From high-profile trials to popular TV shows, numerous events have imprinted on our collective psyche the fact that DNA evidence can be used to solve crimes. But the technique has extensive uses that go far beyond forensic science. You may even owe tonight’s dinner, in part, to DNA fingerprinting.

My curiosity about this subject was piqued when I came across a recent newspaper report that talked about how DNA fingerprinting is being used in India to identify different varieties of basmati rice. The report mentioned a hotel that buys around 200 tons of basmati rice per year. The hotel’s chefs found it difficult to cook the rice properly because each type of basmati rice has different soaking times and cooking properties. A visual inspection is of limited use because all the varieties look nearly the same. They decided to solve this problem by working with the rice’s producer to certify each bag of rice using DNA fingerprinting; the chefs then use the information to help them determine the proper cooking parameters. [Article Continues…]

On our way home from the theater after seeing the most recent X-Men movie, Morgen and I kept finding ourselves surrounded by unusually noisy people—in the lobby, on the street corner, in the subway station. We were attempting to discuss the film, but we could barely hear each other. Every time this happened, I tried to move away to a quieter spot; noise has its place, but when I’m trying to think or carry on a conversation, I prefer relative silence. As we reviewed some of the fictional mutants and their super powers, I said, “If I were a mutant, they’d call me Silento. My super power would be the ability to create a large bubble of silence all around me.” In my book, that beats being able to throw balls of flame or have metal claws pop out of my hands.

I have always been baffled at the fact that people so frequently go to noisy parties, bars, clubs, and restaurants with the apparent intention of getting to know each other or spend quality time together. How is that supposed to work? How can you have a worthwhile conversation with someone when you must yell over loud music, not to mention all those other people yelling their own conversations at each other? Perhaps my telepathic powers are insufficiently developed, but as an ordinary human, it seems more sensible to me that if you want to talk to someone, you’d go to a place where you can hear and be heard. So I was delighted to learn of a relatively recent phenomenon sweeping the world: quiet parties, where the only rule is “no talking.” [Article Continues…]

London has hundreds of popular tourist spots that attract millions of visitors each year. I admit, I did the whole Big Ben to Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace to Tower of London circuit and I enjoyed it. I loved being able to walk out of the hotel and onto a street that contained a 500-year-old house right down the block from a modern tube station and an Indian curry restaurant. But the intricacies of this city, like any city, are often found off the beaten path.

Both my visits to London have included a hike up Highgate Hill and then a walk down the small, winding lane leading to Highgate Cemetery. Many are familiar with London’s abbeys and churchyards, but the real appeal of dead London is Highgate, often referred to as a Victorian Valhalla. [Article Continues…]

Leaving aside religious symbology and questions of historical accuracy, The Da Vinci Code is just the latest in a long line of stories that follow roughly the same plot: someone discovers a series of mysterious clues (often with a code or a map thrown in) that supposedly lead to an absurdly valuable treasure. The hero undertakes a perilous adventure, outwitting villains who want to steal the treasure (as well as, perhaps, guardians who want to protect it), and eventually succeeds—only to discover that the treasure was not quite as it had been imagined after all. From Raiders of the Lost Ark to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to National Treasure, I’ve seen variations on this basic outline countless times. Few subjects ignite the imagination of the book-buying and filmgoing public as reliably as that of hidden treasure.

In the real world, stories of codes leading to buried treasure rarely have tidy endings—and indeed, even separating fact from fiction can be nearly impossible. Such is the case with one of the most intriguing cryptographic puzzles in modern history: a series of encrypted messages dating from the 19th century known as the Beale ciphers. These messages might lead to a hidden stash of gold, silver, and jewels worth tens of millions of dollars, they might be genuine directions to a treasure that no longer exists, they might be a hoax or a joke, or, intriguingly, they might be a misunderstood charity fundraising gimmick. But whether or not the codes lead to treasure, what captivates and infuriates cryptographers is that despite more than a century’s worth of effort by the best minds and machines, the most important parts of the messages remain stubbornly opaque. [Article Continues…]

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m a bit of a French food snob. Before Morgen and I went to France the first time, we did our homework—reading up on lots of French dishes, particularly regional specialties. The list of things we had to try included authentic bouillabaisse, an elaborate fish stew seasoned with saffron. Unfortunately, what constitutes “authentic” is a matter of strenuous debate among French chefs; there are many, many different recipes. But since the dish was invented in Marseille, a large Mediterranean port city, we decided we’d define “authentic” as “whatever they served us in Marseille.”

Based on what I’d read, I didn’t have much interest in Marseille apart from its food, and our schedule was tight. Our itinerary called for us to take an overnight train there from Paris and then pick up a rental car so that we could tool around Provence for a while. We’d have, at most, a few hours in the city, during which time we had just one task to accomplish. Our plan was to get in, get some bouillabaisse, and get out. After we got our car, we drove to the old part of the city where we’d heard we could find some great restaurants. Since it was still before lunchtime and they weren’t open yet, we walked around for about an hour, studying menus and building up an appetite. In the end, we couldn’t figure out which restaurant was the most authentic-looking, so we picked one at random. The waitress offered us menus, but we didn’t need them—we were on a mission. We dutifully ordered bouillabaisse for two, which turned out to be about five times as much as we could eat. But it was unbelievably good—a truly profound experience that made our visit to the city more than worthwhile. Ever since then, the smell of saffron has taken me back to that restaurant in Marseille. [Article Continues…]

Thank God—or, at least, the Great Prophet Zarquon—for Douglas Adams. Although he wrote primarily to entertain, he was surely one of the Smartest People of All Time, and I can’t even begin to imagine how many fascinating topics I never would have known anything about had Adams not mentioned them in his books in his offhandedly humorous way. Endangered species were one of Adams’s biggest causes, and in addition to co-writing the nonfictional Last Chance to See, he dropped comments about numerous animals in his novels. In fact, it was in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency that I first encountered the term coelacanth; a time-traveling character was lamenting the fact that his attempt to rescue this prehistoric fish had inadvertently (and indirectly) led to the extinction of the dodo.

Time Traveler
The coelacanth is best known for its astonishing “undeadness”; the world’s scientists believed that it had been extinct for about 65 million years until a live specimen turned up in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. Prior to that time, the coelacanth was known only from fossils. Coelacanth fossils have been found that are some 400 million years old, which is considerably older than the dinosaurs; that the coelacanth should survive that long at all is quite surprising. The usual story is that around 65 million years ago, coelacanths disappeared from the fossil record for the simple reason that they stopped inhabiting areas where fossils were likely to form. That’s a rather unsatisfying answer, if you ask me, because it doesn’t explain how these large fish—some weighing as much as 95kg (over 200 lb.) and measuring nearly 2m (over 6 feet) long—should have gone entirely unnoticed by science for more than a century after coelacanth fossils were first identified. In any case, once scientists realized there were some still living, a search began for more. Another group of coelacanths was found off the islands of the Comoros (between Africa and Madagascar) in the early 1950s, and in 1997, a second coelacanth species was discovered near the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. [Article Continues…]

There are around 7,000 different languages spoken on Earth (many with numerous distinct dialects), not to mention a great many extinct languages with no living speakers. Every one of these languages is certainly interesting in its own way, though I’ve only called special attention to a few of them, such as Klingon, Bahasa Indonesia, Walloon, Pennsylvania Dutch, and Esperanto. The vast majority of natural languages (which would exclude the likes of Klingon and Esperanto) are related historically to numerous other languages. English is an obvious example, with a huge number of vocabulary words coming from Latin, Greek, Italian, German, and pretty much everywhere else. You can plot out how languages branch out from a common source and become more and more diverse. English and about 400 other languages form a “tree” known as the Indo-European language family. All the languages in this family’s 12 distinct branches are thought to have developed from a single hypothetical source language, dubbed “Proto-Indo-European.” Most of the world’s other languages similarly appear as part of a large family.

