Circumfrence of your brain

Eratosthenes (276-194BC) the Greek who measured the circumfrence of the Earth within 202 miles. (He was short, and the actual distance is 24,902, so do the math.) His measurements were all accomplished using mathematics:

Eratosthenes knew that on the summer solstice at local noon in the town of Syene on the Tropic of Cancer, the sun would appear at the zenith, directly overhead. He also knew, from measurement, that in his hometown of Alexandria, the angle of elevation of the Sun would be 7.2° south of the zenith at the same time. Assuming that Alexandria was due north of Syene he concluded that the distance from Alexandria to Syene must be 7.2/360 of the total circumference of the Earth. The distance between the cities was known from caravan travellings to be about 5000 stadia: approximately 800 km. He established a final value of 700 stadia per degree, which implies a circumference of 252,000 stadia. The exact size of the stadion he used is no longer known (the common Attic stadion was about 185 m), but it is generally believed that the circumference calculated by Eratosthenes corresponds to 39,690 km [citation needed]. The estimate is over 99% of the actual distance of 40,008 km.

This same method was repeated 150 years later by Posidonius, and subsequently rejected by the Christians, who had faith that they were more intelligent and advanced than the Greeks, for about 1,400 years.

Eratosthenes was also a playwright, developed the idea of latitude, and longitude, cataloged over 650 stars, many cartographic maps, was a currator at the Library of Alexandria, and wrote a historical account back to the Trojan War. Because of all of this, he was labeled as "Beta" by his contemporaries for being second best at everything. I'm not sure if they knew they were complimenting him.

from: Wikipedia

If God were real, he would be a lunatic.

This is a recently discovered species of assassin spider. The type of spider was found last year on the island of Madagascar. It preys on other spiders by injecting them with venom out of it's enormous (relatively) fangs, and extending it's long neck to attack it's prey from a distance. Yes, this spider has a neck. Yes it's one of the scariest looking things I can imagine. Luckily they only grow to be, at largest, 2mm in size, but we're just finding out about this type of spider and have already discovered 9 different species of them, so who's not to say that there are some that eat birds or dogs. Another interesting fact about these buggers (or bugs, well arachnids technically) is that this genetic variation has come up at least twice in independent paths of evolutionary history. From Animal Planet News:

The genetics of the new assassin spiders have yielded yet another surprise, said Griswold. The genetic map of the assassin spider family history suggests the long necks and jaws evolved more than once, in what's called convergent evolution, he said.

Convergent evolution is analogous to two people stumbling onto a very similar solution to a problem independently of each other. Apparently, the longer necks are an effective solution that caught on more than once. It's just a little family secret that's impossible to detect if you're just looking the spiders themselves, said Griswold.

Anyway, I'm probably going to have nightmares tonight, and I suggest you do the same. Nature is capable of more bizzare things than we could ever come up with on our own. These new spiders are just a few more examples.



from: Wikipedia: Assassin Spider
National Geographic News
Animal Planet News

Plant-ation

My roommate returned today with stories of plant perception and alleged that even discussing this subject was setting any plant hooked up to a lie detector in the tri-state area off the charts. This was all reported from a zine he picked up on his travels chronicling the discovery of Cleve Backster that plants hooked up to a GSR (galvanic skin response) analyzer registered huge spikes when you even thought about... lots of stuff: fire, not watering them, watering them, undressing them, etc. The plants, Backster found, could pick human thoughts out of the ether. This would give much credence to such theories as divining, lay lines, auras, and energy fields. He also thought that yogurt (of the same culture) could communicate.

I was intrigued. I've been reading a bit about the nature of time, and the possibility that linear time might not exist. Read about entangled particles and try and go to sleep. But anyway,I decided that that would be my knowledge for the night. After spending the day reading and viewing various skeptical publications, I jumped into the so-called Backster Effect.

Unbelievably, it seems his finding are highly dubious.

Basically it was found that plants respond more to the thought of being cut, burned, or torn than to the actual act. He discovered that if he tore a leaf from one plant a second plant would respond, but only if he was paying attention to it. The plants seemed to be mirroring his own mental responses. He concluded that the plants were acting like batteries, storing the energy of his thoughts and intentions. He said of these experiments: “I learned that there is energy connected with thought. Thought can be pulsed and the energy connected with it becomes coherent and has a laser-like power

He has been debunked numerous times since, "The Secret Life of Plants" was published in 1973. Most recently by the Mythbusters. It appears his findings could never be satisfactorily replicated in control experiments, to which he would contest that the plants were not properly attuned to the environment or researchers. He seems to be guilty of the blunder of false correlation. There is nothing to suggest that the plants were reacting to human thought; only human thought connects the two.

