The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers

I read this article called "Moby-Duck: Or the synthetic wilderness of childhood" by Donovan Hohn, in the January, 2007, issue of Harpers magazine (it's online, but only to subscribers; I think you can find it at your public library or online via your library's website). Unfortunately I gave away the magazine, but I highly recommend that you find it and read it. Failing that, here's an article from The Daily Mail last summer about how these 29,000 rubber ducks and other bath toys fell off a container ship and floated all over the world. For fifteen years. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer has devoted his retirement to tracking the toys and their journey of over 17,000 miles.

It's a fascinating story.

I have no idea, actually, whether Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman was inspired by the story of those brave little ducks, but he nevertheless offered the world this enormous Rubber Duck:


The installation, earlier in 2007, was on the Loire river in France. The duck is made of inflatable, rubber-coated PVC, with pontoons and an on-board generator. The notes on his website (translated from the Dutch) say of the project:

"A yellow spot on the horizon slowly approaches the coast. People have gatherd and watch in amazement as a giant yellow Rubber Duck approaches. The spectators are greeted by the duck, which slowly nods its head. The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn't discriminate people and doesn't have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: it can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them. The rubber duck is soft, friendly and suitable for all ages!"

See also his Zwarte kraai ("black crow") and Beukelsblauw, an entire block of derelict buildings in Rotterdam that he painted bright blue. Be sure to click through the slide shows for each of the projects.

And no, I'm not really sure what mondial tensions are either, and my handy Dutch-English dictionary isn't spectacularly helpful. I think it means "universal." Or maybe "worldly."

It's not Friday, but here are some interesting quizzes

They're not the kind of time-waster quizzes that I usually post; these are actual online scientific type studies and you don't get a result or a label that you can post on your blog. But they're pretty interesting and you'll be helping out some graduate students somewhere. The Cognition and Language Lab at Harvard, to be more precise. I've linked to their stuff before, but they've got a new site and I thought I'd link to them again. I know that some of you are language and cognition geeks, so go check it out.

They also have a blog here.

Extinction is forever

Prince Charles has said he believes the world has a duty to save the endangered albatross from extinction. No, really. I mean, it's not that I'm in any way opposed to saving an endangered species.

I agree totally with Prince Charles in fact that it is "our duty to ensure that we do not lose any species if we possibly can help it." Even if it's one that is used figuratively to mean "a source or mark of misfortune, guilt, etc., from which one cannot (easily) be free; a burden or encumbrance. Cf. millstone 2a."*


*From the online OED (subs. req.)

Nature of wonder filmed with an original camera

It's mainly in Japanese, but it's worth a trip over to Kuribayashi Satoshi's website -- or at least it is if you like bug pictures. It says on the first page of his site that this guy "always leads the world of the small creature photograph by novel idea."

I'm not going to argue with that. Satoshi is the winner of the 2006 Lennart Nilsson Award for outstanding photography of the world of insects. His novel ideas and unique methods have to do at least in part with his ability to design and fabricate the gear he uses to capture the insects in situ, including an especially novel medical device of some sort fitted with a 3mm lens. He's published a whole bunch of books and films on the subject of insect ecology, the most recent of which is a book called "In Front of the Ant."

The Lennart Nilsson Award Foundation was formed in 1998 to recognize extraordinary image makers in science and to promote research and technical development in the visual representation of science, medicine, biology, and technology. The prize of 100,000 SEK (about $13,500 USD) is awarded each fall at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Thanks to the Neurophilosopher for the link. Head over to his place if you've never been there -- lots of cool links, great pics, and fascinating posts.

Get your mind outta the gutter

You can't make this shit up. I have no idea whether or not this is for real, but it's a video clip (posted on youtube.com) in which these two guys are talking about a banana. And how its many beautiful characteristics that suit it so well for human, um, consumption are proof of Divine Providence. At least I think that's what they're talking about:

"Notice how gracefully it sits in the hand. Notice it has a point at the top for ease of entry, it's just the right shape for the human mouth. It's even curved toward the human face to make the whole process so much easier..."