Every once in a while, though, linguists encounter a language that doesn’t seem to fit into any of the families. That is, when you analyze its vocabulary, sentence structure, and other characteristics, there’s no clear proof that it’s historically related to any other living language. It’s as though the language simply appeared out of nowhere thousands of years ago. Such languages are called language isolates, and about 100 of them are known to exist. Although some of these (including Japanese and Korean) have a huge number of speakers, most are spoken by much smaller groups of people—sometimes, but not always, geographically isolated groups. But what’s really surprising is when you find a language isolate in a geographical area where all the other surrounding languages are part of a single family. Such is the case with Euskara, the language of the Basque people in northern Spain and southwestern France. [Article Continues…]

When someone refers to my hometown as “San Fran,” I really bristle. People who live in other parts of the world may think “San Francisco” has too many syllables, but locals don’t ever call it “San Fran.” Ever. And only in an effort to be intentionally gauche or ironic would a resident call it “Frisco.” That’s just wrong, and it immediately identifies anyone who says it as clueless. This judgment goes way, way back. A century and a half ago, by the emperor’s decree, calling the city “Frisco” was a high misdemeanor punishable by a $25 fine.

Today’s interesting “thing” is ostensibly a person, though in fact it’s more of a concept: the notion that someone could declare himself to be an emperor, and—without any force or intimidation—actually get an entire city to go along with the fantasy, at least superficially, for more than 20 years. I am speaking of one of San Francisco’s most colorful historical figures: Joshua A. Norton, a.k.a. His Imperial Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. [Article Continues…]

In high school, I read Tom Stoppard’s 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a hilarious take on the lives of two minor (and more or less interchangeable) characters from Hamlet. A lot of the dialog has to do with the philosophical question of destiny. At the beginning of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are tossing coins, and incredibly, 100 consecutive spins come up heads until a “lucky” toss finally comes up tails. This nicely illustrates the futility of the characters’ actions and also puts them squarely in some alternative reality—we all know that in the real world, coin tosses are random and couldn’t possibly come up heads 100 times in a row. We depend on this fact; otherwise, all the bets and disagreements that have been settled by this simple selection mechanism must be in doubt.

When I wrote about rock, paper, scissors tournaments, I made a passing reference to my favorite “binary random number generator,” a coin toss. A reader sent me a note saying that wasn’t quite accurate—coin tosses are not truly random. Talk about shaking the foundations of my faith. What insidious conspiracy could be behind this astonishing claim? Or could it simply be that a bunch of statisticians had entirely too much time on their hands? [Article Continues…]

It’s funny the way random little factoids stick in my head, even after many years. When I was in eighth grade, I did a report for my science class on Pascal’s Law, a description of the way fluids behave in a closed system (and the basis of all hydraulics, among other things). And in the course of researching that project I came across a tiny piece of information that blew my 13-year-old mind: the word fluid is not a synonym of liquid; a fluid can be a liquid or a gas. Really? I’ve been breathing a fluid all my life? I just couldn’t get over it. Neither could my friends—I thought my endless recitations of trivia made me look smarter, but they found it annoying.

Years later, I read a Star Trek novel in which the crew of the Enterprise encountered a race of humanoid beings who breathed a liquid; the book went to great lengths to describe what that experience was like for one of the humans who had to interact with them. Although this fictional liquid was compatible with human lungs, the psychological shock of breathing a liquid was pretty intense. Later still, the very same concept showed up in the 1989 film The Abyss. But hey, that’s all just science fiction, right? Amazingly enough, humans can indeed breathe certain very special liquids. [Article Continues…]

My experience may be exceptional, but I’ve found the several bee stings I’ve received over the years to be rather unpleasant—even after remembering my favorite things, I still felt pretty bad. So when a reader wrote to tell me about a treatment for such conditions as arthritis and multiple sclerosis (MS) that involves voluntarily stinging oneself with bees, I must admit I found the whole idea rather creepy and off-putting. Although this alternative therapy has not yet proven itself in widespread clinical trials, quite a few people swear by it, insisting that the benefits far outweigh the pain. And even some doctors are trying it with their patients. I feel obliged to insert the usual “don’t try this at home” and “your mileage may vary” disclaimers, but though the jury is officially still out, an increasing body of evidence suggests that there just may be something to this weird notion after all.

A Little Jab’ll Do Ya
Numerous poisons can—in small enough quantities and under the right conditions—produce beneficial effects. So it’s entirely plausible that the same is true of bee venom, or at least some of its components, even though its main purpose is to protect the bees by inflicting pain. Bee venom therapy is a subset of apitherapy, the medicinal use of any substances created by honeybees—including royal jelly and honey, each of which is already known to have some health benefits. Researchers have discovered a number of very interesting substances in bee venom—most prominently, melittin, a powerful anti-inflammatory agent. This gives some credence to the anecdotal reports that beekeepers who were stung repeatedly experienced a reduction in the pain and swelling of arthritis. [Article Continues…]

A couple of years ago, I began noticing that our home could use some brightening up, and I thought it might be a good idea to buy a few houseplants. But I’ve never done well with plants. I even managed to kill off several cacti, despite my best efforts. So I walked into a local plant store and asked what they had that could survive under my care. The owner assured me that African violets would be a safe choice. I said, “But no, really…flowers hate me. In fact, most plants run and hide when they see me coming.” But after listening to detailed instructions, I finally agreed that I could probably care for just this one small potted plant successfully. I found one with flowers just the right shade and took it home. Well, the good news is that the plant is still alive. The bad news is that its condition gives all new meaning to the expression “persistent vegetative state,” if you know what I mean. It hasn’t flowered in eons, some of its droopy leaves are a sickly shade of yellow, and it’s clearly hanging on simply to emphasize its ongoing contempt for me. My most sincere intentions notwithstanding, I just can’t seem to keep plants healthy.

When I saw pictures of a plant called Welwitschia mirabilis (also known by such names as “tree tumbo” or “onion of the desert”) it looked very much like it could have been a previously beautiful specimen that had the misfortune of spending a season or two in my yard. In other words, it looked pretty sick and ugly. But appearances, in this case, are deceiving. This incredibly odd and unattractive plant can thrive in extraordinarily inhospitable conditions—and that’s just the start. The tree tumbo is without a doubt one of the world’s oddest plants. [Article Continues…]

Although I like to think of myself as a multitalented “Renaissance man” of sorts, I must admit that when it comes to drawing and painting, I have absolutely no ability. I’m truly pitiful at Pictionary, and I couldn’t paint my way out of a paper bag. Or so I’ve always thought. Based on what I’ve been reading lately, I could probably produce some fantastic art from the inside of a very large paper bag, as long as it had a pinhole on one side and pretty bright light outside. All I’d have to do is trace the image projected by this primitive camera obscura. According to a controversial theory, this technique—or something very much like it—gave some world-renowned artists a little help as far back as 1420. Then again…maybe not. Getting to the bottom of this puzzle has been the consuming passion of quite a few artists, historians, and optical engineers over the past several years.

