No, this tea isn't for you. It's for me, and my breasts. Right breast, would you like some toast?
Good news on lagniappe today - and it happens to be both food-related and something to be thankful for. Am I on topic or what?
SKBubba and Jane Galt have had some good advice lately on why you should not give a puppy as a christmas gift. Good advice, except that, as former pet store employee, I want to make it known that pet store != filthy hovel of animal abuse. Pet stores are a very mixed bag.
But the reason I'm writing is this: There's a good article on anapsid.org (site of Melissa Kaplan, who can only be described as an iguana goddess) on why you should not give reptiles - or any animal for that matter - as a gift. Read it. There are, of course, a few corollaries to that: Don't give an animal to somebody who hasn't spent the last couple weeks reading up on it, and is still enthusiastic. Don't buy an animal yourself, either, unless you are prepared to deal with everything involved - commitments of time, money, and space.
I like the pet store gift certificate idea.
Oh, and one more thing: DO NOT EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER ACCEPT AN IGUANA AS A CARNIVAL PRIZE. EVER! My personal list of Most Evil People goes something like this:
Oh, those playmates are a source of never-ending fun. Or at least I think so (ahem ... it's 4 am right now. I may feel differently in the morning.) But look: playmates care about goldfish.
UPDATE: It's still funny. At 1:40pm, Eve said:
so funny!! it almost made me shoot soda out of my nose!
News flash: hot things in your lap can burn you. Yeah, tell it to Stella.
An overhaul of the broadcast indecency standard? For showing underwear on TV? Right, because women in lingerie are corrupting our children. Children across the country are now wearing underwear as a result of seeing this show...
Gory photos of the day: bird hits airplane.
UPDATE: the centerfolds are gone. Taken down. Copyright issues, apparently.
Somebody has seen fit to put a lot of old Playboy centerfolds on the net. Very interesting. Some of them aren't pretty, have horrible expressions on their faces, and are in unflattering poses with all the naughty bits covered. Why are they centerfolds? This one looks like Eric Idle with breasts. You'd think people who made a living exploiting beautiful naked women would at least have some skill at it ... oh well, at least they're good humorous-caption fodder. If I had more visitors, I'd have a full-blown contest. (hey - email me with your caption. If it's funny I'll post it.) Anyway, I just couldn't help myself:
No, this tea isn't for you. It's for me, and my breasts. Right breast, would you like some toast?
One-stop shopping: over here you can read both medpundit's and my own views on what von Hagens is doing. I still think I'm right, of course.
Von Hagens has been doing the art thing for a good while now. Medpundit alleges that the donors thought their bodies were to be displayed in science museums, not art museums. Funny, a news story I read a few days ago (and, of course, can't locate right now) was saying the opposite: that the donors thought they would be art but that most have ended up in medical museums and the like. I believe von Hagens has been doing both for quite a while - I first heard of his art (or "art" if you prefer) several years ago. Unfortunately, though, searches for his name are only turning up recent controversy in England and nothing more in-depth than that - and I don't have the time right now to sift through for anything too informative. Argh.
Here are some videos and photos of the iBOT in action, link stolen from Medpundit. On monday we will return to our regularly scheduled blogging where posts do *not* all link to medpundit.
Samantha died. They say it was old age. She was 26 feet long.
Somehow I forgot to blog this: what do you get when you take the technology behind the lame-ass Segway and put it to good use? a wheelchair that climbs up stairs and can stand up, putting its occupant at eye level, while balancing on two of its four back wheels. This is great. And expensive.
The German-pathologist - turned- performance-artist, Professor von Hagens, performed his public autopsy to a record crowd, and to a television audience, too. The British aren't sure yet whether they'll prosecute him for violating their Anatomy Acts. Whether or not it's illegal, it certainly breaches the bounds of medical ethics. Although the corpse was donated to the doctor for purposes of art by its original inhabitant when he was still alive, let's be honest about this. The audience was there purely as voyeurs. And the professor knows this. He's not doing this for "art" but for money. He is a circus perfomer, not an artist or an educator.
What, and Mr. Wizard was breaching scientific ethics, because his audience was composed of "voyeurs"? What audience isn't composed of voyeurs? Since when does allowing people to watch something constitute a breach of ethics? If charging to let people see something semi-educational is wrong, the museums of the world better issue their apologies real fast...
