Category Archives: science

memes, natural history, quotes, science

Word of the Week

Hoatzin

A species of colourful, remarkably saurian, chicken-like bird, Opisthocomus hoazin, found in swamps, riverine forest and mangrove of the Amazon and the Orinoco deltas of South America. It is notable for having chicks that possess claws on two of their wing digits; the chicks are also able to swim and climb — useful when you’re a pheasant-sized bird which nests in trees over water!

It is brown in colour, with paler underparts and an unfeathered blue face with maroon eyes; its head is topped by a spiky, rufous crest. The Hoatzin is herbivorous and has an unusual digestive system with an enlarged crop used for fermentation of vegetable matter — broadly analogous to the digestive system of mammalian ruminants. It’s common name of Stinkbird is due to the strong smell produced by the bird, perhaps due to its consumption and fermentation of leaves.

Despite its striking plumage, unwary nature and poor flight it seems to be only rarely hunted by the indigenous peoples of its native range. Consequently it is not endangered. It is the national bird of Guyana.

amusements, medical, pleasures, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week

Here’s this week’s usual eclectic and eccentric mix …

Biologists and philosophers have pondered for generations the ways in which our modern lives may be disconnected from our pasts, out of synch … When you look beside you in bed, you notice no more than one animal (alternative lifestyles and cats notwithstanding). For nearly all of our history, our beds and lives were shared by multitudes.
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]

The moment that made us human in that series of happenings was not the language, the gods, or even the ability to draw Rubenesque women in stone. It was when we decided that when a leopard stalked the cave, we ought to go after it and kill it. When we decided to kill a species not for food or in self-defence, but instead in order to control what lived and did not live around us, when we did that, we were then fully human.
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]

Grasses and cows were not the only species we favored. We also came to choose species that were beautiful to our senses … tulips and other flowers are shipped around the world at huge expense. Goldfish live in houses in nearly every country. Dogs, which appeal to our social sense of appeasement and connectedness, were brought into our beds. (Cats – well, no one can explain them.)
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]

Anyone offering subtitles for the following?

[It’s] amazing how the secondary endosymbiosis has left its signature in the topography of plastid membranes like in dinoflagellates and cryptophytes.
[“fer” in a comment at The Loom]

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
[GK Chesterton]

There are more fools in the world than there are people.
[Heinrich Heine]

Is it true that cannibals don’t eat clowns because they taste funny?
[Thoughts of Angel]

amusements, beliefs, books, quotes, science, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

The usual eclectic and kleptological collection this week …

Blunt common sense is valued above Gauloise-wreathed nuances of gossip about concepts.
[AC Grayling, The Form of Things]

Religion is false but the masses should be encouraged to believe it; it keeps them in order.
[Plato quoted in AC Grayling, The Form of Things]

Harvester of maidenheads
[Description of the second Earl of Rochester, circa 1660, quoted in AC Grayling, The Form of Things]

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.
[Bertrand Russell]

… and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]

I like prime numbers … I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your lifetime thinking about them.
[Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time]

The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
[Thomas Carlyle]

Long range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.
[Peter F Drucker]

Life begins at 40 — but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.
[Helen Rowland]

If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
[Anon]

natural history, personal, photography, science

Skills I Do Not Have, No. 253 of 44975

Common Wasp, Vespula vulgaris by kcm76
Common Wasp, Vespula vulgaris, a photo by kcm76 on Flickr.

I present you with the Common Wasp, Vespula vulgaris.

I found this critter dead on the bedroom floor this morning and in picking it up for recycling I realised just what stunning creatures wasps are. We so often think of them a nuisanceful pests whereas they’re amazingly engineered and even in death almost beautiful. So I had to photograph it – click the links below for larger views.

Image 1 (top left) shows just how hairy they are when we think of them as bald. And you can just see the tiny, shiny bulge of the top of the wasp’s compound eye.
Image 2 (top right) shows some of the mazing engineering: just look at the hooks and barbs on the legs – just what is needed for gripping caterpillar/insect prey and crawling over plants.
Image 3 (bottom left) shows the face and jaws which are the characteristics that identify this as Vespula vulgaris rather than any of the other UK species.
Image 4 shows something I’d never realised before (although my book shows it clearly) and that’s that wasps have two pairs of wings: look carefully and you can see in front of the large main wing a smaller wing. No wonder they’re such skilled flyers.

These are tiny, amazingly delicate yet robust insects. This individual, a worker, is just 12mm long with a wingspan of about 22mm. In her lifetime she may well have “salvaged” numerous flies, caterpillars etc. as food for the next generation of grubs – without wasps we would be knee deep in creepy crawlies.

This was taken under my desk lamp (hence the slight colour cast) with my point-an-shoot Lumic TZ8 – which is amazing for macros like this as it will focus down to just a couple of centimetres (much better than my dSLR)!

