INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES HAS ROOTS IN ANATOLIA, BIOLOGISTS SAY

Nicholas Wade in the New York Times:

Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages.

The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.

Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword.

The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.

More here.

PARADOXES OF ALTRUISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE

William Flesch in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Some evolutionary biologists, David Sloan Wilson among them, think that there are reasons for seeing human cooperation as deriving from a genuine genetic propensity for altruism. Altruism and prosocial tendencies may be taken as roughly synonymous. Species (humans pre-eminently) that tend to engage in behavior which promotes the general welfare — even at the cost of some individual sacrifice — are able to cooperate in ways that help everyone.

They can do this despite the huge risk that free riders will derail the whole system. What prevents free riders from undermining altruism by taking such advantage of altruists that they die out? The answer that many evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, game theorists, and, even narrative theorists like yours truly, have converged on is the concept of what’s now known as altruistic punishment.

The idea behind altruistic punishment is that uninvolved third party witnesses will punish defectors, cheaters, and free riders. They, or a significant number of them, won’t let a self-dealer or serious violator of social norms get away with social or moral transgressions, even if they have to pay a price themselves. And they won’t even let those who are indifferent to the violators get away with such transgressions either. Many people are still angry at the 38 people who allegedly witnessed the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese from the safety of their apartments in 1964 and didn’t bother to call the police.

More here.

CERTAIN TO PENETRATE THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

"From 2 years of break, PSY is finally coming back with his 6th album! The album's weighty title song 'Gangnam Style' is composed solely by PSY himself from lyrics to choreography. The song is characterized by its strongly addictive beats and lyrics, and is thus certain to penetrate the foundations of modern 

HOW SPOILED ARE OUR CHILDREN?

From The New York Times:

A mother asked me last week whether I thought she was spoiling her child. It was the typical pediatric exam-room version of the question: In the weary, self-doubting voice of the recently postpartum, she wondered if it was right to pick up and feed her crying baby. These days, a lot of parents are wondering about the spoiling question. A recent book review by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker compared American children unfavorably with the self-reliant and competent children of a tribe in the Peruvian Amazon; she discussed “the notion that we may be raising a generation of kids who can’t, or at least won’t, tie their own shoes.”

A parenting column in The New York Times acknowledged that Ms. Kolbert’s observations had struck home with many contemporary parents; more recently, an opinion piece advised parents to stop protecting their children from every disappointment. We’re clearly having another of those moments — and they do recur, across the generations — when parents worry that they’re not doing their job and that the next generation is consequently in grave danger. In cultural convulsionsabout how spoiled the children are, disapproving adults look back fondly on the rigors of their own childhoods. But many of the same parents (and grandparents) who are now worrying were members of the generation that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew accused Dr. Benjamin Spock of having spoiled. Indeed, the overprivileged and overindulged child was a stock character in 19th-century novels: As veteran governesses who presumably knew the territory, the Brontë sisters wrote powerful portraits of spoiled older children. The culture changes, but many of the battlegrounds remain the same.

More here.

GAVE ‘SINGLE GIRL’ A LIFE IN FULL (SEX, SEX, SEX)

The NYT obituary for Helen Gurley Brown, by Margalit Fox:

Before she arrived at Cosmopolitan, Ms. Brown had already shaken the collective consciousness with her best-selling book “Sex and the Single Girl.” Published in 1962, the year before Betty Friedan ignited the modern women’s movement with “The Feminine Mystique,” it taught unmarried women how to look their best, have delicious affairs and ultimately bag a man for keeps, all in breathless, aphoristic prose. (Ms. Brown was a former advertising copywriter.)
By turns celebrated and castigated, Ms. Brown was for decades a highly visible, though barely visible, public presence. A tiny, fragile-looking woman who favored big jewelry, fishnet stockings and minidresses till she was well into her 80s, she was a regular guest at society soirees and appeared often on television. At 5 feet 4, she remained a wraithlike hundred pounds throughout her adult life. That weight, she often said, was five pounds above her ideal.
Ms. Brown routinely described herself as a feminist, but whether her work helped or hindered the cause of women’s liberation has been publicly debated for decades. It will doubtless be debated long after her death. What is safe to say is that she was a Janus-headed figure in women’s history, simultaneously progressive and retrogressive in her approach to women’s social roles

