You Know What People Want In Their Cruise Ships? Water.

*EDIT*
As pointed out in the comments section, the first ship to have an on-board swimming pool was not, in fact, the the RMS Olympic as stated below.  It did have a pool before the Titanic, but unfortunately for me, after having written this long post, it was an earlier ship in the White Star Line fleet that had the first on-ship pool.  The honour goes to the RMS Adriatic, not the Olympic.  And certainly not the Titanic.  I'm keeping the article because it's mainly about the frequent confusion between the Olympic and Titanic, with the pool being the focal point for that, but please, as you read, keep in mind that my initial research was wrong and it's not actually the Olympic that had the first ocean-going pool.
*end EDIT*

Let's say you're building a ship in the early 1900's.  Let's say you're building the largest ship known to man at that point.  Let's say that you want it not only big, but luxurious.  Let's say you do it.

So you've got the world's largest ocean liner, and you need to think of a way to make it more luxurious.  You may not be building the fastest ship on the seas, but damnit, if people are going to trapped on your ship, they're going to enjoy it.  So what do you add that no other ship has?  You got it, a pool.

So what was the biggest, most luxurious ship in the early 1900's?  Here's a hint:

Recognize those four funnels (smokestacks) sticking out of the top?

You're wrong.  That's not the Titanic.  Darned good guess though.  And if you accept the information that's widely available, both in many books and most of the internet, the Titanic was the first ship to have an on-board pool.  Like so much information out there though, it's wrong.

So, if that's the first ocean liner with on on-board pool, but it's not the Titanic, what is it?  It's the Olympic, the first of White Star Line's three Olympic-class ocean liners.  It's also the only one to stay afloat for significantly longer than it took to get it built.  The Olympic sailed for over twenty years (despite hitting two other ships in its lifetime).  The Titanic, the second in the Olympic-class, sank on its maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg. The Britannic (rumour says it was originally intended to be called the Gigantic, no joke), the third and final Olympic-class liner, sank a few months short of three years afloat after hitting a mine during WWI.

All three of the Olympic-class ocean liners were built with very similar layouts and amenities, to the point that facts about the Olympic and the Titanic are often used interchangeably when it comes to discussing their layouts.  Some books have mistakenly printed blueprints of the Titanic when talking about the Olympic, and pictures that are said to be taken on the Titanic are sometimes pictures of the Olympic.  This is particularly true when it comes to the pool area, where the differences are extremely negligible and very few pictures exist from either ship.  Don't believe me?  One of these is the Titanic's swimming bath (as the pool area was called) and one is the Olympic's.

Can you tell which is which?
Click to embiggen, clicky-poppy

The Titanic is on the right, the Olympic is on the left.  Honestly, I thought at first that both were images of the Olympic being passed off as the Titanic (it happens, a lot), but then I noticed the tiny differences that, assuming the dates on the photos are correct, aren't likely to be due to additions to the Olympic.

 Alright, so the Titanic wasn't the first pool floating on the open seas.  That distinction goes to its older sister the Olympic.  It was, however, the first pool to sink into the open seas.

So did people like the idea of having a pool on their ship?  Well, the simple answer to that is, "Try and find a decent sized cruise ship without a pool nowadays."  Within a decade or so, pools weren't just common on the large liners, they were de rigueur.  And it all started with the RMS Olympic.

 The RMS Olympic pool: First in the on the open ocean, overshadowed by the first in the open ocean.

---

Sources:
RMS Olympic image taken from here
RMS Olympc swimming bath image taken from LostLiners.com
RMS Titanic swimming bath image taken from CorbisImages.com


LostLiners.com
RMSTitanic.net
Last Mysteries Of The Titanic on YouTube.com
Titanic Wreck Observations 2005
Titanic-Titanic.com
Encyclopedia-Titanica.org
VictorianTurkishBath.org
National Museums of Northern Ireland
HistoryOnTheNet.com
Titanic-WhiteStarShips.com
Wikiepedia articles on the RMS Olympic and the RMS Titanic

They Don't Play Possum

Time for a lesson in the importance of proper spelling, and the dangers of abbreviation.

If you are, like the majority of the people who pass through this bit of webspace, North American, the word possum brings to mind something fairly specific.  Namely, the Virginia Opossum.

Not a rodent, otherwise I'd call it an R.O.U.S.

It's the largest marsupial North of the tropic of cancer, and it basically combines the some of the worst elements of a rat and a raccoon.  Which isn't to say it's not a fascinating animal, but it's a scavenger and it's big enough to be scary.  Trust me.  When one of these bastards is standing in front of you, hissing and baring those teeth at you, you give it a wide berth.

Assuming you forget about the whole
"playing possum" thing.  I did.

Now, this is where the whole 'proper spelling' thing kicks in.  That little beast shown above isn't a possum. A proper possum is named after the similarities to the opossum, but they are, generally speaking, far less disturbing.  Possums (as opposed to opossums) are native to Australasia.  They're marsupials too, and like the opossums, they're generally nocturnal and at least partially tree-dwelling.  Unlike the opossum though, the possums don't pretend to be dead when cornered, and more importantly, they don't tend to look like giant rats.

Heck, you could make a
stuffed animal based off that!

So, what's the etymology behind all this?  Well, it goes back to the Virginia opossum, whose name comes from the Algonquin Indian name for them, aposoum, which meant "white beast."  A pretty fitting name, if you ask me.  Like pretty much everything that was taken from a Native American word, it got bastardized and we call them opossums now.  When the marsupials of Australasia were discovered later on, the more opossum-like ones (sub-order Phalaneriformes) were dubbed possums.  They're not very closely related (think manatee to hippo), but they look a lot alike, so they're named similarly.

Playing possum: Not what a possum will do if you get too close.

I couldn't find a video of someone threatening an actual possum, but I did find lots of video of people feeding them. Here's one that's got a momma possum with her baby.

---

Sources:
Opossum image taken from FIPS blog, image originally from, and owned by 24/7 Wildlife
Opossum playing dead image taken from some crackpot's webpage
Common brushtail possum image taken from the city of Holdfast website
Wikipedia articles on  possums and opossums

Well, The Rats Seem Okay

Think, if you will, all the way back to my last blog post, where I mentioned the name William J. Baerg in reference to experimenting with yourself as the guinea pig. Now I'll explain exactly what I meant by that.