Without a Trace
Tracing over a projected image is a straightforward notion, but if you’ve ever tried it (as I have) you probably discovered that getting good results is not as easy as it sounds. The easy part is getting the proportions right. But lots of things in any image lack well-defined borders, and trying to make sense of textures and the effects of light and shadow while tracing something is quite a complex undertaking. If, instead of tracing, I were painting, the challenge would become even greater, as I’d have to carefully match gradations in color—and as soon as I applied a dark paint to the light surface, the image in that area would virtually disappear. All that to say: projection or no projection, producing a convincingly realistic drawing or painting takes a lot of skill and practice. So if it turned out that one of the great masters from centuries ago really did pull this off, I’d be no less impressed by the final product—and more impressed by the artist’s cleverness. [Article Continues…]

As a teenager, I never thought of myself as someone who had a problem with authority. I may not have liked what I was being told to do, and I may have complained, but it was not in my nature to say no. I had my first crisis of authority when I was 16. I was learning to drive, and I’d already failed my driving test—twice. (The first time, I couldn’t parallel park and I ran into a cone; the second time, I didn’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign.) After several more weeks of practicing and diligently studying the driver’s manual, I was taking my third and final test. If I failed that, I’d have to apply for a learner’s permit all over again and endure embarrassing months of being the only person my age without a license. So the pressure was on. With the examiner, a police officer, in the passenger’s seat and sweat on my brow, I carefully completed the entire course—and I thought I did well.

At the very end, the officer told me to pull over at a certain spot and park the car. And I had a moment of complete panic: the spot he’d indicated was just a few feet from a stop sign, and I remembered from the driver’s manual that it was illegal to park so close. Was this one last test? If I obeyed, I thought, I could be failed for breaking the law. So I hesitated and said, “Isn’t that too close to the stop sign?” The officer became furious and started berating me for my arrogance, reminding me that the manual said, “…unless directed otherwise by a uniformed officer of the law.” Tugging at his sleeve, he ranted, “What does this look like, my pajamas?” He went on and on until I was about ready to shrivel up and die, but in the end, he passed me anyway. [Article Continues…]

There’s an old joke that I’ve heard attributed, in one form or another, to numerous religious groups. It goes: “Why do Baptists (or Methodists, or Mennonites, or Jews, or whatever) prohibit premarital sex? Because it could lead to dancing.” The implication, obviously, is that the group’s taboo against dancing is so strong that it overshadows the moral principle that gave rise to it in the first place; dancing becomes not just a potential path to evil but an evil in and of itself. One of the theological views that sometimes motivates this position is that the body (or “flesh”) is inherently sinful or corrupt, and must be ruthlessly subjugated to the purer values of the spirit. This was certainly the view of the religious tradition in which I grew up. Any activity that even suggested carnal pleasure outside strictly delimited boundaries was an immoral concession to humanity’s fallen nature.

Although this sort of thinking may be an extreme example, it’s indicative of a broader and older cultural trend, which some people refer to as the “mind-body split.” Whether you trace this trend back to Cartesian dualism, the early days of Christianity, or some other source, it amounts to a belief that the body is somehow an ontologically separate entity from the mind (or “soul,” or “spirit”). Perhaps the two are even in competition or conflict with each other. Even if, as adults, we recognize that by implicitly accepting this split we’ve become disintegrated and unbalanced, it’s difficult to reprogram ourselves to recover that sense of being a single, unified whole. A practice called InterPlay exists to encourage that process by helping people to rediscover and express one of their most basic, primal needs: play. [Article Continues…]

From high-profile trials to popular TV shows, numerous events have imprinted on our collective psyche the fact that DNA evidence can be used to solve crimes. But the technique has extensive uses that go far beyond forensic science. You may even owe tonight’s dinner, in part, to DNA fingerprinting.

My curiosity about this subject was piqued when I came across a recent newspaper report that talked about how DNA fingerprinting is being used in India to identify different varieties of basmati rice. The report mentioned a hotel that buys around 200 tons of basmati rice per year. The hotel’s chefs found it difficult to cook the rice properly because each type of basmati rice has different soaking times and cooking properties. A visual inspection is of limited use because all the varieties look nearly the same. They decided to solve this problem by working with the rice’s producer to certify each bag of rice using DNA fingerprinting; the chefs then use the information to help them determine the proper cooking parameters. [Article Continues…]

On our way home from the theater after seeing the most recent X-Men movie, Morgen and I kept finding ourselves surrounded by unusually noisy people—in the lobby, on the street corner, in the subway station. We were attempting to discuss the film, but we could barely hear each other. Every time this happened, I tried to move away to a quieter spot; noise has its place, but when I’m trying to think or carry on a conversation, I prefer relative silence. As we reviewed some of the fictional mutants and their super powers, I said, “If I were a mutant, they’d call me Silento. My super power would be the ability to create a large bubble of silence all around me.” In my book, that beats being able to throw balls of flame or have metal claws pop out of my hands.

I have always been baffled at the fact that people so frequently go to noisy parties, bars, clubs, and restaurants with the apparent intention of getting to know each other or spend quality time together. How is that supposed to work? How can you have a worthwhile conversation with someone when you must yell over loud music, not to mention all those other people yelling their own conversations at each other? Perhaps my telepathic powers are insufficiently developed, but as an ordinary human, it seems more sensible to me that if you want to talk to someone, you’d go to a place where you can hear and be heard. So I was delighted to learn of a relatively recent phenomenon sweeping the world: quiet parties, where the only rule is “no talking.” [Article Continues…]

London has hundreds of popular tourist spots that attract millions of visitors each year. I admit, I did the whole Big Ben to Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace to Tower of London circuit and I enjoyed it. I loved being able to walk out of the hotel and onto a street that contained a 500-year-old house right down the block from a modern tube station and an Indian curry restaurant. But the intricacies of this city, like any city, are often found off the beaten path.

Both my visits to London have included a hike up Highgate Hill and then a walk down the small, winding lane leading to Highgate Cemetery. Many are familiar with London’s abbeys and churchyards, but the real appeal of dead London is Highgate, often referred to as a Victorian Valhalla. [Article Continues…]

Leaving aside religious symbology and questions of historical accuracy, The Da Vinci Code is just the latest in a long line of stories that follow roughly the same plot: someone discovers a series of mysterious clues (often with a code or a map thrown in) that supposedly lead to an absurdly valuable treasure. The hero undertakes a perilous adventure, outwitting villains who want to steal the treasure (as well as, perhaps, guardians who want to protect it), and eventually succeeds—only to discover that the treasure was not quite as it had been imagined after all. From Raiders of the Lost Ark to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to National Treasure, I’ve seen variations on this basic outline countless times. Few subjects ignite the imagination of the book-buying and filmgoing public as reliably as that of hidden treasure.

