New mammoth comes with grains of salt

Frozen mammoths are rare. That's why I was excited to hear this morning to that a new one had discovered. Over the last three centuries, only seventy-three frozen mammoths with skin or flesh attached have been reported. Most were only partial--a foot or a piece of skin--some were only seen with nothing being recovered. However, despite being exciting news, there were several things about the story that set off alarms in my head and made me cringe.

First, is the headline and hook to the story: "Russian scientists make rare find of 'blood' in mammoth." The significance of the blood is explained in the story. Semyon Grigoryev, the head of the team examining the mammoth explained:

"When we broke the ice beneath her stomach, the blood flowed out from there, it was very dark. This is the most astonishing case in my entire life. How was it possible for it to remain in liquid form? And the muscle tissue is also red, the colour of fresh meat."

Liquid blood strikes me as more than astonishing; it borders on completely impossible. Thawed blood, yes. Remaining liquid for over ten thousand years surrounded by rock-hard ice and frozen flesh, no. Grigoryev says they found the blood on the underside of the carcass. This means they had already chipped and thawed their way to that spot, that it had already been exposed to heat when he dug into it.

The bit about the color of the meat is pure melodrama. This is something that is said about most discoveries of frozen Pleistocene animals. When Pfitzenmayer and Herz excavated the famous Berezovka mammoth in 1901, they commented on how fresh the meat looked. They also said the smell of the thawed meat was so bad that they could only work short shifts digging it out before they had to run for fresh air.

My second alarm was, perhaps unfairly, the presence of Grigoryev himself. Grigoryev is a partner with disgraced Korean cloner Hwang Woo-suk. Hwang, for those who don't know or remember, is a very skilled scientist whose career imploded in 2005-6 over fraudulent claims that he had cloned human stem cells. Naturally, the liquid blood is being touted as a big step forward in eventually cloning a mammoth. The cloning angle appears in the first sentence of the story.

The presence of Hwang and the cloning frame don't necessarily disqualify Grigoryev. Last year, he announced the discovery of another mammoth, a young male that they named Zhenya. The announcement included a great deal of hype about it being the most complete mammoth ever recovered. At the time I had never heard of Grigoryev. However, despite the hyperbole and his being new to the scene, it appears the discovery was legit. Zhenya was excavated and moved to St. Petersburg where Alexei Tikhonov, an old hand at mammoth research, confirmed that it really is an important find.

The third alarm, for me, is the photograph attached to the story that purports to be an actual shot taken at the excavation. The photo shows a person in cold-weather gear, a surgical mask, and nitrile gloves. The person is down on one knee in front of a large hunk of the mammoth that has already been loaded onto a sled. The person appears to be filling a test-tube and we are left to believe the person is extracting blood from the carcass. The caption reads: "A researcher in Yakutsk on May 13 next to a carcass of a female mammoth found on an island in the Arctic Ocean." A second picture shows a different person's hand holding up a test tube with a few drops of blood in the bottom.

Perhaps I'm being picky, but there's no way that is can actually be a shot of the vignette suggested. Even if they found liquid blood in the mammoth when it was in the ground, it would not have stayed liquid while they excavated that piece of meat and loaded it onto a sled. The site is described as "a remote island in the Arctic Ocean." Despite the sunlight in the picture and news of record Arctic sea ice retreats, it is still very cold up there this time of year and no matter how warm the surface air gets, it remains well below freezing year-round in the permafrost.

Another reason I don't like the picture is the hunk of mammoth behind the researcher. What is that piece? Maybe it's just pareidolia, but it looks like the head and shoulders of the mammoth with its trunk dramatically raised over its head. There is no way the trunk could have stayed in that position while it froze. Maybe it was on its side while it froze? The story makes clear that that was not the case. They say the stomach was in water and the meat of the back and head were eaten by scavengers. So, the mammoth was upright and the scavengers probably got the trunk. That makes this the stomach and a leg, though the shape and position make it had to figure out just how this fits into a complete mammoth. If that is the stomach, where the blood was found, it makes another part of the story hard to understand. The mammoth location is being kept secret, they say, because the researchers don't want anyone else to steal it. If they've already excavated the stomach, they pretty much have the whole mammoth out of the ground. So, again, just what is that hunk of mammoth on the sled?

As a final gripe, let me say why I hate the cloning frame for mammoth stories. Cloning is not the news part of this story and does not belong in the lede sentence. At most, cloning is background material. The news part of the story is the discovery itself. Of those seventy-four frozen mammoth discoveries that I mentioned, this is only the fifth I know of that is a female and this one was the oldest when she died (most reports don't know or don't mention the sex). That is what should be the big deal about this news, not that someone thinks maybe they could possibly attempt to make a clone from this mammoth at some undefined time in the future. If they are able to recover satisfactory material to attempt a clone, that would be a story in its own right. If they made the attempt, that would be another story, whether they were successful or not. And, of course, if they successfully cloned a mammoth or bred a mammelephant, that would be one of the biggest science stories of the century. None of those things have happened. The news here is that a rare old female mammoth has been discovered.

The story is bad science reporting, pure and simple. It's science by press release. It allows sensationalism to bury the real science. Cloning and "will it tell us why they went extinct" stories are lazy and ignorant writing. It's crap and I do not like it. Please stop.

UPDATE - The official press release from North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk is a little more detailed and a lot less sensational that the PhysOrg notice. It has a less ridiculous picture and says that most of the mammoth is still in the ground and will stay there until the summer when an international group of mammoth specialists will come look at the site. The cloning angle is barely mentioned and only in the last sentence.

As for the blood, some more details were given about that, "The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities below the belly and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out. Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to –10°C. It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties." If that's true, that would be quite an exciting discovery. Mammoth blood did do a better job of carrying oxygen at low temperatures than does the blood of living elephants, but, so far, no one has even suspected the presence of cryoprotective properties. Why should they. We've never had a speck of evidence that mammoths hibernated and we've never found liquid blood in any other frozen carcase. I remain skeptical.

