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~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 28th 2011

On Friday the Duke of Edinburgh was helicoptered to Papworth Hospital in Cambridge where he underwent treatment for a blocked coronary artery. It was a minor operation. The next day the news from the hospital was good and the Queen and other members of the Royal Family paid a visit. Four days later Prince Philip rejoined his family at Sandringham in Norfolk. Our sympathies are with the Duke and his family, but we reserve a little sympathy for the reporters who spent their Christmas standing outside Papworth. They had almost nothing to report.

What can happen in a non-news situation is that reporters feel compelled to give us the facts in a tone of disbelief. The news yesterday that the Duke of Edinburgh had been discharged from Papworth was the lead story on the BBC's "World At One". We learnt that his officials said the Prince was "incredibly cheerful". We learnt that he had walked downstairs to his car "unaided". We learnt that he was sitting in the front passenger seat and "seemed alert and interested". Seemed.

As his car approached the exit, it slowed, the Prince wound down the window and waved. After the days of waiting, this emerged as the most notable detail. A friendly wave from the Prince, we were told, is not something the press is accustomed to. But perhaps the Prince was enjoying himself. He had cheated them of a much bigger story.

The Telegraph has just reported what The Economist noted back in July: scientists have discovered just how Leonardo da Vinci achieved his mesmerising sfumato effect on the Mona Lisa.

Many have long wondered just how the artist achieved such delicate shading on this woman's face, and especially around the mouth. Prolonged staring reveals nary a brushstroke; only a somewhat sly smile "that seems to disappear when looked at directly". Finally, after the use of a technique called X-ray fluorescence (instead of the more invasive and controversial paint sample for chemical analysis), scientists have proven that da Vinci created his trademark shadowing "by applying up to 40 layers of extremely thin glaze thought to have been smeared on with his fingers."

The Telegraph then notes that with "the drying times for the glaze taking months, such effects would have taken years to achieve."

Something about this detail suddenly throbbed with metaphor, I'm afraid. That is, of course it takes many, many years for a woman to cultivate a smile that one suspects is there, but one can't be sure of, and which certainly disappears when scrutinised head on.

In the New York Times yesterday, scientists gave the official biological reasons why we find some creatures heinous:

"The star-nosed mole"...said Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face."

"...It looks like if you handled it [the blobfish],” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, “at the very least you’d get some kind of rash.”

Jokes aside, the real reasons that we find these creatures to be so ugly are fairly self-explanatory (and something we've considered before): we are especially sensitive to creatures whose features look somewhat like our own. Humans are biologically prone to find most baby animals "cute", because we are wired to respond compassionately to signs of infantile need. We are also a bit disgusted by traits in animals that echo unhealthy or undesirable attributes among ourselves, such as asymmetricality, splotches, bumps and patchy hair. (The wrinkly, squinty adorability of shar-peis, however, are another matter.)

Scientists are not immune to this ew-factor. They tend to discriminate against ugly animals in their work—"researchers found 1,855 papers about chimpanzees, 1,241 on leopards and 562 about lions," the NYT reports, "but only 14 for that mammalian equivalent of the blobfish, the African manatee."  read more »

Though posted on a blog, this is a particularly insightful personal account of what it feels like to get off the Twitter-Tumblr-social-networking treadmill, punchy and modest. (As someone who has been feeling like an awkward manifestation of Nicholas Carr's verdict of our brains on the internet, I suppose I'm sensitive to such insight):

On Sunday evening, I deleted Twitter and Tumblr off my phone, and besides for a five minute relapse this afternoon, they have stayed deleted. It was all just starting to feel too much like an eating disorder or like academic mania — being preoccupied with thoughts you don’t care about, compulsively seeking information that is at once overwhelming and boring, soliciting the approval of people you don’t know, relying on your own anxiety for stimulation...

But it also feels surprisingly good to witness the evolution of thoughts and feelings for the first time in what seems like forever; I had forgotten that thoughts and feelings actually grow more complex if you just stop documenting their earliest iterations. Strangers on the street are the most concrete example. They can be funny from a block away, pitiable from half-a-block away, tragic up-close, and then lovable once they’re behind you. If you use a smart phone like I do, you never see the pitiable stranger, the tragic stranger, or the lovable stranger. You take a picture of the funny stranger and caption it with something clever and mean. “Dopamine squirts,” be damned; there are ethical dimensions to disconnecting.

Matthew Valencia, The Economist's US finance editor, picks his favourite books about Wall Street—its colourful past, troubling present and possible future ...  read more »

A solar eclipse is a sharp reminder of the sun’s might, and of how much of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. The fuss over the total solar eclipse of 1999 showed how rare it is to have an eclipse that passes over land, let alone anywhere convenient to Western observers. The cosmos has no time for politics. So it is this time. Today, on January 15th, an annular solar eclipse is due to pass over the Indian Ocean, drawing a dark line from the heart of Africa up the eastern coast of India towards Bangladesh. Annular means there is a brilliant shear of circular light around the blackened moon. The best views are likely to be in Tamil Nadu, India, but dedicated chasers are probably now in the Maldives, where the eclipse will be fullest for longest. ~ ED CUMMING Picture credit: a_seph (via Flickr)

For the first time in 60 years, the Palestinians have a presence at the Venice Biennale. Marisa Mazria Katz talks to all the players involved ...  read more »

In response to my post about Radiohead's decision to concentrate on crafting singles over albums ("An epitaph for the album?"), Brett McCallon, our online gaming columnist, e-mailed the following rebuttal:  read more »

On a hot tip from a co-worker I skipped lunch, grabbed the camera bag and rushed the seven blocks from our office to a long fountain in front of the Chase Bank building on Sixth Avenue and 50th Street in midtown Manhattan. No signs were needed to attract the already swollen crowd; everyone seemed to know that this was the place to be.  read more »

Thanks to Lexington for highlighting this article about the relationship between pain and cursing. According to a study published in the current issue of NeuroReport, swearing helps to alleviate pain:

"Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon," said Richard Stephens of Keele University in England and one of the authors of the new study. "It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain."

Stephens and his fellow researchers proved the neurological efficacy of swearing with the help of 64 undergraduate volunteers. Amusingly, these undergraduates (lured with pocket-change, surely) had to submerge their hands in a tub of ice water for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice; they then repeated the experiment without cursing. (It's hard not to giggle at the image of men in labcoats with clipboards monitoring the blue-mouthed pain of financially insolvent students.) When volunteers swore like sailors, they could keep their hands in the frigid water for longer.  read more »