Photo: piclax

Alternative medicine tends to elicit strong opinions. Some people swear by natural remedies while others insist that traditional medicine isn’t effective and, at worst, can be dangerous. Alternative treatments are gaining popularity in the U.S., where around 50 percent of people say they have used them, but despite the billions of dollars spent on these remedies each year only a third of them have ever been tested.

As USA Today reports, many American consumers cite distrust of big pharmaceutical companies as one of the main reasons they lean towards using traditional therapies. But a new book by Paul Offit, chief of infectious disease at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, argues that the alternative medicine industry is just as focused on profit and business as it is on healing.

In his book, Offit paints a picture of an aggressive, $34 billion a year industry whose key players are adept at using lawsuits, lobbyists and legislation to protect their market.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who has long fought for stricter regulation of supplements, says the alternative medicine industry is “as tough as any industry I’ve seen lobby in Washington. They have a lot of money at stake. They want to maximize their profits and they want as little regulation as possible.”

There’s even a Congressional Dietary Supplement Caucus, composed of legislators who look favorably on the industry.

Moreover, USA Today continues, only about one-third of alternative therapies have ever been tested for their safety and efficacy. In other words, the people selling those supplements, powders or teas can’t really say whether the treatments actually improve a patient’s ailments, and they can’t guarantee their products’ safety, either.   

For the most part, people are free to take whatever alternative therapies they want, but Offit wants consumers to know that they are contributing to a profit-driven industry and may be investing in nothing but empty promises, and in the worst case, could wind up in the hospital.

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Smell is chemistry, and the chemistry of old books gives your cherished tomes their scent. As a book ages, the chemical compounds used—the glue, the paper, the ink–begin to break down. And, as they do, they release volatile compounds—the source of the smell. A common smell of old books, says the International League for Antiquarian Booksellers, is a hint of vanilla: “Lignin, which is present in all wood-based paper, is closely related to vanillin. As it breaks down, the lignin grants old books that faint vanilla scent.”

A study in 2009 looked into the smell of old books, finding that the complex scent was a mix of “hundreds of so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the air from the paper,” says the Telegraph. Here’s how Matija Strlic, the lead scientist behind that study, described the smell of an old book:

A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness, this unmistakable smell is as much a part of the book as its contents.

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There are a lot of reasons people are resistant to reading online, or using e-readers. They just don’t feel like real books or magazines. There are no glossy pages, no nice book smells. And some have suggested that perhaps we don’t remember what we read quite as well because of it. But recent research says that reading comprehension on an e-reader and electronic screen is just as good as with paper.

Researcher Sara Margolin published a paper in 2010 that found no decrease in reading comprehension when using an electronic screen. Now, in a recent paper, she turned to e-readers.

The idea that e-readers make it harder to remember what you read shows up all over the place. Here is TIME’s Maia Szalavitz, explaining her own trouble remembering the names of characters in books she read with an e-reader:

When I discussed my quirky recall with friends and colleagues, I found out I wasn’t the only one who suffered from “e-book moments.” Online, I discovered that Google’s Larry Page himself had concerns about research showing that on-screen reading is measurably slower than reading on paper.

Margolin tested this idea, showing 90 undergraduates short passages of text. Some of them read the passages on paper, some of them read them with the Kindle, and some of them read them as a pdf on a computer screen. They then had to answer multiple choice questions about what they had read. Here’s Research Digest on the results:

Overall accuracy was at around 75 per cent and, crucially, there was no difference in comprehension performance across the three conditions. This was true whether reading factual or narrative passages of text. “From an educational and classroom perspective, these results are comforting,” the researchers concluded. “While new technologies have sometimes been seen as disruptive, these results indicate that students’ comprehension does not necessarily suffer, regardless of the format from which they read their text.”

