Quizzing the Anonymous
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Below are the 50 most recent journal entries recorded in the "shkrobius" journal:[<< Previous 50 entries]
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06:44 pm
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Do the trees feel pain?
Let me guess -- if you ask this question around you'll immediately get the answer that plants do not feel because plants do not have nerves. Neither do the sponges, but they sent voltage spikes through their skin cells when touched. P. caudatum is a tiny unicel; when it bumps into an object it sends inward Ca++ current across its little body to change the beating pattern of its celia.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1282514&blobtype=pdf
Do they "feel"? I think they do. It is not much in a way of feeling, but they do not pretend to be sensitive types. You have long-distance, coordinated transduction of the signal and response to a local stimulus. It is electric, uses ions. Who am I to deny feelings to my metazoan brothers and sisters? Jellies do have nerves but only diffuse nerve nets, no brain. Some of them (box jellies) have eyes attached to this "no brain" and use these eyes to catch fish. If we start deny feeling to those looking at us, we would not get far in discussing feeling, do we? The sponges also have a "nerve net," but their cells are totimpotent and so the whole animal is a giant "nerve," if you wish. So it is questionable he is more touchy-feely: them or us, the eumetazoans.
Transmembrane voltage-gated ion channels like those in the axons and at the synapse are not rare at all. Such channels already occur in the prokaryotes and have evolved 2+ Gya. The plants are full of potassium channels: plasma membrane and vacuolar channels, hyperpolarization-activated channels, and so on. These are present in every tissue. There are also Ca++ channels - again, all kinds of voltage-gated channels. Nobody knows how these are interacting with each other: it is not a hot topic to study and it is not clear how to study it. The plants certainly do because their coordinated action is observed in long-term ion fluxes in guard cells during stomatal movement (see Membrane Transport in Plants; MR Blatt 2004). Stoma are pores in the leafs through which the gas exchange occurs. Wikipedia explains the mechanics of this action here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoma
The Ca++ channels in plants respond to stress, e.g.
...When plant cells are exposed to environmental stresses or perceive internal signal molecules involved in growth and development, ion channels are transiently activated to convert these stimuli into intracellular signals. Among the ions taken up by plant cells, Ca++ plays an essential role as an intracellular second messenger in plants... Signal transduction pathways mediated by changes in cytoplasmic – termed Ca2+ signaling – are initiated by the activation of Ca++-permeable channels in many cases. To date, a large body of electrophysiological and recent molecular biological studies have revealed that plants possess Ca++ channels belonging to distinct types with different gating mechanisms, and a variety of genes for Ca++-permeable channels have been isolated and functionally characterized. We discuss their roles in environmental responses and in the regulation of growth and development. http://www.springerlink.com/content/k66728p8h8635222
...As the nerve-mediated signaling in animals, long-distance signaling in plants is a prerequisite for plants to be able to perceive environmental stimuli and initiate adaptive responses. While intracellular signal transduction has been attracting considerable attentions, studies on long-distance signaling in plants has been relatively overlooked. Stomatal movements are well recognized as a model system for studies on cellular signal transduction. It has been demonstrated that the stomatal movements may be frequently tuned by long-distance signaling under various environmental stimuli. Stomatal movements can not only respond to persistent stress stimuli but also respond to shock stress stimuli. etc.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2634372
When one reads papers like the last one, it is hard to ecape unease: if the plants rely on the same voltage-gated ion channels, have their own favorite mechanisms for long-distance signalling in response to local stimuli, both persistent and shock, if there is already the science of "plant neurobiology"
...The behavior plants exhibit is coordinated across the whole organism by some form of integrated signaling, communication and response system. This system includes long-distance electrical signals, vesicle-mediated transport of auxin in specialized vascular tissues, and production of chemicals known to be neuronal in animals. Here we review how plant neurobiology is being directed toward discovering the mechanisms of signaling in whole plants, as well as among plants and their neighbors.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16843034
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17263772
Stahlberg R. Historical overview on plant neurobiology. Plant Signal Behavior. 2006;1:6–8.
and talk about plant intelligence http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12740212
--- how the heck is one supposed to know whether they feel pain? What does it mean to "feel pain" if you are a plant? That they do not have the nerves is irrelevant, because the nerves are just convenient conduits for long-range electrical signalling in animals. Plants are not animals by virtue of parting the company long time ago; this does not mean that they do not face the problem of coordinated multicellular response to a changing environment which is the essence of feeling. Plants do it differently -- but not entirely differently; on the biochemical level there are striking similarities.
Do the trees feel pain?
Tags: mysteries
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11:39 pm
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Lineus longissimus
The longest animal in the world is a Nemetrean worm 5 cm in width and 30 m long. One specimen found was 55 m long. Most of other ribbon worms are < 20 cm in length (the phylum median is 7.5 cm). I wonder how the evolution of such an animal can be explained by natural selection. I do not say it can't. I simply have no clue how. Say, what precisely is the adaptive value of being 55 m long?
Tags: mysteries
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12:39 am
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Why are there no green mammals?
Someone asked me this question recently. I gave the standard, easy-to-get answer, but I feel uneasy about it because it is worse than incorrect: it is misleading. I'll try to explain, but it may be difficult to follow. On the other hand, it is a fascinating subject, a striking example of natural application of nanoengineering and photonics. First, the standard answer:
...Mammals are overwhelmingly earth-colored. A few sort-of-green mammals do exist: Tree sloths turn grayish-green when algae grows on their fur. Australia's ringtail opossums have bands of black and yellow on their hair that can look a grizzled olive drab. You could argue that a diatom-encrusted whale is green. But nonmammal tree frogs, praying mantises and parakeets are all luminous greens. Green vegetation fills the natural world, and many of its denizens use green as camouflage. Why not mammals? The short answer is that mammals are hairy. Mammalian hair has only two kinds of pigment: one that produces black or brown hair and one that produces yellow or reddish-orange hair. Mixing those two pigments is never going to yield a bright, contestable green. Rutzmoser suggests a more complex explanation: that small mammals - the ones needing protective coloration the most - typically live on the ground, scurrying in leaf litter. "Dead leaves aren't green," she points out. "They're brown."Finally, most predators of mammals are other mammals, and mammals usually have poor color vision; ergo, green wouldn't help. Given enough time, natural selection could surely produce green fur.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1169/is_n5_v33/ai_17338585
also http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2003-09/1064503150.Ev.r.html
This answer is incorrect on several counts. While it is technically true that mammals have only yellow-red-brown pigments, the same applies to all but a handful of animals that make green pigments proper:
...Frogs have green rods in its retina; turacoverdin is found in the feathers of some touracos; there are green pigments in certain moths; a green pigment colouring the bug Psylla mali on apple trees is formed by symbiotic bacteria; a green pigment has been found in the integument of the lugworm, Arenicola; there are green schemochrome which color the polychaete worms Eulalia viridis and Phyllodoce viridis, and there is a dark-green schemochrome in the entomostracans Triops and Cypris. http://www.tightrope.it/nicolaus/metadoc10.htm
The rest have never learned how to produce other pigments than yellow, brown, and red, -- and some of these pigments (carotenoids) come from our food. Green lizards, parrots, and frogs are as dedicated melanin producers as the mammals. Their green originates through Tyndall scattering by microcrystals. The reflected light is enriched in blue and it becomes green when filtered by an overlayer of a yellow pigment, such as pteridine. Blue and green irises in our eyes originate through the same effect, so the mammals have not fully forgotten the trick. Cold blooded animals rely on stacks of DNA base guanine in their reflective cells (iridophores) to produce this incoherent scattering effect. The birds and mammals do not have these guanine filled iridophores, as they have lost the ability to produce the stacked guanine granules. Instead, the birds make nanosize air vacuoles and channels in the beta-keratin of their feather barbs, see
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v396/n6706/pdf/396028a0.pdf
http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/43/4/591
What they do is not exactly Tyndall scattering, it is coherent scattering, by an engineered 2D structure supporting interference in just the right way, as in dichroic optics. Some birds make layered keratin/melanin thin film structures, too
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/Suppl_2/S203.abstract
but for the majority, it is air bubbles or channels lined by beta-carotene; these are thought to be produced by self-assembly.
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/Suppl_2/S253.full.pdf
How did warm blooded animals shed their iridophores? That's because heat trapping required covering skin, so the skill of growing purine and pterine crystals in the skin cells has been lost in the genetic drift:
...the evolution of hair and feathers, in mammals and birds, respectively, which covered the skin entirely, consequently led to the loss of iridophore expression in mammal and bird skin. Some birds retain structural colour-producing iridophores in the iris of their eyes. http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/207/12/2157
The birds had to reinvent color green from scratch, and this was done by inventing a way to entrap air bubbles in the beta-keratin matrix. The mammals never invented this particular approach, but they arrived at a very similar mechanism for coloration of skin (in mandrills and vervet monkeys), see
http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/207/12/2157
Their appraoch is coherent scattering in collagen arrays of the skin, producing blue; the birds color their skin in the same way. These arrays are quasi-ordered 2D photonic crystals.
http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/207/12/2157
Producing green skin via this approach is quite straightforward, and the paper claims that some marsupials and primatrs do have green patches of skin.
I believe that there are two likely reasons for the lack of green fur. One is purely technical: alpha-keratin of mammalian hair could be too soft for the air channel formation. Structurally, these are different proteins: alpha-keratins are helical, beta-keatins are pleated sheets. The mechanism of self-assembly that produces the "aerogel" may not work for these helical keratins, in principle. So the only way to get green/blue would be layering keratin itself. With such an approach, the problem may be in insufficient gradient of refractivity. With the collagen in skin, this is not too vexing a problem as the skin is thick, so one can have many layers, but hair is only 50-70 um in diameter, so it is hard to get an interference filter out of it, especially with the need of segregating the yellow pigment in the outer layer (to make hair green). Perhaps mammals could've developed a green pigment proper circumventing this inherent limitation, but there is another issue: the majority of mammals are color blind. Since grey/brownish coats are already providing excellent camouflage, the only incentive for green fur is sexual selection. The latter, for the dichromates, cannot lead to green fur. For the trichromate primates it could have, but they chose instead coloring their skin using collagen arrays, as chemically and physically it is easier. I speculate that the combination of these two factors is the correct explanation for the absence of green mammals. But that's just a guess.
Why there are no green mammals?
( How frogs and lizards make themselves green )
Tags: mysteries
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12:08 pm
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Of rats and men
I feel that our intelligence is exceptional not in our rationality, which is commodious, but in something more important and basic: the perception of time. To us, the past is a place we revisit and relive. What's it for animals?
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/102856.php
Episodic-Like Memory in Rats: Is It Based on When or How Long Ago?
...Dog owners, who have noticed that their four-legged friend seem equally delighted to see them after five minutes away as five hours, may wonder if animals can tell when time passes.
...Although memory for when a salient event occurred suggests that rats can mentally travel in time to a moment in the past, an alternative possibility is that they remember how long ago the food was found. Three groups of rats were tested for memory of previously encountered food. The different groups could use only the cues of when, how long ago, or when + how long ago. Only the cue of how long ago food was encountered was used successfully. These results suggest that episodic-like memory in rats is qualitatively different from human episodic memory. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5872/113
...rats are able to keep track of how much time has passed since they discovered a piece of cheese, be it a little or a lot, but they don't actually form memories of when the discovery occurred. That is, the rats can't place the memories in time. The research team designed an experiment in which rats visited the 'arms' of a maze at different times of day. Some arms contained moderately desirable food pellets, and one arm contained a highly desirable piece of cheese. Rats were later returned to the maze with the cheese removed on certain trials and with the cheese replaced with a pellet on others. All told, three groups of rats were tested in the research using three varying cues: when, how long ago or when plus how long ago. Only the cue of how long ago food was encountered was used successfully by the rats.
...episodic-like memory in rats is qualitatively different from human episodic memory, which involves retention of the point in past time when an event occurred. The rats remember whether they did something, such as hoarded food a few hours or five days ago. The more time that has passed, the weaker the memory may be. Rats may learn to follow different courses of action using weak and strong memory traces as cues, thus responding differently depending on how long ago an event occurred. However, they do not remember that the event occurred at a specific point in past time. Previous studies have suggested that rats and scrub jays (a relative of the crow and the blue jay) appear to remember storing or discovering various foods, but it hasn't been clear whether the animals were remembering exactly when these events happened or how much time had elapsed. "Animals are stuck in time, with no sense of time extending into the past or future."
Perhaps this is the main divide between human and animal intelligence: the way in which we perceive the past and the future. Having these is our great strength; it is also our curse. I wonder if it is natural. The rapid burst of modernization of H. sapience is commonly explained by the development of language, but it may be secondary to the development of human-like episodic memory, with placing the events in time and in this way constructing the worlds of the past and the future. We have this Biblical intuition that it is some kind of forbidden knowledge that makes us what we are, and this knowledge has something to do with our mortality. Gaining this type of episodic memory would be such forbidden knowledge. I doubt it is wired-in. Perhaps it is taught, and the "fall" involved the one who discovered it and tought to the descendants, making them human. The two major discoveries one makes using this type of memory is, precisely, the fear of death and the classification of the world into good and evil, as it ties good and bad effects with specific causes. That seemingly requires structuring of the past, as otherwise there is no proper causation. This awareness of oneself in time is rational soul; as it is a model rather than actuality, it is immortal. A minute change in the organisation of memory would lead to collosal changes touching on every aspect of intelligence and worldview.
Is it the episodic memory of the past that makes us human?
Tags: mysteries
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11:41 am
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Apples and Newtons
Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. (Matt. 10:29)
I've always thought that the proverbial brick that "for no reason is never going to fall on anyone," together with the earlier observations from St Matthew, have exhausted all there is substantive to say on the matter of falling objects, but I was proven wrong. And so I revisit the question of why apples are falling down from the trees. The common misconception is that apples fall due to gravity. This is misleading, on at least four counts.
First, nobody knows what IS gravity, as we only know the effects OF gravity. Newton did not discover that apples fell from the trees "due to the gravity." Rather, he recognized the universality of what he called gravity in the entire Solar system, considering this mysterious force in a purely phenomenological way: what happens to apples, happens to planets. "What is gravity?" was a question asked, but not answered. Newton first thought that it was an interaction of moving bodies with "some exceedingly subtle matter that seems to fill the heavens" then decided that it must be some sort of electricity and then went back to aether, this time postulating its variable density. This aether, of course, was the front runner for our dark matter and energy subtly filling the heavens and conveniently reassuring us that our phenomenological theories of the effects of gravity are still correct. Telling that "apples fall because of gravity" conveys very little until one explains precisely why apples fall but photons do not -- or why dark matter is needed to explain why Galaxy disk is stable, but not why apples fall down (and there are already suggestions that planets have dark matter halos -- that contribute to the planet's internal heat, see http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.2823). Apples fall down not because of gravity, but because gravity manifests itself in a certain way where apples grow, and the apples are made of the stuff that responds in a certain way to this gravity. Would apple trees grow near black holes, the fall of an apple would be a sight to behold -- but, for some reason, apple trees do not grow near black holes.
Second, apples fall for no other reason than the apple trees let their apples fall. Through trial and error, the apple trees have discovered an amazing fact about nature: if the seeds are covered by a sugary mass and then let go by the end of summer, somehow there are more apple trees next year. If one just lets the seeds out in the wind, it does not work so well. Simple logic tells that dropping seeds right under the tree is sheer nonsense from the stanpoint of seed distribution. Yet it works, illustrating the counter-intuitive geometrical nature of true reality in which the straight path is the best and the shortest path to a faraway. The trees have discovered this true and accurate knowledge about the reality of the place where they happen to grow, and it became their phenomenological theory of gravity. It works beautifully, year after year, for millions of years, making it a widely accepted, universal theory. As far as I can see, their phenomenological theory is not too radically different from ours.
Third, this theory could've been very different. The seaweeds do not cover their sporophytes in heavy shells so that these sink to the bottom. There is gravity in the sea, plenty of it to be sure, but there are no apples falling down... For reasons nobody can comprehend, the strategy that works is producing spores that have the density of water and releasing these during the spring tides, in romantic moonlight. Furthermore, in order to go up and down, all that one needs to do is to release oxygen into one's pneumatocysts. That is all there is to gravity.
Would the cards fall differently, the apple seeds would merrily float up in the air, like balloons. There are green algae and cyanobacteria that photolytically produce hydrogen gas; growing a thin membrane for the H2-filled zeppelin should not be too hard. As these algae are the closest aquatical relatives of the Plantae, the visage of the H2-filled floating "apples" going up, up, up rather than down, down, down and soever optimizing their seed dispersion does not seem impossible. At least, it is no more preposterous than the strategy of falling straight down in order to be eaten by Newtons and germinating in their poop.
Fourth, would Newtons grow on trees and apples run around, it would be Newtons falling on apples rather than other way around. And you know what: both Newtons and apples would find this order of things natural and call it gravity.
Why do apples fall down on Newtons?
Tags: forgotten topics, mysteries
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10:37 am
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Why are grapes sour?
Grapes are sour, lemons and other citrus are tart, containig up to 8% dry weight of citric acid. The latter is also found (1-2%) in cranberries, blueberries, pomegranates, raspberries, strawberries, etc. Fruit contain malic acid (apples), tartaic and lactic acid (grapes), ascorbic acid (lemons), sorbic acid, succinic acid -- all kinds of polycarboxylic acids. These acids are produced via the citric acid cycle coupled to the glycolysis of the sugars (starch), so the precious carbohydrates are consumed to make the fruit sour. Interestingly, both ripe fruit that are consumed on the plant (cranberries) and those falling on the ground (apples) contain acids, so the preservation of cut fruit is not the cause of this acidity. If the purpose of fruit is to be eaten (and it is clearly the goal, as suggested by the presence of sugars) why make itself sour? There are plenty of sweet fruit (say, mango) that do not make such prodigious quantities of the acids. The folk wisdom is that fruit has evolved so as to be attractive to animals who will spread seeds by consuming it... Perhaps there are animals (birds?) that find lemons palatable and the plant has evolved to specialize itself for them. Or the cultivated form of lemons are a kind of "arrested" form of a wild ancestor that is, in fact, sweet. http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2003-10/1065540380.Ev.r.html
Alas, there are no birds or other animals specializing on lemons, and wild citrus are even more acidic than domesticated one. Another popular misconception is that these acids make fruit last longer as these are natural preservatives, antimicrobial agents, antioxidants, etc. This is not true, as can be attested by anyone finding a spoiled lemon in a fridge. Citric acid, unlike the ascorbate, has no antioxidant properties and most of bacteria and fungi are not stopped by this acid. Citrus, grapes, and apples rot like any other fruit regardless of their acid content. For all the passion that goes into the discussions of acidity and sweetness by wine connoiseurs, one would think that someone should've figured out the function of the sourness in fruit long time ago. This is not the case. This function is a mystery, and I doubt it is has anything to do with preservation. I have two ideas:
Idea 1. The tree aims to maximize the dispersal of its seeds. Having a single animal gorging itself on fruit is waste, so it makes fruit sufficiently acidic (repellant) that one animal eats few fruit, so other animals can eat these fruit, too, increasing the spread. Flowers add repellants to the nectar for their pollinators, for the same reason.
Idea 2. Higher acidity assists in speeding of digestion of the fruit or causes slight indigestion keeping the seed from damage by digestive enzymes.
Idea 3. Too much of a good thing, and you'll get something like this Bacchanalia under the old Marula tree in South Africa (see below) -- and this fruit is not only tart, but also reeking of turpentine! Sugary fruit ferments easily and drunk animals do not disperse seeds too well. Someone has to know better, and it is not animals...
Why are grapes sour?
Tags: mysteries
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04:17 am
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Folk paleontology and dragons
A popular explanation of medieval obsession with dragons and serpents is folk paleontology: medieval people were finding dinosaur bones and rationalizing these findings as the remains of the dragons. However, it took science considerable time to class dinosaurs as, specifically, giant reptiles (that happened only in the late 1850s) as the similarity with the modern reptiles is elusive. The first detailed description of a dinosaur fossil is from 1676 (Robert Plot) who took these fossils for the remains of elephants brought by the Romans to conquer Oxfordshire! The first connection to reptiles was made by great Cuvier (1808) who used comparative anatomy to prove that marine reptile Mosasaurus was a reptile. The caveat is that he based this conclusion on the similarities of the skull to that of varanid lizards. The latter were unknown to medieval Europeans. Not only this discovery required the genius of Cuvier, it required previous geographical exploration in order to make the connection. Nobody believed Cuvier anyway. The giant bones were still thought of as remains of mammalian megafauna (elephants, mastodonts). As late as 1836, the giant footprints were thought to be of colossal extinct birds, Noah's ravens. The lizard connection was reinstated by Mantells who reasoned that the teeth of Iguanadon are similar to those of modern iguanas. Once more, the reference was a lizard that does not occur in the Old World.
