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Martin Medeski and Wood (Heart)'s Radiolarians

One of my favorite group of musicians, known as MMW, released their next big idea - Viva la Evolution. This is an innovative concert/record idea. First they will write the songs, then tour instead of making a CD. During their tour they will use that opportunity to fine tune their notes and experiment with different audiences. They will conduct 3 tours resulting in 3 separate albums, each with unique material. Hence, their music will evolve throughout this summer. This may even be a cooler idea than their funky children's CD Let's Go Everywhere (with such great songs like "Pirates Don't Take…

Scholars live on a lean diet

The story of Margaret Mary Vojtko brought out quite a few adjuncts with their own tales of exploitation by universities. It really is shameful how the current system often takes people who love learning and want to teach and treats them like crap, when they should be regarding them as the heirs to the university tradition. There were also a few clueless twits babbling in dumb incomprehension: why don't you just get a real job? Meaning, of course, some kind of work, any kind of work, that pays you more money. I come from a blue collar, union family, and I know I baffled my father a bit, too;…

TechnOlympics

It has been said that the Olympics is rather like a genetic freak-show: All of the extreme outliers from the population show up and do their thing. While specific "genetic gifts" are pretty much required to reach the top of most any sport these days, a little technology can certainly assist in the process. This week's Electronic Design cover story is The 2008 TechnOlympics and discussed some of the technology that will be used in Beijing. One item that caught my eye was the increased use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. Although wind tunnel testing has been used on cyclists…

Contributions of the World's Religions

...according to the Most Great Prophet of Pain, Tim Krieder. Go to the Pain archives via the link above to... October 4, 2006 - Contributions of the World's Religions (Part I): Christianity for wholesome TV programming and burning witches and Islam for angry chanting and those excellent bean pies. October 18, 2006 - Contributions of the World's Religions (Part II): Judaism for pastrami and unsurpassed fashion sense. November 1, 2006 - Contributions of the World's Religions (Part IV): Hinduism for the most f*cked up pantheon since the Legion of Doom. November 8, 2006 - Contributions of the…

Nerd Goddess

Worship me, fools. Really, there was no hope for me. My path to nerdocity was shaped by older siblings: my late sister who was a junior high school math and science teacher (originally wanted to be an engineer, but in the late 50's/early 60's, this wasn't exactly encouraged) and my brother who is a physicist. At age 6, I played chess with my brother who was a member of the high school chess team (if that doesn't say "Kick me," I don't know what does), and poured over my sister's college biology textbooks. I waxed poetic on the various species of dinosaurs in my first grade class circa…

The Evolution of My Dream Technology

I've had versions of the same recurring dream/nightmare for decades. While I don't particularly enjoy the dream, it is hilarious to me to reflect on how it has evolved over time to keep up with advances in technology in my waking life. The dream always involves the urgent need to use a phone at some point. Why I need to use the phone, who I'm trying to contact, how I feel when I'm doing so, what I'm trying to communicate - these circumstances all vary. But commonly, I am unable to complete dialing or entering the number - I cannot put through the call. When I first began having these…

Adam Savage is a godless humanist

Adam Savage gave a talk at Harvard where he beautifully laid out the logic of a godless universe. Here's a short sample, but really, it's worth reading the whole thing: The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It's not just an idea, it's reality. We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day. The inverse square law of gravitation is amazing. Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs. The nearly infinite set of dominoes…

Political independence and science activism

Chris Mooney expresses concern at his blog and in Seed magazine about the possibility that Scientists and Engineers for Change (SEforA) will be too partisan. The races they expect to target include (according to the Times) "Senate race in Virginia between George Allen, the incumbent Republican, and James Webb, a Democrat; a stem cell ballot issue in Missouri; the question of intelligent design in Ohio; and Congressional races in Washington State." On the conference call announcing the group's kick-off, retiring Republican Representative Sherwood Boehlert was the only politician mentioned by…