Now, this might change depending on how long or confusing the passages are. Szalavitz explains other research that suggests that e-readers might make things harder:

In one study involving psychology students, the medium did seem to matter. “We bombarded poor psychology students with economics that they didn’t know,” she says. Two differences emerged. First, more repetition was required with computer reading to impart the same information. Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully. Garland explains that when you recall something, you either “know” it and it just “comes to you” — without necessarily consciously recalling the context in which you learned it — or you “remember” it by cuing yourself about that context and then arriving at the answer. “Knowing” is better because you can recall the important facts faster and seemingly effortlessly.

At Psychology Today, Mark Changizi argues that the trouble with e-readers, like the Kindle, is that there are very few visual landmarks compared with paper books or magazines, which makes them harder to navigate.

But Margolin’s research suggests that these landmarks aren’t as important as some think. At least for short passages. Margolin wants to continue working to see if her results hold up for longer stories.

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Drop an S-bomb today in polite conversation, and heads will likely turn. But back in the ninth century, “shit” referred to excrement in a matter-of-fact, not a vulgar, way. In the new book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, author Melissa Mohr explores how our opinion of this and other curse words have shifted over the years. In an interview with NPR, she delves into the history of “shit”:

It only really started to become obscene, I would say, during the Renaissance. … It basically involves increasing privacy. In the Middle Ages … when that word wasn’t obscene, people lived very differently. The way their houses were set up, there wasn’t space to perform a lot of bodily functions in private. So they would defecate in public, they had privies with many seats, and it was thought to be a social activity. That you would all get together on the privy and talk while you did this. … As the actual act became more taboo because you could do it in private now … the direct word became taboo.

The word itself likely arose from one or all of the Old English terms scite (dung), scitte (diarrhea) or scitan (to defecate). Middle English introduced schitte (excrement), schyt (diarrhea) and shiten (to defecate). Similar terms for the same thing eventually found their way into other languages as well, such as Sheisse (german), schijt (Dutch), skit (Swedish), skitur (Icelandic) and skitt (Norwgian).

As the Online Etymology Dictionary details, “shit” as a term related to excrement dates to at least the 1580s, though people had already adopted the term in reference for an “obnoxious person” by at least 1508.

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Amazon.com sells millions of  books each year. In 2010, the company’s revenue broke 34 billion dollars. They’ve branched from selling books to selling everything from clothing to tires to dog toys to phones. But Amazon wasn’t always a multi-billion dollar company. Their first non-internal order came in 1995, and it was a science book.

Writing on Quora, Ian McAllister, an employee at Amazon, says, “The first product ever ordered by a customer on Amazon was Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter.” On Quora, John Wainwright says he might have been that customer. He writes, “I think I’m the customer mentioned in the other answers, I did indeed buy Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts on April 3rd, 1995 (it’s still in my order history listing!).” In fact, Wainwright still has the packing slip from Amazon, and the book.

While no one has entirely confirmed that Wainwright is the true customer, Kathy Lin, a product manager at Amazon, added to the Quora thread that a building on the Amazon campus is named after him.

If you’ve never heard of the book Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought it’s okay. It’s a relatively technical book by Douglas Hofstader, who is much more famous for another book – Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, affectionately nicknamed GEB by fans. Fluid Concepts is actually a collection of articles, each introduced by Hofstader and written by members of the Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG). Their aim was to further the computer modeling of intelligence.

In the introduction, Hofstader writes this about FARG:

From its very outset, the intellectual goals and activities of FARG have been characterized by two quite distinct strands, one of them concerned with developing detailed computer models of concepts and analogical thinking in carefully-designed, highly-restricted micro domains, and the other concerned with observing, classifying, and speculating about mental processes in their full, unrestricted glory.

Fluid Concepts is still on sale today at Amazon, with the same cover that Wainwright bought. According to Novel Rank, the book currently holds sales position 182,171. You could buy your own copy, but you will never be the first.

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Photo by Lord Jim, art by Banksy

Modern humans are doing it all wrong—they eat wrong, they run wrong, they work wrong, they get married wrong. At least that’s the common line these days, as people push to return to our more “natural” state. The paleo-diet pushes us to eat foods our ancestors ate. Toe shoes try to make us run like them, too. Polygamy is the right way to have relationships, because that’s what pre-historic humans did. But is the life of cave people really what we should be striving for?

