Who Likes the European Union?

Hint: not Britain. Interesting to me that the EU still polls positively in Spain, despite their economic crisis. Perhaps this is because many Spaniards worry that leaving the EU might help bring back to fascism. It is also interesting to me that Czechs have turned negative. When I was in Prague, in the 1980s, all they wanted was to escape communism and rejoin Europe, but I guess it isn't working out as well as they had hoped.

Bread-Eating Dogs and Co-Evolution

Dogs are not wolves. If you let all the different breeds mingle, what you get is not a wolf but a mongrel dog with a rounded snout and short brown hair, the sort of beast that lurks in packs around the edges of cities across Africa and south Asia.

One obvious question is, what are the genetic differences that underlie this contrast? A Swedish group has just published the most detailed study yet of the differences between the wolf and dog genomes. The differences that jumped out at them were not in the genes that control hair type or facial structure, but in the ones that control digestion. Dogs have a whole panoply of adaptions that allow them to better digest starch, which allows them to live on wheat, rice, potatoes, and dog food in a way that wolves simply cannot.

This is another sign of the intense evolutionary relationship between dogs and humans. No other animal  shows such an intuitive understanding of human signals, or responds as readily to human commands. Dogs simply pay more attention to people -- to our gestures, our voices, our facial expressions -- than other animals do. This is because dogs have evolved to understand us; over the millennia, the dogs that understood better when to obey and when to run left more descendants than those that tried to ignore us. Dogs have also evolved ways of communicating their own feelings to us, especially their expressive faces and human-like eyebrows.

We don't really understand how this relationship began. Some prefer a model of human action, in which hunter-gatherers captured wolves or wolf pups and raised and bred them to be hunting guides. Others think some groups of wolves took to hanging around human camps or villages to eat our trash, and gradually evolved more tolerance and understanding of people, that is, that the wolves took the first steps themselves. The new evidence of digestive genes is being touted in some quarters as evidence for the second model; if the biggest differences are in the digestion, the argument goes, then maybe adaptation to eating stealing human garbage was the first and most crucial change.

I think this is a weak argument; a tolerance for bread-eating could equally well have evolved much later in the dog-human relationship. The timing is also questionable, since many archaeologists think wolves were domesticated 30,000 years ago, long before agriculture made grains our most important food source. But the salience of digestion in the differences between wolves and dogs show how strongly and deeply dogs have adapted to life among humans.

Teach the Controversy

Two of the many wonderful t-shirt designs at Teach the Controversy.

All the People in the US and Canada on One Map

Brandon Martin-Anderson made this wonderful, zoomable map showing where the 2010 census placed all 341,817,095 people in the US and Canada. Above, the overall map, and below, my neighborhood on the west side of Baltimore.

Life Light: the Next Frontier in Astronomy

Most of the 859 and counting extra-solar planets so far discovered have been found by measuring tiny variations in the light of their stars. This is the simplest way to find planets, but it tells us little about them beyond their size and how close to the star they orbit.

To learn more about these planets, astronomers would like to separate out their reflected light from the rest of the light coming from the star. A hard trick, that, considering how dim a planet is compared to a star. But if they could do this, astronomers think, they might be able to analyze the light's spectrum and find the signatures of organic compounds that might indicate the presence of life. There are a lot of ifs here, but in principle it would work, and after all telescope technology is making great strides. The basic idea is to create an artificial eclipse by screening out the star's light. There are several competing methods of doing this, some of which are described in the graphic I lifted from Nature.

NASA actually had a plan for a space telescope designed to look for planetary light this way, but they had to shelve it because they didn't have the money. (I've got an idea of where to find some -- shoot down the International Space Station.) Now they are trying to adapt one of the 2.4-meter space telescopes given to them by the spy satellite folks in the National Reconnaissance Office for the job.

It is exciting to think that within another decade or two we might be able to read the chemical signatures of far-away planets and learn about their atmospheres and even, maybe, whether they might host carbon-based life. After all, 20 years ago extra-solar planets were only a theory.

My Royal Nickname

When I was younger and more ambitious, I always thought that if I became a king I wanted to be remembered as John the Wise, or possibly John the Just. But now I think I would be happy to be known by the epithet of the third MacLeod of Dunvegan, who was called Malcolm the Fat and Good.

