Being Human

This GEICO commercial reinforces the general impression that a southern accent is intrinsically amusing:

And here's a tree limb from New York City (?):

At least, it's from somewhere r-less with æ-raising before nasals (e.g. wham) but not before voiceless stops (e.g. happening)…

These are the only ads that I've seen featuring talking road hazards with cute accents, but surely there must be others: a roofing nail from Boston? A clogged fuel line from Minnesota?

Of course, GEICO's public face for years has been a spokes-gecko who speaks Estuary English:

With debates still raging over the new version of the psychiatrists' diagnostic manual, the DSM-V, a selection of radical new diagnoses have been submitted which may give the committee pause for thought.

They have been carefully reviewed by Matthew Hutson over at Psychology Today and we include a couple so you can see how this paradigm shift in medical thinking may affect future practice:

Napoleon Complex

Antecedents: Being short, male; having a French accent.

Symptoms: Power-seeking. Attempting to compensate for small stature through aggression, tall hats.

Notes: Despite widespread misconception, Napoleon Bonaparte of France was of average height for his time. He was actually compensating for almost imperceivably asymmetrical nostrils.

Neapolitan Complex (also known as Tripolar Disorder)

Antecedents: Being Italian; nearly drowning in a vat of frozen dairy dessert.

Symptoms: Having a light side, a dark side, and a sickeningly rosy side. Wanting to be everything to everyone. Chronic brain freeze.

There's plenty more in the full piece but on a more serious note, a short article in Psychiatric News reflects on one psychiatrist's attempt to communicate with the DSM-V committee while finding that actually, much of it has already been decided.

Link to humorous diagnostic suggestions at Psychology Today.
Link to Psychiatric Times piece on 'the DSM process'.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Women have come a long way in this world
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
As the decade progressed, more women joined the graduate school ranks of social, clinical and developmental psychology at UCLA. ...

Psychology Today (blog)
Libel in Fact: Agreement in the Fact Poll?
Psychology Today (blog)
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monograph, 7 (4, Whole No. 644), as well as in other studies. Sometimes this quality of alternate viewpoints is ...

Soapbox: Lessons from golf's level playing field
Financial Times
Research in developmental psychology shows that successful individuals do not avoid failure better than their non-successful counterparts; they cope with it ...

Recently arrived in the mail: an advance copy of Jan Freeman's

Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The celebrated cynic's language peeves deciphered, appraised, and annotated for 21st-century readers [NY: Walker & Company, publication date November 19]

(The subtitle of Bierce's 1909 booklet is A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, which should give you an idea of the tone of the thing.) Jan takes on WIR, item by item, with extensive annotations for each item, looking at the background for the proscription (in many cases its later history as well), trying to work out Bierce's motivation for it, and assessing the state of actual usage.

Jan wears her scholarship lightly, but it's considerable. In particular, she gives a lot of 19th-century (and sometimes 18th-century) background for Bierce's usage advice, and her discussions of usage and judgments on it are illuminating. All this in her usual commonsensical and often entertaining voice (p. 78, on Bierce on fix 'repair, prepare', which he reviled: "This is just loony.").

There are some themes that run through the book. Bierce was committed to a strong version of One Right Way with respect to word meanings; again and again, he insisted that expressions should be used only in what he believed to be their original meanings, and again and again he rejected extended and metaphorical senses of items, admitting only literal senses. (See, for instance, the discussion of dilapidated on p. 58.) He also defended what he took to be elite usages; he detested vernacular variants, and he had a special animus against expressions with a whiff of business and commerce ("trade") about them.

Some of his peeves — expressed in High Curmudgeon — were conventional ones at the time, but many were eccentric to the point of idiosyncrasy, and on these the Bierce-Freeman exchanges are especially delightful.

(And the back cover has fine blurbs from Steve Pinker, Erin McKean, Barbara Wallraff, and this parish's Geoff Pullum.)