William Baerg was an entomologist who worked at the University of Arkansas from 1918 to 1951. He published his first article in 1920 (Beekeeping In Arkansas), and somewhere in the next year he decided that his name wasn't quite epic enough (I agree), and he started publishing under the name William J. Baerg (better, but still not spectacular) in 1921.

For reference, his full and proper name was William Baerg, the J. stood for nothing, and was just there to make him sound more official. Normally, I'd throw up a picture of him now, but I can't seem to find one, but this picture is likely him:

The hand, not the tarantula.
(click to embiggen, clicky-poppy)

You see, Baerg is also known as "the father of North American tarantula research." He focused mainly tarantulas, but he was quite knowledgeable about all sorts of North American spiders.

One of the things he researched was just how dangerous spider bites were. First, he'd get the spider and a few rats to experiment on (he seems to have preferred using six test rats for each experiment). Then, he'd pick up the spider and the rat, have the spider bite the rat, and then he'd observe and report. If the rats didn't seem too badly injured by the bite, he let the spider bite him. And it worked pretty well. Baerg's the main reason we know that tarantula bites are about as dangerous as bee-stings. After seeing the rats suffered no long-term damage from a tarantula bite, he'd let it bite him. In his own words:

It is doubtless a far-fetched conclusion that if the poison produces mild effects on young rats, it will not be dangerous to man; yet this conclusion I found quite safe in the case of the tarantula (Eurypelma steindachneri).

So, when a colleague from Cornell asked Baerg to look into whether the danger presented by the black widow spider was fact or fiction, Baerg knew what to do: Get one to bite some rats and watch to see whether they were badly injured or not.

Guess what? The rats were pretty much fine. You know, relatively speaking. For twelve to fourteen hours they were clearly in pain, they sometimes had convulsions, and they entered a state that he describes in his notes as "Sleeping (in coma?)", before apparently recovering completely. In fact, they built up a resistance to the black widow venom quite quickly, and by the third time they were bitten (three weeks after the first bite) the rats showed no reaction to the venom at all, beyond their licking the wound.

And this is where the previously mentioned "far-fetched conclusion" bites him in the ass. Or more specifically, in the left hand.

At first, things looked promising. On July 9th 1923, Baerg let a black widow bite him. He made it bite him on the finger at 11:15am, and within five minutes there's a sharp pain and the site of the wound is visibly throbbing. Ten minutes later the pain is slowly dissipating, and by 2:10pm the pain is completely gone and he feels fine. Clearly, as the rats indicated, the bite of the black widow isn't actually all that bad.

Not so bad at all, is it?

Since the first test went so well, and the rats seemed to develop an immunity fairly quickly, Baerg decided to repeat the experiment the next day. This time, things didn't go so well.  The spider bit deeper, for longer, and probably injected a lot more venom.  Baerg was, however, both a scientist and an optimist, and here's how he described it in the article he wrote about the tests (emphasis added by me):

The fangs were allowed to remain inserted for about five seconds, and during this time the pain which when the fangs entered was rather faint, increased rapidly, presumably produced by the poison rather than by the fangs. The results, from the point of view of the investigator, were all that could be desired.

I will remind you that Baerg himself was the investigator.

So, he let the spider bite him at 8:25am on July 10th, 1923.  The pain was minor at first but increased rapidly.  Then it spread.  Everywhere.  His arm, his chest, his hips, his legs, his toes, his head. He had trouble breathing and couldn't keep food down.  He didn't manage to get any sleep for the first 28 hours, and didn't manage more than a nap until the night of the 11th, when he was plagued by delirium and nightmares.  He spent almost three full days in the hospital.  Even after he left the hospital, it was still another full day before he was well enough to work.  The pain was gone from most of his body by the 13th, but the pain in his hand persisted for a few days longer, and there was an itchiness that stayed for almost a week.  His body temperature fluctuated fairly wildly for more than a month, although he claimed he wouldn't have known if he hadn't been taking it, since there were no associated symptoms.

That's enough to keep you from ever wanting to be near a spider ever again, isn't it?

Well, you're not William J. Baerg.  He continued to research spiders (and other insects) his entire life. Even after he retired, he was still helping other people do their entomological research.  47 years after the black widow incident, in 1970, when he was 85 years old, Baerg heard that someone was investigating the toxicity of the yellow sac spider, whose bite is thought to be mildly necrotic and highly painful.  What advice did he give them?

He volunteered to be the test subject for the human bite test.

The head researcher politely declined the offer.

William J. Baerg: He makes the Mythbusters look absolutely cowardly in their scientific experiments.

---

Sources:
William J. Baerg's hand (?) image taken from Encyclopedia of Arkansas
Black widow spider bite image taken from WebMD.com, originally from David-O's Flickr stream


Encyclopedia of Arkansas
University of Nebraska - Lincoln, DigitalCommons Journal of Parasitology archive (Vol. 9, No. 3, pp 161-180)

A Whole Other Level Of Cottonmouthed

Ever been really dry mouthed? I mean, so dry-mouthed that your speech is impaired? So much so that it's not just an issue, it's a medical problem? Well, that's called xerostomia (literally, dry mouth disease).  You haven't?  Well neither have I, and I'm pretty glad about it.

But... if you wanted to go all William J. Baerg (I'll discuss him next time) and experiment on yourself... You can find out exactly how bad dry mouth can be by getting yourself a mouthful of silica gel desiccants.  You know, those little packets that you find in the bottles of pills sometimes, or in with other things that are moisture sensitive.

You know, the things that say
"DO NOT EAT"

I'm not going to try it myself (not while writing this anyway, I don't have any silica gel packs handy), but I welcome you to try it yourself*. Feel free to report your findings to me if you do!