Sophie Schmidt in North Korea

Sophie Schmidt, daughter of Google co-founder Eric Schmidt, accompanied her father on a trip to North Korea and wrote a hilarious account of the journey. A small sample:

The Kim Il Sung University or as I like to call it, the e-Potemkin Village:

Looks great, right? All this activity, all those monitors. Probably 90 desks in the room, all manned, with an identical scene one floor up.

One problem: No one was actually doing anything. A few scrolled or clicked, but the rest just stared. More disturbing: when our group walked in--a noisy bunch, with media in tow--not one of them looked up from their desks. Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli. They might as well have been figurines.

Of all the stops we made, the e-Potemkin Village was among the more unsettling. We knew nothing about what we were seeing, even as it was in front of us. Were they really students? Did our handlers honestly think we bought it? Did they even care? Photo op and tour completed, maybe they dismantled the whole set and went home.

When one of our group went to peek back into the room, a man abruptly closed the door ahead of him and told him to move along.

What an amazingly weird place that is. Oh, one other odd fact I just discovered about North Korea is that marijuana grows semi-wild all over the place, and people smoke a lot of it. They certainly need something to help them get by.

The Second Term Agenda

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.

--Barack Obama, today

Pictures of Exoplanets

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has a gallery of all the exoplanets that have been directly imaged. (Most are detected by variations in the light of their stars.) Above is a very clear image of star 1RXS J160929.1-210524 and its planet. One thing about these images is that all of the planets are unusual -- our technology won't let us take pictures of earth-sized planets in earth-like orbits. This planet is both huge, 8 times the size of Jupiter, and very far from its star, 10 times as far as Neptune.

This is the planetary system of HR8799, which includes four orbiting objects. Two of them may be brown dwarfs, or very small stars, rather than planets, but two are definitely planets.

In a very few years we have progressed from wondering if other stars had planets to knowing about hundreds and having photographs of a dozen.

Flowers

By "Sapin de Bois," a French photographer who has a delightful blog.

Today's Castle: Suscinio, Brittany

This fairytale construction dates back to the 12th century, but most of what you see here was built by the Dukes of Brittany in the 1300s to serve as a hunting lodge. And, I suppose, to defend part of their effectively independent realm. But it was situated on the coast in the midst of their deer parks and waterfowl marshes, and their visits to Suscinio were all hunting trips.

During the Hundred Years War, the castle for a time was taken by Bertrand du Guesclin, the infamous Constable of France. When the Dukes retained control they enlarged the castle and added new towers.

From 1471 to 1483 the castle housed Jasper and Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII of England, and over a hundred of their Lancastrian supporters. In 1524 to castle was taken again by the kings of France, and this time they held it. No major work was done on the castle after that date, so it slowly fell into ruin instead of being updated in the 17th century like so many other ducal fortresses.

In 1965, the castle was acquired by the departmental government. Before embarking on restoration, they made a careful photographic record. You can see that the main structure survived, including the outer walls, the tower, and the hall.

Restoration efforts have been under way ever since, and continue. The castle is being restored to its appearance in the 1400s it what seems from here to be a faithful and sensitive way.

The most famous part of the interior is this surviving pavement from the Dukes' private chapel, dating to 1330.

360 degree view of the interior here.

Textiles in the Cleveland Museum

The Cleveland Museum of Art has many images of their collection online now, including many pictures of their textile collection. Most of this stuff is not on display, partly, I imagine, because it is so fragile, so digital images are especially welcome. Above, a fragment of silk from 15th-century Spain.

One thing missing from our picture of medieval Europe is the textiles. Castle walls that are now bare stone would have been covered with wall hangings; for feasts, wooden tables would have been covered with cloth; chests were covered with carpets; and of course the wealthy wore the most brightly-colored clothes they could find. Above,a fragment of an altar cloth from 14th-century Italy. Imagine creating that design on a hand loom!

The textiles of medieval Islam are better known, but again they are missing from historic buildings like the much-visited Alhambra, which would once have been full of carpets and hangings. Above, two works from seventeenth-century Iran, a silk carpet of 1600-1625, and a fragment of woven silk.

