• BBC Nature – In pictures: How elephants cool off overnight
  BBC Nature – In pictures: How elephants cool off overnight:
  

  Scientists from the University of Guelph, Canada have used thermal imaging cameras to record how Asian elephants at the Busch Gardens zoological park in Florida, US handle the heat

  Answer: at night they use their trunks to help disperse the heat.

• Which direction now? Just ask the north-facing map in your head
  Which direction now? Just ask the north-facing map in your head:
  

  26 residents of Tübingen (who had lived in Tübingen for at least two years) were put into a virtual-reality headset and seated in a chair that didn’t allow them to swivel. Participants found themselves in the virtual three-dimensional photorealistic model of their hometown, at locations familiar to them, surrounded by fog masking all but the near distance. Then they had to point to an invisible location — say, the main gate of the university or the fire station. The scenes changed, and so did the participant’s spatial orientation. After 60 three-location trials, participants were asked to draw a map of the town including all the locations they’d pointed to. The results: Although participants drew differently oriented maps, everyone performed most accurately when facing north and got worse the further they deviated from north. The only explanation the researchers could figure was that they’d all seen, and internalized, a map of Tübingen at some point, and Western maps are all oriented the same way — north on top.

• PLoS ONE: Behavioral Priming: It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?
  PLoS ONE: Behavioral Priming: It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?:
  

  The perspective that behavior is often driven by unconscious determinants has become widespread in social psychology. Bargh, Chen, and Burrows’ (1996) famous study, in which participants unwittingly exposed to the stereotype of age walked slower when exiting the laboratory, was instrumental in defining this perspective. Here, we present two experiments aimed at replicating the original study. Despite the use of automated timing methods and a larger sample, our first experiment failed to show priming. Our second experiment was aimed at manipulating the beliefs of the experimenters: Half were led to think that participants would walk slower when primed congruently, and the other half was led to expect the opposite. Strikingly, we obtained a walking speed effect, but only when experimenters believed participants would indeed walk slower. This suggests that both priming and experimenters’ expectations are instrumental in explaining the walking speed effect. Further, debriefing was suggestive of awareness of the primes. We conclude that unconscious behavioral priming is real, while real, involves mechanisms different from those typically assumed to cause the effect.

• Unknown Sixth Toe Discovered in Elephants | Wired Science | Wired.com
  Unknown Sixth Toe Discovered in Elephants | Wired Science | Wired.com:
  

  Three hundred years ago, a surgeon claimed elephants had six toes instead of the usual five, setting off a debate about whether an extra digit was really possible. Modern anatomists scoffed at the idea, insisting instead that the extra toe was really just a big lump of cartilage. Now a study of scores of elephant feet shows that the lump really does turn into bone. The digit is not a true toe — it’s more like a panda’s faux thumb. But it nonetheless helps support the pachyderm’s mighty girth.

• NCBI ROFL: Farts: an underappreciated threat to astronauts. Discover Magazine
  NCBI ROFL: Farts: an underappreciated threat to astronauts. Discover Magazine:
  

  One group of 6 men ate Gemini-type diet (S) and another received a bland formula (F), for 42 days. Breath and rectal gases were analyzed during the first and final weeks. Flatus gases varied widely within dietary groups but much more gas was generated with diet S than with F.

• Genetically engineered silkworms with spider genes spin super-strong silk | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine
  Genetically engineered silkworms with spider genes spin super-strong silk | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine:

  Very cool!

• The Physics of Great White Sharks Leaping Out of the Water to Catch Seals – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic
  The Physics of Great White Sharks Leaping Out of the Water to Catch Seals – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic:

  The diagram in this is wonderful.

• Santa’s Christmas Eve Workload, Calculated – Philip Bump – Technology – The Atlantic
  Santa’s Christmas Eve Workload, Calculated – Philip Bump – Technology – The Atlantic:
  

  Granted, it seems… impractical. Over the course of one night, St. Nick has to stop by the home of every Christian child in the world. Of which there are a lot – an indeterminately large number of kids waiting for their gifts.

  I decided to figure out how many, how big a task Mr. Claus faces as he races west across the face of the globe, staying ahead of the sun. And I did. Or, anyway, I came up with a pretty solid estimate.