Phone scammers target grandparents
Paragould Daily Press
An associate professor of developmental psychology at Arkansas State University described the Barnum Effect on Friday as the tendency for people to believe ...

SMA takes new design, holds 50% market share
Vanguard
Dr. Peter Willatts, Senior Lecturer, Developmental Psychology in the School of Psychology, University of Dundee, Scotland, Guest Speaker, ...

Weasel-speak, as featured in today's Tank McNamara:

There's clearly money in it — and quite a bit of training material out there.

The latest edition of the Journal of Neuroscience has a fantastic collection of articles by leading neuroscientists who look back on the last 40 years of discoveries in brain research.

The collection is to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Society for Neuroscience. As the articles make clear, the last four decades have seen a huge expansion in our knowledge of how the brain works and the Society asked leading lights in the field to reflect on this scientific revolution.

Memory and Brain Systems: 1969–2009 by Larry R. Squire [link]

Neurotransmitters, Receptors, and Second Messengers Galore in 40 Years by Solomon H. Snyder [link]

Four Decades of Neurodegenerative Disease Research: How Far We Have Come! by Anne B. Young [link]

A Paradigm Shift in Functional Brain Imaging by Marcus E. Raichle [link]

The Development of Developmental Neuroscience by Carol Mason [link]

The Biology of Memory: A Forty-Year Perspective by Eric R. Kandel [link]

Strictly speaking, they're not all retrospectives. For example, while Larry Squire gives a whistle-stop tour through the last 40 years of the cognitive neuroscience of memory (and you'll probably not read a better brief article in this area), Marcus Raichle takes the opportunity to look forward and is clearly enthusiastic about the 'default network' which he is co-credited with discovering.

They're all academic articles, so are not the most accessible if you're not familiar with the scientific literature, but as brief guides to some of the major areas of neuroscience they're fantastic and freely available online.

The new Freakonomics book is about to come out (called Super Freakonomics, natch), and Marginal Revolution thinks it's great: "a more than worthy sequel, a super sequel you might say." So does Bryan Caplan at econlog: "Overall, it's better than the original." Time Magazine thinks it's "very good — jauntier and more assured than their first".

But not everyone is convinced: negative voices include Ezra Klein, "The Shoddy Statistics of Super Freakonomics", WaPo, 10/16/2009; Matt Yglesias, "Journalistic Malpractice From Leavitt [sic] and Dubner", 10/16/2009; Bradford Plumer, "Does 'Superfreakonomics' Need A Do-Over?", 10/16/2009; Andrew Sullivan, "Not So Super Freak", 10/17/2009.

Ezra Klein sums up the general complaint: "The problem with Super Freakonomics is it prefers an interesting story to an accurate one." Specific points of contention include a shaky statistical argument in favor of drunk driving (they claim that it's safer than drunk walking), and an allegedly superficial and misinformed treatment of climate change.

I'll withhold judgment until I've read the book. But based on my experience with one particular story featured several times in Freakonomics columns over the past few years, Ezra Klein's evaluation rings true to me.

A few days ago, the NYT Freakonomics column featured (my Penn colleague) Justin Wolfers defending a study first promoted by Freakonomics in 2007 ("Nickled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich", 10/14/2009).  For my own take on the associated media circus, with an excessive number of additional links, see "The Happiness Gap is back is back is back is back", 9/20/2009. Summing it all up, at the risk of oversimplification, a 2007 academic study by Stevenson & Wolfers argued that

By most objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to male happiness. […] Our findings raise provocative questions about the contribution of the women's movement to women's welfare and about the legitimacy of using subjective well-being to assess broad social changes.

It's possible to quibble about how meaningful the female-happiness changes are — they're small relative to the yearly noise in the General Social Survey, for example — but I gather that Stevenson and Wolfers'  questions are plausible ones for those who think that economic "utility" ought to translate straightforwardly into "happiness".  However, from the beginning, the mass media presented these "happiness gap" results in a spectacularly misleading way.  And by "mass media" I don't mean Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Rather, the guilty parties have included David Leonhardt, Steven Levitt, Ross Douthat, Maureen Dowd, and Arianna Huffington.