Making creatures make themselves

As I was skimming through Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863), a book that injects a fair amount of Lamarckian evolution into a children's moral fable (the character Mother Carey "make[s] creatures make themselves."), I came across a section that made me grin. During the course of the story the protagonist Tom is told that he needs to go see the Gairfowl, an old Great auk bird of high breeding (the Great auk just having become extinct in 1852. Thanks to Allen for the correction about the meaning of "Gairfowl."). I do not know what Kingsley thought of the evolution of birds (T.H.…

The Boneyard XV

Smilodon It's been two weeks since the last Boneyard weathered out of the blogosphere. Here's a look at what present excavations have revealed over the past two weeks; Carnivorous mammals have evolved saber-teeth many times in the past, but just how they used their teeth to kill prey has been more difficult to ascertain. Nimravid presents a short review of how creatures so equipped may have caught and killed their prey. Paleontology isn't only focused on nightmarish creatures that ripped other extinct animals to shreds; the Ethical Palaeontologist reports on an amazing fossil of a…

I'm not really here

I had something of an interesting experience this afternoon. I stopped into a local Stop & Shop to pick up a new razor and a few other necessities, and because I only a had a few items I decided to use the self check-out. On my way over someone dropped two boxes of cereal on the ground as I was passing by so I bent down, picked them up, and put them in the cart. The person didn't even look at me. It was somewhat bizarre; the person was talking with a friend no more than a foot away, yet it would seem that they didn't hear the box smack the floor, notice me pick it up, or realize that they…

No thanks, Ken; that argument is poorly designed

As T. Ryan Gregory recently pointed out in his paper "Evolution as Fact, Theory, and Path," it is a shame that the English language is so impoverished as to cause the concept of evolution to be so controversial. Within the evolutionary lexicon, "theory," "saltation," " macroevolution," "direction," "purpose," and "design" are among the words that unfortunately seem to conflate rather than enlighten as far as the general public is concerned, and now Ken Miller (of Finding Darwin's God fame) wants to take back "design" for evolution. I don't have a good feeling about this one... As John Wilkins…

A lesser controversy at Scienceblogs

The case of the various kinds of blogs hosted on ScienceBlogs has come up on Newsweek, and I get quoted trying to explain how I'm unperturbed by a couple of institutional blogs here. Not all bloggers feel this way, Myers included. "We've known about those [institutional blogs] for some time--they aren't a problem," he wrote in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK. "Those sites were set up under the same conditions as the blogs of corporate scientist Mark Chu-Carroll, who works at Google, and university scientist PZ Myers, who works at the University of Minnesota. ... [The Pepsi blog blurred] the boundary…

Friday Afternoon Book Notes

Progress on my chosen books for this past week has been a little bit slow; I had a very busy weekend and a presentation on the paleoecology of Laetoli, Tanzania at ~3.5 mya (which will soon become a post), so I haven't been able to read as much as I would like this past week. Still, I'm about halfway through the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and hopefully I'll finish it over the weekend (I think I can polish off 300 pages before Monday). I'm also about halfway through Molnar's treatment of the huge varanid reptile Megalania prisca (Dragons in the Dust), although I probably won't get to finish it…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Drying dishes

As part of the Ask a ScienceBlogger series, reader Jim Swanson asks: When I open the dishwasher after washing and the contents are still hot, why do the glass and ceramic items dry off more quickly than the plastic items? This is a great question. Great because it is something most everyone can relate to and great because there is some good science. Really, this shows the difference between temperature and thermal energy. I think the common idea is that temperature is a measure of the energy something has - but this isn't quite true. Ok, let me first start with a sample case. Suppose you…

Does everyone need math?