Why walk when you can pay $5000 for a set of wheels to stand on? because it's cutting edge technology! ... um, yeah. If anybody buys this I will (a) be surprised and (b) smack them.
Smallpox in NYC! It was 1947.
Mayor O'Dwyer said the wartime Civilian Defense Volunteer Organization will be recalled to duty ... at full strength, these volunteers, the air raid wardens, fire fighters, first-aid crews, communications men and women, numbered 175,000 persons. Their names were kept for such eventualities as this and they could easily be summoned. Police turning out on the 8 a.m. shift were to have fliers to be handed to the city's 13,000 doctors asking them to volunteer.
It took them a month to vaccinate 6 million people, with all that help and then some. Lines stretched for blocks. We want to vaccinate how many people in how much time?
I love the "most viewed photos" sidebar on my My Yahoo. I get to see all of the shocking and controversial pictures right when they become shocking and controversial. The funny thing is that yahoo doesn't link to the associated stories, so I saw the Michael Jackson collapsed-nose photo shortly after it came out. A few days later it was still in the most-viewed, and I searched google news for stories. A few days after that, medpundit and rangelmd found it, and commented.
And, of course, the baby-dangling photo. As soon as I saw that, I though "I can't wait to see what Tony Pierce will say to this!" ... alas, he posted the picture but did not have a conversation with it. Lileks commented, though. Also, some details here.
UPDATE: Rubber nose!
UPDATE: wow, you coudn't have asked for a better shot! [further update: the link has changed. it was a shot of michael jackson supposedly lookig through a magnifying glass, but it just happened to look like Michael holding a magnifying glass up to his nose to give us a better look.]
Wow, there are just too many good ones: here's the whole slideshow. Don't miss #78 or so, where the two lawyers, in actuality probably screaming at each other or something, look like they're about to kiss.
Well, the guy got to do his autopsy, and I'm glad. Hopefully he did a good job of it and made it interesting and educational - I know I'd feel gypped if I paid $19 to see a guy pull some goo out of a cadaver and say "now here's some ... uh ... maybe this is the spleen. Here, take a look." But, as I was saying, good for him. There should be more public autopsies.
Public autopsies became popular across Europe from the 16th century, after the Roman Catholic Church gave permission for surgeons to dissect bodies to help understand the miracle of creation.
It's one thing to be grossed out; it's another to be "offended" to the point of protesting. Come on. You wouldn't be seeing anything that's not already inside you!
More on hybrids. Note: when I say "fertile", that means that there have been instances of the hybrid being fertile. This does not guarantee that the hybrid will always be fertile. Some are, some aren't, go do your own research.
You know what? There are a whole fucking lot of hybrids. Go here and scroll down for some historical perspectives. Read The Beak of the Finch and learn about hybrid finches that do much better than their parents. Search google with the name of ANY ANIMAL YOU CAN THINK OF and the word "hybrid". As for plants ... plants are just freaky. Plants can do anything. Plants trade genes with bacteria ... I'm not even gonna go there, not least because google searches on the subject turn up very little biology, just lots and lots of GM food controversy.
Watch the Leonids tonight, becuase they're gonna be good ... well, ok, they're not. But the next 99 years are going to be crap, so enjoy the last mediocre one, while you still can.
After a long day at the lab, what could be better than dinner at a scientific restaurant?
Mules are sterile, right? Well, usually. The Romans had lots of equines (mules, donkeys, horses) and so saw enough mule births to know they happen - such a birth was seen as an omen. This report of a modern-day mule birth says there was a latin expression "Cum mula peperit", "When a mule foals" - corresponding roughly to "once in a blue moon" to denote something rare. The recent mule gave birth in Morocco; the owner didn't know the mule was pregnant. Apparently the baby looks donkeyish, but no official word on who the father is.
After a bit of time on Google, I now know that the state of knowledge of mule reproduction, on the internet, is absolutely awful. My best hits are coming from 12-year-olds answering questions from their life-science textbooks. I remember reading a great book on horses (especially in the cavalry) in ancient Rome, and I believe - though I cannot be sure - that this is the book. It talks about mule genetics and mule births, at least a little bit. As with many of the good books I remember finding in a library in the era before I discovered the internet, it is out of print. This is a shame.
