What’s in a Name?

York_36.4_twain Jillian York makes a case for pseudonyms in Boston Review:

Pseudonymous speech has played a critical role throughout history as well. From the literary efforts of George Eliot and Mark Twain to the explicitly political advocacy of Publius in the Federalist Papers or Junius' letters to the Public Advertiser in 18th century London, people have contributed strongly to public debate under pseudonyms and continue to do so to this day.

A new debate around pseudonymity on online platforms has arisen as a result of the identification policy of Google+, which requires users to identify by “the name your friends, family, or co-workers usually call you.” This policy is similar to that of Facebook’s which requires users to “provide their real names and information.” Google’s policy has in a few short weeks attracted significant attention both within the community and outside of it, sparking debate as to whether a social platform should place limits on identity. A considerable number of Google+ users have already experienced account deactivation as a result of the policy, which Kirrily “Skud” Robert, a former Google employee kicked off the service for identifying as “Skud,” has closely documented.

Those in favor of the use of “real names” on social platforms have presented a number of arguments: that real names improve user behavior and create a more civil environment; that real names help prevent against stalking and harassment by making it easier to go after offenders; that a policy requiring real names prevents law enforcement agents from “sneaking in” to the service to spy on users; that real names make users accountable for their actions.

While these arguments are not entirely without merit, they misframe the problem. It is not incumbent upon strict real-name policy advocates to show that policies insisting on the use of real names have an upside. It is incumbent upon them to demonstrate that these benefits outweigh some very serious drawbacks.

Rebuilding Libya

Dr2945k_thumb3 Barak Barfi in Project Syndicate:

Six months after Libyan rebels took up arms against the country’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, they have finally toppled him. But, while victorious on the battlefield, they have not been triumphant in political and economic terms. If the rebels are to ensure their revolution’s long-term success, they will have to overcome the weaknesses that plague them.

In the days following the start of the uprising in February 17, the rebels formed a political body known as the National Transitional Council (NTC) and a cabinet known as the Executive Committee. Though drawn from across Libyan society and staffed by people with technical skills, the groups have been hamstrung by several problems.

Critics have derided the NTC’s lack of transparency and complained about its opaque decision-making. They have also questioned the criteria used to select its members. Libyans say the Council’s chairman, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, favors dissidents who spent time in Qaddafi’s prisons over those with the training and skills needed to rebuild the country. If the NTC does not address these concerns, it is difficult to see how it will manage the complex challenges ahead.

It is not only the NTC’s policies that could imperil the success of the Libyan uprising. Though admired in parts of eastern Libya under rebel control, Abdel-Jalil is a dour figure who lacks the charisma characteristic of revolutionary leaders. Indeed, he is a provincial player who so far has been unable to communicate a compelling vision of a new Libya.

the Boundary Between “Person” and “Product”

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What will it be like to sit down with your spouse or significant other to lay out the design parameters for your offspring? Would not this very act, in itself, have the effect of crystallizing expectations and hopes about your children that would otherwise have remained tacit and inchoate? Does this not, ipso facto, increase your chances of being disappointed if the outcome turns out differently than you expected? What about if you and your spouse cannot agree? Do you compromise by swapping one trait against another, or perhaps by allowing one spouse priority in shaping the traits of one child, while allowing the other spouse to have the say in shaping the next kid? What effect would this subsequently have on family dynamics? And what would it be like, conversely, to know that your parents had sat down for that little planning session in the months before you were conceived? Would it feel like a strait jacket on your potential to be whatever you wanted—even if your parents never told you the specifics of the discussion?24 Would you resent your parents for providing you with traits you ended up disliking in yourself? Would you be jealous of your siblings, envious of the traits your parents selected for them, as compared with those selected for you? Would you wonder, over time, if your achievements really belonged to you, or were merely by-products of the engineering carried out on you by someone else before you were born? And wouldn’t your very ability to explore this question be constrained by the traits that would have been designed into your personality and cognitive profile? All these questions reflect the same basic fact: human genetic engineering would scramble, in profound ways, the categories of “person” and “product.”

more from Michael Bess at Hedgehog Review here.

