` Yes, there's more.
“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in out air and water that are doing it.’ – George ‘Dubya’ Bush
“We’ve got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?” – former president of American Motors, Lee Iacocca.
` First, something actually quite trivial:
* Have you ever wondered what happened to Cheeta, Tarzan’s baby chimp? An answer in the form of a quote: “Oh, he was born way back in 1932, and he managed to outlive everyone else in those films! Last I knew, he worked on paintings and watching his Tarzan movies with his grandson, pointing out the parts when he was onscreen.”
` Hey, that reminds me – anyone wonder why the Tarzan of the movies used vines to swing on, even though vines are too rooted and tangled in trees to swing free of them (without falling down)? Originally, Tarzan was supposed to jump from tree to tree like a really springy chimp. However, it couldn’t be done for the movies and so vines were resorted to in lieu of superhuman athletic abilities.
` And now, something really creepy!
* There are forty species discovered so far (this was in 2005) which seem to be specially suited to whale-falls – which are like windfalls, except involving dead whales. A whale-fall community seems to be able to survive up to a hundred years simply be sucking all the fats and sulphides from whale bones, such as those female worms discovered to contain bunches of tiny males.
` The bacteria living there are so good at degrading fat in cold water that the biotechnology company in San Diego, Diversea, is looking to see whether their enzymes might be useful in cold-water detergents.
` Whale falls are just starting to be investigated really, and there have only been ten so far. Some of them rely on taking beached whales to the bottom of the sea floor, which can take two days and usually involves throwing away one’s stink-saturated clothing afterward. They have sunk 20 whales this way, stationing time-lapse cameras, or submersibles to pick up bones.
` Pinky and Osedax are but two names of weird worms that live in whale carcasses. They are really strange to science, though now you realize that in some ocean basins up to half of these types of specialized species may have gone extinct because of our whaling in the past.
* A lot of people, not knowing any other context of the swastika (or 'fylfot'), may assume that it was created with the intent of representing the Nazis.
` Not so: This same ideogram was a good-luck symbol of the Navajos and other Native Americans. Indians also used the sign, and it is still used by Hindus, Jainas, and Buddhists.
` Also called the Wheel of Life, this cross-like symbol turns in the clockwise ‘deosil’ direction, though when turning ‘widdershins’ it is supposed to be kind of ‘black magic.’ The Nazi symbol was a swastika. The counterclockwise swastika, called a sauvastika, symbolized night and/or Kali, a terrifying goddess.
` The Nazi fylfot in particular, also known as the hakenkreuz (hook-cross) or swastika, originates from the Teutonic runic ideograph called Thorshmarr ‘Hammer of Thor’. Its primary meaning, despite the name, was the solar wheel and the cycle of life.
` Though depicted in mirror-image often, its meaning was the same, as deosil and widdershins, occuring in European magical practice, does not apply to Teutonic runes.
` The fylfot is also common in Native American symbology, from Northern Plains beadwork and Southwest pottery and sand paintings, usually deosil. In Northern Plains, it means the four directions and that the sacred place of two-leggeds (us) is at the center of the world-hoop.
` In the 1870s, the swastika was popularized notably by Heinrich Schliemann, a German archaeologist who found many examples in Troy and Mycenae. He was fascinated by it and publicized it, referring to it as an Aryan religious symbol. Racists attracted to this connection to the Aryans quickly latched onto it. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels was a fanatical Aryan supremacist who used it has the symbol of his cult in 1907, as well as anti-Semitic and militarist groups. Hitler did the same in 1920 and was surprised at its effectiveness.
` On a related vein:
* Gerald Holtom was the commercial artist who created the peace symbol, commissioned by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament headed by Bertrand Russell. The CND was planning an Easter March in 1958 to Canterbury Cathedral to protest the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston.
` First, he was thinking about a Christian cross-in-a-circle. But then, he discovered that in semaphore language, two flags held in an upside-down V-shape means N and one flag up and one down is D. That stands for Nuclear Disarmament.
` Also, the symbols combined resemble an inverted crow’s foot, a symbol which has an ancient history as a symbol of death and despair, looking like a person spreading their arms in defeat. The circle also can mean ‘eternity’ or ‘unborn child’ or even other things.
` A national Republican newsletter noted that it looked like a Nazi emblem, but somehow I don’t think this was the intention! Also, right-wing groups saw it as the ‘broken cross,’ sign of the Antichrist. One John Birch society member said Nero had had Saint Peter crucified on an upside-down cross and that in the Middle Ages it signified the devil.
` The Birchers also distributed bumper stickers that proclaimed the peace symbol the ‘Footprint of the American Chicken.’
* In Kenya, a(n obviously political) study shows that schoolkids brought up without meat have been found to be smaller, weaker, and less intelligent than others. The 544 children in the study were all about seven. Now, Kenyans’ diets consist mainly of starchy, low-nutrition corn and beans that lack sufficient iron, zinc, calcium, and AE and B12. So, a supplement wouldn’t hurt, would it?
` Some of these kids were given 60g of minced beef each day to supplement their ordinary diet. Other groups were given a cup of milk, an equivalent of calories in vegetable oil, or no supplement.
` Over two years, kids given food supplements gained an average of 400g more weight than those without. Those given meat showed up to an 89% greater increase I upper-arm muscle compared with the non-supplemented children. Children who had milk supplements had only 40% more. The kids given the meat supplements were more active in the playground, more talkative and playful, and showed more leadership skills.
` Of all the supplemented children, the ones who took the vegetable oil had the least improvement.
` So what does this tell us? That vegetable oil is not a good dietary supplement, probably because it doesn’t contain much protein or calcium. Other plant-based comestibles, including fortified soy milk, or even heavy-grain bread, have a lot of both.
` And what is the conclusion of the study? That a parent who raises a child without feeding them meat is an unethical parent.
` That is ridiculous. Who came up with this study? I forget because I’m careless and didn’t even write these people’s names down. It shouldn't be too hard to find, though, I just don't have time to. Still, it was flawed and used to an illogical (and ideological) conclusion!
` Speaking of eating flesh, here’s a bizarre story I saw on television:
* Chickens can apparently survive without almost all of their heads. Mike the rooster was one. He lived in Colorado with his owner Fred Olson, and apparently was doomed to be dinner one night.
` It was September 10, 1945, when Mike was two and a half pounds, and the axe came down. But Fred was really amazed when he did not eventually drop to the ground! Apparently, his jugular had been missed, and he never bled to death because a clot formed. Strangely, the chicken carried on as if nothing had ever happened. He had his brain stem and one ear and that was good enough for him.
` For a good eighteen months, people admired him and came to know him. He also grew to a whopping eight pounds – how’s that for a headless chicken? At the end of his life, Mike was in a hotel on a celebrity run when he choked on a piece of grain. Fred couldn’t find the eyedropper he used to feed Mike with, and the rooster suffocated.
` And last but not least, oh, I love these things….
Listen = Silent, The eyes = they see, Conversation = voices rant on, Funeral = Real fun, Software = Swear Oft.
` Well, I must go now. I'm at a coffee shop in Snohomish where I just captivated an audience for a few minutes! That was cool! And now, I'm off to go foil a superhero.
` And Galtron... Get Better, Don't Turn Blue, and Climb Walls!
Friday, March 31, 2006
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Repackaged Notes II
` Here we go again. I have more junk information I’d like to throw out, but I just don’t have the heart. It is largely from Nature and The Straight Dope - unless otherwise stated. Enjoy.
` Again with a random and alleged quote:
* If you speak Mandarin – a language in which words have different meanings depending on the tone you emphasize on them - you are nine times as likely to have perfect pitch than if you speak a non-tonal language.
* If you've ever wondered, denatured alcohol is nothing more bizarre than regular alcohol plus particularly toxic ingredients. You see, regular alcohol is subject to federal excise tax, so they add things to it, such as kerosene.
` Completely denatured alcohol cannot be drunk. Specially denatured alcohol is in things like Listerine and may contain wood alcohol, which can cause blindness, organ damage, and death.
` Listerine - made by Pfizer - is probably not as dangerous: SDA formula 38-B can contain eucalyptol, menthol, methyl, salicylate, and thymol. Since these substances are active ingredients of Listerine, this is probably what it contains.
` But don't think that this mouthwash is particularly safe to drink either: One man actually died after drinking three liters of the stuff, according to the Journal of Emergency Medicine. Eucalyptol, menthol and thymol "may contribute to a severe anion-gap metabolic acidosis and osmolar gap, multiorgan system failure, and death."
` It's also not cost-effective - though Listerine is 54 proof, with 26.9% alcohol - because crappy vodka can be found at 1.4 cents per mililiter of alcohol while Listerine is 1.9 cents per mililiter.
* Whoa! According to a Nature article, this guy accidentally stuck himself with a hypodermic needle in the spinal cord in the side of his neck, injecting it with heroin. This caused an infarction and he was paralyzed. What did the scientists conclude? That self-inflicted spinal cord injury with a small needle is difficult, but not impossible.
* The first capital of the U.S. was Philidelphia, but in Dec 1776, the early delegates fled to the mudhole of Baltimore to escape British forces until March 1777 when they returned to Philly.
` But then, when Philly was about to be captured, the delegates fled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania for one day. Then they went to York, also in Pennsylvania which had 286 houses total. Not many people lived there.
` Lotsa interesting stuff happened, then they went to Princeton, Annapolis, Trenton, New York, Philly again, and wound up staying in another mudhole called Washington DC in 1880.
* Mice have two thymuses! The second one looks like a lymph gland, and so it has never been noticed before. So, in 2006 another piece of mouse anatomy has been discovered!
` ...This is not good upon reflection of certain mouse model medical studies.
* Massospondylus eggs - found in 1978, were recently discovered to have embryos with a quadropedal frame. Adults were bipeds, like so. Juveniles were in between. Throughout life, the animals' neck grew swiftly compared to its head and forelegs. Also, these baby dinosaurs had no teeth, so it would have been tough to bite off parts of plants. Perhaps their parents fed them?
` For more information and photos of the embryos, P.Z. Myers has long since written about them.
* Trypanosoma cruzi, a protozoan that causes Chagas' disease, has two nearly-identical genomes, fused end-to-end. Judging by the rate of change, apparently a few million years ago, two strains added their genes together.
` From a Scientific American Science News March 16:
* Something very unusual has been discovered - rather than a feathered dinosaur, as is generally now expected, a scaly dinosaur has made news! Juravenator starki is its name, and it lived 151 million years ago.
` The discovery is of utmost interest to scientists who are studying feather evolution:
* The myelogenous Leukemia vaccine was tested on people who only had less than three months to live. It had tremendous effects for most of them - some patients lived for four years! Sometimes, the leukemia even went into remission! It works by making the immune system recognize the leukemia cells, and so it attacks them.
* From 1969 to 1977, the 6,000-some moonquakes as measured by seismic stations were actually determined to be caused by earth's gravitational pull.
` Whoa! I found a partial Nature abstract! It shouldn't be too difficult to decipher for most people, though:
* The Ornithorhynchus (platypus), the Caribbean Solenodon and a few shrews (insectivores) are among mammals which have the ability to inject predators and prey alike with venom.
` Although classified within Eutheria, these mammals are phylogenetically remote from modern Insectivora4 and have evolved specialized teeth as salivary venom delivery systems (VDSs) that differ markedly from one another and from those of Solenodon and shrews.
