I went to see the Rousseau exhibition at Tate Modern today (on which possibly more later) and finally saw one of the resident peregrine falcons. Woohoo! It’s the world’s fastest-falling bird, you know.
Author: Harry
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Top ten animals – #6, Kiwi
Depending on whether you ask a lumper or a splitter, there are somewhere between three and six species of kiwi. I’m not going to specify one. This is a picture of a Little Spotted Kiwi, Apteryx owenii, the smallest of the kiwis, taken from the website of the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. In Maori it has the fabulous name kiwi-pukupuku.
In some ways the kiwi is an odd choice to get into the top ten – it’s just a drab brown bird the size of a chicken. I guess it’s mainly the fascination of a bird that is so un-birdy; penguins and anhingas have the same appeal. Not only are kiwis flightless and without obvious wings, they don’t even appear to have feathers. They also get bonus points for living in New Zealand – i.e. a very long way away from where I live, and somewhere I’d love to go some time.
A few facts about kiwis. They’re nocturnal – hence the picture above. They have their nostrils at the end of their beaks, uniquely among birds, presumably to help them find food – they have rubbish eyesight. In fact, I think it’s the only nocturnal bird that has moved from eyesight to another main sense (although the oilbird, which nests in caves, does have primitive sonar). They are in the same family – ratites – as other famous flightless birds like the ostrich, rhea, emu and cassowary. As they shrunk to their present size from their larger ancestor, the egg shrank more slowly then the overall body size, as can be seen in this uncomfortable-looking x-ray:
Booby Henderson, the founder of the Church of the FSM, has produced a book, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He has decided to use the profits towards buying a missionary pirate ship to spread the word. There’s a petition you can sign to try and persudade the US government that the Church of the FSM is a real religion and deserving of tax-free status.
I actually think that the whole FSM thing is a bit annoying. It’s somewhat amusing, and the phrase ‘noodly appendage’ is a fine addition to the language, but the more it goes on, the more it becomes a satire on religion, rather than a focussed argument against the teaching of ID in schools. I have no objection to people satirising religion, but given the high percentage of church-goers in the US, the anti-ID movement needs to win over moderate Christians. Trying to be the calm voice of reason seems a better way of doing that than mocking people’s sincere beliefs.
Even more annoying, for me, is that the FSM idea doesn’t even stand up in the first place. In Henderson’s original letter, he basically said that he had an alternative explanation for life, and if they were going to teach non-scientific theories in school, his theory was just as good as ID. But the whole point of ID is that it is creationism stripped of the scriptural references as a way of getting around the consitutional separation of church and state. Once you strip away the scriptural details of FSMism – the noodliness, the heavenly beer volcano, the pirates – what you’re left with is the assertion that life was created by an intelligent designer. It’s not an alternative to ID – it *is* ID. What the satire really needs is an alternative explanation for how life came to be – however ridiculous – not just a different version of the same thing.
And yes, I do know that I’m too literal-minded for my own good.
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Mask of the Week
Another one from the BM, this from the Chewa people:
What they have to say:
This mask depicts a royal escort who accompanied Queen Elizabeth on an official visit to Malawi in 1979. He was described as ‘tall, heavy, a big man with a moustache and quite handsome’. His image was recreated two weeks later by a mask-maker who had watched the Queen’s arrival at the airport. The mask is made of wood painted pale pink. It has striking eyebrows and a moustache of synthetic fur. It would have been worn with a full length costume made of composite materials.
Simoni masks represent the youngest son of the chief and are often associated with foreigners, especially from the colonial period. They have either red or flesh-coloured painted faces and their dances suggest power and authority. Simoni is seen as intelligent and successful, but also shrewd and dangerous.
Peter Sirr compares three different translations of a poem by Eugenio Montale over at The Cat Flap.
I’ve just finished How Language Works by David Crystal, the linguist who wrote the excellent The Stories of English.
It’s a slightly odd book to be marketed as popular non-fiction, in that it doesn’t have any central hook. Rather it’s a broad survey of all aspects of language; it reads rather like an introductory text for an undergraduate course in linguistics. Perhaps that what he had in mind before his publisher decided to try and cash in on the success of Stories. Anyway, it consists of 73 chapters, all phrased as answers to a ‘How?’ question. He compares it to a car manual, with each chapter designed to be pretty much self-contained. i.e., picking some fairly random examples:
How we make speech sounds
How we peceive speech
How we learn to read and write
How we analyse meaning
How conversation works
How we know where someone is from
How the Indo-European family is organised
How we cope with many languages: translate them
Obviously, any of those is a subject that could fill a whole book, so even at 500 pages, the book can only skim over them.
If you’ve read your Steven Pinker most of this stuff will be broadly familiar, but he still held my attention all the way through. It’s clear, interesting, well-written, quietly entertaining, and Crystal obviously knows his stuff. I hope the lack of a clear USP doesn’t restrict sales too much.