Now, we need to be absolutely clear on a couple things here before you go off and eat some commercial-grade desiccants:

1) It's got to be the 'non-indicating' silica gel. The stuff that looks the same when it's fresh as it does when it's totally used up. The stuff that goes from orange to dark green, or orange to colourless is probably safe too, but it's best to not mess around. And the stuff that goes from blue to pink? Toxic as all holy hell, and you should never put it in your body. It's got cobalt (II) chloride, which if swallowed will cause nausea, will probably cause vomiting, and may cause permanent damage to your thyroid gland and pancreas. It's also carcinogenic. So, once again, to be absolutely explicit about this: DO NOT PUT THE STUFF THAT GOES FROM BLUE TO PINK INTO YOUR MOUTH! Only the stuff that starts clear and stays clear is absolutely positively safe to put into your mouth (and even then, only if it hasn't been contaminated by something else along the way, but if you get it out of a pill bottle, you should be fine).**

2) Don't swallow it. Even if it's the stuff that starts clear and ends clear. It's technically non-toxic (it's pretty much inert under normal circumstances), but it will irritate your insides. Oh, and it might dry the heck out of you. It won't kill you, but it won't be pleasant either.

Even suggesting you put it in your mouth is probably a bad idea, but it won't cause you any permanent harm, especially if you don't swallow and you make sure you're not using the toxic stuff.

Alright, with the disclaimers out of the way, here's how you get the most dry-mouthed bang for your buck:

1) Dehydrate the silica gel. Take them and throw them in a warm oven (200°F / 93°C) for 15mins or so. This will also let you know if it's the non-indicating stuff, or something that goes from a colour (usually orange) to clear. If it's any colour other than white/clear (possibly off-white or yellow-tinged) after drying it out, best not muck about with it.

2) Have something handy to spit it into. This might not be easy since your mouth may dry out fairly quickly. But still, it's better to have somewhere to spit handy than to not have it at all.

3) Keep in mind how much spit it's going to absorb. Your standard silica gel will absorb 40% of its weight in water, so 1g of the silica gel will absorb 0.4mL of spit. The smallest silica gel packs have about 0.25g of silica gel in them, which means they'll absorb 0.1mL of spit. How much is that? Two drops. Your mouth would have to be pretty dry to even notice that it's two drops drier. Best get yourself several, or a rather large one. Maybe several large ones. Remember to avoid swallowing it though.

Now you're ready for scientifically induced cottonmouth!

Damnit, that's not what I meant,
and you know it, Marvel Comics.

So, even though I've made a big deal about how this experiment isn't going to hurt you, you've still got a huge nagging doubt in your head, don't you? "If this isn't dangerous, why the warnings all over the package?" Liability. These things present a fairly massive choking hazard, and heaven help you if you ever inhale some by accident. Not that they're any more toxic in your lungs than in your stomach, but... They won't go away. They are, as I said, pretty much inert. Which means your body won't be able to break them down. Which, in an organ as delicate as your lungs, is a very, very bad thing. If you don't manage to cough it back up, it could do quite a bit of damage in there. Plus, there's the whole cobalt (II) chloride issue. And the outside contamination issue. The silica gel itself may not be dangerous, but if it was shipped with rat poison, then it might be coated in something that is.

Still, what fun is science without a little danger? You'll never discover anything interesting if you never take any chances! Just ask Marie Curie! Hmm... Alright, maybe she's a bad example.

Silica gel cottonmouth: A relatively safe experiment to try at home.*

---

*While I encourage you to try it, I in no way accept any responsibility for any problems, physical or mental, that arise as a result of your trying this. While theoretically safe, there's always a chance that something could go wrong, and you accept all responsibility for that wrong should it happen while you are conducting this test, either on yourself or on someone else.
**That all said, there probably isn't enough cobalt (II) chloride to actually make you sick, but I'm not taking any chances with liabilities here, and neither should you.

Sources:
Silica gel packet image taken from eHow.com
Cottonmouth image taken from Gone and Forgotten blog
Seton Resource Center
Wikipedia
GeeJay Chemicals Ltd.
AGM Container Controls Inc.
eHow.com How To Recycle Silica Gel Packets
Chow.com - What Happens If You Eat One Of Those Silica Gel Packets?
Dictionary.com pages for xero, stome and minim

She's Not My Granny, But She's Welcome In My Kitchen

Mmm... Delicious.  But not Golden Delicious.

The Granny Smith Apple.  Possibly the most popular apple in the world.  I mean, there are all sorts of drinks and other products that are 'green apple' flavoured, and I guarantee you that they're not talking about under-ripe Fujis.  How popular are Granny Smiths?  Have you ever seen the logo for the Beatles' recording company?  Yeah, they're bigger than Jesus (not really) and they chose the Granny Smith as the apple to represent them.

She's the one in the dress.

So, who the heck is Granny Smith anyway?  Why does she have an apple named after her?  Well, Maria Ann Ramsey Sherwood Smith (great name!) was a farmer who grew orchard fruit in Australia in the 1800's, specifically apples and pears, although her family did grow a few other vegetables as well.

 Her entire adult life, when she wasn't busy giving birth that is (she had nine kids, six of which survived childhood), she cultivated apples trying to grow  some that would grow better.  Pretty smart thing to do if you're living in an area which isn't particularly well suited to growing apples.  Her family's orchards were just Northeast of Sydney, Australia, which is very humid and very warm, and that's not so good for most varieties of apples.  So she tried growing hybrids, and her orchards did significantly better than most of the other orchards in the area.  But did that stop her from trying new things out?  Heck no!  I mean, what the hell else did she have to do as an apple grower in the 1800s?  Other than have kids, I mean.

Now, there's a couple stories about how she came up with the Granny Smith, but I like the one that hints at some sort of fate, so that's the one I'm going to tell (thankfully, it's also the most widely accepted version of events at the moment).

The story goes like this: Granny Smith (as she was called locally by this point in her life) was, in addition to being a great orchardist, also a wonderful baker, and her pies were particularly well known.  Not surprisingly, her apple pies most of all.  One day she bought some French crabapples from a chap who grew them in Tasmania, made a pie of them, and threw the cores and skins into a compost pile (I doubt that the term compost pile was used back then, but whatever) near a creek on her property.  Some time later she found a small tree growing out of the heap and associated it with the crabapples.  I guess she was happy with the way the pie had turned out, because she nurtured the sapling until it bore fruit, some time in 1868.  Quite pleased with the fruit of this new tree, which clearly wasn't the crabapples she was expecting, she showed it off to a neighbouring farmer.  They liked it too, and Granny started cultivating this new variety.