可参考我在2009年的札记：
札记 - 好女孩上天堂，坏女孩到处玩
http://wutaitee.blogspot.sg/2009/05/blog-post_15.html

THE USE AND ABUSE OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

What are the proper limits of religious freedom? Marianne Thieme, leader of the Party for the Animals in the Netherlands, offers this answer: “Religious freedom stops where human or animal suffering begins.”

The Party for the Animals, the only animal-rights party to be represented in a national parliament, has proposed a law requiring that all animals be stunned before slaughter. The proposal has united Islamic and Jewish leaders in defense of what they see as a threat to their religious freedom, because their religious doctrines prohibit eating meat from animals that are not conscious when killed.

The Dutch parliament has given the leaders a year to prove that their religions’ prescribed methods of slaughter cause no more pain than slaughter with prior stunning. If they cannot do so, the requirement to stun before slaughtering will be implemented.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Catholic bishops have claimed that President Barack Obama is violating their religious freedom by requiring all big employers, including Catholic hospitals and universities, to offer their employees health insurance that covers contraception. And, in Israel, the ultra-orthodox, who interpret Jewish law as prohibiting men from touching women to whom they are not related or married, want separate seating for men and women on buses, and to halt the government’s plan to end exemption from military service for full-time religious students (63,000 in 2010).

More here.

After Democracy (Chris Kijne, VPRO Backlight 2010)

Can democracy still be saved? Can we address the shortcomings of representative democracy – failing political parties, increasing distrust of government – within the current system or are we set to embark on a journey across a border where nobody ever dared to go?

Should we explore a new political model in order to overcome the current multicrises?

In After Democracy this urgent question is addressed by Fareed Zakaria, John Keane, Hilary Wainwright, William Dobson and Cheng Li.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time – Sir Winston Churchill.

为性牺牲睡眠是值得的

blackhat 发表于 2012年8月10日 13时54分 星期五
为了交配而牺牲睡眠是值得的，至少对于雄性矶鹞而言是如此。睡眠的需求长期以来一直困扰着科学家。为什么任何有着神经系统的动物都需要将一天中的大量时间花在睡眠上？生命中有太多的事情要做，但睡眠却总是不可避免。研究认为睡眠可让大脑巩固记忆和增强免疫系统。但睡眠为什么如此重要仍没有定论。发表在《科学》上的一篇论文提出一种新假说：睡眠是一种适应性策略，在活动不那么重要的时候保存能量，以在必要时保持清醒。研究人员抓住了一些雄性和雌性矶鹞，装上脑活动监视仪去监视睡眠，贴上GPS标签以跟踪雄性与多少只不同雌性交配过了。在三周的矶鹞繁殖季节，雄性在55% 到95%的时间里保持清醒。结果显示，不眠不休的雄性至少有8个后代，而一半时间在睡觉的雄性则只有一个。阅读更多：http://science.solidot.org/

培养皿里的“活”大脑能飞F22

blackhat 发表于 2012年8月10日 17时54分 星期五 
佛罗里达大学科学家利用老鼠细胞在培养皿培育出“活”大脑，能控制F-22飞行模拟器。科学家认为有朝一日可以用活电脑去控制义肢或无人飞机。在最新研究中，佛罗里达生物医学工程教授Thomas DeMarse在玻璃器皿底部铺了一层电极网格，然后覆盖老鼠神经元网格。细胞在液体中从沙砾状慢慢延伸出互相连接的微型线条，最后形成一个神经网络，DeMarse称之为活电脑。活电脑通过一台桌面电脑连接上飞行模拟器。它能像人类大脑一样学习，一开始神经元并不知道如何飞行，因为它没从经历过飞行，但通过模拟它逐渐学会了如何控制飞机。现在它能控制F22在不同气候条件下纵横运动。阅读更多：http://science.solidot.org/

