Mars on life

The Martians are trying to communicate with me through Google Reader.

Today thinking with my hands yet led me to Symphony of Science which is fabulous and entertaining, it also has "The Case for Mars". Once upon a time, many moons ago, when I wrote this blog more regularly, I was thinking of posting something about why I think terraforming is a bad idea but then someone told me that first I should read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and I haven't got around to it. I don't think there is a case for Mars, not for sending humans there and especially not for colonising it.

But it will probably happen because today my favourite webcomics told me:

Perry Bible Fellowship

xkcd (in rollover text)
"all [JFK's] arguments for going to the moon work equally well as arguments for blowing up the moon, sending cloned dinosaurs into space, or constructing a towering penis-shaped obelisk on Mars."

Further research is needed on the morphology of Martian genitalia.

Seeing red

One of the many kinds of unpaid work I do at the moment is shelving books in the junior bookroom at H & K's school. There is one in the easiest level called What is Red? and I thought "Wow! I wonder how they explained what red is with such a limited vocab and structure?" Then I looked inside and found out that it meant what things are red.

I was left with the thought - what is the simplest book I could write that explains "What is Red?"

What is Red? (first attempt - you'll have to imagine the pictures)

Sunlight looks white.
Water can split up sunlight.
When sunlight is split up you see a rainbow.

Sunlight is made up of all the colours of the rainbow.
Red is one of the colours of the rainbow.

This white light is made up of all the colours of the rainbow too.
A glass prism can split up white light.
When white light is split up you see a rainbow.

This is a blue light.
A glass prism can't split up blue light.
The blue light is made up of only blue.

This tomato is red.
It looks red when it is in red light.
It reflects the red light.

This is the tomato in blue light.
The tomato looks black.
There is no red part of the blue light for it to reflect.

The tomato looks red in sunlight.
It reflects the red part of the sunlight.
Red is what we see when the red part of sunlight shines on things that reflect red.

Special theory of evolution

A small figure in a nightie just appeared at the living room door and said pathetically:

"H doesn't believe that a long time ago people looked like gorillas and lived in cages."

Ham

I'm leaving work in a week and so I'm clearing out my email. Here are three snippets I thought I'd share:

---

1. While sitting down, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.
2. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand.
3. Check which way your foot is circling.
4. Try to do this without your foot changing direction.

---

This is a wee snatch of a song that I started inventing:

Beauty's in the eye of the beholder [intro...

There's a woman of size
with massive thunder thighs

And a woman so thin
who thinks eating's a sin

If you think that they're not beautiful [chorus...
you've got ugly eyes.

There's a man in lace
with a brithmark on his face

...

---

From: me
To: D

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. 'Pooh!' he whispered.
'Yes, Piglet?'
'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. I just wanted to be sure of you.'

They run for fun in the hot hot sun

Our school reports graded us on effort and achievement. I have been thinking that we should have been graded on enjoyment too. My idea began with PE.

In my view one of the things that school PE should focus on is creating a love of active play. As an adult being good at sport makes very little difference to most people's lives. Enjoying it does. Enjoying it almost certainly makes people fitter and fitter people are healthier.

Focussing on enjoyment would help people in other areas too. Imagine if kids left school with 10% less achievement English and 10% more enjoyment of reading, or 10% less skill at maths but 10% more enjoyment of using the skills they have. Do you think they'd be worse off?

[The blitle is a Dr Seuss quote.]

The mother of all telepathy

I used to be amazed with how incompetent other people were at knowing what H & K wanted. Now I am amazed at how much easier it is for me to guess than anyone else.

I read an article about some research where they got 30 men to guess emotions from photos of eyes before and after researchers sprayed oxytocin up their noses, 20 of them performed significantly better after.

Breastfeeding produces lots of oxytocin. Maybe this is where some of the maternal telepathy comes from.

Mammals like us

Three snippets about relationships with companion animals:

I used to have pet rats, Tanith and Trillian. Tanith was a small brown rat with white gloves. She was very friendly and affectionate. I taught her not to climb up my legs. She taught me to pick her up if she sat on my foot. Our training regimes dovetailed nicely and were equally effective.

I read something the other day that was saying that cats are different from other domestic animals in that they may have domesticated themselves. Looking for the source I found the story many places including this article from the NY Times, the origin was this paper in Science.

An animal psychologist once told me that dogs and people have much the same psychological problems, most of which are to do with socialising, but cats have very different ones most of which are to do with territory.

It's a small world

Someone forgot to tell Pluto he wasn't invited.

[I'd love to acknowledge the source of these but I got them zillionth hand in a tacky email from a workmate.]