The reptilian character of the fossils is not evident from the bones unless one is knowledgable of comparative anatomy. Owen, who called the dinosaurs dinosaurs in 1840 was convinced that dinosaurs had a mixture of lizard and mammalian traits and thus disproved (progressive) theories of evolution. In fact, dinosaurs have no mammalian features whatsoever. Nearly all fossils on which the anatomy of the newly identified dinosaurs was studied originated from North America, which was strictly off limits to medieval "paleontologists." And yet dragon imagery, for most of its part, is distinctively reptilian, with unmistakable reptilian features that almost never fossilize (e.g., scales). The only reason we readily make the connection between the dinosaurs and modern reptiles in our minds is because we have been told that dinosaurs are reptiles many times over since our early childhood. In principle, one can find many avian similarities and say that the dinosaurs were giant chickens rather than lizards. It is an accident of history of science that the reptilian traits were noticed first, and the avian traits only later. I cannot imagine how can one seriously expect medieval people to make such connections in the absence of complete skeletons, anatomical knowledge, and extant models.
How could medieval people guess from observing dinosaur bones that these beasts had reptilian features? Does this folk theory about folk paleontolgy make any sense? -- And if it does not, why did they imagine the reptilian like dragons and huge serpents everywhere - in Europe, Asia, and the Americas?
On what knowledge this common imagination has rested?
Tags: mysteries
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08:36 am
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The scent of the ideal
A reader of this blog chastized me for abandoning the classical ideals of beauty and harmony and damned me for digressing to lowly evolutionary arguments in the recent discussion of flowery scents. While I hold fast to my argument, by no means it precludes the ideal from the subject. I mean that quite literally:
...Although it is agreed that physicochemical features of molecules determine their perceived odor, the rules governing this relationship remain unknown. A significant obstacle to such understanding is the high dimensionality of features describing both percepts and molecules. We applied a statistical method to reduce dimensionality in both odor percepts and physicochemical descriptors for a large set of molecules. We found that the primary axis of perception was odor pleasantness, and critically, that the primary axis of physicochemical properties reflected the primary axis of olfactory perception. This allowed us to predict the pleasantness of novel molecules by their physicochemical properties alone. Olfactory perception is strongly shaped by experience and learning. However, our findings suggest that olfactory pleasantness is also partially innate, corresponding to a natural axis of maximal discriminability among biologically relevant molecules.
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/27/37/10015#F2
Translating: It has been shown that "pleasantness" is the main factor by which we classify smells in the perceptual space of 1500 odorants. The authors then invented various metrics for chemicals (atom counts, functional group counts, counts of types of bonds, topological descriptors etc.) The one that correlated best with the perceived pleasantness is a topological descriptor of molecular structure with no intuitive content: it is purely ideal, as it is the average eigenvector of the distance matrix, which is suitably normalized by molecular weight (that correlates with the volatility). Very crudely, it is a measure of the denseness of chemical bonds per volume of space. Using this approach they predicted pleasantness of 150 odorants and tested their prediction on their subjects, with moderate success, given the cultural variations and the fact that pleasantness is learned. So there is some very general, if obscure trend in the pleasantness of chemicals as we perceive it -- for whatever reason. Well connected molecules, like benzenoids produced by flowers, tend to have pleasant smells, whereas bacterial metabolites (broken larger biomolecules) tend to have lower connectedness and, therefore, unpleasant smells. In the physicochemical space of this topological measure the flowery aromas are as perfect as the sphere is in the Euclidian space.
The flowers smell of the ideal form, and it is this timeless ideal that we enjoy by smelling flowers and applying perfume. So spit in the eye of anyone telling you that the fragrance of a rose is not the manifestation of the absolute perfection, beauty, and harmony.
Still, there is a minor issue of explaining how the roses settled on this solution and why humans respond to it. That's where the evolutionary argument shows its ugly head once again...
PS: With this post I close the topic of smells before I am accused of corrupting the minds of the young and not worshipping the gods the state worships.
Tags: mysteries
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01:35 pm
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Why do flowers smell good?
see http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/147640.html & the discussion
Are we culturally conditioned to like floral scents (that is, we find such fragrance pleasant because we are told that it is pleasant) or is there a genetic/physiological reason for this preference? I was asked this question in the following form: why do we find the scent of the flowers pleasant and the malodor of feces offensive?
The most likely answer is that it is all cultural, including the rancid smell of the feces. It cannot be genetic or physiological. Apes routinely consume their own and each others poop reprocessing the salts and vitamins B and K. Little kids have no inhibition trying the stuff either. Our ancestors were, without doubt, coprophagous, just like the rest of the apes, and it can be expected that they found fecal smells attractive. The degree of natural aversion to such smells is low, and the horrid stories about the toxic effects of "bacteria" in the feces are nonsense. The stench of the feces and manure was the norm of urban life just 100-150 years ago, and very few people minded. One needs only going to India to understand that what we find self-obvious -- the feces smell bad -- is the result of sanitation, restrictive purity laws, and other cultural taboos. Contrary to what we have been told, the feces do not smell bad. The feces smell of feces. Early in our lives we were told that these smells are bad, and that the feces should be avoided. That's cultural. Until the connection between the feces and the infectious disease was made about 200 years ago, the prevalent odor around H. sapiens was not that of the roses.
There is certain genetic bias for disliking S- and N-rich volatiles, as these accompany food decay, but this bias is much weaker than most people believe. Conversely, there is certain preference for food related smells, but again this preference is weaker than commonly believed. One learns to recognize a particular smell as good or bad. Nobody likes the smell of beer, cheese, fish sauce, sauerkraut, etc. on the first try. We have natural preference for sweet and fruity smells (esters, other fatty acid derivatives, terpenoids, benzenoids), but that's very general. Most smells are neither directly related to food nor indicative of food decay, and such odorants are classified very subjectively, with cultural conventions serving as the prevalent influence in our likes and dislikes. Children younger than eight often cannot tell whether the smell is bad or good and/or have responses opposite to those of the adults. They say that butyric acid (rancid butter) smells just like bananas (amyl acetate) and find the synthetic smell of feces highly attractive. The latter is not unexpected, because the gut bacteria break down starchy components of food into alcohols, aldehydes and acids that are fairly similar to those produced by the flowering plants. We learn good and bad smells; it seems that almost all of the smells are learned. Many "good" odorants that were thought to be genetically attractive have been shown to be learned. The classical example of this kind is vanilla smell: it has been shown that the smell of vanillin is classified as "good" because this chemical occurs in the breast milk and the formulas: the learning of good and bad smells begins as soon as we are born.
Back to the flowers. Flowers do not produce their fragrance for our benefit; they produce attractants for pollinators. Actually, the plants know better than producing just the attractants: they always add repellants to prevent the pollinators from having too much of the good thing, depriving the flower of other visitors (the nicotine is the textbook example of such a repellant). The black art of the flowers is that of animal seduction and manipulation, and we are the ones that are seduced and manipulated. Humans do not use flowers for food, so why are we attracted to these floral scents? One reason is that ripe fruit emit aromas that are either identical or structurally similar to those of the flowers. The plants rely on homologous chemicals partly for economy, partly to confuse animals consuming their fruit: the animals exploring flowers for edibility become inadvertent pollinators. Another reason is that our primate ancestors were occasional insectivores (and descendants of insectivorous shrews) that were very interested in these very pollinators. Flowers smell nice to us because they attract all these yammy insects: it is the association with food for which we are biochemically programmed. Dogs and cats have a powerful sense of smell, but you would not find them enjoying the first irises of the spring. Neither are the cows interested in the fragrance of the violets that they mulch. The only two groups of animals that are truly appreciative of the fragrance of flowers are their pollinators and the predators of these pollinators. Our keen interest in flowers (that goes beyond their smell) betrays our primate lineage.
Said that, I doubt that we like the smell of flowers because of this genetic bias. The flowers smell good because generation upon generation of parents told their children that flowers smell good.
Why do flowers smell good?
Tags: mysteries
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08:32 pm
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Why do women wear perfume?
It is not just why, but also how and where. I've been mystified with perfume since I was a little boy. Why did my mother use something that smelled funny on herself? Did she want to impersonate a flower? Did she do it for the others? Did she do that for herself? The smell was unpleasant and overwhelming. There was something fishy about it, too, because only grown-ups used it.
I've grown up, but I am still mystified. It seems so strange: that our females perfume themselves (rather than, say, tattoo their faces or burn incense) and that the perfume is applied to the temples and the wrists. My impression is that few men appreciate the perfume; we just go along. I doubt it is done for us, to attract us. Could it be done for other females? Perhaps. It is functional, too, as it masks body smells, but the method of its application is not most efficient for such masking. In principle, the perfume can be used for labeling one's man (smelling other's woman perfume on a man betrays an ongoing affair) but that would be too devious. Perfuming is a venerable cultural tradition, but its origin and justification are obscure. The histories of perfume tell all kind of stories about perfume remaining silent about the reason it came into use.
This reason may originates in the forgotten medical theories of the past. See Jones' Women's Bodies in Classical Greek Science, pp. 69. One of the things that puzzled the medical men was the function and the operation of the womb. The latter was considered to be a wandering (or, more correctly, turning) organ in a loose-textured female body having multiple internal passages (hence hysteria, a displacement of the womb). The prevalent opinion, codified by the Hippocratics, but originating from the tradition of great antiquity, was that it generally moved either towards liver or towards heart. It was believed to have the strong sense of smell and be attracted by odors permeating through the channels going all the way to the head. The motion of the womb towards the heart was considered to be most benign and conducive to conception, whereas its relocation to other parts of the body caused all kinds of maladies. Application of fragrance to the upper body, especially to the head, attracted the womb away from the foulness of stomach towards the nourishing, wholesome heart thereby making the womb most receptive to semen.
I suspect that the reason our ladies wear perfume is this fascinating medical theory. People seriously underestimate the effect of such bygone scientific theories on our culture. From going to a restaurant and the beach to old wives' remedies (which are, in fact, the cutting edge medicine of the past, with plenty of learned opinion accounting for its action) to the symbol of love -- it is all forgotten ideas and theories that still live on and go on, with amazing and undiminished tenacity.
Perhaps becoming such cultural rubble is the true destination of all of our best theories.
Why do women wear perfume?
PS: a few more examples
http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/67241.html
http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/18944.html
http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/14048.html
http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/14693.html
Tags: mysteries
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02:18 pm
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The seventh proof
to http://flying-bear.livejournal.com/632906.html
While for many the orderliness of the world is what primarily suggests the existence of the invisible Master, according to Josephus, the man that inferred this existence, Abraham, made it arguing from the opposite premise: the randomness and disorderliness of the Universe. Josephus portrays Abraham as a Chaldean astronomer who was bitterly disappointed with the ridiculous patterns observed in sky and on the earth: the solar year of incomprehensible 365 1/4 days, the moon year of 354 days, the brazen irregularities of planetary motions, the absurdity of tidal tables, and so forth. Abraham realized that worship of the Sun is pointless because the Sun cannot even command the Moon to follow its year, and the rest of it is the mish-mash of numbers, none of which is even round.
...Abram...was the first that ventured to publish this notion, That there was but one G-d, the Creator of the Universe; and that, as to other [g-ds], if they contributed any thing to the happiness of men, that each of them afforded it only according to his appointment, and not by their own power. This his opinion was derived from the irregular phenomena that were visible both at land and sea, as well as those that happen to the sun, and moon, and all the heavenly bodies, thus: If [said he] these bodies had power of their own, they would certainly take care of their own regular motions; but since they do not preserve such regularity, they make it plain, that in so far as they co-operate to our advantage, they do it not of their own abilities, but as they are subservient to Him that commands them, to whom alone we ought justly to offer our honor and thanksgiving. For which doctrines, when the Chaldeans, and other people of Mesopotamia, raised a tumult against him, he thought fit to leave that country... and came and lived in the land of Canaan.
http://reluctant-messenger.com/josephusA01.htm (Josephus Antiquities 1.154-168)
see also http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15769497
I wonder what would Abraham decide had he been born in the 18th century, the clockwork universe being furnished as the foundation of the faith he originated. Perhaps he would prefer our own time with the mess of the Standard Model and its mysterious numerology.
Was the randomness the cornersone of monotheistic faith?
Tags: mysteries
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03:39 pm
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Eeenie Meenie Miny Moe
The Thanksgiving day is close and it is time to begin another LJ season. By tradition, the first post of the season is on nursery rhymes. I welcome all readers of this blog and wish them the very best!
* * *
Every time I pass by a playground I can hear little kids singing
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
followed by "My mother says that you are IT!," or "My mother told me to pick the very best one and you are IT!" ---- and the kid is picked. I've been mystified by this song for a long time, because catching good quality tigers by their toes does not sound like a jolly good idea. In the UK, the words are different, but the general idea is the same. The rhyme has been in print since the 1850s, and it is claimed that the first line is from a Celtic or even Roman sheep-counting rhyme, which I doubt (see below). In 1923, Kipling published this classical version of the rhyme that was commonly heard in the US when he lived in SF. It was still sung widely in 1965. It reads
Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
Catch a nigger by the toe!
If he hollers let him go!
Eenee, Meenee. Mainee, Mo!
You-are-It!
There is an earlier published version with a "tinker" (1917) and a "chicken." (1898) Otherwise, it is uniformly the "nigger." That it was not a chicken is suggested by the alternative last lines
If he hollers make him pay,
Fifty dollars every day.
The song is beginning to make sense: you catch your slave by his toe and do just as mamma says. However, catching the domestics by their toes and making them holler still looks like a strange thing to do for a grown child. The meaning of the rhyme could be quite different:
...the verse was originally medieval and Scottish. It is an exorcism that has been garbled in translation, like "Hoc est corpus meum" ["This is my body"] becoming hocus pocus [via "hax pax max Deus adimax"]. The racial term predated slavery and originally meant the "black one" (accusative Latin "nigrum") or the Devil:
"Eeny meeny miney mo"
"Inimicus animo" is Latin for "enemy of the spirit"
"Catch the nigger by the toe"
Use of "the" this reinforces the concept that this refers to the Devil. It is further reinforced in that many variants use the term devil.
"If he hollers let him go"
If you catch or pinch a human toe, they will feel it and protest, but the Devil has a cloven hoof and therefore has no sensation in the toe. If the person tested cries out in pain it suggests that they are not the Devil and you should release them. http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/18/messages/776.html
The rhyme was used to eliminate the Devil from the choice. This is an interesting interpretation, though "inimicus animo" has never been the greeting and it is bad Latin. The standard greeting of the Devil was
...omnis immundus spiritus,
omnis incursio infernalis adversarii,
omnis legio,
omnis congregatio et secta diabolica.
These persistent "omnis" can be heard by an illiterate man as "eenie meenie miny moe." Here is the beginning of the old standard exorcist rite of the Catholic church: "Exorciso te,
...immunde spiritus,
et omnes administros tuos,
in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,
et in nomine beatissimae Virginis Mariae.
Amen.
The begginings of these lines catch the soundplay of "eenie meenie miny moe" even closer.
What kind of a game is "eenie meenie miny moe?"
Tags: mysteries
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02:32 pm
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Do we have the Enemy?
The bird is the enemy of the earthworm, and yet no worm can describe its own sworn enemy: the enemy exists outside of its sensory world. Even without seeing the enemy, it is possible to deduce its presence by observing the worm. The worm would not try to minimize its exposure on the ground if there were not an enemy spotting it there. The presence of a stinger in a bee immediately tells us that it has an enemy. The avoidance of light by a deep water fish immediately tells about the hunting strategy of its predator. These defensive organs and strategies already suffice to tell that there is a predator, even if the predator is not known or it cannot be seen (e.g., in the deep sea). Passive mimicry falls into the same category: it simply makes no sense if there is no shared predator. The classical manifestation of this sharing is Müllerian rings.
...where two or more harmful species that are not closely related, and share one or more common predators, have come to mimic each other's warning signals. It can be contrasted with Batesian mimicry, where a harmless organism imitating the protected species is referred to as the mimic and the dangerous one being imitated the model. Müllerian mimicry differs because both parties are harmful; each mimic the other species, while serving as a model at the same time. If one species is encountered far less than the other, the more common species could be treated as the model and the other the mimic. However, if they are encountered in similar numbers they would best be termed comimics or mimic-models. The predator mediating indirect convergence between these two parties is known as the signal receiver or dupe, though the latter term is less relevant here, as they are not actually deceived about the harmful qualities of their prey; both prey provide an honest warning signal. Müllerian mimicry need not involve visual mimicry; it may employ involve any of the senses. For example, many snakes share the same auditory warning signals, forming an auditory Müllerian mimicry ring. More than one common signal may show convergences by the parties.
The observation of comimicry immediately tells us that there is a predatory dupe driving the convergence. Observing this predator is not required to deduce its existence. Ditto for the evolution towards infertility, where the organism produces seedless decoys distracting the enemy and making predation too costly.
It is interesting to look from this perspective on ourselves. Is there any evidence that we have the Enemy? The fact that we cannot sense this enemy tells little, as the worm also cannot sense its enemy; when it does, it is too late. Besides, humans are not exactly animals and our enemy should be different from your typical animal predator. The very essense of being a successful predator is to remain undetected or even unknown using the advantage of the sense that the prey is lacking. It makes sense that we cannot see the enemy; the important thing is that it sees us. Not seeing, however, does not mean that the presence of the enemy cannot be deduced, because the defensive and evasive strategies would testify about this presence.
Recently, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dennett had an interesting post on the Turing test. The test posits that a machine that perfectly mimics reasoning of a human is as intelligent as a human; intelligence is nothing more than imitating of the etalon, which is oneself. I consider it self-evident truth that I am intelligent and I deduce that the others are intelligent either by analogy and through interactions. Replace "machine" with "another human" and you get a huge comimicry ring of human beings trying to pass as intelligent to each other, achieving remarkable convergence along the way. There is no denial that a lot of our interaction is comimicry, in which we serve both as mimics and models of other's intelligence. That's an interesting observation in itself, but it becomes even more interesting when one asks, why are we doing that? Why are we so eager to display our intelligence? Are we trying to prove something (e.g. that we are machines)? Is it really for each other? What if it is not for us, but for our common enemy? Perhaps the enemy considers intelligence to be a harmful signal. Then, of course, both the display and the convergence begin to make sense. The trend on increasing the IQ also makes sense. Another great strategy would be decoys: humans that appear to be intelligent, but are not really, as their only goal is to pretend to have the harmful quality that repels the predator. It is Batesian mimicry. Even the lowering of the birth rates can be viewed as evolution towards infertility under the predatory pressure: declining fertility occurs in synchrony with rising intelligence and world population and aims at swamping the enemy with numerous less intelligent decoys. It is not hard to translate many other trends and patterns into this language.
Can the intelligence be an adaptation to the Enemy that targets beings that have achieved certain minimal level of rationality? The fact that this enemy is not perceived is the testimony to its highly successive preying strategy. The nature of the enemy and what exactly it preys upon are less important than its very presence and the latter reveals itself through the nature and the behavior of its human victims.
Do we have the Enemy?
Tags: mysteries
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06:29 pm
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Aeromimicry
Air Force roundels are clearly imitating the wing pattern of medieval dragons:
A double flier: Portugal+Nigeria
Spain
cf.
and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundel
Whom the aviators are imitating: dragons or butterflies?
PS: St George slaying
the synapsid?
take 1 http://www.abcgallery.com/B/bellini/bellini45.html
takes 2&3 http://www.abcgallery.com/B/burne-jones/burnejones12.html
http://www.illusionsgallery.com/St-George-Burne-JonesL.jpg
the therapsid?
http://www.abcgallery.com/M/memling/memling27.html
Tags: mysteries
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04:33 pm
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AI
http://ivanov-petrov.livejournal.com/1014927.html
http://ivanov-petrov.livejournal.com/987875.html
http://ivanov-petrov.livejournal.com/966679.html
http://ivanov-petrov.livejournal.com/959400.html
Can there be such a thing as artificial intellect? To make AI one has to redefine our own intellect in such a way that a facet of it can be modeled. What facet? That depends on what is seen as the essence of intellect. Perhaps the best and also the simplest definition of the intellect belongs to Henri Bergson.