` Our discoveries therefore show that mammals have been much more flexible in the evolution of VDSs than previously believed, contradicting currently held notions that modern insectivorans are representative of the supposedly limited role of salivary venoms in mammalian history. Evidently, small predatory eutherians have paralleled colubroid snakes5 in evolving salivary venoms and their delivery systems several times independently.
` And lastly, a humorous observation:
` I was once thinking of calling giving the name 'Mortimer' to the character in my book who is meant to represent my psychotic dad, so when I saw this, it made me laugh:
“Mortimer cannot express two contiguous thoughts that follow logically one from the other.” – Dr Language, 6/26/2004 yourDictionary.com.
` That's all for now, kids! I'd better go, anyway, as there is a Strange Nymphomaniac Person who is collaborating with me in my plot for world domination... I mean... putting together a bookcase. Yeah, that's it.
` Again with a random and alleged quote:
A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down – Robert Benchley
* If you speak Mandarin – a language in which words have different meanings depending on the tone you emphasize on them - you are nine times as likely to have perfect pitch than if you speak a non-tonal language.
* If you've ever wondered, denatured alcohol is nothing more bizarre than regular alcohol plus particularly toxic ingredients. You see, regular alcohol is subject to federal excise tax, so they add things to it, such as kerosene.
` Completely denatured alcohol cannot be drunk. Specially denatured alcohol is in things like Listerine and may contain wood alcohol, which can cause blindness, organ damage, and death.
` Listerine - made by Pfizer - is probably not as dangerous: SDA formula 38-B can contain eucalyptol, menthol, methyl, salicylate, and thymol. Since these substances are active ingredients of Listerine, this is probably what it contains.
` But don't think that this mouthwash is particularly safe to drink either: One man actually died after drinking three liters of the stuff, according to the Journal of Emergency Medicine. Eucalyptol, menthol and thymol "may contribute to a severe anion-gap metabolic acidosis and osmolar gap, multiorgan system failure, and death."
` It's also not cost-effective - though Listerine is 54 proof, with 26.9% alcohol - because crappy vodka can be found at 1.4 cents per mililiter of alcohol while Listerine is 1.9 cents per mililiter.
* Whoa! According to a Nature article, this guy accidentally stuck himself with a hypodermic needle in the spinal cord in the side of his neck, injecting it with heroin. This caused an infarction and he was paralyzed. What did the scientists conclude? That self-inflicted spinal cord injury with a small needle is difficult, but not impossible.
* The first capital of the U.S. was Philidelphia, but in Dec 1776, the early delegates fled to the mudhole of Baltimore to escape British forces until March 1777 when they returned to Philly.
` But then, when Philly was about to be captured, the delegates fled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania for one day. Then they went to York, also in Pennsylvania which had 286 houses total. Not many people lived there.
` Lotsa interesting stuff happened, then they went to Princeton, Annapolis, Trenton, New York, Philly again, and wound up staying in another mudhole called Washington DC in 1880.
* Mice have two thymuses! The second one looks like a lymph gland, and so it has never been noticed before. So, in 2006 another piece of mouse anatomy has been discovered!
` ...This is not good upon reflection of certain mouse model medical studies.
* Massospondylus eggs - found in 1978, were recently discovered to have embryos with a quadropedal frame. Adults were bipeds, like so. Juveniles were in between. Throughout life, the animals' neck grew swiftly compared to its head and forelegs. Also, these baby dinosaurs had no teeth, so it would have been tough to bite off parts of plants. Perhaps their parents fed them?
` For more information and photos of the embryos, P.Z. Myers has long since written about them.
* Trypanosoma cruzi, a protozoan that causes Chagas' disease, has two nearly-identical genomes, fused end-to-end. Judging by the rate of change, apparently a few million years ago, two strains added their genes together.
` From a Scientific American Science News March 16:
* Something very unusual has been discovered - rather than a feathered dinosaur, as is generally now expected, a scaly dinosaur has made news! Juravenator starki is its name, and it lived 151 million years ago.
` The discovery is of utmost interest to scientists who are studying feather evolution:
` This could mean that feathers evolved, were lost and then regained in the lineage or that the creature shed its coat during different seasons, the researchers write. Or it could be that Juravenator is more primitive than they suggest, argues Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing in an accompanying commentary. "Whatever the explanation, our knowledge of early feather evolution has been enriched by the discovery," Xu writes. "Juravenator may complicate the picture, but it makes it more complete and realistic."
* The myelogenous Leukemia vaccine was tested on people who only had less than three months to live. It had tremendous effects for most of them - some patients lived for four years! Sometimes, the leukemia even went into remission! It works by making the immune system recognize the leukemia cells, and so it attacks them.
* From 1969 to 1977, the 6,000-some moonquakes as measured by seismic stations were actually determined to be caused by earth's gravitational pull.
` Whoa! I found a partial Nature abstract! It shouldn't be too difficult to decipher for most people, though:
* The Ornithorhynchus (platypus), the Caribbean Solenodon and a few shrews (insectivores) are among mammals which have the ability to inject predators and prey alike with venom.
` Although classified within Eutheria, these mammals are phylogenetically remote from modern Insectivora4 and have evolved specialized teeth as salivary venom delivery systems (VDSs) that differ markedly from one another and from those of Solenodon and shrews.
` Our discoveries therefore show that mammals have been much more flexible in the evolution of VDSs than previously believed, contradicting currently held notions that modern insectivorans are representative of the supposedly limited role of salivary venoms in mammalian history. Evidently, small predatory eutherians have paralleled colubroid snakes5 in evolving salivary venoms and their delivery systems several times independently.
` And lastly, a humorous observation:
` I was once thinking of calling giving the name 'Mortimer' to the character in my book who is meant to represent my psychotic dad, so when I saw this, it made me laugh:
“Mortimer cannot express two contiguous thoughts that follow logically one from the other.” – Dr Language, 6/26/2004 yourDictionary.com.
` That's all for now, kids! I'd better go, anyway, as there is a Strange Nymphomaniac Person who is collaborating with me in my plot for world domination... I mean... putting together a bookcase. Yeah, that's it.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Repackaged Notes I
` You know those tacky ‘Internet Trivia’ things? As you may know, I occasionally have been known to falsify a lot of their supposed ‘facts’. I’m sorry… well, no I’m not: They’re just plain wrong so much of the time!
` As I have no time for the internet these days, having to dash off to the library for my internet rations and all, this is very difficult to get done. Taking this into account, I have prepared for you - in shortened form - some information that I am fairly certain is true.
` It actually comes from discarded notes I have taken down for my novel, which I am dubbing ‘CM’ for non-insiders. And why, pray tell, have these notes been discarded? Because; they’re absolutely pointless and useless for my own purposes, and so, I am ‘recycling’ them for blogging purposes.
` In other words, you will not find this stuff in ‘CM’! Plus, they also have a 99.9999% probability of being absolutely correct. Most of them are from the science journal Nature and some are even from Cecil Adams’ Straight Dope.
` Without further ado, though much editing so that they make sense to the casual observer... ah... hmm.... How about a funny quote to start us off? Internet Trivia often contains those:
` And onto the facts! First, let's start with prehistoric reptiles: For one thing, there has been long past discovered yet another very obscure detail that links birds and other Coelurosaurs:
* Female birds have medullary tissue inside their hollow bones, which converts bone material into eggshell. Tyrannosaurs had the same thing! Medullary tissue is not found in bird’s closest living relatives, the crocodiles.
` Judging from this, it would seem that medullary tissue was probably common to many types of dinosaurs.
* Gallimimus bullatus was a filter-feeder, according to soft tissue found preserved around its beak.
* Erketu ellisoni was a Diplodocus-like dinosaur with over 1/3 of its spinal length dedicated to neck! On the other hand, Brachytrachelopan mesai was a similar type of dinosaur whose neck barely reached to the ground!
* Psittacosaurus ‘parrot-reptile’, was a six-foot long dinosaur which had a parrot-like beak and about a hundred ‘porcupine’ quills that grew from its tail. It apparently cared for its young – thirty-four of them were found in half a square meter with an adult.
* Speaking of the reproduction of ancient creatures, the flying relatives of dinosaurs, the pterosaurs, aparently laid eggs! Of the eggs that have been found, they were leathery in texture.
* Along the same lines, Ichthyosaurs as well as giant marine lizards such as Mosasauroids were viviparous, as we know from preserved mothers giving birth.
` Sauropterygians such as plesiosaurs, pachypleurosaurs and nothosaurs, have also been proposed to have given birth. However, two female pachypleurosaurs called Keichousaurus hui have been found with unlaid eggs!
` This has allowed scientists to see their sexual dimorphism and to notice the females’ moveable pelvises. Other sauropterygians are known to have such pelvises, and so it is thought that they also laid eggs.
` And now for something completely different:
* It is not true that Viking warriors wore horns on their helmets (like Hagar the Horrible). In fact, according to Viking-Era artwork, they wore either dome- or cone-shaped helmets, or nothing on their heads. So where did this horn-thing come from?
` Norse and early Germanic priests were the ones wearing horned headgear for religious ceremonies. Celtic peoples, for their own sacred reasons, wore helmets with wings, and somehow these also made it into the image of the Vikings.
` How?
` Plutarch said that the Cimbri (some of the possible Viking ancestors), wore ‘helmets, made to resemble the heads of wild beasts.
` Diodorus Siculus described the Gauls, who were not Germanic but Celtic, as wearing helmets with wings, horns, antlers, or whole animals.
` It should be noted that people who painted pre-Vikings, beginning in the seventeenth century, knew about this horned helmet-wearing described by the ancient authors, who were not clear on their purpose. They painted Cimbri doing battle with ox-horn helmets.
` The Viking warrior’s 'new' helmets with wings, and later horns, in the 1700 and 1800s, were given to them by Romantic artists who often painted in unusual classical, Celtic, and Germanic motifs, ere a Viking driving a chaiot.
` At about the time of World War I, the image of horned helmets became more popular in the cultural eye than winged helmets.
` I should note, however, that two helmets from the Bronze Age have been found in Visko, Denmark, bearing long, twisted metal horns. Apparently, these were not for fighting in: Vikings obviously wore protective helmets without projections that would weigh them down, if anything at all.
` Onto the next Discarded Note:
* Between 1960 and 1970, Americans had grown almost an inch. However, they haven’t actually gotten much taller since then, while western and northern Europeans have grown further on average by as much as 7 cm.
` And if you think there is only a general trend towards tallness here, think again: In the nineteenth century, Americans were 3-9 cm taller than they are now! Americans may be shorter now because in the second half of the 20th century, there has been greater social inequality, inferior helath and prenatal care, and a worsening attitude to preventative medicine in the US compared with Europe.
` Also, of course, there’s immigration: Many immigrants tend to be rather short.
` Well, that’s kind of interesting. How about something kind of bizarre… and contrived?
* On Oct 4, 1958, Cacareco the rhinoceros was the most popular candidate in the Sao Paulo State Parliament elections with about a hundred thousand votes. Makes me wonder about how many other countries he could win over, if only people were given the choice to elect him?
` And last but not least, how about a strange and unusual IM away message I’ve come across in the distant past?
* FAR 91.15: Dropping objects: No pilot in command of a civil aircraft may allow any object to be dropped from that aircraft in flight that create a hazard to persons or property. However, this section does not prohibit the dropping of any object if reasonable precautions are taken to avoid injury or damage to persons or property.
` Hmm. Well, I’ll have more some other day. Until then: Turn blue! Stay sick! Climb walls!
