Mesopotamian riddles of sex, beer and politics

Millennia before modern-day Americans made fun of their politicians or cracked crude jokes over a cold one, people in ancient Mesopotamia were doing much the same thing.

The evidence of sex, politics and beer-drinking comes from a newly translated tablet, dating back more than 3,500 years, which reveals a series of riddles.

The text is fragmentary in parts and appears to have been written by an inexperienced hand, possibly a student. The researchers aren't sure where the tablet originates, though they suspect its scribe lived in the southern part of Mesopotamia, near the Persian Gulf.

The translation, by Nathan Wasserman, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Archaeology, and Michael Streck, a professor with the Altorientalisches Institut at Universitat Leipzig, is detailed in the most recent edition of the journal Iraq.

Rare riddles
The text was written in Akkadian, using cuneiform script. It was a language commonly used by the Babylonians, along with other ancient kingdoms in the Middle East.

"This is a relatively rare genre ? we don't have many riddles," Wasserman told LiveScience in an interview, referring to riddles written in the Akkadian language.

Unfortunately, researchers are not certain where the tablet is presently located. In 1976, it was housed in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. At that time, a scholar named J.J. van Dijk published a copy of the Akkadian inscription, which the researchers used for their translation.

Since 1976, Iraq has been through three wars and, during the 2003 invasion, the museum was pillaged. "We tried to figure out where the tablet is now, (but) I don't know," Wasserman said. He added that the tablet is small and not very impressive-looking, something that a looter may take a pass on, "I very much hope that it is still there," Wasserman said.

Political humor
Some of the decoded riddles are crude and sexual, while others are complex and metaphorical. One of them reveals what appears to be a bit of political humor, albeit with a dark, violent twist.

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He gouged out the eye:

It is not the fate of a dead man.

He cut the throat: A dead man (-Who is it?)

The answer is a governor.

"This riddle describes the power of a governor namely to act as a judge who punishes or sentences to death," write Streck and Wasserman in the journal article.

Wasserman has seen examples in other Akkadian texts of people criticizing their leaders. "We have some interesting traces of political criticism, and (I) might say even say political anger," he said. "It could be a kind of political humor expressed in this governor riddle."

While the governor riddle reflects a sort of gallows humor, others are much lighter.

In(?) your mouth and your teeth (or: your urine)

constantly stared at you

the measuring vessel of your lord (-What is it?)

The answer, it appears, is beer.

Crude and lewd
Politics and beer were not the only things the scribe commented on. Two of the riddles, now in a fragmentary state, are sexual, crude and difficult to understand.

One of them, whose translation is uncertain, reads:

The deflowered (girl) did not become pregnant

The undeflowered (girl) became pregnant (-What is it?)

The answer, strangely enough, appears to be "auxiliary forces," a group of soldiers that tend not to be reliable.

Wasserman said that the meaning of this riddle eludes him. "I don't understand what is really going on," he said, adding that auxiliary forces are often below-average soldiers, "and they are not really trustworthy, sometimes they run away in the middle of the battle."

Another riddle, this one even more fragmentary and whose translation is uncertain, is also very crude.

... of your mother

is by the one who has intercourse (with her) (-What/who is it?)

The researchers aren't sure of the riddle's solution since the answer has been lost.

Ancient metaphor
One of the riddles appears to rely on metaphor to get its point across.

The tower is high

it is high, but nonetheless has no shade (- What is it?)

The answer is sunlight.

"You have to think about the riddle like the ' Lord of the Rings ' or 'The Hobbit'; it is metaphor," Wasserman said. Imagine you are outside and see a beam of light going from sky to Earth.

"It looks like a tower, but it gives no shade, of course, because it's light itself,? Wasserman said. "The answer is the proof for its own validity."

The last riddle relies on logic:

(Note the translation of the first line is uncertain)

Like a fish in a fish pond

Like troops before the king (-What is it?)

The answer is a broken bow.

Here's why that solution makes sense: Soldiers in front of their king are soldiers that are not out fighting or guarding the kingdom. Also "a fish in a fish pond is not really helpful if you are hungry," Wasserman said. A broken bow is useless as well, "a broken bow is not really helpful if you need to go to war or to hunt a deer."

The researchers emphasized in their paper that the number of surviving Akkadian riddles from this time period is "very small" and, overall, this tablet provides a rare opportunity to explore this genre of ancient writing.

Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

? 2012 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46163836/ns/technology_and_science-science/

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The Zetas now Mexico's largest drug gang. Who are they? (The Christian Science Monitor)

Skip to navigation ? Skip to content ? By Sara Miller Llana Sara Miller Llana ? Thu?Jan?26, 3:17?pm?ET Follow Yahoo! News on , become a fan on Facebook

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/mexico/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20120126/wl_csm/456716

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Motorola posts loss, awaits Google deal approval (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? Mobile phone maker Motorola Mobility Inc posted a fourth quarter loss on weak revenue on Thursday in what could be its last report before a planned takeover by Google Inc.

Some Google investors have worried about the search company's decision to buy Motorola Mobility since it warned on January 6 that revenue would fall well short of Wall Street expectations due to legal costs and tough competition from rivals such as the Apple Inc.

The companies are still seeking approval for the deal which is being reviewed by regulators around the world.

Motorola Mobility reported a net loss of $80 million, or 27 cents per share, compared with a profit of $80 million, or 27 cents per share, in the same quarter the year before.

Revenue barely rose to $3.436 billion from $3.425 billion in the year ago quarter.

Set-top box revenue fell 11 percent from the year-ago quarter to $879 million, while revenue from mobile devices rose 5 percent to $2.5 billion.

Google agreed in August to buy Motorola for $12.5 billion, or $40 per share. It wants to get hold of the cellphone maker's patent portfolio to help defend itself and other Android phone manufacturers in patent infringement cases brought by rivals such as Apple and Microsoft Corp.

Motorola Mobility still expects the Google deal to close early this year. The companies are awaiting approval from regulators in several countries, including the United States, China, Europe and Canada.

Motorola said China started phase two of its investigation in December and the European Commission is not expected to announce until February whether or not it will expand its review.

The deal also requires approval from Israel and Taiwan, according to Motorola Mobility, which said that Russia and Turkey have already given their approval.

Since Motorola shares are trading close to the offer price, Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt said investors appear confident the deal will be approved.

Motorola shares closed up 7 cents at $38.67 on New York Stock Exchange.

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/earnings/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120126/tc_nm/us_motorolamobility

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Justice's 'On'n'On' Video Takes A Naked Trip Through Space (NSFW)

Justice's new video for "On'n'On" is right in line with the 70s vibe running throughout their latest album, Audio, Video, Disco. Psychedelic trip through space, naked women, big hair, check check check. Compared to director Alexandre Courtes' other work though -- which has been known to make the ladies faint -- this is lightweight NSFW fare.

WATCH:

Justice - On'n'on by justice

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CES-Microsoft Xbox sales strong over holidays (Reuters)

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Popularity of the device has helped Microsoft Xbox recently outsell Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PlayStation in the United States game console market.

One of Microsoft's undoubted successes in consumer electronics, the Kinect allows users to play games and manipulate their televisions solely through gestures and voice commands. It was launched in November 2010.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, delivering the opening keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, said there are now more than 66 million Xbox units in use and more than 40 million subscribers to its Xbox Live service, which offers more real-time, interactive entertainment.

Microsoft's last tally for Xbox and Kinect sales, from about six weeks ago, were about 59 million and 11 million, respectively, suggesting Microsoft sold about 7 million Xbox and Kinect units over the crucial holiday shopping season.

That is slightly better than Sony, which said earlier on Monday that it sold 6.5 million game machines over the holiday season, including PlayStations and its new hand-held device.

Ballmer added that on February 1 Microsoft would unveil some Kinect functions for Windows users -- suggesting hands-free commands for PCs -- but did not give any details.

Microsoft said last month its CEO would not deliver the CES keynote after this year, as Ballmer and his predecessor Bill Gates have done for the last 14 years.

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Ballmer also announced a new partnership with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, that will bring Fox News, Wall Street Journal and other content to Xbox Live subscribers some time this year.

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Wray Herbert: Law and Disorder: The Psychology of False Confessions

At 9:45 p.m. on Nov. 10, 1984, 16-year-old Theresa Fusco finished up her shift at the roller skating rink in the Long Island village of Lynbrook. She never made it home that night. She was reported missing, but nearly a month passed before her body was found, naked, in a wooded area not far from the rink. She had been strangled and covered up with leaves and debris. There was semen in her vagina.

Fusco was not the first young woman to disappear in the vicinity, and police were under tremendous public pressure to make an arrest. They eventually charged three men with the rape and murder, but the case was built largely on the confession of just one, a 21-year-old landscaper named John Kogut. Kogut steadfastly maintained his innocence, and even provided an alibi: He had been at a party for his girlfriend the night of the crime, with several witnesses. Nevertheless, after 18 hours of interrogation, the police produced a confession, written out by an officer and signed by Kogut.