This is a question that comes up every now in then. But I would like to ask a few similar questions with my first order approximation answers. I would love to hear some other ideas on these questions. Do people need a functional understanding of math to function in this world? I say no. Maybe this is not a popular answer, but this is my first answer. Let me give my reasons. What percent of people in this world have a functional understanding of math? (let me just say functional understanding means they can do basic word problems and understand what is going on) If I estimate this…

This Week in Tech on Education

In this WEEK in TECH episode 197 there was a pretty good discussion about education and the university system. In case you are not familiar with TWiT, it is a tech-based podcast with Leo Laporte (from the old Screen Savers show). If you want to listen to their discussion, it starts about half-way through the podcast. Here is what I find interesting - these are mostly tech-oriented people (there was one person in education) but they can clearly see some of the problems with the educational system. I think the following quote sums up their ideas pretty well (can't recall which twit said it…

Organ donation

New York's experiment in organ donation is intriguing: with a $1.5 million grant over three years from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, a team of medical experts and bioethicists is looking to expand the city’s donor pool by deploying a “rapid organ-recovery ambulance” to collect and preserve the organs of people who die of cardiac arrest. The plan — modeled on a successful program in Spain — is for the ambulance to trail regular ambulances that try to save people’s lives, then to swoop in if patients die and to maintain the bodies in stasis for several hours at a…

Movie Review: Expelled

Expelled is a really, truly, awful movie. Even setting aside its errors and its Holocaust nigh-denial, it's just a badly assembled bit of cinema. It's offensive and absurd to compare the events of the Cold War to the treatment of the supposed martyrs: the folks who variously were called bad names, didn't get tenure because they didn't publish research or get grants, the one who didn't get a new contract after failing to live up to the previous one, etc. People starved behind the Berlin Wall. They were sent to Siberia, and not in any figurative sense. It's doubly offensive for Stein to…

Another HuffPo pontification on science as it is not understood

My readers hate me, and like to make me suffer. That's the only way to explain why they would send me links to the ghastly Huffington Post. I swear, it's becoming as insane as World Net Daily. The latest screed is from some bozo named Dr Larry Dossey. The awfulness begins right away, as he quotes Jeremy Rifkin, the professional Luddite, on the scientific method. [T]he scientific method [is] an approach to learning that has been nearly deified in the centuries following the European Enlightenment. Children are introduced to the scientific method in middle school and informed that it is the…

Fascists, anti-vaxxers and creationists

Shorter Dave Neiwert: Liberal Fascism would be an oxymoron, if it weren't just moronic. David Neiwert is reviewing Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro History, a book which has been appropriately and adequately mocked by Sadly, No! already. I was particularly struck by this passage: Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation in her book…

South Park evades a positive answer, again

One of the most annoying features of South Park is the creators' hypocrisy. They're so infatuated with tearing down that they never bother to build up. Trey Parker has an odd comment in an interview: "All the religions are super funny to me," Parker said. "The story of Jesus makes no sense to me. God sent his only son. Why could God only have one son and why would he have to die? It's just bad writing, really. And it's really terrible in about the second act." But Parker says atheism is more ludicrous to him than anything else. "Out of all the ridiculous religion stories -- which are…

Phill "Pantysniffer" Kline uses taxpayer-funded website to continue election feud

At the Johnson County District Attorney's Office Home Page, Phill Kline (the extra "l" is for loser) pimps a WingNutDaily column by local conspiracy theorist Jack Cashill (HT: KSDP Buffalo Blog). Kline's heading for the article is "WorldNetDaily coverage of Morrison / Tiller controversy," an accurate enough description which fails to establish why it belongs on a county-funded webpage. Tiller is an OB/GYN in Wichita who runs a family planning clinic, Morrison (then the Johnson County DA) beat Kline in last year's state Attorney General election. Neither Morrison nor Tiller currently has…

I Love Paper

Last week, we discussed the differences between reading text printed on dead trees (paper) and reading on a computer screen. I confessed that I'm wedded to my laser printer, since I can only edit when I've got the tactile page in my hand. It turns out I'm not alone. William Powers, the media critic for the National Journal, has written a wonderfully learned essay on the strange anachronistic endurance of paper. He covers everything from Gutenberg to Shakespeare to the much-hyped paperless office, which was actually a dismal failure. But I was most interested in this bit of research, by…

