Ronaldo retires

February 14, 2011 • 6:10 pm

The great Ronaldo, hero of Brazilian soccer, announced his retirement today. He’s only 34.  And, as a nice article in Slate reprises, what a great career he had, and what pleasure he gave the fans!

Here are some of his career highlights:

And I’ll lift this directly from the piece:

What I loved most about watching Ronaldo was that—quite possibly because of the same vague goofiness that made him into a laughingstock—he never stopped playing like the game was just unbelievable fun. Two of my favorite Ronaldo moments came in games that had nothing, or very little, to do with the grim task of beating the competition. The first is the jaw-dropping goal he scored at a charity match in 2002. He and his Real Madrid teammate Raul pirouette in tandem through the entire defense, Raul plays the final pass just behind Ronaldo, and Ronaldo—casually, as if he did this sort of thing all the time—flips the ball up over his body with his heel, controls it with his chest, and slices it into the back of the net past the diving goalkeeper’s hands.

Here’s that sequence, and it’s one gorgeous goal (read the Slate article for the other “Ronaldo moment”):

Ronaldo scored more goals in World Cup competition than any other player: 15.  You can see them all on this video.

No Valentine’s Day in Iran :-(

February 14, 2011 • 3:31 pm

The Iranian regime is acting even more bizarre than usual, for this year they’ve banned Valentine’s Day.  The Wall Street Journal—of all places—reports on the stupidity of theocracy:

In another sign of its ever more improvisational approach to governance, the Iranian regime has outlawed Valentine’s Day. “Symbols of hearts, half-hearts, red roses, and any activities promoting this day are banned,” announced state media last month. “Authorities will take legal action against those who ignore the ban.” . .

. . . The Iranian state has pronounced against unauthorized mingling of the sexes, rap music, rock music, Western music, women playing in bands, too-bright nail polish, laughter in hospital corridors, ancient Persian rites-of-spring celebrations (Nowrooz), and even the mention of foreign food recipes in state media. This last may sound comically implausible, but it was officially announced by a state-run website on Feb. 6. So now the true nature of pasta as an instrument of Western subversion has been revealed. . .

. . In the end, Iran’s rulers face an impossible task. Their genesis myth of a society based on a codified schema of sacred laws looks neither codified nor sacred. It convinces no one. Instead, the regime seems dedicated above all to stamping out joy wherever it may accidentally arise—a sour, paranoid struggle against irrepressible forces of nature, change, the seasons, music, romance and laughter. The Iranian people can take comfort: No earthly authority has won that particular contest for long.

I don’t often read the WSJ, so I was surprised that they published something this hard on theocracy.  But maybe they just don’t like Muslim theocracy. . .

Meanwhile, in the past few days Iranians have mounted their biggest anti-government protest since 2009.

h/t: Malgorzata

The growth of student atheism

February 14, 2011 • 11:49 am

When I was in Whitewater, Wisconsin for Darwin Day, I spent an hour talking to the local Secular Student Alliance, which had just been formed.  There were already about two dozen members, and it was heartening to converse with a group of such young, intelligent, and eager kids.  One of their big questions was “How militant should we be?”  In other words, they wanted to know whether to act like P.Z. or like Mooney.  My answer was to be polite to opponents but never water down their beliefs for public consumption.

It was also heartening to learn that these college atheist groups are growing rapidly.  About 30 new ones have been formed in the last six months, a fact confirmed by the national Secular Student Alliance (SSA). Here’s a graph of the number of chapters over the last four years.

The SSA has recently hit 250 chapters, and—even more amazing—the organization is appearing in high schools, with five new chapters in just the last months.

Can anyone doubt what this growth—180% in less than four years—really means?

I can’t prove this, but I attribute much of this growth to the books of the Gnu Atheists.  The End of Faith, after all, was published in 2004.  I suspect it touched off a wave of “out” atheism, since the more people  express their godlessness, the more people become willing to break their own silence.  I heard this from the students at Whitewater, who had been emboldened to form their chapter because some of them learned that their confrères had similar beliefs.

I like to think this wave is now self sustaining: we won’t need any more Gnu Atheist books to keep it going.  And, when I say I want religion “eradicated,” this is what I mean: I want the young folk to realize that the superstitions of their elders are silly, and to cast them aside.  Like Darwinian evolution itself, atheism progresses not by conversion of individuals, but by change between generations.

