in the house?” J. says that the boyfriend, just like herself before the field trip, “did not understand what is so special.”

For a long time, it was all just rocks to Bill Bryson, just some brown spot on a leaf. That boyhood text with its dry explanations and his subsequent science classes, which apparently were much like that text, had left him hanging. No head fakes here, at least not the intentional kind.

Why does the ball roll to the back of the wagon?

Because of something called inertia, whatever that is. (Better write it down. It could show up on the test.)

Why do rocks roll in the house?

Could you repeat the question?

After interviewing countless scientists while writing The Canon, Angier has come to the conclusion that “the best way to teach science to non-scientists is to go for depth over breadth.” She goes on to say “A rose is a rose is a rose; but an examined rose is a sonnet.” Her aim in her book, she says, is to “get beyond knee-jerk tutorials” about atoms or cells:

You might also have heard that protons have a “positive charge,” electrons a “negative charge,” and neutrons “no charge.” Well, that sounds breezy enough: a plus sign, a minus sign, and free with purchase. But what in the name of Mr. Rogers’s last cardigan are we really talking about? What does it mean to say that a particle has “charge,” and how does this subatomic “charge” of the light brigade relate to more familiar, real-world displays of electric “charge”?

Angier wants these concepts to be not just rocks and much more than the names of the birds. She believes that “nonexplanatory explanations are a big reason why people shy away from science.” She wants, she says,

as much as possible, to make the invisible visible, the distant neighborly, the ineffable affable. If a human cell were blown up to the size of something you could display on your coffee table, would you want to? What would it look like? You say that the average cell is a very busy place. Is that busy like Manhattan, or busy like Toronto?

Angier wants to see the dinosaur in the front yard, touch the brown spot on the leaf, roll the ball in the wagon herself, and touch what the glacier left behind—the same thing any kid would want. Whatever it is, let’s translate it into some reality. Why is this so important? Because being left hanging feels terrible, and that feeling sticks.

There is a later connection to Lakoff and Johnson’s idea of embodied learning in Angier’s “Physics” chapter:

Everything, every single thing deserving the designation “thing” is made of atoms. Even those things that are not obviously thingly can, in the end, be stripped to their atomic skivvies. Thoughts, for example. As they drift from your brain and through the sheetrock of your office cubicle, they seem defiantly fleeting, robustly substance-free. Yet the brain cells that gave rise to your thoughts are all built of atoms, and if one thought triggers another it does so via the transmission of neurochemicals among synaptic pathways in your brain, which again are vast assemblages of atoms.

Our thoughts are not just thoughts. They matter. That’s why rocks can become not just rocks when you visit them where they live and see with your own eyes the fractured, churning, stormy surface beneath our feet that could toss us like a ping-pong ball at a moment’s notice. A brown spot on a leaf becomes more than that on a walk in the woods where you can hold that leaf in your hands and trace the tiny, brown trail on its surface with your fingertips and wonder how it got there. The name of the bird comes alive when you go out in the woods and watch a Red-breasted Nuthatch creep down a pine tree head-first as it scours the bark for insects. This is how you learn the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something

Education, no matter what kind, the good and the bad––all of it is physical education. Why? Because your brain is writing it down.

So many adults and children become so persuaded of their vast limitations that they know they are not good at sports or math or writing or music or cooking. They are utterly convinced. They won’t take no for an answer. The reason for this is clear. When we are left hanging at the pull-up bar, or in the composition class, or pressured to memorize the names of the birds without ever seeing what they are doing, those experiences, too, become part of us. And what we learn there “cannot become unlearned or overridden, at least not by some act of will and almost never quickly and easily.”

Imagine instead a physical education class where the focus is on providing an environment for students of all sizes to feel safe and to feel what it’s like to use their bodies more, a place where a short, heavy boy might find ways to feel more at home in his own skin. Instead of forcing the boy to attempt chin-ups in front a of tough crowd, what if the gym teacher had him begin with where he is, with things he could comfortably do already, and then give him tips on how to do them even better? Would he leave that class saying, “I hate sports”?

So what about writing then? How do you do it? How should you teach it? Whatever we do, it will involve lots of head fakes and lots of hands-on, in-depth experiences. No one should be left hanging. The names of the birds with its breadth-not-depth approach simply won’t do. Writing students list those birds all the time––thesis, introduction, body, conclusion, main idea, transitions, details, examples, argument, compare and contrast, paraphrase, summary, subject-verb-object, adjectives, tense, agreement, “proper,” proofreading, simile, metaphor, “flow,” paragraphs, vocabulary, wordiness, clauses, run-ons . . . . That’s a lot of birds. Sure, you can name them but “when you’ve finished with all that,” according to Mr. Feynman, “you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.” Who takes the time to look at these birds and what they are are doing? What do they do in this situation, or that one? Is this rose just a rose, or is it an examined rose, a sonnet?

Imagine a writing class where everyone looks at writing and what it’s doing, like Feynman with his wagon and ball, like the geology students and their fault lines and glacial evidence, where writing is, as Natalie Goldberg says, a “practice”—for jotting down what you notice, sharing those things with others, reading what others have written, writing about that, then seeing how each stage, each move, sends shock waves, alters the landscape, and opens up ways for you to do things you’ve never done, never dared to try, or never knew could be possible. Imagine this occurring all with “no pressure, just lovely, interesting discussions” with no one left hanging by those turgid, mind-numbing texts or those dusty, bird-name, bird-brain lectures. And imagine what would happen over time as all these activities begin to take hold and gradually, without anyone noticing, become second nature while our writing and our writing brains get rewritten.

How many on the drive home from school that day would say, “I hate writing”? How many would be the clueless boyfriend, forever scratching his head and wondering “what is so special”? And how many, much like young Bryson with science, would from then on steer clear of writing, convinced it’s “supremely dull, but suspecting that it needn’t be, and not really thinking about it at all if [they] could help it”?

"Give me twenty! And keep your tie straight!"

When you’re a little kid… you’re a little bit of everything. Artist, scientist, athlete, scholar. Sometimes it seems like growing up is the process of giving those things up, one by one.

(The Wonder Years, Episode 13)

M., who had recently arrived in the U.S. from Cape Verde, hated his high school phys. ed. class. It was like boot camp, he said, the worst part of the school week. The teacher shouted all the time. Nothing you did was ever good enough. Then there was the day the teacher had all the students line up by a white wall to do chin-ups. Under the bar, the light was “blindingly bright.” One by one, with everyone watching, students took their turn. M. foresaw his undoing, so he hung back, hoping the class bell would come to his rescue.

The bar was too high. He wasn’t tall enough to reach and was too heavy to jump up to it. On top of this, the clock did not cooperate, and he was forced to meet his doom. When he approached the bar, he made a few futile leaps to reach it. The impatient gym teacher intervened, grabbed him in a bear hug around the waist, then boosted M. high enough. Dangling from the bar, M. tried his best, straining, squirming, kicking.

His classmates giggled. He pulled and pulled. He felt veins bulging in his neck and forehead. It got him nowhere. M. wrote that he was left “just hanging there” until, finally, his hands gave out, and he dropped to the mat with a thud. Everyone laughed, “including the girls,” he said. His humiliation now complete, M. sat off to the side for the rest of the class, muttering under his breath, wishing to disappear.

A few years later, M. recalled this experience in a college English essay. The class has been asked to write about either a successful or failed learning experience. The assignment’s purpose was to see if it might be possible to come up with some ideas about teaching and learning (and ultimately about writing)—what works and what doesn’t.

At first, M.’s English classmates thought there was no teaching going on in the pull-up story. All the teacher did was shout orders and leave M. hanging. That ain’t teaching, they said.

Everyone in class could relate, though. They’d all been left hanging by teachers at some point, they complained; in fact, for many it was more common than not.

After some discussion, the English students had a hard time determining just what was being taught, but they were pretty sure what was being learned:

• Gym sucks.
• I’m no good at this.
• School is hell.
• Teachers are jerks.

According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, when we learn things, they change our make up:

as we learn our concepts, they become parts of our bodies. Learned concepts are embodied via permanent or very long-term changes in our synapses. Much of our conceptual system, so deeply embodied, cannot become unlearned or overridden, at least not by some act of will and almost never quickly and easily.

You could say what M. learned that day made quite an impression. That gym class is still a part of him. Literally. Like a wart.

“If you are married to the rooster, you will follow the rooster; if you are married to the dog, you will follow the dog,” a student from another class once wrote. It’s a traditional saying from her country about using caution in choosing a partner.