Back to the Red Planet

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When Earth was thought to lie at the centre of the universe, the planets were seen as wandering stars – Gods perhaps, or their distant abodes. Once Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler redrew the solar system, however, Earth became the paradigm for planetary interpretation. Now it became possible to ask whether Mars and other wanderers might have mountains and oceans, and whether they might support life, even civilizations. Indeed, as Earth was the model, intelligence was more or less the expectation for alien life. A verse in Milton’s Paradise Lost captures this new perspective well, “Witness this new-made World . . . with stars numerous, and every star perhaps a world of destined habitation”. Scientific mapping of Mars began around 1840. By 1877, Nathaniel Green, a British astronomer, had produced a lovely set of maps compiled from the observations of many colleagues. Green’s painterly embrace of diffuse lines and pastel shades – darker in the northern hemisphere and lighter in the south, with white caps at the poles – communicates clearly the limits of nineteenth-century observation. Within a year, however, Green’s masterpiece had been eclipsed by a new map from the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. Where Green had artfully conveyed uncertainty, Schiaparelli drew a sharply detailed landscape dissected by broad “canali”, or channels.

more from Andrew H. Knoll at the TLS here.

the bionaut diet

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At 8:15 am on 26 September 1991, eight “bionauts,” as they called themselves, wearing identical red Star Trek–like jumpsuits (made for them by Marilyn Monroe’s former dressmaker) waved to the assembled crowd and climbed through an airlock door in the Arizona desert. They shut it behind them and opened another that led into a series of hermetically sealed greenhouses in which they would live for the next two years. The three-acre complex of interconnected glass Mesoamerican pyramids, geodesic domes, and vaulted structures contained a tropical rain forest, a grassland savannah, a mangrove wetland, a farm, and a salt-water ocean with a wave machine and gravelly beach. This was Biosphere 2—the first biosphere being Earth—a $150 million experiment designed to see if, in a climate of nuclear and ecological fear, the colonization of space might be possible. The project was described in the press as a “planet in a bottle,” “Eden revisited,” and “Greenhouse Ark.”

more from Christopher Turner at Cabinet here.

Thursday Poem

Poem of the End – 1

Love it could be that sits on the slippery step of the ghat. It’s some unfamiliar animal that one’s reminded of, looking at it.

It could be a dream. Inside the temple, in place of pillars, there are female posteriors. Ashes of jealousy are showering down. “There’s still time, there’s still time.” An old woman is speaking into the sandy grass. “The wrinkles will be wiped away; there’s still time, my child.”

Foreheads are about to split open. Souls are adrift cracking through domes of glass. A luminous body is scrubbing her heel in a wave. A man, slight as straw, sits next to a mound of marigolds. Moist eye. He says, “Is there nothing to me at all?”

To his left, between someone’s breasts, a seven-coloured stone, pulsing, fashioning its own sunlight.

At ten-o’clock in the morning, in the river, water is like readymade tea. A Japanese dancer, in slow motion, dances out his T’ai Chi, raising his flute to the pyre.

Someone will soon be here
to shatter the make-believe.
Someone will soon be here.

by Teji Grover
from Lo Kaha Sanbari
National Publishing House,
New Delhi, 1994
© Translation: 2010, Teji Grover

From Human Nature to Human Resources

From Harvard Magazine:

Darwin After years of study, Lawrence published Driven to Lead: Good, Bad, and Misguided Leadership (2010), which lays out what he calls Renewed Darwinian (RD) Theory of Human Behavior. In short, RD theory posits that all human beings are motivated by four independent, innate drives: the drive to acquire (the instinctive push to obtain things necessary to ensure continuity and reproductive success); the drive to defend (the desire to ensure that what is acquired is not lost); the drive to comprehend (humans’ need to understand the world around them); and the drive to bond (the push to connect and relate to our fellow human beings). Our behavior, according to Lawrence, is a result of our brain’s attempt to maintain a balance among these four drives.

