Seven Days to Decemberists

Counting down to next Tuesday, when mi hermano and I see The Decemberists at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston. (We saw them previously back in 2006.)

Here is a 2007 performance of "Oceanside," the lead track from their debut EP 5 Songs (2003).

Meet the Beetles

In Santa Fe the other week, I happened to meet a Ph.D. candidate who was working at the NIH, but who also got a gig writing copy for the Smithsonian’s Web site. She was in my group, and she was workshopping an article on the Smithsonian Institution’s Osteo Prep Lab about a hitherto unknown (to me anyway) “behind the scenes” activity at many natural history museums: cleaning the skeletons of large animals. That is, removing the flesh and connective tissue.

I was reminded of this topic today as I was investigating the topic of “what do they do with dead zoo animals?” (My initial response was, “Two words: snack bar,” but further digging happily disproved this.) One possible destination for zoo animals that have joined the choir invisible and are pushing up the daisies (etc. etc.) is being sent to places like the Osteo Prep Lab.

Which then brings me back to my original subject: how do they remove the flesh from large animals to study or display bones, skulls, or entire skeletons? Surprisingly, they do not use chemicals or “mechanical” means (which are best left to an overactive imagination). In fact, they use bugs.

Dermestid beetles are a family (Dermestidae) of about 500–700 species in the order Coleoptera. (This order comprises beetles, essentially, of which there are about 350,000 known species; indeed, beetles represent 40% of all known insect species and as much as one-fourth of all the species on earth! The great naturalist J.B. S. Haldane was once asked by a cleric what he might infer about the Creator and is supposed to have responded, “an inordinate fondness for beetles.” The quote is perhaps apocryphal, but no less true.)

Anyway, dermestid beetles are also variously known as skin beetles, larder beetle, hide or leather beetles, carpet beetles, and khapra beetles (but not “silver beatles” with an “a”). Some are called “bow beetles” as they make their homes in violin cases and feast on the hair used to make violin bows, which would make Isaac very stern indeed.

Given so many dermestid species, it’s not surprising that they have a wide range of habits, but most are scavengers, and various genera have carved out their own nutritional niche. Some eat plants, some animal hair, others feathers, and still others eat other insects such as wasps.

One particular genus—the Dermestes—are carrion eaters. That is, they eat dead animal flesh (well, so do we, but “carrion” specifically refers to dead and putrefying flesh; there are a couple of restaurants I could pick on here, but I shan’t). This gives them two useful purposes for us humans.

I have not seen CSI in many years, but I would be very surprised if they had never done at least one episode about Demestes maculatus—hide beetles—which are one of a variety of insects that play a role in the field of forensic entomology. That is, medical examiners can gauge the time of death by examining how much of a dead body has been munched by dermestids. Dermestids have been found to “dine out” about 5–11 days after death (a pretty wide range, forensically speaking, but scientists are working to refine that range; interestingly, different species seem to arrive on the scene first, probably senior bugs after the “early bird special”).

Getting back to my original point, dermestids are also used by many natural history museums to clean animal skeletons.

This is not new; the process actually dates from 1922, and the earliest published description of its techniques dates from 1933 (Raymond E. Hall and Ward C. Russell, “Dermestid Beetles as an Aid in Cleaning Bones,” Journal of Mammalogy, Vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 372–374, 1933). (Ward Russell is said to be the “father of dermestid beetle bone cleaning.” I’m guessing he took many meals alone.) A 1974 article from Curator sums up some of the refinements to the technique.

A page on the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology’s Web site written by Stephen Hinshaw sums up the current state of the art. Whilst some of it gets a tad judgmental (“do not remove the brain unless you are an incredible pansy” or “the fish people don’t care to have their specimens degreased. They say that is part of the fishy ambiance that they like in their work. On the other hand the bird division has an almost fetish desire to degrease their specimens”) it is a very good detailed look at the topic.

Essentially, these labs start a healthy dermestid beetle colony and when it’s up and running, add fresh specimens (i.e., full-fleshed bones) for cleaning. The bugs eat the flesh, lay their eggs in the decomposing flesh, and the young’uns get in on the feast. After a while, significant levels of “frass” build up and must be removed. (Frass is insect excrement. If you’ve ever seen the movie Sideways, you may recall that there was a big celebrity winery called Frass Canyon. The insult was intentional.)

Once the flesh is gone (this was the original opening line of the Mamas and the Papas’ hit “California Dreamin’”: “All the flesh is gone, and the bones are clean...”) , you wash the resulting bones, make sure there aren’t any little critters left on (or in) them, and they’re ready to be sent to other departments in the museum.

The caveats involved with working with dermestids are fairly obvious. First, you have to be careful not to let them escape or they will get into other parts of the museum and eat things you don’t want them to eat. (We all have relatives like this.) One solution involves keeping the temperature below about 80°, since Dermestes maculatus can’t fly at those lower temperatures, which helps matters greatly. Building a bug box (or “dermestarium”) that is sufficiently secure is one big challenge of creating a colony. The bugs also achieve their best results on larger specimens; creatures like fish or small mammals can be damaged during the eating process and “disarticulated.”

I also have it on good authority that some dermestid labs smell rather awful. It’s hard to see why; after all, they only involve large chunks of decaying flesh that are being eaten by bugs. It’s hard to see how that would have any unusual odors. At the same time, dermestid larvae have tiny hairs that can go airborne and cause problems for people with respiratory problems or allergies.

It probably goes without saying that there are other creatures used to clean skeletons, but dermestids are useful because they are thorough, easy to keep, and don’t damage the bone they are cleaning. And it’s more environmentally sound than using chemicals.

So anyway, the next time you are at a natural history museum looking at an elephant skeleton, just remember all the little people that went into its preparation. And then be sure to skip the snack bar.

The Syllable Heard Round the World?

Via Boing Boing, LA Weekly has a review of a 15-minute film by video artist Daniel Martinico which is nothing more than an endless loop of the buildup to Shatner yelling "Khaan!!" in Star Trek II: The Wrath of... umm, sorry, I seem to have forgotten.

A two-minute excerpt fails to capture the majesty of the full-length version, it is said. I'll take their word for it. It might make a good opening short for the new Star Trek movie.

...in the Belfry

I have mixed feelings about bats. I mean, I like the idea of bats, if not their actual presence anywhere near me. (Then again, I rather like the Sun, but I can't say as I would want it in my kitchen, as I would imagine that it would be more of a fire hazard than an un-unplugged toaster.) Sure, they eat mosquitoes in vast quantities; this article by bat expert and Bat Conservation International founder Merlin Tuttle says that

Individuals of some bat species can capture from 500 to 1,000 mosquitoes in a single hour and large colonies can consume enormous quantities. For example, a Florida colony of 30,000 southeastern bats (Myotis austroriparius) was estimated to consume 50 tons (45 t) of insects annually, including over 15 tons (13.5 t) of mosquitoes, and from 77.4% to 84.6% of little brown bats (M. lucifugus) living in the northern U.S. and Canada eat mosquitoes. Nursing mothers of these species eat up to their body weight in insects nightly.

But then maybe it's a question of context. Waking up at 3 a.m. to find a bat flapping around the room does not do much to endear them to me. It was a very creepy moment. Awakened by an odd noise, I turned on the light, and there it was. My resulting scream actually approximated the frequency of the bat's echolocation, and it fled into the living room. What was interesting was that it was a very clumsy bat; it kept blundering into the walls and closet door.

Locked in the "panic room" until dawn, I started thinking... Bats eat mosquitoes of course, and mosquitoes in turn suck human blood. But it had been a Thursday night in early summer. What if the mosquitoes had been feasting on the high-blood-alcohol-level partiers on Caroline Street? Those mosquitoes could very well have then been munched by the bat. Ergo, could a bat get "drunk"?

