The Panda's Thumb

I love Stephen Jay Gould. I really do. I'd probably love him more if he hadn't died so early. He takes complicated subject matter and writes about it in such a way that it seems like the simplest thing you've ever read. This book is a collection of essays about natural history, just like most of his books are. This is the first collection of his essays that I've read (I've only read two other books of his, which is absolutely shocking!).

There's not really much you can say about his work - it's easiest just to say: read it yourself. Not only does he say everything far better than I ever could, it's totally worth it and you could never regret reading anything he's written (and if you could, then I don't really want to know you).

Pascal's Wager: the Man Who Played Dice with God

This is not really a book about Pascal's Wager, so much as it's a book about Blaise Pascal. It was particularly interesting to read this while The Three Musketeers was fresh in my mind, as the two overlap in time, with Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII (who was apparently homosexual) and Anne of Austria being prominent figures in both.

Anyway, this book considers Pascal's life from birth to death. It considers his rational and scientific research, and the varying success thereof, both as it relates to contemporary times and as it related to the time in which he lived. It also considers the religious atmosphere of seventeenth century France. I found Jansenism, and consequently Augustinism, as rather frightening extremes of Catholic belief. I was highly amused at the way the Catholic Church wiggled around the question of heresy, as declaring Jansenism heretical really is the same as declaring Augustinism heretical. But questions of Catholic belief are not relevant here.

What is relevant is that Pascal subscribed to Jansenism. Somehow, from that religious standpoint he formulated his well-known wager. Connor makes the point that the wager is only really useful in the context of the 'rules' of the 'game' in which it was made, which I found very interesting. What I particularly found interesting is that considering Augustinist, and consequently Jansenist, belief in efficacious grace, the wager should never have been made. Which brings up the question of what Pascal actually believed, as opposed to what he thought he believed.

This is a fascinating biography of a remarkable man - both in terms of science and theology and in terms of the relationship between them in the seventeenth century. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in these subjects.

Intracortical remodeling during human bone development – a histomorphometric study

This is a fascinating paper about bone remodeling. Essentially, it sampled a bunch of people's bone to find out what the bone looks like when the people are growing. It's very interesting to me, because I care about things like this (hello, corrections!). It's probably not very interesting to you if you don't. I have a .pdf if you want a copy.

Anyway, the point of this article is mostly to do with cortical porosity, which I'm not particularly interested in. It gives a pretty good outline of the process of remodeling and much of what it talks about is very interesting, if completely useless for my thesis.

The full citation:
Rauch, F; Travers, R & Glorieux, FH. 2007. Intracortical remodeling during human bone development - a histomorphometric study. Bone 40:274-280.

The Father of Forensics

I do like my crime books. This is one I picked up at some museum in Washington (we went to so many that I can't remember which one. I'd like to say natural history, but I'm not sure. It's equally likely to have been science and technology. There are a lot of museums in Washington. Anyway, this book is essentially about the origins of modern crime scene investigation (the CSI tv programmes are insufferable when you can't suspend disbelief properly. If you can, they're fun. If you can't they do horrific things to science and procedure). Sir Bernard Spilsbury investigated a lot of cases and this is the story of his life and how he made immense advances in the field. It's also an account of his personality, by all accounts a formidable one. It details the mistakes he occasionally made and the consequences of that (at least, I think that's in this book. I have a few and that's in one of them, but I can't actually tell which one off the top of my head).

It's an interesting account of both the advances in forensics and getting the science and the evidence accepted legally as well as the personality behind that.

Why Turnover Rate Matters

Hedges, REM; Clement, JG; Thomas, CDL & O'Connell, TC. 2007. Collagen turnover in the adult femoral mid-shaft: modeled from anthropogenic radiocarbon tracer measurements. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 133:808-816.

Highlights:
* Due to the testing of nuclear weapons, the amount of atmospheric 14C almost doubled in the 1960s and then began to decrease slowly.
* Collagen turnover is important in archaeological science because it affects both the precision of 14C dates and the accuracy of dietary reconstructions.
* Terrestrial food sources have the same ratio of 14C to the other carbon isotopes as the atmosphere, though the signal can take as much as a year to appear.
* d13C and d15N were measured as well as 14C. The d-values for males and females were significantly different.
* Between the ages of 20 and 80 years, the turnover rate of collagen decreases from about 4 to 3%/year for females and from 3 to 1.5%/year for males.
* "Human femoral bone collagen isotopically reflects an individual's diet over a much larger period of time than 10 years, including a substantial portion of collagen synthesised during adolesence."

Comments:
The reason I'm interested in this paper is precisely because the turnover rate is important in palaeodietary studies, which is what I'm doing. Now that last conclusion, the one I quoted directly is particularly important to me. Our current dietary reconstructions are fairly broad and spotting changes that occurred in later life is particularly difficult. Which is the entire point of my project. If we can separate out the different stages, then those dietary changes should be fairly easy to see.


Shin, JY; O'Connell, TC; Black, S & Hedges, REM. 2004. Differentiating bone osteonal turnover rates by density fractionation: validation using the bomb 14C atmospheric pulse. Radiocarbon 46:853-861.

Highlights:
* Using bone density fractionation [bdf] to separate older, denser bone from yougner, lighter bone.
* The method can be used to remove diagenetically altered bone from archaeological samples.
* Adequate milling is essential for the method's success.
* Results show that the lighter fractions have 14C values that correspond wtih more recent parts of the bomb curve.
* The results were less clear in those individuals that were older at the time of the 14C peak, presumably due to already decreased turnover rates.

Comments:
The importance of this paper lies in the fact that it's another tantalising glimpse of the method at work. The conclusion drawn by the authors is that bdf does in fact separate the bone into older-denser and younger-lighter fractions. It offers a hint at the conclusions of the paper above, with regard to the slow turnover rates after cessation of growth and the long residence times of bone. Adequate milling might be something to consider in the case of Wendell.