Meanwhile, the BBC has stories on a zebra/horse from last year, and a goat/sheep from the year before that. Those of you familiar with snakes should look at this page: Dr. Frankenstein's - I think the blood python / ball python cross is beautiful. And yet I get laughed off the Kingsnake.com ball python forum for asking about a ball python / burmese python hybrid? Stranger things have happened, like the beefalo, which is quite fertile. Hey, at least a ball/burm cross is within one genus!
Anyway, today's lesson is: never say never.
One of my favorite out-of-print books that, I believe, is still sitting in the stacks of the Carnegie's Sci-Tech department is Of Scientists and Salamanders, which Amazon puts in the following three categories: Embryologists. Correspondence, reminiscences. Salamanders. Those of you on the West Coast, this book is by and about the guy who probably knows (knew?) more about those little orange-and-brown salamanders than anyone else.
UPDATE: Past tense is correct. He died in 1967.
Here's another fascinating hybrid: the beaver lamb / wombat, out of which one can apparently make coats...
I'm a qwerty girl, in a qwerty world ... ditched the dvorak keyboard minutes ago. I'm not sure how long I was using it - maybe six months, maybe a year. It was nice, though. I switched back after realizing, one day, that I had no good reason to be using it (did it improve my typing speed? No. Could it have? Sure, if I'd been willing to do a lot of typing drills. But I never was. Dvorak isn't made so much for typing commands and code, something I'm doing more now than I was before - what moron would design a keyboard where "ls" isn't the easiest to type? Further, what moron would type a keyboard where "ls" is actually hard and time-consuming to type? Somebody designing for typewriters, that's who. Someone named Dvorak.
I still believe that the world would be a better place if we all learned a keyboard like Dvorak from birth. However, in a world where I often have to type on public computers, it's easier to just go with the flow. That said, I'm trained, for when the revolution comes...
look here for some amazingly bad methodology, exposed: if 31% of 18-to-24-year-olds are in college, then they must account for 31% of alcohol-related deaths. Multiply and we get a big number. A big number! That means we must focus on college students, because they have so many more deaths from alcohol than everyone else!
You don't see this very often. Bad statistics, sure, but premises that contradict the conclusion, with no intervening facts?
Marc Canter, father of Director, tells us why it is despicable and wrong to turn off flash to avoid looking at flash ads. Personally, I don't do this, because there are a few worthwhile flashy things I like to look at - but I understand the sentiment.
2. By definition - those ads wouldn't be there if the NY Times or Yahoo could make money - other ways. I'd bet they'd LOVE to turn of fteh animating ads - if you were willing to PAY THEM for their content. So which will it be - keep the web alive as we know it today - or contribute to it's demise? I just don't get how all these starving progarmmers and scriptors could NOT get this very basic issue. We NEED models that can get us paid. Know of any others - that work? How many bloggers get paid to blog?
Sorry, I am not obligated to look at flash ads (or any ads), any more than I am required to sit transfixed during commercial breaks on TV, or open and read through my junk mail. But I'm getting mail service for free! Paying for the web is not my responsibility. It's an option - but if various content providers - and as a blogger I cont myself - want to provide content for free up front, and worry about getting paid later, that does not obligate me to participate in their schemes.
I don't know how much longer the web will stay free, but I think it should. Forever. And that's not just because I'm a well-read moocher, which I have been since childhood (public libraries, anyone?), but because the web just wouldn't be the web if it were pay-access only. The point, for me, is that the internet is there for anybody who can access it, and that it's unlimited in many ways: I can read as much as I want, from any site or number of sites I want, at any time and from any part of the world. You want something, it's online. What if every site was a pay site? I, poor student that I am, wouldn't begin to be able to afford the kind of reading I do daily.
The public library analogy is a good one: we need a modern day Andrew Carnegie to feel bad about his/her ill-gotten gains and decide to spend them on stores of information for the public benefit ... I nominate Bill Gates, who should immediately start sending out checks to the likes of me.
This reminds me of the only money I've ever made on the web: back when amazon affiliate stores were all the rage, I scraped together a few books and posted amazon links on the newt site. Amazon promised comission from every book I sold. Commissions were low and sales were few, and I'd earn a few pennies every couple of months - but, of course, they wait until your total earnings hit a certain dollar amount before they can be moved to cut a check. Last summer I got a little envelope in the mail from Amazon. What could they possibly be sending me? Ah ... $25. My earnings for the past five-plus years.