The worst possible example

The Washington pundit class is in love with the idea of bipartisanship and compromise for their own sake. That is, they don't really care what actual laws are passed or policies adopted as long as they represent bipartisanship. If you were going to argue for this, you would probably look for good examples from the past of both sides giving a little to move forward on an important issue. But, what if you were looking for a bad example? What if you wanted an example of compromise that brought shame on the American form of government? What would be your choice as the worst possible example of compromise and bipartisanship in American history? It might be this one:

One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—"to form a more perfect union"—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together. 

Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator—for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared—the aspiration to form a more perfect union. They set their sights higher, not lower, in order to identify their common goal and keep moving toward it.

James Wagner, the President of Emory University in Atlanta, wrote those words in an editorial entitled "As American as … Compromise" for the university's alumni magazine. I'm not sure when the winter issue of Emory Magazine began hitting people's mailboxes, it could have been months ago because no one ever reads these Letter from the President columns. But it began getting attention yesterday, including attention from the Black Student Alliance.

For those who aren't sure what he's talking about, this is what is usually called the "Three-Fifths Compromise" in the US Constitution. The Constitution requires the federal government to take a census every ten years and to use the census numbers to apportion seats in the House of Representatives. Each state is told how many seats they get and the states draw their own congressional districts according to their own processes. That sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Well it wasn't. The Southern states had, within their boundaries, a huge number of people who were not allowed to vote, who weren't really citizens, African slaves. The Northern states had a much larger population of real citizens than the South. The Southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention assumed that the main divisions in the new congress would be regional and wanted more power for their region. They demanded that slaves be counted in the apportioning of House seats, giving them more power in Congress and in the Electoral College. Northern delegated argued that the apportioning of House seats should reflect the number of voters in each state. Eventually, a compromise was reached allowing the Southern states to claim three-fifths of the number of slaves in each state for the purpose of apportioning of House seats. Wagner was holding up one of the most shameful examples of compromise in American history as a shining example of doing things right.

There is one popular misconception about the "Three-Fifths Compromise" and that is that it implied that African slaves were three-fifths of a person. This is often brought up as a grave injustice against the ancestors of African-Americans. That would have been an improvement of their lot or, at least, a concession that they were entitled to a certain amount of human dignity. Prior to the Civil War, slaves were not people at all; they were property; they were zero-fifths of a person. The only concessions that African slaves were even marginally human was their forced conversion to Christianity and the fact that laws were eventually passed making it illegal to kill a slave without first conducting a sham trial.

I imagine that when President Wagner arrives in his office Tuesday morning he will find several unpleasant message waiting for him including requests for interviews from local and even national media. Someone from the University's press office is probably already spoiling his three-day weekend. What will happen next is that he will issue a standard non-apology apology. He's sorry IF anyone took offense. He won't admit he was wrong to say it; he's just sorry he created a shit-storm. He'll call it a "misstatement," meaning his argument is valid, he just chose a bad example.

So, what was his point? It's hard to tell because, even without that horrifying example, its a really badly written column. He starts out saying some "distinguished public servant," speaking on a forum last Fall, mentioned political polarization, the Constitution, and compromise. He them pulls out the three-fifth compromise as a shining example that we should try to emulate. Then he mentions the fiscal debate. He's halfway through the column now. This, he says is just like trying to consider different view points in a university. Then something about teaching liberal arts classes at a research university. Maybe he's arguing for creationism in the biology classes. It's impossible to tell what compromise he's talking about.

I cannot imagine anyone defending this mess except those who think every word in the constitution was dictated by God and white supremacists (just to be clear, I'm not saying the two are the same). In any case, It's not going to be fun to be James Wagner for the next week or so. He'll be lucky to get out of this with his job.

Update: And he's already issued the non-apology apology: " Certainly, I do not consider slavery anything but heinous, repulsive, repugnant, and inhuman. I should have stated that fact clearly in my essay. I am sorry for the hurt caused by not communicating more clearly my own beliefs. To those hurt or confused by my clumsiness and insensitivity, please forgive me."

History begins right now

In journalism, it's important to say something quickly, even if what you have to say is stupid. On CNN.com just now:

The decision, issued by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco, is an initial step in what will likely be a lengthy legal fight over California's Proposition 8, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Um, I think the lengthy legal fight began some time ago.

What is a supervolcano?

Supervolcano is not a meaningful geological term, it is a media term. What most of us think of as a "normal" volcanic eruption is caused by ash and lava being vented from a magma chamber, a miles wide bubble of molten rock that has risen through the crust to a point just a few miles below the surface. Because it is hot, the magma wants to expand. As it gets close to the surface, the magma is able to create cracks above it that allow some of the molten material to escape. The surface manifestation of these pressure valves are volcanos.

For the last decade or so the term Supervolcano has been popular for describing caldera collapses. These happen when the the entire surface above the magma chamber gives way at once. If a normal eruption is a pressure cooker letting off a little steam through a safety valve, a caldera collapse is a pressure cooker without a safety valve blowing its lid. These produce enormous amounts of ash and gas. They produce sudden cooling events around the world; if other conditions are right they can tip the Earth into an ice age. And, of course, they bury and kill lots of things downwind from the eruption, preserving lots of high quality fossils. Think "giant Pompeii". The key points here are that these are singular eruptions lasting only a few days and producing mostly ash.

Lately, supervolcano has been being used in the press to describe flood basalts. These come from a different type of event that is not a familiar type eruption and does not form a volcanic cone. Flood basalts form when molten rock comes to the surface through long cracks and flows across the land covering hundreds--even thousands--of square miles of land. The flows can last for years and new flows can appear in the same area repeatedly over millions of years, burying the land under thousands of feet of rock. The Columbia Plateau of Eastern Washington and Oregon is the result of over two hundred seperate flows that occured over about a seven million year period of time (the dating of the flows is extremely contentious). These do not produce very many fossils because lava flows slowly enough for most animals to simply walk away and most plants get burned up. Even so, there are some fossils produced under special conditions. The key points here are that these are very slow events that produce mostly rock.