Anyway, bats were in my own belfry as I was reading a post on Cocktail Party Physics about the mammals. I decided to trot on over to Wikipedia and see if there were any anwers to my question.

Did you know...

• There are about 1,100 bat species worldwide, accounting for about 20% of all mammal species?

• That the largest bat is the giant golden-crowned flying fox which has a wing span of 4 ft 11 in and weighs approximately 3 lb? I'm positive that this was the one that was in my apartment, but I may be mistaken...I'd need to see a police line up.

• That there are two suborders of bats--megabats (oh, come on, that sounds like something Douglas Adams made up) and microbats? The latter use echolocation, while the former do not.

• That one species of bat has the longest tongue of any mammal relative to its body size--perhaps known colloquially as the "Gene Simmons bat"?

Come to think if it, I think I'd much rather have a bat than Gene Simmons flying around my apartment.

What is one to do if one does indeed have a bat in one's home? Despite my aversion to the critters, I'd rather not kill it. The first bat--the 3 a.m.one--somehow got out of its own accord; the next morning, after the sun came up, the landlord and I did a thorough search and could find no sign of it. Needless to say, when I came home the following evening, I had left a broom outside the front door, and burst into the house and made a search of the place like Mulder or Scully, kicking in doors, pirouetting and twisting around. It was quite a sight; one wonders what the neighbors thought. The second bat--some months later, and I had been awake for this one--had a distinctive flight path and could be disposed of simply by opening the door and letting him/her fly out.

Anyway, instructions on what to do in the case of batness can be found here.

And, finally, for your amusement, Cocktail Party Physics had a link to a video of a vampire bat on a treadmill. This makes sense. With today's purported obesity epidemic and everyone's cholesterol level elevated, even Dracula needs to join a gym.

Act of Cod

Something's fishy in the state of Iceland:

The Atlantic cod has, for many centuries, sustained major fisheries on both sides of the Atlantic. However, the North American fisheries have now largely collapsed. A new paper in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE from scientists at the University of Iceland and Marine Research Institute in Reykjavik provides insights into possible mechanisms of the collapse of fisheries, due to fisheries-induced evolution.

Cod fishing is of highest intensity in shallow water in Iceland and it selects against genotypes of cod adapted to shallow water. The PLoS ONE paper reports a significant difference in Darwinian fitness (relative survival rate) between shallow-water and deep-water adapted cod. The shallow-water fish have only 8% of the fitness of deep-water fish. This difference can lead to rapid elimination of shallow-water fish in only a few generations with drastic effects on the population and the fishery.

Funny, everyone freaked out over the suggestion that codfishing be restricted to allow fish stocks to replenish themselves, fearing job losses. And now that there are so few cod left...the industry has collapsed and there were many job losses. Good one.

This same situation is playing out with other fish, especially bluefin tuna, as detailed in Richard Ellis' excellent 2008 book Tuna: A Love Story.

Ore Ida

Speaking of science and science journalist, I just came across this Q&A in New Scientist about last week's fossil find. That is:

The publication last week of a paper describing Darwinius masillae, a new fossil primate also known as "Ida", generated massive hype for its claim that the fossil represents an early haplorhine – the "dry nosed" primates that include old world monkeys and apes, including humans.

Other scientists dispute the claim, arguing that the fossil may simply be an early type of lemur and not the "missing link" between the haplorhines and the "wet nosed" primates, the strepsirrhines, such as lemurs and lorises.

A little clarification from the "Father of Ida" and, it bears mentioning, father of the media hype:

The money spent on Ida – the starting price was $1 million – was that spent purely on the fact that it was an exceptionally preserved primate, or did it have something to do with its potential evolutionary relationship to humans?

No. We started off thinking it was the ancestor of all lemurs.

It may still turn out to be a lemur. Do you still have an open mind about that?

Of course, this is science. The discussions will go for a long time. And if other people's arguments are better than what we present here or what we are going to do in the next two papers, we will accept it, no problem.

I happen to have befriended an evolutionary biologist last week in Santa Fe named Diane Kelly who was a tad blasé about the news (“gorgeous specimen introduced with excessive hype” was the term she uses). She blogged about it at her "Science Made Cool" blog which, like my long-winded post below, also talked about some of the issues we discussed last week.

If you’ve somehow missed the media circus surrounding the fossil, its story can pretty much be summed up by “gorgeous specimen introduced with excessive hype.” ...[W]hen Jorn Hurum (University of Oslo) rediscovered the fossil (it had been in a private collection), he didn’t just describe it, he went looking for a filmmaker to build a media event around it. So when the description of Darwinius masillae appeared in PloS Science on May 19th, it was accompanied by a press conference, a TV documentary, a companion book and website, and a whole raft of misrepresentation about its scientific importance. It may be an effective way to get a lot of quick public attention, but it doesn’t help more run-of-the-mill relations between scientists and writers one bit.

And I'll end by cryptically pointing out that "Ida" doesn't look anything like Nancy Walker.

Look What We Can Do

My father has occasionally told this story:

On July 20, 1969, he and my mother were watching the Moon landing. As the first transmissions from another world came back to Earth, my mother is reported to have remarked, “The picture is terrible.” My father looked at her and said, “Yes, but it’s coming from the Moon.” (Yes, I was rised by Burns and Allen.) I was apparently also watching but, only having been just over a month shy of my second birthday, I can’t say I have any recollection of this, although I certainly wish I did.

Look what we can do.

Whilst I may be out of the will for sharing that story, I was in a similar circumstance just last week.

At the Science Writing Workshop at the Ghost Ranch Santa Fe, one of the educational sessions was co-presented by a writer who was physically present, and another who was videoconferenced in via Skype, and whom we could all see on the main screen at the front of the room. The co-presentation worked pretty well except that, every 8–10 minutes or so, the Skype connection would be lost (gee, that never happens), and we would have to interrupt the presentation to call her back. It was a tad frustrating, but, as New York Times science writer George Johnson, who was sitting behind me, remarked, “That this works at all is pretty amazing.” And he was right; we often get so wrapped up in what are essentially new technologies that we expect them to work flawlessly—when only a few years earlier, it was scarcely possible that they worked at all. Sure, videoconferencing is nothing really new, but here it was taking place on an everyday computer with free software and not physically connected to anything except a projector (and wouldn’t it be great if those could be wireless).

Skype kept getting disconnected because the Ghost Ranch’s WiFi was not the most robust in the world; I recall getting frustrated with its slowness myself—forgetting that as recently as five years ago I was on the road struggling with dial-up using hotel phone lines and the 56K modem in my Apple iBook. I cursed it at the time—also forgetting that 15 years before that if I had suggested accessing the Internet from a hotel room it would have been as if I had suggested beaming up to the Starship Enterprise.

The “evolution and reliance on technology” was just one of the many recurring mealtime topics we talked about over the course of the week.

The Science Writing Workshop was attended by about 40 people, predominantly professional scientists (neuroscience and evolutionary biology were heavily represented), with a few professional writers, as well. (By my estimates, it was about 75% scientists, 25% writers.) We all dined together either in the Ghost Ranch’s dining room, or we assembled posses to go out and forage for food in downtown Santa Fe. (I personally will have a hard time looking at Southwest cuisine for a while.) Mealtime conversation was intensely intellectually stimulating, and I learned a great deal—and was actually able to hold my own much better than I thought I would.

