Many secular historians, as well as the Bible itself, agree that at the time of Moses (around 1200 BC), the ancient Hebrews worshipped many gods. There are several instances in the Bible of Moses warning his followers about worshipping false gods, and many other instances of various misfortunes on the Hebrew people being blamed on the fact that they worshipped other gods besides YHWH. Archeological evidence shows that this practice of worshipping multiple gods continued very late.

Archeological digs of sites as late as the 6th century BC (right before the Babylonian captivity) have revealed thousands of statues of various gods. Written inscriptions from the period confirm this as well (there is a well-known tomb inscription from the 8th century BC saying “blessed be <this dead guy> in the name of YHWH and Asherah”. Asherah was the old Canaanite mother goddess. It’s hard to judge the prevalence of such beliefs from archeology alone, but it seems certain that not all of the Israelites were monotheistic at this time – they worshipped other gods as well. It’s only after the Babylonian captivity that they underwent a radical change. After this period, statues and mentions of other gods disappear from the record.

The assumption among Biblical scholars has been that YHWH was a popular god at the time, but one among many. The Hebrews made their contract with this one god, and decided to worship him alone and no other. However, the name YHWH only appears in the Hebrew Bible. It does not appear in any Canaanite text or inscription of the period. So where did YHWH come from? What people worshipped him at the time?

The first non-Biblical mention of the Israelite people comes from an Egyptian stele – the Merneptah Stele, which is inscribed with the victories of the Pharaoh Merneptah in his campaign against Libya. Although much of the inscription is about his victory over the Libyans, it does contain this one line:

Canaan is captive with all woe. Ashkelon is conquered, Gezer seized, Yanoam made nonexistent; Israel is wasted, bare of seed.

This stele, dated from 1208 BC contains the first non-Biblical mention of people called the Israelites living to their east, in Canaan. So if we take the Biblical account as true, this was after Moses led them to the Promised Land, and therefore after the exodus.

The question of when (and if) the exodus happened is difficult to settle, since there is no historical or archeological evidence of it. However, on the North Wall of the Temple of Karnack, there is an inscription describing the victories of Seti I (the father of Ramses the Great, who many believe to be the pharaoh of the exodus). One of the victories mentioned by this inscription is over a people called the Shasu, who lived in southern Canaan (today the region of Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia). These people had a town, mentioned on the inscription as “Yahoo”. In those days, towns were often named after gods; so historically, “Yahoo” is considered both the name of a settlement, and a god (the local god of that town).

In Hebrew, for lack of vowels, “Yahoo” is written as YHW. The Bible also mentions the Shasu, whom it refers to as the Midianites. This is especially interesting for a couple of reasons:

1. After Moses killed the Egyptian overseer, he fled to Midian, where he lived as a shepherd for 40 years (this was before the exodus).  There he was hired by the Midian priest Hobab (also known as Jethro) to look after his flocks, and he married Hobab’s daughter Zipporah. It seems likely that living with a Midian priest, he would learn something about Midian gods.
2. The incident of the burning bush where Moses had his first encounter with god happened in Midian.

After these 40 years in Midian, Moses went off to have a word with the Pharaoh, which led to the exodus. As he led his people out of Egypt, Moses made his way back to Midian, to Mount Sinai/Horeb, where he had first encountered the burning bush. There he stayed for 40 days and 40 nights, while god gave him the 10 commandments. However, when he came down from the mountain, he saw his people worshipping the golden calf, and that made him mad, so he smashed a couple of the tablets. Then god offered to give him a copy of the two tablets he had smashed, so he went back up the mountain for another 40 days and 40 nights, and finally brought back the 10 commandments that were later put in the Ark of the Covenant. Then Moses and the Israelites spent another 40 years wandering the desert, after which they finally came to Canaan. As you can see, the ancient Hebrews liked the number 40.

When Moses brought the 10 commandments to his people, he explained to them that their god was YHWH, and they better not have any other gods before him. This is an interesting connection, seeing that these events happened in Midian – the same Midian of the god YHW (or “Yahoo”). Further, there are other interesting associations. Right about this time, who should decide to join Moses, but his old buddy and father-in-law, Jethro/Hobab, who brought along his daughter (Moses’ wife) Zipporah. If you recall, Jethro was a priest of Yahoo, the Midianite god. He apparently had some hand in setting up the Old Testament religion too. The Bible mentions that when Jethro saw Moses holding courts and passing judgment, he suggested that Moses delegate some of this work, and this is how Moses came to appoint Judges.

Admittedly, this is all circumstantial, but it makes for a pretty solid case. The name YHWH had to come from somewhere. It was not a local Canaanite name; none of the Canaanite texts mention it. But there WAS a god YHW nearby in Midian, the same place where Moses lived for 40 years, working for a priest of YHW, marrying his daughter. The same place where Moses saw the burning bush, and later received the 10 commandments. So I call it a good working hypothesis.

Of course, nothing good lasts forever. In time, Moses got angry with the Midianites, and attacked them. This is one of the great massacres of the Bible, with god telling Moses:

Again, the mention of “avenge the LORD of Midian” seems suspect. The “LORD of Midian” was Yahoo. Did Moses think the Midianites had been naughty towards their god, so the god needed avenging? Who knows. It is certainly suggestive. The war did not go well for the Midianites:

• NUMBERS 31:8 And they slew the kings of Midian, beside the rest of them that were slain; namely, Evi, and Rekem, and Zur, and Hur, and Reba, five kings of Midian: Balaam also the son of Beor they slew with the sword.
• NUMBERS 31:9 And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods.
• NUMBERS 31:10 And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.
• NUMBERS 31:11 And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts.

After which, the Lord rewarded his own:

• NUMBERS 31:15 And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?
• NUMBERS 31:16 Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD.
• NUMBERS 31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
• NUMBERS 31:18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

That’s how the lord was, sort of a finicky fellow. With you one day, out for your blood the next. Anyway, perhaps we are closer to settling on his name. The lack of written vowels in old Hebrew has always made the pronunciation of “YHWH” a bit of a mystery. But now that we have a phonetic spelling from the Egyptians, I propose that we tentatively start calling him “Yahoo”.

For those unfamiliar with the magazine, The American is published by the American Enterprise Institute, a right wing think tank. While I have no idea how scholarly they pretend to be, this particular article is so full of errors and strawmen that it demolishes any credibility they may have as a serious think tank.

Here is the gist of it. They performed an “experiment”, in which they searched for certain phrases in the Lexis/Nexis database. The phrases were:

• science says we must
• science says we should
• science tells us we must
• science tells us we should
• science commands
• science requires
• science dictates
• science compels

They narrowed the search by date, and reported cumulative results for each year, from 1980 to 2009, and graphed them. Here is the graph:

adapted from article at American Enterprise Institute

The steep green line at the top is the cumulative total for all phrases. The next two lines, which show a significant increase over the years are for “science tells us we should” in purple, and “science requires” in brown. The rest of the lines are scrunched up at the bottom and do not show any sharp increases in the frequency of those phrases.

From this molehill of “experiment”, the author derives far reaching conclusions. He says that the graph shows that the occurrence of these phrases has increased sharply over the years since 1980, which reflects an increasingly “authoritarian” slant to science. He says:

“In other words, around the end of the 1980s, science (at least science reporting) took on a distinctly authoritarian tone. Whether because of funding availability or a desire by some senior academics for greater relevance, or just the spread of activism through the university, scientists stopped speaking objectively and started telling people what to do.”

Now consider how laughably unscientific this experiment is. If you have children in middle school, consider if your average 10-14 years old could have designed a better experiment. Then understand that Mr. Kenneth P. Green, resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute failed.

I’ve described some problems with their “experiment” below.

The Graph is Meaningless Unless Normalized

It’s a fair bet that between the period covered by the graph (1980-2009), the size of the Lexis/Nexis database grew tremendously. Recall that back in 1980, people used 300 baud modems, and hard drives in gigabyte sizes arrived from IBM on a palette, and cost thousands of dollars. The web as such barely existed. Now consider the situation today, when 2 terabyte drives are available by mail order for a couple hundred bucks. Obviously, databases have grown. A lot more is being stored in the Lexis/Nexis database today than used to be the case in 1980. Here’s a brief history of Lexis/Nexis, showing how they have grown by incorporating more and more publications into their database.

Anyone interested can do their own search, but 2 minutes on Google turned up these facts:

• By 1983, the LEXIS database had 12.5 million pages, including the full text of federal and state laws, court decisions, and much of British and French law.
• Today, to serve its user population of about 5 million subscribers, LexisNexis hosts over 100 terabytes of content on its 11 mainframes (supported by over 300 midrange UNIX servers and nearly 1,000 Windows NT servers) at its main datacenter in Miamisburg, Ohio.

This is not even going as far back as 1980, the date the author uses, when the database would have been even smaller. In 1983, it was 12.5 million pages. Even at a generous 100 kilobyte per document (100 kilobytes is a good sized novella), the size of the database was about 1 terabyte in 1983. Realistically, it was probably much smaller than 1 terabyte. Terabyte size databases were exceedingly rare in 1983. Today it is 100 times larger. This is because Lexis/Nexis is indexing a vast number of magazines, journals, legal documents and other texts today, than it was in 1980.