I bought a leather skirt with the money. It will be years before I see another one of those checks - maybe then, if the Wilson's outlet is still around, I'll buy the matching halter top.
This is a nice picture. I had never heard of wearing velvet smocks to dissect animals (that *is* what she's about to do, right?), but hey, whatever floats her boat.
Smallpox: prepared, my ass.
So I was reading Cecil's latest Straight Dope column, on delayed twin births, where the first twin is born prematurely and then the uterus says "Hey! Wait! I didn't mean to! Give that back!" - can't give it back, of course, but then the uterus closes back up and decides to wait another month or so before finishing with twin #2. And it reminded me of a story told by a genetic counselor who gave a lecture at my high school. He did this every year, and all us cool biology geeks would go and learn about genetic disorders and a variety of somewhat-related topics.
He told a story about a hospital in his small home town, where a woman came to deliver her twins. So, she delivered the first one, a healthy happy baby whatever, and everyone was so glad to see it. And then they waited for #2 ... and waited. Somebody thought to go exploring inside the uterus (No, I don't know how, and I'm not sure I want to know) - it was empty. The uterus was empty but Mom clearly had another baby in there. This anecdote was to demonstrate to us the anatomy of the ovaries: they're not, strictly speaking, attached to the fallopian tubes. When an egg is released, it has to find its way into the fallopian tube. This is set up to be very easy for the dumb little egg, but sometimes it gets lost. And sometimes it manages to get fertilized while lost, or maybe before getting lost. And so this woman had a baby that had successfully implanted into the wall of the uterus but - you saw this coming - on the *outside*. C-section for her! Both babies were perfectly healthy, IIRC.
So Cecil went on: although the first baby often doesn't make it, being so premature (this, of course, depends on exactly how premature, and on how long ago we're talking about. Lots of historical cases here), he mentioned a case from 1952/53 where a set of twins was born two months apart, but both full term. How can this be? Easy. All you need is a double uterus.
A double what, you say? A double uterus, I respond. You deaf or something? Uterus didelphys is what it's called, and it looks like this. The caption for that is "bifid uterus, gross".
Speaking of the Straight Dope, I've been reading a Straight Dope book published in 1998. I hadn't realized how long ago 1998 was. The book invites you to visit their "AOL or Web" site. This was understandable back when AOL didn't include the Web, and I'd always wondered why, in a post-(what? 1995-ish?) world, anybody bothered to tell you about their AOL-only site. Cecil makes this clear or, rather, his editor does: "If you have to choose one site over the other, pick AOL. We say this because we make money on AOL. Cecil may be the world's smartest human, but even he hasn't figured out how to make a buck on the Web."
For some reason, yesterday the lawn outside my building was, briefly, blanketed with crows. Crows as far as the eye can see. When I went to get my camera, they flew away. See photo.
That was far better than the last afternoon I had birds outside my window: they were geese. I was trying to take a nap, and could hear nothing but the sounds of a few hundred geese (the campus's resident flock) and a jackhammer. When workers immediately below my window started cutting pipes with a power saw, I knew it was all over.
Another reason to stay away from New Mexico. Update: medpundit has details and background information. Medpundit also has a column up on gender bias in medicine.
Could it be - an english professor with multiple neurons? I hadn't thought it was possible...
Promiscuous female lizards sort X from Y sperm. "It would be like a human female who marries a short, dumpy rich guy and then has an affair with a muscular 20-year-old to have a handsome son who grows up in a mansion and goes to the best schools."
How can we raise money to help bombing victims? I know! We'll raffle off a free divorce!
In other news, guy in modern dorky duck costume threatens guy in old-fashioned dorky duck costume.
Bio-IT World - which I somehow ended up subscribing to - has a nice, if short, article on how declaring 'war' on vague phenomena doesn't help anybody. [UPDATE: link works now]
Tom Tomorrow has some thoughts on the election here and here that are worth reading. I can't seem to find an election results summary - an accurate one, I mean, that has been updated since the polls closed - but what I did see indicated that the senate is now republican by a margin of one (1) seat (or three?) and the house by, what, 25? Meaningful, I know, but it's not the landslide some are claiming. Still, the democrats only have two years to get it together and prevent george bush from happening again.