They really say that. Without smirking in the slightest. Anyway, they examine the banana and offer it up to heathen atheist evilutionists (like myself, I guess) as proof that god exists and really cares about us.

Obviously, if he wants us to do that with our bananas he cares at least a little.

As the lovely belledame over at Fetch Me My Axe puts it: "it's just a banana, people. Sometimes a banana is just a cigar. And/or proof that there is, in fact, a God."

But then I came across this version of the same video, which includes the beginning of the piece, in which these guys explain creationism Intelligent Design by displaying a soda can and using it to ridicule -- what, exactly? science? "I have an intellectually stimulating theory," says the guy on the left,

"It's my theory of where the soda can may have come from -- billions of years ago there was a big bang in space -- nobody knows what caused this big bang, it just happened ... and from this bang issued this huge rock, on top of this rock was found a sweet brown bubbly substance and over millions of years, aluminum crept up the sides, formed itself in a can, then a lid, then a tab..."

And then he talks about how that's a crazy and absurd "theory" and clearly the can was designed and manufactured, implying the existence of a designer and a manufacturer. And then they bring on the banana, "the atheists' nightmare!" I believe we're meant to conclude that it's crazy to think that bananas and humans just, you know, evolved.

This is what they want to teach young people?

With suspicion and ID cards for all*

Found this handy public service announcement over at Pharyngula, home of the nearly famous Minnesota biology professor Dr. PZ Myers, who urges readers to verbalize polysyllabically.

For their own safety and privacy of course.

As someone who has always had a paranoid streak, and who was raised by a woman with a healthy conspiracy theory for just about everything, I've long suspected that my telephone conversations are being monitored. Probably by mistake, as I don't have much faith in the competence of folks who do this kind of work. But when I get that icky 'what if they're listening' feeling (which most often occurs when I talk to my sister, oddly enough), I usually start talking about chick stuff -- the really gross kind, like menstrual cramps, or gynecological disorders. Because it really makes me chuckle to picture some poor dweeb of a surveillance operative in a trailer somewhere trying to transcribe the whole conversation.

I like this solution just as well, though. Just start making sense, and it will confuse them.

Anyway, speaking of my favorite scientists, the good people over at ScienceBlogs(tm) have spiffed up their homepage and added a whole bunch of new blogs. The page runs updated blog post headlines as well as science news headlines, and its content is indexed by topic and by blog title, with a few links to free stories in SEED Magazine, which hosts the whole ScienceBlog project. I love the site, but I have to warn those of you who are neurologically impaired or who get carsick watching wiggly graphics & intrusive and/or animated ads, you might encounter a few disturbing things. Sometimes I have to hold a 3x5 index card over parts of the monitor to continue reading. I wish web designers wouldn't do that. Still, it's pretty good.

*I'm quoting Tokyo Tom, one of the commenters at Apostropher, which is where PZ found this nifty graphic.

PZ Myers is brilliant

The good professor offers an almost entirely plausible theory, which is his, regarding a possible link between reindeer, daylight deficiency, and late-December artifact delivery.

If his hypothesis and its associated predictions can be corroborated by means of the experimental tests he proposes, it would be a great big poke in the eye (or a "ha-ha-nanny-boo," if you prefer) to those heathen unbelievers who deny the existence of a North Pole-based artifact production facility.

Dr. Myers' theory posits the existence of an entity or intelligence, a so-called "Arctic Artificer" who exploits the midwinter disruption in the circadian activity cycles of polar animals -- in this case reindeer -- to facilitate a worldwide artifact distribution program that peaks in late December.

Or something. Go to Pharyngula to read more about science and other good stuff.