With a much larger number of publications being indexed today, it’s no surprise that any given search phrase produces more hits. This is why graphs such as these are completely and utterly useless. If the author had even a little bit of common sense, he would have taken the trouble to contact Lexis/Nexis, and ask them specifically “how many gigabytes per year do you add to your database today? How many gigabytes per year were you adding to your database in 1980?” If the difference between 1980 and today is 10 fold, then simply divide today’s numbers by 10 to obtain a normalized result for today. If you want to plot a point for every year between 1980 and 2009, then you need to ask the same question for each year – how many gigabytes of data per year were you adding in 1989? In 1990? In 1991?”

If this was too much trouble, I can suggest a simpler test, which is not as accurate but better than nothing. Pick a phrase that has nothing to do with science, such as “I like cookies”. Do a search for it in the same way, year by year. I am willing to bet cookies to peanuts that he will find the exact same result – that the frequency of occurrence of this phrase increases yearly. This is simply a result of the increasing number of resources indexed by the database, and has nothing to do with whether cookies are really more popular today than in 1980.

So pick half a dozen such non-science phrases. “I like cookies”. “Cars are fun”. Whatever. Get some numbers for how those phrases have changed in frequency, then normalize to those numbers. Better than nothing.

Results Show the Opposite of What Author Claims

Mr. Green makes fleeting reference to the increasing size of the database:

“Some of this may simply reflect the general growth of media output and the growth of new media, but if that were the case, we would expect all of the terms to have shown similar growth, which they do not.”

He gets zero points from me for this. No, we wouldn’t expect all phrases to show similar “growth”. First, as I explained above, no “growth” was demonstrated. You cannot demonstrate growth unless you normalize the numbers, which he failed to do. However, if he had normalized the numbers, even then, any growth (or shrinkage) does not need to be even. Language is an evolving thing. Over time, some phrases become popular. Others become archaic or obsolete. This graph stretches 30 years, over a generation long. That’s plenty of time to see statistical effects in the popularity of phrases.

But the funny thing is that even if you grant him his point, it shows exactly the opposite of what he claims. What are the phrases that are becoming more popular, according to his graph? They are:

• science tells us we should
• science requires

Compare that to which phrases are at the bottom, that did not become more popular:

• science commands
• science dictates
• science compels

Which is more authoritarian? “Science commands”? Or “science tells us we should”? The fact is that the most authoritarian phrases (commands, compels, dictates) are the ones that have grown the least in popularity. If anything this is a sign of decreasing authoritarianism in science. If he had bothered to normalize his numbers, these phrases would probably all have negative growth. But somehow he misses all that and just merrily goes on his way.

Some of the phrases are particularly poorly chosen, such as “science requires”. This could easily be part of a statement such as “… credit in science requires that you take three 101 levels courses in physics, chemistry and biology …” which doesn’t have a darn thing to do with the “authoritarianism” of science, just some school listing its requirements. Or it could be “what science requires of time“, meaning what are the scientific constraints on our understanding of time that need to be taken into account. Again, not an “authoritarian” directive telling people they better not smoke or they’ll get lung cancer, or they better watch the greenhouse gases (Mr. Green’s pet peeve) or the Earth will get hot. Or “Mercury Mission Shows Science Requires Patience“.  This is precisely the content that’s getting indexed in Lexis/Nexis, and is showing up on the graph.

One click on Google turns up a hundred thousand hits, and from what I can see precious few have anything to do with Mr. Green’s thesis about authoritarianism. If you pick such a commonly used phrase, of course you’ll see its use spike as more material is indexed. But it says nothing about authoritarianism in science.

The Lexis/Nexis Database Doesn’t Represent What Scientists Say

The Lexis/Nexis database consists of popular magazines, TV reports, business journals, legal documents, and other texts of this nature. What it does not include are scientific journals. In other words, the material in the Lexis/Nexis database represents the words of journalists, not so much scientists. If you want to see what scientists actually say, better databases would be those which index scientific journals.

So really what he’s claiming is that journalists are using these phrases more often than they used to, that journalists are becoming more “authoritarian” about science. Perhaps in some cases the journalists are actually quoting scientists, but certainly not in all. Journalists also editorialize the words of those they interview. They also present their own viewpoints. Without any effort to differentiate between what the scientists said and what the journalists said, how could you draw any conclusions about scientists? You wouldn’t, if you cared about the truth. Obviously, Mr. Green is not so burdened. He has an agenda to push, and he gets busy pushing it.

The Agenda

So what is Mr. Green trying to do? He works for the American Enterprise Institute, a right wing think tank. They produce reports that are cited by right wing politicians, to support right wing agendas. The science he particularly hates is climate science, specifically global warming. He mentions it specifically:

“The climate community is probably the biggest user of the authoritarian voice, with frequent pronouncements that “the science says we must limit atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to 350 parts per million,” or some dire outcome will eventuate.”

This is what he’s fighting against. Apparently, he’s not happy with the gl0bal warming reports, and he doesn’t want any legislative actions taken. So what is he really saying?

When he says “science should be neutral”, what it amounts to is that scientists should just state the facts as they see them, and then shut up. In particular, they should never make any suggestions about what ought to be done. They should have no political voice.

Who then has the political voice? Who makes the decisions? If the scientists shut up, then it’ll be the non-scientists making the decisions. In other words, in the most complex technical matters, when it really helps to have an understanding of science to know what you’re talking about, he wants to silence the most technically qualified people. He wants the only people who are allowed to make “ought” statements to be the most clueless – hacks like himself, politicians of all stripes, whatever. So long as they’re not scientists.

This sort of viewpoint, overwhelmingly silly though it may be, comes from a very real resentment that people like Mr. Green have. Science is outside their understanding, specially highly technical matters such as climate science, where you need a technical understanding of an immense body of data to even sound half-intelligent. Being unable to use science himself, Mr. Green wants to deny it to his opposition as well. He wants to have a shouting match between people as clueless as himself, with the scientists all locked out of the discourse, because if they participate, they’re “tainting” science, don’t you know.

Mass Effect 2 is the latest in their series of big budget RPGs for PCs and consoles. It continues the story began in the original Mass Effect, from 2007. Mass Effect 2 is bigger and better in almost every way, with beautiful visuals, great audio, good game design with useful skills and talents, and plenty of atmosphere. Combat is great, almost FPS-like, with different weapons and ammo, a good targeting system with double damage points for head shots, etc. The weapons are well thought out and feel different, each with its advantages and disadvantages, each requiring adjustments to your strategy.

Mass Effect 2 is a space based RPG, which borrows elements from a lot of cinematic history. People will find parallels to Firefly (the chief villains are aliens called “Reapers” which sounds suspiciously like the “Reavers” in Firefly, not to mention a wild-west sort of frontier much like Firefly, and Star Wars before that). There are elements of Blade Runner in the cityscapes on different worlds. The “Collector” ship (“Collectors” are another group we’re fighting in this story) has distinct touches of the Alien movies, with organic looking architecture vaguely reminiscent of H.R. Giger, Alien-like sound effects, and even “pods” that reminded me of the eggs in Alien. There are even elements of previous computer games like Starcraft.

I don’t say any of this to detract from Mass Effect 2. While it borrows heavily from different sources, it’s not a clone of any of them, and all the elements are well integrated into the story. The game is very polished and feels that way.

However, there is one problem that annoys me tremendously. In fact, that was what provoked me to write this blog entry. And that problem is the inability to fast forward through the dialog.

First, let me say that I am only writing about the PC version. I understand that the XBox version is different, and does in fact have a way to fast forward through dialog. So please don’t worry about it if you’re only playing Mass Effect 2 on the XBox.

Mass Effect 2 is an RPG, which means it has a strong story line. This is good – in fact, it’s considered a mark of great RPGs to have a story which can interest the player and draw him into the game. The downside of it is that the story is told mainly through dialog and cut scenes. Mass Effect 2 is an incredibly long game, taking many hours (many days of many hours) to complete. Unfortunately, a large portion of this is dialog.

Now I understand that not everyone may have a problem with dialog. After all, there are people who love the old D&D games, which are almost purely dialog – reading stuff on the screen. Not to mention there are many RPG fans to whom story and dialog are an essential part of enjoying the RPG genre. If the game doesn’t provide a sufficient story element, these people make it up on their own.

I point to World of Warcraft as proof – not only does it have an incredibly detailed background spanning multiple games from Blizzard, it also has tons of in-game information about the story, factions, events, and characters available for anyone interested. But since it’s primarily an action RPG, you don’t really need to know any of that in order to play the game. You pick your faction, you roll a character, you start playing. The guys with the red name tags are enemies, you kill them. Sure, there’s some dialog from quest givers. But it’s short and sweet. There is no waiting – the text appears along with the dialog, if you read faster than the dialog is spoken, you can click right in the middle of the dialog and move on. If you’re playing your second or third character and know what choice you’ll make, you can skip the reading too, you already know where to click. This keeps the action moving for those of us who like the “action” part of the action RPG genre.

Yet even in this very action oriented game, the story and background are there for those who care about such things. Blizzard simply leaves it up to the player to determine their own level of interest and tolerance for things such as story and background, which get in the way of gameplay.