Another recurring topic was the often contentious relationship between scientists and science journalists. That is, while there is a symbiotic relationship between the two, each side has its own agenda and those agendas often work at cross-purposes. Scientists have a responsibility to the facts, to the data they have collected, and the results of their studies, while journalists have a responsibility to their editors, publishers, and readers, and thus are often looking for “a good story” and gravitate toward the more sensational, even if the results of a given study don’t lend themselves to the kind of extrapolation that makes for a compelling story.

This is not unique to science writing, of course.

Many of the scientists present admitted they avoid talking to the press for fear of being misquoted or misrepresented. It’s a fair point, but I don’t think avoidance is the best strategy. Perhaps sound beatings would be a better approach.

A good example of this inadvertently presented itself in the project we had to complete for the workshop: On Tuesday, we went up to the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) (an interdisciplinary think tank in the hills above the city), listened to several scientific presentations, and then had to write and workshop a story about some aspect of one of them. (I’ll post my own as soon as I can find it...it’s on the other computer somewhere...)

The first presentation was by Caroline Buckee, a postdoctoral fellow at SFI who was researching malaria transmission, and she spoke at length about the microorganism that causes malaria. One of the reasons that malaria is such a problem, and has evolved resistance to drugs to treat it, is that it genetically recombines “like crazy” (a technical term). (After workshopping about a half dozen stories about malaria, I think I know all this by heart!) At one point, Dr. Buckee mentioned in passing—and I want to stress, in passing—that because the genetic structure of malaria is a moving target, the likelihood that there will be a vaccine against the disease is very slim.

During the Q&A, one of the audience members seized on that one passing statement and tried to get her to say one way or another: will there ever be a vaccine for malaria? It was obvious that she was not comfortable making a definitive statement either way; there is still so much that is unknown and who knows what discoveries await us? But, not having much experience with the press (or even the wannabe press that we were) she eventually was cornered into saying that, no, there probably won’t ever be a malaria vaccine. And yet, if a story were written with that as its primary thrust (and there were several), anyone who had been in the room would know that it was not entirely representative of the talk.

And we wonder why the public gets frustrated when one study seems to contradict an earlier one.

Kariena Dill, an Albuquerque-based writer who was in my group, expanded on this theme with a more egregious example involving the sequencing of the woolly mammoth genome. A summary of the research appeared in Nature magazine, and it bears mentioning that, according to the paper:

A major reason for sequencing the woolly mammoth is to identify functionally important amino-acid differences between mammoth and elephant.

That’s probably not the sexiest application in the world. Wouldn’t something like Jurassic Park be far cooler? And, sure enough, an editorial appeared in the same issue of Nature (sorry, I don’t have a link) suggesting that scientists were only a few million dollars away from actually cloning a woolly mammoth and bringing it back from extinction. Nowhere in the original study was this even suggested—but guess which angle was picked up by the rest of the science media?

Nicholas Wade’s lede in the Science Times was:

Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million.

No, the scientists were not talking about it at all. Science journalists were. Nowhere in the story does any scientist suggest that the completely sequenced mammoth genome would be used to clone an actual mammoth, though one does appear to have been coaxed into speculating about the idea.

It probably sold a few papers (I mean, come on, woolly mammoths capture the human imagination like nothing else), but is it an accurate representation of the work? And where would we put a herd of mammoths, anyway? Because one would get rather lonely, I should think. Could we effectively reconstruct their ecosystem which, after all, may also be extinct? And, perhaps most importantly, what would mammoth meat taste like, and what wine would go best with it? (I am the sole proponent of the field of Gustatory Taxonomy, or classifying animals and plants according to how they taste.)

Joking aside, is there a solution to this contentious reporter-reported relationship? Part of it could involve scientists getting better training in talking to the press, preparing a list of talking points and religiously sticking to them the way politicians do. Another would be a greater understanding of science on the part of people who cover science and a curbing of the desire to immediately go for the lurid and sensational (good luck with that).

But then it also comes down to the public. Science writing, to my mind, should educate the public, not just about the details of any given topic, but about science in general. And, by the same token, the public should look to science writing to be educated about a topic, rather than entertained as if it were a Michael Crichton novel. (Well, okay, bad example...)

In much science writing, there is a tendency to, as one of my lunch tablemates put it, present science “as a product rather than a process.” Those studies that seemingly contradict earlier studies are good fodder for stand-up comedians, sure, but the people who throw up their hands in frustration over this fail to recognize that science is a process. New data arise that shed new light on, clarify, or yes, even contradict and disprove earlier data.

Rather than see that as science’s failing, we should recognize it as science’s greatest strength. It’s what science is supposed to do. It’s about understanding nature and the universe through empirical observations and experiments; it’s not about crafting a written-in-stone law that explains everything, or at least not right off the bat. (It’s nice when that can happen, though.) Even the well-established laws of physics or chemistry or biology that everyone today accepts were only arrived at after many attempts, missteps, errors, and contradictions. Unfortunately, this “changing nature of reality” is one reason why many people turn exclusively to religion; they like the idea of immutable laws that are written in stone and never change or get contradicted. (And for those who do contradict them, there is excommunication or execution.) However, reality doesn’t work this way.

I started reading George Johnson’s excellent book The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments on the flight home and nowhere else is this better illustrated: the fundamental scientific laws and principles we now take for granted were only arrived at after much thought, observation, and experiment. There were many missteps along the way, and the famous names from the history of science—Newton, Galileo, Lavoisier, etc.—got all the credit, but there were many who came before them.

In this day and age, it’s hard to convey to people why learning about science is important. I would make the following cases:

Understanding science is increasingly necessary to secure a decent job in an increasingly high-tech job market. Research and development of new technologies is how we achieve economic growth, and how we get better jobs. Understanding science is a major part of that. Even if you are not in actual R&D, knowing basic science is invaluable. A friend of mine is a research scientist for a company that makes high-tech products, and very often sales and marketing ask them to develop products that violate basic laws of physics.

Understanding science (and math) is also important for understanding many of the political, social, and medical issues facing the world today (and tomorrow). Things like climate change, stem-cell research, and many other “controversial” topics can only be effectively discussed and understood with a strong scientific underpinning.

But the most important reason I would give for learning about science is the thrill of discovery. When it comes right down to it, as a species, we’re explorers. We came out of the cave, we looked up at the sky or down into the ocean and started asking questions and seeking answers. We built better and better tools to get at those answers; we launched probes into space; we have robots wandering around on Mars and flying through the rings of Saturn. What enriches the human spirit more than the excitement of landing on another world, or exploring the bottom of the ocean, or....well, name it? After all, there has to be more than life than just buying and selling stuff.

I would love to have experienced the thrill that Americans had on that July day nearly 40 years ago—lousy picture and all—when Neil Armstrong mentioned the “giant leap for mankind,” saying, essentially, “look what we can do.”

Driven to Distraction

I just saw this sign at the Price Chopper Plaza on Route 50. Great idea! Who woudn't be thrilled and excited to receive a gift certificate for defensive driving classes? "Happy Birthday! I think your driving sucks!" I'd be lucky if I left the party without wearing the cake.
Okay, I can actually sort of see the point, but I thought it amusing nonetheless...

Self-Absorption

The next time someone talks about so-called "frivolous lawsuits," I do hope this takes top honors as the most ridiculous waste of the legal system in the history of humanity. I swear this sounds like an Onion story:

Brawny and Bounty in Legal Squabble Over Paper-Towel Patterns

Those little quilts on paper towels and toilet paper are turning out to be a very big deal in federal courts.

Procter & Gamble Co. filed suit May 8 against Georgia-Pacific in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati alleging bow-tie patterns in new-and-improved Brawny paper towels infringe the trademark bow-tie shapes in the quilts of P&G's Bounty Extra Soft.