To Bergson, intellect is the power of seeing things as separate from each other. That is all. Intellect is the quintessential property of Life. The latter is the fundamental notion of Bergson's philosophy, in which Life is opposing matter. The matter is how the intellect views the inert building blocks from which Life creates itself. How Life does it and through what adaptations it overcomes the resistance of matter is unimportant; it will find a way. The process itself is creative, meaning that its result is unknown and it is not predicated on the past. The only way to know the goal of Life is to let it create itself. This goal is identified with the Absolute. As Life overcomes the resistance of matter in its upward motion towards the Absolute, intellect is Life looking onward and downward, "adopting the ways of unorganized nature in principle, in order to direct them in fact." It is the contemplation of what passes by, not of what drives Life forward, which is intuition. Intellect is breaking into fragments this continous flux of discarded and deflected garbage. Bergson considers mathematics and logic as activities in which the will is suspended and mind is not active: these are pitiful attempts of the intellect to construct something out of the pieces of rubbish it itself separated from the reality. The pieces have no meaning whatsoever. Russell aptly calls Bergson's intellect a "carver that has peculiarity of imagining that the chicken always was the separate pieces into which the carving knife divides it." Intellect is a flaw in our design; in better designed forms of Life it is not needed, because it is counterproductive and unnecessary. In this respect, my own view is similar to Bergson's, see http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/121946.html
...While the relationship between consciousness and matter instantiated in the instinct of animals is sufficient and well adapted to their survival (from the point of view of the species), humans are not adequately equipped in this respect; hence the necessity of something like intelligence.
...His argument consists of four main steps. First, he shows that there must be an original common impulse which explains the creation of all living species; this is his famous vital impulse (élan vital). Second, the diversity resulting from evolution must be accounted for as well. If the original impulse is common to all life, then there must also be a principle of divergence and differentiation that explains evolution; this is Bergson's tendency theory. Third, the two main diverging tendencies that account for evolution can ultimately be identified as instinct on the one hand and intelligence on the other. Human knowledge results from the form and the structure of intelligence. Intelligence consists precisely in an analytic, external, hence essentially practical and spatialized approach to the world. Unlike instinct, human intelligence is therefore unable to attain to the essence of life in its duration. The paradoxical situation of humanity (the only species that wants to know life is also the only one that cannot do so) must therefore be overcome. So, fourth, the effort of intuition what allows us to place ourselves back within the original creative impulse so as to overcome the numerous obstacles that stand in the way of true knowledge.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson
One may or may not agree with Bergson, but suppose he is right. Then AI is hopeless and pointless. Intellect has its purpose only in living things and this purpose is to compensate for the flaws of intuition. It cannot be created "artificially" because to have intellect the object has to be alive and only life brings forth life, so the artificiality is deceptive; at best, one succeeds in creating another deficient life form. Furthermore, it seems completely wasteful to create something which is no more than a handicap. The only worthy task would be enhancing intuition rather than modeling and re-creating a facet of the already facetous and corrupt intellect.
Can there be such a thing as artificial intellect?
Tags: mysteries
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12:32 pm
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On the Enlightenment
related http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/134936.html (On Sacrifice and Common Good)
http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/121758.html (Leaders and followers)
...For many pathogens, the outcome of the interaction between host and bacterium is strongly affected by the bacterial population size. Coupling the production of virulence factors with cell population density ensures that the host lacks sufficient time to mount an effective defence against consolidated attack. Such a strategy depends on the ability of an individual bacterial cell to sense other members of the same species and in response, differentially express specific sets of genes. Such cell-cell communication is called "quorum sensing" and involves the activation of a response regulator. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11437336?dopt=Abstract&holding=npg
...Bacteria which use quorum sensing produce and secrete signaling compounds called autoinducers. When the inducer binds to it’s receptor, it activates transcription of certain genes, including those for inducer synthesis. When only a few other bacteria of the same kind are in the vicinity, diffusion reduces the concentration of the inducer in the surrounding medium, so the bacteria produce little inducer. With high concentrations of bacteria, the concentration of the inducer passes a threshold, so more inducer is synthesised. This forms a positive feedback loop, and the receptor becomes fully activated. http://microbiologybytes.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/quorum-sensing-in-bacteria-we-two-are-one
...Quorum sensing was first observed in V. fischeri, a bioluminiscent bacterium that lives as a symbiont in the photophore of a squid. When V. fischeri cells are free-living (or planktonic), the autoinducer is at low concentration and thus cells do not luminesce. However, when they are highly concentrated in the photophore transcription of luciferase is induced, leading to bioluminescence. The bioluminescence would not be visible if it were produced by a single cell. By using quorum sensing to limit the production of luciferase to situations when cell populations are large, V. fischeri cells are able to avoid wasting energy on the production of useless products. (Wiki)
The herding mechanism invented by the pathogens for coordinated destruction of their Universe and their immediate gain can also be used to produce light for the sake of the Great Friendly Squid on the High Seas seeking its mate. It's astonishing how little is the difference between people and bacteria...
The bacteria living in the photophore of the squid and cooperatively producing light when there is enough of them have no idea why do they cooperate to produce this light.
When we cooperate, for whom do we cooperate?
Tags: mysteries
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10:48 pm
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On Sacrifice and Common Good
...Salmonella survive thanks to a genetically-encoded cooperative strategy. All the bacteria within the small initial population are genetically identical, but nevertheless two groups emerge. Establishing an infection requires the coordinated action between the two groups: one group stays inside the intestinal cavity while the other group invades the cells lining the intestines. The second group is doomed. Invading the intestinal cells touches off a massive immune response that these bacteria cannot survive. They ultimately add to the common good, however, because their self-destruction also causes massive inflammation inside the gut that wipes out many of the existing microbes there. With their competitors gone, the remaining bacteria can multiply into a widespread infection.
...both groups of the bacteria are genetically identical even though some of them are driven towards self destruction. All the bacteria have the genes that drive the self-destructive behavior, but not all of them express these genes. If the two groups of bacteria were not genetically identical, the self-destructive form would be quickly wiped out. Instead, if some percentage of a population is programmed to randomly begin cooperating self-destructively, then the population as a whole will survive.
http://www.livescience.com/health/081001-salmonella-bacteria.html
Who would think that food poisoning is sacrifice of a few on behalf of the many...
Could it be that some people are also randomly programmed for heroic sacrifice the ultimate goal of which is infecting this planet with humans?
Tags: mysteries
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02:03 am
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The battle of ideas
I've been to a bookstore yesterday, and the first thing I saw there, right in the children's section, was this book, modestly titled "Son of Promise, Child of Hope,"
It has an uplifting poem going
One Sunday when Barack was sitting in church,
Barack heard God say, 'Slow down,
Look around you.
Now look to me.
There is hope enough here
to last a lifetime.'
Barack smiled,
tears rolling down his cheeks.
Suddenly he knew for certain
Hope would last long enough
for him to make a difference.
Next week kids will be treated to "My Dad, John McCain" by Meghan McCain:
The Democrats took no chances: before the nomination they commissioned another book, "Hillary Rodham Clinton: Dreams Taking Flight:" One day, there was a girl who wanted to fly. She dreamed of zooming in a spaceship up through clouds into outer space... In her eight years in the White House, she was a new kind of First Lady, blasting off like a rocket. She flew into advancing the rights of women around the world. Always she was in the public, with no privacy. The rocket had a crash landing, but in the enchanted kingdom of commissioned children's books it is still flying over there, between the unblinking stars.
What is going on?
Tags: mysteries
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01:14 am
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One year
My father had died almost a year ago, on September 28, 2007.
I've been thinking of him every day over the last year. I have plenty to think about:
Father did not die of natural causes. A drunken man shove him down the flight of stairs when father tried to stop him from assaulting a woman. Shortly afterwards, his murderer had a fatal accident. My father was 71 year old when he died.
Two months before his murder, father checked into a hospital. He was very ill, he knew he was. The diagnosis, which he showed no one, reads like a life sentence. There was almost no blood circulation in both of his legs. He had emphysema, diffuse pneumosclerosis, aorta atherosclerosis, and hypertension. The doctors were barely able to put him back on his feet. He was told that in a few months both of his lower extremities had to be amputated and that he would be unlikely to survive the surgery, given his condition. Would he survive it, his will be the life of suffering and pain, and yet the progress of emphysema would be only temporarily stalled. Father was going to die a horrible, agonizing death. When he left for that conference by the Black Sea, where the accident happened, he knew that it was the last time he was able to go anywhere; ahead was only misery and darkness. Before he left, he went through his archive and put all papers in order. He knew that he could die any moment now. He just did not know how.
My father died a saint, paying with his life for following the commandment of G-d in whom he stopped believing. What he thought would take months filled with agony and despair, took seconds. His murderer did not outlast his evil by five minutes, becoming a mess of broken bone. The end of this man was as brutal as his life, but that life was finally given its purpose. This man wanted to be evil, and he tried his best to do evil, and perhaps he thought that he did -- and yet he had done evil only to himself. It is not as easy to do evil as people think.
I miss dad and I have been thinking of him every day.
Tags: mysteries
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10:42 am
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The olympic puzzle
I read in today's newspaper an interesting justification of why the Chinese got so many medals at the Beijing Olympics: the exceptional athletic ability is a rare quality that is evenly distributed throughout human population. The country with the lagest population is destined to perform best at the competition of such athletes. I immediately thought about India. Here you have another billion strong country, so how is it performing athletically? I can not remember ever hearing about Indian athletes. It turns out there are such Indians
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_at_the_Olympics
but they excel in field hockey and shooting from a rifle, which are not everyone's favorite sports. The total of gold medals since the beginning of the games is nine (!). Wikipedia observes:
...Numerous explanations have been offered for the dearth, including poverty, malnutrition, neglected infrastructure, the lack of sponsorship, the theft of money and equipment, political corruption, institutional disorganization, social immobility, the predominance of cricket. India is the country in the world with the lowest number of total Olympic medals per capita (of those countries that have actually won at least one medal).
also, http://www.sportstaronnet.com/tss2738/stories/20040918005300800.htm
Could it be that celebration of physicality is not Indian forte? Is it possible that there are hundreds of millions of people who do not consider dedication of one's life to winning by a margin of 0.001 second or 2 inches a worthy pursuit? Perhaps having a large population is not important, after all. The population has to take interest in these queer pursuits and make it a point of national pride. It is remarkable that there are still people resisting to do both.
Why?
Tags: mysteries
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09:41 am
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Whence abbreviations?
There was an explosion of abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms that happened right before WWI. It occurred simulataneously in several countries, most notably in England, France, Germany, and Russia. My wife has a theory (as abbreviations are standard in Talmudic Hebrew, e.g. Tanakh) that this phenomenon was related to mass secularization of European Jewry, especially in Germany and Russia. The paradox is that such contractions as Nazi might've originated in Jewish culture. I remain doubtful, although, as classical and ecclesiastical Latin was as rich in the initialisms as medieval Hebrew, for similar reasons. On the other hand I do not know why the abbreviations suddenly became popular in the 20th century. Nothing of this persistent use of the abbreviations existed in vernacular languages. The list of abbreviations in use in English of 1911 is extremely short; by contrast, the modern abbreviation finders have up to 600,000 entries. Sometimes it is claimed that the abbreviation fad originated in the US in the 1830s; the familiar OK is the remnant of this burst that included such items as SP ("small potatoes"), NS ("nuff said") and KKK (commit no nuisance). Tracking the history of commonly used abbreviations is nearly impossible; for example, I cannot find when the "U.S.A." and the "U.K." began to be used. One authority even claims that
...there is only one known pre-20th-century word with an acronymic origin and it was in vogue for only a short time in 1886. The word is colinderies or colinda, an acronym for the Colonial and Indian Exposition held in London in that year.
Why do we use thousands of abbreviations after centuries of not using any at all?
Tags: mysteries
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10:02 pm
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R.I.P. for D.O.M.
This summer I noticed something I've never read about before and I can not find anything about it: on the vast majority of tombs and sarcophagi in Renaissance cathedrals there is a D.O.M. (Deo optimo maximo or Domino Optimo Maximo; to the greatest and best Lord) instead of the familiar R.I.P. (Riposi in Pace; rest in peace). D.O.M. is the motto of the Order of St Benedict, but it was widely used for those who were not the Benedictines. D.O.M. originated as a classical abbreviation of dedication to Jove
...A word may be said concerning the abbreviation D.O.M., sometimes seen over the doors of our churches and which whatever may be said to the contrary, has never been a Christian symbol. The formula referred originally Jupiter.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01021b.htm
"Its use continued long after the fall of Roman civilization... The abbreviation can be found on many Renaissance-era churches and other buildings especially over sarcophagus, particularly in Italy." Oh, yes. One is hard pressed to find R.I.P. in Florentine or Venetian churches of the era. Then, somewhere around 1600, D.O.M. disappeared, suddenly, completely and entirely, and only R.I.P. can be seen from then onwards. Perhaps D.O.M. fell into disgrace during counter-Reformation due to its questionable allusions and was replaced by a neutrally sounding R.I.P. Or maybe it became too presumptious to assume that the entombed were delivered to the right destination?
What happened?
Tags: mysteries
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02:14 pm
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War and peace
I was trying to remember the other day: when and how did people start to wage wars not for their own gain and their own good but, declaratively, for the good of the people they destroy and in the interest of greater peace?
Ancient East, Greece, Rome and the Middle Ages provide no such examples. I do not recall any such declarations before the Enlightenment. I do not think that even the concept of "peacemaking" existed until the late Middle Ages (the word itself dates from 1436), and in any case it was neither assumed nor suggested that peace should be achieved by waging war. The meaning of "peace" as the absence of war is itself very late, it dates from 1297; before that "peace" meant the absence of civil disorder. With such usage, making peace by decimation of population makes perfect sense, and yet I do not recall anyone using peace as the pretext. "Pax Romana" as a concept was introduced by Gibbon; the Romans were too busy crushing rebellions and fighting barbarians to notice that they were living in peace. There were many other such pax'es in history (from Pax Assyriaca to Pax Hispanica) but those, like Pax Romana, have been recognized as such very recently and "pax" there simply implies that mass atrocities were temporarily stalled by people's pulpable expectations of being at the receiving end of the imperial might. A nice thing about these empires is that they proclaimed their intentions without hypocritical talk about other's good, innocent lives, or the universal peace. Even during the Reformation no effort was made to claim that religious wars pursued the good of the heretics and were waged in the interest of greater peace.
The now familiar rationale of "coercion to peace" was completely unknown before the Age of Reason. The scholarship I found on the subject suggests that, too, e.g.
http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300088663
http://www.amazon.com/Invention-Peace-Reinvention-War/dp/1861974094
Howard goes even further and squarely blames Kant's "Essay on Perpetual Peace" for formulating a new widely adopted concept of peace that, naturally, required finding new justifications for waging war. The conclusion is sobering: the lowest form of demagoguery is a brainchild of the most advanced thought of the modern time. Rather than being conjured in the inflamed minds bent on subjugation and plunder, the rhetoric of benevolent slaughter follows from the development of political philosophy. The hypocrisy has neither been required nor invented in a less advanced age.
Perhaps further development of philosophical foundations of peace will foster the emergence of progressively subtler justifications of war. Will it progress indefinitely towards greater and greater intellectual hights or there are limits to human ingenuity and credulity?
Tags: mysteries
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09:35 pm
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Under the skin
This year Australia (26%) finally passed the US (25%) as the most obese non-island nation.
http://www.pacificmagazine.net/news/2008/06/22/australia-is-fattest-nation-on-earth
If one counts the islands, South Pacific nations (Polynesia) are well ahead, with 90-94% of the population being overweight. Interestingly, these Polynesians blame British imperialists for introducing spam (!) in order to corrupt their island paradise. They say they cannot stop eating spam. Nobody thought of such an argument in the US...
http://www.impactlab.com/2008/02/13/spam-at-heart-of-south-pacific-obesity-crisis
Meanwhile the French are bridging the gap separating them from the UK and the US (42% vs 50% of overweight), reportedly due to the recent introduction of frozen pizza and the shocking brevity of their average meal (down from 82 min in 1978 to mere 38 min in 2007). The learned opinion is that
....The rise in obesity is probably a result of the fact that the French don't understand how to eat properly commercial food, since they have never had to do it before.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/03/news/obese.php
They are still learning this new art. BTW, it is male obesity that gives us the lead over these frog-consuming continentals.
Why do Anglo-Saxon males residing on three continents lead the free world in obesity?
Tags: mysteries
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08:18 am
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Intelligent design
Unlike many people, I believe that intelligence is the general feature of Life. It is already present in the bacteria. The function of the intelligence could be in overcoming the principal limitations inherent in the design. The size of the bacteria is limited by energetics, as they can only use their outer membranes for chemiosmosis, and so the volume-to-surface ratio is fixed. One of the problems resulting from their small size (1-2 um) is the difficulty of chemotaxis: the concentration gradients of the attractants across the cell are generally too small to guide the motion. Hencefore, the bacterium needs to sample the concentrations periodically as it moves and compare these concentrations along its path, which requires memory and the ability to make informed decisions. So it has short memory (of a few seconds) and delays switching the flagellum motor from clockwise to counterclockwise depending on the result of the comparison. This is a very simple intelligent activity, but it is intelligent nevertheless. In this simple way, the bacterium senses the gradients of 1:1000 over the length of the cell, and it can do it over 5 orders of magnitude in the concentration (which would be impossible had it used the tiny differential across the cell) as that would require prohibitive analytical precision over a very wide range. Here the intelligence (continuous series of computations, informed decision, delayed action, etc.) is the solution to an otherwise imponderable problem resulting from the physical design, which cannot be changed without drastic reworking of bioenergetics (that was done via eukaryogenesis).
[See DE Koshland, Science 196 (1977) 1055]
I wonder if this is the general case. Intelligence might be a way to surpass fundamental shortcomings of the design once this design has been settled and cannot be changed without complete overhaul. Interestingly, many evolutionary arguments about our own intelligence are of this nature: our intelligence compensates for various flaws of our design (e.g., toolmaking).
Could it be that the worst designed are the most intelligent? This would naturally explain why there is a trend on increasing intelligence in time - there was less and less time to optimize the performance otherwise.
Tags: mysteries
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07:50 am
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Natural leaders
There are those who lead and those who follow. We interpret this in terms of different ability, the value of initiative, competitive or random advantage, the risks and the benefits. However, there is another possibility, which is best illustrated by an example:
...Motile E. coli placed at one end of a capillary tube containing an energy source and oxygen migrate out into the tube in two bands. The formation of two bands is not due to heterogeneity among the bacteria, since the bacteria in each band, when reused, will form two more bands. If an anaerobically utilizable energy source such as sugar is present in excess over the oxygen, the first band consumes all the oxygen and a part of the sugar and the second band uses the residual sugar anaerobically. On the other hand, if oxygen is present in excess over the sugar, the first band oxidizes all the sugar and leaves behind unused oxygen, and the second band uses up the residual oxygen to oxidize an endogenous energy source. The essence of the matter is that the bacteria create a gradient of oxygen or of an energy source, and then they move preferentially in the direction of the higher concentration of the chemical. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/153/3737/708
The followers are leaders, too. They lead in utilization of the change exerted by the leaders. Life thrives on inhomogeneity. The leaders exploit the pre-existing pattern to their advantage, and the followers exploit the reverse pattern that the leaders create in their wake.
Why are there leaders and followers?
Tags: mysteries
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05:57 pm
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Immortality & Democracy. 6. Whence equality?
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
Why?
The problem addressed in this series is the foundation of democracy (understood as a particular way of relating the individual and the society). Specifically, it is two of its main premises: the equality of people (”all men are created equal”) and what I call the primacy of the individual, namely the position that each individual is an end in itself and never a means to an end (Kant’s dignity), whereas the society is not considered to be an end in itself. Another way to state this principle is that in the hierarchy of values the individual is always above the society. Both of these principles are not self-evident, and in fact both derive from complex and explicitly Christian doctrines. It is no accident that modern democracies appeared where and when they appeared, because shared belief in these doctrines was required for these truths to be regarded as self-evident. Conversely, it is not clear what will happen to these tenets and the edifice built upon these tenets when these doctrines are undermined. Inertia cannot last us forever and introducing these tenets ex postulato works only as far as these are universally accepted. Without faith, the latter can be accomplished only by reason, and so it is desirable to find secular arguments in favor of these tenets. Such a program is useful to religious people as well, because these principles and doctrines are not whims but manifestations of the rational principle. Knowing that these doctrines are true and right should not preclude us from asking why these doctrines are true and right.
