books

My graduate advisee Zach Throckmorton has become really well-known for his anthropology-related jokes and puns. He's sort of a Facebook phenomenon. Fresh off a stand-up comedy routine during the plenary session of this year's American Association of Physical Anthropologists, he's published a book of 101 "terrible physical anthropology jokes":

Anthro 404: Funny Not Found

Some of them really are groaners. For example, from page 6:

What part of the bone doesn't like anything?

The Aversion canal.

They may be just the remedy for that class full of students who won't crack a smile.

I was in the local library this afternoon and browsing through the science section. There were quite a number of popular books on neuroscience published across the last fifteen years or so. These were all nice glossy books in their time, with reviews in the science monthlies. Many of them promised on the jacket to reveal how evolution had left our human brains with their curious features, or to otherwise illuminate a new understanding of how our brains evolved.

I took this occasion to ponder just how little about human brain evolution we have learned in the last fifteen years -- older books and more recent ones being superficial in almost equal measure.

Neuroscience has made some very interesting progress in that time, but much of that progress has happened at levels of brain organization and neural function that are irrelevant to human evolution (i.e., shared across mammals). There has been some interesting work on how human brain anatomy compares to other primates, but in these cases we don't yet understand how the differences cause the human anatomy to function differently from those primates. We don't even know the functional significance of most variations within humans. Most remarkable to me is just how little genetics has impacted our understanding of human brain evolution.

I think it would be more productive to compile the big questions we don't know about human brain evolution, with reasons why we don't know them.

For Sunday morning (here in California, still, although it's fading into afternoon in my native land), I can point you to a book excerpt by Joshua Foer, from his new book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Foer describes in detail how he set about to master the method of loci, to see just how hard it can be to compete in elite memory competitions. The number part was interesting:

When it comes to memorising long strings of numbers, such as 100,000 digits of pi, most mental athletes use a more complex technique that is known as "person-action-object", or PAO. In the PAO system, every two-digit number from 00 to 99 is represented by a single image of a person performing an action on an object. The number 34 might be Frank Sinatra (a person) crooning (an action) into a microphone (an object). Unlike the Major System, these associations are entirely arbitrary and have to be learned in advance, which is to say it takes a lot of remembering just to be able to remember.

I've always thought of paleoanthropology as an extreme memory competition...

An article about the future bookless libraries, which may already be springing up at a campus near you:

Last month, the University of Texas at San Antonio announced it had built the world’s first bookless library. Its Applied Engineering and Technology Library offers access to 425,000 e-books and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions, and librarians say they’ve yet to hear a complaint from the 350-plus students and faculty who pass through its doors daily. “We’ve gotten no negative feedback,” says Krisellen Maloney, library dean at the University of Texas. “We looked at circulation rates, we looked at electronic resources, we looked at requests, and we decided that having the services was more important than the physical books.” She adds bluntly: “When we prioritized the needs, the books weren’t the priority.”

That can't be good for the academic book market.