The moral of the story? Watch out!

It’s a warning teachers should heed as well. Whether they know it or not, they are married to one method or another, and they do whatever it tells them to do. (“Yes, Dear,” they say.)

But it’s not just teachers. Textbooks, too, have an annoying tendency to leave you hanging. In A Short History of Nearly Everything, travel writer Bill Bryson tackles science, a subject he had avoided most of his life. When he describes what inspired a nonscientist to write a book about science, he tells the story of a young Bill Bryson who saw a diagram of the earth’s layers in his elementary school textbook. He found the diagram so exciting, he couldn’t wait to read about it. When he turned from the illustration to the text, however, he was in for a shock: it was boring. Really boring. Also, he couldn’t understand it. How could something that looked so interesting be so dull? He writes, “There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among text book authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call away from the frankly interesting.” So after that, he steered clear of science over the years, he says, and “grew up convinced that science was supremely dull, but suspecting that it needn’t be, and not really thinking about it at all if I could help it.” Decades later while researching and writing his science book, he discovered what he had been missing, and, finally, he was able to rekindle the excitement he’d felt when he first saw that diagram revealing the world under our feet.

"That's awesome! I think when I grow up I'll be a . . . travel writer!"

So what was wrong with young Bryson, anyway? Why did he give up on science? Did he lack curiosity?

Doesn’t look like it. The boy was so excited about the science text that he brought it home and was reading it at dinnertime.

Was he just not tough enough, didn’t have the right stuff? You know––too short or too heavy or too weak for the mandatory science class chin-ups?

Well, in writing about it later, Bryson certainly was nimble enough not only to grasp the major concepts but also, unlike the authors of that earlier textbook, he was able to make them a pleasure to read about.

As Natalie Angier points out, what Bryson describes is a common problem in science education. She quotes physics professor Peter Galison about this incredible ability of school to suck the fun out of some of the funnest things ever:

We had to work really hard to accomplish this spectacular feat, because I’ve never met a little kid who didn’t think science was really fun and really interesting. But after years of writing tedious textbooks with terrible graphics, and presenting science as a code you can’t crack, of divorcing science from ordinary human processes that use it daily, guess what: We did it. We persuaded a large number of people that what they once thought was fascinating, fun, the most natural thing in the world, is alien to their existence.

(Well, we can be thankful that the textbook Bryson mentions had at least one good graphic!)

There’s hope, though, because good teaching can compensate for dull texts. In an interview, physicist Richard Feynman talked about his “little kid” years and how much fun it was to learn things from his father who, “knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” Even when Mr. Feynman read to his son from the encyclopedia––not usually high on the list of thrilling reads––still, it was “exciting.” When he read about Tyrannosaurus rex, he didn’t just recite the facts or present the information “as a code you can’t crack” or as something that was “divorced form ordinary human processes.” He made the words come to life:

the encyclopedia would say something like this thing is twenty-five feet high and the head is six feet across, you see. So he’d stop all this and say, “Let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be high enough to put his head through the window . . . .” Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so that I learned to do that––everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating.

Mr. Feynman didn’t leave his young son hanging. He took a child’s foggy notion of 25 feet and made it real by showing him what it would mean to have a reptile that large outside in his own yard. The concept of Tyrannosaurus rex was no longer “alien” to his existence. This is exactly what young Bryson needed––to have someone “translate” that cool graphic “into some reality” for him. (Apparently, Bryson’s old teacher was no Mr. Feynman, and neither was  M.’s gym teacher.)

Another time, Mr. Feynman and his son came upon a brown spot on a leaf as they walked in the woods. Looking at the leaf his son found, Mr. Feynman spun a tale about a fly with “yellow eyes and green wings” which laid an egg there and when the egg hatched there was a tiny maggot that ate from the leaf, leaving behind a widening brown trail as it grew until it matured and turn into a fly. This fanciful story was not just some easily forgotten, ho-hum lesson about reproduction. (Okay, Dad, I get it. The circle of life, blah, blah, blah. Can I go now?) It had another purpose. In a lecture, Randy Pausch called this type of education “indirect learning,” meaning a lesson that is really teaching something else, something unstated. He explained,

we send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is, and it’s the first example of what I’m going to call a head fake, or indirect learning. We actually don’t want our kids to learn football. . . . [Instead] we send our kids out to learn much more important things: teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance.

With his fly story, Mr. Feynman was doing a “head fake.” His real aim, says his son, was to teach him “to notice things,” that a brown spot on a leaf is not just a brown spot on a leaf. Reading from the encyclopedia was not just a lesson from paleontology––it was about “translation,” about how to read and understand. As Feynman grew up, he learned to “read” the world, not just the encyclopedia.

Another time, his father taught him that just memorizing things such as the names of the birds is a superficial kind of knowing. You might know the name, but you still wouldn’t know much about the bird. It would be better, he said, to “look at the bird and what it’s doing.” These lessons carried over for Feynman. At one point, he noticed the way a ball in a wagon rolled to the back when he pulled the wagon, then rolled to the front when he stopped. He asked his father why the ball did that, and his father told him that the word for what was happening is “inertia,” but he didn’t stop there—he didn’t leave his son hanging. Instead, he told him to go back and look again to see if the ball is really rolling to the back of the wagon or if he is pulling the wagon out from under the ball. Feynman then returned to his wagon and looked at the ball and what it was doing by observing it in relation to the sidewalk instead of in relation to the wagon. This was when he saw with his own eyes how the ball was actually behaving. Because of this, inertia became more to him than just another bird with a name. Mr. Feynman’s earlier head fakes had taught his son that there’s more going on, and that he shouldn’t be satisfied with ready answers.

Feynman’s father was not married to the rooster. For him, learning was not about testing or memorizing. It wasn’t about finding out who “has it” and who doesn’t. It wasn’t about leaving anyone hanging. Instead, it was walks in the woods and “lovely, interesting discussions” with “no pressure.” Lessons were not lectures and the topic was rarely the point.

{Coming up in Part II, a geology class that rocked.}

I am interested in popular science books as a genre and spotted a book called The Canon: The Beautiful Basics of Science in my local bookshop.  The book is by Natalie Angier who is an experienced science writer, having been the senior science writer for Time magazine.

Firstly the bad bits:- The book is riddled with American cultural references that, for readers from the UK or any other country, could become slightly irritating.  There are also many puns or plays on words that are, at times, clever but other times appear a little desperate.  It is as if the author feels that we need a smile on our faces to deal with challenging concepts.  Perhaps she is right!

With the exception of these slight reservations, I found the book a delightful refresher that put many major scientific concepts in perspective and in context.

The layout and order of the book is thoughtful.  For example, the main area discussed in the chapter on physics is that of atomic structure.  This then leads seamlessly into the chemistry chapter, where the importance of the bonds between atoms were the key themes; one concept built on another.

As a phsysist I thought I would enjoy the chapters on physics and astronomy most.  However it was the section on DNA and the miraculous division of cells that captivated me.

This is not a overly large book and it is very readable for everyone from high school kids to oldies wanting to revisit those science lessons at school that they didn’t “get”.  The author has been selective and has had to miss out or skim over many important areas.  She has done a good job doing this, but you are bound to feel cheated if your taste buds have been tickled but not satisfied.  You could think of this book as a taster lesson from which you could drill down deeper into subjects that interest you.

Buy this book if you have a spark of curiosity about how science “fits together”.  It is a one stop shop that takes you one a whistle-stop tour of the key scientific concepts that you need to know.

A MIXED BAG The long-beaked echidna is hard to find but easy to appreciate.

SCIENCE June 9, 2009

With her usual journalistic panache, Natalie Angier reports today in the New York Times on new work on the echidna, otherwise known as the spiny anteater (there are four species in the genera Zaglossus and Tachyglossus). The species is bizarre because, like the platypus, it is one of the two groups of mammals that lay eggs — the monotremes.  And, like the  platypus, echidnas are found in Australia, but also in New Guinea. They are toothless, and, unlike other mammals except the platypus, the females produce milk not through teats, but through a hairy patch on the belly from which milk is lapped up by the young (this may represent the primitive state of mammary glands from which modern breasts evolved).  Unlike other mammals (but like birds), they have a single hole for excretion, sex, and egg-laying: the cloaca.