I'm complaining about this distinction because of news articles like this:

Scientists Explore Origins of 'Supervolcanoes' on the Sea Floor: Ancient Goliaths Blamed for Multiple Mass Extinctions

"Supervolcanoes" have been blamed for multiple mass extinctions in Earth's history, but the cause of their massive eruptions is unknown.

Despite their global impact, the eruptions' origin and triggering mechanisms have remained unexplained. New data obtained during a recent Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) expedition in the Pacific Ocean may provide clues to unlocking this mystery.

The article does not make clear that they are talking about flood basalts and not caldera collapses until paragraph twelve.

It appears that "supervolcanoes" is being used by journalists, and scientists who talk to jouranlists, to mean "big ass volcanoish happenings." They have managed to take vague term and make it completely useless.

The problem with multiple authors

From the Wikipedia entry on the island of Rhodes:

On 19 July 1944 the Gestapo rounded up the island’s nearly 2000 Jewish inhabitants, to send them to extermination camps. About 160 of the island's more than 600 Greek Jews survived.

It's not technically wrong, since we can all agree that 2000 is bigger than 600. Really people, when you add a sentence to an Wiki article read the article first. If that's too much work at least read the sentence next to the one you're adding.

Everything that is wrong in journalism

In the lefty blogs that I read, there is a school of media criticism that refers to the Washington pundits as "the Village." The term is meant to convey the myopic, small town character of a society made up of a few thousand politicians, journalists, and "informed sources." reporters in the Village measure events primarily through the lens of how those events affect the Village. The intrinsic value of political discourse and decisions and how they affect the rest of the country and world comes in a distant second.

One aspect of this is that, to Villagers, manners matter far more than substance. Look, for example, at last week's state dinner: while the president hosted the prime minister of the world's second most populous country and one of its fastest growing economies, the Village press was most concerned with who was or was not on the guest list and on a couple of self-promoting gate crashers. Pundits columns often belong more on the society page than beside serious political reporting.

Other aspects of reporting by Villagers are their double standards for covering the parties (political parties, that is, not Village soirees) and their backwards looking introspection. For an example of these faults, this week's Newsweek gives us Jon Meacham's latest column entitled "Why Dick Cheney Should Run in 2012." I don't need to tell you my opinion of Cheney 2012; I'm sure you all know what that is. Let's focus on what Meacham thinks is important for 2012.

I think we should be taking the possibility of a Dick Cheney bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 more seriously, for a run would be good for the Republicans and good for the country. (The sound you just heard in the background was liberal readers spitting out their lattes.)

Meacham made a funny. You see, liberals are nothing more than a bunch of effete, latte sippers. It's always funny to make fun of liberals.

Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction...

But not a man who has been convicted, a perpetual source of disappointment to us latte sippers. Okay, I made a funny too. Seriously folks, why does conviction matter? We should be far more concerned about what Cheney's convictions are. The Village school of journalism cares more about whether or not their comic book characters have a steely jaw than whether those characters are superheros or supervillains. When picking a president we should be informed more about the latter.

... [who] has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting.

Why would merely having Cheney run for president change the way we hold elections in this country? Why would the press suddenly become interested in a full and frank exchange about the issues if Cheney was on the ballot. Meacham doesn't say.

A campaign would also give us an occasion that history denied us in 2008: an opportunity to adjudicate the George W. Bush years in a direct way.

Because the most important issue in 2012 will be looking back to the Bush years to find out what people thought about them. Is that the issue that we most need to have a "full and frank exchange" about?

Historically the country has tended to muddle through somewhere between the extremes of right and left. There is often much virtue in conducting public life by fits and starts. When things drift too far one way in ideological terms, Americans are pretty good about tugging them back to the middle. ... Given Cheney's views, even conservatives who dislike him or think it is time to open a new chapter might give the possibility another thought, for it seems much more likely that Cheney would pull Obama to the right than that Obama would pull Cheney to the left.

Why would this be a good thing? Because it makes conservatives happy, or because it's always good when Democrats try to be more like Republicans? Even as the Republican Party is careening off into black helicopter land, Meacham thinks it would be "good for the Republicans and good for the country" to drag the Democrats to the right. To what end? Just to make liberals spit their lattes? Does he think the country needs to move further to the right?

This is Village reporting at its most typical. It'd fun to insult liberals. When the Republican Party has been taken over by extremists who wouldn't even have been allowed in the party a few years ago, the realignment that's best for the country is for Democrats to move to the right. The most important issue that the he can foresee in the next election is a navel-gazing expedition into our feelings for villagers of the past.

I do agree with Meacham about one thing; we need a full and frank exchange about the issues. I just don't think we're going to get it from Meacham and the Villagers.

They came from Uranus

David Brooks deserves some kind of award for his use of a tired metaphor:

But deep in the bowels of the G.O.P., there are serious people having quiet conversations.

These are the people who are looking to save the Republican Party> Brooks doesn't make it clear whether these serious people will come exploding out the bowels with their ideas or whether their plans will trickle out of the bowels one fetid detail at a time. We can be assured, however, that these bowel-hatched ideas will make all of us unserious people go "eewwww" when we are finally exposed to them.

Feel free to insert your own scatological humor in the comments.

Math is not his strong suit

Jim DeMint has decided to revive an idea that was dumb when Gingrich made it part of his Contract with America fifteen years ago and which is still dumb today. The dumb seems to a bit infectious, as this Hill piece by Jordan Fabian shows.

A Republican senator on Tuesday introduced a Constitutional amendment that would mandate term limits for all federal lawmakers.

Sen. Jim DeMint's (R-S.C.) amendment would limit House members to three terms and senators to two terms. Every lawmaker then could serve no longer than six years in Congress.