Betelgeuse is Orion's red toe:

[This image from hubble via a boojum].

Those of you who are under the misapprehension that it is summer will also think that Betelgeuse is Orion's head.

Am I getting warmer?

Q: How do you spot a climate scientist?
A: The bike helmet.

This is an observation from a presentation I went to on the key IPCC findings on climate change. IPCC(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Working Group 1, which covers the physical science of climate change, has just reported back. For a quick over view I recommend this press release, for more check out the IPCC site.

One quote from the presentation:

"We are already commited to dangerous levels of warming. We don't want to go much beyond dangerous." Ralph Chapman, Director Environment Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

Remember a catchy tune

I am very, very tired. Last night I couldn't sleep and eventually gave up for a while to be woken a couple of hours later by our alarm clock. Usually in the weekends and when I'm with the girls I nap when they do so for the last couple of weeks I've had a nap most afternoons. But after last night's experience I am trying to stay awake this afternoon to make sure I sleep tonight.

I am also slightly stressed about the new nanny starting tomorrow, the state of the house, D having just left for America for three weeks, having committed to things I have no babysitter for.

Slightly stressed, very, very tired mother is not a pretty sight and H & K are great at picking up on the insanity vibes but not yet old enough to understand that keeping a low profile would be the best response.

Last night when I had given up sleeping for a while I was surfing the web, not, I admit, the most soporific pastime but it was there. And pondering my inability to remember music and thinking that I'd once read a name for the condition but I couldn't find it. What I did find is a test used by people studying amusia, the inability to hear music.

If you're interested in trying the test yourself use this link, they are particularly interested in testing families so if you are related to me your results would be of extra value.

I scored very close to average on the test (25/30 & 27/30) which interested me. D will tell, at length if you'll listen, about my inability to sing a tune. It isn't because I can't sing a tune and I'm not tone deaf, it is because I can't remember most tunes. For example yesterday I was trying to sing the Buzz O'Bumble song and I couldn't remember the tune past the first two lines. I can remember the words but not the tune.

There is an up side to this - someone can say "Hey Mickey you're so fine" to me without leaving the tune stuck in my brain for the rest of the day. Probably unlike you [cue evil laughter].

Musing about beauty

Sitting on the bus it occured to me that human eyes probably look very ugly to other mammals. Normal mammalian eyes do not show the white except if the animal is distressed. Maybe to other mammals we look permanently distressed. Or maybe ideas of beauty are not based on our own species. Think of fur, fur is deeply attractive to humans even though we don't have it ourselves. People are often repelled by pink animals that aren't furry, think of sphinx cats and rats' tails. I am left without a conclusion.

Space is big

I use Google a lot and I have personalised google home with the Nasa Image of the Day and Astonomy Picture of the Day pictures on it. Sometimes they have images that just blow me away, like these to from today (click on them for more info):

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

*hic*

I have hiccups. This is the *hic* third lot of hiccups I've had this evening. *hic* I wish they'd go away. They are *hic* distracting me and interfering with the *hic* clarity of my writing. But never-the-less here *hic* are my three hiccup stories:

1. I used to work in an office where one person thought I nearly always had the hiccups. This was because of the floor plan. Let me explain. There was main corridor loop and all the offices and open plan areas were fed off the corridor, except in one corner where an office had been created in the corridor. To get to my desk from the lifts, I'd turn left so as not to walk through the office in the corridor and then walk half way round the loop. To get to the kitchen from my desk I normally went back, past the lifts and around a the corridor so as not to walk through the office in the corridor. The one time I'd walk straight from my desk, through the office to the kitchen was when I had the hiccups. As a result the person whose office it was saw me a) when I had the hiccups and b) at social club drinks.
2. My grandfather had hiccups for a whole day on his honeymoon. He tried lots of different hiccup remedies but none of them worked. Eventually they just went away.
3. He probably didn't try this but it did get the authors the Ignobel prize for medicine this year.

I'll go *hic* and drink a glass of water backwards now.

*hic*

Picking the scabs out of my hair

I'm back at work today. I've worked one and a half days in the last month. I've lost the rhythm of working. It all seems strange to me. Just think of the millions of years of evolution that have gone into developing a lifeform that sits behind a desk reading email. Perhaps proof of the undirected nature of the process? We are all just accidents on the way to making the best bacteria.