A paper by Muse Opiang in the Journal of Mammalogy reports on the long-beaked echidna from New Guinea, Zaglossus bartoni.  Several individuals were captured (no easy feat for these reclusive beasts: it took 500 man-hours just to find the first one!) and radiotracked to determine home range size.  Although the results — that home range size is variable among individuals, ranging from about 10 to 170 hectares (0.1 to 1.7 square kilometers) — aren’t terribly exciting to the nonbiologist, they are valuable in contributing to our knowledge of this rare animal.   Angier livens things up by telling the tale behind the paper:

Muse Opiang was working as a field research officer when he became seized by a passion for the long-beaked echidna, or Zaglossus bartoni, which are found only in the tropical rain forests of New Guinea and a scattering of adjacent islands. He had seen them once or twice in captivity and in photographs — plump, terrier-size creatures abristle with so many competing notes of crane, mole, pig, turtle, tribble, Babar and boot scrubber that if they didn’t exist, nobody would think to Photoshop them. He knew that the mosaic effect was no mere sight gag: as one of just three surviving types of the group of primitive egg-laying mammals called monotremes, the long-beaked echidna is a genuine living link between reptiles and birds on one branch, and more familiar placental mammals like ourselves on the next. . .

.. . . Reproductively, monotremes are like a VCR-DVD unit, an embodiment of a technology in transition. They lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the so-called puggles that hatch with milk — though drizzled out of glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats, and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink.

Monotreme sex determination also holds its allure. In most mammals, a single set of XX chromosomes signifies a girl, a set of XY specifies a boy. For reasons that remain mysterious, monotremes have multiple sets of sex chromosomes, four or more parading pairs of XXs and XYs, or something else altogether: a few of those extra sex chromosomes look suspiciously birdlike. Another avianlike feature is the cloaca, the single orifice through which an echidna or platypus voids waste, has sex and lays eggs, and by which the group gets its name. Yet through that uni-perforation, a male echnida can extrude a four-headed penis.

When I was a graduate student, I had the good fortune to encounter one of these creatures — an adult named Francis who lived in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.  I used to walk downstairs to pet it on the non-spiny parts,  and found, as Angier notes, that it was a friendly and peaceful beast.

Enrich your world by reading Angier’s article!

Damn!  P.Z. has posted a cat again! I see him a cat and raise him a panda:

I am very much enjoying Natalie Angier’s witty science primer, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. Little did I know that it would give me a brilliant insight into the decidedly nonscientific world of politics.

Witness page 173, where she describes the curious behavior of one particular creature:

. . . the tunicate, or sea squirt, is a mobile hunter in its larval stage and thus has a little brain to help it find prey. But on reaching maturity and attaching itself permanently to a safe niche from which it can filter-feed on whatever passes by, the sea squirt jettisons the brain it no longer requires. “Brains are great consumers of energy,” writes Peter Atkins, a profssor of chemistry at Oxford University, “and it is a good idea to get rid of your brain when you discover you have no further need of it.”

Now, am I crazy, or is this not the the perfect analogy for the modern Republican Party? After many painful years of having to “justify” “beliefs” and “policies” with “reasons” and “evidence” — all of which requires energy-consuming thought — now they have Fox News to tell them to have teabag protests for no discernible reason. The point was to be angry, not thinky.

Unfair? Okay, well, you can’t possibly argue with the sea squirt as analogous to the Bush presidency. Prizing the informational processing power of his “gut” over his brain, relying on instinct and faith over data and reflection. Bush (I assume) never physically ejected his gray matter onto the Oval Office carpet, but he might as well have. For a guy who slept as much as he did, you can bet he was looking for ways to conserve energy. What better way than to shut down a major organ he wasn’t using anyway?

There’s something sublime about this sea quirt metaphor. The GOP’s wholesale rejection of the intellect, their disdain for the educated, their anxiety over science, none of it because they are bad, per se, but because they have adapted to the environment in which they live. Finding that their brains were doing them no good whatsoever, that thoughtful, intellectual discourse was getting them nowhere, they hit the eject button and got Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, and Glenn Beck. Now they need waste no more precious energy on building neurons and firing synapses. They are a miracle of evolution.

Update: Apparently, Arlen Specter agrees with my take, and has opted for continued use of his neocortex.

This is going to be a boring writing post. It’s a gin-filled anti-Writer’s Chronicle-esque rant.

Why did I fuck up yesterday? Why does a bad night of writing–writing for about an hour, 573 words–mean I need/want/think I have to drink a gin and tonic at 8:30 in the morning to get soused enough to edit those 573 words?

If it were just a bad day, a lame piece, that’d be one thing. I’ve written two or three lame pieces for this project. I hate one of the story threads. It was supposed to be a Lovecraft meets Jaws thing, except I’ve never read Lovecraft, I just like some Lovecraft fans (like John Carpenter) and I love Jaws to pieces, but not in the reverential way one would need to write a fucking homage to it. That thread is totally fucked. But I recovered on the third or fourth section (I hope).

Can I recover from last night’s writing?

Yeah, sure.

I could even leave it be, try to forget about it. Just let it be a dead-end piece.

I’m listening to Leonard Cohen right now, singing Be For Real, which ties in to the Afghan Whigs, which is what I was listening to (1965) while writing last night. It’s hard to be mad at them right now, because it was my own fault for putting them on, because I knew what I was doing ….

And there’s the difference with knowing what you’re doing and not.

I was had an idea for a story/novel/piece about Little America, that hellish roadside whatever the fuck–ice cream place, motel, whatever–out here somewhere. I got hammered and told a friend all about it–this was in 2001, early 2001, pre-9/11 (oh, I should do my utterly selfish 9/11 post sometime, that’ll offend some people but not people who actually matter)–it must have been a screenplay. I was still planning on moving to NYC, going to NYU and working at an editing house at that point. FTW.

But I never wrote that script. I don’t even remember the particulars. Because I told my friend all about it. What was the point in writing it.

Last night, I sat down to write with an all-new idea for this project. I’d incorporate one of my old standards. What a great idea.

Standards.

Standards being … my story tropes. Not everyone’s story tropes, but mine. The relationships I find interesting, the scenes I find interesting. I burn them off in stories, the first novel.

So somehow, I decided to bring back one of my oldest standards–maybe the first real screenplay (in terms of ambitiousness and artistic intent … not in quality) I ever finished. Dude and a slightly older married woman. Except it’s been thirteen (?) years since I last worked on that story. Used that standard.

All of a sudden–I think it was because of Haunted and the four levels it hit me on and I’ll break those out in a second if I can remember them–I thought it’d be a great idea to incorporate that standard, that story, into the current project. There’s room for it, there is. But it should be organic, not forced, not planned.

The four levels the song Haunted hit me on …

(Off topic, I’m curious if M1 has even seen Sid & Nancy … it’s a female movie like the Princess Bride but I think of a certain generation … I’m sure it’s passed).

1. I was twenty-two and in wondrous physical condition and in love with a girl who didn’t love me back 2,975 miles away. The song immediately reminded me of being that person. That stupid fucking person who should have been laying everything he could instead of doting. I mean, what’s the karmic payoff of doting on someone who needed doting, but … wasn’t offering anything in return? That’s rhetorical. The payoff is zero. Speaking of ol’ girl … Chris Cornell is here in town soon. I saw the sign on the venue on the way home from the liquor store. We saw Chris Cornell during my week in the meat grinder–he gave me a knowing nod, like I was banging her. I wasn’t. I tried to explain that difference to her. I really never found her hot, which is something no one ever believes, but I didn’t.
2. Sid & Nancy. Loving that movie. Watching Alex Cox movies. Seeing fucking Repo Man. I remember thinking last night, if listening to this song, watching Sid & Nancy, gets me to sit through Repo Man again … I’m going to be pissed.
3. Writing. Thinking I should “feel” when writing, “feeling” the protagonist’s feelings. Musing. Douching. I used to write like an undergrad poet who didn’t understand poems aren’t your soul puked on paper, but editable, changable artifices. I wrote an okay screenplay during this period. I’ve read it recently. It’s decent. It’s something absolutely no one would want to sit through without opening his or her wrists … but it does make the viewer/reader reserve judgement of the protagonist until the last minute, which is the point. And the Sam Cooke usage is tits. I once gave an impromptu five minute Sam Cooke lecture in a history class. Leaving academia was the worst thing I could ever do. I was a goddamn superstar in training. That motherfucker who puts together the boy bands, he was putting me together as an academic superstar. Seriously … the dictionary recognizes motherfucker. Word.
4. What’s the fourth one? Ol’ girl, movies, writing … I forgot the fourth one. Sorry.