Um, Jordan, I hate to break this to you, but two six year Senate terms amounts to twelve years, not six. The text of the amendment also has no restriction on Representatives going on to the Senate after finishing their three terms in the House, meaning lawmakers could serve up to eighteen years in congress.

Today hasn't been a good day for the three Rs in journalism.

Somewhere, Noah Webster silently weeps

From Politico:

"Few political observers or elected officials doubt that an energized GOP has a headwind at its back."

Pointed out by TPM.

The case for better interns

The only explanation I can come up for for this is that it must have been written by an unpaid intern on Friday afternoon after all of the editors had snuck out early for the weekend. This is slide twelve of a slideshow at MSN entitled "Monsters that people believe exist." For reasons I can't explain, the slide show in on their Environment site. The slideshow itself is pretty lame -- three of the twelve slides are variations on Bigfoot and one is a picture of a python in a zoo. But this is the topper. No wonder it was put in the finale position.



This is Ötzi, the mummy of a Chalcolithic hunter who died in the Alps sometime around 3300 BC. In 1991, Ötzi was discovered thawing out of the Schnalstal Glacier on the Italian/Austrian frontier. The MSN caption reads "The iceman is believed to be the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans that roamed the mountains, encased in ice." How many things are wrong with this?

Let's start with the low hanging fruit and mock their grammar. How do you roam the mountains, encased in ice? At best you might slide or tumble downhill, but roaming is definitely out when you're encased in ice. Don't take my word for it, ask Lyuba the baby mammoth. He'll back me up on this one.

"The iceman is believed to be the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans..." Really? It's believed by who exactly? The scientists who examined and named Ötzi are all agreed that Ötzi is a completely modern human and not a Yeti, despite the similarity in their names. I can't find an example of even the most credulous cryptobiologist who thinks Ötzi is a missing link. Real scientists don't even use the phrase "missing link" except when talking down to reporters.

Next, what is Ötzi even doing in a slideshow on "monsters that people believe exist?" There is no "believe" involved here. Like the python, he does exist. He's carefully stored at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy. He is also not a monster, he's a normal guy who happened die in a place where his body was preserved for over five millenia.

I realize that there is constant pressure for commercial sites to keep putting up fresh content, but I could have put together a better slideshow on this topic when I was in the seventh grade. If anyone at MSN is interested, I'm available at a resonable hourly wage.

Postscript: Apparently after being soundly mocked by PZ's Legion of Doom, a grown-up took charge and removed the slide from the show.

A very brief history of plagiarism

In response to my post on a nineteenth century plagiarism mystery, Coturnix wrote:

I am assuming that the standards in the past were much loser than they are now and that the precise definitions of plagiarism evolved some time in the 20th century. Correct?

Coturnix is right about standards being different in the past, but it was much further in the past that he thinks. In ancient and medieval Europe, there was something of a double standard about plagiarism. Many authorless genres like religious texts were freely copied and incorporated into later works, "good writing" usually meant slavishly imitating a small number of respected authors (Cicero being the most important), and scholarship meant demonstrating mastery of the ancient greats. On the other hand, poets and playwrights have always jealously defended their words.

This began to change during the Renaissance when original scholarship became more respected and individual accomplishment was recognized in many more fields that it had been previously (for example, this is when painters began signing their works). Why this happened is an enormous subject that I won't go into right now. The point here is that, by the mid 1600s, accusations of plagiarism and stealing ideas were common in every creative field including the sciences. An accusation of stealing someone else's words or ideas and passing them off as your own was one of the worst insults imaginable and grounds for lawsuits and duels.

Just as a sidebar, the word "plagiarism," in the sense we use it today, first appeared in English in the various battles among Shakespeare and his peers. The mighty and majestic Oxford English Dictionary credits Ben Jonson with being the first to use it in print. The form they used was "plagiary," which is a Latin term for a type of kidnapper or illegitimate slaver.

The first English copyright law was passed in 1709. It had as much to do with protecting the rights of publishers against book piracy as it did with protecting the author's rights against unscrupulous printers, but author's rights developed very quickly. James Boswell, best known as Samuel Johnson's biographer, was a lawyer who argued one of the important cases over how long copyrights lasted for an author and his or her heirs (it was twenty one years at the time).

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the concept and the law were very similar to what they are today. Even footnotes were being used in a form very similar to what they are today. What has changed since then has been the issue of enforcing copyrights across borders. Most European countries concluded agreements to prevent book piracy (we should probably thank Napoleon for making that possible by dramatically reducing the number of countries in Europe). The United States was the odd man out. We refused to give any protection to foreign authors and publishers until 1891 and we didn't sigh on to the Berne Convention until 1988.

The bottom line for my mammoth post is that Buel, Lansdell, MacLean, and Lyell were all operating under the same concepts and very similar law to what we have today.

In the spirit of the topic, let me declare that most of what I know about this subject comes from Thomas Mallon's 1989 book Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism.

A mammoth literary mystery

I hate plagiarism. Everyone believes that plagiarism is wrong in the abstract, but most students are able to justify a little plagiarism now and then. I managed to get through college with recourse to it. My first experience with discovering a plagiarism was when I found out that someone had stolen an essay from me. I was pleased to find out that he received an A for the assignment and thought it was all a great joke. Between college and graduate school, I worked in a bookstore for a few years and became much less tolerant of plagiarism. This was good preparation for becoming a teaching assistant just as my university was adopting a zero tolerance policy on plagiarism, but I was appalled at how hard it was to get some students to even understand the concept. Later, when reviewing what had been written on the topic I chose for my Master's thesis, I discovered a dissertation that had stolen nearly a hundred pages from an earlier dissertation. I called the original author and he filed a complaint with the AHA ethics committee. Since grad school I've discovered one book and some news articles that were plagiarized; I always make an effort to let the original author know about it. I hate plagiarism.