` As I have no time for the internet these days, having to dash off to the library for my internet rations and all, this is very difficult to get done. Taking this into account, I have prepared for you - in shortened form - some information that I am fairly certain is true.
` It actually comes from discarded notes I have taken down for my novel, which I am dubbing ‘CM’ for non-insiders. And why, pray tell, have these notes been discarded? Because; they’re absolutely pointless and useless for my own purposes, and so, I am ‘recycling’ them for blogging purposes.
` In other words, you will not find this stuff in ‘CM’! Plus, they also have a 99.9999% probability of being absolutely correct. Most of them are from the science journal Nature and some are even from Cecil Adams’ Straight Dope.
` Without further ado, though much editing so that they make sense to the casual observer... ah... hmm.... How about a funny quote to start us off? Internet Trivia often contains those:
You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named ‘Bush’, Dick’, and Colon’.
– Chris Rock. (Allegedly, anyway.)
` And onto the facts! First, let's start with prehistoric reptiles: For one thing, there has been long past discovered yet another very obscure detail that links birds and other Coelurosaurs:
* Female birds have medullary tissue inside their hollow bones, which converts bone material into eggshell. Tyrannosaurs had the same thing! Medullary tissue is not found in bird’s closest living relatives, the crocodiles.
` Judging from this, it would seem that medullary tissue was probably common to many types of dinosaurs.
* Gallimimus bullatus was a filter-feeder, according to soft tissue found preserved around its beak.
* Erketu ellisoni was a Diplodocus-like dinosaur with over 1/3 of its spinal length dedicated to neck! On the other hand, Brachytrachelopan mesai was a similar type of dinosaur whose neck barely reached to the ground!
* Psittacosaurus ‘parrot-reptile’, was a six-foot long dinosaur which had a parrot-like beak and about a hundred ‘porcupine’ quills that grew from its tail. It apparently cared for its young – thirty-four of them were found in half a square meter with an adult.
* Speaking of the reproduction of ancient creatures, the flying relatives of dinosaurs, the pterosaurs, aparently laid eggs! Of the eggs that have been found, they were leathery in texture.
* Along the same lines, Ichthyosaurs as well as giant marine lizards such as Mosasauroids were viviparous, as we know from preserved mothers giving birth.
` Sauropterygians such as plesiosaurs, pachypleurosaurs and nothosaurs, have also been proposed to have given birth. However, two female pachypleurosaurs called Keichousaurus hui have been found with unlaid eggs!
` This has allowed scientists to see their sexual dimorphism and to notice the females’ moveable pelvises. Other sauropterygians are known to have such pelvises, and so it is thought that they also laid eggs.
` And now for something completely different:
* It is not true that Viking warriors wore horns on their helmets (like Hagar the Horrible). In fact, according to Viking-Era artwork, they wore either dome- or cone-shaped helmets, or nothing on their heads. So where did this horn-thing come from?
` Norse and early Germanic priests were the ones wearing horned headgear for religious ceremonies. Celtic peoples, for their own sacred reasons, wore helmets with wings, and somehow these also made it into the image of the Vikings.
` How?
` Plutarch said that the Cimbri (some of the possible Viking ancestors), wore ‘helmets, made to resemble the heads of wild beasts.
` Diodorus Siculus described the Gauls, who were not Germanic but Celtic, as wearing helmets with wings, horns, antlers, or whole animals.
` It should be noted that people who painted pre-Vikings, beginning in the seventeenth century, knew about this horned helmet-wearing described by the ancient authors, who were not clear on their purpose. They painted Cimbri doing battle with ox-horn helmets.
` The Viking warrior’s 'new' helmets with wings, and later horns, in the 1700 and 1800s, were given to them by Romantic artists who often painted in unusual classical, Celtic, and Germanic motifs, ere a Viking driving a chaiot.
` At about the time of World War I, the image of horned helmets became more popular in the cultural eye than winged helmets.
` I should note, however, that two helmets from the Bronze Age have been found in Visko, Denmark, bearing long, twisted metal horns. Apparently, these were not for fighting in: Vikings obviously wore protective helmets without projections that would weigh them down, if anything at all.
` Onto the next Discarded Note:
* Between 1960 and 1970, Americans had grown almost an inch. However, they haven’t actually gotten much taller since then, while western and northern Europeans have grown further on average by as much as 7 cm.
` And if you think there is only a general trend towards tallness here, think again: In the nineteenth century, Americans were 3-9 cm taller than they are now! Americans may be shorter now because in the second half of the 20th century, there has been greater social inequality, inferior helath and prenatal care, and a worsening attitude to preventative medicine in the US compared with Europe.
` Also, of course, there’s immigration: Many immigrants tend to be rather short.
` Well, that’s kind of interesting. How about something kind of bizarre… and contrived?
* On Oct 4, 1958, Cacareco the rhinoceros was the most popular candidate in the Sao Paulo State Parliament elections with about a hundred thousand votes. Makes me wonder about how many other countries he could win over, if only people were given the choice to elect him?
` And last but not least, how about a strange and unusual IM away message I’ve come across in the distant past?
* FAR 91.15: Dropping objects: No pilot in command of a civil aircraft may allow any object to be dropped from that aircraft in flight that create a hazard to persons or property. However, this section does not prohibit the dropping of any object if reasonable precautions are taken to avoid injury or damage to persons or property.
` Hmm. Well, I’ll have more some other day. Until then: Turn blue! Stay sick! Climb walls!
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
The Re-Discovery Institute: I love it!!
` Go. Here. Now.
` Bwa aha ha haaaaaaaaaa!!!!
` UPDATE:
` Oh, and how could I possibly forget? I heard about this in Skeptical Inquirer:
` Click the picture to read what they have to say about the beer - and Intelligent Design!
` Bwa aha ha haaaaaaaaaa!!!!
` UPDATE:
` Oh, and how could I possibly forget? I heard about this in Skeptical Inquirer:
` Click the picture to read what they have to say about the beer - and Intelligent Design!
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Sylvia Browne - Her 'Miner Mistake' Wasn't Minor!
` When will it end?! Sylvia Brown is best known for regularly making an utter fool of herself while attempting to demonstrate her self-proclaimed psychic abilities on both Montel's and Larry King's shows, as well as a few others.
` I've seen it, and it's pathetic.
` She's become rich and famous over the years, despite the fact that merely watching her at work is painful. I can't imagine how much it must sting every time she flubs a 'psychic' insight. Doesn't she know when to stop?
` This time, however, I think she's really outdone herself. Here, for all to see, is the ultimate (so far!) obvious blunder by this fantasy-prone fraudster, as first covered by a Fox News article by Roger Friedman, and alerted to me via Skeptical Inquirer:
` On January 4, 2006, 'Shameless Sylvia' was doing the paranormalist radio show Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, when they updated a live story about a mining disaster, saying that all but one of the miners had been rescued.
` According to the transcript, Browne had said; ‘I knew they were going to be found. I hate people that say something after the fact.’
` Strangely, it turns out that the report was wrong; all but one of the miners were actually dead!
` When Sylvia was told this, she suddenly changed her mind; ‘I don’t think there’s anybody alive, maybe one. How crazy for them to report that they were alive when they weren’t!’
` After a commercial break she stated; ‘I didn’t believe that they were alive. … I’ve been on the show with you, but I don’t think there’s any that are going to make it.’
` George Noory said to her: 'They say there are 12 gone. I think we threw you a curveball, we were telling you after the fact.'
` Browne continued to do her best to cover it up: 'Yeah, no, I did believe that they were gone.'
` What was really funny, however, is that in truth, one miner did get out alive! So... Browne apparently believed that they were all rescued but one, then when she found out they were all dead, she pretended like she'd thought that none of them would make it from the beginning. And yet, not even that was true!
` What is with this woman? If I were her, I'd take my millions of dollars and run away to a place where nobody has ever heard of me. And get myself in shape.
` But that's just me.
` To see the original Fox News article, check out; "TV Psychic Misses Mark on Miners"
` Of course, James 'The Amazing' Randi has not failed to notice this - the magician has been keeping a close eye on Sylvia ever since she agreed to demonstrate her psychic abilities for him in 2001.
` So far, nevertheless, this has been the closest she's come to actually following through with it.
` I've seen it, and it's pathetic.
` She's become rich and famous over the years, despite the fact that merely watching her at work is painful. I can't imagine how much it must sting every time she flubs a 'psychic' insight. Doesn't she know when to stop?
` This time, however, I think she's really outdone herself. Here, for all to see, is the ultimate (so far!) obvious blunder by this fantasy-prone fraudster, as first covered by a Fox News article by Roger Friedman, and alerted to me via Skeptical Inquirer:
` On January 4, 2006, 'Shameless Sylvia' was doing the paranormalist radio show Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, when they updated a live story about a mining disaster, saying that all but one of the miners had been rescued.
` According to the transcript, Browne had said; ‘I knew they were going to be found. I hate people that say something after the fact.’
` Strangely, it turns out that the report was wrong; all but one of the miners were actually dead!
` When Sylvia was told this, she suddenly changed her mind; ‘I don’t think there’s anybody alive, maybe one. How crazy for them to report that they were alive when they weren’t!’
` After a commercial break she stated; ‘I didn’t believe that they were alive. … I’ve been on the show with you, but I don’t think there’s any that are going to make it.’
` George Noory said to her: 'They say there are 12 gone. I think we threw you a curveball, we were telling you after the fact.'
` Browne continued to do her best to cover it up: 'Yeah, no, I did believe that they were gone.'
` What was really funny, however, is that in truth, one miner did get out alive! So... Browne apparently believed that they were all rescued but one, then when she found out they were all dead, she pretended like she'd thought that none of them would make it from the beginning. And yet, not even that was true!
` What is with this woman? If I were her, I'd take my millions of dollars and run away to a place where nobody has ever heard of me. And get myself in shape.
` But that's just me.
` To see the original Fox News article, check out; "TV Psychic Misses Mark on Miners"
` Of course, James 'The Amazing' Randi has not failed to notice this - the magician has been keeping a close eye on Sylvia ever since she agreed to demonstrate her psychic abilities for him in 2001.
` So far, nevertheless, this has been the closest she's come to actually following through with it.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Viva Campephilus principalis!
` I have here some lovely plagiarism - if you can call it that – thanks to MAL. This isn’t at all along the lines of the Noci-Notes that I’d started, but I figure that it might help to tie that original idea over.
` Now, I had actually e-mailed this text to myself on Friday, though today was the first time I've been able to access my blogger account (due to technical difficulties), so I apologize for the length of time it took to put this up:
` These 'Quasi-Noci-Notes' are actually from a historical - rather than a science - book called Hope is the Thing With Feathers by Christopher Cokinos. (The title comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson.)
` It is, as you may have guessed, about birds. More precisely, it is a book full of very eloquent and loving obituaries for certain species of North American avians: The Carolina parakeet, the Ivory-billed woodpecker, the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, the Laborador duck, and the great auk.
` …As you may know, times have changed for the better now that it is clear that the Ivory Bill has survived in Arkansas – and therefore does not truly belong in Cokinos' book. Though it once lived in the south, from Texas to Missouri to southern Ohio, most Ivory-bill habitat has been destroyed - which is probably the main reason for its sixty-year disappearance from human detection.