Brawny's "Great New Look" is "an obvious attempt to trade on the goodwill, reputation and commercial success achieved by Bounty Extra Soft," P&G says in its lawsuit.

Methinks P&G is a tad too "self-absorbed," so to speak. Who the heck pays that close attention to the patterns on paper towels?! I think whatever judge can preside over this case without bursting into hysterics should be the next Supreme Court justice.

Crash of Moons

Over at Movie Mis-Treatments, Rocky Jones, Winky, the senior-moment-personified Professor Newton, and the whole Scooby gang are back in 1954's Crash of Moons.

The Rocky Jones show was really low-budget, the writing is pretty lame, and the acting on a community theater level, but it has a certain charm and I confess I do kind of like these movies. I guess it would fall into that category of “quaint science fiction,” for want of a better term.

Crash of Moons has also been variously titled The Crash of Moons, Crash of the Moons, The Crash of the Moons, The Crash the of Moons, The Crash the of the Moons, The the the the Crash of the the the Moons the, and The The of the The. I think that covers all the bases. The.

As an added bonus (if you want to call it that), a pre-Hogan's Heroes John Banner guest stars as the improbably affable ruler of a doomed moon.

Splendid Isolation

The late, great Warren Zevon, from 1989. Transverse City remains my favorite Zevon record.

Seemed vaguely appropriate, if only for the opening lines.

Act of God

I'm not even remotely superstitious or religious, but even I find it rather unnerving to get on a flight from which a priest has been bumped. Then we flew through a thunderstorm... Fortunately, there's no such thing as divine retribution!

Santa Fe

“I want to live all alone in the desert, I want to be like Georgia O’Keeffe.” —Warren Zevon

I love the American Southwest, but the fact that flying into Albuquerque, NM, from the east involves nearly smashing into the side of a mountain does take a bit of the appeal out of it. Especially since by then the “liquid courage” I downed during my two-hour layover in Atlanta had worn off. (Yes, Albany to Atlanta to Albuquerque. This trip is brought to you by the letter “A.”)

And then the shuttle van trip to Santa Fe—about 57 miles, as the crow flies (or, as we say in Saratoga, as the horse flies)—is another of “what the heck was I thinking?” on top of the flight. Whenever I take airport shuttles, I am always—always—the last to be dropped off. So in this case about nine people were stacked like cordwood in a van whose air conditioning system left much to be desired.

But all that snark and crankiness evaporated by the time I got to Santa Fe. My tendency to be dropped off last actually worked in my favor, because I got a very nice driving tour of Santa Fe and learned, if nothing else, that Santa Fe is best traversed either on foot or in a very small car. Indeed, our van driver backed into a pickup truck while attempting to get out of a parking lot.

Eventually, I arrived at the Ghost Ranch Santa Fe for the 14th Annual Science Writers Conference, and immediately learned that Santa Fe was more than 5,000 feet (actually 6,996 feet) above sea level, which I did not know. The ranch literature I found in my room had all sorts of warnings about altitude sickness. As usual, I treated the symptom list as a “to do” list, just like whenever I am forced by my doctor to take prescription medications, the list of side effects is basically a “to do” list.

So after decompressing for a bit, I decided to go out and prowl for the couple hours before the event’s reception.

Santa Fe was founded in 1610 by Spanish territorial governor Don Pedro de Peralta (ergo Paseo de Peralta is a main road) and was officially designated “Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asis” (or “Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi”). So “Santa Fe” actually means “holy faith.” The city was built to be the capital of Spain’s northernmost territory in the New World, but the Pueblo Rebellion shook things up a bit, although the city was recaptured in 1692 by Don Diego de Vargas. Its claim to fame was primarily as a trading center. Los Alamos is nearby and in the 1940s, the influx of scientists brought a renewed economic vitality to the town. (I came across a First National Bank of Los Alamos. I’m guessing you do not want to get an overdraft from them.)

The city itself is the last thing I was expecting from a major city, especially one that is a state capital. (Santa Fe became the capital of the New Mexico Territory in 1851; New Mexico became a state in 1910.) The architecture is best described as “all adobe all the time.’’ In fact, the entire city is very beige. Indeed, the town looks very much as it would have in the nineteenth century. I half expect to see James West come flying out of an upper window or crash through a staircase.
There is one structure that is your standard issue adobe building with what look like wooden bars on the glassless windows. It looks like a jail circa. 1870 but is actually the parking garage for the La Fonda Hotel.
The center of town is the Plaza, a green square surrounded by—again—adobe buildings, housing predominantly art galleries and shops selling turquoise jewelry and other knickknacks with a (surprise) Southwest theme.
I don’t think I have seen this many art galleries in one place...well, ever. I had no idea that this much art could be physically produced. It’s rather astounding. Art is also interwoven throughout much of the town itself, and behind the Post Office is one particularly interesting installation--a school of fish heads emerging from the gravel. It is very cool.
I’m not sure exactly how Santa Fe became an artists’ refuge, but I suspect Georgia O’Keeffe had a lot to do with it. (Her original “Ghost Ranch” is located just outside Santa Fe in Abiquiu, a town that was invaded in 1956 by vowels and, in a standoff that lasted several days, all the consonants were purged save for two hostages.)

The Plaza also has a variety of restaurants. On Tuesday, several of us went to the Plaza Cafe which is an intriguing mix of Mexican and Greek cuisine. It was quite good. I shared an immense dessert with a squid researcher from Monterey and we could not finish it. Over the course of the week, various search parties brought back stories of excellent restaurants (and pubs). Thursday night, there was a mass dinner at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, which had excellent food and even better frozen margaritas. Happily, I didn’t see any chain restaurants in town. Or even any chain art galleries.

There are several churches and a cathedral. (As I recall from my visit to Canterbury Cathedral, a cathedral is a church that contains a cathedra, or the chair that the archbishop sits in.) Santa Fe is home to the grand, imposing St. Francis Cathedral, which was built in the 19th century by French priest Jean Baptiste Lamy. His raison d’etre was to formally separate New Mexico’s Catholics from Mexico, but he was a bit taken aback by the locals’ unusual worship habits—and the humble dirt-floor church they had. His attempts at changing things went over like a you-know-what in church. But he did decide that a large, impressive Romanesque cathedral was what was needed. Ergo, St. Francis’.

It should be noted that St. Francis Cathedral houses not only the seat for the archbishop (or whatever authority they have down here), but also the seat—or, more importantly, the parking space—for the Cathedral’s Gift Shop Manager, who is actually appointed by papal decree.
There are a number of St. Francis statues in town, but my favorite is one just off the Plaza where it looks like St. Francis is trying to answer that age-old philosophical question, “how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” His theological arguments can be found in his tract De Rodentia.
There is also a statue to that other religious figure, R2D2—actually a painted mailbox. I wonder how many people insert letters reading “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope”? But then, perhaps it’s just me.
Santa Fe also is home to the oldest church structure in the U.S., San Miguel Chapel, built circa 1610, although partially destroyed (and subsequently rebuilt) during the Pueblo Rebellion.
The weeklong Science Writers Workshop itself was one of the most enjoyable weeks I think I have ever spent, hanging out with about 40 scientists and science writers having incredible conversations. More about that at another time.

A Change is Better Than a Rest

Heading out to Santa Fe on Monday not to open a restaurant, but rather to attend the 14th annual Science Writing Workshop.

Flying out first thing in the morning to the Albuquerque "Sunport." Okay. I guess I'll have to remember to take that first left at Albuquerque.

As always, a layover in Atlanta.

And, of course, it's just a formality...