It’s a grand unifying theory that Lawrence says manifests itself in just about every aspect of human behavior, and even explicates the drafting of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers’ motivations weren’t born with the Revolutionary War, according to Lawrence, but were instead formed tens of thousands or even millions of years earlier. His “four-drive” translation of the formative conversations that led to the drafting of that foundational document is straightforward: “We need to use our creative capacities (drive to comprehend) to design a government that can strike a reasonable balance between private individual property rights (drive to acquire) and the common good (drive to bond), while guarding us against internal and external enemies (drive to defend).” At the opposite end of the ethical spectrum is the current economic crisis, which he says stems from a few bad apples with an outsized drive to acquire and no moral conscience, due to a lack of the drive to bond.

More here.

In Jobs’ second act with Apple, a dramatic revival

From PhysOrg:

Steve Jobs' resignation as Apple Inc.'s CEO on Wednesday was freighted with sentimental significance, the curtain call on a dramatic 14-year performance in which he rescued one of the world's most beloved brands from the brink of technological irrelevance.

Job As second chances go, Jobs' stewardship of Apple since returning in 1997 to the company he created with a high school friend in a Silicon Valley garage in the 1970s is widely seen as nothing short of first-class. And his job isn't done; he's staying on as chairman, where it remains to be seen how meaningfully his role in product design will change. As mercurial as many employees and suppliers and business partners have found Jobs, few can deny how deeply his ideas have transformed the consumer technology world. Jobs' contributions to the world of technology are numerous. He led a fierce battle against Microsoft's Windows stronghold on the front lines of the personal computer revolution; he changed the way people listen to music; he essentially created the consumer smartphone market and turned tablets from objects of derision into lusted-after luxury items. The innovation attached to the brand is something that might be impossible to replace. Investors expressed their concerns with a selloff that knocked Apple's stock down $19.08, or 5.1 percent, to $355.58 in extended trading Thursday, following the announcement that Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, would be assuming full-time CEO duties. “Apple is Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs is Apple, and Steve Jobs is innovation,” said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research. “You can teach people how to be operationally efficient, you can hire consultants to tell you how to do that, but God creates innovation. … Apple without Steve Jobs is nothing.”

Jobs has now stepped down twice as Apple's leader, both times under unfavorable circumstances. Whereas unmatched technical innovation and single-mindedness defined Apple's early years, and unchecked hubris and micromanaging helped doom Jobs' first go-around as CEO, he has redeemed himself, pulling off one of the most remarkable turnarounds in corporate history.

More here.

three questions for libya

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It is time for the Libyan people to celebrate the end of a four-decade dictatorship. Once they sober up from the jubilations of their well-deserved victory, however, they will discover this is only the beginning. Gaddafi has undermined, marginalised or obliterated many of the state institutions, including the military, and destroyed the political parties – indeed, political life in the country. There is much to restore and more to build from scratch. Security, reconstruction and political transition are only a few of the challenges they will face sooner rather than later. More importantly, they will need to manage expectations of those who have given their all for liberty, freedom and prosperity. Having said that, there is no need for alarm. Not yet any way. It’s easy, even clichéd, to be pessimistic, even negative, about the post-revolutionary challenge. What is needed is optimism anchored in reality. And judging from what we have seen over the past five months, there is much to celebrate in terms of building a steering council and creating locally based revolutionary groups from the bottom up that have been well coordinated and largely disciplined.

more from Marwan Bishara at Al Jazeera here.