Besides the presence of cloth, another thing we have to build into our picture of the past is the presence of making cloth. It was the second industry of the ancient and medieval worlds, taking up more time from more people than anything but agriculture. Thousands of professionals worked was weavers, dyers, tailors, and so on, but even more it was the spare time work of millions of women. Women carried their "work" with them everywhere, so that when they were not doing something else they could spin or embroider or sew. Poor women spun coarse thread; rich women did fancy embroidery; but most women of all sorts did something with cloth. Above, an embroidered strip from a Greek skirt, probably made in the 17th or 18th century. This might have been made by a girl's family for her wedding trouseau.

A Chinese pillow cover from the eighteenth century.

Of course all of these works have faded, and when new they would have been much brighter and more colorful. Above is a fragment of silk from twelfth-century Spain, as it is now and with the color digitally enhanced to show what it might once have been like.

Fiction

I think of the innocent lives
Of people in novels who know they’ll die
But not that the novel will end. How different they are
From us. Here, the moon stares dumbly down,
Through scattered clouds, onto the sleeping town,
And the wind rounds up the fallen leaves,
And somebody—namely me—deep in his chair,
Riffles the pages left, knowing there’s not
Much time for the man and woman in the rented room,
For the red light over the door, for the iris
Tossing its shadow against the wall; not much time
For the soldiers under the trees that line
The river, for the wounded being hauled away
To the cities of the interior where they will stay;
The war that raged for years will come to a close,
And so will everything else, except for a presence
Hard to define, a trace, like the scent of grass
After a night of rain or the remains of a voice
That lets us know without spelling it out
Not to despair; if the end is come, it too will pass.

--Mark Strand

Timbuktu and Mali's Civil War

Northern Mali, as most news readers know by now, has been taken over by Islamist rebels among whom Al Qaeda in the Magrib is prominent. France has now come to the aid of Mali's government and French soldiers are trying to stop the rebels' southward advance and perhaps even retake the north. If the US is not yet involved in this fighting, it soon will be. One of the complicating factors in the fighting is the danger to the historic monuments of the region. Some factions of the rebels have threatened to destroy shrines and mausoleums that they consider "idolatrous." Even more worrying is that the rebels control the fabled city of Timbuktu, and any effort to return the region to the government's control would have to involve retaking this key city.

Timbuktu was a great center of Islamic learning from 14th century onward, and it boasts numerous monuments dating back to the sixteenth century. Above, the Sankore Mosque and University.

The architecture of Timbuktu mostly turns blank adobe walls to the street, but behind these doors are great treasures.

Timbuktu's libraries holds thousands of manuscripts as old as the twelfth century. Over the past decade there has been an effort underway to photograph these, but I understand that it has not made great progress, so only a small percentage have been copied.

So let us hope that peace can be made before there is heavy fighting in Timbuktu itself, because enough of Islam's heritage has already been lost in Syria this year.

UPDATE

According to one man in Timbuktu interviewed by the BBC, the militants fled the city last week, when the French first began bombing. They seem to have panicked and driven off into the desert. But that might have changed by now.

A Range of Worries from Edge 2013

Reading through all of the answers to this year's question from Edge, "What Should We Be Worried About?", is a hard slog, so I offer this greatest hits version for my readers. The biggest worries among these scientists and technologists seem to be: global warming and other versions of the human impact on the planet; concern that immersion in digital technology is doing nefarious things to our brains, or those of our children; and a fear among physicists (Edge polled a lot of physicists) that the progress in physics is coming to an end. Some other answers:

We should all be worried about the gaping psychological chasm separating humanity from nature. (Scott Sampson, paleontologist)

Global greying. . . . out of the 9 billion people expected when the Earth's population peaks in 2050, the World Health Organization expects 2 billion—more than one person in five—to suffer from dementia. Is any society ready for this? Is any really talking about how to be ready? (David Berreby, journalist)

The dangerous fascination of imagination. . . . A number of my colleagues in theoretical physics have spent their life studying a possible symmetry of nature called "supersymmetry". Experiments in laboratories like Geneva's CERN seem now to be pointing more towards the absence than the presence of this symmetry. I have seen lost stares in the eyes of some colleagues: "Could it be?", how dare Nature not confirm to our imagination? The task of separating the good thoughts from the silly ones is extremely hard, of course, but this is precisely where intelligence matters, what should be nurtured. Isn't it? . . . To a large extent, we live in narrations we weave ourselves. So, why not just go for the sweetest of these? After we have freed ourselves from the close-mindedness of the past, why not feel free? We can create enchanting explanations, images of ourselves, of our own great country, of our great society. We can be fascinated by our own dreams. But something tells me we should worry. We live inside a real world, where not all the stories are equally good, equally effective. One dream out of many is the good one.(Carlo Rovelli, physicist)