And as I was taking these I thought: how the hell do you go about dissecting something this small? Clearly scientists have done so, but it’s a skill I don’t have and I’m not dexterous enough to ever conceive how to do it! Amazing insects and amazing scientific work to dissect one!

Montage created with fd’s Flickr Toys

history, medical, pleasures, quotes, science, thoughts, topographical

Quotes of the Week

Somehow I’m not writing this week, probably because I’ve spent a lot of time with my head in family history research. But here is this weeks strange set of bedfellows.

First I’ve been reading a 1923 book about my home town and discovered that even Cromwell’s officials in 1650 could write estate agent-ese …

The Presence Chamber. One very large, spacious delightful Room called the Kinge’s Presence Chamber, being wainscotted round with carved wainscott of good oak, coullered of a liver color, and richly guilded with gold, with antique pictures over the same ; the ceiling full of guilded pendants hanging down, setting forth the roome with great splendour […] Also a very fair, large chimny piece of black and white marble, with four pilasters of the same stone […]
[Government Survey of Theobalds Palace, 1650 quoted in Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt]


This really is what it’s thought Theobalds Palace looked like!
And from the same volume this delight …

For, if those enemies to all good endeavours, Danger, Difficulty, Impossibility, Detraction, Contempt, Scorne, Derision, yea, and Desperate Despight, could have prevailed by their accursed and malevolent interposition either before, at the beginning, in the very birth of proceeding, or in the least stolne advantage of the whole prosecution; this Worke of so great worth had never bin accomplished.
[John Stow, Survey of London, quoted in Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt]

And now for some things much more of our time …

Face to face advice on the internet.
[BBC TV London News, 11/07/2011]

Be especially sure to wipe your children down. Children are just about the grimiest thing in the world.
[Rob Dunn at Scientific American Blogs]

Boris Johnson knows even less about geology than he does about geography. Undercutting Ealing with a tunnel means my constituents, and his electoral voters, will fall into the ground. London’s transport system is built on clay, it would cost more money to tunnel through that than if we replaced HS2 with sedan chairs and walked people to Birmingham.
[Ealing North MP, Steve Pound, on Mayor Boris Johnson’s idea of tunnelling HS2 rail under outer London]

books, history, memes, personal, science

Ten Things – July

Number 7 in my monthly series of “Ten Things” for 2011. Each month I list one thing from each of ten categories which will remain the same for each month of 2011. So at the end of the year you have ten lists of twelve things about me.

  1. Something I Like: Beer
  2. Something I Won’t Do: Parachute
  3. Something I Want To Do: Visit Scilly Isles
  4. A Blog I Like: Not Exactly Rocket Science
  5. A Book I Like: Diary of Samuel Pepys
  6. Some Music I Like: Amanda Palmer, Map of Tasmania
  7. A Food I Like: Cheese
  8. A Food or Drink I Dislike: Tapioca
  9. A Word I Like: Numpty
  10. A Quote I Like: It will pass, sir, like other days in the army. [Anthony Powell]
pleasures, science

Catprints

I got asked a really interesting question on Facebook earlier: I wonder whether every cats’ paw print is unique?

Well is it? Naively one might think that every animal would have unique wrinkles to their skin, but … do they?

It appears that no-one really knows for certain. But grubbing around with Google I have discovered:

The nose print of a dog is as unique as a fingerprint, and your dog can be positively identified the same way. Reference.

It is known that gorillas and other primates do have fingerprints, of special interest however, is that our closest relative, the chimpanzee does not. Koala bears also have fingerprints. Individual fingerprints appear to be restricted to humans and gorillas. Reference.

US scientists and criminal justice investigators have developed a technique designed to more accurately track and conduct a census of some animals. The research focuses on the fisher, a member of the weasel family and the only carnivore known to develop fingerprints. Reference.

The only reference I can find to cats’ pawprints is this, which sounds like a school project.

But then are human fingerprints actually unique?

It is often assumed, but has never really been proven, that fingerprints are unique, in humans or other animals. The history of this apparently involves an assertion (early in the 20th century, as I recall) that they were unique, this assertion was accepted by a court, and they’ve been pretty much never really been analyzed thoroughly beyond that. (It’s not clear to me how you’d go about proving it anyway, since the pattern of fingerprints for any individual is a function of his environment during gestation (yes, identical twins do have different fingerprints..). So the best you could hope to do is to prove the odds of an interference are vanishingly small. Reference.

Which is worryingly true. Human fingerprints have never been subjected to scientific and forensic scrutiny in the way that DNA profiling has been. This article in The Register summarises a New Scientist report (hidden behind a paywall) of an official report. Conclusion: fingerprints have never been scientifically scrutinised properly.

As for cats … Well in their usual inscrutable way, only they know!