Now if we could just figure out this time thing...

more at:
Wikipedia: Plant Perception
James Randi Encyclopedia
Skeptics Dictonary
A pro-Backster Article

"What?" is appropriate

This is the fabled Wolpertinger of Germany and Bavaria. Unlike most native fauna, the wolpertinger is actually benefiting from human expansion as it's natural habitat is gift shops and mantles of incredibly tacky people. It is the equivalent of our jackalope or a Swedish skvader. The wolpertingers vary widely in shape and size, but are commonly assortments of wings, horns and avian feet on a small mammal such as a ferret, rabbit, or squirrel, but you know what small mammals are already.

The only bit of useful information that can be gleaned from this whole episode is that jackalopes and wolpertingers alike are thought to derive from rabbits afflicted with papilomavirus. This virus afflicts most species of animal on the planet and exists in many form that do nothing harmful whatsoever. Certain types of rabbits can catch a serious strain of the stuff that causes horn like growths.





Here is a link to more images of this sort: link
and more images of wolpertingers

from: the Zymoglyphic Museum
and Wikipedia

Seeking knowledge

I know I'm not going to find it here. I think I've had all of 1 comment ever on this blog, but I don't do this for you, and even if I did, maybe I just wanted to get your little gears a' turnin tonight. That being said, I would like to offer a reward of something very cool mailed to the address of whosoever can provide for me a satisfactory explanation of the following quandary that I have been pondering for well on a year now:

My friends and I have wavered back and fourth for some time on the notion of attaching a rope, or tether, or similar device to the surface of the Moon, across space, and into the Earth's gravitational pull. The tether would not, however be attached to the surface of the Earth. If the cord was of considerable length, would it simply traverse the Earth's surface as the Moon orbited, and at certain points (when the distance of the moon to the Earth and the elevation were right) would there just be an end of a rope coming out of the sky that passers by could grab onto, and thus hold something attached to the Moon? As I had cautioned, it is a flight of fancy, but still an intriguing scenario. For fun, I posed this question to NASA about a year ago. 5 months later I received a note directing me to some websites that covered the concept of a "space lazer" more in depth. This was not a satisfactory response, so I have no choice but to torment others who are more versed in physics than my education in animation has afforded me.

The above e-mail was sent and never returned from Professor Rocky Kolb from the University of Chicago Physics department. I attended a lecture of his and hoped he would finally illuminate me on this hypothetical, but sadly, he didn't. Are we to remain in the dark forever?

Bonus: If you satisfactorily describe what would happen if the rope were teathered to the Earth as well.

you may also respond to my post on the Nova board

The Earth's Ages

The Earth is where we live. The Earth is old. Currently believed to be around 4,570 million years old, give or take a year. Please note that this is considerably longer than the 6 thousand years that certain mythologies propose. Why these mythologies are still believed is another matter entirely. It should also be noted that the Earth is relatively young with the origin of the Universe hanging somewhere around 13.7 billion years ago.

So how is the age of the Earth documented? We all know (or think we know) about the Jurassic (Park) and the Cretaceous, but can you put them in order? Do you know which Age or Eon we are in now? Good, because I do now too.

The largest defined unit of time is the Eon. Eons are divided into Eras, which are in turn divided into Periods, Epochs and Stages. Now, some history on the Earth's history:

The first serious attempts to formulate a geological time scale that could be applied anywhere on Earth took place in the late 18th century. The most influential of those early attempts (championed by Abraham Werner, among others) divided the rocks of the Earth's crust into four types: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and Quaternary. Each type of rock, according to the theory, formed during a specific period in Earth history. It was thus possible to speak of a "Tertiary Period" as well as of "Tertiary Rocks." Indeed, "Tertiary" and "Quaternary" remained in use as names of geological periods well into the 20th century.

The identification of strata by the fossils they contained, pioneered by William Smith, Georges Cuvier, Jean d'Omalius d'Halloy and Alexandre Brogniart in the early 19th century, enabled geologists to divide Earth history more precisely. It also enabled them to correlate strata across national (or even continental) boundaries. If two strata (however distant in space or different in composition) contained the same fossils, chances were good that they had been laid down at the same time. Detailed studies of the strata and fossils of Europe produced, between 1820 and 1850, the sequence of geological periods still used today.

Study the following information: Wikipedia: Geologic Time and Smithsonian: Geologic Time so you can be smart, and because thirst for it, and tell all your friends how old you really are, because the DNA in your cells goes back to the origins of life on this planet, some 400 million years, and the atoms that make up those cells go back to the origins of the universe and time. We are all very old indeed.

Also: Remote Sensing: Geologic Time

Wilbur and Orville, Right.

Tired, but really fascinating article from Scientific American about a new theory on dinosaur (or microraptor at least) flight. From the article:

On parts of the creature's arms and legs, the discoverers observed a series of long asymmetric feathers, with one side of the feather narrower than the other. In modern birds such asymmetry is considered a hallmark of aerodynamic function—like the asymmetry of an airplane wing. Based on the orientation of the feathered remains, the group imagined the dinosaur flying spread-eagled, with wings trailing from each limb.

Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and his colleague, retired aeronautical engineer R. Jack Templin of Ottawa, Ontario, take issue with the reconstruction in a paper published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. "We realized there's something wrong in the anatomy because no dinosaurs could splay their legs sideways," Chatterjee says. "No birds can do that."

Chatterjee and Templin instead envisioned Microraptor's legs tucked under its body, with its rear feathers parallel to and beneath the feathers on its outspread arms. "It's a very common posture in living raptors," such as when holding prey, Chatterjee says. That's also a more realistic position, they say, because it puts the leading, narrower edges of the leg feathers forward against the direction of airflow, like the arm feathers. The spread-eagled wing plan had the feathers in clashing orientations, they note.

So tongiht when you drift off to sleep, instead of picturing raptors soaring through the air spread eagle, picture dozens of carnivorous, feathered biplanes swooping and soaring above Cretaceous Earth.

Article

Meat Plants

I've been reading today about meat culturing. It's becoming more and more likely that we will soon be able to synthesize meat sans animal. The study was spearheaded by NASA in June of 2005 along with the University of Maryland. They are able to successfully grow meat by culturing muscle cells in a lab setting. The muscles still must be "exercised" so they maintain some form other than mush, but he implications are staggering. If this could be widely applied, it would probably be much cheaper, and certainly more humane than tending livestock. Vegetarians would have some things to think about. Everyone would. It's definitely in the realm of frankenfood, but the implications are quite interesting. The texture is still a little dodgy, but last week, a team of scientists cooked up a "chicken breast" if that's what you want to call it, in some oil and spices. The agreed that it smelled "quite delicious" but refrained from chowing down.

From: University of Maryland
and BBC

Fur Mich?

This one is for the reading audience. I want to know this, but have been unsuccessful in searching the internet. I want to know, and I'm sure it has occurred, but I want specific cases of people calling in to the police to report that a character on a movie or television show is in peril. I must know, and am determined to find out. If you have any information on these people please contact the author.

Surley Maclaine

Today I had the good fortune of having my attention stolen by the "Gentleman Highwayman," James Maclaine. A kindly thug roundabouts the Hyde Park area of Englad in the mid 1700's. He fell in to cahoots with a destitute apothecary by the name of William Plunkett. The two got together, compared there respective positions and took to highway robbery. At one point they robbed and accidentally shot a one Horace Walpole. Maclaine sent him this courtly letter to try and patch things up. But all good things, as they do, come to an end. They were both eventually caught trying to sell ripped off goods to the people who had been ripped off, and Maclaine was hanged on October 3, 1750. Plunkett however escaped with both his money and his life. No one seems to care much about his exploits after that point. There is a film "somewhat" based around their exploits called titled, appropriately, "Plunkett and Macleane."

from Wikipedia
and Stand and Deliver

Big Fucking Rabbits

Apparently North Korea wants to start breeding the German Grey strain of giant rabbits for food. I didn't know rabbits could get to this size, but here you have it. They are selectively bred all over Europe, but this man, Karl Szmolinsky, has engineered some of the biggest ever. His rabbits regularly break 20lbs, and are as big as well fed children. Everything else aside, they freak me out.

from:
Times UK article
Der Spiegle
Boing Boing

Stephen King, liar.

Recently, I watched Pet Sematary for the first time. I know, a rather large gap to have left in my horror movie education, but what's done is done, and what isn't isn't. My suspicious were aroused at the point in the movie where Tasha Yar's sister has been turned into a hideous skeletal zombie creature and locked in a room upstairs for years because of spinal meningitis. This struck me as a mite queer remembering how a friend of a friend had succumbed to the "same" illness in the course of an evening. As I remembered it, in the case I had heard about, the kid just went to sleep complaining of a stiff neck and never woke up. Didn't begin to resemble a corpse until after he died.
Through the magic of basic research, I have discovered that there are different forms of Meningitis, viral, bacterial, or fungal, but all of them affect the meninges: the system of membranes that envelop the central nervous system. Bacterial Meningitis is particularly serious form will kill within 24 hours without prompt medical treatment (in the form of strong antibiotics, or steroids).

Here is a list of symptoms associated with Meningitis from Wikipedia:

Symptoms of meningitis are: Sudden high fever, drowsiness or confusion, severe, unrelenting headache, stiff neck, intolerance to bright light and sounds, twitching, convulsions, delirium particularly in children, and/or a rash of small, irregular purple or red spots all over the body may indicate meningococcal meningitis. Chills, nausea, or vomiting, may also occur. Seizures may occur in about 20 to 40% of patients. Other signs include Kernig's sign and Brudzinski's sign. Although commonly tested, the sensitivity and specificity of Kernig's and Brudzinski's tests are uncertain.