Barbara Ehrenreich accuses Arianna Huffington of reviving the Happiness Gap circus in order to use her site as "a launching pad for a new book by the prolific management consultant Marcus Buckingham", Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently, by "[giving] Buckingham a column in which to continue his marketing campaign".

This shouldn't surprise us, it seems to me. Overall, the promotion of interesting stories in preference to accurate ones is always in the immediate economic self-interest of the promoter. It's interesting stories, not accurate ones, that pump up ratings for Beck and Limbaugh.  But it's also interesting stories that bring readers to The Huffington Post and to Maureen Dowd's column, and it's interesting stories that sell copies of Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics.  In this respect, Levitt and Dubner are exactly like Beck and Limbaugh.

We might call this the Pundit's Dilemma — a game, like the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which the player's best move always seems to be to take the low road, and in which the aggregate welfare of the community always seems fated to fall. And this isn't just a game for pundits. Scientists face similar choices every day, in deciding whether to over-sell their results, or for that matter to manufacture results for optimal appeal.

In the end, scientists usually over-interpret only a little, and rarely cheat, because the penalties for being caught are extreme.  As a result, in an iterated version of the game, it's generally better to play it fairly straight.  Pundits (and regular journalists) also play an iterated version of this game — but empirical observation suggests that the penalties for many forms of bad behavior are too small and uncertain to have much effect. Certainly, the reputational effects of mere sensationalism and exaggeration seem to be negligible.

[For an interesting take on the history of the freako trend within academic economics itself, see Noam Schieber, "Freaks and Geeks; How Freakonomics is ruining the dismal science" TNR, 4/2/2007.]

[Update — Andrew Gelman, who also hasn't read the book, strikes me as right on the money in this pre-review:

The interesting question to me is why is it that "pissing off liberals" is delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas "pissing off conservatives" is boring and earnest? Based on their writings in Freakonomics 1 and their blog, Levitt and Dubner strike me as open-minded political pragmatists, so it's not that I think they have a big political agenda.

It's possible to write things that piss off conservatives while still retaining an edgy, transgressive feeling–take a look at Nate Silver (or, to take a less analytical example, Michael Moore)–but I think it's a little harder to do. Flouting liberal conventional wisdom is funner somehow. As I said, I think there's something more general going on here but I don't feel I have a full picture of this phenomenon.

Freakonomics 1 was based on Levitt's previous research, which was all over the map, whereas in Freakonomics 2 the authors got to choose ahead of time what to be counterintuitive about. […]

If they're not careful, this book will send them from the "popular science" to the "political punditry" category, with no turning back. Perhaps Freakonomics 3 will have a chapter explaining why evolution is just a theory, not actually proven at all?

I guess that it tells us something about the Zeitgeist that there's apparently no space for a left-wing Freakonomist.  And maybe it tells us something about me, that I was taken slightly aback by Andrew's suggestion that Freakonomics had not been "political punditry" all along… (An update from Andrew is here.)]

[Update #2 — Paul Krugman has three posts on the global-warming chapter: "A counterintuitive train wreck"; "Superfreakonomics on climate, part 1"; and "Weitzman in context". His verdict, in three words: "snarky, contrarian games". Or at greater length:

… what it looks like is that Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness. For a long time, there’s been an accepted way for commentators on politics and to some extent economics to distinguish themselves: by shocking the bourgeoisie, in ways that of course aren’t really dangerous. Ann Coulter is making sense! Bush is good for the environment! You get the idea.

Clever snark like this can get you a long way in career terms — but the trick is knowing when to stop.

And here's an in-depth discussion of the scientific and rhetorical issues by Joseph Romm, who is inspired to coin a new acronym:

In olden days, we called such folks Artistes of Bullshit, but now I’m gonna call them F.A.K.E.R.s — Famous “Authorities” whose Knowledge (of climate) is Extremely Rudimentary [Error-riddled?  I'm still working on this acronym].

