minor musings on the macrocosm
Oh, hey blog. Not much. Touch-and-go lately. Got the DFA reissues of the first two Pylon albums: Gyrate (plus) and Chomp (more) in the mail this weekend, thanks.
Not that I should really be adding anything to my plate at this point, but I’ve started a gig writing science stories for the online only San Francisco Examiner newspaper, check out the first installment here.
Also, go check out the recently redesigned 3D Museum website.
pax.
Figure 3. Copulation duration in Cynopterus sphinx according to whether the female licks the male's penis (Licking) or not (No licking). Means and standard errors are shown. Vignette shows a female performing fellatio, drawn by Mei Wang. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007595.g003
Shocking silence on the interwebs on this one – or maybe I’m just not reading the right blogs?
Okay back to work.
Last Sunday I woke up in Bristol, England and went to bed in California. What happened in between is not that interesting — basically I woke up late, missed my bus, had a panic attack, wound up taking a cab from Bristol to Heathrow (which was I’m afraid, not cheap), called my wife and woke her up to get my flight info, got laffed at by the driver ‘forgot about the time difference did you?,’ heard about his more notable fares (François Fillon and some British celebrities I’d never heard of), charmed my way through the ticket counter (they wanted to bump me to another flight), barely made my plane, watched some of this Morgan Spurlock show (decent, kind of boring), listened to “Well You Needn’t” about a million times, ate some kit-kats, I dunno I guess that was about it.
POINTLESS SEMIOTIC DIATRIBE FROM THE BACK OF THE CAB: The sign on the back of this British lorry which we are rapidly overtaking inquires: “Well driven?” Effing brilliant. Really breaks down the metonymic (synechdochic?) chain summoned by the American version: “How’s my driving?” Lets you damn the driver without directly insulting the truck. Blah blah blah dyadic v. triadic sign relation schemes blah blah blah différance recursion representamen, whatever.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE:
Would have loved to catch Maximum Joy, but I guess I was about three decades too late. Pity. Also, I didn’t catch nearly the volume of Banksy I was hoping to–in fact only ever saw this one: though from various angles and lights and states of relative insobriety.
Bristol, as Jeffrey Martz observes, has a decidedly Escherian feel, each time I tried to take a short-cut I wound up in interesting places far from my intended destination. I very nearly missed the Attenborough lecture this way. This is also how we spotted the fox in a back alley, ’round midnight. It looked like this,
but with a fox.
THE MOST SURPRISING THING I HEARD AT SVP:
, considering the source–a University of Chicago grad student (name withheld for fear that he might be expelled or worse). We were admiring at these artiodactyl accouterments
“Animals are not equations,” says he. “Can I quote you on that?” says I.
SOME MORE PICTURES OF PEOPLE, SINCE I CAN’T TOP THAT:
Here is a photo of @cromercrox I took with my phone:
And here is a photo of @microecos (and assorted internet celebrities including the folks behind Dinosaur Hunting by Boat in Alberta, the Ethical Paleontologist, the Open Source Paleontologist, the SV-POW boys) taken with his:
And of course, there is an interesting story attached to this,
but it involved diacritical maneuvres far beyond my skill set which makes this as good a place as any to stop.
Thanks, and apologies, to all.
I owe you a T-shirt. I’m sorry. It’s tough being both a perfectionist and a procrastinator, terribly difficult to get things done.
Anyway tenrecs get all over the internet now and then, lately now–over at Zooillogix. Far be it from me not to keep a good thing going, so why don’t we drop a little Afrothere roll call huh?
Tenrecs?
Check. [them's Little spikez, Big spikez, Fatty, and Uptown Streaky for those of you keeping track at home]
Elephant Shrew?
Sweet.
“Spitzmaus” (German for shrew) works out literally to “sharp mouse,” which is wholly badical. But you already knew that. Anyway to paraphrase Voltaire, hermano here is neither an elephant, nor a shrew. Nor a sharp mouse.
Golden Mole?
Word is bond. But not a really a mole. uh, okay. Hyraces?
Yikes. Nice grill yo. Moving right along…
Aardvark?
Hey, did you hear the one about the bipedal pangolin? Damnit, there’s no time! Stay focused…
Okay, okay, uh who have we got left?
Sirenian?
Well, dudelet I hate to break this to you, but you’re fired. I mean, extinct. But whatever, you’ll do.
Alright, I know I’m forgetting someone here. Think, think…
Oh yeah:
Nicked this one from Crappy Taxidermy which turns out to be the best thing going on the world wide web these days. You really ought to check it out.
Well, I suppose that wraps things up here. Pax.
DISCLAIMER: No animals weren’t not not harmed in the making of this blog post.
…with apologies to the Theatrical Tanystropheus. Lots of “work” to keep me “busy” and away from “blogging” this “summer.” But I did return from Europe with a steamer trunk of full of chocolate, some knives, and a shit-ton of pictures–so I’ll try to post a steady trickle of the latter over the next few weeks.
Ah, Tanystropheus: proof that the Creator has either a sense of humor or a cannabis habit. Tanstropheus seems to be the only protorosaur that gets any play and generally I’m loathe to reinforce such hegemony, but one must admit the dude is wholly protarded in the best possible sense of the word.
While perhaps a bit out of date–and arguably biomechanically impossible–these diorama reconstructions at least convey to the museum visitor to check it: some crazy-ass critters called this planet home in the past. You can pierce your labrum, or whatever, but basically your species is pretty weakly conventional. Srry.
As you might guess, it’s a big day for astonishing discoveries across the blogowebs:
Topping all of these however is the paper by Daniel Fels published today in PLOS One entitled: “Cellular Communication Through Light.” Fels documents the interactions among different populations of a single-celled ciliate, Paramecium caudatum, seperated by glass. Because the glass barriers effectively prohibit the transfer of chemical signals, Fels infers that these simple organisms are using a form of weak electromagnetic radiation, so-called biophotons, to communicate. I’m guessing Rupert Sheldrake is pretty damn excited about this one.
Here’s the abstract:
Information transfer is a fundamental of life. A few studies have reported that cells use photons (from an endogenous source) as information carriers. This study finds that cells can have an influence on other cells even when separated with a glass barrier, thereby disabling molecule diffusion through the cell-containing medium. As there is still very little known about the potential of photons for intercellular communication this study is designed to test for non-molecule-based triggering of two fundamental properties of life: cell division and energy uptake. The study was performed with a cellular organism, the ciliate Paramecium caudatum. Mutual exposure of cell populations occurred under conditions of darkness and separation with cuvettes (vials) allowing photon but not molecule transfer. The cell populations were separated either with glass allowing photon transmission from 340 nm to longer waves, or quartz being transmittable from 150 nm, i.e. from UV-light to longer waves. Even through glass, the cells affected cell division and energy uptake in neighboring cell populations. Depending on the cuvette material and the number of cells involved, these effects were positive or negative. Also, while paired populations with lower growth rates grew uncorrelated, growth of the better growing populations was correlated. As there were significant differences when separating the populations with glass or quartz, it is suggested that the cell populations use two (or more) frequencies for cellular information transfer, which influences at least energy uptake, cell division rate and growth correlation. Altogether the study strongly supports a cellular communication system, which is different from a molecule-receptor-based system and hints that photon-triggering is a fine tuning principle in cell chemistry.
Like all PLOS publications, the paper is open-access and is freely available here:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005086
Refs.
2009 Cellular Communication through Light. PLoS ONE 4(4): e5086. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005086
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