So, back to editing, as I’m hammered, spilling my drink, listening to Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen (my Human Touch/Lucky Town story is a downer so I won’t share it, surfice to say, I’m a piece of excrement and I loathe myself–in a good mood though) and Nick Cave.

Now it’s time for a little 2Pac.

I wish my wife liked 2Pac.

What’s funny about last night’s knowing fuck-up?

It wasn’t fueled by personal bullshit. It came after a two hour fight. Had nothing to do with that. It was all about self-confidence, etc.

DBBF once told me hating something you write–because it can’t be good enough before you show it–was a sign of good writing.

I don’t know if I agree. I kind of do. I think loving something enough to show it is the same thing though. I mean, I’ve got a useless diploma somewhere telling me I’m a writer, an educated, trained one.

You know what the problem was in high school? White kids.

Seriously. I mean, I wore Cross Colours and listened to rap music, but … I at least liked it. I appreciated it. I wrote M1 a fucking great liner note thingy on 2Pac. So I was lame, but not lame in the right way with that … it’s upsetting. But, this was during the whole “alternative” phase, and that was it’s whole thing. I mean, today I listen to 2Pac and am embarrased I ever, even as a teenager, as a young teenager, listened to the Singles soundtrack. Fuck Campbell Scott, btw; no offense, but he’s like a static Robert Sean Leonard. Spanish Prisoner was wonderful though. I wonder if M1 has seen it. I know ol’ girl has. My wife would hate it. I need a fucking movie buddy local. Someone to go see WKW with.

Where was I?

Am I drunk enough to edit? At 9:18 Ante Meridan, am I drunk enough to edit?

I think I’m close. I mean, sure, I’m drunk. But am I drunk enough.

When I was in undergrad, I used to have to edit my student films–sorry, student videos (wasn’t half-inch at least)–no, not edit, watch, review, my student films drunk.

Getting stoned cuts off too much. Like I can’t get stoned and read. Or write. It fucks up the experience–I can be on call drunk (word to next weekend, drunk all through it, even if I have to transcribe for the mfing movie blog just not to be a douchebag on that one), but I can’t be stoned. I do not care when I’m stoned.

Intoxicants, from worst to best

1. Tobacco. I occasionally–very occasionally, once or twice a year–have a cigarette. It’s all psychological. Haven’t smoked regularly since junior year of high school. My mom used to buy me a pack every other day. My dad told me it was stupid. Stopped for a girl (a senior girl, it started then), who eventually shat all over me. Not literally. Literally would have suggested intimacy. But at least I found some good theaters thanks to her. Ought to facebook her. Curious. She liked some shitty novels/movies.
2. Alcohol. WTF? It’s a fine tool, but whatever.
3. Pot. You know what I do when I smoke pot? I play video games because I love the way it fucks up my perception of time. Wife wants to get jiggy thanks to having read Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography but smoking hurts her throat so we don’t do it.
4. Acid. Because I end up naked in the woods, convinced I’m in my primal state.
5. Coke. Because it’s fun. And I like having fun. My wife would love coke. It took her like five years to admit it.

Unfortunately, this list doesn’t include mini-thins/mini-phins or any of the prescription drugs I’ve snorted, because I can’t remembered their names. That’s my DARE alternative–kids, when someone rolls up a dollar bill and tells you to snort Jimmy’s crushed up prescription medicine … don’t do it. You’ll end up thirty and drunk at 9:28 am. And you’ll be drowning in credit card debt because you really, really, really need that motherfucking Rocquefort steak at the French place you can’t afford. And you’ll need a bottle of Pinot too, because you’re a human being, you’re a Cheyenne, you’re not a savage.

And a boner out to all the film major girls who got that reference. Someday, you’ll be immortalized in some writing–the Cheyenne thing is one of my writing tropes.

i think I’m drunk enough.

To edit.

I can’t remember anything else.

Did I finish the story about being drunk when watching my movies with people?

I made some well-made shit.

Impressive even.

Thank goodness I flushed my filmic ambition.

Okay, yeah, it’s time to edit.

Word. Bring on the fucking Young Snakes (not really, but bring on the Til Tuesday)

While going through the Berkeley website Understanding Science (discussed yesterday), I found something more of interest.  It’s a page called “Astrology: Is it Scientific?”, which sets out a checklist of questions that the student should answer to see if astrology is indeed a science.  Here’s part of the checklist:

Here we’ll use the Science Checklist to evaluate one way in which astrology is commonly used. See if you think it qualifies as scientific!

Focuses on the natural world? Astrology’s basic premise is that heavenly bodies — the sun, moon, planets, and constellations — have influence over or are correlated with earthly events.

Aims to explain the natural world? Astrology uses a set of rules about the relative positions and movements of heavenly bodies to generate predictions and explanations for events on Earth and human personality traits. For example, some forms of astrology predict that a person born just after the spring equinox is particularly likely to become an entrepreneur.

Uses testable ideas? Some expectations generated by astrology are so general that any outcome could be interpreted as fitting the expectations; if treated this way, astrology is not testable. However, some have used astrology to generate very specific expectations that could be verified against outcomes in the natural world. For example, according to astrology, one’s zodiac sign impacts one’s ability to command respect and authority. Since these traits are important in politics, we might expect that if astrology really explained people’s personalities, scientists would be more likely to have zodiac signs that astrologers describe as “favorable” towards science.1 If used to generate specific expectations like this one, astrological ideas are testable.

Relies on evidence? In the few cases where astrology has been used to generate testable expectations and the results were examined in a careful study, the evidence did not support the validity of astrological ideas.2 This experience is common in science — scientists often test ideas that turn out to be wrong. However, one of the hallmarks of science is that ideas are modified when warranted by the evidence. Astrology has not changed its ideas in response to contradictory evidence.

The page concludes by saying:

It seems to me that some of the claims of many faiths are similar to those of astrology–the four ideas given above.  Religion focusses on the natural world (at least some of the time), purports to explain it, uses testable ideas (e.g., efficacy of prayer), and relies on evidence (Scripture, archaeological findings, etc.)  Like astrology, religion fails all of these tests.

I’m not trying to say anything portentous, except that scientists are really keen to denigrate astrology while at the same time bending over backwards to respect religion, even though there is the same amount of evidence supporting each.  This is a point that science writer Natalie Angier makes in her wonderful essay, “My God Problem.”

Consider the very different treatments accorded two questions presented to Cornell University’s “Ask an Astronomer” Web site. To the query, “Do most astronomers believe in God, based on the available evidence?” the astronomer Dave Rothstein replies that, in his opinion, “modern science leaves plenty of room for the existence of God . . . places where people who do believe in God can fit their beliefs in the scientific framework without creating any contradictions.” He cites the Big Bang as offering solace to those who want to believe in a Genesis equivalent and the probabilistic realms of quantum mechanics as raising the possibility of “God intervening every time a measurement occurs” before concluding that, ultimately, science can never prove or disprove the existence of a god, and religious belief doesn’t—and shouldn’t—”have anything to do with scientific reasoning.”

How much less velveteen is the response to the reader asking whether astronomers believe in astrology. “No, astronomers do not believe in astrology,” snarls Dave Kornreich. “It is considered to be a ludicrous scam. There is no evidence that it works, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.” Dr. Kornreich ends his dismissal with the assertion that in science “one does not need a reason not to believe in something.” Skepticism is “the default position” and “one requires proof if one is to be convinced of something’s existence.”

In other words, for horoscope fans, the burden of proof is entirely on them, the poor gullible gits; while for the multitudes who believe that, in one way or another, a divine intelligence guides the path of every leaping lepton, there is no demand for evidence, no skepticism to surmount, no need to worry.

A couple more points of clarification about the last post:

1.  I am by no means denigrating the worthwhile achievements of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for Science Education in pushing back the tide of creationism.  Their effects (especially the NCSE’s) in court cases and school-board hearings have had a real and positive effect on keeping evolution in the schools.  My beef is that these effects are temporary ones.  Creationism is like herpes: it keeps coming back again and again until you extirpate the root cause.  The court cases and school board hearings are outbreaks of herpes, which are stanched by our colleagues.  But until the underlying virus is extirpated (that is, the kind of faith that is incompatible with evolution), the outbreaks will continue to occur.

2.  The NAS and NCSE seem to always trot out the “religious scientists” or “scientific theologians” when they need to sell evolution: John Haught, Ken Miller, Michael Ruse, etc.  I would feel better about the whole issue if they’d also trot out Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the many other evolutionists who represent a non-accommodationist point of view.