At Discover Magazine, Marlene Zuk says no:

As evolutionary and genetic science show, humans, like all other living beings, have always been a work in progress and never completely in sync with the natural world. If we’re going to romanticize and emulate a particular point in our evolutionary history, why not go all the way back to when our ape ancestors spent their days swinging from tree to tree?

It is hard to argue that a simpler life with more exercise, fewer processed foods, and closer contact with our children may well be good for us, but rather than renouncing modern living for the sake of our Stone Age genes, we need to understand how evolution has—and hasn’t—suited us for the world we inhabit now.  

She calls ideas for turning back time “paleofantasies.” But science doesn’t necessarily back up claims like “Our hunter-gatherer ancestors overwhelmingly consumed meat.” Nor does it prove that, even if our ancestors did live that way, we should strive for the same lifestyle.

Take the paleo-diet for example. First, our ancestors did not consume exclusively meat. They ate all sorts of grains and plants, as well. Second, simply because they ate a lot of meat doesn’t mean that our modern bodies and genes would do best with the same diet. We evolve along with our technology, and farming is certainly one of those technologies. Zuk puts it this way:

What we are able to eat and thrive upon depends on our 30 million years plus of history as primates, not a single arbitrarily more recent moment in time.

The pattern continues for workouts, for monogamy, for cancer and for parenting.

Yes, Zuk says, there are advantages to eating better, getting more exercise, and hanging out with your kids more. But that’s not the same thing as striving to return to cave days. The overall message: stop trying to live like a caveman.

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The famous story of Cleopatra’s suicide gets points for drama and crowd appeal: Her lover, Mark Antony, had been defeated in battle by Octavian and, hearing that Cleopatra had been killed, had stabbed himself in the stomach. Very much alive, after witnessing his death, the beautiful last Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt pressed a deadly asp to her breast, taking her own life as well.

But what if Cleopatra didn’t commit suicide at all?

Pat Brown, author of the new book, The Murder of Cleopatra: History’s Greatest Cold Case, argues that the “Queen of Kings” did not take her own life. Rather, she was murdered, and her perpetrators managed to spin a story that has endured for more than 2,000 years.

Brown, writing for The Scientist, says she decided to treat Cleopatra’s story as any typical crime scene.

I was shocked at the number of red flags that popped up from the pages of the historical accounts of the Egyptian queen’s final day. How was it that Cleopatra managed to smuggle a cobra into the tomb in a basket of figs? Why would the guards allow this food in and why would they be so careless in examining them? Why would Octavian, supposedly so adamant about taking Cleopatra to Rome for his triumph, be so lax about her imprisonment? Why would Cleopatra think it easier to hide a writhing snake in a basket of figs rather than slip poison inside one of the many figs? How did all three women end up dead from the venom? Wasn’t it unlikely that the snake cooper­ated in striking all three, releasing sufficient venom to kill each of them? Why was the snake no longer present at the crime scene? Was a brand-new tomb so poorly built that holes remained in the walls of the building? Why did the guards not look for the snake once they thought it had killed the women? Why were the wounds from the fangs of the snake not obvious? Why did the women not exhibit the symptoms of death by snake venom or even by poison? Why did the guards not see any of the women convulsing, vomiting, or holding their abdomens in agony? Why didn’t they see any swelling or paral­ysis of face or limbs or any foaming at the mouth?

Brown began pursuing these answers through historical texts and more recent scholarly works. She spoke with Egyptologists, poison experts, archeologists and historians of the ancient world, slowly forming her own version of what really took place August 12, 30 BC.

With each step back in time from the end of Cleopatra’s life to the beginning, I discovered more and more evidence pointing to a radically different explanation of history than the ancients and Octavian wanted us to believe.

In this story, Cleopatra never loved Antony or Julius Caesar. Antony was murdered, and Cleopatra was tortured and strangled to death.