un peu obscur

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What is remarkable about Roussel’s torturous commitment to his literary career is that he ever entertained the notion that his intricate, tautly rendered feats of almost impenetrable brilliance would appeal to a mass readership. Never has a writer so misgauged the nature of his work or the scope of its appeal. It is thanks largely to the avant-garde he spurned that Roussel’s fragile literary standing was secured. With the exception of Michel Leiris, whose father was Roussel’s accountant, those who most appreciated his proleptic ingenuity discovered him in the decades after his death. Alain Robbe-Grillet found in Roussel’s obsessive attention to the mundane thinginess of the world a predecessor to the nouveau roman: His first novel, Le Voyeur, was originally titled La Vue in homage to Roussel’s long 1904 poem of the same name, a work that minutely describes a variety of miniature scenes, including a fifty-page digression dedicated to the spa pictured on the label of a bottle of mineral water on the narrator’s table. Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec admired his remarkable ability to spin thickly structured narratives from a hidden network of obscure puns, buried double entendres, felicitous homonyms, and devilish mondegreens, the “special method” of linguistic gamesmanship he revealed in the short volume published after his death, How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Michel Foucault wrote a critical study, Death and the Labyrinth, after the chance discovery of one of Roussel’s volumes in an antiquarian shop across from the Luxembourg Gardens. And in several critical essays, John Ashbery enthusiastically imported Roussel, extending his influence to the New York School of poets.

more from Eric Banks at Bookforum here.

forever jung

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The great modern doctors of the mind have made men realize as never before the strangeness of their own psyches, and no psychologist has uncovered, or invented, stranger psychic marvels than did Carl Jung (1875-1961). Although his name still lingers on in pop-psychology circles, the substance of Jung’s ideas and his analytical psychology techniques is fading from memory. Perhaps he is now most remembered as a favored disciple of Sigmund Freud who later became Freud’s most reviled apostate. The split between Freud and Jung presaged today’s division in how we think about the mind: we are fixated on the notion that our inner lives can be investigated through methods of rational inquiry like those so successfully applied to physics and chemistry, but we cannot shake the lurking feeling that our psyches are in reality beasts hidden in shadow — that they can never be fully brought out of the woods into the full light of day. Freud’s ideas were once taboo, then conventional wisdom, and now largely in disrepute. But since Freud’s approach still largely comports with our rationalist shibboleths, we have found a comfortable niche for him as a father of modern psychology. By contrast, Jung remains a more inscrutable, potentially subversive figure: the self-avowed scientist who seemed to embrace all that science defined itself in opposition to — religion, mysticism, even parts of pseudoscience, but most significantly the depths of the human soul. In embracing the strangeness of the human psyche from within itself, he remains that father of psychology who still threatens to upend our view of ourselves.

more from Algis Valiunas at The New Atlantis here.

Can teen fiction explain mental illness to my daughter?

From Guardian:

Teen Children of single parents with mental health issues are often particularly complex protagonists – they have to grow up ahead of time, shouldering adult responsibilities and deceiving concerned authorities for fear of letting down their parents or losing them altogether. The fiction in which they feature isn't solely gritty, “issue”-focused and realistic, however – Philip Pullman's Will Parry, wielder of the Subtle Knife, is adult, reserved and watchful partly because he's been tending his mother, who suffers from justified but crippling paranoia, since his father's long-ago disappearance. Similarly, Charlie, the heroine of Ellen Renner's enthralling alternate history Castle of Shadows, has developed a fascinating streak of self-reliant meanness because her father the King, deserted by her mother, has abdicated mentally to huddle in a tower like a Gormenghastly owl, building palaces out of playing cards. Overall, though, it's a subject probably most associated with authors bedded firmly in contemporary realism, such as Jacqueline Wilson.

Suffering from bipolar disorder myself, I would not, if I had my time again, have read Wilson's The Illustrated Mum while gravidly tank-sized and hormonally obsessed with the worst-case scenario. Marigold, the variegated mother of Wilson's award-winning title, is in many ways an amazing parent – dazzlingly creative, uninhibitedly joyous, constantly sidetracked by new ideas. The effect of her untreated manic depression on her daughters, though, is cataclysmic; she's breathtakingly selfish, has no grasp of the future, evaporates the family finances on a regular basis and is tattooed over every spare inch in impulsive, intricate designs which drive her daughters to despair. Star, the elder, many-times-bitten, is unsurprisingly now shy of everything Marigold offers, wanting only a settled, school-uniform sort of life with her father; the younger daughter, Dolphin, tries with desperate optimism to forge a happy family unit from angry sister and volatile mum. It's difficult, upsetting, and compulsive reading.

More here.

