Discover 04/08

In the new issue of Discover, here's what I found most interesting.

Facing the Crowds: Preventing Disaster in an Unruly World. A geographer at Arizona State University is creating crowds of avatars to simulate what happens in disaster scenarios that lead to trampling deaths. They have more on this and some cool graphics showing what the geographer is up to on the Discover website.

How Verbs Decay. A mathematician at Harvard has figured out the half-life of irregular verbs; for example, how long it will take the verb "hold" to become "holded." It depends on how frequently the word is used in everyday English; the less frequently, the shorter the time needed for it to change.

War. What Is It Good For? looks at current thinking among primatologists on whether our primate cousins are naturally violent and warlike, or whether it is a matter of acculturation and access to resources. This, of course, is seen to have implications for humans.

The issue also includes an interview with Wade Davis, an ethnobotanist. The lead compares him to Indiana Jones, so you get some idea of what his career has been like. But there was an interesting point in the interview where Davis had just told a story about an Inuit man fixing his snowmobile, and the interviewer asked,

Wait--the Inuit were on snowmobiles, not dogsleds? If everybody's going modern, what does it mean to preserve culture?

To which Davis responded,

I don't believe in preserving culture. The real question is, what kind of world do we want to live in -- a monochromatic world of monotony, or a polychromatic world of diversity? The idea is not to eliminate modernity, as if we've got the right to sequester people like some kind of specimen in a bubble.... The distinctions between cultures are not decorative -- it's not feathers and bells or dancers or songs. Those are the symbols of culture. The essence of culture is a blanket of moral and ethical values that we place around the individual.

A succinct way to explain a nebulous issue, I thought.