• The Right (and Wrong) Way to Die When You Fall Into Lava | Wired Science | Wired.com
  The Right (and Wrong) Way to Die When You Fall Into Lava | Wired Science | Wired.com:
  

  You can try the experiment at home (without grievous bodily harm). Take your favorite motor oil (I prefer 5W30) at room temperature and fill a small pail. Motor oil at room temperature should have a density of ~920 kg/m³ and viscosity of ~1 Pa-s – this will be your lava. Cut a little fellow out of styrofoam. It has a density of ~300 kg/m³, so it is roughly 1/3 the density of the oil. Now, position your Styroguy on the edge and push him in. Does he sink instantly into the oil? No! So, neither should you in you fall into lava. Now, Stryoguy didn’t get the full effect by then proceeding into bursting into flames, which would be your bonus for falling into lava — remember, most of the red-hot lava pictures in movies like likely basaltic lava at ~1,100 to 1,200°C (for comparison, your oven on broil is ~275°C).  However, if you’re already in a position to fall into lava, you had it coming.

• Leonardo’s Formula Explains Why Trees Don’t Splinter | Wired Science | Wired.com
  Leonardo’s Formula Explains Why Trees Don’t Splinter | Wired Science | Wired.com:
  

  The rule says that when a tree’s trunk splits into two branches, the total cross section of those secondary branches will equal the cross section of the trunk. If those two branches in turn each split into two branches, the area of the cross sections of the four additional branches together will equal the area of the cross section of the trunk. And so on.

  The answer has to do with wind, apparently. Interesting!

• Beluga body scrub session filmed
  Beluga body scrub session filmed:

  Exfoliating belugas!

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Quotation of the Day for January 23, 2012

“‘No accident that _débâcle_ is a French word,’ observed my brother once…. The word _débâcle_ suggests the going-wrong of an elaborately conceived plan: a disaster that somehow leaves the principal parties not only having lost what they were aware that they were risking but much more besides, as if an attempt to charm the boss by inviting him to dinner and cooking an ambitious favourite dish of his were to result in the death by poisoning of his wife, the loss of one’s job, collapse of one’s marriage, one’s bankruptcy, turn to violent crime, and subsequent death in a shoot-out with police – when all one was worried about was the risk of curdling the hollandaise. Compare the implication of mismanagement, of organization going wrong, in the Gallic _débâcle_ with the candidly chaotic, intimate quality of the Italian _fiasco_, or the blokishly masculine and pragmatic (and I would suggest implicitly reversible and therefore, in its deep assumptions, optimistic) American _fuck-up_.”

- John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure.

Here we have an article exploring pedestrian-vehicle crashes “in which the pedestrian was using headphones“.

Results There were 116 reports of death or injury of pedestrians wearing headphones. The majority of victims were male (68%) and under the age of 30 (67%). The majority of vehicles involved in the crashes were trains (55%), and 89% of cases occurred in urban counties. 74% of case reports stated that the victim was wearing headphones at the time of the crash. Many cases (29%) mentioned that a warning was sounded before the crash.

This sounds a bit confused — were there 116 incidents, or 74% of 116? One wonders. Either way, 116 over seven years (16.6 fatalities a year) doesn’t seem like a lot to get excited about, given that the USA has over 30,000 fatalities annually from car crashes (did they have their car stereos on? Perhaps it’s the music that’s at fault).

One also wonders, if I count as “one”, why the headphones are being blamed here. Being a pedestrian is not in itself inherently dangerous. It’s hard to kill yourself just walking around; it’s the large vehicles with which one may suddenly come into contact that are the danger here. As a pedestrian walking around at 6km/h, I am not dangerous. A motor vehicle comprising a bunch of metal traveling at 50km/h or more is dangerous.

A train is also dangerous. If 55% of these crashes involved trains, mostly in urban areas, why is the focus not on decreasing pedestrian access to train tracks? And since when is 29% — where “a warning was sounded” — “many”?

This sort of blame-the-victim writing really ticks me off.

New Year’s Eve, 4pm

M: Can I sleep over at [friend]‘s tonight?

Me: Um, you don’t want to be here with us?

M: No. We’re cleaning [friend]‘s stuffed animals. We found if you put soap on the stains and let it set, the stains come out with the soap when we wash them!

Me: That’s true, but it’s easier just to put them in the washing machine. We’re going to have cheese and crackers with everybody probably around 7:30, why don’t you drop by for that?

