environment, links, natural history, thoughts, topographical

Links of the Week

This week’s small selection of the curious and not-so-curious you may have missed …

According to a recent survey people spend too long in the shower and use too much water. And it isn’t as green as we were told. Now there’s a surprise!

But then no wonder we go for the therapeutic, because according to uSwitch the UK is the worst place in Europe to live. Well it is if you care about what they measure. For geeks like me you can follow their method, recalculate the scores, exclude things you don’t care about and add in other things you do care about. But you’ll still get much the same answer. 🙁

HornetNow here’s a seriously WOW! image. Yes it’s a European Hornet, Vespa crabro; a humongous but relatively docile wasp**. Sadly you don’t see them often. But just look at those compound eyes … and the detail which I’m sure shows the substructure underneath the eye. I’ve looked out other images of hornets and they all seem to show the same eye substructure. Absolutely amazing!

** Note. Hornets are brown and yellow, as in the image. If what you see is black and yellow it’s a wasp, not a hornet, regardless of its size. Please leave all these creatures alone. They generally won’t attack you unless you provoke them. Wasps and Hornets are superb predators of other insects, on which they feed their grubs. Without them we’d be knee-deep in caterpillars etc. They also chew up old wood for their nests. Besides Hornets are becoming endangered.

If you had a pet monkey, would you feed it crap food and never let it exercise or play and tell it how stupid and ugly it was? No, you’d love your pet monkey! So love your Monkey!

We all make mistakes. They’re nothing to hide. But we all do hide mistake, because they make us feel stupid. Don’t be afraid of Stupid. Stupid means self-awareness. Stupid means you’re learning. Love your Stupid.

quotes, sexuality

Quotes of the Week

What a strange mix we have this week …

If your dog had your brain and could speak, and if you asked it what it thought of your sex life, you might be surprised by its response. It would be something like this:

Those disgusting humans have sex any day of the month! Barbara proposes sex even when she knows perfectly well that she isn’t fertile – like just after her period. John is eager for sex all the time, without caring whether his efforts could result in a baby or not. But if you want to hear something really gross – Barbara and John kept on having sex while she was pregnant! That’s as bad as all the times when John’s parents come for a visit, and I can hear them too having sex, although John’s mother went through this thing they call menopause years ago. Now she can’t have babies any more, but she still wants sex, and John’s father obliges her. What a waste of effort! Here’s the weirdest thing of all: Barbara and John, and John’s parents, close the bedroom door and have sex in private, instead of doing it in front of their friends like any self-respecting dog!

[Jared Diamond; Why is Sex Fun?]

The impulse to cling to youth at all costs, to attempt to preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself and not merely for your children, is a thing of recent growth and has only precariously established itself.
[George Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill”, Horizon, September 1941]

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters however … the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within.
[Sigmund Freud]

If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you’re likely to go to business school.
[George Monbiot, guardian.co.uk, 7 November 2011]

environment, science

How Green is Your Green?

The answer may depend on the quantity of rare earth elements used.

A few days ago I spotted an article on the web under the headline Your Prius’ Deepest, Darkest Secret points out that many products which appear to to reduce ones environmental footprint actually contain relatively large quantities of rare earth elements, which have to be mined and refined — a dirty process at the best of times.

Neodymium magnets turn wind turbines. Cerium helps reduce tailpipe emissions. Yttrium can form phosphors that make light in LED displays and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Hybrid and electric cars often contain as many as eight different rare earths … Walk down the aisles of your local Best Buy and you’ll be hard-pressed to find something that doesn’t contain at least one of the rare earths, from smartphones to laptop batteries to flat-screen TVs. They’re also crucial for defence technology—radar and sonar systems, tank engines, and the navigation systems in smart bombs.

No surprise therefore that the demand for rare earths is sky-rocketing and mining is expanding accordingly. Mining and refining produce mountains of waste from rock spoil to harsh acids as well as consuming gargantuan quantities of energy. And mining companies don’t have good track records at reducing and managing any of this.

Another side of the coin is that many of these elements are used in such small quantities that recovering them from old products and recycling them becomes equally as hard as the original refining.

As I pointed out here and as the article concludes: What good is green technology if it’s based on minerals whose extraction is so, well, ungreen?