In the real world, stories of codes leading to buried treasure rarely have tidy endings—and indeed, even separating fact from fiction can be nearly impossible. Such is the case with one of the most intriguing cryptographic puzzles in modern history: a series of encrypted messages dating from the 19th century known as the Beale ciphers. These messages might lead to a hidden stash of gold, silver, and jewels worth tens of millions of dollars, they might be genuine directions to a treasure that no longer exists, they might be a hoax or a joke, or, intriguingly, they might be a misunderstood charity fundraising gimmick. But whether or not the codes lead to treasure, what captivates and infuriates cryptographers is that despite more than a century’s worth of effort by the best minds and machines, the most important parts of the messages remain stubbornly opaque. [Article Continues…]

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m a bit of a French food snob. Before Morgen and I went to France the first time, we did our homework—reading up on lots of French dishes, particularly regional specialties. The list of things we had to try included authentic bouillabaisse, an elaborate fish stew seasoned with saffron. Unfortunately, what constitutes “authentic” is a matter of strenuous debate among French chefs; there are many, many different recipes. But since the dish was invented in Marseille, a large Mediterranean port city, we decided we’d define “authentic” as “whatever they served us in Marseille.”

Based on what I’d read, I didn’t have much interest in Marseille apart from its food, and our schedule was tight. Our itinerary called for us to take an overnight train there from Paris and then pick up a rental car so that we could tool around Provence for a while. We’d have, at most, a few hours in the city, during which time we had just one task to accomplish. Our plan was to get in, get some bouillabaisse, and get out. After we got our car, we drove to the old part of the city where we’d heard we could find some great restaurants. Since it was still before lunchtime and they weren’t open yet, we walked around for about an hour, studying menus and building up an appetite. In the end, we couldn’t figure out which restaurant was the most authentic-looking, so we picked one at random. The waitress offered us menus, but we didn’t need them—we were on a mission. We dutifully ordered bouillabaisse for two, which turned out to be about five times as much as we could eat. But it was unbelievably good—a truly profound experience that made our visit to the city more than worthwhile. Ever since then, the smell of saffron has taken me back to that restaurant in Marseille. [Article Continues…]

Thank God—or, at least, the Great Prophet Zarquon—for Douglas Adams. Although he wrote primarily to entertain, he was surely one of the Smartest People of All Time, and I can’t even begin to imagine how many fascinating topics I never would have known anything about had Adams not mentioned them in his books in his offhandedly humorous way. Endangered species were one of Adams’s biggest causes, and in addition to co-writing the nonfictional Last Chance to See, he dropped comments about numerous animals in his novels. In fact, it was in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency that I first encountered the term coelacanth; a time-traveling character was lamenting the fact that his attempt to rescue this prehistoric fish had inadvertently (and indirectly) led to the extinction of the dodo.

Time Traveler
The coelacanth is best known for its astonishing “undeadness”; the world’s scientists believed that it had been extinct for about 65 million years until a live specimen turned up in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. Prior to that time, the coelacanth was known only from fossils. Coelacanth fossils have been found that are some 400 million years old, which is considerably older than the dinosaurs; that the coelacanth should survive that long at all is quite surprising. The usual story is that around 65 million years ago, coelacanths disappeared from the fossil record for the simple reason that they stopped inhabiting areas where fossils were likely to form. That’s a rather unsatisfying answer, if you ask me, because it doesn’t explain how these large fish—some weighing as much as 95kg (over 200 lb.) and measuring nearly 2m (over 6 feet) long—should have gone entirely unnoticed by science for more than a century after coelacanth fossils were first identified. In any case, once scientists realized there were some still living, a search began for more. Another group of coelacanths was found off the islands of the Comoros (between Africa and Madagascar) in the early 1950s, and in 1997, a second coelacanth species was discovered near the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. [Article Continues…]

There are around 7,000 different languages spoken on Earth (many with numerous distinct dialects), not to mention a great many extinct languages with no living speakers. Every one of these languages is certainly interesting in its own way, though I’ve only called special attention to a few of them, such as Klingon, Bahasa Indonesia, Walloon, Pennsylvania Dutch, and Esperanto. The vast majority of natural languages (which would exclude the likes of Klingon and Esperanto) are related historically to numerous other languages. English is an obvious example, with a huge number of vocabulary words coming from Latin, Greek, Italian, German, and pretty much everywhere else. You can plot out how languages branch out from a common source and become more and more diverse. English and about 400 other languages form a “tree” known as the Indo-European language family. All the languages in this family’s 12 distinct branches are thought to have developed from a single hypothetical source language, dubbed “Proto-Indo-European.” Most of the world’s other languages similarly appear as part of a large family.

Every once in a while, though, linguists encounter a language that doesn’t seem to fit into any of the families. That is, when you analyze its vocabulary, sentence structure, and other characteristics, there’s no clear proof that it’s historically related to any other living language. It’s as though the language simply appeared out of nowhere thousands of years ago. Such languages are called language isolates, and about 100 of them are known to exist. Although some of these (including Japanese and Korean) have a huge number of speakers, most are spoken by much smaller groups of people—sometimes, but not always, geographically isolated groups. But what’s really surprising is when you find a language isolate in a geographical area where all the other surrounding languages are part of a single family. Such is the case with Euskara, the language of the Basque people in northern Spain and southwestern France. [Article Continues…]

When someone refers to my hometown as “San Fran,” I really bristle. People who live in other parts of the world may think “San Francisco” has too many syllables, but locals don’t ever call it “San Fran.” Ever. And only in an effort to be intentionally gauche or ironic would a resident call it “Frisco.” That’s just wrong, and it immediately identifies anyone who says it as clueless. This judgment goes way, way back. A century and a half ago, by the emperor’s decree, calling the city “Frisco” was a high misdemeanor punishable by a $25 fine.

Today’s interesting “thing” is ostensibly a person, though in fact it’s more of a concept: the notion that someone could declare himself to be an emperor, and—without any force or intimidation—actually get an entire city to go along with the fantasy, at least superficially, for more than 20 years. I am speaking of one of San Francisco’s most colorful historical figures: Joshua A. Norton, a.k.a. His Imperial Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. [Article Continues…]

In high school, I read Tom Stoppard’s 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a hilarious take on the lives of two minor (and more or less interchangeable) characters from Hamlet. A lot of the dialog has to do with the philosophical question of destiny. At the beginning of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are tossing coins, and incredibly, 100 consecutive spins come up heads until a “lucky” toss finally comes up tails. This nicely illustrates the futility of the characters’ actions and also puts them squarely in some alternative reality—we all know that in the real world, coin tosses are random and couldn’t possibly come up heads 100 times in a row. We depend on this fact; otherwise, all the bets and disagreements that have been settled by this simple selection mechanism must be in doubt.

When I wrote about rock, paper, scissors tournaments, I made a passing reference to my favorite “binary random number generator,” a coin toss. A reader sent me a note saying that wasn’t quite accurate—coin tosses are not truly random. Talk about shaking the foundations of my faith. What insidious conspiracy could be behind this astonishing claim? Or could it simply be that a bunch of statisticians had entirely too much time on their hands? [Article Continues…]

It’s funny the way random little factoids stick in my head, even after many years. When I was in eighth grade, I did a report for my science class on Pascal’s Law, a description of the way fluids behave in a closed system (and the basis of all hydraulics, among other things). And in the course of researching that project I came across a tiny piece of information that blew my 13-year-old mind: the word fluid is not a synonym of liquid; a fluid can be a liquid or a gas. Really? I’ve been breathing a fluid all my life? I just couldn’t get over it. Neither could my friends—I thought my endless recitations of trivia made me look smarter, but they found it annoying.