3.   By saying that we should leave the reconciliation of faith and science to theologians, I am not endorsing the idea that they can or should be reconciled.  Personally, I don’t think they can be. I’m saying only that that reconciliation is not the job of scientists or pro-evolution organizations.

International Women’s Day is a day to celebrate the achievements of women, be they political, economic or social. It’s also a good opportunity to remind people of the continued struggle for equal rights and an end to discrimination and violence. I thought I might take the opportunity to mention a few atheist women who nourish my creativity and thoughts.

Ani DiFranco – Fantastic singer-songwriter and activist. Her music is highly accomplished and her lyrics are heartfelt and intelligent.

Björk Guðmundsdóttir – I love her music and her voice. I also love her bold creativity.

Natalie Angier – Prize-winning science journalist and feminist. Her book ‘Woman. An Intimate Geography’ is fascinating and enlightening.

Erika Moen – Her autobiographical comics have spunk, honesty and humour.

So which atheist women would you like to celebrate today?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Seven Deadly Sins

So much has changed in the texture of our cultural consciousness over the last six months. The underbelly of our collective thinking has gone ventral, exposing itself rather nakedly to all the world. In just my last 24 hour random walk through the “elite” media (you gotta love those conservatives designating my favorite channels of information with a specialized category all their own) I have encountered a plethora of exposés, quite unprecedented, on those anciently designated but ever present vices, the Seven Deadly Sins. A PBS special on greed. An article about shame in The Atlantic. An excellent neurobiological view of envy by the esteemed science writer Natalie Angier in the New York Times (which is posted on Slow Painting).

Not typical of our post modern culture milieu, this focus on the darker side of our natures is part of the reevaluation of what happened and how we got into the current disastrous state. Angier is kind enough to point out that other primates experience envy, but I doubt the chimp strain has the potential for rampant destruction that the human variety has.

From Angier’s article:

The new findings are preliminary, and some scientists have expressed reservations about what they or other scanning results from the fast-moving field of behavioral neuroscience really mean. Nevertheless, the research throws a spotlight on a potent emotion that we deny or deride but ignore at our peril. Much of the recent economic crisis, Dr. Smith suggested, may well have been fueled by runaway envy, as financiers competed to avoid the shame of being a “mere” millionaire.

Blame and bitterness is ambient these days, from conversations overheard at the hardware store to those we have at home. Who are the instigators, who are the greedy bastards that brought all of us so low? Bankers. Wall Street “idiots” (Claire McCaskill’s impassioned name calling actually seems tame compared to what I hear from neighbors and friends). The corrupt Cheney type politicos. The tiny oligarchy that really runs this country.

It’s a loaded issue—and one that comes with high personal cost— to spend time rounding up the likely suspects, just as it is costly for Obama to go after the atrocities committed by Bushists during the last 8 years. I don’t want to spend my valuable prana life force capital being angry and bitter just as Obama doesn’t want the much needed focus on rebuilding and repair to slip into retribution and revenge.

One of my favorite essays is by Howard Zinn, The Optimism of Uncertainty. Written in 2004, it is prescient on many levels for life in 2009. I have referred to it many times when discouragement feels like a strong tide that is relentlessly destroying the fragile sand of my beach head. I post it here in case you haven’t read it, since it may prove to be palliative for you too.

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

Most human vices have enough sense to be very, very tempting. Lust, gluttony, sloth, hurling powerful if unimaginative expletives at a member of the political opposition, buying a pair of Thierry Rabotin snakeskin printed shoes at 25 percent off even though you just bought a pair of cherry-red slingbacks last week — all these things feel awfully good to indulge in, which is why people must be repeatedly abjured not to.

One vice, however, dispenses with any hedonic trappings and instead feels so painful you would think it was a virtue, except that there’s no gain in lean muscle mass at the end: envy. Skulking at sixth place on traditional lists of the seven deadly sins, right between wrath and pride, envy is the deep, often hostile resentment you feel toward somebody who has something you want, like wealth, beauty, a promotion or the admiration of peers. It is a vice few can avoid yet nobody craves, for to experience envy is to feel small and inferior, a loser shrink-wrapped in spite.

“Envy is corrosive and ugly, and it can ruin your life,” said Richard H. Smith, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky who has written about envy. “If you’re an envious person, you have a hard time appreciating a lot of the good things that are out there, because you’re too busy worrying about how they reflect on the self.”

Now researchers are gleaning insights into the neural and evolutionary underpinnings of envy, and why it can feel like a bodily illness or a physical blow. They’re also tracing the pathway of envy’s equally petty foil, the sensation of schadenfreude — taking pleasure when those whom you envied are themselves brought down low.

Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan and their colleagues described brain-scanning studies of subjects who were told to imagine themselves as protagonists in social dramas with characters of greater or lesser status or achievement. When confronting characters that the participants admitted to envying, brain regions involved in registering physical pain were aroused: the higher the subjects rated their envy, the more vigorously flared the pain nodes in the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and related areas.

Conversely, the researchers said, when subjects were given a chance to imagine the golden one’s downfall, the brain’s reward circuits were activated, again in proportion to the strength of envy’s sting: the subjects who felt the greatest envy the first time around reacted to news of their rival’s misfortune with a comparatively livelier response in the dopamine-rich pleasure centers of, for example, the ventral striatum. “We have a saying in Japanese, ‘The misfortunes of others are the taste of honey,’ ” said Hidehiko Takahashi, the first author on the report. “The ventral striatum is processing that ‘honey.’ ”

Matthew D. Lieberman of the psychology department at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-wrote a commentary that accompanies the report, said he was impressed by how the neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude were tied together, with the magnitude of one predicting the strength of the other. “This is the way other needs-processing systems like hunger and thirst work,” he said. “The hungrier or thirstier that you feel, the more pleasurable it is when you finally eat or drink.”

The new findings are preliminary, and some scientists have expressed reservations about what they or other scanning results from the fast-moving field of behavioral neuroscience really mean. Nevertheless, the research throws a spotlight on a potent emotion that we deny or deride but ignore at our peril. Much of the recent economic crisis, Dr. Smith suggested, may well have been fueled by runaway envy, as financiers competed to avoid the shame of being a “mere” millionaire.

Envy can be seen in other social animals with personal reputations to defend. Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta noted that monkeys were perfectly happy to work for cucumber slices until a person started giving one monkey a preferred treat like grapes. Then the others stopped working for cucumbers and started nursing a grudge. “The underlying emotion is likely envy or resentment,” Dr. de Waal said.

When children realize they have siblings, their lives become dominated by the calipers of envy. Why does she always get to sit by the window? His cupcake has more sprinkles! No siblings? No problem: you can envy the cat.

Researchers often distinguish between envy and the jealousy you feel by, say, seeing a loved one flirt at a party. Jealousy is a triangle, Dr. Smith said, in which you fear losing a loved one to the embrace of another. Envy is a two-bodied affair, an arrow proceeding from your covetous breast to the heart of the well-endowed Other. Yet envy is restless and gregarious and can embrace popular cliques, honor rolls and entire nation-states. “It’s a fact of life that we pay close attention to status, to who’s doing well and who isn’t and how we stand in comparison to others,” said Colin W. Leach, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, who studies envy.

As a rule, we envy those who are like us in most ways — in sex, age, class and curriculum vitae. Potters envy potters, Aristotle observed.

Paradoxically, this most socially driven of emotions is among the least socially acceptable to confess to. Jealous hostility toward a romantic rival is an acceptable topic for conversation. Envious hostility toward a professional rival is more like an embarrassing body function: please do not share. When asked by researchers about their envy, study participants have said, “I’m privately ashamed of myself.”

As evolutionary scientists see it, envy’s salient features — its persistence and universality, its fixation with social status and the fact that it cohabits with shame — suggest that it serves a deep social role. They propose that our invidious impulses may help explain why humans are comparatively less hierarchical than many primate species, more prone to a rough egalitarianism and to rebelling against kings and tycoons who hog more than their fair share.

Envy may also help keep us in line, making us so desperate to look good that we take the high road and start to act good, too. We struggle with our private envy, our longing for more esteem than we command, and the struggle only sharpens the painful contrast between the imagined perfection of the envied adversary that we have enshrined on an imaginary throne, and the defective merchandise that is ourselves.

“If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon,” Bertrand Russell said. “But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.” If envy is a tax levied by civilization, it is one that everyone must pay.

Natalie Angier
New York Times

Oh, the intelligent and powerful clitoris. The more I learn of her, the more I am in awe of her goddess-like presence.