To get back to my point – even when the game doesn’t force you to spend a lot of time listening to dialog and involving yourself in the story, some people create ways to do that for themselves. This is why Blizzard has role-playing servers, and there are multitudes of people who create guilds that deliberately build a mythos that relates to the story line. These are people who love fantasy, obviously, and to them a good part of the enjoyment of the game is fantasizing about their character, the story, the events. I’ve heard of people getting kicked out of their guild for “breaking character” – the offence of repeatedly talking as if they were Joe the Computer Gamer, rather than Aragorrrn the Magnificient on a quest to retake Alliance territory from the evil Horde.

Now while I don’t grudge these people their fantasy – their money is just as good as anyone else’s, and they have just as much right to enjoy themselves as anyone else – I have to say that I am not one of them. Very emphatically not. I like stories as much as anyone else, but the fact is that when I’m playing a computer game, I want to play a computer game, not listen to an audio book. If I’m in the mood for a story, I’ll read a novel. That’s not to say I think computer game writers are cheap hacks. Some of them might be good writers. But I am not playing a computer game to read pages of text on my screen, or to listen to hours of dialog. That’s what books and movies are for, in my opinion.

This is why I have such a problem with Mass Effect 2. This game has way too much dialog, too many cut scenes. In short, there is too much time when the game takes over my keyboard and mouse, and turns me into a passive reader/listener. This is not why I play games.

In case you are not a gamer and wondering why this is such a big deal, let me explain. Since the game is a well-designed RPG, events unfold very much based on the choices you make. Typically, RPGs tend to build upon the motivations of your character. In fact, they have a vocabulary assigning your character to a spectrum ranging from Lawful Good through Chaotic Neutral to Lawless Evil. It’s sort of a continuum, with characters being lawful, neutral or lawless, and good, neutral, evil. What kind of character you are depends upon the choices you make in the game, and this in turn affects how other people in the game respond to you. These differences can be quite dramatic, with whole parts of the story arc or side quests being closed to one kind of character but open to another.

This is also true for Mass Effect 2, which uses the words “paragon” to describe “good” and “renegade” to describe “evil”. It doesn’t matter what words a game uses, RPG gamers know that every time they talk to a character and try to reason with him instead of shooting him (and vice versa), they are making a choice to fulfill their role as “good” or “evil” and that this choice will have consequences for game play. In other words, they have to pay attention to such matters.

The problem happens when the game makes you sit through a screenful of text, 2 minutes of dialog, a lengthy cut scene, before you are allowed to click a button and make your choice. Now imagine this happening over and over and over throughout the game. You begin to realize you are spending a lot of your time just sitting back, listening to inane chatter and dramatic declamations, waiting for a button to appear on your screen. But we’re not done yet.

The consequences of a choice might not be apparent until the dialog is complete, and you see the message flash up “You just won 15 Paragon Points!” No matter how carefully you listen to the dialog, you’ll still make mistakes. Or maybe you just got bored the 36th time this happened, and your attention wandered. At the end, the message flashes “You just won 15 Renegade Points!” Damn. You just moved 15 points into the evil column instead of 15 points into the good. Or the other way around, if you were trying to be evil. What do you do? Well, the only thing you can do is to load from the last save you made, and play some portion of the game again, to come back to this dialog, so you can pay more attention and make the right choice.

It gets to the point where players get into the habit of automatically hitting the “save” button before any such dialog. Of course, you can’t always predict when the dialog will happen, so you’ll find yourself replaying significant portions of the game just because you clicked the wrong button on a dialog screen, because you were so damn tired of listening to the characters squawk that you had stuffed your ears with your fingers. No, I’m not kidding, I have actually done that with Mass Effect 2. Usually the second or third time I was forced to replay the same dialog to pick a better choice.

This turns the game from pure fun to alternating periods of pure fun and pure torture. Since we humans can’t instantly switch our emotions at will, even the periods of pure fun are marked by long slopes where the fun is admixed with irritation at the dialog you had to sit through a minute ago.

What does it take to avoid this, if BioWare had chosen to avoid it? Simple, it just takes two things:

1. Keep dialogs to a minimum. No matter how much you’re paying your writers, no matter how spiffy you think your dialog is, no matter whether you hired Hollywood talent to speak the voice parts for you. Remember, you’re selling a computer game. Not a book. Not a movie. Keep dialogs to a minimum. Mass Effect 2 has about 5 – 10 times as much dialog as is needed.

2. Always present the choices along with the dialog. Do not impose a delay, where the whole dialog has to be spoken before the choice buttons appear. After all, users have the choice to turn on subtitles to the dialog. They can read. If they can read faster than your voice talent speaks (which everyone does), they already have the information needed to make the choice long before the characters are done speaking. Let them make the choice when they are ready to make it. Don’t force them to wait for the whole tedious thing to be voiced out before you present them with choice buttons.

That’s all there is to it. But Mass Effect 2 breaks both these rules. Dialog is excessive. There no way to stop it. At least, not on the PC.

When I started this game, I picked “Soldier” as the class I wanted to play. Since the game is otherwise so excellent, very soon after I started I decided that I would play it again, as one of the other available classes. This is a great feature of RPGs, that you can replay them as another class for a whole new experience.

However, by the time I was about half way through it, all I wanted was for the game to end. There is no way on earth that I would sit through all that dialog again. It’s like getting a root canal. Two root canals. And then having the tooth pulled by a pair of rusty pliers just after you went through the trouble of getting the root canals.

It amazes me how game designers who spend millions of dollars on a game make such foolish choices. How willing they are to ruin the game experience for thousands of people (and I know I am not alone in this), for lack of a simple feature that would have been trivial to implement.

Again, please don’t take this as a rant against RPGs, or against people who love story lines, who love to listen to hours of dialog, who want cutscene after cutscene to the point where the game begins to look like a movie rather than a game. I have no problem with such people. It’s possible to give these people exactly what they want, but for the sake of those of us who want control back on our keyboards, just give us a fast forward button. You’re taking nothing away from anyone else if you do that.

This profligacy is not limited to lay people and journalists. Scientists have implicated them in things as varied as understanding intentions, empathizing with others, the development of language, a possible role in autism, and a host of other things. Hundreds of papers on these subjects have been published.  Can mirror neurons indeed have such near-miraculous explanatory powers?

What are Mirror Neurons?

What are mirror neurons, and why all this fuss about them? In brief, mirror neurons are certain neurons in the brain that fire not only when the individual performs an activity, but also when the individual observes someone else perform that activity. They were discovered in the 90’s by an Italian scientist named Giacomo Rizzolati, in the macaque monkey. He observed that in the F5 region of the monkey brain (part of the premotor cortex, a region concerned with planning actions); there was a certain population of neurons which had some peculiar properties:

• They fire both when the monkey performs an action, and when the monkey sees another monkey (or human) perform that same action. Typical actions in which such activity is observed are things like reaching for an object, or grasping an object.
• They fire only when the actions are goal-oriented, meaning when there is a perceptible goal to the action, some object towards which the action is directed, for example, reaching for food. They do not fire when the monkey observes another monkey performing meaningless actions, such as waving its arms randomly.
• Further, they fire only when the monkey knows what the goal is. Performing a pantomime (reaching for food when food is not there) will not produce any activity in these neurons. However, if the monkey knows the object is there even though he cannot see it, then they will fire. For example, if the observing monkey sees the food, but then a screen is placed in front of the food, and he sees the acting monkey reach for the food behind the screen, these neurons will fire, even though the object (food) is itself hidden at the time. This is because the monkey saw the food previously, and knows it’s there.
• They don’t fire when tools are used to perform the actions. For example, if food is delivered simply by pressing a button, there is no activity in the mirror neurons when this is observed. Only the observation of direct, goal-oriented action will provoke the activity of the mirror neurons.
• They don’t respond to partial activity. They won’t fire if you show the monkey the food, or show the monkey another monkey looking at the food. Only when the other monkey reaches for the food will they fire in the observing monkey. Further, the response is quite specific for the type of activity. For example, consider two actions – reaching for an object and placing it in one’s mouth (as with food), and a different action, picking up an object and placing it in a container. Both are goal-directed activities, and both can generate mirror neuron responses in the observer, but different populations of neurons are involved in each response. The mirror neurons which fire when the monkey observes another monkey reaching for food and placing it in its mouth are different from the mirror neurons which fire when the monkey observes another monkey picking up some object and placing it in a box.
• The neurons will fire as early as the initiation of activity (as soon as the monkey observes another monkey initiating the activity), even before the action is complete. In other words, they fire as soon as the monkey observes another monkey reaching for the food, before it has actually reached the food, grasped it, brought it back to its mouth, and deposited it there. Now it’s possible that some actions could be ambiguous, for example, a monkey may reach for an object either to place it in its mouth, or to place it in a box. However, in most tested examples where the activities are clearer cut, the appropriate population of mirror neurons for that activity begins to fire at the initiation of that activity, suggesting that the observing monkey is predicting the subsequent course of the action.
• They don’t fire during imitative activities. Adult macaque monkeys do not imitate, but juvenile ones do. Imitation is not a “goal oriented” action in the previous sense. A juvenile monkey will imitate any meaningless action, for instance, if you stick your tongue out at it, it will stick its tongue out back at you. In juvenile macaques, mirror neurons do not fire during imitative activities – not during observation of the activity, and not during subsequent performance of that activity.
• They don’t fire in preparation for the activity, only when the activity occurs. This is important because there are areas nearby in the monkey brain (for example, area 6) which have “set neurons” that fire in anticipation or preparation for an action, before the action is initiated. This is not true for mirror neurons.
• They don’t seem to represent covert activity, that is, activity which happens in the brain but is not implemented by the body. More specifically, covert activity would be the brain going through the motions of reaching for an object, and yet the hands don’t move, the monkey doesn’t actually reach for the object. Covert activity is ruled out by the observation that during the mirror neuron firing, there is no corresponding activity in the primary motor cortex. For covert activity, one would expect some activity in the primary motor cortex, which does not get translated into movement of arm muscles because it’s sub-threshold, or because it’s blocked in some way. Such covert activity is not recorded.
• Finally, it’s important to remember that mirror neurons are only a subpopulation of the neurons in the F5 area. Different estimates put them at somewhere around 20%-40% of population. The rest of the neurons in F5 which do not show mirror activity are called “canonical” neurons. Of the subpopulation of mirror neurons, some might respond only to visual stimuli, some only to auditory, and some only to somatic sensory information. Further, of those that respond to say visual stimuli, some might respond only to certain kinds of actions and others to a different kind of action, as mentioned earlier.