More on chromosomes -- now with evolution & cars

Of course the good Professor Myers over at Pharyngula read the whole Nature article about the sequencing of the human X chromosome, and he provides a beautiful and really pretty accessible accounting of its evolutionary story. Way more interesting than the BBC article I comment on below. Please do check it out here if you're interested in that kind of thing. For one thing, it sorta sets me straight on the role of the X chromosome in the whole sex differences thing. He says, "All human beings are adjusted to having just one fully functional X chromosome, no matter whether you are male or female," and explains further:

"Another misconception that I often see is the idea that the X chromosome is the 'female' chromosome, while Y is 'male'. Avoid that bias. We males also have an X chromosome, and are as dependent on it as are females, and maybe more. The Y chromosome bears almost none of the genes that will be selectively activated in males as they develop. Most of those genes are scattered throughout the genome and are present in both sexes (yes, ladies, you have most of the ingredients to build testicles, just as we gentlemen also contain the complete secret recipe for ovaries in our cells). In fact, the X chromosome is a favored place to stash male-specific genes."

And for another thing, his post explains very lucidly the concept of recombination with a very efficient analogy:

"Recombination is a kind of repair mechanism; not a clever one, but one that can have long term effects. Imagine a very stupid mechanic who maintains two cars by constantly swapping pieces from one to another. If one has a broken carburetor, at least one car will function. If one has a broken carburetor and the other has a broken alternator, every once in a while in his manic swapping, one of the cars will end up with both functioning components, and the other both broken ones: that means there will be at least one car he can send off the lot. Note that this is not a viable business model for a human garage, but it works well enough in a ruthless sort of way for biology. While it produces junk cars as well as good ones, most of the junkers blow up as they're leaving the lot, so no one survives to complain, and all anyone sees actually traveling down the road are the lucky products of random exchanges, and it's only those lucky drivers who go on to make more cars."

This also explains why my father always had two of the same cars -- the two 1963 Ford Falcons (a black station wagon and a white sedan), the two late-sixties Chevy Novas (ditto, but green and blue, respectively), and the the two early seventies Cadillacs (a gold Coupe de Ville and a silver Fleetwood) -- and I seem to remember that if something went wrong with one, the other would suddenly be out of action for a while. He was recombinating them. Or whatever.

I like spider solitaire best

I confess I do sometimes play solitaire at work. Usually, but not always, when I'm off the clock, just before I go home. I don't have any games on my home computer - it's a Mac, and it doesn't come with the game module that Microsoft throws in for free. Oh, I think there's like chess or something, but really, it's not the same. Anyway, according to this article in the Christian Science Monitor, apparently some people find that on-the-job solitaire playing is a serious worker productivity issue. The story somehow reminds me of one of those junk e-mails that was circulating a few years ago [and I'm sorry I can't find a link or a copy] wherein the crew of the Enterprise (the STNG version) stops the invading Borg vessel by uploading the Microsoft 'fun pack' or whatever it's called into the Borg ship's main computer. This slows them down, but they eventually compensate. What does them in is a deluge of little space pods containing Microsoft lawyers in Armani suits trying to sue them for having an unlicensed copy of the upgrade. The Borg are wrapped in red tape and bled dry. The Enterprise crew all avert their eyes at the horror.

Cooties and calico cats explained, finally

Seems like there's a bunch of stuff on the internets the last couple of days about the difference between women and men. It's a perennial favorite, I guess -- or maybe I'm just paying more attention. But the whole "where are all the women bloggers" question has been coming up again for the last few days. And Deborah Tannen's article in the LA Times [subscription required] generated some discussions.

Then the BBC weighed in with this interesting article about how female mammals are genetically more varied than males. It has to do with the difference between the X chromosome and the Y chromosome. Females, of course, have two X chromosomes and males have an X and a Y. And the X, "is much larger than the relatively puny Y, containing 1,098 genes to the Y's 78." Which explains why men are such weenies. Or why boys have cooties. Well, actually, it just means that females have more genetic material to work with than males. To be fair, lots of the genes are 'switched off' in females, but not all of them. And it's sort of random which ones are switched off.

So what does it mean? Well, for one thing, it explains why certain genetic disorders are passed on from mother to son: "Diseases on the X chromosome are usually expressed in males because they don't have a compensating copy of the gene on the second chromosome," said Dr. Mark Ross, the project leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK -- but less frequently from mother to daughter.