Australopithecus afarensis: a “committed terrestrial biped”

February 14, 2011 • 7:36 am

So much information from a single bone!  Paleontologists are expert in deducing a lot of stuff from a fragment of fossil.  Sometimes you have to wonder if they’re doing it rong, but when one of the team is Donald Johanson (the discoverer of the famous Australopithecus afarensis specimen named”Lucy“), then you’re pretty confident.

A new paper in Science by Carol Ward, William Kimbel, and Johanson (reference below) describes the discovery of a metatarsal bone (the fourth metatarsal, i.e., from the toe next to the little toe) from A. afarensis, a bone that pretty conclusively shows that the species was, as the authors affirm, “a committed terrestrial biped.”

You may remember that although the skeleton of Lucy was amazingly complete, it lacked the feet:

The inference that this 3.2 million year old specimen was bipedal was based on two things: the configurations of the pelvis and knee, and the discovery, nearby, of the famous Laetoli footprints, a long trail of footprints left about 3.6 mya by early hominins walking in volcanic ash.  The individuals who made these (probably three of them) certainly walked upright: there are no impressions of knuckles.


Because A. afarensis was the only hominin known from that era in that location (Hadar, Ethiopia), everyone concluded that the species was pretty bipedal.  But fragments of another Hadar foot were ambiguous: some workers suggested that they didn’t have the crucial longitudinal arch of modern humans.

A refresher—here’s where the metatarsals are:

The 4th metatarsal found by Ward et al. is fortuitous, for it  clearly comes from A. afarensis (it was found in the Hadar formation, where the only hominin is of that species), it’s the right age—about 3.2 my old—and it’s a crucial bone for determining how its owner walked.

Humans have a more rigid foot than modern apes, with pronounced arches, both longitudinal and transverse.  When our heel lifts off the ground, so does the rest of the foot up to the toes.  When the ape foot lifts off, there’s a break between the heel and the middle, which facilitates moving around in trees.  This is reflected in the shape of the metatarsals, which show much greater torsion (rotation) during walking than do ape toes.  The metatarsals in humans form a pronounced arch, one that’s much less distinct in apes (figure from Ward et al.):

The shape of the bone tells you how much torsion it underwent during walking, and the shape of the new A. afarensis metatarsal (“AL333-160” in the figure below) clearly shows that its torsion is much closer to that of a modern human than to a modern chimp (P. troglodytes) or gorilla (Gorilla gorilla):

There are other morphometric data supporting a similarity in walking style between A. australopithecus and modern humans, but I’ll give just one more piece.  Below are the fourth metatarsals of a modern human, the new specimen, and of a modern chimp and gorilla.  In modern humans the metatarsal’s “diaphysis” (the long middle section of a bone) is at a sharp angle to the base (the short dark line at the right side of the following diagram), while in apes they’re roughly parallel. And the domed part of the metatarsal head (blue arrow in the diagram) is much higher (more dorsal) in humans than in apes.

The figure above shows that, in both respects, the new A. afarensis toe belonged to a creature that had a longitudinal arch in the foot, like humans but unlike modern apes.

Since the ancestor of humans and apes was likely a knuckle-walking ape (there is some dispute about this), these data all show that A. afarensis, at 3.2 mya, already had a stiff, doubly arched foot and therefore walked much like modern humans, confirming the earlier skeletal and footprint evidence.  Here is the authors’ conclusion:

By at least 3.2 million years ago, the fundamental attributes of human pedal anatomy and function were in place. This includes the transformation of the first toe and associated musculature from a grasping structure to one designed for propulsion and shock absorption [review in (1)]. Evidence from the Hadar fourth metatarsal adds to this human-like portrait of permanent longitudinal and transverse bony arches in the sole of the foot. The evolutionary trajectory suggested by these fossil remains makes it unlikely that selection continued to favor substantial arboreal behaviors by the time of A. afarensis.

In other words, we’d left the trees for good.

______

Ward, C., W. H. Kimbel and D. C. Johanson. 2011.  Complete fourth metatarsal and arches in the foot of Australopithecus afarensis. Science 331:750-753.

Valentine felids

February 14, 2011 • 5:13 am

It’s Valentine’s Day, and I hope you’ve bought presents for That Special Someone, even if it’s only a felid.  To celebrate, we’re featuring three cat-themed contributions from our readers.