Another negative review of the climate stuff is here. I'm looking forward to some evaluations of the other chapters.]

[Update #3: Climate Progress on "It takes a village to debunk their anti-scientific nonsense, but why did they stop Amazon from allowing text searches?"; Brian Dupuis, "FAIL: Superfreakonomics", 10/17/2009; Brad Delong, "Six questions for Levitt and Dubner", 10/17/2009;  P. O'Neill, "Freaky Gurls", 10/18/2009 (critique of the prostitution chapter); Gavin Schmidt, "Why Levitt and Dubner like geo-engineering and why they are wrong", RealClimate, 10/18/2009.

And Stephen Dubner's response to critics: "Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear", NYT, 19=0/18/2009. He gives a lot of explanations, but doesn't seem to me to address the core criticisms. Brad Delong's (earlier) exchange of emails with Dubner is here. Nate Silver weighs in here.]

[Email from Andrew Gelman: "Things get interesting when a scholar steps over the line and moves into pundit territory.  All of a sudden the scholarly caution disappears.  Search my blog for John Yoo or Greg Mankiw, for example…"

Brad Delong writes "*Sigh* Last Post on Superfreakonomics, I Promise", and concludes with " a little unsolicited advice for Levitt and Dubner. If I were them, I would abjectly apologize".

And Paul Krugman ("Superfreakingmeta") suggests an answer to  Andrew Gelman's question about why pissing off liberals is fun while pissing off conservatives isn't:

Annoying conservatives is dangerous: they take names, hold grudges, and all too often find ways to take people who annoy them down. As a result, the Kewl Kids, as Digby calls them, tread very carefully when people on the right are concerned — and they snub anyone who breaks the unwritten rule and mocks those who must not be offended.

Annoying liberals, on the other hand, feels transgressive but has historically been safe. The rules may be changing (as Dubner and Levitt are in the process of finding out), but it’s been that way for a long time.

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber posted about "How SuperFreakonomics killed contrarianism". The discussion there reminded me of the role of Irwin, the secondary-school history teacher in Alan Bennett's play The History Boys, who teaches his students that in answering examination questions, “the wrong end of the stick is the right one”. In his memoir Untold Stories, Bennett describes his own discovery that the route to an Oxford scholarship was “the alternative journalism of a lowlier sort”, which attracts the interest of graders bored with mere competence by “turning a question on its head”.

Bennett describes his Finals at Oxford as “the last and most significant examination in my life, and it was in this examination that I cheated, just as I had cheated a few years before to get the scholarship that took me to Oxford in the first place.”

“I was not dishonest; I kept to the rules and didn’t crib, and nobody else would have called it cheating, then or now, but it has always seemed so to me. False pretences, anyway.”]

Science News has a brilliant special issue on the 'science of slumber' that tackles sleep disorders, the mental impact of sleep deprivation, how sleep differs across species and the still mysterious question of why we need to sleep.

I found the article on two seemingly straightforward sleep disorders, insomnia and narcolepsy, the most interesting. They seem straightforward because they appear as a lack and an excess of sleep, but as the piece makes clear, they are still quite mysterious.

Insomnia is particularly interesting because having trouble sleeping happens to everyone at some point, so in itself, it's not abnormal - meaning that research into what triggers it is unlikely to find anything striking.

Instead research has shifted to try and understand what prevents insomnia from resolving naturally so it becomes a chronic condition:

Sleeplessness may be brought on by traumatic events such as a death in the family, an illness such as cancer or anything else distressing, causing a person to lie awake at night with a racing mind. For a subset of people, though, insomnia has no prompting signal — a condition called primary insomnia.

Regardless of the trigger (or lack thereof), temporary insomnia has a nasty way of becoming a habit. Poor sleep habits can become ingrained. When trouble sleeping persists for three or four nights a week over several months, insomnia is considered chronic.