Years later, I read a Star Trek novel in which the crew of the Enterprise encountered a race of humanoid beings who breathed a liquid; the book went to great lengths to describe what that experience was like for one of the humans who had to interact with them. Although this fictional liquid was compatible with human lungs, the psychological shock of breathing a liquid was pretty intense. Later still, the very same concept showed up in the 1989 film The Abyss. But hey, that’s all just science fiction, right? Amazingly enough, humans can indeed breathe certain very special liquids. [Article Continues…]

My experience may be exceptional, but I’ve found the several bee stings I’ve received over the years to be rather unpleasant—even after remembering my favorite things, I still felt pretty bad. So when a reader wrote to tell me about a treatment for such conditions as arthritis and multiple sclerosis (MS) that involves voluntarily stinging oneself with bees, I must admit I found the whole idea rather creepy and off-putting. Although this alternative therapy has not yet proven itself in widespread clinical trials, quite a few people swear by it, insisting that the benefits far outweigh the pain. And even some doctors are trying it with their patients. I feel obliged to insert the usual “don’t try this at home” and “your mileage may vary” disclaimers, but though the jury is officially still out, an increasing body of evidence suggests that there just may be something to this weird notion after all.

A Little Jab’ll Do Ya
Numerous poisons can—in small enough quantities and under the right conditions—produce beneficial effects. So it’s entirely plausible that the same is true of bee venom, or at least some of its components, even though its main purpose is to protect the bees by inflicting pain. Bee venom therapy is a subset of apitherapy, the medicinal use of any substances created by honeybees—including royal jelly and honey, each of which is already known to have some health benefits. Researchers have discovered a number of very interesting substances in bee venom—most prominently, melittin, a powerful anti-inflammatory agent. This gives some credence to the anecdotal reports that beekeepers who were stung repeatedly experienced a reduction in the pain and swelling of arthritis. [Article Continues…]

A couple of years ago, I began noticing that our home could use some brightening up, and I thought it might be a good idea to buy a few houseplants. But I’ve never done well with plants. I even managed to kill off several cacti, despite my best efforts. So I walked into a local plant store and asked what they had that could survive under my care. The owner assured me that African violets would be a safe choice. I said, “But no, really…flowers hate me. In fact, most plants run and hide when they see me coming.” But after listening to detailed instructions, I finally agreed that I could probably care for just this one small potted plant successfully. I found one with flowers just the right shade and took it home. Well, the good news is that the plant is still alive. The bad news is that its condition gives all new meaning to the expression “persistent vegetative state,” if you know what I mean. It hasn’t flowered in eons, some of its droopy leaves are a sickly shade of yellow, and it’s clearly hanging on simply to emphasize its ongoing contempt for me. My most sincere intentions notwithstanding, I just can’t seem to keep plants healthy.

When I saw pictures of a plant called Welwitschia mirabilis (also known by such names as “tree tumbo” or “onion of the desert”) it looked very much like it could have been a previously beautiful specimen that had the misfortune of spending a season or two in my yard. In other words, it looked pretty sick and ugly. But appearances, in this case, are deceiving. This incredibly odd and unattractive plant can thrive in extraordinarily inhospitable conditions—and that’s just the start. The tree tumbo is without a doubt one of the world’s oddest plants. [Article Continues…]

Although I like to think of myself as a multitalented “Renaissance man” of sorts, I must admit that when it comes to drawing and painting, I have absolutely no ability. I’m truly pitiful at Pictionary, and I couldn’t paint my way out of a paper bag. Or so I’ve always thought. Based on what I’ve been reading lately, I could probably produce some fantastic art from the inside of a very large paper bag, as long as it had a pinhole on one side and pretty bright light outside. All I’d have to do is trace the image projected by this primitive camera obscura. According to a controversial theory, this technique—or something very much like it—gave some world-renowned artists a little help as far back as 1420. Then again…maybe not. Getting to the bottom of this puzzle has been the consuming passion of quite a few artists, historians, and optical engineers over the past several years.

Without a Trace
Tracing over a projected image is a straightforward notion, but if you’ve ever tried it (as I have) you probably discovered that getting good results is not as easy as it sounds. The easy part is getting the proportions right. But lots of things in any image lack well-defined borders, and trying to make sense of textures and the effects of light and shadow while tracing something is quite a complex undertaking. If, instead of tracing, I were painting, the challenge would become even greater, as I’d have to carefully match gradations in color—and as soon as I applied a dark paint to the light surface, the image in that area would virtually disappear. All that to say: projection or no projection, producing a convincingly realistic drawing or painting takes a lot of skill and practice. So if it turned out that one of the great masters from centuries ago really did pull this off, I’d be no less impressed by the final product—and more impressed by the artist’s cleverness. [Article Continues…]

As a teenager, I never thought of myself as someone who had a problem with authority. I may not have liked what I was being told to do, and I may have complained, but it was not in my nature to say no. I had my first crisis of authority when I was 16. I was learning to drive, and I’d already failed my driving test—twice. (The first time, I couldn’t parallel park and I ran into a cone; the second time, I didn’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign.) After several more weeks of practicing and diligently studying the driver’s manual, I was taking my third and final test. If I failed that, I’d have to apply for a learner’s permit all over again and endure embarrassing months of being the only person my age without a license. So the pressure was on. With the examiner, a police officer, in the passenger’s seat and sweat on my brow, I carefully completed the entire course—and I thought I did well.

At the very end, the officer told me to pull over at a certain spot and park the car. And I had a moment of complete panic: the spot he’d indicated was just a few feet from a stop sign, and I remembered from the driver’s manual that it was illegal to park so close. Was this one last test? If I obeyed, I thought, I could be failed for breaking the law. So I hesitated and said, “Isn’t that too close to the stop sign?” The officer became furious and started berating me for my arrogance, reminding me that the manual said, “…unless directed otherwise by a uniformed officer of the law.” Tugging at his sleeve, he ranted, “What does this look like, my pajamas?” He went on and on until I was about ready to shrivel up and die, but in the end, he passed me anyway. [Article Continues…]

There’s an old joke that I’ve heard attributed, in one form or another, to numerous religious groups. It goes: “Why do Baptists (or Methodists, or Mennonites, or Jews, or whatever) prohibit premarital sex? Because it could lead to dancing.” The implication, obviously, is that the group’s taboo against dancing is so strong that it overshadows the moral principle that gave rise to it in the first place; dancing becomes not just a potential path to evil but an evil in and of itself. One of the theological views that sometimes motivates this position is that the body (or “flesh”) is inherently sinful or corrupt, and must be ruthlessly subjugated to the purer values of the spirit. This was certainly the view of the religious tradition in which I grew up. Any activity that even suggested carnal pleasure outside strictly delimited boundaries was an immoral concession to humanity’s fallen nature.

Although this sort of thinking may be an extreme example, it’s indicative of a broader and older cultural trend, which some people refer to as the “mind-body split.” Whether you trace this trend back to Cartesian dualism, the early days of Christianity, or some other source, it amounts to a belief that the body is somehow an ontologically separate entity from the mind (or “soul,” or “spirit”). Perhaps the two are even in competition or conflict with each other. Even if, as adults, we recognize that by implicitly accepting this split we’ve become disintegrated and unbalanced, it’s difficult to reprogram ourselves to recover that sense of being a single, unified whole. A practice called InterPlay exists to encourage that process by helping people to rediscover and express one of their most basic, primal needs: play. [Article Continues…]

From high-profile trials to popular TV shows, numerous events have imprinted on our collective psyche the fact that DNA evidence can be used to solve crimes. But the technique has extensive uses that go far beyond forensic science. You may even owe tonight’s dinner, in part, to DNA fingerprinting.