These observations on macaque monkeys were the basis of our understanding of mirror neurons. Any theory about mirror neurons must explain these observations. So, what are these mirror neurons, what are they doing, and why?

Rizzolati and others initially explained mirror neurons as a form of “action understanding”.  In Rizzolati’s words:

Here’s a map showing the topology of the sea floor where the Deepwater Horizon was located. As you can see, the site is near a steep incline, where the continental shelf drops off sharply towards the sea floor. The depth of the sea floor was around 5000 feet.

I’ve come across a bunch of comments at various websites, with some people saying “oh well, the oceans are huge, so what if we have a spill? If you consider the amount of oil compared to the vast volume of the oceans, it is so tiny it doesn’t matter”. This kind of talk seems singularly uninformed at best and deliberate distortion of the facts at worst to me. It’s clearly obvious if you follow the news at all, that the spill isn’t being distributed evenly among the oceans. Tar balls and oil are appearing on the Louisiana coast. And as the satellite picture from NASA shows, the oil is definitely being channeled in a very specific direction. So I thought to write this note to explain what is happening, and what we might expect in the days to come.

In order to understand what’s happening to the oil as it leaks out, we need to understand water currents and wind directions in the Gulf of Mexico.  These can be summarized as follows:

1. There is a deep water current that enters the Gulf of Mexico from the south, loops through the Gulf, and then exits through the Florida Strait and curves northwards along the east coast of the US, as the Gulf Stream.
2. The prevailing winds in this area are the Westerlies, or anti-trade winds, which blow from south west to north east. Winds do not affect deep waters, but they do in fact produce currents in surface waters. It might seem intuitively right that the surface water current should be in the same direction as the wind, but this is not so. In fact, surface water currents flow in a direction 90 degrees to the right of the wind direction, because of a phenomenon known as Eckman Transport. Since the prevailing winds in this region are southwest to northeast, surface currents induced by the winds flow northwest to southeast.
3. The movement of the oil itself is subject to the Coriolis Effect. This is an effect which happens due to the west to east rotation of the Earth. Air or water or oil flowing in a fluid medium is affected in that its path curves westwards if the flow is towards the equator, and curves eastwards if the flow is away from the equator.
4. The oil leak is occurring at the bottom of the ocean. The oil rig collapsed to the sea floor. The leaks are in the valve at the sea bed, and also in the riser pipe which is now lying collapsed on the sea floor. So the oil is being released at the sea floor, and then rising slowly to the surface. Therefore, since this oil is traversing the entire depth of the sea, from the sea floor to the surface, it is affected by both deep water and surface currents.

You can see these things in this diagram I made:

Notice the deep water current displayed in tan. This current enters the Gulf of Mexico from the south, loops around the Gulf, and then exits around Florida, only to swing back north and proceed along the eastern seaboard as the Gulf Stream.

Next, consider the winds, shown in yellow on the map. These are the Westerlies, or anti-trade winds. At these latitudes, they blow from southwest to northeast (as an aside, this is why “weather” in the form of storms tends to move from southwest to northeast in the continental US). Because of these winds, the movement of surface water is from northwest to southeast, as shown by the orange arrow. This is because of Eckman Transport, which tends to push water 90 degrees to the right of the wind direction. Remember, this represents surface water only, since the wind does not affect deep water.

Now in the light of these factors, look at how this oil slick has evolved over time:

These are four satellite images taken by NASA, from May 9th, 10th, 11th and 17th. Note that the images have not been equally scaled. Specifically, I zoomed out on the May 17th image to include the long tail.

As you can see, the slick slowly elongates in a north-south direction, and develops a “tail” pointing south. Between May 11 and May 17, the tail grows enormously, curving southeast. What could explain this effect?

If you look at the diagram I made earlier, you can see that the slick was slightly north of the loop current. The position of the loop current isn’t fixed, it has some daily/weekly variation. During early May, satellite imaging showed that the northernmost extent of the loop current was about 50 miles south of the oil spill, though the strongest currents were about 80 miles south. Since then, as we’ve seen in the satellite maps, the spill has extended far southwards. The satellite image from May 17th shows the slick extending 100+ miles south of its origin. This would put it well within the range of loop current, even if the loop current has shifted somewhat in this time.

So far, BP is still saying that the oil has not entered the loop current. There is still some doubt about this, but some scientists think it may already have entered the loop circulation. We will probably know for sure in a day or two.

Here is how I think the slick has proceeded:

• Oil leaking from the sea floor rose up and encountered local currents. Since the leak origin was fairly close to the shore where currents are quite turbulent, it initially spread pretty randomly, forming a large patch offshore.
• As oil continued to pump out from the leak and the volume of the leak increased, some of it drifted southwards. It acquired a slight easterly curve, because surface currents move in a direction 90 degrees to the right of the prevailing winds, due to Eckman Transport. The prevailing winds in this area are the anti-trade winds, or westerlies, which blow from southwest to northeast.
• This could very well explain the southeastward trajectory of the slick, without needing to invoke the loop current. However, the fact that it’s spread so far south and is either in or very close to loop current trajectory, means that there is a good chance that at least the tail end of it is being pulled along by the loop current, which would carry it eastwards at this point. The sudden sharp bend it makes at the very southern end also suggests that something else happened at this point – perhaps that something else was the slick being drawn into the loop current.

If the slick hasn’t been drawn into the loop current, it seems almost certain that it will, since it’s so very close.

Future Expectations

The size of the spill is under debate. BP has stated that it’s about 5000 barrels per day, but independent estimates from other scientists say that it could be as much as 70,000 barrels per day. The fate of the spill depends upon its size, which means how much oil is being spilled per day, and how many days it continues to flow before it’s capped.

If a substantial amount of oil leaks out, where will it go? As you can see in the maps, the deep water currents loop around the Gulf, and head north along the Gulf Stream, which passes by the east coast of the US. Oil that gets caught in this current and doesn’t make it to the surface until much later may therefore follow this path and only surface off the east coast of Georgia or the Carolinas. But this would take a lot of oil, and perhaps there won’t be so much.

The more immediate danger is to the Florida Keys and the Bahamas, as well as the north coast of Cuba. Because the loop current stays pretty far away from the west coast of Florida, it seems unlikely that much oil could end up there. But it comes very close to land when the current passes out of the Florida Strait. It has to pass through a triangle formed by the Keys to the north, Cuba to the south, and the Bahamas to the east. Those are the likely danger spots.

If there are strong winds in this period, driving strong surface currents, then the Bahamas and Cuba are probably even worse off, since wind-driven surface currents will be in a southeasterly direction. By the same token, if the oil makes it into the Gulf Stream and heads up the east coast of the US, winds may cause the coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas to be spared, since surface currents would push the oil away from the shores.

It’s also important to remember that the paths of these currents and even the wind directions aren’t always constant. There is day to day variation, as well as seasonal variation now that summer is coming. So these predictions are only approximate.

I also wrote a short article on ocean currents which you can read here, if you’re interested.

EDIT: There were some news stories recently that tar balls have washed up in the Florida Keys. These are not from the Deepwater Horizon spill. As you can see from the maps, the spill hasn’t reached anywhere near the Florida Keys so far. The Gulf of Mexico has a lot of oil rigs and many spills have happened here before, so it’s not uncommon for tar balls to show up on any of these coasts.

The fossils represent two individuals – a juvenile male and an adult female, and there is some evidence that these two individuals were associated in life (perhaps mother and son). The skeletons are remarkably complete, even in comparison to such well known specimens as Lucy. An almost complete skull, mandibles, part of a pelvis, and a complete collar bone are included, as well as limb bones, fragmented ribs, and some vertebrae.

Fossils of two individuals (juvenile male on left, adult female on right) of Australopithecus sediba. From Berger, et al "Australopithecus sediba: A New Species of Homo-Like Australopith from South Africa" Science, April 9, 2010.

