Pursuing praxis

Scientists for Better PCR music video. Please support the cause.  

True story:

Pragmatist: "Are you saying you don’t think a cup has the capacity to hold water?"

Behaviorist: "No, I’m saying there’s no such thing as a capacity. A cup either has water in it or it doesn’t."

Pragmatist: "But what about a cup you haven’t seen before. Like that one there. Would you say that cup has a capacity to hold water?"

Behaviorist: "No. I don’t know." (shrugs)

Pragmatist: "But surely you’ve had to buy cups before! What did you do then?"

Behaviorist: "People have told me that cups hold water, and I trust them, so that’s how I behave towards the cup."

[Brief silence.] 

Pragmatist: "What if I filled this cup with water, right to the brim. Wouldn’t you say it has the capacity to hold water, even though it can’t hold any more?"

Behaviorist: ". . . What is this, a riddle?"

Novelist (to me): "I think this conversation, unlike that cup, won’t hold any water."

Time for a little list-making of wierd biology stuff off YouTube. Isn’t the internet great?

What to do with a decomposing stranded whale? Here’s a dynamite solution. Sheesh.

Sometimes testosterone actually makes the males of a species sedate and pretty, like in this Nyala bull display.Very cool. Rather bizarre.

More usually, testosterone makes male animals retarded. Sometimes beautiful, but usually quite silly. Like the birds of paradise. I do wish giggling evolved more rapidly.  

Sadly, nyala cows are a bit more streamlined than the bulls, and considerably lighter, meaning these beautiful animals are preyed on by reptiles. Here you can see a nyala cow - well, the back end of her, anyway, as a python does what pythons do best - eat entirely too much at once, but very, very slowly, in a very creepy, handless fashion.

And, in case you missed one of last year’s most popular videos, watch this buffalo vs. lion vs. croc. vs. lion vs. buffalo action. Yeah it’s long - 10 minutes or so - and it just gets better and better. Beware the herbivores!

The Origins of Man, revisited, courtesy of Musings of a Highly Trained Monkey.

A great review of the new Cloverfield movie, by Dr. Vector. For the record, I will not be watching this movie. Me and the heebie-jeebies don’t get along so well. I live alone half the time in a tiny corner of a three-floor house on the corner of two poorly lit streets where none of the neighbors speak to each other. It took me a year to come to terms with the wisteria vines bumping against my windows in the wind. I’d rather talk down uninvited strangers with guns than sort out what-went-bump-in-the-night. I’ll leave it at that.

Oh yeah, and this high school wrestler who invented a new move - you gotta watch it to appreciate it. Pretty cool.  

From Dad, courtesy of a family friend:

New Direction for the war on terrorists.

Share this with your senior friends. It’s purposely in big type so you can read it

I’ve recently re-discovered Sarah Brightman. Or should I say, recently re-aquired both a tolerance and enjoyment of the female voice. I usually prefer male singers, when there’s singing involved, usually in the baritone range, despite the popularity of the Three (Four?) Tenors.

The catalyst was stopping for ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s the other day. It was an empty shop, as is usual for some reason, so I sat and listened to the music as it hopped from genre to genre. My listening went from passive to active when this beautiful, slow and haunting duet between two sopranos came on. I was so intrigued by it I asked one of the attendants if he could find out what it was for me. Turns out the store speakers were just plugged into his laptop. The artist was Sarah Brightman, the song Pie Jesu, from Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Requiem. The second soprano was actually a treble - a young boy.

Now, it turns out I’m not a huge fan of Sarah Brightman, especially her newer work. She has an amazing voice, but there’s something about her eyes, that seems to translate to her voice, that doesn’t sit quite right with me. But, this song was recorded in 1985, I think, and doesn’t seem have that trait, whatever it is. It seems more serious, in a good way. And, of course, the song’s sparse Latin lyrics are religious, but that doesn’t seem critical to the piece. It has a churchy sound anyway because of the tone, and the choir-boy-in-a-cathedral sound, but I have always liked that hollow sound, and churches don’t have a monopoly on it. (It would be funny if churches tried to have a monopoly, or if someone claimed they did and tried to ‘regulate’ them).

Anyway, you can listen to the full song on YouTube. I don’t know what the video is about - seems like it was supposed to be for a movie, like a war movie or something. Not sure. 