I believed Cleopatra may have been one of the most brilliant, cold-blooded, iron-willed rulers in history and the truth about what really happened was hidden behind a veil of propaganda and lies set in motion by her murderer, Octavian, and the agenda of the Roman Empire.

This book, Brown hopes, will set the record straight.

*This post has been updated.

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There are a few things that are distinct to every person—her fingerprints, voice, particular way of walking, and, it turns out, the way she chews. Mary Roach’s new book, Gulp, takes readers on the same trip their food goes, and she writes that your way of chewing is unique to you:

The way you chew, for example, is as unique and consistent as the way you walk or fold your shirts. There are fast chewers and slow chewers, long chewers and short chewers, right-chewing people and left-chewing people. Some of us chew straight up and down, and others chew side-to-side, like cows. Your oral processing habits are a physiological fingerprint.

Of course, there are all sorts of people telling you how to chew. Some places say that the way you chew can help you diet better or be healthier. The best way to chew for weight loss is excessively, to burn calories. (Seriously, that is a tip.) Chewing for longer can also make you feel like you’ve eaten more food than you really have and can give your body time to process the “full” signals it’s sending you. This is why many diets suggest chewing gum to fool yourself into thinking you’re eating. (A new study, though, found that chewing minty gum can actually prompt people to eat sugary snacks and junk food instead of fruits and vegetables.)

Roach offers all sorts of other strange insights into our chewing prowess in the excerpt published in the New York Times. Like, for example, this gem about why food crunches:

For a food to make an audible noise when it breaks, there must be what’s called a brittle fracture: a sudden, high-speed crack. Dr. Van Vliet takes a puffed cassava chip from a bag and snaps it in two.

“To get this noise, you need crack speeds of 300 meters per second,” he said. The speed of sound. The crunch of a chip is a tiny sonic boom inside your mouth.

So the next time you sit down for lunch, take note of the tiny sonic booms in your mouth, the uniqueness of your munching and the strangeness of the human digestive tract.

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HeLa cells photographed in a laboratory. Photo: Euan Slorach

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor black mother of five living near Baltimore, died from cancer. But cells taken from her tumor lived on. The so-called HeLa cells multiplied prolifically and were sent to labs around the world, where they went on to help develop medical innovations and understanding about vaccines, cancer treatments, cloning and more.

Lacks’ story also raised significant questions about medical ethics. Lacks’ family was never informed that her cells lived on or even that a sample had been taken from her tumor. They only learned about the HeLa cells about twenty years later, by chance, and researchers used the family for HeLa studies without fully explaining what was going on.

In the story’s latest development, last week scientists published Lacks’ full genome—again, without consent of her family. Journalist Rebecca Skloot, who told the story of the HeLa cells in her best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, responds to this in an op-ed published in The New York Times:

Genetic information can be stigmatizing, and while it’s illegal for employers or health insurance providers to discriminate based on that information, this is not true for life insurance, disability coverage or long-term care.

Uploading a person’s genetic code onto the website SNPedia, for example, can reveal all sorts of personal information about her and her family within minutes, Skloot explains.

Scientifically speaking, that’s good news. There’s a lot of hope for using technology like this for affordable “personalized medicine.” But legally and ethically speaking, we’re not ready for it.

After hearing from the Lacks family, the European team apologized, revised the news release and quietly took the data off-line. (At least 15 people had already downloaded it.) They also pointed to other databases that had published portions of Henrietta Lacks’s genetic data (also without consent). They hope to talk with the Lacks family to determine how to handle the HeLa genome while working toward creating international standards for handling these issues.

As David Kroll points out in Forbes, legally the researchers who published the study were not required to consult with Lacks’ family. Laws requiring consent from offspring when a person or scientist choses to publish their genome do not exist.

Both Skloot and Kroll call for a reinvention of current standard procedure governing such issues, specifically one that focuses more on consent and trust.

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If you grew up in a house that got the funny pages, you might remember Garfield the cat. And you might remember thinking that he was…not that funny. Well, it turns out you’re not as humorless as you might have thought. Unlike New Yorker cartoons, in which you are actually missing the joke, Garfield is not even designed to be funny.