硬件: 科学家实现彩色打印极限分辨率

blackhat 发表于 2012年8月13日 10时08分 星期一 

科学家实现了打印的最高可能分辨率——每英寸10万像素点。报告发表在最新一期的《Nature Nanotechnology》上。新加坡科技研究机构A*STAR的研究人员利用等离子共振效应和纳米大小的粒子打印出极限分辨率的全彩色图像。作为概念验证，他们打印了一幅50×50微米的Lena测试图像，每英寸10万像素点。相比之下，油墨和激光打印机的油墨点是微米大小，最高分辨率为每英寸1万像素点。光学图像有分辨率限制。当两个对象过于靠近，反射光会产生衍射，两对象会变模糊。该效应被称为衍射极限，两个对象之间的最短距离等于成像光波长的一半。而颜色光谱的中间波长等于500纳米，意味着打印图像中的像素点之间距离不能低于250纳米。新加坡研究人员的最新研究已经达到了这个极限.阅读更多：http://science.solidot.org/ Lena测试图像值得一看，惟小儿不宜。

愤青本色

好久没上随笔南洋，一上来就看到一个版主（华英）挂冠的公告。而另一前版主（冷风细雨）则宣称要退出论坛。不免好奇，以为是发生了什么严重的冲突。

待我弄清前因后果，不禁失笑。整个事态与他们两位的回应行动，不成比例得令人错愕。

回味之后，觉得这是一个很好的案例，显示了一些年轻人唯我独尊、自我耽溺的心态。

冷风细雨和华英这两位，平日的姿态，完全是勇猛的民主斗士兼中华文化卫士。批评当局，不可谓不凌厉刻薄。可是，当角色一旦转换，被人批评时，却敏感得像被宠坏的娇滴滴的大小姐。

当他们那些不知所云造作扭捏的“文学作品“，受到批评时，就kao bie kao bu, 说人家要他的命。（华英语）。因此闹请辞，闹退出。

这次事件，让我们看到了一些愤青的真颜色。

我之所以对冷风细雨有印象，因为他出言不逊。在第一次跟我的帖子时，他这么告诉我：“想当狗就继续吧。我可要继续当人而且继续思考。”之后，他每跟我的帖子，都用同样居高临下的口气。

对政见不同的人，一开口说对方是什么御用文人，或者是什么“狗”之类的网友，最令我愤怒。

我和这些人素不相识，不可能有什么过节。居然常被这样无中生有的乱骂。有好几次我几乎想把对方告上法庭，要他们提出证据，证明我与 PAP 或政府的关系，或得过什么酬赏好处。以洗刷名声，讨个公道。

不过，想归想。打官司劳民伤财，况且对方躲在网名后面，网络规范尚未定形，胜算难料。耗费精力时间金钱，对付这辈物类，似有不值。

屡遭冷风细雨这样的“礼待”之后，在网上每看到他的帖子我自然会留意。不过我从来不主动和他讨论问题。因为他的态度不良。他的发言阴阳怪气，在这里是出了名的。（见帖子“正平小林：冷风细雨怪呛怪调”）

其实`，他这种怪腔怪调，完全是有意识的争论策略。在理亏词穷的时候，他往往作无赖状，说什么“我就是喜欢乱说。”（奈我如何？）或者装疯卖傻自贬自谦“我什么都不懂，是白痴，老年痴呆。。。”等等。对方往往因此不屑追究。他就过关了。

虽然他时常有意无意的透露自己在某大机构从事科技工作，换言之，他是靠西方科技吃饭的，不过他对西方的理论、报导、数据一切一切，如果对他不利，他就会非常鄙视，往往全面抹杀，状似不屑一顾。常爱说，“西方的东西，我就是不信。”官方数据更不必说。他推崇的，是咖啡店的资讯，。