My curiosity about this subject was piqued when I came across a recent newspaper report that talked about how DNA fingerprinting is being used in India to identify different varieties of basmati rice. The report mentioned a hotel that buys around 200 tons of basmati rice per year. The hotel’s chefs found it difficult to cook the rice properly because each type of basmati rice has different soaking times and cooking properties. A visual inspection is of limited use because all the varieties look nearly the same. They decided to solve this problem by working with the rice’s producer to certify each bag of rice using DNA fingerprinting; the chefs then use the information to help them determine the proper cooking parameters. [Article Continues…]

On our way home from the theater after seeing the most recent X-Men movie, Morgen and I kept finding ourselves surrounded by unusually noisy people—in the lobby, on the street corner, in the subway station. We were attempting to discuss the film, but we could barely hear each other. Every time this happened, I tried to move away to a quieter spot; noise has its place, but when I’m trying to think or carry on a conversation, I prefer relative silence. As we reviewed some of the fictional mutants and their super powers, I said, “If I were a mutant, they’d call me Silento. My super power would be the ability to create a large bubble of silence all around me.” In my book, that beats being able to throw balls of flame or have metal claws pop out of my hands.

I have always been baffled at the fact that people so frequently go to noisy parties, bars, clubs, and restaurants with the apparent intention of getting to know each other or spend quality time together. How is that supposed to work? How can you have a worthwhile conversation with someone when you must yell over loud music, not to mention all those other people yelling their own conversations at each other? Perhaps my telepathic powers are insufficiently developed, but as an ordinary human, it seems more sensible to me that if you want to talk to someone, you’d go to a place where you can hear and be heard. So I was delighted to learn of a relatively recent phenomenon sweeping the world: quiet parties, where the only rule is “no talking.” [Article Continues…]

London has hundreds of popular tourist spots that attract millions of visitors each year. I admit, I did the whole Big Ben to Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace to Tower of London circuit and I enjoyed it. I loved being able to walk out of the hotel and onto a street that contained a 500-year-old house right down the block from a modern tube station and an Indian curry restaurant. But the intricacies of this city, like any city, are often found off the beaten path.

Both my visits to London have included a hike up Highgate Hill and then a walk down the small, winding lane leading to Highgate Cemetery. Many are familiar with London’s abbeys and churchyards, but the real appeal of dead London is Highgate, often referred to as a Victorian Valhalla. [Article Continues…]

Leaving aside religious symbology and questions of historical accuracy, The Da Vinci Code is just the latest in a long line of stories that follow roughly the same plot: someone discovers a series of mysterious clues (often with a code or a map thrown in) that supposedly lead to an absurdly valuable treasure. The hero undertakes a perilous adventure, outwitting villains who want to steal the treasure (as well as, perhaps, guardians who want to protect it), and eventually succeeds—only to discover that the treasure was not quite as it had been imagined after all. From Raiders of the Lost Ark to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to National Treasure, I’ve seen variations on this basic outline countless times. Few subjects ignite the imagination of the book-buying and filmgoing public as reliably as that of hidden treasure.

In the real world, stories of codes leading to buried treasure rarely have tidy endings—and indeed, even separating fact from fiction can be nearly impossible. Such is the case with one of the most intriguing cryptographic puzzles in modern history: a series of encrypted messages dating from the 19th century known as the Beale ciphers. These messages might lead to a hidden stash of gold, silver, and jewels worth tens of millions of dollars, they might be genuine directions to a treasure that no longer exists, they might be a hoax or a joke, or, intriguingly, they might be a misunderstood charity fundraising gimmick. But whether or not the codes lead to treasure, what captivates and infuriates cryptographers is that despite more than a century’s worth of effort by the best minds and machines, the most important parts of the messages remain stubbornly opaque. [Article Continues…]

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m a bit of a French food snob. Before Morgen and I went to France the first time, we did our homework—reading up on lots of French dishes, particularly regional specialties. The list of things we had to try included authentic bouillabaisse, an elaborate fish stew seasoned with saffron. Unfortunately, what constitutes “authentic” is a matter of strenuous debate among French chefs; there are many, many different recipes. But since the dish was invented in Marseille, a large Mediterranean port city, we decided we’d define “authentic” as “whatever they served us in Marseille.”

Based on what I’d read, I didn’t have much interest in Marseille apart from its food, and our schedule was tight. Our itinerary called for us to take an overnight train there from Paris and then pick up a rental car so that we could tool around Provence for a while. We’d have, at most, a few hours in the city, during which time we had just one task to accomplish. Our plan was to get in, get some bouillabaisse, and get out. After we got our car, we drove to the old part of the city where we’d heard we could find some great restaurants. Since it was still before lunchtime and they weren’t open yet, we walked around for about an hour, studying menus and building up an appetite. In the end, we couldn’t figure out which restaurant was the most authentic-looking, so we picked one at random. The waitress offered us menus, but we didn’t need them—we were on a mission. We dutifully ordered bouillabaisse for two, which turned out to be about five times as much as we could eat. But it was unbelievably good—a truly profound experience that made our visit to the city more than worthwhile. Ever since then, the smell of saffron has taken me back to that restaurant in Marseille. [Article Continues…]

Thank God—or, at least, the Great Prophet Zarquon—for Douglas Adams. Although he wrote primarily to entertain, he was surely one of the Smartest People of All Time, and I can’t even begin to imagine how many fascinating topics I never would have known anything about had Adams not mentioned them in his books in his offhandedly humorous way. Endangered species were one of Adams’s biggest causes, and in addition to co-writing the nonfictional Last Chance to See, he dropped comments about numerous animals in his novels. In fact, it was in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency that I first encountered the term coelacanth; a time-traveling character was lamenting the fact that his attempt to rescue this prehistoric fish had inadvertently (and indirectly) led to the extinction of the dodo.

Time Traveler
The coelacanth is best known for its astonishing “undeadness”; the world’s scientists believed that it had been extinct for about 65 million years until a live specimen turned up in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. Prior to that time, the coelacanth was known only from fossils. Coelacanth fossils have been found that are some 400 million years old, which is considerably older than the dinosaurs; that the coelacanth should survive that long at all is quite surprising. The usual story is that around 65 million years ago, coelacanths disappeared from the fossil record for the simple reason that they stopped inhabiting areas where fossils were likely to form. That’s a rather unsatisfying answer, if you ask me, because it doesn’t explain how these large fish—some weighing as much as 95kg (over 200 lb.) and measuring nearly 2m (over 6 feet) long—should have gone entirely unnoticed by science for more than a century after coelacanth fossils were first identified. In any case, once scientists realized there were some still living, a search began for more. Another group of coelacanths was found off the islands of the Comoros (between Africa and Madagascar) in the early 1950s, and in 1997, a second coelacanth species was discovered near the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. [Article Continues…]

There are around 7,000 different languages spoken on Earth (many with numerous distinct dialects), not to mention a great many extinct languages with no living speakers. Every one of these languages is certainly interesting in its own way, though I’ve only called special attention to a few of them, such as Klingon, Bahasa Indonesia, Walloon, Pennsylvania Dutch, and Esperanto. The vast majority of natural languages (which would exclude the likes of Klingon and Esperanto) are related historically to numerous other languages. English is an obvious example, with a huge number of vocabulary words coming from Latin, Greek, Italian, German, and pretty much everywhere else. You can plot out how languages branch out from a common source and become more and more diverse. English and about 400 other languages form a “tree” known as the Indo-European language family. All the languages in this family’s 12 distinct branches are thought to have developed from a single hypothetical source language, dubbed “Proto-Indo-European.” Most of the world’s other languages similarly appear as part of a large family.