The fossils date from between 1.8 to 1.95 million years old, which makes them very exciting, since fossils from this period are rare. This is also the period when the genus Homo differentiated from australopithecines, and may therefore cast some light on the otherwise hazy ancestry of Homo.

The original paper in Science (full text available with free registration at their site) describes the fossils in great detail, but the interesting features seem to be:

Skull: A. sediba is different from earlier australopithecines in being less prognathous, having a generally thinner and lighter jaw, smaller teeth. These are all characteristics trending towards Homo. In contrast, the cranial capacity has been estimated to be about 430 cc, which is smaller than the lowest currently accepted range of early Homo (510 cc).

Postcranial: The rest of the skeleton is much like earlier australopithecines, with two significant differences. First, the legs are quite long, making A. sediba somewhat taller than earlier australopithecines (estimated height about 4.5 feet). Second, the pelvis appears to be more adapted for walking. Again, both of these traits seem to foreshadow Homo. In contrast, the arms are long and australopithecine-like, as is much of the rest of the skeleton.

Australopithecus sediba skull. From Berger, et al "Australopithecus sediba: A New Species of Homo-Like Australopith from South Africa", Science, April 9, 2010.

Secondly, there is the matter of the persistence of H. habilis. According to the fossil record, H. habilis persisted as late as 1.4 million years ago. This means that for about half a million years, H. habilis co-existed with H. erectus, which is generally reckoned to have descended from H. habilis. Of course, this can be explained by punctuated equilibrium (some population of H. habilis, due to local conditions, rapidly evolved into H. erectus, but other populations of H. habilis continued to exist contemporaneously for a long time). However, if there were in fact habitats for H. habilis to survive so long, it weakens the argument for rapid speciation into H. erectus. Again, this is not a definitive argument against the descent of H. erectus from H. habilis; most anthropologists do in fact believe that H. erectus is descended from H. habilis. It’s just one of those complications that needs to be better understood, and it increases the complexity of the landscape so far as different hominid species are concerned, in which humans involved.

Another point relevant to this discussion: H. habilis had a cranial capacity about half that of modern man, but much larger than australopithecines. Typical numbers are about 650-700 cc for adults, and the low end is about 510 cc. A. sediba has a cranial capacity of about 430 cc, which puts it below the range for H. habilis. This was one of the reasons why the authors preferred to classify the new fossils as australopithecine, rather than human (in anthropology, “human” typically refers to members of the genus Homo).

So what do these fossils say about human evolution? The answer is not clear, but several possibilities can be raised:

1. A. sediba is the direct ancestor of humans. This seems to be one of the possibilities that the authors lean towards, though by no means do they assert this as fact. To support this, they make certain claims and offer some reasoning. The claim is that previous to the discovery of these fossils, the best candidate for the ancestor of Homo would be A. africanus. Berger has made this claim before, though it is not widely accepted by other anthropologists. Since A. sediba seems to be intermediate between A. africanus and H. habilis in terms of physical characteristics, the argument could be made that the line of descent is A. africanus to A. sediba to H. habilis. The same theory of punctuated equilibrium could be used to explain the persistence of A. sediba to 1.8 million years ago, even though H. habilis appeared 2.3 million years ago. The chronology would then make sense: A. africanus (3.0 to 2.4 million years ago), A. sediba (? to 1.8 million years ago), and H. habilis (2.3 to 1.4 million years ago). This would mean that A. sediba originated somewhere between 2.4 to 2.3 million years ago, which is quite possible, though of course, the only specimens we have are these two fossils dated about 1.8 million years old.
2. A. sediba is a cousin instead of an ancestor. In this scenario, both A. sediba and H. habilis shared a common ancestor (some other species of Australopithecus). Similarities between A. sediba and H. habilis (such as the more human-like pelvis and skull) could be explained by either positing a more human-like australopithecine ancestor, which is yet to be discovered, or by convergence. After all, the climate and vegetation were changing, grasslands were becoming more common, and these changes might very well have affected two related species which shared the same habitat.
3. A. sediba is really not an australopithecine, but some ancestral species of Homo. In favor of this theory are a few things – the relatively young age (we know that H. habilis and probably H. erectus were already around at the time of these fossils), the previously mentioned wide variation in H. habilis specimens (which makes it more acceptable to think that this is just yet another variant), and the many human-like characteristics of these new fossils. Against that is the fact that the cranial capacity is smaller than we had previously accepted as the lower limit for Homo, and that the skeleton retains more primitive characteristics than are seen in Homo.

So at this point, it’s hard to say what the true situation is. If we classify these fossils as Homo, it could easily start a debate over whether earlier fossils are correctly classified. As I mentioned earlier, some of the older H. habilis fossils are quite fragmentary, and there have been arguments made in the past that some of them should really be considered australopithecines.

One problem in anthropology is that because of the scarcity of fossils, a lot of classifications are based on “type specimens” rather than any solid statistics. There is a large range of variability in any population (consider humans today, for example). In the absence of a sufficient number of fossils to quantify the extent of variability, anthropologists pick certain fossils with well-defined characteristics as “type specimens”, or “typical” of a certain species. Then when new fossils are found, their classification becomes a matter of relating them to known type specimens, setting up a chain of inferences. If you knock out a link in that chain (for example, declaring some early H. habilis specimen to be australopithecine instead), then there is a cascading effect on the classification of many other specimens, which were in part classified based on some similarity to these fossils.

In short, if we classify the new fossils as yet another variant of H. habilis, we will need to do some rethinking about other early specimens of H. habilis. Rethinking is always good, so this is not a problem. In fact, I am sure that right now there are many anthropologists busily thinking and writing away on just such issues.

Better answers will have to await more fossils. In the meantime, we have added to the richness and complexity of human evolution, and specifically to the period around 1.8 to 2.0 million years ago, which happens to be relatively fossil-scarce. We now have yet another species wandering around Africa at this time period, which is a critical period for the emergence of H. erectus, and the branch of the evolutionary tree leading to us.

EDIT [4/10/2010]: Scientific American has a story up quoting Donald Johanson (the discoverer of Lucy), in which he opines that (1) these fossils have been misclassified as Australopithecus, they are really a new species of Homo, and (2) he thinks it unlikely that this species descended from Australopithecus africanus.

Neanderthal face reconstructed by Vendramini, Copyright themandus.org

He has written a book called “Them and Us”, in which he propounds the hypothesis that Neanderthals were:

• Very different looking from most modern representations – much uglier, hairier, and far less human-like.
• That they were brutal, intelligent, tool-using predators, who preyed upon modern man in the areas where they came in contact, specifically, the Levant.
• That being the prey of Neanderthals was the most important factor in human evolution, and that it was responsible for the flowering of art and sculpture, the technological innovations in the tool making industry, perhaps even the flowering of language – all of which happened around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.
• And not only that, it was responsible for the evolution of the human body type, including features that distinguish us from other apes, such as decreased hairiness, the development of a prominent and protruding nose, different body posture and gait, etc.
• Finally, he lists a whole range of human behavioral traits, such as preference for symmetrical faces, fear of the dark, abominable snowman myths across various cultures, etc. as some sort of racial memory of Neanderthals, whom we fear and despise, because they preyed upon us.

Now at first read, this appears to be the work of a misguided though enthusiastic kook. He seems to have no formal qualifications in biology or paleo-anthropology, and is self-taught. He makes the first few chapters of his book available online, and from a quick read, he seems very dismissive of arguments that run counter to his thesis, for example, the loss of body hair in Homo sapiens. He mentions other theories, such as the thermoregulation during the transition from forest living to life on the savannah, but he dismisses them so hastily that it looks like he doesn’t really understand them all too well. Some of the examples he gives (such as big cats are predators, and some of them live in hot climates, why didn’t they lose their hair?) have reasonable answers in the literature, but he makes no mention of them. Instead, he pushes his theory, that we lost body hair because of sexual selection – we didn’t want to look like those ugly, murderous Neanderthals – it became a taboo to look like them.

Profile reconstruction of Neanderthal face, Copyright themandus.org.

Superficially, some of this may make sense. We certainly can’t rule out the role of sexual selection in the loss of body hair. But making the jump from “might be possible in a mundane way” to “it was a response to Neanderthal predation” is a very long stretch. He does this in many, many different areas, not just body hair.

Now I understand that he offers this as a hypothesis. He is not saying this is how it happened, just that this is how it might have happened. Which is fine, but the supporting evidence is very thin. Further, in his enthusiasm to bring in every possible argument to bear, he adds so much speculative and flimsy stuff that it makes it seem like he can’t distinguish between science and fantasy. To name a few, he finds some supposedly “universal” human traits such as xenophobia, preference for bathing and cleanliness, loyalty to the group, self-sacrifice, patriarchy, aggression, and many more, and ties them all into some imagined “prey psychology”, which developed as a result of humans being the victims of Neanderthals.

To be fair, he is not alone in this. Many so called “evolutionary psychologists”, or evolutionary biologists in general, make sweeping generalizations and assumptions, based on the flimsiest evidence. To me, this is an example of science turning into social narrative, the trivialization of science. You don’t need rigor and reasoning based on solid evidence, you don’t need to be cautious, to make no claim beyond the evidence – all you need to do is to tell a good story, preferably sensational enough to get picked up by the popular press, and give you your 15 minutes of fame.