和这样的对手讨论问题，真理往往越辩越模糊。避免浪费时间，所以我尽量不和他讨论。

和很多愤青一样，他充满了自怜，自义（self pity, self righteous）。好像这个社会亏歉了他，并自视为一个既有爱心又有正义感，替天行道的热血青年。

真的是这样吗？这次不成型的“文学论战”事件，就让大家看到他的“愤青本色“。

热爱文艺是好事。这里没有人禁上他人作文学试验，而且，真诚的试验者，都会希望得到读者的回馈，虚心的接受批评，精益求精。如果觉得对方说得不对，大可以为自己的文学方向与信仰全力辩护。

我们看到的是，别人只不过讲了一声“故弄玄虚“，他就跳起来，对号入座，顿足扁嘴，眼泪鼻涕，“你们欺负人，我再也不来这里发言了。”其实只是个别网友批评他，不是随笔南洋网批评他，这样迁怒网站，实在莫名其妙。

最可笑的是，居然有人危言耸听，嚷嚷说这里有什么文化革命。制造迫害气氛。

其实，一天到晚用卡夫卡，“百年孤独”之类的东西来自我标榜。谁都看得出，纯是心虚的姿态。最重要的，是拿出一些扎实有诚意的作品。或者老老实实的写几篇加西亚 马尔克斯或卡夫卡的评论。

存在主义者沙特最看不起的，就是那些一天到晚扮演受害者的酸溜溜的哓哓之徒。

更千万不要再提起鲁迅或什么匕首投枪了。羞死人。被人（相信是一个女流之辈）两三下手脚，就打得连扑带滚，而且毫无斗志，都还没真正过招，就找籍口遁逃。从来的文学论战中，这样不济的斗士，诚属少见。

是时候換一面镜子了。

至于，这里有没有人言不符实，肉麻的互相吹捧恭维，有目共睹，大家心里有数, 也不待枚子网友指出。

那些毫无证据，公然损人人格的作为，又该怎样看待？

Brain Anatomy and Functions

GORE VIDAL (1925 - 2012) QUOTES: 26 OF THE BEST

From The Guardian:

"I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so."

"Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice like, Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin."

"Envy is the central fact of American life."

"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."

More here.

ISLAM AND THE ARAB AWAKENING

Tariq Ramadan in Guernica:

Do the secularist intellectuals of the Global South have an alternative to propose for their own countries? Over and above the simulacrum of a debate pitting them against religious conservatives and Islamists, do they have a vision of society drawn up for the people, with the people, and in the name of the liberation of the people? The debate over secularization and political Islam is to the secularists of the Global South what the foreigner (and today, the Muslim) is to the populist xenophobes of the North: a pretext, and an alibi.

The true challenge of the day is to choose the right battle, to mobilize the creative energy of the people in the attempt to find real solutions to real problems. The march toward democracy in the Global South entails a thorough reconsideration of the three “fundamentals”: economic (and agricultural) policy, educational policy, and cultural and media policy (in the general sense). The secularist elite would be well advised to acknowledge that it truly has nothing new to offer in these three vital policy categories. At the risk of sounding repetitious, there can be no true political democracy without a profound restructuring of the economic priorities of each country, which in turn can only come about by combating corruption, limiting the prerogatives of the military and, above all, reconsidering economic ties with other countries as well as the modalities of domestic wealth distribution. Concern for free, analytical, and critical thought must take the form of educational policies founded upon the construction of schools and universities, revising the curriculum and enabling women to study, work, and become financially independent.

More here.