Partially Filled Glasses

This morning, I and two other regional Toastmasters were judges for a speech contest conducted by the North Atlantic District of Optimist International. I confess, I had never heard of Optimist International before, but it turns out that they are a service organization like Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions, with local clubs doing all sorts of community-oriented activities, a lot of it having to do with helping kids raise money for school, giving out scholarships, etc. The folks we met--who are based in Syracuse--are about as dedicated to their clubs and organization as we Toastmasters are, and they are a great bunch of people.

The speech contest was for kids (ages 10-15, or somewhere thereabouts) from upstate New York and New England. They were required to give a 4–5-minute speech on "What optimism means to me..." and, man, some of these kids could easily go up against any seasoned Toastmaster (well, maybe in a couple of years, at any rate). My joke going into the event was, if I have to speak on that topic, I'll be chased from the building and/or have my car set on fire. But they all had a diverse set of perspectives on the topic. Some of thsoe speeches were extremely well-written.

One common "motif" in many of the speeches was the old chestnut "is the glass half-full or half-empty?" My own response tends to be a function of how the water level got to where it is--that is, which direction was the water traveling when it got to the current level? If the glass had been completely full, and was then emptied to the halfway mark, then it's half-empty. If the glass was in fact only filled up to the halfway mark, then it's half-full. If I am presented with a glass utilizing of 50% of its capacity, I guess I can't say either way without knowing more about the history of the glass and water. But then, maybe I'm overanalyzing this a bit too much. It's probably about at this point that my car would be set alight...

At any rate, it was a very fun event, and I did realize that the event organizers have one problem we typically don't have to deal with when organizing Toastmasters contests: parents who freak out when their kids don't win!

It Might Have Been Chapter 12

It just keeps going on. The latest chapter of It Might Have Been is now up at http://massmedea.wordpress.com.

Crying Wolfram

If you've not heard of Wolfram Alpha, it is an attempt to create a "knowledge engine" or "answer engine." Says New Scientist:

it is designed to understand search requests made in everyday language and work out the answer to factual questions on almost any aspect of human knowledge.
...
Alpha was created by Stephen Wolfram, famous for the software package Mathematica. He employed more than 150 people to collect information on all the major branches of science, from the properties of the elements and the location of planets to the relationships between species and the sequence of the human genome. Economic measures, such as inflation histories for specific countries, are included, as are geographic, cultural and many other data sets.

It just went live a day or so ago, and they're still working out the kinks. I started noodling with it a little, and turned up some limitations--not the least of which that the number of users it can handle easily gets maxed out, and a very common reponse is "Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input." Hm. Sounds ike that android in the "I, Mudd" episode of Star Trek: "I am not programmed to respond in that area." Norman, coordinate!

Still, if it ends up working anything like this demo (always a big if; when has software ever worked in the real world the way its demo does?), it will be very impressive.

Fish Story

Gotta love a headline like this, from the Albany Times Union:

Second woman charged in seafood heist

Kind of like The Bank Job, only more moist. And that's a lot o' lobster:

Felicia A. Tulej, 45, of Oriskany Falls is charged with fourth-degree grand larceny and attempted petit larceny, deputies said. Tulej and Heather Rimmer, 32, of Utica were involved in the theft of more than $1,000-worth of seafood and other grocery items from the Price Chopper Store...

The Butler Did it

Are you scared to turn off instant messaging, lest someone not be able to contact you for five seconds? Apparently people are, for reasons passing understanding. Instead, researchers at Cornell have found, people indulge in "butler lies." Huh?

Just like a real life butler might be, these lies are deployed to protect us from unwanted guests politely, without hurting anyone's feelings or appearing rude. By tracking the messages of 50 IM users the Cornell team determined that around 10 per cent of all messages sent were deceptive, and 20 per cent of those were butler lies.
...
The ones most commonly used quickly draw a conversation to a close, some by inventing imaginery work committments:

"I have a prelim tomo tho so I gotta study for ittt and then head to a meeting"

Huh? (I don't know why people get so worked up about English as a national language when people now communicate like this. But, c'est la vie.) But I digress...

Others by exploiting the time of day:

"im gonna go grab some lunch now i guess"

"sleep! Time"

Butler lies are clearly useful, yet by now most IM users are wise to old chestnuts like those. In the name of polite etiquette, we desperately need a new set of more imaginative - but still plausible - ones.

How about "I'm going to get my Shift key fixed" or "Searching for apostrophes"? (Yeah, I know, I should be used to this by now. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.)

As for butler lies, they're hardly unique to instant messaging. How many of us do the same thing to get off the phone? I knew someone once who had on his computer a recording of a phone ringing. When he wanted to get off a call, he would trigger it, then say "Oh, that's my other line. I have to go." Rather clever, really. I've found that "Sod off" works just as well, particularly with telemarketers.

While I prefer instant messaging to telephones any day, like anything else, it has its uses and its abusers, and maybe I'm fundamentally more antisocial than most people because I have no problem just turning it off and hiding when I'm in the middle of something and don't want to be bothered. Though there have been days when the sound of the iChat plinking noise will drive me into complete madness—which is not that far a drive to begin with, I suppose.

It Might Have Been Chapter 11

In case you missed it last Friday, the latest Chapter of It Might Have Been has been posted. Star Wars: Episode 1, The B-52s, and several acres of live cattle play important roles in Chapter 11.

Dumb and Dumber

As Atrios would say--The stupid! It burns!!!

As if texting while driving a car weren't skull-crushingly stupid enough, now the phone-tards are driving trains and texting. Please kill me. Oh, wait...they probably will:

The head of the Boston-area transit authority said Saturday he'll ban all train and bus operators from even carrying cell phones on board after a conductor told police he was texting his girlfriend before a trolley collision Friday.

About 50 people were hurt in the underground crash in downtown Boston, though none of the injuries was life-threatening.

At least he didn't kill 26 people like the moron in L.A.

Ripping Yarn

The thing about this very cool Cthulu ski mask is that if I were to wear one while skiing, I would actually not look any sillier than I normally look while skiing.

TGI Fridayssssssss

"Snakes on a Plate" was already taken:

The sight of a severed snake's head under his broccoli made Jack Pendleton lose interest in dessert.

Pendleton said he found the head, the size of the end of his thumb, while eating Sunday at the T.G.I. Friday's in Clifton Park.

Oh, I don't know. From my experience, that's probably the most appetizing thing about a TGI Friday's.

It Might Have Been Chapter 10

Another Friday, another chapter of It Might Have Been. Go there now.

When Claude Rains It Pours

Over at Movie Mis-Treatments, Claude Rains is shocked, shocked, to discover a rogue planet menacing Earth in Battle of the Worlds.

1961’s Italian production Battle of the Worlds was filmed in Confuse-O-Vision®. The Confuse-O-Vision™ process involves randomly cutting shots of spaceships, pilots, Mars bases, and, inexplicably, the Moon in such a way as to make completely incomprehensible what is actually happening on screen.

Battle of the Worlds stars Claude Rains, and one gets the sense that he wishes he were the invisible man at various points. The Italian title, Il pianeta degli uomini spenti, I believe translates as “scenery served with diced tomatoes and fresh basil in a pesto sauce” which is apt, since Claude Rains spends most of the movie chewing the scenery rather voraciously.

Connect 4

I am beavering way on a special WhatTheyThink report on e-books and e-publishing, which is diverting me into downloading and playing with various e-book readers. eReader has a pretty good e-book reader for the iPhone, and Fictionwise is a pretty good e-book store. (Both eReader and Fictionwise have recently been acquired by Barnes & Noble.)

