TheBigUpshot

The news – the puppet theater – is enough to scare the bejuzus out of me. I can hardly bear to watch TV news. Half the time, I watch them say the most absurd things as though they were legitimate and the other half, I strongly suspect them of trying to sell me something. Someone once said about televised media that ‘it’s a campaign of fear and consumption.’

He would be in a position to know – it’s how he made his living. And in this case I have to agree with him.

Consumption used to mean something bad. It meant tuberculosis. It meant your lungs filling with bacteria. To consume used to mean “use up” not “support”. To stimulate this new kind of consumption, the media pulls out all of the stops, and most of the results are ham handed and irritating.

But then there are these jems that strain the imagination. Apparently, via Disinfocon, some local news company picked up a rumor about kids literally huffing shit to get high. The whole thing was mostly (I hate to say mostly) hoax and rumor. I don’t know what is worse: the content of the subject, or the fact that the communication-major flunkies believed it.

The recipe goes like this: Take your own feces. Put it in a bottle with some other bodily fluids (plus other magic ingredients? I don’t know.). Cover the bottle with a balloon and let it ferment. It will release gasses (no kidding!) which will be trapped in the balloon. Breathe the gasses – called butt hash, I am not making this up – and you will experience a high not unlike cocaine.

Did the newscasters go to a doctor, a chemist or anyone with a shred of common sense to check this out? Did they check to see if there was even one case of this ever actually happening? No. They warned the community about the danger to their children. Apparently, people will believe that teenagers will do anything to get high.

Unbelievable? Watch for yourself:

Some kid is going to see that news report and say, “I gotta give that shit a try.”

-The Jester

Tags: Humor by Jester
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Tell me that’s not a great title. It inspires the imagination. Magnetic cows? Some kind of robot, perhaps? Large enough to be visible from space? About to crush Manhattan under an Iron Hoof? I’m sold! Tell me more!

I hope you are as excited as I was because then I can have the pleasure of completely disappointing you.

Some people used satellite images (science via Google Earth!) to tabulate the preferred orientation of cows. They tend to align north-south. The scientists did the obvious corrections for wind, sun and local distractions (like ponds for drinking). It implies that cows have a sense of magnetism, like pigeons. Moo.

What are the global implications? Could cows find their way back to Capistrano? I don’t know. The motivations of our bovine friends are inscrutable. But I wonder if the researchers knew about Cow Magnets.

Cow magnets are big, powerful magnets that ranchers feed to cows. The magnets sit in one of the cow’s stomachs and if the cow eats a nail or a piece of barbed wire, the magnet keeps it in the first stomach so it doesn’t end up tearing up the whole digestive tract. Cows are very intelligent.

Here’s my question: How likely is it that the cow is facing north because that’s the preferred alignment of the 4 inch hunk of magnet in its stomach? I imagine I’d be pretty likely to face north if I had one of those in my belly.

-The Jester

Tags: Humor, Science by Jester
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Peter told me that since he was ‘busy’ with ‘getting engaged’ he didn’t have time to ‘filter’ my ‘unique perspective.’ He’s very diplomatic. What he means is that my brand of cynical bullshit requires a censor, and he doesn’t want to do it today. Well, I suppose that means that you get the unadulterated scoop.

Herman Tse of the University of Hong Kong wrote a letter to Nature the other day. Academics like to think of themselves as being above economic interests. They are interested in the passionate pursuit of knowledge. But Herman describes the problem: to fuel that pursuit requires support, and support is granted based on a metric. That metric is usually publications. His quote sums up the perspective of anyone who gets paid for something they love: “It would be hard to argue that the pressure to publish is somehow better or more meaningful than the pressure to recoup economic returns.”

That’s fine. Money is not the filthy bribe given to sellouts in exchange for their souls. But the pressure to recoup economic returns brings an agenda that is… problematic for basic research. It’s a kind of censorship. Research that won’t be profitable (or that looks like it won’t be profitable) won’t get done. Solid state semiconductors and “transistors” probably didn’t look like profitable research to people working on vacuum tubes. The fact that it was interesting to someone meant it could be published. The publication metric, though not inherently more meaningful, encourages a different subset of things to get done. It’s not the perfect subset, but at least it is a slightly different subset.