Building the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial

From Smithsonian:

MLK-Memorial-front-631 In early August, as the finishing touches are being made to the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial in Washington, D.C., Deryl McKissack waits in a trailer on the premises. “You could not pick a better site,” says the engineer, of the four-acre plot alongside the capital’s Tidal Basin. “He is sitting on a direct axis between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials—so between two presidents. That is a spot for a king, right?” Surprised by the pun that rolls off of her tongue, McKissack splits into laughter. “I never thought of what it would be like the day of dedication. I always thought about just being a part of something great,” says McKissack, 50, president and CEO of McKissack and McKissack, an architectural and engineering firm. The memorial opens to the public August 22, and the official dedication ceremony is set for August 28. “It is sinking in for me now,” she says. The memorial for King has certainly been a long time in the making. In the mid-1980s, a few members of Alpha Phi Alpha, the oldest intercollegiate fraternity for African Americans, presented the idea to the brotherhood’s board of directors. (King became an Alpha in 1952 while studying theology at Boston University.) It was not until the fall of 1996, though, that the Senate and House of Representatives passed joint resolutions to finally authorize the building of a memorial honoring the civil rights leader. In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the resolution, and by December 1999, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Foundation was accepting design proposals. The foundation’s panel of judges reviewed over 900 designs, submitted by architects, designers and students from 52 countries. Ultimately, an entry by San Francisco’s ROMA Design Group was chosen. From there, the foundation worked tirelessly to secure the memorial’s high-profile site near the National Mall and raise money. In 2006, Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin was selected to be the Sculptor of Record and contribute the centerpiece of ROMA’s design, a statue of King. A year later, McKissack’s involvement became official. Her firm—with Turner Construction, Tompkins Builders and Gilford Corporation—was hired as the design-build team that would take the memorial from concept to reality.

For McKissack, this job is a culmination of work done by generations of her family. Today, she is among the fifth generation in her family to work in construction and architecture. The first generation, Moses McKissack, came to the United States from West Africa in 1790 as a slave and learned the trade of building from his master, William McKissack.

More here.

he painted time

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In 1965, while waiting in a cafe, Roman Opalka decided to paint time. He didn’t paint the counters of time — clocks and watches and calendars and such. He didn’t paint people waiting for the bus or racing to the finish line. Roman Opalka painted time itself. He called this project, his life’s work, “OPALKA 1965 / 1 — ∞.” The title might be read as this: (Roman) Opalka (the artist begins in) 1965 (painting numbers from) one to infinity. Having decided to paint time, the French-Polish conceptual artist went to his Warsaw studio and prepared a canvas. He sat before it. His hand trembled. He knew that once he started this immense project, he could never go back. Armed with a size 0 brush, and still shaking, Opalka painted in white a little “1” on the upper left-hand corner of a gray canvas. He then made his way horizontally across the canvas, number by number—2…3…4…5 — until he had a row of numbers, then two rows of numbers, then three. When Opalka ran out of room, when the last number was painted in the bottom right-hand corner, he stopped. Later, the artist made another painting, and another, each one picking up numerically where the last painting left off. He called the paintings “Details.” The canvas was always the same size: 196 centimeters by 135 centimeters. The numbers were always painted in white. When Opalka made a Detail, he recorded himself speaking the numbers as he painted. When a painting session was finished, Opalka would take a photograph of his face in front of his work, the numbers stopping when he did. Opalka devoted himself to this project alone, painting time. “All my work is a single thing,” he once wrote, “the description from number one to infinity.”