M: No, we just want to play in the basement.

Me: OK then. Have fun! Happy New Year!

M leaves

D: So, just to be clear about this — we’re less fun than laundry.

Me: Yep.

And so — 2012.

As usual Neil Gaiman has the best wish, which has managed to condense thoughts that took me three pages to write for my niece into a few short lines. Well, that’s why Neil gets the big bucks and I don’t, isn’t it?

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

If one does fall prey to the most common New Year’s Eve mistake, there is this helpful guide from Slate to guide us through those first, often fraught, hours after waking: Drinking in the Morning After – The do’s and don’ts of imbibing in the a.m.

Drinking at breakfast is a rare pleasure with a noble heritage, and you need to show some decorum. If self-respect is beyond you at the moment in question, then settle for showing some respect for the institution. Treat this as a special occasion and dress to impress—a feat easily accomplished by waking up in or near your tuxedo. At the very least, affix a boutonniere to the lapel of your bathrobe.

Finally, while it’s still nice and quiet and we all have time to plan, I’ll remind everyone that I have declared January 2 to be Introvert Day — the only holiday that you celebrate by deliberately NOT gathering with beloved family and friends. Enjoy your precious solitude, and may 2012 bring you happiness.

Again it’s time for the holiday health curmudgeons to bleat at us, disregarding mental and emotional health and a warm feeling of togetherness and community in favour of carrot sticks and abstinence.

This year they’d like us to tell our relatives they’re fat.

‘Tell loved ones they are overweight this Christmas’

Christmas may be a time of indulging for many, but health experts believe it is the perfect time to tell a loved one they are overweight.

Right, because
1. They don’t know?
2. It’s any of your business?
3. There’s not an increasing body of evidence that the connection between health and body size is not as simple as “fat = bad”?

That’ll be a really merry Christmas for everyone.

Pff. If the “health experts” are worried about people’s health, perhaps they shouldn’t give people advice that will get them punched.

Today I was watching Twitter hashtags from two separate events. Both were notionally on a similar topic, but the difference in tone was striking and it clarified something for me.

There are two kinds of events that nonprofits tend to have.

In the first, a select or invited group of people who aren’t terribly conversant with the realities of the work get together to talk about how wonderful they all are and what great work they’re doing. They know they’re doing great work because they keep inviting each other to events, and they keep getting invited so they must be doing great work because that’s the point of the events, right?

In the second, a group of people who really grok the situation get together to talk about how they can work within awkward structures and systems (within reality, really) to make things incrementally better, or at least prevent them from getting worse. This group looks at who’s in the room, is delighted to recognize very few people, worries about who’s not there, and sees its main work as turning apparent answers into better questions.

The problem is that the people at the first kind of event really need to be at the second, and vice versa.

M, singing:

L, O, double-L I, P-O-P spells lollipop, lollipop
That’s the only decent kind of candy, candy
Man who made it musta been a dandy, dandy
L, O, double-L I, P-O-P spells lollipop, lollipop
It’s a lick on a stick guaranteed to make you sick
Lollipop for me!

C, A, SS E R, O-L-E spells casserole, casserole
That’s the only decent kind of medicine, medicine
Man who made it musta been an Edison, Edison
C, A, SS E R, O-L-E spells casserole, casserole
It’s a lick on a spoon guaranteed to make you swoon
Casserole for me!

Me: What? A casserole is dinner, not medicine!
M: I know, but that’s how the song goes!
Me: I think it’s supposed to be castor oil. C, A, S-T-O-R, O-I-L spells castor oil.
M: Oh.

This is a picture I did not take of a man in his late 50s in a beat-up burgundy car with all the windows down, driving down Bloor Street on a warm November afternoon belting out Rod Stewart’s Maggie May with great feeling and much volume, slightly out of tune.

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

As I was sitting on an Air Canada “Express” plane last night, waiting for a “ramp crew” to produce a nonexistent ramp — the plane was a turboprop about two feet off the ground; the built-in stairs did nicely, but apparently we needed three “ramp crew” to smile at us and point us into the terminal ten metres away before we were allowed to exit the damn plane — I was pondering how “Express” has somehow become a synonym for “inferior PITA version of what used to be”.