` Much of this discovery has been written about recently, although I have been slow to catch any of it. It just so happens that I have a few tidbits from recent magazine articles, including this one from the humorous Steven Mirsky of Scientific American:
` The Ivory-billed woodpecker has been known to science for hundreds of years. Nobody has ever doubted that it is a real species. On the other hand, Bigfoot was invented in the 1950's - and if you’d like to read more about the history of Bigfoot, be my guest!
` The point of the article is this: The existence of a small population of a small species that we are already familiar with from earlier interactions, records and specimens does not mean that thousands of large - and therefore easier to spot - creatures of which no real evidence has ever been produced also exists.
` Plus, Bigfoot has only been reported since the fifties, beginning with a popularity stunt in the Canadian tourist trap of Hot Springs. Hello? ` Furthermore, a team of researchers that have taken masses of video and audio recordings in what is known as ‘Bigfoot territory’ have not yet found anything large and hairy that we don’t already know about.
` But I digress - this post is meant to be about the Ivory-bill ‘obituary’ of Cokinos’ book. No longer known as a proper obituary, however, it is still informative. Without further primates, beakers, or oroblancos, the chapter begins:
` (The other birds pictured are the pileated and red-headed woodpeckers.)
` The species continued to decline throughout the 1800s until it was pronounced extinct. However, in 1924 that all changed: In Florida, a guide named Morgan Tindle pointed out a bird’s nest to Arthur Augustus Allen, a distinguished Cornell University ornithologist.
` Two Ivory-bills lived... there! Sadly, when Allen and his wife, Elsa, briefly left the nest, two taxidermists shot both birds! He bemoaned this tragedy and understandably wondered if they had seen the only pair left in the whole world.
` Searches for the Ivory-bill continued to turn up nothing until April of 1932, when a Louisiana state legislator and attorney named Mason D. Spencer, shot one in Madison Parish! The officials at the conservation department constantly scorned verbal reports of the bird - joking that the moonshine must be really strong in the area - until they saw Spencer’s specimen!
` Soon enough, Audubon Society president T. Gilbert Pearson and Ernest G. Holt (who was then the director of Audubon’s Refugees Program), came to Madison Parish in order to investigate the region.
` Between May 12 and 17 in 1932, they observed Ivory-bills on land owned by the Singer Sewing Machine Company. So much was unknown about the habits of the reclusive bird that this was an incredibly lucky chance to learn more.
` It wasn’t long before Arthur Allen and a team from Cornell deigned to do something more enlightened than shooting what they studied. They were trying out something new - touring the country in order to record the birds instead of kill them. Naturally, they set out to film and record the voice of the majestic woodpecker, as well as to study how Ivory-bills live in order to figure out the best method of preservation.
` Along their bird-recording tour of the country, the scientists found themselves in Mason Spencer’s law office, where he talked about the Ivory-bill with enthusiasm, using the local word for them. The curator of ornithological specimens at Cornell, Dr. George Miksch Sutton, recalled Spencer saying: ‘Man alive! These birds I’m tellin’ you all about is Kints! Why, the Pileated Woodpecker’s just a little bird about as big as that.’ (Holding fingers close together) ‘And a Kint’s as big as that!’ (Spreading his arms far apart.) “Why, man, I’ve known Kints all my life. My pappy showed ‘em to me when I was just a kid. I see ‘em every fall when I go deer huntin’ down aroun’ my place on Tinsaw. They’re big birds, I tell you, big and black and white; and they fly through the woods like Pintail Ducks!’
` Indeed, ivory bills would indeed look as sleek and pointy-tailed as a Pintail while flying. This description convinced the Cornell team that Spencer was indeed familiar with the birds and could be trusted.
` Next, in April of 1935, they went to the swamp of Singer Tract, though the trucks quickly became mired in the recent March rainfall. Sutton commented that the trail to woodsman J. J. Kuhn’s cabin was ‘practically a lake’, though they managed to get through on a mule-drawn wagon.
` They searched everywhere for the bird, amazed by the foot-long pieces of wood and bark they had chipped off while feeding. At one point, Kuhn, swearing that he’d heard the bird while the men walked across a fallen Cypress, finally saw one: He grabbed Sutton and pointed him in the right direction – they nearly fell as he said; ‘It flew from its nest, too, doc! What do you think of that! A nest! See it! There it is right up there!’
` Sutton hadn’t gotten a good look at the bird, but this nest… yes, that was something! They held onto each other’s arms and shirts, giddy, laughing and dancing at the whole prospect, while trying not to fall into the briars and muck. The other two people on the scene, Arthur Allen and graduate student James Tanner, quickly caught this bug of joyousness. Soon enough, the men were all shushing one another – they had finally heard the call of the Ivory-bill.
` Incidentally, just afterward a tree had fallen in the woods and scared them half to death.
` What a great time that had been! The mosquitoes were not yet out, plus they had managed to take photographs of the birds at their nest. It wasn’t long afterward that the team loaded up their equipment and took moving pictures as well as audio recordings in a small area they called Camp Ephilus. (Get it?) This is where Tanner, Allen and his assistant, Dr. Peter Paul Kellogg, bivouacked, studying the animals for five days, ending on April 14.
` What had become of the Ivory-bills was scandalous: They had left their nest, and when the cavity was examined it was found littered with woodchips and eggshell, all swarming with mites. However, Allen saw later that day another nest with parents feeding their young. Unfortunately, that also failed and yet no mites were discovered in the cavity afterwards.
` After this, in the Singer Tract, James Tanner went on studying Ivory-bills passionately, counting six of them there. Then, he went looking for more C. principalis in other potential locations in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. Though the accounts of many people there were credible, his search was in vain.
` So, he stuck with the Singer Tract birds.
` Unfortunately, as the Ivory-bills favored the grubs from trees that had been dead for only two or three years, such grubs were quite scarce. Therefore, any place where the trees were in danger of being cut down, the woodpecker's future would be in danger.
` On top of this problem, there were plenty of people shooting the birds, profiting from their bills or stuffing their skins for display.
` And then, the unthinkable happened: The Singer tract was logged. While the timbermen were careful to girdle the trees – to provide grubs for the Ivory-bills – and to only cut down certain trees without clear-cutting, and to use animal carts, this was still a very bad thing for the birds.
` In 1934, there were seven known Ivory-bill pairs and four young. In 1939, only one pair, one young bird and three males remained. James Tanner saw the Singer birds for the last time in 1941. In March 1942, he wrote:
` Governor Sam Jones of Louisiana pledged him two hundred thousand dollars: Then he and three other governors - Prentice Cooper of Tennessee, Paul B. Johnson of Mississippi and Homer Adkins of Arkansas - wrote to Chicago Mill, asking them to not interfere with the Ivory-bill, as it would surely go extinct. (Considering that the loggers were German POWs, nobody would lose their jobs for lack of trees to cut down!)
` At the meeting between the chairman of the board of Chicago Mill and Lumber, John Baker, the conservation commissioner, the refuge director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (and their attorney), chairman James F. Griswold stated that; “We are just money grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.” The rest on his side of the matter seemed just as indifferent.
` Baker sent Audubon staff – and future Nature Concervancy president – Richard Pough to the Singer Tract each day from December 4, 1943 to early 1944. He wrote; ‘So far, no I-Bs. It is sickening to see what a waste a lumber company can make of what was once a beautiful forest. Watched them cutting the last stand of the finest sweet gum on Monday. One log was 6 feet in diameter at the butt.’
` Even Chicago Mill’s own local attorney – Henry Sevier – was all for the preservation of the wild land. Pough even stayed at Sevier’s hunting camp in the woods. Then one day, in the icy rain, he found a lone female – one that Baker had once seen. She was feeding on the second-growth woods, as she wouldn’t fly across the logging railroad or the cutover land to find older trees.
` Pough wrote to Baker: ‘Can’t help feeling that mystery of I-bs disappearance is not as simple as Jim’s report might lead one to believe. I wonder if the bird’s psychological requirements aren’t at bottom of matter rather than it being just a matter of food.”
` Indeed – sometimes animals will not cross a barrier such as a change in landscape and so become isolated populations. This strong tendency has, in fact, been known to create distinct species, and can be used to keep animals confined within certain areas of zoos.
` Wildlife artist, Don Eckelberry had caught wind of this Ivory-bill news and managed to get to the spot during the floods of April. For two weeks, he followed that lone female around, painting her.
` At the same time, he got to watch the U.S. Army guards force the POWs to cut down the trees and load them onto trains bound for Tallulah, noting the fact that they were “incredulous at the waste – only the best wood taken, the rest left in wreckage.”
` And for what? According to Chicago Mill’s official John R Shipley; “The Tallulah Plant was so busy making… chests for supplying the English army with its tea that they had a regular production line which ended in 3 box cars sitting side by side on the railroad siding tracks.”
` Tragedies upon tragedies!
` After the destruction of the Singer Tract, the birds continued to be sighted in the south by respected naturalists and amateur birders alike, as well as audio-taped and photographed. Still, nothing could be confirmed as to the authenticity of such records – it could all easily be a hoax.
` Even as late as 1987, Jerome Jackson – one of the world’s authorities on Ivory-bills - said that he and a student had heard what could only be described as that very species. They had listened to it for several minutes in a forest north of Vicksburg, Mississippi – though they never did catch a glimpse of it. Jackson wrote that loggers had since cut that forest down. Then, in the 1990s, Jackson heard of some reports from Florida that could not be easily dismissed.
` Other fairly credible sightings have come from other states as well as Cuba. In 1980, the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge was established over the land that had once been the Singer Tract. One of the managers, Kelby Ouchley invited Tanner to the part that had been Singer Tract. Strangely and horrifyingly, Chicago Mill and Lumber happened to be logging in the refuge at that time.
` Said Ouchley; “The day he came we could see some of the old nesting areas were just cleared [again]. It was a pretty grim situation… midnight phone calls telling us that ‘dozers had moved in and were clearing. There were [court] injunctions.”
` In the last part of the chapter, Cokinos writes about his own experiences as he grasped at ghosts. He strides into the new growth of the wildlife refuge, near to where an Ivory-bill named Mack Bayou Pete had roosted in 1938. Tanner had recalled Pete:
` Says Cokinos: ‘Some psychologists, scientists and activists have written about the parallels between familial grieving and ecological grieving, comparing the loss of a treasured place or species to the loss of a loved one. If the comparison rings true, and it does for me, then we must find ways to grieve well. We must confront loss rather than deny it and, in doing so, nurture the energies to cope with the difficulties of loving a world we have systematically diminished.’
` I can’t claim to really understand how Cokinos feels, though I trust that his nostalgic, poetic drama is probably not even a sign of eccentricity – in fact, I sort of understand where he’s coming from:
` At the beginning of the book, he describes observing (to his surprise!) two nanday conures – a type of green parakeet – being chased by an osprey through marsh in Kansas. These birds, having evidently escaped from humans, looked - to him - very alien and out of place in this habitat. That is, until Cokinos discovered that the waterways in Kansas were once home to America’s own green parakeet!
` I admit – when I had first learned that Carolina parakeets were once a native species in the country in which I was raised, I felt scandalized that no one had ever notified me, as well as upset by the fact that bird books never seemed to mention them!
` ‘Hey,’ I’d inanely protest to myself. ‘They were real birds, too! Just because we killed them doesn’t mean we have to forget that they ever existed! What kind of sense does that make?’
` Such was not the case when the species was abundant. Indeed, the NativeAmericans revered them. In addition, the memoirs of a settler’s daughter, Sarah Dyer, read that in the spring of 1853, she saw ‘lots of wild parroquets’ in Kansas. At this time, the parakeets were more or less taken for granted.