It may turn out that untangling the prompting signals of insomnia, as many sleep researchers attempt, is a fool’s errand, says Michael Perlis, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program in Philadelphia. “The whole zeitgeist has changed,” he says. Most sleep researchers now agree that “once insomnia goes chronic, it stays that way,” regardless of the prompting signal, Perlis says. So rather than focusing on the immediate trigger for insomnia, many scientists are trying to figure out why it becomes chronic and how to prevent that from happening.

I also liked the short piece that briefly compares the amount of type of sleep between lots of different animals. It seems dolphins don't have REM sleep. I wonder if that means that they lack or have very limited dreams?

Anyway, a great collection of articles and all freely available online.

Link to SciNews 'Science of Slumber' collection.

Surprising insights from the social sciences
Boston Globe
Honesty and Deception as a Function of Strategic Self-Interest,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (forthcoming). HAVE YOU EVER noticed that some ...

Ellis Weiner has a very funny "Shouts and Murmurs" feature in The New Yorker this week (October 19): it's an imagined memo from a marketing assistant at an understaffed publishing company, laying out a marketing plan for a new book. Those who have published books and filled out author's marketing questionnaires will smirk at slight exaggerations of things they actually recall reading ("We can send you a list of bookstores in your area once you fill out the My Local Bookstores list on your Author's Questionnaire"); but there is worse to come.

This marketing department is into viral marketing. The author has had a Facebook account set up for him, and is advised to start a personal blog and feed its content to everyone he knows:

We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click "Endless," and under "Contacts" just list everyone you've ever met… [M]ake sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent.

Pure gibberish, but cleverly suggestive of the sort of real geekspeak that makes you feel you have stumbled in on a newly evolved language, related to your own but not nearly closely enough. Or stayed away from the computer support staff for too many months and then stopped by to find that the "software solutions" they are now supporting are so alien that you don't even know what problems they are supposed to be the solutions to…

Michael Quinion reports in his latest World Wide Words (#661, October 17):

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE TWINK  It's amazing what you can learn from e-mail error messages. The issue last week was blocked by one site in the UK because it had a rude word in the message body. Do you recall reading any rude words? I don't remember writing any. It transpired that the offending "word" was in the title of a nursery rhyme I listed: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The filtering system spotted the first five letters of the first word and pounced. I had to look it up: TWINK is gay slang (I quote Wikipedia) for "a young or young-looking gay man (usually white and in his late teens or early twenties) with a slender build, little or no body hair, and no facial hair."

From the Wikipedia entry, it's hard to see why anyone should treat twink as a rude word. In current gay slang, it labels one of a number of recognized "types" of gay men: twink, bear, clone, prep(py), leatherman, queen, jock, etc. Each is associated with a stereotype involving physical appearance, attitudes, and presentation of self, through dress, bearing, gesture, speech, and so on; there is a weak, but only a weak, association with preferences for sex acts and roles. The set of types is not a taxonomy of gay men; a great many gay men don't fall clearly within one of the types.

Within the world of gay men, the labels are taken seriously as social identifiers, but as is common with labels associated with social stereotypes, they're often used in a mildly mocking (even self-mocking) fashion.

But things are more complex than that.

Believe it or not, the OED (additions series 1993) has an entry for uses of twink, and twinkie as well, with reference to gay men. The etymology of twink is uncertain, though the OED hesitantly suggests a relationship to twink 'twinkling', and it notes a popular association of twinkie, and so twink as well, with the snack cake Twinkie (the OED doesn't go so far as to record jocular references to twink(ie)s as being, or getting, filled with cream).

Uses of twink(ie) with reference to gay men are fairly recent. The OED's first cite for twink is from 1963, but it's in an American Speech article reporting on word uses, so that the word surely has an earlier history. The first cite for twinkie is from 1980, again in a report on usage, this time in Maledicta.