This brings us to the mammoths. The other night I was using Google Books to track down the earliest version of, ironically, a fake discovery that made its way into mammoth literature in the nineteenth century. Searching a couple of keywords I found this pharase in two books : "Again, in 1843, M. Middendorf found a mammoth on the Taz, between the Obi and the ..." My first reaction was the same as I had when I discovered the dissertations: disgust followed by compulsion and finally obsession. I threw aside the work and went off to do something else. After a few minutes I came back because I had to look. I had to confirm that the two were exactly the same for at least couple paragraphs and determine which book was published first before I could go to bed. The next morning I got up early because it wouldn't let me sleep. Now came the hard work of reading both books in a split screen view and documenting the similarities. The two books were Through Siberia published in 1881 by Henry Lansdell and Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia published in 1882 by James William Buel. Both books were accounts of the authors' journies across Siberia, from west to east, with special attention paid to the condition of prisoners and exiles. The two authors followed more or less the same itinerary. The paragraphs that caught my eye appeared in both books as part of an extended digression on the history and resources of the Lena River valley.

In Lansdell the paragraph appears at the end of a three paragraph footnote on pages 289-90:

Again, in 1843, M. Middendorf found a mammoth on the Taz, between the Obi and the Yenesei, with some of the flesh in so perfect a condition that it was found possible to remove the ball of the eye, which is preserved in the Museum at Moscow.

In Buel it appears in the main text on 420:

Again, in 1843, M. Middendorf found a mammoth on the Taz, between the Obi and the Yenesei, with some of the flesh in so perfect condition that it was found possible to remove the ball of the eye, which is preserved in the Museum at Moscow.

My first glance the night before had shown that Buel copied all three paragraphs of Lansdell's footnote as well as the paragraphs that appeared before and after the point where Landsdell inserted the footnote. The following morning, working backward and forward from that point, I figured out that the copying amounted to an entire chapter (13 pages in Lansdell) with only minor differences. Unfortunately, I did the backward comparison before the forward comparison. At the end of Buel's version of the chapter, I found a found a footnote that would have saved me a sleepless night: "* For much of the information here given concerning the Lena, I am indebted to Mr. Lansdell's 'Through Siberia.'"

Okay, I thought, Buel isn't the jerk I thought he was. But, the footnote got me wondering how much of Buel's book was original. I searched the text of his book to see if he was indebted to Lansdell anywhere else. The only other place where Lansdell's name appeared in the book was in the introduction.

Several books on life in Russia and Siberia have appeared since the Turko-Russian war, but few that I have read treat the subject in a manner that suggests a personal visit to those countries by the authors. ... During the present year a work has appeared from the pen of Henry Lansdell, entitled "Through Siberia," that has met with much favor because it treats of a country about which so little is known, and because the author claims to have been a missionary and philanthropist. The facts are, however, that this work, I know, from observations made while in Siberia, to be a pure fiction so far as it relates to convict life; its statements concerning the prisons of Siberia are almost as wide of the truth as any of Munchausen's choice yarns. ... The London Graphic, reviewing the book, pronounces it an aggregated canard throughout. ... I was told by many prominent persons in Russia that the Government purchased several thousand copies of Mr. Lansdell's book and has been active in circulating it through several countries, because it represents convict life in Siberia as an existence of elegant ease and epicurean luxury...

While Buel though Lansdell's work was good enough that he borrowed an entire chapter from it, when he got around to writing the introduction, Buel damned Lansdell as a liar and a naive, if unwitting, propagandist for the Russian government. Buel wasn't the Jerk that I originally thought he was; he was simply a different type jerk.

This should have been the end of the story, but something bothered me about the paragraph that first caught my attention. It seemed familiar. There are only so many was to tell the same story and I have read about the fresh eyeball in many places. Still I decided to run the first sentence of the paragraph through another search. What I found was page 54 of Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man published in 1878 by John Patterson MacLean, three years before Lansdell's book. It's a book that I read about a month ago.

In 1843, Middendorf, a distinguished Russian naturalist, discovered a mammoth on the Tas, between the Obi and Yenesei, near the Arctic Circle, latitude 66° 30' North, with some parts of the flesh in a perfect state of preservation. The ball of the eye is in the Museum at Moscow.

The paragraph before all three of these is a description of the famous Adams mammoth, discovered in 1799 (I'll blog about it later). The Lansdell version is a shorter version of the discovery. Though different from the MacLean paragraph in wording, the juxtaposition of the two discoveries looks bad for Lansdell.

At this point, the score appears to be: Buel was an ungracious jerk, Lansdell was minor plagiarist, and MacLean... I decided one more search was in order. This time I used the last sentence of the paragraph. This is what I found.

From of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology starting with the 1847 edition:

The most recent discoveries made in 1843 by Mr. Middendorf, a distinguished Russian naturalist, and which he communicated to me in September 1846, afford more precise information as to the climate of the Siberian Lowlands, at the period when the extinct quadrupeds were entombed. One elephant was found on the Tas, between the Obi and Yenesei, near the Arctic circle, about lat. 66° 30' N., with some parts of the flesh in so perfect a state that the ball of the eye is now preserved in the Museum at Moscow.

Principles of Geology was Lyell's best known and most important book. It was enormously influential (Darwin read it during his voyage on the Beagle) and most educated Englishmen of the mid-ninteenth would have been familiar with it. It went through eleven editions between 1830 and Lyell's death in 1875. Lyell updated the book in most editions as new data came in. The next few paragraphs In Lyell and the final (1873) edition of Lyell look bad for MacLean.

In MacLean, one paragraph after the Middendorf eyeball:

In 1866 many skeletons were found retaining the skin and hair, in the flat country near the mouth of the Yenesei, between lat. 70° and 75° N. The heads of most of them were turned towards the south.