And then she died in 1870.  Long before there were enough mature trees for her to find out whether the fruit would turn out to be popular.  Which it was.  Several local orchardists started growing them, and they started winning awards about twenty years later.  By 1895, Albert H. Benson, an expert for the New South Wales Department of Agriculture said it was fit for export.  The next year he planted a full crop of them at the Bathurst Primary Industries Centre (then known more simply as the Bathurst Experimental Farm, or alternately as the Government Experimental Station, which sounds way more sinister), and from there?  It's all history.

Slow moving history, but history nonetheless.  England started growing them in the 1930s, and they started growing them in the United States in the 1970s.  And now?  Canada imports 16,000 tonnes of Granny Smith apples a year.

Granny Smith: She died without ever knowing just how awesome her found fruit was.

---

Sources:
Apple image taken from Southwood Nursery
Maria Ann Smith image taken from the city of Ryde website
City of Ryde
Australian Dictionary of Biography
EzineArticles.com
FindAGrave.com
Wikipedia
Bathurst Primary Industries Centre
TheWorldGourmet.com

Fake Guards, Real Sadism

Alright, we learned yesterday that we, as a whole, will cave to authority pretty easily. But what happens when the position of authority is just in our heads? When the authority is totally arbitrary and not based on anything other than random chance?

If you've heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment, you already know the answer and you can go read an article on Cracked.com or something else if you want.  Try this one about animal intelligence, it's pretty fascinating.

I'm Testing The Effect Of Negative Reinforcement On ESP

Alright, this isn't about ESP, but it is about electrical shocks and negative reinforcement.  The title is a Ghostbusters reference, which is, in turn, a reference to today's topic: The Milgram Experiment.

Also, this fact isn't particularly fun except for the fact that it's a great conversation topic. But since that's kind of how this blog started, it's what we're talking about today.

The 1960s and early 1970s were a wonderful time to be an experimental psychologist, in that a lot of laws regarding ethical experimentation were only made in reaction to some of these experiments. In addition to the Milgram experiment, there was also the Stanford Prison experiment (I plan to cover it tomorrow) and the end stages of the CIA's MKULTRA experiments into LSD. Basically, you could get away with almost anything, which made for some interesting research. Unethical by modern standards, but totally interesting nonetheless.

The Beekeeper's Keep Will Keep

When I was a kid, my grandfather supplemented his retirement funds by being a beekeeper. The technical term for a beekeeper is an apiarist, but beekeeper's much more to the point. So needless to say, honey's been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I'd get burns as a child, the burn would be covered in honey. My grandmother used to sing to me, "Honey in the morning, honey in the evening, honey at suppertime. Won't you be my honey, and love me all the time?" I'd have peanut butter and honey on my toast. My life was infused with honey. Honey has a place in my heart now, and it will forever.

So I guess it's a good thing that honey will never go bad.

Assuming the honey
was good to start with, that is.

What deliberately
fermented honey
looks like.

Alright, it's not entirely true that honey won't go bad, but it can be. Basically, honey is fairly acidic (somewhere between orange juice and a tomato), very high in sugar, and it traps moisture easily. Those three factors mean that honey, if it's in a container that doesn't allow moisture to enter it, doesn't support any bacterial growth since either the acidity, the high sugar, or the lack of water will keep any bacteria from surviving in it. If it's not in a moisture-proof container, the honey will eventually absorb enough moisture for it to dilute enough for things to grow in it. Usually this will result in the honey fermenting (ya alcohol!), sometimes it will end up being much more dangerous, but properly sealed? It will keep pretty much forever.

It is said (although I cannot find a copy of the original source, although I know it's attributed to archaeologist Theodore M. Davis and the Sept. 1913 issues of National Geographic) that some honey found in Egyptian tombs is still edible, after roughly 3,300 years. I personally still have a container of perfectly edible honey from my grandfather's hives, and he's been dead for over a decade, and he retired from beekeeping years before that.

That's not saying that all honey is safe.  I mean,  just because nothing dangerous will grow in it, that doesn't mean that there's nothing dangerous in it to start with.

First off, there's a good chance that there are spores from the bacteria that cause botulism in honey, and while there's not enough of them to be dangerous to an adult (we tend to digest the spores) they can be dangerous for very small children, so honey shouldn't be given to kids under a year old.

Secondly, bees sometimes get their pollen and nectar from plants which are toxic to people but that have no effect on the bees.  Honey made from nectar from the common rhododendron, for instance, can cause both delirium and vomiting.  A whole host of plants can give rise to toxic honey, with symptoms varying from excessive perspiration and dizziness to paralysis and death, with a whole host of possibilities in between.  In fact, it's said that honey made from hives where opium poppies are common is narcotic.

Commercially farmed honey is rarely toxic because the honey comes from enough sources that any toxic components are only present in trace amounts, and in general it's a problem more associated with wild hives.

Properly stored honey: As good as the day it was put away.

---

Sources:
Image of the Honey movie poster taken from Online-movies-free.com - I in no way use or endorse this site, it's just where I took the image from
Mead bottle image taken from Bunratty Winery
Honey-Health.com
Canadian Honey Council
National Honey Board of America
Wikipedia articles on honey and bees and toxic chemicals

I'd Name Him Redenbacher.

Click play and listen to this while you read.
It'll add to the experience. I promise.

So. Bearcats. What exactly is a bearcat? Well, if you look at the cat evolutionary tree I linked to yesterday, it would be somewhere near the bottom of the image with the linsang, the civets and the genets, so it is related to cats. It's in the Suborder of Carnivora called Feliformia, while means cat-like. It's not actually part of Family Felinae (it's from Family Viverridae), so it's not technically a cat, but it is catlike. It's also a burly omnivore, which is a pretty bear-like thing to be, hence the name bearcat. Its proper name is Binturong though. And it looks like this:

Anyone else think there's a bit of a resemblance
to Salacious B. Crumb?  No?  Just me?  Oh well.