On Quora, someone asked this question and got a surprisingly interesting response from a woman who used to be bombarded with licensing proposals from none other than Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield. She dug up this Slate article that suggests that Davis really had no intention of making the strip funny at all:

Davis makes no attempt to conceal the crass commercial motivations behind his creation  of Garfield. (Davis) carefully studied the marketplace when developing Garfield. The genesis of the strip was “a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character,” Davis told Walter Shapiro in a 1982 interview in theWashington Post. “And primarily an animal. … Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not.” So, Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn’t a strip for the nation’s 15 million cat owners. Then, he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat.

…

The model for Garfield was Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, but not the funny Peanuts of that strip’s early years. Rather, Davis wanted to mimic the sunny, humorless monotony of Peanuts‘ twilight years. “After 50 years, Snoopy was still laying in that dog house, and rather than getting old, it actually has the opposite effect,” Davis told the Chicago Sun-Times last year during the press blitz for Garfield‘s 25th anniversary.

Caroline Zelonka, the intrepid Quora answerer, also argues that, even without the strip, Davis could make tons of money from Garfield.* She writes:

 The strip isn’t what’s important: what with the movies, plush toys, branded pet food, even the “Garfield Pizza Cafe” in Kuala Lumpur.

And it turns out the Peanuts creater Charles Schultz hated Garfield, according to one other answerer:

About 25 years ago I met a woman who worked for United Features Syndicate. UFS represented Peanuts as well as Garfield and countless other cartoons.

We got to talking and she told me a story about her early days with the syndicate. She was hired to work on Peanuts business (licensing, merchandising) and one of her first assignments was to fly out to Santa Rosa, California, where Charles Schulz lived, stay in his house for a week, and establish a good relationship. After a couple of days she was distraught because Schulz did not seem to be warming up to her. Might she lose her job? She tried harder to make him like her. Finally after another day or so he casually asked her, “What percentage of your time will be devoted to the Peanuts property?”

“One hundred percent,” she assured him. “I was hired to work only on Peanuts.”

She could see the ice cracking already. He gave her a relieved look and said, “GOOD. BECAUSE I THINK THAT CAT IS STUPID.”

By the end of the week they had a warm and trusting business relationship.

Other comedians have taken up the challenge of making Garfield funny. There’s the Lasagna Cat site, and the existential crisis of John in Garfield Minus Garfield.

Other people on the Quora answers have different takes on why Garfield has the elements of humor, but isn’t funny. Joshua Engel cites Aristotle, saying:

The strips aren’t exactly uproariously funny, but the fundamental building blocks of humor are there. It’s kind of Aristotelian, actually. From the Poetics:

Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type—not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain.*

We can definitely quibble with Aristotle’s definition, but it’s the essence of Garfield. Jon is both ugly and defective, but not generally in a painful way. Aristotle’s definition of comedy relied just on our feeling superior to him.

But no matter how you slice the lasagna, Garfield just isn’t that funny, and Davis is still incredibly rich—something comedians, many of whom have the first part down, could take a lesson from.

*Updated: This post originally reported, in error, that new Garfield strips were no longer being published

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While pawing through a stack of medieval manuscripts from Dubrovnik, Croatia, University of Sarajevo doctoral student Emir O. Filipović stumbled upon a familiar set of splotches marring the centuries-old pages. Years ago, a mischievous kitty had left her ink-covered prints on the book. Filipović explains the finding:

My story line follows a simple path: I was doing some research in the Dubrovnik State Archives for my PhD, I came across some pages which were stained with cat paw prints, I took a few photos of this (as I do whenever I notice something interesting or unusual on any old book I’m reading), and carried on with my work not paying too much attention to something which at that time could essentially be only a distraction.