I started from the insight of C. S. Lewis who linked the primacy of the individual (dedivination of polis) with the doctrine of immortality of the soul. I observed that the core of this argument remains intact if one considers biological immortality, as it naturally elevates the individual over the society: it is the individual rather than the society who carries heritable traits. As such, the individual has inalienable reproductive rights, and I conjectured that the principle of individual primacy might be a way of guaranteeing inalienability of these rights. The possible function of this principle may be in opposing eusocialization; it counteracts the transformation of human society into an anthill. I argued that certain trends in our society can be viewed as ongoing transition to eusocialization, that the existence of isolated eusocial communities in the past cannot be excluded and that our moral law could have been informed by encounters with such communities, and that the driving force for the eusocialization may not even be us. The principle objectively opposes the trend on eusocialization thereby protecting our common human nature and guaranteeing our right to individual biological immortality.
How about the equality? Can it be justified? The equality is one of these murky concepts that everyone uses but few even try to define. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it mildly observing that
...many egalitarians concede that much of our discussion of the concept is vague and theoretical. But they believe that there is also a common underlying strain of important moral concerns implicit in it. Above all it serves to remind us of our common humanity, despite various differences. In this sense, egalitarians tend to think of egalitarianism as a single coherent normative doctrine — but one in any case embracing a variety of principles. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equality
This belief of the egalitarians is just that: a belief that is based on nothing but faith. This faith has little grounding in reality. The commonest observation about humanity is that all people are different. Many a society did not hold it self-evident that all people are created equal, and it is not immediately obvious in precisely what respect we happen to be equal. Furthermore, none of us is capable, both physically and psychologically, of considering oneself on the same footing as the others, so the equality has an important exemption. In theory, we know that we are supposed to treat the others equally, but in practice it is unclear what this special treatment implies.
...current disagreements about equality as a normative concept center on (1) factual claims about the specific sense or senses in which human beings are identical, (2) what constitutes relevant special treatment, that is, which specific senses carry normative weight, and (3) factual claims about which public policies are consistent and coherent with and effective in ensuring the relevant special treatment. http://media.hoover.org/documents/0817928626_1.pdf
If you ask around, what is this mysterious respect in which we are all equal, the most likely answer you’ll hear would be that we are all equal before the law. Unfortunately, this is tautological, as is the case with other intellectual arguments about equality. The Romans were not equal before their Roman law, and the majority of law systems unhesitantly embrace inequality. It is the other way round: legal egalitarianism originates in the principle of equality. This is the reason why the proclamation of this principle is the first precept of constitutional law. So, in what respect are we equal? John Adams, the signer of the Declaration of Independence, explains:
...That all men are born to equal rights is clear. Every being has a right to his own, as clear, as moral, as sacred, as any other being has. But to teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life, is as gross a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French revolution. Was there, or will there ever be, a nation, whose individuals were all equal, in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches? The answer of all mankind must be in the negative. It must then be acknowledged that in every state... there are inequalities which God and nature have planted there, and which no human legislator ever can eradicate.
So, all men are created equal with respect to having rights [guaranteeing their equality]. But why should we all have equal rights and who exactly decides which individual wills constitute one’s inalienable rights? The idea of equality of rights could’ve been self-evident to the founding fathers, because the doctrine of natural rights was the intellectual currency of their age. Unfortunately, the naïve anthropological theories about “the primeval state of nature” in which noble or not so noble savages exercised their equal “natural rights” have been thoroughly discredited by field observations. In any case, equal rights presume the equality of wills demanding and realizing these rights, and this gets us back to the square one. In the 350 years that passed since the equality became the pillar of political philosophy, very little progress has been made in identifying just what makes us equal and on what grounds should we consider each other equal. Here is a telling passage showing the ambiguity of egalitarianism:
...Fundamental equality means that persons are alike in important relevant and specified respects alone, and not that they are all generally the same or can be treated in the same way. In a now commonly posed distinction, moral equality can be understood as prescribing treatment of persons as equals, i.e., with equal concern and respect, and not the often implausible principle of treating persons equally. This fundamental idea of equal respect for all persons and of the equal worth or equal dignity of all human beings is accepted as a minimal standard by all leading schools of modern Western political and moral culture. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equality
All this leaves unclear just why fundamentally nonidentical people should be treated with equal concern, respect, and dignity. In reality people command vastly different amounts of respect and vastly different assessments of worth. If leveling of this respect and worth is equality, it does not exist and it will never be reached unless we become eusocial. The equality of dignity is particularly vague concept because seeing each man as an end in itself is the celebration of diversity rather than equality; things that are “equal” are supposed to be comparable. “The minimal standard” of modern Western thought is an elusive concept which becomes only more obscure and elusive when clarified. It all boils down to proclaiming people equal with respect to the proclamation of equality. The only reason that such bizarre approach is considered at all – and even regarded as self-evident - is that the belief in equality of all people before God and moral and divine law originating in God’s will has been around for thousands of years before the founding fathers set to their task. It is this belief that underlies the equality before the civil law. The question remains why the moral law is such that all people are equal before it. Our common humanity is rooted in our common descend. This descend does not necessarily make us equal parties to moral law. It is not obvious why putting equal demands on inherently different individuals is the highest perfection of justice.
From the theological perspective, the specific part of our common humanity that accounts for the uniformity of moral law and causes its very existence is that we are all parties to original sin. We all have the bewildering tendency not to live to our best expectations of ourselves and we all transgress not only this universal moral law but any rules that we as individuals voluntarily set upon ourselves. This universal tendency to wrongdoing is what makes us, from the lowliest murderer to the holiest saint, equal. Since we are all transgressors and sinners by our nature, we are equal before the grace that alone can do us justice. The existence of moral law presumes that individuals will transgress this moral law; that is not the case with the physical law. You would not need a commandment “thou shall not kill” if there would not be people capable and willing to kill, with or without the knowledge of this commandment. There are no commandments that forbid us dividing in half instead of sexual reproduction; it is built-in. Not harming each other, not taking advantage of each other, trusting and loving each other are not. We are equal only in our potential to transgress whatever law is there and the inevitability of this transgression, and so the doctrine of original sin, the democracy of sinners awaiting their judgment and hoping for grace, through no particular merit of their own, is the true foundation of the modern democracy. Like the principle of individual primacy that can be traced to the doctrine of immortality of the soul, the principle of equality can be traced to the doctrine of original sin.
The theologians have always been divided on this doctrine, from the time of St Augustine and Pelagius, perhaps even earlier. It is hard to accept that something inside you inclines you to evil despite your possession of free will, which is perfectly capable of choosing good over evil and, moreover, equipped with rational ability to identify this good. As a rule, we know all too well what is the right thing to do, but we do wrong nevertheless. One school of thought is that the transmission of the original sin is cultural: each generation is born into the society of sinners and becomes acculturated to this society, becoming sinners. “We are all the victims of the cumulative effect of choices and actions which were less than worth of human freedom and community… The individual is at the mercy of the heritage of confusion of values” (Hellwig). If this sounds familiar, it is. This is the usual fallacy of our kind, to assume that proper policies and social structure will change things around and the immaculate generation of “new men” will stop sinning. All of the evidence points to the opposite. The sin seems to be rooted much deeper than our history, culture, sociology, or psychology.
The equality begins with a dark insight into human nature. To Aristotle, the role of polis is positive: to help humans to be good. To St Augustine, nothing of this world can help people to be good, least of all the society. The only role of the state is purely negative: thwarting evil. We are equal in our capability and predicament to do this evil unto ourselves.
Why are we equal?
Suggested reading
A Jacobs, Original sin: A cultural history http://www.amazon.com/Original-Sin-Cultural-Alan-Jacobs/dp/0060783400
D P Domning & M K Hellwing, Original Selfishness: Original Sin and Evil in the Light of Evolution. http://www.amazon.com/Original-Selfishness-Evolution-Ashgate-Religion/dp/0754653153
S Pinker, The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature. http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0670031518
M Ridley, The origins of virtue: Human instincts and the evolution of cooperation, http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Virtue-Instincts-Evolution-Cooperation/dp/0140264450
N Capaldi, The meaning of equality, http://media.hoover.org/documents/0817928626_1.pdf
Tags: morals, mysteries
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12:59 am
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The great fall of homme petit
A very happy New Year to all readers of this blog! By tradition, the first post of each new season is a nursery rhyme; this time it is
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
I find this brief and tragic story very confusing. It is said to be a riddle about an egg. Maybe, but... If Humpty Dumpty is an egg, what is he doing up the wall? Is he actually an egg? It is a reasonable question, because here is the 1854 (pre-Alice's 1874) version of this rhyme
Humpty Dumpty lay in a beck
With all his sinews round his neck;
Forty doctors and forty wrights
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty to rights.
J. Halliwell, Comp. Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England. London, England: Frederick Warne and Co., 1853, p.49. No. CXCIV http://eclipse.rutgers.edu/goose/rhymes/dump/vv.aspx
What is an egg doing in a beck (brook) with his sinews round his neck? It does not make any sense.
...The fact that Humpty Dumpty is an egg is not stated in the rhyme. In its first printed form, in 1810, it is a riddle, and exploits for misdirection the fact that "humpty dumpty" was 18th-Century slang for a short, clumsy person. Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as Boule, Boule in French, or Lille Trille in Swedish & Norwegian, and Humpelken-Pumpelken in different parts of Germany (The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes).
I've found no evidence of Boule, Boule and Humpelken-Pumpelken. Lille Trille is the obvious and recent translation which is simplified to make the tentative "correct answer" (egg) more obvious:
Lille Trille satt på hylle.
Lille Trille ramlet ned.
Ingen mann i dette land
Lille Trille bøte kan.
Little Trille Sat on a shelf.
Little Trille Had a fall.
No man in this land
Could put together Little Trille again.
http://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=380&c=52
So, who is Humpty Dumpty and why did he fell? The interpretations one finds range from an obscure children's game to forgotten heroes of the English Civil War to unfortunate kings and nobles to Roman war machines to the the fall of mankind to the loss of virginity to the character of physics laws (as in CS Lewis' Miracle)
Humpty-dumpty, from Fr. nursery rhyme hero (the rhyme first attested in Eng. 1810), probably a reduplication of Humpty, a pet form of Humphrey. Originally, humpty-dumpty was a drink (1698), "ale boiled with brandy," probably from hump and dump, but the connection is obscure and there may not be one. Meaning "a short, dumpy, hump-shouldered person" (1785) is attested earlier in Eng. than the nursery rhyme. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=humpty&searchmode=none
I am afraid that "Fr. nursery rhyme" does not exist. Perhaps the authors were fooled by this funny pseudo-medieval "translation" of Mother Goose into jibberish, sound-alike French
http://www.aescon.com/aesconsulting/french/num1.htm
What else?
...Humpty Dumpty was a children's game for girls in which the player's would sit with the skirts clasped tightly to the ankles. The idea was to fall backwards and right yourself without falling over again. http://www.mystical-www.co.uk/eggs.htm#HUMP
...Humpty Dumpty was a powerful cannon used in the Siege of Colchester during the English Civil War. It was mounted on top of the St. Mary's at the Wall Church in Colchester defending the city against siege in 1648. Although Colchester was a Royalist stronghold, it was besieged by the Roundheads for 11 weeks before finally falling. The church tower was hit by enemy cannon fire and the top of the tower was blown off, sending "Humpty" tumbling to the ground. Naturally all the King's horses and all the King's men (Royalist cavalry and infantry respectively) tried to mend "him" but in vain. (wiki)
....Humpty Dumpty referring to a sniper nicknamed One-Eyed Thompson, who occupied the Wall Church in Colchester:
There One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall
A gunner of deadliest aim of all
From St. Mary's Tower his cannon he fired
Humpty-Dumpty was its name...
...Humpty Dumpty referred to (allegedly) hunchbacked King Richard III (Hump) of England, the "Wall" being the name of his steed (A horse, a horse! Half-kingdom for...), a "walleyed" horse. During the battle of Bosworth Field, he fell off his steed and was said to have been "hacked into pieces". Hence the final part of the rhyme: 'All the King's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.' http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=16116
...It refers to King Charles I, who was toppled by a majority of the members of parliament and was ultimately executed. The people prevailed over the King. It yet celebrated the the diminution of the power of the Royal proclamation. The "Puritans" had out voted him the King Parliament and finally ousted him from power. (Syd Dickenson)
...The story of Cardinal Wolsey's downfall is depicted in the children's nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty. At length Cawood Castle passed to Cardinal Wolsey, who let it fall into disrepair in the early part of his career, due to his residence at the Court. King Henry VIII sent Wolsey back home in 1523 after he failed to obtain a divorce from the Pope. Wolsey returned to the castle and began to restore it to its former grandeur. However, he was arrested for high treason in November, 1530 and ordered to London for trial.
...Humpty Dumpty refers to a Roman war machine called a Testudo used to cross moats and climb over castle walls. Humpty Dumpty refers to the turtle-like look of the machine and the noise of the wheels. The Romans often used this predecessor to the modern tank to cross moats and climb over castle walls. As the story goes, the British army was trying to conquer a castle with a moat, but they had no way to get over the wall, so decide to construct a Testudo. During the night, while the British army was working, the opposing army widened the moat. The next morning when the British attacked, their valuable machine plummeted from the wall into the moat. This failure is why the Testudo was the only Roman warfare technology not widely used by the British Empire.
...Humpty Dumpty means the fall of King Louis of France right before Napoleon took over. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall: This was when he was in rule of France. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall: When the peasants revolted, they had a civil war, making him give up his throne, and killing him and his family. All kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put humpty dumpty back together again: This is when the peasants cut off his head and buried his body in lime so that they knew he was never coming back to life to rule again.
http://www.rooneydesign.com/HumptyDumpty.htm
...Paul said, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Humpty Dumpty didn’t plan to smash on the hard ground on the other side of that wall. He didn’t plan to lay there all day while horses and men tried to fix him. No! He didn’t plan on any of these things. That was his problem! Mankind is a Humpty Dumpty and mankind has had a great fall... So what hope do we have? “The king’s horses” have failed. “The king’s men” have failed. There is only one hope—that is “the King” himself! Let us trust Him for help. Let us ask Him to put us together again. http://www.forministry.com/USOKSOBCOFBC5/vsItemDisplay.dsp&objectID=12535181-F180-4751-A01BB29A3609DCCB&method=display
Who was Humpty Dumpty and what happened to him?
Tags: mysteries
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07:35 pm
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Natural democracy
Are there examples of direct/representative democracy in Nature?
Parallels are commonly drawn between absolutist & patriarchial societies and eusocial animals (ants, bees, mammals) to the effect that these social orders are "natural." Are there natural democracies? There are species in which multicellularity does not have rigid soma/germ line division (Volvox, sponges), where potentially any cell can be fertile, but the reproductive power ("representation of the society") is not consensually delegated, it is largely an accident. Social Amoebazoa (e.g., myxomycetes) can be thought in certain ways as democratic entities when they assemble into a motile slug or vegetative (macroplasmodium) state, but the assembly often requires acellularity (e.g. in Physarum). If not, it means differentiation of totipotent cells into fertile and sterile casts and also the death of 20% of the cells to vacuolation (making the stalk and the walls of the fruiting body). Not too democratic. Still, D. discoideum provides one of the few known examples of altruistic (green-beard) genes that code a trait, recognize it in others, and perform altruistic acts directed at the carriers. That's democratic.
See, e.g. http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~evolve/pdf/2002_2004/smnewspaper.pdf
In any case, "natural democracies," if the analogy stands at all, seem to be limited to organizationally primitive creatures.
Are there other examples? Why are there so few and far between?
Democracy on the move: Dictyostelium's "slug"
Tags: mysteries
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04:31 am
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Fearless
...Japanese scientists were able to successfully switch off a mouse's instinct to cower at the smell or presence of cats—showing that fear is genetically hardwired and not learned through experience, as commonly believed. In his experiment, the genetically altered mice approached cats, even snuggled up to them and played with them.
http://www.livescience.com/imageoftheday/siod_071213.html
...Sakano et al. created two lines of mice -- one lacking the receptors to translate odors and the other lacking receptors for smell detection. They were then exposed to the urine of predators such as snow leopards and foxes. The first group kept smelling and they turned around and they showed very strong curiosity but they never could tell any danger. As for the second group, they were very poor in detecting smell, but as soon as they detected the fox urine, they would freeze and pretend to be dead. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2007-11/10/content_6245234.htm
http://www.physorg.com/news116739098.html
What does it take to engineer fearless people?
PS: Meanwhile, the Koreans are breeding fluorescent cats
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/photogalleries/wip-week59/index.html
Tags: mysteries
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11:03 am
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Elections & common good
I was at a Thanksgiving party yesterday, and friends started to talk politics; the coming US elections. I am not too interested in the subject, but there is something about elections in general that mystifies me. There are, on principle, two voting systems. One system is similar to economic models: there are rational agents that vote for what they perceive as their best interest. Another system is when the voters chose what is not necessarily best for them, but “good for the country,” “helps America,” etc. – in short, what they think might be best for the others. It strikes me that our election system was originally designed having in mind the voter of the first type. Our interests are represented on progressively higher levels by the representatives of our choosing. This makes sense, because I more-or-less know what my interests are, whereas I have only vague idea what might be in the best interest for a Mormon elder from Provo, Utah or an organic farmer from Flagstaff, Arizona. I may theorize what might be good for them, but I could be wrong about it.
It is not the question of whether there is such a thing as common interest or common good. It is the question whether this good is the common denominator of selfish interests or it exists as an ideal that the voters have to identify themselves and vote accordingly. I do not think that the latter system has rational basis, yet I do not know of a political party which does not make arguments along these lines persistently and obsessively, offering their help in identification of their respective “common goods.” There is something deeply perverse and undemocratic about that. I guess the voting system of the second type is the most conducive for politics. If one votes in the interest of preconceived “common good,” someone has to formulate what this good is, and it is likely to be the politician professing perfect knowledge of what is good for the others than the voter that knows chiefly his or her own interests. The first voting system has the interest of the voter in mind; the second has the interests of the politician in mind. I would argue that voting for self- or externally- identified “common good” perverts the very idea of democratic elections, because it creates the situation where consensual common good based on fair representation may not emerge.
Why are we bombarded by this “good for the country” rhetoric every election? Why does it persist? Can the voting system of the second type be in some sense more preferable than the voting system of the first kind?
Tags: mysteries
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08:58 pm
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Why don't we have tails?
The answer that one typically gets is that our tail became vestigal because "we do not need it." Why don't we? The vast majority of bipedal animals have massive tails in order to keep balance during walking and running. There has never been a tailless biped except for hominids, precisely because it is such a poor design. My uninformed thinking has been that our lack of tail is one of those tragic evolution stories: the tail was lost by our quadripedal ape ancestor. In retrospect, it could've been very useful to us bipeds, but once lost, it has been lost for good. However, it seems that that is not quite the story. The answer might be that we evolved something better than tails, something that is better for endurance running: our behinds.
Estimated dates of innovations: Loss of tail: 23 Mya. Rotation of thumb: 18 Mya. Stable elbow: 15 Mya. Upright walking: 3.7 Mya. Broad sacrum: 3.3 Mya. First stone tools: 2.5 Mya. 'Human' knee joint and foot: 1.8 Mya. High forehead: 0.1 Mya http://www.idlex.freeserve.co.uk/idle/evolution/human/early/golden.html
...Human embryos have a tail that measures about 1/6th of the size of the embryo itself. As the embryo develops into a fetus, the tail is absorbed by the growing body, but some traces remain even in adults, as coccyx. Occasionally, a child is born with a "soft tail," described by one embryologist as containing "no vertebrae, but blood vessels, muscles, and nerves, of the same consistency as the short tail of the Barbary ape." http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_077.html
...humans lack one of the most obvious features of animals adapted for serious speed: a tail. In creatures that cover ground bipedally, such as kangaroos, kangaroo rats, and roadrunners, the tail is the major balance organ. In the whole history of vertebrates on Earth, humans are the only striding biped that's a runner that's tailless... Without the balancing help of a tail, how do we avoid falling over when we run? The butt, it turns out, is crucial among traits that make us uniquely human. Chimps and other primates have little buns. Our own rear ends are huge; the upper part of the gluteus maximus is greatly expanded. Although few scholars have studied its role in running, the butt is, according to Bramble, "basically a substitute for a tail." http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/tramps-like-us
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-11/hu-erm111504.php
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/11.18/01-running.html
...The human gluteus maximus is a distinctive muscle in terms of size, anatomy and function compared to apes and other non-human primates. We tested the hypothesis that the human bottom plays a more important role in running than walking. The results indicate that the gluteus maximus is mostly quiescent with low levels of activity during level and uphill walking, but increases substantially in activity and alters its timing with respect to speed during running. The major functions of the gluteus maximus during running are to control flexion of the trunk on the stance-side and to decelerate the swing leg; contractions of the stance-side gluteus maximus may also help to control flexion of the hip and to extend the thigh. Evidence for when the gluteus maximus became enlarged in human evolution is equivocal, but the muscle's minimal functional role during walking supports the hypothesis that enlargement of the gluteus maximus was likely important in the evolution of hominid running capabilities. http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/209/11/2143 (J. Exp. Biol. 209, 2143 (2006)). Also, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/110482977
One often hears that it was our brain that made us human. Perhaps, but first it was our butt. That is where the winding road to H. sapience originates.