` But what about as time went on? Cokinos gives an example of an old man recalling life in the early 1900s of Florida. This man had believed that the parakeets foraging on his land were from Cuba, which is what his neighbors had told him.
` Was the Carolina parakeet being widely forgotten by then? How many people remembered that it had really belonged in their backyards and not some tropical land?
` Cokinos was quite dismayed of the fact that he personally knew more knowledgeable and experienced birders which did not even know about this species. That is why the first chapter of his book is entitled ‘The Forgotten Parakeet’.
` The point is, not only is it a tragedy when a species dies – at least when we're the ones who make it too difficult for them to carry on! - but when we forget the existence of that species altogether, that tragedy is compounded. Hence, Cokinos’ educational guide to remind others of experiences that bird enthusiasts of past times have had, and perhaps even the sense of mourning one has when they fall in love with something after it has already been destroyed.
` And here, I've passed some of that onto the World of the Internet. My hope is that some thought it was interesting.
` Now, I had actually e-mailed this text to myself on Friday, though today was the first time I've been able to access my blogger account (due to technical difficulties), so I apologize for the length of time it took to put this up:
` These 'Quasi-Noci-Notes' are actually from a historical - rather than a science - book called Hope is the Thing With Feathers by Christopher Cokinos. (The title comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson.)
` It is, as you may have guessed, about birds. More precisely, it is a book full of very eloquent and loving obituaries for certain species of North American avians: The Carolina parakeet, the Ivory-billed woodpecker, the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, the Laborador duck, and the great auk.
` …As you may know, times have changed for the better now that it is clear that the Ivory Bill has survived in Arkansas – and therefore does not truly belong in Cokinos' book. Though it once lived in the south, from Texas to Missouri to southern Ohio, most Ivory-bill habitat has been destroyed - which is probably the main reason for its sixty-year disappearance from human detection.
` Much of this discovery has been written about recently, although I have been slow to catch any of it. It just so happens that I have a few tidbits from recent magazine articles, including this one from the humorous Steven Mirsky of Scientific American:
` …I imagined that it’s probably in the best long-term survival interests of any species to keep the word ‘ivory’ out of its name. I therefore mused that the ivory-billed woodpecker should henceforth be known as the cheap-Formica-billed woodpecker. You know, for its own good.` There’s even a Skeptical Inquirer article by Benjamin Radford about the Ivory-bill and the way some people use its rediscovery as some kind of evidence for the existence of Bigfoot. Of course, those are two entirely different matters:
` The Ivory-billed woodpecker has been known to science for hundreds of years. Nobody has ever doubted that it is a real species. On the other hand, Bigfoot was invented in the 1950's - and if you’d like to read more about the history of Bigfoot, be my guest!
` The point of the article is this: The existence of a small population of a small species that we are already familiar with from earlier interactions, records and specimens does not mean that thousands of large - and therefore easier to spot - creatures of which no real evidence has ever been produced also exists.
` Plus, Bigfoot has only been reported since the fifties, beginning with a popularity stunt in the Canadian tourist trap of Hot Springs. Hello? ` Furthermore, a team of researchers that have taken masses of video and audio recordings in what is known as ‘Bigfoot territory’ have not yet found anything large and hairy that we don’t already know about.
` But I digress - this post is meant to be about the Ivory-bill ‘obituary’ of Cokinos’ book. No longer known as a proper obituary, however, it is still informative. Without further primates, beakers, or oroblancos, the chapter begins:
` Campephilus principalis, the Principal Lover of Grubs: The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, splendid recluse of the swamp.` As wonderful a description as this is, there is thankfully no longer any need to imagine it for some lucky Surveyors of All That Flies In Ivory-Bill Country. ` Such a proud bird this was, Cokinos goes on, that it shone from a famous description by Alexander Wilson. This man, originally from Scotland, once went searching for birds to paint for a book called American Ornithology, published in a set of volumes between 1808 and 1814. He wrote these words – paragraphing added by myself.
` Two of its nicknames announce the awe that this bird inspired –the Lord God Bird and King of the Woodpeckers. Observers impressed with the huge Ivory-bill would blurt, “Lord God!” For the Ivory-bill measured nearly two feet long, beak to tail, with an imposing wingspan of two and one half feet and a bill about three inches long and one inch wide at the base….
` Brightly yellow-eyed and jittery, the Ivory-bill appeared vividly strange, nearly Mesozoic, as it pounded and drilled the rotting trees of shadow-wet forests and jerked its long, white-billed head this way and that, as if it were the alert guardian of the sloughs. The Ivory-bill conveyed a manic glory as it hopped up and down the sides of cypresses and hackberries or launched off into flight. Upon seeing an Ivory-bill for the first time, one naturalist wrote that he felt “tremendously impressed by the majestic and wild personality of this bird, its vigor, its almost frantic aliveness.” This, the King of the Woodpeckers.
` The plumage seemed elemental: black bodies with white stripes stretching from the side of the head along he neck and down the back; when the bird perched, a patch of white on the wings’ trailing edge showed like a knight’s bright culet. The female’s recurved crest displayed only jet-black, while the male sported a crest that gleamed in the sunlight shafting through the forest canopy….
` The first place I observed this bird at, when on my way to the South, was about twelve miles north of Wilmington in North Carolina. There I found the bird from which my drawing was taken. This bird was only wounded slightly in the wing, and, on being caught, uttered a loudly reiterated and most piteous note, exactly resembling the violent crying of a young child; which terrified my horse so, as nearly to have cost me my life.` Unfortunately, the woodpecker not only died in a hotel room as the subject of an illustration, but a fairly mediocre one! Double tragedy!
` It was distressing to hear it. I carried it with me in the chair, under cover, to Wilmington. In passing through the streets, its affecting cries surprised every one within hearing, particularly the females, who hurried to the doors and windows with looks of alarm and anxiety.
` I drove on, and on arriving at the piazza of the hotel, where I intended to put up, the landlord came forward, and a number of other persons who happened to be there, all equally alarmed at what they heard; this was greatly increased by my asking, whether he could furnish me with accommodations for myself and the baby. The man looked blank and foolish, with the others stared with still greater astonishment.
` After diverting myself for a minute or two at their expense, I drew my Woodpecker from under the cover, and a general laugh took place.
` I took him up stairs, and locked him up in my room, while I went to see my horse taken care of. In less than an hour, I returned, and, on opening the door, he set up the same distressing shout, which now appeared to proceed from grief that he had been discovered in his attempts to escape.
` He had mounted along the side of the window, nearly as high as the ceiling, a little below which he had begun to break through. The bed was covered with large pieces of plaster; the lath was exposed for at least fifteen inches square, and a hole, large enough to admit the fist, opened to the weather-boards; so that, in less than another hour, he would certainly succeeded in making his way through.
` I now tied a string round his leg, and, fastening it to the table, again left him. I wished to preserve his life, and had gone off in search of suitable food for him. As I reascended the stairs, I heard him again hard at work, and on entering, had the mortification to perceive that he had almost entirely ruined the mahogany table to which he was fastened, and on which he had wreaked his whole vengeance.
` While engaged in taking the drawing, he cut me severely in several places, and, on the whole, displayed such a noble and inconquerable spirit, that I was frequently temped to restore him to his native woods. He lived with me nearly three days, but refused all sustenance, and I witnessed his death with regret.
` (The other birds pictured are the pileated and red-headed woodpeckers.)
` The species continued to decline throughout the 1800s until it was pronounced extinct. However, in 1924 that all changed: In Florida, a guide named Morgan Tindle pointed out a bird’s nest to Arthur Augustus Allen, a distinguished Cornell University ornithologist.
` Two Ivory-bills lived... there! Sadly, when Allen and his wife, Elsa, briefly left the nest, two taxidermists shot both birds! He bemoaned this tragedy and understandably wondered if they had seen the only pair left in the whole world.
` Searches for the Ivory-bill continued to turn up nothing until April of 1932, when a Louisiana state legislator and attorney named Mason D. Spencer, shot one in Madison Parish! The officials at the conservation department constantly scorned verbal reports of the bird - joking that the moonshine must be really strong in the area - until they saw Spencer’s specimen!
` Soon enough, Audubon Society president T. Gilbert Pearson and Ernest G. Holt (who was then the director of Audubon’s Refugees Program), came to Madison Parish in order to investigate the region.
` Between May 12 and 17 in 1932, they observed Ivory-bills on land owned by the Singer Sewing Machine Company. So much was unknown about the habits of the reclusive bird that this was an incredibly lucky chance to learn more.
` It wasn’t long before Arthur Allen and a team from Cornell deigned to do something more enlightened than shooting what they studied. They were trying out something new - touring the country in order to record the birds instead of kill them. Naturally, they set out to film and record the voice of the majestic woodpecker, as well as to study how Ivory-bills live in order to figure out the best method of preservation.
` Along their bird-recording tour of the country, the scientists found themselves in Mason Spencer’s law office, where he talked about the Ivory-bill with enthusiasm, using the local word for them. The curator of ornithological specimens at Cornell, Dr. George Miksch Sutton, recalled Spencer saying: ‘Man alive! These birds I’m tellin’ you all about is Kints! Why, the Pileated Woodpecker’s just a little bird about as big as that.’ (Holding fingers close together) ‘And a Kint’s as big as that!’ (Spreading his arms far apart.) “Why, man, I’ve known Kints all my life. My pappy showed ‘em to me when I was just a kid. I see ‘em every fall when I go deer huntin’ down aroun’ my place on Tinsaw. They’re big birds, I tell you, big and black and white; and they fly through the woods like Pintail Ducks!’
` Indeed, ivory bills would indeed look as sleek and pointy-tailed as a Pintail while flying. This description convinced the Cornell team that Spencer was indeed familiar with the birds and could be trusted.
` Next, in April of 1935, they went to the swamp of Singer Tract, though the trucks quickly became mired in the recent March rainfall. Sutton commented that the trail to woodsman J. J. Kuhn’s cabin was ‘practically a lake’, though they managed to get through on a mule-drawn wagon.
` They searched everywhere for the bird, amazed by the foot-long pieces of wood and bark they had chipped off while feeding. At one point, Kuhn, swearing that he’d heard the bird while the men walked across a fallen Cypress, finally saw one: He grabbed Sutton and pointed him in the right direction – they nearly fell as he said; ‘It flew from its nest, too, doc! What do you think of that! A nest! See it! There it is right up there!’
` Sutton hadn’t gotten a good look at the bird, but this nest… yes, that was something! They held onto each other’s arms and shirts, giddy, laughing and dancing at the whole prospect, while trying not to fall into the briars and muck. The other two people on the scene, Arthur Allen and graduate student James Tanner, quickly caught this bug of joyousness. Soon enough, the men were all shushing one another – they had finally heard the call of the Ivory-bill.
` Incidentally, just afterward a tree had fallen in the woods and scared them half to death.
` What a great time that had been! The mosquitoes were not yet out, plus they had managed to take photographs of the birds at their nest. It wasn’t long afterward that the team loaded up their equipment and took moving pictures as well as audio recordings in a small area they called Camp Ephilus. (Get it?) This is where Tanner, Allen and his assistant, Dr. Peter Paul Kellogg, bivouacked, studying the animals for five days, ending on April 14.