It also provides another example of the female once again making up for the inadequacies of the male: "Although nobody quite knows why the Y chromosome shrank like it did, its decline was not catastrophic thanks to the X chromosome. In a sense, it does not matter too much that a male is missing genes on his Y chromosome, because he has equivalent copies on his X chromosome."

OK, they're just chromosomes. But I thought the article was interesting. Oh, and it also accounts for the phenomenon of calico cats.

Squid? Or Octopus?

It's not all that long ago (a few days? weeks?) that Pharyngula came to my attention, but I've become what I guess you could call an admirer of PZ Myers.  And since it's his birthday, and he likes cephalopods, I thought I'd post this story about a squid.  Well, it's not a squid, actually, but the squid plays a very important role.  Plus it does take place in Minnesota.  Well, my dad lives very close to Minnesota, anyway. Just across the river in Wisconsin.

Here's the story:

My dad called me one Saturday morning, quite a few years ago now, and said he wanted my opinion about something Very Serious.  I said OK, go ahead, and he said he was going to tell me about something that had happened at his house that morning, and I was not to interrupt, but at the end he was going to ask me a couple of questions. He said he would, if necessary, put his wife on the phone to confirm that he was not making anything up, just in case I thought he was.

Now, a bit of background about my dad: he's a big practical joker. And having grown up with a big practical joker, I am inclined to fact-check pretty much everything anyone tells me. I will never again, for example, go into a hardware store and ask for a left-handed tool of any kind. And I knew he was lying when he told me that the stop signs with white borders were optional.

But his story, roughly, was this: he was outside that morning after a heavy snow, using his spiffy new snowplow to carve an opening in the enormous plow mound that the snowplow had left across his driveway. His, um, high-spirited pale blonde cocker spaniel puppy was nearby. The snow was deep and there were lots of big chunks of ice in the plow mound. It was kind of rough going for the old guy, but he soldiered on until an odd frozen chunk of something shot out of the snowblower-chute. He leaned over to look at it and as he was thinking, "my god, that looks like half an octopus," the barely-visible-in-the-snow puppy ran off with it.  Into the street.  Directly into the path of an oncoming snowplow, which had returned to pile snow in the driveways across the street.  Dad took off after the dog and twisted his knee, but caught the dog before the snowplow did.

At this point I couldn't help it, I said, "Dad, are you sure it wasn't a squid?" He said to shut up until he was done telling the story, and that his knee was badly sprained in case I cared.

So he got the frozen sea-creature away from the dog and took it in the house to show his wife. "Hey look honey, I found half an octopus in the driveway!"  She looked at it and said (and I'm not making this up), "Are you sure it isn't a squid?" Some discussion followed about the difference between a squid and an octopus, and they ended up looking it up to confirm that it was indeed, as far as they could tell from the parts they had, an octopus.  I'm not sure why they bagged it up and put it in the freezer, but they did, and my dad and his badly sprained knee went out to finish clearing the driveway. [This is a man who a) lives for bad weather, and b) once finished a 26.2-mile in-line skating event with a fractured coccyx sustained in a fall just a few yards from the starting line. Operating a snowblower in adverse weather conditions with a sprained knee is very likely his idea of a great time.]

The dog, however, stayed in the house. Which was good, because it wasn't very long before most of the rest of the octopus appeared, and she had been pretty excited about the first part, and pretty mad when it got taken from her. The remaining octopus remains were taken inside and frozen along with the rest of it.  Why?  Again, I don't know.  Evidence?

Some neighbors came by, and dad told them the story.  First question: "Are you sure it wasn't a squid?"  They were shown the evidence, and the pictures in the "How to Tell the Difference Between an Octopus and a Squid" book and admitted that it was in fact an octopus.  And then dad's father-in-law called.  He got the story, and wanted to know just exactly how they knew it was an octopus and not a squid.

"So that's the story," my dad said. "Could I have possibly made that up?"

"Well, yeah," I said, "but what are your questions?"