Read this.

http://andrewolmsted.com/

Check out these amazing photographs, from the Smithsonian Institutions’ Nature’s Best.

Index of 2007 winners
Index of 2006 winners
Flash of 2005 winners
Flash of 2004 winners

Among the 2007 winners, my favorites are the zebra, bison, mandarin duck, Fly Geyser, goliath grouper, and snowy egrets.

Among the 2006 winners (there are a lot more), I like the giraffe on a purple sunset, osprey, giant kelp, orchid cactus, pink cyclamen, Alaskan brown bear, horseshoe crabs, snow and ice at sunset, lightning strike, and ladybug.

And the idiot award goes to the photographer of this alligator.

Only two more posts on zoo animals - from San Francisco, anyway. Here are the remaining non-bovid ungulates, i.e. rhinos and zebras (perissodactyls, not artiodactyls), and muntjacs (related to deer), and deer (non-bovid ruminants).

So what’s a muntjac, apart from being a deer relative? Well, there are actually 11 species of muntjacs (which I just learned from ultimateungulate.com), and I don’t know which one this guy is. But, they’ve got long, hair-covered pedicles from which the antlers grow, and in at least one species the females have remnant pedicles on their foreheads. Pretty cool. They’re small, cute, and at least some of the species’ males grow protruding canines. That’s right, saber-toothed deer - about a half a meter tall. In cervids (deer, etc.) the size of male canines scales inversely with the size of the antlers, give or take. That is, the bigger the head gear, the smaller the fangs, which is why you don’t see them on North American deer, elk, reindeer, etc.

Anyway, here’s the muntjac. He busied himself patrolling the perimeter, and sniffing and licking the females’ genitalia. The Discovery Channel could do a purely factual, X-rated documentary on the sexual habits of ruminants, I’m telling you.

In’he cute??

On to reticulated giraffes. They’re the rare kind, I’m pretty sure. They have less white between their spots, and the spots are more square-ish, and less like puzzle pieces. It’s a love-hate thing with giraffes and me. I’m interested in their heads. The rest of the time I wish more bovids were as prevalent and popular as giraffes. At least they have personality. Unlike lions.

I take it back. I like giraffes - baby giraffes. Check out how short his neck is, and how stocky the body is, compared to adults. Amazing. Intriguing. Compelling. Ontogenetic.

Here’s an adult for comparison.

On to non-artiodactyls. Living perissodactyls include horses, rhinos (four species, did you know that?) and tapirs. Tape-whats? Tapirs. Pig-like horse-relatives with elongated semi-elephant like noses. I trust that clears up what tapirs are. lol.

This is an Indian rhino, notable for its bizarre folds of textured skin. His horn got sawed off (it’s just fingernail-like, no bone inside like horns or antlers), but I think he’s still pretty compelling.

Interestingly, the first time I became aware of this type of rhino was in Art History class in college - Albrecht Durer did an engraving of a rhino in 1515, and I thought he must have got his info wrong, because I didn’t think rhinos looked like that. I mean, we’re talking 1515, the tail end of DaVinci’s career. I don’t remember where Durer was from, but I’m guessing northern Europe, and that he spent time in Italy, like many artists of his day. Durer gets the last laugh I guess. 

[update 1/12/08: Yup, the top two tiger photos are of the siberian tiger, Tatiana, who killed a kid and was subsequently shot and killed herself.] 

Back in November I posted pics from the SF Zoo. I’d only gotten to the ruminants, but had a whole non-ruminant-but-still-cool critter feature planned. But then I got busy and it never happened.

In the meantime, as you probably heard in the news a lot, one of the SF Zoo tigers got out a killed a kid on Christmas day, and mauled two other people besides.

Oi. Well, I’m not sure which tiger it was - it was a female, but I can’t sex a tiger without it laying on its back - but I got tiger pics, so it’s probably one of these. If I can find a confirmed online photo of the now-dead tiger, I’ll compare stripes and see if it’s the same one as below. But, at any rate, this was the enclosure that didn’t do its job properly. This is the tiger that was pacing a lot.

(Actually that was him yawning, but it’s a nice scary pic nonetheless).  

I thought this lioness had a bizarrely stout head. I’m not sure why. I don’t know lions that well, but she’s not very gracile, as lions go. Maybe it’s one of those maneless male lions. But, I seriously doubt they’d put two males in a single cage, so probably not.