The earliest uses are (mildly or strongly) derogatory, and seem to come mostly from straight people. The American Speech article glosses twink as 'an effeminate young man, a sissy', and gives it in the list of alternatives

pansy-ass, petunia, punk, swish, weenie

Eventually, we get to Armistead Maupin, a gay man, using twink non-derogatorily, as a label for a gay male "type". From More Tales of the City (1980:85):

I found this gorgeous twink carpenter in the Mission.

The OED glosses twinkie as 'a male homosexual, an effeminate young man; also, a child or youth regarded as an object of homosexual desire'. The cites are all at least mildly derogatory in tone, though by 1988 we get an American Speech article in which twinkie and clone refer to gay male "types".

NOAD2 lacks twink, and, like the OED, treats twinkie as a general term for 'a gay or effeminate man', but adds a more specific (perhaps too specific) gloss describing a "type":

a young gay male who is meticulous about his dress, hair, weight, and other aspects of his personal appearance

What's new in NOAD2 is a usage label, "informal offensive"; the OED merely labels twink and twinkie as "U.S. slang".

These dictionaries don't distinguish out-group and in-group use, but that's clearly significant. There's also variation in in-group uses; as is usually the case with social labels (and categories), attitudes towards the words (and the referents) differ from person to person. Here's a site (with descriptions of gay slang) that makes both of these points:

Twinkie or its more common abbreviation twink, are used as generic derogatory terms to describe a weak or effeminate male. In gay slang, twink is a term that describes a young or young-looking male, usually of slender build, only slightly muscular, with little to no body hair (often referred to as a "swimmer's build"). Often they are described as bleach-blond. To many gay men, the term is pejorative and implies shallowness and stupidity. There are also allusions to the Twinkie pastry, due to the analogy of the creme filling to a young gay male. Twinks are typically contrasted with bears. (link)

Note that twink(ie) picks up aspects of the "dumb blonde" stereotype.

None of this, of course, would justify filtering out e-mail that has the word twinkle in it, on the grounds that twink is a "rude word". Even if twink counts as taboo vocabulary in current English — a very dubious claim, it seems to me — the automated searching that picks out twinkle as a problematic word is inexcusable (another instance of the baleful Scunthorpe effect).

Yesterday in the Journal of Biology, the editor introduced a new series (Miranda Robertson, "Ockham's broom"):

Although it is increasingly difficult to gauge what people can be expected to know, it is probably safe to assume that most readers are familiar with Ockham’s razor – roughly, the principle whereby gratuitous suppositions are shaved from the interpretation of facts – enunciated by a Franciscan monk, William of Ockham, in the fourteenth century. Ockham's broom is a somewhat more recent conceit, attributable to Sydney Brenner, and embodies the principle whereby inconvenient facts are swept under the carpet in the interests of a clear interpretation of a messy reality. (Or, some – possibly including Sydney Brenner – might say, in order to generate a publishable paper.)

Robertson points out that sweeping things under the rug is often a necessary condition for scientific progress:

While Ockham's razor clearly has an established important and honourable place in the philosophy and practice of science, there is, despite its somewhat pejorative connotations, an honourable place for the broom as well. Biology, as many have pointed out, is untidy and accidental, and it is arguably unlikely that all the facts can be accounted for early in the investigation of any given biological phenomenon. For example, if only Charles Darwin had swept under the carpet the variation he faithfully recorded in the ratios of inherited traits in his primulas, as Mendel did with his peas, we might be talking of Darwinian inheritance and not Mendelian (see [3]). Clearly, though, it takes some special sophistication, or intuition, to judge what to ignore.

