Here’s your usual selection of things which interested/amused me and which you may have missed. And do we have a bumper selection this week!
First something useful? There’s a view that “use by” dates on food are a myth which needs busting. So it’s American but I don’t see much being different in the UK. But I do worry whether people have enough common sense to safely abolish “use by” dates.
And now to the very unuseful. Why does the search for the Higgs Boson matter? Actually to most people it doesn’t matter; whether physicists find it or not it won’t change the lives of 99.9999% of the population. That doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t look for it, but in the overall scheme of broken banks and countries it actually doesn’t matter.
Sociable wasps have an eye for faces. But not for caterpillars. And you just thought they were animated automatons sent by the Devil to annoy you!
And talking of the works of the Devil, pyjamas are another … The joys and benefits of sleeping naked. And no, it isn’t colder!
Think you’re good at sudoku? You’ll need a good night’s sleep before you try this! He-he!
A few weeks back we told of these strange paper sculptures left in libraries. Well the phantom has returned, for the last time.
Not got enough to do in the run-up to Christmas? Need a craft project? Make storybook paper roses (above).
And finally … Do you need an udder tug? Well who doesn’t? — Certainly no self-respecting mutt!
A hint that the large human penis serves as some sort of signal may be gained by watching what happens when men take the opportunity to design their own penises, rather than remaining content with their evolutionary legacy. Men in the highlands of New Guinea do that by enclosing the penis in a decorative sheath called a phallocarp. The sheath is up to two feet long and four inches in diameter, often bright red or yellow in color, and variously decorated at the tip with fur, leaves, or a forked ornament. When I first encountered New Guinea men with phallocarps, among the Ketengban tribe in the Star Mountains […] I had already heard a lot about them and was curious to see how they were used and how people explained them. It turned out that men wore their phallocarps constantly […] Each man owns several models, varying in size, ornamentation, and angle of erection, and each day he selects a model to wear according to his mood, much as each morning we select a shirt to wear. In response to my question as to why they wore phallocarps, the Ketengbans replied that they felt naked and immodest without them [despite that they] were otherwise completely naked and left even their testes exposed. In effect, the phallocarp is a conspicuous erect pseudo-penis representing what a man would like to be endowed with. The size of the penis that we evolved was unfortunately limited by the length of a woman’s vagina. A phallocarp shows us what the human penis would look like if it were not subject to that practical constraint.
