Ed Felten helpfully links to the second annual Art of Science exhibit at Princeton. My favorite is this electron microscope image of a Drosophila egg, followed by this painting, this poem, and this lichen. These thingies are pretty as well.
Here are some of the better bits from my RSS feeds over the last few days.
In an initial study by Georgene Troseth and colleagues, two-year-olds told face-to-face where a toy was going to be hidden went and found it in the first place they looked 77 per cent of the time, whereas those told by the same researcher via a video-recording found the toy in the first place they looked just 27 per cent of the time.
That’s at Cognitive Daily.
I’m not sure what went on behind the scenes at One Language Log Plaza to provoke this devastating take-down, but Geoff Pullum completely fucks shit up:
Certainly, it is possible that the phrase dada kraut psych mindblowing conscience expanding sublime acid oriented arcana coelestia weirdness has roughly nine stacked attributive modifiers; but one cannot really tell, because it all depends on how it is parsed: doubtless “consciousness-expanding” (I add the helpful hyphen) is intended as a syntactic unit, but one doesn’t know about “kraut psych” and so on. This is basically the problem one finds with quotes from chimpanzee language: chimps are occasionally reported as having signed things with transcriptions like BANANA BANANA HELP REFRIGERATOR GIMME OPEN BANANA GIMME, and syntactically one does not really know where or whether to begin.Part of the problem here is that Eric is one of the younger staffers here at Language Log Plaza. They work with headsets on, they have X-men posters on their walls, they talk about whether Lara Croft’s breasts in the new Crystal Dynamics video game release are as big as before. The average age in their part of the building is approximately 19. They typically list their hobbies as (i)~being wicked cool, (ii)~dancing to their iPods in public places, (iii)~shopping at American Eagle, and (iv)~staying out all night. One does not see them at EVOO; they dine at place where the menu is a series of brightly colored pictures on glass with lights behind them, and often there is a neon sign in the window saying “BURRITOS AS BIG AS YOUR HEAD”. And their reading material does not fully meet the criteria for being called “language”.
Which raises the question: how much would you pay to see Belle Waring and Geoffrey K. Pullum in a heavyweight title bout?
A few months ago, my sister joined both me and Adrianne as a proud owner of a Crumpler Bag. The McBain’s Lovechild I bought from them online is really well made, and pretty swell looking. The only downside is that you pay for what you get; at $40, my laptop bag was one of their cheapest.
So to prove how incredibly cool they are, they’re running a promotion starting a week from today that anyone should be able to get down with: Beer for Bags. You show up with some combination of beer, exchange it for a bag, and then hang around and drink with the staff. Sounds like June is the time to be working the Crumpler store in Manhattan. Now I just need to find someone who will deliver my 12 pack of Leffe and bottle of Chimay while I’m in Chicago to secure me a Complete Seed.
It turns out that this bastard is real. Coulda fooled me.
Here’s a neat post at Gene Expression about the roles of three different calcium ion sources in long-term potentiation.
More good descriptions of parasitic bugs from Zimmer:
If you keep a vegetable garden, there’s a fair chance you’ll encounter a grisly sight this summer. Some poor catepillar will be clutching a leaf, with the pupae of parasitic wasps sprouting off its back. It has just died in a most grotesque way. A wasp has zeroed in on the catepillar and injected eggs into its body. The eggs hatched, and the larvae devoured their hosts from within, keeping it alive until they were ready to emerge.What makes this sight all the more grotesque is the fact that the plant the catepillar is sitting on may have been an accomplice to the crime. When catepillars nibble on plants, the plants sometimes respond by releasing a distinctive cocktail of chemicals. This odor then attracts parasitic wasps. The plants are not just releasing a sort of chemical scream. Wasps are very precise in the species of catepillars they choose, and they can tell these odors apart.
The post is really about a new article in PLoS Biology which suggests that the caterpillars also pick up the wasp-attracting chemicals, and cleverly avoid eating the plants at times when they are likely to emit those particular chemical signals.