Thanks to a frenzy of Twitter and blog coverage, a French historian picked up on the photo and decided to include it in her Interactive Album of Medieval Paleography so that other historians can utilize the unique finding, which gives insight into daily life in 14th century Dubrovnik. Filipović elaborates:

The photo of the cat paw prints represents one such situation which forces the historian to take his eyes from the text for a moment, to pause and to recreate in his mind the incident when a cat, presumably owned by the scribe, pounced first on the ink container and then on the book, branding it for the ensuing centuries. You can almost picture the writer shooing the cat in a panicky fashion while trying to remove it from his desk. Despite his best efforts the damage was already complete and there was nothing else he could have done but turn a new leaf and continue his job. In that way this little episode was ‘archived’ in history.

Filipović hopes the finding may move beyond a simple cat meme and inspire more interest in the medieval Mediterranean.

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Although he lived in the 1950s, author George Orwell’s mug was never captured on film. At least that’s what scholars thought, until someone uncovered this footage from around 1921.

At around the 50 second mark in this video above, you can see Orwell at a spritely age of 18 walking across a field at Eton College. But that’s all you get. No interviews, no readings, nothing. Orwell’s voice was never captured on tape, and this brisk march is all anyone has found of him on film.

So while Orwell lives on in millions of class syllabi, his image lives for just a few seconds in our collective film history.

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In the NHL, players’ birthdays fall into a strange pattern: the best players seem to all be born in the earlier months of the year. This pattern was extremely clear from youth hockey all the way up to the pros. In Outliers, journalist Malcolm Gladwell explained one possible cause of this weird birthday trend. Here’s New York’s summary:

Gladwell explains what academics call the relative-age effect, by which an initial advantage attributable to age gets turned into a more profound advantage over time. Because Canada’s eligibility cutoff for junior hockey is January 1, Gladwell writes, “a boy who turns 10 on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn 10 until the end of the year.” You can guess at that age, when the differences in physical maturity are so great, which one of those kids is going to make the league all-star team. Once on that all-star team, the January 2 kid starts practicing more, getting better coaching, and playing against tougher competition—so much so that by the time he’s, say, 14, he’s not just older than the kid with the December 30 birthday, he’s better.

Coaches seem to draft based on this idea that older players—players born in the first three months—will have the advantage and be better. A new paper, published in PLoS ONE, looked at those numbers:

Compared to those born in the first quarter (i.e., January–March), those born in the third and fourth quarters were drafted more than 40 slots later than their productivity warranted, and they were roughly twice as likely to reach career benchmarks, such as 400 games played or 200 points scored.

But, actually, this is a daft way to put a team together. The birthday effect that Gladwell describes hasn’t held up to scrutiny, and, in fact, when you look at the Canadian Olympic hockey team, it’s not at all full of “older” players. The NHL doesn’t seem to follow that pattern either, according to SB Nation:

According to nhl.com, at the 2010 Olympic break there were 499 Canadians on NHL rosters. That’s about 55% of the players in the entire league. If you broke their birthdates down by quarters of the year you get the following:

Canadians Non-Canadians (as of the end of the 09-10 season)

Jan-Mar: 25.7% 34.2%

Apr-June: 28.5% 23%

July-Sept: 25.5% 21.3%

Oct-Dec: 20.3% 21.5%

As you can see, if there’s a country with an “old” hockey workforce, it’s not Canada. There were actually more Canadian NHL players born in September (43) than January (41), and June was the most populous month (50). True, there are more players born in the first half of the year, but the notion that Canada is only producing successful players from a small portion of the calendar seems to be, at best, somewhat of an overstatement.

Robert Deaner, the researcher behind the new study, wanted to show people that this birthday effect simply doesn’t hold up. He told the press office at Grand Valley State University:

“There’s no doubt that drafting professional athletes is an inexact science. Plenty of sure-fire first-round picks fizzle while some late-round picks unexpectedly become stars. But our results show that, at least since 1980, NHL teams have been consistently fooled by players’ birthdays or something associated with them. They greatly underestimate the promise of players born in the second half of the year, the ones who have always been relatively younger than their peers. For any given draft slot, relatively younger players are about twice as likely to be successful. So if teams really wanted to win, they should have drafted more of the relatively younger players.”

Take note, coaches: stop listening to Malcolm Gladwell, and start listening to science.

