I begin with a full disclosure: As many readers know, Vanessa Woods is one of my very best friends. I love spending time with her because she's insightful, outrageous, brilliant, and funny. And I can sincerely say I love her new memoir, Bonobo Handshake for the very same reasons. But most of all, I'm recommending this book because it's so important. At the start of Bonobo Handshake, we're introduced to Vanessa as she sets off rather haphazardly on an adventure to Africa with her new husband, Duke anthropologist Brian Hare. By the end, she--and we--are not the same. Woven in between is a beautiful and complex narrative about people and other primates that slowly unravels what's really at stake. There were times I laughed out loud reading about the challenges of working with a species that--yes--famously approaches sex as easily as humans would a handshake. But there is a lot more to bonobos than their sexual behavior. Just as Jane Goodall documented the unforgettable antics of chimpanzees like Flossie and David Greybeard, Vanessa brings us into the world of 'Empress' Mimi, mischievous and lovable Malou, and my favorite bonobo of all, sweet little Lodja. It's easy to fall in love with all ...

Tonight’s the night: Futurama returns with fresh episodes on Comedy Central, starting at 10 PM Eastern Time. Two weeks ago we featured our conversation with Billy West, the voice actor behind Fry, Professor Farnsworth, and other characters. Today, it’s executive producer David X. Cohen, who worked on The Simpsons before creating Futurama with Matt Groening more than a decade ago.

Cohen discusses how he went from scientist to comedy writer, the logic (or illogic) behind heads in jars, why things still don’t work in the 31st century, and how he sneaks math jokes into the show.

*Plus, read through to the end for some spoilers about the plots of some new episodes coming this season.

DISCOVER Magazine: I feel compelled to ask: Does the X stand for anything? Or is it like the Harry Truman S, and it stands for nothing?

David X Cohen: I’ll get that off my chest right off the bat: It’s a fraudulent middle initial, but there is a logic behind it. The reason for that is the writer’s guild, which has a regulation that no two writers can have the same name for on-screen credits. So, when you join the union, if your name is already taken, you have to change your name. Being named David Cohen—as you can imagine, there were several other David Cohens already in the guild, [and] one with my actual middle initial, S, for Samuel.

So, I decided to go for the craziest most sci-fi letter available, X.

DM: Both of your parents were scientists, correct?

DXC: Yes. Both PhDs in biology. I grew up in a house that was very science-oriented. The family activities we did were usually science-related—trips to the zoo or the museum of natural history in New York. So it was just taken for granted—by me at least—that I would be a scientist sooner or later. I tended to gravitate, though, more toward the physical sciences and math and computer science and physics, and I actually majored in physics in college. So, my undergraduate degree is in physics, and then I got a master’s degree in theoretical computer science as well. Before I derailed.

DM: How did you “derail?”

DXC: When I was growing up I just wasn’t really aware that there were careers such as writing cartoons. It wasn’t something that anybody I knew did and never popped into my mind. But then, when I went off to college, I worked on the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine, and suddenly I did know some people who had the career goal of becoming writers, or specifically, comedy writers.

And after that, I was somewhat torn. Should I continue down my path to be a scientist, or should I pursue this thing which (I thought) I did for fun? Ultimately, [I decided] I would like to go to graduate school before forgetting everything I did as an undergraduate. I went to UC Berkeley and had a good time there, but got to the point where I had reached the end of the line of what I was working on, and I had to reevaluate. I decided I might rather try the other option after all.

It worked out. So, my leave of absence from graduate school is still in progress.

Next: Fermat’s Last Theorem, Star Trek, and suicide booths

Gifted astrophotographer Stéphane Guisard — whose Easter Island picture garnered him the #3 spot in my Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2009 — has done it again. He just published this amazing picture of star trails, but it’s not like one you’ve ever seen:

[Click to see a bigger, cleaner pic, and yes, you really want to!]

This astonishing picture shows the entire sky from horizon to horizon with the help of a wide angle lens (to help orient you, south is to the left, north to the right, west at the bottom, and east is at the top). It was taken on a volcano called Chimborazo, which is in Ecuador. The volcano has a latitude of 1.5° south, so it sits almost exactly on the Equator [Update: Stéphane sent me a note that he has been to this volcano before, and has an amazing Milky Way picture taken from it.] Guisard started the exposure about an hour after sunset, once the sky got dark, and ended 10 hours later, about an hour before sunrise. Because of this, it shows roughly 90% of the entire visible sky!

How can this be?