The Academy of St. Petersburg, in 1869-70, sent out an exploring expedition under Herr Von Maydell, to the river Indigiska, to examine some remains said to have been discovered there. The exploring party found the skin and hair as well as the bones of the mammoth at two points on the river, about thirty miles distant from each other, and sixty-six miles from the Arctic Sea.

In the 1873 edition of Lyell, two paragraphs after the Middendorf eyeball:

In 1866, in the flat country near the mouths of the Yenesei, between lat. 70° and 75° N., many skeletons of mammoths were found retaining the skin and hair. The heads of most of them are said to have been turned towards the south. So late as 1869-70, an exploring expedition was made by Herr von Maydell, under the direction of the Academy of St. Petersburg, to the river Indigiska, to examine some remains said to have been discovered there. We learn from M. Brandt that the travellers found the skin and hair as well as the bones of the Elphas primigenius at two points on the river, about thirty miles distant from each other, and sixty-six miles from the Arctic Sea.

Lyell footnotes Brandt for his information. An especially damning bit of evidence against MacLean is that he used the same misspelling as Lyell for the Indigirka River. (I don't yet have a copy of Brandt's paper so I can't say whether he also used that spelling.) I've discovered a dozen references in English to the Middendorf eyeball appearing over the sixty years after Lyell first mentioned it. All of them, except MacLean, give Lyell credit. Did MacLean plagiarize Lyell, the most famous geologist of his generation, or was he just sloppy in attributing sources? MacLean was very careful in his description of the Adams mammoth use quote marks and give credit to Richard Owen for six sentences. MacLean also gives credit to Lyell for quotes in two other places in the book.

At the end of the game, the score is: Buel was an ungracious jerk, Lansdell was minor plagiarist, and MacLean (or his editor) was at best very sloppy in his work. Only Lyell come out of this looking good. The possible morals of the story are: A) You can die but you can't hide when you are a plagiarist; B) Cite your sources, dammit; or C) I have way too much time on my hands. All of the above is also allowed. I still hate plagiarism.

Fake quotes and bad jokes

Watch Rachel Maddow slap down Pat Buchanan on MSNBC's Race For The White House. Apparently, MSNBC has cut this segment out of the version of the show available online. Naturally, Left Blogistan is going nuts over this heavy-handed censorship and calls are out to deluge the brass at MSNBC with mail. The kossacs are running with this. A typical example is this from a diarist called Jonibgud.

Jonibgud follows his/her call with this:

A network executive, seeking to explain MSNBC's apparent kidnapping of its own footage, spoke of his company's public-interest obligations.

“Viewers are incredibly engaged this election season, with a real appetite for political news,” said Phil Griffin, Senior Vice President, NBC News and Executive in Charge of MSNBC. "But sometimes, for viewers' own good -- and to maintain our good standing in the Village -- we have to self-censor. Some truths are just too painful, and we have a responsibility to protect the public as well as inform them."

It's an outrageous admission. Raw Story repeats the quote. I didn't think it sounded genuine, so I Googled it and found that the first part comes from a press release announcing Race For The White House last March. The second--and damning--part only appears in Kos and Raw Story, though in a few minutes I expect it will be all over Left Blogistan.

I suspect Jonibgud meant the quote as a joke but failed to make that clear. In any case, it's a fake quote and will be sure to bite the kossacs and anyone who uses it on the ass. DO NOT use the quote until it has been confirmed, as it possibly libels Phil Griffin.

Update: The comments on the Jonibgud post are outraged at the Phil Griffin quote and ready for action. Over twenty quotes in, someone named Parallax857 points out that the quote is joke. A few more angry comments ensue and then the rest of the gang catch on. Too late, I'm afraid. Democratic Underground has picked it up; it took till comment number 29 for someone to catch on and inform the enraged readers. It's been ten hours since Raw Story posted it and they haven't caught on yet. Phil Griffin is probably baffled by the angry e-mail he's getting today.

Passive aggressive resistance

P-Zed points us to this story from the Philadelphia Inquirer. A local business man and atheist has put up a billboard for the local rationalist community. It reads: "Don't believe in God? You are not alone." Steve Rade wanted to start a group for atheists in his area to get together with like minds. When he looked into it, he found that there were several atheist, skeptic, and humanist groups in the region, but that they had little contact with one another. He brought their leaders together and proposed forming an umbrella group called the Greater Philadelphia Coalition of Reason. He also offered to bankroll a director and put up the sign for a recruiting drive.

What I find unusual about the story is the angle the writer took. The story is about Rade and how he came to in this position as a leading light of the local rationalist community. The billboard is only mentioned as a hook to set up the question, what sort of person would put up a sign like that? The short profile of Rade is informative and fairly neutral in tone. Ninety percent of the newspapers and virtually all of the television stations would play the story as one of controversy. You know the type: "Local churches offended by billboard. Film at eleven." Yet the writer not only took a different tack, he avoided the controversy angle altogether. There are no quotes from local pastors or startled drivers con or pro. He even avoids mentioning the controversy where it might have fit into the story. For example, Rade mentions how many phone calls the billboard has generated for the group; that would have been a natural place to mention haw many were positive and how many negative. But the writer, David O'Reilly by name, avoided the easy story and stuck to talking about Rade.

This wasn't good enough for someone in the office. Like many news outlets, the Philadelphia Inquirer wants its website to be an interactive experience. O'Reilly's story is presented with an instant poll and blog-style comments. Whoever set those up wanted to see the controversy angle covered and set up the reader participation to invite the believers to air their wounded feelings.

The poll asks "Do you believe in God?"* The vast majority of Americans believe in some form of deity. That's not news. It's also not especially relevant to the article. Relevant would be a question phrased to tease out interest in Rade and his group, such as "Would you attend the meeting of an atheists' group?" or "Do you know any atheists?" The do you believe in God question adds nothing to the story except to allow the uncomfortable majority to reassure themselves that their numbers are still unassailable enough that the Rades of the world pose no threat to them. Giving comfort to the powerful is a contemptible way for a newspaper to behave.

