So what can marine animals actually hear? Seals are among the first to have their ears tested. They have developed different hearing mechanisms for land and sea and hear well in both environments. For example, seals have erectile tissue in their inner ear, which swells up with blood when they are underwater. “It’s like the penis of a man,” says Ron Kastelein at the Sea Mammal Research Company in Harderwijk, the Netherlands, who did the hearing tests. The blood in the engorged tissue helps conduct sound waves to the inner ear, allowing seals to hear a slightly greater range of frequencies in water than on land.
From New Scientist, 11 April 2015
Category Archives: amusements
Five Questions, Series 7 #3
And so, it has come to pass that the time is upon us when we need to answer the next of my Five Questions.
Question 3: How can you drop a raw egg on a concrete floor without cracking it?
You will need:
1 raw egg (species of dinosaur donor of egg immaterial)
an uncracked concrete floor
a hand (or similar holding device)
Method:
1. Grasp egg in hand.
2. Hold the egg above the concrete floor.
3. Release the egg.
4. Observe the effects of gravity.
5. Observe also that the egg hits the floor.
6. Clean any mess of egg from the floor.
7. Observe the floor.
Result:
1. One cracked egg.
2. As requested, one undamaged concrete floor.
Other methods may be possible but have not been verified experimentally.
Something for the Weekend
I suspect a number of my friends will be able to identify with this (from one side or the other!) …
Five Questions, Series 7 #2
Let’s try and catch up a bit and answer the second of our five questions.
Question 2: What is your spirit animal?
Now everyone is going to expect me to say TIGER, especially as I was born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger. And according to the Chinese I’m actually a Metal Tiger — or as I prefer to think of it: Tin Tiger.
But is my spirit animal a tiger?
Well no, I’m not sure it is. But then I can’t say definitely what it is. And of course one isn’t able to choose one’s own spirit animal — it has to choose you. At least that’s what American Indian culture says. And your spirit animal may change throughout your life, depending on what lesson you’re supposed to be learning.
Tigers are creatures of scrubland as well as forest. Whereas in many ways I actually feel more drawn to the Jaguar, cryptic and silent, slinking through the forests of Central and South America.
How can you not like a lazy cat like that!
Jaguar are still large cats, actually the third largest after tigers and lions respectively. They weigh in at around 1.7m from nose to tail compared with a tiger’s roughly 2.5m. So you still wouldn’t want to pick a fight with one!
Perhaps I’ve gone off tigers because they’ve been over-exposed due to their endangered status, but I have certainly recently come to appreciate more the beauty of the jaguar compared with the raw power of the tiger.
In trying to answer this I have done a number of (apparently more serious) quizzes online. Most of them reckon my spirit animal is either an owl or a wolf. Neither of those feels intuitively right. But then the questions are stupid. And, as mentioned above, spirit animals have to choose you; they can’t be chosen or assigned.
Mind you, there is Tigger in Winnie the Pooh. Maybe Tigger is my spirit animal as I would like to be perpetually bouncy!
Or maybe just any cat will do; small domestic cats are just fine. Oh and I also like crows (all the crow family), parrots and fish.
So no, I really don’t know. Maybe I need some guided mediation the find the answer.
Five Questions, Series 7 #1
Oh dear, so much for the best laid plans etc. There I was, 10 days ago, about to write an answer the question 1 of my latest Five Questions when the dreaded gastric flu lurgy struck. Still hopefully I’m OK now, back in the land of the (semi-)sane, and we can resume what passes for normal service.
So to our question …
Question 1: Does killing time damage eternity?
Crumbs, you do ask some difficult ones don’t you!
First of all we need to understand what time is and what eternity is. And we don’t. No-one has yet agreed. Even our top physicists really don’t have much of a clue what time is. See for instance physicist Sean Carroll and Wikipedia.
And if we don’t understand time, we cannot understand eternity. For eternity is just the infinite extension of time. And how to understand the infinity of something we don’t understand.
But there, we now have a connection between time and eternity. So anything which affects one of them can logically have an effect on the other. But what effect? We don’t know, because we understand neither time nor eternity.
But then again we have the wisdom of Terry Pratchett in Thief of Time …
Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, re-created anew. Therefore, he understood, there is, in truth, no Past, only a memory of the Past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.
And …
Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn’t live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.
Something for the Weekend
Oddity of the Week: Kew Gardens
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (aka. Kew Gardens) has been in existence since 1759 so it isn’t surprising it has a few little eccentricities.
The Gardens has its own police force, which with 17 staff and one vehicle is one of the smallest police forces in the world.
Turner’s Oak was planted in 1798 but was feared destroyed in the great storm of October 1987. However it was discovered that the tree had been lifted by the storm and dropped back down in place; this loosened the soil round the roots and gave the tree a new lease of life. As a result a new technique for treating old trees has been developed.
The Palm House is home to the world’s largest pot plant, an enormous Jurassic cycad, Encephalartos altensteinii, collected from the wild in the 1770s. It has a four metre wide trunk and is repotted roughly every 20 years.
Kew is also home to the smallest royal palace in the country, Kew Palace, which is more the size of a manor house than a palace. The palace (also known as the Dutch House) was reopened to the public in 2006 following a 10 year restoration.
From 7 things you never knew about Kew Gardens.
Five Questions, Series 7
So, almost nine months on (is this significant?) from starting the last round of Five Questions, I bring you another series. As always they’re bound to keep us on our toes, and I hope provide some humour as well.
Here in Series 7 we bring you more questions both profound and stupid (often at the same time) which will be answered with whatever degree of seriousness and erudition — or not — I feel like at the time.
So the five questions for Series 7 are:
- Does killing time damage eternity?
- What is your spirit animal?
- How can you drop a raw egg on a concrete floor without cracking it?
- Does thought require language?
- What character (fictional if you wish) you would like to kiss?
Unlike the last series, I promise to try to post answers are regular, weekly-ish, intervals and not leave everyone dangling for weeks between answers.
Oh, and you’re all invited to sing along — I’d like it if you all joined in! You can either answer the questions, as I answer them, by posting in the comments or by posting your answers on your own blog (in which case just leave a comment here so we can find your words of wisdom).
I’ll aim to answer, or at least attempt to answer, Question 1 in about a week’s time.
Until then, play nicely! ☺
Something for the Weekend
I feel sure most of my former colleagues will identify with this …
Oddity of the Week: Myddleton Passage
Myddelton Passage is a quiet road near Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London EC1. Initially a narrow footpath, the street was widened in the early 19th century as a result of nearby development, but despite this expansion it was considered to be a dark and dangerous alley throughout the Victorian era; a reputation making it notorious enough to feature in George Gissing’s 1889 novel, The Nether World.
Today you can walk along Myddelton Passage in the evening without fearing for your life. But look more closely at the wall running along its southern edge and you’ll see a hint of its shadier Victorian past.
Carved into the brickwork of the wall is a large collection of seemingly random numbers. They were mostly carved around the mid- to late-19th century by an array of police officers and each number represents the respective bobby’s collar number. Most of the numbers feature a a letter ‘G’ linking them to ‘Finsbury Division’; the team who operated out of the former King’s Cross police station.
Quite why so many Victorian coppers chose to create this swathe of graffiti in this particular location remains something of a mystery.
From Cabbie’s Curios: The Policemen’s Wall