` The men watched each morning when, at 6:30, the male (whose duty it was to spend the night incubating the eggs) “Tapped on the inside of the nest hole,” then “grew more impatient [and] stuck his head out,” calling “a few ‘yaps’ or ‘kents’ in no uncertain tone.” When the female finally arrived, “a little intimate conversation then ensued and she entered.” The only foreboding note to this otherwise fetching daily ritual happened when the male would spend several minutes preening and scratching,” as if he were infested with mites,” Allen wrote.` Until 4:30 each afternoon - when the male entered the nest for his long 14-hour night shift - the parents alternated between incubating and feeding in two-hour intervals. James Tanner described in wonderful detail the “regular ceremony” that usually took place when a shift conclused:
` One would fly or climb to the entrance and signal the other by calling or pounding. We occasionally heard the setting bird answer by pounding on the inside of the cavity. It would flip out of the hole and catch itself on the outside of the tree beside its mate, and the pair would then exchange a low, almost musical call that had a conversational quality, often given with their bills pointed upward.` Unfortunately, the Cornell team left after this time, just at the beginning of the second year of what is now referred to as the Dust Bowl. In fact, April 11 of that year was Black Sunday, a day when black dust got into every conceivable crevice – including the inside of lungs, sometimes resulting in death.
` What had become of the Ivory-bills was scandalous: They had left their nest, and when the cavity was examined it was found littered with woodchips and eggshell, all swarming with mites. However, Allen saw later that day another nest with parents feeding their young. Unfortunately, that also failed and yet no mites were discovered in the cavity afterwards.
` After this, in the Singer Tract, James Tanner went on studying Ivory-bills passionately, counting six of them there. Then, he went looking for more C. principalis in other potential locations in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. Though the accounts of many people there were credible, his search was in vain.
` So, he stuck with the Singer Tract birds.
` While discouraged by rain, the birds were otherwise “quick and vigorous, almost nervous,” Tanner wrote. “When perched and alert, they have a habit of swinging the body quickly from one side to the other, pivoting on the tail pressed to the tree, pausing to peer back over the shoulder, then swinging back and looking over the other shoulder, at each quick swing flirting [sic] the wings.” The Ivory-bill seemed to glory in its own body, in brisk, keen movements.’` In each six square miles, only two Ivory Bills could be found – however, one square mile could harbor 21 Red-bellied woodpeckers, and 6 pairs of Pileateds. Life was tough for the Ivory-bill because it scaled the bark of trees to get at its most precious food items - grubs. Unfortunately, most of the trees in the Singer Tract were too small for a roosting hole as well as much in the way of infestation (and thus food).
` Unfortunately, as the Ivory-bills favored the grubs from trees that had been dead for only two or three years, such grubs were quite scarce. Therefore, any place where the trees were in danger of being cut down, the woodpecker's future would be in danger.
` On top of this problem, there were plenty of people shooting the birds, profiting from their bills or stuffing their skins for display.
` And then, the unthinkable happened: The Singer tract was logged. While the timbermen were careful to girdle the trees – to provide grubs for the Ivory-bills – and to only cut down certain trees without clear-cutting, and to use animal carts, this was still a very bad thing for the birds.
` In 1934, there were seven known Ivory-bill pairs and four young. In 1939, only one pair, one young bird and three males remained. James Tanner saw the Singer birds for the last time in 1941. In March 1942, he wrote:
There is little doubt but that complete logging of the tract will cause the end of the Ivory-bills there, and since the surrounding country is young second-growth forest and cultivated lands, it will doom the woodpeckers to a vain search for suitable food and habitat. Discussions are being carried on with officials of the company controlling the tract to determine what might be done for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker….` Even John Baker (president of Audubon) had appealed to Franklin Roosevelt (president of the United States), and before he knew it, the directors of the Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and War Production Board were all pitching in!
` Governor Sam Jones of Louisiana pledged him two hundred thousand dollars: Then he and three other governors - Prentice Cooper of Tennessee, Paul B. Johnson of Mississippi and Homer Adkins of Arkansas - wrote to Chicago Mill, asking them to not interfere with the Ivory-bill, as it would surely go extinct. (Considering that the loggers were German POWs, nobody would lose their jobs for lack of trees to cut down!)
` At the meeting between the chairman of the board of Chicago Mill and Lumber, John Baker, the conservation commissioner, the refuge director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (and their attorney), chairman James F. Griswold stated that; “We are just money grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.” The rest on his side of the matter seemed just as indifferent.
` Baker sent Audubon staff – and future Nature Concervancy president – Richard Pough to the Singer Tract each day from December 4, 1943 to early 1944. He wrote; ‘So far, no I-Bs. It is sickening to see what a waste a lumber company can make of what was once a beautiful forest. Watched them cutting the last stand of the finest sweet gum on Monday. One log was 6 feet in diameter at the butt.’
` Even Chicago Mill’s own local attorney – Henry Sevier – was all for the preservation of the wild land. Pough even stayed at Sevier’s hunting camp in the woods. Then one day, in the icy rain, he found a lone female – one that Baker had once seen. She was feeding on the second-growth woods, as she wouldn’t fly across the logging railroad or the cutover land to find older trees.
` Pough wrote to Baker: ‘Can’t help feeling that mystery of I-bs disappearance is not as simple as Jim’s report might lead one to believe. I wonder if the bird’s psychological requirements aren’t at bottom of matter rather than it being just a matter of food.”
` Indeed – sometimes animals will not cross a barrier such as a change in landscape and so become isolated populations. This strong tendency has, in fact, been known to create distinct species, and can be used to keep animals confined within certain areas of zoos.
` Wildlife artist, Don Eckelberry had caught wind of this Ivory-bill news and managed to get to the spot during the floods of April. For two weeks, he followed that lone female around, painting her.
` At the same time, he got to watch the U.S. Army guards force the POWs to cut down the trees and load them onto trains bound for Tallulah, noting the fact that they were “incredulous at the waste – only the best wood taken, the rest left in wreckage.”
` And for what? According to Chicago Mill’s official John R Shipley; “The Tallulah Plant was so busy making… chests for supplying the English army with its tea that they had a regular production line which ended in 3 box cars sitting side by side on the railroad siding tracks.”
` Tragedies upon tragedies!
` After the destruction of the Singer Tract, the birds continued to be sighted in the south by respected naturalists and amateur birders alike, as well as audio-taped and photographed. Still, nothing could be confirmed as to the authenticity of such records – it could all easily be a hoax.
` Even as late as 1987, Jerome Jackson – one of the world’s authorities on Ivory-bills - said that he and a student had heard what could only be described as that very species. They had listened to it for several minutes in a forest north of Vicksburg, Mississippi – though they never did catch a glimpse of it. Jackson wrote that loggers had since cut that forest down. Then, in the 1990s, Jackson heard of some reports from Florida that could not be easily dismissed.
` Other fairly credible sightings have come from other states as well as Cuba. In 1980, the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge was established over the land that had once been the Singer Tract. One of the managers, Kelby Ouchley invited Tanner to the part that had been Singer Tract. Strangely and horrifyingly, Chicago Mill and Lumber happened to be logging in the refuge at that time.
` Said Ouchley; “The day he came we could see some of the old nesting areas were just cleared [again]. It was a pretty grim situation… midnight phone calls telling us that ‘dozers had moved in and were clearing. There were [court] injunctions.”
` In the last part of the chapter, Cokinos writes about his own experiences as he grasped at ghosts. He strides into the new growth of the wildlife refuge, near to where an Ivory-bill named Mack Bayou Pete had roosted in 1938. Tanner had recalled Pete:
[He] was hard to find, and once found was soon lost. Restless as a blue jay, Pete would dig out a few borers, pound and call loudly, then wing through the tree tops to some distant part of his domain, leaving the earthbound watcher to plod over (and through) the forest floor in the same general direction with eyes scanning the trees and ears stretched wide to hear a distant kent.` Then, Cokinos plays the Ivory-bill sounds recorded by the Cornell scientists… And at the same time, I am listening to part of that recording. I think it sounds rather like a very staccato: Ep! Eep-ep! Eep! Eep! Eep! Eep! Eep! Eep! Eep-ep!... There is also some drumming and what seems to be two birds calling to one another.
` Says Cokinos: ‘Some psychologists, scientists and activists have written about the parallels between familial grieving and ecological grieving, comparing the loss of a treasured place or species to the loss of a loved one. If the comparison rings true, and it does for me, then we must find ways to grieve well. We must confront loss rather than deny it and, in doing so, nurture the energies to cope with the difficulties of loving a world we have systematically diminished.’
` I can’t claim to really understand how Cokinos feels, though I trust that his nostalgic, poetic drama is probably not even a sign of eccentricity – in fact, I sort of understand where he’s coming from:
` At the beginning of the book, he describes observing (to his surprise!) two nanday conures – a type of green parakeet – being chased by an osprey through marsh in Kansas. These birds, having evidently escaped from humans, looked - to him - very alien and out of place in this habitat. That is, until Cokinos discovered that the waterways in Kansas were once home to America’s own green parakeet!
` I admit – when I had first learned that Carolina parakeets were once a native species in the country in which I was raised, I felt scandalized that no one had ever notified me, as well as upset by the fact that bird books never seemed to mention them!
` ‘Hey,’ I’d inanely protest to myself. ‘They were real birds, too! Just because we killed them doesn’t mean we have to forget that they ever existed! What kind of sense does that make?’
` Such was not the case when the species was abundant. Indeed, the NativeAmericans revered them. In addition, the memoirs of a settler’s daughter, Sarah Dyer, read that in the spring of 1853, she saw ‘lots of wild parroquets’ in Kansas. At this time, the parakeets were more or less taken for granted.
` But what about as time went on? Cokinos gives an example of an old man recalling life in the early 1900s of Florida. This man had believed that the parakeets foraging on his land were from Cuba, which is what his neighbors had told him.
` Was the Carolina parakeet being widely forgotten by then? How many people remembered that it had really belonged in their backyards and not some tropical land?
` Cokinos was quite dismayed of the fact that he personally knew more knowledgeable and experienced birders which did not even know about this species. That is why the first chapter of his book is entitled ‘The Forgotten Parakeet’.
` The point is, not only is it a tragedy when a species dies – at least when we're the ones who make it too difficult for them to carry on! - but when we forget the existence of that species altogether, that tragedy is compounded. Hence, Cokinos’ educational guide to remind others of experiences that bird enthusiasts of past times have had, and perhaps even the sense of mourning one has when they fall in love with something after it has already been destroyed.
` And here, I've passed some of that onto the World of the Internet. My hope is that some thought it was interesting.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
IVF Stem Cells: Why do some people oppose research?
` The fact that an injection of stem cells into an early-stage Alzheimer's patient can completely reverse the symptoms is quite an amazing thing to ponder and to behold. To think that someday, Alzheimer's patients will no longer necessarily have to face the degeneration of mind, erosion of personality, and the possibility that even the wisest elder could degrade into a squalling, infantile vegetable within his or her lifetime!
` You know, the kinds of things that can make flat-out death actually sound more inviting.
` Some people I know scorn stem cell injections because it's 'unnatural', saying that they'd rather lose their minds to Alzheimer's (or even die of cancer!) than be treated by Western medicine.
` A more conspicuous argument, however, has to do with the idea of extracting stem cells from microscopic, hollow spheres of about a hundred cells known as blastocysts, which are artificially created within in-vitro fertilization clinics.