One section I was just working on--advantages and disadvantages of e-books (and e-periodicals) compared to printed books (and periodicals)--involves the idea of hyperlinking. From the (first draft) of this report:

It is worth mentioning that the great history of science and technology writer and presenter James Burke (of Connections fame) has written several books that have attempted to add hyperlinks to print. Introduced in his 1996 book The Pinball Effect, the way this worked was that a hyperlinked reference in the text was identified with a superscripted number, and the margin contained references to other superscripted numbers and their pages numbers. It was an intriguing idea, but kloodgy when compared to what a electronic version could accomplish.

I have all (well, almost all, I soon discovered) of Burke's books, and thought it would be interesting to see if any of them are available as e-books--and, if so, do they take advantage of the hyperlinking ability of the technology to further Burke's vision of creating a book comprising an interconnected network of links?

Alas, no.

First of all, what is very frustrating is that it is difficult to search for James Burke without getting all the hits for James Lee Burke.

The only title by the proper Burke is a hitherto unknown to me book from 2007 called American Connections, which attempts to link together signers of the Declaration of Independence. Uh, okay. Anyway, I bought the e-book from Amazon for my Kindle for iPhone app. In the introduction, obviously converted verbatim from the print edition, Burke laments,

In a medium other than print, I might have been able to offer each reader (user?) the means to make his own connections so as to become part of the narrative. Perhaps at some point in the future this book will take that form and you’ll be able to make the connections yourself.

Given that the table of contents is actually hyperlinked to the respective chapters (fairly de rigueur in e-books), it might have been fairly easy to go into the e-book and add these connections and links. At any rate, if there is one author crying out for this kind of elaborate proof-of-concept e-book experimentation, it is Burke. Jim--call me.

Still, the book didn't get very good reader reviews, even from Burke fans. I have not read it in its entirety yet, so I can't say.

My Name is URL

Via mi hemano, an alternative to those URL-shorteners like TinyURL. This one is actually a URL lengthener called Dickens URL, which takes a URL and appends a random Dickens quote.

So I took my home site, www.richtextandgraphics.com, plugged it into Dickens URL, and now my longer, literary URL is http://dickensurl.com/3b59/Take_nothing_on_its_looks;_ take_everything_on_evidence._ There's_no_better_rule.

It is based on the quote "Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule," which Mr. Jaggers said to Pip in Chapter 40 of Great Expectations. I rather like that quote.

It probably wouldn't be suitable for Twitter, but then what would?

Yo Da Man

Sez the BBC:

About 390,000 people listed their religion as Jedi in the 2001 Census for England and Wales. In Scotland the figure was a reported 14,000.

But then:

Eight police officers serving with Scotland's largest force listed their official religion as Jedi in voluntary diversity forms, it has emerged.

Pigs on the Wing

Welcome to the return of the 1970s! I seem to recall getting a swine flu vaccination when I was in grammar school in 1976, the last time health officials thought there was going to be a pandemic (it didn't happen, but I think it pays to be prepared). Anyway, it confers no protection against the current strain, since "swine flu" can refer to any of a large number of viruses that typically infect swine and can occasionally be transmitted to humans. (By the way, swine flu cannot be contracted through eating pork, much to Homer Simpson's delight, methinks.)

LiveScience is running a four-part series this week on the myths and realities of the swine flu. Shorter version: try to avoid live pigs, which I think is just generally good advice anyway. There is no vaccine yet, and the CDC has identified only 20 cases in the U.S., none of which have proved fatal (Mexico has had far more cases, and fatal ones, and fatal ones among young, otherwise healthy people, for reasons no one quite understands). Swine flu is probably not worth freaking out over, but at the same time taking sensible precautions can keep it from becoming a serious, freak-outable issue. The CDC recommends some pretty common-sense preventive measures:

There are everyday actions people can take to stay healthy.

• Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.
• Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hands cleaners are also effective.
• Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread that way.
• Try to avoid close contact with sick people.
• Influenza is thought to spread mainly person-to-person through coughing or sneezing of infected people.
• If you get sick, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.

The CDC's Q&A page is here. New Scientist has more. Scientific American has yet more.

Now, let's hope disco doesn't come back, which would be far worse.

Birthday Boy

Happy 445th birthday to William Shakeaspeare!

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come
And let my liver rather heat with wine,
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.

-- Merchant of Venice, I.i

It Might Have Been Still Continuing

If it's Friday, that must mean it's time for a new chapter of It Might Have Been over at http://massmedea.wordpress.com.

Prompt Attention

Every issue, Writer's Digest magazine has a little short short story contest in which they provide a prompt and you are supposed to write a 750-word (no more) story based on it. I usually try to participate, just for fun (haven't won one yet, but hope springs eternal), and you may recall that I do usually post them here, although sometimes I forget.

Right before I left for the long weekend last Friday, the latest issue arrived, and the contest prompt was "A police detective is assigned to a case involving a burglary at a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop."

So I mulled that over on the drive to Boston (long road trips are great for plotting out stories and other projects; most of the first half of It Might Have Been was "written" between Saratoga and Boston) and it kind of gelled Saturday night. First thing Sunday morning, I was able to write it down. A bit silly, but fun.

Unfortunately, when I got back home yesterday, I reread the prompt and discovered that it actually said: "A police detective is assigned to a case involving arson at several Krispy Kreme doughnut shops." Oops. Actually, that might work out better; I just need to alter a few things.

The Leavening

Detective Brad Gilroy got out of the car in front of the Krispy Kreme and strode over to where the suspect was being held.

“Lieutenant,” he said with a tone of slight confusion, “did I hear you correctly?”

“Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant Jordan. “Employees say this individual”—he gestured to a handcuffed suspect being held by two uniformed officers—“charged in, brandished a weapon, and demanded every doughnut they had.”

“A weapon?”

“Yes, sir, this.” He handed Gilroy a plastic bag inside which was a metallic blade-like object. “It’s a frosting knife.”

Gilroy expressionlessly looked at the suspect. As if on cue, he began to struggle.

“I must get back! You have to believe me! All of humanity hangs in the balance!”

Gilroy sighed knowingly. “Great, one of these. What did you want with the doughnuts?”

“I must get them back! Quickly”

“Back where?”

“To—” He stopped abruptly.

Gilroy knew the drill. “Let me guess, you’re from the future.”

The suspect cautiously nodded.

“Cyborg?”

“Human.”

Gilroy sighed again. “All right. Let’s have it from the top.”

The suspect looked around warily, then began. “I am from the year 2207.” He glanced across the parking lot to what looked like a large metal mixing bowl, easily four feet across and three feet deep. “You see, we are in the middle of a civil war.”

The suspect explained. In the late 21st century, after decades of food scares, and the contamination and recall of many “healthy” foods like vegetables, fruits, nuts, and even meat, consumption of junk food skyrocketed. Peoples’ entire diets revolved around M&Ms, cookies, cakes, and other snack items. The Twinkie rose to the top of the food pyramid. By the beginning of the 22nd century, obesity had become epidemic and public health was in crisis. The government was unable to cope effectively (not surprisingly), and society was left with a power vacuum that was exploited by several ambitious and ruthless dieticians and nutritionists. They seized control—which was easy enough given their superior physical condition—and declared martial law (some called it “marshmallow law”), banning all foodstuffs that were not deemed “healthy.” At first, violators were punished via a stern lecture, but, inevitably, power corrupted, and before long the possession of any dessert item was punishable by death. Even possession of a dessert cookbook was grounds for imprisonment.

“My own grandmother,” said the suspect, “was caught with a bootlegged copy of ‘Completely Cookies’ and was sentenced to 10 years in the ‘food pyramid,’” a massive stone structure that served as a maximum security prison.