Her strength is unparalleled: with some 8000 nerve fibers (more than exist anywhere else on the body, and about twice the number as found in the penis).

Freya, Goddess of sex, battle, and pleasure

Her desire for pleasure unapologetic. How else could one explain her design, whose function is “purely for pleasure, with no known anatomical role” (source, p.10).

Her power undiminishing. Unlike the vagina, she is unaffected menopause and remains strong into old age (source, p.60).

Most important of all, she offers guidance and wisdom, silently encouraging women to take control of their own sexuality—and perhaps by extension their lives. Without words, hers in the language of blood engorgement and nerve endings: the “clitoris operates at peak performance when a women feels athunder with life, when she is bellowing on top, figuratively if not literally” (source, p.70).

Indeed, I am thankful for the tiny goddess living between my legs, who, growing warm and moist as I read and learn about her, urges me to continue this journey in sexual exploration..

Penis envy?

As if.

Prop 8 is a probl​em,​ and binds​ religious values to state​ laws.​ If marri​age is limit​ed to being​ betwe​en and man and a woman​,​ due to relig​ious value​s,​ then it shoul​d be limit​ed to relig​ious coupl​es as well- which is not something I am suggesting. This legislation is a step towards undermining basic rights to happiness that are currently awarded to us through the constitution. The notion that a person can deny another human being, an equal on all levels, the right to get married to someone that they LOVE just as much as you love your own partner is disgusting.

The claim that a persons sexual orientation is a lifestyle choice is absurd, and if you would like more information about the reality of the issue please click here, and here. Before I landed on History as my major in school, I took every class I possibly could on Human Sexuality because (gasp) that was what I wanted to study. The links, if you aren’t inclined to click them, go to two separate studies that discuss the biological components involved in determining sexual orientation. The first links to Simon Le Vay’s study of the anterior hypothalamus and has not made it into the greater public sphere, but has been around since 1991 and can be found in psychology textbooks. The second links to a study done by Natalie Angier suggests that there is a connection between a persons sexual orientation and their genes. If you are interested in reading more on the topic, check out the books Stigma and Sexual Orientation edited by Gregory Herek,  Sex Changes by Patrick Califa-Rice, Sexual Orientation and Human Rights edited by  Saul M. Olyan and Martha C. Nussbaum.

Proposition 8 is on par with suppo​rting​ segre​gatio​n,​ being​ again​st inter​racia​l marri​age and being​ again​st the separ​ation​ of churc​h and state​.​ It’s a step in the wrong​ direc​tion, and goes against the basic values that the US represents.​ When I voted on Tuesday, I voted for freedom, not discrimination and hate: 

Treat​ing someo​ne diffe​rentl​y under​ the law becau​se of somet​hing that is out of his or her control is wrong​ and unavo​idabl​y discr​imina​tory.​ Colo​red and whit​e drink​ing fount​ains,​ bathrooms and resta​urant​s,​ as equal​ in appea​rance​ and funct​ion can never​ be truly​ equal​.​ On that same note,​ the disti​nctio​n betwe​en “Marr​ied” and “Dome​stic Partn​ers” is clear​ly a rehas​h of this absur​d Pless​y v. Fergu​son argum​ent.​

These​ argum​ents again​st gay marri​age are almos​t indis​tingu​ishab​le from the argum​ents against inter​racia​l marri​age.​ Those​ who oppos​e the court​’​s rulin​g on gay marri​age today​ claim​ that “acti​vist judge​s” subve​rted the “peop​le’s will.​” Well,​ until​ 1967,​ it was also the “​peopl​e’​s will”​ that inter​racia​l marri​ages be illeg​al.​ No matte​r how the “peop​le’s will”​ is today​,​ we need to stand​ up for what is right​ just as we stood​ up for inter​racia​l coupl​es.​

– Blake M.

If you’re angry about the outcome of Tuesdays state decision, you have every right to be! But don’t act out in a hateful way, don’t get violent, don’t go around screaming and having a tantrum: be the bigger person and show others that you are a human being. You have rights just like everyone else. Remember that in this vote, only the title was taken away – not the rights. Every decision can be changed as long as you act and participate in the efforts of change, and don’t work against them by stirring up more animosity from people who just don’t know any better.

Please check out the sites below, they range from equal rights to school activism. If you want to participate in a rally, check out their event schedules and also search for your local GLBT group and join them.

http://www.eqca.org/site/pp.asp?c=kuLRJ9MRKrH&b=4025493

http://www.victoryfund.org/home

http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/home/index.html

http://www.milkclub.org/

http://www.hrc.org/

http://www.thetaskforce.org/

Dear Adele:

I am gullible and insulated from reality. Your excuse is fine–you’re 3 (almost 4) months old, and your conversation skills aren’t quite developed yet. (Don’t misunderstand, Petunia–I love talking with you. You say “Eh-heh,” and I say, “Yes?” Or you say, “Aaaahhhh,” and I say, “Hold on, Adele.” So “developed” you might not be, but damned adorable you are. And you’re much more verbal than your brother was. I just wish you’d give us a good laugh, one of those giant baby boomers right from your sloshy little gut. We’re working on it. Pants on the head, by the way, don’t work.)

I was reading an article in an old Bitch Magazine about why so many mother-memoirs aren’t written by women of color, and in taking this genre so astutely apart, Deesha Philyaw provided information that made me realize, Adele, how insulated I am from the rest of this culture. For one thing, most mothers work and always have, especially women of color, so this debate is sort of a non-sequitur. For another thing, two authors whose work I’m slightly familiar with–Caitlin Flanagan (a woman-hating traitor who writes for The Atlantic, a magazine whose marginalization of women as subjects and journalists, from what I can tell, is notable) and Linda Hirshman (whose work I am unfortunately less familiar with but whom I do have respect for because I think she cares about women and our future), have written extensively about working mothers. Flanagan states that women shouldn’t work because they’ll scar their children and Hirshman states that women need to work in order to level the workforce playing field. But my interest in these subjects, Adele, is exactly that–my own–because their books have sold very few copies. You’d never know this, though, since according to Philyaw, the media–morning news shows and comedy news shows–interviewed them and pushed their books. So there I was, your mother, getting agitated by Flanagan’s extended girls girls girls version of sexism and getting irritated at both of them for assuming that mothers actually have a choice about working–but it’s clear I think that not very many of us really care, Adele–and not too many of us spend much time looking down on women for working or looking up to women for staying home or analyzing the whole situation as intensely as Flanagan and Hirshman.

Well.

Some insight here about the relevance of middle-class white dilemmas. Seriously.

These books lack of popularity, Adele, means a lot, but let’s talk about two that really come to your mother’s mind: a) Flanagan and Hirshman have connections that help them get their books hawked on these popular television programs; b) these books pit women against one another and divide us, and media love books and stories and ideas that do that. So please, Petunia, please spend your whole life thinking a little harder than I’ve been thinking, and don’t be so damned suggestible or self-absorbed. I tell my students that truth isn’t true because they see it in print or on the news–I need to incorporate those directives into the way I view the world, especially about the issues that I write about the most, which all have to do with women.

So now I’m working on not being a mommy-traitor, Adele, and I’m starting to realize that I have been a mommy-traitor for quite awhile now, especially with regards to breast feeding. I take the blame for this, but also place some of it on the constant you-must-breast-feed-your-baby rhetoric that was assailed upon me by doctors and nurses and literature while I was pregnant with your brother. By the time I was pregnant with you, I needed no assailing–I was sold on breastfeeding and I still am, largely because I don’t work nine hours a day straight, but also because I have had very few problems with breastfeeding like mastitis, clogged ducts, or thrush. The ease of breastfeeding for me has resulted in the act itself being a source of bonding from me to you. Breastfeeding is one thing that makes me love you, Adele, and it made me love your brother, too. Since I don’t have any trouble with it, I just sort of experience it–watch you sleep and eat and cuddle and relax and coo and slurp. It’s wonderful.

But there are many mothers who don’t breast feed because they work too often to make it manageable or because their breasts don’t respond well to the process or because they just don’t want to. I am now convinced that not breastfeeding is fine. (How big of me. God, Adele, please don’t be such a snot.) Natalie Angier was able to help me reorient my views. As she pointed out, women for centuries have been trying to find alternatives to breastfeeding, whether they be wet nurses (kind of icky, if you ask me) or cow udders (gross) or bottles or “cow horns… or nipples fashioned from leather” filled with some kind of substance that baby digestive systems can absorb. Angier also says that “Clay bottles shaped like breasts have been found at several sites in Europe that date from the late Neolithic era, around 3500 B.C.”