Someone should let me know if I’m the only one who thinks this weird bug stuff is neat.
The Da Vinci Code opens later this week, and I imagine that Ruth and I will go see it at some point. We both read the book. I bought it while in a foul mood after a painful dental procedure, planning to hate it in order to spite the world. It wasn’t as bad as I expected, having already sat through the audio book version of Deception Point. But it was bad.
I thought about trying to describe the ways in which these books are bad. Then a few weeks ago I found a bunch of old posts by one of the Language Log guys absolutely ripping Brown to pieces. I think the biggest thing is Brown’s “knack for coming up with exactly the phrase not to use.” Even if the plots of his novels were better, it is very hard to get into the action because the you’re constantly distracted by unfortunately phrasings and ludicrous dialog.
Dr. Pullman starts out by laying out some specific criticisms of word choice and style.
A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.”On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.
Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn’t speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. “Chillingly close” would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man’s pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.
Later, he explains how every Dan Brown novel begins with exactly the same sentence.
The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier (“Renowned linguist Geoff Pullum staggered across the savage splendor of the forsaken Santa Cruz campus, struggling to remove the knife plunged unnaturally into his back by a barbarous millionaire novelist”), and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2, along with several curiously ill-chosen clichés and mangled idioms.
And, in probably the funniest post on the subject, he returns to cover both the lazy repetition and the terrible word choice.
A renowned male expert at something dies a hideous death and straight away a renowned expert at something quite different gets a surprise call and has to take an unexpected plane flight and then face some 36 hours of astoundingly dangerous and exhausting adventures involving a good-looking (and of course expert) member of the opposite sex and when the two of them finally get access to a double bed she disrobes and tells him mischievously (almost minatorily) to prepare himself for strenuous sex. Where are we?We’re in a Dan Brown novel.
[...]
But the acme of inexpertly crunched metaphors in Deception Point is on page 27 (and I swear I’m not making this up): he uses the expression “learning the ropes in the trenches”. Think about that for a while. Learning the ropes is a naval metaphor; it’s about rigging and sails and mooring. Being in the trenches is an army metaphor. You can hardly be in both services simultaneously — hauling up sails on a naval frigate while dug in with the infantry on the western front. Dan has to make his military metaphor mind up.
I’m sorry, but this man is simply not competent to write prose for public consumption.
Good stuff all around. Please go read all of those posts, and if you enjoy them, also the one on Digital Fortress and abuse of eyebrows.
Finally, a bit of google bombing. There is compelling evidence that someone named Mark Steyn is a plagiarist.
So, I’m currently tearing my way through the most recent Neil Gaiman novel. I was holding out for paperback, but my mom mailed me a copy, which was awesome. Anyway, that got me poking around online, and I found a remarkable reference for American Gods. The entries for Shadow and Mike Ainsel are particularly interesting.
Update: Speaking of Neil Gaiman. One of these days I should point out that his blog is often pretty entertaining. He’s very generous about answering questions from fans, which is nice, but not always compelling. Better are the more bloggy posts, such as this, concerning a bear that has been tearing up his garden:
Lacking bear pepper-spray, I walked home across the garden last night singing very loud bear songs, which went something along the lines of, “Lalala, I am singing very loudly to alert the bear to my presence, Lalala because most of the websites I’ve found talk about making noise and giving bears lots of time to get away, Lalala also I do not want to startle a bear at all because according to everything I’ve read on the subject bears do not like being startled.” You don’t have to worry about rhymes with bears. They don’t mind about rhymes. Or tunes. Or scansion. Frankly, hypothetical bears are a very easy sort of audience.
It’s all well and good to joke about how terrifying Ann Coulter is. That is, until she goes and says something like “Why hasn’t the former spokesman for the Taliban matriculating at Yale been beaten even more senseless than he already is?” Not only is it impossible to interpret that as a joke, but it leaves all of our own attempts at humor feeling a little hollow and sad. Well, all of them but this one.