Spinal Meningitis, though serious, is not a chronic illness. I think Zelda was misdiagnosed:

Either that or Stephen King just opened up his "Big Book of Medical Ailments" and picked something that sounded good. Don't trust everything you see in pulp horror.

See also:
Understanding Meningitis
Mayo Clinic: Meningitis
Wikipedia:Meninges

Of cats and a flame

Today I unearthed the knowledge of the long forgotten pastime of "Cat Burning." The "sport" was popular in 16th century France where spectators would huddle around a fire and hoist bails full of cats into the air; slowly lowering the yowling bundle of felines until they perished in flame. The Parisians apparently thought this was great fun and "shrieked with laughter, as the animals, howling with pain, were roasted." The dessicated kitty ashes were scooped up into bags and carted home for good luck.

It was apparently commonplace for the royalty to partake in this form of revelry, including Louis XIV who personally lit one such bonfire wreathed in roses and dancing jovially about the flames to the chorus of shrieking cats.

I was tipped off to this bit of history because Stephen Pinker is happy that we don't do it anymore. I suppose, base as Fox News and MTV are, at least it's not Cat Burning.

from Wikipedia

Indiana + Polis

I wanted to try and learn a little about the history of the town that bored (that's correct) and raised me, because I am back home again in Indiana this weekend, and bored out of my mind. Unfortunately for aforementioned mind, learning about my city was just as boring as being in it.

It was founded as the state capital in 1821 by Indiana Supreme Court Judge Jerimiah Sullivan. It was founded here because the state legislature demanded that it be as close as possible to the center of the state. Great. In an incredible leap of intellect, he created the name of the city by combining Indiana (the name of the State) with Polis (which is Greek for city). Boy! Indiana City! Great. Yep.

Indianapolis appears to be most notorious for not quite being notable for anything. I'm so glad I took the time to find all this out.

That's really about it, the White River, which the developers had high hopes of being a central hub for transport and trade, proved to be too shallow and too sandy for anything but pavement in the 1990's. Admittedly, the canal is nice now, but it has become over run with rental pedi-carts.

Oh and Kurt Vonnegut is from here. Cool people call it Naptown.

from Wikipedia
and Indianapolis History

>>What would you like to do?

Your brain interprets the information. On your desk is a pen and a pad of paper. You write down a few notes to call upon later. It is dark out, but not later. It's Winter, but a peculiarly (less so each year) warm one.

>>What would you like to do?
>>Read on.

>>I found myself recently immersed in an alien but exciting world. A world of obsessive genius, it's own language, and imagination. I have found the world of Interactive Fiction. An admittedly limited world, but one of much interest. Since the beginning of computer programming, it has existed in some form or other, but it has achieved the bulk of it's accomplishments in the form of Inform.

From Wikipedia

Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Versions 1 through 5 came out relatively quickly between 1993 and 1996. Around 1996, Graham rewrote Inform from first principles to create version 6 (or "Inform 6")[1]. Over the following decade, version 6 has become reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Graham released version 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor ("Inform 7" or "Natural Inform"). As of this writing, Inform 7 is still in beta, but is usable for and has been used for the release of interactive fiction.

>>There is much possibility within the medium of IF, and it deserves consideration. For more information, see the following pages:

The Bible of IF
Zoom Manual
Indie Game Developers

Freaky Fungus

I generally try to do better than just transmission of other people's posts, but this is just too cool to pass up:


Deep in the Cameroonian rain forests of west-central Africa there lives a floor-dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. This large ant -— indeed, one of the very few capable of emitting a cry audible to the human ear -— survives by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain-forest floor.

On occasion, while thus foraging, one of these ants will become infected by inhaling the microscopic spore of a fungus from the genus Tomentella, millions of which rain down upon the forest floor from somewhere in the canopy above. Upon being inhaled, the spore lodges itself inside the ant’s tiny brain and immediately begins to grow, quickly fomenting bizarre behavioral changes in its ant host. The creature appears troubled and confused, and presently, for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins an arduous climb up the stalks of vines and ferns.

Driven on and on by the still-growing fungus, the ant finally achieves a seemingly prescribed height whereupon, utterly spent, it impales the plant with its mandibles and, thus affixed, waits to die. Ants that have met their doom in this fashion are quite a common sight in certain sections of the rain forest.

The fungus, for its part, lives on. It continues to consume the brain, moving on through the rest of the nervous system and, eventually, through all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spikelike protrusion erupts from out of what had once been the ant’s head. Growing to a length of about an inch and a half, the spike features a bright orange tip, heavy-laden with spores, which now begin to rain down onto the forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.

So if you go to the rain forest in Camaroon, don't look up and don't inhale.

From Boing Boing
And Mr. Wilson's Cabinet