Her reference [3], by the way, is Jonathan C Howard, "Why didn't Darwin discover Mendel's laws?", J Biol 8:15, 2009.  Howard argues that  Darwin failed to discover the "laws" of (Mendelian) inheritance because he was unwilling to sweep under the rug the complexities that he observed in his genetic experiments — many of which involved, like most genetic phenomena, non-Mendelian inheritance. Meanwhile, it's worth noting that R.A. Fisher ("Has Mendel's work been rediscovered?" Ann. Sci. 1:115-137, 1936) made a detailed argument that Mendel's results must have been fraudulent (or, as Fisher quaintly put it, "are the product of some process of sophistication"), given how close they were to the expected values of the random process involved even in "mendelian" inheritance. Here's one of the summary tables from Fisher's argument:

As Fisher explained, "Fictitious data can seldom survive a careful scrutiny, and, since most men underestimate the frequency of large deviations arising by chance, such data may be expected generally to agree more closely with expectation than genuine data would. "

Arthur Koestler (in The Case of the Midwife Toad, 1971) suggested that perhaps Mendel explained his theories to the monks who were tasked with carrying out the experiments, and they simply reported back the results they understood him to want, rather than actually carrying out the onerous task of hand-pollinating numerous plants according to a complicated schedule.

Sydney Brenner's comment, I've heard, was that Mendel "didn't invent the numbers, but he certainly knew when to stop counting". I haven't been able to find out where that quote comes from either, so perhaps it's from the same source as Ockham's broom.

Meanwhile, though I've failed to find either of those citations, reading through Brenner's old "Loose Ends" columns at Current Biology led me to some other gems, such as his innovative solutions to various problems of "Academic dynamics", including the Pharaoh Configuration:

This is a scheme which offers a solution to the fundamental problem of all scientific departments, which is how to get rid of the old — both people and science — and create space and resources for the young and the new. Our elegant answer is to treat all scientists as Pharaohs; thus, when a senior scientist retires, he and all of his research associates, post-docs, students and technicians are sacrificed and buried in a specially constructed pyramid, together with all of their equipment to enable them to continue research in the after Life Sciences. At one blow, space would have been created for a new professor and a new group, without any arguments and with none of the rancour that usually accompanies such events.

It is obvious that this needs to be carried out only once. Thereafter, all that would be required at the appropriate time is for two men to arrive, equipped with surveying equipment and tape measures. A new pyramid would be laid out in plain sight of the present occupants, who would instantly vacate the premises.

Letter: Speaker answered question about homosexuality
East Oregonian
The study was published in "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology." (2) The father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, said "There is no third sex. ...

A note from Bob Ladd:

Yesterday I received a complimentary copy of Intelligent Life, the Economist's foray into general magazine publishing.  One of the feature articles was entitled "The last days of the polymath?", with profiles of a few people who "know a lot about a lot" and ruminations on the age of specialisation.  The article includes a little box entitled "Living polymaths: who qualifies?", which lists about twenty people who were regarded as qualifying for that title in an informal office poll of staffers at the Economist and Intelligent Life.  The list includes a number of names that LL readers might have been expected to come up with, including Jared Diamond, Douglas Hofstadter, and Noam Chomsky (no Daniel Dennett, though).

For each person listed, the box shows their name, age, and nationality, as well as up to five "strings" (presumably as in "another string to his bow").  The strings are ordered by their importance in the individual's intellectual and career profile - so Hofstadter is listed as a mathematician first, then an aesthetic theorist, then an author.  Here, too, not a lot of surprises.

However, LL readers may be interested to learn of Chomsky's list of "strings".  He's listed first as a philosopher, second as a cognitive scientist, third as a political activist, and fourth as an author.  What, you might well ask, happened to "linguist"?  The fact that the Economist feels it appropriate to label Chomsky a philosopher is about as clear an indication as one could ask for that linguistics as a field remains invisible.

New York Times
Leslie Sutton-Smith, Mark Blackman
New York Times
The bride's father retired as a professor of developmental psychology at Penn; his books include “The Ambiguity of Play.” The bridegroom, 52, is a director ...

Albert J. Tobin
Mirror
He specialized in Nuero-Developmental Psychology, focusing on developmentally challenged children. Albert was the psychologist for the South Lyon Public ...