It's around 60cm to 90cm long, with a tail around the same length, which means that a big specimen is probably longer tail-tip to nose than you are tall. It normally weighs between 10kg and 14kg, although it's not unheard of for large specimens to get into the 40kg range. It lives all throughout South-East Asia. The list of things that makes them fascinating is fairly long, and I don't want you cycling through Do The Bearcat too often, so I'll just give a quick lowdown for most.

They laugh.  Or at least, they make a chuckling sound when they're happy.  I'd love to throw a link here for you to listen to a chuckling bearcat, but I can't find one.  Hell, I even tracked down the episode of Dirty Jobs where they met a bearcat, and no chuckling there either. If Mike Rowe can't get footage of a happy bearcat, nobody can.

Their massive tail? It's prehensile. They are, in fact, one of only two 'carnivorous' animals with a prehensile tail, and arguably the largest animal on the planet with a prehensile tail. Carnivorous is in quotes there because even though they are capable of catching, killing and eating almost anything smaller than they are, they eat mostly fruit.

They are capable of embryonic diapause, which means they're capable of delaying fetal development for up to a year after becoming pregnant. This lets them time the birth of their litter (up to six) to a time when things are looking good, whether that's Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter. There's only around 100 species of mammals that can do it, and the bearcat's one of them.

They are capable of turning their ankles backwards so that their claws can still grip into trees as they climb down face-first.

Lastly, and bestly in my opinion, is their musk glands. When you hear musk, it's not generally a good thing. Think sweat, think cat piss, think skunks. None of those are particularly pleasant. And then along comes the binturong and its musk glands. What does binturong musk smell like? Buttered popcorn. Or cornbread, depending on who you ask. Either way, it smalls buttery and delicious. Their largely fruit-based diet, along with their buttery-corn musk, makes their poop smell (according to some, not according to Mike Rowe) like Frito corn chips.

While I'm fairly certain that it's not legal to own one as a pet anywhere in North America, they are sometimes kept as pets in Malaysia. Which means they can be at least partly domesticated.  Which means I want myself a biggish, burly, buttery beast for myself.

The binturong: Cat-like, bear-like, and deliciously buttery scented.

---

Sources:
Binturong image taken from the East Timor National Zoo
Wikipedia
San Diego zoo
Honolulu zoo
TheAnimalFiles.com
Various YouTube videos linked above

I'd Name Him Wan Li

I'm allergic to cats, to the point that I'm almost willing to say I'm deathly allergic to them.  That doesn't mean that I don't think they're very cool. At the very least they've got that whole aloof predator thing going.  Plus, cat's have those wicked slit pupils.  Cat's wouldn't be nearly as cool if their eyes didn't form slits when they contracted would they?  I mean, try and picture a cat that had tiny round pupils in bright light.  They'd lose a lot of mystique.

Oh.  Hey there kitty.

Alright, so not all cats have slitted pupils.  As a generalized statement, animals within the feline family are more likely to have slitted pupils if they're small, and the larger ones tend to have round pupils like people do.  The lynx, which is something of a mid-sized feline has pupils that aren't round, but aren't quite slits either.

The reason for slitted pupils is that they reduce chromatic aberration, which is breaking the light into its spectrum colours.  You'll see it a lot with crappy digital cameras.  It's sometimes called fringing, because it leaves fringes of colour along the edges of things, with the fringe getting wider near the edges of the image.  It caused by light refracting at different amounts at different wavelengths, and it's more pronounced when put through a rounded lens (like your eye).  The slitted pupil doesn't eliminate the problem entirely, but it does go a long way.

What's interesting about this is that there doesn't seem to be any logic to why the large cats have round pupils while the small cats have slitted pupils.  One could argue that it has to do with diurnal (daytime) or nocturnal hunting habits, with the nocturnal hunters having slits so they can protect their sensitive eyes during the day (slit pupils can close completely, round pupils can't), but it doesn't hold up fully.  Size seems to be a bigger factor than hunting times.

Even the currently accepted evolutionary tree for cats doesn't help here.  Yes, it splits the panthera genus from the smaller cats very early on, which would explain the pupil thing there, but then we've got ocelots (small, slit pupils) further removed from the modern house-cat than the puma (large, round pupils).  Servals (small, slit pupils) are further removed than cheetahs (large, round pupils).  There are exceptions to the small = slits; large = round rule though (isn't there always an exception?), but it's still the best general rule for pupil shape we've got for felines.

Cat eyes: Beautifully designed, arbitrarily assigned based on size.

That's it for the fun fact of the day, but feel free to keep reading, since I kept writing.

My personal favourite exception to the small = slit pupil rule?  The Pallas's cat.  It's about the size of a house-cat, although the thick fur makes it look quite a bit bigger, it has round pupils, and short legs for a feline.  I would totally get one as a pet if I wasn't nearly deathly allergic to cats.

And if they weren't borderline endangered.

They have a few things stacked against them in the survival game, the first being that they've got great fur.  Until humans came around and started wearing the skins of other animals to stay warm, that was an advantage.  Now, it's a liability.  Better to be ugly with no usable parts than be warm and fuzzy.  Particularly if your habitat includes places that still use powdered tiger penis as folk medicine.

Hunted for his fur.
With good reason.

Another big problem for our short-legged pal the Pallas's cat is that it eats agricultural pests.  That means that people don't hunt them for their fur nearly as much as they used to, because they're useful.  Unfortunately, they're not so good at their job as pest control that the farmers have stopped poisoning the pests.  A dead pika (rock rabbits, not to be mistaken for a pikachu, the electric mouse) is a much easier meal for a Pallas's cat than a live one. Unfortunately, they're usually dead because they ate poison.  Which means the Pallas's cat is poisoned by eating the dead pika. And good luck convincing a farmer to stop laying out the poison that's saving his food supply from pests just so that a wild cat won't die.

Also going against the poor round-eyed Pallas's cat is the fact that it's pretty isolated.  Again, a benefit before people starting hunting them (still something of a benefit in that regard as well), but now it's actually working against them.  Their isolation from, well, pretty much everything has meant that their immune system is almost laughable (it would be if it didn't mean these awesome cats were dieing).  Captive breeding programs have met with limited success because captive animals have a nasty tendency of dropping dead from infections that most other animals would survive, or wouldn't even noticeably contract.