If you’ve ever been to this blog before, you know I’ll be happy to explain. But it takes a minute, so I’ve split the rest of this post up into two sections: you can read about the guts of how this picture works just below, or you can skip to the part where I describe what’s in it (stars and so on). Enjoy.

1) How this can be:

[First, a note: when I say "entire sky", I mean the whole thing, like you were floating out in deep space and could see in every direction with nothing blocking your way. It would feel like you were in the center of a sphere with the stars surrounding you no matter which way you look. On Earth at any one moment, the most you can see is 1/2 the sky, because the Earth itself blocks your view.]

OK, we need a a little geometry lesson. Imagine you are standing on the north pole. As the Earth spins under you, the stars appear to make circles centered directly over your head. Polaris would make a tiny little circle in 24 hours (it’s not exactly on the north celestial pole, the point in the sky directly over the Earth’s north pole, but it’s close), and stars farther from the pole would make bigger circles. At the horizon, the circles would be biggest.

But that’s all you could see. The Earth itself blocks your view of the southern sky, so you can only see half the entire sky. The stars all make circles that are parallel with the horizon, so they never rise nor set. It doesn’t matter what time of night you go out; you see the same stars, just in different positions in the sky. You’ll never see Alpha Centauri or the Southern Cross.

The same is true if you were to stand on the south pole, except this time you can only see the southern sky. The Earth would forever block your view of the Big Dipper, Polaris, and other exclusively northern sights.

Things change if you’re on the Equator. Facing north, you would just see Polaris on the horizon — and actually it would be a bit above the horizon, due to, of all things, our atmosphere. The air of the Earth acts like a lens, bending the path of the light from stars near the horizon. Because of this, Polaris would actually be about two degrees (about 4 times the size of the full Moon) above the horizon. If the Earth had no atmosphere, Polaris would be exactly on the horizon as seen from the Equator.

Turning round and facing south, you’d see the south pole of the sky (marked by the much fainter star Sigma Octans), which would likewise be on the horizon. Facing east, you’d see stars just now rising, and facing west those that are just now setting. If we had no Sun, over the course of 12 hours you’d see every single star in the sky as the Earth rotates beneath you. That’s because any star just setting in the west as you start your observation will be just rising in the east 12 hours later.

However, we do have the Sun (yay!) and so you can’t observe for 12 straight hours, only realistically about 10. So you don’t see the whole sky over the course of the night, you can only see about 10/12 = 5/6 = 80%. If you can push the observing for another half hour you can get up to about 87% of the sky. [Update: Stéphane corrected my math here, and he's right. My apologies for any confusion!] Astronomers divide the sky up into 24 hours — in this case, each "hour" is the distance a star on the Equator of the sky will travel in that time. It’s equivalent to 15 degrees (360 degrees / 24 hours = 15 degrees per hour). The part of the sky not seen in a picture like the one above is shaped like a watermelon slice, with the narrow points at each pole and the widest part at the Equator, near the Sun’s position. It’s one hour wide on each side of the Sun, so altogether that slice is two hours wide. That means the picture has the entire sky (24 hours) minus those two hours, for a total of 22 hours. The amount of sky seen is therefore 22/24 = 11/12 = 92%.

Plus, the Earth’s air give you a bonus: because it bends the light of stars low to the horizon, you can actually see stars that are below your physical horizon! In a sense, the air is acting like a periscope, allowing you see around a corner.

So all this together means that Guisard’s remarkable all-night photo from the Earth’s Equator shows over 90% of the entire sky that is possible to see from the ground.

Amazing.

2) So what’s the deal with this picture, anyway?

He used a fish-eye, a wide angle lens, to capture the entire 360° view of the sky. That’s why star trails near the poles are distorted. The bright trails near the southern pole are from Crux, the Southern Cross. You can also see a bright meteor that blazed its way near the pole, too.

Other stars are identifiable if you know your way around — though without labels they’re hard to find and even harder to describe. Let me try a few (though no promises on my accuracy!):

The reddish-orange streak to the right of center and extending almost the whole picture vertically is from Arcturus. I suspect the red streak just to its left that only extends a third of the way up from the photo’s bottom is Mars. I think the whitish streak to the upper right is Capella, and the bright blue one just to the right of that is Vega.

Interestingly, Orion straddles the Equator, so the three stars marking the belt would all blur together in a picture like this. Plus, this picture was taken when Orion was near the Sun, so it’s only seen briefly in this picture, making a short trail: orange-hued Betelgeuse is the very short streak at the bottom of the image, just to the right of center. I suspect the bright streak at the very top is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, and the bright streak near the bottom just to the left of center is Fomalhaut. The famous star Alpha Centauri is the long yellow streak to the left of center starting at the top of the image. Where that streak ends, at about the center of the picture, you can see an orange streak continuing just to its left; that’s Beta Centauri.

