Monday Science Links

This week's nutritious science:

• Mark Liberman at Language Log looks at David Brooks's claims about American vs Asian worldviews: Those who've followed our previous discussions of David Brooks' forays into the human sciences ("David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist", 6/12/2006; "David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist", 9/17/2006) will be able to guess what's coming. In this case, Mr. Brooks has taken his science from the work of Richard E. Nisbett, as described in his 2003 book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why, and in many papers, some of which are cited below. I was familiar with some of this work, which has linguistic aspects, and so I traced Brooks' assertions to their sources. And even I, a hardened Brooks-checker, was surprised to find how careless his account of the research is.


• At Pharyngula PZ wishes he were a paleontologist: Imagine you're a paleontologist, digging through the Sahara desert looking for dinosaur bones and you stumble, instead, upon [a] wondrous find. That's exactly what happened to Paleontologist Paul Sereno and his team back in 2000, and they have announced their findings from their excavations of this region in Northern Niger in National Geographic this week. This team unexpectedly unearthed 200 human burials on the shores of a long dried up lake, representing two very distinct cultures spanning 5000 years (between 4500 to about 9000 years ago).


• Iristjan at Pro-Science also blogs about this, with several good links: There is a lot of news about th discoveries of the largest known graveyard of Stone Age people in Sahara. The initial discovery was made by paleontologist Paul Sereno eight years ago, and since then he has lead a team of archaeologists in uncovering the graves.


• Bee at Back Reaction tells us that General Relativity is sexy: Some time in sixth grade a well-meaning librarian shoved me out of the Scifi/Horror aisle and into the dreaded youthbook (Jugendbuch) section, an act that had unintended consequences. The books in that aisle were neatly marked with dots, the more dots the higher the recommended age. I didn't immediately realize that blue dots were meant for boys and red ones for girls, so ended up with a book that recommended to handle unwanted occurrences of sexual arousal by mentally focusing on something decidedly unsexy, such as potatoes or General Relativity. This advice changed my view of the world. Not only did I realize that being a teenager with a Y-chromosome can't be easy either, it also explained why my male classmates were suddenly developing interests in things like Special Relativity or Scanning Tunnel Microscopes (Nobel Prize '86). It made also sense they were usually very irritated if a girl attempted to join them: all that was just suppressed hormones, the poor guys*. It further revealed a deep connection between General Relativity and potatoes that hadn't previously occurred to me. Most disturbingly however, it labeled General Relativity as unsexy, a fact that has bothered me ever since.


• And finally, Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East teases us with a glimpse of things to come: Not a very great distance from the Temple of Bel lies a huge blank unexcavated area on the map of Palmyra (coloured reddish-brown on the aerial photograph, left). Now, archaeologists from the University of Milan have started exploring this almost empty quarter on the south-east side of the city. Until recently, Palmyra was treated like a vast treasure trove. Archaeologists dug up the glory monuments: temples, the theatre, agora, senate, and baths -- not to mention their immense task of reconstructing the 1,000 metre/3,000'-long Great Colonnade; and they concentrated, too, on the magnificent tombs, often stuffed full of funerary goods and effigies of the dead. Now, La Professoressa Maria Teresa Grassi, team leader of the Archaeological Mission to Syria, intends to change that: as her team fills in the blank, we're almost certain to see rising one of the human-scale residential quarters of the city.

Enjoy!