Pallas's cats: A cool little cat with big-cat round pupils.

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Sources:
Tiger eye image taken from Crystal Springs High School, Mississippi
Chromatic aberration sample image taken from TLC-Systems.com
Pallas cat image taken from ShawnOlson.net
Cat pupil shapes courtesy of dozens of Google image searches
PubMed abstract on pupil shapes and lens optics in terrestrial vertebrate eyes
AllExperts.com article on feline pupil shapes
Niches blog on feline evolution
National Geographic article on feline evolution
Wikipedia articles on Family Felidae, Genus Panthera, cats, chromatic aberration and Pallus's cat

It's A Mouthful

Remember when I said that I was "perfectly okay being a freak in many other regards"? Today, I introduce you to one of the ways in which I'm a freak, and the physical manifestation of it.

I suffer from bruxism, and as a result I have exostotic mandibular tori.

...

Alright, that's a lot of medical terminology, and today's fun fact is (like the one about the popliteal fossa) about telling you the proper names for things you didn't know the names of. In this particular case, you may not even know that they exist. So let's break this down into simpler, smaller, bite-sized nuggets, shall we?

Bruxism is grinding your teeth or clenching your jaws, either while awake or asleep, and I've had a great deal of difficulty in finding stats for its prevalence. It's cited as one of the most common dental problems in the developed world, and it's also listed as one of the most common sleep disorders. Either way, about 33% of children do it regularly but most grow out of it. Depending on the study, between 5% and 85% of people are bruxers (yes, that's the proper word for someone with bruxism), while the majority report somewhere in the 10% range are chronic bruxers. About 5% of the population suffers from bruxism to a degree that they need treatment for their symptoms (usually headaches, jaw pain or tooth damage). I personally am not a tooth grinder, but a jaw clencher, both while awake and in my sleep.

Exostotic is the adjective (modifies a noun, if you forget your grammatical definitions) form of exostosis, which itself means bony outgrowth (ex = out, ostosis = bone growth). This is as opposed to an osteoma, which is a benign bone tumor.

Which brings us to the strangest of the odd medical terms I threw around up there: Mandibular tori. That's a plural of mandibular torus, in case you're wondering. Mandibular is, obviously, associated with the mandible, or jawbone. A torus, if you remember back to your geometry lessons, is a doughnut shape. In anatomy it refers to a rounded ridge, because it looks like the edge of a torus. Anatomically, it doesn't need to be a complete torus, just shaped like part of a torus. A mandibular torus is a bony outgrowth on the curved inner part of your mandible.

An exostotic mandibular torus is a bony outgrowth caused by damage to the jaw, usually through stressing the bone through prolonged pressure. The kind of pressure that one exerts when they clench their jaws. Exostotic mandibular tori usually form in roughly symmetrical growths on both sides of the mandible, while mandibular tori formed by osteomata rarely form symmetrically.

Normally, at this point, I'd throw a picture at you, but pictures of the insides of someone's mouth, even when it's perfect, aren't super pleasant. And pictures of a perfect mouth are pretty much unknown on the internet. All you get are the freak cases. So I will, instead, give you a CT scan, which aren't nearly as gross. Feel free to search for mandibular tori on your own if you want to look at the inside of freak mouths.

Those eight lumps on the interior
of the jaw? Signs of a bruxer.

Not everyone who grinds or clenches their teeth get mandibular tori, and not everyone with mandibular tori clench or grind their teeth, but there is a strong connection between the two. There seems to be some sort of genetic predisposition, but it's unclear whether the genetic element plays more into the likelihood of being a bruxer or of forming exostoses. What is clear is that roughly 10% of the North American population has them, with no significant variance between whites or blacks, and only a minor difference between men (more likely) and women. Worldwide the prevalence varies between 5% and 40%, with the higher numbers coming from Asian and Inuit populations.

The reason that it's not considered strictly a genetic condition despite the large racial disparities is this: The can grow and shrink over time. For some people something as simple as wearing a mouthguard while sleeping is enough to make the tori slowly disappear due to reduced stress on the jaw. Clearly it's sometimes caused by environmental factors, but the high rates amongst the Inuit point towards a genetic predisposition as well. Since mandibular tori are almost always totally benign and rarely cause problems until you need dentures (at which point they pretty much just get in the way) there's not a great deal of research on what causes them. Bigger fish to fry, as it were.

They can be surgically removed but, like the appendix, there's not a whole lot of reason to do it as a preventative measure. Particularly since they can grow back. The most common problem with them (other than the denture thing) is cutting the skin covering them on sharp food like chips. Sometimes they can become so large that they interfere with swallowing and moving the tongue though, in which case medical attention is probably a good idea.

Exostotic mandibular tori: A mouthful of words for a mouthful of bone.

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Sources:
Mandibular tori CT scan image taken from Radiopaedia.org
Studio Dentaire article on bruxism
Bio-medical.com article on bruxism
Soft Dental dental services
Anesthesia-Analgesia.org article on mandibular tori - PDF
Wikipedia entries on bruxism and mandibular tori
Dictionary.com pages for bruxism, exostosis, torus and osteoma

Welsh Watchers, An Ineffective Diet

It's not very often that people who get called out on their lies end up dead because of it, particularly if they could avoid dying by just admitting that they lied. But it does happen. Today, we learn about just such an instance. I present to you the strange case of Sarah Jacob.

Sarah Jacob was, by all accounts, a plump Welsh girl of strong morals and strong religious faith living in the mid 1800's. She also didn't eat from the age of twelve without any serious harm for almost a year and a half. Or so she claimed.

One day when she was around 11 years old, she started to vomit blood for no reason that anyone could figure out. Even though that came to an end fairly quickly, she was bedridden from then on. And the very sight of food from then on is said to have caused "very strong fits". For the next sixteen months her parents viewed her, and her survival despite not eating, as a miracle. They told the local vicar, one Reverend Jones, who despite initial doubts became convinced that the girl was a miracle and told the world.