Why don't we have tails?
Tags: mysteries
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11:19 pm
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Звезда пленительного счастья
...Товарищ, верь: взойдет она,
Звезда пленительного счастья…
To Chaadaev, A. S. Pushkin, 1818?
My wife asked me: what exactly does it mean? What is this star? In English, this line is translated as "captivating star of happiness," "the star of bliss", or even "the star of captivating rapture" (the latter might be related to the Protestant belief that the star of Bethelem will rise again before the Rapture). But what does it really mean? The expression does not sound quite Russian to my ear. It sounds like a Gallicism or a direct translation from Latin, but I cannot identify its source. Neither can I find any explanation of this line in the literature; apparently, it is assumed to be self-explanatory. I do not think so; the association of a star with happiness is absent in Western poetry. I have an idea, where Pushkin might have picked up this association, but it is a far-fetched one. The rising star of bliss is Venus; the morning star. It is the star in the star-and-crescent Muslim (more specifically, Ottoman) symbolism that was inherited from Byzantium that in turn got it from the ancient pagan world (it was already known in Sumer in 2100 BC). The association of the rising star with happiness and bliss is Oriental and it is common in Persian and Arabic poetry. How could’ve Pushkin picked it up? My guess is that he got it through Antoine Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights, which he had in his library:
…Без малого два с половиной столетия прошло с тех пор, как Европа впервые познакомилась с арабскими сказками "Тысячи и одной ночи" в вольном и далеко не полном французском переводе Галлана… Восхищался арабскими сказками и Пушкин…он заинтересовался ими настолько, что приобрел одно из изданий перевода Галлана, которое сохранилось в его библиотеке. http://www.skazka.com.ru/vzrosl/1001/000000-1001.html
...Cups of pure wine, time was, went circuiting
In joy, what time the lute sang melody,
While kept his troth the friend who madded me,
Yet made me rising star of bliss to see:
But--with Time, turned he not by sin of mine;
Than such a turn can aught more bitter be?
(A song from a tale in Volume 4 of the Arabian Nights, transl. by R. F. Burton http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Vol_4/tale43.htm)
Unfortunately, I cannot locate Galland’s books (there are several volumes) and check it up. I would be very grateful to anyone who can. But before doing it, keep in mind that this poem has never been published when Pushkin was alive, and it is actually an abridged version of many variants. Pushkin himself denied the authorship. The copy that Chaadaev kept in his archive was different from the familiar text. Actually,
...В 1936 году «Литературная газета» (№7) опубликовала письмо двух шахтеров председателю Совнаркома В.М.Молотову. В духе времени рабочие доносили Молотову, что в стихотворении «К Чаадаеву», опубликованном в новом издании сочинений Пушкина, ими, шахтерами, обнаружены искажения. Оказывается, вместо «Заря пленительного счастья» в новом издании поэта было написано «Звезда пленительного счастья», а вместо «тихой славой» в тексте значилось «гордой славой». В той напряженной ситуации редакторы нового пушкинского издания спасали себя и решили, что «звезда» надежнее «зари», а «громкая слава» Пушкина лучше «тихой». После публикации письма пушкинисты гордо рапортовали Совнаркому и в газету: оба внесенных изменения основаны «на более достоверных, чем в предыдущих изданиях, текстах». От имени советских пушкинистов Борис Мейлах благодарил шахтеров за помощь литературоведам.
...Имеется ряд списков стихотворений, составленных самим Пушкиным для себя, но ни в одном нет «К Чаадаеву». Версия, одобренная многими пушкинистами, можно сказать, канонизированная, печатается по так называемой копии А.В.Шереметева… принятый сегодня текст стихотворения «К Чаадаеву» идет от составленного Борисoм Томашевским и изданного в Петрограде в 1925 году сборника политических стихотворений Пушкина. А всего, с крупными и мелкими разночтениями, имеется около семидесяти вариантов этого стихотворения. Трудность в том, что Пушкин рукописи не оставил, но даже пушкинский автограф, буде он найден, авторства окончательно не докажет: Пушкин мог переписать для себя понравившееся ему стихотворение. Другое дело черновик с его поправками, но шансы, что такой отыщется, ничтожны. Еще более важно и имеются свидетельства, что сам поэт от авторства отказывался, и не раз… Знакомый нам заголовок «К Чаадаеву» надписал после смерти поэта Анненков. Впервые опасное слово «самовластья» в 20-й строке появилось в печати только в 1901 году в книге К.С.Кузьминского «Пушкин, его публицистическая и журнальная деятельность». http://www.druzhnikov.com/text/rass/duel/7.html
The point is that the expression may not be Pushkin’s and several versions of the line have existed. In particular, the star might have been added for political reasons; maybe it means nothing at all. I finish this piece with another Pushkin’s poem, which is more to my liking:
Чедаев, помнишь ли былое?
Давно ль с восторгом молодым
Я мыслил имя роковое
Предать развалинам иным?
Но в сердце, бурями смиренном,
Теперь и лень и тишина,
И, в умиленье вдохновенном,
На камне, дружбой освященном,
Пишу я наши имена.
Tags: mysteries
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05:25 pm
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Poisonless
There are thousands of venomous snails, insects, reptiles, frogs, and fish. There are only very few venomous mammals (the platypus, a few shrews, and the lori). There are also New Guinean birds that have neurotoxins [batrachotoxin steroids] in their feathers; however, their poison comes from Choresine beetles they eat, see more on http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041106/fob3.asp
There are no truly venomous birds. Why?
Tags: mysteries
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05:11 pm
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Unshod
Why is it prohibited to wear leather shoes on Yom Kippur? The answers I found seem to be on-the-spot improvisations. Is there a deeper reason? Were we gently steered to invent the Keds and sneakers?
...A leather shoe is an animal hide that has been processed and refined. Our soul's mission on earth is to take the crudeness of our inborn personality and refine it. Leather shoes represent the work we humans are supposed to achieve in this world. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/7428
...Yom Kippur is a time when we consider deeply the meaning of life and death. We abstain from wearing leather since an animal died in order that the leather garment could be produced. http://scheinerman.net/judaism/hhd/yomkippur.html
...When Moses approached the Burning Bush, G-d told him to take off his shoes, which also metaphorically meant to take off his body. The shoe to the body is like the body to the soul. On Yom Kippur, we disassociate ourselves, for one day, from our bodies. http://www.isralight.org/assets/Text/RDA_haazinu06.html
...Leather shoes were considered by our ancestors a sign of luxury and comfort. Yet life of too much ease dulls the edges of our conscience. Periodically, G-d asks us to deliberately forgo comfort. http://www.jtnews.net/index.php?/news/item/3319
Tags: mysteries
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05:48 pm
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Why did they pinch their noses?
for LR
One of the greater mysteries of our sublunar world is fashion. I do not mean the routine of the day to day changes. The long-term trends seem just as whimsical as these short-term trends. Are there rational causes for such fashion trends? Why did the cane, which was the gentlemanly attribute for nearly three centuries, suddenly disappeared after WWI? For what sins do we have to wear ties and jackets? What is causing the periodic rise and fall of the hat? One of such puzzles is the rapid climb to popularity and the subsequent rapid decline of pince-nez. Between 1880 and 1910, the pince-nez outsold all other types of eyewear put together, in both sexes. By the 1930s, the pince-nez was all but gone.
The usual way in which the pince-nez wearers are shown in the old movies is when they rub the bridges of their tired noses, with their pince-nez hanging on a chain. Alternatively they take the pince-nez off with a majestic jest. It seems that the only pleasure was taking it off. Pince-nez do not look comfortable and I think that pince-nez were rather painful to wear. So why did they wear these gismos and what prompted them to switch back to spectacles in the 1930s?
The pince-nez first appeared between 1820 and 1840; before that there was no technology to make spring-loaded, flexible steel rims. The original C-bridge design followed the familiar "nose spectacles" pattern that has been known since the 15th century. Actually, some of these spectacles must have been springy horn "pince-nez", as they were worn in a rather risky way on the tip of the nose
1490? Death of the Virgin by Holbein
1440? St. Jerome, Giovanni Angelo d'Antonio
...Nose spectacles were developed in the 15th century and could be seen up until the 18th century. They consisted of simple frames made of wood or metal; they could not be flexed or adjusted, instead having to be 'slotted' onto the bridge of the nose. They were designed for long sightedness, as reading lenses were the only ones that could be manufactured at that time.
...The 19th century p-n was usually on a ribbon, cord, or chain about the neck or attached to the lapel. Ladies often wore the oval rimless style on a fine gold chain which could be reeled automatically into a button-size eyeglass holder pinned to the dress. http://www.teagleoptometry.com/history.htm
...C-bridge p-n possess a bridge comprised of a curved, flexible piece of metal which would provide the tension needed to stay on the nose. They existed from the 1820s through to the 1940s. Hard bridge p-n have a solid bridge piece which is molded to fit the curvature of the bridge of the nose. They are anchored onto the bridge of the nose via two small spring-loaded clips terminating in special nose-pads. They were popular from the 1890s through to the 1950s. Their popularity stemmed from the fact that they could be set and removed at will using only two fingers of one hand to operate the finger-pieces. (Wiki)
...Pince-nez were popular especially with presbyopes because they not only could be carried about easily but they also could be put on and off with one hand. The popularity of various forms of pince-nez rimless glasses lasted until around 1930. http://www.marchon.com/Prof.%20Courses/Preparing,%20Fitting/preparing-fitting.html
...Most eyeglass-wearers opted for wire-rimmed pince-nez, which did not require wearers to contort their faces [as was the case with the monocles]. The idea was to make invisible what still was considered a prosthetic device. Then everything changed with the advent of aviator glasses in the early 1930s. Developed by Bausch & Lomb at the request of the U.S. Air Force, aviators came to symbolize the macho daring. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n32_v12/ai_18607637
The pince-nez did not appear by chance and it did not disappear sporadically. It appeared when it was capable of appearing and it was a minor improvement on the existing nose spectacles. The pince-nez, like the monocle before it, hides that one is wearing glasses. The popularity of pince-nez rested on (i) the stigma attached to a prosthetic device, and (ii) the fact that it was chained and so it was easily put in a breast pocket or a holder. The sudden demise of the pince-nez was caused by the sudden popularity of "aviator glasses." The spectacles were not longer seen as the prosthetic devices to be ashamed of but rather as a status symbol. That is why the spectacles were back and the rims became thicker and thicker over time. We are still living in this post-"aviator" era. The pince-nez, though, was left behind the cultural divide.
Is that why they were pinching their noses?
 
 
 
 
 
Tags: mysteries
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05:42 pm
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Why do we laugh?
Why do we laugh? This is a companion to Why do we cry?
...most studies of laughter have been problematically conducted: the bias of the researchers is too evident; they want to prove that laughter has benefits. We'd all like to believe that good-humored people are rewarded with long lives. http://men.webmd.com/features/why-we-laugh?page=3
...In 1962, in Tanzania, three school girls began to laugh uncontrollably. Within a few months, about 2/3 of the school's students had the symptoms, and the school closed. The contagion spread, and eventually affected about a thousand people in Tanzania and Uganda. More on http://www.atypon-link.com/WDG/doi/abs/10.1515/HUMOR.2007.003
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_Laughter_Epidemic
...The muscular action of laughter clears the system of the substances which have been mobilized in various parts of the body for the performance of other actions. Why is the respiratory system utilized for such a clarifying purpose? Why do we not laugh with our feet and hands as well? Were laughter expressed with the hands, the monkey might fall from the tree and, if by the feet, man might fall to the ground. Laughter has the great advantage of utilizing a group of powerful muscles which can be readily spared without seriously interfering with the maintenance of posture. Why the noise of laughter? In order that the products of excitation may be quickly and completely consumed, the powerful group of expiratory muscles must have some resistance against which they can exert themselves strongly and at the same time provide for adequate respiratory exchange. (John Ashhurst, Jr. Surgical Society of the University of Pennsylvania, 1912). http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/tech/medicine/OriginandNatureofEmotions/chap4.html
...Does laughter express hostility, aggression, the vestiges of the jungle whoop of triumph after murder? Is laughter incompatible with sympathy, geniality, or indeed with any emotion. The dark-laughter theorists spring from Thomas Hobbes; the genial-laughter theories from Jean Paul Richter. Bergson sees the basis of laughter in the conflict of the rigid and mechanical with the flexible and organic. It is the corrective by which society humiliates in order to preserve itself from the deadening effects of political, ideological, social, and psychological rigidity. Freud discusses the laughter at stupidity, the naive, caricature, repetition, and the like, explaining it as differing from wit in its psychic location (foreconscious rather than subconscious). The pleasure is provided by the feeling of superiority plus a release of inhibition energies. Both wit and the comic, Freud argued, are incompatible with strong emotion. Humour is a way of dealing with pain: economized expenditure of affect, in which the energies associated with any strong emotion are aroused, then shown to be unnecessary.
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/kincaid2/intro2.html
Read Bergson on http://www.fullbooks.com/Laughter--An-Essay-on-the-Meaning-of-the.html
...Laughter evolved from the panting behavior of our primate ancestors. Apes pant in conditions in which human laughter is produced, like tickle, rough and tumble play, and chasing games. Other animals produce vocalizations during play, but they are so different that it’s difficult to equate them with laughter. Rats, for example, produce high-pitch vocalizations during play and when tickled. But it’s very different in sound from human laughter. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3077386
...Evolutionarily elaborated from ape play-panting between 4 and 2 Mya, laughter arising from non-serious social incongruity promoted community play during fleeting periods of safety. Around 2 Mya, human ancestors evolved the capacity for willful control over facial motor systems. As a result, laughter was co-opted for strategically punctuating conversation and conveying embarrassment and derision. (Gervais, Wilson "The Evolutions and Functions of Laughter and Humor: A Synthetic Approach." Quarterly Review of Biology, Dec. 2005) http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/498281&erFrom=-7504877410601143498Guest
...Owren and Bachorowski suggest that human laughter evolved as a way to form alliances. First came the smile, which communicated a positive disposition to other individuals. Over time, however, smiles became increasingly easy to fake, so a more complex signal was needed. That is where laughter came in. http://www.icr.org/article/189
...Though laughter is present in all cultures, even tribes wholly isolated from all others, this is not firm evidence that it is innate. An infant who laughs could be imitating a parent’s laughter. Studies of congenitally blind, deaf, and dumb children proved that they could smile and laugh when tickled or caressed, even though they were unable to imitate other people.
...juveniles use "laughter" to distinguish playful from threatening physical interactions. Inability to signal the pretend-play leads to serious fighting. This is when we learn how to use laughter to indicate that aggressive play is just in fun. Teeth baring in primate displays of aggression and in laughter are similar. Laughing in potentially aggressive or competitive situations disarms our social companions. On the verge of becoming our adversaries, they pick up from our laughter that the situation is not threatening. http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n13/mente/laughter/page2.html
...laughter is a message that we send to other people, because we rarely laugh when we are alone. We laugh at the sound of laughter itself. That’s why the Tickle Me Elmo doll is such a success. The first laughter appears at about 3.5 to 4 months of age, long before we’re able to speak. Laughter, like crying, is a way for a preverbal infant to interact with the mother and other caregivers. Laughter has a bonding function within individuals in a group. Young children probably laugh the most (400 times a day). At ages 5 and 6, we tend to see the most exuberant laughs. Adults laugh less than children (25 times a day), probably because they play less. (Robert Provine) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3077386
Provine's paper on http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Provine_96.html
...Morreall believes that the first human laughter may have begun as a gesture of shared relief at the passing of danger. It inhibits the biological fight-or-flight response. Studies have found that dominant individuals use humor more than their subordinates. If you've often thought that everyone in the office laughs when the boss laughs, you're perceptive. http://people.howstuffworks.com/laughter2.htm
...Whether they are speakers or audiences (in mixed-sex groups), females laugh more often than males. Female speakers laugh 127% more than their male audience. In contrast, male speakers laugh about 7% less than their female audience. Neither males nor females laugh as much to female speakers as they do to male speakers. The limited cross-cultural evidence suggests that males are the leading humor producers and that females are the leading laughers. These differences are already present by the time that joking first appears around six years of age. http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Provine_96.html
I have my own theory of laughter. I suspect that it exists solely to demonstrate the state of one's dental health; coincidentally, the teeth are also shown in agressive behavior, to exhibit the weaponry. Laughter begins about the time the teething occurs. Females laugh more than males to advertize their health to polygamous males. Old people laugh less because such an advertisement would be pointless. Little kids laugh more because the state of their baby teeth would not matter later on, it is training for the adult life, like other forms of play. Laughter is contageous because teeth are best judged by comparison. Et cetera.
Why do we laugh?
Tags: mysteries
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03:02 pm
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Why do the English speak English?
Why do the English speak English?
The normal situation after a conquest is that the conquerers are absorbed into the indigenous population. The Normans in Britain, the Rus and the Tartars in Russia, the Xiongnu, the Mongols, and the Manchu in China are typical examples of this rapid acculturation. Yet we are told that the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the British Isles resulted in the complete obliteration of the native languages and customs. Why?
First, think about it from a purely numerical perspective:
...current estimates of the contribution of the Anglo-Saxon migrants range from less than 10,000 to as many as 200,000. http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_b/papers/RSPB20063627.pdf
...historical and archaeological data suggest that < 200,000 Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain around the middle of the fourth century A.D. The native Britons are believed to have numbered 2 to 3.7 million. And yet > 50% of England's gene pool contains Germanic Y chromosomes. Y chromosomes are genetic markers that are passed down from fathers to sons.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/07/060721-england_2.html
How likely is it that 1-10% of the alien population would force 90-99% of the others drop their mother languages? One radical idea is that the British were speaking English well BEFORE the Anglo-Saxon invasion and their genes already had Germanic Y chromosomes:
...DNA testing suggests the ancestors of the British, who arrived about 16 kya, were mostly from Spain and spoke a language related to Basque. DNA from later invaders accounts for 20% of the gene pool in Wales, 30% in Scotland, about a third in eastern and southern England and 12% in Ireland. http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20070306-21245600-bc-britain-brits.xml
...A myth I was taught at school, is that the English are almost all descended from 5th-century invaders, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from the Danish peninsula, who wiped out the indigenous Celtic population of England. The story originates with the clerical historians of the early dark ages. Gildas (6th century AD) and Bede (7th century) tell of Saxons and Angles invading over the 5th and 6th centuries. Gildas, in particular, sprinkles his tale with "rivers of blood" descriptions of Saxon massacres. And then there is the well-documented history of Anglian and Saxon kingdoms covering England for 500 years before the Norman invasion. But who were those Ancient Britons left in England to be slaughtered when the legions left? The idea that the Celts were eradicated—culturally, linguistically and genetically—by invading Angles and Saxons derives from the idea of a previously uniformly Celtic English landscape. But the presence in Roman England of some Celtic personal and place-names doesn't mean that all ancient Britons were Celts or Celtic-speaking.
...The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and along the south coast during Caesar's time all had Belgic names or affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the Thames. Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul "the language differs but little."
...The common language referred to by Tacitus was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.