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

There was nothing left to say

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On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde. As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a “tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,” as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by a bizarre coincidence, he had gone to school with the employee; it was, rather, that, like many Frenchmen who kept up with contemporary literature, he had assumed that the young man was dead. To an astonished Bardey, Bourde explained that, twelve years earlier, his taciturn employee had made a “stupefying and precocious” literary début in Paris, only to disappear soon after. Until that moment, for all Bardey or anyone else in his circle knew, this man was simply a clever trader who kept neat books. Today, many think of him as a founder of modern European poetry. His name was Arthur Rimbaud. What Bardey learned about Rimbaud that day is still what most people know about Rimbaud. There was, on the one hand, the dazzling, remarkably short-lived career: all of Rimbaud’s significant works were most likely composed between 1870, when he was not quite sixteen, and 1874, when he turned twenty. On the other hand, there was the abrupt abandonment of literature in favor of a vagabond life that eventually took him to Aden and then to East Africa, where he remained until just before his death, trading coffee, feathers, and, finally, guns, and making a tidy bundle in the process. The great mystery that continues to haunt and dismay Rimbaud fans is this “act of renunciation,” as Henry Miller put it in his rather loopy 1946 study of Rimbaud, “The Time of the Assassins,” which “one is tempted to compare . . . with the release of the atomic bomb.”

more from Daniel Mendelsohn at The New Yorker here.

think odessa

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Like other burgeoning seaports of southern Europe, such as Trieste or Thessalonica, Odessa became a magnet for Jewish enterprise, and by the late nineteenth century Jews constituted a third of its population. They suffered the usual indignities and impertinences of prejudice (‘No Jews are admitted’, blandly says my Murray’s Handbook, 1899, of the Odessa Commercial Club): they responded with perhaps more than the usual vivacity. They never, it seems, realised the commercial and financial dominance that they achieved in Trieste, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire; but during the later years of tsarist rule many of them played prominent parts in the intellectual and artistic society of Odessa. Theatre, literature and opera flourished in the city. Writers, actors and musicians responded to its generous climate, and cultivated Jews contributed largely to the style of a city that was sometimes called the southern capital of Russia, and sometimes the Pearl of the South. King traces this rise to celebrity with vivid portraits of the people who inspired it. There was Grigory Potemkin himself, whose very first show-villages were built to ornament a preposterously grand visit by the Empress Catherine, his lover as well as his boss. There was the French Duc de Richelieu, the first governor of the city, whose statue stands to this day at the head of the Steps; there was also the very Russian Count Mikhail Vorontsov, governor-general of New Russia. There was Alexander Pushkin, the poet, who was exiled to Odessa because of his subversive attitudes and presently had an affair with the governor-general’s wife. And there was Lev Bronstein, who learnt, as a troublesome Jewish schoolboy in this city of cross-currents, some of the insights that would guide him when he became, in later life, Leon Trotsky.

more from Jan Morris at Literary Review here.

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

John Tierney in the New York Times Magazine:

ScreenHunter_05 Aug. 23 13.21 Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.

Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.

More here.

The Iceman’s last meal: goat

Alexandra Witze in Science News:

ScreenHunter_04 Aug. 23 13.17 Outside of the Nancy Grace show, few people have had their final hours as poked, prodded and scrutinized as much as Ötzi, the “Iceman” who died high in the Italian Alps 5,300 years ago.

Hikers discovered his frozen, mummified body in 1991. Two decades later, scientists have a good idea of what happened to Ötzi: Fleeing pursuers, he retreated to the mountains only to be shot in the back with an arrow. But even today, the Iceman is still giving up surprises.

New, more detailed radiological images of the mummy have revealed his stomach for the first time and shown that he didn’t die hungry. Within an hour of his murder, Ötzi ate a big meal mostly of the wild goat called ibex, reports a team led by Albert Zink, head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy.

“We now think that he must have felt quite safe, because otherwise he wouldn’t have had this big meal,” Zink says. “This was a really big surprise.” The work was published online August 17 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

More here.

Gaddafi Found Running for Republican Nomination

From the Borowitz Report:

Gaddafi1 The mystery surrounding Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s whereabouts was resolved today as the dictator announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in a town hall meeting in Concord, New Hampshire.

In announcing his candidacy, the Libyan madman joins a Republican field which is believed to number in excess of seven hundred candidates.

While some New Hampshire Republicans seemed surprised to see Col. Gaddafi shaking hands and kissing babies at the Concord town hall, an aide to the Libyan strongman said his transformation to GOP candidate made perfect sense.

“In those final days in Tripoli he was becoming increasingly disconnected from reality,” said the aide. “So I think he’ll fit right in.”

More here.