Every once in a while, though, linguists encounter a language that doesn’t seem to fit into any of the families. That is, when you analyze its vocabulary, sentence structure, and other characteristics, there’s no clear proof that it’s historically related to any other living language. It’s as though the language simply appeared out of nowhere thousands of years ago. Such languages are called language isolates, and about 100 of them are known to exist. Although some of these (including Japanese and Korean) have a huge number of speakers, most are spoken by much smaller groups of people—sometimes, but not always, geographically isolated groups. But what’s really surprising is when you find a language isolate in a geographical area where all the other surrounding languages are part of a single family. Such is the case with Euskara, the language of the Basque people in northern Spain and southwestern France. [Article Continues…]

When someone refers to my hometown as “San Fran,” I really bristle. People who live in other parts of the world may think “San Francisco” has too many syllables, but locals don’t ever call it “San Fran.” Ever. And only in an effort to be intentionally gauche or ironic would a resident call it “Frisco.” That’s just wrong, and it immediately identifies anyone who says it as clueless. This judgment goes way, way back. A century and a half ago, by the emperor’s decree, calling the city “Frisco” was a high misdemeanor punishable by a $25 fine.

Today’s interesting “thing” is ostensibly a person, though in fact it’s more of a concept: the notion that someone could declare himself to be an emperor, and—without any force or intimidation—actually get an entire city to go along with the fantasy, at least superficially, for more than 20 years. I am speaking of one of San Francisco’s most colorful historical figures: Joshua A. Norton, a.k.a. His Imperial Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. [Article Continues…]

In high school, I read Tom Stoppard’s 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a hilarious take on the lives of two minor (and more or less interchangeable) characters from Hamlet. A lot of the dialog has to do with the philosophical question of destiny. At the beginning of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are tossing coins, and incredibly, 100 consecutive spins come up heads until a “lucky” toss finally comes up tails. This nicely illustrates the futility of the characters’ actions and also puts them squarely in some alternative reality—we all know that in the real world, coin tosses are random and couldn’t possibly come up heads 100 times in a row. We depend on this fact; otherwise, all the bets and disagreements that have been settled by this simple selection mechanism must be in doubt.

When I wrote about rock, paper, scissors tournaments, I made a passing reference to my favorite “binary random number generator,” a coin toss. A reader sent me a note saying that wasn’t quite accurate—coin tosses are not truly random. Talk about shaking the foundations of my faith. What insidious conspiracy could be behind this astonishing claim? Or could it simply be that a bunch of statisticians had entirely too much time on their hands? [Article Continues…]

It’s funny the way random little factoids stick in my head, even after many years. When I was in eighth grade, I did a report for my science class on Pascal’s Law, a description of the way fluids behave in a closed system (and the basis of all hydraulics, among other things). And in the course of researching that project I came across a tiny piece of information that blew my 13-year-old mind: the word fluid is not a synonym of liquid; a fluid can be a liquid or a gas. Really? I’ve been breathing a fluid all my life? I just couldn’t get over it. Neither could my friends—I thought my endless recitations of trivia made me look smarter, but they found it annoying.

Years later, I read a Star Trek novel in which the crew of the Enterprise encountered a race of humanoid beings who breathed a liquid; the book went to great lengths to describe what that experience was like for one of the humans who had to interact with them. Although this fictional liquid was compatible with human lungs, the psychological shock of breathing a liquid was pretty intense. Later still, the very same concept showed up in the 1989 film The Abyss. But hey, that’s all just science fiction, right? Amazingly enough, humans can indeed breathe certain very special liquids. [Article Continues…]

My experience may be exceptional, but I’ve found the several bee stings I’ve received over the years to be rather unpleasant—even after remembering my favorite things, I still felt pretty bad. So when a reader wrote to tell me about a treatment for such conditions as arthritis and multiple sclerosis (MS) that involves voluntarily stinging oneself with bees, I must admit I found the whole idea rather creepy and off-putting. Although this alternative therapy has not yet proven itself in widespread clinical trials, quite a few people swear by it, insisting that the benefits far outweigh the pain. And even some doctors are trying it with their patients. I feel obliged to insert the usual “don’t try this at home” and “your mileage may vary” disclaimers, but though the jury is officially still out, an increasing body of evidence suggests that there just may be something to this weird notion after all.

A Little Jab’ll Do Ya
Numerous poisons can—in small enough quantities and under the right conditions—produce beneficial effects. So it’s entirely plausible that the same is true of bee venom, or at least some of its components, even though its main purpose is to protect the bees by inflicting pain. Bee venom therapy is a subset of apitherapy, the medicinal use of any substances created by honeybees—including royal jelly and honey, each of which is already known to have some health benefits. Researchers have discovered a number of very interesting substances in bee venom—most prominently, melittin, a powerful anti-inflammatory agent. This gives some credence to the anecdotal reports that beekeepers who were stung repeatedly experienced a reduction in the pain and swelling of arthritis. [Article Continues…]

A couple of years ago, I began noticing that our home could use some brightening up, and I thought it might be a good idea to buy a few houseplants. But I’ve never done well with plants. I even managed to kill off several cacti, despite my best efforts. So I walked into a local plant store and asked what they had that could survive under my care. The owner assured me that African violets would be a safe choice. I said, “But no, really…flowers hate me. In fact, most plants run and hide when they see me coming.” But after listening to detailed instructions, I finally agreed that I could probably care for just this one small potted plant successfully. I found one with flowers just the right shade and took it home. Well, the good news is that the plant is still alive. The bad news is that its condition gives all new meaning to the expression “persistent vegetative state,” if you know what I mean. It hasn’t flowered in eons, some of its droopy leaves are a sickly shade of yellow, and it’s clearly hanging on simply to emphasize its ongoing contempt for me. My most sincere intentions notwithstanding, I just can’t seem to keep plants healthy.

When I saw pictures of a plant called Welwitschia mirabilis (also known by such names as “tree tumbo” or “onion of the desert”) it looked very much like it could have been a previously beautiful specimen that had the misfortune of spending a season or two in my yard. In other words, it looked pretty sick and ugly. But appearances, in this case, are deceiving. This incredibly odd and unattractive plant can thrive in extraordinarily inhospitable conditions—and that’s just the start. The tree tumbo is without a doubt one of the world’s oddest plants. [Article Continues…]

Although I like to think of myself as a multitalented “Renaissance man” of sorts, I must admit that when it comes to drawing and painting, I have absolutely no ability. I’m truly pitiful at Pictionary, and I couldn’t paint my way out of a paper bag. Or so I’ve always thought. Based on what I’ve been reading lately, I could probably produce some fantastic art from the inside of a very large paper bag, as long as it had a pinhole on one side and pretty bright light outside. All I’d have to do is trace the image projected by this primitive camera obscura. According to a controversial theory, this technique—or something very much like it—gave some world-renowned artists a little help as far back as 1420. Then again…maybe not. Getting to the bottom of this puzzle has been the consuming passion of quite a few artists, historians, and optical engineers over the past several years.

