The Slings of Outrageous Fortune

By: | May 5, 2011

Something is curiously missing in most Old Master paintings of David and Goliath. The famous story from the Old Testament focuses on David’s feat of killing a nine-foot-tall warrior kitted out in mail armor with just one, perfectly aimed slingshot.

Yet when 16th and 17th century artists went to paint this story of the biblical underdog, they seldom bothered to portray the weapon system that took down Goliath. (Or if they did, they snuck it onto the canvas unobtrusively, as Tanzio da Varallo did in his 17th century portrait of David above.)

For the most part, however, these painters preferred to depict David wielding a shiny sword, just after he had beheaded his opponent. Why is that? Continue reading →

It is now safe to move about the cabin

By: | May 4, 2011

It’s not every day that a flight is delayed because there are too few people on board. But, blame Will and Kate, Brits just weren’t flying out of London last Friday. As a result, the Virgin Atlantic A340-600 called Ladybird was carrying only 112 of her usual 380 passengers.

So before we could take off, we had to play a little game of musical chairs. This was done to balance out the plane. Rows 37-40 were blocked off so no one could sit in them. A lady from a middle section was asked to move next to me over on the right side of the plane, and similar reconfigurations took place all over economy. (A flight attendant confirmed my suspicion that no Upper Class passengers were made to move from their pods.) Everyone was free to prowl around the cabin and claim the empty rows once we reached cruising altitude, but the seat distribution had to be exact for takeoff and landing.

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The Not-So-Feeble Frédéric Chopin

By: | May 3, 2011
Frédéric Chopin, age 25, in 1835

How would you describe the Minute Waltz, by 19th-Century composer Frédéric François Chopin?

Lighthearted and whimsical? Dainty, delicate, fragile?

In some classical music circles, Chopin’s work has a sissy reputation. As a Washington Post critic wrote last year, “Chopin’s music has sometimes been branded effeminate, or ‘salon music’: not quite serious, not quite healthy.” Chopin the man is also known for a certain lack of virility. The American composer Charles Ives once wrote, rather viciously, of Chopin: “One just naturally thinks of him with a skirt on, but one which he made himself.”

Part of Chopin’s feeble image comes from the fact that he was always sick. As a teenager, he suffered long bouts of respiratory illness, with swollen glands and dramatic weight loss. For the rest of his life, he dealt with frequent episodes of bronchitis and laryngitis. He never developed facial hair. He was extremely weak: after long piano performances he had to be carried to bed.

When Chopin died, at just 39 years old, his death certificate blamed tuberculosis, a common bacterial infection. But, as described in a review published last month, some medical experts are skeptical of that diagnosis.
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An empathy gap so big, you could march an army through it

By: | May 2, 2011

A year on and many thousands of leaked documents later, it’s easy to forget how Wikileaks first came to wide international attention. But a recent paper in Psychological Science brought the memory back to me with a sharpness and intensity out of all proportion with the grainy YouTube video at the incident’s core. The memory is unpleasant enough that I’m not even going to think about sharing it until after the jump.

Human beings are weird animals. You knew that of course—our constant self-evaluation, whether bemused or infatuated, is a key contributor to that weirdness—but I’m talking about something deeper than the whole hairless bipedalism situation. From a biological point of view, we have a profound contradiction running right through the psychological essence of our species.

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Sleuthing around the Great Death-Pit

By: | April 29, 2011

In 1927, Leonard Woolley began digging human remains from a vast gilded killing field at Tell al-Muqayyar in Iraq, a place better known to most today by its biblical name: Ur. Woolley, the son of an Anglican curate and a very skilled excavator, had made a study of Ur, a city-state that rose to prominence along the Euphrates in the third millennium B.C. With financing from both the British Museum and Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Woolley had documented Ur’s great ziggurat–a stepped pyramid made of bricks–and pored over its temples and other monumental buildings. Digging its tombs seemed the logical next step.

Little prepared Woolley, however, for the haunting death scenes he soon uncovered. In 16 royal tombs, he and his workmen found two mass graves, or “death-pits” as Woolley dubbed them, containing gold-and silver-adorned skeletons. One pit,  PG 789, brimmed with the bodies of 63 individuals. The second, known as the Great Death-Pit, PG 1237, revealed rows of skeletons, almost entirely female, 74 individuals in all. Many of the women had gone to their grave wearing gold ribbons, gold wreathes, gold necklaces with lapis lazuli beads. Some were arranged in overlapping rows, so that the head of one lay companionably on the legs or feet of another.

Woolley concluded that the bodies in PG 1237 belonged to court retainers who were sacrificed to serve their royal masters in the next world. But he puzzled over the manner of their death. Continue reading →

The Long Hello

By: | April 28, 2011

On April 4, the physics department at Columbia University held an unblinding party. For 100.9 days between January 13 and June 8, 2010, a detector 4,500 feet underground at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, in central Italy, had been collecting data. Following the protocol of a “blind” analysis, the data had instantly disappeared into a “box”—a Pandora-esque hard drive—so as not to prejudice the human analysis. Now some of the collaborators on the experiment had gathered in a laboratory at Columbia to watch as a software program lifted the lid on the box and allowed them all a first peek at whatever there was to see.

What they saw on the computer screen were six red dots. Six: a number statistically significant enough to allow them to claim a detection…and for the leader of the team, Elena Aprile, to cop a Nobel Prize.

Cheers! Hugs! Kisses!

Also (straighten tie; smooth skirt), analysis. Over the next few days they discovered that they had to attribute three events to electronic noise. Which still left them with three events. But they had known in advance that no matter how many or how few “detections” they found, they would have to discount two—or, more accurately, 1.8 ± 0.6, the number they had calculated that in a sample of this particular size would be due to radioactive interference. Which left them with one, a statistically insignificant number. On April 13—nine days after the unblinding party had turned into a party party—the collaboration posted their paper online, including this conclusion in the abstract: “no evidence for dark matter.”

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Faust, My Grandfather, & the Laser Guide Star

By: | April 27, 2011

My grandfather was interested in the Faust legend and I inherited the interest, though for the life of me I don’t know why it’s interesting and he died before I could ask him.   Whatever it is, it has to do with trading your soul for certain bad kinds of knowledge, or with excessive curiosity leading to nothing good.  As legends go,  Faust is not ancient – it first showed up in the 16th century – but it is persistent.  One of its modern incarnations is scientists who work on weapons for the military.  If this particular incarnation had interested my grandfather — and it probably would have —  I would have argued with him.   My argument would have been, it’s not as simple as bad and good. Continue reading →