Category: Nature

I can’t help but notice a definite chill in the air when I walk the dog in the morning…

 

 

 

Kai’s noticing it as well…

 

 

This year we have what seems to be getting close to a plague of field-mice. Working in the garden is accompanied by a flurry of brown or black bodies fleeing for the nether regions.

 

They are also discovering the attractions of staying indoors. I’ve found unmistakable evidence of mice in the kitchen – droppings in the drawers. OK, it’s now down to placing the traps in strategic spots. So far, the score in the kitchen is one down – an unknown number left to go. The battle continues…

 

The victims (from the kitchen and the attic) have thus far been placed in the compost container. PZ Myers draws my attention to the fact that the tiny bodies may have other uses…

Carl Zimmer, over at The Loom, has a fascinating post about the double sets of jaws possessed by Moray eels. It turns out that Nature got there long before H. R. Giger dreamed up the double jaws for the monster in Alien. 

That’s the title of a rather depressing blog entry from Carl Safina about a recent trip to the Artic to observe the impact of climate change on both wildlife and human communities there.

 

It’s definitely worth reading, but I did feel a twinge on reading Safina’s (to my mind) somewhat glib summary:

It’s probably true that people look to religious leaders. It’s just a pity that, to my mind, they often have little to say beyond their own dogma.

This sounds like something dreamed up by Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado (A More Humane Mikado…). Some amputees have not so much a phantom limb as a phantom John Thomas… which stands to attention… Life is so unfair. 

In the past week, I’ve had two sightings of a pair of birds. The first time, I saw them strolling through the garden, bold as brass, looking for insects, and then yesterday I saw them in the adjoining potato field. At first I took to be partridges, but now I believe them to be corncrakes. The colouring wasn’t right for partridges, and they had the long necks characteristic of corncrakes. Needless to say, my camera wasn’t to hand on either occasion, so I can’t provide visual evidence. I also haven’t yet heard their eponymous, and distinctive, "Crex crex" call. I’ll have to go out early one morning with a metal comb and a pencil to imitate it, and see if I can lure them in…

Dan Dennett has a typically thought-provoking article in Technology Review looking at chess playing machines. One of the machines is IBM’s Deep Blue; the other machine has trillions of moving parts at the molecular level – the brain of Garry Kasparov. Dennett’s argument is that, so far as chess-playing is concerned, the substrates may be very different, but the outcomes of the mechanisms have more in common that many people would like to think. It’s quite amusing how some people want to move the goalposts in order to preserve mystery.  

 

(hat tip to Mind Hacks once again)

Vaughan, over at Mind Hacks, points us towards some experiments aimed at either inducing the sensation of being located out of one’s body or having one’s body image extended to incorporate inanimate objects. I’ve tried the Ramachandran experiment, and can attest to the fact that it is a weird sensation indeed.

 

I also recall one time, when very young, of opening my eyes while lying in bed only to discover that I appeared to be floating a few inches from the ceiling. Turning round I momentarily saw my body below me on the bed before "falling" back into my body. Was it a dream? I don’t know, but it was both scary and interesting at the same time. I wanted for it to happen again, but it never has.

That’s the title of a fascinating article, written by Bob Harrison, about what makes a person. I see that he refers to the book Reasons and Persons by the philosopher Derek Parfit. It just so happens that I have that book sitting in my "to be read" pile. I got it through a reference to one of Parfit’s "thought experiments" mentioned in Douglas Hofstadter’s excellent I Am A Strange Loop. I think I’m going to have to raise the priority of Parfit’s book in the pile…

 

(hat tip to Mind Hacks for the article link)

PZ Myers draws our attention to a real beauty. More here:

 

 

Carl Zimmer writes on a topic that fascinates him (and me, in a toe-curling way): the life of parasites. This time, it’s the group of parasitoid wasps callen the Ichneumonidae that gets the Zimmer treatment. Eye-opening reading. Even Charles Darwin found this aspect of Nature red in tooth and claw a little unsettling: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars." 

I managed to have an hour outside on Saturday night with a clear sky in which to see the Perseids. Despite the claims that the meteor shower has a broad peak, in that hour I only managed to spot 15 meteors, and five of those weren’t Perseids. In fact, one of the five was the most spectacular of the night – a slowish-moving meteor with a double fireball as it fell.

 

Last night was the peak of the Perseids. And of course, last night the clouds rolled in. In 90 minutes of frustrated viewing, peering through the occasional clear patch, I managed to see just two Perseids. So much for the predicted 60-80 per hour. At least I’m not the only one who was frustrated; Justin didn’t seem to have much fun either. But at least I didn’t have to put up with a shower of idiots on the ground as he did, just the occasional screech of an owl, and the croak of a frog or two.

This weekend sees the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. More information here. 

I don’t watch much Dutch TV, I find little of it to be worthwhile; and I certainly don’t watch any of the output of the EO (Evangelische Omproep), the religious broadcasting company here in the Netherlands. So I missed the fact that the EO had licensed David Attenborough’s great Life of Mammals series. The EO has both broadcast it, and made it available on DVD with Dutch dubbing and subtitles.

 

But the real news is that the EO has also excised any references that Attenborough makes to evolution. Here’s two examples, shown in a side by side comparison:

 

    

While I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at this, I still find this pretty disgusting behaviour by the EO. More examples of this rewriting of reality to fit their creationist folklore can be found here.

 

(hat tip to Phil Plait, over at The Bad Astronomer, for drawing my attention to this)

Setting out on Sunday morning to go to the Deventer Book Market, I noticed these rather unusual (at least to me) clouds in the sky. The tops seemed to be the usual fluffy stuff, while the undersides were being drawn out into wisps. I’ve not seen this before.

 

 

A rather worrying video from EUtube. It also contains another version of the graphic showing the impact of sea-level rises on The Netherlands. Sigh.

 

 

Geoff Manaugh, over at BLDGBLOG, adds his thoughts on an article in the New Scientist about the effects of rising sea levels. I note that the article also has a map showing the possible outline of the Benelux countries 100 years from now. There’s not much of The Netherlands left in this scenario, although our corner of the country still has its head above water… 

A couple of days ago I spotted a pair of young barn swallows perched on the pergola. Their parents were still feeding them. I suspect that it’s high time they learned to fend for themselves…

 

 

 

 

 

 

PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula, draws attention to a startling thought: it wasn’t a rib that God took from Adam to make Eve, but a bone from lower down in the body – the baculum. It’s perfectly true that, unlike most mammalian species, the Homo sapiens male does not possess a baculum, which is a bone inside the penis. Perhaps the original writers of Genesis were a bit too embarrassed to write the truth. 

I’ve mentioned this visualisation of the processes that go on inside each and every one of our cells before. It was made for the biology courses at Havard University. The version that I originally came across was this edited version with a music soundtrack. That emphasises the beauty and wonder of these microscopic processes, but does not explain what’s going on. Take, for example, the kinesin molecule at about 1:17 minutes into the video. It’s an extraordinary image – a tightrope walker pulling a huge balloon – but how does it work? I’ve now come across another video that explains the processes that power the kinesin molecule; it’s the second video in this post. Finally, I’ve found the original visualisation video, restored to its full eight minutes, shorn of the music soundtrack, and with the explanatory voiceover restored. That’s the third video embedded in this post. Wonderful to see.