Neanderthal with spear, Copyright themandus.org.

Part of it is the problem of generalists versus specialists. Evolutionary biologists or evolutionary psychologists (*shudder*) are generalists, tying together a lot of details from anthropology, genetics, sociology, psychology, etc. to make some broad claim. But in doing so, they often lack the specialized knowledge of each individual field – they lack sufficient knowledge to not over-generalize, and sometimes end up making silly blunders. They tend to trivialize and gloss over problems that are ambiguous and not resolved, picking the interpretation that favors their own theory, often not realizing that the foundation is very shaky.

And then there are those who disconnect with reality altogether, like Vendramini, when he goes off about connecting “fear of the dark” to nocturnal predation by Neanderthals or similar arguments. The pity is that he doesn’t seem to realize what he’s doing. In trying to add weight to his arguments, he is throwing in every last thing he can think of. And so he’s mixing in things that have some weight and credibility (like, we don’t really know exactly what Neanderthals looked like, perhaps they were more ape like than modern representations; or we don’t know exactly what human-Neanderthal interactions were like, there may well have been violence), with things that are utter nonsense, such as fear of the dark. So the good stuff gets mixed with the bad, and taints everything as trash. Further, it creates a bad impression of the writer, in that he doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish science from fantasy.

To top it all, he really appears serious about this airy-fairy stuff. He has another theory (and another whole website devoted to it), which propounds something he calls “teem theory”. In simple terms, the theory is that nasty stuff that happens to us and creates powerful negative impressions gets imprinted on non-coding regions of our DNA, and thus becomes heritable to future generations. This is what he uses to explain things like fear of the dark, xenophobia, etc. – that these bad experiences with homicidal Neanderthals became imprinted on our DNA, and continues to manifest in modern behavior.

That would be a whole other discussion and a whole other blurb on this blog, so I don’t want to get into it at this time. Briefly, he looks at instinctive behavior of a certain kind, such as certain animals instinctively recognizing their predators and avoiding them, concludes that such behavior must be coded into the DNA, since it’s untaught and not learned, therefore DNA must provide a mechanism for coding our fears. Such ideas ignore a whole realm of evidence, that a huge range of predator-avoidance behaviors are in fact learned, and that interpreting specific instances where they don’t appear to be learned is over-generalizing. Yes, there are instincts that are heritable, but the actual mechanism of how they work, what exactly is coded in the DNA, are very much unknown. Making it out to be something as specific as xenophobia is very imaginative, but poor science.

Neanderthal, hunting. Copyright themandus.org.

I see evolutionary biologists make similarly specific claims, that generosity and altruism are hard coded in our genes – all sorts of stuff like that. I consider it all very unlikely, an over-specification of something much broader. Perhaps what we are inclined for is social cohesiveness, being social animals, and specific instances of it are just a manifestation, they are not individually hard coded. It’s possible to take a population of rats, breed for either aggressiveness or docility, and in a very few generations end up with two distinct populations that are behaviorally very different in that respect. It’s been done. It doesn’t show anything very specific, other than that “fight” responses and aggression are more marked in one population than another, perhaps through some simple hormonal trigger. Going from that to very specific theories about brain centers dealing with aggression, or “cooperation” or something similar is not warranted by the evidence.

While I find his theory not convincing, it did make me wonder about a few things. What exactly do we know about how Neanderthals looked like? Forensic recreations based on bones have to be somewhat an exercise in guesswork, on prior knowledge. I agree with his point that they are not at all comparable to forensic recreations of humans. After all, we have a huge body of knowledge of what humans are supposed to look like, so our guesses are founded in a great deal of prior information. We don’t have a similar body of knowledge of what Neanderthals looked like, so our reconstructions may err on side of making them look too human (or conversely, less human) than they really were.

We have no casts of their soft tissues. We don’t know how hairy they were. We don’t know how much their noses protruded. We don’t know how big their eyes were, how erect their spines, how prominent their musculature. For all of these things, we make educated guesses, but some guesses are more educated than others. For example, the musculature is hinted at by the shape of the bones, the sites of attachment of various muscles to the bones. So this kind of guess can be trusted to a greater extent than say, the guess about how hairy they were, or what their skin was like, or how symmetrical their faces were.

So our picture can’t be very precise, there is some range of possibilities, within the constraints set by the bones. Just how wide that range is, I don’t know, and I wonder if they could have looked like the pictures on his web site. I don’t personally know of any physical evidence that goes against his reconstruction. Perhaps some more knowledgeable people can add to this. But it occurs to me that if Neanderthals looked sufficiently ape-ish, sufficiently non-human, it would explain why we find no evidence of human-Neanderthal interbreeding in the genomes. It would discourage (though not necessarily prevent) the two species from interbreeding.

I look forward to more information which should become available as the Neanderthal genome is fully sequenced and annotated.

Users have fought back with ad-blocking add-ons to their browsers. So far, the only browser that fully supports such add-ons is Firefox. Google Chrome will also introduce an extension scheme in version 4 of their browser (already in beta and available for download), and there are a couple of ad-blocking extensions already available for it (AdThwart, AdBlock) , though neither is as good as Ad Block on Firefox just yet. The market penetration of such extensions remains poor – it’s estimated that only 4% to 8% of Firefox users actually install and use Ad Block, though it’s been around for years. And Firefox (all versions combined) is installed on less than a third of all computers out there. So at this time, ad blocking extensions are not a major threat to ad revenue.

However, it seems likely that the popularity of such ad blocking extensions will continue through word-of-mouth advertising. Some of their success is linked to the success of the Firefox browser itself, which has continued to gain market share. Google Chrome is also a fast growing browser, and when it starts to offer extensions (in a non-beta version, which will be in a few months), it will likely also carry some ad blockers along with it. Anyone who has used an ad blocker knows for himself how immediately and profoundly it alters the web-surfing experience for the better, making surfing much more pleasant. So it’s not like ad blockers are a hard sell. I think that even if ad blocking isn’t a revenue threat to the ad industry now, it will become a threat in time.

This has hurt revenues in the web publishing industry. It’s not just extensions like AdBlock, which has a fairly negligible market presence – it’s more that users are simply ignoring ads. Coupled with the fact that non-ad revenue is also down, since fewer people buy newspapers or magazines; the result is that publishers are facing serious problems, shown in the number of bankruptcies, closures and layoffs in the industry.

Now I am not one of those who have a pathological hatred of  ads. I realize that much of the valuable content on the web is not produced by part-time hobbyist bloggers; it’s produced by people to whom publishing is a profession. These people don’t have other day jobs – they feed themselves and their families through the content they create for the web. They deserve to be paid for their work. And if they are not paid, they will be forced to turn to some other line of work to pay their bills, and the web will be poorer for it. For example, although news bloggers provide a lot of value added service, without the original news gathering efforts from paid journalists, there is only so much bloggers can do to recycle each other’s stories.

So far, very few people have figured out how to make money off a pay-to-view site. This may eventually change if Rupert Murdoch has his way. Any site that makes money off the internet would probably love to put their content behind a pay wall if they could, if they thought it would increase their revenue. But this has not worked for the large majority of people who have tried – it has only made viewers turn to alternative sources for similar content. Alternative sources are made viable by news aggregators like Google, who undermine pay wall protection by leading users to competitors who aren’t behind a pay wall. Clearly, things will not change until publishers band together in significant numbers and act together.

I don’t know when or if this will happen. However, I know that markets are driven by money, and eventually, a business model that produces poor revenues will be supplanted by one that produces better revenue. Whether that will be pay walls or court injunctions against the likes of Google or something else, I can’t say. But something will change.

For decades, ads supported a large fraction of the publishing industry. Over time, they became a proven way that worked for both publishers and readers. Publishers got their revenue; readers got cheap content, subsidized by ads. This worked well in the print medium, but somehow it has not translated well to the internet. I’d like to ask why, and suggest ways in which it could be made to work again.

I think the primary reasons why ad revenues have started to fail are:

1. Ads have become intrusive to the point that they are an annoyance even to those readers who might be inclined to buy, and people are starting to tune them out.
2. There is no good system for pricing internet ads, as there is for print and TV. Simple pay-per-click schemes don’t go far enough. They don’t sort out the public into marketer-friendly demographics where it’s possible to know well in advance how much an ad should cost, and what’s the most effective place to place it.

The first is relatively easy to deal with, but it requires some coordination and a great deal of work by someone with credibility enough to make it work. This is what I would propose. First, work out a standard that takes the annoyance factor out of ads. Second, create a certifying authority that vets ads and approves those that are non-annoying, and gives them a digital certificate of approval. Third, create a mechanism in ad-blocking products that permits certain ads to go through. Fourth, create a scheme that lets content providers serve content only to browsers which allow certified ads to appear.

Each of these steps has major technical and organizational hurdles to cross, and even if they are crossed, it will never be 100% effective. However, it does not need to be 100% effective. It only needs to be reasonable enough to convince a majority of users, and non-threatening enough that people don’t care to expend a great deal of energy to circumvent it.

Let’s take each of these steps one at a time.