Oh and here’s today’s piece of gratuitous pornography. 🙂

medical, nudism, science

Sleep in the Raw

Yesterday I found a potentially useful little site called sleep.com. And yes, it is all about sleep. Being a confirmed nudist what caught my eye was a short item entitled Benefits of Sleeping Naked. Ah-ha! At last we aren’t the only ones to appreciate a lack of nightwear:

Sleeping naked can increase feel-good hormones in the brain, strengthen emotional ties and heighten both desire and intimacy between you and your partner.
…
You don’t have to have a partner to enjoy the benefits of sleeping naked, however. Research shows that sleeping naked:
— Allows the body to relax and rest more peacefully, which can in turn, increase your energy and daytime alertness levels.
— Improves self-confidence.

Yes, indeed. Apart from the occasional sojourn in hospital, I’ve eschewed night attire entirely since I was a student. Yes, that’s right, not even a pair of boxers. I was brought up to wear pyjamas and frankly they were often necessary in an unheated house in the 1950s, although my parents often slept in the nude. But as soon as I left home and had a room of my own (rather than a shared room or lodgings) I threw off my pyjamas, never to look back — it felt better and was a lot more comfortable.

For us sharing a bed and sleeping nude is all part of a good, healthy relationship. As the article says:

Skin contact creates more than just useful hormones — it creates a bond! Increase the sense of bond between you and your partner and feel closer together than ever before. Remember, increased closeness encourages greater sex.

What better excuse could you want?!

history, personal, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week

A rather temporal theme this week …

What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.
[St Augustine, Confessions]

Time is Nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.
[John Archibald Wheeler]

The universe is a simple place. True, it contains complicated things like galaxies and sea otters and federal governments, but if we average out the local idiosyncrasies, on very large scales the universe looks pretty much the same everywhere.
[Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: the Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time]

Apart from Earl Alan, the Lord of the Manor, there is no record of local names. As to the women, who one must assume formed the usual percentage of the community, not one word!
[Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt commenting on the Domesday Book entry for Cheshunt]

I just love the preambulatory greetings in old documents, which are maintained even to this day in royal letters patent.

To all Christ’s faithful people unto whom this present shall come, Peter, by the grace of God, Abbot of the Church of St Peter of Fulgeres and of the Convent in that same place, greeting in the Lord!
[Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt translating a 12th century document]

Conan, Duke of Brittany, Earl of Richmond, to all the sons of the Church of the Holy Mother, and its steward and chamberlain, and to all its servants, and to all its men, French and English, and to all Britons, and all its well-wishers, greeting!
[Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt translating a 12th century document]

The constant recurrence of old familiar names in the ancient Parish registers seems to show that some of them have long taken root in the place. “Lowin” and “Adams” and “Archer” and “Cock” and “Tarry” and “Dighton”, and a good many more household names, are plentiful as blackberries in the old Registers.
[Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt quoting comments on parish registers by Revd Arthur Brown]

books, medical, memes, personal, photography, pleasures, science, topographical

Listography: What I want to do this Summer

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Keith at Reluctant Housedad is running Listography again this week while Kate Takes 5 has a break and we’ve been asked to say five things I want to do this summer.

Hmmm … well .. I thought summer was over. Wimbledon has finished, the first blackberries have been picked and it’s raining. Sounds like the end of summer to me. 🙂

But in the spirit of beating my brans out (‘cos I actually found this hard!) here is my rather pathetic list …

Run a Successful Conference. For the Anthony Powell Society; at the beginning of September. Yep, I’m organising it (again — that only five of the last six!). It certainly promises to be good, but you never know until you get there if some joker or other is going to be put into play. So let’s hope all the speakers turn up; the venue works OK and the events all run smoothly.

Kill off my Depression. I’ve had depression for far far too long. It’s high time it b*ggered off for good. It’s certainly better than it was; I’ve halved my dose of anti-depressants this Spring and the hypnotherapy seems to be doing some good. Now for the remainder, please!

While we’re at it can I also Get Rid of my Hayfever once and for all. It had really p’ed me off more than usual this Summer as I’ve been having really itchy, watering eyes despite my usual anti-histamines. After 50-odd years enough is enough. Thank you!

Visit Kew Gardens at least once on a nice day. Kew is one of my favourite places, but despite living only a few miles away we get there all too seldom. At least one visit is a must this summer.


Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, home of the late Derek Jarman.
© Copyright Dr Keith C Marshall, 2010.
Finally we need a Holiday. But it ain’t going to happen until after the conference in September. Does that still count? We’re going off to wallow in decent B&B in New Romney, Kent. The Romney Marsh area is another of my favourite places: wide open spaces; Dungeness; seaside; medieval churches; RH&D Railway. And I have ancestors from New Romney and around the edges of the Romney Marsh, so we’ll be doing some family history while we’re there too. Mix and match depending on the weather, but get away and get some good sea air — and even better if it is warm and sunny.

Will that do?