Any revolution will eventually spawn a backlash, and soon one began in the last surviving Dunkin Donuts franchise. “So many of them were built in the 20th and 21st centuries that it was statistically certain that at least one would survive the Healthy Age.” One did, and a “doughnut underground” was formed. Within a decade, it had built itself into a force powerful enough to overthrow the Nutritionists. “The doughnut was our symbol, our rallying cry, our weapon.” The world indeed ran on Dunkin.

Among some revolutionaries, legends had been passed down the generations about another type of doughnut, the fabled Krispy Kreme, and the countryside was scoured for evidence. This was about the time that time travel was discovered. “We sent scouts back in time and they brought forward examples of Krispy Kreme doughnuts.” Soon, there was a rift, and two factions emerged—the Dunkinians and the Krispyites—each vying for control. The result was violent civil war. “It became impossible to tell the blood from the jelly.” Those with access to the time portals went back in time to acquire more doughnuts to fortify their arsenals. “As Krispyites, we don’t have the luxury of having a manufacturing infrastructure the way the Dunkinians do.”

“So you see,” concluded the suspect, “these doughnuts are desperately needed in the future.”

Gilroy stared at him for several moments. There was no sound but dry leaves blowing softly across the parking lot, and the occasional crackle of a police radio. “Get him outta here!” Gilroy finally exclaimed.

As the suspect was being led away, he broke free and dashed across the parking lot. “Get him!” yelled Gilroy.

The suspect jumped inside the metal bowl before the police could catch him. He flipped a switch and there was a bright flash. The bowl and the suspect vanished. Everyone stopped and stared, mouths agape.

The lieutenant looked at Gilroy. “Sir?”

Gilroy looked at his watch. “I’m going out for a salad.”

Home Furnishings from the Quincy Collection

Via Boing Boing. I was wondering how to redo the bathroom. This bloodstained bathmat and matching shower curtain would be perfect when the CSI folks come over. They could go with the line of chalk outline beach towels I saw a few years ago.

Seg-what?

Now, I confess, the first thing I ask myself when I see a Hummer on the road is, "What deep-seated psychological torment must be required to want to drive one of those things?" But then at the other end of the spectrum, after seeing the prototype of a joint venture between Segway and GM, I can't help but wonder, "Who with any sense of shame would want to be seen in something like this":

Project PUMA (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), a compact, battery-operated two-wheeler for two that it's developing with Segway, Inc., maker of the upright electric lawn mower–like vehicle that debuted in 2002.

PUMA, which exists only in prototype, resembles a golf cart cut in half: it's a two-seater that stands upright thanks to dynamic stabilization, which uses an array of angular rate sensors and accelerometers to determine the orientation and motion of the vehicle's platform.

But then, probably the same people who don't mind being seen on a Segway. Granted, I'm all in favor of vehicles that run on alternatives to petroleum, but...come on. By the way, it also looks like a death trap, especially given that it

can travel at speeds up to 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour), with a range up to 35 miles (56 kilometers) between recharges

This is just asking for trouble, knowing how everyone around this thing would be driving. I mean, one ditzoid yakking or texting while driving an SUV and game over.

On another matter, I guess I'm still bitter that the Segway has forever altered the way a lot of people think the actual word segue is spelled.

What Can Brown Do for You?

Brown fat, that is:

For more than 30 years, scientists have been intrigued by brown fat, a cell that acts like a furnace, consuming calories and generating heat.
...
papers, appearing Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, indicate that nearly every adult has little blobs of brown fat that can burn huge numbers of calories when activated by the cold, as when sitting in a chilly room that is between 61 and 66 degrees.
...
The fat really is brown, researchers say, because it is filled with mitochondria, the tiny energy factories of cells. Mitochondria contain iron, giving the tissue a reddish brown color.

The hope is that scientists may find safe ways to turn on peoples’ brown fat, allowing them to lose weight by burning more calories. But researchers caution that while mice lose weight if they activate brown fat, it is not clear that people would shed pounds — they might unwittingly eat more, for example. The data on global patterns of obesity are not good enough to say whether living in a cold climate makes people thinner.

My non-scientific observation, living in the frozen Northeast, is that it does not.

What's Your Sign--Really

There is no factual basis to astrology, of course, but now a story over at LiveScience shows that there is even less reason to believe our astrological forecast: our "sign" may not be what we think it is.

Zodiac signs were originally determined by which constellation the Sun was "in" on the day you were born.

Early astronomers observed the Sun traveling through the signs of the Zodiac in the course of one year, spending about a month in each. Thus, they calculated that each constellation extends 30 degrees across the ecliptic.

But this was more than 2,200 years ago.

Unbeknownst to the ancient astrologers, the Earth continually wobbles around its axis in a 25,800-year cycle. This wobble—called precession—is caused by the gravitational attraction of the Moon on Earth's equatorial bulge.

Over the past two-and-a-half millennia, this wobble has caused the intersection point between the celestial equator and the ecliptic to move west along the ecliptic by 36 degrees, or almost exactly one-tenth of the way around. This means that the signs have slipped one-tenth—or almost one whole month—of the way around the sky to the west, relative to the stars beyond.

For instance, those born between March 21 and April 19 consider themselves to be Aries. Today, the Sun is no longer within the constellation of Aries during much of that period. From March 11 to April 18, the Sun is actually in the constellation of Pisces!

So if the predetermined characteristics of your sign never seemed to apply to you, now you know why. Or, more likely, it could be because there is no reason to think that the positions of stars millions or billions of light-years away should have any bearing on your psychological make up.

Wise Madonna of the Flies

All right, the last one (or, if you're reading this blog upside-down, first up) is a cool find: Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians on David Letterman in 1989--I remember this, and thought I was in an alternate universe when I heard (somehow, there was no Internet then) that he was going to be on.

I Feel Like a Three-Legged Chinchilla

Guzzling Marshmallows

Let's see if we can spot the over-35s out there. How many of you remember this one?

The Devil's Fishbowl

Robyn Hitchcock live acoustic in 2007 with Sean Nelson of Harvey Danger on backing vocals.

It Might Be Up to Chapter 6

And, of course, last Friday, the latest installment of It Might Have Been was posted over at http://massmedea.wordpress.com/.

One Nation Underground

Over at Movie Mis-Treatments, the 1951 snoozefest Unknown World takes us 2,500 miles below the Earth surface, for some reason.

The word “bore” can mean either “to pierce with a turning or twisting movement of a tool” or “to cause to feel boredom.” In the case of Unknown World, both senses are appropriate, as a team of deluded scientists spends 74 agonizing minutes in a large, motorized drill burrowing into the Earth and getting on each other’s nerves. In fact, it often seems like an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. “I’m a sick man...a mean man. There’s nothing attractive about me. I think there’s something wrong with my liver.

Non-Craptacular

Lest it seem like blogs are solely a place to complain about things (see below) I should in all fairness use this space to at the same time praise one particular company (well, technically two).

Back in December 2003, I bought a new treadmill to replace one that, purchased in 1998, gave up the ghost. An exercise equipment store in the Clifton Park Mall was having a sale, so I picked up a Keys Fitness Milestone treadmill. And it's great (note present tense); my only beef was that the instruction manual was obviously automatically translated from its native language by Google and then proofread by a vision-impaired raccoon. (In fact, when I sent in the warranty card, they had a space for comments and I literally wrote "proofread your manual!") Still, that's fairly picayune stuff, and it turned out to be a good machine.

Flash forward 5+ years, and that's 5+ years of fairly rigorous use (about 45-60 minutes every day, once in a while skipping a day, admittedly). A few weeks ago, I was in the middle of a routine and an error message flashed on the control panel just as the unit shut down. Now, let me tell you, when a treadmill abruptly stops while you are running full speed, you develop a healthy respect for the laws of physics.