Taking the Annoyance out of Ads

Here are some rules for ads that would make them much less annoying for me. No doubt others could add items I have forgotten:

1. No pop overs or pop unders. Nothing that would open another window or tab in your browser unless you explicitly and deliberately click on the ads
2. Ads must not cover up or obscure content that the user visited the page to read. You must not require the user to acknowledge the ad by clicking a “close” or “go away” button before he is allowed to read the content. That only makes him hate you, and hate the ad provider.
3. No flashing, no animation, no movement of any kind. This is like asking a person to read a page in a book while ambulance lights flash and flicker in the background. They are distracting and make it harder to read the page.
4. No audio. Pages should never load with any audio playing. Audio should only be enabled after a deliberate and unmistakable click from the user, specifically requesting the audio.
5. Goes without saying, but I’ll add it anyway. Ads must be vetted for malware, browser hijacking, and similar exploits.
6. No mixing ads with copy. In other words, don’t use fake underlines and highlights on content, trying to fool the reader that such highlights or underlines are relevant to the content, when in fact they only point to ads.
7. Privacy concerns: although it’s useful for ad servers to keep track of users, and I would not suggest that they do away with this powerful mechanism that the internet provides for targeting ads, there should be some easy way for users to opt out of it. If you don’t provide it, users will build their own, and then you will be worse off than if you had just provided it in the first place.
8. 8. Ads should not unduly slow down page loads. More specifically, content should never have to wait for a slow ad server to be displayed.

I’d like to mention one more point, but separately from the list. That point is ad ratio. If your page is 75% ads and 25% content, your users will notice that. They are not stupid. This is not something that should be enforced by the ad certifying agency; it’s up to whoever owns the web pages in question. This is where that second agency I mentioned, the one that figures out ad prices, comes in. It may well be more profitable for some little company to create pages which are 4/5th ads and 1/5th content, in the hope that the greater number of ads will offset the decreased number of users. But this should reflect in the cost of those ads, which pay-per-click systems don’t always do. Print and TV have long-established means to price ads, with companies that survey and measure such things down to the last penny. The internet needs the same.

Certifying Agency

Not much to be said here. It could be a private corporation, or it could be a volunteer effort. There is really very little work to do, so long as the guidelines are very clear. Either an ad passes those guidelines and receives the certificate, or it doesn’t. Checksums and hashes can make sure that the certificate is paired with a specific ad, and that the ad producer can’t modify the ad after it’s been approved. Again, the point is that the guidelines should be clear enough that even a machine could figure out whether to approve or reject an ad.

Ad Blocking Software

This is the easiest part. Ad blocking browser extensions (and perhaps someday the browser itself) would have a built in mechanism that allows the user to select which ads will come through, simply by checking a box in the configuration. The browser or extension downloads the certificate from the authority, and vets each ad to make sure it’s been signed with the proper certificate.

Ad Serving

This is the hardest part to solve, technically. This is what the web server needs to implement at the content end. The goal is to serve content only to browsers which allow certified ads to go through. To figure out how this might be done, consider how ad blockers work now.

There are several mechanisms, depending on the browser and extension. The best implemented is Ad Block on Firefox. This mechanism is based on a feature built into the Gecko engine, which is used by browsers like Firefox or Thunderbird. The feature is called “content policies”, and it’s simply an object that gets called whenever the browser is asked to load a page. It looks at the content (the address, plus some other stuff), and based on that, it decides whether to allow the content or not. Extensions like Ad Block simply define content policies. How they do so varies. One way is by maintaining a list of ad providers, and simply blocking their IPs. This is a really good way, because it prevents the browser from even downloading the ad, so you save bandwidth too, and the page loads faster. Another is by searching the text (through regexps) for stuff that is likely to be found in ads and not in content.

Chrome extensions at present don’t allow a mechanism for ad content not to be downloaded, since Chrome’s engine (Webkit) doesn’t have that feature from Gecko. So the ad content is downloaded, but after download the extension checks it against similar publicly available lists and also examines the text, and hides content that it thinks is an ad.

There are problems with both approaches, and also with the implementations. At present, it’s possible to create scripts on web pages that can detect the presence of Ad Block, and simply refuse to serve pages to browsers which have Ad Block installed. However, it’s still fairly uncommon to see a site that actively refuses to serve to Ad Block-enabled browsers. More often, it’ll just post a notice to the web page with something like “we know you’re using Ad Block, if you enjoy the content on this site, please consider turning off Ad Block or donating – here’s our PayPal button”.

It’s really not practical to expect users to turn Ad Block on and off individually for different sites, depending upon how much they like the content. Some will do it, but most will just keep Ad Block on, and ignore your message like they ignored the ads previously.

It’s also possible for users to circumvent the ad-block detection. But this also leads nowhere – it just produces a constant state of war, where content providers continue to develop ever smarter ways to detect Ad Block and users continue to invent new ways to circumvent it. This process never ends, as we’ve seen with various DRM schemes. No one really wins in the end.

Instead, we need to come to a consensus. This will only happen if content providers understand the very real problems faced by users, and take them seriously. And if users understand that content providers need to make money to continue working, and ads are a much better alternative than pay walls, or killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

If you look up recipes for dal on the internet, you’ll find hundreds. Maybe more. They all vary in details, like which spices were used, how much of each, when they were added, etc. Partly this is because India is a big country, with many distinct cuisines from different parts of the country. So dal cooked in the north won’t be the same as dal cooked in the south, or west, or east. Even within a region, there are dozens of variations. Mughlai style food uses a lot of different spices, but not a lot of each. South Indian food might use fewer spices, but some of them will be pretty strong – enough red-hot chilis, for example, to burn your mouth.

So this is my distillation of many such recipes that I have tried. I’ve stuck to what I consider are essential spices – those which I’d definitely notice a lack of, in the finished product. At the end, I’ve provided a short list of what else some people add to dal.

Which Lentils?

First, get the right sort of lentils. There are lots of different legumes or “pulses” eaten in India. While cooking methods for each are similar, they are not exactly the same. This recipe is for brown lentils (whole, not split), commonly known as “masoor” in India.

Brown lentils are very easy to find in most American supermarkets, but be aware they are not exactly the same as Indian brown lentils. Indian lentils are generally smaller in size, more rounded and less flat. They may look darker, though the darkness of supermarket lentils is variable, from greenish to reddish to brownish. Indian lentils have a much richer and more robust flavor.

Comparison of Indian and American Brown Lentils

Brown lentils can be found in Indian grocery stores, where they are known as “masoor dal”. Whole brown lentils, like in the picture above, are sometimes labeled “matki masoor”. It’s worth it to get the real thing and not the supermarket imitation. There really is a difference.

Ingredients and Method

This is a “tempered” dal, meaning, the dal is cooked in two separate stages, which are combined at the end. The purpose of tempering is to keep the butter and fat-soluble spices separate from the rest of the stuff, and cook them for a much shorter time, so the volatile oils in the spices mix in with the butter, and don’t disappear or acquire an off flavor due to the longer cooking time of the dal itself.

Take 1 cup of lentils (dry volume), and soak in 5-6 cups of cold water for about an hour. Then wash the lentils thoroughly in cold water.

In a large pot, add the following:

- the pre-soaked, washed lentils from the step above
- cold water – 4 cups
- turmeric powder – 1 heaped teaspoon
- amchoor powder (dried green mango) – 1 level teaspoon
- garlic – 3-4 cloves, peeled and crushed
- onion – 1 small onion, chopped
- ginger – either 0.5 teaspoon powder, or a half inch piece fresh, crushed to a paste
- bay leaf – 1
- salt: about 1.5 teaspoons, or to taste (kosher)

Bring everything to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer, cover the pot, and let it simmer for about 30 minutes to an hour, until the lentils are thoroughly cooked, but not mushy.

Meanwhile, prepare the “tempering” mixture. It will take about 10-15 minutes to prepare, so you can start working on it about 15 minutes before the lentils are cooked.

In a large frying pan, melt about 1/2 or 2/3 of a stick of butter. When the butter is hot, start adding stuff in the following order:

1. add half a teaspoon of cumin seeds, fry for about 30 seconds until the seeds start to crackle and pop and turn slightly darker. Don’t burn them.

2. add one medium chopped onion, fry it while stirring frequently, until the onion changes to a golden brown color. This is different from typical onion-frying instructions, which tell you to fry until it becomes transparent. You are not frying to extract onion flavor (it’s already there in the lentils from the other onion which you added to them). You are frying to caramelize the onions, to get the sweetish-caramelized-fried-onion flavor, so make sure they’re golden brown.

3. meanwhile, in a small bowl, mix these spices – 1 level teaspoon of red chili powder, 1 level teaspoon of ground cumin, 1 level teaspoon of ground coriander, 1 pinch of asafoetida powder. These are all dry powders, so put them in a small cup or bowl and mix them up. Then, after the onions have finished frying and turned golden brown, dump all these mixed spices into the frying pan.

4. Continue to fry for a while, stirring constantly to prevent the spices from sticking to the bottom of the pan and burning. At this point, you might want to turn the heat down to medium (if you had it on high while frying the onions), just to be safe. If it looks like there is any danger of burning the spices, have some water handy, and add a teaspoon or so to prevent burning. But they won’t burn if you turn the heat down to medium and stir constantly.