His first question was what's with the squid? Would it somehow be less bizarre to find a frozen squid in the snow in your upper-midwestern driveway than to find a frozen octopus? If so, why?

His second question was what in the hell was an octopus doing in his driveway?

I couldn't answer either question, but I thought it was a pretty good story, and we laughed pretty hard. The only plausible thing we could come up with to explain the presence of the beast was that my dad coaches hockey, or used to from time to time, and there is apparently some kind of tradition among fans of I forget which hockey team that involves hurling an octopus onto the ice if you don't approve of something that happens.  But he didn't have a team that season.  And the only thing we came up with to explain why so many people asked was it a squid was that sometimes someone's trash gets too close to the curb and the snowplows knock it over and spread it around. I mean, you could sort of imagine that maybe someone had purchased a squid at the fancy grocery store and never got around to cooking it & finally just threw it out.  But not an octopus.

Anyway, later that day, I called up some friends -- a couple who love a good story and also happen to both be pretty intrepid reporters -- and told them the whole story.  Bizarrely, they both asked the Squid Question, interrupting at more or less the same point I had. They didn't have any useful ideas about how it had got there. But just the other day, my dad was here visiting and we told the story to some friends. Well after the story was over and we had moved on to other topics, my friend's brother, whom I don't know all that well and who hadn't appeared to be paying attention, said, "Atmospheric convection. That's what it was. Like when it rains frogs or something." He said it as though raining frogs or something was a pretty routine happening where he lived.

I suppose it's as good a theory as any.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Professor.

I can't hear you

In my post the other day about the evolution dust-ups I mentioned at the very end my feelings about how the two sides of the argument are so far apart they can't hear each other. It's true of course in any dispute that engages people on a deep and non-rational level. I came across a good example of what I'm talking about via Ed from the excellent Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The example features a quote from a user of the ARN Design Forum message/discussion board.

The writer (Douglas Bender) is responding to a question about so-called 'abstinence only' sex-education, and his response is fascinating. He says, essentially, that the risks to the souls of the individuals engaging in premarital or promiscuous sex are perhaps more important than the risks to their physical well-being (pregnancy, disease, etc.); therefore "one should not teach them ways to destroy or taint their souls in 'safety.'"

In other words, if you're going to go out and do something that my religion says will endanger your souls, boys and girls, you're going to have to risk your body and your future to do it. These people don't much care that their misbegotten anti-sex education concept is not effective at preventing pregnancy nor at slowing the spread of sexually transmitted disease -- nor even that it doesn't do much to reduce the numbers of young people who go out and have sex, with or without the appropriate knowledge. What they care about is that they don't appear to be placing the immortal souls of our youth in peril -- a peril in which only they believe.

And we try to argue with them saying that their programs aren't effective and that kids are going to do it anyway, and we trot out our statistics and our examples of lives shattered and bodies ruined, but they don't care. That's not the problem, in their world. They don't want a secular society in which the public health system and the public education system work to prevent and/or address the real-world consequences of (in this case) raging teen hormones. They want sinners to be punished -- even if the "sinners" don't subscribe to their particular set of beliefs.

The middle ground is going away fast. There is less room every day for reasonable people to disagree and discuss and try to resolve anything. And it doesn't help matters when we dismiss the increasingly militant christian right as merely stupid and uninformed.

Don't even get me started about gay marriage.

Darwin v Jesus

I've been thinking a lot lately about this whole new wave of monkey business over evolution, and whether it should be taught in schools. While I'm firmly in the mainstream science camp (and I'm a card-carrying member of the heathen commie intellectual elite to boot), I'm not going to make any particular argument here; I'm just trying to sort a few things out and make a few observations.

As a moderately well-educated person who has spent many of the last 20+ years living and working on the edges of science, I just can't understand what the fuss is about. I don't have what you'd call a deep understanding of evolutionary biology, but it seems to me that this "evolution" thing is not very controversial among working scientists. I don't know any scientists who practice a religion called "Darwinism," nor any who would say "Darwin was right; therefore Jesus is wrong." I can't think of a single practicing scientist who would try to ascribe inerrancy to Darwin's writings.

