There’s been a lot out this week about the discovery of a proto-turtle with a plastron (front plate) but no shell. Very cool!

Turtles are extremely interesting in an evolutionary sense because it is completely not clear how their shells developed. This new discovery begins to answer one part of that question — OK, it seems the front bit of the shell began to develop, and then later on the dorsal part joined it.

But it still leaves unanswered the main question of turtle evolution, which is: how on earth did the turtle’s hips and shoulders end up inside its ribcage? Think about it for a minute. What is the interim stage there? And why would it ever have been evolutionarily successful given the wide selection of large predators back when turtles were developing?

This isn’t a criticism of the interpretation of the new fossil turtle find at all, just a general statement about the extreme mysteriousness of turtles. Who have been the same for 150+ million years now (vs. our 200,000-ish). Whatever they’ve got, it works. But we may never know how they got there.

On the shelf at a local toy shop, next to (appropriately enough, I guess) a doctor’s kit:

“Stiffy Stuff”. snort.

Someone didn’t quite do enough market research there.

Me, having picked M up from a birthday party, as she dug into her loot bag: “Honey, don’t fill up on sugary junk. We’re going out to dinner.”

Her: “I wouldn’t call it sugary junk.”

Me: “No? What is it then?”

Her: “Candy!”

No, no, no. This is just mad:

Hybrid Cars Too Quiet For Pedestrian Safety? Add Engine Noise, Say Researchers

Important pedestrian safety issues have emerged with the advent of hybrid and electric vehicles. These vehicles are relatively quiet—they do not emit the sounds pedestrians and bicyclists are accustomed to hearing as a vehicle approaches them on the street or at an intersection. In a recent study, human factors/ergonomics researchers examined participants’ preferences for sounds that could be added to quiet vehicles to make them easier to detect.

They’re not even seeing the problem clearly. The problem here is that most cars are insanely loud, not that a very few of them are quiet. The problem is that those of us in cities have to put up with increasing levels of noise pollution. The problem is that drivers of cars (loud or quiet) don’t watch properly for pedestrians and cyclists, nor are they much good at sharing the road with them — or even recognizing that anything other than a car has any right to use our publicly-funded roads (but that’s another rant for another time).

Deliberately add noise and that compensatory human response to safety measures will kick in: my car makes a special noise, so it’s other people’s problem to get out of my way (cf. the beeping noises of trucks backing up — truck drivers never seem to bother checking behind them anymore, assuming the wretched beeps do the job).

The answer is not “make the cars louder”. It is to teach people this: if you’re silent, whether it be as a pedestrian, a cyclist, or the driver of a blessedly quiet hybrid car, pay attention. Assume you’re invisible, or assume the guy trying to cross the road in front of you is blind, or (even better) assume both of those things. You’re not a guided missile aiming for your home or your office, you’re part of the grand dance that is traffic. Try to keep in time and try not to step on people’s toes.

Actually, I’d like the folks using non-silent modes of transport to think that way too.

When I’m out and it’s just D and M having dinner alone, they order pizza and eat it on the couch while they watch videos.

When D is out and it’s just me and M, I am told we have to have a fancy, restaurant-style dinner at the dining table with candles and napkins and our juice in wineglasses and actual conversation.

Hmmm.

I really enjoyed this very plainspoken TED talk by James Howard Kunstler. The official blurb is this:

In James Howard Kunstler’s view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.

…which makes the talk sound all dainty and idealistic. I suppose it is, but Kunstler himself is far from it, cheerfully using “clusterfuck” as a descriptor and sustaining a good rant for the whole nineteen minutes. I particularly liked his turn of phrase “the nonarticulated agony of suburbia”.

Worth the time. If you’d rather grab it to watch on an iPod or download it directly, it is here.

(If you see grey boxes saying Player 7 and Player 8, just click one to bring up the video.)

Some days — like, say, today — my brain is very uncooperative and won’t do much except flit about randomly around my head and buzz like some annoying internal deerfly.

I should be starting on a fairly large project but for today I’ve given it up as a bad job and acceded to my brain’s demands to have a wee peek at the Internet.

Hurray for RSS! How else would I profitably occupy myself on flighty-brain days?

Since it’s dropping below zero at night now and I’m preparing to go into hibernation for the winter, I’m on the lookout for appropriate sleepwear. And I have found it:

Built-in feet. Polar fleece. Basically, a vastly scaled-up version of a toddler’s sleeper. Perfect!

And see how happy they are with their steins of beer there? That’s because the jammies have a drop seat, so you don’t have to expose your entire self to freezing air every time you pee.

…Okay, the sexiness quotient is pretty far into the negatives, but you can’t have everything.

I’ve been rather depressed this week overhearing (in my office and elsewhere) a lot of “well, maybe when the old guys die off we can quit this Remembrance Day nonsense. I don’t support war, so I don’t wear a poppy.”

User Friendly nails it for me in this series of strips from this past week:

If WWI and WWII don’t do it for you and you need something more recent, perhaps contemplate Bosnia (you would prefer we left people to wipe each other out entirely?), Rwanda (ditto), Afghanistan (ditto, plus, you’d prefer the female half of the population to be violently oppressed?)…*

I don’t like war, or even the thought of war, either. But some things are worth fighting for.

–
* not to disregard those who served in Korea, Cyprus, or anywhere else we’ve sent them, either.

A poem:

CONSOLATION

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hill towns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.
There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon’s
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.
How much better to command the simple precinct of home
Than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?
Instead of slouching in a cafe ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide in the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

- Billy Collins, poet, from ‘Sailing Alone Around the Room’.

(Quotation of the Day for August 29, 2008)

I may not leave the house tomorrow either. Rain, cold, rain, cold… weather for hibernating, baking, and (of an evening) taking occasional sips of liqueur.

Drive: A road trip through our complicated affair with the automobile
by Tim Falconer

Falconer talks about the history of automobiles, Detroit then and now, car culture, the quirks of traffic, urban sprawl, and much more, all structured around a long road trip of his own. Somehow he manages to treat all the various viewpoints with great sympathy and doesn’t shy away from that word complicated in the title.

His topics range from the expected:

Most people equate automobiles with freedom, and the more they have, the greater the independence, but the executive director of DU’s Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute doesn’t see it that way. “Owning three cars is enslavement,” he told me, citing all the time and money needed to maintain vehicles. “If we walk or bike, we can be free. That, in fact, is more freedom than being forced to buy three cars.” (p.211)

to thought-provoking side-effects of urban sprawl:

it dawned on me that sprawl encourages impaired driving. People heading out for a night on the town, or even a dinner that includes a bottle of wine, don’t want to take a cab because they can’t flag one at the end of the night — and they have to travel so far they couldn’t afford the fare anyway. So they drink and drive. (p. 141)

In an appendix it contains an amusing playlist of car tunes, which is really an indispensable part of any road trip. Nicely done.

I just happened across an ad in a kids’ paper while I was eating lunch:

The Shining Path: Your Newest Option in Childbirth

After recovering from the spit-take I had to wonder what on earth they were thinking. Do they in fact approach the birth-support process from a Communist terrorist perspective? I suppose there are possibilities there — although one’s mind does stray into Bad Thoughts territory pretty quickly when considering what they might be — and it’s a niche market at best.

Do you suppose they will ever have a Peruvian client? My guess is No.