...analysis of the genetic evidence shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the Neolithic period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and bronze age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga Beowulf, owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is consistent with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia. A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects. (Oppenheimer)
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7817
Another equally radical idea is that the Anglo-Saxons imposed apartheid-like living conditions on the oppressed Britons:
...the most hotly debated of all the British cultural transitions is the role of migration in the relatively sudden and drastic change from Romano-Britain to Anglo-Saxon Britain. This transition was once widely accepted as providing clear evidence for a mass migration from continental Europe and the near-complete replacement of the indigenous population in England. Archaeological evidence confirmed a rapid rise of continental culture in England and suggested a contemporaneous desertion of continental Germanic settlements. More recently, however, authors have questioned the evidence for large-scale immigration and continental emigration and emphasized the continuity of the Romano-British population in England. The sudden change to an Anglo-Saxon culture has been attributed instead to rapid acculturation and indigenous developments, with only a small number of Germanic immigrants (perhaps a male military elite) settling in Britain. The contribution of Anglo-Saxon immigration to the modern English gene pool thus remains uncertain. http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/19/7/1008
...The laws of Ine—written 200 years after the Anglo-Saxons arrived—demonstrate that the life of an Anglo-Saxon was worth far more than that of a native Briton, who was known as a "Welshman." If an Anglo-Saxon was killed, for example, the "blood money" payable to the victim's family was two to five times more than that of a "Welshman." http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/07/060721-england_2.html
...An initially small invading Anglo-Saxon elite could have quickly established themselves by having more children who survived to adulthood, thanks to their military power and economic advantage. We believe that they also prevented the native British genes getting into the Anglo-Saxon population by restricting intermarriage in a system of apartheid that left the country culturally and genetically Germanised. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/apartheidengland
...A computer population model was designed to study how such an apartheid-like structure would affect genetics. By testing different combinations of ethnic intermarriage rates and levels of Anglo-Saxon social dominance, it was found that a small immigrant population could easily gain genetic supremacy. When intermarriage rates were kept to less than 15% and Anglo-Saxons had a reasonably high social standing, then Germanic genes flourished.
...What is interesting is that there was seemingly no intermarriage between Britons and Anglo-Saxon settlers. That isn't what one might have anticipated, and [it] also of course reinforces the fact that this was a migration of a people, not an invasion of a male military force. Another question posed by the study is why the native Britons ended up accommodating the Anglo-Saxons and their culture instead of rebelling. "The natives realized they were the underdogs and realized that the only way to assimilate upwards was to adopt the new culture. They tried to improve their status by learning English, which is why English was adopted."
...Archaeological surveys have shown that 47% of adult males were buried with their weapons, while the rest were buried without them. We looked at [physical] stature and found that the men who were buried with their weapons were taller. Anglo-Saxon men are believed that have been 1-2" taller than native British men. This suggests that the men buried with their weapons were of Germanic origin and had a higher social status, while the men buried without their weapons were native Britons with lower social status. Historical evidence shows that these kinds of differences continued until the early seventh century, after which the apartheid-like structure appears to have broken down. Just 300 years of Anglo-Saxon dominance was enough to almost obliterate native Britons' gene pool and culture. In England today there is no ancient British identity left except for a few place- and river names.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/07/060721-england_2.html
...The problem with genocidal view is that the English resemble all the other countries of northwest Europe. Using the same method (principal components analysis), I have found greater similarities between the southern English and Belgians than the supposedly Anglo-Saxon homelands at the base of the Danish peninsula. When I looked at exact gene type matches between the British Isles and the continent, there were indeed specific matches between the continental Anglo-Saxon homelands and England, but these amounted to only 5% of modern English male lines. The English maternal genetic record (mtDNA) also contradicts the Anglo-Saxon wipeout story. English females almost completely lack the characteristic Saxon mtDNA marker type still found in the homeland of the Angles and Saxons. The conclusion is that there was an Anglo-Saxon invasion, but of a minority elite type, with no evidence of subsequent "sexual apartheid."
...The orthodox view is that the entire population of the British Isles, including England, was Celtic-speaking when Caesar invaded. But if that were the case, a modest Anglo-Saxon invasion is unlikely to have swept away all traces of Celtic language from the pre-existing population of England. Yet there are only half a dozen Celtic words in English, the rest being mainly Germanic, Norman or medieval Latin. My explanation is that England was not mainly Celtic-speaking before the Anglo-Saxons. (Oppenheimer)
...Here's the problem: there's a tiny Anglo-Saxon population in the south-east, there's virtually no other contact with England and yet the minute we get the first firm evidence of what the Scottish demotic actually was, in the 14th century, it's English. The question then becomes: How did this (let's be charitable) 10% of Anglo-Saxon speakers persuade the other 90% of Celtic-speakers in the rest of Lowland Scotland to adopt their language? And unlike England, you won't be able to call in aid either ethnic cleansing or cultural trickle-down because the Anglo-Saxons never ruled these parts. http://community.channel4.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8896096411/m/6100092996/p/5
I also wonder. How did it happen that the English so rapidly and completely superceded the native languages? I am very sceptical of the apartheid idea of Thomas and I am no less sceptical of Oppenheimer's idea that pre-invasion Britons already spoke English. I wonder if the Britons began speaking English voluntarily for the same reason the Indians are doing it today: it was simple to learn and so it rapidly established itself as lingus franca. Speaking English was the only practical way to understand each other in the patchwork of principalities where every glen and dale had its own impenetrable Celtic dialect. Is that why the English speak English?
Tags: mysteries
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07:06 pm
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Why do we cry?
Why do we cry when we are sad?
...Aside from a very few, unconfirmed reports in animals humans are believed to be the only animals who shed tears when they are sad, scared or otherwise overwhelmed by emotion.
...identical twins do not show more similarity [in their tear output] than fraternal twins; depressed people do not cry much more than control groups; and women's crying does not correlate with their hormone levels, although women do cry more than men. Some adults never cry, and this falls within the normal range, while other people cry almost daily. St. Ignatius Loyola reportedly cried four times a day.
http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/archives/archive53/newposts/436/topic436043.shtm
...Charles Darwin closely studied crying children, and noted that they contract the muscles around their eyes during prolonged screaming. He thought that involuntary behavior helped to protect the eyes, and tears were just a by-product.
http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/archives/archive53/newposts/436/topic436043.shtm
...there is a theory that crying helps protect the upper respiratory tract from infection by increasing the flow of tears, with their anti-bacterial properties, into the nasal cavity, although I don't quite understand why your body should react to strong emotion by beefing up your protection against sinusitis. http://www.edwardwillett.com/Columns/tears.htm
...we are literally crying out the extra hormones and proteins in our brains that generate the feelings that saddened us in the first place. Emotional tears are the body’s way of flushing out the chemicals that makes us sad -- the excess prolactin, manganese and ACTH. Emotional tears contain more Mn, an element that affects temperament, and more prolactin, a hormone that regulates milk production. Sobbing out manganese and prolactin is thought to relieve tension by balancing the body’s stress levels and eliminating build ups of the chemicals. http://scienceline.org/2006/10/23/ask-driscoll-tears
...emotional tears have 20-25% more protein. They also have four times the amount of potassium normally found in blood plasma, and 30 times the concentration of manganese. Psychic tears are also loaded with hormones, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), for example, an extremely accurate indicator of stress, and prolactin. Prolactin is the hormone that makes it possible for women to produce breast milk. High concentrations of manganese show up in the brains of people suffering from chronic depression. Too much ACTH is an excellent indicator of increased anxiety and stress. And studies show that women – all of whom have higher levels of prolactin than men -- cry about five times as often.
...There’s a perplexing connection between prolactin and tears: when the child of a breastfeeding mother cries, the mother’s milk reflexively “lets down” so that it becomes immediately available to the baby. In other words, the mother’s body instantly and reflexively prepares itself to relieve the infant’s reason for crying, or at least the most likely one.
...Before babies can speak, they can cry. The only way for infants to express frustration, pain, fear, or need is to cry. Adults may use crying to bond with other humans. Expressing sadness can prompt comfort and support from peers...Some animals do appear to cry for emotional reasons. Elephants seem to grieve when a family member dies and will guard the body and travel long distances to view it. Elephant experts at the London Zoo once told Charles Darwin that the animals do indeed mourn. Chimpanzees also appear to cry, but some scientists still insist that the tears released by these animals are strictly for cleaning the eye. http://scienceline.org/2006/10/23/ask-driscoll-tears
..tears reveal us at our most vulnerable... it is an unmistakable plea for help, an expression of utter vulnerability. Tears in some intense and commanding way, communicate an opportunity for intimacy and authenticity that is more powerful than any words could be. When we cry, the walls are down, and the defenses have been breached…
...Being ‘truthful” may explain the origins of our tears. Because tears are costly and rare, and because they are cried only when very deep emotions are being felt, they are not easily faked and send an unmistakable signal that the feelings behind them are absolutely real.
http://www.chipwalter.com/thumbstears.htm
...Many theories about emotional tears focus on crying babies, sometimes not bothering to distinguish between the acts of making crying sounds and shedding tears, either of which can happen without the other. Any theory that relates emotional tears to infant crying must deal with two facts. Many infant primates make various crying sounds without shedding tears and are perfectly able to get parental attention. Human infants also manage to get parental attention by crying without shedding tears -- most babies do not actually shed tears when they cry for several weeks or months after they are born.
...What emotional tears are for is not clear. Animals either don't shed emotional tears or do so much more rarely than humans. Some marine animals, like seals, shed tears to get rid of excess salt. These marine tears, among other anomalies, have led Elaine Morgan to speculate in "The Descent of Woman" that human evolution included a period when our predecessors dwelt in shallow seas. In this theory tears, like hairlessness, bipedalism, and other human oddities, is a response to saltwater living. http://www.salon.com/health/feature/1999/05/17/emotional_tears/print.html
...the actual observed and measured excretions in human tears far more closely resemble the excretions from the "salt" glands of terrestrial birds and reptiles than those of marine birds and reptiles. The idea that human tears indicate a marine past is certainly far less parsimonious than the idea that the actual observed and measured active secretion of the lacrimal gland indicates our actual environmental past habitat would be terrestrial rather than aquatic. http://www.aquaticape.org/tears.html
...None of this really explains why humans cry emotional tears when other animals don't. The most likely explanation is that we've discovered crying is a powerful form of communication: specifically, it makes other people want to help us. http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/archives/archive53/newposts/436/topic436043.shtm
Do we cry to get rid of unwanted hormones that make us sad, to get in touch with our aquatic past, to get help, to look truthful, or to express vulnerability?
Why do we cry?
Tags: mysteries
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07:11 pm
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Why are bricks red?
Why are bricks red? Pale bricks are as easy to make as the red bricks. We prefer eating from plates made of white clay. So, why do we like our bricks red?
...During the Renaissance and the Baroque, visible brick walls were unpopular and the brickwork was covered with plaster. It was only during the mid-18th century that visible brick walls regained some degree of popularity. (Wiki)
...Bricks rose in popularity when Flemish refugees brought bricks into East Anglia. Their use spread and by the late 18th century, yellow 'stocks' became common in London...Until 1800, most bricks were red from the iron in the clay used. Palladian ideals led to the development of 'white' bricks, in which lime changed the brick to pale yellow, buff, or brown. A whitish brick made from Gault clay was used widely in the south-east of England outside London. Brown bricks were made and used in the Thames valley. A silver-grey brick can be seen in south Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Hampshire. In the Vale of York, a dark brown brick was produced. As red bricks were re-introduced from the 1870s, they were expensive and so the most basic houses still used only yellow bricks; more expensive houses used reds just for decoration such as over windows. As the cost declined further, the front elevation was built entirely in reds. http://www.bricksandbrass.co.uk/deselem/extwall/bricks.htm
We have red bricks because in Victorian England these "natural looking" (and cheaper to make) red bricks were so much out of fashion that they were MORE expensive than the pedestrian yellow bricks. The red brick was a status statement. Once these red bricks became desirable, they became cheaper. Now there is no way back to the lost Palladian ideal...
Are we stuck with the red bricks forever?
Tags: mysteries
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01:15 pm
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What was the . ?
Who invented percents, decimal fractions, and the radix point? What for? When did people start using them on the regular basis? Why?
From what I read it appears that the decimal fractions took off only when logarithms began to be used systematically, and that did not happen before the mid-17th century. Many mathematicians mistrusted logarithms because it was not understood how do they work, and the decimal fractions were suspect by association. Calculus had changed all that, but it took fifty years. The first credible results for hyperbolic areas were from St. Vincent (1647); the connection to logarithms was made by de Saras (1649). However, these results were not well known, so the logarithms remained magic before analytical calculus was invented. Interestingly, Newton used decimal fractions very sparingly in his Principia, and almost exclusively in the context of logarithms (e.g., Book II, Proposion XL, Problem IX). Fractions were the preferred way with him (he did not hesitate to use 15/58 or 17/48). Actually, every time he was using the decimal fractions (sometimes, to 9 significant digits!) he misused them rather than used them.
It seems that percents were accepted first (around the time when local base-100 currencies first appeared in Italy). The symbol % gradually evolved from a symbol introduced in 1425 and it acquired its common form between 1650 or 1684; though, it was still vertical. It became diagonal only in the mid-19th century. Mind that our common diagonal symbol for fractions "/" was invented in the late 18th century:
...The earliest instance of a diagonal fraction bar was in 1784, when a curved line resembling the sign of integration was used in the Gazetas de Mexico by Manuel Antonio Valdes. In 1843, a curved line was used by Henri Cambuston in Definicion de las principales operaciones de arismetica. In 1845, the use of the solidus was recommended by De Morgan in an article "The Calculus of Functions." In 1852, the solidus was used by Antonio Serra Y Oliveres in Manuel de la Tipografia Española.
http://steiner.math.nthu.edu.tw/usr3/summer99/44/mathword/fractions.html
Before that, the fractions were vertical ("-"). The latter symbol was invented by the Arabs around 1200 and it was popularized by Fibonacci. In retrospect, it seems surprizing that "." and "," where adopted instead of "-", because it would naturally remind of the fractions. Note that "-" for minus became used around the time "." became used, so it could've really happened.
It is harder to tell how the decimal fractions came into the limelight. Napier and Kepler are commonly credited with the first systematic use of the decimal fractions for calculations, although it appears that it was neither Napier's idea (base 10 was suggested to him by Henry Briggs), nor was it really new, because Napier's construction of natural logarithms was semi-trigonometric and he used the existing 7-decimal placed tables of sines as his starting point. Actually, Napier's geometrically/mechanically derived "logarithms" are only somewhat related to our logarithms. The d.f. were already in use for astronomy since Tycho Brahe adopted "prosthaphaeresis," which is a method based on Viete's formula for the product of two cosines (1580). It was through John Craig who visited Brahe and told Napier about this technique that the latter began working on his logarithms. If Brahe would have published his tables with as many significant digits as Briggs, we would probably use this method for the next two centuries. Vieta, incidentally, was the first to use the "+" and "-" symbols systematically, although these two symbols go back to Pacioli (1494). Amazingly, these symbols were used in algebra long before they were used in arithmetics!
It is remarkable how many people are credited with the invention of the decimal fractions and the radix point:
...In 1617 in his Rabdologia, Napier used both the comma and the period as separators of units and tenths. Before 1617, he used the period in his Constructio, which was not published until 1619.
...The dot as a separator occurs in 1616 in Wright's translation of John Napier's Descriptio. Boyer refers to this as the first appearance of a decimal point separating the whole number part from the decimal part. However Cajori says "no evidence has been advanced, thus far, to show that the sign was intended as a separator of units and tenths, and not as a more general separator as in Pitiscus."
...Bartholomaeus Pitiscus (1561-1613) achieved fame with his influential work "Trigonometria: sive de solutione triangulorum tractatus brevis et perspicuus" (1595), which introduced the word "trigonometry." Pitiscus is sometimes credited with inventing the decimal point, which appears in his trigonometrical tables. (Wiki)
...The use of a decimal point separatrix generally is attributed either to G. A. Magini (1555-1617), a map-making friend of Kepler and rival of Galileo for a chair at Bologna, in his De planis triangulis of 1592, or to Christoph Clavius (1537-1612), a Jesuit friend of Kepler, in a table of sines of 1593. Clavius used the period for other reasons in his works, and his purpose in using the period in this case is not clear (Cajori). Carl Boyer says Clavius was the first person to use the decimal point with a clear idea of its significance.
...Jobst Bürgi (1552-1632) in his manuscript of 1592 used both a period and a comma for the decimal point. He also used instead a small circle placed above or below the units digit.
...Simon Stevin (1548-1620) discovered the hydrostatic paradox and was the first to explain the tides using the attraction of the moon. In 1586, he demonstrated that two objects of different weight fall down with exactly the same acceleration. He was the first to give a mathematically accurate specification for equal temperament in music, and he also introduced double entry bookkeeping. In 1586, Stevin wrote a pamphlet called De Thiende ('the tenth'). Decimal fractions had been employed for the extraction of square roots some five centuries before his time, but nobody established their daily use. His notation is rather unwieldy. Stevin printed little circles around the exponents of the different powers of one-tenth. (Wiki)
the book is on http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/~schultz/3M3/L11Stevin.html
...For 3.14, Stevin used the notation 3 (0) 1 (1) 4 (2). Other notations tried included 3(14 by Kepler, 3(superscript)14 by Briggs, and 3|(subscript)14 by Viete.
...In 1530, Christoff Rudolff used a vertical bar exactly as we use a decimal point today in setting up a compound interest table in the Exempel Büchlin (1530)... He apparently knew how to operate with these forms as well as merely to write them, as various predecessors had done. His work, however, was not appreciated, and apparently was not understood, and it was not until 1585 that a book upon the subject appeared.
...Francesco Pellos or Pellizzati published a commercial arithmetic textbook at Turin in 1492 in which use is made of a decimal point to denote the division of a number by a power of ten." Pellos "unwittingly made use of the decimal point for the first time in a printed work" and that he "did not recognize the significance of the decimal point." He "used a point and came near the invention of decimal fractions."
...Al-Kashi produced his Treatise on the Circumference in 1424, a work in which he calculated 2pi to nine sexagesimal places and translated this into sixteen decimal places. In "The Key to Arithmetic" al-Kashi gives as clear a description of decimal fractions as Stevin does. However, the idea had been present in the work of several mathematicians of al-Karaji's school, in particular al-Samawal. The main advances brought in by al-Kashi are (1) The analogy between the sexagesimal and the decimal systems and (2) The usage of decimal fractions for real numbers.
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Al-Kashi.html
...Abu'l Hasan Ahmad ibn Ibrahim Al-Uqlidisi (920-980) wrote the earliest known text offering a direct treatment of decimal fractions. "Al-Uqlidisi uses decimal fractions as such, appreciates the importance of a decimal sign, and suggests a good one." Isis 57 (1966) 475.
...Yang Hui (1238-1298) was a minor Chinese official who wrote two books, dated 1261 and 1275, which use decimal fractions in the modern form.
I guess the decimal fractions were so late in acceptance because there was no real need for them. Who needed pi to sixteen decimal places in 1424? One begins to feel the need for decimal (as opposed to common) fractions for (a) calculation of percents (naturally!) and compound interests in base-100 currencies and (b) doing bulk calculations, were rounding errors are important. Since base-100 currencies were uncommon and complex calculations were not really needed, it took such a long time to develop the appetite for the decimal fractions. Actually, even that does not explain why the decimal as opposed to sexagesimal fractions were adopted, because the first real need for accuracy and number crunching was in astronomy, where base-60 fractions are used to this day. As for the commercial math, decimal national currencies were too late in coming (Russian ruble was the first, in 1701) to explain the success of the decimal fractions in the 17th century. Before the decimalization, people did not have much difficulty with fractional and non-decimal calculations. The first log tables originated from the contemporary trigonometric tables, which were predominantly base-60 (then as now), and one needed to go back and forth, especially for astronomy calculations. I do not see what was the .
Was it a fad?
PS: The short history of mathematical symbols can be found on
http://www.roma.unisa.edu.au/07305/symbols.htm
http://steiner.math.nthu.edu.tw/usr3/summer99/44/mathword/fractions.html
Napier's logarithms http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s8-01/8-01.htm
http://www.humboldt.edu/~mef2/Presentations/HSU%20Colloquia/napiercalc.html
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Napier.html
Tags: mysteries
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07:04 pm
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What is the most mysterious poem in Russian literature?
I believe that "The Sail" by Mikhail Lermontov is the most mysterious poem ever written in Russian. It is only due the fact that this poem has been memorized by countless generations of little children that its surrealistic nature and bizarre allegory are seldom recognized. It strikes me that the author couldnt've seen the sea when composing this poem (which is perhaps true, as in 1832 Lermontov did not travel farther than Moscow). A foggy sea is not blue, there is no such thing as "blue mist" on the sea, and a white sail would not contrast itself against the fog. Furthermore, one cannot have the combination of "blue fog," strong gail (of such tempestous strength that the mast "is bending with a creak"), heaving waves, the stream that is bluer than azure, and the golden ray of sun -- all at the same time. It just cannot happen. This is typical Lermontov: in his "On the road alone", which closely follows "The Sail" in its juxtaposition of melancholy and nature, there are flints shining through the fog and other atmospheric impossibilities: The fog in the desert -- at night! The Earth sleeping in the sky becloaked in blue aura. I'm afraid that the only place one can see such a sight is on the moon. There is something very odd about these combinations of the blue, the fog, the shine, and the tormented self in Lermontov's landscapes. Apparently, I am not the only one confused. There is the whole "extraterrestrial school of thought" about his poem: http://www.mistsofrussia.info/people/lermontov.php
The allegory of "The Sail" is just odd. The last two lines imply that the sail is irrational and whimsical in its desire to seek the storm, because there is no rest in a storm. However, this desire is perfectly reasonable. No sailor in his right mind would keep the sail on during the storm that is so strong that it bends the mast. Surely, it is precisely during such a storm when the sail is put to rest. What is strange or rebellious about such a desire?