The comment board is even more obviously slanted toward controversy and bringing out those opposed to Rade and his group. The link reads: "Your thoughts: Does the billboard bother you?" It's not just set up to provoke controversy, it is clearly encouraging those offended to use the comments to air their feelings of grievance.

It is possible that these sidebars are nothing more than the work of an unimaginative low level editor or webmaster with no ax to grind. But, given the obvious slant, I'm more inclined to see it as a passive aggressive attempt to undermine the message of the article--that atheists are normal people--by encouraging outrage and providing a rallying forum for those hostile to that message of tolerance. But whether it was the result of hostility or incompetence, it is bad journalism.

* The Pharyanguloid hordes are swamping the poll. It was running two to one against God when I read the article.

Mammoths are not dinosaurs

Dinosaur and extinct are not synonyms. Any eight year old could tell you that, but it remains a point beyond the ken of most grown-ups. MSNBC is the latest offender. As a sidebar to their review of Roland Emmerich's woolly mammoth movie "10,000 B.C." they have a list of other famous prehistoric movies. The editor managed to stay out of trouble with the title: "Land before time: 11 great prehistoric flicks." Then he went on to add a subtitle: "‘10,000 B.C.’ is the latest movie to take us back to when dinosaurs roamed." This is above a picture of a mammoth chasing a primitive human. Even there the editor seems to have some trouble: "A woolly mammoth looks for a meal in Roland Emmerich's '10,000 B.C.'" I haven't seen the film yet, but I'll bet the mammoth isn't planning to eat the cave man. Since the mammoth appears to have a spear stuck in it's side, I'll bet it was the cave man who was looking for a meal.

To sum up: mammoths were not dinosaurs. Mammoths were not carnivorous. Never send a grown man to do an child's job.

Your yellow press at work

On the CBS News website, the top headlines include storms in California, Britney's latest breakdown, the Labor Department monthly jobs report and this: Accused Clinton Neighbor Admits Affairs.


The story is about one Carlos Perez-Olivo, a man in New York who is accused of killing his wife over a year ago. Prosecutors in the case released evidence of Perez's infidelity without comment, though the implication that it might be motive is clear. The story is a local crime with no national significance, but there are enough interesting elements in the story that it might have made the back pages of some larger papers on a slow news week. The only connection to the Clintons is that the Perezes lived near them. That is enough. Not only is the Clinton connection mentioned in the headline, the first sentence of the story makes it clear that the only reason the national news media care is because that connection.

The neighbor of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton who is accused of murdering his wife admitted to police he had a 10-year affair with another woman and had sent her flowers two days before his wife was shot.

The story that CBS ran is off of the Associated Press wire. The AP sent the story out with a less sensational headline: New Details in Death of Clinton Neighbor. Apparently the temptation to use "Clinton" and "Affair" in the same headline was more than the CBS web editor could resist. The Poughkeepsie Journal also ran the AP story and succumbed to the same temptation: Clinton neighbor accused of killing wife admits affair. United Press International also mentioned the Clinton connection in the headline to a story on Perez, but never mentions their names in the body of the story.

A Google News search produced two dozen stories over the last month that mentioned the Clinton connection, almost always in the headline. The Clintons have nothing to do with the murder of Mrs. Perez and nothing to do with Mr. Perez's affairs. It's the worst sort of distortion and sensationalism. Should we frame every crime in Manhattan as happening to or by a neighbor of Donald Trump? We deserve better.

A trifling point, or not

When Bob Kerrey endorsed Hillary Clinton yesterday, he offered some kind words for her chief opponent, Barack Obama:

It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims and I think that experience is a big deal.

Some Obama supporters and liberal bloggers have taken offense at this, seeing it as a sneaky way to keep the Muslim Manchurian Candidate theme alive. Kerry says he meant no such thing, "I know that middle name is seen as a weakness by Republicans, but I don’t think it is. I think it enables him to speak to a billion Muslims around the world.”

Mark Kleiman is inclined to give Kerrey the benefit of the doubt, and, what's more, agrees with him.

It’s entirely possible that Kerrey meant what he said about Obama’s name doing America good in its foreign relations. I’m more inclined to believe that because I also think that what Kerrey said was true: a big advantage to electing Barack Hussein Obama to the Presidency is that there are a billion people in the world with relatives named “Hussein,” and they’d be less inclined to be our enemies if our leader had “Hussein” in his name.

James Joyner is also inclined to give Kerrey the benefit of the doubt, However Joyner strongly disagrees with him.

[T]he idea that religious nuts who are willing to murder thousands of Americans would think “Hey, they elected a guy with a Muslim middle name! They must be okay!” is absurd. Hell, they kill plenty of people named Hussein who actually are Muslims; the only thing they hate more than American infidels is Arab apostates.

I agree with Joyner, but in the spirit of playing the "on the other hand" game till I have more hands than Kali, and, more importantly, in the spirit of pointless, academic pedantry that I so love, I do need to point out one flaw in Joyner's statement. Arab isn't a religion. Arab is a nationality and you cannot commit apostasy against a nationality (you cam emigrate, but that's not the same thing). Apostasy is a religious crime. Muslim is a religion. Arab and Muslim are not synonyms. Kerrey's lame point was that having the middle name "Hussein" would give Obama instant credibility with the world's Muslim population, over half of whom are not Arab.

Here let me present it as a handy list that you can print out and give to your friends and kin.

Arab - A nationality, not a religion
Muslim - A religion, not a nationality
Arab and Muslim - Not the same thing
Muslim and Islam - The same thing
Islamofacism - Not a real thing

Sigh. Actually, this is more than a pedantic point. These confusions about Arab and Muslim and about religion and nationality are epidemic among even the best educated Americans. The Bush administration is made up of arrogant, bullying idiots, but another administration made up of people with the best of intentions will still be a disaster in foreign policy if we don't care enough about the rest of the world's people and cultures to learn even the most basic facts about them.

