Category Archives: Items of note

Dinosaur scientists really reaching

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Two newly discovered horned dinosaur species from an ancient “lost continent” are some of the most surprising and ornate yet found, paleontologists say….

The larger of the two dinosaurs, Utahceratops gettyi, had a 7-foot-long (2.3-meter-long) skull, prompting study co-author Mark Loewen of the University of Utah to compare the animal to “a giant rhino with a ridiculously supersized head.”

The other new dinosaur, Kosmoceratops richardsoni, is “one of the most amazing animals known, with a huge skull decorated with an assortment of bony bells and whistles,” study leader Scott Sampson, also of the University of Utah, said in a statement.

– Rachel Kaufman, National Geographic.

C’mon dinosaur scientists. More new dinosaurs? This is all just make-good stuff because of the whole Triceratops kerfuffle, isn’t it?

“A giant rhino with a ridiculously supersized head”? C’mon. Now you’re just making stuff up.

Here’s what they supposedly look like:

I only see one LeBaron, Freddy

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I just got an email saying that SNY.tv has been approved for one credential to the Vendy Awards on Saturday.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that means me, so, you know, woohoo!

Unless it turns out someone else in this outlet applied and I’m getting muscled out of the Vendys by Gary Apple, in which case there’ll be hell to pay.

But since I doubt that’s the case, look out for reports from the Vendys at some point this weekend or early next week, depending on the Internet situation on Governor’s Island. Also, if anyone can fill me in on how the hell I get to Governor’s Island, that’d be sweet.

Why do we like spicy food?

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But he has evidence for what he calls benign masochism. For example, he tested chili eaters by gradually increasing the pain, or, as the pros call it, the pungency, of the food, right up to the point at which the subjects said they just could not go further. When asked after the test what level of heat they liked the best, they chose the highest level they could stand, “just below the level of unbearable pain.” As Delbert McClinton sings (about a different line of research), “It felt so good to hurt so bad.”…

Other mammals have not joined the party. “There is not a single animal that likes hot pepper,” Dr. Rozin said. Or as Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, puts it, “Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture and so on. I’d stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”

– James Gorman, N.Y. Times.

Good reading from the Times examining why some peppers are spicy and why we enjoy spicy foods. In short: It’s unclear, and apparently “because they’re good” is not an acceptable explanation.

I like spicy foods a lot myself, definitely toward the spicier end of the normal spectrum — spicy enough that if a food is too spicy for me I get all sanctimonious because food shouldn’t be that spicy and who the hell do you think you are, restaurant serving food I can’t handle?

But that said, I find that I especially like spicy foods seasoned with fresh peppers rather than hot sauce or cayenne powder or whatever. This is a relatively recent discovery made largely because of all the hot peppers I grew this summer — and it could be all in my head — but it seems like they bring a more balanced, flavorful heat rather than just pure burning.

For what it’s worth, one time in college I went to a lauded Buffalo wing place out in Virginia with my roommate Rich and his girlfriend. They had something called The Flatliner on the menu and a plaque on the wall celebrating the names of everyone who had ever managed to eat six. Plus you had to sign a waiver just to try one. Serious stuff.

Rich is a Navy man, ever eager to demonstrate his manhood, and I am innately competitive, so we both ordered a half-dozen Flatliners.

The waiter talked us out of it.

“Don’t even bother,” he said.

We tried to convince him that we could handle them, but he promised us we couldn’t and even said he’d buy the next six if we could finish off the first order between the two of us.

We took one bite each and couldn’t eat anything else we ordered. We wound up stretched out on the bench seats in the back of Rich’s minivan, shivering for the length of the half hour drive home.

Those wings were too spicy.

Also, fun fact about peppers: Anaheim peppers, bell peppers, cayenne peppers, jalapeno peppers and poblano peppers are all the same species, capsicum annuum. Just different breeds, kind of like dogs.

Hat tip to my wife for the link.

Video game stuff

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“Japan used to define gaming,” said Jake Kazdal, a longtime developer who has worked at Sega in Tokyo and the American game publisher Electronic Arts. “But now many developers just do the same thing over and over again.”

Part of Japan’s problem, Mr. Kazdal said, is a growing gap in tastes between players there and overseas. The most popular games in Japan are linear, with little leeway for players to wander off a defined path. In the United States, he said, video games have become more open, virtual experiences.

“Smarter developers in Japan are trying to reach out to the West,” Mr. Kazdal said. “They’re collaborating and trying to make games that have more global appeal.”

– Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times.

Interesting read on how Japan has fallen behind the West in video-game design, which came as news to me.

And the point about more open, virtual experiences is an interesting one. Video games probably simulate reality better than any other artistic medium in that they provide the gamer some agency — limited by the world of the game, granted, and so not quite free will, but more control over the experience than is given to consumers of film or novels.

So it strikes me that as video games gain legitimacy as an art form — something that seems more or less inevitable — and a higher percentage of creative young minds begin dedicating themselves to game design, I imagine video games should present aesthetic experiences more thorough than those available in any earlier medium.

Does that make any sense? I guess I mean to say that, while a movie in which the protagonist makes a series of misguided choices that lead him down a desperate road to agony might be heartbreaking to watch, it seems like it would be exponentially more heartbreaking to be controlling the protagonist, making all those poor choices, and leading an avatar down that desperate road in the game world you control.

Of course, that’d make for a pretty crappy video game. And though I haven’t played many video games — especially of the non-sports variety — in years, it seems to me that they still lack the emotional timbre of good films and novels. So maybe it’s not to be.

Just thinking out loud I guess. I just really wanted a good excuse to mention an idea ex-roommate Mike and I came up with a while ago, I guess while we were hatching plans to design a video game or maybe just playing video games: The Mars Volta should score a video game. I think they’d be awesome at it, and that game would probably rule.

Reading about reading

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I have just realized something terrible about myself: I don’t remember the books I read. I chose “Perjury” as an example at random, and its neighbors on my bookshelf, Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (on the right) and Anka Muhlstein’s “Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine” (on the left), could have served just as well. These are books I loved, but as with “Perjury,” all I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child….

But this cannot be. Those books must have reshaped my brain in ways that affect how I think, and they must have left deposits of information with some sort of property — a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it. Mustn’t they have?

– James Collins, N.Y. Times Book Review.

Excellent read on reading. I discovered this phenomenon relatively recently. For most of my life I only read fiction for leisure, so when I began reading non-fiction I assumed I’d be picking up and retaining all the new information I encountered and priming myself to dominate Jeopardy!, unleashing my inner Ken Jennings.

But I found out that, as Collins writes, it doesn’t quite work like that for me; I enjoyed good non-fiction books like I enjoy good novels, but I remember only snippets and factoids and overarching ideas, not every single detail.

The conclusion of this essay, though — the one Collins touches on in the second paragraphs excerpted above — is a rather redeeming one I came to when struggling with how I spent so much time and money in grad school on a master’s degree that prepared me for no particular trade. I realized that all the reading, writing and critical thinking impacted the way I approached just about everything, and made me feel smarter, like I was using new and previously untapped parts of my brain.

And that’s similar to what Collins — with the help of a neuroscientist — comes to in the linked essay. Even if you don’t remember every detail of what you read, just having read it and considered it likely enriched you mentally.

It’s a comforting conclusion, I think. Reading is good.