How are we supposed to understand these poems? Is this just sloppiness and cluttered imagination of the person who never saw the sea, been to a desert, or sailed anywhere?
Tags: mysteries
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11:08 pm
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Entomology of smugness
One of the first poems I memorized as a little kid was The Dragonfly and the Ant by Ivan Krylov. It is a fable about the carefree Dragonfly and the frugal, industrious Ant. The Dragonfly falls on bad times in winter and comes to the Ant for help. The Ant sadistically denies her the entrance: “You sang, did you? That’s nice. Now dance.” I confess that my sympathy is entirely with the rakish Dragonfly. The questionable morals of the fable aside, the story is just ridiculous entomologically: the Dragonfly is first called a hopper, while everyone knows that dragonflies do not hop; then it is implied that the dragonflies sing and dance, which they do not. There is no doubt where Krylov got this story: it was from La Fontaine's "La Cigale et la fourmi" - The Cicada and the Ant. So it was a cicada first; at least singing is explained (although, only male cicadas sing, so there is a gender problem). Of course, La Fontain did not invent his story either, he got it from Aesop. In Aesop's fable it was the cricket. In the prose version of his fables, it was actually the dung beetle. Where do all these lazy insects come from?
A cricket talking to an ant makes at least some sense. I can readily see how such a story could have originated: there is a type of crickets ("ant crickets", Myrmecophilus) that actually live in the anthills as parasites
...the host ants were always aggressive toward the crickets, unless they were more than 4 mm away. Speed and quickness are essential to avoid capture by an ant. Despite the truculent nature of the ants, the crickets could approach an ant, usually from the rear, while the ant was engaged in grooming or trophallaxis with another conspecific ant. While the ant was busy in one of these activities, the cricket used its antennae to contact the ant, mimicking mutual grooming and trophallaxis behavior. If the ant did not act aggressively, the cricket typically moved closer to strigilate (lick surface secretion) or take part in trophallaxis with the ant. http://buzz.ifas.ufl.edu/s391lha86.pdf
So the cricket makes a lot of sense: perhaps someone observed this unusual activity of crickets around ant hills and rationalized it in the fable. However, it turns out that La Fointain was not the first to use the cicada. Apparently, Maori of New Zeland had the same story:
...The pokorua (ant) said to the kihikihi (cicada), “Let us be diligent and collect food during the summer, that we may retain life when the winter arrives.” “Not so,” remarked the cicada; “rather let us ascend the trees and bask in the sun on the warm bark.” Even so, the ant laboured at collecting and storing food for the winter. The cicada said, “This is true pleasure, to bask in the warm sun and enjoy life. How foolish is the ant, who toils below!” But when winter came, and the warmth went out of the sun, behold, the cicada perished of cold and hunger, while the ant, how snug is he in his warm home underground, with abundance of food! http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz/volume/rsnz_41/rsnz_41_00_003460.html
Interestingly
...Maoris see a similarity between the clicking of the Cicada and the English language, hence in Maori the word for Englishman is the same as the word for cicada.
http://www.earthlife.net/insects/cicadidae.html
Apparently, the Chinese also have the same story (on the authority of "Cicadas in Chinese Culture" by Gaines Kan-Chih Liu, Osiris, Vol. 9, 1950 (1950) 275-396). The Japanese have it too, but the ending is rather different
...the story ends with this moral: “All summer long, the ants worked as hard as they could and the cicadas sang with all their might. Now it was time for the ants and the cicadas to join together in a winter feast” http://www.sil.org:8090/silebr/2003/silebr2003-011
Furhtermore, in its Greek original and in some Latin translations the cricket is also a cicada, although no one really knows if Aesop's fables or these translations are authentic.
...versions of the fable are found in the verse collections of Babrius and Avianus, and in several prose collections including those attributed to Syntipas and Apthonius. In a variant prose form of the fable, the lazy animal is a dung beetle, which finds that the winter rains wash away the dung on which it feeds. (Wiki)
...The collections which we possess under the name of Aesop's Fables are late renderings of Babrius's Version or Progumnasmata, rhetorical exercises of varying age and merit. Syntipas translated Babrius into Syriac, and Andreopulos put the Syriac back again into Greek, since original Greek scripts had all been lost. Ignatius Diaconus, in the 9th century, made a version of 55 fables in choliambic tetrameters. Stories from Oriental sources were added, and from these collections Maximus Planudes made and edited the collection which has come down to us under the name of Aesop, and from which the popular fables of modern Europe have been derived. http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Bios/Aesop.html
That the cicadas, the dung beetles, and the crickets got all mixed up during this tortuous process would not be surprising. The surprising thing is the cicadas, because the cicadas (unlike the crickets or grasshoppers) do not really dance (hop). In late summer, after they sing their love songs and mate, they... die. The fable makes little sense with a cicada. The cicadas do not live off ants, it is the other way round
...Cicadas and Grasshoppers are often confused by ancient writers of their later translators, particularly those who lived in northern Europe and had no first hand knowledge of the Cicada. Fabre correctly points out that in reality it is the ants which are lazy, displacing the Cicada from the hole she has drilled in the branch so that they can drink the nectar she has made available. The Cicada dies in winter but that is her allotted life span and not a fault. http://www.earthlife.net/insects/cicadidae.html
...La Fontaine has the story backwards. The ant is the beggar and the cicada is the provider. Hundreds of cicadas spend the summer in our plane trees, boring into the smooth bark and quenching their thirst on sap. Pere points out the tiny ants that seem to be attacking the giant cicadas. One crawls under a cicada and nibbles at its legs. Another climbs onto the cicada’s back and tugs on its wings. The big insect eventually loses patience. It pulls its sucking mouth out of the bark and moves away. The ants then nip in and drink from the sap spring, which soon dries up with no cicada to tend it. (Fabre)http://www.vidyaonline.net/arvindgupta/fabrechildren.pdf
So, is it a cricket or is it a cicada? Why is it a cicada? Why does this story that makes no sense with a cicada prevails in so many cultures?
Tags: biosermons, mysteries
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07:53 pm
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Anachronistic fruit
Who were the original avocado, ginkgo fruit, breadfruit, osage orange, mango, grapefruit, and pomegranate eaters? It was not people, right? Apparently, the original eaters were Cenozoic megafauna. See more on http://darwiniana.org/ghostsof.htm. Avocado is easily the oddest:
...animals such as cats, dogs, cattle, goats, rabbits, birds, and fish can be severely harmed or even killed when they consume the avocado leaves, skin, or pit. The avocado fruit is poisonous to birds. Avocado leaves contain a toxic fatty acid derivative known as persin. Birds seem to be particularly sensitive to this toxic compound...The avocado was adapted for ecological relationship with now-extinct megafauna (such as the giant ground sloth). The fruit, with its mildly toxic pit, co-evolved with megafauna mammals to be swallowed whole and excreted in their dung, ready to sprout. The avocado's ecological partners have disappeared, and the avocado plant has not had time to evolve an alternative seed dispersal technique, aside from human cultivation. (Wiki)
Perhaps 10,000 years from now there will be endless speculations what kind of a large animal swallowed whole avocados and excreted pits in year 2007 AD...
Tags: mysteries
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05:40 pm
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So Long And Thanks For All The Flowers
...In recent months, there has been an alarming decimation of honey bee colonies for which there is no explanation. Scientists are studying the problem from a variety of angles – mites and their associated viral diseases, unknown fungal pathogens, pesticide contamination, etc.
http://podcasts.psu.edu/node/262
...(i) Adult bee population suddenly gone without any accumulation of dead bees; (ii) Small cluster with queen, remaining bees often young; (iii) Brood, pollen, and honey present; (iv) Little evidence of robbing, or wax moth or small hive beetle attack.
http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/pressReleases/FallDwindleDisTalkAustin.pdf
...During the months of October, November, and December 2006, an alarming number of honey bee colonies began to disappear along the East Coast of the United States. West Coast beekeepers are also beginning to report unprecedented losses. This phenomenon, without a recognizable underlying cause, threatens the pollination industry and production of commercial honey in the US. The losses are so great that there will not be enough bees to rebuild colony numbers. http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/pressReleases/FallDwindleUpdate0107.pdf
...Researchers are scrambling to find answers to what's causing an affliction recently named Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which has decimated commercial beekeeping operations in Pennsylvania and across the country. Initial studies revealed a large number of disease organisms present, with no one disease being identified as the culprit. Ongoing case studies and surveys of beekeepers experiencing CCD have found a few common management factors, but no common environmental agents or chemicals have been identified. http://aginfo.psu.edu/news/07Jan/HoneyBees.htm
1) In collapsed colonies
a. The complete absence of adult bees in colonies, with no or little build up of dead bees in the colonies or in front of those colonies.
b. The presence of capped brood in colonies.
c. The presence of food stores, both honey and bee bread
i. which is not immediately robbed by other bees
ii. when attacked by hive pests such as wax moth and small hive beetle, the attack is noticeably delayed.
2) In cases where the colony appear to be actively collapsing
a. An insufficient workforce to maintain the brood that is present
b. The workforce seems to be made up of young adult bees
c. The queen is present
d. The cluster is reluctant to consume provided feed, such as sugar syrup and protein supplement
http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/pressReleases/FallDwindleUpdate0107.pdf
...Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert man to the danger; but most of their attempts were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived. The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated double backward somersault through a hoop whilst whistling 'Star-Spangled Banner,' but in fact it was this: so long and thanks for all the fish."
(Douglas Adams)
???
Tags: mysteries
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01:14 am
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The balancing act
It is hard enough to make one's personal choice between good and evil. Is it possible to make such a choice for millions of people, including the unborn ones? What kind of foresight would that require? Can evil be nothing else than good that we cannot perceive due to our lack of wisdom?
The gift of sickness, or the lesser evil
One third to two thirds of Europeans died in 10 years of the Black Death,
...the most devastating pandemic in human history. It began in south-western Asia and spread to Europe by the late 1340s. The total number of deaths worldwide from the pandemic are estimated at least 75 million people [20+ million in Europe]. The same disease is thought to have returned to Europe every generation with varying degrees of intensity and fatality until the 1700s. It has disappeared from Europe in the 18th century. (wiki)
...In October 1347, twelve Genoese trading ships put into the harbor at Messina in Sicily. The ships had come from the Black Sea. The ships contained dead or dying sailors. Rumors of a plague supposedly arising in China and spreading through India, Persia, Syria and Egypt had reached Europe in 1346. No one paid any attention. By January 1348, the plague had penetrated France by way of Marseilles. The plague then spread west to Spain and and North to central France by March. By May, the plague entered Rome and Florence. In June, the plague had moved to Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and London. Switzerland and Hungary fell victim in July. In any given period, the plague accomplished its work in three to six months and then faded from view. Its appearance and movement was totally unpredictable. In northern cities, the plague lay dormant in winter and then reappeared the following spring. In 1349, the plague reappeared at Paris and eventually spread to Holland, Scotland and Ireland. By the end of 1349, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Iceland and Greenland felt the full effects of the plague. The plague left nearly as quickly as it had appeared. By mid-1350, the plague had completed its deed across the continent of Europe. In enclosed places like monasteries, nunneries and prisons, the infection of one person usually meant the infection of all. Of 140 Dominican friars at Montpellier, only one man survived. Watching family and friends suffer and succumb to violent deaths, men could not help but wonder whether this pestilence had been sent to exterminate all sinners. Wheat was left unharvested, and oxen, sheep, cows, goats, pigs and chickens ran wild, and they too fell victim to the plague. http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture29b.html
A quater of all villages across Europe were totally depopulated. Florence's population passed from 120,000 to 50,000; similar mortality was in Hamburg and Bremen. Nobody knows what caused the plague; it is believed that it was a bacterium Yersinia pestis that lives in the fleas on rats. Others argued that it was viral haemorrhagic fever or anthrax. It is unknown why there where no waves after 1770; the best idea is that black rat that was introduced from Asia, was subsequently displaced by the bigger Norwegian or brown rat which was not as prone to transmit the fleas to humans.
Who died and who lived? Was it just sheer luck? It has been suggested that a genetic mutation in a chemokine receptor confered resistance to Y. pestis.
...The CCR5-Delta32 mutation confers protection against HIV-1 in an average of 10% of the people of European origin today. It is suggested that all the Deltaccr5 alleles originated from a single mutation event that occurred before 1000 BC and the subsequent epidemics of haemorrhagic plague forced up its frequency to 5e-5 at the time of the Black Death. Epidemics of plague over the next three centuries then steadily raised the frequency in Europe (but not elsewhere) to present day values. http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:15879045
This idea has been hyped in the media but, in fact, there is no support:
...this hypothesis is not supported by the historical evidence: the Black Death did not strike Europe alone but spread from the east, devastating regions such as China, North Africa, and the Middle East as much or even more than Europe. Further, in Europe its levels of mortality do not correspond with the geographic distribution of the proportion of descendents with this CCR5 gene. The gradient of Black Death mortality sloped in the opposite direction from that of present-day genotypes: the heaviest casualties were in the Mediterranean, the very regions whose descendents account for the lowest incidences of the HIV-1 resistant allele. http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:16880184
...We infected both normal and CCR5-deficient mice with the bacterium Yersinia pestis and found no difference in either bacterial growth or survival time between the two groups. Unless the pathogenesis of Yersinia infection differs markedly between mice and humans, our results indicate that CCR5 deficiency in people is unlikely to protect against plague. http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:14961112
The likely selective factor for this gene was smallpox rather than the plague. Recently, I read about another intriguing theory: those who survived were mostly anemic. The victims were primarily healthy men and women; many of the survivors were either young or old, often malnourished and deficient in iron. In fact, they were not exactly deficient; quite to the contrary:
...Hemochromatosis, HH (iron overload disorder) is a hereditary disease characterized by improper processing by the body of dietary iron which causes iron to accumulate in a number of body tissues, eventually causing organ dysfunction. It is one of the most common inheritable genetic defects, especially in people of northern European extraction, with about 1 in 10 people carrying the defective gene. It is presumed, through genetic studies, that the "first" haemochromatosis patient lived 60-70 generations ago. Around that time, when diet was poor, the presence of a mutant allelle may have provided advantage in maintaining sufficient iron levels in the blood. (wiki)
...It has been hypothesized that the gene may be advantageous to women by compensating for high iron losses (through menstruation, pregnancy, and milk production). On the other hand, men with the gene may suffer from excessive iron stores late in life. More recently, a different hypothesis has been advanced based on the finding that individuals bearing the hemochromatosis mutation (C282Y) show partial resistance to Yersinia, the bacterium causing plague. In normal individuals, Yersinia initially multiply within iron-rich macrophages, however this does not occur in persons with C282Y because their macrophages lack iron, a mineral essential for the pathogen's survival. http://bmc.ub.uni-potsdam.de/1472-6920-5-16
...About 80% of individuals of European descent with HH are homozygous for a cysteine-to-tyrosine substitution (C282Y) in the gene now called HFE. Three consequences of the C282Y mutation are lack of expression of HFE on the cellular surface, a lowered iron level in macrophages, and an increased rate of clearance of iron from the intestinal lumen. These changes could confer protection against certain pathogens early in life before iron overload occurs. Furthermore, the C282Y mutation might have been selected for during the European plagues caused by Yersinia spp. and other pathogens because of the conferred resistance to infection, i.e., by epidemic pathogenic selection.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/j6803q8143556896
...It was initially suggested that the ancestral C282Y mutation occurred within the Celtic group of peoples. However, the distribution of the C282Y mutation in Europe is more consistent with an origin among the Germanic Iron Age population in Southern Scandinavia. From this area, the mutation could later be spread by the migratory activities of the Vikings. The highest frequencies (5.1–9.7%) of the C282Y mutation are observed in populations in the Northern part of Europe, i.e. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Eastern part of England (Danelaw) and the Dublin area, all Viking homelands and settlements. The highest allele frequencies are reported among populations living along the coastlines. The frequencies of the C282Y mutation decline from Northern to Southern Europe. Intermediate allele frequencies (3.1–4.8%) are seen in the populations in Central Europe, which is the original Celtic homeland. Low allele frequencies (0–3.1%) are recognized in populations in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean.
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1034/j.1399-0004.2003.00083.x/abs
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=12972035&dopt=Abstract
The survival of a large number of people predisposed to iron overload might explain the sudden surge in the popularity of medical bloodletting
...Phlebotomy was a popular medical practice up to the late 19th century, involving the withdrawal of often considerable quantities of blood from a patient in the hopeful belief that this would cure or prevent a great many illnesses and diseases. The practice is still used to reduce body iron stores to minimal levels in the HH patients. It works by removing red blood cells which are rich in iron. With phlebotomy, asymptomatic HH subjects can avoid irreversible tissue injury, and other patients can minimize the progression of symptomatic iron overload. Despite attempts to develop more elegant strategies to remove iron from the body, it is still the most effective, economical, and safe treatment known for iron overload.http://hemochromatose.tripod.com/tp.html
Providence works in subtle and strange ways: First the Scandinavian barbarians descended in their fury upon Europe pillaging, raping, but also settling down and carrying their mutated C282Y genes though the founder effect. Four hundred years later, their descendants (now mixed with the rest of the population) carrying this defective gene helped the Western civilization to survive the greatest calamity in its history (that marked the onset of modernity, including mass persecution of the Jews). Four hundreds years later, another Scandinavian invader, brown rat, unleashed its fury unto black rat, bringing the latter to near extinction in Europe. The plagues ceased, and we were saved from the regular devastation.
To the victims of Norse atrocities, the assault of the Vikings was the end of their world; the final - lost - battle of good and evil. They've asked, dying: Why? For what sins did we deserve such fury? Why is there such evil in the world?
Was it to prevent a greater evil from happening?
PS: The hemochromatosis story is from Moalem's Survival of the Sickest. A remarkable book, although perhaps 90% untrue.
Tags: mysteries
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04:09 pm
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Rejected love
Give me a storm; if it be love,
Like Danae in that golden shower,
I swim in pleasure; if it prove
Disdain, that torrent will devour
My vulture hopes; and he's possessed
Of heaven that's but from hell released.
Then crown my joys, or cure my pain;
Give me more love, or more disdain.
Does it feel this way?
Tags: mysteries
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09:47 pm
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On French intellectuals
France is the country of intellectuals (or such was its self-vision until recently).
Why France? What has changed?
...Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic disease caused by the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii. The parasite infects most warm-blooded animals, including humans, but the primary host is the cat [where it sexually reproduces]. Animals are infected by eating infected meat, by contact with cat faeces, or by transmission from mother to fetus. The most common means of transmission to humans is raw or undercooked meat. The illness is usually minor and self-limited. In the US, 22.5% of the population carries a Toxoplasma infection. The infection typically causes a mild flu-like illness or no illness. After the first few weeks of infection have passed, the parasite rarely causes any symptoms in otherwise healthy adults. Most patients who become infected do not know it: the infection enters a latent phase, during which only bradyzoites are present, forming cysts in nervous and muscle tissue. (Wiki)
...There is wide geographical variance in the incidence of T. gondii infection, a variability that seems to depend on the amount of uncooked or undercooked meat, that a given population consumes, and/or the amount of contact a given population has with cats. Among the French, the incidence of toxoplasma infection is greater than 90% in adults. http://www.thebody.com/hivnews/newsline/aug99/advances.html
...In the US, about 30-35% have antibodies and in France more than 65% of women will have already had toxoplasmosis. Because infection is more common in France, congenital toxoplasmosis occurs at over twice the rate in the UK or US. http://www.womens-health.co.uk/toxo.asp
...The prevalence of congenital toxoplasmosis is 1 in 1000 live births in France. By the fourth decade of life, 90% of the French population as compared to only 12.5% of the Japanese population are seropositive for toxoplasmosis. http://www.emedicine.com/oph/byname/toxoplasmosis.htm
...It has been found that the parasite has the ability to change the behavior of its host: infected rats and mice are less fearful of cats - in fact, some of the infected rats seek out cat-urine-marked areas. This effect is advantageous to the parasite, which will be able to sexually reproduce if its host is eaten by a cat. The mechanism for this change is not completely understood, but there is evidence that toxoplasmosis infection raises dopamine levels in infected mice.