` Of course, these spheres I speak of are early embryos, modules of building material that - if implanted successfully - have the potential to launch a sequence that allows each one to form into a human being, perhaps even twins (if split in half) or triplets (if split into three)!
` (What I'm saying here is that one embryo definitely does not equal one person. Or two, or three. But it may well, after a long process.)
` The general opposition to this harvesting of stem cells has been summed up quite lyrically by one Kevin B. Keating:
` True, we were once blastocysts - though this argument is misleading: It does not shed any light on exactly which embryos are actually used for stem cell research!
` In fact, the embryos that are shipped to stem cell laboratories are only there because they are not wanted for implantation! Because not all IVF embryos can be used in any case, these 'leftovers' would otherwise be headed into an incinerator!
` In other words, non-usable embryos, having been considered to be medical waste, would all be burned if it were not for scientific interest! So, what harm is it to at least rescue a valuable part of them before they are destroyed?
` Hence, the reply poem by Scientific American Editor-in-Chief, John Rennie:
` I mean, what are scientists supposed to do with the unwanted embryos? Kidnap women and use their bodies as growing facilities? I mean, extremist efforts to give each embryo a chance are not working out that well as it is.
` Also, because a higher percentage of IVF embryos are defective (compared to in-vivo fertilization), many of them wouldn't make it anyway. This is why several of them have to be implanted in the same attempt - only one is likely to take.
` In reality, most of these little spheres - far from resembling a baby with working organs - haven't got a chance at this stage. So, why grow them? After all, pregnancy is a huge undertaking! Why not choose the ones most likely to develop properly over ones that will probably or definitely amount to nothing but trouble and wasted effort? (And, perhaps, a grotesquely deformed child?)
` On top of that, many viable embryos inevitably are not used if, for example, earlier attempts at pregnancy turned out to be satisfactory.
` Mainly, then, there are two realistic choices:
` 1: The stem cells of leftover embryos could be cultured in the promising hope of curing the currently incurable; diabetics may no longer live in fear of nerve damage or insulin shock, and it is even very probable that many quadruplegics will someday have the ability to once again feel and move their entire bodies!
` 2: These same reproductively useless embryos could also amount to a pile of microscopic ashes. (And usually, this is the case, as IVF is common and scientific donations of leftovers are rare.)
` I'll also mention here that, though certain types of stem cell can be captured from, say, adults, artificially-created embryos are still currently the most promising way to go (and they may always be!).
` In this light, I hope that anyone who disagrees with me can see where I am coming from in this matter: Some people like to call IVF stem cell researchers 'baby killers', trying to get more people on their side by saying, for example, that the stem cells are taken from aborted fetuses!
` I can only say that lack of education can make someone susceptible to believing such lies, especially if that person is driven by some sort of fanatacism, religious or otherwise.
` In conclusion, IVF stem cell research is most certainly not the 'Culture of Death' that millions have claimed it to be - starting with the most powerful man in the world (who has used this view in an attempt to gain popularity): If anything, it is the extraction of life and regeneration from the failed and the doomed.
` You know, the kinds of things that can make flat-out death actually sound more inviting.
` Some people I know scorn stem cell injections because it's 'unnatural', saying that they'd rather lose their minds to Alzheimer's (or even die of cancer!) than be treated by Western medicine.
` A more conspicuous argument, however, has to do with the idea of extracting stem cells from microscopic, hollow spheres of about a hundred cells known as blastocysts, which are artificially created within in-vitro fertilization clinics.
` Of course, these spheres I speak of are early embryos, modules of building material that - if implanted successfully - have the potential to launch a sequence that allows each one to form into a human being, perhaps even twins (if split in half) or triplets (if split into three)!
` (What I'm saying here is that one embryo definitely does not equal one person. Or two, or three. But it may well, after a long process.)
` The general opposition to this harvesting of stem cells has been summed up quite lyrically by one Kevin B. Keating:
A stem cell's a miracle, you see,
It could extend the life of you - or me.
Only week-old embryos are needed for stems,
The problem is - we were once them.
It could extend the life of you - or me.
Only week-old embryos are needed for stems,
The problem is - we were once them.
` True, we were once blastocysts - though this argument is misleading: It does not shed any light on exactly which embryos are actually used for stem cell research!
` In fact, the embryos that are shipped to stem cell laboratories are only there because they are not wanted for implantation! Because not all IVF embryos can be used in any case, these 'leftovers' would otherwise be headed into an incinerator!
` In other words, non-usable embryos, having been considered to be medical waste, would all be burned if it were not for scientific interest! So, what harm is it to at least rescue a valuable part of them before they are destroyed?
` Hence, the reply poem by Scientific American Editor-in-Chief, John Rennie:
IVF embryos have potential for life,
But when destined to end from a cold dish's strife,
Why not harvest their stem cells for future folk's good?
It's a waste and a sin if we don't when we could.
But when destined to end from a cold dish's strife,
Why not harvest their stem cells for future folk's good?
It's a waste and a sin if we don't when we could.
` I mean, what are scientists supposed to do with the unwanted embryos? Kidnap women and use their bodies as growing facilities? I mean, extremist efforts to give each embryo a chance are not working out that well as it is.
` Also, because a higher percentage of IVF embryos are defective (compared to in-vivo fertilization), many of them wouldn't make it anyway. This is why several of them have to be implanted in the same attempt - only one is likely to take.
` In reality, most of these little spheres - far from resembling a baby with working organs - haven't got a chance at this stage. So, why grow them? After all, pregnancy is a huge undertaking! Why not choose the ones most likely to develop properly over ones that will probably or definitely amount to nothing but trouble and wasted effort? (And, perhaps, a grotesquely deformed child?)
` On top of that, many viable embryos inevitably are not used if, for example, earlier attempts at pregnancy turned out to be satisfactory.
` Mainly, then, there are two realistic choices:
` 1: The stem cells of leftover embryos could be cultured in the promising hope of curing the currently incurable; diabetics may no longer live in fear of nerve damage or insulin shock, and it is even very probable that many quadruplegics will someday have the ability to once again feel and move their entire bodies!
` 2: These same reproductively useless embryos could also amount to a pile of microscopic ashes. (And usually, this is the case, as IVF is common and scientific donations of leftovers are rare.)
` I'll also mention here that, though certain types of stem cell can be captured from, say, adults, artificially-created embryos are still currently the most promising way to go (and they may always be!).
` In this light, I hope that anyone who disagrees with me can see where I am coming from in this matter: Some people like to call IVF stem cell researchers 'baby killers', trying to get more people on their side by saying, for example, that the stem cells are taken from aborted fetuses!
` I can only say that lack of education can make someone susceptible to believing such lies, especially if that person is driven by some sort of fanatacism, religious or otherwise.
` In conclusion, IVF stem cell research is most certainly not the 'Culture of Death' that millions have claimed it to be - starting with the most powerful man in the world (who has used this view in an attempt to gain popularity): If anything, it is the extraction of life and regeneration from the failed and the doomed.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Classifying things....
` In general, why do people have problems classifying objects (much less their own peers)? A lot of it has to do with language and culture, to be sure. The rest, I would think, has to do with the habitual way that people artificially divide and group things.
` Surely you've heard (or even asked) the old question; 'Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?' I've heard it numerous times, and yet the answer is so easy to grasp that I am astounded by the sheer number of people who do not know!
` So, to give anyone who doesn't currently know a bit of an informational one-up, I've added a bit of technicality:
` A tomato plant bears flowers. As you probably know, one part of a flower is called a pistil. And part of the pistil is called an ovary, which contains the ovules. After fertilization, the ovaries ripen into fruit and the ovules mature into seeds.
` That's what a fruit is, and this particular fruit is called a tomato.
` Therefore, the fruit of a tomato plant is... well, a fruit.
` It is surprising how many people do not know that. At one point in my life, I read this on a container of vanilla soy milk; 'Vanilla! The bean that's a fruit!' Apparently, what the writer of those words failed to grasp was that all beans are fruit!
` They are filled with seeds, are they not? Same goes for squashes, corn, and peppers - they are all the seed-bearing parts of flowering plants and therefore cannot be anything but fruit!
` On the other hand, leaves (i.e. kale and spinach) roots (such as carrots and potatoes) and stalks (like celery and rhubarb) are obviously not the fruit of the plant and so can be called 'vegetables'.
` Let's review:
` If it contains seeds, it's a fruit. If it's some part of the plant other than the fruit, it's a vegetable. Therefore, cucumbers, being full of seeds, are fruit. Radishes, being the part of the plant that seeks out, obtains and stores nutrients, are not.
` Could it be any simpler?
` Another question that I've heard people ask would be: 'Is Pluto a planet?' Now that is a tough question. It all depends on your definitoin of what constitutes a planet. I suppose we can all agree that a gas giant - such as Jupiter - which does not have enough mass to initiate nuclear fusion, is a planet: Once fusion begins, the object has become a star. (Though, conversely, are burnt-out brown dwarfs really stars?)
` On the small end of the scale, however, it is much harder to draw any lines between small planets and rocks of some type or another.
` The fact is, Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object and could be argued to be a planet, for example, because it is so large. Yet, it is not the smallest Kuiper Belt object!
` There are several other KBOs that are similar to Pluto in size and orbit, and at least one that is much larger. I suppose the question could be 'Can planets be Kuiper Belt Objects?' If so... what's the difference between KBOs that are planets and those that are not? Is it a spherical shape?
` Figure that out and at least you're closer to an answer.
` This is why I prefer biology and taxonomy. It's not quite as arbitrary, at least above the level of interbreeding populations. And classification data can be so accessible - you can just reach out and touch it! For example, vultures, a clade of raptors, look a lot like condors.
` However for decades, biologists suspected that condors (and other New World vultures) are more closely related to storks and herons than they are vultures and eagles.
` Simply by analyzing the DNA of both Old World Vultures and their American Lookalikes, it is abundantly clear that condors and other species like turkey vultures are Ciconiiformes - or at least close relatives - like the more graceful egrets and ibises. (Incidentally, cranes are lookalikes of Ciconiiformes!)
` Of course, this relative ease of classification in biology is due to the fact that there exist fairly unambiguous taxonomic definitions. That is entirely due to the fact of common decent.
` Unfortunately, planets and other giant bodies come to be in a relatively separate and more chaotic manner. Therefore, they can only be classified in terms of what they are formed out of, how much mass they contain, their position, their movement, shape, and other such aspects.
` This is why I prefer biology - things are easier to define. In anatomy, 'fruit' describes the ripe ovary, the part of an Angiosperm that contains seeds. In taxonomy, a condor is clearly a type of Ciconiiform and is definitely not a Raptor, due to the intervention of millions of years of evolution.
` The word 'planet' on the other hand, is more of a traditional word from the ancients rather than a scientific term.
` I admit, I am rambling. Perhaps I shall not ramble as much in about a week or so when I get my own internet connection. I must go now, as I'm rapidly running out of time.
` Surely you've heard (or even asked) the old question; 'Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?' I've heard it numerous times, and yet the answer is so easy to grasp that I am astounded by the sheer number of people who do not know!
` So, to give anyone who doesn't currently know a bit of an informational one-up, I've added a bit of technicality:
` A tomato plant bears flowers. As you probably know, one part of a flower is called a pistil. And part of the pistil is called an ovary, which contains the ovules. After fertilization, the ovaries ripen into fruit and the ovules mature into seeds.
` That's what a fruit is, and this particular fruit is called a tomato.
` Therefore, the fruit of a tomato plant is... well, a fruit.