The world pretty much laughed in his face and then tried to ignore him. So he set up nurses to watch the girl. To quote the British Medical Journal:

A local committee was therefore instituted to watch over this fasting girl. No public confidence was, however, placed in the watchers, and no satisfactory result ensued therefrom. Considering that these watchers were actually debarred from touching the child's bed, it is obvious that the whole process was reduced to an absurdity, the very first element of success being denied it. We must not, notwithstanding, be too hard upon these Welsh watchers.

The Welsh watchers were ineffective because they were limited by the ground rules put in place on them, and the medical community pretty much continued to ignore Sarah Jacob.  It wasn't until a medical examiner from London went through the area on vacation and made a stop to see the "fasting girl" that the whole thing really blew up.  Dr. Robert Fowler of London sent a letter to the London Times, and by the next day every paper in England and Wales was reporting on the case.  It was, admittedly, a slow news day.

It was a little harder for the medical community to ignore this apparent medical mystery now that a doctor had written about it to the media, and now that everyone on the street knew about it, so a proper test of whether Sarah was actually fasting or not was set up in 1869.  She would be carefully monitored for two weeks.  They set up guards, day and night.  They searched her bed.  They checked everyone coming into the room for food or water.  They were going to make sure that Sarah didn't get anything to eat or drink without their knowing it.

Now, they weren't psychopathic about it.  They didn't want her to die.  She could eat or drink whatever she wanted, but if she wanted it, they wanted it on record.  Nurses offered her food and water, but she turned them down every time.  Her health started to decline, and the Reverend Jones asked the parents to stop the whole thing, but the parents refused, saying that they had seen this kind of decline in her health before.  As long as Sarah didn't eat anything, she'd get better.

Yes, they actually thought that she'd get better if she didn't eat.  Let me clarify, she'd get better only if she didn't eat.

What bad parents looked like before reality TV.

On the eighth day of the fast, to the surprise of nobody except her parents (and presumably herself), Sarah Jacob died.

There was almost as much controversy over her death as there was over the last year and a half of her life.  Because she was, even up to her death, described as a plump girl.  There was an inquest into the cause of death, since how do you stay plump while starving to death?  Well, in a case of acute starvation the body can't actually break down the fats in your body quick enough to stave off starvation.  You'll get thinner, sure, but you can die of starvation long before you look like you're starving to death.  This inability of the body to break down fat at will is also the reason that a good physical trainer will advise against losing more than a kilo a week; you're not actually losing fat, you're burning muscle.  It's only with chronic starvation that you really start to get that emaciated, anorexic look. (quick side note: anorexia nervosa was formally named in 1873, totally unrelated to Sarah Jacob though)

The vicar, the doctors and the parents were all investigated in the death, but in the end only the parents were charged.  They were both convicted and sentenced; her father was given a one year sentence of hard labour, but her mother was given leniency because she was pregnant.  She only had a six month sentence of picking oakum (pulling apart rope and cordage into fibers).  Just so you know, that's sarcasm.  Picking oakum seems like a pretty hellish thing to have to do for six months, although I have little doubt that it's still better than hard labour.

It's thought that Sarah's parents honestly thought she was a miracle fasting girl, which makes the entire thing tragic for them. It's thought that one of her sisters was sneaking food in for Sarah to eat before, but they couldn't do that with the tight supervision of the test. So, there's no way that Sarah herself thought she was a miracle fasting girl, which means that she literally starved herself to death rather than admit that she was lying. That's what you call committing yourself to the lie. When you have people all around you saying, "Listen, we know you're lying. Your lie is literally killing you. Just have a sandwich and we can all go home," and you still choose to die, that's a special kind of crazy.

Sarah Jacob: Died of starvation to keep a lie going. And adding insult to injury, she was still getting called plump.

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Yes, I'm aware that plump wasn't an insult.
Sources:
Evan and Hannah Jacob photo taken from the Camarthen Gaol felons register
Police news image taken from the BBC
British Medical Journal Volume 2, 1869 edition
The Lancet, Volume 2, 1870 edition
Casglu'r Tlysau - Welsh heritage & culture website, available in Cymraeg and English
WelshLegalHistory.org
Suite101.com
Wikipedia article on Fasting Girls
BBC article on Sarah Jacob being added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Books Are Dangerous

Not all books, and defining dangerous is probably a really subjective term when it comes to books. I mean, there are places that consider On The Origin Of The Species a dangerous book, but today I'm talking about books that are truly dangerous. So dangerous that you have to sign a waiver if you want to see them. And this is a dead serious waiver.

The books in question were written by the lady below:

Most dangerous author EVAR.

That's Maria Skłodowska, better known by her married name, Marie Curie. She both figured out that radiation was an atomic phenomenon not a molecular one, and she also coined the term radiation. She was the first woman to win a Nobel prize, and the first person to have won two Nobel prizes (one for physics with her husband, one for chemistry by herself). She's pretty much a huge deal in science.

So you can probably guess why the books she wrote are dangerous, and you're right: They're still radioactive enough to be dangerous. The notebooks and cookbooks she used in the years 1897 through 1901 will still set a Geiger counter ticking away like mad. The three notebooks are kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and to get access to them you need to sign a waiver acknowledging that you're aware of the danger they represent. They're slightly less radioactive than is required for a substance to be considered "contaminated" by most nuclear regulatory bodies, but they're still radioactive enough that you wouldn't want to lick them or anything. The funny, but not surprising thing is, the radioactivity is highest on the surfaces where Mrs. Curie's hands would have held them.

Books: Not always just dangerous ideas, sometimes just plain old dangerous.

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Sources:
Marie Curie image taken from NobelPrize.org
About.com
Women scientists in history
American Institute of Physics
Science Links Japan
MarieCurie.co.uk
Nobel Prize official website
Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Wikipedia article on Marie Curie
Wikipedia article on Nobel prize multiple laureates
Czech Republic State Office for Nuclear Safety

Oh Shat...ner

Imagine, if you will, that you're asked by the producer of a TV show that makes dramatizations of paranormal events if you've ever experienced something paranormal yourself.  You tell him about how one day you were out riding your motorcycle in the Mojave Desert and deciding to stop to take a drink of water.  When you go to start the bike again, it won't start.  On the horizon, you can see a smudge of gray in the sky, and figuring that, since it's in the direction the road is going anyway, you'll push your bike towards it.  As you get closer, you see that it's a UFO hovering in the distance.  Once you get close, the world fades out and you remember nothing else until you wake up some time later in a different location along the same highway, now within view of a gas station.  You push the bike the remainder of the way to the gas station, get the bike fixed and yourself rehydrated, and continue safely along your way.