Losing our hands. I don't mean that someone is going to come and chop our hands off. I mean that we are unwittingly, but eagerly, outsourcing more and more of our manual skills to machines. Our minds are losing touch with our bodies and the world around us, and being absorbed into the evolving technosphere. (Susan Blackmore, psychologist)

Homogenization of the human experience (Scott Atran, anthropologist)

Unmitigated arrogance. (Jessica Tracy, psychologist)

When the value of human labor is decimated by advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, serious restructuring will be needed in our economic, legal, political, social, and cultural institutions. Such changes are being planned for by approximately nobody. This is rather worrisome. (David Dalrymple, "researcher")

Most of the smart people I know want nothing to do with politics. (Brian Eno, composer)

The power of bad incentives. (Sam Harris, celebrity atheist)

The recent reset of the long-count Maya calendar didn't end the world. But there are serious scientists who worry that Armageddon could soon be headed our way, although from a different quarter—an attack by malevolent, extraterrestrial beings. The concern is that future radio broadcasts to the stars, intended to put us in touch with putative aliens, might carelessly betray our presence to a warlike society, and jeopardize the safety of Earth. (David Shostak, SETI)

Morbid anxiety. (Joel Gold, psychiatrist)

Governments and corporations have woken up to the fact that not only can they use the Internet, they can control it for their interests. Unless we start deliberately debating the future we want to live in, and information technology in enabling that world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures and not society in general. (Bruce Schneir, security expert)

An exploding number of new illegal drugs. . . . A total of 49 new psychoactive substances were officially notified for the first time in 2011 via the EU early-warning system. (Thomas Metzinger)

We have next to no idea which things in the world around us are conscious and which are not. (Timo Hannay, science writer)

Unknown unknowns. (Gary Marcus, cognitive scientist)

Data disenfranchisement. (David Rowan, editor)

There are two kinds of fools: one who says this is old and therefore good, and the other who says this is new and therefore better. The argument between the two is as old as humanity itself, but technology's relentless exponential advance has made the divide deeper and more contentious than ever. My greatest fear is that this divide will frustrate the sensible application of technological innovation in the service of solving humankind's greatest challenges. (Paul Saffo, "Technology Forecaster")

We should be worried about the state of water resources. (Giulio Goccaletti, physicist)

Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's what I'm worried about. . . . We can now create life from scratch, and model the global climate, yet battles rage over the teaching of evolution or human impact on the environment that Darwin or Galileo would recognize as challenges to the validity of the scientific method. There is a cognitive dissonance in fundamentalists using satellite phones in their quest for a medieval society, or creationists who don't believe in evolution receiving a flu shot based on genetic analysis of seasonal mutations in influenza virus. These are linked by workings that are invisible: deities behave in mysterious ways, and so do cell phones. We're in danger of becoming a cargo cult, living with the inventions of Ancestors from a mythical time of stable long-term research funding. (Neil Gershenfeld, physicist)

Chinese eugenics. (Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist)

The loss of death. . . .The prolonging of the human lifespan is often lauded in the media but it is almost never questioned. Nobody seems to doubt that we should push forward with aging research, identify those genes, tinker with them, make them work for us. For nobody wants to die, and so we all want this research to succeed. We want it for ourselves, and our families. We want ourselves and our loved ones to live as long as possible—forever, if we can. But is it the best thing for our species? Have four billion years of evolution been wrong? We are not Antarctic sponges or blue-green algae—we die for a reason. We die so that our youth—those better versions of ourselves—can flourish. We should worry about the loss of death. (Kate Jeffrey, neuroscientist)

An Ancient Gold Wreath

This golden oak wreath was recently seized from Greek smugglers; no doubt it was looted from some Hellenistic tomb.

Could Progress Stop?

Here's another answer to this year's Edge's question, "What Should We Worry About?", from Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media:

For so many in the techno-elite, even those who don't entirely subscribe to the unlimited optimism of the Singularity, the notion of perpetual progress and economic growth is somehow taken for granted. As a former classicist turned technologist, I've always lived with the shadow of the fall of Rome, the failure of its intellectual culture, and the stasis that gripped the Western world for the better part of a thousand years. What I fear most is that we will lack the will and the foresight to face the world's problems squarely, but will instead retreat from them into superstition and ignorance.