` It is surprising how many people do not know that. At one point in my life, I read this on a container of vanilla soy milk; 'Vanilla! The bean that's a fruit!' Apparently, what the writer of those words failed to grasp was that all beans are fruit!
` They are filled with seeds, are they not? Same goes for squashes, corn, and peppers - they are all the seed-bearing parts of flowering plants and therefore cannot be anything but fruit!
` On the other hand, leaves (i.e. kale and spinach) roots (such as carrots and potatoes) and stalks (like celery and rhubarb) are obviously not the fruit of the plant and so can be called 'vegetables'.
` Let's review:
` If it contains seeds, it's a fruit. If it's some part of the plant other than the fruit, it's a vegetable. Therefore, cucumbers, being full of seeds, are fruit. Radishes, being the part of the plant that seeks out, obtains and stores nutrients, are not.
` Could it be any simpler?
` Another question that I've heard people ask would be: 'Is Pluto a planet?' Now that is a tough question. It all depends on your definitoin of what constitutes a planet. I suppose we can all agree that a gas giant - such as Jupiter - which does not have enough mass to initiate nuclear fusion, is a planet: Once fusion begins, the object has become a star. (Though, conversely, are burnt-out brown dwarfs really stars?)
` On the small end of the scale, however, it is much harder to draw any lines between small planets and rocks of some type or another.
` The fact is, Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object and could be argued to be a planet, for example, because it is so large. Yet, it is not the smallest Kuiper Belt object!
` There are several other KBOs that are similar to Pluto in size and orbit, and at least one that is much larger. I suppose the question could be 'Can planets be Kuiper Belt Objects?' If so... what's the difference between KBOs that are planets and those that are not? Is it a spherical shape?
` Figure that out and at least you're closer to an answer.
` This is why I prefer biology and taxonomy. It's not quite as arbitrary, at least above the level of interbreeding populations. And classification data can be so accessible - you can just reach out and touch it! For example, vultures, a clade of raptors, look a lot like condors.
` However for decades, biologists suspected that condors (and other New World vultures) are more closely related to storks and herons than they are vultures and eagles.
` Simply by analyzing the DNA of both Old World Vultures and their American Lookalikes, it is abundantly clear that condors and other species like turkey vultures are Ciconiiformes - or at least close relatives - like the more graceful egrets and ibises. (Incidentally, cranes are lookalikes of Ciconiiformes!)
` Of course, this relative ease of classification in biology is due to the fact that there exist fairly unambiguous taxonomic definitions. That is entirely due to the fact of common decent.
` Unfortunately, planets and other giant bodies come to be in a relatively separate and more chaotic manner. Therefore, they can only be classified in terms of what they are formed out of, how much mass they contain, their position, their movement, shape, and other such aspects.
` This is why I prefer biology - things are easier to define. In anatomy, 'fruit' describes the ripe ovary, the part of an Angiosperm that contains seeds. In taxonomy, a condor is clearly a type of Ciconiiform and is definitely not a Raptor, due to the intervention of millions of years of evolution.
` The word 'planet' on the other hand, is more of a traditional word from the ancients rather than a scientific term.
` I admit, I am rambling. Perhaps I shall not ramble as much in about a week or so when I get my own internet connection. I must go now, as I'm rapidly running out of time.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
MAL is back!
` ...As of five days ago, anyway. (Internet use has been extremely limited as of late.) And with MAL up and running, you know what that means, don't you? That's right! I'm just that much closer to:
` Party at the lab!!
` Party at the lab!!
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Daguerreo-What?
` Recently, I have been leafing through past issues of Scientific American. I found that an article in the November 1855 edition read:
` Ah, 'twas a tragedy! I like the sharp, silvery contrast of the Daguerreotype. Interestingly, the preceding edition of SciAm had an article in which was announced the discovery of a 'capital auxillery to identification', in relation to tracking down the numerous soldiers who had deserted in Lanarkshire.
` In other words, it seems that the first ID photos were not even photographs. And now, digital photography is threatening to take over!
` I'd write something more interesting, but I am currently surrounded by Very Talkative People: On my left are two girls who are giggling about their friends on MySpace, while to my right, a very verbal 'internet lesson' is in session.
` Why am I still here, you ask? Hey, it's my five-dollar-hour and I'm sticking to it! Plus, they have Mozilla. And at least I can ignore boisterous conversation, whereas I cannot at all tune out whispering, which is why I left the library earlier today.
` Grah! I can't wait until I finish rebuilding MAL! He is currently 'in the shop' so to speak, undergoing decontamination.
` Photography is the general name now applied to sun painting on paper and glass as being different from the daguerreotype, which is produced on metallic plates.
` The inventor of photographs is Fox Talbot, of England, who secured patents in Britain and America, but has thrown them open to the public.
` Photography is destined apparently to supersede the art of Daguerre. In France, the splendid display of photographs in the Great Exhibition of Industry, and the limited number of pictures on metallic plates, affords conclusive proof that, within the French artists, the daguerreotype is becoming obsolete.
` Ah, 'twas a tragedy! I like the sharp, silvery contrast of the Daguerreotype. Interestingly, the preceding edition of SciAm had an article in which was announced the discovery of a 'capital auxillery to identification', in relation to tracking down the numerous soldiers who had deserted in Lanarkshire.
` The pictures are fidelity itself. When a man disappears from Lanark, the plate upon which his physog is imprinted is sent to the recruiting serjeants for the regiment, who can look after the man as if he had been an old acquaintance.'
` In other words, it seems that the first ID photos were not even photographs. And now, digital photography is threatening to take over!
` I'd write something more interesting, but I am currently surrounded by Very Talkative People: On my left are two girls who are giggling about their friends on MySpace, while to my right, a very verbal 'internet lesson' is in session.
` Why am I still here, you ask? Hey, it's my five-dollar-hour and I'm sticking to it! Plus, they have Mozilla. And at least I can ignore boisterous conversation, whereas I cannot at all tune out whispering, which is why I left the library earlier today.
` Grah! I can't wait until I finish rebuilding MAL! He is currently 'in the shop' so to speak, undergoing decontamination.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Alas, SQEEE!
` Originally written Feb 22. (Didn't have time to finish it before!)
` This is getting ridiculous. Not only do I have to covertly access the internet (accounting for the lack of fun little posts), but I have yet to post on this blog through MAL, my all-powerful supercomputer. He's not working terribly well at the moment because most of his parts have apparently been infested with blueberry monsters.
` In fact, I have recently been attacked by a blueberry monster. No, I am not talking about the nutritious juice drink called 'Blueberry B Monster' - here I mean a ferocious creature that ripped up my hand and stained a good pair of pants!
` ...That's what happens when the lid to the specimen jar breaks. And it was the last one in its liquid phase!!
` But this is not the time to cry over spilled blueberry monsters. In fact, I have many more important things to cry over. Such as MAL being out of order and my having to resort to the black market in order to acquire the appropriate strange and unusual spare parts.
` My mind is actually spinning like it used to when I was a little freak-girl and I would be forced to solve all these horrendously tricky puzzles in order to lower my self-esteem. If only I'd had MAL around to tell me how perversely twisted these things really were.
` (Heck - if only I had him now in order to continue my work! But, I digress....)
` The most insidious puzzle of them all was the seemingly-simple axiom of the SEQ system. I liked working it, but the emotions it elicited did nothing but ruin my self-confidence.
` Why don't you try it yourself at your own emotional risk? Since you're under no pressure, it should be fun!
` Your starting point is SE. Your ending point is SQ. There are four rules which determine how one can manipulate your letters - It's fairly straightforward:
` First off, you can add a Q onto the end of a string in which the last letter is E. By this rule, SEE can become SEEQ!
` Secondly, one can double a string of letters after S. For example, SEEQ can become SEEQEEQ.
` The third rule states that if you have three Es in a row, you can turn them into one Q. The string SEEQEEE can become SEEQQ.
` Lastly, two Qs in a row can be subtracted from any part of a string. Therefore; SQEQQ can become SQE.
` So, let's say you start out with SE... you can do one of two things - Add a Q or duplicate.
` If you add Q, you get SEQ.
` After that, you could replcate like so: SEQEQ => SEQEQEQEQ.
` If you instead duplicated the initial E, you would have SEE!
` And then, you could add a Q and wind up with SEEQ. After that, the only available step afterward would be to duplicate it to SEEQEEEQ.
` Or, if you wound up with SEEEE, you could duplicate it and get SEEEEEEEE or add a Q for SEEEEQ, or turn any of three Es (in a row) into Qs, thereby getting SEQ or SQE.
` It goes on and on... try working out the rules for yourself!
` Eventually, I was expected to get to SQ. In fact, I even tried working the problem backwards, and that was when I realized the whole trick.
` Now, if you are seriously going at this puzzle, I am sure you can tell me exactly why it was meant to break me!
` This is getting ridiculous. Not only do I have to covertly access the internet (accounting for the lack of fun little posts), but I have yet to post on this blog through MAL, my all-powerful supercomputer. He's not working terribly well at the moment because most of his parts have apparently been infested with blueberry monsters.
` In fact, I have recently been attacked by a blueberry monster. No, I am not talking about the nutritious juice drink called 'Blueberry B Monster' - here I mean a ferocious creature that ripped up my hand and stained a good pair of pants!
` ...That's what happens when the lid to the specimen jar breaks. And it was the last one in its liquid phase!!
` But this is not the time to cry over spilled blueberry monsters. In fact, I have many more important things to cry over. Such as MAL being out of order and my having to resort to the black market in order to acquire the appropriate strange and unusual spare parts.
` My mind is actually spinning like it used to when I was a little freak-girl and I would be forced to solve all these horrendously tricky puzzles in order to lower my self-esteem. If only I'd had MAL around to tell me how perversely twisted these things really were.
` (Heck - if only I had him now in order to continue my work! But, I digress....)
` The most insidious puzzle of them all was the seemingly-simple axiom of the SEQ system. I liked working it, but the emotions it elicited did nothing but ruin my self-confidence.
` Why don't you try it yourself at your own emotional risk? Since you're under no pressure, it should be fun!
` Your starting point is SE. Your ending point is SQ. There are four rules which determine how one can manipulate your letters - It's fairly straightforward:
` First off, you can add a Q onto the end of a string in which the last letter is E. By this rule, SEE can become SEEQ!
` Secondly, one can double a string of letters after S. For example, SEEQ can become SEEQEEQ.
` The third rule states that if you have three Es in a row, you can turn them into one Q. The string SEEQEEE can become SEEQQ.
` Lastly, two Qs in a row can be subtracted from any part of a string. Therefore; SQEQQ can become SQE.
` So, let's say you start out with SE... you can do one of two things - Add a Q or duplicate.
` If you add Q, you get SEQ.
` After that, you could replcate like so: SEQEQ => SEQEQEQEQ.
` If you instead duplicated the initial E, you would have SEE!
` And then, you could add a Q and wind up with SEEQ. After that, the only available step afterward would be to duplicate it to SEEQEEEQ.
` Or, if you wound up with SEEEE, you could duplicate it and get SEEEEEEEE or add a Q for SEEEEQ, or turn any of three Es (in a row) into Qs, thereby getting SEQ or SQE.
` It goes on and on... try working out the rules for yourself!
` Eventually, I was expected to get to SQ. In fact, I even tried working the problem backwards, and that was when I realized the whole trick.
` Now, if you are seriously going at this puzzle, I am sure you can tell me exactly why it was meant to break me!
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