Don't Read the Business Page

So the financial markets are all upset. Stocks began the morning with another steep slide. The media, of course, is covering the growing liquidity crisis in excruciating detail, spending lots of hours and column inches analyzing the latest rumors and sentiments on Wall Street. But here's my advice: ignore everything. Don't read the business page. Turn off the television. Go read a novel. In the late 1980's, the Harvard psychologist Paul Andreassen conducted a simple experiment on MIT business students. First, he let the students select a portfolio of stock investments. Then he divided the…

Physics, Neuroscience and Mystery

What's the biggest philosophical difference between neuroscientists and physicists?* I think neuroscientists are more averse to discussions of mystery and the limits of knowledge. They've spent so much time convincing the public that there is no soul - the ghost is just a side-effect of our vibrating machinery - that they are unwilling to let some immaterial presence back in. Physicists, on the other hand, strike me as much more willing to confess their ignorance. Perhaps this epistemic modesty is just a result of time: physics is a much older field than neuroscience. Perhaps it's just a…

Unpatriotic Christians

This is a totally frightening poll: Yes, you read that right: 42 percent of Christian Americans are Christians before they are Americans. In general, Christians in America are about as conflicted in their identities as Muslims in France. And they call atheists un-American... I'd be curious if there's any historical data on this poll question. Have Americans become more likely to self-identify as Christians over time? My sense is that one of the side-effects of globalization is to minimize the perceptions of difference between the citizens of different nation-states. Everybody drinks the…

Modeling the Future

I'm glad Al Gore won the Oscar. Personally, I found his film a little dry and pedantic, but it has clearly played an essential role in shifting the public debate on global warming. (Or are we now supposed to call global warming "the climate crisis," pace Gore?) But it's worth remembering that our scientific models of global warming, although they seem accurate and are backed by an iron clad scientific consensus, will no doubt turn out to be wrong, at least in the details. This is just the nature of scientific models. As the respected scientific authors of Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental…

The Self-Delusion Diet

What you believe about your body affects your body: Psychology researcher Ellen Langer of Harvard University has long been intrigued by mind-over-body effects. She and student Alia Crum therefore invited 84 women, ages 18 to 55 years old, who worked as housekeepers at seven Boston hotels, to participate in a study. Those in four hotels were told that their regular work was good exercise and met the guidelines for a healthy, active lifestyle. After all, the women cleaned about 15 rooms a day, taking 20 to 30 minutes for each, so they did get a bit of a workout. Those in the other three hotels…

The Cost of Kids

Having children is bad for your health: A pair of researchers, drawing on the experience of nearly 22,000 couples in the 19th century -- has measured the "fitness cost" of human reproduction. This is the price that parents pay in their own health and longevity for the privilege of having their genes live on in future generations. The findings, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, manage to be both predictable and surprising. Not surprisingly, women paid a bigger price than men. Older mothers were four times as likely to die in the year after having a…

Nature and Compassion

I've written before about the powerful mental benefits of communing with nature - it leads to more self-control, increased working memory, lower levels of stress and better moods - but a new study by psychologists at the University of Rochester find that being exposed to wildlife also makes us more compassionate. Nature might be red in tooth and claw, but even a glimpse of greenery can make us behave in kinder, gentler ways. The study consisted of several experiments with 370 different subjects. In each experiment, people were exposed to either natural settings (pristine lakes, wooded…

Persistent Memories

What happens when a memory disappears? Once upon a time, I could actually recall the details of organic chemistry. But then I took the class final and promptly forgot every piece of information related to the chemical properties of the carbon atom. This raises the obvious question: What does it mean to forget? Do we actually delete our memories, like an unwanted computer file expunged from the hard drive? Or does the memory always remain, a persistent neuronal ensemble that we just forget how to find? A new paper in Neuron by scientists at UC-Irvine and Princeton suggests the latter…