Oh.

So… um… to breastfeed or not to breastfeed, this whole huge debate that absorbed me for years and resulted in my breastfeeding my children, for which I am grateful, but which also resulted in my being judgmental, and which results in millions of mothers being judgmental or feeling like shit about themselves because they didn’t or couldn’t breastfeed or didn’t particularly enjoy it, this whole huge thing… is nothing… um… new. At all.

I guess we’re in a Mommy Matrix, Adele. (A fantastic movie. Don’t even bother with the second or the third. None of us understand what happened.)

I also guess that now, Adele, since I’ve been made aware of this information (thank you to science writers), I can fully accept that women for thousands of years have been nursing or not nursing. And I can realize that mothers do what they can do and I can leave it at that. Last week, I was having a pleasant and interesting conversation with the owner of a clothing store downtown. She is in her 50s, I’d guess, and she has three grown children. We were exchanging stories of Baby Days, and she told me that her second child, her son, refused to take formula, so she had to pump for him. Well, I thank whatever Force of Thought stopped me from saying You know, breastmilk is better for babies, anyway, which was the first sentence in my head after she told me she’d tried formula; instead, we continued talking and as I left her store, that Force of Thought was helping me behave in a wise and ethical manner and said, You were talking to a woman in her 50s, a mother, a solid and gracious woman here, you were making a friend–would you give it a fucking rest? Would you just stop it, already?

Adele, I wish this Force would have infiltrated my psyche a lot sooner–but please remember that the Force we’re probably talking about here is the Force of Information. I read a book and I learned about history and I figured out how to behave and I figured out how to think. I will do everything I can to see that you do the same for your entire life.

I love you.

Mommy

You are shopping in a busy supermarket and you’re ready to pay up and go home. You perform a quick visual sweep of the checkout options and immediately start ramming your cart through traffic toward an appealingly unpeopled line halfway across the store. As you wait in line and start reading nutrition labels, you can’t help but calculate that the 529 calories contained in a single slice of your Key lime cheesecake amounts to one-fourth of your recommended daily caloric allowance and will take you 90 minutes on the elliptical to burn off and you’d better just stick the thing behind this stack of Soap Opera Digests and hope a clerk finds it before it melts.

One shopping spree, two distinct number systems in play. Whenever we choose a shorter grocery line over a longer one, or a bustling restaurant over an unpopular one, we rally our approximate number system, an ancient and intuitive sense that we are born with and that we share with many other animals. Rats, pigeons, monkeys, babies — all can tell more from fewer, abundant from stingy. An approximate number sense is essential to brute survival: how else can a bird find the best patch of berries, or two baboons know better than to pick a fight with a gang of six?

When it comes to genuine computation, however, to seeing a self-important number like 529 and panicking when you divide it into 2,200, or realizing that, hey, it’s the square of 23! well, that calls for a very different number system, one that is specific, symbolic and highly abstract. By all evidence, scientists say, the capacity to do mathematics, to manipulate representations of numbers and explore the quantitative texture of our world is a uniquely human and very recent skill. People have been at it only for the last few millennia, it’s not universal to all cultures, and it takes years of education to master. Math-making seems the opposite of automatic, which is why scientists long thought it had nothing to do with our ancient, pre-verbal size-em-up ways.

Yet a host of new studies suggests that the two number systems, the bestial and celestial, may be profoundly related, an insight with potentially broad implications for math education.

One research team has found that how readily people rally their approximate number sense is linked over time to success in even the most advanced and abstruse mathematics courses. Other scientists have shown that preschool children are remarkably good at approximating the impact of adding to or subtracting from large groups of items but are poor at translating the approximate into the specific. Taken together, the new research suggests that math teachers might do well to emphasize the power of the ballpark figure, to focus less on arithmetic precision and more on general reckoning.

“When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they’ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,” said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is married to a physicist. “They’ll ask, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago, or what contribution to the ocean’s temperature do fish make, and they’ll try to come up with a plausible answer.”

“What this suggests to me,” she added, “is that the people whom we think of as being the most involved in the symbolic part of math intuitively know that they have to practice those other, nonsymbolic, approximating skills.”

This month in the journal Nature, Justin Halberda and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins University and Michele Mazzocco of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore described their study of 64 14-year-olds who were tested at length on the discriminating power of their approximate number sense. The teenagers sat at a computer as a series of slides with varying numbers of yellow and blue dots flashed on a screen for 200 milliseconds each — barely as long as an eye blink. After each slide, the students pressed a button indicating whether they thought there had been more yellow dots or blue. (Take a version of the test.)

Given the antiquity and ubiquity of the nonverbal number sense, the researchers were impressed by how widely it varied in acuity. There were kids with fine powers of discrimination, able to distinguish ratios on the order of 9 blue dots for every 10 yellows, Dr. Feigenson said. “Others performed at a level comparable to a 9-month-old,” barely able to tell if five yellows outgunned three blues. Comparing the acuity scores with other test results that Dr. Mazzocco had collected from the students over the past 10 years, the researchers found a robust correlation between dot-spotting prowess at age 14 and strong performance on a raft of standardized math tests from kindergarten onward. “We can’t draw causal arrows one way or another,” Dr. Feigenson said, “but your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math.”

The researchers caution that they have no idea yet how the two number systems interact. Brain imaging studies have traced the approximate number sense to a specific neural structure called the intraparietal sulcus, which also helps assess features like an object’s magnitude and distance. Symbolic math, by contrast, operates along a more widely distributed circuitry, activating many of the prefrontal regions of the brain that we associate with being human. Somewhere, local and global must be hooked up to a party line.

Other open questions include how malleable our inborn number sense may be, whether it can be improved with training, and whether those improvements would pay off in a greater appetite and aptitude for math. If children start training with the flashing dot game at age 4, will they be supernumerate by middle school?

Dr. Halberda, who happens to be Dr. Feigenson’s spouse, relishes the work’s philosophical implications. “What’s interesting and surprising in our results is that the same system we spend years trying to acquire in school, and that we use to send a man to the moon, and that has inspired the likes of Plato, Einstein and Stephen Hawking, has something in common with what a rat is doing when it’s out hunting for food,” he said. “I find that deeply moving.”

Behind every great leap of our computational mind lies the pitter-patter of rats’ feet, the little squeak of rodent kind.

Natalie Angier
New York Times

• Angier, Natalie: El canon : un viaje alucinante por el maravilloso mundo de la ciencia. Barcelona : Paidós, 2008

Una guía alegre y apasionada sobre la ciencia que nos rodea, escrita por la ganadora de un premio Pulitzer.

Un libro para todos aquellos que quieran entender las grandes cuestiones de nuestro tiempo, desde las células madre y la gripe aviar hasta la evolución y el calentamiento global. También está dirigido a todos aquellos padres que, alguna vez, han sentido pánico cuando alguno de sus hijos les ha preguntado cómo se formó la Tierra o qué es la electricidad. La brillante prosa de Angier y sus memorables metáforas hacen que la ciencia cobre vida.

Una obra espléndida, entretenida y fascinante.

Un texto apasionado: un embriagador cóctel de brillante divulgación científica. Richard Dawkins

“Science is not a body of facts.  Science is a state of mind.  It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face.” -Natalie Angier, The Canon

About a week ago I came home from work and found my kids perplexed with our TV.  The volume wasn’t working and they didn’t know what to do.  My first grader knew about the “volume” and “mute” buttons on the remote, but neither worked for her.  This was clearly a family crises, so I made correcting this situation my top priority.  

First I turned the amplifier mute on and then off.  Nope.  Then the cable receiver mute on and then off.  No again.  Next I rebooted the cable box.  Didn’t work.  But when I tried the mute button on the cable receiver again, voila!  We have all used a simple sequential problem solving process like this for issues with a TV, computer, or some other home appliance.  By developing a clear hypothesis, isolating potential solutions, and testing these solutions one at a time, we are implicitly using the scientific method.  The feedback loop on whether our experiments worked or not is abundantly clear — the volume is either on or off.

Then we go to work.  And despite a degree from XYZ university in engineering or business, we often apply less scientific rigor to product development than we do to fixing the volume on our televisions at home.  Think about it.  Product releases are often packed with features.  Why?  The product development leadership has decided that those features are what the customer wants, right?  But how will they know if their hypotheses are right if they are simultaneously running a large number of experiments (features)?  Sure they can develop statistical inference models to isolate certain variables, but why go there?  It’s like trying to solve a home PC internet connectivity problem by trying every potential solution simultaneously.  That’s a terrible algorithm, yet it dominates product development.