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Aphrodite rescuing her son Aeneas, wounded in fight, scene from The Iliad. Work on display in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen. Image: Bibi Saint-Pol

The Iliad—Homer’s story of the Trojan War, and the battle between Agamemon and Achilles—is one of the oldest examples we have of Western literature. But when was it actually written? To answer that question, you might turn to a historian or a literary scholar. But geneticists wanted a crack at it, too.

It turns out that tracing the evolution and history of a book is a lot like tracing the evolution and history of a people or language. Geneticists from the journal BioEssays just applied their methods to the Iliad, writing:

Here we apply evolutionary-linguistic phylogenetic statistical methods to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to estimate a date of approximately 710–760 BCE for these great works.

Basically, the geneticists traced the words present in The Iliad the way they might trace genes – using a database of concepts and words that appear in every language as the gene bank. That word database is called the Swadesh word list, and it contains about 200 words that exist in everyone language and culture, like water and dog. They found 173 words that exist in both the Iliad and the Swadesh list and then watched them evolve over time. Inside Science explains:

For example, they looked at cognates, words derived from ancestral words. There is “water” in English, “wasser” in German, “vatten” in Swedish, all cognates emanating from “wator” in proto-German. However, the Old English “hund” later became “hound” but eventually was replaced by “dog,” not a cognate.

The author of the study knows you might be surprised at this technique, but he says you shouldn’t be. Inside Science spoke with him:

“Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes,” Pagel said. “It is directly analogous. We tried to document the regularities in linguistic evolution and study Homer’s vocabulary as a way of seeing if language evolves the way we think it does. If so, then we should be able to find a date for Homer.”

And the date that Pagel came up with is pretty close to what historians and linguists estimate. They put the date of the Iliad at around 762 B.C., plus or minus fifty years or so. Pagel’s estimate fits that guess as well. Science might not be able to help you read and appreciate the epic work, but they can at least tell you how old it might be.

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If you’re an angler and an author, there’s a good chance you’re using a pen name—perhaps “Piscator” or “Hampshire Fisherman” or “Pelagius.” Angler pen names hit their heyday in the mid-1800s, but they also appeared as early as 1613, in the earliest known poetical treatise in English on fishing, The Secrets of Angling (written by John Dennys, a.k.a. “I.D. Esquire”).The list of pseudonyms that angling authors have taken up spans from obvious salutes to the fishy nature of their pursuit to the more thought-provoking (or eyebrow raising) “Sparse Grey Hackle”, “Detached Badger” and “Theophilus South.”

The American Angler, published in 1864, compiles a list of nearly 100 of the most significant angling author pseudonyms. By way of explanation, the books says only:

It may be interesting, in this connection, to note the well-known names, in American and England, of those who are enrolled in the coterie of angling authors, under various pseudonyms. To present a complete list, even of notable piscatorial writers who have assumed pen names, would be impossible, but according to Plato, “It is the commendation of a good huntsman to find game in a wide wood, so it is no imputation if he hath not caught all.”

The list of pseudonyms and initialisms, incomplete though it may be, has a range of time from the Waltonian period down to the present.

Fennel’s Priory explains the draw of writing and reading about fishing:

Traditional angling authors write about the peripherals of our sport – the nature around them and the joy of being by the waterside – as much as the act of catching fish. Their books are not so much technical instruction; instead they are entertaining reads that will transport you to a happier place.

Or as Arthur Ransome, author of the classic angling book Rod and Line published in the 1920s wrote, “To read a fishing book is the next best thing to fishing. It is like talk in the fishing inn at night.” Other authors, accoridng to Fennel’s Priory,  ”successfully articulate the emotional reasons why we fish.”

Nearly all of the great, if pseudonymous, angling authors listed in The American Angler are male. However, a few exceptions did exist. Some ladies who wrote of their love of angling included Mrs. W.D. Tomlin (“Lucy J”), Miss Cornelia Crosby (“Fly Rod”) and Mrs. H.C. Brown (“Beryl”).

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