I do know a few scientists who are deeply religious (christians but also jews, muslims & buddhists) and they just don't seem to find a conflict between their religious beliefs/practices and their understanding of biology, nor do they appear to find it necessary to spend time refuting such concepts as natural selection in their work or in their conversations.

I also know a few christians of the hard-core bible-is-the-inerrant-word-of-god persuasion and they seem to feel deeply threatened by science generally and poor old Darwin in particular. Their definitive argument seems to consist of the evidence that Darwin himself is dead, and Jesus is not, therefore education is evil and science classes should teach religion instead of science. I think I'm reading the bumper stickers correctly.

But in any case, the evolution-haters have come up with this "intelligent design" (ID) concept to replace the largely unsuccessful "creation science" efforts of a few years back. It's been written about all over the place lately; google it yourself, or you can look it up here at the Intelligent Design Network website. And TalkDesign.org is a website set up by the same folks as TalkOrigins.org; both of these explore the creation/evolution controversy, with the former focusing more exclusively on ID and its implications. TalkOrigins has a lovely FAQ page and an excellent archive.

Oh, and The Panda's Thumb is an excellent group blog in which the integrity of both science and science education are defended. Among other things.

So if I'm understanding ID correctly, one of their central points is that everything in the universe is so amazingly perfect that it couldn't be the result of a random process -- like, say, evolution -- and must be taken as evidence that an "intelligent designer" -- god, for example -- is running the show. On the one hand, this is a pretty harmless idea, and doesn't necessarily contradict natural selection, for example, as a description of the mechanism by which this "intelligent designer" constructs its designs. It does, however, seem to fall prey to the very thing I find most irksome about the popular understanding of Mr. Darwin's theory: namely that homo sapiens is somehow the "end product" of natural selection; that there is this orderly progression of increasingly sophisticated organisms from primeval ooze to lizards to monkeys to contemporary humans, such as we are. Like we evolved -- or someone evolved us -- on purpose. Seems goofy to me.

I know it's difficult to get your mind around it; didn't Galileo or somebody get into hot water for suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe? This is sort of the same thing. We're not only not at the center of the universe, we might not even be the goal of evolution. Yeah, this is a bummer for some. And yeah, I know that it's disconcerting to think that it's possible no one is in charge. I imagine this is why religious traditions and creation stories are so essential to humans, and why pretty much every community of humans comes up with some way to account for it all and impose some sort of order. It's what we do.

And yes, I know that I'm going to go to hell for implying that there might not be a god. I told you already I was a heathen.

But I digress again.

What I was saying was that while such notions as those comprising ID are harmless enough on their surface, I am extremely nervous about the ways in which they are being used as levers to divide communities, ravage local school district budgets, and undermine the efforts of educators. (See Michelle Goldberg's recent Salon article, for just one recent example).

And this Darwin v Jesus argument is only one part of the current wave of hostility that I find increasingly difficult to stomach. Just as is the case on every other front in the ongoing culture war, the two sides of the argument are so far apart that they can't even hear each other. There is no middle ground. Everybody's getting more angry and/or more afraid.

And everybody's losing.

Science for everybody

PZ Myers over at Pharyngula is my hero for today. He's a scientist, which gives him a lot of points, but what he's doing right now is just too cool. He is implementing the Cafe Scientifique program in his little campus town of Morris, MN. Maybe you've seen the movie 'Fargo'? Morris is not far from there. Lots of gently rolling prairie. I haven't spent much time in Morris, but I have been there, and I love the idea of people there -- or anywhere -- talking about science over coffee or maybe a beer.

Here's an article about the Cafe Scientifique program implemented on the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus (my alma mater, I guess you could say).

While you're over at Pharyngula, I encourage you to look around at his archives and follow some of his highly excellent links. Added bonus: on the left-hand side of the page you can even click on a skull & crossbones icon that will toggle the whole site into pirate mode.