The instruction manual was of no help (big shock) so I went to the Keys Fitness Web site, where they have a "Contact Support" page, and described my problem--and, hey, they let me use more than 240 characters, so I could actually describe the problem fully. (Take note, Sony.) Less than a day later, I got a note back from a Robin Scott (not the Robin Scott who, under the moniker M, recorded the 1979 hit "Pop Muzik"--or at least I don't think) at a company called Maverick Service and Assembly. Turns out that Keys Fitness has filed for bankruptcy--I hope they proofread their court papers--and Maverick took over their customer support. So I was told that I needed to call them. Which I did.

I called Mr. Scott (no, not Montgomery Scott and, no, he did not talk about, pop muzik, talk about, pop muzik...) and we cracked open the motor cover and went through some things. I learned an awful lot about the inner workings of a treadmill. Although the error code I got could refer to any of a variety of related things, he seemed to think that it had something to do with a defective speed controller. This is a small, plastic tuning-fork-shaped structure that attaches to the motor. Connected to the motor is a fan, and around the base of the fan is a set of teeth that pass through the two prongs of the controller. Sensors in the controller count how many teeth pass per unit of time and that's how it calculates the speed. I never knew that. If the controller stops working, the unit gets confused and shuts down in a panic. Kind of like having any kind of contact with Sony. Anyway, he ordered me a new speed controller. (I also needed to replace the walking belt, which was getting a little frayed by this time.) He also told me to ensure that I use a spray lubricant on the walking belt at least every 30 days. I mentioned that the instruction manuel said not to, under any circumstances, use a lubricant on it, as it will dissolve the belt and the underlying board. Robin said, "I don't know why they print that. You shouldn't use WD-40 but instead a lubricant like NAPA 8300 that is safe for wood." Harrumph. I guess it was more like a destruction manual. No wonder they're bankrupt.

A few days later, everything arrived. Robin had sent detailed instructions (PDFs) of how to replace everything, which were actually not badly written, although there were a couple of steps that seem to have been written by someone in a Nyquil-induced haze or that kid from The Sixth Sense, as they apparently saw parts that weren't there. It did require a fair amount of contortion, and it would have helped to have fingers like those aliens in Close Encounters.

It was not easy to get the new controller on, and it took a few tries to get it seated properly. Once that was done, I started up the treadmill, and then it shut down with a different error message. Doh! So I called Robin back and he was flummoxed, since that error message referenced the same basic problem (who designs these things?). So we tried a few things, and I eventually ended up on a conference call with it seemed everyone else in the support department and I stumped all the experts. He said it may very well have been another defective speed controller, so he sent out a second one.

Overnight, I started mulling that over, and it didn't seem statistically likely. So the next day, I went back into the motor and took out the new controller and examined it in the light. I noticed that a small, sliver of plastic had somehow been shaved off the tip of one of the prongs, and was partially obscuring the thin groove where I suspected the sensor was located. So I pulled off this sliver, made sure the groove was clear, then reinstalled it. I started up the treadmill and success! It worked. Feeling lucky, I started my usual routine and had no problem--and, in the two weeks since, it has worked flawlessly. Knock wood.

So, a shout out to Maverick Service and Assembly and Robin Scott for exemplary customer service and to Keys Fitness for, despite all their woes--both financial and editorial--actually made a damn good treadmill that will hopefully keep--and keep me--running for 5+ more years.

Craptacular

In January 2008, for reasons passing understanding, I thought it would be a good idea to buy a new TV. I didn't really need one, the old one that I bought in 1997 worked fine, but, I figured, what the heck. A friend of mine had recently bought a widescreen LCD TV and it was faintly cool. So after poring through Consumer Reports, I took the plunge and picked up a Sony Bravia 46-inch LCD TV and it was not bad. Watching the NCAA finals last year in HDTV was pretty cool, although, since I refuse to pay more for cable than I absolutely have to (since I find 99% of all programming these days to be unwatchable), that was one of two channels I get in HD. Mostly I just used it to watch DVDs.

All a moot point, since a couple weeks ago the TV started acting up; everything on the left-hand side of the screen ghosted (including menus, so it was not some user setting that had to be adjusted), and would eventually collapse into a thin horizontal line, like the beginning of The Outer Limits. I did discover that it cleared up if I whacked the side of the TV, like Fred Flintstone or Ralph Kramden used to do. That probably wasn't a viable long-term solution, so I went to Sony's Moebius strip of a support site and, naturally, the FAQs were of no help beyond determining if the TV was plugged in or not or whather I had working retinas.

I used their e-mail support service to describe the problem (and they limit you to 240 characters--is Twitter really the best model for describing what can be complex technical support problems?) and five days later I got a response, which was only a link back to their general support site that I had already checked out and which, as it happens, is where you get the link to send them e-mail. A Moebius strip, indeed. (Funny; they had e-mailed me a customer support satisfaction survey even before they had responded to my actual issue. Needless to say, they got all 0s). However, their response also suggested calling a local service center, and they provdied some options. I looked them up and 2 out of 3 got very low user ratings, but one got good marks, so I called them--Electronics Specialist (just the one?) in Albany.

They came fairly promptly, gave a few preliminary suggestions (something about the "z-control board" or the "Heisenberg compensator" or the "warp drive" or whatever), and hauled it away to crack it open. After two weeks of tests, and swapping out boards, and consulting the I Ching, it was determined that the entire display panel is "bad" and needs to be replaced. The cost? No man can say! But, they did say, likely about as much as I paid for the TV. Bullshit. Entire books could be written about why that is not going to happen.

I guess I could put a poster on it and use it as static decoration. But in all likelhood I will probably try to sell it to someone who can fix it themselves. Maybe I'll call another ssrvice center, but actually Electronics Specialist seemed pretty on the ball. I don't have the time or the inclination to pursue this any further. Also, my new rule is: never buy anything ever unless it is absolutely necessary. And never buy anything from Sony again.

It's funny--Sony used to make decent products. The Trinitron I bought in 1997--and which has more mileage on it than my car--is still working like new (knock on wood). And it will continue to do so until the day it dies...in which case, well, books always work.

Must-See Non-TV

Around the World in 80 Telescopes

Live 24-hour webcast from astronomical observatories

Organised by ESO, the European Southern Observatory, from its HQ in Garching, Germany
Date: 3 April 2009, 09:00 UT (Universal Time/GMT) to 4 April 2009, 09:00 UT (Universal Time/GMT).

Duration: 24 hours

"Around the World in 80 Telescopes" is a unique live 24-hour webcast, following night and day around the globe to some of the most advanced observatories both on and off the planet. You can watch it right here on the 100HA website, and on the 100HA channel on Ustream.tv.

Rocket from the Crib

Hmm...and they say that sugar makes kids hyperactive*. From the Times Union:

Traces of a chemical used in rocket fuel were found in samples of powdered baby formula, and could exceed what's considered a safe dose for adults if mixed with water also contaminated with the ingredient, a government study has found.

*Actually, the sugar-causing-hyperactivity thing is a myth, not borne out by experimentation, and debunked here.

iCapture

Here's another accidentally discovered iPhone feature that I never knew existed. For some reason, I was looking through my camera roll on the iPhone (I almost never use my camera phone) and I discovered a bunch of screen captures, and I had no idea how they got there.

So I did some digging, and learned that if you hold down the Home button, then press the Power/Sleep button, the iPhone takes a screen capture and adds it to the camera roll, where it can then be transferred to a proper computer.

Note that this only works in the iPhone 2.0 software.
Pretty cool. I don't know that I will ever need this, but it's good to know that it exists.