Consider how in 375 AD, after a dream in which he was whipped for being "a Ciceronian" rather than a Christian, Saint Jerome resolved no more to read the classical authors and to restrict himself only to Christian texts, how the Christians of Alexandria murdered the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia in 415, and realize that, at least in part, the so-called dark ages were not something imposed from without, a breakdown of civilization due to barbarian invasions, but a choice, a turning away from knowledge and discovery into a kind of religious fundamentalism. . . .

Civilizations do fail. We have never yet seen one that hasn't. The difference is that the torch of progress has in the past always passed to another region of the world. But we've now, for the first time, got a single global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.

I have, of course, contemplated the same question: could our civilization fail as that of the classical world did?

I am much more impressed than O'Reilly by the differences between our situation and that of the Romans. The scientific, technical side of classical learning was quite small compared to what we have achieved, and any progress had slowed to a crawl long before Rome turned to Christianity. It is hard to point to any major achievement in ancient mathematics or physics that took place after about 100 BCE. The ancients never created any rigorous experimental method, nor did they ever establish the infrastructure of science -- university chairs, learned societies, scientific journals -- that helped accelerate scientific progress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today technical advancement is considered crucial by both business and government, and any entity that turns away from it is soon left behind by others that continue to innovate. The spread of scientific culture around the world may make it more vulnerable in one sense, but it also means that if one nation or region lags, others move ahead. Consider cloning, where the squeamishness of Americans and Europeans has led the Chines and Koreans to invest heavily, hoping to seize the lead. Even if America should fall to the fundamentalists, or Europe to mad greens, scientific progress will continue somewhere. I think the only potential threats to our civilization are ecological catastrophe and war.

My Answer to the Question, What Should We Worry About?

The replacement of truth by politicized conspiracy theories.

The great catastrophes of modern times have arisen from the acceptance of false doctrine as a true picture of the world, or lies as truth. To the ancient struggle over resources and prestige we have added the accelerant of ideology, like pouring gasoline onto a smoldering fire. Ideology corrodes our understanding, obscures our senses, degrades our judgment, inflames our worst passions. Peering through its distorting lens, we cannot see our real interests, our the real threats to our well being. It also provides a cloak behind which power-seekers can operate, obscuring their real intentions with a fog of rhetoric about class enemies or anti-American socialism.

I worry that the age of the internet and unlimited tv channels will only worsen our problem with perceiving the truth through the political miasma. If you like, you can now get all your news from outlets that share your own ideology, and spend all day online swapping conspiracy theories with fellow travelers. As North Korea shows, with complete control of information flows you can get people to believe almost anything, and millions of Americans seem to be voluntarily subjecting themselves to North Korean levels of indoctrination. There may come a time when political compromise is all but impossible because majorities on all sides believe crazy conspiracy theories about their opponents. The American system seems particularly vulnerable to this danger; what happens when it is simply impossible to write a budget that could pass a House controlled by one party and a Senate controlled by the other?

There is already a wide range of topics on which any statement is no longer judged according to its truth, but only its ideological content: climate change, sex education, the relationship between taxation and growth, the usefulness of international treaties, the morality and effectiveness of torture. It is very, very hard to get people to change their minds, and I worry that our system is creating more and more people whose beliefs are fixed in dangerous directions.

What Should We Worry About?

This year's question that Edge put to their roster of scientists and the like is, "What should we be worried about?" For those of you who were feeling a bit to safe and happy, here is part of the answer given by evolutionary psychologist John Tooby:

The universe is relentlessly, catastrophically dangerous, on scales that menace not just communities, but civilizations and our species as well. A freakish chain of improbable accidents produced the bubble of conditions that was necessary for the rise of life, our species, and technological civilization. If we continue to drift obliviously inside this bubble, taking its continuation for granted, then inevitably—sooner or later—physical or human-triggered events will push us outside, and we will be snuffed like a candle in a hurricane.