Without a Trace
Tracing over a projected image is a straightforward notion, but if you’ve ever tried it (as I have) you probably discovered that getting good results is not as easy as it sounds. The easy part is getting the proportions right. But lots of things in any image lack well-defined borders, and trying to make sense of textures and the effects of light and shadow while tracing something is quite a complex undertaking. If, instead of tracing, I were painting, the challenge would become even greater, as I’d have to carefully match gradations in color—and as soon as I applied a dark paint to the light surface, the image in that area would virtually disappear. All that to say: projection or no projection, producing a convincingly realistic drawing or painting takes a lot of skill and practice. So if it turned out that one of the great masters from centuries ago really did pull this off, I’d be no less impressed by the final product—and more impressed by the artist’s cleverness. [Article Continues…]

As a teenager, I never thought of myself as someone who had a problem with authority. I may not have liked what I was being told to do, and I may have complained, but it was not in my nature to say no. I had my first crisis of authority when I was 16. I was learning to drive, and I’d already failed my driving test—twice. (The first time, I couldn’t parallel park and I ran into a cone; the second time, I didn’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign.) After several more weeks of practicing and diligently studying the driver’s manual, I was taking my third and final test. If I failed that, I’d have to apply for a learner’s permit all over again and endure embarrassing months of being the only person my age without a license. So the pressure was on. With the examiner, a police officer, in the passenger’s seat and sweat on my brow, I carefully completed the entire course—and I thought I did well.

At the very end, the officer told me to pull over at a certain spot and park the car. And I had a moment of complete panic: the spot he’d indicated was just a few feet from a stop sign, and I remembered from the driver’s manual that it was illegal to park so close. Was this one last test? If I obeyed, I thought, I could be failed for breaking the law. So I hesitated and said, “Isn’t that too close to the stop sign?” The officer became furious and started berating me for my arrogance, reminding me that the manual said, “…unless directed otherwise by a uniformed officer of the law.” Tugging at his sleeve, he ranted, “What does this look like, my pajamas?” He went on and on until I was about ready to shrivel up and die, but in the end, he passed me anyway. [Article Continues…]

There’s an old joke that I’ve heard attributed, in one form or another, to numerous religious groups. It goes: “Why do Baptists (or Methodists, or Mennonites, or Jews, or whatever) prohibit premarital sex? Because it could lead to dancing.” The implication, obviously, is that the group’s taboo against dancing is so strong that it overshadows the moral principle that gave rise to it in the first place; dancing becomes not just a potential path to evil but an evil in and of itself. One of the theological views that sometimes motivates this position is that the body (or “flesh”) is inherently sinful or corrupt, and must be ruthlessly subjugated to the purer values of the spirit. This was certainly the view of the religious tradition in which I grew up. Any activity that even suggested carnal pleasure outside strictly delimited boundaries was an immoral concession to humanity’s fallen nature.

Although this sort of thinking may be an extreme example, it’s indicative of a broader and older cultural trend, which some people refer to as the “mind-body split.” Whether you trace this trend back to Cartesian dualism, the early days of Christianity, or some other source, it amounts to a belief that the body is somehow an ontologically separate entity from the mind (or “soul,” or “spirit”). Perhaps the two are even in competition or conflict with each other. Even if, as adults, we recognize that by implicitly accepting this split we’ve become disintegrated and unbalanced, it’s difficult to reprogram ourselves to recover that sense of being a single, unified whole. A practice called InterPlay exists to encourage that process by helping people to rediscover and express one of their most basic, primal needs: play. [Article Continues…]

From high-profile trials to popular TV shows, numerous events have imprinted on our collective psyche the fact that DNA evidence can be used to solve crimes. But the technique has extensive uses that go far beyond forensic science. You may even owe tonight’s dinner, in part, to DNA fingerprinting.

My curiosity about this subject was piqued when I came across a recent newspaper report that talked about how DNA fingerprinting is being used in India to identify different varieties of basmati rice. The report mentioned a hotel that buys around 200 tons of basmati rice per year. The hotel’s chefs found it difficult to cook the rice properly because each type of basmati rice has different soaking times and cooking properties. A visual inspection is of limited use because all the varieties look nearly the same. They decided to solve this problem by working with the rice’s producer to certify each bag of rice using DNA fingerprinting; the chefs then use the information to help them determine the proper cooking parameters. [Article Continues…]

On our way home from the theater after seeing the most recent X-Men movie, Morgen and I kept finding ourselves surrounded by unusually noisy people—in the lobby, on the street corner, in the subway station. We were attempting to discuss the film, but we could barely hear each other. Every time this happened, I tried to move away to a quieter spot; noise has its place, but when I’m trying to think or carry on a conversation, I prefer relative silence. As we reviewed some of the fictional mutants and their super powers, I said, “If I were a mutant, they’d call me Silento. My super power would be the ability to create a large bubble of silence all around me.” In my book, that beats being able to throw balls of flame or have metal claws pop out of my hands.

I have always been baffled at the fact that people so frequently go to noisy parties, bars, clubs, and restaurants with the apparent intention of getting to know each other or spend quality time together. How is that supposed to work? How can you have a worthwhile conversation with someone when you must yell over loud music, not to mention all those other people yelling their own conversations at each other? Perhaps my telepathic powers are insufficiently developed, but as an ordinary human, it seems more sensible to me that if you want to talk to someone, you’d go to a place where you can hear and be heard. So I was delighted to learn of a relatively recent phenomenon sweeping the world: quiet parties, where the only rule is “no talking.” [Article Continues…]

London has hundreds of popular tourist spots that attract millions of visitors each year. I admit, I did the whole Big Ben to Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace to Tower of London circuit and I enjoyed it. I loved being able to walk out of the hotel and onto a street that contained a 500-year-old house right down the block from a modern tube station and an Indian curry restaurant. But the intricacies of this city, like any city, are often found off the beaten path.

Both my visits to London have included a hike up Highgate Hill and then a walk down the small, winding lane leading to Highgate Cemetery. Many are familiar with London’s abbeys and churchyards, but the real appeal of dead London is Highgate, often referred to as a Victorian Valhalla. [Article Continues…]

Leaving aside religious symbology and questions of historical accuracy, The Da Vinci Code is just the latest in a long line of stories that follow roughly the same plot: someone discovers a series of mysterious clues (often with a code or a map thrown in) that supposedly lead to an absurdly valuable treasure. The hero undertakes a perilous adventure, outwitting villains who want to steal the treasure (as well as, perhaps, guardians who want to protect it), and eventually succeeds—only to discover that the treasure was not quite as it had been imagined after all. From Raiders of the Lost Ark to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to National Treasure, I’ve seen variations on this basic outline countless times. Few subjects ignite the imagination of the book-buying and filmgoing public as reliably as that of hidden treasure.

In the real world, stories of codes leading to buried treasure rarely have tidy endings—and indeed, even separating fact from fiction can be nearly impossible. Such is the case with one of the most intriguing cryptographic puzzles in modern history: a series of encrypted messages dating from the 19th century known as the Beale ciphers. These messages might lead to a hidden stash of gold, silver, and jewels worth tens of millions of dollars, they might be genuine directions to a treasure that no longer exists, they might be a hoax or a joke, or, intriguingly, they might be a misunderstood charity fundraising gimmick. But whether or not the codes lead to treasure, what captivates and infuriates cryptographers is that despite more than a century’s worth of effort by the best minds and machines, the most important parts of the messages remain stubbornly opaque. [Article Continues…]