Population Density

What led to the birth of human civilization? How did a naked ape manage to invent complex cultural forms such as language and art? One possibility is that something happened inside the mind, that a cortical switch was flipped and homo sapiens was suddenly able to paint on cave walls. But that doesn't seem to be the case, as UCL anthropologist Ruth Mace explains in a recent Science article: Traits such as the creation of abstract art, improvements in stone and other tools, long-distance "trading," and the manufacture of musical instruments mark the emergence of modern humans who behaved much…

The Secret of Self-Control

I've got a new article in the New Yorker this week on the pioneering work of Walter Mischel and the science of delayed gratification: In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a "game room" at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she's now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness…

Steven Johnson

In the NY Times Book Review, Steven Johnson has a very kind review of How We Decide: Jonah Lehrer's engaging new book, "How We Decide," puts our decision-making skills under the microscope. At 27, Lehrer is something of a popular science prodigy, having already published, in 2007, "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," which argued that great artists anticipated the insights of modern brain science. "How We Decide" tilts more decisively in the thinking- person's self-help direction, promising not only to explain how we decide, but also to help us do it better. [SNIP] Explaining decision-making on the…

Buffett

Via Marginal Revolution, comes this interview with Warren Buffett, where he makes the case for the current stimulus package. I highlight this excerpt not to argue for the bill, but to highlight one of Buffett's many excellent mental habits, which we should all attempt to imitate: SG: But there is debate about whether there should be fiscal stimulus, whether tax cuts work or not. There is all of this academic debate among economists. What do you think? Is that the right way to go with stimulus and tax cuts? WB: The answer is nobody knows. The economists don't know. All you know is you throw…

Livebogging the execrable Meyer

Forgot to post this last night. He's back to claiming phylogenetics is circular. Not fair to say that IDers are not there, or that their numbskulls. He is insisting that he's not a creationist, and yet: Q. Do you accept the general principle of common descent that all life is biologically related back to the beginning of life, yes or no? A. I won't answer that question as a yes or no. I accept the idea of limited common descent. I am skeptical about universal common descent. I do not take it as a principle; it is a theory. And I think the evidence supporting the theory of universal common…

Endorsements

For President: Barack Obama. 'Nuff said. House: Barbara Lee. In Kansas, Boyda, Betts, and Moore. Senate: No race in California, Jim Slattery in Kansas. The Wichita Eagle, the KC Star, and just about every other serious observer of Kansas politics likes Slattery, and thinks Pat Roberts has lost touch with Kansas. It's time for a change. Local offices: Rebecca Kaplan is really the only interesting endorsement. Propositions: 1A: Yes. Supertrain! Kevin Drum is against it, but he's wrong. Wrong on the cost (which will be recovered through ticket sales, and given that that money would be…

Brown people are susceptible to diabetes

In medical news which won't be surprising to anyone, Ethnic Variation in Fat and Lean Body Mass and the Association with Insulin Resistance: Objective: Our objective was to compare total body fat to lean mass ratio (F:LM) in Aboriginal, Chinese, European, and South Asian individuals with differences in insulin resistance. ... Results: After adjustment for confounders and at a given body fat, South Asian men had less lean mass than Aboriginal [3.42 kg less; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.55-5.29], Chinese (3.01 kg less; 95% CI = 1.33-4.70), and European (3.57 kg less; 95% CI = 1.82-5.33)…

Local school boards

One of the great ironies of politics is that the most local offices, the ones that ought to be most responsive to constituent needs, are often the least-known. Presidential elections are hotly debated, even in a state like Kansas where the outcome is fore-ordained. But a local or state school board election can be decided by a few hundred votes, yet draws substantially less interest. That apathy towards local races has made them prime targets for extremists and ideologues, as Mike Hendricks points out in the Star. He discusses slates of candidates from Wichita to Topeka and Kansas City,…

Electrons Have Free Will?