Our humor impaired minority party

This looks like a major of American and International copyright laws as well as a possible misuse of committee resources. Right now it's up on the Republican page for the House Energy and Commerce Committee. I'm printing the whole thing here, because I suspect this thing will be gone by Monday.


The text, in case you can't read it, says:

Republican Senate hopeful Montgomery Burns today joined with Mayor Joe Quimby, D-Springfield, to support the Senate’s gazillion-dollar SCHIP bill.

"If the poor children can get a piece of the action, why can’t I?" explained Burns at a MoveOn.org rally in Capital City. "The little darlings are needy? Me, too. I need somebody to pay. Quimby here says he knows a bunch of low-income nobodies who are ripe for the picking. Excellent."

"You need this?" wondered the mayor. "Well, why not. I’ve got needs, too. Why, I’ve got 27 paternity suits pending and to quote the Speaker, 'suffer the little children.' The Quimby Compound is overflowing with those little sufferers. Vote Quimby."

Inexplicably, the mayor then leaned toward a comely MoveOn organizer and whispered in her ear, "Ah, if anyone asks, you’re my niece from out of town and you don’t get SCHIP."

“But Uncle Joe, I am your niece from out of town, and I do get SCHIP."

"Good Lord, I’m a monster!" exclaimed the mayor.

Mr. Burns shrugged and pressed on with a stirring call to arms: "Truth and fairness, these are the demons we must slay if we wish to save the tykes."

His patience was tested when a ruckus arose from a restive crowd of backdrop-toddlers who’d been rented by MoveOn for the photo-op. "Get these props away from me," Burns hissed.

"Kids? Who needs ‘em? Rahm, release the hounds!" added Quimby with a spreading grin. "Ha, I’ve always wanted to say that, Burns."

The 37 rental children fled and were not seen again, but the arf-arf-arfing of their pursuers could be heard well past sunset.

I'm sure some college aged staffer thinks he (I would be very surprised if it was a she) was very clever coming up with this. It was actually sent out as a press release as well as being posted on the committee's website. I have often said that conservative humor is no laughing matter. This is one more data point to prove that. Besides not being funny, it makes no sense.

How many things are wrong with this?

• Did the Republican staffer who wrote this really think claiming Mr. Burns as a Republican candidate would reflect well on their party?
  
• Did they think that just because The Simpsons runs on a Fox channel that they could appropriate Groening's trademarked and copyrighted characters for the Republican cause?
  
• Why did the Republicans of the House Energy and Commerce Committee feel they needed to weigh in on this issue anyway?
  
• Is this press release supposed to speak for the four Republican members of that committee who voted for the S-CHIP amendment--Fred Upton (MI), Heather Wilson (NM), Mary Bono (CA), and Tim Murphy (PA)?
  
• Do the staffers start drinking early on Fridays after their bosses leave for the weekend

There are no Africans

Science Daily has an article about the The Louisville Zoo’s new baby pygmy hippo. It has pictures and the baby is completely adorable. The piece should be pure candy, but they ruined it with this sentence:

The Louisville Zoo’s female baby pygmy hippo heard her name for the first time—Isoke (ee SO keh), which is African for satisfying gift.

Let's see if I can say this without shouting, there is no language called "African." There is a language called "Afrikaans" and it's a dialect of Dutch, but that's not what they are talking about. There is also not a culture called African, nor is there a people/tribe/nation called African. What there is, is a continent called Africa. On that continent are over a thousand distinct cultures. Africa is home to half of the human languages spoken on this planet. While I'm on the subject, there also is no Native American people, culture, or language called "Indian."

When an American refers to something as being in the African language, they usually mean kiSwahili, a language spoken on the East coast of the African continent. KiSwahili is a trade language made up of a simplified grammar drawn from the Bantu subgroup of the Niger-Kordofanian language family (also called Niger-Congo B) and a vocabulary made up of equal parts of Bantu and Arabic with a smaller portion of Persian and English loan words. It is the one language from the African continent for which it is easiest to find a cheap dictionary in the United States. Just for the record, kiSwahili is spoken on the wrong side of the continent to be part of the heritage of slave-descended African-Americans. It is, however, part of the heritage of Barack Obama whose father came from East Africa.

When someone says that the Indians believe this, or that something else is a word in African they are speaking from ignorance and, worse, showing an utter contempt through indifference for the people, cultures, or languages they are supposedly quoting. Either that or they are doing it just to tick me off.

Populist elitists

We really must play buzz-word bingo more often with Pat Buchanan. In his column today he manages to create such a powerfully oxymoronic construction that it would clear the card and be awarded an automatic bingo in any game.

The subject is his good friend Don Imus. Buchanan sputters with outrage through a full column of incoherent and badly assembled talking points. He says that the remarks of Imus and Bernie McGurkin about the Rutgers women's basketball team were indefensible, and then proceeds to defend them. If black rappers get to use those words, how come racist white guys can't? How come no one is apologizing to the Duke lacrosse team? Al Sharpton was wrong about Tawana Brawley. What about the First Amendment?* Then he drops this masterpiece:

Imus threw himself on the mercy of the court of elite opinion – and that court, pandering to the mob, lynched him. Yet, for all his sins, he was a better man than the lot of them rejoicing at the foot of the cottonwood tree.

Got that? It was those elitists giving the people what they wanted. Or maybe it was those populists who think they know better than everybody else. Unless by "mob" he means the Mafia, that paragraph makes no sense at all.

As an old master panderer to momentary public hysteria and agitator of lynch mobs, Buchanan should be ashamed of himself. But then, he should be ashamed just for being Pat Buchanan. That's never stopped him.

* In order: Rappers who call women "hos" are jerks and many people call them on it. People are apologizing to the Duke lacrosse team. What does Tawana Brawley have to do with anything? The First Amendment has nothing to do with who a corporation chooses to fire or not fire.