I’ll leave the rest to you to discover. And I’ll note that I spent some time a couple of years ago in the Galapagos, at pretty much the exact same latitude this picture was taken. The southern skies are breathtaking, and seeing Alpha Centauri for the first time was incredible. I hope sometime to repeat the experience. And if I do, I may just try to get some star trail pictures for myself.

Picture courtesy Stéphane Guisard, who actually alerted me to it.

One of the peculiarities of the synthesis of 19th and early 20th historical linguistics and biological anthropology was the perception by many British thinkers that the English, as the scions of the Anglo-Saxons, were fundamentally a different race from the Celtic nations to their west, the Welsh and Irish, and the Scots to the north (yes, I know the Scottish nation emerged is a mix of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon elements which were preponderant at different times and periods). In other words English nationalists would characterize their own race as a branch of the German peoples. English was a Germanic language, and the linguistic chasm emphasized more starkly a distinction from the Celts who inhabited Britain prior to the arrival of the Germans, and gave the island its name before they were marginalized and pushed to the “Celtic fringe.”

The historical context of this does not need to be elaborated in detail. The Emerald Isle’s integration into the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland was always a difficult affair. This was due in large part to religion (the lack of an effective Irish Reformation may have had other structural causes); the Irish were a Roman Catholic populace at a time when Roman Catholicism and loyalty to the monarchy were presumed to be contradictory. In 1800, before the potato famine and the English demographic explosion, Ireland accounted for one third of the population of the United Kingdom (I do not put much stock in the linguistic difference, as the Welsh speaking regions were firmly Protestant and so not perceived to be sources of equivalent dissension despite their cultural marginality). With the rise of taxonomic science what was a crisp social chasm was reconceptualized as a biological and evolutionary gap along the Great Chain of Being.

In the twentieth century the tide turned, today most scholars would assert that the shift from Celtic to Anglo-Saxon speech and culture in what became England was a matter of emulation, not genetic replacement. Personally I suspect that the pendulum has swung too far, but it does show how strongly influenced by fashion these sorts of preconceptions are.

Modern genetics can clear up the confusion to some extent. A new paper in The European Journal of Human Genetics surveys samples from Dublin, the south & southeast of England (the heart of Saxon Britain), Aberdeen, Portugal, Bulgaria and Sweden. Population structure and genome-wide patterns of variation in Ireland and Britain. I’ll just focus on the figures of interest in relation to the questions I aired above.

I’ve added some labels to figure 1, but it’s pretty obvious what it’s depicting. Each point is an individual. CEU = Mormons from Utah. This is mostly a British origin sample, but I assume its overlap with Swedes is indicative of the European immigration to Utah by early Mormon converts, some from Scandinavia.

And here is what economists would term a more stylized figure from the supplements:

These figures are showing what we know from other studies on European genetics; the largest component of variation seems north-south (at least until you start pushing into Russia where a simple European wide pattern starts to break down), and the second component is west-east. This is more evident in the frappe plots, where you see the individuals within the populations broken down by K ancestral groups.

Again, from the supplements:

The above figures require a little art in their interpretation. Remember that the PC charts are just representing the biggest components of independent variation within the data set. As for the frappe results, they don’t always represent real ancestral populations in a straightforward manner. Or at least we have no independent checks on what was going on ten thousand years ago in Europe. So below are the pairwise Fst values. Remember, these compare the proportion of between group genetic variation across the pairs. The print is small, so let me just tell you that the Fst value for England-Sweden is twice a large as England-Ireland. In other words the English of the south and east of England are closer to the Irish of Dublin than they are to the Swedes.

Ideally the Swedes would not be the reference population for the Germans of yore. Rather you’d want Frisians, Danes and Saxon Germans. From what I’ve seen in the other results on European genetics Swedes have been somewhat influenced by the Finns, who are genetically peculiar, so that might understate the German affinity of the English as some of the distance might be due to the Fennic component in the Swedish gene pool. But I’ve seen other studies which lead me to infer that the peoples of the Isles share more than not, and the English share more ancestors with the Irish and Scottish than they do with the Saxons over the sea.

H/T: Dienekes

Citation: Population structure and genome-wide patterns of variation in Ireland and Britain, doi: 10.1038/ejhg.2010.87