We are menaced by gamma ray bursts (that scrub major regions of their galaxies free of life); nearby supernovae; asteroids and cometary impacts (which strike Jupiter every year or two); Yellowstone-like supereruptions (the Toba supereruption was a near extinction-event for humans), civilization-collapsing coronal mass ejections (which would take down the electrical grids and electronics underlying technological civilization in a way that they couldn't recover from, since their repair requires electricity supplied by the grid; this is just one example of the more general danger posed by the complex, fragile interdependence inherent in our current technology); and many other phenomena including those unknown to us. Here is one that no one talks about: The average G-type star shows a variability in energy output of around 4%. Our sun is a typical G-type star, yet its observed variability in our brief historical sample is only 1/40th of this. When or if the Sun returns to more typical variation in energy output, this will dwarf any other climate concerns. . . .

Feeling chipper?

Today's Place to Daydream about: Zadar, Croatia

On this cold, cold day my thoughts take me to the Mediterranean, to pick over ancient ruins in the warm sun. Or to Zadar, Croatia, once a great trading city and now a haven for students, tourists, and yachtsmen. The people who rank such things regularly put it in their lists of top destinations, so why not?

The town is full of cute squares and the kind of narrow, angled streets that create little surprises as you walk through its medieval buildings.

Zadar is one of those Mediterranean ports that passed back and forth between empires like a model changing clothes. In ancient times it was the capital of the Liburnians, who tried to stay neutral in the long war between Rome and Illyria so they could trade with both sides. They slid into being Roman allies, and when they took Julius Caesar's part in the civil war he made them honorary Romans.

When Rome fell apart, Zadar became part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom. Justinian reconquered it for Rome, and then Charlemagne took it for the Franks but returned it to Constantinople by the Treaty of Aachen in 812. Over the next century, as Byzantine power shrank it became effectively independent. The town even has a monument from those years, the 9th century church of St. Donatus.

Then in 998 Zadar asked for help from the Venetians against pirates who had effectively besieged the town. The Venetians said, we'd be glad to help, and sent a fleet that defeated the pirates and then turned against Zadar, taking the town by surprise. Was there ever any state more treacherous and perfidious than the Venetians? The city gained its independence from Venice in the twelfth century, but in 1202 the Venetians used the army of the Fourth Crusade to take and sack the town, on their way to the dreadful sack of Constantinople. Among the monuments of their rule is the porta terra firma or landward gate, with the Lion of St. Mark.

The people of Zadar did not give up, though, and they revolted several times against Venetian rule. In 1358 they finally managed to get themselves transferred to the Kingdom of Croatia. But they fell by inheritance to Ladislaus of Naples, who went bankrupt and in 1409 sold them to Venice for 1,000 ducats. They remained under Venetian rule until 1797, when the town became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The town has several medieval churches, two of which are above. In the sixteenth century they were twice besieged by the Turks, and it was in those years that the great stone walls were built that still survive on the landward side.

With so many layers of history, it is hard to know how old many buildings are, and even the recent ones incorporate ancient stones. This carving is said by tour guides to date to Roman times; it looks more Romanesque to me, but who is to say?

Life, Death and Transformation at the Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum's amazing collection of American Indian art has been largely in storage for the past five years while they reconfigured their exhibits. Now it is back, in the form of an exhibit titled Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas. Holland Carter has a review in the Times. The famous Maya sculpture above shows a hunchbacked human wearing a jaguar skin; the Maya, like many people, thought physical deformity suggested a strong connection to the divine realms, and this person was probably a shaman.

The exhibit takes the currently fashionable route of organizing American Indian art by theme, rather than separating the different tribes, periods or regions. The picture above shows a Huastec work made in Mexico between 900 and 1250 CE, a god carrying a human skeleton on his back, and a Wild Man mask made by Canadian artist John Livingston around 1970. I am not a huge fan of this approach myself; it seems to me to suggest that Indians lived out of time and never changed or developed. I gather that curators think people find chronology boring. I don't, but then I am a historian fascinated by how things developed, so I suppose I am not the typical museum goer.

Gold ornament from Panama depicting the Crocodile God, ca 700 to 900 CE. To ancient Indians, the underworld was a watery place, and their underworld deities often had aquatic natures. Thus the crocodile god, eater of corpses who sometimes carried living men down into the depths.

I'm glad the Brooklyn Museum  finally put these wonderful things back out where people can see them. Above, a 19th-century ladle used in initiation rituals by the Heiltsuk people of Canada's northwest coast.