• Experts stunned by swan ‘divorce’
• Moonlight Makes Owls More Chatty
• New data on how much infection in the first wave of the pandemic
• Moving through time: Thinking of the past or future causes us to sway backward or forward
• Viability and Resilience of Languages in Competition
• Dinosaur extinction grounded ancient birds, new research finds

I feel a bit sorry for the writer, who is clearly stuck in potty-training hell with his kid, but this review did make me snort:

Safety 1st Jack Potty ($33.65)

Just as I was set to love the Boon, I was ready to despise Jack Potty—a potty chair that looks like a slot machine? Has there ever been a worse concept for a children’s product? Excluding lawn darts and candy cigarettes?

The Jack Potty has multiple colored lights and a spinning display that features guitar-playing bananas. When the potty has been used successfully, lights flash, buzzers buzz, and a voice offers congratulations. For additional verisimilitude, the potty plays the sound of cascading coins, though no actual money pours out (Version 2.0?). The Jack Potty is the only addiction-themed potty I ran across in my research, and I half-worry that my son will, as an adult, find himself inextricably drawn to casinos, sitting there day after day, glassy eyed, wearing diapers so he doesn’t have to leave his machine. Oh, the irony.

• Should we encourage self-promotion and lies?
• Physicists tie light in knots
• WHO prepares to don a hair shirt

“I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.”

–Ian Fleming

Quotation of the Day for January 13, 2010

“But the main idea is the first one: hanging on, staying alive. Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all. Our central idea is one which generates, not the excitement and sense of adventure or danger which The Frontier holds out, not the smugness and/or sense of security, of everything in its place, which The Island can offer, but an almost intolerable anxiety. Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back, from the awful experience — the North, the snowstorm, the sinking ship — that killed everyone else. The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival; he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, except gratitude for having escaped with his life.”

- Margaret Atwood, writer, in her book Survival, comparing the dominant symbols of the literatures of the United States (The Frontier), England (The Island), and Canada (Survival).

Case in point, Alden Nowlan’s poem, which had a nice run in the Toronto subways a decade ago:

Canadian January Night

Ice storm: the hill
a pyramid of black crystal
down which the cars
slide like phosphorescent beetles
while I, walking backwards in obedience
to the wind, am possessed
of the fearful knowledge
my compatriots share
but almost never utter:
this is a country
where a man can die
             simply from being
caught outside

—Alden Nowlan, Selected Poems

• The fatal attraction of ’suicide magnets’
• Caroline Mala Corbin, “Ceremonial Deism and the Reasonable Religious Outsider”
• Lessons from the Sea Squirt
• Oldest Land-Walker Tracks Found–Pushes Back Evolution
• Negative phys ed teacher can cause a lifetime of inactivity

• Lighting can influence how wine tastes
• How you remember dance steps depends on culture: I think step to the left, you think step to the east
• Wake up, women: Sleep is a feminist issue
• What's in a Color? The Unique Human Health Effect of Blue Light

The flip side of yesterday’s post…

• Rick Mercer lighting into Stephen Harper for proroguing the government while still ostensibly fighting a war for democracy in Afghanistan.
• Girls and boys have similar math abilities.
• Someone felt it necessary to create a Misery Index.
• People who return things to libraries decades and decades after the items were due. Better late than never!
• People continue to remove themselves from the gene pool in exciting ways. See also: Large Wild and Exotic Cats Make Dangerous Pets (PDF), a helpful 4-page pamphlet from the USDA.
• The Wikipedia list of unusual articles. I particularly like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_insult and
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet-related_injury.
• It’s now possible to use your Blackberry to Google stuff like, oh, how to deliver a baby, should the occasion call for it.
• People who think up stuff like this:
  
• …and this:
  
• Oak clones from the Pleistocene. They estimate they’re 13,000 years old.
• Listening to music can help cure ringing in the ears caused by… listening to music.
• Refusing vaccines really does put you (and your kids) at increased risk.
• Really, really, REALLY big explosions.
• There is a gene called Sonic Hedgehog.
• You can score a free holiday in exchange for your poop.
• In this country sometimes storms toss lobsters right up on the beach!
• The Governor General’s house has a public skating rink.

There we go! Fluffy bunnies!

• People getting all public healthish about Santa. (The BMJ link is clearly in jest, but still, that’s up there with Cookie Monster now going on about cookies as a “sometimes food” and Christopher Robin becoming a girl.)
  
• If you’re a teenager, apparently being a violent jerk is an effective way to boost your cool factor.
• Want to see Antarctica before it all melts? Well, you’re part of the problem.
• While champagne may be reasonably good for you, apparently we need to wear goggles while opening it. Also, some bad people spray it all over the place instead of drinking it. No, no, no. Also a no-no: handling your tarantula sans goggles.
• Drinks with actual flavour give worse hangovers.
• Apparently the world needs a new acronym, REV, to describe “rape with extreme violence“. Think “…mutilate female genitals with guns, pieces of glass, wood, or heated plastic”. What a charming way to conduct a war.
• I still can’t read headlines like this one: 2 dead in murder-suicide in Sask. town without assuming it’s a woman who’s been killed and wondering boyfriend or husband?. …And yes, yet again in this case it was a woman shot by her partner.
• I’m cold.
• Platinum Blonde, of all bands, in the Hall of Fame. I mean. Really.
• People’s obsession with hand sanitizers is going to kill us all.
• Our security while flying requires that we confiscate babies’ teethers.
• We continue to fund fancy buildings in underserved neighbourhoods, but not the programs and organizations to staff them effectively.

See, this is what happens when I spend a whole day feeling cranky and reading my RSS… all the depressing stuff floats to the top. Perhaps next week I’ll manage a companion post on good stuff, but the first Monday of the year didn’t lend itself to fluffy bunnies.

…Um, happy new year!