...The findings of behavioral alteration in rats and mice have led some scientists to speculate that toxoplasma may have similar effects in humans, even in the latent phase that had previously been considered asymptomatic. Toxoplasma is one of a number of parasites that may alter their host's behaviour as a part of their life cycle.
...The latent prevalence of a long-lived and common brain parasite, T. gondii, explains a statistically significant portion of the variance in aggregate neuroticism among populations, as well as in the ‘neurotic’ cultural dimensions of sex roles and uncertainty avoidance. Spurious or non-causal correlations between aggregate personality and aspects of climate and culture that influence T. gondii transmission could also drive these patterns. A link between culture and T. gondii hypothetically results from a behavioural manipulation that the parasite uses to increase its transmission to the next host in the life cycle: a cat. While latent toxoplasmosis is usually benign, the parasite's subtle effect on individual personality appears to alter the aggregate personality at the population level. Drivers of the geographical variation in the prevalence of this parasite include the effects of climate on the persistence of infectious stages in soil, the cultural practices of food preparation and cats as pets. Some variation in culture, therefore, may ultimately be related to how climate affects the distribution of T. gondii, though the results only explain a fraction of the variation in two of the four cultural dimensions, suggesting that if T. gondii does influence human culture, it is only one among many factors... In populations where this parasite is very common, mass personality modification could result in cultural change. Variations in the prevalence of T. gondii may explain a substantial proportion of human population differences we see in cultural aspects that relate to ego, money, material possessions, work and rules. (Lafferty)
http://royalsociety.metapress.com/(20cws0ide5i3ynulk3lpal55)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,9,15;journal,11,319;linkingpublicationresults,1:102024,1
...Correlations have been found between latent Toxoplasma infections and various characteristics:
- Increased risk taking behavior
- Slower reactions
- Feelings of insecurity and self-doubt
- Neuroticism
...The evidence for behavioral effects on humans, although intriguing, is relatively weak. There have been no randomized clinical trials studying the effects of toxoplasma on human behavior. There are claims of toxoplasma causing antisocial attitudes in men and promiscuity (or even "signs of higher intelligence") in women, and greater susceptibility to schizophrenia and manic depression in all infected persons. A 2004 study found that toxoplasma "probably induces a decrease of novelty seeking."
...According to an article in Australasian Science magazine, T. gondii infections lead to changes depending on the sex of the infected person. The study suggests that male carriers have a tendency to have shorter attention spans, a greater likelihood of breaking rules and taking risks, and are more independent, anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose. It also suggests that these men are deemed less attractive to women. Women carriers are suggested to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls. (Wiki) http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/parasite-makes-men-dumb-women-sexy/2006/12/26/1166895290973.html
...The high prevalence of T. gondii infection in France led to the establishment of a national screening program. Preventive measures were progressively introduced, and these became compulsory in 1978 with the result that the incidence of congenital toxoplasmosis is now markedly reduced. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1290073&dopt=Abstract
Could it be as simple as that?
Tags: mysteries
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01:54 am
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Getting where you started
Imagine: You started from point A, somewhere in the middle of a desert. After several days of travel without a map or knowing your destination, seeing only a few rocks at a time and making countless random turns, you finally arrived at point B. There you were given a heavy load to carry back to point A. Without missing a beat, you went home in a straight line. No instruments, no navigation tools. Can you do that?
Our brains are capable of great intellectual feats, such as multiplication of two by two or setting DVD players, but imagining our exact trajectory in 3D space and finding the shortest way back (the home vector) is not our innate ability. Yet insects do that every moment of their lives. How do they do that? Do they use cartesian or polar coordinates? any coordinates at all? How do they compensate for navigation errors? Do they use visual cues? Do they use maps? What kind of maps are these?
...The ability to use currently perceived terrain features to set a course for an area you cannot presently perceive requires the use of a map. It also implies the ability to do navigational computations utilizing the data on the map. The brain of an insect has computational capabilities analogous to those found in a GPS. http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/GnG/Insect_Symbol_Processing.pdf
...Integration of walking speed and angular variation along the arthropod’s walking route (path integration) gives a global home vector that enables it to determine distance and direction of its nest at any position and time. Charles Darwin was the first to assume that animals may navigate this way. Apart from path integration, many species are capable of using landmarks to get their bearings. However, before these local vectors can be applied successfully, some information about their position has to be stored. Orientation with the aid of local vectors is error-prone, since landmarks can disappear or change their appearance, and, of course, is out of question when no visible landmarks are nearby. The global vector gets updated on the complete trip, even if the orientation is conducted by using landmarks. Moreover, after a sudden failure of the stored landmarks, insects revert to their global vector for orientation. Even if not used for several days, they keep the global vector stored in their memory.
...the main inputs for navigation are spectral skylight gradient, sun position, and the pattern of polarised skylight. The ants continuously use the sky as a reference to determine their body axis orientation. Insects make use of the fact that light waves with their different wavelengths are not equally distributed over the illuminated sky. Direct orientation with respect to the azimuthal position of the sun (or any other light source) has been found in ants, bees, and spiders. The skylight polarisation pattern represents the most effective and stable means for orientation. Each rotation of the ant’s body axis results in a corresponding change of this orientational angle allowing the ant to measure not only its current body direction relative to the skylight pattern, but also the rate of its angular rotation, independent of whether it is moving or turning on spot. Although the polarised light pattern is changing with elevation of the sun, insects use a stereotypical projection that resembles the skylight pattern at dawn or dusk, respectively, in their memory. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/q-bio/pdf/0512/0512031.pdf
...Desert ants perform large-scale excursions in surroundings devoid of conspicuous landmarks, from which they return to their nest on a direct, shortcut way. During their outbound path they continually update, with astonishing precision, a `home vector', which at any point indicates the homing direction and the distance to the nest. To assess this home vector, the ants need a source of information about the distances they have travelled, i.e. a kind of odometer, and also about the compass direction of their path segments. The polarisation pattern of the sky is the predominant reference system for the estimation of walking directions. The sensory basis of the ants' odometer, however, is less well understood. Three types of cues: (i) energy expenditure, (ii) self-induced optic-flow and (iii) idiothetic cues, i.e. information derived from the animal's own movements, have been proposed. Desert ants use neither energy expenditure nor optic flow cues for gauging distances. Heavy loads did not affect the measurements of walking distances, and the ants arrived at a fairly exact distance estimate even if all optic flow cues had been excluded. The conclusion from these experiments was that ants rely mainly on idiothetic cues, probably on a kind of step counter. Further experiments with ants that were trained to walk over a linear series of hills, however, indicated that the use of idiothetic information cannot be as simple as activating a step counter or monitoring the output of a central pattern generator. The ants indicated homing distances that corresponded to the outbound run's ground distance, not to the (much longer) distance actually walked over the hills. Ants seem to be able to derive the horizontal projections from the uphill and downhill segments of their path. Hence, the animals must be able to measure the slopes of the terrain and to integrate this information into their process of distance estimation. The results show that it is the ground distance that the ants feed into its path integrator, and suggest that the ants are able to keep an accurate home vector also in hilly terrain. http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/reprint/208/21/4005.pdf
...The integrator is made of linear arranged neurons. Every neuron inhibits its two neighbours and, once activated, stays activated. If a virtual ant starts from the nest, all but the first neurons are reset. Every time the ant has traveled a certain distance, the activation passes to the next neuron. If the ant is able to register the orientation to an objective direction, it might store the two coordinates of the vector in function of the orientation (dx,dy) in two different integrators.
http://www.restena.lu/convict/Jeunes/Navigation.htm
This model is just a speculation. Nobody really knows how insects do path integration, measure distances, position themselves relative to landmarks, and integrate all this information to go straight home. Furthermore, the path integartion alone is generally insufficient for optimum homing, as there are always obstacles getting in a way. Not only one has to find the shortest path home, one has to stay on this path avoiding the known obstacles and do that in an optimum way, as the load is very heavy. Insects do that, too. One theory suggests that they store panoramic views of all obstacles that they identify. Another suggests that insects use vector maps and follow field lines.
...The global path integration is enhanced by long-term memories of significant sites that insects store in terms of the coordinates of these sites relative to the nest. With these memories insects can plan routes that are steered by path integration to such sites. Quite distinct from global path integration are memories associated with familiar routes. Route memories include stored views of landmarks along the route with, in some cases, local vectors linked to them. Local vectors by encoding the direction and/or distance from one landmark to the next, or from one landmark to a goal, help an insect keep to a defined route. Although local vectors can be recalled by recognising landmarks, the global path integration system is independent of landmark information and that landmarks do not have positional coordinates associated with them. The major function of route landmarks is thus procedural, telling an insect what action to perform next, rather than its location relative to the nest.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15477037&dopt=Abstract
more on the snapshot theory
http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/reprint/199/1/227.pdf
http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/ccnr/Papers/Downloads/CollettGraham2004.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11007299&dopt=Abstract
...The snapshot model assumes that a panoramic image of the surroundings of the target position (nest, feeding station) is acquired and stored by the animal. The stored visual snapshot is then used to calculate the direction that the animal has to follow in order to return back to its target position. This is done by employing a matching mechanism that compares the current image with the stored snapshot. According to the ALV model, the animal does not need to store a snapshot: the only piece of information needed is the direction of the Average Landmark (AL) vector which is acquired by a simple summation of unit vectors pointing to landmarks (which are simple visual features, e.g. edges). The target direction is calculated at any position as the vector difference between the AL vectors at the target and the current position. The single vector representation of the target direction suggests that there might be a closer link between the landmark navigation system and the celestial compass navigation system.
http://voronoi.sbp.ri.cmu.edu/~motion/papers/sbp_papers/integrated2/lambrinos_landmark_vector.pdf and, in more detail, http://www.verena-hafner.de/papers/emoa.pdf
How is that done? Here is the conclusion from the recent paper:
...in our model, the arthropod does not need to perform complicated calculations such as applying trigonometric or other non–linear functions, but rather updates two cartesian coordinate values of the relative global vector by computing a simple system of linear differential equations. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/q-bio/pdf/0512/0512031.pdf
You see how simple it is: an animal the size of a pinhead solves the system of linear differential equations, uses spectroscopy and polarimetry for absolute positioning, counts its steps for hours at a time, uses globally referenced maps, derives and memorizes horizontal and stereotypical projections, and adds multiple vectors -- all without using trigonometric and other nonlinear functions. Nothing fancy. Apart from that, it is doing numerous other, equally improbable, tasks. The ability is built-in; it is not learned. It is passed on.
Now imagine this brain to be the size of yours.
Imagine the ability to untangle the loops and zigzags of one's life, integrate over all thoughts and memories, tally up all losses and wasted hopes, and go straight back to one's beginnings, by following the light that shineth unto the perfect day: the global home vector. Do we have this ability?
Tags: mysteries
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04:49 pm
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Fatal attraction
If my heart's not on fire, then why all this smoke?
If there's no incense burning, then what do I smell?
Why do I love? And why do I doubt?
Why is the moth so eager to burn in the candle's hell?
Rumi
Light compass theory of the fatal attraction was the first mathematical fact that captured my imagination when I was a kid. I do not know who made this observation first; perhaps is was D'Arcy Thompson ("On Growth and Form", 1942)
...The equiangularity of the logarithmic spiral is well illustrated by the path of certain insects as they draw towards a light. Owing to the structure of their compound eyes, these insects do not look straight ahead but make for a light which they see abeam, at a certain angle. As they continually adjust their path to this constant angle, a spiral pathway brings them to their destination at last.
Thompson offered this explanation without testing it experimentally, like everything else in his famous book. Ever since, this explanation has been reproduced in countless evolution treatises and popular books without any proof. It is one of these things that everyone knows but nobody knows exactly why. It takes a professional entomologist to admit that this idea is lore
...There is no good biological reason that insects should be attracted to lights. Nor is there a good explanation of why insects end up at lights. A reasonable hypothesis to explain the phenomenon of the moth to the flame is that that night-flying insects get confused in the presence of a point source of light. Instead of flying by the flame, they fly toward it. Insects had evolved for millions of years when point sources of light at night were absent or rare. In those times, insects went flying about at night without encountering points of light. But in the modern world, the night-flying insects are faced with localized lights. The result is a congregation of insects around lights. http://www.entm.purdue.edu/entomology/ext/Outreach/onSixLegs/OSL_files/html/2006/2006-1-26.htm
Over the years, the myth has been elaborated (pseudoscientific "explanations" were supplied by popular imagination):
...When insects fly at night they use the moon for navigation. Light from a distant source reaches both eyes with the same intensity. This enables the insect to fly in a straight line with both wings beating at the same rate. If the light is from a closer source such as a candle or lantern, the light is perceived stronger in one eye than in the other eye. This causes the wing on one side to move faster. The insect then begins to approach the light in a spiral path. http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/science_for_kids/11252
I am afraid this is all pure fiction. The eyes of insects do not work as differential photometers and there is no correlation between the fluence on the eye and the beat rate of the wing. In fact,
...moths don't fly around lights in logarithmic spirals. Hsiao tethered moths to little styrofoam boats in a tiny artificial pond and tracked their flight as they headed toward a light source. He found the moths flew more or less straight at the light until they got up close, at which point they veered off and circled around it at a more or less constant distance. They seldom actually touched the light. A number of other theories have also been discredited. Some claim that, to the moth, bright lights mean open space and open space means safety. But moths are nocturnal, and the night sky has no light sources anywhere near as bright as a porch light. Besides, why should the moth feel compelled to fly around the light in circles? Others argue that moths associate light with warmth. Yet ultraviolet lamps attract more moths. Hsiao suggests that moths exhibit two kinds of behavior. When they're distant from a light source (they're drawn to light from as far as 200 ft away), they make a beeline straight toward it. Why, nobody knows. However, when the moths get close to the light, a different kind of behavior takes over. Instead of being attracted to the light, the moth is actually trying to avoid the light. When you think about it, this is only natural. To a creature of the night like a moth, daylight and by extension any bright light means danger. The moth doesn't fly directly away from the light due to a peculiarity of vision called a Mach band. A Mach band, which apparently is common to all sighted creatures, is the region surrounding a bright light that seems darker than any other part of the sky. Hsiao conjectured that the moth's brain figures the darkest part of the sky is safest. So it circles the light in the Mach band region, usually at a radius of about one foot. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_038.html
Henry S. Hsiao, Attraction of moths to light and to infrared radiation. San Francisco Press (1972) ISBN 0-911302-21-2
Hsiao, HS. Flight Paths of Night-Flying Moths to Light. J. Insect Physiology, Vol. 19:1971-76, 1973.
The straight-pass stage suggested by Hsiao has not been supported experimentally
...We present here the results of three experiments designed to determine the distance of response of free-flying moths to an artificial light source. Our results suggest that the effective range of a 125 W mercury vapour lamp is about 3 m.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v276/n5690/abs/276818a0.html
There is a curious theory suggesting that the problem is not the visual system, but the antennae that act
...as 'dielectric waveguides or resonators to electro-magnetic energy', and pick up specific IR wavelengths. This is supposed to explain why either a candle or UV light is a far superior moth attractant than a Coleman lantern. It seems that the entomological community has not been receptive to this idea, and tends to ignore Callahan's work. It may be that Kennedy's anemotaxis was a more satisfactory explanation for long-distance olfactory orientation than Callahan's electromagnetic theory one spectrophotometric analysis of IR fluorescent emission from pheromone molecules.( 1977. Moth and Candle; the candle flame as a sexual mimic of the coded infrared wavelengths from a moth sex scent pheromone. Applied Optics 16:3089-3097; Phillip Callahan's book 'Tuning in to Nature' (Devin-Adair, 1976); Callahan, P. 1985. Insects and the Battle of the Beams. Fusion Sept.-Oct.: 27-37; 1988. "The influence of moonlight and weather on catches of Helicoverpa armigera in light and pheromone traps. Bull. ent. Res. 78:365-377) [I am afraid the theory is nonsense.]
Yet another popular theory (of uncertain origin) posits that
...The response to light traps seems to differ between species, some flying directly to the light, others in a chaotic fashion and some seem completely unaffected by the light source and fly straight past. Moths may be 'dazzled' by a bright light. Once they enter a circle of light they are reluctant to leave it because they cannot see 'outside' it.
http://www.butterfly-conservation.org/species/moths_factsheets/Light_Pollution.doc
...A moth's dark-adapting mechanism responds much more slowly than its light-adapting mechanism. Once the moth comes close to a bright light, it might have a hard time leaving the light since going back into the dark renders it blind for so long. http://science.howstuffworks.com/question675.htm
In short, nobody knows why do the moths end up fatally attracted to burning candles. What is known, however, is why some bugs like landing on red cars. Many insects use polarization of diffuse sunlight to track their orientations (P-vision):
...many aquatic insect species seek new habitats during their migration and dispersal en masse usually between dusk and midnight. These [polarotactic] insects detect water by means of the horizontal polarization of light reflected from the water surface. Polarotactic water detection is easiest at low solar elevations, because the risk that a polarotactic insect will be unable to recognize the surface of a dark or bright water body is minimal. This partly explains why many aquatic insect species usually fly en masse at dusk. As the air temperature at sunrise is generally too low, dusk is the optimal period for polarotactic aquatic insects to seek new habitats. http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/reprint/207/5/755.pdf
...Aquatic insects detect water based on the horizontal polarization of reflected light. Light from the red and black cars was highly and horizontally polarized, so from a bug's point of view, the darker surfaces look like water. http://intl.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/313/5783/25a
The P-vision is convenient but it is also a problem:
...While polarization provides an additional visual channel to the intensity and color of light, it can also be confusing. After all, the polarization of the light reflected, for example, by a leave, depends on the position of the sun, on the inclination of the leave, and other factors such as if it has rained or not. For those reasons the polarization sensitivity of insects that use it for navigation is generally restricted to the dorsal upwards-looking portion of their eyes. The polarization sensitivity of the insect visual cells is canceled if the ommatidia are twisted along their length. In that case the microvilli tubes at different heights of the cell are oriented in different directions and their preferred directional sensitivity averages out. The honeybee has about 5,500 ommatidia, each with nine visual cells. Half of the ommatidia are twisted clockwise and half counterclockwise. Most of the visual cells of the ommatidia are twisted by a full 180 degrees, does canceling out the polarization sensitivity, except for those visual cells responsible of P-vision. http://www.polarization.com/eyes/eyes.html
I wonder if it is P-vision that is the cause for the fatal attraction of the candles. The insects are not used to unpolarized light, begin to improvise, and get burnt. This is not as far-fetched as it might seem: it has been shown that dung beetles do navigate using polarized light reflected off the Moon
...The best way for the beetle to guarantee that it (successfully) leaves the dung pile, where all the other beetles are likely to steal its (dung) ball, is to go in a straight line away from the pile. By rolling in a straight line, it not only gets away spending as little energy as possible, but it is also guaranteed not to return accidentally, to the pile. A curved path is very likely to bring the beetle back to the dung pile again. On moonless or cloudy nights, dung beetles become confused and crawl all over the place. By holding a polarizing light filter over a typical beetle one can shift the polarity of lunar rays by 90 degrees. Almost instantly, the beetle made a hard right or left. Until now, few if any experts inferred that insects might be sophisticated enough to sense the "million-times dimmer polarization of moonlight. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/07/07/MN111325.DTL
also, the possibility of celestial P-vision http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?id=90884
...artificially changing the position of the moon, or hiding the moon's disc from the beetle's field of view, generally did not influence its orientation performance. We thus conclude that the moon does not serve as the primary cue for orientation. The effective cue is the polarization pattern formed around the moon, which is more reliable for orientation. Polarization sensitivity ratios in two photoreceptors in the dorsal eye were found to be 7.7 and 12.9, similar to values recorded in diurnal navigators.
The insects might be capable of nocturnal P-vision by having fewer twisted ommatidia in their eyes. The response to the point light would depend on how well the P-vision is developed in a given species.
Why is the moth so eager to burn in the candle's hell?
PS It has been speculated that Vikings used polarimetric navigation looking at the diffuse light through analyzers made of cordierite
http://www.polarization.com/viking/viking.html
http://www.ips-planetarium.org/planetarian/articles/viking/viking.html
http://jot.osa.org/abstract.cfm?id=83976
Another curious fact that I did not know is that humans also have rudimentary P-vision
http://www.polarization.com/haidinger/haidinger.html
due to dichroism of radially patterned pigment lutein in the fovea.
Tags: mysteries
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