The confession stated that Kogut and the two other men had given Fusco a ride in a van owned by one of the others. She entered the van voluntarily, but was then raped by the two others. Kogut confessed to murdering the teenager with a coil of rope. Based on this confession, police searched the van and found several strands of hair, which were introduced as forensic evidence. The alibi witnesses, now aware of Kogut's signed confession, started questioning the certainty of their own memories.

Kogut was convicted in May of 1986 and sentenced to 31? years to life in prison. His two accomplices got similar sentences in a separate trial. The sentences were vacated in 2003, based on new DNA evidence, and Kogut was retried. In 2005, a judge found him not guilty, and set him free. Kogut had spent nearly two decades in prison.

Confessions are powerful and damning evidence, which is a good thing if the defendant is guilty. But what if the defendant is innocent, as Kogut was? It's not clear just how the police extracted Kogut's false confession, but the statement clearly had a powerful corrupting effect on his trial. In part, that's simply because people tend to believe confessions. It doesn't make any sense that someone would take the blame for murder and rape if they didn't commit the crimes. But there is also a second, more insidious, explanation for the power of false confessions: Confessions can taint others' perceptions of potentially exonerating evidence. Were Kogut's alibi witnesses swayed by his confession? How about the forensic experts? The jurors? The judge?

Fully 25 percent of exonerations based on DNA evidence reveal a false confession, and experts are beginning to believe this is just the tip of the iceberg. Psychological scientist Saul Kassin of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice has been especially vocal on this issue, and in a recent study he and two colleagues decided to systematically reexamine the evidence in exoneration cases that revealed a false confession. They compared them to exoneration cases without a false confession, to see if evidence other than the confession itself was tainted -- and contributed to wrongful imprisonment. Were false confession cases more likely to have other evidence errors? What kind and how often? And, importantly, which came first -- the other evidentiary mistakes or the false confession?

The scientists examined the case files of the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to helping prisoners prove their innocence with DNA evidence. Since 1992, the Innocence Project's efforts have led to the exoneration of 273 prisoners, including 17 who served time on death row. Kassin and his colleagues examined 241 of these cases, including police reports, witness statements, trial testimony, and other court records -- basically any evidence that might have led to conviction. Two independent coders examined these records, enumerating the contributing causes of conviction, erroneous eyewitness testimony, bad forensic evidence and reliance on informants. They also noted the order in which the confession and other evidence were gathered.

The results were troubling. As reported online in the journal Psychological Science, multiple errors were discovered in three out of four cases involving a false confession, compared to fewer than half of cases without a false confession. These additional errors included, in order of frequency, invalid or improper forensic science, eyewitness mistakes and incriminating snitch testimony. Two-thirds of the false confession cases also had forensic errors, and a third had at least two of these additional errors. What's more, false confessions were much more likely to come before (rather than follow) forensic missteps or informant errors. The timing strongly suggests that the false confession actually corrupted the other evidence.

Laboratory evidence has already highlighted this problem. Confessions have been shown to bias not only other witnesses but also trained polygraph examiners and fingerprint experts. This study is the first to document the same kind of bias and misjudgment among forensic experts in actual criminal cases. The findings reiterate the conclusions of the National Academy of Sciences, which in 2009 was highly critical of many forensic disciplines, including ballistics, handwriting analysis, fingerprint analysis and -- most relevant here -- hair and fiber analysis. Indeed, the expert hair analysis introduced at Kogut's original trial was so inept that it was thrown out at his retrial.

How does a false confession distort perceptions of other evidence? It's not entirely clear, but one possibility is the well-known confirmation bias: Belief in guilt leads people to see only evidence of that guilt. It's also possible that knowledge of a confession motivates people to help the police and prosecutors bring the guilty to justice.

The scientists believe that this analysis underestimates the problem of evidence corruption. It also demonstrates that the criminal justice system's safeguards are inadequate. Many states require that confessions be corroborated by other evidence in order to be admissible, but this doesn't help if the corroborating evidence itself has been biased by the false confession. And courts allow convictions to stand if a coerced confession is considered "harmless" -- that is, if the remaining evidence is enough to convict. But if the remaining evidence is tainted, as these findings say, that calls into question any possibility that a confession is truly harmless.

For more by Wray Herbert, click here.

For more on the mind, click here.

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Follow Wray Herbert on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@wrayherbert

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wray-herbert/crime-psychology_b_1199390.html

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