The internet is awash with photos of pairs of kittehs sleeping in the shape of a heart, but we have our own, sent all the way from Sumatra by alert reader David Pearton:

I am currently working with an orangutan research project in Bukit Lawang, Sumatra (Indonesia) and we have acquired a number of cats (as so often seems to happen in these places).  As the weather is up at 30deg C and 90% humidity the cats spend a lot of time “resting” – I don’t know why they tend to do it in piles in the heat, but c’est la vie.  I thought you might enjoy this pic I took the other day – Jack is the black and white (named after Jack Sparrow because of the eye patch) and the black one is Will (Smith).  You can see Will’s tail is malformed, an inherited trait that seems to affect to some degree at least 60% of the cats I’ve seen in Indonesia. I’m not sure of the mutation but it seems to be variably penetrant and leads to shortened (sometimes dramatically) and kinked tails.  I’ve seen some where the tail is kinked up to 160 degrees.

And our Official Japanese Correspondent, Yokohamamama, contributes a box of cat-themed chocolates sold in Japan for Valentine’s Day (see her new post on Valentine’s Day in Japan.)  The custom on V-day in Japan is the opposite of that in America: ladies must give candy and valentines to their men.  Lucky is the dude who gets these:

And, finally, a Valentine Video. Yokohamamama has also done us the favor of translating the third Japanese commercial for the Jalan travel agency, featuring the randy, tie-clad bizness cat Nyaran.  (We’ve had two pervious videos and Y’s analysis of them: here and here.)  If you don’t speak Japanese, you’ll probably be a bit curious about what’s going on in this video, even though it’s funny:

I had been greatly puzzled by this commercial.  Who was this hawt Persian kitteh that Nyaran was dreaming of?  Did he have a date with her, or had he been stood up, accounting for the two empty bathrobes?   Our correspondent clears up the mystery, showing that the video is truly appropriate for Valentine’s Day, for Nytaran is preparing for a Big Date:

This episode in Jalan Travel’s continuing Nyaran Saga is titled “Nyaran no Dato no Shitami no Maki”, or “Nyaran’s Preliminary Inspection Episode”

Nyran has come to a new hotel to check out the amenities in preparation for a Hawt Date before he takes his girlfriend (although it’s not entirely clear in this commercial whether the Hawt Persian has already agreed to go out with him, or he’s just hoping that if he can find someplace suitably cool enough that she *will* go out with him… but in any case, the date has not yet happened…)

“Watashi wa Nyaran”  (I am Nyaran)

“Kyou wa Hoteru ni Dato no shitami ni kitan nyo da!”  (Today I’ve come to the hotel for a preliminary inspection before a date!)

“Dewa, sassoku!”  (Well, I’ll check immediately!)

“…Futari de tabete…”  (…we can eat together…)

“…futari de momowarete…”  (…get a massage together….)

“…Dakiyosete…!”  (…hug each other…!!)

“Maji *ya-bai nyo da—!”  (“This is seriously *amazing!”  …*Another, more usual, meaning of “yabai” is “risky” or “dangerous”.  If you substitute that meaning, along with Nyaran’s agitated voice in the video at that point, you get the impression that he’s gotten carried away with his own imaginings…especially given what he says next—)

“Me, me, me!”…kore ga todome no… yakei” (Hem. . hem. . .hem. . And this is the piece de resistance… the nightscape!”)  [Thanks to reader Tim Martin for correcting this line.]

Those last two lines as he sits in his robe looking at the Tokyo nightscape…and the camera flashes to two robes hanging in the bathroom (in preparation, presumably )

As Nyaran looks out the window in his robe, the words on the screen say:  “Nichijou wo hanareru.  Shiawase.”  (Let go of the everyday life.  Happiness.)
Finally we hear the female announcer saying “Mada, koko ni nai, deai”, an ad campaign for Recruit that means something like “We meet needs you don’t know you have yet”.

This is a Western-style hotel, clearly, so there’s not as much to deconstruct, so to speak, in this commercial.  The main thing is—Nyaran is anticipating a date; he hasn’t been stood up.

Official Japanese Correspondent

A lovely goal

February 13, 2011 • 6:45 pm

Lately Wayne Rooney hasn’t had an easy time of it, either soccer- or lifewise, but on Saturday he scored a fantastic goal against Man City, giving United a 2-1 victory:

Manager Sir Alex Ferguson says it’s the best goal he’s ever seen at Old Trafford. More expert opinion is here.

Bicycle goals aren’t unique, of course: here are ten more.