Out of gas?  Need water?  Follow us to Grey's Gas & Gulp!

The producer is, of course, thrilled.  This is exactly the kind of story that he was hoping for.  He turns your story into the pilot for the show and from there the story spreads.  Why does the story spread?  Because you're famous.

Who are you?  You're William Shatner, and you're currently playing Captain Kirk on Star Trek.  Later in the year you release the album The Transformed Man, which some people claim is a very 'spacey' album.  Everyone else just claims it's terrible (#45 in the worst 50 albums ever according to one source), but I'll let you decide that for yourself here, while pointing out the album released by Shatner's co-star Leonard Nimoy in the same year, Two Sides Of Leonard Nimoy.

Alright, so you're an actor playing a character that loves to get some alien booty, and now word is out that you've actually encountered aliens.  Do you downplay it, pretend that it never happened?  Of course not!  You acknowledge it whenever asked about it!  You use it to your advantage!  You make it part of your mystique!  You... secretly regret telling the story for almost 40 years?

True story.  Shatner regrets ever telling the story, because it's just that: A story.  It never happened.  Despite making it into a biography (unofficial, unendorsed, unappreciated), the story about aliens in the Mojave never happened.  Here's Shatner himself explaining it in an interview (the interviewer is his daughter, FYI):

In 2008 Shatner released his autobiography, Up Till Now, and set the record straight. The story about meeting aliens was just an actor embellishing an otherwise pretty dull story for a friend, and the whole thing took off and got out of his control.

William Shatner: Victim of his own brilliant storytelling.

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Sources:
Image stolen from NewAgeDawns.com
WilliamShatner.com
Wikipedia.org
NYMag.com
UFOEncounters.co.uk
PurpleSlinky.com
ParanormalNewsCentral.com
RockListMusic.co.uk

Ĉu Vi Parolas Esperanton?

One of my favourite things about this blog is coming across some truly epic names. Gideon Algernon Mantell, Queen Ulrika Elenora of Sweden and Katsushika Hokusai are the only ones you'll see listed, but trust me when I say that in my research I come across a lot more. But they're only vaguely connected to my topic at hand, so I have no reason to mention them. Today's topic comes to us courtesy of another epic name from history: Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof. If that's not an epic name, I'm not sure any name would qualify.

So what did this man of such an epic name do that I've heard of him, and am now sharing his name with you? He made a language. Not an easy task, but he's hardly the only one. J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, a fairly epic name itself) laid out the basis for two Elvish languages to the point that they're both now usable. Marc Okrand is almost single-handedly responsible for the Klingon language, and only words he invented are considered officially part of the language. Yes, Star Trek nerds take their fake languages very seriously.

The language that our Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof invented is Esperanto. You may have heard of it, but probably not. And unless you're an incredible information junkie like myself, you've probably never heard it, even if you've heard of it. Don't worry, I'll give you a chance to listen to it further down. But stay with me for a bit. Esperanto is, despite being almost entirely unknown, the most widely spoken artificial language ever created. Klingon may be more widely known of, but Esperanto has something Klingon doesn't: People with it as a first language. Not many, mind you, only about a thousand, but that's a hell of a lot more than any of the other artificial languages out there. And around 1million people can understand the language better than I can understand French, despite eight years of French classes and a French-Canadian grandfather.

It's a language that was designed to be universal, and there have been attempts to have it implemented as the official language of the United Nations (which have been ignored), and there's currently a bill in Brazil that would make Esperanto one of the optional languages taught in public schools (it's languishing in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies). One of the strongest selling points for Esperanto in this regard is that it's remarkably easy to learn. While some people claim that you can learn it in days, they're largely regarded as crackpots or linguistic savants. Still, it's estimated that you can become passably skilled in Esperanto in about 1/4 the time it would take to learn another language similar to one you know already (English-German), and less than 1/20 the time it would take to learn a language with a different root than one you know (English-Japanese) because it has none of the eccentricities of a natural language.

Once you learn a pattern in Esperanto, it's very safe to assume that it's always true. In English in particular, a generalized pattern isn't always useful. Consider all the exceptions to 'i before e except after c'. Esperanto doesn't have giants lists of exceptions to simple rules, which makes it much, much, much easier to learn.

Alright, enough trying to sell you on the merits of Esperanto. Let's get to the listening! I present you the sixth part of the YouTube posting of the 1965 film, Incubus (subtitled).

Did you recognize that handsome young soldier? You're right! It's none other than William Alan Shatner (a remarkably un-epic name for such an epic man)! See how this all came back around to Star Trek? What is it with Shatner and made-up languages?

Incubus is, for the record, a pretty entertaining little movie, and might possibly be worth watching from the start if you're into b-movie horror and don't mind subtitles. Also, for the record, the film is largely ridiculed within the Esperanto community because of the terrible pronunciation. They say Shatner speaks Esperanto with a French accent.

There's only one other Esperanto film, and it's called Angoroj, which means "Agonies". It was even more poorly received than Incubus, and the director tried to destroy all the copies of it. He nearly succeeded, only three copies escaped his wrath. Strangely enough, Incubus was nearly lost to the ages as well. At one point it was thought that every copy had either been lost, destroyed or used to the point that they had worn out completely. It was only when the original master copy burned in a fire that people started looking for other copies. To date, only one early copy has been found, and every release of it since (including the one on YouTube) is a copy of that one.

William Shatner: Intimately connected to the two best known artificial languages on the planet.

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Sources:
Esperanto.net
World Esperanto Association
Canadian Esperanto Association
FailureMag.com article on artificial languages
Wikipedia articles on Esperanto, Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, Incubus, Angoroj and William Shatner