A plea for help. I'm trying to write something about this paper, by John Conway and Simon Kochen of Princeton. Any guidance from physics experts would be greatly appreciated. I'm afraid that when it comes to these sorts of papers I'm like the simple son at the Seder: I don't even know what questions to ask. On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is equally not a function of the information accessible to the particles. We show that this…

The Limits of Science

Are there any? In my post last week on consciousness studies, I argued that neuroscience will never tell us anything interesting about how the water of the brain becomes the wine of conscious experience: Even if neuroscience discovers the neuronal correlates of consciousness one day - assuming they can even be found - the answer still won't be very interesting. It still won't explain how we exceed our cells, or how 40 Hz oscillations in the pre-frontal cortex create this, here, now. It is ironic, but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. Needless…

Stocks and Names

When it comes to stocks, ticker symbols seem to be extremely important. Instead of evaluating a company's financial fundamentals, investors get seduced by cute abbreviations. As the WSJ notes: For at least two years, Harley-Davidson Inc.'s investor-relations folks had thought about it: Their ticker symbol, HDI, wasn't exactly evocative of the motorcycle maker's image. And there was something better available: HOG, biker-slang term for a Harley motorcycle. Something surprising has happened since Harley-Davidson adopted the symbol in mid-August: Its shares have gained nearly 16%, compared with…

The Neuroscience of Porn

Porn is a big business. Every year, Americans spend $4 billion on video pornography, which makes the industry larger than the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or Major League Baseball. When you include Internet Web sites, porn networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, phone sex, and magazines, the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually. As Frank Rich notes, "People spend more money for pornography in America in a year than they do on movie tickets, more than they do on all the performing arts combined." Sex sites are estimated to account for up to…

Without Salt

The great Laurie Colwin, on learning to cook and eat without salt: After a few weeks I felt I had gotten the hang of my new regime. I had discovered saltless bread, smoked mozarella, green peppercorns and fresh sage. I felt I might venture out into the real world for a meal. I did, and I was shocked. How incredibly salty everything was! A bite of ham seemed almost inedible. A Chinese meal brought a buzz to my head and tears to my eyes. She goes on to describe how cooking without salt made her more sensitive to the other flavors of food, much like a blind person who develops an especially…

Social Psychology

Via Vaughan, over at MindHacks, a great quote on the utility of social psychology from Dan Gilbert: Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old. Social psychology is the exception. We kept cognition alive during the behaviourist revolution that denied it, we kept emotion alive during the cognitive revolution that ignored it, and today we are keeping behaviour alive as the neuroscience revolution steams on and threatens to make it irrelevant. But psychological revolutions inevitably collapse under…

The Anatomy of Sarcasm

Is your right parahippocampal gyrus feeling a little tired? Then maybe you should stop being such a sarcastic smart ass. It turns out that this obscure brain area, tucked deep inside the right hemisphere, is largely responsible for the detection of sarcasm, a rather sophisticated element of social cognition: Dr. Rankin, a neuropsychologist and assistant professor in the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, used an innovative test developed in 2002, the Awareness of Social Inference Test, or Tasit. It incorporates videotaped examples of exchanges in which a…

Mozart and Medicine

There are lots of ways to combine science and art. Some of them are more problematic than others: One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of "Design and the Elastic Mind," the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The "victimless leather" was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is. Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. "It was growing too much," she said in an interview from a…

The Dud Stud

War Emblem, the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner, is one finicky horse: By all accounts, he [War Emblem] is a happy horse -- gamboling through fields most of the day, showing the turn of foot that propelled him to lead every step of the way in America's greatest horse race. In reality, however, War Emblem is in therapy. He is isolated from the other studs at Shadai Stallion Station in the hope that he will feel safe and more confident in his sexuality. Mares surround him in an effort to revive a long-dormant libido. "We know he is fertile, but he has no interest in mares," said Dr. Nobuo Tsunoda,…

The Collective Mind

A great comment by Joel Kahn, who argues that we need a new science of human interaction, able to study what Durkheim referred to as "the conscience collective": Durkheim was obviously not the first to advance a notion of mind which transcended the individual. But while it may have been common for many nineteenth century figures to write about group minds with distinctive emergent or transcendent properties (think for example of all that interest in the spirit of history, or more concretely in crowds, or 'primitive' minds), which required minds to be viewed collectively rather than as…