Less is More?

There is a fashionable design philosophy in product development circles these days — let’s call it less is more.  37signals has been a champion of this approach, but there are many others.  A key tenet of the philosophy is that uncluttered products with fewer, better features are preferred to similar products with more features.  I agree with the less is more product development approach, but for a different reason.

The reason I like less is more as an approach is that it allows for a more scientific approach to product development.  By starting a new product off with as few features as possible (1?), you can be incredibly scientific.  With 10 features in a single release, you may spend more time trying to figure out what is working and what isn’t working than it took to build the thing in the first place.  As you incrementally experiment with your product, you can observe the impact of a particular feature one at a time and adjust accordingly.  

Scientific product development.

So this leads us to the following approach to developing new products.

Step 1.  Have a very clear idea of the problem you are trying to solve.  

Step 2.  Develop a hypothesis about the minimal feature set that will address the problem (ideally just one thing). You can do research or just have a gut feeling about the answer.  A good “product picker” offers significant leverage in this step of the process.

Step 3.  Test your hypothesis by shipping product quickly.  A killer engineering team provides massive leverage in this step of the process.

Step 4.  Observe the results of the experiment.  Did the results of your test match what you expected?  If not, kill the feature and start over at Step 2.  If things worked, continue feature development by starting over at Step 1 again.

Most experiments fail.  Many teams do a relatively good job on Steps 1 through 3, but forget the importance of Step 4.  Instead of killing bad features, they simply add more hoping that feature 10 will somehow make crappy features 1 through 9 better.  

By embracing a scientific approach to product development, not only will your business have a much higher probability of success, but it will also be a more fun and creative place to work.  Nothing kills innovation like the fear of failure.  And nothing leads to failure like a process that resembles astrology more than it does astronomy.

Science

BASICS

About Death, Just Like Us or Pretty Much Unaware?

Do animals grieve like we do?

Oliver Werner/Getty Images

MOURNING OR CONFUSED? Gana held her dead baby, Claudio, for days.

…Last week the Internet and European news outlets were flooded with poignant photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Münster Zoo in Germany, holding up the body of her dead baby, Claudio, and pursing her lips toward his lifeless fingers. Claudio died at the age of 3 months of an apparent heart defect, and for days Gana refused to surrender his corpse to zookeepers, a saga that provoked among her throngs of human onlookers admiration and compassion and murmurings that, you see? Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for the dead and are really just like us after all.

Nobody knows what emotions swept through Gana’s head and heart as she persisted in cradling and nuzzling the remains of her son. But primatologists do know this: Among nearly all species of apes and monkeys in the wild, a mother will react to the death of her infant as Gana did — by clutching the little decedent to her breast and treating it as though it were still alive. For days or even weeks afterward, she will take it with her everywhere and fight off anything that threatens to snatch it away. “The only time I was ever mobbed by langurs was when I tried to inspect a baby corpse,” said the primatologist Sarah Hrdy. Only gradually will she allow the distance between herself and the ever-gnarlier carcass to grow…

…The Hallmark hanky moment alternates with the Roald Dahl macabre. A mother will try to nurse her dead baby back to life, Dr. Wilson said, “but when the infant becomes quite decayed, she’ll carry it by just one leg or sling it over her back in a casual way.”…

…Yet adult chimpanzees rarely react with overt sentimentality to the death of another adult, Dr. Wilson said. As a rule, sick or elderly adults go off into the forest to die alone, he said, and those that die in company often do so at the hands of other adults, who “sometimes make sure the victim is dead, and sometimes they don’t,” he said. The same laissez-faire attitude toward death-versus-life applies to chimpanzee hunting behavior. “When they’re hunting red colobus monkeys, they will either kill the monkeys first or simply immobilize them and start eating them while they’re still alive,” Dr. Wilson said. “The monkey will continue screaming and thrashing as they pull its guts out, which is very unpleasant for humans who are watching.”

For some animals, the death of a conspecific is a little tinkle of the dinner bell. A lion will approach another lion’s corpse, give it a sniff and a lick, and if the corpse is fresh enough, will start to eat it. For others, a corpse is considered dangerous and must be properly disposed of. Among naked mole rats, for example, which are elaborately social mammals that spend their entire lives in a system of underground tunnels, a corpse is detected quickly and then dragged, kicked or carried to the communal latrine. And when the latrine is filled, said Paul Sherman of Cornell University, “they seal it off with an earthen plug, presumably for hygienic reasons, and dig a new one.”

Among the social insects, the need for prompt corpse management is considered so pressing that there are dedicated undertakers, workers that within a few minutes of a death will pick up the body and hoist or fly it outside, to a safe distance from hive or nest, the better to protect against possible contagious disease. Honeybees are such compulsive housekeepers that if a mouse or other large creature, drawn by the warmth or promise of honey, happens to make its way into the hive and die inside, the bees, unable to bodily remove it, will embalm it in resin collected from trees. “You can find mummified mice inside beehives that are completely preserved right down to their whiskers,” said Gene E. Robinson, professor of entomology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

But all is not grim for those dead in tooth and claw. Researchers have determined that elephants deserve their longstanding reputation as exceptionally death-savvy beings, their concern for the remains of their fellows approaching what we might call reverence. Reporting in the journal Biology Letters, Karen McComb of the University of Sussex and her colleagues found that when African elephants were presented with an array of bones and other natural objects, the elephants spent considerably more time exploring the skulls and tusks of elephants than they did anything else, including the skulls of rhinoceroses and other large mammals.

George Wittemyer of Colorado State University and his colleagues described in Applied Animal Behavior Science the extraordinary reactions of different elephants to the death of one of their prominent matriarchs. “One female stood over the body, rocking back and forth,” Dr. Wittemyer said in an interview. “Others raised their foot over her head. Others touched their tusks to hers. They would do their behaviors, and then leave.”

They were saying goodbye, or maybe, Won’t you please come back home? NYT

See also two of my Desert Island articles on these subjects, or any others (below) – and the elephant segment from one of my favorite animal documentaries, the Wisdom of the Wild episode of Nature; the scene where the aged chimp rushes to embrace its remembered caretaker, Linda Koebner, from decades ago will crack the toughest of nuts (or the nuttiest of toughs - Ed.).

BBC News | South Asia | Elephant dies of grief

Damini would stroke her pregnant friend’s stomach with her trunk

An elderly female elephant has died of grief at an Indian zoo after the death of a close friend.

Damini, who was 72, had befriended a younger pregnant elephant called Champakali at the Prince of Wales Zoo in Lucknow.

But she starved herself to death in misery when Champakali died in childbirth.

Their zookeeper is mourning the loss of his two charges. “It will take me some time to get over the death of my two loved ones,” said her keeper, who goes by the name of Kamaal.

The two elephants became inseparable in September after Champakali was brought in pregnant from Dudhwa National Park where she had worked carrying tourists.

Surrogate daughter

She was in Lucknow for maternity leave, and Damini immediately became her best friend and surrogate mother.

According to animal experts, this kind of deep attachment is common among elephants, with older ones often taking a mothering role.

“Elephants are very social animals. They can form very close bonds with others in their social group,” said Pat Thomas, curator of mammals at the Bronx Zoo in New York City.

But when Champakali died giving birth to a stillborn calf last month, Damini lost all interest in her food and began starving herself to death.

Zoo officials said she shed tears over her friend’s body, then stood still in her enclosure for days.

Over the next 24 days she barely nibbled her diet of sugar cane, bananas and grass until her legs swelled up and she collapsed.

Grass tent

She then lay still, losing weight and crying, and a week ago stopped eating or drinking her daily 40 gallons of water, despite the hot weather.

Her keepers tried to keep her cool by building around her a makeshift tent of fragrant grass and spraying her with water.

Vets tried to save her by pumping more than 25 gallons of glucose and vitamins into her veins, but she died on Wednesday.

Kamaal has now buried her next to her friend.

“In the face of Damini’s intense grief, all our treatment failed,” said Dr Utkarsh Shukla, the zoo vet.

Alex, a Parrot Who Had a Way With Words, Dies

Mike Lovett/Brandeis University

Alex, a 31-year-old African gray parrot, knew more than 100 words and could count and recognize colors and shapes.

…Even up through last week, Alex was working with Dr. Pepperberg on compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, Dr. Pepperberg said, Alex looked at her and said: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”

He was found dead in his cage the next morning, and was determined to have died late Thursday night.