Ford Prefect: How are you feeling?
Arthur Dent: Like a military academy. Bits of me keep passing out. Ford? If I were to ask you where the hell we were, would I regret it?
Ford Prefect: We’re safe.
Arthur Dent: Ah. Good.
Ford Prefect: We’re in a cabin of one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet.
Arthur Dent: Ah. This is obviously some strange usage of the word “safe” that I hadn’t previously been aware of.

Air Canada “Express”. Is this what Jazz has become? Except on Jazz you could get hot drinks, and you could gate-check your bags. Neither of these conveniences were available on this “Express” flight, so my perfectly legal carry on needed to be wedged very firmly under an empty seat across the aisle since they’ve apparently made both the overhead bins and the underseat area too small to fit normal carry-ons. And on a two-hour flight after five hours of meetings and a four-hour drive, we couldn’t have some tea, since they appear to have dispensed with all heating elements onboard. Then when we arrived we had to wait ten minutes before the “ramp crew” was able to supervise our descent of the three steps to the tarmac.

I’m fond of Holiday Inn Express hotels, but they’re inarguably the inferior, less nice version of Holiday Inns.

Lately my wine club has instituted an “Express” line for members. Before this line, I could walk up to the (enclosed, covered) warehouse loading dock, hand them my pick-up notice, wait three or five minutes then walk away with my wine. Now I have to go into an office, wait in line, have someone peruse my ID, wait for that someone to fuss about on the computer, and eventually be sent outside to a distant door far past the loading dock to wait outside in the rain for my wine. I have yet to spend less than twenty minutes on this “express” process.

“Express”. Feh.

I absentmindedly pick up and throw out loose elastic bands, thanks to my old cat Tigr, who ate them (elastic bands are not good for cats).

I never leave Swiss Chalet undefended on the kitchen counter, thanks to our old cat Oliver who was a fierce, fierce predator of all things Swiss Chalet.

I put my slippers on a high shelf when I take them off so Elwood can’t bite through the drawstrings, and I pick up plastic bags left on the floor so Elwood can’t pee on them (he had a serious fondness for piddling on plastic).

All these cats are gone, but I’ll probably be doing all these things until I’m 90.

We are, or at least I am, a creature of habit.

We lost one of our kitties last night. He had stones blocking his urethra that proved immovable and thus inoperable; we did the kind thing.

He was a very fine cat.

He came to us in December 2007 from a rescue, along with our other cat Jake. They thought he was from someplace near Keswick. Here’s the first picture we have of him, just when we brought him home. He was a little unsure and decided to sit by the front door, just in case.

He settled in quickly. He was a very sociable cat; if someone was home he was always in the same room with us, although I could never convince him to be a lap cat. He was loud and opinionated, especially about his food and his water dish (anyone who’s been to the bathroom in our house knows that Elwood would always come in with you and demand to have his water dish refilled), and could carry on long conversations. He was a Biter of Strings – no shoelace, window blind, jacket drawstring or other hanging cord was safe.

He would come running in the morning when he heard my alarm so he could stampede across my bladder, crawl up into my armpit and have some snuggles before the snooze alarm. He would lie on my head and purr when I had a migraine (believe it or not, this actually helps) and would nap with me when I was sick. He slept on his back with legs ridiculously askew, like an otter or a fossil.

He always ate first even though Jake was bigger. He would dig at the kitchen cupboard in which the food was kept before eating; we never figured out whether he was trying to cover or uncover his food (which was, after all, just sitting there in the open). He napped luxuriantly on the heated floor in the bathroom. He had funny little grey dots on the end of his nose. He loved lying in clean laundry and was a good sport about our house rule that if you don’t help fold, you have to wear a Cunning Hat.

He came running whenever I opened a particular desk drawer because he knew that’s where the treats are kept and quickly learned not to fight the claw-trimming that had the treats at its end. He’d always be there waiting at the front door when we came home, saying WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN and FEED ME.

He never minded being the dorkier Blues Brother.

Rest well, bud. We miss you already.

As usual, someone else has said what I wanted to say about Remembrance Day much better than I could:

The Evil That Walks By Night

There is an evil that walks by night, stalking a nurse just off the night shift, stomping a gay guy, snapping the crucifix from a headstone.

Unchecked and unchallenged, it becomes bolder, enjoying the ability to strike fear or cause pain or create suffering. Sometimes it finds like-minded companions and begins to feel safe in the daylight and to contemplate even larger evils.