---

One of the many emails I've been trolling through said:

The innocent victims of Internet child abuse cannot speak for themselves.
We need you to light a candle of support <http://www.lightamillioncandles.com/>.
We're aiming to light at least One Million Candles by December 31, 2006.
This petition will be used to encourage governments, politicians, financial institutions, payment organisations, Internet service providers, technology companies and law enforcement agencies to eradicate the commercial viability of online child abuse.
They have the power to work together. You have the power to get them to take action.
Please light your candle at lightamillioncandles.com <http://www.lightamillioncandles.com/> or send an email of support to light@lightamillioncandles.com.
Together, we can destroy the commercial viability of Internet child abuse sites that are destroying the lives of innocent children.
Kindly forward this email to your friends, relatives and work colleagues so that they can light a candle too.

The page the links take you to has two links, the one labelled ENTER didn't work for me, the one that says "If you cannot see a flame on this candle, click here" did.

That furry feeling

Are cat lovers sick?

Toxoplasmosis is disease caused by a parasitic protozoan. The life cycle the protozoan is aiming for goes from cats to soil to rodents to cats. When rodents are infected with toxoplasmosis their behaviour changes: their reaction times are slowed and they are attracted to (rather than being repelled by) the smell of cats. This is clearly a good thing for the protozoan as it makes the rodents it infects more likely to be eaten by cats.


In the life cycle of the protozoan it is easy for things to go wrong. Many other animals, not just rodents, can become infected from the soil. Humans can become infected either from eating imperfectly washed vegetables grown in soil with toxoplasmosis oocysts in it or from eating inadequately cooked meat from animals who became infected from such soil. Recently studies have been done that show that people infected by toxoplasmosis also have slower reaction times and much higher car accident rates.

When I was pregnant I realised that if toxoplasmosis is common in NZ then I have it - I grew up with cats who hunted and a vege garden. What I wonder is, there are clearly people who are drawn to cats, is this also an effect of toxoplasmosis? If you tested people who grew up with cats but are not 'cat people' would you find that they are not infected?

Am I infected because I'm a cat person or am I a cat person because I'm infected?

Pohutukawa springing

Spring

Today I walked to work and it was absolutely, positively Spring. I'm not sure if it snuck up on me while I was obsessing about my operation or if the lovely sunny weekend we've just had tipped the balance.

For a few weeks the early signs have been out - first fleshy pink magnolias, then all the leaves gone from the kowhai trees replaced with yellow flowers and the Botanical Gardens becoming ever more tulipy. But suddenly today lots of unimpressive trees I don't usually notice were covered in blossom, the blackbirds were flirting and one very early pohutukawa was out.

Pohutukawa

When Europeans first settled in Wellington there were no pohutukawa trees here, they were only found further north in New Zealand. Then between 1930 and the 1970s the Wellington City Council planted 30,000 [quoted from memory from Bob Brockie's excellent book City Nature]. Wellingtonians also planted them in their gardens and many self seeded. They are now very common here.

The interesting question is why had a tree that grows so readily in Wellington not spread here naturally? Some scientists believe pohutukawa did used to grow in Wellington. It was only during the last iceage [or mini-iceage I forget which] that it got too cold for them. If we had waited long enough they would have spread back south of their own accord. The problem with proving this theory is that pohutukawa pollen looks so similar to northern rata pollen that the identification of pohutukawa pollen by some experts is questioned by other experts.

I like the idea that the spread of pohutukawa south was inevitable and only assisted by generations of Wellingtonians.

Tutuing with unexpected penguins

I just found out about Google Scholar which is a very nifty thing and so I was tutuing* about with it and searched for "penguin" and came out with First Measurement of the Rate for the Inclusive Radiative Penguin Decay b→sγ which made me curious about what kind of penguin they were on about.

The answer is that there is a kind of feynman diagram for performing calculations in quantum field theory called a penguin diagram. This lovely picture from Wikipedia shows why:



For more information about feynman diagrams and this picture in its natural habitat check out this link.

* tutu is a verb meaning to fiddle or play about with something which I first encountered in Whangarei. I have only met it from New Zealand English speakers from Hamilton and northwards although it is spreading south. It is mentioned on this New Zealand English site and there are a couple of other examples of it being used here.

As a Wellingtonian I am slightly embarassed that a word which might be associated with Auckland has colonised my vocabulary but I feel the word's derivation from the Maori for trouble-maker makes up for that.

I woke up in the morgue

I saw a documentary about catalepsy called "I woke up in the morgue", a name so awful that defies belief but the documentary was OK.

It said cataleptics who collapse when they laugh or experience strong emotion have a defective part in their brains (which I can't remember the name of right now). In most people this part produces stimulants when we experience strong emotion.

Which made me think about:

• laughing so hard you can't stand up
• asking people if they are sitting down before giving them bad news
• other times one feels weak at the knees (she said discretely)

The brain has to actively prevent us collapsing when we experience strong emotion and the surprise is not that some people do collapse but that the rest of us do so rarely.