5. Fry until the oil starts to separate from the spice/onion mix. This can take anywhere from a minute to 5-6 minutes, depending on how hot your stove is, and whether there was any moisture from the onions remaining in the pan before you added the spices.

6. When the spices have fried, add half a cup of diced tomatoes (canned are fine). Continue to fry until the tomatoes lose their moisture and the oil starts to separate again, which could take another 5 minutes or so.

Bringing Everything Together

Now you are ready to combine the cooked lentils and the tempered spices. Remove the bay leaf from the lentils if it bothers you. Then dump the lentils (with cooking liquid and all) into the frying pan with the spices. Mix everything well. Reduce the heat to simmer, cover the frying pan with a lid, and let simmer for 5 minutes. Then turn off the heat, and let the frying pan sit on the stove for another 5-10 minutes before serving. If you like cilantro, you can sprinkle some fresh chopped cilantro on top, just before serving.

Dal is typically served over a bed of rice, usually basmati rice in North India, or shorter/stickier rice in South India. But it can be eaten with almost anything – Indian style “roti” or “paratha”, “nan”, etc.

Other Spices

Here are a few spices that I don’t use for dal, but some other people do.

1. Cardamom and Cloves: they sort of go together, if you add one, you usually add the other as well. If you were to add these, you’d use 4-5 green cardamom pods (cracked open) and 5-6 cloves. They can be added to the spice mix which goes in the frying pan, after the onions have finished frying. They can add subtle flavors, but I think they’re more useful for other Indian dishes, and other dals. Brown lentils have a more robust, earthy flavor, and don’t really need either of these.

2. Mace (known in Indian groceries as “Javitri”). This is sort of like nutmeg (in fact, it comes from the same plant), but with a milder flavor. Again, I would probably use it for a lighter and creamier dal, not for this recipe.

3. Fenugreek (known in Indian groceries as “methi”). This is actually not a bad thing to add. It has a characteristic smell, which will be more dominant than the actual flavor. A pinch or two of fenugreek added to the spice mix won’t hurt, and may possibly improve the taste for some people. Fun fact: fenugreek has been used for millenia by people all over the world, as a galactogogue – something that increases milk production in lactating women. Unlike some folk remedies, it actually works.

4. Carom Seeds (known as “ajwain” in Indian groceries). These are more common in South Indian style dals. I never add them. They have a flavor like thyme, only more powerful. You never, ever add them directly to the food. If you use them, use a small amount (1/4 teaspoon to start with), and fry them well in oil to temper them and make them milder.

5. Black Pepper and Garam Masala – These are both added to increase the “spiciness” of the dish. I don’t add either. Black pepper makes food hotter, and this dal is plenty hot enough with the powdered red chili anyway. Garam Masala is a mix of spices, many of which are already added separately in this recipe, and not needed. If you do add either, the best way would be at the end. Do not fry either black pepper or garam masala. Instead, when you add the cooked dal to the fried onions and spice mix at the end, add both or either of these directly to the food. They don’t need to be cooked.

Some Variations

Although dal with rice is very yummy (and healthy!) and can be eaten often, sometimes you will want to vary it a bit. Fortunately, brown lentils go well with a lot of stuff, so it’s easy to vary the recipe by adding something to it.

I usually add potatoes or spinach (one or the other, not both). For potatoes, use a low starch potato like yukon golds, which hold their shape after cooking. Take two medium potatoes (for the amounts in this recipe, which has 1 cup of raw lentils), peel them, and dice them into fairly small pieces. Add them directly to the lentils at the start, and cook along with them.

If you’re using spinach, take a pound of leaf or chopped spinach, and cook it along with the lentils. You might think that this is overcooking the spinach, since the lentils can easily cook for 45 minutes or an hour before they are done, while this is way too long for spinach. But remember, this is an Indian dish, and the purpose of the spinach is mainly to thicken the dal gravy and impart a flavor, so it works well this way.

How to Eat Dal

Most Indians eat dal with rice (preferably basmati), and that’s probably my favorite way to eat it as well. However, dal is very versatile, and there are plenty of other uses:

1. With bread, in a sandwich. If you have a sandwich grilling machine, leftover dal makes an excellent grilled sandwich. Take 2 slices of bread, butter each on one side, and put some dal in the middle (non-buttered side). Grill in a sandwich maker, or frying pan.

2. In salads. Cold dal goes great with salads. Just make sure it’s not watery, and that you adjust the amount based on the spiciness. You don’t want it overwhelming the salad.

3. With pasta. If I have leftover dal, I sometimes make a pasta sauce out of it. Warm the dal in a frying pan over medium heat. The dal should be fairly dry, so drain it first if it’s too watery. Add about a cup of sour cream per cup of cooked dal, stir until everything is well mixed and warm. Great with shell pasta or macaroni.

Finally, a note on the consistency of dal. If you follow the recipe exactly as described, you’ll have some water in the dal at the end. Remember, dal thickens when it stands, so you’ll end up with less water than you can see at the end of cooking.

This is actually perfect, if you’re planning to eat the dal with rice. Since rice is also dry, the moisture in the dal is a welcome addition. However, if you want to make a grilled sandwich out of the dal, or add it to pasta or salads, you might want drier dal. You can do this in two ways, either reduce the water in the recipe by up to one cup, or else take the lid off the pot during the final 10 minutes of cooking, and let some of the water evaporate. I prefer the second method, but it’s up to you.

Because you’re using Windows. Because file fragmentation is a problem with every version of Windows, and it inexorably slows down your computer the longer you use it. Because browser caches are some of the highest file activity regions on your disk, which means they make the disk fragment very quickly. You don’t want your operating system or programs disks to be fragmented that fast, do you? So you make a separate scratch disk, just a tiny one, and place all browser caches and other fast changing files there.

Except that unlike Firefox or Internet Explorer, Chrome doesn’t let you choose the browser cache size or location. Instead, it dumps it right on your OS disk, which is about the worst place to have a browser cache.

Here’s how you can change the location of Chrome’s cache, despite the laziness of the programmers. What you do is manually create a directory for the cache on a disk of your choice. Then you set up a symbolic link from the default Chrome cache location to this new directory you’ve created. Chrome still thinks it’s dumping files in its default location, but the files are really going to a different disk.

Step by Step Instructions (Vista and Windows 7)

1. Shut down Chrome if it’s open. Now open Task Manager and look under the Processes tab to make sure there is no Chrome process running. This is necessary because even after shutting down the browser, the process often continues to run for a while to do housekeeping tasks. If it’s running, it will have locked the files you need to move, so the process won’t work. Make absolutely sure it’s not running.

2. Next, open Windows Explorer, navigate to where you want the cache to go, and make a directory there for the Chrome cache. In my case, I made a directory called “Chrome Cache and Profile” on drive S, as shown in the picture below.

3. Next, navigate to where Chrome stores its user profile. This will usually be:

C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data

Move the entire “User Data” directory to the other drive, and make it a subdirectory of the new directory you just created in the previous step. So in my case, I moved it from the default location listed above to S:\Chrome Cache and Profile\User Data.

4. Now open an elevated command prompt. This means that you right-click on the command prompt icon in the Start Menu, and choose “Run as Administrator”. In the command prompt window, enter the command:

mklink /J “C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data” “S:\Chrome Cache and Profile\User Data”

Make sure you replace {username} with your own username, and change the directories as appropriate in your case. The quotes around the directory names are necessary, so leave them there.

That’s it. You’ve created a symbolic link from the default location to the new location of the User Data directory. Because you used the “/J” switch, Windows created what’s called a “junction”, which Chrome can’t see, so it continues to think that the directory hasn’t been moved, and proceeds as usual.

Note that if you did exactly like I described above, you’ve not only moved the Chrome cache, but the entire User Data directory, which also contains stuff like cookies, bookmarks, etc. If you don’t want to move the rest of this stuff over, dig deeper into the User Data subdirectory, and locate the cache subdirectory, which will be:

… User Data\Default\Cache

In that case, you could just make the symbolic link at that directory level, rather than at the User Data level. It’s up to you.

If you’re using Windows XP or Windows 2000

Windows XP and Windows 2K have the ability to make symbolic links but don’t come with a command line tool to make them. So if you’re using either of these two operating systems, you’ll need to download a tool to make them. Microsoft Technet offers Junction, which is a tiny utility that lets you add symbolic links in either XP or 2000.

The command would be:

junction C:\path-to-directory\User Data “S:\path-to-directory\User Data”

Make sure you fill in the proper paths to the source and linked directories, and also note that the second set of quotes is required.

Other Methods

Some people use a different method for changing the cache location, which is to start Chrome with an argument pointing to a separate directory. For example, if you wanted the cache to be located in S:\junk, you could make a shortcut to start Chrome with the command line:

C:\path-to-chrome-executable\chrome-exe –user-data-dir=s:\junk

This would work, but there are problems because a browser isn’t always started from a shortcut. Many other applications often invoke the default browser to display HTML stuff. So if Chrome is started by some other application, or in any way other than through your shortcut, it will still dump files in the default location and not in your junk directory. For this reason, I prefer the symbolic link method.