When it comes to complex courtship displays, birds of paradise are right up there. They do this whole hanging-upside-down-from-a-branch thing. And granted, the mantis shrimp has an impressive suite of wooing manoeuvres, used to communicate amorous intentions to the potential mate in question (otherwise the wooer might come across as an aggressor to the wooee). But complexity for size, the jumping spider (family Salticidae) has got to take the cake.
“The first time I would have seen a habernatus dance would have been in 1974,” says Wayne Maddison, zoologist and Director of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He recalls that as he watched, transfixed, the male spider’s dance just kept going and going. “It was this thought of: Oh my god is this complexity ever going to end?” Continue reading →
I am totally in love with potatoes. I’m getting married in two weeks, so I guess I love my fiancé more, but potatoes are a close second.
Bolivians love potatoes too. They buy them by the sackful. Bolivia has the distinction of being home to both the best potato and the worst. The best is called a papa rellena, which means “stuffed potato.” To make a papa rellena, you start with two globs of mashed potato. Take the globs and shape them into cups. Fill one half with beef and onions or a hard-boiled egg or some cheese – whatever you have on hand. Then fit the other cup on top so that you have a tennis ball-sized object. Then you fry the whole thing in oil.
Woman selling chuño
To make the worst potato — chuño — travel to the frigid and barren altiplano. Take a normal potato and lay it on the ground in the sun. Leave it there for several days until its soul has evaporated. You will have a shriveled porous thing that resembles a bleached shrunken head. Now rehydrate and serve. On second thought, just chuck it in the wastebasket. Continue reading →
A bee really does this little dance — called a waggle dance because it waggles its little butt — to tell other bees where it’s found food. An Austrian named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for figuring this out.
To distract you from making a judgment about whether AG is a dick or not — maybe he’s just going through a phase — here’s a nice video by Andrew Quitmeyer and Tucker Balch, showing how the bees talk to each other via dance. And here’s a charming NPR show by Robert Krulwich on bee decision-making processes which make the human processes look outright lame.
In that post, I pointed out the contrast between two meetings I’d recently attended and tried to extract some lessons for how to make conferences better. After some more thought and a lot of feedback from LWON readers, I have put together some rules of thumb on how to make a good conference.
Last September, I posted to my (now defunct) personal blog a cheeky theory: scientists can be categorized into four types, which roughly agree with some of the Myers-Briggs personality test buckets. I’ve re-posted it here, with a few updates and tweaks based on reader comments.
I took my first Myers-Briggs personality test in the seventh grade, on the one afternoon of the year my teacher had set aside for us to go ahead and choose a future fulfilling career already. We all sat down at a computer, answered a few hundred multiple-choice questions, and finally discovered which of the 16 types best fit our preferences.
I’m an ISTJ. In the system’s jargon, that’s ‘Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Judging.’ In plain English, the type is often referred to as the inspectors, the truth-tellers, the ‘Just the facts, Ma’am‘s. Continue reading →
It’s a sunny evening in Fairbourne, a coastal village in rural Wales. Inside a small food shop, I’m listening to the owner and his wife discussing the true nature of the holy spirit.
I reach for a packet of breakfast cereal. “The woman just didn’t understand,” says the shopkeeper.
I place a tin of tomatoes into my basket. “I told her the holy spirit is not a thing,” he says.
I wander along the narrow space between the shelves into the back of the shop. It’s quiet here and there are no windows. On the left, a line of dusty red wine bottles sits opposite bags of bread. On the right, racks of stationery and cheap plastic toys. In the corner there’s a disused Post Office counter. In a village, it’s common for a shop and postal service to run from the same premises. That used to be the case here.
My basket is full, so I return and place it on the till. “I explained to her that it is Him,” the shopkeeper says to his wife. Continue reading →
Galaxies are the universe’s basic units. (True, they’re made of stars, but all the stars are in galaxies.) So if you understood why galaxies look the way they do and how they’ve changed with time, you’d probably understand the history of the whole damn universe. Oh boy. And astronomers believed they sort of did but for years the belief was just that, mostly supposition and hope.
Astronomers did know that, the way people are (with notable exceptions) either male or female, galaxies seemed to be (with notable exceptions) either spiral or elliptical. They also knew that galaxies are the color of their stars. So spirals are blue because they’re full of stars being born out of gas in a hot shower of ultraviolet light. And ellipticals are red because they burnt up their gas and are full of dying or dead stars whose light had cooled to red or infrared. Astronomers inferred, reasonably, that spiral galaxies were young and elliptical galaxies were old, old, old. Spiral galaxies also seemed to live in the universe’s rural fields and ellipticals, in cities of other galaxies. Nobody could put it all together and explain why young, starforming galaxies would live in the field and old dead ones in cities. But astronomers had only small samples of tens or a few hundreds of galaxies, so they didn’t have leave to generalize. Continue reading →
What is it about modern homesteading that drives so many women mad?
There are a lot of ways to shrink a carbon footprint. Bike instead of drive. Eat low on the food chain. You know the drill. Where I live, in the boondocks of Colorado, a lot of people — myself included, but I’ll get to that in a minute — go on a carbon diet by purchasing some cheap land, rigging up a few solar panels, and getting off the grid.
Most of these people are well-educated, well-meaning, and idealistic, determined to build and garden their way toward some version of a better future. But after living here for more than a decade, I’ve noticed a disturbing susceptibility among these modern homesteaders. I’ll call this recurring disease Not One More Winter In The Tipi, Honey (NOMWITTH).
Here’s what happens: A couple arrives in our valley, young, strong, in love, and full of plans to build an ultra-energy-efficient house out of straw bales, rammed earth, adobe bricks, or, heck, used bottlecaps. They set to work with equal enthusiasm, buying land and setting up temporary quarters in a yurt or a tipi. The weather’s good, the views are great, and the new house is humming along.
But at some point, the weather turns, or the project slows. Or a baby arrives, and everything gets more complicated. For whatever reason, their brio fades, NOMWITTH sets in, and what was once a joint project becomes a battlefield, XX vs. XY. In mild cases, help is hired, the house gets a roof, and all ends well. In more serious cases, one person — inevitably XX — splits town for a fully-furnished condo with central heating, leaving XY alone with the low-carbon dream.
I’ve seen many couples, and carbon budgets, fall prey to NOMWITTH, and the predictability of its gender roles has always bothered me. Women may have different strengths than men, but we don’t lack for toughness — we demonstrate that in feats ranging from mountain-climbing to childbirth. So why does NOMWITTH always seem to strike women first? Continue reading →
When it comes to complex courtship displays, birds of paradise are right up there. They do this whole hanging-upside-down-from-a-branch thing. And granted, the mantis shrimp has an impressive suite of wooing manoeuvres, used to communicate amorous intentions to the potential mate in question (otherwise the wooer might come across as an aggressor to the wooee). But complexity for size, the jumping spider (family Salticidae) has got to take the cake.