Take Kinsey. Plenty of people take issue with his data and his conclusions. Plenty more people would take issue with his sexual habits. But prior to his work, there was virtually no reliable body of knowledge about what turns people on. Only wild speculation. His research was worth more than a lascivious perusal; it helped change a culture. Would it have been done in the interest of economic value? Sex can be monetized, but can sex research?

And at the other end is something that looked economically promising: nuclear fusion

“Those who have been in the fusion business a long time believe that it is better to go ahead with ITER than to hope another device will get there first, says Hazeltine. Decades of promises and billions in investment have left international fusion research in what he describes as a fragile condition. ‘Fusion science is on the edge of vanishing,’ he says. ‘I think we need to go ahead and turn this damn thing on.’”

I couldn’t agree more.

-The Jester

Tags: Humor, Science by Jester
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As you might have heard, I am in Germany. I like it a lot. The people here are helpful. And tolerant of my ignorance. I appreciate all of this. For the most part, German Engineering is everything I had heard and more. The trains and trams are on time and easy to navigate. The dorm room in which I am staying is nicely equipped and clearly designed to be very easy to clean - one could practically hose it out if need be. This is entirely unlike the dorm rooms I cut my teeth on in the states.

Those hexagonal beasts had so many nooks an crannies it was nearly impossible to get them clean. It was ridiculous. And two people in there! Three in some cases! Unbelievable. And expensive! almost three times the price of this little place I have rented for the month, even after the terrible exchange rate.

Yes, I will be here through August, but I’ll update as best I can.

Some fun lapses in German Engineering Sense: hotel shower faucet with a long metal handle (think kitchen faucet). It’s at elbow level, so is almost impossible to bump it when showering. Then try to reposition it quickly and brace yourself! You’re about to be scalded or frozen. Same hotel: both the room and building doors open inward and require a key to exit. The fire hazard is terrifying!

The other thing I’m not so fond of here is the bells. There’s a bell tower across the square form my room, and at totally random times (as best I can tell) it rings continuously for several minutes at a time. It’s like somebody just tells Quasimodo, “3:47? Sure, kid, knock yourself out. Good a time as any.”

I like bells as much as the next guy, but I’m thinking maybe ring it 4 times at 4 o’clock? That’s nice. Ring it off the hook for 5 min at 3:47? I don’t know. I thought that maybe it was a special occasion. Glockeläutentag or something. But no, it’s just how it works here.

-Peter

Addendum: today, the noon bell actually corresponded to noon, amazingly. What was great was that a dog down in the square below my window started to howl and didn’t stop until the bells did. It pretty much summed up my feelings.

Tags: Humor by Peter
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Since Peter is still lazing in Germany, we, here are going to discuss duck penises. Don’t question my Judgment! The publication of the discovery of the longest penis in the bird kingdom is worth noting. In the popular press article covering the discovery, Dr Raoul Mulder from the University of Melbourne is quoted as saying “I’m not fond of the ‘nudge nudge, wink wink’ comments by the authors.”

I beg to differ. If the your scientific legacy is the discovery of the single longest penis in the avian world, most of which is penis free, then I would suggest some nudging and winking is called for. Just to be clear, we’re talking about a 42 cm (17 inch) wang on a duck that is, itself, no longer than 15 inches.

Peter appraised me not too long ago about an interesting lab conversation in which the following question was discussed: if child-rearing responsibilities were not biologically biased to one gender ot the other, would the existance of a penetrative sexual pattern result in a dominant/submissive behavior pattern elsewhere in the species’ behavior? Yes, that is how he phrased it. All hoity-toity like that.

Well, it seems that the bird family has good examples of this: birds exist with and without “penetrative sexual organs,” and lay eggs. Compare ducks to chickens. Chickens mate using the “cloacal kiss.” It’s not as romantic as it sounds. Just as when humans kiss, they form a continuous tube from one rectum to the other, when birds mate, they form a continuous tube from one beak to the other. No penetration. But there’s still dominance. Hence the phrase ‘cock of the walk.’ Ducks, who have the penetratative dynamic, still leave the female to care for the eggs.

So, evidently, penetration is not a necessary condition for dominance. I’m sure that’s good news for somebody.

-The Jester

Tags: Humor, Science by Jester
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