When that happens, there have always been those willing to force the evil back into the night. Some of those brave men and women don’t come home, leaving families in need of help. Some return from the battles with scars it takes time to heal.

That’s where the money raised by Poppies goes. And wearing one designates you as one who understands that sometimes sacrifice is required and you respect those who chose to pay the price.

But it also marks you as one who knows that there is evil in the world and that you stand against it.

• Meta-stereotypes of Groups with Opposite Religious Views: Believers and Non-Believers

• Why Does God Love Beards?

Quotation of the Day for April 12, 2009

“You will hear many men saying: “After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties.” And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!”

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca, from On the Shortness of Life

While I love them, physical books have a few practical issues for me at the moment.

One, it’s trivially out of my way to pick them up at the library. It’s only a few blocks but it has to be either on my way to work (unlikely, since the library doesn’t open until 9, and I leave to take M to school rather before then) or on my way home (which means I can’t use a transfer and take the bus, or which means I add 2km to my bike commute) – both awkward.

Two, I have to physically carry them around. My purse is big but once it’s full of Purse Stuff, lunch, coffee thermos, keys, iPod, etc. there’s not a lot of room for a book. Plus if the subway is crammed — and it always seems to be crammed these days — there’s not a lot of room to wave around a large book.

Three, if I buy them, they don’t go away when they’re finished. I rarely re-read books so more and more I enjoy reading something and then giving it back to the library so it takes up their shelf space, not mine. I know it’s there if I ever need it so the whole library concept seems pretty ideal really.

Four, aside from subway time, I mostly have time to read late in the evening after the dinner/child-putting-to-bed fuss is over, which means I’m tired and have trouble keeping my eyes open.

I haven’t yet committed to an ebook reader / iPhone type of object, so unless I read on my computer (and I sometimes do) my commuting/bedtime salvation is found in audiobooks.

Hurray, audiobooks! An especial hurray for unabridged (abridged books are an abomination) audiobooks read by authors or readers who are good at reading. A huge, monster-size hurray for ones I can borrow from the library. (Granted, borrowing most audiobooks from the library usually means I have to have a Windows computer “read” them to my Mac in real time and re-record them before I can actually listen to them, but whatever.)

So lately, my audiobooks:

Katie MacAlister – lots of fluffy but entertaining quasi-romances about dragons and whatnot. In the first couple months of this year I was working insane hours and wanted pure fluff to distract me as I fell into bed, and this fit that niche to a T.

Neil Gaiman – I had some short stories on my iPod as well as Coraline (kids book) and The Graveyard Book (YA-ish). He reads his own books, and well. They’re very good. I’ve read all his other stuff on paper, as it came out.

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Patrick O’Brian – a wonderful, wonderful friend loaned me the entire 20-volume Aubrey-Maturin series in paper when I was pregnant with M and hopelessly sick and bed-bound. They’re fabulous books. “But I don’t care about 18th-century naval battles and spycraft,” you say. Yes you do. Trust me. Read them. Or get the audiobooks — the first one is read badly, much too slowly and ponderously and with no sense of fun, but the rest are excellent.

As actual physical books:

Ian (M.) Banks – I have a couple of these on my nighttable, waiting to be read. He never disappoints. But they are heavy, and I am tired, and once I read them they’ll be read and I won’t be able to look forward to them anymore. So they’ve sat for a while.

Jasper Fforde – recently I finished pretty much all of his oeuvre by finishing off the last two Thursday Next books (not quite as clever as the first couple in the series), the Nursery Crime books (fun but more ponderous, somehow) as well as Shades of Grey. They’re all well worth a read. I somehow came across Shades of Grey as an audiobook after I’d read it in paper, and I liked it rather more as an audiobook. Not sure why. It was very well read, anyway.

Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. I wasn’t crazy about this one; I think his reach exceeded his grasp somewhat. Great universe, great concepts, but the plot and characters didn’t do much for me. The supposed cleverness overreached the actual content, IMO.

Anyway, there’s a brief overview of my recent fictional explorations.

• Removal of restrictions can decrease music piracy, study suggests

• We discount the pain of people we don’t like

• How Long Do the Dead Survive on the Road? Carcass Persistence Probability and Implications for Road-Kill Monitoring Surveys
• Northern Alberta hadrosaur called a new species