Gawdelpus.

amusements, sexuality

Fact of the Week : Phallocarp

This is from Why is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond:

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.

medical, personal, science

Hairy Mysteries

We are used to the fact that men grow hair on their heads and faces. And that some men even dare to grow hair on their chests — much to the horror, it seems, of most girls.

We also know that male hair growth is in part related to testosterone levels — or at least the testosterone level at some critical point in their development — as well as genetics.

So why is it that even the hairiest of men don’t grow hair round where their shirt collar goes? (There are a few very, very hairy men who do grow hair under their collars, but they are unusual.)

It seems unlikelky that the lack of hair is due to collar abrasion. The area is totally devoid of hair and there is no sign of hair regrowth if collars are not worn. The collar also seems not to affect hair growth in those very hairy men who do grow hair on their necks.

This really does seem to be a genuinely hairless area.

Can anyone explain why this is the case and what evolutionary advantage it might once have had?

Or perphaps to put it another way … why is facial and chest hair selected for, but neck and shoulder hair mostly isn’t?

food+drink

Lamb's Liver with Fennel and Pasta

Here’s a quick, easy, cheap and wholesome meal. It’s a variation on my usual theme of chuck it all in a pan until done. So I give you …

Lamb’s Liver with Fennel and Pasta

Serves 2-4 (depending on greed)

You will need:
400-500gm Lambs Liver (roughly sliced into 1x1cm goujons about 5-7cm long)
1 Red Onion (thinly sliced)
1 bulb Fennel (thinly sliced)
Garlic (as much as you like; chopped)
4 or so Ripe Fresh Tomatoes (chopped)
Herbs, Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil, White Wine
250gm Pasta (preferably fresh; shape of your choice)

Cook the pasta.
Meanwhile prepare the other ingredients.
When the pasta is (almost) done, sauté the onion, garlic and fennel in some olive oil until the onion is going translucent.
Now add the liver and herbs. Cook for 2-3 minutes stirring occasionally.
Add the tomatoes, salt & pepper to taste, and leave to cook (if possible with a lid on), stirring occasionally, until the liver is just done (probably about 5 minutes).
If the pan looks like it is getting a bit dry add half a glass of white wine.
You might also like to add something to give it some extra zing: lemon juice (instead of wine), a small amount of chilli, large splash of Worcester Sauce — you get the idea.
When the liver is just done, throw in the pasta and toss it all together for a couple of minutes.
Serve with a glass or few of red wine.

Voilà!

Of course, if you prefer you can serve the liver and the pasta separately.
And you could substitute chicken livers for lamb’s liver.

natural history, photography

Green Autumn

It’s a warm and green autumn in the UK this year. It is mid-November; the daytime temperature is stills several degrees above average; I’m not aware that we’ve had any frost yet; and the fish in the pond are still feeding (in a normal year they stop feeding for the winter in mid-October).

What’s interesting is that it has highlighted something I’ve known about for some time but which we don’t usually see in action so clearly. That’s the way in which (deciduous) trees lose their leaves.

As I understand it (and I can find nothing to substantiate this) there are two triggers to autumn leave loss: day length and temperature. Some trees start losing leaves when the hours of daylight fall below some critical point. For other trees the trigger is consistently low temperatures.

No I have no idea exactly what the trigger points are in detail, and I would expect them to vary between species. Some trees may also of course have a combined trigger where day length and temperature both have to fall; and again I would expect this to vary greatly by species.

But it is noticeable this year that some trees have lost their leaves according to much their normal schedule (presumably due to changes in day length triggering the process) and others are still green (where presumably the trigger is a drop in temperature).

Coming back from the supermarket this morning I did a quick, fairly unscientific, check and found:

Trees that have (mostly)
lost their leaves		 Trees which are (largely)
still green
Ash
Poplar
Hawthorn
Horse Chestnut*
Beech
Cherry
Silver Birch
London Plane		 Alder
Oak

Can anyone confirm that I am right about the triggers and that the trees I see are acting the way they should?

And can someone please arrange some proper cold weather. I don’t like these warm winters — if only because they tend to be grey and murky. I’d rather have cold and alpine. And besides, as the old saw goes:

A green Christmas means a fat churchyard.

* Horse Chestnut may be a red herring as most of the trees around here are infected with the leaf-mining moth Cameraria ohridella which is affecting these trees progressively across most of the country. This causes early leaf death.