All posts by Keith

I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
links, science, words

Your Interesting Links

Another round of pointers to articles you probably missed the first time …
According to Dan Vergano at BuzzFeed Mars Missions Are A Scam, as I have always suspected. He lays out the opinions of many scientists that, despite claims by NASA and various private outfits, we have neither the know-how nor the funding to send people to the Red Planet.
Also on things celestial, did you know that Earth has a second moon, with a crazy orbit, and that we didn’t know about it until recently.


There’s a new theory that it was cute little gerbils and not nasty rats which were to blame for spreading bubonic plague. Yeah right. Maybe in Asia, but we don’t have indigenous gerbils in Europe. [Why is it that rats are nasty and dirty unless they’re gerbils or squirrels?]
How self-aware are animals? Well certainly Asian elephants, magpies and great apes are among the species that can self-recognize. But what do animals see in the mirror?
And then we have to ask whether what they see is blue, because there is another theory that no-one could see the colour blue until modern times. It is a theory which I don’t entirely buy … we must have been able to see blue but we may not have decided what to call it.
And here’s another curiosity about sight … It appears that we have fibre optic cables in our eyes which act to separate different colours of light and direct the colours to the correct cones. But it implies that, contrary to what I had been led to believe, we have only red and green sensitive cones and it is the rods which are blue sensitive.
DON’T PANIC but right now you are breathing a potentially dangerous substance: AIR. Maybe you don’t want to know what floats around in this essential ingredient of life but there are guys who make it their job to find out. [Long read]
Still on human biology, here’s a troubled history of the foreskin — albeit a US-centric history. Curious irony: Americans will campaign vigorously against FGM and yet they routinely circumcise their own male children; somehow this does not compute! [Another long read]
So girls, your turn: there is nothing wrong with your sex drive. Sex educator Emily Nagoski writes an op-ed in the New York Times. Oh and I’m reading her new book Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life on which her op-ed is based; it’s well written and very interesting.
So why is it that the menstruation taboo just will not go away?
It isn’t as great a step to this next item as one might think … What’s it like to have a form of synaesthesia in which you taste words. Pretty horrible when they taste of ordure.
And here’s another curiosity … it seems that after we shake hands with someone of the same sex we surreptitiously smell the palm of our right hand, presumably for scent markers. But we don’t do it if we shake hands with someone of the opposite sex. Guess it has to be more dignified than dogs smelling each other’s bums.
It seems that Lewis Carroll’s two Alice in Wonderland books reveal some interesting facets of the brain.
Gerardus Mercator was the 16th century cartographer who came up with the projection we mostly still use for mapping the globe onto a sheet of paper. Where it falls down is that it distorts the relative sizes of countries, making those nearer the poles appear larger than they should. There are other projections, of course, but because they are all a 2D mapping of a 3D object all will have distortions somewhere.
From maps to languages … the latest research suggests that Indo-European languages originated about 6000 years ago in the Russian grasslands.
And still on words, here’s a fascinating Guardian piece by Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape. [Long read]

And finally here’s a review of Ruth Scurr’s new biography of John Aubrey. Her approach of writing the biography as a sort of diary in Aubrey’s own words is a very interesting approach — I’m reading the book and so far it is a method which works.

words

Word: Tarantism

2 Comments

Tarantism
1. A hysterical malady, characterized by an extreme impulse to dance, which prevailed in parts of Italy from the 15th to the 17th century, popularly attributed to the bite of the tarantula. The dancing was sometimes held to be a symptom or consequence of the malady, sometimes practised to cure it.
2. Overcoming melancholy by dancing; the uncontrollable urge to dance.


First used in English around 1640, according to the OED the word is derived from the modern Latin tarantismus, Italian tarantismo and French tarentisme which in turn derive from the Italian town of Taranto. However it was popularly associated with Tarantola, the tarantula spider.

medical, science

Oddity of the Week: Chimerism

One person outside but two people inside. That’s the gist of the chimera, a human being who carries the DNA (and sometimes the body parts) for two. It sounds crazy, but it happens. In fact, doctors think it probably happens more often than we realize. Unless there were some reason to test the DNA from cells in different parts of your body, you could easily be a chimera and never know it.
A chimera is a single organism composed of genetically distinct cells. This can result in male and female organs, two different blood types, or subtle variations in form. Animal chimeras are produced by the merger of multiple fertilized eggs.


Tetragametic chimerism occurs through the fertilization of two separate ova by two sperm, followed by aggregation of the two at the blastocyst or zygote stages. This results in the development of an organism with intermingled cell lines. Put another way, the chimera is formed from the merging of two non-identical twins. As such, they can be male, female, or have mixed intersex characteristics.
This can produce an organism with totally different characteristics on each side of the body: different genders or different colouring — as in the budgie above. Or it can cause mozaicism where the organism contains patches of the different cell types, something most easily spotted in coat colouring — as in the human above — or eye colour.
But very often the mosaicism is there; we just don’t know it.

photography

Weekly Photograph

Meteorologically, at least for the UK, yesterday (1 March) was the first day of Spring. Which means Summer must surely be not far behind. This week’s photograph is another from the archive to remind us what Summer is like and what we have to look forward to.

Click the image for larger views on Flickr
Hollyhock
Hollyhock
Pinner; July 2011

natural history, photography, science

Oddity of the Week: Bats

Bats roost in big groups in caves. Wrong! If you’re a Hardwicke’s woolly bat, you prefer to sleep in a more luxurious — and private — place.
Kerivoula hardwickii roosts inside tropical pitcher plants. These carnivorous plants usually attract insects, but Nepenthes hemsleyana lacks the scents that others have, so few bugs are lured in. Instead, it benefits from the faeces of this tiny bat, which provides more than a third of its nitrogen and may be crucial to the plant’s survival.
These bats found a niche that no-one else was occupying; they are the only bat species known to roost in pitcher plants.


To take [the image above, and others] Merlin Tuttle waded through tropical forest peat swamps on Borneo. Once he had found an occupied plant, he would spend a few hours taming a bat before snapping it from his portable studio, which provided protection from heavy rains. “It only takes a small fraction of a second for a bat to either enter or emerge, so capturing the action at just the right moment is a real challenge,” says Tuttle.
Within a few days, the bats had learned to bump against his nose when they wanted him to give them some mealworms. “We were quite amazed at the intelligence of such tiny animals,” Tuttle says. “Contrary to common misconceptions, bats in general are gentle, highly intelligent and trainable.”
It is the fact that wild bats are so easily trainable that really struck me!
From New Scientist, 21 February 2015 and at www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530090.100-tiny-bat-makes-home-in-a-carnivorous-plant.htm.

nudism, personal, photography

Weekly Photograph

This week a self-portrait from several years ago. Taken, with a fisheye lens, in our hotel room when away for the weekend — I was actually going to a school reunion.

Click the image for larger views on Flickr
Self-Portrait with Chair
Self-Portrait with Chair
Cheshunt; June 2008

words

Word: Bascule

Bascule
A device operating like a balance or see-saw, especially an arrangement of a movable bridge, by which the rising floor or section is counterbalanced by a weight.
A bridge with a movable section hinged about a horizontal axis and counterbalanced by a weight.


London’s Tower Bridge has two bascules …

From the French bascule, formerly bacule, a see-saw; from battre to beat, to bump, or bas low, down + cul the posterior.
The word appears to have been first used in English in 1678.