MURREE BREWERY: PAKISTAN'S TRUE BREW

From Come Con Ella:

2012 has proved to be an interesting year for pakistan. alongside the staple flow of pessimistic news, one of its most successful businesses, murree brewery, has captured the imagination of the local and international press. for the latter in particular, the existence of murree brewery is a paradox. the telegraph opens on the line ‘pakistan is one of the last countries in asia where you would expect to discover a flourishing – and legal – brewery, especially these days’ in an article titled ‘ale under the veil: the only brewery in pakistan’. the economist follows suit on how an unlikely outfit in pakistan is flourishing under the banner ‘hope in the hops’. even the guardian cannot help itself with its description of murree brewery as ‘a raj-era oddity in an increasingly conservative islamic country’ under the more neutral title of ‘pakistan and india start new era of trade co-operation with a beer’.

Murree brewery, however, is far from an oddity and a contradiction. since its inception in 1860, the only period when it ceased productions was after bhutto’s declaration of prohibition of alcohol. a subsequent court order led to the resumption of operations on the basis that bhutto’s laws breached the rights of minorities. aside from this it has always enjoyed the support of the government, military or otherwise. the greater paradox perhaps is that a powerful leader like bhutto, who loved his drink, felt compelled to appease the religious right through prohibition. until his ban in 1977 alcohol was freely available in army messes, clubs and from licensed stores.

But that of course is not the pakistan of today.

More here.

THE PUREST WATER OF THEM ALL

Kelly Izlar in Scientific American:

When most Americans talk about good-tasting water, they’re talking about water that tastes like their own spit.

“When you taste something, you’re comparing the taste of that water to the saliva in your mouth,” says Gary Burlingame, who supervises water quality for the Philadelphia Water Department. “The saliva in your mouth is salty.”

Salty saliva bathes your tongue, drenching every one of your thousands of taste buds. It protects you from nasty bacteria, moistens your food, helps you pronounce the word “stalactite” and even lets you know when you might be drinking something bad for you. Like water.

Pure water, that is.

Stripping water down to an ultrapure state makes it unfit for human consumption.

More here.

ROMNEY HASN’T DONE HIS HOMEWORK

Jared Diamond in the NYT:

MITT ROMNEY’S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich
and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.
It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”
That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)
That’s not the worst part. Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney — would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date.

Virginia Woolf 

NINE SCIENTISTS RECEIVE A NEW PHYSICS PRIZE OF $3,000,000. EACH

Kenneth Chang in the New York Times:

The nine are recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize, established by Yuri Milner, a Russian physics student who dropped out of graduate school in 1989 and later earned billions investing in Internet companies like Facebook and Groupon.

“It knocked me off my feet,” said Alan H. Guth, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was among the winners. He came up with the idea of cosmic inflation, that there was a period of extremely rapid expansion in the first instant of the universe.

When he was told of the $3 million prize, he assumed that the money would be shared among the winners. Not so: Instead, each of this year’s nine recipients will receive $3 million, the most lucrative academic prize in the world. TheNobel Prize currently comes with an award of $1.5 million, usually split by two or three people. The Templeton Prize, which honors contributions to understanding spiritual dimensions of life, has been the largest monetary given to an individual, $1.7 million this year.

More here.

NUDGE, NUDGE: CAN SOFTWARE PROD US INTO BEING MORE CIVIL?

Evan Selinger in The Atlantic:

Nudging is a distinctive way to help people make good decisions. It differs from the typical ways of attempting to change behavior: rational persuasion (e.g, providing new information), coercion (e.g., using threats to ensure compliance), adjusting financial incentives (e.g., paying students to get good grades) and bans (e.g., prohibiting smoking in restaurants). And, it has a limited domain of application: contexts where decisions need to be made, but we lack adequate time, information, or emotional wherewithal to know how to act in ways that further our best interests. In these cases, nudges work by subtly tweaking the contexts within which we make choices so that, on average, we will tend to make good ones.

Take ToneCheck, the emotional analogue to a spell checking tool. It is a nudge for those of us who can't resist sending flaming emails. Applying connotative intelligence research to "automatically detect the tone" of your email," it offers the author a warning (that can prompt revision) if a draft exceeds the threshold for negative emotions (e.g., anger or sadness). The author has been nudged.

More here.